Free The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq by Victor Davis Hanson

fight immediately or surrender. 49
    Because Themistocles had persuaded the Persians into committing their ships into the narrow channels, it is probable that the actual plan of the Greek deployment was also his as well. The secret to the Greek success was to draw the cumbersome enemy fleet further into the narrows and thus ensure that it could not utilize its overwhelming numerical advantage. Themistocles had the Greek ships initially row backward. That induced the Persians to row further into the channel, on the assumption that the Greeks were in fact trying to flee as their fifth-column “intelligence” had indicated. When the two fleets collided, the Persians—again, as Themistocles had planned—were dispersed and not in good order, and unable to bring their full strength against the ordered Greek armada.
    Controversy surrounds yet another supposed Themistoclean stratagem—the purported postwar second secret message to the defeated Xerxes urging him to sail home while Themistocles prevented the Greeks from reaching his bridges at the Hellespont first and destroying easy entry back into Asia. If this second effort at deception was also true, then it had the added effect of encouraging another split in Persian forces after the battle and drew off further Persian manpower. That meant at the subsequent battle of Plataea the following August, the enemy forces under Mardonius were not all that much more numerous than the assembled Panhellenic Greek army. 50
Themistoclean Counterfactuals
    The ancient verdict on the genius of Themistocles was unanimous. If his later career was checkered, his character dubious, and his end shameful, he remained the most gifted strategist that classical antiquity ever produced. Proof of that ancient assessment is found in imagining what might have happened had Themistocles failed to galvanize the Greeks at Salamis. 51
    There are no large islands immediately off the Hellenic coast to the south off the Isthmus of Corinth. Nor are there many bays or inlets on the northeastern shore of the Argolid peninsula to offer shelter for a retreating Greek fleet, in which to nullify the numerical advantages of the Persian armada. Even if the Athenians could have been convinced to leave Salamis and fight far to the south—perhaps transporting their refugees on Aegina and Salamis southward to join those already on Troizen—they were still down to only two poor alternatives of defense: a sea battle in the more open waters off the Isthmus, or a last-ditch land defense behind the fortifications of the Isthmus itself. Neither offered hope of victory. The former strategy would have probably meant being swarmed by a superior fleet in open waters; the latter option ensured being surrounded and outflanked by numerous enemy amphibious landings.
    Herodotus reports a speech of Themistocles in which he rejected just this sort of a naval engagement off Corinth. Instead, he tried to convince the Spartan admiral Eurybiades of the merits of his strategy “to save Hellas”:
    If you fight the enemy at the Isthmus, you will battle in open waters—just where it is to our worst advantage, since our ships are heavier and less in number. In addition, you will give up Salamis, Megara, and Aigina—even if we should win a victory there. And their infantry force will follow their fleet. And so you will lead them to the Peloponnese, and endanger all of Greece. 52
    In contrast, Themistocles added that a fight at Salamis would ensure that the Peloponnesians might delay their enemies from approaching the Isthmus and keep them far distant from their own territory. Only a victory at Salamis might save both Athens and the Peloponnese. Even a success at the Isthmus was too late for the salvation of Attica. The key for the Greek defense, then, was to keep its two greatest powers, Athens and Sparta, both committed to the spirit of Panhellenic defense after thecatastrophic defeats and withdrawal from Thermopylae. Themistocles knew that tens