I just finished Victor Davis Hanson’s Ripples of Battle, which details three lesser-known battles: Okinawa (1945), Shiloh (1862), and Delium (424 B.C.) As usual, his description of the battles and surrounding events are fascinating. But the thesis is that these battles, though not as much discussed as others, have had ripples extending up to today. To take one example, he contends that the Japanese knew they could not hold Okinawa, but committed vast reserves to the battle, fought tenaciously, and adopted suicide tactics to deter the Americans from contemplating an invation of the mainland. But this only served to reinforce the decision to use the atom bomb to avoid the projected massive casualties that the battle of Okinawa taught Americans to expect on the mainland. He also uses the American experience with Japanese suicide fighters to suggest implication for the use of suicide bombers today.
I thought perhaps the final paragraph (with my insertions connecting it to the themes of the book), would entice readers to give it a try:
Millions of the anonymous have had their lives altered in ways we cannot grasp for centuries, as a single battle–with all its youth, confined space, and dreadful killing–insidiously warps the memory of friends and families of the fallen [such as Hanson’s namesake uncle at Okinawa], twists the thoughts and aspirations of the veterans of the ordeal [such as Socrates at Delium], and abruptly ends the accomplishments of the dead [such as General Albert Sidney Johnson at Shiloh]. In that sense the ripples of battle are also immune from and care little for what people write and read, in or outside the dominant West. They simply wash up on us all as we speak and in ways that cannot fully be known until centuries after we are gone
Typing this last sentence actually gave me chills.
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