If anyone has a passion for history (especially military history), Victor Davis Hanson (VDH) is a must read. His book, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (©2001), is a thought provoking read, particularly in the current conflict against a non-Western power of radical Islam.
The author looks at nine battles; three from antiquity, one from the middle-ages, two from the renaissance, one from the Victorian area, and two in the twentieth-century. The Western cultures VDH discusses are Hellenic (before and during the reign of Alexander the Great), Ancient Roman, Medieval Franks, Conquistador Spanish, Renaissance Southern Europe, Victorian British, and Twentieth-Century American. The non-Western cultures include Ancient Persia, Carthage, the Moors, the Ottomans, the Zulu, Japan, and North Vietnam. Carthage is a peculiar one that surprises most people. As a Greek colony it has Western foundation. But at the time of the Punic Wars (Cannae) were they Greek with North African influence or North African with Greek influence? I'll leave that for you to decide.
The premise of this book is that because of Western notions of liberty, politics, and philosophies (religious and secular), they have a marked advantage in warfare against cultures of vast disparaging notions to that of the West. He begins with Salami and the motivations the Greek city-states had in the desire to maintain their freedom, compared to the Persians whose military men were their by force to build a greater empire for Xeres.
In the battle of Gaugamela, VDH describes the instilled discipline of Greek hoplites that stand against the Persians so that the shock of the cavalry can be used for greatest affect. His also describes the use of a culture of liberty by a tyrant to achieve victory for the tyranny. As a matter of fact VDH compares Alexander to Hitler and how they took people of a great thought and culture and made them a killing machine unrivaled in their times.
The two chapters that had my interest were the battle of Tenochtitlan where the vastly outnumber Spanish defeated the Aztecs, and the battle of Midway where the inferior American forces won a decisive victory over the Japanese. It was interesting to see how the religion of the non-Western cultures dictated how they fought.
With the Aztecs, they did not want to annihilate the Spanish, but capture them to sacrifice to their gods. And their weapons were made as such to capture instead of kill. The Japanese and their reverence of the Emperor as a god brought a mentality to battle that gave them courage, but also clouded judgment. They sacrifice all for their Emperor, including their lives heedlessly, where as the Spanish and the Americans did not look to war as a religious endeavor, but as an amoral fight of political (and in the Spanish case physical) survival.
Whether you agree or disagree with him, this book is a good read. The battles are described with crisp clarity that puts you there. His conclusions are just a concise, but wants you to explore further into the questions that he asks (the specifics of the battles and the overall questions of the book). It is definitely a thinkers book.
