Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think (Hardcover)

~ Victor Hanson (Author) "Throughout the fall of 2001 and early 2002, the military referents in the West for the war against the Islamic fundamentalists were the fanatical kamikazes..." (more)
Key Phrases: Albert Sidney Johnston, Pittsburg Landing, Lew Wallace (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With this usefully idiosyncratic and provocative work, Hanson may succeed the late Stephen Ambrose as America's laureate of military history. But where Ambrose's tone is ultimately elegiac, reflecting on the deeds and character of a past "greatest generation," Hanson's is sharp edged and confrontational, linking past history and present policy. Even before the September 11 attacks brought him to national prominence as a commentator and analyst, Hanson's postulating of a "Western way of war" based on seeking decisive battle (not a given throughout the world) had gained wide attention. Ripples furthers this argument via three disparate battles, treated in reverse chronological order, taking the reader from more to less familiar territory to show its arc. On WWII Okinawa, the Japanese proved an inferior force could inflict significant damage by suicide tactics; U.S. forces responded by defining victory in the most extreme way possible: killing as many of the enemy as the could (rather than, say, seeking to gain a particular piece of ground). The Civil War's Shiloh set William T. Sherman on his path as a democratic war maker committed to both the defeat and the reconstruction of America's foes, while at the same time inaugurating the enduring Confederate myth of a "stolen victory" via Albert Sidney Johnston's death at the battle's climax. It also marked the beginning of Nathan Bedford Forrest's meteoric rise as symbol and avatar of the "unyielding South," which persisted long after 1865. The Battle of Delium, fought in 424 B.C. during the Peloponnesian War, was the first defeat Athens suffered that involved high casualties at the hands of Theban/Boeotian opponents, and it directly affected large numbers of thinkers, writers and statesmen-including Socrates, one of the survivors. The severity of the battle shaped the Western "decisive" approach that survives to the present. Hanson's conclusions show the threads of these battles in the garments of the war on terror. Some of his last points may seem forced to some readers, but he makes them with conviction and a genuine sense of wanting history to provide valuable lessons.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Arguing for the primacy of military history and its crystallization around key moments of life and death, Hanson looks at three highly influential, yet often overlooked, battles in three highly influential wars. Moving backward, his narrative covers suicide bombers at Okinawa, the death of a key southern general at Shiloh, and the survival of Socrates in the battle of Delium in 424 B.C.; key ripples of these events include the use of the atom bomb, the popularity of Ben-Hur, and the definition of all western philosophy, respectively. In extrapolating the webs of causality and coincidence surrounding important moments and always asking "what if?" Hanson reveals surprising connections that many historical narratives miss, and that is this book's strength. Its weakness is its tendency to wear its politics on its bloodstained sleeve. Drawing explicit comparisons between the "Greatest Generation" at Okinawa and present-day suicide attacks, framed within an argument about greatness emerging through battle, the less-than-subtle justification for our current conflict may put off some readers. It's their loss; this is an illuminating and insightful work. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 edition (September 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385504004
• ISBN-13: 978-0385504003
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #655,289 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What If?, November 16, 2003

By	William Holmes "semloh2287" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Hanson is an excellent writer with a vigorous style, and "Ripples of Battle" is a pleasure to read. The book explores the "ripples" that flowed from three battles--Okinawa, Shiloh, and Delium--and explains how those ripples changed the world.

Human history would have been very different had the Greek philosopher Socrates been killed at the otherwise obscure Battle of Delium in 424 BC. At the time, Socrates' most profound thinking was yet to come and Plato was only a child. If Socrates had fallen along with hundreds of other Athenians, "the entire course of Western philosophical and political thought would have been radically altered" (216).

The Battle of Shiloh was likewise a crack in time. Among other things, the fighting changed William Tecumseh Sherman from a failure to a hero and taught him that it was far less costly to wage war against civilian infrastructure than to fight a pitched battle against a modern army. The March to the Sea began with the hard lessons that Sherman learned at Shiloh.

And at Okinawa, America learned how difficult it would be to force Japan to surrender, enduring fanatical resistance and suicidal attacks that cost the lives of thousands Americans and tens of thousands of Japanese. Hanson argues that the experience yielded a cold American resolve and a willingness to use atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Whether you agree with Hanson's conclusions or not, the journey is worth the price of admission. History is often written is if key outcomes were inevitable, as if Socrates were ordained to lay the foundations of western philosphy or the north were bound to win the Civil War. But history is contingent, and the only way to fully appreciate the significance of a given occurrence--especially the "near run things" that crop up in battle--is to think about what might have happened if the event had turned out differently. In this respect, Hanson's book bears a kinship to the "What If? series of essay collections--in fact, Hanson's original essays on Delium and the fate of Lew Wallace after Shiloh can be found in those books.

Of course, the biggest ripples that flow from these battles might be those that remain unseen. We know that Socrates did not die at Delium and that the intellectual world as we know it depended on his survival--but we don't know whether Delium, or Shiloh, or Okinawa or any other event or battle ended the lives of other geniuses who might have changed history, for better or worse. Those imponderables are left to more speculative works than this.

54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Handsomely Done, September 26, 2003

By	Bruce Loveitt (Ogdensburg, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

If you enjoyed "Carnage And Culture," I am sure you will also like "Ripples Of Battle." Mr. Hanson is an academic who knows how to write clearly, and in a style which can best be described as conversational: you feel as though you are in his classroom (a small classroom, not a lecture hall) and he's just chatting with you. Whether he's writing about the movements of hoplites and cavalry at the Battle of Delium, the plays of Euripides, Socratic philosophy, Japanese kamikaze pilots, or the miraculous feats of Nathan Bedford Forrest at the Battle of Shiloh, it is all explained so that the layperson can understand it (without being "dumbed down") and it is all fascinating. Mr. Hanson is a writer who has more ideas in one chapter than most authors have in an entire book. If you think I'm just blowing smoke, consider what's under discussion in the chapter on the Battle of Delium, which took place in Greece in 424 B.C. : there is the background to the battle (why it was fought); the strategy and tactics of the battle itself; Greek religious beliefs ( the victorious Boeotians wouldn't let the Athenians gather up their dead from the battlefield, so they could be buried quickly - before the bodies started to decay. This was to retaliate for the fact that the Athenians, after the battle, occupied a Boeotian temple); how the battle changed the way future battles were fought (the Boeotians introduced the concept of holding back a "strategic reserve," to be brought into the battle at the proper moment. They also coordinated cavalry with infantry and arranged their hoplites in deepened columns); the importance to the history of Western philosophy that Socrates (the Greeks saw no contradiction in combining a life of martial action with a life of contemplation) survived the battle. These are just a few of the things that are discussed - so you can see that the book is not just about the nuts-and-bolts of the battles. Personally, I found this one chapter "worth the price of admission." However, the other chapters are equally good. For example, we learn how the Battle of Shiloh rehabilitated the career of General Sherman (who, only a few months before, had been referred to as "crazy"); forged the friendship/partnership between Sherman and Grant; made a popular hero of Confederate officer Nathan Bedford Forrest (who single-handedly rode into a brigade of Sherman's troops, took a point-blank bullet in the back, near his spine, yet managed to lift a Union soldier off the ground and plop him behind him on his horse to use as a "human shield" while Forrest galloped back to the Confederate position. Forrest was back in action two months later. It is also noteworthy that after the war, for a short while, Forrest was the head of the newly formed Ku Klux Klan); and, in a bizarre twist of history, resulted in the writing of the novel "Ben-Hur" (which, by 1936, had earned the greatest amount of money of any novel in American history) - but, I don't want to give THAT story away! "Ripples Of Battle" contains so many different threads and ideas that there really is something here for everyone - even the serious student of military history, who may know these battles inside-out, will find much to think about. Is this book perfect? Of course not. Mr. Hanson has lots of opinions, and some of them (depending upon which side of the fence you are standing on) are bound to rub you the wrong way. For example, in the chapter on Shiloh, the author writes that Sherman was so appalled by the carnage that he thought there must have been a better way of fighting the war - namely, carry it to the civilians - which led to the March To The Sea. Fair enough, so far. But I didn't agree with Mr. Hanson's assertion that Sherman's March caused "ripples" which affected the way later wars were fought. Frankly, I don't see the evidence, and the author is very lax in supplying any. I also didn't agree (and many Southerners won't, either) with Mr. Hanson's claim that Sherman left the "little man" alone - that on his March through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina his troops specifically targeted only the homes and farms of the rich people who supported secession. If Mr. Hanson really holds this view, I find it amazing. He is too good a military historian to be unaware of what happens when troops (especially unopposed troops) are unleashed on the countryside and are told to "live off the land." The idea of Sherman's March was to destroy the Southern infrastructure and to break the morale of the general population - period. Still, this book is full of so many good things that even the occasional slip-up cannot cause me to lower my opinion of the whole. This is a book that is well-worth reading.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Riding The Waves Of War, April 24, 2004

By	The Sanity Inspector (USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Edward Shepherd Creasy's classic Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World would seem to be the prototype of this book. But Dr. Hanson's theme is more subtle than merely listing the big hinges of fate. The battles he picks caused less dramatic but still far-ranging influence on our policies and even our attitudes. It's a very interesting read, as are all of VDH's writings.

I don't quite go along with some of the suppositions. Sherman's march to the sea was far from the first punitive campaign in history, though he persuades me that Shiloh caused Sherman to take up that style of war. The battle of Delium's influence must have been very subtle indeed, as the connecting thread is vanishingly faint, to my mind. Invoking a what-if influence, of Socrates possibly having been killed in that battle, is cheating; for by that standard any battle that any future famous person survived would have to count as an influential battle.

The Shiloh section is best for the account of how careers were launched and scuttled, how reputations were born, and how myths were created. His description of how the savagery of the fighting on Okinawa greased the skids for the deployment of the atom bombs is well done. The Imperial Japanese expected a bloodbath, expected Okinawa to fall, but did not expect that their show of suicidal fanaticism would prompt the Americans to one-up their brutality. And that's what stopped the war and, according to Hanson, provides precedent for Americans to escalate the modern War on Terror way beyond what the jihadists bargained for.

Hanson's storytelling powers and erudition are wonderfully entertaining, whether you agree with his points or not. The book's a bargain simply for the history lessons.