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Virtual Macedonia Bookstore - The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny
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List Price: $16.95
Our Price: $9.81
Your Save: $ 7.14 ( 42% )
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Manufacturer: Anchor
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 355.009
EAN: 9780385720595
ISBN: 0385720599
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: 2001-04-17
Publisher: Anchor
Release Date: 2001-04-17
Studio: Anchor
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Importance of Moral Conviction in War
Comment: This book explores three immensely effective generals: General William Tecumseh Sherman, General George Patton and the lesser-known Epaminondas of Thebes. General Sherman planned and led the infamous "march to the sea" during the U.S. Civil War. This campaign annihilated everything in its path, including the city of Atlanta. However, this march did shatter the spirit of the Confederates and was instrumental in securing the victory for the North.
Patton was an innovative general who always demanded hot meals and clean socks for his men but also expected prompt compliance, tidy appearance and flawless execution of his edicts. Patton is also known for his ruthlessly efficient campaigns in North Africa, Sicily as well as his leadership during the Battle of the Bulge and his blitzkrieg-like march from Normandy to Czechoslovakia.
Epaminondas is a little known general from the Greek city-state of Thebes who heroically led his people out of subjugation from the brutal Spartan rule. Unfortunately, I found this section more difficult to read, as I had almost no prior context of knowledge of Epaminondas to build on.
Hanson draws many convincing parallels between the three. All three enjoyed legendary success during their military campaigns. All three also understood the unfortunate necessity of engaging in total war when forced into war with an ideological enemy. Moreover, all three led highly controversial campaigns despite being instrumental in winning the war. Sherman is known for the devastation that he left behind him in Atlanta. Patton's career was nearly ended for slapping a weeping soldier who claimed to suffer from battle fatigue.
Most importantly, all understood the importance of moral conviction. Hanson persuasively argues how having moral certainty was crucial to the success of each of these leaders. Each recognized that they were combating a true evil (Epaminondas - Spartan oppression; Sherman - chattel slavery; Patton - Nazism). Sherman would frequently write about the savage racism and the brutal treatment of slaves that he observed in the South. Patton would constantly make fiery moral condemnations of Nazi Germany. Contrast the success of these conflicts to the failures of conflicts when one army lacked the moral certainty to fight (e.g., U.S. in Vietnam or Athens during the Peloponnesian war.)
Overall, despite some unnecessary repetition, this book is well worth reading simply as a biography on these three great generals. Moreover, Hanson's thesis is fairly good, but it can certainly use some polishing. In particular, I would have preferred to see Hanson delve into what these men were fighting *for*; not just what they were fighting against. Hanson does repeatedly claim that they fought for "democracy". However, since Hanson never really clarifies what the essentials of a democracy are (i.e., Is it the democratic elections? Is it the limited government? Is it the fact, for Sherman and Patton, that they fought for a country whose government was established to protect individual rights?). Unfortunately, this makes Hanson's thesis more superficial than it could be.
If you enjoyed this book, then I also highly recommend Six Days of War by Michael Oren and Old Soldiers Never Die: A Biography of General Douglas MacArthur by Geoffrey Perret. Lastly, I encourage you to brace yourself for Nothing Less Than Victory: Military Offense and the Lessons of History by John David Lewis, which should be available around March of 2009!
Customer Rating:
Summary: IDEOLOGICAL TWADDLE
Comment: I expected biography and military analysis; it's Victor's personal opinion of 3 military leaders, filtered through his PC ideology. In fact, he doesnt like the military at all. What he likes are unwashed armed mobs who prevail over people who bathe.
He has few kind words for the great military leaders of history.
This is the sort of twaddle pedagogues cobble together today.
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Summary: Strongly-Argued, Intriguing, but Unconvincing
Comment: Victor Davis Hanson's "The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny" is a thought-provoking, interesting, but too-lengthy study of three great democratic military leaders: the Theban Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton. Hanson argues that the democratic armies under these three leaders, engaged in noble fights to save the oppressed and end tyranny, used their moral soul to defeat enemies that most considered superior.
Hanson devotes one section to each of the leaders, giving brief biographies as well as highlighting their major campaign: Epaminondas' successful campaign to free the Spartan helots; Sherman's march through Georgia; and Patton's breakout from the Normandy beachhead. Hanson eschews traditional narrative history and tells the stories of these campaigns in a random order, sometimes starting at the end and working backwards, hopping around at other times, and never leaving any doubt or suspense about the conclusion. The book reads more like a discussion of the subject than actual history.
Hanson harps on his thesis that, by fighting to free the helot slaves in Sparta, black slaves in the American South, and Jews and many other minorities being exterminated in the Greater Reich, the democratic armies' moral ascendancy translated into ascendancy on the battlefield; and that great military leaders with a vision, leading these armies, can ignore traditional military tenets and crush enemy forces: Epaminondas' army of farmers attacked the heretofore invincible Spartan professional army and homeland; Sherman cut his supply lines and marched through the heart of enemy territory; and Patton succeeded when all other Allied generals were too timid and could have ended the war in 1944 if he was not held back.
Despite Hanson's eloquent writing, he is numbingly repetitious: at times it feels as if he's repeatedly beating you over the head with the same point or quotation. Readers familiar with his writing will again see his sweeping generalizations repeated while he ignores or belittles opposing viewpoints without giving them due consideration. (And anyone with any sympathy for the Southern viewpoint in the Civil War will not like Hanson's vitriolic condemnation of almost every aspect of the antebellum South.)
As sympathetic as I am to Hanson's argument that a democratic army fighting tyranny is superior to all others, I found this book intriguing and persuasive, but ultimately unconvincing. Hanson could have made the same ambitious arguments without the lumbering repetition or overstated conclusions, expanded his narrative history to tell the whole story instead of part of the story, and still written a much shorter book. Ultimately, despite these shortcomings, this is a stimulating book that anyone with a serious interest in military history should read.
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Summary: Thought-provoking but a tad repetitious
Comment: This is an interesting and thought-provoking book. It brings to light little-known facts about three important warriors, and is probably the most coherent account of WIlliam Sherman that I have read, more insightful even than the excellent biography of Sherman, "A Soldier's Passion for Order". There is perhaps a willingness to push opinions to extemes - it seems unlikely to me that Alexander's campaigns, or those of Napoleon or even of Julius Caesar were entirely expressions of their commanders' egotism without any moral component, for instance.
Hanson's views of Spartan society and of antebellum Southern society are dark indeed, but I think that he supports them well enough. The evil of Nazi government needs no elaboration.
Hanson, as one might expect, writes well, and yet ... I wouldn't say that he is exactly repetitious, but he will discuss a subject, go off on another, and then circle back to the first, adding new information and insight. It is an imperfect style, but it does get across a complex of information in a way that a more linear approach might not.
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Summary: WHERE DOES FREEDOM COME FROM?
Comment: In The Soul of Battle, Victor Davis Hanson traces the historical development of Western methods of battle and also of the free Western societies from which great democratic armies have arisen, starting with the Greeks. If you are interested in the sources freedom and prosperity in a society, and the way wars have been fought, and won, by free democratic armies since the Greeks, this book is illuminating and essential.
In The Soul of Battle, VDH describes the military campaigns of three commanders who led the army of a Western democracy: Epaminondas in ancient Greece, William Tecumseh Sherman in the American Civil War, and George S. Patton in World War II. VDH describes the military tactics and strategies in fascinating detail. He describes how each commander led an army of free, independent individuals, well-trained to act with consummate levels of discipline and camaraderie, to destroy their opponent's ability to wage war, thus to end each war sooner, and thus actually to save lives. He describes that they fought with ingenuity and discipline because they wanted to preserve the freedom they had at home, and to make it safe for their freedom-based way of life to continue.
But perhaps more importantly, VDH describes the social conditions that allow the creation of this kind of democratic army: freedom, self-reliance, property ownership, individualism, civilian control of the military, ability to innovate, freedom of self-expression and inquiry, and equal protection of private property, to name just a few. VDH describes how these conditions created societies of strong, individualistic, freedom-loving citizens, who, when stirred by great urgency, became soldiers, who came together only for the purpose of winning a war as quickly and completely as possible, then disbursed immediately thereafter to their homes to go on with their lives.
This book reveals the line of civic freedom that started with the Greeks and runs through Rome, to Europe, to America and all the western-style democracies we have in the current day all over the world. This book shows how war and battle have fit into the picture through the centuries. Perhaps most importantly, this book helps the reader to see which parts of our laws and customs help to ensure freedom for the future, and thus must be cherished and protected.
All Victor Davis Hanson's books about battle and society are excellent. His thesis that freedom in a society and the ability to win wars are inextricably linked to traditions of liberty, independence and free inquiry, is illustrated by different battles and different adversaries in each book. VDH argues convincingly that these keys to freedom and liberty also account for the prosperity, commitment and know-how that create the ability to win wars in societies that inherited or adopted the traditions of Western culture. In his books, he traces the development of the traditions of freedom, self-expression and individual innovation from ancient Greece through the development of battle techniques and civic traditions in Europe and then to the United States and the rest of the world.
The Soul of Battle is an awesome book, wonderfully interesting, about fascinating events, told so that the reader can see what is important to preserve freedom in our current times. I highly, highly recommend it. Read it. It is simply outstanding. Then read Carnage and Culture, another VDH book. I think you will love it.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Victor David Hanson, author of the highly regarded classic The Western Way of War, presents an audacious and controversial theory of what contributes to the success of military campaigns.
Examining in riveting detail the campaigns of three brilliant generals who led largely untrained forces to victory over tyrannical enemies, Hanson shows how the moral confidence with which these generals imbued their troops may have been as significant as any military strategy they utilized. Theban general Epaminondas marched an army of farmers two hundred miles to defeat their Spartan overlords and forever change the complexion of Ancient Greece. William Tecumseh Sherman led his motley army across the South, ravaging the landscape and demoralizing the citizens in the defense of right. And George S. Patton commanded the recently formed Third Army against the German forces in the West, nearly completing the task before his superiors called a halt. Intelligent and dramatic, The Soul of Battle is narrative history at it’s best and a work of great moral conviction.
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