World War II Seen by a Classicist, and Other New Books About Conflict
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Version 0 of 1. It often is difficult to pinpoint exact moments in long-term trends, but there is no question in my mind that the low point of the 20th-century United States military came on March 16, 1968, the day that Army soldiers massacred several hundred Vietnamese villagers, most of them women, children and old men, in the incident we remember as “My Lai.” We remember Lt. William Calley as the perpetrator. But we tend to forget that the events of that day were covered up by officers in the chain of command up to the level of generals. Indeed, the immediate reaction of one general involved was to suggest that charges be brought against an American helicopter pilot who tried to stop the shootings. MY LAI: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent Into Darkness (Oxford University, $34.95), by Howard Jones, a professor of history emeritus at the University of Alabama, is a difficult book to read, but essential to understand the modern history of our nation. One of the few soldiers present to retain a hold on his moral compass was a door gunner on a helicopter who saw a woman lying on the ground, freshly murdered. He realized “instantly that this experience would haunt him for the rest of his life.” More representative was one of the soldiers who took part in the killings who stated, “At the time, I don’t recall that this was a particularly unusual thing.” This book has a flat tone that at times grows monotonous. But in this case, the author’s “just the facts” approach is appropriate. It is a book at once painful and useful, and is likely to become the standard reference work on My Lai. For humanity in general, the low point of the 20th century was World War II, which Victor Davis Hanson accurately portrays as an unprecedented global bloodbath, killing about three percent of all human beings who were alive in 1939. Hanson, the Martin and Illie Anderson senior fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has a mixed reputation among military historians — essentially, it is that the further he wanders from his academic specialty of ancient Greek history, the less reliable he becomes. (For the details, see John A. Lynn’s “Battle: A History of Combat and Culture.”) So I picked up Hanson’s THE SECOND WORLD WARS: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (Basic Books, $40) with some trepidation. To my surprise, I found it lively and provocative, full of the kind of novel perceptions that can make a familiar subject interesting again. It wouldn’t make a good introduction to World War II, but it may win readers already familiar with the conflict’s events. Much of the book is written at the level of the strategic overview. Hanson notes, for instance, that both Germany and Japan probably would have won the war had they stopped early in 1941 and consolidated their gains in Europe and the western Pacific, without Germany attacking Russia and Japan pulling the United States into the conflict. One of Hanson’s running themes is that the Allied victors mainly killed German and Japanese soldiers, while the Axis focused more on killing civilians. Over all, in its accounting of the global carnage, this book amounts to an ode in praise of deterrence and against appeasement and isolationism. Hanson is most original and enjoyable when he uses his professional background in ancient history to illuminate 20th-century war. He writes, for example, that, “like Spartans, Wehrmacht soldiers were effused with militarist doctrine, chronically short of men, brilliantly led on the battlefield — and often deployed for imbecilic strategic ends.” The Red Army’s powerful new T-34 tanks “shocked the Germans, not unlike the manner in which unfamiliar Parthian mounted archers flummoxed supposedly superior Roman Republican legions.” The Allied landings on D-Day in 1944 amounted to “the largest combined land and sea operation conducted since the invasion of Greece by King Xerxes of Persia in spring 480 B.C.” In fact, the book might have been better called “A Classical Historian Assesses World War II.” Less revealing but still entertaining is Michael Korda’s ALONE: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory (Liveright, $29.95). It is half-history, half-memoir, but it tends to work. Many readers have been through all this material before, from the Munich Agreement in September 1938 to the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940. Indeed, the purely military aspects were better covered by Alistair Horne in the classic “To Lose a Battle: France 1940.” But here this crucial time is recounted by someone who witnessed those years as a child. Korda, a longtime book editor before becoming a full-time author, is like a charming dinner party host offering his personal experience of history. In the late 1930s, he writes, refugees from Central Europe arriving at his London home “had the haunted look of people who have just witnessed a bad accident.” As the British Army retreated from the beaches of Dunkirk, Korda’s nanny instructed him to include the British Expeditionary Force in his prayers. In discussing the retreat itself, he persuasively highlights the essential role played by the Royal Navy, which often is overshadowed by the tales of the fishing boats, yachts and other small craft that retrieved thousands of besieged soldiers. Oddly, the title, “Alone,” is misleading, as Korda’s story is not about England fighting alone against Germany — that is, from June 1940, when France dropped out, to June 1941, when Germany attacked Russia — but rather about the events leading up to that difficult time. Still, Korda’s breezy book makes a fine introduction for anyone new to this fulcrum point of the 20th century. One of the few areas of World War II history where more information is still emerging is intelligence operations. In THE LONDON CAGE: The Secret History of Britain’s World War II Interrogation Centre (Yale University, $26) Helen Fry, a prolific historian of the war, looks at the London detention and interrogation center, located in an exclusive neighborhood at the western end of Hyde Park. This unusual London prison camp went through three distinct phases. Early in the war it was used by British military intelligence to examine odd lots of prisoners — U-boat crews, unlucky German paratroopers and spies. Then, starting in 1944, it began to receive a flood of German prisoners, many of them senior commanders. After the war, it housed German officers suspected of war crimes. Some of the most startling interviews took place then, as émigré Jews listened to Waffen SS officers boast of the number of Jews they had killed. One British officer who had been captured during the war found himself interrogating the Gestapo officer who once had brutally interrogated him. This is a good story told poorly, as Fry tends to jump around in time and often repeat herself. One of the most misremembered aspects of World War II is the notion that relations between the military and the news media were smooth then. People who think this usually cite the work of Ernie Pyle, who beautifully chronicled the life of the average G.I. The historical record is far different. Perhaps the biggest single intelligence leak to a reporter in American military history came in June 1942, as the journalist Elliott Carlson demonstrates in his sprightly STANLEY JOHNSTON’S BLUNDER: The Reporter Who Spilled the Secret Behind the U.S. Navy’s Victory at Midway (Naval Institute Press, $29.95). Johnston, a correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, was a talented drifter and a bit of a scammer. He also was a relative newcomer to journalism when he lucked into being aboard a Navy ship that received a top secret transmission about the Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. His news article about that, recklessly written and misleadingly edited, was never submitted to censorship, as was the normal practice. Anyone reading between the lines of the article could deduce that the United States Navy had broken the Japanese Navy’s codes. President Franklin Roosevelt urged the Justice Department to prosecute the reporter and the anti-Roosevelt Tribune. But the Navy refused to discuss its code breaking with a grand jury, rightly fearing any additional publicity, and the case fizzled out. And the Japanese, arrogantly confident in the impenetrability of their codes, apparently did not notice the article and so never realized their secret dispatches were being read by the Navy. Military leadership is an endlessly interesting subject. Few human activities carry such a heavy triple burden — physical, intellectual and spiritual. Two new biographies of Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, illustrate that well. Patrick N. Hunt’s HANNIBAL (Simon & Schuster, $28) starts slowly but comes alive when Hannibal charges into battle. The slow start is more the fault of Hannibal than of Hunt, an archaeologist and biographer who teaches at Stanford University. Hannibal was a one-dimensional man who seemed to live solely for combat against Rome. We know more about how he fought than what he thought. Hunt demonstrates why Hannibal was so adept at battle, in particular his ability to turn to his advantage the quirks of terrain, weather and the characteristics of his Roman foes. The book is particularly illuminating in discussing Hannibal’s famous crossing of the Alps in 218 B.C. Yet Hannibal seemed to have little idea of what to do to turn battlefield success against Rome into lasting victory over it. He wound up fighting up and down Italy for 16 years — at that point, almost a third of his life — only to be recalled to Carthage and then wind up in a lengthy exile. Hunt excels in his descriptions of battles, but the freelance classicist John Prevas, in HANNIBAL’S OATH: The Life and Wars of Rome’s Greatest Enemy (Da Capo, $28), is better at providing context, both strategic and political. For example, he notes that Hannibal’s Alps expedition was striking because it ran against the “conventional thinking at both Carthage and Rome … that a war between the two city-states would be fought initially in Spain and then the decisive campaign would take place in North Africa.” Indeed, he adds, “the Romans apparently never imagined that Hannibal would invade Italy from the north.” Altogether, the two biographies complement each other well in illuminating different aspects of Hannibal’s abilities as a military leader. Reading about our Civil War is almost the opposite of reading about Hannibal. That is, we know so much about this war that we can examine it on an almost minute-by-minute basis, from the level of the generals down to the privates. Perhaps for that reason, there seems to be a kind of trend in Civil War studies to examine minor skirmishes and neglected periods in the conflict. It’s the military history equivalent of “infill” real estate development projects that focus on vacant lots and other neglected urban odds and ends. Earl J. Hess’s minute dissection of THE BATTLE OF PEACH TREE CREEK (University of North Carolina, $37.50) shows the value of this sort of work. It is similar to the Hannibal books in that it illustrates how good military leaders can overcome great odds to prevail in combat. Hess, a Civil War historian at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, emphasizes that the Union troops were seasoned, confident and well supplied. Most of all, they were well led, with field commanders who knew, for example, how to support infantry attacks with devastating artillery barrages. Their top general, William T. Sherman, pursued a coherent and effective strategy informed by the savvy collection and use of intelligence. Peach Tree, fought on July 20, 1864, was a relatively minor Civil War encounter, but even there, the carnage was so great that one soldier reported seeing blood “run in streams down the hillside, and go where you will, there are pools of blood.” A lesser example of Civil War infill is MEADE AND LEE AFTER GETTYSBURG: The Forgotten Final State of the Gettysburg Campaign, From Falling Waters to Culpeper Court House, July 14-31, 1863 (Savas Beatie, $29.95). In it, Jeffrey William Hunt, the director of the Texas National Guard’s museum, does a workmanlike job of telling the story of those two transitional but still minor weeks in the war. A study such as this is for aficionados, not novices. Two of my favorite kinds of military history offer opposite approaches to the subject. One is the quirky niche book that descends into obscure, even humdrum areas and makes them interesting. In the right hands, such a book can be a pleasure. This is the case with HOW TO PLAN A CRUSADE: Religious War in the High Middle Ages (Pegasus, $28.95). In it, Christopher Tyerman , an Oxford historian, looks at the thinking that went into a crusade — how it was justified, supported, peopled, financed and supplied. The theme of the book is that crusaders were not crazed dreamers. Rather, he emphasizes, they pursued their goals rationally — more Dwight Eisenhower than Don Quixote, as he puts it. And for a time, he notes, they succeeded. My other favorite type is the “big think” work that endeavors to provide an insightful new broad overview of a subject. WAR: An Enquiry (Yale University, $26), by the British academic philosopher A.C. Grayling, is an example of such an approach, but unfortunately it is a failed one. Grayling doesn’t seem to know much about war, but with his training in philosophy he apparently decided to read some books on the subject and see what he might come up with. He begins with a gallop through military history, briefly summarizing the summaries of others. He follows this with a series of questionable assumptions and assertions. For example, “aggression is a feeling in an individual, but it is a choice in a state.” (His italics.) Or, more controversially, “the idea of war is a too accepted — too thoughtlessly accepted — feature of the very idea of the state and its behavior.” Unfortunately, in his survey of the history of war, he seems to have missed the discussion by the historian and sociologist Charles Tilly about how modern war made the modern state. If that observation of Tilly’s is true — and the historical record suggests it is — then the question of how to get the state out of the business of war becomes far knottier. But Tilly does not appear in the bibliography. I put down this book wondering why anyone thought that writing and publishing it was a good idea. (Pet peeve: The British and Americans have been fighting in Afghanistan for 16 years, long enough to know that its people are Afghans, not “Afghanis,” which is the currency.) A more successful example of big think history is VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (Princeton University, $35). In it, A. James McAdams, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, explores the rise and fall of Communism. If war built the state, it also helped build the Communist Party. Vladimir Lenin’s faction, the Bolsheviks, was particularly aided by World War I. And Communism, once in power, reversed Clausewitz’s famous dictum and made politics war by other means. The party often attacked the people — first in the Russia of Lenin and Stalin, but most especially in Mao Zedong’s China, from the Hundred Flowers movement to the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution, killing untold millions of people. It’s a lively if depressing story. It made me think that Communism arose in reaction to the Industrial Revolution, became a major force during the era of heavy industry, with all those spewing smokestacks — and then ended along with it. So, I wondered, will there be a similar political reaction to the Information Age? If so, is that new ideology already being born? |