Throughout history great generals have done what their enemies have least expected. Instead of direct, predictable attack, they have deceived, encircled, outflanked, out-thought, and triumphed over often superior armies commanded by conventional thinkers.
Collected here are the stories of the most successful commanders of all time – among them Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stonewall Jackson, Sherman, Rommel, Mao Zedong – who have demonstrated, at their own points in history, the strategic and tactical genius essential for victory. Ironically this virtue does not come naturally to military organizations, since more often than not the straight-ahead, narrow-thinking soldier will be promoted over his more lateral-minded, devious counterpart. Yet when the latter gets control, the results may be spectacular.
Hannibal’s trap at Cannae, careful in preparation and perfect in execution, annihilated an entire Roman army – yet it depended on Hannibal being somewhere entirely unexpected and the Roman legions behaving conventionally. Stonewall Jackson tied down Union armies many times larger than his own for months just by marching to points in the Shenandoah valley and feinting attacks toward Washington, almost without firing a shot. Napoleon’s revolutionary manaeuvre sur les derrieres, though in many ways not a new idea, allowed his small army to inflict defeat after defeat upon a much larger Austrian force in northern Italy and helped cement his position as an awesome commander – and future emperor.
Bevin Alexander analyzes the mindset that distinguishes a truly great commander from a merely good one: unpredictability, vision, charisma, and an ability to play on the opponent’s mind. All warfare is based on deception, wrote Sun Tzu, the celebrated Chinese strategist, in 400 BC: How Great Generals Win shows us how leaders of different eras have interpreted this advice, and why it still holds true today.
–Book Jacket.