The art of war

These women have spent their entire lives in luxury. Trained from birth in the art of pleasure, they know nothing of
the world beyond the Kings royal court. But two of these women are about to die a gruesome death.
The name of their executioner is one you might have heard, Sun Tzu, warrior, philosopher and creator of the art of
war.
This ancient text holds the keys to victory in war and life. Now the art of wars’ tactics and strategies are revealed in
graphic detail to help solve a military history, where the outcomes of America’s greatest battles foretold since 200
years ago.
Did the art of war prophesize the Nazi’s ultimate doom? Predict how the North would win the civil war and predict
why America would be defeated in Vietnam?
Understand the art of wars lessons and you will prevail. Ignore them and you will fight in darkness.
King Helu, ruler of the Chinese state of Wu, agonizes over a growing threat. A hostile neighbor is poised to invade.
Desperate to defend his kingdom, Helu summons one of the greatest military minds in history, Sun Tzu.
Mark McNeilly : Sun Tzu’s important because he has a cohesive, holistic philosophy of how to approach strategy.
If you listen to Sun Tzu, if you follow his principles, you will be victorious. If you ignore him, you do so at your own
peril, because you will definitely lose.
Sun Tzu assures king Helu that he can train the smaller Wu army to overcome and defeat the larger invading force.
Andrew r. Wilson : King Helu asks Sun Tzu, challenges Sun Tzu in something of a mocking way. He says, “You
claim that you can turn anyone into a soldier. Can you turn these palace women, these spoiled, soft concubines
into a fighting force?” Sun Tzu answers, “Of course, I can”. He simply shows the women what the important
maneuvers are. He chooses the two most senior of these concubines to serve as platoon leaders, and charges them
with making sure discipline is observed in their units.
But when Sun Tzu orders the exercise to begin, the women simply laugh.
Foo Check Teck : So Sun Tzu says, “Well, okay, maybe my instruction were not clear to you. Now, let me
rephrase again my instructions to you in simple language.” He told the concubines, “When the drums sounded,
you as concubine must assemble as soldiers, use spears, use a saw and form a line.” Second time, what happens?
They still giggle away.
Andrew R. Wilson : Sun Tzu says, “If the orders are unclear, it is the fault of the general that the troops do not
obey. But if the orders are clear and my orders have been clear, it’s the fault of the subordinate officers that the
troops do not obey.”
There is only one way Sun Tzu can convince the concubines that he is deadly serious.
To Sun Tzu, war is a matter of life and death. This is the key principle of his teachings. Once understood, everyone
from the leader down to the individual soldier will be motivated to win.
Sun Tzu appoints two new officers. The women now follow his orders without hesitation.
Andrew R. Wilson : And the big take away from this incident for king Helu is that even a state like Wu, which is
relatively weak in terms of numbers compared to its larger neighbor, Chu, can nonetheless wield a disciplined,
effective military force if they take Sun Tzu’s teachings to heart and implement them throughout their military.
While these women will never see battle, Sun Tzu has proved his point. King Helu appoints Sun Tzu as
commander of the Wu army.
Sun Tzu must now make good on his promise to train a force of 30,000 to fight an army ten times larger. The
strategies and tactics he uses in this showdown become the foundation of his mater word, “The art of war”.
Sun Tzu writes “The art of war” around 500 B.C. The book is written on vertical bamboo strips, each the length of
a chopstick. Each strip contains 15 to 25 Chinese characters. The strips are then painstakingly stitched together.
Inside the 13 chapters of “The art of war” lie the secrets to success.
Mark McNeilly : Basically, if you understand “The art of war” and the principles in it, you can predict how wars
or battles will turn out.
“The art of war” is filled with many important insights, but there are three key principles that stand out and unify
Sun Tzu’s philosophy.
Sun Tzu says, “Know your enemy and know yourself, and in 100 battles, you will never be in peril .” In “The
art of war”, understanding your opponent is crucial to victory. Sun Tzu says, “To win 100 battles is not the height
of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is.” Fighting costs lives and money. Sun Tzu prizes the general
who can outwit instead of outfight his opponent. Sun Tzu says, “Avoid what is strong, attack what is weak.”
Throughout history, armies fight head-to-head on the battlefield to show their strength and courage. But Sun Tzu
doesn’t care about glory. He only wants to win.
Mark McNeilly : While each of these principles is important, think of them as cords in a strong rope. Individually,
they may be strong, but when you put them together and use them holistically, they’re unbreakable.
For more than a thousand years, Sun Tzu’s secrets are kept hidden, made available only to emperors and authorized
scholars. They surface in the eighth century in Japan, and since then, their insights have spread throughout the
world. More recently, “The art of war” has spawned hundreds of books that apply its teachings to sports, politics
and business. Today, it’s part of the core curriculum at many war colleges, including west point. But as we shall
see, Sun Tzu’s advice isn’t always heeded, which often leads to disaster.
Mark McNeilly : I think, throughout time, if generals had listened to Sun Tzu, you would probably not have seen a
lot of the bloody wars of attrition that mankind has suffered through. He was very focused on, “How do I achieve
my goal with the minimum amount of resources used, with the minimum amount destruction.”
Sun Tzu’s principles are about to be put to the test. Sun Tzu has trained the army of Wu to defend itself against the
powerful state of Chu to the west.
Andrew r. Wilson : At the outset of this war between Wu and Chu, when Sun Tzu was given command of an army
of Wu, it seems that Chu holds all the advantages. Sun Tzu’s army is only about 33,000 men, where Chu can field
forces of hundreds of thousands of men.
Leading 300,000 Chu warriors is a power-hungry and corrupt prime minister named Nang Wa. Nang Wa cuts a
swath of destruction through the Chinese countryside. Outnumbered nearly ten to one, Sun Tzu could prepare his
defenses and wait for the Chu onslaught. But being Sun Tzu, he does the unexpected, he invades Chu.
Sun Tzu doesn’t attack Nang Wa’s army head on. He chooses soft targets, like remote outposts and border
crossings.
Andrew R. Wilson : It would be unwise for Sun Tzu to try to seek a divisive engagement early in this war by
attacking the Chu army directly. He simply does not have the mass necessary to do that.
Sun Tzu attacks with blistering speed and brutal efficiency.
Nang Wa immediately launches counteroffensives. But when the reinforcements arrive, Sun Tzu’s soldiers are
gone and attacking the next location.
Andrew R. Wilson : By keeping Chu constantly shifting its forces back and forth on the frontier, he frustrates
their leaders, and gains at the same time, a much better picture of the way that Chu armies will likely fight.
After every battle and skirmish, Sun Tzu gains a better understanding of his enemy.
Andrew R. Wilson : He downplays the value of direct attack and puts the emphasis on maneuver, surprise,
deception.
Bevin Alexander : All warfare should be based upon the intellect. In fact, the greatest battles of all time have been
won by the brain and not by brute force.
That doesn’t stop Nang Wa from trying. He eventually launches 100,000 soldiers to try to crush the guerilla
attacks.
Mark McNeilly : And this reminds me of the difference between chess and the Chinese game of go. Chess is very
much attrition based. You start the board with many, many pieces; over the game, they’re eliminated, and at the
end, you’ve only got a few pieces left standing.
The object of chess is to force your opponent to surrender by eliminating his pieces. Each piece has its own rank
and can only move in a specific way. The goal of chess is to kill the king.
Mark McNeilly : In contrast to that, the Chinese game of go starts with a board empty, and you use as few pieces
as possible to acquire as much territory as you can, and in that sense, it’s a very resource efficient strategy.
The object of Go is not the destruction of the opponent’s force, but the conquest of space. The goal of Go is to
capture the most territory with the least number of stones.
Using a Go-like strategy, Sun Tzu decides where and when he fights. He avoids the strongest part of Nang Wa’s
army and attacks where it is weakest. Sun Tzu’s guerilla tactics against the Chu forces echo throughout history. But
it’s during an infamous war more than 2,000 years later that they resonate most loudly, and where Sun Tzu’s
ultimate secret becomes most evident.
It’s the mid-1960s and the World’s greatest superpower battles north Vietnamese communists in a country smaller
than the state of Montana. General William Westmoreland, a hard-nosed World War 2 combat officer, sees the
battlefield like a chessboard, where armies stand and fight head on. But unlike chess, Vietnam has no clear
objective for Westmoreland to attack.
Richard A. Gabriel : It’s a classic case of a general fighting the last war in the sense that the lessons he had
learned there only applied partially to Vietnam. There were no fixed objectives to be taken. There were no fixed
units to be destroyed.
No one understands this better than north Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, who sees Vietnam like Sun Tzu
would as a go board. Instead of facing the military directly, he uses insurgent forces, the Viet Cong, to stage hit-
and-run attacks all over the country.
Andrew r. Wilson : We see something very similar to Sun Tzu’s raids into Chu in north Vietnamese tactics and
operations in the Vietnam war.
Giap has learned Sun Tzu’s principle that “It is more important to outthink your enemy than to outfight him.”
And its tactics and strategy, not overwhelming firepower, that caused US to ultimately lose the war in Vietnam. A
loss that Sun Tzu predicted thousands of years earlier. How Sun Tzu was able to do this, as well as predict the
outcome of the invasion of Normandy, and the final harrowing day of battle at Gettysburg, is about to be revealed.
Sun Tzu, says “In war numbers alone confer no advantage, do not advance relying on sheer military power”
It’s The Mid-1960S in Vietnam, US general William Westmoreland orders intense aerial bombardments. US will
eventually drop nearly seven million tons of bombs on Indochina during the war more than twice the tonnage of all
the bombs dropped by US in World War 2. But the Americans are about to learn Sun Tzu’s lesson the hard way.
That, despite overwhelming military power and the valor of soldier. The US cannot win this war.
Mark McNeilly : Between 1959 and 1975, the North Vietnamese fought a very desperate war against the South
Vietnamese government and their US allies. And even though they were heavily outgunned, when you look at how
the war was fought and see that through Sun Tzu’s eyes, it’s obvious how they prevailed.
Westmoreland uses a chess-inspired strategy, stop the communist spread by killing as many north Vietnamese and
Vietcong as possible. Conversely, Westmoreland’s adversary, the north Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, uses
more of a Sun Tzu Go strategy.
Mark McNeilly : Westmoreland is trying to attrite the enemy, trying to kill as many as possible. Giap, meanwhile,
is looking at it from more of a go perspective, trying to focus on “how do I win as much territory as possible and
thus defeat my enemy.”
To combat the American aerial bombardment, Giap looks to a key Sun Tzu principle, “Know your enemy and
know yourself, and in 100 battles, you will never be in peril.”
Mark McNeilly : The way of Americans often operated was somewhat predictable. They would prepare a landing
zone through artillery strikes and air strikes, and then they would bring the troops in. Giap recognized this and
realized that, if he could have his troops hunker down and survive the artillery attacks, then when the troops
landed, they would be able to set up ambushes to take them on.
The American bombs don’t destroy the enemy. They merely telegraph that US Infantry is on its way.
Giap also orders his fighters to stay as close to American soldiers as possible.
Richard A. Gabriel : The Vietcong have no tactical air. They also understand that, once their positions get
identified in any given battle, they’re going to get whacked from the air. So how do you compensate from that?
“Well,” general Giap said, if you grab the enemy by the belt, put another way, what you want to do is you don’t
want to establish positions out there. And when they did defensively, for example, like at hamburger hill, you know,
wham, they get hit by lots of air. But if you’re in a tactical situation, you close with the enemy, you intermingle
your forces with his so they can’t bring air power to bear without hurting their own troops.
Free from US Bombs, Giap launches Sun Tzu inspired guerilla attacks against Americans on the ground;
Ambushes, hand grenade booby traps, and snipers.
Andrew R. Wilson : What Giap starts to do are close-in harassing raids against the Americans. … And Sun Tzu
likes this idea because, by forcing the enemy to maneuver, to respond to you, he reveals strengths and weaknesses.
And the more you know about his strengths and weaknesses, the more you can avoid the strengths and attack and
exploit the weaknesses.
The major US weakness in this war is not on the battlefield.
Bevin Alexander : Now, our weakness was not in Vietnam. We never lost anything in Vietnam. We lost no
engagements in Vietnam. But we did lose in the resolution of the American people to pursue the war. Giap realized
this from the very start, and he did not try to defeat us in Vietnam, he tried to defeat us in the United States.
Giap knows that if he can turn the American people against the war he can defeat the overpowering US military. In
the beginning of the war nearly 80% of Americans supported the military action in Vietnam. Between 1965 and
1967, President Johnson increases troop strength dramatically from 190,000 to almost half a million. But more
soldiers mean more casualties.
Mark McNeilly : Between 1959 and 1965, the US had suffered 2,000 battle deaths. But then in 1966, it jumped to
6,000, and then in 1967, it jumped to 11,000. And this was because Westmoreland was enacting an attrition-based
strategy. He wanted to take the battle to the North Vietnamese and try to kill as many of their soldiers as possible,
and of course this led to higher casualties among the Americans.
Ignoring the rising death toll and the potential political backlash, Westmoreland persists with his chess-like
strategy.
Richard A. Gabriel : One does not win wars by winning battles- that’s a very archaic concept. The Romans
learned this they fought for 40 years in Spain; they fought for 30 years in England, and still couldn’t subdue the
insurgency. Battles and military operations are nothing more than means to an end, means to the achievement of
strategic goals, okay? Those goals, by the way, are often political. What often happen to military men is they, as
we used to say in the army, “You dance with who” they’re military guys, they got one trick, that trick is war okay?
And what happens and happens to us now is that essentially the war and the battles become an end in itself without
any consideration of whether or not it leads to the ultimate strategic goal of breaking the will of the enemy.
But no matter how bloody the battlefield gets, the Vietnamese will is never broken. Giap famously claims he’s
willing to lose ten men for every one American.
Many North Vietnamese troops where a tattoo that says, “Born in the north to die in the South” and it’s this
difference that Giap knows will allow him to defeat the Americans who now have more than half a million soldiers
in Vietnam. Many of whom don’t want to be there.
Richard A. Gabriel : Believe me, all conscripts want to do is get the hell out of country. You know Everybody
arrives with what they call their "deros" date-- date of expected return from overseas. You know, scratch
somewhere, across your forehead this is when I get to go home. And it’s very hard to train them to do the kind of
stuff that special operations forces have to do in order to fight an insurgency. So you put it altogether, and it’s a
failure of strategic thinking, a failure to appreciate the cultural context in which things occurred, And inevitably
deduce from that a failure to develop tactics that are effective.
To combat Giap’s guerrilla insurgency, Westmoreland launches search and destroy missions throughout South
Vietnam. He believes he is successfully rooting out Giap’s Vietcong insurgents, but a pentagon report released after
the war shows just how wrong he actually was.
Richard A. Gabriel : What it found was that in more than 80% of the cases where American troops fought
Vietcong troops, that in fact it was the enemy that chose the time and place of the ambush. That, in point of fact, we
were not searching and destroying anything; in point of fact, if the enemy didn’t want to fight, he just let us stumble
on through the bush, but when they wanted to fight, they would pick the time and place.
Giap’s guerilla tactics are working, but his Sun Tzu-inspired strategy is suddenly overruled by his commanding
officers. He is ordered to plan a full-scale direct offensive against the US forces. Giap knows this is suicide, so
instead, he modifies the plan. Returning to Sun Tzu’s principles, he decides to coordinate a simultaneous
multipronged attack in hundreds of different locations across South Vietnam. The date for the attack, January 31st,
1968, Vietnam’s lunar New Year holiday called Tet. Giap has less than nine months to plan his Tet offensive, a
Sun Tzu-inspired strategy that will prove to be a powerful turning point in the war.
Sun Tzu says, “Let your plans be as dark as night, then strike like a thunderbolt.”
During the Vietnam war north Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap prepares his Tet offensive in absolute secrecy.
And just like the master, Sun Tzu, Giap puts his faith in his spies.
Mark McNeilly : Sun Tzu places a great importance on spies and, in fact, he devotes an entire chapter to the
different types of spies and how they can be used.
Sun Tzu would have been impressed with general Giap’s spy network in South Vietnam.
Richard A. Gabriel : Giap understood that accurate knowledge of the enemy is worth ten divisions, and so what
happened was he literally had created a spy network that was unrivaled. I mean, every barman, every taxi driver,
every taxi dancer, anyone who dealt with Americans was potentially a source of information for the Vietcong.
The man who ran the taxi stand outside US headquarters in Saigon is supposedly the chief of Vietcong intelligence.
Richard A. Gabriel : The place was by simply overhearing what Americans were saying, what soldiers were
telling girls, the prostitutes, the drug dealers, all of this thing by collecting that information together enabled,
essentially, to predict the movement of American units. And as a result, as the study later shows, we didn’t surprise
anybody. They knew we were coming almost all the time.
With up-to-the- minute information on his enemy, Giap moves forward with his plans for the Tet offensive. The
element of surprise is key, but means nothing if his men aren’t sufficiently armed.
Giap’s next challenge is to figure out how to smuggle in and hide thousands of weapons throughout South
Vietnam. The solution is all Sun Tzu - deception and secrecy. Giap goes underground.
Richard A. Gabriel : What we found is an enormous complex of tunnels that ran for miles, and three and four
levels deep. There were field hospitals below there, supply depots. It’s where the V.C. and N.V.A. would go to rest
and recuperation. There were booze, gals down there, and some of them ran underneath American base camps.
The largest of these tunnel complexes is north of Saigon in Ku Chi. Stretching from the Cambodian border, it has
more than 75 miles of interconnecting passages. Built by the Vietnamese in the 1940s and 50s, he tunnels were
originally dug out of the hard clay by hand with simple farm tools. Over the next decade, the tunnels are expanded
and fortified with zigzags and sharp drops to resist US attack. The Vietcong add secret entrances, camouflaged
ventilation systems, and booby trapped doors.
Richard A. Gabriel : How in all hecks’ name do you fight in tunnels? You use what we called "tunnel rats," which
were often urban Irish kids, little, I say little, but you know, 5’5", 5’6", thin but brave as hell-- I mean, to go down
to those holes into the tunnels armed 45 sometimes and a flashlight. I mean, that’s really war up close and
personal, never knowing what you were going to find down there.
Giap funnels tens of thousands of Vietcong troops through these tunnels as the Tet offensive draws nearer. With
just two months until Tet, Giap plays what might be his greatest deception. Vietnam announces it will honor the
traditional Tet cease-fire.
Mark McNeilly : Part of the deception campaign is actually agreeing to a cease-fire over Tet. his really lulls the
Americans and the south Vietnamese into thinking that they can relax their guard, send troops home, and there will
be no conflict during those holidays.
Now, with Tet a little more than a week away, Giap launches a surprise attack base at Khe Sanh. US Marines fight
back waves of north Vietnamese soldiers that try to overrun the sprawling compound. The US is determined not to
lose Khe Sanh.
Mark McNeilly : Lyndon Johnson actually has a scale model of the battlefield built so he can monitor it on a daily
basis. He even goes and takes the step that he makes the joint chiefs of staff sign a paper that says, “The Americans
will not lose in Khe Sanh.”
But Khe Sanh is not Giap’s real objective; it’s a plau to draw US attention away from the cities before Tet. Sun
Tzu would applaud Giap’s maneuver.
Sun Tzu says, “In battle, use a direct attack to engage and an indirect attack to win”
In the art of war you should always try to deceive your enemy. Pick a place you want to attack, then attack
somewhere else to divert his attention. While he’s distracted, capture your real objective.
Giap has done everything he can to prepare for the Tet offensive. He uses spies, secrecy and deception. The time to
attack is now at hand. January 31,1968, fireworks crackle. It’s the Tet lunar new year. Suddenly, the celebration
turns deadly. More than 80,000 Vietcong troops carry out simultaneous individual attacks on more than a hundred
cities, villages and bases all across South Vietnam. The Tet offensive has begun.
Mark McNeilly : The Americans and the South Vietnamese are shocked, they were stunned. They had thought the
enemy was on his last legs, yet reports are coming in from everywhere-- every city, every town, every base that
they are under attack.
US commanders see the map of South Vietnam light up like a pinball machine.
Richard A. Gabriel : They couldn’t believe that they had moved this many troops this close to the cities and, you
know, they had been very patient, had taken months to position arms there and troops and give them cover. An
amazing, amazing logistical feat.
Giap’s informants lead the Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops through the streets to strategic targets. One
group captures the national radio station, while another blows a hole in the wall of the American embassy and
fights its way onto the grounds. The Tet offensive looks like it might succeed. But the north has ignored one very
important Sun Tzu principle, and it will cost fore!
Sun Tzu says, “There are five fundamental factors for success in war - weather, terrain, leadership, military
doctrine, and, most importantly, moral influence.”
Moral influence means a leader must have the will of the people behind him, otherwise a war will ultimately fail.
It’s an important clue in solving the mystery of whether Sun Tzu predicted America’s demise in Vietnam. As the
Tet offensive rages in 1968, the Vietcong carry blacklists and assassinate south Vietnamese sympathizers at will.
One of the most brutal massacres takes place in the city of Hue.
Richard A. Gabriel : They massacred 5,000 people in hue, many of them government functionaries whose only
crime was that they worked in a government agency. And also they exterminated, they literally shot several
hundred nuns, whose only crime was that they were catholic nuns. … That brutality, I think, backfired. A lot of
Vietnamese said, “Wait a minute, this is not the kind of thing we do. It’s not the kind of people we, but it was a
terrible, and in my judgment, pointless massacre.”
Without the will of the people, Giap’s small units are left without reinforcements. They have no idea what to do
and no way to communicate with each other. Then, US Forces sweep in and devastate the fragmented North
Vietnamese fighters. 10,000 Die in the first few days of the attack while US Forces suffer only 250 casualties. Tet
is a military disaster for the North Vietnamese. But Sun Tzu’s concept of moral influence cuts both ways.
When Americans see the images of the Tet offensive on their television screens, popular support for the war rapidly
erodes.
Bevin Alexander : This had the effect of just simply turning everybody’s feelings about the war upside down. We
had thought we were winning in Vietnam, and we were finding that we were losing in Vietnam. And at that
moment, I think everything changed in America.
Despite losing the battle, Giap is well on his way to winning the war by defeating where it matters most, at home.
After Tet, Giap returns to his guerrilla tactics. In 1975, U.S. Military support all but gone, Saigon finally falls to the
North Vietnamese army. At the end of the war US Colonel Harry Summers meets with North Vietnamese leaders
to negotiate the American withdrawal.
Richard A. Gabriel : Harry Summers, at a meeting with colonel Tuo, his enemy North Vietnamese counterpart in
Hanoi, probably getting a little angry at what was going on and snapped at the colonel, at the Vietnamese colonel.
“Well, the truth is you never on the battlefields” the Vietnamese colonel looked at him and said, “well, that’s
true,” he said, “but it’s also irrelevant and there you have it.” It was the political context that was important far
more than the military, as it always is throughout history. One more time to remember that war is a means to an
end, and that end is almost always governed by politics, not by military victory or defeat.
This is a notion that general Giap well understood, as did the master, Sun Tzu. It’s about 5 hundred BC in ancient
china. Sun Tzu’s hit and run campaign against the kingdom of Chu is working. Sun Tzu’s adversary, the Chu prime
minister Nang Wa, grows frustrated and loses some political allies.
Andrew R. Wilson : Nang Wa and his generals are increasingly frustrated by Sun Tzu’s cross-border raids. The
constant harassment is undermining the morale of the Chu troops. Money is being drained out of the Chu treasury.
Some cases, the best of Chu’s warriors are either killed or captured by Sun Tzu. Faced with this dilemma, Nang
Wa is forced to turn to Chu’s allies for men, money and materiel.
Throughout the countryside, there is fear of where Sun Tzu will strike next. Leaders in the royal court begin to lose
faith in Nang Wa, and allies begin to defect to Sun Tzu’s side. But this disloyalty doesn’t come without
punishment. Nang Wa deploys his army to destroy a rogue ally in the north called Cai. As the capital is about to be
attacked, the duke of Cai calls on Sun Tzu for help. Sun Tzu now faces a seemingly no-win situation. If he does
nothing, his ally will be destroyed; if he tries to save his ally, Nang Wa will crush his army. But for Sun Tzu, the
solution is simple. He leads a small force toward Cai to act as bait to draw Nang Wa away from the city.
It’s a key principle of Sun Tzu’s teaching, “To move your enemy, entice him with something he is certain to
take.”
Gary J. Bjorge : This is this whole idea of in a sense, achieving kind of maneuver dominance or controlling enemy
movement by your own maneuver.
Nang Wa immediately stops his siege on Cai and mobilizes his army to intercept Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu saves his ally
without drawing a sword. But will he be able to save himself?
Andrew R. Wilson : While Sun Tzu has succeeded in drawing Nang Wa away from his siege of Cai, it seems that
he’s maneuvered himself into a trap. He’s surrounded by Nang Wa’s forces.
Sun Tzu has placed his men where there is no possibility of retreat; he has placed them on death ground.
Sun Tzu says, “Put the army in the face of death where there is no escape, and they will not flee or be afraid.
There is nothing they cannot achieve.”
Sun Tzu studied every aspect of war including the psychology of men facing imminent death.
Foo Check Teck : Sun Tzu says that when the men know that they are in death ground, they will be transformed.
They will become, overnight, fearless fighters, that they will fight with all they have in order to win.
On death ground is exactly where Sun Tzu wants his soldiers, and it is on death ground that another great army
finds itself with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.
June 6th, 1942, Allied troops in World War II invade Europe. They land on the treacherous beaches of Normandy,
France.
Richard A. Gabriel : If you put troops on a beach from which there is no retreat and there’s almost no retreat
from beaches then they will fight because they have to fight to survive. And you can see this at Normandy.
Bevin Alexander : What those men went through was almost unbelievable. When you see those beaches, and you
see what those men had to face, it’s absolutely sobering to realize. And it makes you very proud to be an American,
far as I’m concerned.
How they survive and ultimately defeat the Nazis is predicted in the pages of Sun Tzu Art of War?
Sun Tzu says, “All warfare is deception.”
If you can deceive your enemy before battle, you are more likely to win.
Foo Check Teck : Imagine I’ve got 10,000 soldiers; you’ve got one million, right. So what do I have to do to
counter you? Right, I have to deceive you, right, into splitting up your forces into more diverse groups.
Supreme allied commander Dwight D Eisenhower. Eisenhower takes this principle to heart as he prepares to invade
Europe during World War II. His invasion strategy at Normandy is one of the most daring in history, and it’s
foreshadowed in the pages of Sun Tzu – Art of war by 1944, Nazi Germany knows the allies are coming, but they
don’t know where or when.
Richard A. Gabriel : It’s very clear at some point that, in order to win World War 2, the allies would have had to
invade the continent. And the buildup in England, the only place they could build up from meant it was going to
come somewhere on the coast of France. The only question is where?
There are only three feasible locations where the allies could land : the pas-de-Calais, the Cherbourg peninsula, or
the Normandy beaches.
Bevin Alexander : The reason why this was true is that the allies were absolutely certain to only land on a beach
that could be protected by the air power of the fighter planes that could fly out of Southern England. The range of
these fighters was 400 miles. Therefore, any landing site had to be within 200 miles of these beaches.
But even with air support, the allies know a beach invasion of Europe is nearly impossible. To succeed, they must
employ more of a go strategy than a chess strategy. So, instead of a direct attack, the allies follow Sun Tzu’s
principle of deception and convince the Germans the attack will not occur at Normandy.
Mark McNeilly : One way Normandy is comparable to go is the fact that the deception is involved. As you are
playing go, you are signaling by your moves which parts of the territory you’re going to try and conquer.
Richard A. Gabriel : What the allies were able to do with the clever use of deception, as well as actually clear
military logic, was to convince the Germans that when it came, it would come at Pas de Calais, when in fact they
planned to come at Normandy.
It’s called operation fortitude, and it’s one of the most complex deception campaigns ever attempted. The allies
create a fake army that appears ready to strike at Calais. They use inflatable tanks, planes and trucks to fool
German photo reconnaissance.
Angelo Caravaggio : They would move the tanks and the trucks around at night, and they would have men with
rollers actually making the tracks so that there would actually be tracks in the ground so it would look like there
was a real movement of troops during the night.
The phantom army needs to be seen and heard, so allied army personnel broadcast endless hours of fake
transmissions about troop and supply movements.
Angelo Caravaggio : On the one hand, you would think it’d be a bit of a funny job because you’re just sending
bogus traffic. But on the other hand, it’s a very important job that, if they were lax in it or they didn’t do it well, it
would defeat the whole purpose of the deception plan.
Eisenhower shows the Germans his fake army, but keeps his real fighting force an absolute secret. For weeks, they
are successful in their deception campaign. But one month before the d-day invasion of Normandy is set to begin,
the allies fear their secret is out. British counterintelligence officers discover five crucial Normandy code names in
a single newspaper crossword puzzle, overlord, Neptune, Utah, Omaha and mulberry.
British agents track down the creator of the crossword puzzle, a 54-year-old teacher named - Leonard dawe.
Angelo Caravaggio : And they interrogate him and he gets very indignant and says, you know, “am I not allowed
to choose the words that I want for a crossword puzzle.” And they press him, but at the end of the day, they figure
out that he is actually telling the truth and that the words were actually just an accident.
With the scare behind them, the allies must now actively sell the Germans on the Calais invasion threat. They turn
to one of Sun Tzu’s favorite methods, spies.
Sun Tzu says, “It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to spy against you and bribe them to
serve you.”
Andrew R. Wilson : In “The art of war”, double agents are the most important spies. Double agents begin as the
spies that your adversary has sent to spy on you. When you find them out you don’t jail them or execute them, you
hire them. You give them lavish rewards and what they start to do then is they continue to act as if they’re spying
on you, but the information they feed back to your adversary is misinformation.
During World War II, nobody uses double agents better than the British. Their program is called “double cross,”
and one of their key double agents is a welsh naval contractor named Alfred Owen.
Angelo Caravaggio : When the war breaks out, he’s picked up right away and they either come over or become a
double agent for us or essentially you go to prison and many of them were executed. And he gets the code word
“snow,” and so when the Germans try to infiltrate their first wave of spies in September of 1940, the Germans
radio "snow" and let him know that these four agents are coming in. And of course, they’re met with a British
reception committee right away.
Double cross is so successful that British intelligence is able to turn or imprison nearly every spy sent by Germany
during the war. These double agents with code names like "garbo," "brutus," and "tricycle", give such convincing
misinformation that the Germans not only believe the invasion is coming to Calais, but it’s the Normandy landing
that’s the diversion.
Sun Tzu says, “The way a wise general can achieve greatness beyond ordinary men is through
foreknowledge.”
Sun Tzu teaches the importance of deception and foreknowledge to uncover the enemy’s intentions. The allies gain
foreknowledge by breaking German codes. For years, the Germans believe their encoding machine, called
“enigma,” is completely unbreakable. It can scramble a message 150 million, million, million ways. But with the
help of a polish mathematician, British intelligence does the impossible. They are able to decode an intercepted
German message within hours. They call their code breaking, “ultra”.
Mark McNeilly : Through “ultra” the allies know what the Germans are thinking, what their perceptions are of
the battlefield, and their view of what’s happening. Thus, they’re able to feed German spies information that
reinforces those misconceptions.
Sun Tzu would prize “ultra” for its ability to read the mind of the enemy.
Foo Check Teck : The “art of war” essentially is using the mind to fight a war. Meaning to say that it is a mind-
to-mind battle. So in order to win against the enemy, you must be able to read the mind of the enemy.
But sometimes knowing what your enemy is thinking creates moral dilemmas. According to a British intelligence
officer, on November 14, 1940, the British decode a German message about an impending attack on the English
city of Coventry. If Churchill tries to protect Coventry, he could tip off the Germans that he is reading their
messages.
Angelo Caravaggio : It must have been a very, very difficult position to be placed in, and a very difficult decision
for him to make, and in this particular case, he was looking at the long term allied victory and he essentially
sacrificed the citizens of Coventry that were lost that night.
Coventry is devastated from the air. The destruction is so complete, the Germans coin a new phrase, "coventrated,"
to describe total obliteration of a town. The story is controversial as there is no hard evidence to support the claim
that Churchill was warned about the Coventry attack.
As D-day approaches, the allies discover through “ultra” and their network of spies that the Nazis still believe the
invasion will come through Calais. Still, attacking Normandy will be difficult, as the Germans establish defenses
all along the coast.
Sun Tzu would praise the allies preparation for the landing and their mastery of deception, but he would seriously
condemn what they do once they arrive.
Sun Tzu says, “When a falcon’s strike breaks the body of its prey, it is because of timing. When torrential
water tosses boulders, it is because of momentum.”
Sun Tzu believes even the most well executed attack can be ruined if momentum is lost. The Normandy invasion
shows that Sun Tzu could have predicted its outcome some 2,000 years earlier. After months of preparation and
deception, Eisenhower launches his attack against German occupied France. 150,000 Ground troops jammed onto
hundreds of small landing craft leave England and cross the English Channel. They’ll land at five different beaches
in France codenamed “juno,” “sword,” “gold,” “utah. ” As the landing craft approach the beaches, 15,000 aircraft
and 7,000 ships provide a coordinated aerial assault on the beaches. At some of the landing sites, the allied soldiers
meet very little resistance. But at beaches like Omaha, it’s hell on earth. For many of the allied soldiers inside the
landing craft, these moments before the door opens will be their last.
Richard A. Gabriel : It’s a case of incredible courage in the face of overwhelming horror. I mean, if you think
about it, the landing crafts came up to the beach, and as they came up to the beach, the troops inside the landing
craft could hear the machine guns tuckering on the outside. … The enemy machine gun had switched to what they
see else, final coordination line. They’re going to put as much machine gun fire on the front of that boat so when it
drops, bullets go right through it, kill two or three guys at a time and a lot of guys just died that way.
Many don’t make it off the boats. For the soldier lucky enough to survive the initial machine gun barrage, the
nightmare is just beginning. He then has to cross 200 yards of mined tidal flats weighed down with wet, heavy
gear. Then get through another 100 yards of barbed wired beaches. It’s three football fields of death and destruction
as German machine guns shred fellow soldiers and friends.
Bevin Alexander : If you ever get a chance to visit in Omaha, it will change your whole view about the world. It
will change your whole view about America. It will make you realize what incredible heroism was displayed by
those guys there.
The allies survive on death ground exactly the way Sun Tzu by fighting together, and never giving up.
Richard A. Gabriel : It was unmitigated horror, and still they kept coming, and you wonder why, how? How do
you make people do that? And perhaps Sun Tzu is in fact instructive here. You make them do that because there’s
no other alternative except death. What are you going to do, turn around with equipment and swim back to
England? There’s no plan for evacuation unless you’re wounded. There’s no way you can refuse to get off the
boat. So in a sense, once you put that number of guys on the beach, you’re following Sun Tzu in that you’re putting
an army in a situation where it must fight or die, and they fought and they fought well and they survived.
The allies also benefit from another Sun Tzu the poor judgment of their enemy’s leader.
Sun Tzu says, “It is essential for victory that generals are unconstrained by their leader.”
The allied command structure gives total authority to General Eisenhower as supreme commander of all forces on
the western front. Beneath him are four commanders: One for the navy, air force, the US army group and the
British army group. In the business world, this would be a very clean org chart with well defined responsibilities.
Bevin Alexander : The great advantage that Eisenhower had, that he could work with all sorts of people, and
there were a huge number of prima donnas on both sides. He was able to work with these people and to get them to
work for the common good.
One would expect a dictator like Hitler to have an even more efficient chain of command than the allies. But it’s
just the opposite. Hitler sets up a confusing system of overlapping authority.
Angelo Caravaggio : He wanted to make sure that no one person beneath him had all of the information and/or all
of the control over forces at their disposal. And so by divvying it up, it always ensured that Hitler was the one that
actually made the final decision on the disposition and the allocation of troops.
General von Rundstedt holds the title of commander in chief for forces in the west, but the navy and air fleet each
had separate command chains that aren’t under his control and often don’t cooperate with each other. Rundstedt
said a separate military arm that fights alongside the German army, answers to Himmler. And Rundstedt has only
indirect control of the mechanized divisions. Four tank units are under his command, but the remaining six are split
between army groups "B" and "G". It’s a complete mess.
Andrew R. Wilson : Hitler’s leadership style and the chaotic command structure in the German army render
Hitler a very cooperative adversary for a Sun Tzuian type campaign. He is constantly interfering in the decisions
of his subordinates, the generals who should be acting objectively and professionally in trying to defend France
against the allied invasion.
One of Hitler’s greatest blunders is how he deployed his prized panzer tank divisions. Some generals believe the
panzers must be close to the beaches to knock the invading troops back into the sea. Others think the tanks should
be held in reserve so they can be deployed in force wherever the allies choose to land. Since none of the generals
have the authority to make the call, the decision falls to Hitler.
Bevin Alexander : And being Hitler, he made all the wrong decisions. He put one panzer division in Holland, and
another panzer division at the Bay of Biscay, both of which were entirely out of any range of a possible landing,
and he put the rest of his panzer divisions back some distance from the beaches.
Hitler’s failure is a perfect example of why Sun Tzu says the enlightened general must be free to conduct war
without interference from the leader.
Angelo Caravaggio : When you look at the strategy for the German defense in France or in Normandy, it’s very
divided how the defense should be arranged, what forces are actually available to defend the beaches and what
forces are actually available to reinforce the beaches or reinforce the German forces at the invasion point, because
no one person has control of all of the forces as Eisenhower did on the allied side.
The allies achieved the impossible. Through bravery and determination, the troops are able to take all five landing
sites at Normandy.
Angelo Caravaggio : Despite all of the complex planning that went into the invasion of Normandy, it was the
small unit tactics and the buddies fighting side by side that win the battle of the beaches, and that’s consistent
throughout history.
Sun Tzu would have marveled at the timing and execution of the invasion, but soon the allies encounter a new and
completely unexpected enemy. A labyrinth of giant impenetrable hedgerows in what is known as the Bocage
country of France.
Andrew R. Wilson : It looks like the allies have pulled off this amazing, miraculous feat, and they have. They have
landed an army on the beaches of Normandy, but then they get bogged down in the hedgerow country. They had
not anticipated that despite the fact the reconnaissance aircraft had photographed these hedgerows, the allied
planners simply assumed that these were like the hedges in a suburban backyard, four or five feet tall, maybe.
But these ancient hedges, dating back nearly 2,000 years, are 20 to 30 feet tall and extremely thick. They can’t be
climbed, tanks can’t maneuver through them safely, and explosives would give away a unit’s position.
Andrew R. Wilson : The hedgerow country in Normandy threatens to completely undermine the momentum that
the allies need to build up.
Richard A. Gabriel : The American army is a mechanized army. And you can’t move tanks and trucks very
quickly through hedgerows that are enormously thick.
The allies momentum stops dead in its tracks. 40 days pass and they have only reached their day five objectives.
Casualties mount to more than 78,000. And the entire invasion is in jeopardy. But the solution on how to escape
this enormous maze lies in the pages of Sun Tzu’s “art of war.”
Sun Tzu says, “Make your enemy prepare on his left and he will be weak on his right.”
In Normandy, France, the allies are getting pummeled in the hedgerows of the Bocage country, terrain perfectly
suited for German ambushes and snipers.
Richard A. Gabriel : The Germans have a word for close order combat in terrain that’s very complex and closed,
it’s called Rattenkrieg. It means, literally, the war of the rats. … It means, in essence, that warfare gets reduced to
almost individual combat, one or two men against one or two men because the terrain, in this case the hedgerows,
won’t allow you to maneuver, won’t allow you to bring your technological advances of artillery, air power,
mobility to tanks to bear. … So the war in the hedgerows was a terrible war. It was up close and personal.
But perhaps what’s most deadly in the hedgegrows are the German panzer tanks prowling the maze.
Angelo Caravaggio : The British actually had a pamphlet on how to hunt tanks. They would send out specialized
teams of individuals with bazookas or “piats,” as the British and the Canadian armies called them, in order to
actually hunt down tanks and take them out. And the manual actually likens it to big game hunting where you’re
out stalking a tiger or an elephant and trying to take it down.
Eventually, the allies devise a Sun Tzu inspired strategy to help free themselves from the carnage of the Bocage
country. The plan is to lure most of the German forces fighting at the Bocage to the city of Caen, so a weakened
force is left behind.
Bevin Alexander : Primarily because Caen had airfields and it was closest to Paris, so the Germans were fairly
sure that we would attack through Caen.
The allied plan begins with operation "Goodwood," a blistering barrage of air power against the city of Caen. The
Germans take the bait and move many of their panzer tank divisions away from the Bocage, leaving only one and a
half divisions behind to hold back forces in the hedgerows. The US immediately takes advantage of the shift, and
strikes with a withering air attack on the remaining German panzer tank divisions. Its call Operation Cobra.
Foo Check Teck : Sun Tzu says is you must behave like the snake. Why? So that when you are attacked on the
front, the back will reinforce the front. You attack in the rear, the front can reinforce that point. And you are
attacked in the middle, both sides can come in. So, for Sun Tzu, right, it is really that enemy attacking you, in your
responses, you must be flexible.
With nearly all of the German tanks destroyed, US Forces are able to punch a hole in the German line with
artillery, tanks and infantry. Finally, after weeks of frustration, the allies break out of the Bocage. The diversion of
"Goodwood" at Caen and the success of "cobra" in the Bocage country changes the strategic equation. The stalled
allied momentum returns with a vengeance.
Throughout the Normandy invasion, Sun Tzu’s invisible hand guides the allies to victory through their use of
deception, foreknowledge and a superior command structure that motivates the entire army to fight as one.
Sun Tzu says, “The winning army realizes the conditions for victory first, then fights. The losing army fights
first, then seeks victory.”
The battle between the kingdoms of Wu and Chu rages. Sun Tzu’s small Wu force is on death ground. They are
surrounded by the army of the Chu prime minister, Nang Wa. But Sun Tzu isn’t worried. While Nang Wa’s army
attacks, Sun Tzu’s main force is headed to capture the Chu capital of Ying.
Andrew R. Wilson : When Nang Wa realizes that Sun Tzu’s main force is bent on the attack on Ying, he has a
tough decision to make. Obviously, he wants to kill Sun Tzu. He wants to wipe out this force under Sun Tzu’s
command. But while he doesn’t think the Wu force, the main body, is much of a threat to the Chu capital, he’s
afraid that the defender of Ying, another general, will win credit for defending the capital against the Wu forces.
As a result, he races back to defend Ying.
It will be Nang Wa’s most colossal mistake of the war. Like Nang Wa, generals throughout history have charged
headlong into battle without having all the information they need.
Thousands of years later, in the farmlands of Pennsylvania, another general rushes into battle without knowing
what lies ahead. He is confederate general Robert Lee, who some consider the greatest commander in American
history. But at Gettysburg, lee fails to heed Sun Tzu’s wisdom and pays a terrible price.
Sun Tzu says, “No nation has ever benefitted from prolonged war.”
The American civil war is Sun Tzu nightmare scenario, a bloody stalemate that will end up costing more than
620,000 lives. By far, the deadliest war in American history.
Richard A. Gabriel : By 1863, it’s pretty clear on both sides that this is not going to be the short war everyone
thought it was going to be when at the battle of Manassas, the ladies and gentlemen drove out of DC in their
carriages with picnic lunches to observe what they thought would be the first and last battle of the war. Everybody
knows now it’s going to be a long war.
The war affects every American, sometimes in unexpected ways. The civil war sees the creation of the first
American psychiatric hospital at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington DC, still in operation today. The war between the
north and south also affected how Americans receive their mail. A Cleveland postmaster becomes so distraught by
the sight of anxious wives and children lining up at his post office that he institutes home delivery for the very first
time, though what many homes receive are death notices.
Richard A. Gabriel : The turkey buzzards realize that whenever they saw an army, sooner or later there would be
flesh to eat, and as the armies moved along they often move along with hundreds of turkey buzzards overhead just
waiting for the battlefield, waiting for the carnage, waiting for the open wounds, peck out their eyes and eat the
innards as they would any other carrion. An almost horrific scene, but that’s what war is, pretty horrific at times.
Civil war field hospitals are human butcher shops with arms and legs stacked in piles. Some 40,000 amputations
are performed on the union side alone, only 24,000 of them under anesthesia. Doctors perform dozens of surgeries
without ever washing their hands.
Richard A. Gabriel : It was seven times safer to fight through the entire battle of Gettysburg then it was to be sent
to an army hospital. … The death rate there was 30% and 40%. Just one part of it. Now you have the problem of
gangrene, suppuration, infection and the death rates were just staggeringly high.
The American civil war is a classic example of why Sun Tzu warns against going to war in the first place. But other
principles in “The art of war” will prove instrumental in how the war eventually ends.
Sun Tzu says, “Those skilled in war bring the enemy to the field of battle, they are not brought by him.”
Pennsylvania, 1863 the civil war is a bloody stalemate. By the end of June of that year, confederate general Robert
Lee boldly moves his army of nearly 60,000 men into union territory. While most of the battles of the American
civil war have been fought in the south, Lee decides the moment is right to invade union soil. This plan destroy as
many military posts as possible in Maryland and Pennsylvania while union armies defend Washington DC. One
key target is camp curtain, outside of Harrisburg, the largest military supply depot in the north.
Richard A. Gabriel : The strategy of lee’s attack on the north is not primarily military, it’s primarily political.
And he’s going to try to essentially defeat Lincoln politically. What he hopes is a massive defeat of the north will
encourage people to lose faith in the war.
Lee’s bold military action to achieve a political victory is more of a Go strategy than a Chess strategy, exactly the
kind of plan Sun Tzu would have admired. But as lee’s main force moves north, a skirmish erupts in Gettysburg
between two cavalry units.
Bevin Alexander : Confederate general heath had a division at Cashton, and he wanted to move over to
Gettysburg in order to get some shoes that were in a factory there. That was the only reason he went. And he, in
this fashion, he moved without any understanding of what lay ahead of him, and in the process set off the greatest
war that’s ever been fought in the western hemisphere.
Lee gets word of the skirmish and is told that a major union force is at Gettysburg. Instead of sending a cavalry
reconnaissance force to confirm the report, Lee orders his entire army to mobilize. It’s a colossal mistake.
Richard A. Gabriel : Lee decides to abandon the original plan. He gives up what we call strategic aim and he
makes the mistake of allowing operational developments to drive strategy.
Lee orders all his forces to converge at Cashtown, a small village seven miles from Gettysburg. Sun Tzu would not
like his choice, as Cashtown has not been fully scouted.
Richard A. Gabriel : If general Lee read Sun Tzu, he would have known better than to proceed on what you think
is happening and try to spend the resource to find out what really is happening.
Sun Tzu says, “Move only when you see an advantage and there is something to gain. Only fight if a position
is critical.”
Some 60,000 confederate troops begin to pour in from nearby Cashtown and Carlisle. 3,000 Union soldiers take
position on McPhereson ridge. They try to hold off the onslaught of enemy soldiers until help arrives, but
reinforcements are miles away toward Washington DC. So the union soldiers withdraw southeast onto cemetery
ridge, a range of hills that forms a shape of a fish hook. Cemetery ridge provides an extremely strong defensive
advantage.
Richard A. Gabriel : The terrain is so obvious in favor of the defense that my guess is almost any second
lieutenant from west point would have chosen that ground given the opportunity to do it.
When union general Hancock arrives, he declares it the best natural position he has ever seen. Lee immediately
sees the danger of the union’s position, but because union troops are still straggling in, he believes they are
vulnerable. Lee then gives an order to confederate general Yewl that many believe isn’t really an order at all.
Richard A. Gabriel : And Lee says to him, “Attack when you think it is practicable.” He didn’t order him to
attack. Yewl doesn’t know the battlefield what the hell is going on and decides not to attack.
Bevin Alexander : Yewl decided it was not .. his troops were tired, and they were exhausted and he wanted to rest.
While some criticize Yewl for not following orders, Sun Tzu’s own words place the blame on Lee.
Andrew R. Wilson : If we look all the way back to this famous interview between king Helu of Wu and Sun Tzu, in
that incident with the palace concubines, the importance of clarity in orders, Sun Tzu says at that point if orders
are unclear it is the fault of the general. At Gettysburg, we see lee issuing very unclear and very ambiguous orders
to his subordinates.
Union reinforcements soon arrive and strengthen their position. Lee now faces an uphill battle.
Sun Tzu says, “When the enemy occupies high ground, do not confront him. If he attacks downhill, do not
oppose him.”
As night falls on the first day of the battle of Gettysburg, Lee confers with another confederate general James
Longstreet, a man who grasps the situation from Sun Tzu’s perspective. Longstreet wants lee to abandon the idea of
attacking the union high ground. Instead, he wants to march south around cemetery ridge, then east right toward
Washington DC.
Bevin Alexander : “And this will force the union army to come off cemetery ridge and attack us where we are,
and if they attack us, we will win” this would’ve been precisely what Sun Tzu would have recommended.
But lee says no. He points to cemetery ridge and says, “The enemy is there, and i am going to attack there.” Lee has
completely given up his go strategy, and reverts back to chess.
Mark McNeilly : Longstreet is stunned. He sees the union army dug in, in the hills and knows that they should not
be attacked. Sun Tzu would have advised against it. He would have said, “Assess the situation, adjust your forces,
find another way to attack the enemy.”
But lee doesn’t listen. The second day of Gettysburg is hell on earth. Bucolic pastures are transformed into fields of
slaughter. Places like Plum Run, the Peach Orchard, and Little Round Top see some of the bloodiest hand to hand
combat of the war
Richard A. Gabriel : What’s terrible about hand to hand combat is the memories. You know, for a lot of war you
can pull a trigger and maybe you see somebody drop, maybe, most often you don’t. This is up close and personal,
this is bayonets, knives, rifle butts, pistol shots in the head, in the face, and you see it. And it takes a piece out of
you and that’s why you have psychiatric casualties. God knows how many members of both sides remember that
battle every night for the rest of their lives, just gory beyond belief.
On top of Little Round Top is union colonel Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine regiment. They have survived
three confederate charges, and are nearly out of ammunition.
Richard A. Gabriel : And here comes the fourth attack and Chamberlain orders fixed bayonets. Everybody fires
the last two rounds they got, stands up and the great moment in history, stands on the wall with a saber and gives
the command which rings through the ears of American infantry history, “Follow me boys, bayonets forward.”And
down they go.
Union troops howl down the hill. Shocked at the charge, the confederate soldiers retreat. Against all odds, the union
hangs on to little round top. Sun Tzu’s principle of never attacking an enemy on high ground holds true. But this
does not seem to deter Lee, for he’s going to ignore Sun Tzu yet again, and order his men to attack uphill one more
time.
Sun Tzu says, “There are some armies that should not be fought, some ground that should not be contested.”
The sun rises on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg. Despite the thousands of dead bodies strewn across the
fields, confederate general Robert Lee is about to order his troops to attack the high ground, yet again.
Richard A. Gabriel : One of the things you never want to do in war never throw good money after bad. Follow the
advice of Sun Tzu, use an attack to exploit a victory, never use an attack to rescue a defeat. And Longstreet gets it.
General Longstreet once again suggests to lee that they should move around cemetery ridge and threaten to draw
the union off the high ground.
Richard A. Gabriel : Longstreet understands that the confederates are in a terrible position. They’re
outnumbered, they do not have the high ground, they have suffered terrible casualties in the last two days of
fighting, and that there’s no real chance of pushing the union army off the high ground.
But Lee feels his men have sacrificed too much to turn back now. Lee gives the order to attack. The infantry charge
is led by major general George Pickett.
Richard A. Gabriel : And the story is Dutch Longstreet is sitting there and Pickett says, “shall I go “ and
Longstreet just drops his head and looks away. and Longstreet again looks away and said, “general, I’m going to
attack“ and Longstreet looked again away. Longstreet never gave the order to attack. He knew it was suicidal.
In the sweltering July heat, 12,500 confederate soldiers led by Pickett make their determined march across an open
field nearly a mile long. As they advance in close ranks, thousands are cut down by union artillery and rifle fire.
Bevin Alexander : There was nowhere that they could hide. There was almost no range between the union forces
and the confederate forces and the union forces were simply able to stand behind these reinforced positions and
fire on the confederates. And so the confederates had no way of defending themselves.
Richard A. Gabriel : To Pickett’s men’s bravery, they continued all the way up and there was one whole unit from
south Carolina that marched straight into the Rhode island artillery guns. It was destroyed by canister shot, The
whole unit died instantaneously. Limbs, heads, eyes, Blood, hair, and eyeballs everywhere.
Of the more than 12,000 confederate soldiers who made the charge, only 5,000 survive. The battle of Gettysburg is
over.
Bevin Alexander : Sun Tzu would have been horrified at the tragic waste of Pickett’s charge. Sun Tzu always
believed in using the intellect rather than force and never of attacking head long enemy force if he could do
otherwise.
At Gettysburg, Lee doesn’t adjust his strategy to the situations on the ground. He refuses to retreat even when the
situation is clearly hopeless.
Richard A. Gabriel : And Lee takes off his hat, dismounts and walks into the field and says, “It’s all my fault, boy,
it’s all my fault, boy.” “You’re damn right general, it’s all your fault.” No one in his right mind would’ve ordered
that you should’ve listened to Sun Tzu.
In the end, his failure to follow Sun Tzu’s wisdom is one of the factors that costs the confederates the war.
Sun Tzu says, “When troops flee, are insubordinate, collapse or are routed in battle, it is the fault of the
general.”
In “The art of war”, Sun Tzu imagines the role of the supreme a man general who must be intelligent and cunning,
never rash nor arrogant. Exactly the opposite of Sun Tzu’s adversary in the Wu-Chu war, Nang Wa.
Foo Chech Teck : Sun Tzu is deathly against impulsive behavior, rash behavior, or making the army march
double-quick time in order to seize the victory. For in Sun Tzu’s mind, victory comes from deep thinking, from
detailed calculation, from long preparation.
While Nang Wa has a larger, more powerful army, Sun Tzu shows he is the master by outwitting his enemy. Nang
Wa rushes to his capital, believing Sun Tzu is about to invade. But the master never had any intention of attacking
such a well-protected city. It’s a ruse to lure Nang Wa into a trap. And it works perfectly. Without warning, more
than 20,000 of Sun Tzu’s elite warriors ambush Nang Wa’s forces. The surprise attack throws Nang Wa’s men into
confusion.
Andrew R. Wilson : What we have now is a series of running battles between Nang Wa’s much depleted forces
and Sun Tzu’s main force. In each battle Nang Wa gets weaker, Sun Tzu gets stronger and the Chu capital lays
exposed.
Sun Tzu joins up with his main force and attacks the disorganized Chu army. Finally, Sun Tzu has won the war.
Through preparation, deception and indirect attacks, Sun Tzu pulls off one of the greatest upsets in history. But as
mysteriously as he arrived, Sun Tzu leaves and disappears.
Andrew R. Wilson : There’s some speculation as to why he disappears. One theory is that the behavior of the
leaders of Wu shock him, discourage him. When the king of Wu enters the Chu capital he’s dumbstruck by its
wealth. He becomes greedy and covetous. It would seem then that Sun Tzu has provided this ambitious and
potentially corrupt king with a dangerous instrument, this new military that he’s honed. He also sees infighting
breaking out and perhaps this is the moment that Sun Tzu retires from this life and goes instead to write what he
sees as the lessons of the conflict between Wu and Chu.
The first line of Sun Tzu’s art of war is: “War is a matter of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life
and death, survival or ruin.”
Sun Tzu knows that war can lead to disaster. Sometimes the best way to win is not to fight at all. This is perhaps
Sun Tzu’s ultimate secret.
Richard A. Gabriel : Nations often rush into wars with very little concern for thinking through what the total cost
is going to be. Not just in dollars, but also in terms of human suffering not only to you but to the civilian and the
children of the country in which you’re fighting. It’s a kind of thing that, you know, we find in Sun Tzu that, you
know, before you go to war think this through and then ask yourself is the reasons for which you’re fighting worth
the total cost of the war or is there another way?
As Sun Tzu says, the angry can be made happy again, but the dead cannot be brought back to life. Still, some
historians believe the genius behind “The art of war”, wasn’t actually Sun Tzu, but a collection of different
strategists. While his existence is debated, his legacy isn’t.
Today “The art of war” is read by Generals, CEOs, and professional sports coaches. And while it offers us insights
into the battles of the past, it could prepare us for the wars of the future.
Bevin Alexander : Sun Tzu is extremely relevant to us today, because the rules that he laid down 200 BC. Are the
same rules that we apply to warfare today or should apply to warfare today. The recommendations for indirect
warfare that we learned from Sun Tzu are the way we need to fight wars today, because there is no way we can
continue to fight direct, heavy conventional wars, because no other army is going to attack us the in a conventional
fashion. We are going to have to use the indirect methods of dealing with the enemy that Sun Tzu recommended,
and the quicker we learn these, the more likely we will be to be successful in our wars in the future.
Andrew R. Wilson : Sun Tzu can teach us not merely to know ourselves and know our strengths and weaknesses,
what we are capable of doing in the battlefield, but constantly reminds us that it is as important, if not more so to
cultivate a deep, fundamental understanding of our adversaries so that we can better achieve our objectives. That’s
what I think makes it a possession for all time.
Throughout history, Sun Tzu’s principles have guided the outcome of war. We must embrace his wisdom or fight
in darkness.