The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (4 page)

Yet despite the immediate Athenian ebullience, Marathon proved not quite to be the final victory that it seemed at the time. A worried Themistocles, almost alone among Athenian leaders, drew quite different lessons from the victory—and all would prove vital for the survival of the Athenians in the years to come. While others celebrated the courage of the Marathon fighters, Themistocles felt the victory a fluke of sorts. He saw no grand strategy that had contributed to the infantry victory. There was no way that the hoplite victory at Marathon offered a blueprint for future military success against the huge maritime resources at the king’s disposal.

Instead, to the mind of Themistocles, Marathon was merely a “beginning of far greater struggles”—in the way that the supposed war to end all wars, the “Great War” of 1914–18, was soon to be rebranded as a prequel First World War once an ascendant Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and started another global conflagration. Marathon was a probing attack, no more—given the greater resources of Persia that were still uncommitted to the war against the Greeks and were hardly diminished by the single, though humiliating, defeat. The loss of even 6,400 troops meant little in an empire of several millions. Themistocles immediately tried to warn his Athenians that unfortunately there might be no future Marathon victories in the face of “events still to come.” Yet few Athenians wished to hear that ominous message at this time—the equivalent of someone warning the Americans in January 1991 that their brilliant four-day victory over Saddam Hussein was the beginning, not the end, of a far larger rivalry with a determined foe who would remain in power for twelve years into the future, until yet another American expeditionary force was sent into the Persian Gulf.
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In retrospect, Themistocles fathomed why the superior Persian forces had arrived in Attica in 490 after conquering both the islands of Naxos and Euboea without much Greek interference. Their choice and style of battle at Marathon proved perhaps unwise, but it nevertheless had been theirs alone. Had not Persian admirals under their general Datis—without worry about their Greek counterparts—determined when and where to fight? The Athenians and their few allies had been reactive, given their limited options. Yet with greater resources the Athenians
might have fought at a time, place, and manner of their own choosing. Despite the Greek victory and the high enemy losses, perhaps more than two-thirds of the defeated Persian force had simply sailed away unscathed. They could easily come back. Sea power, Themistocles concluded, had enabled the Persians to arrive when and where they desired. In comparison, Athens by 490 still had only a small fleet and thus no comparable maritime lift capability. It took a keen contrarian mind, and a willingness to endure ridicule, to grasp that fundamental Athenian vulnerability at a time of infantry triumphalism.
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In the future, if an Athenian army had to march up and down the coast each time a Persian armada in the Aegean threatened the Attic coast, how could the city ever be truly safe without fortifications? Themistocles saw additional reasons why naval power made sense. The young democracy at Athens was only seventeen years old. It had hardly evolved beyond the culture of the traditional agrarian city-state whose backbone was a minority of landowning hoplite farmers. Most citizens, despite the radical notion of “power to the people,” remained poor. Perhaps half did not own property. Aristocratic grandees like Aristides or Miltiades usually had managed to end up as the city’s leaders, as the idea of political opportunity had not yet led to a notion of comprehensive equality.

To the mind of the radical Themistocles, the ideal of egalitarian politics would never come to fruition if the defense, and with it the prestige, of the city rested only with a minority of conservative property owners. Was there a way that Athens could still survive, even when its farmland was overrun, without need for countless Marathons? Why should security policy depend solely on those who could afford hoplite armor? How could the city remain safe against the Persian hordes when thousands of landless Athenians were not even mobilized for its defense?

In the ancient world, those who fought for the city-state usually ended up controlling it. Military strategy, in other words, simply reflected class realities. Wars, for radicals like Themistocles, were as much about internal politics as they were about national defense. Accordingly, using public money to pay thousands of poor to row in the fleet or build fortifications would strengthen the sinews of the new democracy. The poor would have their wages in silver coin and enjoy the prestige of protecting the city—while ensuring a permanent constituency for popular leaders like Themistocles.
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Themistocles had a final argument for sea power. Given the vast resources of the Persian Empire, the expeditionary force under Datis and Artaphernes in 490—while large in comparison to the Greek resistance—had actually been somewhat small. The Persian strike had intended to be merely punitive, concerned more with Euboea and Attica than the whole of the Greek mainland. But could the Athenians and their allies always count on such Persian half-measures in the future? Did not Darius’ empire of some 20 million that stretched from the Aegean to India possess the means not merely to punish Athens, but to destroy it outright? If Athens were to be safe, Themistocles reasoned, it needed to reinvent itself, and almost immediately so, given the imminent threat. The Athenians required a large navy. A fleet in turn demanded a protected port and urban fortifications. Such investments likewise reflected an entirely new defense strategy more attuned to the nature of the enemy and in accordance with a growing democratic culture at home.

Yet the implementation of these radical ideas demanded rare political skills in order to warn his triumphant countrymen that the strategies that seemed unquestioned would prove suicidal. The career of Themistocles between Marathon and Thermopylae is similar to Winston Churchill’s between the world wars—both were visionaries who were written off as alarmists and eccentrics by their contemporaries. Yet neither was fooled into thinking that prior victories had created permanent deterrence against a persistent enemy, temporarily down but by no means out. Instead, such mavericks knew that the once defeated already had far more assets than did their own victorious, but poorly prepared, democracies. In serial, unresolved conflicts, the initial victors can turn complacent in hoarding their advantages, the once defeated become audacious with more to gain than to lose—a logical enough fact that nevertheless few leaders appreciate.

After Marathon, each major traditional political figure who might have challenged Themistocles’ new vision was either fined, ostracized, or came under public suspicion—Megacles, Miltiades, Xanthippus, Aristides. This growing infantry and naval divide between Themistocles and his more conservative rivals came to a head in 483, just three years before the arrival of the Persians at Salamis in a most unexpected way. A new, unusually rich vein of silver ore was discovered at the state-controlled mines at Laurium in southern Attica. That lucky find gave the Athenians an unexpected influx of sudden wealth. The resulting coined silver would prove an opening for the impatient Themistocles to see his strategic thinking at last become state policy.
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The
Olympias
is a modern replica of an ancient trireme. While contemporary ship designers have difficulty understanding just how the Greeks engineered their three-bank warships, the
Olympias
offers a good understanding of how Greek warships might have appeared as they sailed against the Persians at Salamis. Photo courtesy of the Hellenic Navy.

Themistocles prevented the distribution of the windfall to the citizens on an equitable basis, as might have been expected in the egalitarian spirit of the young democracy (each citizen would have received an annual dole of about ten days’ worth of wages). Instead, he somehow persuaded the assembly to build enough ships to ensure a fleet that would reach two hundred triremes. How a radically democratic politician could persuade his own constituents to pass up such easy money in the here and now in order to invest in an unproven naval program against a distant enemy, we are not told. But Themistocles’ naval law proved a monumental turning point for Athens, not unlike, in the American experience, the passing of the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 that squeaked by in the House of Representatives in August 1940 by just one vote—and just in time, on the eve of war.

Triremes were relatively novel warships that were becoming common in Aegean warfare. The radical design of three-tiered rowing benches resulted in unprecedented speed and power for ramming, but required
careful training to ensure the fragile vessels were not swamped in rough seas and winds. Ostensibly the expressed threat to Athens was the nearby rival island power of Aegina, not the looming revenge of the Achaemenids. Why worry the assembly just yet with an apocalyptic vision of a huge Persian invasion?
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Themistocles no doubt always expected to use the new fleet and its conscripted crews against a second, massive Persian invasion that could arrive by sea at any time. But the war with Aegina, and the chance strike at Laurium, gave him the pretexts and the money to prepare for the looming existential Persian threat. By late summer 480, the Athenians may have built 170 triremes. Soon more than thirty thousand trained seamen protected the city from invasion.

William Tecumseh Sherman would later invent a new way of holistic warfare in attacking the civilian infrastructure of the slaveholding class. Matthew Ridgway would grasp that conventional warmaking might be more rather than less frequent in the age of nuclear deterrence. And David Petraeus was convinced that the conventional American military behemoth could nevertheless excel at counterinsurgency. In that same dissident vein, Themistocles had revolutionized the Athenian military and with it the entire Greek way of war.

History is replete with great generals who won unexpected victories. But rare are commanders who first built a military force ex nihilo, then crafted a national defense strategy, and finally drafted the tactical plan that achieved victory. Themistocles did all three and more. He was a veritable chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, chief of naval operations, and four-star admiral all in one.
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The energetic and young king Xerxes (somewhere in his late thirties) assumed power on the death of his father, Darius, in 486 or 485. His mother, Atossa, was the daughter of the first Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great. And so Xerxes claimed royal preeminence through his maternal line in a way his upstart father never could, cementing his position among Persian elites as the rightful heir to the throne. He quickly determined to draw on the entire resources of the empire to avenge his father’s failure. This time the Persian aim was to annex southern Europe
across the Aegean as the westernmost province of Persia. Xerxes would crush the Hellenic resistance and end a bothersome Greece altogether.

By autumn 481 the Greeks got word that Persian mobilization was in full swing from Xerxes’ western base at Sardis. The king might well cross the Hellespont into Europe within a year. Themistocles and his supporters immediately tried to prepare the Athenians for the danger. The endangered democracy finally passed various resolutions under Themistocles’ leadership, recalling political exiles and preparing to mobilize the fleet for a combined Hellenic land and sea expeditionary defense.
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Once it was known to the city-states that Xerxes’ forces were gathering in the western Persian provinces, the allied Greek leaders hastily agreed to meet at their own Panhellenic congress at the Isthmus of Corinth. Time had almost run out. There were still no forward Greek defenses to stop Xerxes before he built momentum and began to coerce into his alliance vulnerable city-states in the north. When the generals arrived, the usual bickering and delay characterized the Greek debate: Athens and Aegina needed to end their internecine war. Athens would be forced to grant supreme command of the allied resistance to the more esteemed Spartans, who nonetheless had far fewer ships. Spies were to be sent out to obtain more accurate intelligence. Invitations were extended to distant Greek states to contribute resources for a common defense.

Yet no concrete action followed. By early spring, the squabbling Greek states again met. This time they at last agreed to organize a combined land and sea force to fight as far to the north and as soon as possible to keep Xerxes away from the majority of the Greek population. But in April 480, Xerxes had already crossed into Europe with a combined force of hundreds of thousands of infantry and seamen. We do not know the exact numbers of the Persian muster; but to man a fleet of over twelve hundred triremes would require alone nearly a quarter million sailors. Most modern estimates put Persian land forces at somewhere between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand combatants and support troops. In any case, Xerxes’ grand expedition was the largest amphibious invasion of Europe until the 1944 Normandy landing more than 2,400 years later, and he claimed forty-one states had contributed to his muster. Scholars still do not quite understand how the Persian quartermasters solved the enormous logistical problems of feeding and caring for such a horde—one that dwarfed William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066.