Arms and influence

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?

El Alamein

This weekend, I watched El Alamein: In the Line of Fire, an Italian movie about the North African corner of WWII. Like most war movies made since the 1960s, El Alamein takes the soldier's perspective, not the generals, so don't watch it to learn about the battle. However, it's refreshing to see the Italians given their due for a change.

The story is familiar: War is brutal, confusing, and random for the infantryman. The characters face some interesting challenges along the way, and the acting is top-notch. The movie shows "the face of battle" extremely well, including the terror of being on the receiving end of an artillery barrage or a tank-led attack.

The Italian army is one of the most interesting and the most under-studied combatants in WWII. Good luck finding an institutional history of the Italian army, compared to hundreds of books about the Wehrmacht. Italians fought and died in the Italian peninsula, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Eastern Front, and all most Americans know of them is an unflattering caricature.

That's a shame, not only because of the gaps in the historical record, but also because of the Italian army's little-known opposition to the Holocaust. As an organization, not as discrete individuals, the Italian army regularly threw a spanner into the machinery of genocide whenever it could. For example, Italian troops guarding the trains carrying prisoners to German concentration camps would regularly "forget" to lock the doors of the train cars. If I had more time and resources, I'd love to research this topic more deeply.

Flags of our fathers

After several abortive attempts to get through it, I finished watching Flags of Our Fathers. The movie ends with a quote that bluntly states the movie's point:

I finally came to the conclusion that he maybe he was right maybe there are no such things as heroes maybe there are just people like my dad, I finally came to understand why they were so uncomfortable being called heroes. Heroes are something we create, something we need. It's a way for us to understand what is almost incomprehensible, how people could sacrifice so much for us, but for my dad and these men the risks they took, the wounds they suffered, they did that for their buddies, they may have fought for there country but they died for there friends. For the man in front for the man beside him, and if we wish to truly honor these men we should remember them the way they really were the way my dad remembered them.

Amen to that. There's nothing wrong, and everything right, about remembering American's veterans this way. Even if the Iwo Jima campaign turns out, in hindsight, not to have been as critical as we thought, that judgment doesn't diminish one iota the risks and sacrifices these men made.

For the Marine at Iwo Jima or Fallujah, what matters is how they fought. It's up to us, as citizens of a democracy, to make sure that there aren't lingering doubts about why.

I liked this movie a lot. If you haven't seen it, I recommend you do so. It's just as much about the civilians at home as the soldiers on the battlefield--which means it's worth watching now for the questions it poses to all of us.

I think we're turning Japanese

IN THE NEWS
As the Bush Administration tries to turn the national security bureaucracy and public opinion increasingly against Iran, the natural question is, How serious is the risk of war? With the American position in Iraq continuing to disintegrate, how could any sane person in the US government contemplate expanding the war? With memories of the mendacious PR campaign to invade Iraq, followed by the horribly botched occupation, still fresh, who would listen to the same pitchmen making the same pitch about Iran?

I’m sure that many people hope these questions are rhetorical. American military over-extension, which is doing grievous damage to the US Army and Marines, should be reason enough to take an attack on Iran off the table. (Since there’s little chance that air and sea power alone could eliminate the Iranian nuclear program, or change the Iranian government’s policies, ground attack must be considered as part of any campaign.)

Unfortunately, expanding the war into Iran is not inconceivable. If you think that rational human beings, given these circumstances, could only conclude one way, think again.

In August 1945, the Pacific War was in its final stages. The Imperial Japanese Navy had been smashed to bits, incapable even of assembling its few remaining ships into a fleet. Counterattacks had devolved into suicidal assaults against American ships, planes, or soldiers. The nation had a fraction of the oil needed to continue the war effort. Women and old men were being armed with sharpened wooden spears and drilled to defend the Japanese home islands. American bombers had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and American firebombing attacks had inflicted even greater death and destruction.

Still, the same factions that had driven Japan into conflict with China, the USSR, Britain, and most disastrously, the United States, believed that Japan should continue to fight on. Four years earlier, these same generals and admirals had argued that the only way to solve the deadlock in China was a surprise attack on the United States. By 1945, victory may not be in their grasp, but these leaders believed that preserving national honor was more important than preventing continued, pointless losses. (Of course, having conflated themselves with the national interest, protecting their own careers was, by extension, protecting the nation.)

Had the Emperor not made an uncharacteristically direct, firm, and unambiguous decision to unconditionally surrender, Japan would have fought on. Earlier, the Emperor worried that the militarists might remove him in a coup, if he had made just such a decision. Now, he risked his throne, and possibly even his life, in ordering Japan to end the war.

Emperor Hirohito’s recorded announcement was recorded within the Imperial palace on August 14, to be played on the radio to the nation the following day. A junior officer, Major Kenji Hatanaka, learned of the decision and tried to stop it. Leading his unit of the Imperial Guard, he broke into the palace (a capital offense), searched the grounds for the recordings. Hatanaka threatened Chamberlain Yoshihiro Tokugawa and other members of the Imperial household, and it’s unclear what would have happened if he had confronted the Emperor. Fortunately, Hatanaka never found the recordings, even when he burst into a radio station that was to play the announcement. When the commander of the Imperial Guard, General Giishi Tanaka, learned of the attempted coup and regained control, Hatanaka committed suicide.

Before you object to the comparison, let’s get the obvious dissimilarities out of the way. No, the United States in 2007 is not exactly like Japan in 1945. For example, the US military is obedient to civilian authorities; officers in the Imperial Japanese Army regularly ignored orders from Tokyo, starting and running wars on their own. As awful as American policies on torture and renditioning have been, they do not match the pain and death inflicted by the Japanese military during the Pacific War.

However, if you look at Japan then, and the United States now, you might see some familiar faces. A determined faction of aggrieved nationalists, having gambled the nation’s fortunes on high-risk ventures (the invasion of China or Iraq), now see the expansion of the war as the only way out of the current deadlock. Rather than question the whole enterprise, or the way it is being fought—in other words, to accept criticism—these men would rather find a “solution” through the elimination of foreign support for their enemies (Chinese guerrillas or Iraqi insurgents).

These sorts of men go farther than history should allow if they are propelled by larger, transcendental concerns. In the 1930s and 1940s, many Japanese felt that their government, led by the divine person of the Emperor, should assert its role as a great power. Since 2001, a faction of unilateralists, supported by Christian fundamentalists who believe in a God-sanctioned mission for the United States, have used the 9/11 attacks as the starting point for an effort to re-shape the region of the world most troublesome for US power.

As the failures mount, the transcendental ingredients of this political brew immunize leaders from their own mistakes. Setbacks become a test of faith, not a rebuttal of the original strategy. Normal rules of conduct, such as the Geneva Conventions, become intolerable restraints. Internal dissent becomes a treasonous attack on national will. To hell with what the rest of the world thinks, as long as the government can continue the pattern of lies and apologies, for as long as it keeps foreign leaders stammering in frustration. The worse things get, the more faith has to outshine everything else—diplomacy, democracy, treaties, international law, even mundane tactical questions—for fear that Providence will turn its face away permanently. As nations, Japan in 1945 and the United States in 2007 are very different. As wars, Japan’s conflict in the Pacific is not the same as the US occupation of Iraq. However, many of the stock characters in these two dramas are the same. When these familiar members of the dramatis personae start talking about new enemies, we should take what they say very seriously. They certainly do.

Shooting Hitler

IN THE NEWS
[Don't ask me how I got to this particular topic. People have tried to follow my chain of thought, only to go mad in the attempt. Let's just say it has something to do with what I've been reading lately.]

One of the staples of time travel stories is a strange ethic about tampering with the past. No, we're not talking about the kind of chaotic consequences that a small change far in the past can create, as in Ray Bradbury's short story, "A Sound of Thunder." I'm talking about when people have an opportunity to right a great wrong, and the effects are largely predictable. The classic question is, If you had a chance to kill Hitler before he unleashed Nazism on Germany, the Holocaust on Europe, and World War II on the world, would you do it? As I get older, I'm increasingly surprised that anyone hesitates at the answer: Of course you would.

Here's a simple rule of thumb: If you would applaud an action taken by someone living through a particular historical moment, you would expect someone with historical hindsight to do exactly the same thing. For example, if you think it was the right decision for the United States to attack Afghanistan in 2001, any time traveler who took Bush's place should also order the same assault on the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Everyone who reads about the famous failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944, a.k.a. "the von Stauffenburg plot," wishes it had succeeded. When you hear that Hitler's enemies tried to kill him on earlier occasions, you wish those had succeeded, too. Rewind further, and you wish that a lucky partisan had bombed Hitler's train as he was visiting the Eastern Front. Rewind further, and you wish that Hindenburg had send Hitler and the NSDAP packing, instead of giving the future Fuhrer the first step on the path towards Gleichschaltung. If Hitler had died in the trenches in WWI, even better.

The events of 1933 to 1945--the Nazi seizure of power and the Second World War--depended on Hitler the man, capable of wreaking havoc beyond what fascism could do as a virulent political disease. The events after 1945, the Cold War, were also Hitler's creation. Who knows, perhaps the US and USSR would have acquired nuclear weapons, had a different version of the Cold War, and ended it with a bang instead of a whimper. That seems unlikely, for at least two reasons. World War II escalated the Soviet regime's paranoia about the West, leading to the creation of its Eastern European satellite states, an aggressive foreign policy beyond its sphere of influence, and a grim determination to get nuclear weapons at any cost. By rallying the multi-ethnic empire around the regime, Operation Barbarossa also helped keep the Communist Party and Stalin in power. World War II mobilized the USSR on a level it hadn't achieved before, gave the Communists broader opportunities to liquidate their enemies, gave the Red Army battle experience it lacked (and successes it had missed during the Civil War and the clumsy conflict with Finland), and armored the regime in the prestige of having won the Great Patriotic War.

So, yes, given the chance, I'd shoot Hitler on the spot. Anyone who would have hesitated because of the unpredictability of history should stop to think about the choices they have to make each day that have an effect on the future.

WWII veterans database

IN THE NEWS
A colleague showed me the World War II memorial's online database of veterans. I immediately looked up John Covington, the husband of one of my high school English teachers. He was a tank commander at D-Day, after which he faced the hard fight through bocage country. Like many veterans, he did not talk about his war experience until many years later--in Covington's case, when he related them to a goofy teenager (me) doing a history class project. It was an honor I still feel that I did not deserve.

I encourage you to look up a relative or acquaintance in the database. It's quite an experience.

How not to handle the Holocaust

IN THE NEWS
Yesterday, my daughter and I spent a few hours talking with a Holocaust survivor. Among other hair-raising stories, she told us how she met in Auschwitz the doctor who delivered her into this world. The doctor was working on Mengele's "research" staff, and he recognized her immediately. (They lived in the same German city long enough for the doctor to have known her as a young woman.) Because of their personal connection, he protected her for a time by pretending to do research on her. That didn't save her ultimately from the other Nazi doctors, unfortunately.

What can I say about this encounter? Words fail me, except to say, we all have to do our part to prevent anything like Nazism from ever staining the world again. The first step, of course, is to treat the historical details of the Holocaust with the seriousness and diligence that they deserve.

In other words, you don't play stupid games around the issue, the way C-SPAN may be in its coverage of the Deborah Lipstadt/David Irving trial. Lipstadt, as you may already know, is an historian who demolished Holocaust denier David Irving's whitewash of top Nazi officials. Irving, the author of several error-filled books on WWII, once said that more people died in Ted Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than in the "alleged" gas chambers in Auschwitz.

Irving, who rubs shoulders frequently with other Holocaust deniers, was arrogant and reckless enough to sue Lipstadt for libel. The British court that adjudicated the case not only ruled in favor of Lipstadt, but the judge delivered one of the most blistering denunciations of Irving on record.

There is no "balance" required here. We don't demand "balance" for the Flat Earth Society when Nova broadcasts a program on astronomy. C-SPAN can interview Lipstadt, period, and be done with it. Try explaining to the Auschwitz survivors how the man who denies they were experimented on, beaten, starved, and gassed deserves equal time.