Victor Davis Hanson provides a riveting and analytically powerful
account of the battle at Rorke’s Drift in his book, Carnage and Culture.
I have recommended this book highly before, and welcome another
opportunity to urge Corner readers to buy and read it. His new book,
Ripples of Battle, a sequel of sorts to Carnage and Culture, is
excellent and moving as well, though somewhat less intellectually
ambitious.
In Culture and Carnage VDH explains how the West has prospered
in large part because of its capacity for efficiently killing great
numbers of its enemies, and he credits the individualistic culture of
the West not only for its superior technology but also for its superior
tactics. The thesis of Ripples of Battle is that the three
battles discussed there–Okinawa, Shiloh & Delium–”still determine how
we fight, how we live, and how we think.” I must say that his vivid
account in Ripples of Okinawa, where his namesake uncle Victor
Hanson was killed, was amazing. I was surprised how little I knew of
that battle given that, as a baby boomer, I was raised on WWII
documentaries.