The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq Read online

  Contents

  Prologue: Saving Lost Wars

  Chapter One.

  Athens Is Burning

  Themistocles at Salamis—September 480 B.C.

  Chapter Two.

  Byzantium at the Brink

  The Fireman Flavius Belisarius—A.D. 527–59

  Chapter Three.

  “Atlanta Is Ours and Fairly Won”

  William Tecumseh Sherman’s Gift to Abraham Lincoln—Summer 1864

  Chapter Four.

  One Hundred Days in Korea

  Matthew Ridgway Takes Over—Winter 1950–51

  Chapter Five.

  Iraq Is “Lost”

  David Petraeus and the Surge in Iraq—January 2007–May 2008

  Epilogue: A Rare Breed

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  To Pauline, William, and Susannah

  Servata fides cineri

  Prologue: Saving Lost Wars

  What Wins Wars?

  How are wars won or lost? Through sheer luck? Surprise? Morale? Material resources? Or does the outcome of conflict hinge on the advantages of superior manpower? Are more brilliant strategic planning and tactical protocol the keys to success? Then again, do armies win through lethal cutting-edge technology—more accurate bombs, deadlier shells, and longer-range missiles? And do all these criteria shift and turn and hinge on how we define war—as conventional, asymmetrical, counterinsurgent, terrorist, or the like?

  All these considerations in varying degrees have always determined military success. Hernán Cortés’s destruction of the Aztec Empire (1519–21) was predicated largely on possessing better arms. The vastly outnumbered but well-led Spanish conquistadors had access to harquebuses, artillery, steel swords, metal breastplates and helmets, horses, and crossbows, while the Aztecs did not. Spanish technological monopoly allowed a few hundred mounted knights to help enlist indigenous allies and end an empire of millions in roughly two years.

  The industrial might of the United States often ensured that American forces in the distant Pacific during the Second World War simply had far more food, weapons, medical care, and military infrastructure than did the imperial Japanese in their own environs. Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht was usually outnumbered through much of 1944–45; nevertheless, its superior machine guns, artillery, and armor allowed spirited Germans to continue fighting when most other armies would have given up, in the face of terrible strategic decision making, supply shortages, an immoral cause, and superior enemy numbers.

  Generals Still Matter

  Yet on rare occasions, generals and the leadership of single individuals can still matter more than these seemingly larger inanimate forces. There are more than nine hundred admirals and generals in the U.S. military. They are not often considered to be in a position, under the protocols of postmodern conflict, to alter radically the course of battlefield action—especially given the role of twenty-first-century technology. Yet among them are a few rare military geniuses and inspired leaders who, when the planets line up, can still, by their own genius or lack of it, themselves either win or lose wars. Winston Churchill was not altogether wrong when he said of Admiral John Jellicoe’s command of the British Grand Fleet in the First World War that he “was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.”

  So often we forget the power of individuals in the anonymous age of high technology and massive bureaucracies. Today, machines and regulations seem to lessen the influence of humans. They lull us into thinking that events transpire organically, almost without human agency. Yet frequently the fate of millions, both on the battlefield and to the rear, has always hinged on the abilities of just a few rare men of genius. In somewhat similar fashion, the emergence of corporations like Apple or Microsoft was predicated on the singularity of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates. The success of either company would be hard to envision without the genius of a single man.

  Take away Hernán Cortés, and for all their gunpowder and Spanish steel, the conquistadors would probably not have defeated the Aztecs when they did. The American Third Army’s summer sprint across France seems unlikely without George Patton as its commander. The war in Europe might have been won without Patton at the head of the Third Army, but in a manner that would have been far more costly and lengthy. France had sufficient armor, artillery, and manpower to stop the German offensive through the Ardennes in May 1940; what the reeling French military tragically lacked was any sort of inspired or skilled leadership to translate its advantages into salvation—in other words, a George Patton, Erwin Rommel, or Charles de Gaulle in charge of ground forces. Any German general other than Rommel would probably never have reached El Alamein; British generals other than Montgomery in late 1942 would probably never have pushed him back so decisively. Had a gifted American General Creighton Abrams commanded much earlier in Vietnam in 1965, and had an equally talented North Vietnamese General Giap never commanded Communist forces at all, the war—despite its myriad political, moral, cultural, and technological contours—might have turned out quite differently.

  For those historians who appreciate human agency, it is common to attribute such overarching powers of military leadership to history’s great captains of the battlefield. The genius of an Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon Bonaparte could decide the fate of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the battle line. Pity the Persian who lined up opposite Alexander’s outnumbered troops at Gaugamela, or the Gaul who was besieged by Caesar at Alesia; had the former just faced a Parmenio or the latter a Pompey or Crassus, the overwhelming numbers of his kindred by his side might have saved him. Sometimes we grant such importance of command to sober and judicious organizers. Marcus Agrippa, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John J. Pershing, Alfred von Schlieffen, and Isoroku Yamamoto so mastered the planning of war and the mustering of forces at the general staff level that their insight and knowledge seemed to predetermine the course of upcoming battle. Even brilliant military bureaucrats at home such as George Marshall or Samuel Pepys on occasion ensured that forces at the distant front were likely to win battles before they started.

  An industry of military history also exists to chart how and why some generals proved great, and most mediocre. Usually singular imagination, daring, charisma, speaking ability, instinct, calm, learning, physical robustness, relative youth, and an organizational mind are cited as the common gifts that, from Alexander to Napoleon, ensure success. Books on the untold secrets of the “Great Generals” appear each year—as do their antitheses, the aggregate lessons for modern leaders to be gleaned from the military disasters, errors, and follies of abject incompetents. We assume that there is an identifiable profile of both successful and disastrous military leadership across time and space. And such patterns can be studied, copied, and perhaps put to good use by those less naturally talented, from education to business. Rarely, however, do we read about saved, rather than won or lost, wars—or generals who in extremis rescued rather than started or finished a war. Perhaps we neglect saviors who rescue unwise interventions better written off as over and quickly forgotten; or we feel that they are mere relief pitchers of sorts, who can only preserve, but not claim credit for, the eventual successful efforts begun by their worn-out predecessors.

  Yet often the best generals do not plan wars or assume control on the eve of the first battle, when instead the better-connected marshals
of the peacetime bureaucracy exercise high-profile command. Instead, the savior generals prove to be a subset of history’s great captains. Such men emerge far later from the lower echelons when wars are almost lost. They arise only because their superiors are desperate and turn to the unlikely, to whom, in normal circumstances, they otherwise probably would not. These eleventh-hour landscapes of battle, when most at home and officers in the field have given up on a war as irrevocably stalemated or lost, draw in a different sort of commander. Prewar education, reputation, influence, and rank matter little when the enemy is gaining ground and very few know how to turn him back.

  These “firemen” are asked to extinguish the conflagration that others, of typically superior rank and prestige, have ignited. Their moment signals a crisis of national confidence, when the general public of a consensual society may already have favored retreat or even lost hope in their cause. William Tecumseh Sherman outside Atlanta in summer 1864, Matthew Ridgway retreating from Seoul in winter 1951, and David Petraeus trying to save Anbar Province in Iraq in early 2007, for all their assertions of calm and confidence, privately knew that only results would win back public support. In some sense, winning against impossible odds—when most others cannot or would not try—is the only mark of a great general.

  Ulysses S. Grant certainly was felt to be such a figure by spring 1864, after he had come eastward to assume direct command of Union forces in Virginia that had been bled white since 1861. Yet by late summer 1864, all the Union dreams of ending the Civil War that year under Grant had been nearly wrecked, with the near destruction of the Army of the Potomac in a series of horrific battles in Virginia. The disasters of summer 1864 led not only to doubts about the reelection of Abraham Lincoln, but also to some initial worry over the president’s renomination by his own party. Then yet again, thanks in part to William Tecumseh Sherman and the capture of Atlanta, the Union cause recovered, and both Grant and Lincoln were given a reprieve. It proved hard for the Northern public to give up completely on their unpopular president and the general responsible for the nightmare of Cold Harbor, when suddenly Atlanta fell and a huge Union army in the west was free to go where it pleased in the Confederate rear.

  Unlike Alexander the Great, Epaminondas the Theban in 371 B.C. had not inherited a great army from his father, much less any blueprint of invasion. Rather, he marched his agrarian hoplites—classical Greek heavily armed and armored infantrymen who fought in the phalanx—to the battlefield at Leuktra when an invading Spartan army was only an hour’s march from his capital, and outnumbering his shaky Theban army three to two. When defeat seemed inevitable, Epaminondas did the impossible by crushing the Spartans in battle, routing the invading army, killing their king—and in time was marching on the enemy capital to the south to free the Messenian helots from their Spartan serfdom and to end Sparta as a major Greek power.

  The Suspect Few

  Resentment and its twin, envy, arise through the higher echelon of the officer corps at the selection of an outsider such as William Tecumseh Sherman or Epaminondas the Theban to salvage the battlefield. After all, a change in command is inherently a harsh verdict on all those invested in everything that preceded it. The outward qualities in a military leader necessary to galvanize dispirited troops and resurrect national will—greater knowledge and insight, outspokenness, self-promotion, individualism, eccentricity—sometimes incite suspicion and engender spite. General George McClellan, and the succession of generals who followed him, felt that the successes of Sherman and Grant by early 1865 were predicated on unacknowledged lessons learned from the preceding generals’ earlier failures.

  Savior generals were often suspect outsiders well before their appointments. During their command, even spectacular recovery could be attributed to luck or the inevitable ebb and flow of the battlefield—or to the previous underappreciated efforts of their failed predecessors. Even after their successes, most saviors did not enjoy the commensurate acclaim and tranquillity that the moment of their military brilliance otherwise might have ensured. Heroes like Themistocles, Scipio, or Belisarius—and in the modern age, a Philippe Pétain or a Grant—died either in poverty, obscurity, or self-induced disgrace. Today mention William Tecumseh Sherman a near century and a half after he went into Georgia, and many are as likely to equate burning plantations with terrorism as appreciate a grand strategy to minimize loss of American life, both Union and Confederate. Mavericks of real genius such as George Patton and Curtis LeMay often ended up as buffoonish caricatures of their brilliant selves. When David Petraeus left Iraq, his real problems began rather than ended—continual stalemate in Afghanistan, controversy at the CIA over the killing of an American ambassador and three other Americans in Libya, and sudden resignation from the CIA amid rumor, innuendo, and scandal—the full consequences of which were not known when this book went to press. National laurels and a quiet retirement did not meet a triumphant Matthew Ridgway when he returned from Korea. Instead, forced retirement and endless controversies marked the next four decades of Ridgway’s long life. The ascendance of a savior general is brief, the moment of his glory passing.

  Lost Wars Won

  The following case histories, from antiquity to the present, are admittedly somewhat arbitrary and varied. Sometimes generals turned defeat into victory in a matter of months, as in the case of Matthew Ridgway; at other times, they achieved success only after many decades of fighting, as the career of Belisarius attests. In many ways, George Washington, U. S. Grant, Curtis LeMay, George Patton, or Chester Nimitz could be seen as savior generals just as impressive. As an American, I have shorted the military tradition of other Western consensual societies—the brilliant recoveries engineered by Generals Kitchener, Slim, and Montgomery—and omitted non-Western savior generals altogether. Between antiquity and the modern age, Hernán Cortés, Don Juan of Austria, and the Duke of Marlborough won unlikely battles that turned around entire conflicts. Nor have I included, from the ancient world, the Spartans Gylippus or Lysander, the Theban Epaminondas, or the Roman Sertorius, who all inherited unfavorable military circumstances and were able to find, if only for a time, victory amid defeat. Considerations of space limited my selections, but the five generals in this book also seem to me to have inherited unprecedented failure that made their triumphs singularly spectacular. Here I emphasize permanent recoveries (Athens, Byzantium, the Union, and South Korea were saved when most thought they would not be); rather than brief reprieves in the manner that Alcibiades for a time revived the Athenian navy, or Rommel for over two years turned a strategic backwater in North Africa into a major front. The verdict is still out on the survival of a constitutional Iraq.

  There is another obvious bias in the choice of biographies: I more or less have favored generals of consensual societies over their opponents. There were Chinese Communist generals whose eleventh-hour planning stopped MacArthur at the Yalu. Most military analysts had expected the ultimately successful General Vo Nguyen Giap to lose the Vietnam War; few thought Marshal Zhukov could save Leningrad or even Stalingrad. Yet I am not so interested in such careers that are inseparable from authoritarian societies. Field Marshals Heinz Guderian, Erich von Manstein, and Walter Model (“Hitler’s Fireman”) were great recovery artists who, against all odds and on more than one occasion, saved Hitler from himself, but their causes ultimately were better lost than won. After all, the very notion of “savior” is embedded within some sense of a moral universe that should be saved. And “savior generals” would be paradoxes should we profile captains who advanced totalitarianism and saved tyranny from the forces of reform and liberation.

  The following episodes are also meant to be representative of a military profile that can by analogy elucidate hundreds of other careers throughout history and likewise serve as some sort of guide to the future, rather than an attempt to be comprehensive and systematic. In short, there are history’s great generals, and then among them are its far fewer savior generals who did the improbable and often changed history
for the better.

  Chapter One

  Athens Is Burning

  Themistocles at Salamis—September 480 B.C.

  Athens Aflame (September 480 B.C.)

  The “Violet-crowned” Athens of legend was in flames. It no longer existed as a Greek city. How, the Athenians lamented, could their vibrant democracy simply end like this—emptied of its citizens, occupied by the Persian king Xerxes, and now torched? How had the centuries-old polis of Theseus and Solon, with its majestic Acropolis, now in just a few September days been overwhelmed by tens of thousands of Persian marauders—enemies that the Athenians had slaughtered just ten years earlier at Marathon?

  News had come suddenly this late summer to the once hopeful Athenians that the last-ditch Hellenic defense, eighty-five miles away at the pass of Thermopylae—the final gateway from the north into Greece—had evaporated. A Spartan king was dead. There were no Greek land forces left to block the rapid advance of the more than a quarter million Persian sailors and infantry southward into central Greece. The Greek fleet at Artemisium was fleeing southward to Athens and the Peloponnese. Far more numerous Persian warships followed in hot pursuit. Nearly all of the northern Greek city-states, including the important nearby city of Thebes, had joined the enemy. Now the residents of a defenseless Athens—on a desperate motion in the assembly of their firebrand admiral Themistocles—faced only bad and worse choices, and scrambled in panic to abandon their centuries-old city to King Xerxes.