A Small Lesson in Tactics Part II

2. Buying Time

One of the reasons there were only 300 Spartan’s at the battle of Thermopylae was that the king could not win support of his constituents to go to war, and so took his own “bodyguard” of 300 off for a stroll. Apart from winning support for the war at home, Leonidis’ actions gave time for the rest of the Greek city states to react.

Xerxes knew that in order to gain control of Greece, the capitol state of Athens must fall. Athens was his primary goal. Once the Athenians finally believed that Xerxes could not be stopped, they needed time to react. They could not let Xerxes, with his army of 5 million, just walk into Athens, and they were powerless to stop them. An overall evacuation of Athens was ordered, and the citizens and Armies of Greece assembled on the small Island of Salamis just west of Athens. It was close enough that they could watch as the Persians looted and pillaged their city from across the water.

Now, the only way Xerxes could truly defeat the Greeks, was to land his army on the island and try to take it by force. But first he had to destroy the Greek navy. The Greeks seemingly had already learned from Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae, and arranged their much smaller fleet in such a way that it narrowed the fighting area, choking the Persian Fleet between two jutes of land, and defeating them in detail.

Evacuation of the entirety of lower Greece, and assembly of the fleet off of Salamis, could not happen overnight. If Leonidas had failed to delay Xerxes at Thermopylae, Athens would surely have been overrun before they could evacuate, and forced into servitude, (which is exactly how Xerxes had such a large army in the first place.)

Fast forward again to Burnside’s damnable bridge. An entire corps on the Confederate right would have caught the Confederate army in a vice, and squeezed them together against the Union corps already north of Sharpsburg. The entire Confederate army would have no choice but to flee to Sharpsburg, and be caught against the river much like Hooker at Chancelorsville. The inevitable outcome would have been utter destruction, or surrender of, the entire Confederate army.

Gen. Toombs, in delaying the fight at the bridge for three hours, allowed A.P. Hill to come up with his forces from Harper’s Ferry just in time to check the Union attack at a crucial moment. (The Union stopping for lunch did not help matters much). All though Antietam itself was a marginal Union victory (more like a stalemate), if Toombs had not been able to hold his position as long as he had, it is quite possible that the majority of the Confederate forces would have been lost that day. A small victory, snatched from almost certain defeat.


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2 responses to “A Small Lesson in Tactics Part II”

  1. elektratig Avatar

    Ray,

    Since you’ve mentioned Salamis, I can’t resist recommending Barry Strauss’ book The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece — and Western Civilization. For all the publicity that Thermopylae has received recently — and I think that’s great — Thermopylae would have been irrelevant if Themistocles had not crafted his brilliant plan and held the Greeks together to execute it.

    Perhaps there is the real connection between the Persian War and Antietam. Themistocles took a small, potentially insignificant advantage and used it to create a crushing victory. McClellan took a stunning advantage — the Lost Order — and threw it away.

  2. Ray B Avatar
    Ray B

    I already beat you to it! Read this book a few years ago when it was first published. You are right, it is an amazing piece of work. I was always amazed at how much of a detailed picture he put together giving how ancient the battle was.

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