A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

by Victor Davis Hanson

Was it a more moral and effective strategy to burn the slave estates and ruin the property of the plantation class of Georgia, which had fueled secession, or to have Ulysses Grant kill thousands of largely young and non-slave-owning youth in northern Virginia in open battle? Far worse still, was Curtis LeMay a war criminal who burned down the cities of Japan, killing tens of thousands of civilians with his napalm-fed infernos? Or, in effect, did he shorten the war and punish those in Tokyo’s household factories whose labor produced the planes, shells, and guns without which the Japanese imperial army could never have murdered thousands of innocent Koreans, Chinese, and Filipinos and killed so many American servicemen? Hans Delbrück was not interested in such abstract moral questions. It was the efficacy of the respective strategies that mattered to him. Delbrück wrote in a defeated Germany not long after the horrors of the trenches of World War I and was searching for a less costly strategy of battle mixed with more comprehensive economic, cultural, and psychological tactics that might still achieve Germany’s strategic aims. He concluded that Pericles had hit upon a formula of success, a strategy that defined deadlock as victory—without ruining armies of young men in the process. Had Pericles lived, had the plague not broken out, and had the Athenians not jettisoned their strategy, Athens could not have been defeated militarily and might have obtained far earlier roughly t...