The military historian Victor Davis Hanson was in Washington, D.C., to promote his latest book, The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq. Considering what is transpiring overseas, the timing couldn’t be better. (It also makes for great summer reading.) At a lunch sponsored by the Hoover Institution, where Hanson is a senior fellow (he’s also a raisin farmer), the author discussed at length the five men who rose to the occasion.

Despite formidable odds, the Greek commander Themistocles led his beleagured army to victory at Salamis against the Persians. General Flavius Belasarius prevented Byzantium from falling in the 6th century and secured borders and fortifications that held up for the next nine centuries—until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Hanson moves on to William Tecumseh Sherman, who captured Atlanta in 1864, and General Matthew Ridgeway, aka “Old Iron Tits,” who reversed the largest retreat in American history—when the Chinese Red Army came down the Korean Peninsula and pushed U.S. forces back 400 miles. His last profile, interestingly enough, focuses on David Petraeus and the surge that saved Iraq.