Whatever happened to the warrior spirit?

In 1864, Union Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman summarized his infamous “March to the Sea” through Tennessee and Georgia with the following remark: “War is hell. The more brutal war is, the sooner it will end.”
He applied the same principle to the Indian Wars in the West following the Civil War. Sherman, along with Gens. Phil Sheridan, George Crook and Nelson Miles, among others, endorsed a policy of attrition against the Indian tribes by allowing them to starve into submission. The will to fight among many tribes was too great and strong for the United States Army to simply break in a single battle, or even a long series of them, for that matter. The Civil War and the Confederate resolve had proven this.
So, the Army allowed the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo, a primary food source for many Indian tribes in the West, thus effectively cutting off their food supply and forcing them onto reservations where they could eat.
Whether or not one agrees with this tactic is a topic of debate for another time and place. But it is clear that such brutality was, in fact, effective in hastening an end to the Indian Wars.
About eighty years later, a lieutenant general named Douglas MacArthur proposed to invade China as part of a plan to sweep the communists out of Southeast Asia for good. But his commander-in-chief, Harry S. Truman, would have none of it. President Truman held a deep fear of communism—especially the Soviet Union to the north. He feared an invasion of China would provoke communist Russia into nuclear war with the United States. Perhaps President Truman had become gun-shy after having authorized the drop of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the devastating aftermath of which prompted the swift surrender of Imperial Japan and officially ended World War II. Whatever the reason, his reluctance to support MacArthur led to the latter’s dismissal, right in the middle of an American-led offensive that had the communist North Koreans on the run, fleeing across the border into China. MacArthur had argued that relentless pursuit of the enemy and its allies was the surest and shortest means to an end—that being an end to the Korean War.
But as history went, President Truman fired MacArthur, ordered Allied forces to pull back, and allowed the communist army to retake Northern Korea. This move not only made the war drag on longer, but it also bolstered the confidence of the communists and ultimately resulted in a cease-fire that drew the political lines that still exist today. Consequently, Korean families have been separated from each other for more than a half-century.
Truman’s cowardice toward communist nations sent a message to the rest of the world that the United States could be bullied and bluffed into submission, because it was willing to pull its punches. Consequently, we locked horns with communism in a 45-year Cold War.
America did not pull any punches in either World War I or II, both of which resulted in Allied victories. She didn’t do that in Cuba, either, when her Roughriders helped to kick the Spanish in the teeth at San Juan Hill. And the Union was particularly brutal and deliberate in its victory over the Confederacy, especially the final two years under the direction of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his subordinates, Sherman, Sheridan and Custer et al.
As a result of Grant’s deliberate pursuit, Sherman’s March and Sheridan’s raids throughout the Shenandoah Valley, the tenacious and stubborn Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered little more than a year after Grant assumed command of the Army of the Potomac. Prior to Grant’s appointment, President Lincoln had gone through a half-dozen or more commanders in three years, including four between September 1862 and July 1863. Consequently, the war continued on and Gen. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had built up a head of steam that seemed near impossible to stop. Only the simultaneous victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg kept the Union from summarily losing the war by July 1863. But Gen. Meade’s reluctance to pursue a retreating Lee across the Potomac River dragged the war on and left Lincoln asking what every other American was wondering: How much longer?
Fortunately, Grant was not hesitant the way Meade and McClellan were. He was neither clumsy like Hooker, nor assuming and predictable as Burnside, nor uninspiring as Pope or McDowell. And he certainly wasn’t as arrogant as many of Lincoln’s general staff in Washington, D.C. were.
This same spirit inspired future military commanders like the eccentric Gen. George Patton, who gave German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel all he could handle in North Africa and Italy. Patton’s blood-and-guts style also helped to break the spirit of the German Army at the Battle of Bulge.
The reason why Germany and Japan failed to conquer the world, respectively, was because of brutal warriors such as Patton, MacArthur and other contemporaries of like mind. If not for them, the Second World War could have lasted longer and at much greater expense of lives lost.
Indeed, where would the world be today if the warrior spirit hadn’t existed in at least a few during history’s most pivotal conflicts? More importantly, imagine how much better our world might have been had the warrior spirit not been shackled by the fears of a few.
Perhaps we’d be looking at a unified Korea and democratic Vietnam.
But history is what it is. All we can do is learn from it. God willing.