Robert L. O'Connell

From the subtitle, one would expect this book would be about “Xenophon and the First Great Mercenary Army’s Epic Escape from Persia.”

Perhaps because O’Connell didn’t have any new primary materials on offer, he pads his story by taking us through the entire history of warfare, beginning with ants [!] When he finally makes his way to relevant material involving the Persians and Greeks between 600 and 300 BCE, he relies mainly on Greek sources, offering their assessments of Persians show more as definitive:

“They were subtle and treacherous…. with .. monumental sexual excess… and “addiction to luxury and especially bling..”

O’Connell seems to accept all that at face value, as if the Greeks were, by contrast, paragons of virtue (except, he allows, for their apparent willingness to be bribed. One would think that might indicate they too were addicted to what money could buy, but O’Connell draws no such conclusions). In any event, he repeatedly gives too much credence to scant written records made by persons with axes to grind, so to speak.

(It should be noted one of the sources he consults is “the Septuagint, translated into Greek by seventy-two Hebrew scholars a the command of Ptolemy II of Egypt, sometime in the first half o the third century BCE.” As even Wikipedia knows, “this story [of the creation of the Septuagint] is considered to be pseudepigraphical [i.e., false]. . . . Biblical scholars agree that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were translated from Biblical Hebrew into Koine Greek by Jews living in the Ptolemaic Kingdom. . . probably in the early or middle part of the 3rd century BC. The remaining books were presumably translated in the 2nd century BC.”)

Moreover, the “Ten Thousand” was a force of mercenary units made up mostly of Greeks. “When times were good” for this army, we learn, they had serial bouts of feasting, drunkenness, and “basically free access to sex completely on male terms,” which included sharing of women and adolescent boys and girls, as well as “a number of love affairs between soldiers and members of both sexes.” Hmmm, sounds like the Greeks were not so different from the descriptions they gave - that O’Connell accepted - of the Persians. Were the Greeks engaging in damnation by projection, one wonders? And when O’Connell wrote about the Persians, was he forgetting what he also told us about the Greeks?

When it comes to the saga of the Ten Thousand, O’Connell doesn’t do much more than quote Xenophon’s own history, Anabasis. Okay, rendering it in contemporary English is helpful, but otherwise, I was not impressed by this retelling. show less

From the civil war generals reading program, and engaging and well-written biography of William Tecumseh Sherman. Author Robert O’Connell uses a partially chronological and partially thematic arrangement that works quite well. The first section – and more than two thirds of the total – covers Sherman’s military career, starting with his arrival at West Point in 1836. He served in the Seminole War – where O’Connell suggests he learned something about guerilla warfare – and then show more found himself, to his expressed disgust, doing administrative work in California while his West Point comrades were winning laurels in Mexico. He dropped out of the military for a while to work as a banker – with indifferent success – then, in 1860, found a job as the superintendent of a military academy in Louisiana. His exposure to the Southern upper class may have influenced some of his later actions; when Louisiana seceded he famously prophesized to a colleague “You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth. … You are bound to fail. Only in spirit and determination are you prepared for war.” Which is more or less how it came out.


He had a meeting with Abraham Lincoln – who didn’t impress him at the time – and one with Winfield Scott – who did – and ended up in command of the Third Brigade of the First Division at Bull Run, where after some initial confusion he performed as creditably as any other Union commander. That got him posted to Kentucky as a deputy to Robert Anderson. O’Connell begins to develop what he considers to be a theme in Sherman’s life here – he was more comfortable as a wingman than as top gun, since he insisted that he would serve only as deputy and not as theater commander. But Anderson became ill and Sherman did become commander, leading to the famous incident where an interview convinced Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas that Sherman was crazy. I had always thought of Sherman as taciturn – perhaps because he looks that way in photographs – but O’Connell points out he was a non-stop talker and always a bundle of nervous energy. That stood against him in Kentucky; he was reported …”twitching his red whiskers – his coat buttons – playing a tattoo on the table – or running his fingers through his hair. … And on and on he talked, nervously and obsessively … making odd gestures …”. Sherman got poor reviews from the newspapers and from Washington, and resigned his command to be replaced by Don Carlos Buell. He then turned up in St. Louis, under Henry Halleck – a man he’d always had issues with. Once again he got in trouble for “nervousness” – a military doctor said he was “unfit for command”. Only the intervention of political friends and family in Washington kept him from dismissal; Halleck ended up assigning Sherman to command a division of volunteers under another man Halleck didn’t like very much – Ulysses S. Grant.


That lead to Sherman’s next action – at Shiloh Church in Tennessee. Here his performance was much the same as at Bull Run: a brief moment of panic – he reportedly screamed “My God, we’re attacked” as Johnston’s troops came boiling out of the woods – then the supposedly crazy Sherman settled down, got his unit into battle formation, saw to it that reinforcements and ammunition were brought up, and generally impressing everyone who had contact with him as cool and clearheaded as he stabilized the Union line. That eventually lead to another famous quote, when the garrulous Sherman encountered the laconic Grant sitting under a tree in the rain. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” “Yes. Lick ‘em tomorrow, though”. And they did.


(As an aside another famous Sherman quote is “Grant stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk.” As it happens when Sherman was accused of lunacy, in Kentucky, Grant was fighting much further west around Cairo, Belmont, and Paducah and had no recorded comment on whether Sherman was crazy or not. Grant was accused of being drunk at Shiloh – there’s no evidence one way or the other – but if he was it didn’t matter.)


The Grant/Sherman team continued to work together, first around Vicksburg, where Sherman discovered how easy it was to live of the land in the South, then at Chattanooga. At this point O’Connell’s “wingman” took off on his own and conducted a brilliant campaign against Joe Johnson, ending with the capture of Atlanta, and then talked Grant into letting him march through Georgia then through the Carolinas. After the war, he was arguably again a wingman, as commanding general of the United States Army under Grant and subsequent presidents. The Indian Wars didn’t call for much of Sherman’s skills; he basically acted as an administrator, although O’Donnell argues that the completion of the Transcontinental Railway was at least partially a Sherman accomplishment.


That brings us to the second section of the book – a discussion of Sherman’s army. Ironically Sherman was initially quite contemptuous of “volunteer” soldiers (his first large command remembered him as a “rude and envenomed martinet”), believing that the war could only be settled by Regulars or at least troops trained to the level of Regulars. O’Donnell credits the Army of the West with what he says are the typical characteristics of American soldiers – adaptability and “creative insubordination”; an eastern officer sent to observe remarked “Sherman’s appears to be an Army of independent commands – each individual being a “command”. The “boys” changed Sherman’s dislike of the volunteers to avuncular admiration (he became known as “Uncle Billy” to the troops) and his natural garrulousness stood to his advantage – he’d talk to anybody, even the lowliest private; when he stripped naked with a bunch of soldiers to wash in a river one commented “I’d follow Uncle Billy to Hell”.


Having worked through Sherman’s military career and the performance of his army, O’Connell returns to the beginning and discusses Sherman’s civilian life. He was named “Tecumseh Sherman” at birth – which, come to think of it, is sort of like naming you child “Rommel” or “Yamamoto”. His father, a justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, died deeply in debt when Sherman was nine; young Tecumseh “Cump” Sherman and his ten brothers and sisters were parceled out among various friends and relatives. Sherman ended up with Thomas and Maria Ewing, his late father’s best friend and fellow lawyer. However, there was a condition – Maria Ewing was a devout Catholic and insisted on baptism into the Church. Since there was no “Saint Tecumseh” in the calendar, and it was Saint Williams day, that’s how it ended up. (Although not mentioned by O’Connell, Ulysses S. Grant also had a name change; he was born Hiram Ulysses Grant but somehow ended up as “U.S. Grant” on his West Point letter of recommendation.)


The Ewings already had six children when Sherman arrived, and his foster brothers and sisters became closer than his natural ones – in fact, extremely close to Ellen Ewing, whom he eventually married. O’Donnell points out that marrying his sister – even his foster sister – should have had some negative effect on Sherman’s career, but apparently it didn’t. His foster family connections generally worked to his benefit, as the Ewings were politically connected and helped Sherman on many occasions. Ellen seems to have been a little problematical, though, establishing a consistent pattern through their lives – if Ellen joined him wherever he was stationed, she would immediately get pregnant, and retreat to her parents’ home in Lancaster, Ohio for the “confinement” and birth. The leads to another O’Donnell subtheme – that Sherman had many encounters with other women. The evidence for this is sparse but interesting. Some of Sherman’s letters to Ellen have casual references to whores – for example, that he saw “many” in Valparaiso, Chile, while on the voyage to California. He doesn’t, of course, say he made use of their services but it still seems sort of an odd thing to even mention in a letter home. Next, while Sherman was in duty in California he boarded with a local family – and again makes a seemingly strange comment in letters home – that the husband often away for weeks on business and his wife, Doña Augustina, was very beautiful. During the war there doesn’t seem to be anything going on – O’Donnell notes that Sherman’s army had one quarter the venereal disease rate of the Army of the Potomac – but years later Sherman seems to have taken up with the much younger sculptress Vinnie Ream (he was 53, she was 31). Then, in his 60s, Sherman had some sort of an affair with Mary Audenried, widow of one of his aides, who was again much younger. This time Ellen seems to have believed there was something going on (her major complaint seems to have been that Mrs. Audenreid was a Protestant). Sherman seems to have laid down the law as a Victorian head of the family – O’Donnell notes “the affair continued” but provides no further details. So was there anything actually going on here, in any of these situations? It’s perhaps telling that Sherman and Ellen had eight children – as mentioned Ellen became pregnant almost immediately every time she came to live with Sherman at a duty station – but there were apparently no illegitimate children with any of Sherman’s supposed mistresses. Perhaps 19th century contraception worked better than we have been lead to believe, perhaps the affairs were not as intimate as moderns might expect, or perhaps the “mistresses” were no more than dinner and theater companions (Sherman loved going out; Ellen didn’t).


O’Donnell does address some of the modern criticisms against Sherman – that he was a racist, that he engaged in genocide against Native Americans, and that he was a war criminal for his actions against the South. These are dismissed on the basis of trying to apply modern morality backward. Sherman certainly used the “N” word in letters and conversation, and when a unit a black soldiers was sent to him at Savannah he disarmed them, gave them axes and shovels and put them to work building corduroy roads through the swamps. However, when Edward Stanton tried to find some evidence for racism all the blacks he spoke to said he had always dealt with them without prejudice or condescension; and when Sherman’s army marched through Washington for the victory parade the black pioneer units marched in front of each formation. As far as Native Americans are concerned, Sherman’s attitude wasn’t any different from the majority of Americans at the time; although things happened on his watch he never gave any specific orders for massacres. The “war criminal” charge is historically naïve. There was little or nothing in the way of international law at the time, and even if there was its application in a civil war would have been dubious; the idea that civilian populations were somehow immune from enemy armies moving through their territory had never actually been applied and would have been great with astonishment and derision by every military commander in previous history. Southern apologists have always been proud to note that when the Army of Northern Virginia moved north into Maryland and Pennsylvania, it paid for everything it seized – in Confederate money.


O’Donnell discusses Sherman’s place in history in his preface, not at the end, putting Sherman in the “second tier” of great American – behind Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. I think you can make a case that Sherman was the greatest American general – more so than Washington, Lee, Grant or Patton. The victory at Atlanta is conceded to have saved the 1864 election for Lincoln, which probably makes it the most important Civil War campaign; thus Sherman won the most important battles in the most important war in American history after the Revolution.


Illustrated with contemporary photographs and drawings – including some by Sherman, who was a passable sketch artist. No bibliography but you can pick the references out of the extensive endnotes. Good campaign maps. Robert O’Connell’s other works are mostly what might be called “military philosophy”, and he’s contributed to several alternate history collections. show less

A good story told poorly. O'Connell's theory regarding mercenary armies gets in the way of simply recounting the tale of the Anabasis for a modern audience. I also found his constant need to belittle the practice of ancient Greek religion to be annoying. Good works of history help you understand the mindset of the subject of the work, rather than allow you to port in all your previously conceived ideas. It doesn't matter if I find their religion credible, they did! Ultimately, he would have show more been better served to let the story breathe and spend his time painting a picture of that.

See my full review on my YouTube channel "I'll Read It...Eventually"

https://youtu.be/gYH-E-2GuWk show less

You know you're in trouble when the second sentence of a non-fiction work is factually wrong. But that's what we find in this book: "the Old Testament... the Septuagint, translated into Greek by seventy-two Hebrew scholars at the command of Ptolemy II of Egypt." That's the folklore of the origin of part of the Septuagint, but only part (specifically, the Pentatuech, or the Five Books of Moses), but every reputable scholar agrees that that is false, and it only applies to five books out of 39 show more anyway!

A few more examples, in multiple fields: On page 17, we read that "copper, when mixed with a little arsenic, produced bronze." No, bronze is copper plus tin; arsenic was often found in copper ores, but the goal was to get rid of it safely!

Page 49 refers to the Persians being unlettered. Flatly false -- as author O'Connell would have known had he read the Septuagint with care, because the Book of Ezra would have told him of a search of written records in the Persian archives (Ezra 6:2ff.). The same book describes a written correspondence between the emperor Darius and some of his officials, and the Book of Esther (6:1) refers to the Book of Records being read to the Emperor. Or google "Behistun Inscription" for a monumental (literally) writing partly in Old Persian. The Persians seem to have been un-literary -- they don't have a written literature, unlike the Greeks or Romans or Chinese -- but they were not collectively illiterate.

O'Connell also has his obsessions, e.g. with the Greek use of sacrificial oracles; if I never have to read about "liver lobes" again, I'll be happy. And there are a lot of misused words in here. Admittedly I'm reading an advance reader copy, but an ARC is supposed to be near-final. This thing really needs both an editor and a fact-checker to give it a thorough going-over. Maybe two goings-over.

So: If you're interested in high levels of accuracy, this book may drive you bonkers. And the opinions in the first chapter, about the history of warfare in general, are certainly subject to debate.

On the other hand, if you don't read Greek, most translations of Xenophon (the source of most of what you read here) are a bit of a chore. Xenophon is much longer than this book, and the rhetoric can be a bit much. You will probably find yourself rather desperate for an overview.

Enter this volume. My gut feeling is that it boils down Xenophon by about 50%. Given that summary, the real thing should be much easier to handle.

Of course, that raises the question of whether you really need Xenophon. If you want to read Greek history, Herodotus and Thucydides and the historians of Alexander the Great are surely more important. And Greek drama is from this general period and is much better as reading material. And the level of violence is depressingly high; the Ten Thousand really were a dangerous and unprincipled bunch (though I feel like this book puts too much weight on that). But Xenophon is important for completeness. Read it -- or read this summary -- in that light. show less