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Excerpt: 'The Father Of Us All'

NPR | By Victor Davis Hanson

Published May 10, 2010 at 11:40 AM EDT

Studying War: Where to Start

The best place to begin studying war is with the soldiers' stories themselves. E. B. Sledge's memoir, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, is nightmarish, but it reminds us that war, while it often translates to rot, filth, and carnage, can also be in the service of a noble cause. Elmer Bendiner's tragic retelling of the annihilation of B-17s over Germany, The Fall of Fortresses: A Personal Account of the Most Daring, and Deadly, American Air Battles of World War II, is an unrecognized classic.

From a different wartime perspective -- that of the generals -- Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs is justly celebrated as a model of prose. Yet the nearly contemporaneous Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman is far more analytical in its dissection of the human follies and pretensions that lead to war. Likewise, George S. Patton's War As I Knew It is not only a compilation of the eccentric general's diary entries but also a candid assessment of human nature itself. Xenophon's Anabasis -- the story of how the Greek Ten Thousand fought their way out of the Persian Empire -- begins the genre of the general's memoir.

Fiction often captures the experience of war as effectively as memoir, beginning with Homer's Iliad, in which Achilles confronts the paradox that rewards do not always go to the most deserving in war. The three most famous novels about the futility of conflict are The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and August 1914, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. No work has better insights on the folly of war, however, than Euripides' Trojan Women or Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.

Although many contemporary critics find it passe to document landmark battles in history, one can find a storehouse of information in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, by Edward S. Creasy, and A Military History of the Western World, by J. F. C. Fuller. Hans Delbruck's History of the Art of War and Russell F. Weigley's The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo center their sweeping histories on decisive engagements, using battles like Marathon and Waterloo as tools to illustrate larger social, political, and cultural values. A sense of high drama permeates William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru, while tragedy more often characterizes Steven Runciman's spellbinding short account The Fall of Constantinople 1453 and Donald R. Morris' massive The Washing of the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation under Shaka and Its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879. The most comprehensive and accessible one-volume treatment of history's most destructive war remains Gerhard L. Weinberg's A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II.

Relevant histories for our current struggle with Middle East terrorism are Alistair Horne's superb A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, Michael B. Oren's Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, and Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. Anything John Keegan writes is worth reading; The Face of Battle remains the most impressive general military history of the last fifty years.

Biography too often winds up ignored in the study of war. Plutarch's lives of Pericles, Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great established the traditional view of these great captains as men of action, while weighing their record of near-superhuman achievement against their megalomania. Elizabeth Longford's Wellington is a classic study of England's greatest soldier. Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command, by Douglas Southall Freeman, for all its detractors, remains spellbinding.

If, as Carl von Clausewitz believed, "War is the continuation of politics by other means," then study of civilian wartime leadership is critical. The classic scholarly account of the proper relationship between the military and its overseers is still Samuel P. Huntington's The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. For a contemporary J'accuse of American military leadership during the Vietnam War, see H. R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

Eliot A. Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime were purportedly a favorite read of the former presidents. It argues that successful leaders like Ben-Gurion, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lincoln kept a tight rein on their generals and never confused officers' esoteric military expertise with either political sense or strategic resolution.

In The Mask of Command, Keegan examines the military competence of Alexander the Great, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler, and comes down on the side of the two who fought under consensual government. In The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, I took that argument further and suggested that three of history's most audacious generals -- Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton -- were also keen political thinkers, with strategic insight into what made their democratic armies so formidable.

How politicians lose wars is also of interest. See especially Ian Kershaw's biography Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis. Mark Moyar's first volume of a proposed two-volume reexamination of Vietnam, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965, is akin to reading Euripides' tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances. See also Alistair Horne's To Lose a Battle: France 1940.

Few historians can weave military narrative into the contemporary political and cultural landscape. James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era does, and his volume ushered in the most recent renaissance of Civil War history. Barbara W. Tuchman's The Guns of August describes the first month of the First World War in riveting but excruciatingly sad detail. Two volumes by David McCullough, Truman and 1776, give fascinating inside accounts of the political will necessary to continue wars amid domestic depression and bad news from the front. So does Martin Gilbert's Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939-1941. Donald Kagan's On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace warns against the dangers of appeasement, especially the lethal combination of tough rhetoric with little military preparedness, in a survey of wars from ancient Greece to the Cuban missile crisis. Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation reminds Americans that their idealism (if not self-righteousness) is nothing new, but rather helps explain more than two centuries of both wise and ill-considered intervention abroad.

Any survey on military history should conclude with more abstract lessons about war. Principles of War by Clausewitz remains the cornerstone of the science. Niccolo Machiavelli's The Art of War blends realism with classical military detail. Two indispensable works, War: Ends and Means, by Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury, and Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, edited by Peter Paret, provide refreshingly honest accounts of the timeless rules and nature of war.