the March, only some eight thousand were alive at the end.
By familiar Western standards of judging success in a military commander, it would be difficult to imagine a less auspicious high point to a general's career. Why, then, we might fairly ask, is Mao regarded as one of the greatest commanders and strategists of the twentieth century, rather than as one of its worst failures?
The short answer is that he won. In a quarter-century of nearly constant warfare, against the Nationalist Chinese government, various warlords, and Imperial Japan--and with the Nationalists having received, in the last years of the war, massive American logistic and technical support, the Chinese Communists under Mao's leadership ultimately prevailed.
If, in Clauswitz' famous phrase, war is the extension of politics by other means, then the ultimate test of war is not victory in the battlefield, but success in attaining the political objectives for which a war was fought. Rommel and Robert E. Lee were both brilliant successes in the field, but in the last ana
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