Hubris

The ancient Greeks defined hubris as the worst sin a leader, or a nation, could commit. It was the mindset of supreme arrogance, where mortals in their folly would set themselves up against the gods. Its consequences were invariably terrible. There have been numerous books on decisive battles which altered the course of a war. Alistair Horne's is different: he analyses several engagements of the twentieth century which had consequences above and beyond the war itself, affecting the wider course of history and our own times. The common thread running through Horne's choices is hubris, or complacency, or a deadly mix of the two. In the nineteenth century, Trafalgar in 1805 was lost almost as an oversight by a thoroughly hubristic Napoleon. In the twentieth century nothing illustrated the theme better than the two Pacific battles of Tsushima in 1905, and Midway in 1942, covering a period which began with the extraordinary rise of the Japanese Empire, to its spectacular demise at Hiroshima in 1945, in which the Battle of Midway was the turning point in the Pacific war. The other battles with awesome consequences include: Khalkin Gol, 1938, on the Siberian-Manchurian frontier; the defence of Moscow in 1941; Verdun, 1916; Sedan, 1940; Dien Bien Phu, 1954; the Six Day War in 1967. Each chapter of Alistair Horne's brilliant work of narrative history closes by dramatically showing the longer-term consequences for our times - and how almost without exception, hubris leads to crushing defeat.