The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (18 page)

Live and Learn, Learn and Live

W
HAT CAN WE
learn from the wartime blunders and controversies that together cost hundreds of thousands of American lives but usually did not endanger eventual victories? Surely, we should not shrug, concede that “stuff happens,” keep quiet, and simply support our troops, no matter what.

Instead, first, remember that such failings usually were aired in a long tradition of investigative, hard-hitting exposés and columns. Long before Seymour Hersh and Peter Arnett, Thomas Knox, Edward Crapsey, Ernie Pyle, Drew Pearson, and Walter Winchell wrote scathing critiques of American military performance. In reaction, the most vehement attack on the wartime press came not from Richard Nixon but from William Tecumseh Sherman. “If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world,” he sighed, “but I am sure we would be getting reports from hell before breakfast.” Yet until the defeat in Vietnam, there was a sort of tragic acceptance of military error of some sort as inherent in war. Senator Harry Truman won national attention only through his Truman Committee, which uncovered billions of dollars of military waste and fraud during the war years. True, he relieved General Douglas MacArthur in April 1951, but for interfering in politics, not the general’s incompetence and laxity in being surprised by a Chinese invasion.

Ours was once a largely rural population, a harvest away from hunger and inured to hard physical labor, accustomed to natural disaster and resigned to human shortcoming, without instant communications or the contemporary unspoken faith that we may all die in our sleep. Though presidents Lincoln and Truman were both at times reviled, Americans still felt that ultimately the American system of transparency and self-criticism would correct wartime mistakes. Fault-finding and partisan grandstanding there were aplenty, but the common desire for victory usually overcame perpetual finger-pointing and despair. Pearl Harbor and its attendant conspiracy theories may have set the Greatest Generation back, but such losses, humiliation, and suspicion were hardly considered tantamount to American defeat.

So we plowed on, accepting that, in war, choices are only between the bad and worse. Yes, it was foolhardy not to escort convoys early in the Second World War, but Admiral King—always suspicious of British motives—erred because he believed that such a commitment would divert precious assets from the Pacific War, where the United States, largely alone, had to face the Japanese fleet, which was far larger and more formidable than Hitler’s. Unescorted daylight bombing raids in 1942–43 were suicidal, but slowly the planners in the American Eighth Air Force learned from their errors, and by late 1944 improved B-17s, drop tanks, and long-range fighter escorts, refined tactics and ordnance, and far more skilled and experienced personnel led to the destruction of most of the key German urban and rail centers. The Sherman tank trapped and incinerated thousands of Americans when easily torched by Panthers and Tigers, but Patton himself saw that its dependability, speed, easy maintenance, and sheer numbers offered countervailing advantages in racing toward the Rhine.

By the same token, for every recognized blunder in Iraq, there was at least an understandable reason why such a lapse occurred in the context of human imperfection, emotion, and ignorance. Such considerations do not mitigate the enormity of military mistakes, but they should foster an understanding of how and why they occur. Such recognition might lend humility to criticism, and wisdom to the perpetrators—and prepare us to accept and deal with similar human fallibility in the future.

So shoot the Baghdad looters of April and May 2003—and CNN likely would have libeled the occupation forces as recycled Saddamites. Level Fallujah in April 2004—and Iraqis would have compared us to the Soviets in Grozny. Had we kept together the Republican Guard in 2003—if that were even possible—charges of perpetuating the agents of Saddam’s genocidal regime would have followed, with unfavorable contrasts to our successful de-Nazification program after the Second World War. Granted, there were not enough American troops to close borders, monitor ammunition depots, and maintain order. But as a result, there were enough deployed elsewhere to discourage trouble in the Korean peninsula, reassure Europe and Japan of our material commitment to their security, fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, help keep order in the Balkans, and man dozens of bases worldwide.

When MiG-15s surprisingly proved superior to American F-80s, our Korean War planners took a pass on blaming one another and instead deployed with blinding speed the superb F-86 Sabre jet, which soon often surpassed its Russian counterparts. Once a General Hooker or Fredendall was found incompetent, Americans expected that someone like Grant or Patton would eventually step forward from a large officer pool of the formerly peacetime army. A general like Sherman or Petraeus doesn’t emerge on the first day of war. Only the lethal experience during early high-level B-29 bombing missions from the Marianas led to appointment of General Curtis LeMay, who, in unorthodox fashion, turned a sophisticated, million-dollar precision bomber into a relatively low-level, low-tech night raider spewing napalm over Tokyo.

We are relieved that the recent emphasis on counterinsurgency under General Petraeus has brought radical improvement in Iraq in a way that previous counterterrorism tactics did not—but much of our current wisdom nevertheless accrued from the hard years of fighting between 2003 and 2006, when Americans severely weakened both al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents, and gained invaluable knowledge in the process about the tribal fissures and affinities within traditional Iraqi society. The notion that America was “surging,” and not leaving, likewise had enormous psychological benefits to the struggling Iraqi security forces that grew and improved all through 2008 and 2009. Again, what loses wars is not necessarily the inevitable mistakes but the failure to correct them in time—and the degree to which defeatism and depression (because errors occurred at all) are allowed to erode morale.

The quagmire in the Normandy hedgerows in 1944 led to thousands of American deaths, but also to innovations and new tactics, whether specially equipped “Rhino” Sherman tanks or using B-17s to blow holes in the German lines (and by mischance kill hundreds of Americans in “friendly fire” blunders). Likewise, the United States may have started in Iraq with the naive belief that thin-skinned Humvees were simply updated Jeeps good enough to transport personnel behind the lines. But troops quickly learned that, in a war with no lines, the Humvees became underarmored coffins—prompting a challenge and response cycle between the enemy’s improvised explosive devices and our armor.

Frenzied development efforts produced up-armored kits, factory-designed models with superior protection, and entirely new vehicles like the Strykers, MRAPs (mine resistant, ambush protected), and Rhinos. Technological improvements, along with experience gained in identifying the profiles of bomb-laying terrorists, meant that by late 2008 almost no Americans were dying from IED road mines, while those who planted them were often killed or captured.

Back at Home

A
MERICANS ON THE
home front once accepted that our adversaries faced the same obstacles and challenges of war. Moreover Americans assumed that the enemy, usually being less introspective and self-critical, was even more prone to military error than we were—and less likely to innovate and correct. The lack of free-thinking Nazi generals and general staff debate eventually would doom the megalomaniac Hitler to commit strategic blunders; ossified standard Soviet tank and infantry doctrine would ensure that North Korean and Red Chinese invaders would finally fight in predictable fashion, and not adapt to changing conditions on the ground as quickly as their American counterparts. A mere three months after they triumphantly crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea in January 1951, the Chinese in dejection were pushed back across it, suffering tens of thousands dead.

That wartime confidence of past generations, embedded within a more general realistic view of human limitations, often ensured that the public saw mistakes not just in absolute but also in relative terms. Yet currently is there any serious discussion at home about the terrible effects of Predator drone attacks on bin Laden’s terrorists in Waziristan, the wear and tear on his minions living under constant aerial attack, or the lopsided ratios of human losses that typically follow Taliban-NATO firefights?

The First World War saw one million ill-equipped Doughboys deployed against the most experienced and deadly modern army the world had yet seen. But the mass drafting of one million soldiers, equipped and sent across the Atlantic in a mere year without losses to German U-boats, was acknowledged on all sides as a feat even beyond the ability of the kaiser’s general staff. It was not the newcomer United States that found itself in a hopeless two-front war in the First World War, but the sophisticated planners of Bismarck’s new Germany.

In the Second World War, lapses in our convoy system were hardly as damaging to us as Germany’s repeated mistakes at sea were to the Nazi cause—faulty German torpedoes, poor air support for submarine operations, and abject security breaches that lent the Allies almost instantaneous knowledge of the Kriegsmarine’s operations. There is no need to document the stupendous Baathist strategic and tactical blunders that led to Saddam’s ignominious defeats in both 1991 and 2003. But in his wake (and after his demise), the supposedly sophisticated jihadists have made just as many mistakes. In a self-proclaimed war of Islamic liberation that hinges on public support, al-Qaeda in Iraq has mutilated, butchered, and terrorized a once largely sympathetic population. As a result, the radical Islamists have nearly pulled off the impossible: A formerly receptive Sunni tribal community has turned against Sunni Muslim jihadists and joined with American infidels, sometimes alongside the troops of a Shiite-led government.

In past wars there was recognition of factors beyond human control—the weather; the fickleness of human nature; the role of chance; the irrational; and the inexplicable. All that lent a humility to our efforts and tolerance for unintended consequences. “Wars begin when you will,” Machiavelli reminds us, “but they do not end when you please.” The star-crossed and disastrous Dieppe raid of August 1942 did not mean that D-Day two years later had to fail. The unnecessary surrender of Wake Island in spring 1942 did not mean that Japanese amphibious forces were unstoppable.

Again, when in March 1945 maverick General Curtis LeMay sent high-altitude precision B-29 bombers carrying napalm in low over Tokyo, with little if any armament, the expected American bloodbath did not follow—thanks to a ferocious jet stream and dark, cloudy nights that meant the huge planes came in much faster and with better cover. In war not everything can be anticipated or planned for. “To a good general,” wrote the Roman historian Livy, “luck is important.” When presented with a list of generals for promotion, Napoleon purportedly sighed, “I want none of those. Go back and find me a lucky general.”

By contrast, the American media went into near hysterics during the so-called pause in the 2003 three-week victory over Saddam, when an unforeseen sandstorm temporarily stalled our preordained successful advance. Only later was it revealed that air operations with precision weapons had continued all along to decimate Saddam’s static forces. Few journalists seemed to grasp that sand and poor weather bothered both forces—but the side that had a history of better adaptation to the unforeseen might find such natural obstacles of some comparative advantage.

WMDs were not found in Iraq, it is true. Yet an earlier American generation might have consoled itself with the notion that at last we had proved (as previous intelligence had not) that Saddam no longer posed a threat, and ensured that Iraq would not again translate oil wealth into the deadly forces with which it had attacked four of its neighbors. They would have added that at least twenty of the original twenty-three congressional writs (Public Law 107–243) that authorized the war—ranging from genocide to prior violations of U.N. protocols and armistice agreements—remained valid reasons for his removal.

Our ancestors might have even sighed that the mishandling of the war had effectively raised our standard of proof from “You must prove that you don’t have WMDs” to “We must prove that you do.” In any case, Libya, for example, may well have had more WMDs in stock than Saddam did—and may well have given them up to avoid the latter’s fate. Pakistan mysteriously put its national hero and world nuclear proliferator Dr. A. Q. Khan under house arrest—just weeks after the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Selling the Iraq War on the premise that displays of American resolve would force Mu’ammar Gadhafi to give up his illicit nuclear program would have been as ill-advised as in fact were promises that removing Saddam was essential to neutralizing a sizable Iraqi biological and chemical arsenal.

Has War Changed, or Have We?

V
ICTORY DOES NOT
require achieving all of one’s objectives, but achieving far more than an enemy does of his. Patient Northerners realized almost too late that victory required not merely warding off or defeating Confederate armies, but also invading and occupying an area as large as Western Europe in order to render an entire people incapable of waging war. That enormous effort required an “Anaconda” plan of blockading the eastern and southern coasts of the southeast quadrant of North America, controlling the entire length of the Mississippi River, invading from the northern Midwest, and sending thousands of troops into northern Virginia—simultaneously, and as part of a moral crusade to end slavery in the South, keep the border states in the Union, and maintain the western expansion and diplomatic relations overseas in the midst of a horrific Civil War. And twelve years of postwar Reconstruction had no more success in ensuring lasting racial equality in the South than did twelve years of no-fly zones of removing Saddam Hussein.