Perhaps I have a jaundiced eye, but it sure seems that a lot of recent World War II history has focused on making heroes out of the victims of events that most historians classify as gigantic fuckups. For example, consider Halsey’s Typhoon: The True Story of a Fighting Admiral, an Epic Storm, and an Untold Rescue and In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors.
Bull Halsey certainly was a “fighting admiral” — he was the man who ordered that the slogan “Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill More Japs” be painted on the side of a bombed-out hulk in Pearl Harbor to inspire his sailors. He also had the habit of sailing his fleet into typhoons. “Halsey’s Typhoon” caused the loss of 800 men, and the only reason he wasn’t relieved of command was his prior success in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. A year later, he did the same thing, and only the intercession of Chester Nimitz kept Halsey from being relieved of duty. The sober histories that I’ve read consider Halsey’s stubborn unwillingness to move his fleet out of the way of storms a major shortcoming, and the loss of life and materiel he caused is considered a blot on his otherwise great military record.
Similarly, the Indianapolis was sunk by Japanese torpedo. Because of a Navy fuckup, nobody noticed that the Indy had not arrived in port, so the survivors of the sinking endured over four days of shark attacks, starvation, dehydration and desquamation (shedding of skin) while waiting for rescue. Some of the survivors killed themselves or others due to hallucinations or delirium.
I’m sure that there were many instances of individual and group heroism in both of these tragic events, but to create books that focus on that heroism is to miss a fundamental fact about wartime tragedy: much of the death in war is caused by stupidity and could have been avoided.
A culture that will tolerate endless wars has to believe in a heroic ideal of noble sacrifice. As long as the victims of every action, no matter how pointless, are portrayed as noble heroes rather than tragic victims, their deaths are justified. I shudder to think what revisionists will write about Iraq in 60 years, and how that will be used to salve consciences inflamed by whatever folly we’re engaged in then.
stuckinred
Do you figure dropping a battalion of 1st Cav troopers in the middle of a NVA Regiment at the Battle of la Drang Valley was a great military success?
c u n d gulag
Look at Custer as one example.
Oh, don’t worry, they’ll figure out/manufacture some really heroic shit in these two clusterfucks. You need great hero’s and martyrs to recruit.
And if these two don’t sell. Coming soon to a Recruitement Center near you: IRAN – ‘Cause maybe the Neo-cons are right THIS time…
stuckinred
Oh yea, if you think the Battle of the Leyte Gulf was all that great pick up “The Last Stand of the Tin can Sailors” and check out how Halsey left Taffy 3 wide open to a Japanese attack at Samar when he took the bait and chased a Japanese carrier group.
The Battle of Samar may be the “Greatest victory in American Naval history” but it came about because of a Halsey screw up. (disclaimer, my father was a fast attack destroyer sailor in the Pacific and he LOVED Halsey)
Asshole
How was Halsey heroic for the Battle of Leyte Gulf? He chased after a Japanese diversion KNOWING it was a diversion, left some imaginary “Task Force 34” behind to guard the transports it was his job to defend, and almost lost the entire invasion fleet because he wasn’t there to defend it.
If the Japanese had done a better job of following up on their own plan, Leyte Gulf would’ve been one of the greatest military catastrophes in history, and Halsey would’ve taken 100% of the blame. His reputation just lucked out insofar as the Japanese were too frazzled by the drubbing they’d taken up to that point to carry out their own objectives.
Asshole
Whatever, though. If they can make a hero out of Douglas Macarthur, they can make a hero out of anyone. That man’s body should’ve been cremated in a shit-heap and every survivor of the Bataan Death March should’ve been invited to help extinguish the flames with their own urine.
pfrets
Captain Ramius: “Your conclusions were all wrong, Ryan. Halsey acted stupidly!”
dmsilev
I’ve always thought that the US Navy was very lucky that Halsey came down with a skin infection just prior to the Battle of Midway, so command descended to Spruance. Spruance was a more deliberate personality, which is really what you want when fighting a defensive battle whilst badly outnumbered. I could imagine Halsey ordering an advance in the late stages of the battle, resulting in surface contact between the two fleets…
dms
stuckinred
@Asshole: Now you sound like my old man!
stuckinred
@dmsilev: Shingles.
4tehlulz
Considering that we commemorate traitors, creating heroes out of fuck ups is minor by comparison.
Napoleon
@Asshole:
Beat me to it!
stuckinred
@Asshole: Hell, if their target identification was worth a shit at Samar they would have realized the phenomenal advantage they had over Taffy 3 and crushed them.
dmsilev
@stuckinred: Wikipedia says it was psoriasis. Doesn’t much matter either way.
dms
RSA
Best book about World War I: All Quiet on the Western Front.
stuckinred
@dmsilev: Interesting, I hit the google and there does seem to be confusion.
stuckinred
@stuckinred: The Guns of August ain’t bad.
eyepaddle
@stuckinred:
Wow, a WWII naval history thread first thing in the morning! Today’s looking up. Leyte and specifically Samar REALLY could’ve gone horribly astray if (a mentioned previously) the Japanese had contiued through with their own plans, but they kind of had a history for not being able to close the deal in daylight actions.
I’ve always been a little puzzled by the Japanese (who were impeccable night fighters with both guns and torpedoes) performance in daylight surface actions, both off Samar and in the battle of the Kommandorski islands the Japanese withdrew almost as soon as they had things really start to go their way.
PurpleGirl
Ah, Ad. Halsey. In The Hunt for Red Octobe there is an exchange between Capt. Ramius and Jack Ryan about his work as an analyst. When Ryan names a book he write about Ad. Halsey, Ramius says “Hmmm… I know this book. Your conclusions were all wrong Ryan. Halsey acted stupidly.”
SteveE
An example out of this most recent war is the story of Operation Redwing, where they dropped 4 S.E.A.L.s into a remote corner of Kunar Province in Afghanistan. They were supposed to capture or kill some Taliban leaders. Instead got themselves bushwacked by something like a couple hundred Tali’s.
Everyone got killed except for one petty officer, Marcus Lutrell. He wrote a book, “Lone Survivor.” His story is actually an incredible tale of toughness and stamina (and also a compelling look at the willingness of these mountain tribesmen to risk everything in order to protect a traveller in their care).
However, all this is wrapped-up in a gauzy veil of hero-making as Lutrell struggles to make sense of what has happened to himself and his brother “super-warriors,” as they thought of themselves.
In other words, they were so good, so tough, so professional; and their cause was so self-evidently just, that for them to be extinguished so simply requires so kind of cosmic justification or… something. It’s not enough for Lutrell to say, “We were sent on a fool’s mission with inadequate intel or support, and that’s why they died.” Instead, he need to build the dead men into mythical superheros who could only have been overcome by an overwhelming combination of force and fate.
And of course, the Navy is all over that shit. They gave Lutrell the Navy Cross and the dead Lt. got the Medal of Honor (posthumously, of course).
It is a good book, but to be read with a cautionary eye on the mythmaking machinery in full gear.
geg6
@c u n d gulag:
THIS.
@Asshole:
AND THIS.
Alex
As pointed out, Halsey’s “victory” at Leyte consisted of sinking a few sacrificial lambs of Ozawa’s northern group while leaving the San Bernardino straight unguarded and open to penetration by Kondo’s Center Group, nearly resulting in the destruction of an entire escort carrier group. Halsey’s status as a hero was derived more by morale boosting raids against Japanese held islands early in the war and in the closing stages of the guadalcanal campaign.
OTOH, our abilities to locate weather systems at the time were imperfect, and the sheer size of the Third Fleet made avoiding the typhoons very difficult. Still, his decisions early during the typhoon may have prevented individual commanders from taking action to save their vessels. Hard to make a lapse in judgment heroic.
eyepaddle
@PurpleGirl:
I was thinking about that too–I always sort of thought that exchange revealed Clancy’s true feelings on the matter.
I sort of have to agree with Ramius.
stuckinred
@eyepaddle: Evan Thomas looks at Samar from a little different perspective in “Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign 1941-1945”. Adm. Takeo Kurita never comes straight out and says it but Thomas suggests he knew the Empire was done and he didn’t want to sacrifice any more people for nothing.
Blue Neponset
@Asshole: Asshole is right! Halsey almost cost the US a whole invasion force. If the Japanese hadn’t lost their nerve it would have been a very very very bad day for the US. As it was, a whole lot of Sailors were killed because Halsey forgot what his mission was.
Asshole
@stuckinred:
My old man had a picture taken of himself urinating on a statue of Macarthur, so I can’t pretend to be too original about this.
Asshole
@stuckinred:
We should celebrate the heroic incompetence of the Japanese Navy more than anything else.
Mike in NC
Macarthur remains a huge hero to the American far right. He was a complete authoritarian and would be forgotten today if WW2 hadn’t given his career a second chance. He ignored Hoover and attacked the Bonus “Army” camped in DC with tanks, cavalry, and tear gas. Innocent people died.
Then he fucked up royally in the Philippines in early 1942 and again in Korea by cluelessly drawing China into the war and dragging it out for years. Thankfully Truman had the guts to fire him.
As a naval officer I’ve read all the WW2 books mentioned here and “Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” was the only one that rose above mediocrity.
geg6
@Asshole:
Hah! I love your dad!
My uncle (a veteran of the Pacific and very entertaining when he got a real McArthur hate rant on) would have loved to have done that.
Alex
An overstatement to say that Halsey’s error almost cost us the whole invasion force.
Oldendorf’s surface group was taking position inside the Leyte Gulf after having demolished their opposition in the Surigao Straight and as depleted as Kurita’s force was, his 6 battleships and other ships would likely have prevented destruction of the amphibious forces and inflicted terrible damage.
Bad enough that Halsey’s mistake could have caused the loss of the escort groups operating outside the gulf.
eyepaddle
@Alex:
After the 3rd fleet got wrecked by the first “Halsey Typhoon” the fleet investigation could’ve gone in a few different directions–the American fleet was almost universally top heavy, designs which started fairly low stability grew progressively worse as the war went on and the fleet added guns, electronics and ammunition to lavish degrees–this affected the destroyers most severely, but it also affected the Essex carriers and US light cruisers to a concerning degree.
Instead they chose to focus on the (lack of) basic seamanship within the fleet, and things like operational practices, namely too many captains were more concerned with station keeping than they were with staying afloat. There was also a reluctance to add ballast (they would have to clean the fuel tanks before they could re-fuel, which is a giant pain in the ass, but in retrospect less of a hassle than losing your ship!)
While I think the leadership should’ve been a little more open about the ship’s inherent vulnerablity to stability problems, emphasizing seamanship in a Navy largely made up of people new to the sea (due to its immense wartime growth) was certainly a good idea.
And it seems to have worked, the next typhoon didn’t sink any ships and caused much less damage to the fleet.
stuckinred
Here’s an interesting point on this. Here is a picture of the con of my dad’s destroyer, the USS CrosbyAPD-17. You will notice that it says “First in Philippines” above the Dingitat Suluan Island Operation. The Crosby landed a group of Rangers on that island on Oct 17, 1944 three days before Dugout Doug. My reason for mentioning this is to highlight how the Battle of Samar was swept under the rug to protect Halsey. In 2001 my dad and I went to the dedication of the Pacific Wing of what is now the WWII Museum in New Orleans. There was a truck full of Sailors from Taffy 3 with a big banner on it “The Famous Taffy 3”. I asked my dad what it was and he had no idea. He was in the Battle of the Philippines but he was not aware of “The Greatest Naval victory in American history” nor were most other people at the time.
stuckinred
@geg6: My dad was part of the “Return to the Rock” and hated it when Doug showed up for the flag raising!
wilfred
Yet McArthur did manage to win without throwing way more lives than necessary; unlike naval ‘strategists’ who spent Marine lives like water in their areas of operation. As a product of WWI, McArthur knew a little about senseless slaughter. His speech on the Missouri was notable for its lack of sentimentality about sacrifice.
More to the point is our current situation, when the ‘gluurrrious dead’ are invoked as a magical charm to conceal the criminal nature of the Iraq war.
eyepaddle
@stuckinred:
Wow, that’s intersting. It makes a hell of a lot of sense to be honest. Kurita always came off as pretty calm about how the affair turned out in the few quotes I have seen. This attitude would certainly explain that.
Sheila
Thanks for this, mistermix. As I see it, the only heroes in war are the conscientious objectors who refuse to take part in the madness, and the story of Halsey is just more proof that engaging in war destroys all sense of sane judgment even if one buys into the initial concept of a “just” war.
artem1s
@4tehlulz:
yes, Lee was not only a traitor but a crappy General who couldn’t control his own command. he lost his most “heroic” General because of this lack of control AND lost the whole war because he was too chickenshit to leave his own back yard and waited two years too long to attack PA and DC. If he had backed up Morgan early in the war in KY the anti-war sentiment in the north might have actually kicked in and Lincoln might have been forced to come to terms. Morgan was a traitor and an a**hole too but at least he wasn’t afraid to take the fight to the north.
aimai
I’ve been reading a ton of Roman history lately. You want to read about some major fuckups read about the battle of Noriea, of Arausio, and a bunch of others. The Germans rolled right over the Romans several times until they finally came up against Marius. The bad decisions, the bad generalship, is just kind of jaw dropping.
aimai
stuckinred
@Sheila: Yea, you are right. We should have all just refused to fight the Japanese and Germans. How’d that work out for the Jews and the Chinese?
Asshole
As pointed out earlier, though, Custer’s a hero even though his only “victory” in the Indian Wars consisted of massacring a village of women and children while most of the men were away (Washita, 1868); then dividing his forces in the face of overwhelming enemy numerical superiority and losing the biggest section to a man (including himself) at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Apparently, getting all of your men exterminated makes you a great hero of some kind.
Shit, let’s talk about General George Washington. What did he do that was so heroic, other than keeping his entire command from getting destroyed? He won a skirmish at Trenton in 1776; he won a victory at Yorktown in 1781 with massive French help; the rest of his Revolutionary War record consisted almost entirely of defeats and retreats. Some of those were marked with gross incompetence; the Fort Washington debacle in 1776 stands out as a prime example of this.
Somehow, Washington’s a great hero for not managing to lose his entire army. That was his claim to military greatness. I’ve never understood it.
And don’t even get me started on General Grant. That murdering son of a bitch should’ve been court-martialed the day after Cold Harbor.
Alex
Eyepaddle,
Agee it made sense to focus on issues of seamanship rather than ship design, since the former was, at that point, more remediable than the latter. Ship losses were all destroyer types, and even Fletcher class and similar classes constructed on the same hull design were vulnerable to an extent larger vessels or smaller DE types were not. Given that there were hundreds of Fletchers in commission and at least a hundred more on various stages of completion, it made sense to focus on why
some ships floundered and others survived. Too much emphasis on station keeping and inattention to ballast seemed to be the answers.
stuckinred
@eyepaddle: Hmm, I got moderated. Anyway here’s one that was pretty low in the water. WWI vintage that was converted.
tomvox1
Dude, this is so dead on I’ve got chills. When every soldier who gets killed or wounded is a “hero,” it distorts the very concept of heroism (which is actually an active characteristic not a passive one) and absolves their superiors from objective examination of the actions that put the “heroes” in harm’s way (see Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, etc). The way the debate over military endeavors has come to be framed in this country since the 1980s would make Orwell vomit blood.
People nostalgic for WWII need to read Studs Turkel’s “The Good War” and James Jones’ “The Thin Red Line.” That is fucking war.
Asshole
@Mike in NC:
Yeah, who can forget the Bonus Army? Leading a charge against veterans who’d served under him when they were peaceably demonstrating in Washington.
If the bankers had come to him with their conspiracy instead of going to Smedley Butler, America would’ve emerged from the 1930s a Fascist dictatorship allied with the Nazis.
roshan
This had to be re-posted: Wars Don’t Make Heroes
Excerpt:
*By making our military a league of heroes, we ensure that the brutalizing aspects and effects of war will be played down. In celebrating isolated heroic feats, we often forget that war is guaranteed to degrade humanity. “War,” as writer and cultural historian Louis Menand noted, “is specially terrible not because it destroys human beings, who can be destroyed in plenty of other ways, but because it turns human beings into destroyers.”
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@wilfred: Don’t forget about his post-war time rule of Japan. He might have been a wingnut’s wet dream, but he didn’t rule like one when he had the chance. Not saying that people above are wrong(as my Gramps was in the Pacific during WWII and hated Mac too), just that he had at least one redeeming quality.
Asshole
@geg6:
Americans’ penchant for historical agnosticism (to put it gently, rather than to call them a bunch of fucking ignoramus cretins) is a major part of the reason why our country will continue to deify the stupidest elements of its own military tradition.
Why is Macarthur a hero instead of Matthew Ridgeway? Ridgeway’s the one who had to clean up Macarthur’s mess, and on his worst day he was a better general than Macarthur could ever hope to be. Why isn’t he famous? Why is that prima donna Patton famous, while no one’s ever heard of Omar Bradley? Why do we idolize the preening martinets over the men of quiet competence?
stuckinred
@tomvox1: And listen to Studs interview EB Sledge author of “With the Old Breed”. Reading it is one thing but listening to this man who survived the horrors of the Pacific to become an educator and orinthologist is remarkable.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Asshole: While you are on a roll, why don’t you tell us your opinions on Pershing, Sherman and Andrew Jackson. ;-)
stuckinred
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: Yea, and as commander of US Forces in the Korean War he never spent one fucking night in Korea!
Asshole
@aimai:
Crassus’ attempted invasion of the Persian Empire was a pretty amazing fuck-up, too. And then, of course, there’s the way Hannibal kept crushing them in the Second Punic War. Among many, many other examples.
America’s very much like Rome in that we seem to win wars despite repeatedly losing large quantities of men due to the gross incompetence of commanders. Rome suffered much worse losses, though, and still came to dominate.
eyepaddle
@Alex:
Also@stuckinred:
Fleets of WWII by Worth is pretty good book about ship design and construciton in WWII, and also a book about Atlanitc Escorts written bya British Naval Architect (whose name escapes), those two books me really brought the topic of ship stability to my attention.
One of the reasons the DEs may have fared better than the full size DDs might have been the bottleneck in supplying 5/38 guns. When the Navy substitued the much lighter 3 inch guns it significantly changed the designs stability calculations. While they weren’t very vulnerable to capsize, they did roll very fast and sickeningly. When British officers took theirs to sea, they denounced the ships’ lurid roll behaviour, and the Americans did not–presumably because they lacked experience and just assumed that all shjips rolled like that!
stuckinred
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: And my commander, Gen Westmoreland?
NonyNony
@Asshole:
Wait – Custer’s a hero? When the fuck did THAT happen?
Growing up in Wyoming/South Dakota in the 80s I can’t recall ever being taught that I was supposed to consider Custer a hero. An idiot, definitely. A genocidal asshole? Possibly, depending on who was talking about him. But a hero? Who would suggest that that egomaniacal, idiotic, racist jackass was any kind of hero? His biggest claim to fame is that he stupidly led his own troops into a massacre because he underestimated just how good the “savages” were when it came to military strategy – he let his racism color his tactical sensibility.
He kept his command from getting destroyed by one of the largest military empires on the planet. And eventually the side he led won the war against one of the largest military empires on the planet. When you’re David in a David vs. Goliath situation the bar for heroism is a little bit different.
Asshole
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
I don’t want to talk about Pershing, I lost too many relatives under his command. Sherman was a good general, he was certainly a damn sight better than Grant. I like Sherman a lot as a general, actually, but I don’t visit the South too often. Or the West, since some of his comments about the Sioux nation could be read as quotes from Heinrich Himmler if you changed the word “Sioux” to “Jew.” If you wanted a man who was good at killing and wasn’t too shy about doing it, he’s your general, though. (And he was better at not killing his own men than Grant was.)
I don’t know much about Andrew Jackson, but from what I do know I think he was like Sherman in that he was competent and completely cold-blooded. But really, what can you say about a man who crotch-shoots another guy in a duel for allegedly insulting his wife? “Cold-blooded” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Bnut
I’ve read your book. You conclusions on Halsey were all wrong.
said in terrible Scottish/Russian accent
JR
Okay, we get it: you don’t like Tennyson. Jeez, just SAY so next time!
stuckinred
@eyepaddle: Whoa! $177! I have a pretty good collection of work on the Flush Deckers and APD’s. One gem is “A Family Saga, Flush Deck Destroyers” by Dickey. It’s one of those self published book and I bought it as sort of an oddity. It really has great historical information and points out that not one of these ships remain today.
wilfred
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
Just. He wrote the Japanese constitution, with its foregrounding of pacifism and de-militarization.
Similarly, James Gavin wrote that he appreciated McArthur’s taking the brunt of the criticism in the Bonus March incident since it exculpated him and other junior officers.
He won more with less loss of life than any other Army commander in any war, with the exception of Marlborough.
@stuckinred:
Wrong. Simply wrong. As for Ridgeway, in the end what did he accomplish. Stalemate.
McArthur posed a question that has never been answered: How far are you willing to go to win? I don’t agree with his decision to go to the Yalu, but he was supported straight through to the top. When the Chinese attacked, he wnated to use tactical nuclear weapons to protect the troops – not such a radical idea in 1950, btw.
He didn’t start the war, you know.
stuckinred
@wilfred: And his decision to split the force and send them to the Yalu with no winter gear because it was going to be a cakewalk? Tell it to someone else pal.
Asshole
@NonyNony:
I’ve heard plenty of people argue Custer was a hero. There’s over a century’s worth of literary and cinematic paeans praising him. I’m not defending the motherfucker, just pointing out that it’s there. Don’t shoot the messenger.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on Washington. I think Benedict Arnold was a better commander before he turned traitor.
jrosen
@#37
Maybe this will give you a different perspective:
Fighting an insurgent war against a much stronger power (the world’s pre-eminent armed force with complete command of the sea) which is at the end of a long supply line is exactly about not losing, keeping an army in being, and being opportunistic. Think Vietnam: When it was pointed out to Gen. Giap that the US never lost a standup engagement he replied “True, but irrelevant.”
Washington wrote the book on asymmetric warfare before there was any example, except perhaps the German tribes against the Romans (which was not fought with cannon but spears). He had to fight with a militia army that was constantly threatening to dissolve itself, with a Continental Congress at his back that was bickering and short-sighted (not unlike our own today), persuade a French Admiral to ignore his primary directive (i. e. leave the Indies and blockade the British Army at Yorktown), move his own troops from New York to Virginia in days, and conduct a technically perfect siege operation. Not only that, recognize the opportunity to make a military operation of indifferent intrinsic weight into a major political victory.
Making do with the army you have and reading the political tea-leaves correctly (and being lucky, as Napoleon knew!) counts for something. And don’t write off Trenton (and Princeton) as trivial skirmishes…again, in numerical terms it meant little, but it rallied the faltering American resistance and kept the Revolution, on the brink of being extinguished, alive. Read “Washington’s Crossing”.
And while the Battle of New York was a fiasco, mainly because of the British Fleet, Washington learned a lot in the process and made his adjustments…unlike some other “heroes” of a later day.
Anyway, the most competent conventional general on the American side was probably…Benedict Arnold! The Battle of Saratoga was his masterpiece, and again politically huge, as it convinced the French to enter the war.
eyepaddle
@stuckinred:
Dude! I bought it for about twenty bucks around six or seven years ago–word must’ve gotten out after it went out of print. On first read it seems pretty cursory, only a few ships classes get more than a paragraph or two, but for some reason I had trouble putting it down. Once you really get to know what’s in it, you flip back and forth between navies and classes and compare and voila, a truer understanding starts to emerge.
To give an example, at the start I had no idea about the importance of the relationship between shell weight and muzzle velocity, and had just sort of assumed that more of both was the way to go. Nope. If your fire control is good enough to pull it off, heavy, low speed shells are the way to go, as they are MUCH more likely to strike a ship from above and face less armor and hit something vital.
The book is full of stuff like that. Plus, I had not realized how much better American boilers were than everybody else’s during WWII, and so on. I’d say buy a used copy!
Ump 902a
“Into the Valley of Death rode the 600…”
The more things change, etc.
Asshole
@wilfred:
Under the circumstances, that was pretty fucking good. He went from looking at a total loss of Korea to reclaiming a decent chunk of the peninsula- against China, under the military genius of Mao with Soviet air support. Macarthur couldn’t have pulled that shit off. If it didn’t involve crushing unarmed protests or embezzling gold while abandoning his men to horrific tortures and death, Macarthur usually wasn’t too interested.
Yes, the Inchon landings were good. Yes, pacifying Japan was nice. So fucking what? Are we supposed to say George Bush was a great President now because he didn’t nuke Afghanistan on 9/12/01? Is every figure in American history a hero just because they could’ve done much worse than they did?
Bnut
I recommend “Eagle and the Sun” for general Pacific warfare history. For more interesting reading I loved “Under Two Flags“, a naval history of the civil war.
Cat Lady
OT- 34 US billionaires agree to give away 50% of their wealth.
We can haz tax cuts expire now plz? kthx.
stuckinred
@eyepaddle: I’ll bookmark it and see what comes up. Amazon does list used and they are in the $80 range. The APD’s were converted DD’s and they took out 2 boilers (hence the 4 stacker) and put in new one’s and troop berths. They used them throughout the war for landings although there were only 34 of them.
stuckinred
@Bnut: $1.77 hell yes!
El Tiburon
This quote is from one of the commenters at Amazon.
Exactly.
Think of Iraq and Afghanistan as the multiple USS Indianapolis ships. We have basically forgotten our fighting military over there while our politicians use them as political ping-pong balls.
Asshole
@jrosen:
Agreed on Benedict Arnold, but there are plenty of examples of insurgency warfare between Germania and Vietnam. The The Vietnamese against the Chinese… the Dutch versus the Spanish… the Welsh against the English… the Irish against everyone who set foot in Ireland… the French and Indians against a General Braddock and a young George Washington at Monongahela. (Jesus, Fort Necessity. ANOTHER example of Washingtonian stupidity I’d almost overlooked.)
Bottom line is that Washington was more lucky than skillful. If Benedict Arnold hadn’t won the Battle of Saratoga, we’d all be speaking English right now… AND we’d have a queen on our money. Or something.
In my opinion, the greatest thing Washington ever did was decide not to become king. I really think he could’ve pulled that off circa 1783, although there would’ve been a lot of opposition to it and the consequences would be impossible to predict.
Stillwater
Here’s a general rule of thumb: a military figure is lauded (as opposed to merely praised) in inverse ratio to what his achievements warrant.
Asshole
@Stillwater:
Very much agreed. And even the most “glorious” of truly successful and intelligent commanders (Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Timur, etc.) were mostly just great at creating wastelands of death.
Ave Caesar.
Michael D.
There are only a few people I truly hold up to hero status in America:
John Adams
Washington
Smedley Butler
There are dozens I’ve never heard of, I am sure, as well as some that you’ve mentioned here or will mention that I’ll agree with. But I think these three.
eyepaddle
@stuckinred:
Thanks for the tips on the APDs. While the fourstackers are covered in Worth’s book, and he delineates their many conversions, in that book he sticks to ships whose job is naval combat first and foremost.
However, since once I get an interest I tend to take it way, WAY too far, I’ve been digging in to amphibious stuff in the last year or so. I know not many people read about doctrine, unless you know that, you’re always trying to figure out why the hell a given force acted as it did.
Here’s a book I stumbled on which really fleshes things out.
Link
Maxwel
McArthur received 6 silver stars in WWI, for good reason. Thousands of Americans are alive today because of the sensible way he conducted his Pacific campaign. Americans who wouldn’t have survived if he had behaved like the commanders of the South Pacific theater. Try Manchester’s biography.
wilfred
@stuckinred:
reading comprehension, please. I wrote:
The cables between him and Washington are in all the biographies. In any case, they did get to the Yalu without incident.
He commanded in a manner to win the war. He can’t be held responsible for the entry of the Chinese into the war, or the stalemate that followed.
That’s just silly.
Asshole
@Michael D.:
Lincoln was a pretty good guy. Margaret Sanger. Dorothy Day. MLK Jr. (if you overlook his personal life a little bit). Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Rodger Young. George McGovern. Kenneth Michael Kays (I’m sure there are loads of other Conscientious Objectors who won the Congressional Medal of Honor, but he’s always the one I think of because his life after the war makes me so utterly fucking sad- he ended up a one-legged homeless drug addict who committed suicide at age 42.). Eugene V. Debs. John Mitchell. Those are the ones occurring to me at the moment, but I know there are at least several dozen others that are slipping my mind.
Asshole
@wilfred:
I’m pretty sure the survivors of the Bonus Army and the Bataan Death March didn’t find it very funny.
gypsy howell
Doncha know? Everyone’s a hero today, just for showing up.
And if you happen to die when you show up, well, even better (except of course the unlucky citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan who show up and die at the hands of our heroes. They’re not heroes, they’re collateral damage at best, and probable terrorists most of the time.) .
Everyone currently serving in the military is a hero, every veteran is a hero, everyone who died in 9-11 is a hero, our police are all heroes, everyone in the CIA is a hero… the list goes on.
Asshole
Ah, fuck it, Kenneth Michael Kays deserves more than a passing mention. From wikipedia, here’s his CMH citation.
What wikipedia doesn’t mention is that he was a pacifist who didn’t even want to go to war, and that after the war he wound up just another homeless disabled vet with PTSD who got addicted to drugs. Then at 42 years old, he shot himself.
This is the sort of hero the US military quietly chews up and spits out while the public glorifies would-be Fascists and amateur Caesars like Macarthur and Halsey.
zeph
I don’t really see this as any different from the Shacklemania that broke out a few years ago.
Contrarian viewpoint + tragic hero = $ale$.
With these two books, sounds like you also get elements of “The Perfect Storm” and “Shark Week.”
rachel
@Asshole:
Here’s one.
flyerhawk
@asshole,
I think you also discount the impressive withdrawal from Brooklyn. Had Washington not escaped from Brooklyn the entire war likely would have been lost. It was a remarkable logistical movement for its time.
Washington is easily the most important man in our history. We would not have won the war without him, we would not have had a Constitution without him, and his personal star power was what kept the republic together for the first 10 years of its existence.
RobertB
Nathanael Greene would like a word with you.
Omnes Omnibus
@rachel: Or this one.
Xenos
@Asshole: One was played by George C. Scott, the other by Karl Malden. No surprise there, really.
Asshole
@rachel:
Thank you. Another guy I hadn’t read about amidst all the laudatory tomes thrown at assholes like Patton and Macarthur.
Asshole
@Xenos:
LOL, good point.
rachel
@Asshole: I found out about him when I was reading this book. Lots of interesting stuff in there.
celticdragonchick
@eyepaddle:
This was a major problem with the Cleveland Class cruisers throughout the war, since aluminum was scarce under wartime conditions and steel had to be used instead in much of the superstructure where aluminum had been intended. The class had stability problems as a result.
Asshole
@flyerhawk:
Meh. First of all, he shouldn’t have been defending Brooklyn with inadequate forces to do the job. If he couldn’t stop the British from landing, he shouldn’t have been there. If he didn’t know whether the British would attack Manhattan or Brooklyn, it was stupid to split his force between the two and ensure inadequate numbers to defend either. And he wouldn’t have escaped if some of his regiments from Delaware and Maryland hadn’t gotten themselves torn to pieces defending his withdrawal. Or if Howe had been a bit more aggressive. He escaped more by luck than by skill.
I liked him as a politician much more than as a general. No underestimating his wartime symbolic importance, but being a symbol and being effective are two very different things.
stuckinred
@eyepaddle: I hear you, here’s another about the amphib’s
Amanda in the South Bay
I don’t think Halsey had any way of knowing for sure that Ozawa’s force was a decoy and IJN naval aviation was a mere skeleton. The prudent thing was to attack them. Besides, I think the invasion force had already off loaded most if their supplies, and the longer Kurita dabbles with Taffy 3 the more like ly Halsey turns around and lauches an air strike, or detaches battleline under Lee.
I don’t think Japan has acknowledged it’s ww2 guilt nearly to the same degree as Germany has. I chalk it up to MacArthur’s bumbling of the occupation. Like in any sane world Hirohito wouldve been executed for war crimes.
And his entire sw pacific strategy leading up to recapturing the PI was a complete waste and diversion of resources that didn’t help speed up the war at all, and that were a complete break from pre war plans that had the US taking the shortest route to Japan via the central pacific.
celticdragonchick
@RobertB:
I agree.
I actually did an end of semester project in my GIS class a few weeks ago showing the day by movements of Greene and Cornwallis in the run up to the Battle of Guilford Courthouse and then the aftermath. It is very cool to see how Greene keeps Cornwallis at bay while trying to collect as many militia and other units as possible before dashing to a battlefield of his choosing.
I had to georefference two period researched maps against a modern GIS map of North Carolina, and then add each days activity as a separate layer, along with layers for period cultural features like the Speedwell iron Works, churches, roads and so on.
Silver
The problem is the inclination to treat anyone in a US military uniform as a hero, unless proved otherwise.
In actual practice, it’s better to view anyone in a military uniform as one rung up from a mercenary until proved otherwise.
celticdragonchick
@Amanda in the South Bay:
They had nothing to do with his primary responsibility of protecting the landing force. He wanted to hotdog and go have a nice, shooty naval battle somewhere else instead of doing his damned job of helping secure the air and sea space in his assigned AO.
The Japanese played him like a fiddle, and they would have inflicted a catastrophic defeat on us if they hadn’t lost their nerve.
A fantastic book examining the personalities of four officers involved in the battle is called Sea Of Thunder:Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign 1941-1945 by Evan Thomas.
stuckinred
@Amanda in the South Bay: Hey you! I left a note for you at the end of that education thread.
stuckinred
@celticdragonchick: Along with the Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.
celticdragonchick
@Silver:
Fuck off, jackass. Mercs don’t take an oath to defend our Constitution and obey the orders of the President. We do.
Karmakin
I’ve said it and I’ll say it again. The fact that the Normandy operation was needed to regain a foothold into Europe should be seen as a national tragedy and embarrassment.
celticdragonchick
@stuckinred:
That will be put on my list. Thanks!
celticdragonchick
@Karmakin:
For the British, perhaps?
paradox
Being very late the only thing I can add is that the battle of Leyte Gulf holds a marker in my brain for the effectiveness of the 5 inch cannon, I cannot recall right now but I’m sure a Japanese cruiser was blown up from one 5 inch shell, from a jeep carrier or destroyer I can’t recall either, I’d have to re-read the history again.
A 5 inch cannon sunk the first Japanese ship of the war, by the way, with the Marines off Wake.
Leyte is many things about that fuckup Halsey, yes, but to me it will always be the staunch bravery of those jeep carriers and destroyers going out to their deaths at the mercy of 12 inch shells, however poorly initially aimed. They went out there with our smallest guns and did terrific damage. Then they died.
stuckinred
@wilfred: I’m sure you will tell me this is wrong wrong wrong too
General Douglas MacArthur in Seoul, South Korea, 1950. During the time he commanded there he never spent a night in the country, preferring to return to his headquarters in Japan. © Bettmann/Corbis.
Anoniminous
@Asshole:
The last assault at Cold Harbor was a mistake — even Grant realized it later. The earlier assaults? I don’t know. He did keep Lee pinned, sending Butler – that worthless asshole – around to Petersburg. If Butler had attacked on July 15th instead of pissing the day away they could have captured the town, threatening The Army of Northern Virginia from the left-rear AND Richmond which would have put Lee in a real bind. Butler, instead, sat on his ass, dithering, giving time for reinforcements to arrive and then the entire ANV.
And the siege resulted.
The Army of the Potomac was plagued by idiots in high command all through the war.
Shifting gears, probably the best general in either side of the war was Joseph Johnson. His generalship in front of Atlanta is a thing of beauty.
stuckinred
@paradox: The Johnston, a DD commanded by Captain Evans, a Cherokee Indian who went to the Academy.
wilfred
An implication of this is to ‘honor’ the sacrifices of those who died in what one perceives to be an illegal/immoral/pointless war.
What is the precise relationship between ‘sacrifice’ and the cause in which it is made? I don’t know of any discussion on ethics that deals with this question. Seems to me that you’d have to come up against something like honoring the Waffen SS at some point.
I think the war in Iraq is criminal in every sense. How can I possible ‘honor’ people for the sacrifice they make unless I know for sure what their intentions and understanding of the war are? Even then, does it make sense to honor people for what amounts to having the strength of their convictions, however crazy or wrong they may seem to you.
Interesting.
maya
Surprised nobody has brought up the James Cagney, The Gallant Hours, movie about Halsey. It was largely a stage production which climaxed on the shooting down of Adm Yamamoto. As if that was Halsey’s greatest accomplishment in WWll. Never even went near his decoy chasing adventure. The movie did have a great choral intro tune and Cagney looked very much like Halsey, sans Halsey’s loose dentures dialect.
Maxwel
Jesus, MacArthur was in his 70’s. He got his Silver Stars in WWI from leading the Rainbow Division (as Chief of Staff) from the front.
celticdragonchick
@Anoniminous:
I’m not sure that Butler would have changed anything attacking a day earlier. His incompetent subordinate Gillmore would still have been incompetent, and the lines along the plank road etc were well fortified while Beauregard would still have been able to bring reinforcements form Richmond, which he did in any case.
stuckinred
@Maxwel: Here’s a solution, you believe what you want and I’ll believe what I want. Fair enough?
Anoniminous
Sherman was one of the few generals who learned during the Civil War. His idea, if followed, of pinning Lee with the Army of the Potomac while his Army of the Tennessee wiped-out the southern logistics infrastructure would have reduced, by a lot, the number of Northern and Southern causalities in the last year of the war.
Asshole
@Anoniminous:
I know Grant regretted it later, and I know he displayed superb ability on many other occasions. But I get extremely emotional when I think about the number of lives that were wasted for absolutely nothing at Cold Harbor, and in my opinion that attack does demonstrate Grant’s standard disregard of casualties.
McClellan, for all his obvious flaws as a commander, cared about the lives of his men and was a superb organizer and administrator. Maybe he cared a bit too much, or maybe he was too much of a glory-hound himself. Grant wasn’t a glory-hound, but I can’t help but think that he should’ve valued the lives of his men a bit more highly. I know, hindsight’s 20/20, armchair quarterbacking, etc. But my views were pretty common at the time, as well.
Maxwel
@Stuckinred:
I couldn’t care less what you think, bub. You have a serious problem with reality.
MTiffany
So long as it’s other people’s children being sacrificed, that is…
Remember how the Romney boys got to serve their country in a time of war?
eyepaddle
@celticdragonchick:
I just have to say–I did not thnk I’d EVER discuss the Cleveland class’ stability problems with another human. The world will seem a different place from now on.
They were definitely wartime expedients, but amazingly effective ones.
geg6
@Asshole:
Back when I still taught American History, I used to just scandalize my freshman students by telling them that Washington’s greatest ability as a military commander, and IMHO what allowed him to emerge victorious, was his brilliance at retreat.
They used to just look at me with their mouths hanging open, dumbfounded.
But really, I think it really was. He always seemed to pull them back (or the Brits foolishly pulled out for no discernible reason) just before the entire Continental Army was crushed into an ink stain. He always saved them to fight another day.
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
Unfucking-believable.
Wow.
Does it remotely register with you that a volunteer army under the commend of a democratic constitutional republic does what we collectively tell it to do, including fighting and dieing in ill advised wars?
We honor them because they put their self interest aside in order to serve and defend the rest of us, while hoping we don’t use them wastefully.
How you manage to compare that with Aryan Waffen SS exploits is a shining example of smug, pseudo intellectual complacency wrapped in fashionable sneering flippancy.
Damn.
Anoniminous
@celticdragonchick:
Gillmore! That’s the name I couldn’t remember.
Granted I’m playing What-If but if the Union Army had grabbed Petersburg Lee would have had to move while in contact with the AotP always a risky endeavor when the other side is commanded by an aggressive general — which Grant WAS. The risk is never being able to stop and successfully re-group for a set piece battle.
Might have seen the last 2 weeks of the war played-out a year earlier?
But, with the incompetents in the AotP, it’s likely the siege would have been played-out 5 miles, or so, from where it was.
stuckinred
@Maxwel:Yea motherfucker YOU know exactly what happened.
Asshole
@Anoniminous:
Sherman was my favorite general on either side of the war. I also liked General Thomas, the “Rock of Chickamauga.” On the Confederate side, Johnston was certainly Sherman’s favorite general, but I think Jubal Early and Patrick Cleburne don’t get the praise they deserve for their professional competence (I don’t condone treason, however, which every Confederate officer was guilty of).
It’s amazing, though. For every competent or semi-competent officer you can think of, there were at least 2 or 3 craven/drunkard/imbecile reprobates who shouldn’t have risen to the rank of corporal. That war really was a tribute to our willingness to let shit rise to the top of the military. Lincoln was exasperated for most of the war by this trend.
geg6
@Asshole:
If you’ve read his memoirs, you know that he understood quite well his mistakes, the carnage he was responsible for, and felt very much weighed down by the loss of life among his troops. But he also makes quite a good case for strategy in almost every case.
Grant did what he felt he had to do and what he felt would save lives in the long run. I don’t know if he was right about that (and certainly not in every case), but I buy it.
celticdragonchick
@eyepaddle:
Another example of the daily strangeness found at Balloon Juice.
:)
I seem to accumulate unrelated and otherwise useless bits of information for this very purpose.
Daddy-O
Mistermix, this is one of the best posts I’ve ever read on this site, and one of the best I’ve ever read, period.
There’s a side comment about this idea, and the widespread acceptance of torture rattling around in my heat-soaked brain…but I just can’t do it. Nothing makes me angrier than thinking about soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan for NOTHING. Nothing. For nothing.
I’m certainly not a military worshiper like the typical Republican or Teabagger. But the deaths of our soldiers bothers me even more than the collateral civilian casualties, for some reason. Whenever I see an Iraq War film like “The Hurt Locker” or “The Messenger” or “Brothers” or the upcoming “Restrepo”, I just grind my teeth and imagine Bush and Cheney in a shining clean metal cage at the Hague.
celticdragonchick
@Anoniminous:
Maybe. Counter-factual history is always fun. Your point about trying to withdraw while in contact with the enemy and then regrouping later is well taken. That is an insanely difficult thing to do, and most commanders…even experienced ones, really run the risk of having a rout on their hands.
Asshole
@geg6:
Yep, that sums it up. Washington was great at running away and not losing his entire army. When it came to stand-up fights, he lost almost all of them.
The British really were overstretched, though. They had a serious problem on their hands, not unlike our problem in Iraq. How do you hold down a huge area with a tiny force? Even with technical and tactical superiority, the best they could do was garrison strategic points and make pointless little forays and chase after Washington. I think the war would’ve gone on forever if it hadn’t eventually gotten too expensive for the Exchequer’s office (and if they hadn’t been made to realize that if they didn’t cut their losses in America the French were liable to pry their entire Caribbean Empire away from them, too).
Maxwel
@stuckinred:
I’m quoting from books moron. Very respected books.
Cacti
@Michael D.:
Adams loses hero status for the Alien and Sedition Acts.
wilfred
@celticdragonchick:
Oh, dear. Righteous indignation and high-minded moralizing. Where do you teach? At a Catholic girls school?
Ok:
The question I made is about the individual responsibility within that framework and the ethical questions that arise from it. Is this really so difficult for you to follow?
My question about the relationship between sacrifice and the cause it is made is beyond your ken. Think of it Socratically. Better yet, just leave it alone and wrap yourself in a flag.
celticdragonchick
@Asshole:
We fight, get licked, get up and fight again.
I believe that is a quote from somebody in Washington’s army at the time.
Anoniminous
@Asshole:
By:
you’re not making a veiled reference to the Glorious General Sickles are you?
His advance into the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg was a notable innovation in Civil War era tactics.
:rolleyes:
(I gotta get to work.)
Asshole
@geg6:
I know. Grant’s one of the ones where my emotions get in the way of my judgment. It’s heart-rending reading about men preparing for battle by stitching their names in their coats and writing them down on pieces of paper so that after their heads are blown off their families will still be able to give their bodies proper burials, or about how men were writing in their diaries entries like “I was killed.” I have a hard time forgiving Grant for any of that, and a number of other Americans in his day did also. (A distinct minority, obviously, since he was elected President; but, still. A vocal minority.)
stuckinred
@Maxwel: Oh boy, books, pretty heavy. I quote from a book that says Mac Arthur never spent a night in Korea and I’m wrong but you quote from a book and all is well. You’re pretty tough on a blog there Max.
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
Actually, I’m shopping for my master’s program in geology (likely at Chapel Hill), but thanks for the thought.
Asshole
@celticdragonchick:
The Army had some very heroic elements in it. That doesn’t change the fact that Washington’s main claim to fame was not getting the entire army completely destroyed.
Actually, some of the best units in the Continental Army were destroyed a couple times- namely, the Maryland regiments and the 1st Delaware Regiment. They were decimated on Long Island covering the retreat of the rest of the Army; and then after distinguished service in various battles in the intervening years, they managed to get themselves destroyed again fighting a rearguard action at Camden in 1780. General Gates, the “hero” of Saratoga (if we ignore Benedict Arnold), disgraced himself by fleeing the battlefield while those units were destroyed. So some elements of the Army managed to get demolished repeatedly, which is rather sad.
celticdragonchick
@stuckinred:
LMAO!
Yeah, I had to snicker at that line from Max also.
Bill Murray
@Asshole: most of the really incompetent were not regular army as they were often political appointees rather than trained military
@Michael D.: and another I would add is Joseph Warren http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Warren
wilfred
@celticdragonchick:
Good luck. If it was in the humanities your supervisor wouldn’t appreciate ‘begging the question’ arguments.
Asshole
@Anoniminous:
Sickles, Burnside, Butler, Hooker, Hood (they weren’t all Union incompetents, that’s for sure), Rosecrans, Bragg, Fremont… Soooooo many incompetents to discuss, it’s hard to even think of them all.
But yeah, Sickles’ would be funny if it weren’t for the dead bodies. Neighboring commanders were supposedly saying things like, “Just you wait. He’ll be retreating back this way soon enough.” History (i.e., events about 3 hours later) proved them right.
Silver
@celticdragonchick:
And if he tells you to fuck up a bunch of poor brown people, you do it.
Like I said, one step up…maybe.
celticdragonchick
@Asshole:
The charge by the 1st Maryland Regt at Guilford Courthouse is the real heartbreaker of the battle. There is considerable debate as to whether Cornwallis ordered his artillery to fire into the close combat between the Marylanders and the 2nd Guards.
I am a re-enactor in the Guilford Militia, which was a historic unit that fought on the left flank of the 1st line at Guilford Courthouse.
celticdragonchick
@Silver:
You take on oath on your honor to follow the lawful orders of the President and the officers appointed over you. If we, as a nation, decide to take such action, then you as a soldier are ethically and legally bound by your oath to do as we the people direct.
Maxwel
@stuckinred
I never said you were wrong. I said Mac was in his 70’s. You apparently can’t figure out the implication. As for the other buffoon, I doubt there are many Koren War vets here.
John
Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower seem to fall more into the latter category, and they’re probably our three most universally acclaimed military leaders (and all managed to get themselves elected president). Also George Marshall. But I take your point.
Seriously? MacArthur was an enormous asshole, but I’d say things have turned out rather well. Executing the Emperor would have been idiotic – it would have created a martyr and spurred far-right nationalism for no good reason. That also wasn’t MacArthur’s deal, anyway. It was Truman who agreed to accept Japan’s condition that the emperor be retained.
It’s certainly true that the Japanese have never confronted the evils they committed in the World War II era to the same extent that the Germans have. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have a lot to do with that, I think. But ultimately, does it matter much? Does anyone think it’s remotely likely that Japan will ever again become a militaristic, aggressive country? Whatever failings the occupation may have had, it was completely successful as a political matter. It was not really MacArthur’s job to save their souls, just to assure a Democratic, pro-western, non-militaristic post-war order, and he was completely successful at that.
As a general, he was awful, though. BTW, are those low casualty figures including all the Australians he sent to their deaths?
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
Begging the question?
I would not have thought it necessary to illustrate ethical differences between individuals freely serving a democratic republic, and individuals in an authoritarian autocracy fighting knowingly and explicitly to exterminate untermenschen and enslave other peoples.
My bad.
jeffreyw
Lemme just pop in here at the end with a shout out for my guy, John Logan. Raised a regiment for the Civil War right here in southern Illinois, was credited with keeping this part of the state Union. Rated very highly as a combat general despite being a “political general”.
Local library when I was growing up was set up in an old house donated by his widow, Mrs Sallie Logan.
Asshole
@Bill Murray:
Good point, although sometimes the political appointees could beat the regular army folks.
Case in point: Kernstown, 1862, when political hack Brig. General James Shields (whose only other claim to fame was that a young lawyer named Lincoln once backed out of fighting a duel with him) beat Stonewall Jackson. It was a pretty minor battle, but still, beating Stonewall Jackson’s nothing to scoff at.
Asshole
@celticdragonchick:
Whatever happened to Gates after that debacle, anyway? I know he was disgraced, but I don’t remember much else.
wilfred
@celticdragonchick:
Thus begging the question, qed. Ethics is not what you believe to be true but how you conduct yourself in relation to what you believe right conduct to be.
You’re not bright enough to be either condescending or sanctimonious, btw. You’re a pattern thinker; stick to rocks.
scarshapedstar
I can’t believe you’d slander our troops like that, John. They have the courage to brave potential electrocution every time they take a shower, and you insult not only them but the very military that blessed them with such heroic opportunities?
For shame.
Bnut
Chesty.Motherfucking.Puller
Aaron Baker
Well, fuck-ups often make for engrossing human drama. As another World War II example, I offer Max Hastings’ Bomber Command on, among other things, the decision in 1940 to send obsolescent Blenheim bombers on daylight missions with no fighter escort. It’s almost physically painful to read about brave young men (little more than boys, really) thrown away to no good purpose–but at the same time, I can’t stop reading.
If the books you’ve mentioned don’t palliate the errors of judgment involved, I can’t really object to them.
Shelton Lankford
Creating heros from the rough stuff of military battles is as old as the human race. Creating heros out of stuff like Rudy Giuiliani, on 9/11, that’s really special. We were “led” for two terms of office by traitorous bastards who, at the very least, knew of the attacks, and allowed them to happen. Even now the macho posturing of these killer clowns is revered by roughly 30 percent of our countrymen, and our current “liberal” government carries forward their wars. Their policies persist along with the myths they created to smooth it over in the minds of those who can’t be bothered to think too deeply on the implications of buildings that stood up for 30 years crumbling to earth in seconds unlike any other buildings of their kind in history.
One of the things this thugocracy brought about, besides trumping up a case for a war of aggression, was turning us into a torture state sanctioned by our government, a policy which abandoned the moral high ground from which we could even attempt to invoke the Nurembergl Principles against other tinhorn opportunists.
And to return to the theme of creating heros, we might invoke Pat Tillman or Jessica Lynch.
Zuzu's Petals
[a torpedo is racing toward them]
Capt. Vasili Borodin: Torpedo impact, 20 seconds.
Captain Ramius: [to Ryan] What books?
Jack Ryan: Pardon me?
Captain Ramius: What books did you write?
Jack Ryan: I wrote a biography of, of Admiral Halsey, called “The Fighting Sailor”, about, uh, naval combat tactics…
Captain Ramius: I know this book!
Capt. Vasili Borodin: Torpedo impact…
Captain Ramius: Your conclusions were all wrong, Ryan…
Capt. Vasili Borodin: …10 seconds.
Captain Ramius: …Halsey acted stupidly.
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
Uh, no. The two things are different in kind. One is demonstrated as doing what one is told because one has sworn a legal oath to do so in a free society, and did so believing that the oath is more important then his or her private notions of right or wrong foreign policy are.
The other has deliberately and knowingly engaged in intrinsically evil actions from the outset (whether from delusion, propaganda or whatever), and did so in full agreement with the objectives of the state.
You can cry about petitio principii all you like, but you are actually engaging in a form of absurdity by trying to conflate ethics, free will and actions between people in a free society and those in a totalitarian society. Arguably, those in the latter may have little free will at all…but I digress.
In any event, nations have long recognized that uniformed soldiery engaged in conflict that does not violate the norms and laws of Land Warfare do not accrue any legal hazard or liability for doing what is recognized historically as their duty to their nation.
Make of that what you will, but it is the traditional historic norm to recognize that soldiers have little say in the issues that brought them to the field, and they are not ethically responsible for those same issues. Waffen SS, as you glibly and ostentatiously tried to bring into the conversation, were not part of the regular army and units were comprised of volunteers who knew from the beginning (mens rea) that they would be engaged in acts that are deemed savage and unacceptable by civilized peoples. Waffen SS units figured prominently in brutal pacification atrocities in Ukraine, Russia, the Baltic Republics and so forth, and where used for extermination activities that were deemed far too demoralizing for normal Wehrmacht units. The level of ethical burden is far different from that of a normal soldier whatever your protestations of begging the question imply, since anybody with even a cursory knowledge of WW II history would have known the comparison was invalid and fallacious to begin with.
They are not the same, since…uh…they are not the same. A chunk of Southern California Batholith granite is not the same in kind to a chunk of Metcalf Phylite, no matter how much you scream “But, but, they’re rocks! Prove it”
The fact I have to show you how the comparison is false demonstrates the depth of your ignorance that lead to such a gobsmacking conflation.
wilfred
@celticdragonchick:
Ok, by the numbers. My use of Waffen SS as an example was to suggest that there are times when even the most hated representatives of the military could also perform with dignity and courage, which they most certainly did in 1944 – see SS Grossdeutschland and, gasp!, Hilterjugend at Normandy, and their covering of German civilians escaping through the Baltic ports in 1945.
In these particular instances, every one of these people fought in the defense of their country. Again – military affiliation is not an ontological category. So I rephrase the comment I posed above, the one you find so difficult, into a question: Did a Waffen SS soldier who died fighting in France make a sacrifice for his country? Or does his status as a Waffen SS soldier determine the nature of whatever he does, regardless of any other factor?
Perhaps you can see the implication in the comment now, along with its relationship to the original post.
Now this has enormous implications for the present day. I just spent 2 years in a very conservative and traditional Muslim country where suicide bombers are honored as martyrs for their sacrifice. It would be absurd for me to argue with them that the sacrifice of American soldiers is somehow superior to the actions of suicide bombers… because that would be begging the question.
And by the way, they all know about Dresden, so nothing about civilian deaths or lawful orders.
Paul in KY
@Asshole: When you talk about incompetance among Union generals, google ‘The battle of the Crater’ sometime. The general in charge of that fiasco should have been shot.
HumboldtBlue
And who was the Captain who led the charge against those veterans and their family’s? None other than Captain George Patton.
Someone mentioned Grant earlier in reference to Cold Harbor and Grant lamented that decision to his final day. Cold Harbor was only the finishing touch, however, because the Wilderness campaign began on May 4th and by June 4th, through nearly daily vicious combat including Spotslyvania, the Bloody Angle etc. at a horrific cost in lives, kept Lee locked in, unable to maneuver. Lee almost pulled off a second Chancellorsville once Grant crossed into the Wilderness that May when General Gordon’s Division from Early’s Corps (the II, Jackosn’s old command) had his flank turned but could not get permission to hit it and hit it hard. Grant understood Lincoln’s mathematics, in that the north had far more men to lose in relation to the south and that attrition would yield a victorious end. Of course he ended up outside Richmond and Petersburg in the exact same position Mac had reached in 1862 only to be called back to DC because Jackson was once again marching down the valley to threaten the capitol, Grant just did it with the loss of nearly 50,000 men while Mac’s campaign to that point was nearly bloddless.
As for Lee being overrated and too much of a punk to invade the north, well that’s horseshit. He’s among the top battle Captains this nation has ever produced, along with Forrest, Sherman, Bradley and Spruance.
Asshole
@Paul in KY:
That was Burnside, wasn’t it?
I saw that crater a couple years ago. I was surprised by how tiny it was. I was also amazed at how close the Union and Confederate pickets were to one another.
stuckinred
@Maxwel: No but there is at least one DMZ War vet here.
HumboldtBlue
The general in charge of that fiasco should have been shot.
He also should have never been left in charge. You’re speaking of Ledlie, I believe, whose brigade was used instead of two Negro brigades under Ferrero (who oddly enough, was on record earlier in the war arguing against the use of negro troops) who had trained for weeks before the explosion to exploit the gap. Meade overruled Burnside, however, stating that the loss of Negro troops would reflect badly on the army and look like a deliberate sacrifice, therefore they sent in unprepared troops and a fiasco resulted.
Paul in KY
@wilfred: IMO, a member of the Waffen SS was the member of an illegal organization that did not abide by the Geneva Conventions or basic humanity as followed since at least the Napoleonic Wars. To me, they are analagous to mafia henchmen (with cooler uniforms).
That they acted at times as normal soldiers are supposed to act & helped their civilians in some kinds of evacuations does not mitigate their membership in the SS & thus their basic criminality.
Asshole
@HumboldtBlue:
Lee made his mistakes too, though. Just ask poor General Pickett, who had to lose his entire division at Gettysburg for no reason.
Paul in KY
@Asshole: Burnside may have been the overall commander, but I believe a general called ‘Ledley’ or something like that was responsible for the criminal delays between the sapper explosion & the actual attack.
stuckinred
@Asshole: Ever been to Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield where Sherman committed his only frontal assault of the campaign up Cheatum Hill?
HumboldtBlue
@Asshole: Indeed, but his brilliance, his daring and his leadership far outclassed his failings.
Pickett’s charge was certainly one as was his vague and ambiguous order to JEB Stuart at the start of the Gettysburg campaign which left him without his eyes and ears for a week leading up to the battle.
Paul in KY
@HumboldtBlue: Yeah, that General Lee was such a military genius that he allowed Gen. Pickett’s division to march up a hill in close order as the Union troops with their cannons at the top of said ridge chanted ‘Fredricksburg, Fredricksburg…’.
Asshole
@HumboldtBlue:
Thanks, I’d forgotten the names of the subordinate commanders and was too lazy to look them up.
Burnside should’ve been shot for Fredericksburg anyway. I can’t believe that man survived the war with enough of a reputation intact to found the NRA (and that’s not saying a whole lot).
HumboldtBlue
Also, the comparisons between Grant and Sherman as far as quality go are a bit unfair. Sherman was fortunate enough to face Johnston following the relief of Chattanooga and later, the pig-headed Hood, while Grant still had to face the best and most dangerous general in the war — Lee.
Grant’s Vicksburg campaign, particularly the final act, was an extraordinary piece of command.
wilfred
@Paul in KY:
I’m not disputing that. I’m reaching for a larger question here that I posed above, i.e. What is the precise relationship between sacrifice and the cause in which it is made?
Again, imagine a German civilian saved by the Waffen SS in the Baltic port withdrawl. Does this person honor the sacrfice. If yes, why? If not, why not? What are the moral implications?
I used them as an example. Other examples recall the basic question.
HumboldtBlue
Burnside should’ve been shot for Fredericksburg anyway. I can’t believe that man survived the war with enough of a reputation intact to found the NRA (and that’s not saying a whole lot).
I agree there, and on the flip side, a man who is always overlooked and yet became one of the North’s most dependable generals was O.O. Howard. His corps was on the receiving end of the Chancelllorsville flank attack and then they were routed out of Gettysburg and driven up to cemetery ridge almost creating a rout that would have ended the battle on the first day if ol’ Jubal Early had listened to general Gordon.
Howard went west and oddly enough, was part of the reason that Joe Hooker resigned in a huff. After McPherson was shot down outside Atlanta. Sherman replaced him with Howard which led Hooker to have a snit and Sherman couldn’t get rid of him quickly enough.
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
I believe I made my position on that exquisitely clear. The purpose of the Waffen SS units was not the same as that of the Wehrmacht, and was in fact, intrinsically evil and that was known to all the recruits. They may have had notions that mass murder and brutal subjugation were not, in fact, evil acts, but they knew perfectly well that they would be doing those things when they joined. I’m sure many of them had courage. They still used that otherwise admirable quality to ill ends, and association with the SS is an over-riding determinant IMO.
Of course, you could easily counter (as I hinted at above) that in a totalitarian society where all media and communication are controlled, free will becomes a somewhat nebulous concept and ethical norms are freely dispensed with and changed according to the needs of the state. Hence, an SS recruit could be shining paragon of fascist ethics, since he believes in what he is doing. This is difficult to square with basic innate human empathy, since a person engaged in mass murder, however impersonal and mechanized, must still choose to suppress what would normal feelings of revulsion for the act in all but confirmed sociopaths. Admittedly here, I am not an anthropologist, so YMMV.
HumboldtBlue
Oh, and as for modern titloes, Rick Atkinson, who penned the “Long Gray Line” has the first two books of his trilogy on the European theater out. The first, “An Army at Dawn” recounts North Africa and the second, “Day of Battle” recounts Sicily and Italy. masterful work, he’s a brilliant writer.
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
I think Dresden was a warcrime, personally. “Bomber” Harris should have gone to the dock for his continued fire bombing of German cities well after it had any appreciable impact on the progress of the war.
Robert Sneddon
The Indianapolis’ sinking and the failure to respond to it was a special case of absolute secrecy overriding everything else. Nobody except the gadgeteers at Tinian Field knew it was coming and it maintained comms silence before and after it delivered the gadget for very very good reason.
As for destroyers, the US fobbed a bunch of those obsolete 4-stacker DDs on the Royal Navy as the major element of Lend-Lease. They were a black hole for trained manpower (four boiler room crews!) and didn’t have sonar (pretty much a sine qua none for sub-hunting and convoy escort, the major task for the British Navy small ship flotillas at that time). My father was nearly sent to Orlando to get trained up on their engineering spaces but he ended up as a CPO(E) in a corvette pulling convoy duty, shuttling back and forth between the East Coast ports and Murmansk during the middle part of the war.
He always said that a corvette would roll on a wet lawn, but they were based on deep-sea trawler hulls and so they were quite seaworthy in bad weather although using the steam hoses to de-ice the superstructure during winter sailings got to be a bit of a pain eventually.
Tim I
Any Indianapolis crewman who survived those four days in the ocean deserves to be called a hero.
There is no question about it. The fact that this was the result of someone else’s fuck-up takes nothing away from the strength and courage it took to survive in those horrific circumstances.
celticdragonchick
@Tim I:
I agree.
Asshole
@stuckinred:
No, and I hadn’t heard of that one. Thank you. I’d only read relatively uninformative accounts of the specific battles in the Atlanta Campaign after Chattanooga.
It was very nice of the Confederates to stop shooting long enough to help the Union troops save their wounded from getting burned to death. Nice to read about acts of compassion in the midst of war.
wilfred
@celticdragonchick:
And yet the members of the Wehrmacht were somehow not engaging in criminal acts by their willful partcipation in crimes against peace? Even if this particular charge came out after Nuremberg, it’s clear that they engaged in precisely these things.
As for the rest, you draw the correct conclusions, but:
Hardly. There’s no such thing as ‘basic innate human empathy’. If there was, the Nazis would not have been able eradicate in less than 10 years.
It’s the duty of a thinking person to challenge assumptions, not parrot them.
People are conditioned to believe in all sorts of things. Acting on what they have been taught to believe is not right/good/noble/heroic, etc.
Robert Sneddon
@celticdragonchick:
And the commanders of the USAAF 508th Composite Bomb Group would have been standing beside him in the dock, all members of the US military sworn under oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and all, in your eyes, as guilty of war crimes as Harris was as they bombed the same targets and firestormed the same cities by day as the RAF did by night. Their compatriots in the 509th CBG half a world away were at that time taking the armour out of their B29s so they could carry more firebombs to drop on the tinderbox cities of Japan — Osaka, Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe.
War is murder. We like to pretend otherwise, to elevate our shining murderers (heroes, one and all!) over their despicable murderers (the cowardly psychopathic brutes!) but in the end it is only numbers and a superior ability to murder them before they murder us that matters in the end.
Asshole
@HumboldtBlue:
How Sherman would’ve fared against Lee is a historical “what if” that we’ll never know the answer to. Interesting tidbits about Howard, thank you. I mostly knew him from the fight against Chief Joseph out west. It’s fascinating to read about the Civil War careers of the Army officers who ended up destroying the Native American tribes. Many of them are men whose careers I could have respected if they’d ended with the Civil War and hadn’t gone on to the treaty-breaking and genocide-in-earnest years.
Paul in KY
@wilfred: Yes, they can be grateful to the actual assholes who saved them. I’d be grateful to Darth Cheney if he personally saved me from drowning or something like that. That’d be the only thing I was grateful to him about.
Thus the civilians can be grateful for the actual rescue, but still lament the existence of a vile organization as the Waffen SS (IMO).
HumboldtBlue
@Asshole: As Phil Sheridan said: the only good Injun is a dead injun.
Custer himself put together a pretty good track record as the youngest man to ever wear a general’s star in our nation’s history (I think, I may be wrong). He graduated at the bottom of his class, the goat, like Patton, but the man who graduated at the top of that class, noted by all who knew him a simply brilliant, was given a command and was found to be severely lacking in the military skills.
Paul in KY
@celticdragonchick: IMO, Dresden was not a war crime as it was the HQ of a German army & there were many German military units that were retreating from the Red Army that were present at the time of the bombing.
Maybe some other fire bombings may have been war crimes, but not that one.
wilfred
@Robert Sneddon:
You beat me to my Socratic finish.
@Paul in KY:
I agree. Now with that established I return to the original point of the post, at least as I see it.
I think that the war in Iraq is criminal and that it has hurt the interests of this country very much. To honor the people who have made sacrifices in this war seems unethical to me since it is a priori ridiculous to assert that the war was fought to defend the constitution of the United States while, quite conversely, it has done irreparable damage to the country.
Thus my question about the precise relationship between sacrifice and the cause in which it is made.
Paul in KY
@wilfred: I think you honor the sacrifices of the troops who honorably tried to carry out the mission as it was presented to them (within the confines of the Geneva Conventions). These people follow orders, they don’t make them.
The ones who need the shunning/disgust are the civilian leaders who came up with the idea and wrote the orders.
Once you are in the military & have taken the oath, etc. you don’t get much choice in which orders are ‘lawful’ and which aren’t. Only the most obscene/murderous direct orders are ones which you would expect a 20 year old private to refuse.
Kolohe
@Asshole:
“Why is that prima donna Patton famous, while no one’s ever heard of Omar Bradley?”
Well, part of that is Bradley writing a book that featured Patton but was made into a movie *about* Patton. (with Bradley’s input)
stuckinred
@Asshole: I’ve also read that they traded salt and tobacco while pinned down at the Dead Angle. I’m from Illinois and when I visited the battlefield 25 years ago I was stunned to see this giant Illinois monument here in Georgia.
Svensker
@Paul in KY:
Also, too, our civilian population appears to be running around worshiping “warriors” which doesn’t seem at all healthy to me. Democratic republics don’t have “warriors,” empires do.
wilfred
@Paul in KY:
A fair and reasonable position to take. The only danger in it, and I’m not suggesting that this is the case with you, is to take that fair and reasonable feeling about the intentions of soldiers, view their sacrifices in that light and then arrive at some a posteriori justification of the cause which compelled their sacrifice.
I think this was implicit in the original post. It’s an old technique.
Asshole
@HumboldtBlue:
My understanding that the fell at the top of Custer’s class bought the farm at one of the earlier Civil War battles. I can’t remember which one- part of me wants to say Shiloh, but that’s probably completely off.
Custer was not a great tactical mind. He knew how to attack, and he knew that well. He was an incredibly brave soldier who was perfectly willing to attack despite being hopelessly outnumbered. That was a good quality to have in the Civil War a lot of the time, particularly in a defensive-minded group like the Union Army officers’ corps. He stood out, and got advanced accordingly. But it was mostly luck, and luck ran out on him when he tried it against Sitting Bull’s pre-battle religious visions.
stuckinred
Sounds like a bunch of lawyers to me.
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
Not under current international law. The responsibility lays with the leadership, not the soldiers (particularly when the consequences for ones self and ones family were dear, should one try to abstain in 1942 Germany…). Again, quasi military units like the Waffen SS are another matter, since in that case they were predicated on performing acts that were and are clearly and undeniably in violation of the recognized Laws of Land Warfare.
Then explain the cultural construct by which it magically emerges to begin with? The Nazis never eradicated it…they merely propagandized it to generate rage at the dastardly enemy doing those horrible things to the noble troops and suffering civilians. Read some of the accounts of Japanese soldiers engaged in mass rape and slaughter of Chinese civilians at the Rape of Nanjing. They describe being shocked and horrified…and sometimes even refuse to participate, and then become inured. Finally, they, they actually begin to enjoy inflicted carnage as they come to despise the weakness and impotence of the civilians they are butchering. (There are actual Japanese newspaper accounts of beheading contests among Japanese officers using Samurai swords to decapitate hapless Chinese prisoners).
In any event, some evolutionary paleo-anthropologists would likely take issue with your assertion.
Another note: It is probably useless to compare cultural notions of ethical conduct between a conservative Muslim culture and ours. The attempt would be unavoidably ethnocentric, and the differences in mores and cultural constructs would be so great as to make any such comparison meaningless.
stuckinred
Yep, lawyers or professors fo sho!
celticdragonchick
@Robert Sneddon:
Dresden had no military value, and the notion that we were trying to stop some German units from retreating though it does not begin to make any sense given the amount of devastation we inflicted on a helpless civilian population.
I place far more responsibility for this on the leadership than I do upon the aircrews who do not pick their targets and are not told why they are bombing them in the first place. Nice strawman, though.
jrosen
OK Greene certainly rates, and for sheer tactical skill, Dan Morgan (Cowpens) comes in pretty high.
This argument is little like comparing favorite baseball players. Which statistics really matter? How much does luck enter into it? It’s all very well for us to throw biographies at each other and have the benefit of hindsight, and what does it all mean? War is stupid and so are many warriors. Skill in handling a company doesn’t translate into commanding a regiment, a division, or an army. The Peter Principle applies, with a vengeance. Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.
And Custer was an arrogant shmuck who shouldn’t have commanded a KP squad. I think we can agree on that.
Washington’s greatest strength was his perseverance. Facing his problems, how many of us would have kept going?
Asshole
@wilfred:
I’d hope not. I think it’s possible to look at the Wehrmacht, say, and to admire the genius tacticians and the courage of individuals and units within that organization while simultaneously decrying the greater military and genocidal aims to which they were employed.
I can think that, say, Operation Punishment (the bombing of Belgrade during the 1941 invasion of Yugoslavia) was an effectively conceived and executed operation while simultaneously condemning it as an appallingly vicious and brutal mission whose only goal was to create civilian casualties and spread terror and confusion. It worked, though. It achieved those things very, very well- bombing a defenseless city without a declaration of war was a very good way to kill a lot of defenseless civilians.
As a less pejorative example, I can admire the tactical genius and execution of the counterattack Field Marshal von Manstein conceived and executed in the Ukraine in 1943 in which he thwarted Vatutin’s lumbering attack and reconquered the city of Kharkov without admiring Hitler’s
greater goal of conquering the Soviet Union, or von Manstein’s personal morality, or really much of anything beyond that I think it was a pretty effective way to stop the enemy and reclaim the initiative.
Another example: the ordeal the 6th Army suffered in Stalingrad. 91,000 of them were marched off into captivity in Siberia after months of freezing and starving under Soviet siege, and only about 5,000 of them ever returned home- a decade after the war ended. It’s a horrible human tragedy, and it’s possible to view those Germans with pity even if you don’t admire them personally or anything about what they were doing or view their sacrifice as noble in any way beyond the fact that extreme human sacrifice is always something to be impressed by. (It’s also possible to feel another way about them- when I found out that elements of the 6th Army assisted with the massacres at Babi Yar, my feelings of pity pretty much stopped instantly.)
Point is, if I can view the sacrifices of German soldiers (whose army was trying to kill both of my grandfathers and also enslave the entirety of Europe) as something that might merit some kind of admiration or pity on a purely abstract and human level, why wouldn’t I feel the same way for an American who was fighting for my country and happened to find himself or herself in a stupid war that he or she didn’t choose? Do we sacrifice empathy and compassion on the altar of justice? Can’t we look beyond our opinion of whether a cause is “just” or not and express some kind of common bond of humanity with people on the other side of that question?
celticdragonchick
@Asshole:
It is the smug, sterile legalism that Wilfred seems to be entrenched in that I find most disconcerting. Anyways, nicely put.
Asshole
@celticdragonchick:
I think I just spotted someone else who’s read Iris Chang’s “Rape of Nanking.”
Man, that book’s horrific. I’ve read dozens of books about the Third Reich and the Holocaust the Einsatzgruppen. I even read a book about Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731. And those are all awful beyond description. But Iris Chang’s book is the only one that made me physically ill. If the descriptions weren’t bad enough, some of the photos were even worse.
Asshole
@celticdragonchick:
Thank you.
celticdragonchick
@Asshole:
Yes, I read it. I bought copies and gave them to other cast members when I was studying for a part in the Vagina Monologues where I was to portray a comfort woman who had been used as a sex slave by Japanese soldiers.
Iris Chang’s book is beyond horrifying. Her death is a loss to historians everywhere.
Asshole
@celticdragonchick:
I read that book almost 15 years ago, and it’s still stuck with me. I can remember vast swaths of the book very, very well. What’s worse, though, is being able to remember the pictures. And many of the atrocities described were things that my young mind had never even considered. I had no idea it was possible to be raped to death until I read that book. Somehow, the concept of being raped to death had never even crossed my mind. I remember trying to wrap my brain around that concept broke something inside of me.
Reading that book was like getting pulled across the threshold of Hell itself. I was very sorry that Iris Chang killed herself, but I’m sorry to say it didn’t surprise me very much. Just reading that book was physical torture; I don’t even want to know what researching and writing it must have been like.
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
That looks like badly misplaced passive-aggression.
“I won’t honor soldiers who were stupid enough to take an oath and follow the orders of the president we elected and got us into a war I think is illegal, har har har”.
Maybe your sense of ethics needs some retuning, since you can’t seem to separate the servants from the masters in this case. We as a nation sent them there, and you want to deride them for that? My initial impression of your legalistic chicanery was correct.
celticdragonchick
@Asshole:
Exactly. There were things described in that book that I have difficulty imagining any sane human being even contemplating doing to another.
Making people drink gasoline and then shooting them with tracer bullets to watch them burn? What the fuck??!
Nightmarish beyond reason. I’m getting ill again just thinking about it.
RobNYNY1957
@Asshole:
Probably because a better general would have lost his army.
lawguy
@Asshole: I think Grant understood the kind of war that was being fought at that time better than any other general. Certainly, the Vicksburg campaign was perhaps the most brilliant of the war and gave Sherman the idea that he could march overland and cut himself off from his supply bases.
Andy K
@lawguy:
I’d put Rosecrans’ Tullahoma Campaign right up there with the second Vicksburg Campaign (the first, of course, ending with Sherman’s disastrous attack at Chickisaw Bluffs), if not for the fact that Bragg was left intact to counter at Chickamauga.
Are you familiar with Sherman’s campaign to Meridian in February of 1864? That was the dry run for the March to the Sea.
Paul in KY
@Svensker: Good point! Our military historically was a bunch of farmers & shopkeepers who temporarily were part of the military. The ending of the draft changed all that, IMO.
Publius
As the comments and John Keegan would indicate any endveor involving many people with big egos and limited communication and thousands of contingencies are bound to result in a lot of screwups both obvious at the time and in hindsight. With war, the human cost of those screwups is astronomical, as are the egos and the need to cover up/spin by one faction or the other for their own purposes. The best cinematic example of this is John Ford’s Fort Apache in which an egomaniacal officer (Henry Fonda) leads his troops into certain death despite the advice of his more experienced junior officer (John Wayne). What makes the movie extraordinary is the surprising aftermath, when Wayne covers up Fonda’s mistakes for the media. Ford had been with the Army in WWII as a film producer so the issue of falsely glorifying incompetent officers was clearly fresh and real for him.