Carnage and Culture, Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

Some years ago a coworkers described a TV show which tried to unravel a mystery of how Zulu warriors overwhelmed a British garrison.  All that stuck with me from his account was that there were sealed boxes of ammunition still left.

This came to mind as I read “Carnage and Culture, Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power”, a family-friendly compendium of carnage by Victor Davis Hanson.  Among the battles he discusses is Isandhlwana where 250 horsemen and 300 native foot soldiers were annihilated by the Zulu’s.  This was probably the same battle.

Hanson’s analysis is that the officer in charge underestimated the opposition to the extent that he violated standard military practice.  In short, the British forces were spread to far apart which, when they ran out of ammunition allowed them to be swarmed over by the Zulu. The British ran out of ammunition for several reasons:

1)   Bureaucratic stupidity – a quartermaster refused to dispense ammunition to one set of troops because the ammunition belonged to another troop.

2)   By not following standard practice, the troops were spread out - too far away from ammunition stores and separated enough to be enveloped by the Zulu.

To quote: “ It was as if their officers—like the Roman generals at Cannae – had done everything to ignore their intrinsic advantage of Western discipline and superior offensive power. “  There’s more of course, but Hanson points out that the next day, the same Zulu warriors were unable to best a hundred British soldiers at Rorke’s Drift where the troops followed standard military procedure.

What make’s it so striking (besides the blood and gore) is that the Boer’s had long before worked out the gold standard protocol for defense against Zulu attack:  a tightly defended area (encircled wagons, walls, stockades), readily available ammunition, and steady disciplined rifle fire.

The author maintains that the Zulu never developed anything other than their single envelopment strategy despite horrific losses against Europeans.  There was also the cultural difference, the author’s main thesis.  The Zulu’s fasted before battle, did not carry supplies, and did not seem to have much in the way of strategy other than to get as close as possible to their enemy by stealth and then swarm over and envelope them.  By the time the Zulu army got to Rorke’s Drift they had not eaten for 2 days.  They had never developed the idea of a siege.

I’ll spare you a book review, (see below) but to say that in the section on Cortes and the Aztecs, repeated the theme: the Aztec’s idea of war seems to have been to capture sacrificial victims.  If they managed to knock down a Spaniard or one of the native forces allied against them, the captive was bound and dragged to the rear for later sacrifice rather than dispatched on the spot.  The idea of killing your enemy on the battlefield was quite literally a foreign notion.  The Aztec's horrific losses didn't seem to change their strategies.  It didn't hurt the Spanish conquest that their weaponry was centuries ahead of that of the Aztecs.

There are plenty of reviews of the book including one by Newt Gingrich, he of the "Contract On America" fame, on Amazon.

It only struck me later that the book is about battles, not wars and it is a history.  I have yet to read the section about the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.  While the Viet Cong may have been defeated as a strategic move the Tet Offensive accomplished two things: it shocked the American public ("I thought we were winning") and it removed the Viet Cong as a potential home-grown adversary to the inevitable victory.  This last is reminiscent of the Soviet Army halting their advance through Poland in July of 1945 to give the German army time to decimate the Polish partisans, effectively removing a source of opposition to their seizure of post-war power.

Battles are not wars.  Guerrilla warfare is a different situation.  I noted that there was no mention of Napoleon's Iberian campaign, arguably the first modern example of guerrilla warfare. Mathematical models in the 1960's predicted that guerrillas were more likely to lose because even though the probability of success in each engagement was large, the large number of actions reduced the probability of overall success was low.  I've always been cautious about accepting mathematical models as predictors of human behavior.  We're just too squirrelly. 

Current events (Afghanistan, Somalia, your suggestion here) with an opposition where death/martyrdom is interpreted as success suggest that if nation states have progressed beyond confrontation warfare (Hello, Iran?) in favor of letting proxies do their fighting (Hezbollah for Iran and Syria), battles will be few and far between.  What armies will be facing a continuing series of attacks.  With more advanced technology (remote controlled bombs) I would expect the balance of a war of attrition to shift in the favor of insurgents.