The fatal victory is a battlefield success which costs the victor the war. It is often a brilliant, smashing success, such as Hannibal's triumph at Cannae, celebrated for two millennia as the absolute masterpiece of military tactics. But as a victory it was fatal. Hannibal mistook the battle for the war, and as a result, Carthage was destroyed, utterly. The fatal victory is not a Pyrrhic victory, a tactical success where the "winner" loses by exhausting himself. Manifestly not Pyrrhic was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A triumph of conception, planning, and execution, it was achieved at virtually no cost. But it was fatal to Japan because tactics were based on xenophobic and racist assumptions. The enemy did not collapse, but fought back, incinerating the home islands.

Includes index.

Affairs of Empire : The absolute masterpiece : 216 B.C., Cannae (Second Punic War) --|t Who's afraid of the big bad Hun? : 451 A.D., Challons (Attila's invasion of Gaul) --|t Matters of religion : What happened at Hattin : 1187, Hattin (Second Crusade) --|t The blind leading the blind : 1205, Constantinople (Fourth Crusade) --|t Mephistopheles and the Snow King ; 1632, Lützen (Thirty Years War) --|t Power to the people : My enemies, not my children : 1709, Malplaquet (War of the Spanish Succession) --|t A different kind of war : 1755 Fort Duquesne (French and Indian/Seven Years War) --|t Regulars and rabble : 1775 : Bunker Hill (Revolutionary War) --|t "You got into our inwards" --|t 1963, Chickamauga Creek (American Civil War) --|t Rabble and regulars : 1881, Majuba Hill (First Boer War) --|t The bee's sting : 1914, Sarajevo (First World War) --|t Easter egg : 1916, Dublin (Easter Uprising) --|t A single miscalculation : 1941, Pearl Harbor (Second World War) --|t The year of the monkey, 1968, Vietnam (Vietnam War).