The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (42 page)

That incessant demand for rapid success in turn required aggressive tactics—Themistocles challenging the Persian fleet, Sherman methodically driving into Georgia to capture Atlanta before the election of 1864, Ridgway upon arrival in Korea demanding that his division commanders offer plans for offensives, and Petraeus surging in Iraq. Many mediocre generals ultimately come to distrust, if not despise, the politicking of their civilian superiors; savior generals usually understood and dealt with the public constraints that limited their overseers’ options. They are, after all, creatures of politics, sent in to win back public approval.

Note here the key role of spouses—sources of support that were often underappreciated—Antonia probably kept Belisarius from Justinian’s executioners on more than one occasion. Sherman would never have received a second chance at Shiloh had his influential, rich, and savvy wife, Ellen Ewing, not politicked on his behalf and restored her husband’s sinking spirits—going so far as to meet with Lincoln himself. By all accounts, Ridgway at last found happiness with his young, beautiful wife, Penny. And Holly Knowlton Petraeus was not just a general’s wife, but also an informed and trusted confidante, a daughter of a general who probably knew as much about the politics of the U.S. army as her husband—a role that the media did not fully appreciate when Petraeus was engulfed in postbellum extramarital scandal. If it is critical for a savior general to be a contrarian, such independence is made far easier when he has a loyal—and connected—spouse.

Regardless of their class upbringing or the exalted status of their rank, savior generals adopted the profile of an egalitarian on the battlefield to lead by example. No Persian could distinguish Themistocles from any other trireme commander at Salamis. Sherman was scruffier than most of his subordinate officers. Ridgway, with live grenade and medical kit hung on his chest, was indistinguishable from a sergeant. Petraeus out of camouflage appeared aberrant. None had the look of a plumed Alexander or Napoleon.

All this was contrived—but not wholly contrived. A savior general really was a man of action. He looked restless, appeared to relish combat, and was as vigorous and often as warlike as his men. Petraeus often challenged officers and enlisted men half his age to outrun or outexercise him. Sherman’s mess was as crude as his soldiers’. If such generals were to
ask their men to take new risks to salvage victories, then they must be willing to share the ensuing dangers, and, like a Sherman or Ridgway, appear almost indistinguishable from the men they led. It was no accident that Themistocles, Belisarius, Sherman, Ridgway, and Petraeus on almost any day of their commands could easily have been killed, so close were they to the front and so unconcerned were they for their personal safety.

Unexpected successes won these visionaries public acclaim. But they also raised their stature from minor theater commanders almost overnight into national political figures—often with unfortunate personal results. Such radical change in fortunes often clouded perceptions of why these contrarians had been suspect in the first place for most of their careers, and thus perhaps explains why in the calm of peace their reexamined lives would so often end in controversy and sometimes in unhappiness. Many, after all, were reckless and had difficult personalities, large egos, and eccentric habits that became once again apparent in peace after having gone largely unremarked in the context of war. One can be as uncomfortable in public life as he is adroit on the battlefield. David Petraeus’s resignation from the directorship of the CIA, in a scandal that originated in a Gmail account, was perhaps simply a twenty-first-century version of the controversies that surrounded Themistocles, Belisarius, and Sherman when they left the battlefield and navigated tumultuous postwar careers. Themistocles and Belisarius, remember, both faced trials on capital charges. Ridgway had a long retirement; and if it was scandal free, it was also marked by serial controversies

Democracy can be unkind to successful military commanders—but especially unkind when the conditions of peace encourage collective amnesia about how close a victorious nation had come to military debacle. America was not only shocked that Curtis LeMay ran as vice president on the George Wallace ticket in 1968, but had forgotten as well LeMay’s prior heroic career as a World War II Army Air Force general who shortened the war and saved thousands of American lives. By 2010, David Petraeus was no longer so readily associated with the ever more distant salvation of Iraq in 2007–2008. By 2011, as CIA director, a retired General Petraeus could say little as the Obama administration for whom he worked pulled the last U.S. troops from Iraq. Sherman spent much of his postwar years engaged in constant feuds with former Union comrades
and Confederate enemies who repeatedly charged him with preferring warring against civilians rather than soldiers—calling their criticism “bottled piety” possible only after others had secured the peace. When President Dwight Eisenhower pressured Ridgway into retirement in 1955, the public assumed that their heroic president had good reason.

When we are safe, we value consensus and resent troublesome gadflies who claim the enemy is already on the horizon, our strategies wrong and prescriptions for defeat. We do not wish to hear that we are spending too little on defense or that a dangerous complacency has set in among the populace. But when war is upon us, we blame yesterday’s timidity. We abruptly borrow what we do not have for war—and in extremis seek out a different sort who can offer us hope of victory when few others dare. In other words, Themistocles no longer seems just a half-Thracian braggart. We call once more out of retirement an aged Belisarius to stop the Huns, take a second look at the despairing William Tecumseh Sherman, send Matthew Ridgway back out to the front from his Pentagon office, or summon a David Petraeus from his classrooms at Fort Leavenworth.

Human nature, even in this sophisticated age of neurology, genetic engineering, improved diet and material circumstances, and advanced brain chemistry, is unchanging. The result is unfortunately threefold in its implications: there will be future wars; history will continue to be a guide to present conflicts; and we will thus often see in many wars initial ebullience, replaced by despair, and then panic as certain defeat looms. That latter fact will be even more true in Western consensual societies, whose affluent and leisured publics will not tolerate wars abroad that do not immediately turn out as they were advertised and in which a demand to cut war’s costs rather than to ensure victory will very quickly predominate.

Do not believe that high technology and globalized uniformity have made military leadership, especially eccentric leadership, outdated or even rare. Instead, in the future age of robotic soldiers, fleets of drones, and deadly computer consoles, there will always be commanders waiting in the shadows for their moment, different sorts of people who thrive on chaos and ignore criticism. Whether they will be listened to next time—and whether lost wars are to be saved—hinges on how well we have learned from savior generals of the past.

I thank my agents of nearly a quarter century, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, who freely offered their valuable advice about the manuscript. My editor, Peter Ginna, at Bloomsbury provided many helpful suggestions, as did Peter Beatty of Bloomsbury as well. Friends Jennifer Heyne and Bruce Thornton of California State University, Fresno, read the entire manuscript and caught a number of errors. I thank Dr. David L. Berkey, a research analyst at the Hoover Institution, for help with editing and preparing the final version of the manuscript. Copy editor Emily DeHuff offered insightful changes. Tom Church, Curtis Eastin, and Ian Hughes aided with the maps and illustrations. Dr. John Raisian, the director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, generously provided me with research support, made possible through the kindness of Martin Anderson and his family. I have dedicated this book to my three children, Pauli, Sus, and Bill, in recognition of their constant encouragement and unlimited optimism.

1.
See Plutarch,
Themistocles,
10.5. In classical literature (much of it reactionary), the older city of Athenian hoplite farmers is associated with virtue—and to be contrasted to the post–Persian War radical democracy of rootless sailors who came into their own after Salamis.

2.
On the details of the evacuation of Attica, see Herodotus 8.36–43; Plutarch,
Themistocles,
8–12. Cf. Strauss,
Salamis,
73–77, for the evacuees on Salamis itself.

3.
On the wall at the Isthmus, cf. Herodotus 8.71.

4.
Plutarch,
Themistocles,
10.2; Herodotus 8.53–57, 60–63. It is rare in military history that the decision how—or even whether—to fight an existential war finally hinged upon an ad hoc, pre-battle shouting match between two rival generals.

5.
For a version of the debate, cf. Diodorus, 11.15.2–4; and for Themistocles’ sagacity at Artemisium, 11.12.4–7. See Strauss,
Salamis,
11–30, for a review of the Artemisium campaign. The Persians may have lost over half of their fleet of some 1,300 triremes to storms and in battle; the degree to which those losses were made up by eleventh-hour reinforcements from Ionia, or repairs on the damaged hulls coupled with new crews, is unknown. Yet those earlier losses have great bearing in determining how large the Persian fleet really was a month later at Salamis.

6.
See Plutarch,
Themistocles,
11. Themistocles was not far off the mark, since there were probably at least 180 Athenian triremes in the Greek fleet, and perhaps more. He emphasized the irony that the people without a city were still those with the strongest forces in the Greek coalition.

7.
The various ancient accounts of Herodotus, Plutarch, Diodorus, and Nepos concerning the great Greek debate before the battle cannot be quite
reconciled, though Herodotus’ version does not show too much rancor between Themistocles and Eurybiades, at least to the point of violence. Rather the chief friction originates between the Corinthians and the Athenians, especially given the now stateless status of Themistocles. Cf. Grote,
Greece,
5.123; cf. Herodotus 8.58–9.

8.
For the campaign and battle, especially the date, strategy, and the numbers of combatants involved, see the controversies reviewed in Lazenby,
Defence of Greece,
46–64.

9.
Agrarian conservatives always claimed exclusive credit for Marathon; see Hanson,
Other Greeks,
323–27. For the “Marathon fighters,” see Aristophanes,
Clouds,
986.

10.
On Themistocles’ foresight, see Plutarch,
Themistocles,
3.3–4. Most Greek generals sought to best use the existing resources their societies put at their disposal; Themistocles, in contrast, ensured that his society would have the wisdom and capability to put the right resources at his disposal.

11.
Thucydides, writing perhaps seventy years after the battle, made precisely that point that Persian error as much as Greek skill had led to their failure. He has the Corinthians a half century later argue, in self-serving fashion, that the Persians lost the war—perhaps both at Marathon and later at Salamis and Plataea—largely because of their own mistakes (1.69.5) rather than Athenian genius.

12.
On the role between military service and political clout in the Greek city-state, see Aristotle,
Politics,
4.1297b23–4.

13.
On the new silver find at Laurium and the disbursement, Hale,
Lords of the Sea,
8–14, has a good discussion. Apparently, wealthy private citizens were entrusted with much of the newly minted silver; they, in turn, would use such public funds to oversee the building of a ship. Cartledge,
Thermopylae,
98–99, explores briefly the decision not to distribute the treasure among the citizenry.

14.
Cf. Podlecki,
Life of Themistocles,
11: “Themistocles’ purpose in eliminating his opponents one by one was the realization of a scheme he had cherished at least since his archonship, the transformation of Athens from a second-rate land power to the leading maritime state in Greece.”

15.
The so-called Naval Bill of Themistocles rests on good ancient authority (cf. Aristotle,
Constitution of Athens,
22.7; Herodotus 7.143–44; Plutarch,
Themistocles,
4.1–2; and especially Thucydides 1.14.3). But we are not sure whether 100 ships were built in 482 to augment an existing 70–100, or whether up to fully 200 were ordered newly constructed from the revenues—only that the Athenian fleet that was ready at Salamis two years later numbered some 180–200 triremes. Cf. again Hale,
Lords of the Sea,
10–15.

16.
Herodotus 8.79–82. The nature of these various decrees and their relationship to the texts of Herodotus and Plutarch are under dispute. These
earlier resolutions probably concerned general contingency efforts and the recall of exiles, while the famous subsequent “Themistocles’ Decree” belonged to late summer 480 and in more precise detail outlined the nature of the evacuation of Attica. We still do not know whether the decree accurately reflects a preemptory and long-planned Athenian decision to leave the city to fight at Salamis
before
the loss of Thermopylae, or was simply a later compilation that drew from several authentic decrees, and thus is at odds with a more accurate Herodotean account that the evacuation of Athens was a somewhat more ad hoc, last-ditch effort
after
Thermopylae was unexpectedly breached. The details of the provisions of the Themistocles decree, and their relationship with the text of Herodotus, were first set out long ago by its discoverer, Michael Jameson. The historical ramifications of the decrees are covered in M. Jameson, “The Provisions for Mobilization in the Decree of Themistocles,”
Historia
12 (1963): 385–404.