(11) ROMAN-PERSIAN WARS

 

The first world war, fought intermittently on the frontier between successive Roman and Persian polities over almost seven centuries.

No, seriously. Well, half seriously.

The Roman-Persian Wars were a world war, or war between two different worlds – that might have been fought on the frontier between them, a little like the Western Front writ large (and long) but had ramifications or repercussions throughout both empires that extended across Eurasia from Britain to India.

And that comparison to the First World War’s Western Front writ large and long stands. Despite seven slugging centuries of grinding war, the Roman-Persian border remained remarkably stable.

“One has the impression that the blood spilled in the warfare between the two states brought as little real gain to one side or the other as the few meters of land gained at terrible cost in the trench warfare of the First World War.”

That is, until the last dramatic phase of the wars, the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628 – which might be compared to the similarly abrupt and dramatic reversals of fortune in 1917-1918 that ultimately saw the end of the First World War. However, even that last war of the Roman-Persian Wars effectively ended with the restoration of the status quo (and border) between the two empires.

The Roman-Persian Wars are an interesting contrast to those other Persian Wars of antiquity, the Greek-Persian Wars, in lacking the same existential stakes or outcomes – with the Greek city-states desperately defending themselves from outright conquest by the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the classical Greek-Persian Wars, and Alexander the Great conquering that same empire outright in his Macedonian-Persian Wars.

The latter always struck me as incredible in contrast to the failure of the Romans, more powerful and commanding more resources than either Alexander or their own Persian adversaries, to achieve anything like Alexander’s decisive defeat and conquest of Persia. That is despite the Romans, at least emperors Caracalla and Julian, expressly seeking to emulate Alexander. The reality seems to have been that for the most part neither side did little more than essentially raid each other over the frontier, with the Romans famously sacking the Persian capital Ctesiphon numerous times.

The Roman-Persian Wars might be classified into four phases, corresponding to three successive Roman polities and two Persian ones – not to mention Armenia bouncing back and forth between the two empires as client state or protectorate.

First, there was Roman Republic against the Parthians – initiated by the invasion of Mesopotamia by Roman general Crassus, which saw one of the Republic’s most crushing defeats at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC. However, the Parthians did nothing to exploit this defeat or the subsequent civil wars of the Republic with one notable exception, as they generally sought to remain on peaceful terms with the Romans. That notable exception was their support of the so-called Liberators – the assassins of Julius Caesar – and invasion of the Roman eastern provinces after the Liberators’ defeat. The Romans defeated the Parthian invasion, but the Parthians then defeated the retributive campaign by Mark Antony against them.

Second, there was the Roman Empire against the Parthians, which saw five major wars between them, mostly to the defeat of the Parthians with their capital Ctesiphon sacked three times and four Roman emperors claiming the title of Persicus Maximus. Those wars were the Roman-Parthian War of 58-63 AD (with the Roman campaign led by the general Corbulo under emperor Nero), Trajan’s campaign into Parthia, the Roman-Parthian War of 161-166 AD under Roman emperor Lucius Verus (the co-emperor of Marcus Aurelius), the campaign of Roman emperor Septimius Severus in 195-197 AD, and finally the Parthian War of Caracalla in 216-217 AD.

Third, there was the Roman Empire against the Sassanids or Sasanians, successors to the Parthians. The Sassanids were very different to the Parthians in hostile character towards Rome – in the words of Youtuber Tominus Maximus, “Sassanid Persia was like Parthia…on cocaine and mixed with crystal meth”. Most famously, there were the Sassanid incursions deep into the Roman eastern provinces during the Crisis of the Third Century, after fighting between them during the reign of Roman emperor Severus Alexander.

However, the Romans subsequently defeated the Sassanids, sacking Ctesiphon a further two times in campaigns led by Roman emperors Carus in 283 AD and Galerius (with Diocletian holding his hand) in 298 AD. The latter was the most decisive Roman victory against the Sassanids, enduring for decades until hostilities resumed in the Perso-Roman Wars of 337-361 AD under Roman emperor Constantius III and the ill-fated expedition by Roman emperor Julian.

Surprisingly, the Sassanids mellowed in the fifth century, remaining mostly peaceful with the Roman Empire while the latter’s western half fell to barbarian invasions. In part that was due to the Sassanids facing off their own barbarian threats, but it was instrumental in the survival of the eastern Roman Empire. Which brings me to…

Fourth, there was the eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire against the Sassanids or Sasanians. While the Persians were only peer state the Romans had as adversary, the classical empire had the advantage in population and resources, albeit that advantage was diluted by more far-flung commitments. After the fall of the western empire, the eastern empire and the Sassanids were much more closely matched.

Not surprisingly then, this saw the most dramatic and mobile phase of the Roman-Persian Wars from the preceding centuries of effective stalemate – with the Byzantine-Sassanid War of 602-628. First the Sassanids almost decisively defeated and conquered the eastern empire, even besieging Constantinople, but were then decisively defeated in turn by a near miraculous eastern Roman recovery under emperor Heraclius – albeit the eastern Roman empire was too weakened to exploit its victory other than regaining its lost territory and effectively restoring the status quo between them.

The ultimate futility of the Roman-Persian Wars came in their aftermath with the event that decisively ended them altogether – the Arab conquests, achieved in large part from both empires being so weakened fighting each other that they were unable to resist their new adversary, with one being completely conquered and the other barely surviving defeat as well as the loss of much of its former territory.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(10) GERMANIC & GOTHIC WARS

 

“Give me back my legions!”

The Roman-Germanic Wars – the longest wars fought by the Roman Republic, Roman Empire and eastern Roman Empire, both in space and time, the wars of the crisis and fall of the classical empire.

In space, they were fought along Rome’s northern frontier from the Rhine through the Alps to the Danube. I’ll see Turner’s Frontier thesis about the frontier defining American history and raise it with the Roman-German frontier defining world history.

In time, they exceeded even the seven centuries of Roman-Persian Wars, extending both before and after the latter if you count them extending through the Gothic Wars and Lombard Wars fought by the eastern empire.

And yes – I’ve effectively featured Roman-Germanic and Roman-Gothic wars in my special mentions for the Crisis of the Third Century as well as the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with the Goths playing the leading role in the latter. It’s not overstating it to attribute the fall of the Roman Empire to the Goths, even if as Youtuber Tominus Maximus quips, they’d didn’t mean to do it.

However, the Roman-Germanic wars date back before the empire to the republic, prior to the Republic’s wars with Persia, with the Cimbrian War in 113-101 BC – a war often overlooked for the more glamorous Punic Wars, despite a Roman defeat in the Battle of Arausio exceeding that at Cannae and the first threat to Italy or Rome itself since the Second Punic War.

The Republic saw more Roman-Germanic Wars with Caesar’s Gallic Wars – which despite being primarily directed at the conquest of Gaul also had campaigns against Germanic tribes such as the Suebi or across the Rhine, even if the latter weren’t much more than skirmishes compared to the subsequent wars.

When it comes to the classical empire, the Roman-Germanic Wars might be classified as falling into three phases.

The first phase was essentially when the Roman Empire held the initiative against the Germans – to the extent that there was the serious possibility of the empire incorporating Germania as a province or provinces, potentially pushing the imperial border from the Rhine to the Elbe or Weser. Famously that possibility was lost with Varus and his three legions in the Roman defeat at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest at the hands of Arminius, German turned renegade from his Roman citizenship.

Despite this defeat, the Roman Empire still (mostly) held the initiative against the Germans, although they used it more for pre-emptive or punitive expeditions, not least to avenge the defeat at Teutoburg Forest, rather than imperial expansion.

The second phase might be considered as one in which the initiative oscillated between the Romans and the Germans in clashes at and over the frontier. The Romans were mostly robust enough to retain both the initiative and frontier, but from the Marcomannic Wars in 161-180 AD onwards Germans and Goths were able to make substantial incursions within the empire – as in the Crisis of the Third Century or the invasions of the western empire fought by Julian or Valentinian.

The third phase is that of the decline and fall of the classical empire, when the Germans – particularly the Goths – increasingly held both the initiative and territory within the empire itself, from the Gothic War of 376-382 and the Roman defeat at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 onwards. Ultimately, the western empire and Rome itself fell to the Germans and Goths.

The fall of the classical or western empire wasn’t the end of Roman-Germanic and Roman-Gothic Wars, as the eastern empire continued fighting them – against the Vandals in north Africa, against the Visigoths in Spain, and above all against the Ostrogoths in the Gothic Wars of 535-554 in Italy.

The Byzantine-Gothic Wars were initially very successful against the odds under the leadership of Belisarius, but bogged down with an impressive revival by the Ostrogoths and ultimately ended with a Pyrrhic victory for the Romans – (re)conquering Italy from the Ostrogoths but then left desperately clinging on to increasingly small parts of it against a new Germanic invader, the Lombards.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(9) CRISIS OF THE THIRD CENTURY (235 – 284 AD)

 

Before the Fall came the Crisis…

With the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire deserving first special mention, is it any surprise that the Crisis of the Third Century, that dress rehearsal of the fall, is far behind?

The Crisis of the Third Century – also known as the Military Anarchy or Imperial Crisis – had much the same scope as the decline and fall. Indeed, the Crisis of the Third Century was part of the decline, even if the empire narrowly forestalled its fall for another two centuries. Many of the fundamental problems of the empire from the Crisis endured to the fall, even when in muted form.

Narrowly forestalled its fall, that is, as in the empire “nearly collapsed under the combined pressure of repeated foreign invasions, civil wars, and economic disintegration” – “at the height of the crisis, the Roman state had split into three distinct and competing polities”, the so-called Gallic Empire and Palmyrene Empire vying with the central Roman Empire in its western and eastern provinces respectively.

Indeed, had it collapsed – or fragmented – it is hard to imagine the eastern half of the empire enduring in quite the same durable form as it did two centuries later. For one thing, the empire was divided into thirds rather than halves – with what was to become the eastern empire, that is, apart from the Palmyrene Empire, more resembling a quarter than half, albeit not unlike the eastern empire after it had rebounded from Arab conquests. It also lacked the capital founded by Constantine – Constantinople, with its nigh impenetrable defenses against all but the most overwhelming siege – or indeed the seat of imperial government founded as its own distinctive new Roman empire.

Although mind you, the eastern empire pulled off its own near miraculous recovery from crises – note that plural, crises – to rival that of the third century, like it looked back at the classical empire’s direst crisis and said hold my beer.

Two things saved the classical empire in the Crisis of the Third Century, even if it went from classical to late empire.

The first was that, as fearsome as the foreign invasions were, they lacked the ability or even intent to conquer territory or form their own states within the empire, rather than raiding it for plunder albeit on a larger scale than ever before. Even the Sassanid Persian Empire – the closest adversary the Roman Empire had to a rival peer state – for all its successes only raided Roman provinces and moved its border slightly away from its capital.

The second was a series of soldier emperors or barracks emperors – mostly the so-called Illyrian emperors originating from that region as the then heartland of the Roman army – who managed to hold the line and turn the tide to restore the empire, “an accomplishment many historians regard as about as unlikely and impressive as any of Rome’s Golden Age achievements in building the empire in the first place”.

Foremost among them of course was Aurelian – Restitutor Orbis or Restorer of the World, who reunited the empire by defeating the rival Palmyrene and Gallic Empires – but he built on the achievements of the emperors who came before him, Claudius Gothicus and arguably also Gallienus, and had successors who consolidated his achievements, notably Probus and the emperor who is credited with finally ending the Crisis, Diocletian.

At the core of the Crisis was the political instability of imperial succession (and usurpation) suggested by the other names used for the Crisis (Military Anarchy and Imperial Crisis).

Tacitus had observed that the ‘secret of the empire’ had been exposed with the succession crisis after Nero in the first century – “that emperors could be made elsewhere than in Rome”, a secret that excited “all the legions and their generals”.

Despite this observation, those legions and their generals had mostly followed the various imperial dynastic successions for the first two and a half centuries of empire – its founding Julio-Claudian dynasty, the Flavian dynasty, the adoptive succession of the Five Good Emperors, and the Severan dynasty.

In the Crisis, however, the legions and their generals had become very excited indeed – as one so-called barracks emperor succeeded another, usually by usurpation. And that’s just the line of imperial succession generally regarded as legitimate – beyond that there were literally countless usurpers, some of which we are still discovering through archaeology or coins.

Indeed, it often seems from the Crisis that where even the most minor commanders of a legion or legions had even the barest degree of military success (or were just left outside or stranded by the ebbing tide of imperial authority), they would proclaim themselves as emperor – or their legions would.

Not surprisingly, with Roman commanders and their legions marching either to advance their own imperial claims or against those of others, that saw them abandon the defense of the empire’s borders.

That was compounded by drain on population by the Cyprian Plague that raged through the empire, and which struck military barracks or manpower particularly hard – indeed the capture of Emperor Valerian by the Persians, the first time an emperor was captured by foreign forces, was attributed to his army being laid waste by plague.

The population decline of the empire also compounded its economic instability, characterized by the collapse of its currency and trade.

Through the gaping holes left in the imperial borders poured the empire’s recurring foreign enemies to raid it – further compounding the empire’s economic decline as the empire’s problems became an intense feedback loop as each problem cranked up the others.

Foremost in notoriety as the empire’s recurring enemies were the German barbarian tribes – who had grown in military capability (and relative population) through two centuries of contact with the empire, although they were not yet as capable as they were when they brought about the fall (and mostly replaced those Roman commanders and their legions vying within the empire).

The capabilities of the Germans were increased by forming new tribal coalitions or confederations – particularly the Franks, who raided across the Rhine through Gaul as far as Spain, and the Alemanni, who raided through the Alps into Italy, even threatening the city of Rome itself (the first external threat the city had faced for centuries) and giving Aurelian himself pause, inflicting his only defeat before he rallied to victory against them.

And across the Danube came the Germans who were ultimately to do more than anyone else to bring about the fall of the empire – the Goths, raiding as far as Greece and even Asia Minor because they managed to get themselves a fleet and there’s nothing worse than barbarians with boats.

All these German raiders paled in comparison to the Sassanid Persians – which as I noted was the only state on Rome’s borders that came close to being Rome’s peer – as they raided deep into Rome’s eastern provinces, particularly Syria.

As was typically the case, Rome’s worst enemy was itself as it fractured into three rival empires fighting among themselves. The core empire remained around Italy, fortunately including the Illyrian military heartland of the empire and its breadbasket in north Africa – but it lost its western provinces to the Gallic Empire led by usurpers, and its eastern provinces to the Palmyrene Empire, essentially a client state that had loyally led the defense against the Sassanid Persians but had gone rogue under its queen Zenobia.

Fortunately, along came Aurelian – breathing two centuries of life into the empire before the fall.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(8) PELOPONNESIAN WAR (431-404 BC)

 

Greek against Greek – Athens vs Sparta.

There was a point when I cracked during the film 300. It was when Leonidas spoke about the necessity of Sparta fighting Persia because even “those boy-loving philosophers” in Athens were fighting Persia. “Screw you, Leonidas”, I yelled “the Peloponnesian War isn’t over!” And after the ushers bounced me from the cinema, I ruminated on this slur on the Athenians. There was of course the fact that they were the true Greek heroes of the Persian Wars.

But there was also, you know, the Peloponnesian War of Athens against Sparta (or Peloponnesian Wars, as there was first and second war with a brief peace between them).

And we’re still fighting it, in that the war between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta underlies the grand ideological conflict in Western civilization. Few things may actually have an ideal Platonic form, but Sparta did – Plato’s Republic, with its philosopher-kings or guardians who perceive the Forms of the true reality, trained from childhood to govern in the interests of the polity (by physical and moral regimen) and bound by stricter rules than the rest of the populace.

It has been argued that Plato’s Republic was a dystopian satire rather than a utopian ideal, but it is difficult not to see it intended as the latter – or worse, as Plato’s distaste for his own democratic Athens (which after all, executed his beloved teacher and philosophical mouthpiece Socrates) and idealization of a philosophical version of Athens rival, Sparta, although he and his ideas didn’t do too well when put into practice with attempts at a philosopher-king in Syracuse.

And so we are still fighting the Peloponnesian War against Plato’s mystical fascism or totalitarian Spartanism as it has recurred throughout Western political ideology – the General Will of Rousseau, the dictatorship of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard in Marxism or communism, the Fuhrerprinzip of fascism or Nazism, and so on.

Of course, I know this is mostly my projection. I’m not sure if Western political ideology has actually been influenced by Sparta or even Plato and his Republic to that extent (or how much Sparta and Plato influenced each other for that matter). But I’m not the only one to see such parallels and I’m sticking with it – it has a certain mythic resonance. Hence its god-tier special mention entry second to the Trojan War, which might otherwise seem extravagant for a war between Greek city-states.

And what about, you know, the historical Peloponnesian War, you ask? To paraphrase Martin Prince’s sneer from The Simpsons, I’m aware of its work – namely, that Sparta won, with a little help from their Persian friends, albeit to be humbled later by Thebes, before the Macedonians and Romans swept over all the Greek city states.

And that Athenian political ideas didn’t work too well in Syracuse either, with the disastrous Athenian Syracuse Expedition sometimes likened to the American experience in Vietnam, only a lot worse for the ultimate defeat of Athens in their not so cold war against Sparta.

As I said previously, Plato’s ideas – and Plato himself – didn’t fare too well in Syracuse, when he came closest to implementing his Republic and its philosopher-kings in practical reality through Syracuse and its tyrant. Closest that is, as in not at all, founding the time-honored tradition of how intellectuals fare when courting people in power or political tyranny – running afoul of tyrants and narrowly avoiding execution or literal slavery and imprisonment.

Of course, history is a lot messier than our black and white projections of it. Lest we think of the Spartans too much as the bad guys, while their allies wanted Athens destroyed and its population enslaved after its defeat, it was the Spartans with their warrior code of honor who declined to do so – particularly as they regarded that all of Greece owed Athens a debt of honor for its role in the Persian War. And screw you, Thebes and Corinth! I’ve got a letter for the Corinthians and this time there’s no love in it. I’m an Athenian fan.

And for that matter, even the Spartanism or mystical fascism of Plato in my projection may be more nuanced than that, given it has a recurring appeal to or arguments for it. Even I’m a fan of one of the many pop culture versions of Plato’s Republic – Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One. Mega-City One is essentially Plato’s Republic in twenty-second century America, with the Judges as its philosopher-kings or guardians and the Law as its Forms. Judge Dredd – he is the Forms!

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(7) BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE

 

Styled as World War Zero by some historians.

The Bronze Age Collapse – or more precisely Late Bronze Age Collapse – was the widespread societal collapse of Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization in the 12th century BC, argued to be worse than the collapse of the western Roman Empire or even the worst case of societal collapse in human history.

Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece – the Greeks of the Trojan War – were among the most famous casualties, ushering in the Greek Dark Ages for a few centuries.

However, they are among about a dozen ancient civilizations that collapsed or declined – foremost among them the Hittite Empire that collapsed in Anatolia, while Egypt’s New Kingdom and the Assyrians clung on by the skin of their teeth, in decline or weakened. “Almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”

I don’t know much about the finer details of the Bronze Age Collapse, but then neither does anyone else ultimately, as it remains the subject of argument and theory.

However, war is often cited as the main culprit, typically at the hands of the mysterious and to some extent still hypothetical “Sea Peoples”, seaborne raiders to rival the more usual horse blitzkrieg of nomadic herding tribes in civilization-crushing effect.

I certainly think war played a major part, hence this special mention, although am less clear whether it was the cause of the collapse or an effect – with the latter involving the Sea Peoples and others effectively moving into the void left by collapsing civilizations.

Interestingly, the Sea Peoples are proposed to include a number of ethnic groups – one of which is identified as the ancestors of the Philistines faced by the Israelites in the Bible. The Israelites themselves rose in the vaccuum left behind by the retreat or collapse of Hittites, Egyptians and Assyrians – so that the Bible itself has origins in the Bronze Age Collapse, as does that other landmark of western culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Apart from Sea Peoples and war, other causes are proposed for the collapse – political fragmentation or rebellion within societies, drought or famine, natural disasters such as earthquakes or volcanic eruption, plagues, and the collapse of trade for manufacture of bronze (or the emergence of iron among adversaries).

Or a combination of all of these – “the civilizations could have endured any one disaster, but not multiple at the same time, especially not when they were feeding into one another”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(6) CHINESE REVOLUTION & CIVIL WAR (1911-1949)

 

That’s right – it’s the other definitive communist revolution, and arguably the true model of communist revolution or insurgency in the Global South.

The fourth of the four revolutions I rank as the god-tier revolutions of history and include in my special mentions for my top ten wars from sheer scale and impact – but also in this case as it was more civil war than revolution.

It naturally follows on from my special mention for the Russian Revolution and Civil War, not least because of the role Soviet assistance played in it but also because it replayed many of the same beats, albeit over a much more protracted period – in at least two phases, or three if you count the initial warlord period.

Of course, the original Chinese Revolution – of which both the two largest warring parties in the civil war, the Communists and the Nationalists or Kuomingtang (KMT) saw themselves as the true successors – the one led by Sun Yat-sen (or Sun Yuxian) that overthrew the Qing dynasty as China’s last imperial dynasty, was in 1911-1912 and hence preceded the Russian Revolution in 1917.

However, as was often the case with the collapse of central state authority in China (or the mandate of heaven), it devolved into the usual competing warlords or warring states from 1916-1927 – in an exotic multi-party battle royale that might be compared to the Russian Civil War at the height of all its chaotic glory.

It even had foreign intervention, albeit on a smaller scale than the Russian Civil War. The Soviets assisted the main warring party, the Nationalists seeking to reunify China under their Republic, as the Soviets saw them as the necessary prelude to socialism. Intriguingly, the Germans also assisted the Nationalists – and more intriguingly, that assistance continued from the warlord period to the first genuine phase of the Chinese Civil War, by both the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.

It is intriguing to ponder how world history might have turned out if Nazi Germany had continued to support Nationalist China, but they swapped to the foreign power that ominously loomed over China to exploit its weakness and ultimately was the one to intervene most decisively of all – Japan.

The warlord period is generally considered to have transitioned to the first phase of the Chinese Civil War proper from 1927 “when Chiang Kai-shek led the Socialist-Nationalist two thirds of the KMT’s military forces against Wang Jingwei’s Socialist-Communist/Internationalist third…the first time in the Republic’s history that two organisations with sufficient bases of popular support and military-economic power to potentially unify the country had fought one another”.

Wang Jingwei was subsequently eclipsed by the new Chinese communist leader who became virtually synonymous with the Chinese Civil War and for whom Chinese communist ideology was named – Mao.

However, the Chinese communists did not do too well in this first phase, with effective control of less than a twentieth of the population (compared to the third controlled by Chiang’s Nationalists) and were on the brink of complete extinction. “Their doom was, historians agree, imminent and inevitable” – until they were effectively saved by the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937.

The Japanese had already indirectly given the Chinese communists some much needed reprieve with their invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In an episode which also showed that some of the warlord period chaos lived on in the Nationalists, the Xian Incident, two of Chiang’s generals kidnapped him to force him to form a united front with the communists against the Japanese.

Chiang subsequently reneged on the united front with renewed hostilities against the communists but the Sino-Japanese War from 1937 forced his hand again to put those hostilities on hold for a second united front against Japan, even if both he and the communists increasingly paid lip service to it in preference to the inevitable renewal of civil war against each other.

Despite the united front, Chiang’s Nationalists bore the brunt of Japan’s war in China, which arguably dealt them their mortal wound in China’s civil war. In 1944, Japan launched its last major offensive, Operation Ichi-go – the last successful offensive by it or any Axis power towards the end of the Second World War and yet largely unknown outside specialist historians – which severely weakened Chiang’s forces (as well as an economy increasingly ravaged by hyper-inflation). In general, “the demands of fighting the war essentially destroyed the KMT’s capacity to function as an administration”.

The civil war resumed “as soon as it became apparent that Japanese defeat was imminent” (at the hands of the Americans) “with the communists gaining the upper hand in the second phase of the war from 1945 to 1949, generally referred to as the Chinese Communist Revolution”.

This again saw foreign intervention along predictable Cold War lines – the Soviets on the side of the Communists and the Americans on the side of the Nationalists.

The Americans were notoriously cautious in their intervention – subsequently giving rise to accusations of “losing” China and communist infiltration of the American government. What is interesting is that the Soviets were equally cautious in their own intervention, perhaps from Stalin’s intuition that a united communist China would be their rival in the long term. Hence the Soviets consistently urged restraint on Mao to accept the north-south partition that was all the vogue in Cold War Asia – between a Communist north and a Nationalist south.

Mao ignored this and the Communists gained control of mainland China anyway, proclaiming the People’s Republic of China. However, the Communists ultimately had to accept a residual partition of a different kind with the Nationalists retreating to the island of Taiwan to proclaim their Republic of China there, as the Communists had no means to pursue them – particularly after the US gave their naval support to Taiwan. That partition of course continued even until today, remaining as a source of tension with no armistice or treaty signed between them.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

(5) RUSSIAN REVOLUTION & CIVIL WAR (1917-1922)

 

That’s right – it’s the communist revolution, as in THE communist revolution. The origin or archetype of all subsequent communist revolutions, which in turn have made the word revolution itself virtually synonymous in modern history with communist revolution.

“Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and corpses of their victims.”

I’ve included the two great eighteenth century revolutions or revolutionary wars – the wars of the American Revolution and the French Revolution – in my god-tier special mentions as wars that made the modern world.

However, they are only two of the four revolutions I rank as the god-tier revolutions of history pursuant to adding the two definitive twentieth century revolutions. I was going to reserve the latter two revolutions for my top ten revolutions but consider that they simply have too great a scale and impact, particularly in the fascinatingly convoluted civil wars fought because of them, to omit from special mentions for my top ten wars.

So following on from my special mentions for the American and French Revolutions, this is my special mention for the third of my four great revolutions or revolutionary wars – the Russian Revolution and Civil War, evolving from and overlapping with the Eastern Front of the First World War.

Whereas the American Revolution and French Revolution had been the vanguard of modern liberalism and nationalism, the Russian Revolution was the vanguard of modern Marxist socialism – literally in the ideology of its chief revolutionary Lenin, for which its strand of socialism came to be named as Marxist-Leninism.

Or in other words, communism, although technically communism was its professed theoretical end state – or rather, end-statelessness, since Marxism proclaimed its ‘temporary’ authoritarian state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, would wither away.

However, the Marxist authoritarian state proved much more durable than Marx had anticipated, particularly the new communist government or Soviet Union that emerged from the Russian Revolution and Civil War.

It also proved to provoke much more fervor, both for and against it, in a manner similar to Marx’s opiate of the masses, religion. I sometimes like to quip about the four great evangelizing or missionary religions in history – Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Marxist-Leninism. And of the other three, the Bolshevik revolutionaries in the Russian Revolution and Civil War most closely resembled the militancy of Islam – as observed by Paul Johnson, although Johnson also thought Lenin even closer to Jean Calvin, “with his belief in organizational structure, his ability to create one and then dominate it utterly, his puritanism, his passionate self-righteousness, and above all his intolerance”.

It tends to be forgotten that there were in fact two revolutions in the Russian Revolution, resulting in one of my pet peeves of history with the popular misconception that the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian monarchy of the Tsar.

They did not. The first revolution or February Revolution did, instituting the new Provisional Government in the style of a parliamentary republic and closer to the liberalism or nationalism of the American and French Revolutions.

What the Bolsheviks overthrew, in the second revolution or October Revolution that is generally remembered as the Russian Revolution, was the first revolution’s Provisional Government – capitalizing (heh) on that Government’s single biggest weakness, the continuation of Russia’s war effort in the First World War.

Surprisingly, the Bolsheviks did this by mostly bloodless coup – at least at the outset. The resistance to their revolution and their reaction to that resistance proved very bloody indeed. The new Bolshevik regime, which ultimately became the Soviet Union, pulled out of the world war but fought a far-flung civil war on an even larger scale. It always seemed to me ironic that Russian war-weariness from the casualties of the First World War played such a large part in the revolution led by the Bolsheviks, only for the Bolsheviks to fight a civil war which involved even more casualties in the former Russian empire than the First World War.

And it’s that civil war which is particularly fascinating, albeit incredibly convoluted, as far removed from the more straightforward civil wars fought (at least largely) between two opposing sides. Instead, the Russian Civil War was what Wikipedia describes as a “multi-party civil war” and what I would describe as an all-out battle royale or pile-up.

Sure, there were the two largest combatants – the Bolsheviks or Reds, and the so-called Whites, “the loosely allied forces” in opposition to the Bolsheviks. Beyond the opposing Red and White Armies, there were the Blacks or anarchist forces, particularly those led by Makhno in Ukraine, and the non-ideological Greens or nationalist forces. Not to mention a Blue Army in there somewhere, rival militant socialists, village peasant factions, Baltic and Caucasian nationalist separatists, Poland, and more.

And beyond them were the foreign forces – the Allies intervening for the Whites or against the Red Army, “whose primary goal was re-establishing the Eastern Front of World War 1” and the Central Powers, chiefly Germany, intervening for the Reds or “rivalling the Allied intervention with the main goal of retaining the territory they had received in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Soviet Russia”.

While the Allied intervention extended to a dozen or more nations depending on how you reckon them, it is another one of my pet peeves of history when people, usually left wing, bring this up as an indictment of capitalist states going all-out attempting to crush “the revolution”. While the Allies no doubt hoped to reopen the Eastern Front and therefore opposed the Reds, they were even less united than the Whites they ostensibly supported, and with a few notable exceptions never committed forces on any decisive scale – mostly more in the nature of a few guys as advisors or sitting around docks to protect them or the materiel they had shipped to their former Russian ally.

Ultimately the Bolsheviks or Reds won against all other combatants, among other things from their greater unity and fanatical purpose, as well as a greater ability to make promises and break them later – particularly the longstanding ability of communists to stab anarchists in the back. “Some historians have determined that the Black Army saved the entire war from the Whites at several points…However, they were betrayed three separate times by the Bolsheviks and defeated finally when they could turn their full force onto them”

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

I’ve always found wars a fascinating subject of history, from the comfortable armchair of hindsight and the fortunate perspective of being well removed from any firsthand experience of them. History, particularly military history, has always been something of a hobby of mine. So of course I have ranked my Top 10 Wars of history.

Just some notes – these are not ranked by scale of destruction or historical impact, although I’d like to think that most or all of these entries would rank highly by those criteria. They are also not ranked by moral justifiability or in terms of being ‘good’ wars, to the extent that such a term can be used for wars, if at all. Rather, they are ranked in terms of historical interest to me – and I tend to be interested in the broader themes of history, so I have preferred a broader classification of the wars in each entry, although I do nominate individual wars (or conquests or invasions) within each entry.

 

Just some further notes – I have some ratings within each entry:

 

ART OF WAR

Rating the wars by the art of war shown in them, typically by the victors of course, albeit based on my more idiosyncratic application of Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

 

WORLD WAR

Rating the wars by their scale – some wars might well be considered world wars (or at least part of world wars) beyond the two twentieth century wars formally designated as such, from World War Zero to World War X.

 

STILL FIGHTING THE WAR

Rating the wars by their span, particularly for those wars we are arguably still fighting.

 

GOOD GUYS VS BAD GUYS

Rating the wars by taking a shot at choosing moral sides or nominating the good guys and bad guys – or not, since history usually does not repay moral judgements.

 

So these are my top ten wars in history. You know the rules – this is one of my deep dive top tens, counting down from tenth to first place and looking at individual entries in some depth or detail of themselves.

But wait – there’s more! The subject is prolific enough for my usual twenty special mentions per top ten and for honorable mentions beyond that.

 

 

(10) AMERICAN INDIAN WARS –
SIOUX WARS (1854-1891)

 

The wars that defined the American West and ‘manifest destiny’ of the United States. The wars that put the frontier into Turner’s frontier thesis, as its literal frontier – or front line.

In origin they predate the United States itself, extending to the European colonial powers or American states prior to independence (or union). The American Revolutionary War and War of 1812 were also American Indian Wars, as the British and Americans each had their native American allies.

They were of existential importance to the native American nations or tribes, given that they ceased to exist as independent polities outside of reservations or territories within the United States, if at all. They were also of fundamental importance to the United States as well, given its “acquisition” of territory from those same tribes or nations.

Hence the span, scale and scope of the American Indian Wars in total extends for centuries across a continent. So as for which American Indian War to nominate for this entry, I’ll go with the archetypal or definitive entry, particularly from their place in the culture, history and mythology of the American West – the Sioux Wars.

Even those extended for almost half a century from the First Sioux War in 1854 to the Ghost Dance War in 1891 (and through the Great Plains but as also as far as Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado), with the most definitive Sioux War as the Great Sioux War of 1876 fought by two of the most famous native American war leaders, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

The Sioux Wars feature the archetypal or definitive image of the American Indian Wars fought by mounted native American warriors as well as many of the landmarks of the American Indian Wars – from Colonel Chivington and the Sand Creek Massacre, through the Battle of Little Bighorn and General Custer’s Last Stand, to the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee Massacre.

However, the American Indian Wars take their place as wars within even wider themes – indeed, among the widest and oldest in human history.

Firstly, there is the theme of wider native American wars, which the native American nations or tribes found themselves fighting in for half a millennium throughout both American continents against the European colonial powers or their settler successor states, including my next entry.

Secondly there is the theme of wars against tribal nations or tribes, not only in the Americas but worldwide. I’ve heard it said that the basic political states are empires and tribes (or tribal confederacies). That seems somewhat overstated, but certainly tribes or tribal nations throughout the world found themselves under fire in the same period – in the Americas, in Africa, in Siberia and Central Asia, and in Australasia or Oceania.

Thirdly – and overlapping with the previous theme – is the longest theme or war of all, spanning millennia, the wars of sedentary agricultural societies or states against nomadic hunter-gatherers. And it is a war that, despite setbacks at the hands of mounted nomadic herding tribes, has been overwhelmingly won by agricultural states – riding roughshod over the nomadic hunter-gatherers at their frontiers, through their weight of numbers and the things that come with it, the titular “guns, germs and steel” of Jared Diamond.

Even the ghost dance falls within those wider themes over millennia – and millennialism. Of course, I tend to think of all religion as a ghost dance, but particularly so when societies face overwhelming material odds against them and essentially resort to magic to win wars.

And it’s not always tribal societies. The Boxer Rebellion was essentially the Chinese ghost dance – as was the Taiping Rebellion before it, a conflict that tends to be strangely overlooked in history, despite more casualties than the First World War. Of course, the Taiping or Boxer Rebellions show that the ghost dance can get a few good punches (heh) in before it goes down, but it is almost universally doomed to go down, except in fantasy.

Although occasionally even in history the ghost dance wins its weird victories. One tribal confederacy or kingdom that popped up during a power vacuum in its region, but then found itself progressively overwhelmed by successive empires until it existed at the whim of a final one, also resorted to a ghost dance that increasingly substituted heavenly victory for an earthly one.

That of course was the Jewish tribal confederacy or kingdom and its great messianic ghost dance, existing at the whim of the Roman Empire. The Jewish kingdom itself did not survive the Roman Empire, but its ghost dance did – ultimately succeeding first to the imperial cult of the Roman Empire, and then to the remnants of the imperial state itself.

 

ART OF WAR

The Sioux tactically demonstrated the speed, surprise and shock that is part of the art of war – indeed, similarly to the mounted horse tribes of central Asian steppes that were so effective elsewhere, not surprisingly given the geography of the Plains.

The only problem was they were too little and too late – a few centuries too late, against an industrial adversary that used the true strategic art of war (for winning without fighting) – picking curb stomp battles from a position of overwhelming material superiority.

It also demonstrates something of an issue for guerilla warfare. Guerilla warfare is often touted as the ultimate expression of the art of war – and it often is, avoiding pitched battles to outlast the adversary, but it had one limitation, particularly in pre-modern history.

Mao Tse-Tung wrote that “the guerilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea” – which is all very well unless your opponent is willing and able to drain the sea, displacing or eliminating the whole people (or at least enough of them).

 

WORLD WAR

Not of themselves, but the Sioux Wars and the American Indian Wars were part of a wider world war in its total scope, the native American wars as one continent descended on two others

 

STILL FIGHTING THE AMERICAN INDIAN WARS

We’re still fighting the American Indian Wars – or rather their legacy, although in some cases native American wars are still being fought in the Americas. The American Indian Wars persisted in actual warfare until 1924 (!) – and subsequently in the form of the new and more effective ghost dance of political activism.

 

GOOD GUYS VS BAD GUYS

Ah USA – although it’s difficult to imagine the contemporary United States without the American Indian Wars, it’s equally difficult to see the US as the good guys from our modern perspective.

 

RATING: 4 STARS*****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(9) SPANISH CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAS –
CONQUEST OF THE AZTEC EMPIRE (1519-1521)

 

Remarkable for just how few Spanish forces conquered such a populous empire in such a short span of time (as it was with the conquest of the Inca Empire).

The Spanish Conquest of the Americas – la Conquista by the conquistadors – falls within the broader native American wars. Indeed, it and the American Indian Wars might be regarded as the two poles of native American wars – whereas the American Indian Wars fall at the tail end of them, the Spanish Conquest is at their very head.

It also propelled Spain, something of a peninsular backwater in Europe that had only just reconquered all its territory from Islamic conquest to the first world maritime superpower.

As for which Spanish conquest to nominate for this entry, I’ve gone with the conquest led by Hernan Cortes of the Aztec Empire. After all, it was either that or the close second for the conquest by Francisco Pizarro of the Inca Empire – and the conquest by Cortes was the influence and model for the latter, as well as effectively the springboard of the whole Conquest of the Americas, at least on the mainland.

Population estimates of the Aztec Empire prior to its conquest vary but generally seem to be about 10 million people, while Cortes had 508 soldiers in his expedition.

And he was lucky to get away even with that, as he set sail only just evading the Governor of Spanish Cuba revoking his commission, as it had become obvious that Cortes had something far more audacious in mind than mere exploration or trade. Cortes also famously scuttled his ships after arriving in Mexico, so that his forces could not retreat and had no other option but to fight.

Of course, Cortes’ forces did have some qualitative advantage of technological superiority. It is tempting to see it purely in terms of the first element of Jared Diamond’s titular trinity of guns, germs and steel – guns.

The Spanish certainly had guns, even cannon, and while the latter gave a useful advantage to the Spanish, I’m not sure I’d want to face down a fanatical horde of Aztec warriors in close combat with my inaccurate sixteenth century muzzle-loading single-shot musket, let alone whatever an arquebus is.

Far more useful were the Spanish crossbows and of course the third element of trinity – steel, in their armor and weapons, which the Aztecs lacked. More useful yet were the 16 horses of the expedition, as the Aztecs (and the Americas) were utterly without and therefore unfamiliar with horses, so that the Spanish cavalry had a real impact of shock and awe on the Aztecs. Probably with less impact but fascinating to me was the Spanish use of war dogs.

Another qualitative advantage was leadership. While Cortes had no experience, he proved himself a capable and charismatic military commander, while the Aztec emperor Moctezuma or Montezuma was generally perceived as weak or hesitant, even by the Aztecs.

Cortes was so capable and charismatic, that he defeated the larger Spanish force sent to retrieve him and then talked its soldiers and cavalry around to joining his conquest. However, this expanded Spanish force was still pitifully small compared to the Aztecs, even with its technological and tactical superiority

Which is where the second element of Jared Diamond’s trilogy was probably decisive – germs. The Aztecs are estimated to have lost almost half their population to smallpox from the Spaniards by the last year of the conquest and Cortes’ assault on their capital.

God and the gods also played their part. Faith in God was an important part of motivation and morale for the Spanish and not least Cortes himself in their conquests, coming as they did on the heels of the Reconquista of Islamic Spain.

One factor may or may not have played a part, reported by Cortes himself, was that he was seen as the return of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl – but it is disputed as to whether or what extent the Aztecs actually believed this, and impossible to know its effect on them even if they did.

Another factor that certainly did play its part was that of the old saying that behind every great man is a woman. Malintzin, a slave-woman “gifted” to the Spanish with her own gift for languages, who became Cortes’ interpreter, diplomatic adviser and mistress – and who might well be hailed as co-conquistador.

Malintzin was an instrumental part in the true reason for the Spanish victory other than disease – that the Spanish force didn’t win it as such, but rather led the much larger winning force consisting predominantly of their native American allies against the Aztecs.

The Aztecs had their own bloody sacrificial empire that was still new and expanding just prior to the Spanish conquest – for which they were absolutely hated by many or most of their imperial subjects, at least some of whom were all too happy to ally themselves with the Spanish to overthrow the Aztecs.

 

ART OF WAR

Well obviously when your forces of a few hundred (or few thousand with reinforcements) defeat an empire of millions in a few years, you’re doing something right in the art of war.

And partly this would seem to be down to factors you can’t plan or even predict according to Sun Tzu – good fortune, and even more so, the boldness it favors. Say what you will about Cortes but he had cojones.

Of course, partly this would seem to be down to factors you can draw from Sun Tzu – subterfuge, diplomacy or alliances, and capturing enemy leaders or holding them hostage.

 

WORLD WAR

The Spanish Conquest was the decisive landmark in what might be described, in its total scope, of a world war as the powers of one continent commenced their conquest of two others – the world war that started all the world wars of European maritime empires.

Even more as the Spanish conquest extended beyond the Americas to Asia (where the Spanish conquered the Philippines) and Africa, not least in the slave trade to the Americas.

 

STILL FIGHTING THE SPANISH CONQUEST

While the Spanish empire in the Americas fought for and (mostly) won its independence, the Spanish conquest casts a long shadow in Latin America – with native American resistance persisting even today, as with the Zapatistas in Mexico.

 

GOOD GUYS VS BAD GUYS

Modern historical perspective tends not to favor the Spanish as the good guys, although this is often disputed as a continuation of so-called Black Legend of anti-Spanish history – with some fairness. On the other hand, of all people the Spanish conquered, the Aztecs qualify the least as good guys, although again often disputed as historical propaganda against them – with some fairness.

Probably the only people who unambiguously qualify as the good guys are the indigenous population of Mexico caught between the two empires as one conquered the other.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(8) MONGOL CONQUESTS –
MONGOL INVASION OF EUROPE (1236-1242)

 

The Mongols were essentially a horse blitzkrieg across Eurasia, achieving a mobility and speed on land, exceeded only by modern mobile warfare using the internal combustion engine.

The horse blitzkrieg was a recurring feature mounted (heh) by nomadic herding tribes, particularly by those from the steppes of central Asia, to such devastating effect against more sedentary or settled agricultural states throughout history. I can’t resist the memorable quote by the Pax Romana Youtube channel that “history is mostly a matter of hoping those psychos on horseback don’t attack this summer, steal the grain and take the slaves”.

None were more supremely effective at it than the Mongols, one of the most proficient and versatile military forces in history – one that was also supremely adaptable at coopting its conquered people for further conquests and for strategies of war beyond their horse blitzkrieg. It’s surprising how small the actual Mongol component was of their forces.

The founder of the Mongol Empire – Temujin, better known as Genghis Khan – was the best military and political leader of his era, or arguably any era. He succeeded in unifying the Mongol tribes as the nucleus of his empire, which at his death stretched from northern China through Central Asia to Iran and the outskirts of European Russia. In doing so, the Mongols conquered glittering states along the Silk Road in central Asia that barely anyone remembers because the Mongols wiped them out so thoroughly – the Khwaraziman Empire of Iran and the Qara Khitai.

However, it is the wars of his successors that are particularly fascinating to me as they advanced into almost every corner of Eurasia.

In the Middle East, they besieged and sacked Baghdad, the center of Islamic power for half a millennia, occupying as far as parts of Syria and Turkey, with raids advancing as far as Gaza in Palestine, where they were stopped in the battle of Ain Jalut by the Mamluks of Egypt.

In East Asia, the Mongols did not face a unified China but two warring states, the Jin in northern China and the Sung in southern China. Genghis had largely defeated the former – his successors finished it off and conquered the Sung as well. The latter was most famously by Kublai Khan – and in Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.

The Mongols also invaded Korea, Burma and Vietnam. It’s interesting to think of the Mongol Vietnam War, which as Vietnam Wars usually go, resulted in defeat for the Mongols. It’s also interesting, given the definitive horse blitzkrieg of the Mongols, that the Mongols launched naval invasions of Java and Japan, but perhaps not surprisingly neither did well – the latter giving rise to the Japanese word kamikaze or divine wind for the storms that scattered the Mongol invasion fleets.

However, I’m giving this entry to the campaigns of his successors most familiar to me from my Eurocentric perspective – the Mongol invasion of Europe, commanded in the field by one of the best Mongol generals, Subutai. The Mongols rolled over European Russia – over much of which they would remain ruling as the Golden Horde until the fifteenth century – and invaded central Europe, decisively defeating Poland and Hungary.

They were poised to strike into the heartland of Europe and the Holy Roman Empire, indeed raiding the latter (and the Balkans), with little to stop them but the English Channel – but fortunately for Europe, the Great Khan Ogedai died, so the Mongol armies withdrew back to Russia while their leaders returned to Mongolia to select the new Great Khan. Or so the story goes – historians vary on whether that was the true cause for the Mongols to desist from their invasion.

Even so, the Mongols continued to cast a long shadow of terror into Europe, reinforced by further raids in the thirteenth century (such that the raids of the 1280’s are sometimes styled as the second Mongol invasion) and fourteenth century.

And traumatizing Europeans with steak tartare, based on the popular legend of Mongol or ‘Tartar’ warriors tenderizing meat under their saddles and eating it at night after it had been ‘cooked’ by the heat and sweat from the horse.

 

ART OF WAR

Forget Sun Tzu – the true Art of War was written by Genghis Khan and the Mongols…in conquest. A friend and I used to observe the irony of Sun Tzu’s Art of War originating in China – a country that historically has gotten its ass kicked as often as not. (The same irony for Machiavelli’s The Prince originating in Italy – a country known for its political chaos).

But seriously – an army that conquered the world clearly excelled in the art of war. Ruling their conquests on the other hand…although in fairness any empire that size at that time was doomed to fragmentation.

 

WORLD WAR

The Mongol Conquests were nothing short of what should be described as a world war to create the largest contiguous land empire in history, and one that is still only exceeded by the British Empire – perhaps the most serious contender for the first true world war.

 

STILL FIGHTING THE MONGOL CONQUESTS

One of the few wars we’re not still fighting, even though we live in a Mongol-made world. The rising Russian state, with long memories of the Golden Horde, saw to that by conquering the steppes and various residual khanates (into the nineteenth century), but arguably inheriting their legacy and former territory as the new horde.

 

GOOD GUYS VS BAD GUYS

History has tended to overlook the positive or even progressive aspects of the Pax Mongolica – but it is also difficult to cast them as good guys, given the destruction they wrought, exceeding even the Second World War relative to world population.

 

RATINGS: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(7) HUNNIC WARS –
HUN INVASION OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (440-453)

 

Yet another horse blitzkrieg of mounted nomadic tribes from the Eurasian steppes and the most formidable one prior to the Mongols, founding an empire that should be ranked as the fourth great empire of late antiquity and menacing the other three – Persian Empire as well as eastern and western Roman empires – in turn.

To be honest, purely on their own merits of military conquest, I’d rank the Mongols over the Huns. It’s hard to argue with the world’s largest contiguous land empire – and second largest empire in all history. While both shared the historical infamy of being extremely barbaric and ruthless towards their adversaries, albeit almost a millennium apart, the Mongols seemed to rely more on strategy than savagery. Both the Huns and Attila acquired such a reputation for savage barbarism that Kaiser Wilhelm sought to invoke it for his German soldiers in the Boxer Rebellion – which of course backfired as the Allies happily used it as a pejorative term for the Germans in the world wars. Although I have to admit Attila being identified as the Scourge of God earns him badass points. The Mongols also seem more diversified in the number of their skilled leaders and commanders beyond Genghis Khan and his death – while the success of the Huns seems largely focused through the charismatic leadership of Attila himself, with the Hunnic empire rapidly disintegrating after his death.

On the other hand, I have this chronological ranking going among the top tier entries of my top ten – and the Huns do predate the Mongols. However, it’s more than a matter of mere chronology – the Hunnic Wars also overlap with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, itself ranking as god tier special mention to my top ten, arguably more so than any other war. To pit the Mongols against the Romans is often the ultimate fantasy match of military history – I always recall that very proposal in a pulp science fiction novel of my youth – and the Hunnic Wars is the closest you get to that scenario, albeit the Roman Empire in terminal decline rather than its prime. (Spoiler – the Mongols actually did overlap with the Roman Empire, as in the surviving eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire, but more as allies). And from a Eurocentric perspective, the Hunnic Empire was more in Europe itself, with both a seat of power and range of penetration much further west than the Mongols ever did.

I also have a romantic soft spot for the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in Gaul or France as the heroic last stand of the Roman Empire, although that may be more legend than history – on par for me with the final battle of King Arthur against Mordred at Camlann, particularly as depicted in the film Excalibur, to the stirring choral music of Carmina Burana and Arthur thankful for the mist so that their enemy “may not see how few we are”. Aetius as Arthur, yo! Although in fairness, that was few in Romans, with Aetius relying less on mystical mist and more on his Visigoth and other Germanic allies to make up numbers.

Although truth be told, the real heroic stand and final battle that doomed the Hunnic Empire was the Battle of Nedao in 454, where they were defeated by their former Germanic vassals. The Huns took one last shot at the eastern Roman Empire under one of Attila’s sons in 469, vanishing from history with their defeat.

Their origin is even more mysterious – with some theories resembling an extent almost as wide as the Mongols, particularly those theories that linked them to the Xongniu and other nomadic peoples that menaced China, often stylized as Huns, such as in the Disney version of Mulan. They are also often linked to other nomadic tribes, sometimes also stylized as Huns, that menaced the Persian Empire and even India.

The only clear history of the Huns seems to be that they emerged east of the Volga from about 370, soon conquering the Goths and other Germanic tribes to forge a vast dominion essentially along the Danube on the borders of the Roman Empire – ironically driving the fall of the Roman Empire even before they invaded it, as the various Germanic tribes that invaded or settled in the Roman Empire were fleeing the Huns.

Ultimately however the Romans had to face off the fearsome Huns themselves – and that is where my romantic soft spot for last stands come in, as the Romans managed to mobilize themselves one last time to hold off the Huns. Firstly, however, the Huns turned on the more robust eastern Roman Empire, invading the Balkans and threatening the capital Constantinople, with little to stop them until the emperor opted for the pragmatic policy of paying tribute for peace. The Huns then invaded the western Roman Empire in 451, with Attila claiming the sister of the western Roman emperor as his bride and half the empire as his dowry – with some fairness, as she had swiped right on him in preference to her betrothal to a Roman senator. However, there the Huns encountered the general Flavius Aetius, often hailed as “the last of the Romans”. That’s right – this is an Aetius fan account.

Ironically, Aetius had effectively risen to power by relying on the Huns as his allies. Now he had to face off against his former allies as Attila invaded Gaul, drawing on the waning resources of an increasingly vestigial empire to field one of its last major military operations in alliance with the Visigoths and its other Germanic allies – and won, defeating the Huns at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.

Or not, as historians dispute how conclusive a victory it was. Certainly Attila and the Huns withdrew from Gaul, only to invade Italy the following year – with there was little Aetius could do to stop them there, except for the Pope to ask Attila nicely if he would leave without sacking Rome.

Surprisingly, it worked – Attila left Italy (albeit more for lack of supplies and expectations of tribute), never to return as he died the following year, aborting his plans for a further campaign against the western empire – as with the Mongols, Europe was saved from invasion by a fortunately timed death (from Attila partying too hard celebrating his latest wedding to his hot new bride).

 

ART OF WAR

Certainly the Huns demonstrated the art of war, despite their reputation for savage barbarism. At a tactical level, they had the usual mobility, speed, surprise and shock of the steppes horse blitzkrieg – while strategically, they also sought out ways of winning without fighting through tribute and political alliances.

As for the Romans, they might have excelled in the art of war at the height of their empire, perhaps even retained their tactical skill towards the end, but just had too few legions as they struggled to mobilize any army.

 

WORLD WAR

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire – and the Migration Period or barbarian invasions – might be considered to be on the scale of a world war, but is a little too piecemeal in space or time.

I also like to think the Huns might also qualify as precursors of the Mongols on a similar world scale, but their origins – and links – to people identified as Huns in China, central Asia, Iran and India is not clear.

 

STILL FIGHTING THE HUNNIC WARS

Well, not so much the fighting the Huns, vanishing as they did from history, but perhaps still living in the decline of empire…

 

GOOD GUYS VS BAD GUYS

Sorry Huns – that reputation for savage barbarism may be unfair and overstated, but when it comes to classical history, I usually side with the Romans, particularly in the fifth century.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(6) PUNIC WARS –
SECOND PUNIC WAR (218-201 BC)

 

“Carthago delenda est” – Carthage must be destroyed!

The wars that defined the Roman Republic and its empire.

Also the most famous historical duel between two rival powers, with the stakes of supremacy to the victor and destruction to the vanquished.

Also arguably the most fiercely fought of Rome’s wars – and the closest it came to defeat in its rise to empire under the republic, with one of its worst defeats in battle of Cannae.

Also a nice polar opposite to the Hunnic Wars in my previous entry (even down to the resonance of their names) – with the rising republic of the Punic Wars at one pole and the falling empire of the Hunnic Wars at the other.

As for the Punic Wars defining the Roman republic and its empire, I know the Punic Wars took place well before the formal Roman empire, but they defined the Roman Republic as an imperial power and laid the foundations for the Empire in its most famous duel for Mediterranean supremacy.

As for that duel, such was its historical fame and potency of its imagery that the Punic Wars have continued to provide metaphors for modern history. “The wars lasted for more than a hundred years (264-146) and were analogous in many respects to later great hegemonic rivalries like the Anglo-French rivalry of the 18th Century and the Cold War, filled as it is with military arms-races, proxy-wars, attacks on regional states, at the end of which there was only a unipolar political landscape”.

Or in other words, the Mediterranean wasn’t big enough for the two of them.

Even in its defeat and destruction by Rome, Carthage provided the metaphor of Carthaginian peace – for “any brutal peace treaty demanding total subjugation of the defeated side” or terms that “are overly harsh and designed to accentuate and perpetuate the inferiority of the loser”, even more so for the subsequent legend that Rome salted the earth. Most famously, it was used by John Maynard Keynes for the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War – inaccurately in my view as a Versailles fan, and dangerously so as it undermined enforcement of the treaty. It’s a pity the term didn’t prompt more like one wry response to Keynes’ usage of it – “Funny thing, you don’t hear much from the Carthaginians these days”.

“Carthage must be destroyed” was the famous catchphrase of Roman senator Cato the Elder, who concluded all his speeches with it, whether it was relevant or not. It’s certainly an ice-breaker. I’m thinking of throwing it into all my conversations as well, or hijacking other people’s conversations with it.

Of course, by the time Cato was using it, it was really kicking a man when he was down. Rome had soundly defeated Carthage in the Second Punic War, essentially reducing Carthage to a small harmless shadow of its former territory – and a satellite state under the Roman thumb.

But to Cato, grumpy old curmudgeon that he was, the Carthaginians didn’t have the decency to be poor after their defeat, having far too much wealth when he visited it as a member of a senatorial embassy. And eventually he got his way with the Third Punic War (149-146 BC) and Rome crushed Carthage completely.

The Third Punic War was the somewhat anti-climactic conclusion to the trilogy of Punic Wars. The First Punic War (264-241 BC) was obviously not decisive but certainly interesting with the Romans wrestling Sicily from Carthage – as well as their impressive feat of throwing together a navy mostly from scratch, laying the foundations for Roman naval supremacy, even if that was mostly done through the neat trick of using ships as boarding platforms for infantry combat.

The Second Punic War (218-201 BC) was the big one . You know, the one with the elephants – in the famous crossing of the Alps into Italy, although only one elephant survived.

So while the elephants may not have loomed as large as had been hoped, what did loom large was the Carthaginian invasion of Italy , striking fear into the heart of Rome itself, and even more so the legendary Carthaginian general Hannibal, one of the greatest military commanders in history, with his textbook victory against the Romans at Cannae.

Sadly for Carthage, however, Hannibal was one of my top 10 great military leaders who were actually losers, because he didn’t know to go hard or go home – or rather, to go Rome or to go home, instead wasting his dwindling time and army d*cking around Italy, something of a running theme in that top ten.

Of course, it’s a lot more nuanced than that (particularly when it comes to the role of Hannibal’s leadership) but the Roman general Quintus Fabius avoided major battles and chipped away at Hannibal’s forces in Italy through attrition, while Hannibal’s rival and nemesis, Roman general Scipio Africanus, pulled a Hannibal in reverse by attacking the Carthaginians in Spain and Africa itself.

The Second Punic War also features some of the most famous battles in history – Cannae of course, but also the battles of Trebinia and Lake Trasimene for Carthaginian victories, as well as the battles of the Metaurus, Ilipa and Zama for Roman victories.

 

 

 

ART OF WAR

Obviously the Romans excelled in the art of war in their empire as a whole, perhaps even more so the Byzantines in Sun Tzu’s definition of the art of war as winning without fighting. An empire doesn’t survive a millennium without a few tricks of political diplomacy or playing enemies against each other up its sleeve.

However, facing Hannibal on their home territory in Italy was not their finest demonstration of the art of war. Reading Roman military history often prompts me to see the Romans as the Soviet Union of ancient history – winning through the manpower to replace one lost legion after another – and never more so than in the Second Punic War against Hannibal, which is eerily reminiscent of a Roman parallel for the Soviets in Barbarossa. Just ask Pyrrhus – who gave the world the term Pyrrhic victory because the Romans could just soak up their losses and keep coming.

This is something of a caricature for the Romans as well as the Soviets winning through brute force of manpower – both of which were as capable of finesse in the right circumstances, usually a combination of good leadership combined with well maintained or experienced forces. And the Roman legion was the finest fighting force of its time, with a discipline and tactical superiority that allowed it to outfight opponents that outnumbered it – as in the Battle of Alesia or Battle of Watling Street. Although one of the greatest strengths of the Roman legion was not so much its skill in fighting but in engineering, again as at Alesia.

 

WORLD WAR

It’s a bit hard to label the Punic Wars as a world war, even if was fought between two continents and had global consequences in the rise of the Roman Empire. However, as mentioned before, it had parallels to subsequent global hegemonic conflicts between rival powers.

 

STILL FIGHTING THE PUNIC WARS

Well if there’s one thing a Carthaginian peace is good for, it’s for not fighting any more Punic Wars.

 

GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS

Who were the good guys? The Romans obviously! Yes, it’s a bit more nuanced than that – with perhaps not too much to distinguish one from the other, and much to admire about Hannibal. But to quote the Youtube channel Pax Romana, child sacrificer says what? There’s a reason that the name for Moloch has passed into English as a pejorative term – and part of that reason is Carthaginian child sacrifice. No more Moloch!

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(5) PERSIAN WARS –
ALEXANDER’S CONQUEST OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE (336-323 BC)

 

The Macedonian-Persian Wars of my namesake, Alexander the Great – the one exception to actually defeat and conquer the Persian Empire among the various Persian Wars, those recurring definitive wars of classical history fought by Greeks and Romans against successive Persian Empires over a millennium.

Of course, that was because Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire involved one of the finest fighting forces in history, the Macedonian phalanx, led by one of finest military leaders of history, without a defeat to his name, usually against numerical odds. That’s right – I’m an Alexander the Great and Gaugamela fanboy.

In fairness, Alexander was lucky, particularly in the opening of his campaign against the Persian Empire – narrowly escaping death at the Battle of the Granicus River. As the saying goes however, fortune favors the bold and Alexander was certainly bold, indeed to the point of personal recklessness, while the Persians were unlucky with their emperor, Darius III, who seemed cautious to the point of cowardly, notoriously fleeing his two big set-piece battles with Alexander at Issus and Gaugamela.

In fairness, Alexander was also legendary. Unable to untie the legendary insoluble Gordian knot of which it was prophesied that whoever untied it would conquer Asia? No problem – just cut it with your sword and go on to conquer Asia.

Faced with threat of the Persian navy which can strike at Greece behind your lines? No problem – just conquer the coastline of the Persian empire. Where’s your navy now, Persia?

Darius offers to surrender half his empire to you and your wimpy general Parmenion says you should accept? Sneer at him “I would too, if I were you”, then proceed to demonstrate you’re Alexander the Great by conquering the other half as well, while showing the Persian emperor he can run but he can’t hide.

Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire is also one of those wars that I style as adventurous wars – wars that resemble or evoke a tale of epic adventure, charismatic leaders and small heroic bands of warriors fighting against the odds to win. Indeed, Alexander and his conquests became just that – a historical and legendary source for tales of epic adventure

“Alexander became legendary as a classical hero in the mould of Achilles, featuring prominently in the historical and mythical traditions of both Greek and non-Greek cultures. His military achievements and unprecedented enduring successes in battle made him the measure against which many later military leaders would compare themselves, and his tactics remain a significant subject of study”.

Other wars in my Top 10 Wars that might be similarly styled as ‘adventurous’ wars are the Mongol Conquests and the Spanish Conquest of the Americas – to which one might also add my special mentions for the Arab Conquests and Viking Invasions.

Of course, this sets aside the distinctly unadventurous nature of wars to those at the pointed end of their destruction, usually on the other side, but also those who end up as casualties on the same side. Alexander’s conquests were no exception – infamously, he personally killed Cleitus the Black in a drunken altercation, the man who had saved his life at Granicus.

Of those wars I’ve styled as adventurous wars, I’d have to rank the Spanish conquest the highest in terms of just how lopsided or overwhelming the numerical odds were against it (for the Aztecs and even more so the Incas), victories unparalleled in history, even by Alexander. That said, Alexander did face overwhelming odds against him and his Greek or Macedonian forces, both in individual battles and the conquest of the Persian Empire as a whole.

In fairness, Alexander also probably started in the best position of all the leaders in those adventurous wars, having inherited the Macedonian state and its phalanxes honed to one of the finest fighting forces in history by his father Philip – although on the other hand, it is hard to imagine that Philip or any other Macedonian leader had the audacity or acumen to achieve Alexander’s conquest of the whole Persian Empire.

 

ART OF WAR

Let’s face it – Alexander the Great would have kicked Sun Tzu’s ass, cutting through all that mystic Taoist poetry like the Gordian knot. I know it and you know it. Did I mention this as an Alexander the Great fan account?

 

WORLD WAR

I think it would be overstating to it to claim that Alexander the Great fought and won the first world war, but you know he would have kept going through India if his army hadn’t wimped out on him.

 

STILL FIGHTING THE PERSIAN WARS

Alexander’s conquests might be done and dusted – indeed, pretty much after he died as so much relied on his personal charisma. However, the Persian empire was replaced by Greek kingdoms founded by Alexander’s generals, which would cast a long shadow in history even as they ultimately crumbled and the Persian empire rebooted against the Romans.

 

GOOD GUYS VS BAD GUYS

Sorry Persia – I know you’re one of the great civilizations of ancient history, but the Greeks and Alexander the Great will always be the good guys to me.

 

RATING: 4 STARS*****
A-TIER (TOP-TIER)

 

 

(4) PERSIAN WARS –
GREEK-PERSIAN WARS (499-449 BC)

 

The classical Persian Wars – when the Greeks fought for their very existence as independent states against the imperial Persian superpower of the Achaemenid Empire, as an uneasy coalition of Greek city states fighting off two Persian invasions of Greece against the odds in the archetypal battles of classical Greek heroism.

That is not to overlook the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire featured in another top ten entry, or the longer Roman-Persian wars – through to the twilight of classical history, for nearly seven centuries from 54 BC to 628 AD, when the Romans fought their relentless slogging match against two successive Persian empires, the Parthians and the Sassanids.

Ultimately, however, the Roman-Persian Wars lack the existential significance of the Persian invasions of Greece, both to the classical Greeks and by extension Western civilization itself. It is difficult to imagine the shape of Western civilization, had the Persians succeeded in their invasions of Greece, particularly their second invasion, but it would have been immeasurably different.

Greek victories in the Persian Wars were certainly a defining moment for Athens and its democracy, as well as the Greeks as a whole – “their victory endowed the Greeks with a faith in their destiny that was to endure for three centuries, during which western culture was born”.

The Persian wars were also among the first wars in history to be written as history – by the creators of history as a genre, foremost among them Herodotus, styled as the father of history. They might also be argued to be the origin of Western military strategy and tactics – or at least the feature that was to recur so decisively as part of Western military superiority, the drilled formation, in this case the hoplite phalanx.

They also featured two of the landmark battles of history, won against the odds – Marathon and the naval battle of Salamis – as well as the heroic last stand of Thermopylae, the Spartan Alamo. Of course, as an Athenian loyalist, I’d point out that Marathon and Salamis were Athenian victories, as opposed to all that pro-Spartan agitprop of the 300 film, in which Leonidas breezily dismissed Athens.

Salamis was a particularly impressive Athenian victory, since they won it from exile after evacuating Athens itself, which was captured and razed by the Persians – choosing to carry on fighting from exile rather than submit to the Persians. This feat might be compared to the scenario if France had not surrendered to Germany in 1940, but had fought on with its fleet from north Africa – and won.

In terms of historical narrative, the first Persian invasion from 492 BC to 490 BC, under Darius the Great, was inconclusive with their defeat in the battle of Marathon…for the time being. Darius had to postpone a further invasion of Greece to fight strife within his own empire. When he died, his son and successor Xerxes took the second swing at Greece in earnest in an invasion from 480 to 479 BC, which was ultimately defeated at the battles of Plataea and Mycale.

After that, the Greeks were able to go on the offensive against the Persians in the Persian Empire itself, particularly in its formerly Greek fringes, but the Greek-Persian wars largely fizzled out from there with a return to the pre-war status quo by 449 BC, not unlike the persistent stalemate of the subsequent Roman-Persian Wars, although Greece was freed from the threat of Persian invasion. Of course, a lot of that was undone as the Persian Empire then learned to sit back and exploit the Greek city-states fighting among themselves, most notably in the Peloponnesian Wars.

 

ART OF WAR

The Greeks in the Persian Wars were almost exact contemporaries of Sun Tzu on the other side of the world, as the Persian Wars commenced a few years before the traditional date given to Sun Tzu’s death in 496 BC – and I’m inclined to favor the Greeks over Sun Tzu when it came to demonstrated art of war in actual history. Winning without fighting is all very well, but sometimes you have little choice but to fight – and to fight in desperate defence against numerically superior forces.

Hence the genius of Greek strategy, consistently fighting at geographical bottlenecks or chokepoints, including the straits of Salamis. Beyond that, the Greeks won because “they avoided catastrophic defeats, stuck to their alliance, took advantage of Persian mistakes” and possessed tactical superiority with their hoplite forces.

 

WORLD WAR

Sadly, I think it would be stretching things too far to call the Greek-Persian Wars a world war, even though the Greeks often styled it as the war of one continent against another or East against West, harking back to the legendary Trojan War as its predecessor – a continental front line that was replayed in the Roman-Persian Wars and beyond, as the Persians were replaced by Arabs and Turks.

 

STILL FIGHTING THE PERSIAN WARS

Well perhaps not in the style of the Greek or Macedonian Persian Wars, but Americans might feel they’ve been replaying the Roman-Persian Wars since 1979…

 

GOOD GUYS VS BAD GUYS

Sorry Persia – I know you’re not the weird mutant army featured in the film 300 and indeed one of the great civilizations of ancient history, but the Greeks will always be the good guys to me.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(3) VIETNAM WAR (1954-1975)

 

The iconic twentieth century war after 1945 – as visual image in popular culture or imagination, and as metaphor and archetype in history or politics.

In terms of visual image in popular culture or imagination, Vietnam is a war most people can see in their mind’s eye, whether accurate or not. I have a theory that we all have a mythic or psychic geography of cities and landmarks we can see in our mind’s eye or psyche – and so too we each have a mythic or psychic history. And Vietnam looms large in our modern mythology.

It originates from the modern proliferation of visual images that inform our mythic or psychic geography and history – predominantly on screen in film or television. For Vietnam, there was the prevalence of images from the war itself, often stylized as the first war fought on television, which was a substantial part of why the American civilian population and government turned against it, as well as fictional depictions of it in American mass media and popular culture.

The imagery from the war itself endured beyond the defeat of the Americans or of South Vietnam in those fictional depictions, including my favorite film of all time, Apocalypse Now. As such, Vietnam lent itself to the most enduring iconic images of war in the twentieth century – the ubiquitous choppers or helicopters, the Viet Cong or Charlie, napalm, fragging, My Lai, Tet, the fall of Saigon, and so on.

And the endurance of the Vietnam War in history is also in large part because of its historical significance, not least because it continues as an enduring historical Rorschach test or metaphor. President Kennedy famously quipped that while victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan. Ironically, however, that quip doesn’t apply to Vietnam, where almost everyone seems to claim it as vindication for their own ideas or ideologies – although the only ones who might do so unequivocally would be the Vietnamese themselves.

Our entry here is for the Vietnam War involving the United States in varying levels of engagement from about 1954, with the height of its military engagement from about 1965 to 1972. However, that war was also the Second Indochina War, following almost directly from the First Indochina War 1945-1954 against the French colonial regime – and in turn followed by the Third Indochina War 1975-1991, primarily between Vietnam and Cambodia but also the brief Sino-Vietnamese War against Vietnam’s former Chinese ally. And arguably these are part of a long line of Vietnam Wars, dating back to Vietnamese resistance to Imperial China and the Mongols.

American historiography of the war often poses the questions of whether the war was justifiable or moral, and whether it was winnable – with a tendency to answer both questions in the negative, although that is clouded by the historical reality of defeat on one hand and parallels with the Korean War on the other. It’s as much a part of that historical Rorschach test as the rest of the war.

At very least, the Americans should have queried how they could improve upon the French defeat, let alone double down on it. In this, ironically, they lapsed into similar errors of military judgement as Germany in both world wars in their failure to understand the nature of war, which involved understanding the limitations of military force in war and limitations of national power in the world.

I’ve seen arguments, with various degrees of persuasive force although I have yet to be persuaded by them, as to how the United States might have “won” – interestingly, these seem to cluster either near its starting point or its finishing point, with the former being more persuasive for obvious reasons, although with the obvious counterpoint that not starting it at all may have been better yet.

Finally, as a historical archetype, Vietnam seems to combine most of the predominant threads of war in the twentieth century – anti-colonial war or war of independence, civil war, proxy war, and most famously above all, guerrilla war or insurgency, perhaps the definitive type of war in the twentieth century (and beyond).

 

ART OF WAR

It’s been famously said that the Americans won all the battles but lost the war. However, almost as famous is the Vietnamese rejoinder (to Col. Harry Summers Jr) – “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.” And so it was, as for the Vietnamese, the Vietnam War was not about battles but winning the war – which was a matter of endurance or outlasting their adversary.

It, along with other successful modern insurgencies, has often led to observations of guerrilla warfare as synonymous with, or even definitive of the art of war. Not so much in pre-modern history – although it did occur in the right circumstances, you don’t tend to hear too much of successful guerrilla warfare, because states were prepared to wipe out or displace entire populations to eliminate resistance.

However, counter-insurgency in modern warfare is notoriously tricky. There is arguably a modern, smart way of winning against insurgency, or there remains the more brutal way, but few modern states have demonstrated the means or above all patience to achieve the former without invariably lapsing into the latter or something resembling it. Just ask the Americans about the coup against Diem, My Lai, the bombing, napalm, Agent Orange or the Phoenix program.

Of course, insurgency can be tricky as well. After all, what do you do with all your forces while you are avoiding all those battles – but at the same time hoping to expand your political control? Insurgencies often default to a brutal answer – killing civilians. You know, those civilian collaborators or representatives of your enemy. Even those insurgencies seen as the “good” ones. Just ask the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive.

 

WORLD WAR

Vietnam as world war? Surely not? Although even in strict terms of combat, Vietnam was not that localized as a battlefield. It was after all the Indochina War – expanding to Laos and Cambodia, while also involving China and Thailand at its borders.

Beyond that, it evolved from being part of one world war to another. The Vietnamese resistance to French colonialism was caught up in the Second World War – involving Americans, Chinese, Japanese and British one way or another in Indochina. And after the Second World War, the Americans sponsored the French in the First Indochina War, before becoming involved more directly in the Second Indochina War after France was defeated. And that was part of the larger cold war – with the Soviet Union and China provided substantial aid or forces to North Vietnam, while Australia, South Korea and the Philippines all provided combat forces to support the Americans and South Vietnam.

 

STILL FIGHTING THE VIETNAM WAR

The stereotypical Vietnam veteran is or was often depicted as “”still fighting the Vietnam War” – I’m not sure to what extent that stereotype is accurate, such as whether they may have had disproportionately high rates of PTSD. Beyond that, the Vietnam War cast a long shadow, particularly with refugees and persistent allegations of MIAs or prisoners retained by Vietnam.

For the actual Vietnam War, we’re not still fighting it. If anything, Vietnam is probably more positive or even a potential ally towards the United States than it is to its former ally, China.

But for the Vietnam War as enduring imagery, metaphor and archetype, we’re still fighting the Vietnam War – with new wars constantly being compared to it.

 

GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS

Defeat may be more an orphan – and never more so than in terms of morality for the defeated. Not many people these days tend to argue for the Americans as the good guys, although that begs the question of how one distinguishes it from, say, the Korean War, which tends not to be seen in the same terms.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

(2) COLD WAR (1945-1991)

 

Cold War? Can I get a Cool War instead?

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union that defined much of the twentieth century, where the logic of avoiding directly fighting each other was reinforced by the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons.

Cold wars are a recurring theme in history. Even before modern firepower or nuclear weapons, states often sought to avoid outright war with other states, particularly where they were evenly matched. Wars are costly and destructive, especially big or long wars of attrition, and even when you win, you often still lose. There’s a reason Pyrrhic victory is a term.

Of course, the majority of wars in history have been hot wars, in which states have actively fought each other, but even those have often been preceded or punctuated by periods of cold war, albeit where the participants often maneuvered against each other for advantage.

The period from 1933 to 1939 might be regarded as a three-sided cold war before the biggest hot war in history, in which Nazi Germany and other fascist states, the western democracies, and the Soviet Union all maneuvered with or against each other.

The Great Game between the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries might be regarded as another cold war. Indeed, in many ways the Cold War replayed much of the same territory, literally and metaphorically.

The Roman-Persian Wars obviously did not persist for six centuries entirely as active fighting or hot war, but were punctuated by cold war. Indeed, the Romans and Persians might well have paid more heed to cold war logic of avoiding directly fighting each other, since their exhaustion from war led to their defeat or conquest by the new antagonist of the Arabs under the banner of Islam.

The Greek-Persian Wars offer a better example of cold war, although there the cold war logic for the Persians arose from their costly defeats at the hands of the Greeks. Indeed, the Persians arguably did much better in their cold war strategy of supporting the Greek city states fighting each other.

Of course, that might be said of cold war strategies in general, with states doing better than they would directly fighting their antagonists. Imperial Germany would have done better if it had waged cold war rather than world war, as would have any successor that showed more restraint or strategy than the Nazi regime.

But of course, there’s no cold war like the Cold War.

 

ART OF WAR

Ironically, cold war strategy is the essence of the art of war of winning without fighting. Which the Americans and their allies did, although not without some lapses on their part – most notably land wars in Asia. Indeed, it might be said the Second World War and Cold War were the peak of the American art of war.

Although I’m not sure what Sun Tzu would have thought of his art of war being applied from the logic of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction.

 

WORLD WAR

Not least in how pervasive it was, both in the forms of its conflict, including hot wars by proxy, and its extent (as well as its stakes, that threatened the world itself). The Cold War extended through more of the world than the Second World War, which had largely left sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America unaffected, although ironically not so much Europe, despite the masses of military force the opposing sides gathered there

 

STILL FIGHTING THE WAR

We’re all Cold Warriors now. Not against the Soviet Union of course but pundits always seem to be declaring the new or next cold war.

Also the same logic of avoiding direct fighting has persisted even after the end of the Cold War, such that it might be regarded as the default standard of modern conflict. Of course it looms largest between nuclear-armed states, but also arises from just how costly it is to deploy modern firepower, or even to engage in low-level conflicts against insurgencies or guerilla combatants.

 

GOOD GUYS VS BAD GUYS

I’ve always been a Cold Warrior – as in believing in the morality of its cause and the necessity of its purpose as a war that needed to be fought, although not necessarily in all aspects of the way that it was fought.

So…USA! USA! USA!

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

(1) SECOND WORLD WAR (1939-1945)

 

Yes – it’s the big one. The Cold War may have threatened to be bigger, but there are no world wars to rival the wars that are officially known as such, particularly the Second World War, which was more destructive, extensive and pervasive than the First, despite largely being a continuation of it.

The narrative of WW2 is worthy of its top ten and is well known, even in popular culture and imagination, albeit often distorted or sensationalized. It featured almost every aspect of modern warfare, while remaining unique in others – not least being fought to a conclusive result and destruction of enemy states rarely paralleled in modern history.

My favorite historian of it – H.P. Willmott – has quipped that, paradoxically, WW2 might be regarded as the last war of the 19th century and WW1 was the first war of the 20th century. I understand that to mean WW2 was closer to 19th century wars, in part because the technology and technique of offensive mobility won out over defensive firepower and attrition – briefly and with waning effect through the war’s duration – while its predecessor was more characteristic of 20th century wars that followed it.

Or alternatively, WW2 was closer to the model of the Franco-Prussian War, at least in its European opening, or the Napoleonic Wars in its continuation within Europe. On the other hand, WW1 was closer to the American Civil War as the true precursor of twentieth century warfare, with the western front of the latter resembling the eastern theater of the latter, only with even more lethal firepower. Indeed, WW1 is sometimes dubbed a European Civil War. It’s a pity that European powers, particularly Germany, seemed to have reflected less on the American Civil War than the Franco-Prussian War for future wars.

Ironically, however, WW1 finished by armistice in a manner closer to the Franco-Prussian War except with France and Germany reversed, while the WW2 was fought to unconditional surrender like the American Civil War. For that matter, H.P. Willmott has also observed that the war of the United States against Japan in WW2 uncannily resembled the former’s war against the Confederacy.

And speaking of the United States, my own quip is that the Second World War is the American Iliad, while the Cold War is the American Odyssey. USA! USA! USA!

 

ART OF WAR

The theme of H.P. Willmott’s The Great Crusade – the best single-volume history of the war – is the refutation of the popular myth of German military excellence. As he paraphrased Oscar Wilde, to lose one world war may be regarded as misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness.

Contrary to the art of war, Germany military genius lay in fighting, not in war. When it came to understanding war and waging it, Germany was hopelessly outclassed by the Allies – a situation shared by Germany’s ally Japan. All Germany managed to achieve in two world wars was its encirclement and attrition by enemies with superior resources.

 

WORLD WAR

Well, obviously.

 

STILL FIGHTING THE WAR

Not so obviously – although the two world wars were essentially Europe’s new Thirty Years War 1914-1945. And of course beyond that, there was the cold war – such that some historians have classed both world wars and the Cold War as the Long War 1914-1991. And beyond that…

 

GOOD GUYS VS BAD GUYS

Again, well obviously – with WW2 probably the closest example in history to an actual war in black and white moral terms. To quote Bart Simpson, there are no good wars, with the following exceptions – the American Revolution, World War Two and the Star Wars trilogy.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

HISTORY – TOP 10 WARS: TIER LIST

S-TIER (GOD TIER)
(1) WORLD WARS – SECOND WORLD WAR (1939-1945)
(2) COLD WAR (1945-1991)
(3) VIETNAM WAR (1954-1975)

If the Second World War is my Old Testament of war, the Cold War is my New Testament – and the Vietnam War is my apocalypse…now (heh)

Alternatively, the Second World War is my Iliad and the Cold War is my Odyssey – as they are for the US, with WW2 as the American Iliad and the Cold War as the American Odyssey

A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(4) PERSIAN WARS – GREEK-PERSIAN WARS (499-449 BC)
(5) PERSIAN WARS – ALEXANDER’S CONQUESTS (336-323 BC)
(6) PUNIC WARS – SECOND PUNIC WAR (218-201 BC)
(7) HUNNIC WARS (441-453)
(8) MONGOL CONQUESTS – INVASION OF EUROPE (1236-1242)
(9) SPANISH CONQUESTS – CONQUEST OF MEXICO (1519-1521)
(10) AMERICAN INDIAN WARS – SIOUX WARS (1854-1891)

 

(4) FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY & NAPOLEONIC WARS (1792-1815)

 

Cue the La Marseillaise!

The wars that made the modern world – and the modern world wars. Indeed, I’ve seen it persuasively argued that the Napoleonic Wars should outrank the First World War as the more genuinely global conflict. And the French Revolution – along with its subsequent wars – are generally regarded as the landmark of modern political history, hence the god-tier special mention entry.

Napoleon needs little introduction – the Corsican artillery officer who commandeered the French Revolution and crowned himself Emperor of France to dominate Europe.

Napoleon distinguished himself as one of the most brilliant military commanders of history. Under his leadership, the French armies repeatedly defeated numerically superior Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies – outfighting coalition after coalition led and financed by Britain.

The French in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were not the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of the modern joke – a somewhat unhistorical slur in any event given France’s military history, although the Book of Lists did rank France among its Top 10 Most Defeated Nations in Modern History – but the armies that forged a French empire across Europe from Spain to Russia and from Italy to Denmark.

But in the end Napoleon lost his Napoleonic wars – his empire dismantled, France completely defeated (once and for all in a battle subsequently commemorated by Abba) and Napoleon himself exiled to progressively more pathetic islands.

Despite his strategic and tactical brilliance, Napoleon was undermined by his own flaws. One basic flaw was his nepotism in handing out kingdoms or nations as prizes to his relatives – most critically in giving the kingdom of Spain to his brother Joseph, which prompted Spain to rise up against France in the Peninsular War, the running sore or “Spanish Ulcer” of Napoleon’s empire

Of course, it didn’t help that Napoleon was relentlessly opposed by the British, who were unparalleled in magnificent bastardry – with their most cunning aspect to pose as being nice, as if they were just going about playing cricket rather than taking out almost every country on earth in the name of empire.

In fighting the world’s greatest maritime power, Napoleon was handicapped by his lack of understanding of naval strategy (or his navy’s lack of ability) as well as geopolitics. It was trying to fight outside Europe (and on the seas) that Napoleon met with his earliest (and most consistent) defeats.

For all his romping around Europe, he effectively was bottled up in Europe by the British navy, unable to project his power into the world. All his victories in Europe did not change the basic fact that true world power had moved from the center of Europe to its edges – to the maritime empire of Britain and the continent-spanning empire of Russia, which ultimately crushed him between them. And in the end, all Napoleon’s wars achieved was handing world empire over not to himself, but to two successive Anglo-Saxon powers, Britain and the United States (the latter not least through the Louisiana Purchase) – the real winners of the Napoleonic Wars.

The Napoleonic Wars also initiated the rise of Germany under Prussia – with Prussia reforming itself militarily, and then, as part of the Congress of Vienna seeking to beef it up for a better balance of power, acquiring industrial regions in Germany that transformed agrarian Prussia into an industrial leader in the nineteenth century.

Of course, Germany was to have the same fatal flaw as that of Napoleon before them, bottled up between Britain and Russia as well as misjudging the extent to which world power had moved beyond Europe. Actually, their situation was even worse, as world power to their west had moved across the Atlantic to the United States, well beyond their reach. Indeed, only twenty years after Waterloo, another Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville predicted Russia and the United States as the two global powers – a process that visibly took shape during the Napoleonic Wars.

The French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars saw the transformation of Europe and the world – spreading revolutionary principles over much of Europe (then identified as liberal with the same distaste as a subsequent era was to identify socialist or communist).

Those principles saw the transformation of formerly aristocratic armies into the beginnings of modern warfare, not least the levee en masse or mass conscription of armies – which saw the French revolutionary army achieve objectives that had eluded the French monarchy for centuries

It also saw the beginnings of total war – with the dawn of industrial warfare (with the Industrial Revolution lending Britain the ability to punch above its demographic weight) and the dawn of ideological warfare, as well as the emergence of nationalism (or “people’s wars”) and militarism in the culture of war

“The wars had profound consequences on global history, including the spread of nationalism and liberalism, the rise of Britain as the world’s foremost naval and economic power, the appearance of independence movements in Latin America and subsequent decline of the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire, the fundamental reorganization of German and Italian territories into larger states, and the introduction of radically new methods of conducting warfare.”

To which might have been added other things, such as the relative peace in continental Europe during the nineteenth century, and the territorial expansion of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase. And my own pet theory that the destruction of indigenous nations or peoples in the Americas and Australasia can be traced to Napoleon. Not directly, of course, but indirectly through the Louisiana Purchase, consolidation of British “settlement” in Australia and Latin American revolution or independence, which accelerated the impending destruction of indigenous peoples or nations.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

(3) AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY & CIVIL WAR (1775-1783 & 1861-1865)

 

That’s right – two wars for the price of one in this special mention, the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the American Civil War (1861-1865). Also two wars that could be described as the commencement of modern history – and certainly of the predominant superpower of modern history, the United States.

These two wars earn their special entry mention for a number of reasons – firstly as representative of those categories of war that deserve (and will get) their own top ten (and special mentions), revolutions and civil wars.

Of course, those two categories tend to be overlapping, as revolutions tend to evolve (or devolve) into civil wars – that is, if they don’t start out that way. For that matter, we often forget the American revolution was itself a civil war between British subjects – loyalists and revolutionaries.

And the American Civil War has also been seen as the unfinished business of the American Revolutionary War, with the victor of the American Revolution effectively as the South (or what Gore Vidal called the Virginian junta). Indeed, some have seen both as part of series of Anglo-American civil wars back to the English civil war. Not to mention the American Revolutionary War’s loose sequel, the War of 1812.

However, both are more than representative – each earn top entry in those categories. In large part that’s due to their iconic predominance in American history and therefore in the American popular culture that is to a large extent global popular culture.

But more so because I categorize the American Revolution as the best revolution – firstly, because it succeeded, and secondly that it did not collapse into despotism like other revolutions. Pro tip – revolutions are best when they are limited. The more radical the revolution’s goals – the more it seeks to overturn and upend – the more likely it is to fail, or worse, succeed as despotism. Also – shout-out to the American Revolution’s good fortune in its quality of leadership, particularly Washington (with his only rival in popular American reverence being its Civil War president Lincoln).

Secondly, these two wars also earn their special mention in another category of wars that will get their own Top 10 – American wars. Although in that case I do cheekily profess to rank them by their art of war – and the American Revolutionary War ranks up there with the best American wars in art of war.

In large part, that is because it is almost unique among American wars as the Americans fought it as underdogs, against the largest and most powerful maritime empire in history (of course, that is, apart from their own subsequent modern maritime empire)

And they won it through the tried and true art of war for states weaker than their adversaries (as well as Americans generally in their bigger wars) – having others do the fighting for you. In particular, the French – but also the Spanish and Dutch in what was effectively a world war against Britain.

Not so much the American Civil War of course, which was fought entirely between themselves without foreign allies or intervention – and remains, not coincidentally, the American war with the highest American casualties.

Thirdly and finally, these two wars earn their special mention for their own significant impact in history, military or otherwise.

The American Revolution looms larger here, inspiring as it did the Haitian and Latin American revolutions. And it not only inspired the French revolution, but directly led to it as the French monarchy had bankrupted itself fighting the American revolution – literally two revolutions for the price of one.

The American Revolution also not only saw the United States gain independence from the British maritime empire, but ultimately supplanting it as world power, fuelled by their territorial expansion across the continent that also originated with the American Revolution.

And perhaps Europeans – particularly Germans, who were unified under Bismarck at about the same time – might have paid more attention to the American Civil War as more indicative of the attrition, industrial mobilization and general slog-fest of modern warfare, as opposed to, say outliers like the Franco-Prussian War.

Lest we do too much cheerleading for the American revolution, let’s remember its losers, apart from the British (as well as French and Spanish) monarchy. British loyalists – many of whom fled to Canada or elsewhere. Those native Americans allied with the British or who otherwise sought to thwart the growing United States. And of course slaves and women, as the new American republic deprived both of liberty or representation, uncannily echoing classical Athenian democracy.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER)