Review
“What [Hanson] brings to the public discussion–along with an unusually vigorous prose style and a remarkable erudition–is a philosophy of war not meant for the weak—kneed or faint—hearted. Hanson does not celebrate war, but he accepts it as a fact of life, a part of the human condition that no amount of idealistic preaching or good intentions can will away.” –The New York Times Book Review
“Victor Davis Hanson is refreshingly unabashed about being an old-fashioned military historian . . . [and] he displays an exceptional chronological sweep.” --The Washington Post Book World
“What’s most impressive about Hanson’s work is his constant reminder that history is not just a faceless story of economic and social progress, but also one about the strength of individuals, brought to life here in masterly prose.” --The Christian Science Monitor
“His premise is fascinating and well executed. . . . A great little book. . . . Hanson is a superb storyteller and a clear and concise writer.” --The Washington Times
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
What defines a "watershed event," a moment in history that changes the world forever? Victor Davis Hanson tackles this intriguing question in RIPPLES OF BATTLE, an eye-opening look at three great military encounters: Okinawa, Shiloh, and Delium, an obscure battle of the Peloponnesian War. A master of military detail, Hanson describes the strategies and tactics, and the terrible cost in human life, of each battle. These vivid accounts set the stage for a wider inquiry into the long-term, often unintended, consequences of war.
RIPPLES OF BATTLE begins with the most recent battle and works backward in time, starting with Okinawa (1945) and its legacy. While many have drawn comparisons between the 9/11 pilots and the Japanese kamikazes, Hanson argues that the real significance of the battle was the heightening of America?s resolve to win the war at any cost. The failure of suicide tactics was also a vital catalyst in ending Japan?s militarist leadership and setting the country on the path toward democracy. Next, Hanson explains how the death of Confederate Commander-in-Chief Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh (1862), long considered a turning point in the Civil War, gave birth to the myth of the Lost Cause?the belief that only a tragic accident of fate destroyed the South?s noble dream. The stubborn devotion to this reactionary view would slow Southern progress for a century. Turning to the battle of Delium (424 B.C.), Hanson shows how the ripples of each battle spread and deepen with the passage of time. Little remembered today, the battle inspired a tragedy by Euripides, profoundly altered the direction of Western philosophy (Socrates was one of the few Athenians to survive), and virtually created Western infantry tactics.
Employing the lens of the past to bring the present into focus, RIPPLES OF BATTLE is a work of penetrating insight and profound understanding of the human cost and consequence of war.
From the Back Cover
“Like any good classicist, Victor Davis Hanson accepts the primacy of military history in human affairs. In 'Ripples of Battle,' a sequel of sorts to his masterful 'Carnage and Culture,' he shows the fascinating repercussions of three lesser-known battles. You cannot fully understand Hiroshima, the bitterness of the Old South, or the Golden Age of Athens without reading this gem of a book.”
--Robert D. Kaplan
"Victor Davis Hanson is one of our leading military historians, and in 'Ripples of Battle' he does not disappoint. A far-reaching story of man, war, and history, it is, by turns, iconoclastic, touching, deeply learned, and endlessly fascinating. This slim book is a grand study."
--Jay Winik, author of April 1865: The Month That Saved America
“Victor Davis Hanson has earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the most interesting and innovative military historians in the world. In 'Ripples of Battle,' he shows once again why he’s the best. He ranges far and wide, from World War II to the wars of ancient Greece. Along the way he combines a born storyteller’s gift for rip-roaring battle narrative with a scholar’s attention to the deeper meaning of conflict. Once again he manages to take what may seem familiar and to show it in an utterly new light. The “ripples” that he identifies–which include characters as disparate as Socrates and the author of Ben Hur–astonish and delight. This book is not only deeply enlightening but also a sheer pleasure to read. It is, in short, vintage Victor.”
--Max Boot, Olin senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
About the Author
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is Professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of several popular books on classic warfare, including The Other Greeks, The Western Way of War, and Carnage and Culture.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
The Wages of Suicide: Okinawa,
April 1-July 2, 1945
Recipe for a Holocaust
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 of Okinawa of the past--their letters published in newspapers, the Pacific war recounted by columnists, and veterans of the conflict interviewed on television. Suicide bombing by nature is at first horrifying, calling into doubt the notion of a shared human instinct for self-preservation. Suicide killers are purportedly of a creed not of this world, and thus instill despair that such enemies can ever be thwarted and that somehow theirs is a superior ideology by its singular ability to galvanize thousands to kill themselves for the cause. Yet Okinawa reminds us that there are plenty of far more frightening mechanisms to ensure that it fails. Contrary to our own popular doubts and fears, the horror of Okinawa entailed the frustration, not the success, of kamikazes. And with that result there ensued the lessons that suicide warriors are not always willing volunteers, much less superhuman, but themselves just as often unsure and full of doubt. Literature and culture were changed by Okinawa, but the ripples of that battle were also military; after September 11 they lap up as never before to remind us that there remains an array of tactics and long-term strategies by those who fight to live that will ensure failure to those trying to die.
The forces arrayed for the American invasion of Okinawa on April 1, 1945--Operation Iceberg--were gargantuan. The greatest armada of combined naval and land power in the history of the Pacific war was prepared to storm an island not much more than sixty miles in length. In terms of initial troops to be landed, firepower arrayed, and tonnage to be used, the American invasion was larger than the one seen at Normandy nearly a year earlier. Indeed, Okinawa was perhaps the most impressive sea and ground assault since Xerxes' invasion of Greece in 480 b.c.--but then, both those earlier invasions had been directed against the continent of Europe, not an island in the Pacific.
Nearly 1,600 ships carried over a half million Americans toward Okinawa. A quarter million soldiers--infantry, support troops, airmen, and sailors in various branches of the military--eventually hoped to occupy the island. Sixty thousand Marines and army infantrymen of the newly formed 10th Army would embark on the first day alone, supported by bombs from some 40 aircraft carriers of various types and shells from 18 battleships and 150 destroyers. Some 183,000 actual infantry combatants from the army and the Marines were ready to join the fight on the island during the ninety-day campaign. Over 12,000 combat aircraft on the American side could, in theory, be thrown into the fight. The campaign was planned as a textbook American exercise in overwhelming material and numerical power that would simply bury even the most courageous adversaries.
Many of the invading Americans were hardened veterans of the bloodletting on Iwo Jima, Peleliu, Saipan, and Tarawa. If they were successful in capturing the linchpin of the Ryukyu Islands, the Japanese mainland would lie defenseless to American ships, troops, and planes, all to be based a mere 350 miles away. Indeed, after the battle and despite the horrific costs, the official military history of Okinawa declared that "the military value of Okinawa exceeded all hope" as a base for "an even more desperate struggle to come."
But the Americans in their great confidence and careful preparation had also overlooked an essential but bitter truth about their proposed campaign. The enemy would fight this battle in a manner not entirely explicable by the strategic calculus involved in losing Okinawa. Nor did he much care about the Americans' proven tactical and material superiority--much less about the age-old Western idea that the purpose of battle was largely to defeat the enemy, obtain his surrender, advise him of the futility of subsequent resistance, and therein achieve results that mere politics could not.
Indeed, the Japanese did not realistically hope militarily to defeat the invaders on Okinawa at all! Nor did they worry whether their own army, navy, and air forces would survive the conflict. And the defenders may even have accepted that after the fighting, Okinawa, for a time, would--at least for a few months or even years--become American and not Japanese. Col. Hiromichi Yahara, the brilliant architect of the Japanese defenses, wrote after the war that "the fact is that we never had a chance for victory on Okinawa."
Instead, by mid-1945 the desperate Japanese military's aims were quite different from all conventional war wisdom. And so their plans were also very simple: kill so many Americans, blow up or shoot down so many aircraft, and sink so many of their ships that the United States--both its stunned military and its grieving citizens back home--would never wish to undergo such an ordeal again. After the butchery to come on Okinawa, perhaps these rather affluent and soft Westerners would seek a negotiated armistice from Japan--and not tolerate another, greater cataclysm on the mainland in pursuit of an unnecessary unconditional surrender. Okinawa, then, was to offer a suicidal lesson to Americans to stop before they found themselves dying in the millions on the beaches of the Japanese motherland. In the words of the historian Joseph Alexander, the Japanese saw Okinawa as the "England of the Pacific"--a proximate island that would likewise serve as an enormous staging area and supply depot for the eventual foreign annexation of the sacred soil of Japan itself.
In that context, despite the Americans' skill and overwhelming material preponderance, much of the advantage on the island still lay with the Japanese in this new phase of attrition. Because Okinawa was larger than many of the other Pacific atolls of the previous campaigns, because it was a home island of the Japanese empire, because of its unpredictable weather, coral rock, prepared fortifications, and dense vegetation, and because of the number, nature, and leadership of the Japanese defenders, nearly every combatant on the island in theory could resist to the death for a very long time. The commander of the island's defenses, Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, had written a brief slogan to cheer on his troops that summed up the Japanese strategy: "One Plane for One Warship; One Boat for One Ship; One Man for Ten of the Enemy or One Tank." As it turned out, instead, Americans would kill ten Japanese for every one they lost. Yet even to this day they still feel that something had gone terribly wrong during the campaign. And it had.
Even if, as the planners thought, Okinawa were merely to be conquered, Operation Iceberg had not made allowances for the attacker's age-old and necessary edge in numerical superiority. There were only one and a half, not the requisite three, American invaders to match each Japanese defender. Yet to kill all the Japanese--110,000 soldiers and thousands more civilians who would resist at their sides, whether coerced or willing--how many American combatants would that gruesome task require? A million? A ten-to-one ratio of offense to defense? Just how many American infantrymen, bombers, and warships would be needed to blast out every Japanese in every cave of the island? And did the Americans realize that an entire army of over 100,000 men had become veritable subterranean and nocturnal terrorists--snipers, suicide bombers, and ambushers who would hide beneath coral at day and unleash artillery, mortar, and automatic weapons fire at night? If it cost 6,000 American dead to kill 23,000 Japanese on Iwo Jima, how many fatalities would be incurred in eliminating 110,000 more experienced troops on Okinawa?
In hindsight, Okinawa would prove not that the Americans had marshaled too few troops to take the island, but that its massive armada was in fact far too small to eliminate the enemy without suffering catastrophic losses in the process. American field artillery on the island itself would fire 1,104,630 105mm howitzer shells--and another 600,000 rounds of various calibers from 115mm to 75mm--during the course of the three-month campaign. Fifteen of such monstrous shells were fired for every Japanese death--and still such munitions could not save thousands of Americans from being killed. Before the battle was even half over, the Americans had already dropped thousands of tons of explosives on Ushijima's soldiers, without achieving any clear weakening of the enemy's will to resist.
Japanese tactics were for the most part well thought out--given the acceptance of the realities of war in mid-1945 when American bombers for weeks prior had incinerated many of the key factories on the mainland while surface ships and submarines made reinforcement and resupply anywhere in the Pacific island empire almost impossible. Generals Ushijima and Isamu Cho--the infamous rightist who in 1931 had once engaged in a terror campaign of assassination to hijack the Tokyo civilian government--along with the brilliant Colonel Yahara, planned to let the Americans land on the beaches unopposed. Then they would lure them into well-fortified Japanese positions in the southern part of the island before systematically grinding them up. By day there would hardly be a Japanese in sight; at night tens of thousands would shell and attack American lines--small teams infiltrating as often as possible to nullify American advantages in naval and ground gunfire. Although Okinawa is a huge island of several hundred square miles, the convergence of over 100,000 troops of the Imperial 32nd Army into the southern third of the island in a series of fortified lines meant that the Japanese, not the Americans, possessed the high ground and the greater concentration of force.
There, hidden wheeled artillery would pound the Americans, only to be drawn back on tracks into the safety ...
