Review by Choice Review
The battle of Cannae on August 2, 216 BCE has been much studied for the tactics and also because it was probably the single bloodiest afternoon in human history. When it was over, 48,000 corpses, most of them Romans, covered the field. This is an extended commentary by well-known military historian O'Connell. He discusses first the historical situation and the events of the preceding half century, the battle itself at length, and then the aftermath of the ensuing half century. The "ghosts" of the title are the roughly ten thousand Roman survivors who were disgraced and shunted aside for a dozen years until they were recruited by Scipio Africanus and assisted in his victory at Zama in 202 BCE. A nice touch is the addition of a "cast of characters" at the beginning and a glossary of terms at the end. Although there are copious endnotes, there is, inconveniently, no separate bibliography. O'Connell writes in a witty, breezy, almost conversational style. His scholarship is good, but not very original. Scholars will profitably read the book, but it will be most valuable to general readers, especially military history buffs. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. J. J. Gabbert emerita, Wright State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
OTHER battles are perhaps just as famous - Thermopylae, Waterloo, Gettysburg - but the aura of Cannae, where Hannibal obliterated the largest army the Roman Republic had ever put into the field, is unmatched. The battle is unparalleled for its carnage, with more men from a single army killed on that one day, Aug. 2, 216 B.C., than on any other day on any other European battlefield: something like 50,000 Romans died, two and a half times the number of British soldiers who fell on the first day of the Somme. In the last century Cannae has acquired added significance. The quintessential annihilation battle of encirclement, it has become a benchmark for overwhelming operational success. Its long shadow reached into the frozen bunkers of encircled Stalingrad, where officers of the German Wehrmacht watched the Russian jaws snap shut behind them and reflected despairingly on the coincidence that the name of their commander, Friedrich Paulus, echoed that of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the Roman consul killed at Cannae. It is therefore not surprising that the recent boom in military histories of the ancient world has already given us at least two books on Cannae in the last 10 years. An author needs to ask what he can bring to the topic that is new. The distinctive edge of "The Ghosts of Cannae" is Robert L. O'Connell's consistently professional instinct for the behavior of men and units on the battlefield. He is able to put himself and his reader on the ground at Cannae, gagging in the heat of a southern Italian midsummer, assailed by an overload from every one of the five senses. With a scrupulous recognition of the dangers of a "pornography of violence," O'Connell spells out what was involved in the process of systematically butchering the helpless Roman army, in "what must have been the most horrific several hours in all of Western military history." He notes that "other than those who succumbed to the heat, each of the men who died had to be individually punctured, slashed or battered into oblivion." Above all, O'Connell, the author of several military histories, points out that the participants did not have the benefit of a modern battle diagram. Color coding and dotted arrows would have revealed at a glance the thinned-out Carthaginian center between the menacingly packed forces on either flank, ready to swing in once the Romans had committed to the pocket. But even from horseback, the Roman commanders' field of vision was severely limited, and O'Connell's imaginative evocation of their point of view makes his reconstruction of their battle plan extremely convincing. With hindsight, the Romans' determination to fight Hannibal looks deluded or desperate, but O'Connell must be right to stress how confident they would have been in the size of their force and in the proven ability of the sword-fighting Roman legionaries. Two years before, when Hannibal first descended onto the northern plain of Italy, the main force of the Roman legions had managed to carve through the enemy in front of them at the battle of the River Trebia, even as their Italian allies on the flanks were being annihilated. At Cannae, Paullus and his co-commander, Caius Terentius Varro, must have thought things were going according to plan as the enemy's center gave way and the legionaries started to press forward. Yet, though it took another 14 years, Hannibal lost the war, leaving Rome as the pre-eminent Mediterranean power. As O'Connell shrewdly demonstrates, Hannibal's understanding of politics and alliances derived from the Carthaginian empire and from the deal-cutting princes of the Hellenistic world. Neither model allowed for the revolutionary nature of the Italian alliance system, which was guided by the granite resolve of the Roman governing class. The supreme tactical victory at Cannae has made Hannibal the envy of professionals ever since, but he could not cash it in for a strategic victory: 70 years after the battle, his home city of Carthage was reduced to powder, and it was his enemies who went on to rule the Mediterranean and its hinterlands for another five centuries. Military experts may purr over the perfection of Hannibal's achievement by the banks of the River Aufidus, but the more enduring lesson is that tactics alone cannot win a war. The shadow of Cannae reached even into the frozen bunkers of Stalingrad. Denis Feeney is the Giger professor of Latin at Princeton University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 29, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
The Second Punic War began over Roman and Carthaginian competing claims in Spain and quickly escalated into a life-and-death struggle for control of the western Mediterranean. At the center of the struggle was Hannibal's invasion and ravaging of Italy over a span of 15 years, during which he inflicted a series of devastating defeats upon successive Roman armies, climaxed by the slaughter of an estimated 50,000 Romans at Cannae in southern Italy in 216 B.C. This outstanding account of the background of the Italian campaign and of the battle itself is primarily a military history, but O'Connell avoids excessive use of military jargon and explains the tactics and strategies in terms nonspecialists can easily comprehend. He also pays ample attention to the political aspects of the war and shows how the ability of the Roman Senate to persevere and change strategy was critical to Rome's survival and eventual triumph. This is a superb chronicle of events that shaped the fate of Western civilization.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Military historian O'Connell (Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression) has established the new standard for studies of the second conflict between Rome and Carthage. In dramatic and comprehensive fashion, he describes the rivalry, based on temperament and territory, that led to the slaughter at Cannae in 216 B.C.E. and beyond. Focusing chiefly on Hannibal and his Roman nemesis Scipio Africanus, he also awards proper consideration to Fabius Maximus, whose strategy of attrition and delay could have saved countless Roman lives. Differences in Roman and Carthaginian tactics, armament, and philosophy are explained, as is the importance of religious belief to both cultures. O'Connell shatters the popular myth of the invincibility of the Carthaginians' fabled elephants, the "panzer pachyderms." The "ghosts" of the title are the Roman survivors of Cannae, who were unwanted reminders of defeat. They were banished to Sicily until Scipio Africanus incorporated them into the army that achieved the final Roman victory at Zama. Unfortunately, a lack of sources restricts O'Connell's ability to provide much information on the Carthaginian home front, but ample attention is given to the political maneuvers that shaped Roman policy. 6 maps. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
O'Connell (Of Arms and Men) gives a sweeping account of Hannibal's victory over the Romans in the bloody 216 BCE Battle of Cannae, an event of the Second Punic War whose strategy of encirclement has been emulated for centuries. O'Connell tracks the fate of some of the battle's survivors, including Scipio Africanus, Fabius Maximus, and the titular "ghosts of Cannae" (the defeated Roman soldiers), also measuring the historical impact of several factors that eventually led to the conversion of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. Multiple Audie Award nominee Alan Sklar's (see Behind the Mike, LJ 3/1/09) engaging and witty narration complements this well-researched and well-written work recommended for all those interested in Roman and military history. [The New York Times best-selling Random hc was described as being "thoughtful," "in-depth," and "accessible" and recommended as "an excellent companion" to books by Adrian Goldsworthy and Gregory Daly on the subject, LJ 7/10.-Ed.]-Scott R. DiMarco, Mansfield Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Readable study of a 2,000-year-old battle that still reverberates today.On Aug. 2, 216 BCE, in southeastern Italy, a massive Roman army faced down a smaller, apparently weaker Carthaginian force led by Hannibal. Two years earlier, Hannibal had famously led that force, war elephants and all, over the Alps into Italy, devastating the armies of the Roman Republic. At Cannae, he nearly finished the job, using a pincer movement to surround the Romans and nearly annihilating them. Contemporary accounts of the battle, such as those by Livy, aren't really contemporary at all, following it by a century and more. O'Connell (Soul of the Sword: An Illustrated History of Weaponry and Warfare from Prehistory to the Present, 2002, etc.), a former analyst with the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency, has his work cut out for him in sorting out what is reliable from what is fabulous or moralizing in the records of the past. Perhaps surprisingly, he gives fairly solid marks to Polybius of Megalopolis, who came nearly 75 years after and had access to now-lost Carthaginian accounts of the battle. The "ghosts" of the title are the Roman survivors of the battle, who crossed the sea with Scipio Africanus and sowed Carthage's fields with salt, erasing it from the map in an act that can only be considered genocide. O'Connell pointedly contrasts Carthaginian and Roman society, the one commercial and the other bellicose, and at several points he likens the Punic Wars to the transcontinental slaughter of the two world wars. He also notes that modern generals continue to study Cannae as a textbook example of smart, fluid strategizing. "[F]or the Allied invasion of Germany," writes the author, "Eisenhower envisioned a huge Cannae-like maneuver, employing a double envelopment of the Ruhr," and George Patton likened the Polish army in 1939 to the unfortunate Roman consular army at Cannae.A wide-ranging account of the battle that sets it in the larger context of the Punic Wars and the rise of the Roman Empire. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
