Sách EBOOK: 50 Battles That Changed the World - William Weir

EBOOK: 50 Battles That Changed the World - William Weir (321 PAGES)

Contents
Introduction 7
1. Marathon, 490 BC 10
2. Nika Rebellion, 532 AD 16
3. Bunker Hill, 1775 AD 21
4. Arbela, 331 BC 26
5.Hattin, 1187 AD 31
6. Diu, 1509 AD 36
7. Britain, 1940 AD 42
8. Constantinople, Part 1, 1205 AD 46
9. Tsushima, 1905 AD 51
10. Saratoga, 1777 AD 55
11. Valmy, 1782 AD 60
12. Adrianople, 378 AD 63
13. Midway, 1942 AD 67
14. Hastings, 1066 AD 72
15. Tenochtitlan, 1520-21 AD 77
16. Stalingrad, 1942-43 AD 88
17. Busta Gallorum, 552 AD 94
18. Lechfeld, 955 AD 100
19. Dublin, 1916 AD 104
20. Emmaus, 166 BC 113
21. Yarmuk, 636AD 117
22. Batte of the Atlantic, 1939-45 AD 121
23. Cannae, 216 BC 127
24. Malplaquet, 1709AD 135
25. Carrhae, 53 BC 140
26. Constantinople, Part2, 1453 AD 145
27. The Armada, 1588 AD 150
28.TheMarne, 1914 AD 156
29. Rhodes, 1522 AD 161
30. Tours, 732 AD 170
31.Tanga, 1914 AD 174
32. Chalons, 451 AD 180
33. Las Navas de Toloso, 1212 AD 185
34. Gupta, 1180 AD 191
35. Chickamauga, 1863 AD 196
36. Lepanto, 1571 AD 205
37. New Orleans, 1814 AD 210
38. Petrograd, 1917 AD 218
39. France, 1918 AD 222
40. The Alamo, 1836 AD 229
41.Wu-sung, 1862 AD 234
42. Waterloo, 1815 AD 240
43. Kadisiyah, 637 AD 245
44. Kazan, 1552 AD 249
45.Lutzen, 1632 AD 255
46. Manila Bay, 1898 AD 264
47. Tet Offensive, 1968 AD 270
48. Rome, 390 BC 275
49. Sedan, 1870 AD 279
50. Poltava, 1709 AD 286
Honorable Mentions: Other Battles, Other Lists 291
Biographical Glossary 294
Glossary of Military Terms 299
Timelines 304
Bibliography 306
Index 311
About the Author 320


Introduction
any attempt to list the 50 most important battles in all history is necessarily
subjective. To list them in order of importance is an even greater exercise
of chutzpah. Nevertheless, people have been listing decisive battles since
Sir Edward Creasy, a lawyer who taught history, a century-and-a-half ago.
Other compilers include General J.F.C. Fuller, a professional soldier; Captain
B.H. Liddell Hart, who was gassed and injured early in his career and had to leave
the army—he then became a journalist, and Fletcher Pratt, who was a writer by
trade. Each brings a distinctive flavor to the enterprise. Fuller is very strong on
battles that were fought on land. He's less interested in sea power and far less interested
in air power. Liddell Hart emphasizes his strategic theory—the superiority of
the indirect approach. He, and to some extent Fuller, preaches the gospel of small,
highly trained armies rather than the mass armies we've had in every major war since
those of the French Revolution. Pratt's The Battles that Changed History has the
distinct tang of salty air, although most of the early battles it covers were fought on
land. Pratt also has the most openly Occidental orientation.
"[Ojne of the most striking features of Western European culture," he
writes, "has been its ability to achieve decisive results by military means. It
may even be the critical factor, the reason why that culture has encircled the
8
50 Battles
That Changed
the World
world. Not that the Far East and Africa have been lacking in great battles or
great victories, but their results have had less permanent effect on the stream
of world history."
It might be hard to convince a Russian that the victories of Genghis Khan and
the consequent subjugation and isolation of his country for three centuries didn't
have much effect on the stream of history. Considering that the Mongol conquests
brought such Chinese innovations as cheap paper, movable type, the astrolabe, and
gunpowder to Europe, it might be difficult to convince anyone else, either.
In this book, I've attempted to avoid this kind of bias. But it's necessary to consider
who we are and where we are. What's important to this author—an American
living at the juncture of the 20th and 21st centuries—and to his audience would
probably not be important to a Chinese person in the 13th century.
It's been fairly easy to avoid a bias in favor of any particular military approach. I'm
the son of a career U.S. Navy officer and the father of a career U.S. Air Force officer,
but I'm a dedicated civilian. Service as an army combat correspondent and regimental
public information NCO in the Korean War gave me a slightly broader picture than
most GIs get, but the main thing I learned was when to keep my head down. Some
of the military in my upbringing may have rubbed off, though. Large proportions
of the articles I've written have concerned military history and weapons. Of my four
previous books, one, Fatal Victories, was entirely military history. Another, Written
With Lead, was about legendary American gunfights, including such military events as
the Battle of Saratoga and Custer's last stand. Still another, A Well Regulated Militia,
detailed the history of the American militia.
ã Every battle has some effect on history. How do you decide which
had the most?
ã The basic criteria for picking the importance of the battles that changed
the world are:
ã How big a change did the battle make, and how much does that change
affect us?
One way is to decide what's really important to us and how did we get to enjoy
it. Most people would put freedom and democracy high on any list of desirable
things. Consequently, Marathon, which preserved the world's first democracy, holds
the number-one spot. Order, not anarchy, is also highly desirable. Justinian, Narses
and Belisarius, by crushing the Nika revolt, made the world's most widely used code
of law possible. Bunker Hill, and to a slightly less extent, Saratoga, ensured the independence
of the United States. So, in a much less direct way, did Jackson's victory at
New Orleans. The Allied victories in World War II, particularly the Battle of Britain,
were the latest battles to guarantee democracy.
Another approach is to look at the currents of history. The ancient Greeks saw
history, to a large extent, as a record of the conflict between East and West. That is
certainly a viable idea. There are, in a very general sense, two cultures in the world—
Western and Eastern. The former would include ev erything from the Orthodoxinfluenced
culture of Russia to the secular culture of the United States. The latter
would include the Far Eastern culture of China and Japan, both deeply non-Western
in spite of a Western veneer, and a wide variety of other cultures, many of them
Islamic. Neither the East nor the West has managed to absorb the other, but it wasn't
for want of trying. This struggle, too, goes back to Marathon. It continues through
Alexander, Crassus and the seemingly interminable conflicts between Christianity and
Islam.
The West has been unable to absorb the East, but it certainly was able to domi- Q
nate it. There are a string of decisive battles that helped bring that about. At Diu on
the Indian Ocean, Portuguese sailors destroyed a Muslim fleet in 1509. That crippled
the thriving Arab trade with India and China. Dar es Islam began to shrink economi- IfltrOdllCtlOII
cally. Ten years later, Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico. Two years after that, he
had conquered—for the first time since Alexander—a non-European empire, which
opened a trade route to the Far East across the Pacific. Russia's conquest of Kazan in
1552 initiated European expansion overland to the Far East. A generation later, the
defeat of the Spanish Armada energized the English to push west across the Atlantic
and conquer North America.
The latest trend in world history seems to be that the Western political domination
of the world is ending. In 1940, there was only one independent country in
Africa. Europeans owned the rest of the continent. Today there are no colonies in
Africa. Most of Asia and the Far Eastern islands, except, China, Japan, and Japan's
colony, Korea, were also owned by Westerners. Today none of it is. In a way, the
battles of the American Revolution started the trend. The United States became the
first independent country in the New World. The rest of the Americas followed.
In 1905, Togo's Japanese showed that non-Caucasians equipped with modern technology
could beat Caucasians equipped with comparable technology. In 1914, von
Lettow Vorbeck's black African soldiers proved that, man for man, they were the
equal of Caucasians. But none of the colonial countries could field the military equipment
the Japanese could. It took a European country, Ireland, to demonstrate how a
weak nation could win its independence from a strong one.
History is full of odd twists like that.