'Sup.

Hammond definitely would have been around in the 1950s (his cover as a Classicist allowed him to serve as an SOE operative in Greece during WW2). His work is pretty outdated. However, I'm afraid I don't have Lazenby's The Defence of Greece or Cawkwell's The Greek Wars: The Failure of Persia at hand to see what exactly these more recent and critical accounts say on the matter.

Generally speaking, it's a malady of modern treatments of Xerxes' invasion that they assume the Greeks were strategic masterminds who carefully planned and coordinated their every move. Herodotos hardly supports this. He represents them as a proud, bickering, wavering bunch whose successful cooperation was nothing short of a miracle.

Xen's take on Artemision definitely suffers from the inclination of modern historians (especially those who had military experience of their own). While Herodotos indeed says fleet and army were meant to work together, he explicitly states that the plan was for the army to hold the pass at Thermopylai, with the fleet's presence at Artemision being no more than a natural consequence of that decision. This makes sense in light of the Greeks' earlier attempt to hold the pass at Tempe in Thessaly, and the later decision of the Peloponnesians to fall back on the Isthmus of Corinth. Their primary concern was always to block Xerxes' advance over land. In fact, the battle of Salamis almost didn't happen because the Spartans were not that worried by the thought of yielding naval supremacy to the Persians.

You can always recognise an interpretation that suffers from the influence of modern strategic thinking by its attempts to offer strategic justifications for the Spartan last stand at Thermopylai. The sources give us absolutely no grounds for this. Any attempt to explain the death of the 300 and their allies is conjecture. For Herodotos, it was not necessary to say more than that the Spartans found it disgraceful to leave their station. Notions of delaying action, rearguard action and so on inevitably fall down on the sheer lack of evidence that any such plan was contemplated, and if it was, that it would have had any effect.

As for Artemision, it would have been extremely optimistic for the Greeks to believe they could destroy the entire Persian fleet, which at that point still massively outnumbered their own. They made a good attempt to keep the straits clear of Persian ships, preventing the encirclement of the land army at Thermopylai, but ultimately they were forced to retreat. A pair of heavy storms had evened the odds for them by the time of Salamis.