Category Archives: History

Free eBook of the Day: U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011 Reply

Free PDF Book, History, International Relations, National Security • Tags: , , , , , , ,

U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011
Stacie L. Pettyjohn
RAND
2012
144 pp.

In a refreshingly thin volume, Stacie Pettyjohn offers us an overview of how the U.S. approach to its national defense evolved from a minimalism that could barely defend the national frontiers to global interventionism.

It is a thoughtful, largely apolitical study that points us to a future where the U.S. treads more lightly overseas, and as such will offer food for thought for all of us who debate U.S. foreign policy.

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When Deeds Speak Louder Reply

History, Leadership, Military History • Tags: ,
ADMIRAL RAYMOND A. SPRUANCE, USN

ADMIRAL RAYMOND A. SPRUANCE, USN (Photo credit: roberthuffstutter)

 

The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance
Thomas B. Buell
Naval Institute Press
January 1987
518 pages

 

“There are two kinds of people in this world,” a Chinese executive told me once. “The kind of people who speak for themselves, and the kind who let their deeds speak for them.”

 

This insight not only compelled me to look at my own life (which one am I?), it also forced me to re-evaluate my heroes. Who among my pantheon was a doer, and who did some good things but was really exceptional at tooting his own horn (or paying others to toot if for them?) What does it say about an individual who crafts his or her life after one type or the other? And what does it say about nations that make heroes of narcissists?

Old “Electric Brain“

Admiral Ernest J. King, the Chief of Naval Operations in World War II, thought Raymond Spruance was the single most intelligent U.S. naval commander in the war. Given the competition – Nimitz, Turner, Halsey, McCain, Leahy, and King himself – this was high praise. Yet Spruance today is largely unknown outside of the relatively small circle of mariners, historians, and history buffs. Why?

Thomas Buell, himself a naval officer, offers an answer with his definitive portrait Spruance, the enigmatic commander who made the critical decisions at Midway and led the US Navy-Marine Corps team in their legendary drive across the Central Pacific. Throughout his life, his subordinates and superiors all came in turn came to rely on his quiet intellect, his preternatural calm under fire, and his ability to size up a situation and act with deliberation, neither vacillating like Ghormley nor impetuous like Halsey.

 

Working from a relatively small number of sources on Spruance, Buell gives us no great insights that will change the way we think of war, but it will change the way we think of warriors, their flacks, and their biographers. Buell paints a credibly human picture of Spruance, and rather than inflate him to larger-than-life size, offers us the spartan, taciturn, stone-faced career officer whose deeds remain greater than the man himself. It would have been easy for the author to write a panegyric, but you can almost hear the ghost of Spruance whispering over his shoulder, telling Buell not to go down that path. While ably defending Spruance against criticism of his actions at Midway (later proven to be correct), Buell uses the same historiographical care to excoriate the admiral’s actions during his tenure as Ambassador to the Philippines.

The Smartest Man in the Navy

Buell also points out more sublime examples of Spruance’s leadership that resonate today. Spruance led his fleet with a staff that was a fraction of the size of Halsey’s, demonstrating an economy that the brass-bloated navy of today has forgotten: he was early to recognize and defend geniuses like Kelly Turner and Carl Moore against the capricious politics of the Navy; he was a battleship officer who never learned to fly, yet absorbed so much about carrier aviation that he became one of the country’s ablest commanders of airpower; he oversaw the reinvention of naval logistics, a factor the Japanese navy recognized as the keystone to the US victory in the Pacific; and he grasped early that American bases in postwar Asia would be an irritant that would lead to further conflict.

And then there was that intellect: rebelling against the provincial, trade-school approach the navy had taken to professional education, he spent the last years of his career turning the Naval War College into an outstanding graduate school with unparalleled programs in strategy, national security, and world affairs. While nothing he did will surpass his feats as a commander, in terms of its importance to the nation, to sea power, and to global security his two years as President of the College are unmatched.

Buell also offers us an illustration as to why, seven decades after the end of the conflict, we are still unearthing truths that compel us to reevaluate how we understand the war, history, power, and leadership. As we do, we are finding that many of the lessons our fathers learned from their victories are wrong, and many of the right lessons have been forgotten. The time has come for a reappraisal of that conflict: as we watch the rise of a new set of world powers, now more than ever we need to understand why World War II was won (or lost), and we need to find the people who were really responsible, not just the heroes and villains our fathers’ textbooks served to us. Raymond Spruance offers us a timeless model of leadership in crisis. We would be wrong if we did not go looking for more.

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Guarding the Straits 1

History, National Security
US Navy 050330-N-1307C-005 Quartermaster 2nd C...

US Navy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

High Seas Buffer: The Taiwan Patrol Force, 1950–1979
Bruce A. Elleman
Naval War College Press
June, 2o12

Recent events in the South China Sea and the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, timed with a continued warming in relations between Taiwan and the Mainland, have temporarily displaced the six-decade international focus on the Taiwan Straits. Yet the strategic significance of that strip of water has not declined in the wake of recent events.  If anything, the PRC’s claims to the south and immediate north of Taiwan can be seen as an oblique effort  to bolster Beijing’s territorial claim on the Green Island itself.

That this is all taking place as China bestows overdue attention and budget on its navy and on maritime strategy is likely no coincidence. For these reasons, now is a good time for China watchers and naval planners to learn more about why China is so focused on controlling its “near seas.”

Bruce Elleman of the U.S. Naval War College offers us an oft overlooked piece of that puzzle. While history, Chinese irredentism, and geopolitics have set Beijing and Taipei at loggerheads, China’s grand strategy – and the doctrine of the People’s Liberation Army – Navy (PLAN) are also a response to decades during which the China coast was an uncontested highway of American naval might. Those decades formed the thinking of today’s PLAN leaders, and their doctrine and ambitions are tempered by the humiliating fact that the PLA, strong enough to challenge the U.N. on land in Korea, has been a dull instrument on anything wetter than a shallow river.

Elleman recounts the formative years of the PLA and its nearest sea from an American point of view, thus his study offers serves as a mirror for the PLAN, and deep background for what motivates China to dominate the waters within the “first island chain.”

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Who Started It, Hitler or Stalin? Reply

World War II • Tags: , , ,
English: Joseph Stalin after 1943 in military ...

English: Joseph Stalin after 1943 in military uniform with shoulder marks of the Marshal of the Soviet Union. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?
Victor Suvorov
300pp.

Following our review of a small library about Russia’s fight against Germany in World War II,  a reader introduced to me Victor Suvorov’s provocativeIcebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? In this book, the author debunks the accepted idea that Hitler was the primary instigator of the war, suggesting instead that it was mostly Stalin’s fault.

The author sets himself against a mass of historical evidence and analysis in his work, and in so doing opens himself to accusations of being an apologist for Hitler. But Suvorov is not that kind of revisionist: his goal is not to exonerate the Austrian Corporal or the Nazis, but to prove that the accepted Soviet/Russian narrative about the war is wrong.

Much has been done to uncover the crimes of Nazism and find the butchers who perpetrated atrocities in its name. This work must be continued and stepped up. But while unmasking fascists, one must also expose the Soviet communists who encouraged the Nazis to commit their crimes, so that they could avail themselves of the results of these crimes.

The task would seem almost impossible given that Soviet historians had 44 years after the war to alter the historical record and eliminate any countervailing evidence. Suvorov manages to make an argument that is interesting to those of us who still puzzle over Stalin’s tactical idiocy in the opening days of Operation Barbarossa. Believing that the whole show was a Stalin set piece, even down to the sacrifice of tens of millions of Soviet lives, offers a rationale that seems to reconcile Stalin’s early bumbling with the Red Army‘s victories during the last 30 months of the war.

What is more, Suvorov is no longer alone in the effort to make Stalin a co-culprit in World War II. Timothy Snyder‘s excellent Bloodlands is a reminder that both Hitler and Stalin engaged in political killings and mass-murders of their own citizens and those of the lands they conquered.

Unfortunately, Suvorov’s book (and indeed much of his other work, including his Inside the Soviet Army) comes across rather less than an academic study and more as a political treatise against Soviet communism. When the book was written in the late 1980s, there was a receptive audience for such works. Today, Suvorov’s tone and approach seems rather quaint (although, I would argue, not as anachronistic as it may seem, given events in Russia.)

Stripping away that foible, though, Suvorov at least opens the door to further academic examination of his points. There seems a vast field for historians to sow in probing the degree to which initial Soviet defeats were calculated by Stalin to secure his own power and provide an opening for Soviet domination of Europe.

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How the USSR Won World War II 3

Military History, World War II • Tags: , , , ,

When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler
David M. Glantz & Jonathan House
University of Kansas
384 pages

The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany, Volume I
John Erickson
Yale University Press
606 pages

The Road to Berlin: Stalin’s War with Germany, Volume II
John Erickson
Cassell Military Paperbacks
896 pages

Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
Catherine Merridale
Picador Press
462 pages

For nearly three generations in the west, and in the Anglophone countries in particular, we have been given a narrative of World War II that focuses on the contributions of the United States and Great Britain to the defeat of Nazi Germany. After a lifetime of this narrative, it is not unreasonable to believe that the war was won by England and America. That belief tends to cast the Russian Front and the China-Burma-India Theater as little more than diversionary sideshows to the core campaigns of the conflict.

Little doubt this was reinforced by the prejudices laid upon our interpretation of history by the Cold War. It is, after all, impolitic to grant your enemies in your present conflict the credit for victory in the last. Since the fall of the Wall in 1989, we have been engaged in a celebration of the “Greatest Generation” of Americans, Britons, and Australians who fought that righteous conflict. The contributions of the Russians, largely ignored during the Cold War, was all but forgotten by the generation that came after.

I was a victim of this collective epidemic of amnesia. A lifetime study of the war my father’s generation fought has left me with a fair appreciation of the Pacific War from the perspective of the U.S. Navy; of the Battle of the Atlantic from the perspective of the Royal Navy; and the fight in Europe from the perspective of the U.S. Army (in particular, Patton’s Third Army.) I say this not to apologize, but to suggest that the scope of the war was so great and the literature so vast (including a trove of government documents declassified only recently) that it is possible to lose the wider perspective.

When the Cold War ended and the Iron Curtain fell, the time had come for the psychological curtain to come down on the history as well. The Russian Front has now emerged from the realm of the scholarly to the realm of popular history, allowing a wider, balanced reconsideration of the role played by the Soviet Union in Germany’s defeat.

The Basic Narrative

Unguided, the newcomer to the study of the Eastern Front will quickly fall into a deep rabbit hole. The story of Stalin’s war against Hitler, begun in hubris and betrayal and ended 46 months later in vengeful retribution is so vast and deep that it invites a lifetime of study. Fortunately for those of us unable to afford such a commitment, three authors have created a superb overview of the Russian theater that will either satisfy the casually curious or entice the serious scholar into deeper study.

The risk of trying to capture the conflict in a single volume of popular history is that important though seemingly peripheral events will be left out. But two of the U.S. Army’s most distinguished military historians, Colonel David M. Glantz and Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan House manage to offer a thorough and engrossing narrative that serves as the ideal primer on the war in the East. Experienced instructors of undergraduates, Glantz and House know their audience, readers who want an overview of the war and plenty of maps to put a litany of unfamiliar places into comfortable context. The authors break some new research ground, but perform yeomen’s service in delivering a history with enough detail to provide understanding without getting us immersed in detail.

The Authoritative History

Glantz and House leave the reader thirsty to know more, and the next (and best) step is John Erickson’s authoritative two-volume history, The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin. In what is perhaps the single best account of the Eastern Front, suited for popular readers and scholars alike, Erickson offers less a military blow-by-blow than a social history of the conflict from the Soviet point of view. Erickson’s achievement in research, conducted when the Cold War was at its height, would have been challenging to duplicate in today’s more open environment – it was a work of genius at the time. His greatest accomplishment, though, is in his restraint: Erickson manages to give the Red Army the credit it is due for its role in the war without creating a panegyric.

Cover of "THE ROAD TO BERLIN (STALIN\'S W...

Cover via Amazon

At the core of Erickson’s telling is the man FDR called “Uncle Joe,” who emerges over the course of the books as a Machiavellian thug possessed of just enough intelligence and raw cunning to save the Soviet Union and himself after his hubris and ruthlessness placed both on the cusp of oblivion. Hitler, for his part, had co-opted the German officer corps and let them forge the Wehrmacht into the most powerful armed force the world had seen to that point, all in less than a decade of Germany’s repudiation of the Versailles Treaty. Stalin, by contrast, had by the time Germany turned on the USSR reduced the Red Army’s leadership to little more than a corps of incompetent sycophants who commanded an army utterly unprepared to fight a modern war.

Without belaboring Stalin’s error, Erickson shows us how a tiny handful of capable Red Army officers who had dodged the worst of the purges (led by G.K. Zhukov and I.S. Koniev) were joined by heretofore overlooked leaders who distinguished themselves in battle (including V.I. Chuikov, the savior of Stalingrad, and P.A. Rotmistrov, arguably the Red Army’s best tank commander) rallied demoralized, ill-equipped, and ideology-crippled Red Army after eighteen months of defeat and retreat. Their first victories were internal. With the Germans at the gates of Stalingrad, “The Boss” relented and allowed Zhukov to unify the Army’s command structure and relegate the military commissar’s role to that of an indoctrination officer. A seemingly small change, this opened the door for the Red Army to fight the war on military terms and make decisions on weapons and doctrine for purely military reasons. It was a very near thing.

Yet Stalin was the quintessential control freak, and his institutionalized tool for micromanaging every aspect of the war’s conduct, the Supreme High Command (Stavka), was proof that while Stalin would give his commanders some leeway, their ropes were short. Indeed, Stalin arguably involved himself as much with his battle conduct as Hitler did. But after a year-and-a-half and a swathe of blood and destruction from the Bug River to the Vistula, Stalin had learned to give his better generals the benefit of the doubt. Still, earning even that modicum of trust was not easy for Uncle Joe, and he delegated only when detail became too overwhelming.

Erickson does not venerate the Red Army marshals, even the best of them. To the very last, even when better weapons, hard-won lessons, and the preponderance of forces offered opportunities for tactical innovation, the leaders of the Red Army remained as careless with the lives of their own soldiers as they were with those of the enemy. Arguably Leningrad, Sevastapol, the Moscow campaign and the battle for Stalingrad were desperate battles where the only choice was to win by bloody attrition. To suggest that the Red Army was in such straits as it prepared to launch the final battle for Berlin in 1945, though, is ludicrous. Yet Zhukov, who remains the most venerated Soviet commander of the War, turned Seelow Heights between the Polish Frontier and Berlin into a meat grinder, and the last two weeks of the war cost the Red Army a quarter of a million lives. It is, perhaps, as much a testament to the heavy hand of the Stavka as to the hard-headedness of Soviet commanders that a revolution in battlefield doctrine would have been seen as a counterrevolutionary act. The average Soviet soldier paid the price for such orthodoxy in blood, right up to the moment of German capitulation.

The Average Ivan

The individual soldier of the Red Army and what he indured for Stalin’s ultimate victory is the subject of Catherine Merridale’s superb oral history Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army 1939-1945. Merridale has done historians a remarkable service capturing the memories and memoirs of Russia’s own Greatest Generation while at least a few of that generation remained. The story she assembles compliments Erickson’s in that she tells the story from the point of view of the average Ivan. She makes no apologies for the often atrocious extra-combat behavior of Soviet soldiers. Yet in describing their backgrounds, their hopes, and the psychological effects of living in the early years of the USSR, she offers us a chance to understand what turned these otherwise unassuming peasants into remorseless marauders.

What is more broadly relevant, though, is how so many of these (mostly young) soldiers believed that the end of the war would mean a better life than before. Somehow, reading into the promises of Party propaganda, most of them felt that greater freedom and prosperity would be their reward for the sacrifices they and their mates had made for Comrade Stalin and therodina.They certainly deserved as much. Without denigrating the contributions of the Yanks and the Tommies, it is fair to say that Ivan, his willingness to endure the worst possible conditions, the strongest imaginable enemy, and officers prepared to sacrifice him by the tens of thousands, was the single decisive factor in the war against Germany.

Birth of an Empire

Ivan may have achieved little more than a chance for survival via victory. Stalin, however, had every intention of exacting from Europe and the world the fullest possible payment for Russia’s blood and devastation. From the moment the Red Army turned Stalingrad into a German rout, Stalin began a campaign to permanently neuter Germany and turn the Soviet Union into a hegemonic power. Erickson in particular weaves into his account the story of how Stalin systematically undermined every government-in-exile in Europe (save Greece and France), how he crafted his own proxies, and how he bullied the rest of the Allies into accepting a fait accompli even as the NKVD “disappeared” entire delegations of exiled Polish leaders. With a 19 page summary of the Yalta conference, Erickson makes it clear that Roosevelt and Churchill were neither conspirators nor dupes. In war as in business, Erickson’s account suggests, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Short of taking Eastern Europe back by force, there was no way Stalin was going to give an inch more than suited him.

As much as in the diplomatic salons, Stalin made sure that every move on the battlefield reinforced the Soviet Union’s claim on postwar hegemony. Stalin insisted that the U.S. and British armies stop cold on the previously-agreed demarcation lines across Germany, even though the Allies were prepared to storm across Europe and could have met the Red Army much farther east (on the line Prague-Dresden-Berlin) and ended the war as much as a week sooner. Stalin preferred to bleed Germany – and the Red Army – for as long as it took to ensure he was not going to have to ask the Allies to give up anything that they had taken. General Patton, somewhat less in awe of Soviet ambitions than his superiors, let the forward reconnaissance elements of his force get all the way into the suburbs of Prague, two days before the Soviet 13th Army reached the same point. Stalin pressed the Allies, who pressed Eisenhower, who told Patton to withdraw.

U.S. soldiers returned home to 52 weeks of paid vacation and an opportunity to attend university at government expense. Ivan did not do near as well. Joseph Stalin, for his part, won an empire that just outlasted him and marked the high-water mark of Russian civilization. Whether the cost seemed dear to Stalin the world will likely never know.

A Lesson for China

If there is an enduring lesson in the course of Stalin’s war with Germany, it is that the cost in national treasure and blood of a politicized army is prohibitive. Ideology and military necessity are uncomfortable bedfellows in the best of times, and utterly incompatible in the crucible of combat command. The salvation of the Soviet Union was a very near thing, so much so that it is arguably an even more powerful legitimizing myth for Russia than the Revolution, much in the way the Civil War serves as an historic vindication of America. The price to Stalin of political conformity in the military was almost the existence of the USSR itself.

China will likely face no such existential moment, no matter how poorly its forces perform in the field: possession of nuclear arms guarantees as much. Whether a Chinese government could remain legitimate in the eyes of its own people after the rout of its conventional forces is another matter altogether. China is betting on force structure, diplomacy, and bluff to ensure against such an eventuality. But the politicization of the force and its doctrine remains a weakness that would inhibit battlefield performance at every level. It seems, though, that the PLA will be no more able to exercise this problem in advance of combat than the Red Army was seven decades ago.

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An Alternative to Clausewitz and Sun Tzu Reply

Military History, Strategy

 

portray of J.F.C. Fuller

Colonel J.F.C. Fuller (Image via Wikipedia)

The Foundations of the Science of War, by Major General J.F.C. Fuller

Fuller was a British officer during the Boer War, the First World War, and the 1920s, but he is one of the most controversial figures in the firmament of 20th century strategy. He was brilliant but arrogant, inquisitive but opinionated, and had rotten political instincts.

Yet despite all of that, he was learned in the conduct of battle and sought to create a unified theory of war in this compilation of his lectures from the British Army’s Staff College at Camberly.

Fuller never quite reaches the level of the great strategists like Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Mahan, and Boyd, but the book serves as an excellent foil against which to pit other theories of war.

The Tao of Bill, the Te of Dave Reply

History, Innovation, Technology

Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built The World’s Greatest Company
by Michael S. Malone
Portfolio, 438pp

Cognizant that saying this may well sound ungracious, if not heretical, the recent well-deserved paeans to Steve Jobs tactfully omit the fact that in all he accomplished, he stood on the shoulders of giants. This is not to belittle what he accomplished. He created one industry, disrupted several others, created products that inspired the fierce loyalty of millions of consumers (myself included), and set in motion careers, companies, and trends that will define the foreseeable future. But Steve Jobs did not spontaneously self-generate. Everything he became, everything he accomplished, he was able to do because other men and women had passed that way before. The Apple II, the Macintosh, NEXT, Pixar, OS X, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and iTunes were his products.

But Jobs himself was the product of Silicon Valley: the place, the ecosystem, and the attitudes that combined to give this powerful, unique, and ultimately fragile wizard the place to create electronic magic.

As supporting evidence for my heresy I offer Michael Malone’s engaging biography of the founders of Hewlett-Packard, Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company. It is hard for most of us to recall the days when HP was the glowing heart of Silicon Valley, especially as the latest in a long string of outsiders attempts to save the company from the consequences of misguided leadership. But in telling the story of the two proto-geeks-cum-billionaires, Malone reminds us why Hewlett and Packard deserve to stand above the Silicon Valley milieu as both icons and role models.

To be sure, the environs south of San Francisco have been engineering hotbeds since just after Governor and Mrs. Leland Stanford turned their Palo Alto farm into a college. Stanford Professor Fred Terman and entrepreneurs like Charlie Litton and Ed Varian were the early shoots of the Valley’s transmogrification into the global capital of electronic engineering. But Malone’s narrative suggests that the Valley’s destiny was no given: the region was such a backwater when Bill and Dave graduated from Stanford in the mid ’30s that there was no company in the region capable of hiring either of the talented young engineers: Packard went to work for GE in its test lab Schenectady, New York, and Hewlett, a year behind, stayed in Stanford to work with his mentor Terman. The only way for the two men to get a job that suited them was to start a company. But when they did, right on the eve of World War II, established an enterprise that brought to the region and to the industry an ethos that mixed engineering talent, opportunistic flexibility, and Depression-tempered business sense. That ethos, suggests Malone, was the fertilizer that allowed Silicon Valley as we know it to take root.

After a time as a freelance electrical engineering firm, the two men produced their 1st unique product: an audio oscillator, a product that seems prosaic now but at the time was a revelation: the men had figured out a way to use an overlooked principle of electronics to create a device that cost a tenth of the competition’s product, and was easier to use to boot. The result, the Hewlett-Packard 200A Audio Oscillator, not only set the company on its path, it also set the mold for the way the company would do business for the next five decades: tinker, innovate, disrupt, reap, repeat. In the process, Hewlett and Packard established a legacy that the young Turks of the PC revolution could only envy.

For those younger entrepreneurs…many had already failed at least once. And all of that combined to make their respect for Hewlett and Packard ever greater. Those two guys, they realized, had not only already negotiated every step of the career path they intended to follow, often doing so first, but they had done so with breathtaking grace…Even in the virulently competitive world of high technology, even as people measured their own careers against those of Hewlett and Packard, many privately admitted that matching Bill and Dave was beyond their reach. No amount of revenue or percentage of market share would ever match a company that had invented a dozen entirely new industries; no amount of laudatory BusinessWeek cover stories would ever match a company whose employees set historic records for loyalty and commitment’ and no number of trips to Washington would ever equal having a medal for quality named after you.

What is more, Hewlett and Packard had created a series of business innovations that altered forever the world of work. Flex-time, coffee breaks, casual Fridays, beer and pizza busts, open plan offices, profit-sharing, flattened organizational charts, managing-by-walking-around, and the open-door policy are but a few of the practices that HP’s founders created, championed, or popularized. Then they crafted all of these into a form of enlightened management that reinvented work for much of the developed world, and turned conventional labor-management relations on its ear.

Malone began his career as a public relations guy for Hewlett-Packard, which is perhaps why he treads lightly on the shortcomings of HP’s founders. He skims past allegations of Packard’s marital infidelities, soft-pedals HP’s defense work, and lamely excuses HP’s failure to start the personal computer revolution by suggesting that the company was “just too busy” when Steve Wozniak presented his Apple I computer to HP management. These and other tells leave Malone open to accusations of hagiography.

One could argue in Malone’s defense that his treatment of Hewlett and Packard is far less breathless than the fawning prose that too often passes for business journalism. In an age when men of commerce with far less impressive legacies than HP’s founders are lionized and deified by the business-as-a-spectator-sport crowd, Malone’s tribute to his idols is perhaps a measured effort to restore some perspective.

Which brings us back to Mr. Jobs.

A friend and I were lunching in these willow-shaded precincts last week, shivering slightly as the Beijing fall worked its way into our bones. The topic turned to Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple CEO, and my friend asked if I would be reading it. “No,” I replied, “but not because I’m not interested.”

For an aspiring historian, Isaacson’s study has come out a decade or more too soon. I was a teenager when Apple was born, and I grew up watching Steve Jobs, so I don’t need a rehash of his remarkable life or career. What I want to know is whether history will treat him like a Morgan, Edison, Westinghouse, Pullman, Ford, or Watson; or whether, perhaps, he was a transitional figure setting the stage for someone or something even greater.

As for me I believe the former. But as Bill & Dave illustrates, our importance to history, to the bigger picture, is not always what we think it is at the time.

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The Battles Inside the US Navy in World War II Reply

Bibliography, History, World War II
Mark 14 Steam Driven Torpedo

Image via Wikipedia

Administrative histories of military forces rarely make for scintillating reading. Accounts of the activities of command bureaucracies are, however, treasure chests for the military historian. Without taking from the fighting men and women or their commanders, it is usually the force that has its stuff together in the rear and in the higher echelons of command that wins the battles. Administrative histories show us the terrain on which the bureaucratic battles were fought.

Some of those fights were spectacular and were felt on the battlefield. The fight between the OSS, the FBI, and the armed forces, for example over control of strateic intelligence; the denial of the Navy bureaucracy that there was something seriously, fatally wrong with the Mark 14 torpedo; the Army Air Corps’ struggle for independence from the ground forces that made tactical air support and battlefield interdiction permanent poor cousins to strategic bombing and air superiority; and the countless internal fights that determined the way the war would be fought and by whom. These conflicts not only dictated the nature of the battle, but cast the shape of the US armed forces for the remainder of the 20th century. And they are all chronicled in so-called “administrative histories.”

Thus, the Guide to United States Naval Administrative Histories of World War II is a bibliography of the internal accounts of these battles in the Department of the Navy. They serve, therefore, as glimpses into the birth and early growth of modern naval forces, as well as the conduct of the war itself. The resource is indispensible for the serious historian, and, if nothing else, serves as a guide when pursuing research into any significant naval topic.

The Unexpurgated Pentagon Papers Reply

Asia, History, National Security

Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnem Task force (The “Pentagon Papers“).
U.S. Department of Defense
1967
7,000pp.

In June of 1971, Daniel Ellsberg leaked significant portions of this report, blowing the lid off of the way the United States had conducted the war in Vietnem.

Today, thanks to the National Archives, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, and the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, the entire, original, unredacted seven thousand page report has been declassified and made available to the public. It also includes background documentation and a complete account of the peace negotiations, none of which were previously available.

That this release will become one of the most important documents in the study of the war is axiomatic. What is better, it is available at no charge to anyone with the desire and bandwidth to download its 1.5 gigabytes of PDF files. Whether you have read the original edition published by the New York Times or not, historians, political scientists, and Vietnam War buffs will want to grab this. I’m scheduling it for when I am back in the US, or someplace with really fast download speeds.

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America’s War in the North Atlantic Reply

History, World War II
On lookout for U-boats in the Second Battle of...

Image via Wikipedia

As much as the U.S. Army’s role in the Pacific War somewhat unjustly fades behind that of the Navy and Marines, the Navy’s role in the victory in Europe is too-often overlooked. Samuel Eliot Morrison tried to rectify that somewhat in his multivolume histories of the U.S. Navy in World War II, but there is precious little grist available to us amateur historians to learn more about the US Navy’s Atlantic fight.

One of the most critical of those fights was the Battle of the Atlantic, the six year effort to thwart Germany’s plan to win the European war by severing the Allies’ transatlantic supply line. Our hindsight makes it easy to forget that the matter was often in doubt, especially after German U-Boats were organized in Wolf Packs, began operating off the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and shredded convoys like the infamous PQ-17. Indeed, the U.S. applied the same strategy to Japan with huge success.

Navy Task Force 24 was the U.S. unit charged with the safe conduct of merchant convoys from U.S. ports to a point where British escorts could assume escort duties. The official account of the Admirals who commanded that unit, Commander Task Force 24, is thus a critical primary source for anyone with an interest in that period.

As with many such government-produced documents, the narrative can be a bit dry, more of a chronology than a thematically-organized work, and it is focused heavily on administrative matters rather than operations themselves. Nonetheless, this is essential background, and anyone familiar with or interested in the conduct of the war in the Atlantic will find the work enlightening.

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The Untold Story of the Navy on D-Day Reply

History, World War II
Normandy Invasion, June 1944 A convoy of Landi...

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The Invasion of Normandy: Operation NEPTUNE (Administrative History of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe, 1940-1946)

Do not let the otherwise bland title fool you. Nearly seven decades after the Allied landings in northern France, this service history remains the most comprehensive study of the maritime side of the invasion of Normandy.

Covering the complete history of the operation, from its early planning stages in January 1942 until its execution 30 months later, this is an exhaustive study of what had to happen behind the scenes in order to bring together the massive flotilla necessary to make D-Day happen. It is probably one of the best yet least told naval stories of World War II, and it is available for free reading online.

The work itself has, to my knowledge, never been published in book form, though the original manuscript was apparently a key source for naval Historian Samuel Eliot Morrison when he wrote the eleventh volume in his massive operational history of the U.S. Navy in World War II. This it is probably the single best primary source of history about the operation.

A must for any historian, we can only hope that somebody will put it in book, pdf, or Kindle format at some point soon.

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The Pacific War According to MacArthur Reply

History, World War II
General Douglas MacArthur surveys the beachhea...

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There are histories aplenty of World War II in the Pacific, and the biographies of General Douglas MacArthur would fill a long bookshelf. Anyone interested in the man or the period, however, would do well to read The Campaigns of MacArthur in the Pacific, Volume 1.

This account of Douglas MacArthur’s World War II, published by the U.S. Army and compiled by MacArthur’s staff, is excellent source material, but should not be seen as a definitive history. Indeed, the work seems a tad more biased than both contemporary and recent works by distinguished historians, and there are those who would read into the portrayal of some of the events and battles an overly flattering picture of MacArthur, his generalship, and the strategic importance of his theater of operations.

That said, the account of the war against Japan could use a little bias away from the accepted narrative, if only to prevent important campaigns from vanishing from memory. As the saying goes, there were two wars being fought in the Pacific, the one between the Allies and Japan, and the one between the US Navy and the US Army. If history is written by the victors, the Navy won the latter, and as a result the role of the US Army in the region has been minimized by a focus on the Navy by academic and popular historians alike.

This begs for some rectification without taking from the sacrifices and achievements of the Navy/Marine Corps team. MacArthur’s account, although compiled by men intensely loyal to the general personally, is a first step in that direction.

So What Did YOU Do in the War, Daddy Reply

Bibliography, History, World War II

Reading through David Brinkley’s excellent Washington Goes To War provided a jarring reminder to this amateur historian that history during that period was made outside of the Armed Forces as well.

For those interested in studying the home front in World War II, an excellent resource is The Administrative Histories of World War II Civilian Agencies of the Federal Government. This is essentially a large bibliography, but it is exhaustive, and thus an outstanding scholarly resource.

How Intelligence Helped Turn the Tide Against Japan 1

History, World War II
USS Yorktown (CV-5). In Dry Dock # 1 at the Pe...

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On April 17, 1942, Imperial Japan seemed invincible. The nation’s armed forces were virtually undefeated in battle. All of East Asia, including much of China, lay under the boot of Dai Nippon; Australia and India looked to be next; and with the Allies focused on Europe first, the U.S. looked to be at least a year away before being able to take the offensive against even an overextended Japan.

Within 50 days, that had all changed.

While her armies were still rampant on mainland Asia, Japan’s Navy had suffered a sequence of defeats. The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo ended the myth of Japanese invincibility, the Battle of the Coral Sea had halted Japan’s drive into Australia, and the Battle of Midway destroyed the Imperial Japanese Navy as a strategic offensive force.

That turning point was enabled by a range of factors, but it surely would not have happened had there not been a series of coups in signals intelligence in the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. In A Priceless Advantage: U.S. Navy Communications Intelligence and the Battles of Coral Sea, Midway, and the Aleutians, Frederick D. Parker gives us a look at the facts behind the legends, and provides a behind-the-scenes look at the unconventional team that enabled those (and many other) victories.

If the work leaves one wondering why, in contrast, the history of US intelligence over the last six decades reads like the annals of the Keystone Kops, it also offers the beginnings of an answer. Superior intelligence organizations are often not the conscious product of organizational science, but of brilliant, directed operators who are completely focused and left unhampered in their work.

A superb read for lovers of history and anyone interested in intelligence.

 

U.S. Navy Communications Intelligence and
the Battles of Coral Sea, Midway, and the Aleutians
Frederick D. Parker

The British Army and Modern Counterinsurgency Reply

Asia, Free PDF Book, Military History, National Security

The attention given to failed efforts to contain insurgencies like Vietnam tend to drown out the cases of successful outcomes where insurgent groups were defeated. Of the successes, the one that proponents and practitioners of counterinsurgency continue to come back to is Britain’s defeat of Malayan communists between 1947 and 1960. Given the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, interest in the lessons of the Malayan Emergency is high again.

As a result, there is plenty of current literature on the topic, the best of which is probably John A. Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Contemporary accounts, on the other hand, drawn as they are from the context of the times, can often be more enlightening as they lack the additional haze that comes with the passage of time. Such an account is Riley Sunderland’s Army Operations in Malaya, 1947-1960.

Given unprecedented access to the files of the War Office in the United Kingdom, Sunderland made his study just as the U.S. was expanding its involvement in Vietnam. The intent, therefore, was to give the U.S. Army as much insight as possible into how to fight a successful counterinsurgency. The work is interesting not only because it provides some interesting perspective on what the Americans did and did not learn before escalating the Vietnam effort, but also because it informs the today’s conflicts without using Vietnam as a yardstick.

Even a superficial analysis suggests that the U.S. Army could have learned little from the Malayan experience. The British succeeded in their effort because they were able to contain the growth of the insurgency long enough to secure the countryside. By the time the U.S. showed up in Vietnam in force, not only was the guerrilla infrastructure well into its second decade of development, it had a sympathetic and supportive sovereign country next door to sustain it. Nonetheless, some of America’s more successful tactics in Vietnam (the USMC’s Combined Action Platoons, for example) were rooted in the Malayan playbook.

Sunderland’s account is a testament to the need to stop insurgencies early, and the futility of fighting them once they have reached a critical mass. For anyone interested in whether and how it is possible to quell an uprising with armed force, this book will provide much food for thought.

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The Road to Catalonia Reply

Europe, History, World War II
Cover of "The Battle for Spain: The Spani...

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There are probably any number of reasons someone of my vintage might not know much about the Spanish Civil War.

Perhaps it is because I grew up in America, and there were probably far less than 10,000 Americans involved in the conflict, making it defensible to gloss over in courses on modern European history. Perhaps it is because the intervening years have seen Spain relegated to the back bench of European powers, thus making the civil war easy to ignore. Or perhaps it is because the conflict, waged between Franco’s facists on one side and the anarcho-socialist-communist Republic on the other, gave us anti-Facist and (after 1945) anti-Communist Americans no easy heroes?

In his masterful The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, Anthony Beevor, who has written some of the best popular histories of World War II campaigns like Stalingrad, Crete, and the fall of Berlin, has taken on a far more complex conflict than the others. His task is thus ambitious: given a nation with whom few of us are familiar and a vast cast of characters who are all but alien and irrelevant to your average English speaker, allow us to follow the course of the conflict sufficiently to reach our own conclusions about it.

While there were moments about halfway through the book that I despaired of ever getting it all straight, not long afterward it was all coming together, even without the benefit of a good map or a scorecard of the major and minor characters. Along the way, Beevor makes it painfully clear that the war was inevitable. Spain needed to be yanked out of its somnambulant neo-feudalism, but a democratic republic could not accomplish the necessary changes against the opposition of the church and the landowners, and the radicals that captured and led the republic provoked an inevitable reactionary response.

There are few heroes, but Beevor hesitates just short of making either Franco or his radical opponents into villains. The Caudillo was as vain and power-hungry as the worst Latin despots and a mediocre commander, but one is left believing that if it had not been Franco, it would have been someone else, perhaps Jose Sanjurjo de Sacanell or Gonzalo Quiepo de Llano, Franco’s fellow generals and co-conspirators in the plot to overthrow the republic. The leaders of the republic, portrayed as fractious, squabbling, and mutually-distrustful, are tragic figures.

If there were evildoers in this saga, Beevor subtly points beyond Spain: at the Germans and Italians, who honed their arsenals and armies for World War II in supporting Franco; at the Russians, who supported the Republic but exacerbated its centrifugal politics; at the British and French, who feared giving Hitler an excuse to go to war more than they feared facism in Spain; and to the Vatican of Pope Pius XII, who framed the war as a Catholic jihad and mobilized the faithful around the world against helping the Republic.

Beevor’s other conclusions are even more provocative, but I will leave you to read the book and decide for yourself.

One last thought.

The framers of the Declaration of Independence understood that, at some point, even the most downtrodden of peoples must rise up and replace the government that has kept them there. The history of the past three centuries is replete with examples of successful revolutions, and these have framed our political thinking. But if we learn more from our failures than our successes, it behoves those of us who believe in the value of a modern, participatory state to spend more time studying the failed revolutions than the successful ones.

The Spanish Civil War was a failed revolution. With peoples from Malaysia to Tunisia rising up against their leaders, we must remember Catalonia, the Republic, the Spain that might have been, and we must understand why it was not. Only then can we comprehend the dangers of spontaneous risings as well as we do the opportunities.

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Finding Stuff from Above Reply

Aerospace, Free PDF Book, History

As the U.S. Armed Forces increasingly rely on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or “drones”) to gather information about current or potential battlefields, the time has come to remember that the skills that count among the people controlling those aircraft are not limited to remote-control airmanship. Equally important are the other abilities that give drones their value.

Most important among those skills is figuring out what you are seeing when you look down from above. For that reason, the RAND corporation has re-issued a series of papers from the early jet age about how to conduct aerial reconnaissance. This makes fascinating reading for the aviation buff, and would be fun for anyone who spends way too much time checking out Google Earth as well.

Marshall’s Airman Reply

Aerospace, Free PDF Book, World War II
Lieutenant General Frank Maxwell Andrews

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The history of war is written not only by the victors, but the survivors. How much better we remember those who made it through the fight than those who fell, even when the fallen fought on the side of the victors.

One of those soldiers who fell in the allied cause was General Frank M. Andrews, who died in a B-24 crash enroute to take command of the U.S. Air Force in Europe in 1943. Andrew’s most important role in his career predated the war, when he was the organizer and commander of the General Headquarters Air Force (GHQAF), and as such the man who pulled the U.S. Army’s U.S.-based aviation units into a single, integrated operational force. if General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold is the man best remembered as the commander of U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, it was Andrews who made Arnold’s efforts possible.

Andrews was the officer, arguably, who sold Army Chief of Staff George Marshall on both the concept of strategic bombing applied in Europe during the war, and on the primary weapon used in that effort, the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber.

In Frank M. Andrews: Marshall’s Airman, a brief but engrossing biography published by the Air Force History and Museums Program, historian DeWitt Coop goes further. He suggests that Andrews, in his advocacy of an independent air arm and the first commander of GHQAF, was one of the leading architects of an independent air force that came into being after the war. Coop thus places Andrews in that aerospace pantheon of air visionaries who, like Billy Mitchell, made an independent air force possible.

History has not been kind to Andrews or his vision. Andrews was virtually forgotten after his tragic death, eclipsed by Arnold, LeMay, and others who survived him. The ultimate benefits of the strategic bombing campaign he was to have led in Europe, once taken as a given, are now a matter of hot debate among historians. And the value of an independent air force, appreciable in a day when few non-aviators understood the role of aviation on the battlefield, is now much less so in an era of pervasive aviation, unmanned aerial vehicles, and combined-arms doctrine. But there was no way of knowing any of that then, and at no point has it been suggested that Andrews was anything but sincere in his beliefs.

I am a member of what I believe to be a small group of historians who think that we have more to learn from failed beliefs, doctrines, and strategies than winning ones. Understanding Frank Andrews, what he believed, and why he believed it offer us a mirror for our own passionately held beliefs, whether in war, in business, or in life.

Autonomy of the Air Arm Reply

Aerospace, Military History

This interesting history describes the background behind the autonomy U.S. Air Force and its split from its mother service, the U.S. Army. The informal 1947 government accords which laid out the roles and missions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, known as the Key West Agreements, were a triumph for Air Force supporters.

Throughout the service’s history it has been in the Air Force’s best interest to remind senior civilians in the Pentagon and Congress occasionally why there was an autonomous Air Force in the first place. Hence this book. The arguments herein are primarily that the Air Force was a de facto autonomous service from its early beginnings in 1907, and that its formal separation from the army was a mere formality after years of divergent evolution. There is some evidence to support this position, and the book makes an excellent case that the air arm does not belong under the oversight of an infantryman.

What has become the case over the years, however, and with the authors of this work either miss or studiously avoid discussing, is the Air Force’s pathway of divergence from the Army continued throughout the Cold War and its aftermath. Today we have not just an autonomous air service, but one that appears to be developing increasingly independent of the strategies, doctrine, and tactical considerations that drive the other three services. At some point between 1947 and 2001, the Air Force crossed a line between autonomy and independence.

This is no simple matter of semantics. The matter has reached the point where the Junior service now no longer provides the aerial support required by sister services. This issue is part of what drove Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to appoint Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz as Air Force chief of staff in 2008. Gates and his successors are going to have to contend with an Air Force is growing in budget hunger, even as it falls its ability to deliver airframes on target and drifts further away from the integrated approach to conflict championed by its sister services.

American political theatrics being what they are, at some point, not only the autonomy but the existence of the air arm will be called into question in the parts of Washington where decisions of this nature can be made. Shutting down the Air Force in America’s political climate would be impossible. But until the service shakes its thinking clear of the conflict that created it (World War II) and the conflict that formed it (the Cold War), it will struggle to retain relevance in an increasingly budget conscious capital, China bogeyman or no.

Airborne Assault on Holland Reply

Aerospace, World War II
Waves of paratroopers land in the Netherlands ...

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This book gives us the perspective of the US Air Force on the story made familiar in Cornelius Ryan‘s epic A Bridge Too Far. As you read through this account, even if you’re familiar with the events of Operation Market-Garden, you’ll realize that the Air Force’s side of the story has not been well told.

What is most fascinating about this account, however, is the Air Force’s own admission that while it did everything that it could to help beat back stiff German resistance, airpower was unable to secure the victory. This must come as a sobering realization to airmen dedicated to the proposition that air power is decisive in battle. Clearly at a tactical level in World War II, this was not the case, despite the presence of some of the best close air support tacticians, practitioners, and equipment ever produced.

If you have read other accounts of this campaign, you’ll find this work to be of great interest.

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Communist China’s Policy Toward Laos: A Case Study 1954-67 1

China, History, International Relations

Apart from Zhou Enlai’s well known initiative to forge a bloc of non-aligned nations at the Bandung Conference in 1955, China’s foreign policy before Nixon’s visit is not frequently covered in popular histories.

In this book, Chae-Jin Lee makes the case that local conditions determined the nature of China’s foreign policy toward each country, and examines the country-specific factors in Laos that informed China’s policy toward the kingdom even as the PRC supported the growth of the Pathet Lao, the local communist movement.

Air War Over South Vietnam, 1968-1975 Reply

Aerospace, Military History
Cessna A-37B Dragonfly attack planes of the So...

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Historian Bernard Nalty gives us a look into the way the air war in Vietnam changed after the Tet Offensive in 1968. His selection of dates is not arbitrary. The growing opposition to, politicization, and micromanagement of the war after Tet, as well as the shift of operational responsibility to the Republic of Vietnam Air Force (RVNAF) changed the way in which the air war was conducted, and arguably gives a preview of the challenge faced in air warfare in our current conflicts.

Keep in mind that this is a service history, published by the U.S. Air Force. Political considerations and bias do enter the report and should be accounted for. But this makes the candor with which Nalty examines a few of the less flattering aspects of the period – the drugs and personnel issues, the over-extension of the B-52 force – the more interesting.

It is also worth noting that while Nalty’s aim is to tell the story of the air war, he does not limit himself, and provides a great deal of context and general history. As such, this book is a worthy addition to any library on the war.