The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny (Paperback)

by Victor Davis Hanson (Author) "THEBES-the present-day community is built right atop the ancient-is a pleasant but little-visited Greek provincial town..." (more)
Key Phrases: democratic march, plantation class, marching fire, Third Army, Army of the West, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
On first glance, The Soul of Battle appears to be three different books: biographies of two well-known generals--Sherman and Patton--and one who is virtually unknown today, the ancient Greek leader Epaminondas. Yet Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor and author of The Western Way of War, makes a compelling connection between these three men. They were "eccentrics, considered unbalanced or worse by their own superiors" who led democratic armies on missions of freedom. Epaminondas crushed Sparta's military dominance of Greece in a single winter, Sherman delivered a deathblow to the slaveholding South in the U.S. Civil War, and Patton was the general most feared by his Nazi enemies in the Second World War. Hanson disputes the conventional notion that soldiers fight only for their buddies, rather than abstract ideals. He writes: "Theban hoplites, Union troops, and American GIs were ideological armies foremost, composed of citizen-soldiers who burst into their enemies' heartland because they believed it was a just and very necessary thing to do. The commanders who led them encouraged that ethical zeal, made them believe there was a real moral difference" between what they and their opponents stood for. Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton each became extremely controversial for his success, but Hanson argues persuasively that their efforts demonstrate "that on rare occasions throughout the ages there can be a soul, not merely a spirit, in the way men battle." With this idiosyncratic approach, Hanson makes a unique contribution to our understanding of not only these three men and their troops, but also the role of the military in a democratic society. --John J. Miller --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Hanson, a scholar of classics as well as of military history (The Western Way of War), depicts three great armies under three great captains: Epaminondas of Thebes, William T. Sherman and George S. Patton. Their enemiesArespectively, Sparta, the Confederacy, the NazisAhad been considered unstoppable. Yet they were defeated not by professional soldiers but by citizen-soldiers turned quickly into ruthlessly efficient fighting forces. It is no contradiction, Hanson argues, that democracies can produce such fierce killers. On the contrary, democracies, he writes, are uniquely suited to quickly mustering forces, imbuing them with "near-messianic zeal... to exterminate what they understand as evil, have them follow to their deaths the most ruthless of men, and then melt anonymously back into the culture that produced them." To accomplish this, he says, a democracy requires both a clear cause and a leader of genius. Hanson presents his three generals as examples of such leaders. Each man led forces seeking to liberate others, whether serfs in Sparta or slaves in the American South or Europeans tyrannized by Hitler. Hanson's thesis, however, is not self-evident: it is still a matter of debate, for example, whether Epaminondas fought to liberate Sparta's serfs or, less idealistically, to strike a decisive blow against Thebes's mortal enemy; similarly, the Union did not fight the Confederacy solely or even mainly to liberate the slaves (and the Confederacy, too, was made of citizen-soldiers who had, if anything, more devotion to their cause than most Union fighters). Nevertheless, Hanson delivers an eloquent reminder that democracies under great captains, facing enemies challenging the essence of their cultures, can make war at levels beyond the worst nightmares of their warrior opponents. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (April 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385720599
• ISBN-13: 978-0385720595
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #76,974 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Moral Imperative, April 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny (Hardcover)

The Soul of Battle is a brilliant work crafted by a master of both ancient and contemporary sources in Military History. Shunning the relativistic analyses expounded by many recent military historians, Victor Davis Hanson offers instead three historical armies of liberation, each of whose commanders and soldiers fought for real moral imperatives. By comparing Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton to other giants of military strategy--Alexander of Macedon, Napoleon, and Hitler--Hanson accurately exposes the real difference between the former generals, who believed that armies could be vehicles of liberation, and the latter rulers who used armies as tools to subjugate, not free. Readers conversant with classical works will especially appreciate Hanson's exclusive use of primary source literature in his treatment of Epaminondas. The reforms of this Theban general, famous for his innovations of novel phalanx tactics--later borrowed by Philip and Alexander of Macedon--are supported by an abundance of ancient source materials. Anyone familiar with Hans Delbrück's Warfare In Antiquity will be delighted by Hanson's readable prose and illustrative accounts of how the Theban general altered the way Greek columns operated on the classical battlefield. We also learn that just after Napoleon made himself emperor through his effective, but costly, direct approach, Sherman, who eluded politics, utilized the indirect approach, saving the lives of his men by "cutting a swath" through southern slave-holding territories. Under Sherman's command most unionist soldiers aspired both to reunite the nation, and to give slaves a real share in the American constitutional ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Many of the French soldiers of the levee en mass also fought for democratic principles. However, the French had a very different leader. Napoleon, as Michelet has written, was "pitiless to the common people," and it was the men of France, not their Corsican leader, who were the "true heroes of the Revolution." Napoleon's "children" were sadly mistaken in the notion that their "Petît General" had a real faith in the same ideals that drove them forward. Napoleon understood well that the effectiveness of moral principles to create an esprit de corps among his soldiers did not depend on his own humanitarian ideals. Indeed it was a young George S. Patton Jr., who recognized the value of ideology in creating the victorious French armies. In his "The Secret of Victory," a study on Marbot and other writers of the Napoleonic Wars, Patton wrote that the French soldiers had often been moved by intense emotional inspiration. It was the very faith in abstract principles such as, La Patrie, Liberté, Le Peuple Souveraine, and La Gloire that had been among the prime motives of their greatest feats of arms. Patton, as Hanson rightly points out, hoped to engender such passionate morale in his own armies. But Patton, unlike Napoleon, believed in the values with which he inspired his men: armies could and did exist to save lives. And when lives were at stake, quick action was always better than hesitation, courage always better than fear. In addition, Hanson's comparison of Alexander to Hitler could not be more precise. Both leaders intentionally allowed atrocities throughout the duration of their campaigns in order to subjugate the "uncivilized" peoples to their East. Alexander's pan-Hellenistic cause was little different than Hitler's pan-Germanism; his policy was the same. Rape, plunder, murder and the razing of cities was the order of the day. As Arrian recounts, festivals of Bacchian glee followed each Macedonian victory where soldiers were encouraged to drink away their guilt and revel at the expense of the eastern peoples they had brutalized and robbed. It is dead wrong to assume that dressing up like a Persian at such debauched costume parties was the same as "attempting to merge Greek and Persian customs through example." If Alexander had not burned Old Thebes, Tyre, Gaza, and Persepolis-- repositories of nearly all the knowledge and high culture of the Eastern world--such a "blending of cultures" might have been possible. Alexander's actions prove his intent. Battle is always bloody, nearly always catches up the innocent in its violence, and is often little more than a tool utilized to solve disputes over foreign policy among nations. At their worst wars promote the selfish and inhumane policies of autocratic leaders such as Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler. But Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton serve as paradigms to remind us that the act of battle can also have a soul or deeper purpose more profound than the more common and insidious reasons for which it is most often employed. As surely as wars can be waged as a means to enslave, they can, have been, and must be fought to free any who are oppressed victims of inhumane policies. And it was exactly because Soul's three generals fought for such moral imperatives, infusing the spirit of their armies with their own principled ideals, while additionally evading the temptation to become caught up in the games of high politics, that each was hated by his own leaders. These three great men of history nevertheless overcame jealousy, as well as internal politics, in order to further the cause of freedom. The point is exactly that democratic armies DO NOT always produce men of such moral calibre--they are few and far between. Hanson's perceptive arguments, then, finally disabuse us of the common misconception that men everywhere, and at all times, fight only to save their own skins and those of the men in their individual units--an uncompounded answer to a complicated question now passé, and discredited. Instead, ideology counts, and those with the higher moral imperatives can, through perseverance, win in the end. This work belongs in every serious military historian's library. Geoffrey Parker's comment that, "Hanson is fast emerging as our foremost living military historian," stands repeating. Like Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, Soul of Battle truly is a "history for all time", and like Hanson's Western Way of War this work will rank among the great classics of military history.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars WARS OF LIBERATION , May 9, 2006

By	C. Davis (Hanover, MD) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Soul of Battle compares three "campaigns", for lack of a better word, that in the author's mind have very similar characteristics. While the timing of this book (it was written in 1999 and published initially in 2001) and the epilogue indicate that this book was written to either critique the limited war aims of the first Gulf War or to urge - in a rather abstract way - the liberation of the Iraqi people, it is a fantastic read that will long outlast the current war in Iraq. Mr. Hanson is viewed by many as an apologist for the Neo-cons, but that does not detract from his ability to create an interesting thesis, write a compelling narrative, and imply multiple levels of interpretation. In short, this type of book is exactly what a classics or liberal arts education is supposed to be about.

This book does a great service by introducing Epaminondas to the modern reader. It seems a safe assumption that most moderately well educated Americans knew nothing about this man until Mr. Hanson published this book. It also seems a reasonable assumption that Boeotian democracy has further lessons for the modern Americans.

One of the interesting characteristics of all three "liberators" shared is the fact that, to a large extant, they waged war not only on the army of the enemy, but also his culture or soul. One of the not so subtle points in Mr. Hanson's writings is that not all cultures are equal or morally equivalent. Therefore, it is necessary from time to time to beat back the evil that men do by destroying the culture and support infrastructure that makes such evil thrive. However, Mr. Hanson seems to argue that evil can be completely vanquished. The ancient Greeks would say that evil is part of human nature and must be dealt with as necessary. They would agree that one way to do so - perhaps the most effective, albeit horrifying, terrible, and costly way - is war.

Another interesting fact is that people who are liberated did not, in statistically significant way, participate in the fighting that liberated them. To be sure, the Union raised hundreds of thousands of black troops, Epaminondas left behind former Helots trained in war with walled cities, and there were many partisan groups in France, Germany, and Poland. The latter country also had Jewish partisan groups that had fought from the first day of war until they were eventually disarmed by Soviet forces. Yet the fact remains that none of these forces could have liberated themselves or been more than a nuisance on their own. Therefore, these three conflicts are fundamentally different from revolutions where an outside entity intervened.

Mr. Hanson is a bit unfair, perhaps, in his critique of Gen Eisenhower and Gen Bradley. While Gen Patton was probably right that the Battle of the Bulge could have been exploited better, it is just as likely that well trained and disciplined German troops could have opened their lines and let Patton's striking force go past and then close the lines to block his fuel and ammo support. This is something they did time and time again to Russian forces on the Eastern Front as the German forces declined in mobility and firepower. Indeed, this is often the only effective tactic left to forces that either lost or never had the mobility required for modern warfare.

In the end, this book is typical of Mr. Hanson's other works: Highly readable, interesting thesis, and based on a solid grounding of history and traditional intellectual discourse. This book is highly effective and worth reading.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and controversial, October 5, 1999

By	Steven Zoraster (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny (Hardcover)

I found Dr. Hanson's latest book interesting, informative and controversial. In "The Soul of Battle" he describes the campaigns of three generals and the very successful armies they led, which - he asserts - were ideological armies driven by moral imperatives rather than loyalty to friends in the same unit. This is a revolutionary claim - at least to this reviewer - who has been fed for the last 3 or 4 decades on the theory that morale in any army was a product of the interpersonal loyalties of a few close comrades.

I don't know that I completely believe the arguments in the "The Soul of Battle," but the book is so provocative that I am going to have to wait a while and then read it several more times to figure out what I really believe. In the meantime, the book provided me with new insights into the short period of Thebean hegemony in Classical Greece between 370 and 360 BC, the daring success and real goals of Sherman's march to the sea during the American Civil War, and the outstanding accomplishments of the United States Third Army under General Patton in France in the second half of 1944.