H I S T O R Y 'S G R E A T E ST THE EPIC CONFLICTS THAT SHAPED THE MODERN WORLD J O S E PH C U M M I NS AUTHOR OF WHY SOME WARS NEVER END A\ FAIR WINDS PRESS BEVERLY, MASSACHUSETTS TExt © 2008, 2009, 2011 Joseph Cummins This edition first published in the USA in 2011 by Fair Winds Press, a member of Quayside Publishing Group 100 Cummings Center Suite 406-L Beverly, MA 01915-6101 www.fairwindspress.com All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. 15 14 13 12 11 12 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-1-59233-471-1 ISBN-10:1-59233-471-7 Digital edition published in 2011 eISBN-13: 978-1-61058-055-7 Digital edition: 978-1-61058-055-7 Softcover edition: 978-1-59233-471-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available Cover design by Peter Long Printed and bound in Singapore CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 4 CHAPTER 1 The Greco-Persian War 6 CHAPTER 2 The Wars of Alexander the Great 18 CHAPTER 3 The Punic Wars 28 CHAPTER 4 The Barbarian Invasions 38 CHAPTER 5 The Muslim Conquests 48 CHAPTER 6 The Reconquista 56 CHAPTER 7 The Norman Conquest 66 CHAPTER 8 The Crusades 76 CHAPTER 9 The Mongol Conquests 86 CHAPTER 10 The Hundred Years War 96 CHAPTER 11 The Spanish Conquest of Mexico 108 CHAPTER 12 The Thirty Years War 118 CHAPTER 13 The Seven Years' War 128 CHAPTER 14 The American Revolution 138 CHAPTER 15 The French Revolutionary Wars 150 CHAPTER 16 The Napoleonic Wars 162 CHAPTER 17 The Taiping Rebellion 176 CHAPTER 18 The U.S. Civil War 186 CHAPTER 19 World War I 202 CHAPTER 20 The Russian Civil War 220 CHAPTER 21 The Chinese Civil War 232 CHAPTER 22 World War II 244 CHAPTER 23 The Arab-Israeli War 260 CHAPTER 24 The Vietnam War 272 CHAPTER 25 The Soviet-Afghan War 282 BIBLIOGRAPHY 292 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 298 INDEX 299 4 INTRODUCTION All the wars included in this book are thunderous affairs, wars that Mars himself would be proud of. None of your three-day wonders or saber-rattling standoffs, but wars with meat to their bones, wars that took the world by the throat and shook it. Starting with the Greco-Roman Wars and moving on to the Soviet-Afghan War, each one of these twenty-five History's Greatest Wars has been ot extraordinary importance in making the world the place we find it today, for better and for worse. There is a reason for a book like History's Greatest Wars—it's to remind us that we are born of fire and blood, shaped more by conflict than peace. War is rarely a surprise, only a shock. The Greek victory against the Persians in the Greco-Roman War helped Greek culture and literature—that all-important sense of the individuality and imperish- ability of the human spirit—survive. The Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, as savage as they were, gave those of us who live in the western world our civilization, law, money, and language. The Muslim conquests of the first millennium spread the message of Allah across what is now the modern Middle East and into North Africa and Spain, and the Crusades and the Spanish Reconquista fought to reclaim this lost territory (of both flesh and spirit) in the name of Christ, thus setting up violent religious dichotomies that exist to this day. Bloody civil wars shaped France, the United States, China, and Russia, unleash- ing new forces. Some of these forces (the abolition of slavery and the overthrow of oppressive ancien regimes) were positive, while others (the advent of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Mao's China) were massively negative. Covering twenty-five wars in a relatively short 300 pages means that one must focus on what is essential. Each chapter of this book covers a single war, and provides a quick overview, the detailed story of the most essential battle of the war, the biog- raphy of the most influential figure (or figures) of the conflict, and two or three short articles that cover diverse aspects of the conflict, from military innovations (which, in the Punic Wars, meant a fiendish little shipboard spike known as the corvus) to a description of one aspect of any particular war—in the World War One chapter, for instance, "Life in the Suicide Ditch" gives a precis on living in the trenches of the Western Front. Aside from giving both an overview and more detailed depiction of each of these important, world-changing wars, what I have tried to do is bring clarity to my descrip- tions of both strategy and combat. The English word war comes to us from the Old English werre (and the Old French guerre). Both descend from the Old German wer- ran, meaning "worse," but there is also another Old German root variant, verwirren, which means "to bring into confusion." Wars are confusing affairs. Any authentic description of combat captures this— the blast of gunfire (or deluge of spears); the screams of the wounded and dying; the sudden rushes and pell-mell retreats. Battles change, quite literally, one's perception of the world. When the young Goethe bravely and foolishly wandered through the midst of the pivotal Battle of Valmy during the French Revolutionary Wars, he saw the earth and sky colored by what he later described as "a blood-red tint." The conceit of a romantic German poet? Yet sixty some years later, a Union soldier at the Battle of Antietam during the U.S. Civil War noticed the same phenomena under a hail of bullets and artillery fire—the landscape turning red around him. It is this type ot detail that I've sought to provide a soldier's eye view of the battles in History's Greatest Wars, and I've sought it as well when looking into the lives of the generals and leaders whose job it was to make clarity out of this confusion of war. Did Hannibal really swear a curse to destroy the Romans? Was Napoleon Bonaparte driven solely by egomania, or did he attempt in his own way to make a better world for the people of France? Just how did Hernan Cortez walk into the elaborate Mexica empire with a handtul of soldiers and take it over—and why did Montezuma allow him to? And how did Mao Zedong go from an awkward young man from the country, who loved spicy hot food and plump peasant girls, to the iron-willed revolutionary who proclaimed, "We know that political power is obtained from the barrel of a gun"? History's Greatest Wars: The Epic Conflicts that Shaped the Modem World offers a fresh approach that cuts through the confusion that has been aptly called (by Clausewitz) "the fog of war" and provides a fast-moving narrative of the conflicts that made us who we are today. 6 1 THE GRECO-PERSIAN WARS 500-449 BCE A LONG-RUNNING CONFLICT BETWEEN GREEK CITY-STATES AND THE PERSIAN EMPIRE, WHICH CULMINATED WITH THE GREEKS REPELLING A MAJOR PERSIAN INVASION TURNING BACK THE PERSIAN TIDE-AND SAVING A CIVILIZATION Started in 559 BCE by Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empire arose rapidly out of the grasslands of what is now Iran. By 500 BCE, it was a domain that extended from Pakistan in the east, westward through Central Asia to Macedonia in the north, and to Egypt in the south. It was home to twenty million people, out of an estimated world population of one hundred million. The Greeks spoke of the Persians as barbarians, but they were generally quite civi- lized. They established roads and fine palaces, brought peace to outlying areas, and introduced the world's first large-scale coinage system. The Persian aristocracy adhered to knightly ideals of honor, courage, and chivalry. Persia was, however, an autocracy; even more significantly for its neighbors, the Persians believed that their ruler, whom they called the "One King" or "Great King," governed all the world's peoples. In contrast, what is now the nation of Greece was divided into numerous city- states. Although they sometimes had fractious relationships with each other, these states shared a strong sense of a common kinship, as Greeks or Hellenes. Moreover, they shared a democratic spirit, permitting open political debate and favoring forms of representative government based on majority rule. Indeed, they were passionately opposed to rule by one individual and clung fiercely to their freedom. These contrasting political philosophies set the two cultures on a collision course. The first clash occurred in 500 BCE in Ionia, now western Turkey, which the Per- sians had steadily conquered during the preceding half-century. The Greek city- states of that region rose up against the Persians and received support from Athens and Sparta. It took the Persians, under King Darius, six years to suppress the revolt and left Darius determined to seek revenge on the Greeks. In 492, Darius sent his nephew and son-in-law Mardonius to invade Thrace and Macedonia; Mardonius was able to subdue these northern Greek provinces with relative ease. However, a storm then wrecked his fleet near Cape Athos, and he was forced to retreat to Persia. In 490, a dissatisfied Darius sent his nephew Datis to invade Attica. But a small force of Athenians defeated a much larger Persian army on the plains of Marathon, mainly as a result of superior armaments and tactics, and the Persians were forced to retire without properly punishing Athens. For the Greeks, this was an extraordinary, morale-boosting victory; for the Persians, it was a vexing but not catastrophic loss. After the death of Darius in 486, his son Xerxes became king and carefully began planning an invasion of Greece. Xerxes' ambitions were not only to pun- ish the Greeks for their upstart victory at Marathon, but also to use Greece as a launching point for a larger push to the west. He sent emissaries to Athens and Sparta, demanding the Greek states submit to his authority; the Athenians threw the emissaries into a pit, the Spartans dropped theirs into a well. Determined to wreak revenge, Xerxes bridged the Hellespont to allow his troops to safely cross that stormy strait leading into the Black Sea, and by 480 had marched a force of perhaps two hundred thousand invaders into mainland Greece while his powerful navy approached by sea. To oppose the invasion, the Greeks formed an organization of city-states, the Hellenic League, and it was decided to mount a combined land-sea operation to repel the Persians. The navy, to be commanded by the Athenian leader Themistocles and consisting of about 270 wooden battleships called triremes, would row north to meet the Persian fleet, which had about 1,200 triremes. Meanwhile, King Leonidas of the Spartans would march north with his small, handpicked army. At the narrow mountain pass of Thermopylae, Leonidas's three hundred Spartans, leading a force of some eight thousand other Greeks, heroically managed to delay the Persians for three days before being wiped out. At the same time, 40 miles (64 km) away at the north end of the island of Eurobea, the Greek navy engaged the Persian fleet in a series of actions near the harbor of Artemesium, winning a three-day battle, which delayed the Persian fleet but by no means destroyed it. Despite these setbacks, the Persian army continued to advance. In mid-August, Xerxes marched his force unopposed through Attica and took Athens. The Greeks retreated to the island of Salamis, just off the coast, where Xerxes' Phoenician-led navy prepared to administer the coup de grace. However, under the leadership of Themistocles, the Greeks won a stunning victory by outwitting and outfighting the Persians in the naval battle of Salamis. With fall storms setting in and fearing that his retreat over the Hellespont might be cut off by the Greeks, Xerxes made his way back to Persia, leaving behind, however, a sizable force under the command of Mardonius, his brother-in-law. G R E A T E ST W A RS Newly confident, the Greeks overwhelmed Mardonius's forces at the battle of Plataea in August of 479, thus effectively ending Xerxes' attempt to conquer Greece. Intermittent conflict between the two sides continued in Asia Minor, Egypt, and Cyprus for some years, but in 449, with the drawing up of the Peace of Callias, Persia agreed to stay out of the Aegean. THE BATTLE THAT CHANGED THE COURSE OF THE WAR AND MADE IMMORTALS OF THE SPARTANS The Battle of Thermopylae, 480 BCE To a shepherd boy hiding behind a rock, it would have seemed like the entire world was on the move; certainly, so many people had never been seen together at one time in these remote and rocky regions of northeastern Greece. There were bearded Assyrians with iron-studded clubs; Scythians with their short bows; Indians in cot- ton dhotis; Caspian tribesmen with scimitars; Ethiopians who covered themselves with red-and-white war paint and wore horses' scalps—with the ears and manes still attached—as headdresses; Arabs, Sarangians, Pisidians, Moschians—as Herodotus said, all the ancient nations of Asia. What would have especially astonished a shepherd boy were the Immortals, King Xerxes' personal guard ot ten thousand Persian knights, who wore brightly burnished armored corselets and were accompanied by their own baggage wagons carrying con- cubines and personal servants. Most impressive of all, appropriately, was the king himself, traveling in his royal chariot, drawn by ten horses specially picked from the Nisaean region ot Persia, famous for its equine stock. Herodotus claimed that this great force numbered three million men, but that is unlikely; modern historians estimate Xerxes had about 210,000 soldiers, including 170,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry, 2,000 charioteers and camel corps, and 30,000 Thracians and Greeks. Whatever the exact number, all of Greece must have trembled at the approach of the so-called Great King of the East, who was advancing steadily westward, determined to conquer these upstart states—especially Athens and Sparta—once and for all. The Hot Gates Almost the only way for Xerxes' army to reach central Greece was via a narrow pass between the mountains and sea, at a place called Thermopylae, meaning "hot gates," for its sulfurous springs. Around August 14, 480, King Leonidas of Sparta arrived here ahead of the Persians, with three hundred of his Spartan warriors and eight thousand other Greeks. Only Spartans who had left sons behind had been allowed to travel with the king, so that their line would be carried on. The troops