The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny [Paperback]

Another argument that is interesting and not completely drawn out is that society had possibly changed around battle preventing Patton from executing his war plan to his best ability. The idea Patton expounded of killing as many of the enemy as possible with as few American casualties as possible seems to have been somewhat politically incorrect. The advent of better communications also meant the leader had less freedom of action. It would be interesting to read more on this thesis.

Finally, one small flaw that bothers me, Mr. Hanson can get a bit repetitive. For example he dwells on General Patton's lack of supplies so often and uses almost the same sentences all the time. It is like he feels we forgot what he said a few pages before.

In describing the conquests of the three great liberators, Hanson excels. His descriptions are more than just a narrative of the events, but a clear and extraordinary analysis of what made the three liberators and their armies click. Hanson clearly and justifiedly is a fan of the three.

However, if the book is purportedly more than just the story of the three great leaders and their armies, that is where it loses some of its strength. While a democratic army can be a devastating force, history reveals exceptions. For instance, while Patton's armies defeated the Nazi's, the American armies were routed by the Chinese in Korea and the British and French armies were defeated by the German blitzkrieg. Moreover, from Alexander to Genghis Kahn to Napoleon, history is full of examples of dictators leading armies of conquest and overwhelming their opponents. Hanson should have discussed theses other examples and explored why they are not inconsistent with his theory.

What Hanson, does discuss, but what could have been focused on more, is that the democratic armies were not professional armies like the ones of Alexander or Napoleon. Both the armies of Sherman and Patton, the soldiers were ordinary citizens who were called up to fight antidemocratic forces and who quickly reentered civilian life after their mission had been accomplished.

All in all, the reading of the book was a positive experience even given the limitations of Hanson's theory.

Hanson starts with Thebes v. Sparta in the 4th century B.C.E. and the campaign of Epaminondas. This was a revelation to me. I had known next to nothing about Greece between the end of the Peloponessian War and the rise of Macedon and had never heard of Epaminondas before reading another book of Hanson's a few months ago. Learning that Sparta, undefeated and ,literally, uninvaded for centuries, had been humiliated and had seen its enslaved dependencies freed over the course of a winter's campaign by the Theban Epaminondas made for interesting and fast-paced reading.

Hanson presents a lot of contrarian perspectives, for example his characterization of Alexander the Great as, essentially, a homicidal maniac. Similarly, and more broadly, Hanson inquires why Athens, a ruthless imperial power, is more valued today than Thebes, which, after all broke the power of Sparta and which did not seek hegemony even at the peak of its power. This seems, however, to overlook a broad range of Athenian cultural achievment, not to mention Marathon and Salamis. Further, within 5 years of Epaminondas' campaign, he died in battle, following which Thebes was submerged in the Macedonian conquest. Bad timing there on Thebes'part.

Turning to the analysis of Sherman's March to the Sea(and beyond),Hanson seems a little harsh in his treatment of the Army of the Potomac, which after all had to fight the best Confederate commander and the Army of Northern Virginia in territory highly favorable to the defending force, with limited room for manuever. He also ignores the point that Grant eventually did outflank Lee when he crossed the James and attacked Petersburg, while Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia awaited frontal attack 50 miles away in their lines in front of Richmond. That is the very type of deep strike that Hanson praises Patton for wanting to make.

As is well known, however, this deep strike failed because the Union generals on the scene at Petersburg, with overwhelming strength on hand and a day and a half to attack, bungled matters so badly that Lee was finally able to shift troops to that front and hold the position. Had this stroke been succesful, as it deserved to be both in conception and execution up to the point of actual attack, the War would have ended before Sherman took Atlanta. So, Grant and the Army of the Potomac were not the bumblers that Hanson paints.

Having said that, Hanson does an excellent job giving Sherman the credit he deserves, which has been largely denied him due to the dominance of the pro-Southern view of the Civil War.

Turning to Patton, Hanson is again excellent but this section is hard to read because of the staggering consequences which followed the repeated refusals of Patton's superiors, Generals Bradley and Eisenhower, to allow him to go forward and cut behind retreating or bypassed German forces. These consequences, Hanson argues, included the failure to win the European War in 1944, many thousands of Allied combat deaths, probably several million death camp victims,and Soviet domination of eastern Europe for 50 years with the resultant Cold War. Hanson is unsparing and convincing in pointing out what he sees as the high command errors that led to these consequences and the consequences themselves.

This book was written after the First Gulf War and before the Second. An interesting and unintended aspect of the book, given current events, is Hanson's analysis of what each of the 3 commanders in question would have done at the end of the First Gulf War and the obvious comparison to our current strategy, operations and tactics in Iraq. For a point of reference, I write this review on 11/14/03, while our forces are apparently intensifying operations in the "Sunni Triangle", following several weeks of intensifying attacks against U.S. and allied forces. I'll leave matters there. I recommend this book.