Benefiting from a military point of view
Jasper Griffin
THE PUNIC WARS by Nigel Bagnall Hutchinson, £19.99, pp. 355 It is a mark of a civilised society when its military men read books; much more so when they write them. Field Marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall was Chief of the General Staff from 1985 to 1988, and he has written a serious and well-informed book on the wars between Rome and Carthage in the third century BC. We can all take pleasure in those facts. It is, however, not simply a piece of disinterested research but a tale with a moral for current politics.
The two great wars between the two city states, each of which might have dominated the Mediterranean, lasted in all 40 years: the First Punic War from 264 to 241, the Second from 218 to 201. They involved fighting at sea and in Spain, southern France, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and North Africa; and in the Second War, Carthage succeeded in mobilising against Rome other powers further East, in Illyria and northern Greece.
At times, Rome was brought close to defeat. In 247, the census roll of citizen males showed a fall of 17 per cent, and Rome had lost 500 warships and 1,000 transports; in 207, the number of citizens was actually down by 50 per cent, and the whole political system was tottering with the strain of war, expense and lost battles. The eventual defeat of Carthage turned Rome from a provincial to an imperial power, hardened by long struggle, and ready for the conquest of the world.
Nigel Bagnall goes through this long and very eventful history primarily from the military point of view. The battles are described vividly, but this is no blood-and- thunder, thin-red-line narrative. The Field Marshal's interest is in analysis, in the theoretical and practical waging of war. He applies to these distant conflicts the three- fold analysis taught at modern military academies.
Thus there are the strategic level, defined as the definition of strategic objec- tives to be achieved in fulfilment of gov- ernment policy; the operational level, which is the planning and execution of mil- itary operations to achieve stated strategic objectives; and the tactical level, that of the planning and conduct of battles in pur- suit of the operational aim. As he soberly points out, no nation had a general staff before the Prussians established one in the 19th century, and this sort of analysis was not, in that form, accessible to earlier gen- erals or governments; but it can illuminate past events, and the decisions which were taken in the course of them.
The First Punic War began as the result of a piece of unscrupulous opportunism by Rome, which could not resist the chance to snatch an entry into Sicily at Carthage's expense. The moral is two-fold. First, Rome was a very warlike society; warlike societies do exist, and the rest of us must be on our guard against them. Specif- ically, 'the Soviets have been expansionist like the Romans', but less through a cul- tural propensity for war than through an ideology which regards war, and still more the threat of war, as a tool of a policy which aims at universal dominion. Gor- bachev or no Gorbachev, the threat from the Soviet Union will continue to exist, and we must be prepared to meet it. For the second moral is that un- preparedness means disaster. The Romans tried it on in one corner of Sicily because Carthage looked unprepared; the absence of a crisp Carthaginian response led Rome to attempt to take over the whole island. Had Carthage looked more formidable, the Romans might have left them alone. At the end of the Second Punic War Carthage was thoroughly defeated, dis- armed, placed under a burden of repara- tions which was meant to be crushing, but not destroyed. But such was the hatred engendered in Roman hearts by the long and terrible struggle that the desire to exterminate the enemy city continued to smoulder; and 50 years later, by a cynical series of ruses, they forced a virtually defenceless Carthage to fight, took the city, and destroyed it completely (though the story, here repeated, that they sowed the ruins with salt is a modern invention). Moral: 'The fate of Carthage clearly demonstrates that unilateral disarmament does not ensure survival'.
These morals sound a little predictable, the axe-grinding of a professional soldier who believes in the importance of armies. Sadly, it is all too true that whatever history does or does not teach, of one thing it leaves no doubt: a society which cannot defend its possessions and itself will finish up poor and dependent, if not looted and enslaved. More thought-provoking are the Field Marshal's reflections on the vital importance of clear thinking and exact planning at every one of his three levels.
Rome went into the First War in pursuit of an opportunistic goal, and was lured by early success into going further; she had no strategic plan of objectives, and no clear grasp on the operational level either, blun- dering on thanks to her superiority, usually, at the tactical level, and the defensiveness of Carthaginian strategy and the poor qual- ity of their generals. In the Second War, Hannibal, one of the greatest commanders of all time, had a clear strategy as well as supremacy at the other two levels. For some time he was invincibly victorious, crushing three Roman armies with over- whelming losses (General Schwarzkopf, too, admires Hannibal's skill in inflicting very heavy casualties at small cost to his own army), and putting constant pressure on Rome and her allies to split apart and cave in. Rome showed, by a narrow margin, the political will to fight on, and the Carthaginian establishment failed their brilliant general through political in- fighting and lack of vision.
On the interplay of strategic and opera- tional decisions, on the risks of politics in time of war, on the importance of morale: this book gives much food for reflection. Not least suggestive, perhaps, is the robust- ly stated view that the fundamental weak- ness of Carthage was its failure to create a common feeling of identity or commitment in its colonies: 'the needs of commercial exploitation predominated over any sort of political freedom or reciprocal loyalties'. In Rome, on the other hand, there was a `binding sense of duty to the family, social group, or military unit: all established with- in the hierarchy of state authority'. That is important. It is lucky for us, as the ideology of the Eastern bloc crumbles, that we are not up against anything so tough as Repub- lican Rome.
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