Fatal victories / William Weir.

"From the Crusades to Bunker Hill to the Vietnam War: history's most tragic military triumphs and the high cost of victory"--Cover

Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-268) and index.

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.