Arms and influence

Nice guys bleed from the eyes

I sometimes marvel at how generous of spirit I can be. It's a marvel, because it leads me to do stupid things, like give Ridley Scott another chance to convince me that he can make an historical drama.

I watched Kingdom of Heaven over the weekend. I couldn't finish it. The scenes establishing Orlando Bloom's awesomeness (usually accompanied shots of Eva Green leering at him like an overfed cat) were bad enough. But why, oh why, did the director see fit to mangle the history to no good dramatic effect?

For example, Eva Green's character, Sibylla, was in real life a much more interesting character than the nymphomaniacal sidekick depicted in Kingdom of Heaven. And Bloom's character, Balian of Ibelin, was no medieval Horatio Alger. Had he been depicted as who he really was, the acknowledged son of an Outremer noble, his leading role in the events of Kingdom of Heaven would have made much more sense.

Equally nonsensical was his purported ability to tell the new king of Jerusalem to get stuffed, he wasn't going to join him in the march against Saladin that turned into the hattin disaster. On what grounds, then, was a disloyal subject given the authority to run Jerusalem's defenses? Again, the reality was far more interesting: Balian, who was captured along with other knights at Hattin, swore he would not take up arms against Saladin if he and his family (not depicted in the film) were released. After the citizens of Jerusalem begged him to stay and help defend the city, Balian broke his oath.

Of course, you'd have to give your audience credit for having some intelligence to understand this kind of drama. Instead, Scott gives us ridiculous villains like the fictionalized Guy de Lusignan, who provokes war with Saladin because....um....er....well...It's not altogether clear why, other than he's eeeeeeevil.

Ugh. Will no one ever make a decent movie about the Crusades?

Johann Bach, Nazi thief

It's a cautionary tale about fact-checking.

Have you ever been experienced?

[Before the brouhaha over Wesley Clark's recent comments started, I had planned on posting something about military experience and presidential leadership. I guess it's even more overdue that I thought.]

For the next several months, we're going to hear a lot of debate over how much personal military experience matters when making presidential decisions about foreign policy and national security. Already, it's clear that the typical discussion in the mainstream media makes a lot of incorrect assumptions, so I thought I'd add some perspective.

Certainly, being in combat does teach you important lessons. For example, every infantryman learns quickly exactly how boring the time leading up to a battle can be, and how terrifying it is when it starts. The average ground-pounder also sees how confusing battle can be. The unluck soldiers also learn how quickly a battle can unravel because of bad information, poor training, or weak leadership.

Leaving aside any existential lessons about life and death, do you really learn anything that is relevant to the job of President of the United States? Yes, to a limited degree. You certainly get an appreciation for how difficult the "management of violence" is. The obvious conclusion is to be conservative in your expectations of what soldiers can do, when chance and violence intersect.

Military experience provides lessons about the means of warfare. It doesn't necessarily teach you anything useful about its ends. There are exceptions. Soldiers who have been stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan may have learned something about how counterinsurgency  is the ultimate expression of the adage, "All politics is local." Someone stationed at NATO headquarters may absorb by osmosis many of the important dynamics of alliance politics. However, these are hardly all the experiences you might wish someone to have before becoming the commander-in-chief.

In fact, many people go through their military careers being dumb about warfare. Here are a few quick examples from the American military experience:

• Mark Clark, the general whose unimaginative, prickly leadership style helped turn the Italian campaign in a slow, bloody crawl up the peninsula.
• William Westmoreland, who vainly tried to treat the Vietnam War as the sort of conflict Americans preferred to fight, instead of the type it really was.
• George McClellan, who had bursts of inspiration at the theater level of strategy, only to fumble these plans when handling the operational and tactical specifics.
• John C.H. Lee, who as the general responsible for supply and logistics in the European theater of WWII, whose laxity and ineptitide almost single-handedly set the war effort back several months (and many thousands of lives).

And we're just getting started with the generals. If you keep going down the chain of command, you'll find countless officers and enlisted men who "saw the elephant" but didn't understand what they were seeing.

While you might prefer your presidential candidates to have served in the military, service is no guarantee of good leadership. For example, while many historians have overlooked Grant's virtues as a general, there's little disagreement that he was a mediocre president.

We also have to be careful not to confuse gratitude with praise. We may be grateful that someone served in the US military. That is not the same as saying that they were good at the military profession, or that they will excel in a different role related to the waging of war.

A banner day

Since I haven't had the time to do a regular post today, I have to at least share one piece of incredibly cool news:

Flags from the battlefield at Waterloo have been found in a cupboard at the home of Sir Walter Scott.

More on the WWII Memorial

Some comments at DCist, Matthew Yglesias, and Lawyers, Guns, and Money, plus my earlier post.

Here's a typical comment in defense of the monument (from the DCist):

So ridiculous, I'm not even sure where to start...

How about with the "It looks like a Nazi/Fascist Memorial" complaint:

Newsflash people: European fascists of the early 20th century are NOT the only people to use Neo-Classical architectural motifs. Fascist governments did use them, and yes, the Nazis were very good at using them. That doesn't make any other application of those motifs inherently fascistic. To the poster who referred to the memorial as fitting in well with "Mussolini's Rome": Since when does a city with thousands of years of culture and history get dismissed as belonging to a dictator who ruled for a smidgen of that?

I'll try, try again to make a simple point: even if the comparison is superficial, or even unfair, a simple artistic choice would have avoided it altogether. Not every monument has to plod along, artistically, following some faux classical motif. Nor does the design have to be as weird as, say, the Pompidou Museum in Paris. There's a lot of architectural possibility between these extremes, none of which would have been reminiscent of the fascist aesthetic.

For example, there's this monument at Omaha Beach. Many Holocaust memorials honor the victims, without suggesting the favorite architecture of the people who killed them. (Here's one in Berlin.) Even this memorial to the Canadians who died liberating Caen has a classical look, without making you think of Albert Speer at all.

Imagine someone building a monument to the West's victory in the Cold War. Hanging from the colossal edifice are 40-foot banners displaying the faces of Reagan, Thatcher, and other Western leaders. In the entrance is a stylized bronze statue depicting a vigorous-looking businessman, sleeves rolled up, briefcase in hand, looking at the distant horizon where history ends (in the Fukuyama sense, not the Marxist sense). I bet a lot of people--not just conservatives--would object to the socialist realist overtones of this design.

Now, back to the WWII memorial: forget the differences among neoclassicism, modern classicism, Soviet classicism, and anything else inspired by the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Just don't build a monument that has any resemblance to the favorite architectural style of the Third Reich.

A medieval view of counterinsurgency

A few months ago, Kat over at Castle Argghh! wrote this great post about the Normans' counterinsurgency war in the British Isles, in the years following 1066. While modern revolutionaries like Mao and Lenin might have crafted particular revolutionary strategies, counterrevolutionary challenges go way, way back. For example, the medieval version of an enclave strategy drove the construction of castles across post-Conquest England and Wales in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Monty in Baghdad

Reading Max Hastings' Armageddon, which covers the closing years of WWII in Europe, I realized that I was in the thick of yet another account of Operation MARKET GARDEN, the fabled (and failed) "bridge too far" campaign. I've read so many accounts of this particular battle, I can't accurately count them. So why read yet another one?

I'll skip quickly past the usual reasons: no one book adequately covers all the details; military historians get into interesting and important debates; even reading the same book twice may give you a slightly different understanding the second time around. My reason for mentioning the uncountable accounts of MARKET GARDEN is a bit different: you never know when you'll bump into an insight about current events, rounding a corner in an historically familiar neighborhood.

Monty's gamble
Here's the short version of Operation MARKET GARDEN: Between September 1944, the Americans and British had chased the Wehrmacht from the Normandy beaches to the banks of the Rhine. Overstrained supply lines, the ingenuity of the Germans on defense, and other factors brought the Allied offensive to a halt. After the seizure of Antwerp, the bulk of British forces faced the Germans in the Netherlands. The top British commander, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, looked across the Dutch landscape and saw an opportunity.

In his sector, Montgomery argued to Eisenhower, the Allies could make a surprise thrust through Holland, cross the line where German defenses were weaker, and then drive into Germany proper. The main problem was the landscape of Holland, which limited any offensive to a single highway, crossing several major rivers. If, in the first days of the battle, the Allies failed to seize all the major bridges around the Dutch cities of Nijmegen, Eindhoven, and Arnhem--and, just as importantly, prevent the Germans from demolishing them--the operation would fail.

The resulting plan, Operation MARKET GARDEN, depended on British and American paratroopers and glider-borne troops to surprise the Germans, secure the bridges, and wait for the British XXX Armored Corps to assault down the highway connecting the three critical cities. Unless the airborne troops moved quickly, the Germans would destroy the bridges. Unless the XXX Corps moved quickly, the Allied troops behind enemy lines would be the lightning rods for devastating German counterattacks.

Operation MARKET GARDEN suffered many problems, all of which contributed to a costly debacle. The Germans delayed the airborne troops from seizing their objectives as quickly as planned (especially difficult, since the parachute and glider drops took more than a single day to put all the troops into the battlezone). The tanks of the XXX Corps could not leave the highway to drive overland, given the risk of bogging down in the soft Dutch terrain. The armored advance, therefore, remained only a few tanks wide across its entire length, making it relatively easy for the Germans to bring it to a halt at any point. This geographic limitation, combined with a strange lack of urgency at key points in the battle, made it impossible for the XXX Corps to link up with the British 1st Airborne division in Arnhem, where the "Red Devils" fought a courageous but doomed defense. Aside from massive casualties, the Western Allies also suffered months of delay in finally defeating Nazi Germany.

The biggest problem with MARKET GARDEN, however, lay in the plan itself, not its execution. Montgomery's plan--unusually risky, for a general famous for his caution--depended on every element succeeding. If the Allies seized the bridges around Eindhoven, and if they seized Nijmegen, and if they seized Arnhem, and if the British armored column reached all three cities in time, MARKET GARDEN would be a success. If any link in this chain of events failed, the entire campaign would fall apart.

Bush's blunder
MARKET GARDEN, therefore, is a cautionary tale to which the practitioners of war should regularly return. Whenever someone feels tempted to take this sort of risk, they can sober up quickly just by remembering the American paratroopers crossing a river in small boats, in broad daylight, into German machine gun fire, because it was the only chance to seize the next link in the chain. Or, you might remember the slow death of the 1st Paras in Arhhem, fighting a delaying action from house to house, with inadequate weapons to combat the German tanks blasting their hiding places into rubble.

Of course, there's nothing stopping people who are ignorant of history from violating its lessons. There's also no firm barrier between ambition and sense. Just as Montgomery imagined he saw a chance for the British to claim the great prize, the killing blow to Hitler's Reich, George W. Bush and members of his Administration thought they found the moment to deal, once and for all, with the Ba'athist regime in Iraq.

As anyone could and should have seen at the time, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM depended on too many military and political "ifs" going exactly according to plan. If Iraq forces collapsed quickly, as the proponents of "shock and awe" had hoped...If a roaring success in Iraq could silence any domestic and international critics...If Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's promises that the American forces committed to both the invasion and occupation proved to be correct...If the Iraqi populace felt more gratitude for the occupation than resentment...If the Iraqi exiles, or their counterparts who remained in Iraq, could quickly assemble a functional government...Then, of course, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM would be a success.

Again, you might fault many aspects of this military operation's execution. Had the US officials been more concerned about the shadowy insurgency than capturing Saddam Hussein, the critical first few months of the occupation might have muted the violence to come. Had the same officials thought more carefully about how the motley insurgent groups might react to American actions, instead of treating them as if they were target dummies waiting to be shot and then collected, the Americans and Iraqis might have avoided wasting the first few years of fighting a counterinsurgency war.

These questions of execution can mislead us into believing that there was just a tactical adjustment here, a few extra resources there, that might have led to a happier outcome. The problem with Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was just the same as with MARKET GARDEN: too many elements had to succeed for the overall plan to be anything but a failure.

Refusing to take the sucker's bet
The major difference, of course, was who bore the responsibility for stopping the needlessly risky enterprise (or radically re-designed it to the point where it was a different campaign entirely).
In 1944, Eisenhower should have said no to his nominal subordinate, Montgomery, even if this refusal put greater strain on the American-British alliance. In 2003, the Congress--the President's Constitutional peer--plus the American press, and ultimately the American public, should have recognized a bad plan for what it was. Even if few of them were experts on Iraq, they could have asked the obvious question: "What's the fallback plan if any part of this strategy should go awry?"

For anyone who doesn't see the point of revisiting the failures of 2003, military history poses an obvious question. If, in 2003, Americans were willing to ignore the bloody, awful lessons of 1944, what are the chances that we've really learned the lessons of 2003 yet?

Why I hate the World War II memorial

While in DC, I finally got to see the World War II memorial. While we were resting our feet, Queenmommy asked me what I thought of it.

"Um, I don't know if there's any good way to say this, but..."

She immediately jumped in: "It looks like a Nazi memorial!"

Queenmommy knows whereof she speaks, having written a dissertation on totalitarian art and architecture, including the Third Reich's. Even someone who is less learned in the arts, and just has spent his life reading about the Nazis and World War II, could see the similarity. Why didn't the people who approved this structure?

If you have doubts, take a look at this side-by-side comparison. On the left is the Ehrenhalle, part of the Nuremberg rally grounds. On the right is a picture of the WWII memorial in Washington.

Not convinced? Take a look at this aesthetic comparison:

And then there are the eagles:

Even if the resemblances were completely superficial, the designers of the WWII Memorial should have avoided them altogether. In fact, the two monuments on either side of it suggest alternatives. The Washington Monument, like the Vietnam Memorial, has a distinctive simplicity, without any faux classical pretensions. The Lincoln Memorial has a more human element, unlike the tiny reliefs in the entry pathway to the WWII Memorial. (If you enter from the other side, you may miss them altogether.)

There were alternatives to the design, but now we're stuck with something that the very people we defeated in WWII would have applauded.

UPDATE: Garrison Keillor doesn't like the WWII memorial either.

Constant State of Antipathy (CSA)

Americans are too damn polite.

That's what I thought while reading a "pity the poor Confederates" screed in the designer's notes section of a wargame rulebook. Normally, that's where the designer talks about the decisions that went into a game simplifying the complexity of historical events, without being so complex that the game becomes unplayable.

We can study military history via the medium of a wargame without giving our approval or disapproval to the contending parties. No one should be confused, when playing a game about the European theater in WWII, that the German player is inherently pro-Nazi--just as reading a book about the Holocaust doesn't mean you approve of genocide.

In the case of the wargame C.S.A., however, the designer's notes take a very different turn, musing about whether both the North and South would have been better off had the South won its independence. Here are the key lines from the designer's notes, titled (I kid you not) "The South Was Right...":

But what if the South had won? What if all the rage and resentment over defeat, reconstruction, and civil rights had never happened, and the South were free to find its own road out of the heathen barbarism of slavery?

Defenses of the Confederate cause usually feature some mix of bad history, non sequiturs, unworkable attempts at moral equivalency, and specious arguments. The two sentences quoted above contain at least two of those elements. Let's knock a few of them down, one by one:

• The "rage and resentment over defeat" are, of course, the by-product of deciding to secede from the United States, fight a secessionist war, and lose. Anyone starting a war risks losing that war.
• The "rage and resentment" over reconstruction might have had some justification until the election of 1876, when Reconstruction effectively ended. Nothing happened during those 22 years that was so horrible that, 132 years later, Southerners should still smarting over it. Did carpetbaggers and granting the vote to former slaves constitute a chamber of horrors?
• Here's a simpler, more historically justified explanation for the South's "rage and resentment" against the civil rights movement: racism. Not states' rights, not Reconstruction, not the loss of some mythic cavalier culture. The people who turned fire hoses and dogs on their fellow citizens, just because they wanted to sit at the same lunch counter as everyone else, hated "the nigrahs."

Ultimately, all roads lead back to slavery. Other issues may be tangled up in it, but in 1861, it was the issue. Instead of it fading away, as the Founders had assumed it would, slavery grew. The total number of slaves expanded, as did the percentage of the Southern economy invested in both slaves and the land they worked. As cotton grew more profitable, the South's defense of slavery grew more vigorous. Southern politicians fought aggressively to extend slavery to new territories and states, and to prevent their slaves from escaping to the North.

By the eve of the Civil War, there was no clear sign that the South would "find its own road out of the heathen barbarism of slavery." Whether the driving force was the economics or the lifestyle of the plantation, the plantation itself ran on slave labor. Both Northerners and Southerners believed that, barring a major historical event, slavery would persist. And even if they had believed that "the peculiar institution" was fated to shrivel and die, what exactly is the moral argument for keeping further generations of human beings in bondage until it did?

There's no polite way of saying these things. The Confederates were the bad guys. They lost. Hallelujuah. Southerners defending "the Cause" are inescapably defending an evil institution. States' rights are, in theory, a fine thing; states' rights invoked to maintain slavery are an abomination.

Politeness should have its limits. When we allow a major segment of our own population to maintain a grudge against the rest of the country, based on historically and morally unjustified fantasies, we're doing all of us a grave disservice.

[For an excellent demolition of Confederate revisionism, see this series of posts at Lawyers, Guns, and Money.]

Tonight, on "The Adams Family"

What the hell happened during the production of the HBO series John Adams? The series started strong, with Adams' dramatic defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre. By the last episode, the show seemed to have lost interest in Adams the public man.

Charles, Adams' son, drinks himself to death. We all suffer through long, long scene of a doctor removing Nabby's breast, without anesthesia. Urk.

Screen time spent on these events is time subtracted from public affairs--including, startlingly, the collapse of the friendship between Adams and Jefferson. There's no mention of Jefferson's hiring of James Callender to execute a smear campaign against Adams in the 1800 election, which backfired horribly. Therefore, in the HBO series, their famous reconciliation through correspondence is mysterious: why did they need to be reconciled in the first place?

And what was up with all the tilted camera angles?  I felt as though I was in the Joker's hideout on the old Batman TV series.

Yes, I'm annoyed. The series hooked me in, then somewhere in the middle, took a disappointing turn.

Our American relative

Being in Washington, DC has certainly helped me get blogging again. New York may be grand; San Francisco, vibrant; Savannah, welcoming; or Chicago, muscular. No city in the United States can match Washington for its power to inspire.

Visiting the Newseum, the new museum of journalism, was an unexpected pleasure. I was braced for a lot of superficial, self-congratulatory pap. Sure, that did appear in the occasional nook or cranny (or multi-screen, Jumbotron-delivered montage), but by and large, the real theme of the Newseum is the Bill of Rights.

You get to see every point on the continuum of liberty, from old copies of the Catholic Index to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, the extremely helpful guides suggest that you start at the bottom of the multi-story Newseum, which includes sections of the Berlin Wall and, more disturbingly, one of the guard towers that used to keep East Berliners from escaping to West Berlin.

Of course, the entire landscape of Washington, DC, is its own memorial to liberty. Not just the monuments, but the office buildings themselves, suggest important moments in American history, and the daily work to keep the American republic going. Here is the place where Martin Luther King gave his most famous (but not necessarily his best) speech. Here is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

As difficult as the last several years have been, it's moments like these that remind me how much I love America. At its best moments, the United States has encouraged the conviction that everyone in this country is part of the same family, and that people abroad are just our distant cousins. All of them deserve the best treatment we can give.

Love of America is tricky. You can't govern the American family by imposing sentiment, as if our public moments were like an uncomfortable holiday gathering. Everyone must say the right things. Everyone must sit in their proper place. Don't mention any uncomfortable truths, for fear that these moments of manufactured amity will shatter.

Loving America is more like embracing a difficult relative. At times, it will do and say stupid things. The misbehavior might grow to such alarming proportions that you begin to question whether redemption is possible. Still, you persevere, in the hopes that things will get better. The brother who is skipping from one dead end job to another has an epiphany about how much better his life might be. The alcoholic aunt, at long last, checks into the rehab center. The United States decides that fear is not the best guide to domestic or foreign policy.

Love demands faith. In fact, love is faith. Not the type of faith that demands you believe in the unprovable, or the ridiculous, in the fashion of credo quia absurdum. Faith, in this sense, means the compulsion to do good, to persevere even in the face of your own incredulity.

This is the kind of faith shown, in the New Testament, by a Roman soldier who asks Jesus to cure his sick servant, even though he does not believe that Jesus has supernatural powers. Still, he must try any way he can to help his servant, which leads Jesus to comment, "Assuredly, I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel!"

Even for the unchurched, such as myself, you can see the secular equivalent of this story.

One of history's most moving moments

Shown here are two victims of the destruction of Pompeii. The man appears to be trying--in vain--to protect the woman from the wave of destruction sweeping through the city.

It's one thing to see this picture. It's another to see the real thing, created when archaeologists poured plaster into the hole that Vesuvius' pyroclastic flow left where two human beings once were.

Straight from 2,000 years ago, indescribable pathos. Amazing.

Oh, the pain, the pain...

The A&E mini-series about Napoleon re-defines agony. Do not, under any circumstances, rent or buy this giant mutant raging turkey.

The first episode was unintentionally hilarious for a little while. Apparently, the producers couldn't scrape together many re-enactors, so Napoleon's army in Italy and Egypt consists of about 20 guys. The expedition to Egypt consists of three or four baffling scenes (Napoleon dumping a plague-ridden soldier into his buddy's arms, Napoleon's tiny army marching across some dunes, Napoleon's mother providing some clumsy exposition about the destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay). During a party at Malmaison, people react to the news of Napoleon's return as if Mongo were arriving instead. The dialogue was laugh-out-loud ridiculous. (Napoleon: "People talk about you as if you were God." Talleyrand: "Or, Satan!")

After a while, the awfulness becomes too agonizing to endure. The MST3K moments don't outweigh the pain. Stay away.

[P.S. I know there's a law in France that all indigenously-produced movies must star Gérard Depardieu, but does that apply to movies about France? Even if he's the producer?]

"Look at the detail on President Lee's face!"

For any Civil War history buffs who were ever tempted to order something from the Franklin Mint:

Sin no more, you polluting clones

As someone keenly interested in the role of religion in Western history, today's headline, Vatican lists "new sins," including pollution was both intriguing and frustrating. Was the Catholic Church actually defining new sins? Or was it saying that global warming and unchecked corporate greed were merely the modern versions of eternal categories of sin, such as gluttony and greed?

From what little you can discern from the articles this morning, maybe Archbishop Girotti was just dressing old sins in modern costume. However, where then does the Vatican's version of bioethics fit? Some version of natural law, and not one of the categories of deadly sin? Or is this just a scheme to find more reasons for people to confess?

Thank you, mainstream media, for trying to convince us that the Catholic Church is making some sort of historical change, and then not bothering to explain what it is.

Wargames and poetry

[Today is the harmonic convergence of personal geekdom. I don't know why--it just happened that way.]

Here's a recent video review of a wargame I liked:

I have a lot of respect for people wargame designers, the poets of military history.

Poetry...Huh? I'll explain.

Brevity is the soul of wit
Designing wargames isn't like writing a book, in which more detail means greater accuracy. Wargames are supposed to be played, which means there's only a limited about of complexity you can cram into a game before it becomes unplayable.

Therefore, you pick the details that you think matter. You pick game mechanics that fit the subject. For example, ancient and medieval battles normally ended when one side's morale broke. High casualty rates in battles like Cannae were far and away the exception. Therefore, if you're designing a game depicting the important battles of the Hundred Years War, you don't want to pick game mechanics (usually involving a lot of die rolling) that ends with unhistorically high levels of carnage.

With a limited amount of rules that any player can learn, you therefore want to pick ones that capture the essence of what you're simulating. For ancient and medieval battles, you want morale to be the deciding factor. You might also emphasize the limited command and control that the army commander had, especially once formations started moving and fighting. Too many added details might actually get in the way of telling the story of a battle through the game.

The shock of the new
Interesting innovations happen when you can't borrow mechanics from earlier games. For example, about 15 years ago, Mark Herman, who had designed dozens of wargames, was thinking about how to make politics and historical events an important, vivid part of a new game about the American War of Independence. His Big Idea was a deck of cards that the players used to move their leaders and armies, drop "political control" markers around the map, and trigger important events like the Declaration of Independence and the French entry into the war. Today, the wargame market is flooded with "card-driven" games covering conflicts as varied as the Thirty Years War, World War I, and Napoleon's "Spanish ulcer."

[In the video, I refer to "block games," which use stand-up wooden blocks to hide the identity and strength of units from the other player. It's the same fog of war mechanic used in Stratego, but these are much more interesting games.]

More lovely and more temperate
Realistically, game designers also have to think about making the game interesting to play, not just historically faithful. You have to consider how long it will take to play the game, and how much "down time" one player suffers while the other player is doing something. You have to reach the right level of aesthetic appeal to engage the eye while the brain is churning away.

Playability is especially tricky, since most conflicts, from the grand strategic to the tactical, have favored one side over the other. "Nearly-run things" like Waterloo are the exception. Finding ways to make the game challenging and interesting to both sides often demands a lot of cleverness.

Wargames, therefore, pack a lot of meaning into a constrained medium. They have to be interesting, evocative, and often provocative. They have to capture something truthful and essential. They are, in these ways, the poetry of military history, which complement the prose of books and articles. 

Military history's blank spots

The other day, I was playing a tactical-level wargame, Combat Commander, with a friend. The new "Mediterranean" expansion was just published, which added three nationalities--French, Italian, and British--to the original set of Americans, Soviets, and Germans. I had the misfortune of playing the French. If you believe the way in which the rules depict the French Army, they had the worst infantry, bar none, of any European power in World War II. Since the designer uses the French to depict all the "Allied minors" (Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, etc.), the same broad brush strokes tarred them as well.*

As you might guess, I don't agree with this depiction of the French in WWII. While the French military in 1939 and 1940 had its share of problems--for example, it had not finished the doctrinal and organizational changes needed for modern mechanized warfare--it's unfair for the game designer to extend the blame to the poor bloody French infantryman. By the admittedly few accounts I've read, the French soldier was not as abominably trained, equipped, or led as, say, the poor schmucks in the German Ost battalions. Though the Italians often get caricatured, too, I'd be hard pressed to say that Italian infantry units were markedly better than their French counterparts.

Of course, there's not a lot of information about the French army in WWII that's widely available in English. Sure, you can find plenty of accounts of the American, German, and British armed forces. Here in the US, there's even more information about the Soviet military than the French armed forces, including the Free French. (Again, the same statement applies to the Italians.)

Maybe I'm slightly less ignorant, or slightly more ignorant, about the French army in WWII than the game designer in question. However, both he and I have a hard time finding a lot of information on that topic, so the difference isn't likely to be substantial.

Most standard accounts of the Battle of France are largely written from the German point of view. You might find some very high-level information about French strategy in 1940, such as the interesting historical fuss that Ernest May kicked up in Strange Victory. (Was it more "strange" that the French lost, or that the Germans won?) However, in May and other widely available accounts, you won't find a lot about the organization several levels below Gamelin or other French military leaders.

It's important, therefore, to know what you don't know in military history--or any history, for that matter. For example, I used to joke that Liddell-Hart's history of WWII was originally titled, How the British Muddled Through and Were Really Responsible for the Allied Victory. No surprise, though, since Liddell-Hart was writing about what he knew, Great Britain's part in World War II, particularly in the European theater. Historians write and draw conclusions based on what they know. Whether the topic is the French army in World War II, or the Iraqi insurgent groups today, we have to be very, very careful about how our covert ignorance, even more than our overt biases, can distort our understanding.

 

---

* For the wargamers reading this post, Combat Commander depicts command, control, leadership, and troop quality through the cards used to take actions. Just as important as having a big hand of cards, and therefore a lot of choices, is the discard rate, which can help you when all the choices fate has dealt to you are bad. The discard rate for the French and Allied Minors is one card, the lowest of all nationalities in the game.

World religion in less than five minutes

I know, this animated graphic oversimplifies a lot, but it's a noble effort.

Battlefield Biker

Even if you travel in a less adventurous four-door sedan, Battlefield Biker is a great resource for military history buffs. If you want to know how to get to a battlefield site, and in many cases, how to tour it by motorcycle, car, velocipede, or ice cream truck, the Biker is a good place to start.

A different 9/11 anniversary

On September 11, 1944, American troops were preparing for an assault into the Hurtgen Forest, a dense tangle of pine trees southeast of Aachen. The campaign to seize the Hurtgenwald started before and ended after the Battle of the Bulge, though few Americans have ever heard of this other operation in the winter of 1944. Like the slow crawl up the Italian peninsula, the fight for the Hurtgen Forest was, at best, a Pyrrhic victory for the Allies.

The US Army was not used to fighting in a forest like the Hurtgenwald--certainly not as experienced in that sort of terrain as its German opponent. The Wehrmacht had fought through forests in Poland, Belgium, and France, including the unexpected dash through the Ardennes Forest that led to the collapse of the French army. German soldiers had also seen combat in the forests of Denmark, Norway, and most significantly, the USSR. They had learned the deadly advantages that forests could give the defender and applied these techniques to their defense of the Hurtgenwald.

The US Army believed it had the material advantages, and certainly the initiative, over its German adversary. What American generals did not have was a clear reason to be fighting in the Hurtgen Forest, which was not critical for the Allies to meet their theater-level objectives. American forces, driving into Germany, had other routes into Germany. However, once the Army had started fighting, its generals were loathe to give up the fight. The prestige of the US Army was at stake, and they worried about the blow to morale a retreat from the Hurtgenwald would have delivered.

However, it's hard to imagine worse damage to the 10 divisions that entered the Hurtgen Forest in September 1944 than what they suffered in the actual battle. Many units suffered casualties of 100% and higher. (If you're wondering how that's possible, consider that casualty rates include replacements, who are cycled into units to replace soldiers who are killed, wounded, captured, or missing.) In the second attempt to seize the town of Schmidt, the 112th Infantry Regiment lost 2,093 out of 3,000 men in two weeks of fighting.

The battle shattered the nerves of those fighting almost immediately. Combat fatigue struck not only soldiers in the front lines, but captains, majors, and colonels, many of whom had to be relieved of their commands.

Eventually, the Allies evicted the Germans from the Hurtgen Forest. However, that victory happened, in large part, because of the general collapse of German defenses across the Western Front, along with the pressure from the Soviets in the East.

It's worth remembering and analyzing the US failure in the Hurtgen Forest because, as the Army itself says, defeat is often a better teacher than victory. It's also worth remembering the cost of refusing to retreat, particularly when the reasons for fighting were never clear in the first place.

Slaves and lemonade

You're organizing the senior prom, and you can't think of a theme. Where on the list of ideas would you rank a Confederate theme, complete with people who darken their skin to play slaves? Assuming the other 58,731 ideas don't pan out, would you have a "skit" about the capture of a runaway slave? Or a lemonade stand, run by faux slaves? Or run a caption under the picture of the lemonade stand that says, "The slaves served lemonade- it was a riot"?

In short, it takes a monumental collapse in judgment to do what the Riverdale, CA school run by the local chapter of the Assembly of God, a Pentacostal sect, did recently. And that's the generous interpretation.

To be fair, the information about this incident is scant. There's this post from a local blogger, who included the photographs and captions. There's also the web site for the Riverdale Assembly of God church, which is currently down. Finally, there's also the picture album of an Assembly of God parishioner, which is currently unavailable to anyone who's not on his friends list. No one from the local media, including the Fresno Bee, has yet covered the event.

What on earth were they thinking? Sadly, no one can say at this point. (I'd welcome anyone from the Riverdale Assembly of God, if you're reading, to post a comment here. Please, please, tell us that this is all a horrible misrepresentation or misunderstanding.) Possible explanations range from an astounding ignorance of American history to something a lot more sinister. I sincerely hope ignorance is the culprit here.

If not, we're left to speculate about the politics of this central California church. Certainly, the appearance of a substantial contingent from the Riverdale Assembly of God at a Free Republic rally says something about the political leanings of some members. Many Christian conservatives, including Assembly of God members, have been very cozy with Confederate revisionists. The pictures from Riverdale suggest the sort of "the slaves were happy in the bucolic South" blarney that revisionists like the Council of Concerned Citizens and many backers of "Confederate Heritage Month." However, that's just speculation at this point.

It's well past time for the people who won the Civil War--i.e., all Americans--to set the record straight, once and for all. "Respect" for the prickly opinions of some Confederate revisionists allows unforgivable ignorance of our own collective history to flourish. Even if not a single person in the Riverdale Assembly of God is a Confederate revisionist, the Confederate revisionists have fostered ignorance and confusion about the defining conflict in American history, leading to collective stupidities like this senior prom. People who are too polite (or afraid) to object to the revisionists are just as culpable.

War on the map

Continuing from the last post, here's another way to show how useless numbers alone are in deciphering a battle. Most good military histories include a map that looks something like this:

In this case, we're looking at a detail of the final phase of the Battle of Antietam. The IX Corps, under General Ambrose Burnside, pushed across Antietam Creek. The image is static, but you get a sense of the troop movements, the terrain across which they fought, and (in many maps) the outcome. In this case, the mapmaker is trying to depict that, after Burnside's troops captured a bridge and moved beyond west bank, the Confederates counterattacked, pushing the IX Corps back to the creek.

It's hard to convey the entire course of a battle in a single map; multiple maps are usually best. Here are two maps of Antietam side-by-side, including the larger map from which I extracted the detail. You can see the changes from the beginning of the bloodiest single day of combat in American history, around 9:00 AM, and at the end, before sundown. Zooming out, these two maps show you the troop movements around what became the Antietam battlefield, showing how and why the Union and Confederate armies clashed at this particular spot.

If you want another example of this "multiple snapshot" approach, take a look at these maps depicting the beginning, middle, and end of the Battle of Austerlitz. In an age of relatively easy-to-use video tools, it's no surprise that many historical cartographers are now creating fully animated maps, letting you play, pause, and rewind the course of a battle or campaign. The BBC created this animated map of the Battle of Trafalgar, complete with details on ship-to-ship tactics.

Orders of battle, and other obsessions

The other day, when I was writing a post about urban warfare and counterinsurgency, I tripped over a classic problem in military history: the order of battle. It's a good window into many issues, from the particular concerns of military history, to the reasons why you hardly ever hear substantive news about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

First, let me rewind to yesterday, when I was trying to make a point about battles in cities. I needed a simple piece of information: when the Red Army closed the noose on the Germans trapped in Stalingrad, how badly outnumbered were the Germans? I was away from the home office, so I didn't have access to the usual references. So I searched for Internet sources...And searched...And searched.

While I'm usually a defender of Wikipedia, despite its flaws, it was irritating to read the wholly inadequate account of the Battle of Stalingrad there. If the 20th century turned on the results of World War II, and World War II turned on Stalingrad, the battle deserves a bit more detail than you'll find in the Wikipedia entry--like, for example, the actual forces deployed in the battle.

I looked for another shortcut, such as a map of the battle. If you can see a list of the units deployed, and where, you can get an approximate idea of the ratio of forces. You can extrapolate from the number of soldiers in each level of military organization--regiments, divisions, armies, etc.--based on the average size of these units at the time of the battle. If you know the order of battle, the exact units involved in the battle, you can estimate the ratio of Soviet to German troops.

Unfortunately, you also need to know how depleted these units were. Units take casualties; replacements take time to train and deploy; more soldiers die. Rarely do you find any unit fully manned, and at Stalingrad, many Soviet and Axis units had already taken heavy casualties when the Soviets launched Operation Uranus, the encirclement of the city.

At this point, I have to point out that the order of battle is a bit trickier than I've implied. For example, the German 6th Army, which was surrounded in Stalingrad, included more than just German troops. Many Rumanians also found themselves trapped in the city. Nearby, around the city, the Axis forces pushed back during Operation Uranus included Germans, Rumanians, Italians, and Hungarians.

Not every army had the same number of soldiers in each type of unit, and they often had a different mix of roles and equipment. For example, a German infantry division had more anti-tank guns, and more trucks to move them around, than a Rumanian division. Differences in the size and composition of units existed even within the same army. For example, a Soviet Guards armored division, an elite unit, was normally better staffed, equipped, and supplied than a regular armored division.

Which leads to questions about the actual combat strength of a given unit. Numbers alone don't decide battles; the training, morale, equipment, leadership, and supply level of a given platoon, company, battalion, or other type of unit can be an even better measure of fighting capability than numbers. A German division that had been fighting, block by block through Stalingrad put up far less of a fight than a fresh Soviet division. On the other hand, a batch of Soviet conscripts, fresh off the boat (in the sense of being unloaded from the Volga River bank straight into combat), would break and run faster than many fatigued, understrength, and undersupplied German veterans.

So, we have the numbers, the organization, and the current fighting effectiveness of the units involved in the battle. Have I left anything out? Oh, yeah. You also need to know where they were deployed, at each point in the battle.

The "where" part of the equation has two parts, position and terrain. Position matters a lot, since not everyone is necessarily fighting in the same part of the battle. When the Soviets launched Operation Uranus, they were attacking both the Axis units in Stalingrad as well as the ones around the city. Therefore, if you look at the number of Soviet units deployed, you might mistakenly believe that they were all focused on the Germans and Rumanians in the city. Later, once the Soviets closed the ring, a number of their forces shifted to the strangulation of the Axis defenders in Stalingrad. Therefore, troops shift around the battlefield, changing the combat ratio at different geographical points. (Therefore, a series of maps, snapshots of different points in time, are always a better guide to a battle than any single map.)

That last point--the "local" balance of forces--is always critical. Armies don't fight equally across all fronts. Instead, they concentrate their efforts at key points. When the Wehrmacht concentrated their forces in Belgium and the Low Countries, rupturing the Allied defenses in the Battle of France, they were seizing strategic territory and creating confusion behind enemy lines. In 1944, when the Soviets focused their efforts on the destruction of Army Group Center, they were trying to crush any hope that the Germans could halt the Red Army's march through Eastern Europe and Germany. In a different conflict, the First Indochina War, the Viet Minh threw their strength against the defenders of Dienbienphu to cripple French national morale.

Therefore, local superiority matters. Even armies that are outnumbered, as US forces were in the 1991 and 2003 wars against Iraq, can still go on the offensive if they can maintain local superiority in the places where it hurts the enemy. (Since this trick depends on superior battlefield intelligence, communications, and coordination, the American advantage in training and equipment was a huge "force multiplier" in both conflicts.)

However, terrain can nullify major advantages in numbers, training, and all the rest.  The Axis forces on the flanks of the 6th Army were stuck in the vulnerable steppes. Attacking troops in the wide open spaces was far easier than digging German defenders out of the buildings and rubble of Stalingrad itself.

So, what does this all have to do with Iraq? On any given day, coverage of the war uses only two perspectives: the individual soldier at the bottom of the order of battle, and the civilian and military leaders at the top. Those are two valid perspectives on any given day of combat, but they're hardly the whole story.

Which units are fighting, in what shape they are, whom they're fighting--these are far more important details, if you want to know how well the war is going. (Which is another way of saying that the press overlooks the operational level of strategy.) Of course, this picture takes a lot of work to assemble--a much bigger job than sitting through a press conference, or following an infantry squad on patrol.

Incidentally, the actual ratio of forces at Stalingrad was 1.14 million Soviet troops, versus 300,000 Axis defenders in Stalingrad. Of course, as you can see, those numbers alone don't tell you a lot.

D-Day squared

Today is the anniversary of D-Day, the greatest testament to the value of throwing all the preparation, resources, and expertise you have into anything you claim to be a defining battle for the future of civilization.

Today is also the birthday of Diane Meysenburg, my high school US history teacher. Diane was a great influence on many of her students. After I graduated, she and her husband were friends and mentors. Diane passed away several years ago. We miss her.

Books 'n' games

During my morning crawl around favorite web sites, I spotted this list of top-notch military history books, with matching top-drawer wargames. If you're a military history buff who has never looked into wargames before, this might be a good way to get your bearings in that hobby. Plus, many of the book recommendations are worth writing down.

Memorial Day, Athenian-style

Another way you might mark Memorial Day is by reading Pericles' funeral speech. After being struck by its brilliance, you might then ponder the deep flaws and contradictions of imperial Athens, especially in the midst of the Peloponnesian Wars, when Pericles delivered his famous oration. The faults of the speaker or the Athenian polis do not undermine their virtues and accomplishments, however.

Memento mori

Memorial Day started as a day of remembrance with strong political overtones. After the Civil War, local communities set aside a day to remember those who had fallen in the Civil War. There was no national consensus about the date for this remembrance, nor was there even an agreement over whom to remember. Northern communities naturally favored the memories of Union troops; Southern communities preferred to mourn the Confederate dead. Since the focus of the event varied, so did the name, from the neutral "Decoration Day" to the explicitly secessionist "Confederate Memorial Day."

With memories of the war still raw, the nation nevertheless survived, in spite of these divided views over which casualties deserved to be honored. By the 20th century, enough time had passed that Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line could agree on having a single day to remember all the hallowed dead from all of America's wars.

A neutral holiday eventually turned into a neutered holiday. Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and the Fourth of July have stopped being events about the nation's history. These are now largely private events, held in the backyards of American homes--with the exception of Fourth of July fireworks displays, which lack any historical or civic content. The public reminders of our collective history, even one as controversial as the Civil War, and our contemporary duties, as seen in the mirror of our war dead, are largely missing.

Nevertheless, we can take at least a moment today to remember the casualties of our wars. We can also use the opportunity to make our feelings known about our current and future wars. When is it worth sending men and women to die, to protect the rest of us? The United States is strong enough, as a democratic union, to endure both our agreements about whom we memorialize, and our disagreements over how many new casualties we mourn next year. In fact, American democracy needs both these agreements and disagreements, in equal measure. If we survived the Civil War, we'll survive our current conflicts.

Norman CGI

Although I could have done without the music, this animated version of the Bayeaux Tapestry is amazingly clever.

Did the Civil War end?

Since April was "Confederate Heritage Month," the team at Lawyers, Guns, and Money spent those sunshine-filled weeks dismantling the mythology about the Confederate cause. They slapped down the myth that slaves were ready to fight for their white masters. They gave a stomach-churning example of the treacly odes to the lost cause. They recounted the massacre of Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, a war crime for which Confederate partisan Nathan Bedford Forrest never paid. They highlighted the disgusting coziness between many Southern politicians and modern Confederate revisionists.

In toto, it was a great series, some of the best blogging I've read. I wish I'd had more time in April--I would have contributed a few posts on the same topics over here in Arms and Influence-Land.

It's important to remember that, for many Americans, the Civil War was never settled. It's bizarre, embarrassing, and immoral that Americans are still debating whether the Civil War was really about slavery, or if the good guys won that conflict. But here we are.