Yes, this is one of the preeminent historians of war writing today. Yes, we should expect a great deal from his work. With these points in mind, Victor Davis Hanson, former professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, describes how particular battles persist and therefore ripple through the centuries. In Ripples of Battle, Hanson begins on a engrossing and fascinating starting point, his own family military history, and weaves the fateful account of his father's first cousin who was to die tragically, and as Hanson argues, unnecessarily, on Okinawa. His cousin died without progeny and his branch of the family ended. Hanson speculates later on in the work who is know what kind of contribution the dead may have made. He seems to be aware of the futility, though tragic necessity for war. War is central in the human experience. This is the high point of the work. It is written with a great deal of passion and verve.
As to the remainder of the work, it is less successful, and in summary reverse order, Hanson reviews the Athenian defeat at Delium in 424 BCE that brought tactical innovations to infantry fighting; it also assured--which is a flaw in Hanson's argument--the influence of the philosophy of Socrates, who fought well in the battle. Nearly twenty-three hundred years later, the debacle at Shiloh and the death of the brilliant Southern strategist Albert Sidney Johnson inspired a sense of fateful tragedy that would endure and stymie Southern culture for decades. The Northern victory would also bolster the reputation of William Tecumseh Sherman, and most critically according to Hanson, inspire Lew Wallace to pen the widely popular Ben Hur. And, most poignantly, the agony of Okinawa forced the Japanese to sanction state-supported suicide, a tactic so fanatical, it haunts our view of non-Western combatants to this day. Okinawa also provoked the appropriate level of response, the controversial deployment of atomic weapons.
The odd thing of Hanson's argument is that he loses force the further back in history he reaches. He correctly places Okinawa front and center in American thinking that led to dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese mainland. Okinawa was far bloodier than American field commanders expected and he shows that most likely only the unfortunate death of General Simon Bolivar Buckner, during the battle, prevented an inquiry into his unimaginative and flawed tactics that did nothing to avoid the unwarranted deaths of so many Marines. Buckner ignored the credible alternatives of his staff and plunged many more to their deaths without cause.
Hanson's argument is less effective than his review of Okinawa in his account of Shiloh. Shiloh was of course a tragedy but he does not make a clear connection between Johnson's death, and the brilliance of General Nathan Bedford Forrest at the battle. The mistake is that by simply relating a cataclysmic event, and drawing a connection to much of what follows chronologically, is not enough. Shiloh was a tragedy on so many levels, the amount of casualties, the unmitigated carnage, and who is to say that Forrest would have become the leader of the Ku Klux Klan regardless of his important role at Shiloh. The Northern victory of course bolstered the reputation of Sherman and he is widely recognized for inventing a more comprehensive, if not brutal tactic of devastating the enemy's infrastructure to demolish your opponent, an American military trademark since then. The fact that Wallace wrote the incredibly popular Ben Hur as an allegory and defense of his flawed role in the battle would escape later readers. In fact, in more recent times, the story is best known for the classic film adaptation, and is no longer even associated with a Civil War general, much less Shiloh. Hanson gives Americans too much credit, and attributes a much profounder appreciation of history than the story would warrant.
Even more troubling is Hanson's review of the Athenian defeat at Delium. I'm with him when he argues that the battle initiated tactical innovations to infantry fighting. However, I must part company when he states categorically, that since Socrates lived to tell the tale of his personal involvement in the battle, he therefore has been a huge influence in philosophy. Once again, he mistakes the personal appearance of a participant in a battle as proof of how wars determine our thinking and how we live.
The failure is the lack of evidence which is the hallmark of historical analysis. As Plato relates the ideas of Socrates, did Socrates argue this point? Did Socrates agree that Delium was a personal watershed? Is there any evidence for such a statement? It is true of course that we only have evidence of Socrates through second-hand sources, since he did not write, but surely we should some Socratic statements indicating that this traumatic battle is the wellspring of his thought.
In the final analysis, we know where Hanson is going with all this. He wants to argue that 9/11 is a defining moment for the West. The West will fight vociferously, will think of non-Westeners as we have in the past, and will determine how we will fight the war on terror. In a final section, this is what he has been driving at which he reveals. However, it is simply still an open question of how the defining moment of 9/11 will be addressed. We are too close to the events in question and since the West is characterized at least as much by its ambiguity, defeatism, and misunderstandings in the face of a resurgent Middle Eastern Islam, Hanson's argument fails to persuade. If he were correct, the West's response would be swift, ferocious, and devastating. That day may come but it has not arrived, not yet anyway.
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