In the classical Greek scheme of things, hubris—overweening pride—was a lurking trap for headstrong humans, not least such extraordinary figures as King Oedipus. Along with nemesis, its personified enforcer, hubris was a chronic susceptibility of the human temperament woven into the cosmic order.
Alistair Horne adopts this familiar myth as title and theme of his latest inquiry into the history of 20th-century warfare. Readers know him as a specialist whose masterworks include a definitive trilogy on French military fortunes and a biography of Harold Macmillan. Horne’s treatment of the Algerian war, A Savage War of Peace (1977), has enjoyed a recent revival among professional warriors concerned with intractable struggles in North Africa and the Middle East. That book’s paradoxical title is pertinent to asymmetrical wars that defy conventional great-power might, and among the episodes Horne treats in Hubris are the Japanese catastrophe at Midway after Pearl Harbor (the end of the battleship era); General Douglas MacArthur’s misadventure as supreme commander in Korea; and the French attempt to salvage imperial control over Indochina, ending at Dien Bien Phu — a grim curtain-raiser for the American agony in Vietnam.
Horne writes with authority and eloquence. His study of both Dien Bien Phu and the French war for Algeria draw upon his earlier work on the siege of Verdun. (Bernard Fall called Dien Bien Phu “Verdun . . . [in] a tropical setting.”) In Indochina, hubris loomed fatefully in the French confidence that the North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap and his peasant army could not drag heavy artillery pieces into the heights overlooking their base, nor implant them in hillside dugouts to make them safe against bombing and artillery.
How does Horne adjust an ancient mythic idea to complex episodes of modern war? He does so by exposing, in detail, forms of overreach, misconception, and forgetfulness that lead to catastrophic reversals known to the Greeks as peripeteia. Many of these encounters are familiar, with the exception of a little-known clash between Russian and Japanese armies in the Mongolian borderlands. The ensuing naval counterpart was the Battle of the Tsushima Straits, the second instance in which the Japanese destroyed a landlubbing Russian fleet. The Japanese Navy came into its own as a world power at Tsushima, but with a legacy of dangerous overconfidence.
Accompanying the victorious admiral in a chivalrous visit to his hospitalized Russian rival was a young officer, Isoroku Yamamoto, who would later become prophet of carrier warfare and planner of Pearl Harbor. The later strategic decision of the 1930s to “go south” in quest of land and resources brought Japan into collision with the United States, the patron of Chinese territorial integrity and guardian of the Open Door policy. The fateful attempt to cripple American naval power in the Pacific brought a permanent reversal months later at Midway. There, the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers. Horne shows that Yamamoto’s overreach at Pearl Harbor consisted, in significant part, of excessive complexity, including a simultaneous assault on a strategically valueless Aleutian island.
Peripeteia, indeed.
Continuing in the Asian theater, Horne also offers a probing account of Douglas MacArthur’s firing in Korea. MacArthur, a 20th-century military giant, was lured by his more-than-ample ego into a clash with his commander in chief, Harry Truman, (an artillery captain in France when MacArthur was emerging as the most decorated officer in that brief but costly intervention). Horne’s balanced analysis of MacArthur’s sensational sacking is the finest in a fine study. He notes that, under the controlling National Security Council memorandum, MacArthur could not be sure of the length of his leash. He read it as authorizing him, after the brilliant landing at Inchon behind North Korean lines, to push his forces up to the Chinese border on the Yalu River, notwithstanding warnings that the maneuver would trip a Chinese intervention. When refused sanction, and with an implicit command to halt at the 32nd parallel, he dispatched an insubordinate letter that was read on the floor of the House of Representatives challenging presidential command with an oracular admonition that “there is no substitute for victory.”
Hubris is a richly instructive historical reminder that merits attentive reading, especially in Washington. But in conclusion, a memory: Some years ago I was one of a small party touring the Antietam battlefield with Alistair Horne and other friends. One, a devoted student of our Civil War, maintained a running commentary on the features of the battle terrain, not realizing that the polite and attentive but silent Englishman in our midst was a distinguished military historian. He learned about that later in the day when shown a shelf containing Horne’s renowned trilogy on the French Army. The modest silence at Antietam was characteristic of the Alistair Horne I have known for four decades. That modesty parallels his magisterial grasp of the role of inflated egos that lead nations into military ruin.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. is the author, most recently, of Vacancy: A Judicial Misadventure.
