Torturing History

A military historian abuses the past.

Chris Bray from the April 2002 issue

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Take the problem of why there was even a battle at Salamis in the first place. Hanson fudges the issue, suggesting that the Persians were "perhaps fooled by a ruse of Themistocles," the Athenian naval commander. Hanson acknowledges that the leaders of the assembled Greek city-states "shouted and screamed at each other" over "whether to stake all at Salamis." He shades the disagreement down into a debate over tactics, something "raucous and not pretty, but when the battle itself got under way, the Greeks, and not the Persians, had discovered the best way to fight in the strait of Salamis."

Herodotus would disagree: "At this point Themistocles, feeling that he would be outvoted by the Peloponnesians, slipped quietly away from the meeting and sent a man over in a boat to the Persian fleet....This man -- Sicinnus -- was one of Themistocles' slaves....Sicinnus made his way to the Persian commanders and said...'The Greeks are afraid and are planning to slip away....They are at daggers drawn with each other, and will offer no opposition.'" And so the Persians moved to block the strait, forcing the reluctant Greeks to fight. Herodotus reports that Themistocles has this to say: "It was I who was responsible for this move of the enemy; for as our men would not fight here of their own free will, it was necessary to make them, whether they wanted to or not."

"Over the long haul," Hanson writes about Salamis, "men fight better when they know that they have had the freedom to choose the occasion of their own deaths." Of course, it's possible that he has a clearer understanding of the events at Salamis than Themistocles did.

And so on; there is no shortage of misstated fact and falsely applied analysis in this book. Let one more example stand in for the rest: At the battle of Roarke's Drift, Hanson tells us, 139 British soldiers held off 4,000 Zulus with a storm of rifle fire, "all predicated on a strict adherence to formal British military practice and discipline that would keep men at the ramparts shooting continuously without respite." The British troops were probably helped in their decision to stay at the ramparts and keep shooting without respite by the fact that 4,000 Zulu warriors were trying to breach those ramparts and kill them. As he does with Salamis, Hanson finds cultural and political motivations in the actions of men who are fighting simply to stay alive.

Hanson describes "British redcoats methodically blasting apart Zulu bodies at close range" and tallies as many as 800 Zulu dead -- although only 381 bodies were found. After the 10-hour battle, he notes, "the British counted more than 20,000 cartridges expended." Hanson draws this conclusion about the superior Western military culture of the British Army: "Strict firearms training guaranteed that they would usually hit what they aimed at." Quick: Divide 800 by 20,000 -- and remember all of that "blasting apart" at "close range." Do you get something that can be described with the word "usually"?

Hanson decides what he wants history to say. And then he tortures it until it complies. "There is something seductive about political historiography," wrote Christian Meier in 1993's Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age. "When you trace a sequence of events, it often seems that each development gives rise inevitably to the next. Reasons for what transpired at a certain time are extracted from preceding events. Partial explanations seem sufficient even for major turning points. This kind of historiography obeys 'the law of the narrative sequence,' which is, as the writer Robert Musil said, 'the most time-honored perspective for curtailing understanding.'"

Historians owe history more respect than this.