A Regiment of Blunderers

By Gerald Clarke

FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY by Charles Fair. 445 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

Almost anyone can write with a certain flair about battlefield heroes. Charles Fair, author of this delightfully eccentric volume, has chosen instead to commemorate the battlefield villain, the truly bad general who invariably manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

With more than 2,000 years of military stupidity to choose from, Fair, a Boston writer and amateur historian, has marshaled an impressive regiment of brilliant blunderers and incompetents.

There is, for a start, Russia's General Boris Sheremetev, who panicked when he was attacked by Charles XII of Sweden in the battle of Narva (1700). Sheremetev made a dash to safety with his entourage across the Narva River; in consequence, more than 1,000 of his leaderless troopers were swept over a waterfall and drowned.

Not far behind is France's Emmanuel Felix de Wimpffen, who briefly led Napoleon Ill's army during the Franco-Prussian War and deserves special mention for his ingenious plan to break through the Prussian lines. Wimpffen's scheme placed France's combat forces on one side of the enemy and their supply lines on the other, at the same time leaving Paris completely unprotected.

"Under the circumstances,"writes Fair, "it was perhaps the only plan which, even if successful, would have failed."

World War I puts the "connoisseur of bad generalship," as Fair styles himself, to the same exquisite torture an oenophilist might face in the cellars of the Tour d'Argent. There were so many foolish commanders that it is hard to pick only one or two for special commendation. Sir Douglas Haig, however, can at least be called representative. The battle of Loos (September 1915) was typical of his style. He began the engagement with a gas attack that hurt the British more than the Germans. Next morning he mounted a massed assault by nearly 10,000 troops against the entrenched foe, not bothering to protect his men with a smoke cover or more than a desultory artillery barrage. The British lost 8,246 men; the Germans not a one. After a number of equally bloody encounters, Haig was promoted to head all British ground forces on the Western front.

Aggressive Imbecility. The American Civil War provides only slightly less rewarding material for Fair's connoisseurship. His favorite humbler seems to be one of the Union's least renowned commanders, General Ambrose Burnside. As Fair tells it, Burnside was so bad that he won at least one small victory--at New Bern, N.C., in 1862--simply because the Confederates were taken by surprise by his aggressive imbecility in storming well-protected defenses. On other occasions he was less lucky. At the battle of Antietam, for example, he spent hours trying to take a bridge to cross a shallow creek that his men could easily have waded. Burnside's delay cost the Union a victory that might have changed the course of the war. True to form in such matters, Burnside was subsequently promoted to head the Army of the Potomac.*

Fair's final, bitter chapter is devoted to the military mistakes of Viet Nam--which are too recent to be judged fully right now. But his conclusion is at least worth thinking about. The world may need bad generals much more than it needs good ones, he argues. Good generals, after all, can make the battlefield seem glamorous. It is the butchers and blunderers who show just how hideously futile war really is.

*He is also known as the originator of long side whiskers, or "sideburns."

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