Where are the Good Histories of the Viet Nam War?

Mrs. Buce asked if I could suggest a good history of the War in Viet Nam.  I said, "oh sure," and quickly bogged down.  I dug out an old copy of Stanley Kranow's  Vietnam: A History, which I remember as instructive if not exactly mind-bending (I see from the Amazon blurb that it's in available in audio but not Kindle--the old fashioned way).  And beyond that--

Well--beyond that, there are any number of accounts written with high intensity and great personal engagement, about aspects of the war.  I'm thinking of stuff like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, or Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, or Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake, or Neil Sheehan's  A Bright Shining Lie.  And as I scan, I'm remembering the movies: Apocalypse Now of course, and Deer Hunter, which I actually liked better.  There are some remarkable postmortems of the strictly military aspects--books like Harry Summers' On Strategy, or Andrew Krepinevich's The Army and Viet Nam.  If I'm not careful, I'll find myself getting sucked back into the undertow before the American involvement, to books like Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy  Graham Greene's The Quiet American or even Marguerite Duras' The Lover.

But it still seems to me like there is something missing here.  I suppose it is precisely because the war was such an open wound and because, yes, it remains so unfinished, that we seem never to have learned how to package it into a narrative.  So, Kranow it may have to be.

What I've Learned about Sex from Ian Buruma

It's probably nothing to be proud of, but I confess to a certain fascination with "defeat" literature--stories about wreckage and recovery in the aftermath of war.  I remain in debt to my late friend Ignoto for alerting me to Naples '44, Norman Lewis' darkly hilarious account of his service in the British cleanup crew at the end of World War II.  I've met the challenge of Primo Levi's spare-but-elegant Italian, not only in his account of his concentration camp experience, but also in his two accounts (one admittedly fictionalized) of the disintegration of the Nazi death camps, and the reconstruction of lives in the aftermath (link, link).  Now I'm onto Ian Buruma's   Year Zero: A History of 1945, with the same level of satisfaction.

Lewis and Levi lived through the horrors they describe.  Buruma,  generation younger, has a different task: he is trying to acquaint himself with what his forebears, particularly his father, went through.  The distance means that his account lacks some of the particularity of the other two (although Buruma, like the others, does have his share of hair-raising yarns).  But the detachment allows him to develop some independent critical judgments.  For example, about sex.

Grant that we've had no shortage of sex-in-the-wreckage accounts, prurient or horrific--particularly, I suppose, about systematic vengeance rape among Russian invaders in Germany, or about any girl (or boy) who might have to market what s/he had just to fend off starvation.   Buruma's account fits the general framework. What perhaps he adds is the suggestion of just various the sexual pallet was in those days: how many did how much for how many different motives.

Set aside outright rape (with the concession that yes, western soldiers raped too, but not as a matter of government policy).  Acknowledge sex out of desperation--to fend off starvation, or to ally one's self with a protector.  Buruma's point is that there was  lot more:  in particular, we are dealing here not just with desperation and hardship but also with the new birth of optimism: after four or more years of war, we observe an explosion of what we can only call erotic energy.  Aside from the girls trying to feed themselves, we have those who were just happy for the chocolate and the nylons.  We have some who formed loving, even lasting, relationships. And we have a whole lot of people who were just primed for a good time.  Side note: introducing a nice irony, Buruma remarks on how the Japanese were terrified that  the invading Westerners would treat Japanese women the same way the Japanese invading forces had treated subject peoples in East Asia--but it didn't happen. Not at all incidentally, we can observe  sudden, sharp spike in the birth rate, and the other thing that the chaplains warned of: venereal disease.

In this realm, the Western soldiers--not just US GIs, but also Canadians and Brits--were the fortunate beneficiaries.  It wasn't precisely their niceness that carried the day: rather more the exhaustion, emaciation and general air of defeat that hung like a cloud that hung over the  Germans and their collaborators.

Mr. Dooley and the War Lovers

Oh, now I know why I've been rattling on about Theodore Dreiser.  It's because I have been reading Evan Thomas' admirable The War Lovers, about the great spasm of bellicosity that led us to grab an empire we didn't need from paltry and pathetic Spain--and the spasm of aversion and regret that almost restrained us.

They say that history is written by the victors but it isn't quite that.  The real point is that the victors' story is so full of cheery self-congratulation that you lose sight of all the reservations and second thoughts even if they are right before your eyes.  So we remember Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst, the bumptious bullyboys who carried us into the Spanish American war as if it were a picnic.  You tend to forget people like Thomas Reed, speaker of the House of Representatives who threw up his hands in dismay when he saw he couldn't do anything to stop it.   And beyond the leaders: one of the virtues of Thomas' book is that it shows you the mindless awfulness of the war fever as it possessed not just the leaders but the masses of Americans who cheered them on.  Another virtue is that he shows how even at high tide, war fever was far from universal--and how, as the war slogged on in the Philippines, more and more Americans came to wonder what it was all about, and even Roosevelt himself seemed almost (but not quite) ready to distance himself from what was, in large part, his own creation.

Which beings me to one of the most refreshing creatures in the whole menagerie--Finley Peter Dunne, Chicago newsman, sometimes friend and colleague of Theodore Dreiser, supra, surely one of the sharper political commentators we've ever had the good fortune to enjoy. It is Dunne who created Mr. Dooley, the Chicago saloon keeper who did so much to deflate the pretensions of the war madness.  Of course he didn't prevail; he wouldn't have been funny if he had prevailed.  But it's a bit of a consolation to recall that he was able to hold an audience--to evade lynching--even at the height of the war enthusiasm.   In the following excerpt he instructs his friend Hennesey on the correct approach for us to take against a country which, as Mr. Dooley suggests, most of us couldn't have found on the map.  "Mack" is William McKinley, nominally the President of the United States but often a seeming spectator at his own sideshow.  Anyway:

I know what I'd do if I was Mack," said Mr. Hennessy. "I'd hist a flag over th' Ph'lippeens, an' I'd take in th' whole lot iv thim." 

"An' yet," said Mr. Dooley, "tis not more thin two months since ye larned whether they were islands or canned goods. Ye'er back yard is so small that ye'er cow can't turn r-round without buttin' th' woodshed off th' premises, an' ye wudden't go out to th' stock yards without takin' out a policy on yer life. Suppose ye was standin' at th' corner iv State Sthreet an' Archey R-road, wud ye know what car to take to get to th' Ph'lippeens? If yer son Packy was to ask ye where th' Ph'lippeens is, cud ye give im anny good idea whether they was in Rooshia or jus' west iv th' thracks ?" 

"Mebbe I cudden't," said Mr. Hennessy, haughtily, "but I'm f'r takin' thim in, annyhow."
"So might I be," said Mr. Dooley, "if I cud on'y get me mind on it. Wan iv the worst things about this here war is th' way it's makin' puzzles f'r our poor, tired heads. Whin I wint into it, I thought all I'd have to do was to set up here behind th' bar with a good tin-cint see-gar in me teeth, an' toss dinnymite bombs into th' hated city iv Havana. But look at me now. Th' war is still goin' on; an' ivry night, whin I'm countin' up the cash, I'm askin' mesilf will I annex Cubia or lave it to the Cubians? Will I take Porther Ricky or put it by? An' what shud I do with the Ph'lippeens? Oh, what shud I do with thim? I can't annex thim because I don't know where they ar-re. I can't let go iv thim because some wan else'll take thim if I do. They are eight thousan' iv thim islands, with a popylation iv wan hundherd millyon naked savages; an' me bedroom's crowded now with me an' th' bed. How can I take thim in, an' how on earth am I goin' to cover th' nakedness iv thim savages with me wan shoot iv clothes? An' yet 'twud break me heart to think iv givin' people I niver see or heerd tell iv back to other people I don't know. An', if I don't take thim, Schwartzmeister down th' sthreet, that has half me thrade already, will grab thim sure. 

"It ain't that I'm afraid iv not doin' th' r-right thing in th' end, Hinnissy. Some mornin' I'll wake up an' know jus' what to do, an' that I'll do. But 'tis th' annoyance in th' mane time. I've been r-readin' about th' counthry. 'Tis over beyant ye'er left shoulder whin ye're facin' east. Jus' throw ye'er thumb back, an' ye have it as ac'rate as anny man in town. 'Tis farther thin Boohlgahrya an' not so far as Blewchoochoo. It's near Chiny, an' it's not so near; an', if a man was to bore a well through fr'm Goshen, Indianny, he might sthrike it, an' thin again he might not. It's a poverty-sthricken counthry, full iv goold an' precious stones, where th' people can pick dinner off th' threes an' ar-re starvin' because they have no step-ladders. Th' inhabitants is mostly naygurs an' Chinnymen, peaceful, industhrus, an' law-abidin', but savage an' bloodthirsty in their methods. They wear no clothes except what they have on, an' each woman has five husbands an' each man has five wives. Th' r-rest goes into th' discard, th' same as here. Th' islands has been ownded be Spain since befure th' fire; an' she's threated thim so well they're now up in ar-rms again her, except a majority iv thim which is thurly loyal. Th' natives seldom fight, but whin they get mad at wan another they r-run-a-muck. Whin a man r-runs-a-muck, sometimes they hang him an' sometimes they discharge him an' hire a new motorman. Th' women ar-re beautiful, with languishin' black eyes, an' they smoke see-gars, but ar-re hurried an' incomplete in their dhress. I see a pitcher iv wan th' other day with nawthin' on her but a basket of cocoanuts an' a hoop-skirt. They're no prudes. We import juke, hemp, cigar wrappers, sugar, an' fairy tales fr'm th' Ph'lippeens, an' export six-inch shells an' th' like. Iv late th' Ph'lippeens has awaked to th' fact that they're behind th' times, an' has received much American amminition in their midst. They say th' Spanyards is all tore up about it. 

"I larned all this fr'm th' papers, an' I know 'tis sthraight. An' yet, Hinnissy, I dinnaw what to do about th' Ph'lippeens. An' I'm all alone in th' wurruld. Ivrybody else has made up his mind. Ye ask anny con-ducthor on Ar-rchy R-road, an' he'll tell ye. Ye can find out fr'm the papers; an', if ye really want to know, all ye have to do is to ask a prom'nent citizen who can mow all th' lawn he owns with a safety razor. But I don't know." 

"Hang on to thim," said Mr. Hennessy, stoutly. "What we've got we must hold." 

"Well," said Mr. Dooley, "if I was Mack, I'd lave it to George. I'd say: 'George,' I'd say, 'if ye're f'r hangin' on, hang on it is. If ye say, lave go, I dhrop thim.' 'Twas George won thim with th' shells, an' th' question's up to him."

--From Mr. Dooley in Peace and War, first published in 1898 and available at  Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.  "George" is elsewhere identified as Mr. Dooley's cousin George Dooley, of whom his Chicago expositor says "whin we come to find out about him, we'll hear he's ilicted himself king iv th' F'lip-ine Islands. Dooley th' Wanst."  

Paul Kennedy's Back-office War (With Cameo Walkon from Jon Gertner)

Here's a shoutout for Paul Kennedy's Engineers of Victory, a fine book even if it is difficult to say just exactly what it is about.  The subtitle is  The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War which is perhaps a bit closer to the mark except you could say that everybody was a problem solver from George C. Marshall on down.  Of course that isn't quite what Kennedy has in mind.  A better pitch would be that it is a book about learning-by-doing, about getting things wrong and then staying lucky long enough to get them right the next time.  Closer, but still not enough.  Better to say that in context, what really gets Kennedy's juices flowing are a few stories about individual innovators, mosly  unhonored and unsung (until now) and also, not at all incidentally, the system(s) that were able to assimilate and operationalize their innovation.

In this context, I suspect Kennedy's favorite character in the whole book is an otherwise virtually unknown British test pilot named Ronnie Harker who tried out a US P-51 fighter aircraft and, in an almost seat-of-the-pants intuitive judgment call, suggested that they could vastly improve its performance by dropping in a Merlin 61 Rolls-Royce engine.  Harker's suggestion turned out to be not just right but dramatically right: in effect he turned the air war around: the Allies had been taking near-intolerable losses: after Harker they were able to reclaim the upper hand.  

Of course it wasn't just Harker. Kennedy tells it, the happy ending lies at least as much in the story of how Harker's idea turned into action: how the British operational structure turned out to be loose and flexible enough to know a good idea when they saw one, and how the Americans were able and willing to cooperate in production.

It's a lovely yarn and there are others in the book almost, if not quite, as good.  One gets the sense that there would be more such to tell if only we could find them.  But in a way, that's the problem: Kennedy seems to have done a prodigious job of research but some the stuff you would want most to know continues to repose behind a veil of wild surmise.   Kennedy himself gives the game away at the end of a superb story about the  epic resurgence of the Russians and and after Stalin grand, ending with their savage reprisal/conquest of Germany itself,

 But what about the lesser-known contributors to the Soviet victory? Who were the problem solvers in that part of the story, the equivalents to the innumerable players on the Anglo-American side whose tales are so readily accessible? Clearly they existed and made enormous contributions...

Unh hnh.  It's no real disrespect to Kennedy--after all, the Russian archives just aren't available.  But there is so much more you wish he could tell.

  Even with this limitation, though, I'd shelve Kennedy's offering close to another of my favorite books from the last year: Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.  Like Gertner's, Kennedy's is a delight to read, and gives you a warm glow, if tinged with a dash of wry nostalgia, about a time when things more or less worked.  And can contrast, for example, Tom Ricks' The Generals, in which he offers an account of the Post-War Army's descent into careerism and heroin addiction.

Both Kennedy  and Gertner are well worth the time and effort, even if Kennedy seems a tad  unfinished. Still, in the end you've got the unsatisfied sense that you've got a just-so story.  You could say they both tell you lots of good stuff about institutions that did what you would have wanted them to do, but very little about who or how.  Where's the secret sauce?  Isn't there some way we can have it bottled and stocked in every market in the land?

Casus Belli

For no particular reason I find myself considering events that may or may not trigger wars, particularly, though not exclusively, those that involve boats.

I would include, of course, the sinking of the Battleship Maine in 1898 that so well served the purpose of William Randolph ("you furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war") Hearst.  We know now that the imputation of the sinking to the Spaniards was wholly spurious--about as spurious as Hitler blaming the Commies for the Reichstag Fire.

On the same plane I could of course include the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 that trigered a major escalation in Viet Nam--apparently not quite as fictional as the Maine, but still far more theatre than reality.   

I hope it's not inappropriate to throw in the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861: Here we have a bona fide conflict between genuine belligerents although it certainly did serve the political purpose of the new President Abraham Lincoln to mousetrap the Confederates into making the first move.

If the topic is attacks involving ships, I suppose I have to include Pearl Harbor in 1941, though obviously orders of magnitude bigger than the others.  And just for the record, I'm not at all persuaded that it was a putup job: cockups happen and the evidence of cockup here is conclusive, I think.  But I do feel the pain of those who think otherwise.  For a failure of those magnitude, you just naturally want to find a culprit and it's not surprising that an awful lot of people spend time looking for one.

Although it doesn't involve boats, I suppose the same only moreso re 9/11 in 2001.  I can understand the impulse to look for a culprit but the evidence of inside conspiracy here seems even weaker.

On the other hand, I'd like to remember at least one event that did not trigger a war: the attack on the Gunboat Panay by the Japanese in the Yangtze River outside Nanjing in 1937.   I'm sure it is almost completely forgotten today, but it's remarkable how much diplomatic pushing and shoving ensued in the months that followed.  I suppose the main reason we didn't go to war over that one was that the nation was still deeply settled in its plague o' both your houses isolationist mode.  It would take another and far greater surprise to change the state of play on that one. 

You Think You've Had a Bad Week?

This journey alone has recompensed me for my departure from Paris by presenting me with so many new sights and experiences--things that  sedentary men of letters would not guess at in a thousand years. The most interesting days were the 25th and 26th of October . . .

So Marie-Henri Beyle, Stendhal,writing on November 9, 1812, from Smolensk in Russia to a friend back in France.  the "most interesting days" were the beginning of Napoleon's calamitous retreat from Russia.  In another letter the same day, he elaborates:

...as we were mking our fires, we were surrounded by  mob of men who started firing at us.  Complete disorder, oaths from the wounded: we had all the trouble in the world to make them take up their muskets.  We repulsed the enemy, but we thought ourselves destined for great adventures. ... We decided to spend the night on our feet, and on the morrow, at first break of dawn, to form a battalion-square, set our wounded in the middle of it and try to break through the Russians; if we were driven back, to abandon our vehicles, to reform into another, smaller battalion-square, and to be killed to the last man rather than let ourselves be taken by peasants who would kill us slowly with knives or in any other amiable fashion. ...

[The experienced officers] agreed that our goose was cooked.  We distributed our napoleons amongst the servants, to try to safeguard some of them. We had all become close friends. We drank the little wine we had left.  On the morrow, which was to be so great a day, we all set off on foot beside our calashes, hung with pistols from head to feet.  

In the end, the battle turned out to be non event:  

The enemy did not consider us worthy of his fury; we were attacked only in the evening, by a few cossacks who lanced fifteen or twenty of our wounded.

Stendhal was back in Vilna by the 7th of December; he celebrated his 30th birthday in January, in Berlin.  The retreat was an almost unspeakable calamity for the army taken as a whole, not to mention the Russian peasants who had been so victimized by the entire affair.    For Stendhal, it was probably the high point of his life.  He spent his remaining years as a marginal diplomat and disappointed lover--and, yes, author of two of the greatest novels ever.

Source:  excerpts from To the Happy Few:  Selected Letters (Norman Cameron trans. 1986).

  

The Admirals: What did Leahy Do?

I've finished my audioread of Walter Borneman's The Admirals, thus further filling in the many gaps in knowledge from my childhood in World War II, when I waited in fascinated apprehension, trusting they would get this damn thing over with before I turned 17, else I would have to go to war and would be killed.  Borneman's book is a satisfying read at least for someone as ignorant as I, though how it would hold up for the serious boffins is an interesting question to which I don't have the answer.  I am forced to revise a couple of  my untutored judgments.  I'd say that Ernest King, who commanded from Washington, is perhaps not quite as rotten a human being as he appears from a distance and probably on the whole an effective presence, though perhaps a bit more focused on winning glory for the Navy than winning victory for the allies.  On the other hand I'm revising downward my untutored  opinion of William Halsey--active and aggressive, always in the thick of the fray but culpable for a few whopper mistakes from all of which he seems to have walked away unscathed, at least in the eyes of an adoring public.  Halsey, that is, appears to be a natural master of showmanship--not the calculating megalomaniac that was Douglas MacArthur, but simply one whose instinctive effusiveness left him richly qualified for the role of hero.  Chester Nimitz comes across as just about on pitch with his reputation: steady, likeable, warm-hearted.

The puzzle for me is William D. Leahy, who spent the war at Roosevelt's ear, first as adviser on military matters and at the end--as Roosevelt was dying--the President's sole avenue of communication with the world.  It seems undisputed that if anyone stood had the full attention of the President, it was Leahy.

Yet what, exactly, did he do?  I haven't read Leahy's  own memoir of Leahy, nor any biography of him, but on Borneman's telling his record is oddly opaque.   Borneman does remark on their differences--Leahy was a "conservative" by the standards of  his time (which are not the standards of our time).  He also remarks on Leahy's unstinting fealty to the President whom he served, yet whose aspirations appear so different from his own.

Is that it?  Is Leahy then  merely (as MacArthur said of Eisenhower) a great clerk?   It seems unlikely.  Even if he left no dramatic mark, still it is true that one may exercise influence in ways that may not always be easy for a biographer to spot.   For example, Leahy  seems to have managed the President's agenda--some of it from the beginning, and all of it at the end when the other great agenda-setter, Harry Hopkins, and the President himself, were dying.   

There is at least one other possibility--one which Borneman, at least, does not explore.  That is: I wonder what are the chances that Roosevelt, the master manipulator, was simply using Leahy--defanging his deep-seated conservatism with flattering attention on the principle that you keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Of course there may be some mix of motives here, and the relationship may have evolved over time.  It could be that  Leahy began as a pawn in Roosevelt's larger chess game and grew genuinely  to respect and sympathize with his boss.  Beyond all that, it may be simply that Leahy was one of those people about whom it can be said: we don't know what he does around here, but we know that as long as he is here, a lot of things go right and not many go wrong.

Afterthought:  I turned 17 in 1953, long after World War II and a gnat's eyebrow too late for Korea.  By the time I did get to the military--as a reservist/trainee in 1958--nobody in the world was particularly mad at anybody, and I found the whole thing pretty much of a cakewalk.

A General Rates a General

All this military stuff: it's not that I'm so interested in military history per se--I'm no better at doping out a battle plan than I am an NFL offense.  It's rather more the "development" thing, as in how did Ike become Ike, or what moulded the four admirals who ruled the waves in World War II.  Of course might consider this issue in the context of almost any occupation (or more generally, "life-plan")--I recall a wonderful book from a few years back about how Lincoln became Lincoln, for example.   But the military provides particularly good lab specimens, for two reasons: one, they care about this stuff, and write about it and think about it a lot.  And two, they keep such good records. Each of the subjects under scrutiny leaves a long paper trail of documented assignments, efficiency reports and whatnot--also, in several cases, private diaries or introspective letters to loved ones.

Expanding on the topic, I'm remembering a fine one I read a few years back--The Class of 1846 by John C. Waugh, considering the class that provided so much senior manpower for the Civil War (20 general officers, counting both sides).  I won't rehash the whole product at the moment, but allow me to pick out one fascinating insight about the man who was second in the class of '46--but whom everyone, it seems, assumed would be the class star.  Of course he was not: he rather fizzled out as the first of Lincoln's several false starts in his search for an effective commander of northern forces in the Civil War.  The speaker here is not a member of the class of '46, but he is someone whose judgment has to be heard:

McClellan is to me one of the mysteries of the war.  As a young man he was always a mystery.  He had the way of inspiring you with the idea of immense capacity, if he would only have a chance. . . .  I have never studied his campaigns enough to make up my mind as to his military skill, but all my impressions are in his favor. . . .  The test which was applied to him would be terrible to any man, being made a major-general at the beginning of the war.  It has always seemed to  me that the critics of McClellan do not consider the vast and cruel responsibility--the war, a new thing to all of us, the army new, everything to do from the outset, with a restless people and Congress.  McClellan was a young man when this devolved upon him, and if he did not succeed, it was because the conditions of success were so trying.  If McClellan had gone into the war as Sherman,Thomas, or Meade, had fought his way along and up, I have no reason to suppose that he would not have won as high a distinction as any of us.

Waugh at 519.  The writer is, of course, the one who did succeed as Union commander, U. S. Grant,  17th out of 39 in the West Point class of 1843.  Fun fact: at the time he graduated, Grant stood 5'2" and weighed 117 pounds.

Update:  Here's David Frum's list of "worst generals."  Lot of room for second-guessing here, I suspect.

Education: Whatever Works

I've finished up my Ike biography (though perhaps not finished writing about it).  I've moved on to Walter Borneman's The Admirals--a group bio of Leahy,* King, Halsey and Nimitz who stood at the forefront of the Navy in World War II.  The fascinating parallel is not just the war stuff (actually, I  haven't got to the war part of Borneman yet), but the stuff about all these guys before they were famous--"Ike before Ike" and so forth.  And the inevitable question: for any of the five could we have known on graduation day that they were bound for greatness?  And the related question: what (if anything) about their experience and education prepared them for what they became?

As to "could we have known," one kind of answer is easy:  "of course not,"   because we didn't know that there would be a global war at just the time they were positioned for high command.  But this is a cop-out.  Remember the precise question, and beware the problem of 20-20 hindsight.  Had we been present as they walked down the aisle, would we have said "he's the one!"--?   I grant that I can't give a conclusive answer but I doubt it.  By Borneman's account (with Smith's), only one of the five seems to have been impelled by naked ambition from the beginning.  That would be King who never shied from telling people that he intended to make it to the top and that he deserved to be there.  Yet that kind of ambition can damage a career just as often as it pushes one forward, and in King's case, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find there were people who would have taken the chance to derail him if it came their way.

Another of the four Navy men--Leahy, the oldest, though apparently less brazen about it than King, does seem to have shown remarkable foresight in picking his protectors.  He signed up early in the club of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Undersecretary (but de facto boss) of the Navy, and formed a bond that lasted through FDR's time in the White House.  But did Leahy know in the 20s that he had backed the right horse (maybe a better metaphor would be "yacht").  The question answers itself.  Picking Roosevelt as protector may show nothing more than good luck.

The other two Navy men--Nimitz and Halsey--seem less focused on the very top rung.  Or at any rate, more happy with their day to day work: both men just seemed to enjoy being sailors.  Of the four, so far I find Nimitz more likeable--Nimitz who, after all, once plunged into the ocean to rescue an enlisted man.  Great for PR, I must say: maybe Paul Ryan should push somebody into Lake Michigan, so he can pull him out.  Or maybe Mitt Romney can push Pau--but I digress.

Perhaps what they do have in common is a quality somewhat more abstract: a capacity for learning from experience, a knack for taking something out of the job every day, of building  book of skills and intuitions that will serve them in their different ways when, as and if.

Back to the particular matter of schooling.  Evidently Annapolis was pretty much of an intellectual backwater in those days.  In pure academics, King did well; the others less so.  But in retrospect it is hard to see how the classroom experience --or deficiency thereof--had much to do with their careers one way or another.  Aside from the Borneman bio, another thing I stumbled on today was a post from the personal blog of James Kwak, he better known as co-proprietor of  Baseline Scenario.  Regular blog-shoppers will know that Kwak graduated last year from Yale Law School-in his 40s--after a career (or careers) of stunning variety   Here's a bit he wrote back as he entered his final semester at YLS:

In the long run, what I’ve learned is that being good at school is not that important in the real world. In the business world, for example, academic and intellectual skills are far less important than the ability to pick up a phone, call someone you hardly know who doesn’t owe you anything, and get him to do something for you — and that’s something they don’t teach in any school. In the academic world, even, the skills you need to take classes are far less important than the ability to identify promising research areas and convince other people (particularly funders) that they are promising areas of research. And of course, in life as a whole, being able to get along with other people and enjoy your time with your family and friends is more important than just about anything. But that’s made law school even more enjoyable in some ways, because it’s this little cocoon where I can forget how complicated life can be outside the classroom.

*Leahy or Leahey?  The preferred spelling seems to be "Leahy," but "Leahey" is widely reported, including at least once on the book's Amazon page.  And yes, Nimitz.

Liveblogging Smith on Ike: The Buck Stops Here

Surveying the Eisenhower presidency, Jean Edward Smith (cf. link, link, link) writes with obvious fascination about one of its  most inglorious moments: the occasion  in 1960 when the Soviets brought down an American spy plane over Sverdlovsk, bringing the pilot home alive.  As Smith shows, Ike and Khrushchev had been moving delicately towards closer cooperation but the U2 episode hurled the improving relationship off track.  Smith recounts how the administration tried at first to defang the incident but that Ike finally chose to face up to the fact that they had been caught red-handed.  Smith:

 The president telephoned Secretary [of State Christian] Herter and instructed him to issue a new statement acknowledging that for the past four years, U2s had regularly been sent into the Soviet Union under orders from the President.  [Emphasis added]....

Focus on that "personal responsibility" stuff.

Milton Eisenhower....told his brother that he must not take the rap for the U2.  Ike disagreed.   He said he would not blame subordinates for his decisions.  It would be a glaring and permanent injustice.  John [Eisenhower, Ike's son] suggested that his father fire Alan Dulles; again, Ike said no. "I am not going to shift the blame to my underlings."

 Smith is impressed.  

Eisenhower's decision to accept personal responsibility for the U2 flights may have been the finest hour. of his presidency.  Rather than force Alan Dulles and Richard Bissell to walk the plank for reasons of state, Eisenhower acknowledged his own culpability.  FDR would  not have not have done so. Ronald Reagan was shielded from Iran contra.

But  then:

In Eisenhower's case the President,  by taking direct  responsibility,  doomed the Paris summit, scuttled an impending nuclear test ban treaty blew the chance to  reduce defense expenditures and forfeited the possibility of progress on the German question.  "I had longed to give the United  States and the world a lasting peace, Eisenhower said later.  I was able only to contribute to a stalemate."  His sense of decency and personal sense of responsibility had carried the day.  ... Cynics would argue that such sentiment is out of pace in the  oval office but it was not out of place for Eisenhower. Ike knew the difference between right and wrong. and tried to apply that knowledge to politics and diplomacy.   That is why the country always trusted him.

 The reader is invited to consider whether the "cynics" were right; whether, to put it differently, this outburst of moral purity was an adolescent indulgence on his part; that he would have served the country better by throwing Dulles and Bissell under the bus and (perhaps more important) that they expected nothing less when they signed up for the job.

Liveblogging Smith on Ike: The Bomb

How far can we blame General/President Eisenhower for the Cold War and its umbrella of nuclear terror?  In his biography of Ike, Jean Edward Smith lays out a case that the answer is "not very much."  It's well-argued but not quite persuasive enough.

Of course Ike wasn't present at the creation: by all accounts he never learned bout the bomb until the genie was already out of the bottle. And by general agreement, he counseled Truman against using it on Japan.  Moreover as Smith makes clear, Ike strongly opposed using it in the "small wars"--Korea and Viet Nam.  In both cases, he had to sit on the heads of his own generals to get his way.  And the one thing everybody knows about Ike is that he left the Presidential stage with a valediction inveighing against the military-industrial complex.

Yet it was Ike who presided over (if he did not exactly create) the doctrine of of "mutually assured destruction"--the policy that kept a generation of school children hunkering down under their desks whie their parents dug fallout shelters.  My mother, only somewhat in jest, said she was going found a construction company called Grandma's Linger-a-Little-Longer.

It's probably Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who gets primary credit for the rhetorical incendiarism of MAD.  In other cases, Ike stifled Dulles, just as he often stifled the generals, but not here.  Why not?

If I read Smith right, the answer is three fold.  Ike felt, as I understand the argument, (1) that nukes were cheaper than ground war; (2) reduction in conventional weapons would actually reduce the scourge of ground wars; and (3) the very threat of mass destruction would be enough to keep it at bay.

O boyo boyo boy.  But before you fulminate with excess against Ike's policy, keep in mind the stark fact that it worked: we got through the Cold War precisely without the kind of holocaust that MAD was supposed to scare us out of (FWIW, I don't think this discussion as anything to do with proliferation, rogue nukes, or the other problems of the 21st Century--they were bound to happen anyway).

It worked:  my mother again: well, that's more good luck than good planning.  It might well be, and thank heavens we don't have any kind of a double-blind study designed to see how it might have gone in an alternative universe (does Harry Turtledove go into this possibility?  I don't know).  So, the fact is it worked.  But I'm still not quite persuaded that this ends the analysis.  For even if we sidestepped the unspeakable, still the fact is that MAD led is straightway into the  colossally dangerous, destabilizing and mainly  expensive arms race that MAD put in place.  In  short, precisely the sort of thing Ike inveighed against when he spoke about the military-industrial complex.

Gray's Warriors

One more short book not to throw out: Glen Gray's The Warriors appears to persist in print, if just barely, but I suspect it wouldn't be there at all without the imprimatur of Hannah Arendt who wrote a preface to a 1967 reprint.  And Arendt, for her part, apparently undertook her task to correct what she saw as a great wrong.  She says the book "was almost entirely overlooked when it first appeared' (i.e., in 1959).  She adds that in time it had acquired "a group of readers in very different walks of life who cherished it as a triumph of personal discovery," but obviously she thought it deserved better, and so came to sponsor the edition which remains available today.

Yet if Gray seemed remote in his own time, today he seems as distant as a Tiepolo ceiling.  Gray was reporting--no, reflecting--on his own experience of war, from the sober and removed vantage of a small-college professorship, back in the days when a small-college professorship was a post of obscure dignity.  So much has happened, not least to the small colleges, but for our purposes much more important, to our understanding of war.

Recall the simple irony: some 11 million Americans "fought" (broadly defined) in World War II.  They brought home their stories.  Or so we thought; but in fact almost everything conspired to assure that the home folks just didn't get it. The military itself and the press had collaborated to put a benign face on the endeavor while it continued.  And the soldiers, for all their stories, really didn't want to talk about the worst of it; they much preferred to turn their face away and to get on with their lives.  Grant that we had The Naked and the Dead (and by the way, does anybody read it these days); but recall that Joseph Heller didn't finish Catch-22 until 1961--and that it didn't really gain traction until years later in a different war.

We've had on the whole rather better war writing since--think Tim O'Brien and Phil Caputo--to say nothing of the monumental "real war" movies llke Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.  Compared to all of these, Gray is bound to seem irretrievably far away.

Arendt did Gray (and us) a great service, but I think she may have misunderstood its spirit. She says in her preface that "the first lesson to be learned on the battlefield is that the closer you were to the enemy, the less did you hate him."  But Gray deserves a more careful reading.  He does conjure up "the image of the opposing enemy as an essentially decent man who is either temporarily misguided by false doctrine or forced to make war against his better will and desire,."  He says that; he says also that this image "appeals to most reasonable men"--but he says that this image appeals to most "only after a war is past" (my italics).  During the war, we can expect that kind of detachment from "only  the minority of combat soldiers who are at the same time reflective and relatively independent in their judgment."  One is tempted to add: and for that very reason, perhaps not very good warriors?

Wonderful Interview

...with Max Hastings about his new WWII book: link.  Sounds like an enormously decent and likeable man.

Blenheim

On this day (N.S.) in 1704: the Battle of Blenheim, where 52,000 allied troops (Britain, Austrian Empire) faced down 56,000 French etc.   Winston Churchill called it the beginning of British hegemony in Europe. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat but it wasn't nearly the end of the war, which lasted until 1714. Robert Southey branded it (with leaden irony) "A Famous Victory."  

The Duke returned from the wars today and did pleasure me in his top-boots.

--Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, wife of

John, Duke of Marlborough,

commander of the allied forces.

In the Time of the Breaking of Nations

Somehow we at Chez Buce have stumbled onto a distinctive literary genre--war books of a sort, but more particularly, books about people caught up in the mad schemes of others.   It's a grim business but it can be grimly satisfying.

I suppose the most all-round engaging of the current crop is Yasushi Inoue's Tun-Huang, lately republished by NYRB.  Nominally it is not a war book at all: it's a fictional account of the burial of a trove of Buddhist manuscripts in the Mogao Caves in what is now Western China.  Nominally not, but the whole point of the story is that we are in the contested no-man's land on China's northwest frontier, as one polity passes away while another takes it place.  Crisply and directly told, plausible as the story of a man living his life in the buffeting of forces that should have nothing to do with him.

Tun Huang is a curious pendant to  Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell's classic account of his military (if you can call it that) service in the Spanish Civil War.  Once again, it is a meditation on the slippage between the conflict on the ground (in the mountains of Aragon) and the larger--and here, much more sinister--political forces that shape and surround it.  For a 21st Century reader, perhaps the most important takeaway is how innocent we (still) were about the insidious role of the Comintern in corrupting native radicalism.

They Burn The Thistles,  by Yashar Kemal, may seem hardly to belong on this list at all.  Strictly speaking, it is not a war novel in any sense.  But there is a resonance insofar as Kemal gives an account of poor peasants victimized by landlords whose greed they can barely comprehend.

Perhaps the grimmest of the grim (in the current lot) is Gert Ledig's The Stalin Front--an attempt to give an account of what it was really (I mean really)  like on the Hitler-Stalin frontier during World War II.  So far as I can tell, the book has always enjoyed a certain esteem, but not much popularity.  Not hard to see why:   Ledig's war is human misery without a trace of romance in it.

All of which makes William Faulkner's The Unvanquished look positively cheery by comparison.   This is not first-tier Faulkner, at least in the English-teacher sense.  It's just a rattling good story of resilience and cunning and if it is a bit too close to nostalgia for the good ol' cause, why then you need a break once in a while.

I just remembered another that surely belongs on the list: Jean-Paul Sartre's story of the old shepherd in the south of France who gets caught up in the preparations for World War II without fully grasping what "France" might be. Part of the trilogy Les chemins de la liberté, though I cannot pin down exactly which part.

How do you Bomb Sand back to the Stone Age?

Asks the Wichita Bureau. NATO has shot its arsenal dry in Libya in two months.  Cf. link.

"Right now," he adds, "I bet the Turks could take Vienna."

War, Killing and Sheer Bloody-Mindedness

As I follow up on what I wrote the other day about war and killing (link, link), I find Kuznicki's fascinating thread (link, link) in which he showcases and explores the assertion of the great SLA Marshall that only 20 percent of the men in battle do all the serious killing. There are so many ways one could go with this, not all explored in the comments.   For example, one, is it consistent with the general principle of organizational behavior that 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work (or 95-5, whatever)? 

Update: Two, is it a subset of the (well-known fact, folkloric fantasy) that snipers do most of the killing in warfare?

But I want to go in a slightly different direction.  I want to explore the point that 20 percent is quite enough, thank you to make the system work--that sheer bloody-mindedness rules, even if most of the populace is all sunflowers and bunny rabbits.

I think this may be parallel to the theory I've argued before about criminals.  It is said that most criminals are stupid, and I would agree with a qualification: most  stupid criminals are stupid, but it is the really clever sociopaths who work in the white space around the letter of the law, and who rise to top of great firms and even great nations (if there is a meaningful distinction between the two).

I'm veering towards the edge of my comfort zone here but I think I could turn this into a grander bit of social theory.  That is: imperialism.  The vulgar Marxists  (and others) like to tell us that materialism is all about rapacious capitalism and its search for new markets.  An embarrassing hole in that theory is that imperialism appears often to have been horrendously unprofitable.  And yet imperialists persist, despite the economic drain.

The counter-theory (somebody must have worked this up) would be that imperialists go beat up on their neighbors just because they can--for the sheer hell of it, for the fun of it, just because it is there.   History seems to offer a few indisputable.  Take Tamerlain the great (please!): he didn't even clean up after himself.  He just charged in and had himself a nice little conquest, piled up some skulls and moved on.  The Hittites are a less dramatic instance but they seem to fit the pattern: by all appearances they got really nothing tangible out of their neighbors; the obvious inference is that they just must have enjoyed it.

In short, on this analysis,  the bloody-minded set the agenda.  It's their world, we just live (or die) in it.

Update:  UB's warfare correspondent offers:

Actually, artillery is the major cause of death on the battle field.  It’s pretty anonymous –It also may depend on what kind of battlefield – I suspect the snipers do major damage in the house to house fighting in Iraq where use of artillery is a bit of overkill.

Second Thoughts on the Medal of Honor

That piece where I thought I saw a "shift" in the Medal of Honor: Joel suspects I have my history wrong.  Grant that the "new" awards seem to be for saving and  not killing, still am I sure that this new practice is "new?"  Maybe we've done it this way all along?

He's got me there.  Actually, I don't know much of anything specific about who gets/got the Medal.  Indeed, about all I know is what I learned from the Audie Murphy movie (though apparently Audie does counts as a killer: "he personally killed or wounded about 50," according to the official citation).  And the Wiki makes a telling point: apparently our conception of the model has shifted over time and in particular we used to award it for stuff seemingly far less important than what it goes for today.    Example: the first Medals went to the six Union soldiers who kidnapped "The General," the Confederate locomotive (no Medal for Buster Keaton, though).

I still suspect that a careful survey would show a trend away from bellicosity over time, but that is a job for a dissertation and I haven't done it (I'll blog it when I hear of one, though).  So,  advantage, Joel. I suspect there is no disagreement on the other proposition, though: war is about winning,  not killing, and to glamorize killing is wretchedly to miss the point.

Feminizing Masculinizing the Nature of War

Bryan Fischer, a proponent of the view that Christianity requires more killing, actually has an interesting point about the Medal of Honor--it seems to have gone all girlie on us.  He writes:

We have feminized the Medal of Honor.

According to Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, every Medal of Honor awarded during these two conflicts has been awarded for saving life. Not one has been awarded for inflicting casualties on the enemy. Not one. ...

When we think of heroism in battle, we used the think of our boys storming the beaches of Normandy under withering fire, climbing the cliffs of Pointe do Hoc while enemy soldiers fired straight down on them, and tossing grenades into pill boxes to take out gun emplacements.

That kind of heroism has apparently become passe when it comes to awarding the Medal of Honor. We now award it only for preventing casualties, not for inflicting them.

In the narrow sense, he is correct: lately  our recent habit has been to give medals for saving lives, not taking them.  Beyond that, I think he makes a critical error.  I wouldn't claim to be an expert on the theology of Christian slaughter.  But I think he is all wrong on the purpose of war.  The purpose of war is to win.  Killing is incidental.   If killing were the criterion, then the greatest general of the 20th Century would be Sir Douglas Haig. who drove the flower of British manhood in World War I at places like the Somme and Ypres.  Concentration on killing is one of the reasons we had such a terrible record in Vietnam: with such a glorious body count, we couldn't get our minds round the idea that we might not have won.

True that a lot of people get killed in wars, and that plenty of times you have to kill to win.  Ulysses S. Grant made a sad demonstration of that truth in the Overland Campaign.  But you can  make an instructive comparison with Grant's great companion-in-arms, William Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia. For white southerners, Sherman lived on (and, I suspect, still lives on) as the great villain of the piece.   Yet the point of the March through Georgia is that, comparatively speaking, it wasn't all that bloody.  Sherman won it by proving he could do anywhere, do anything: he made the Confederacy his bitch.  But in terms of sheer bloodshed, it is one of the less dramatically bloody in recent history.

Fischer buttresses his argument with a quotation:

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.

But the source is instructive: it is George C. Patton, concededly an effective general, but one who seemed really to enjoy the killing part, at least as long as it was others who died. Patton's bood lust was strong enough that it made some of his own colleagues uncomfortable. It's not a good example for somebody who is trying to create a responsible theory of war.

Today's Factoid: Cannae

Hannibal'a Carthaginians  confronted the Romans in the Battle of Cannae on August 2, 216 B.C.

The battle is unparalleled for its carnage, with more men from a single army killed on that one day ... than on any other day on any other European battlefield: something like 50,000 Romans died, two and a half times the number of British soldiers who fell on the first day of the Somme. ... "[O]ther than those who succumbed to the heat, each of the men who died had to be individually punctured, slashed or battered into oblivion.”

That's Dennis Feeney in the NYT book review this morning, reviewing and quoting from Robert L. O'Connelll, The Ghosts of Cannae.   And yet the Romans won the war.  I've heard it said--by whom?--that the Romans had a way of losing every battle except the last one.