The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (2 page)

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.

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.

Themistocles at Salamis—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.

Desperate Athenians rowed in boats over to the nearby islands or the northern coast of the Peloponnese. Anyone who stayed behind in the lost city would meet the fate of the Spartans and Thespians at Thermopylae—killed to the last man. It was as if the great Athenian infantry victory at Marathon that turned back the first Persian invasion a decade earlier had never occurred—like the French who lost their country in May 1940 to the Germans despite the valor of Verdun a generation earlier. All of Greece was to be the westernmost satrapy of an angry Xerxes’ ascendant Persia that now for the first time incorporated European land into its empire. Athens—and everything north of it—was already Persian. The war seemed, for practical purposes, almost over, with only some mopping up of the crippled and squabbling Greek fleet at Salamis.

The ensuing mass flight of Athenians was a landmark moment in the history of Greece. Centuries later, the Roman-era biographer Plutarch, who in his own times could not conceive of Asians in Europe rather than Europeans controlling Asia, summed up the Athenian panic and the decision to forgo a last glorious land battle with the brief obituary: “The whole city of Athens had gone out to sea.” But what exactly did that mean? Could a Greek polis—traditionally defined concretely by its locale, monuments, and landed patrimony—survive in name only without a home? Many Greeks could not conceive of handing over their shrines and tombs of their ancestors to the enemy without even a fight. That is, until the popular leader Themistocles had convinced them all that they had no choice but to leave. Only that way would the gods fight on the Athenian side and eventually give them victory and what was left of their charred city back.
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Soon almost all the fighting-age resident males—perhaps as many as thirty thousand to forty thousand Athenian citizens—had abandoned the city to man its fleet of triremes off Salamis. More than a quarter million elderly, women, and children had sought safety outside Attica, one of the largest transfers of population in the ancient world. In their haste, the despondent Athenians abandoned some of the ill and aged in the city or left them to their own devices out in the Attic countryside. Meanwhile, well over a hundred thousand Athenian civilians would crowd across the bay from the city to the rocky island of Salamis. They were gambling that their own seamen, along with still unconquered Greek allies from the Peloponnese, could wreck the Persian fleet before they all starved—and before the onset of autumn.
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There was little help from anywhere. None of the dwindling number of surviving but terrified large Greek states to the south—Argos, Corinth, Sparta—on the other side of the Isthmus of Corinth wished to send a relief force to its likely destruction on the Attic plain. The Greeks of Asia Minor were on the side of Xerxes, those in southern Italy and Sicily too distant to offer help—had they been willing. Apparently the remaining free Greeks to the south would write the Athenians off as an extinct race as they looked to their own defenses, or found some sort of accommodation with Persians. Most were still terrified by the news that King Xerxes’ Persians, hot after the Greeks retreating from Thermopylae, had arrived in Attica to level Athens and demonstrate a similar fate waiting for other city-states to the south. The Persian king was becoming legendary, a force that could not be stopped by man or god; and in fact Xerxes was the first Asian invader to reach this far south into Europe in the long history of the Greeks—and he would be the last to do so in force until the Ottoman Turks entered Athens in 1458, nearly two millennia later.

Inside the empty city, the occupying Persians began the laborious task of destroying the stone shrines and temples and torching homes. They quickly finished off a few Athenian holdouts still barricaded on the Acropolis. Meanwhile Xerxes drew up his fleet nearby at the Athenian harbor of Phaleron. The Persians’ war to annex Greece was now in a sense almost over. There was only the Megarid and the Peloponnese to the south left to occupy and the easy task of mopping up the retreating Greek ships and refugees trapped on Salamis.

The king himself ostentatiously perched his throne on Mount Aigaleos outside the city. He was eager to watch the final destruction below of what remained of the Greek fleet in the straits of Salamis, if the retreating Greeks could even be shamed into rowing out. Surely Xerxes’ firing of Athens should have been an insult to all the Greeks, one that might incite some sort of last gasp of resistance. Or perhaps the humiliated Athenians, like most of the other disheartened Greeks up north, would simply just give up and wisely join the winners. If he could not cut off the head of another Spartan king, as he had done weeks earlier to Leonidas at Thermopylae, perhaps Xerxes could at least impale a Greek admiral or two.

For six months, Xerxes had enjoyed momentum and glory, like all of history’s grand invaders. Their huge spring and summer expeditions at first rolled out with little resistance—always admiring their own magnitude, never worrying much about the unseen and surely inferior enemy
to come. The legions that joined Napoleon’s invasion force in summer 1812 sang as they headed out for Czarist Russia, hardly imagining that most would die there. The imperial German army that nearly surrounded Paris in August and September 1914 had no thought of a Verdun on the horizon. Hitler’s Wehrmacht that plowed through the Soviet Union in June 1941 with thoughts of storming the Kremlin by August lost not only the theater, but the war as well. Amid such grand ambitions, few commanders wonder how to feed such hordes as supply lines lengthen, the enemy stiffens, the army loses men to attrition and the requirements of their occupations, the terrain changes, and the fair weather of summer descends into a crueler autumn and winter in a far distant hostile country.

Likewise, few in Xerxes’ horde that crossed the Hellespont in April imagined what a distant September would bring. One side or the other inevitably would suffer enormous losses that would shake the foundation of their societies for decades after, given the magnitude of forces and the logistical challenges in play. Xerxes had transported tens of thousands of sailors and infantry nearly five hundred miles from his western capital at Sardis into southern Europe. He had successfully crossed from Asia Minor to Europe by constructing at Abydos an enormously expensive cabled pontoon bridge over the Hellespont—all on the gamble of being able to feed his forces in part from conquered or allied territory. His army and navy were not merely bent on punishing the Greeks in battle, but rather on absorbing the Greek people into the Persian Empire. What was left of the collective Greek defense rested upon fewer than 370 ships from little more than twenty city-states, about half the size of Xerxes’ imperial fleet in the bay of Phaleron a few miles distant. Most of the assembled Greek admirals were already distraught at the idea of being blockaded by the Persians in the small harbors around Salamis. Nearly all commanders were resigned to retreat even further, fifty miles southward to the Isthmus at Corinth to join the last Greek resistance on land. Indeed, ten thousand Peloponnesians were frantically working there on a cross-isthmus wall as the Greeks bickered at Salamis. The historian Herodotus—who was a boy of four or five when Xerxes invaded—believed from his informants that many in the Greek alliance had already decided on a withdrawal from the proposed battle. France in 1940 or Kuwait in 1990 had at least kept their defeated peoples inside their occupied cities. But the conquered city of Athens was both taken over by the enemy and also emptied of its own residents. Unlike other
defeated Greek city-states that “Medized” (became like Persians) and were governed by Persian overlords, the Athenians who fought at Salamis faced a different, existential choice: either win or cease to exist as a people.
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