It's a familiar figure of speech: "What if they gave a war, and no one came?"

I am old enough to recognize this slogan. I was born in 1958, the youngest of five, with my older siblings in college. I grew up during the 60s. Vietnam. Campus radicalism. Jefferson Airplane. Etc, etc.

By and large, World War II doesn't usually fit this model. After all, there wasn't much wriggle room here. What if Adolf Hitler gave a war, and no one came? Any reasonable person can be certain about it: it wouldn't have ended well for anyone.

But actually, there was an interesting moment in World War II when one side did give a war and no one came. In September 1943, the Allies launched a sizable diversionary operation codenamed Starkey. It was part of a series of operational plans put together by Lieutenant General F. E. Morgan, Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC). The first was a contested invasion of Normandy (codenamed Overlord). The second was a quick uncontested landing on the French coast, in the event of a German surrender (Rankin). Finally, Morgan had orders to plan a large deception operation to coincide with these potential invasions, codenamed Cockade. Cockade itself had three parts: a feint against Axis forces based in Norway (Operation Tindall), a phony invasion against German forces based in Brittany (Operation Wadham), and a mock invasion of Pas de Calais (Starkey).

Of the three diversions, the Allies decided on Starkey, timing it coincide with the Allied landings on the Italian mainland at Salerno (Operation Avalanche). The plan was to threaten a landing in northern France, which would hopefully draw the attention of the Germans, prevent them from reinforcing Italy, and thus assist the Allies in getting ashore. A secondary purpose was to test the strength of German air defenses in France, part of the longer range planning for Overlord. To that end, major units of the U.S. Eighth Air Force would fly against targets in northern France, simulating the preparatory stages of an Allied landing.

It all sounds sensible enough. Unfortunately, Starkey misfired from the start. The Allied navies didn't want to commit major units to a diversion, and so withheld the battleships. Likewise, landing craft were in short supply for real operations, and no one wanted to risk too many of them for Starkey. As a result, German coastal defenses, spotting only light Allied forces, remained silent and refused to reveal themselves. The Luftwaffe, too, failed to rise to the bait. To be honest, its attention was focused on Italy, and there wasn't much it could have done anyway. As to major German ground formations, they could only be in one place at a time, and in September 1943 that place happened to be Salerno, where they gave the Anglo-American landing force just about all it could handle. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill probably put it best upon first seeing the plans for Starkey: "I cannot feel that there is enough substance to this."

There you have it. A failed diversion. An enemy who fails to bite. Typical fog of war stuff. End of story, right?

Unfortunately, not in this case. General Ira C. Eaker was the commander of the U.S. 8th Air Force. He had just been through a tough few months. As commander of the American half of the "Combined Air Offensive" (CBO) against Germany, he had known nothing but frustration. Rather than the quick victory over the Luftwaffe that U.S. air force planners had expected, it had been a time of heavy German resistance, high friendly losses in bombers and crews, and minimal results. Voices were already being raised back home about Eaker. Perhaps he wasn't ready, wasn't up to the job. Perhaps someone more aggressive would get the results that had eluded him.

Eaker was an experienced officer, and he could hear the whispers. Maybe that's why he looked at the results of Starkey and saw something different than what other people were seeing. Perhaps, he surmised, the Germans hadn't reacted because they couldn't react. Perhaps their air units had already been crippled by heavy losses and didn't feel like tangling with the Americans. Perhaps the bombing raids up to now had been more destructive than his intelligence officers were reporting. After all, he knew, bomb damage assessment and claims of enemy kills were notoriously difficult to pin down.

As a result, in the words of one scholar of the air war, Eaker looked at Starkey and "immediately claimed victory." The day after Starkey had concluded, Eaker was in an exultant mood. "They refused to attack our bombardment whenever it was supported by our fighters," he wrote. Clearly the Germans were weaker than expected: "The enemy could have concentrated his fighters and overwhelmed and overpowered one of these air task forces of ours. This they did not do. This indicates a breakdown in German air command or communication, or both," he concluded.

Eaker wasn't the first commander in history to misjudge an operation under his purview. What sets this narrative apart is the conclusion he drew. With the German Luftwaffe clearly off balance (as he saw it), the time had come for the forces under his command to land a knock-out blow. He began planning a series of bold airstrikes on various German targets. Leipzig (Operation Suction). Berlin (Operation Halleck). And finally, the massive German ball-bearing complex at Schweinfurt, hit but not taken out in August 1943.

Eaker wasn't the only one getting giddy. His boss, General Henry "Hap" Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), was beginning to feed off of the same optimism. On 26 September, he told Eaker that "we obviously must send the maximum number of airplanes against targets within Germany, now that the German Air power appears to be at the critical stage."

They did just that in a single horrible week from October 8th through the 14th, launching one raid after the other, culminating in a massive strike at Schweinfurt. And they got their unescorted bombers shot out of the sky in prodigious numbers, no fewer than 148 aircraft, along with their highly trained crews. By any accounting, it was a "Black Week," a week of disaster. It seems the Luftwaffe wasn't on its last legs after all.

War is never simple, but the failed diversion of Operation Starkey leaves us to ponder one of the most complex questions of World War II: what if we gave a war, and no one came—but we thought they had?

Last time out, I wrote about a forgotten campaign: the Allied landing in the south of France in August 1944. The planners first called it Operation Anvil, then renamed it Dragoon just days before it took place. By any accounting, it should be a major part of the narrative of World War II. It put ashore two allied armies—the 7th U.S. and "French Army B" (later redesignated 1st French Army), and they eventually comprised the 6th U.S. Army Group under General Jacob L. Devers. It seized a good-sized port (Toulon) followed by a truly massive one (Marseille). It resulted in far more pressure being put on the Germans than could have been applied by the Overlord landing alone. And yet, you have to look pretty hard to find it in the history books. It usually gets a paragraph in a standard history of the war, and often that lone paragraph contains some pretty disparaging language about the senselessness of it all.

But why? Why has Anvil fallen in to the memory hole for American readers? I think we can identify three reasons:

1. It happened in the Mediterranean. Let's face it, Mediterranean operations have never grabbed the attention of the American people the way that the battles in Normandy and Western Europe have.

2. The French were involved. I teach World War II for a living, and the notion that the French were fighting alongside the Americans and British often evinces a certain amount of surprise from the student body, along with a hefty amount of disinterest. I'm not saying that's a good thing. But it exists.

3. There was no real fight. By the time the Allies landed along the Riviera, the Germans were in trouble—deep trouble—in Normandy. Their front had been ruptured as a result of the U.S. Army's success in Operation Cobra, the cream of the Wehrmacht in the West was desperately trying to escape annihilation near Falaise, and there were many in the Allied high command who felt that Germany might be finished in a month or so. Thus, there wasn't a lot a spare force lying around for the Germans to contest Anvil, and the results showed it. The Allies got ashore without much of a fight. There was no equivalent of Omaha Beach. No fighting in the last ditch. No need for General Norm Cota-style heroics.

I could go on. But instead, let me offer a response to each of these issues.

1. Yes, it happened in the Mediterranean, but it impacted the ETO. It put an army group on the German border within months. This was a far different campaign from the tough fighting in Italy, which after June 1944 truly was a fight to nowhere, and which still remains controversial for students of the war.

2. You don't care about the French army in 1944? Get over it. There were precisely seven armies in the Allied order of battle in Western Europe. Certainly U.S. manpower dominated—providing four of the seven. But America's allies did their part—one British army, one Canadian army, and one French army. Take away any of these three and you have less Allied fighting strength, less forward momentum, and more Germans troops in the reserve to plug holes. It's a different war, and from the Allied perspective, a worse one.

3. Funny, I always thought an uncontested and relatively bloodless landing should be considered a success! Certainly, it's hard to imagine the Dragoon landing being the subject of a movie like Saving Private Ryan. I get that.

In the end, I know that fewer people want to read about a battle that was more about logistics than heroism. But an absence of blood doesn't mean it was any less important. Last time out, I mentioned an amazing statistic, the one about the port of Marseille accounting for 25% of all Allied tonnage shipped into the European theater. It's just one number in a campaign of many numbers, and perhaps for that reason it is easy to underplay. But it is also a number that represents a logistical triumph of the first magnitude, in a war where supply was the principal limiting factor on Allied operations. I never met General Eisenhower, but if he were alive today, I am fairly certain that he would have some choice words for those who downplay the importance of Marseille. Ike was a smart guy, and if he understood one thing about modern war, it was the enormous logistical requirements that supported it.

They say that amateurs talk battle, while professionals talk logistics. I agree. And for this reason alone, maybe we should talk about Anvil-Dragoon a lot more than we do.
 

Life isn't fair, and neither is history. Indeed, some historical events—no matter how vast or significant—seem destined to be forgotten. And World War II is full of them.

Let's say you are launching a complex amphibious invasion of an enemy-held continent in, oh, 1944 or so. You storm ashore in style, naval, land, and air assets working in full harmony, catching your opponent by surprise and brushing aside his weak attempts to stop you. On D-Day alone, you land 94,000 men and over 11,000 vehicles—an amazing achievement by any standard. Friendly casualties are minimal, and by day two your troops have pushed nearly twenty miles inland. The enemy is confused, on the run. In less than two weeks you manage to seize the largest port in your theater, a target of strategic importance that you had originally scheduled for D+40. Soon after that, you land not merely your initial assault corps, but an entire army, and then a complete army group—a massive and irresistible mechanized force that drives the beaten enemy back to his own borders and beyond. Your operation is a complete and utter triumph.

And ever since, the world has yawned.

As a card-carrying military historian™, I have to admit: I am puzzled. Clearly, we should be falling all over ourselves with enthusiasm. We should be devising new superlatives, shouting phrases like "brilliantly conceived!" and "perfectly executed!" and "Napoleonic!" We should be handing out medals all around, reserving spots in our general's hall of fame, and writing book after book about the operational and strategic lessons of this magnificent campaign. Military historians tend to be enthusiastic by nature, and there is nothing we like more than a decisive victory.

Unfortunately, that has not been the case with the event under discussion—not even close. The perceptive reader has already figured out that I am talking about Operation Anvil, the Allied landing in the south of France between Toulon and Cannes on the Riviera coast. It put ashore the VI Corps (under General Lucian King Truscott, Jr., a hard-charging Texan who had proven himself in combat in Italy), which took the key port of Toulon effortlessly and soon thereafter drove the Germans from one of the largest ports in the entire Mediterranean, Marseille. Following VI Corps was Truscott's parent formation, the U.S. Seventh Army (General Alexander "Sandy" Patch), and eventually the 6th Army Group, under the command of General Jacob L. Devers, another one of the U.S. Army's sharpest and most aggressive commanders.

In other words, Anvil was not some minor or irrelevant piece of the puzzle in the Allied war against Germany. In the course of the war against Hitler's Germany, the U.S. Army deployed two army groups in the ETO, and one of them belonged to Devers (the other was General Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group). By that admittedly simple count, Anvil was responsible for half of the U.S. order of battle in Europe. From the beaches in the south of France, 6th Army Group drove north up the Rhône river valley and eventually fell in on the right flank of Eisenhower's battle array as it headed into the heart of Germany. The Wehrmacht defenders never did coalesce in front of 6th AG, and there are some very fine historians today (such as David P. Colley, author of Decision at Strasbourg) who argue that Devers had a real chance to break into Germany ahead of the rest of the Allied armies, thereby shortening the war, if only Ike had recognized the opportunity that beckoned.

As important as Anvil was in the purely operational sphere, however, we can go further. "Amateurs talk operations," the old saying goes, "but professionals talk logistics." Marseille is an immense port, and its capture was a boon to the Allies. It would eventually account for a full 25% of all Allied supplies brought into the ETO. Think of the problems Eisenhower had supplying his armies. Then think about those same problems without possession of Marseille.

So there it is. Landing an entire army group. Capturing a world-class port. Increasing the pressure on the German defenders all along the line until they reached teh break-point. By any reasonable standards, Operation Anvil was one of the keys to Allied victory in World War II.

But like I said, life isn't fair, and neither is history.

Next time: why Anvil gets no respect.

I am all thumbs. Put me at a computer keyboard, and I am trouble. I am the lord of the typo. Put my on an iPhone and things get exponentially worse. Put me on an iPhone with that quaint function known as autocorrect, and I am capable of almost anything. Broken friendships. Broken homes. World War III.

Curiously enough, I believe that my failings as a communicator have helped me as a military historian. I think a lot about how commanders issue their orders, about the precise words they use, and about how their subordinates interpret the orders they receive. Most of us simply assume that the process works. The boss says "do this" and the underlings do it. But it isn't that simple at all.

Take the modern German army, for example. German doctrine has always stressed short, crisp orders, directives that allow subordinates a great deal of leeway in carrying them out. Indeed, this has always been one of the German army's key operational strengths: it tended to act (and react) more quickly than its adversaries, since it spent less time sending detailed and lengthy messages up and down the chain of command.

Such a vibrant command style was a particular benefit in the opening days of World War II. The pace of the new armored operations meant that German commanders had to devise a new language, a sort of "Panzer shorthand." Consider the experience of 7th Panzer Division in the French campaign of 1940, commanded by none other than General Erwin Rommel. A glance at the division's radio traffic from those days is revealing. To call the messages "short" is to understate the case considerably. The neighboring 5th Panzer Division radioed Rommel on May 13, 1940: "Angriff 0430," which might better be rendered, "Our attack is going in at 0430 hours." At 0550 that morning, Rommel requested a situation report from his own 7th Infantry Regiment with a two-word message: "Wie Lage?" ("How situation?"). Its response: "0600 S.R. 7 Fluss Maas überschritten" ("7th Infantry Regiment crossed the Meuse at 0600"). When Rommel wanted his division to pursue the beaten French on May 14, his orders consisted of a terse "Rommel 1930 Verfolgung mit allem Waffen" ("Rommel at 1930: Pursuit with all weapons"), and when he wanted his engineers brought up to help repair the bridges near Arras, his message to the divisional staff was "Rommel Pioniere nach vorne" ("Rommel: Pioneers to the front"). This was the new language of mobile warfare—crisp, concise, and stripped down to essentials.

Sharp, eh? The Wehrmacht on parade, circa 1939–40! One perfect campaign after another.

Erm… not exactly.

Even in these successful campaigns, the Germans had their moments of confusion. On May 13, Rommel received a radio message that his 7th Motorized Regiment was "eingeschlossen," which was bad news indeed, as bad as it gets. "Eingeschlossen" is German for "surrounded." Showing his characteristic aggressiveness, Rommel did just about what you'd expect. He gathered up every man and vehicle he could find and rode off to relieve his trapped formation.

When he arrived at the front, however, he realized that the reports had been wrong. A quick comparison of the relevant transmissions revealed a simple and very understandable typo. It turned out that the regiment had been "eingetroffen" ("struck") by a French attack involving a handful of tanks near Onhaye, not "eingeschlossen." By the time the relief column arrived, the regiment had the situation well in hand all by itself, and it certainly was nowhere near being encircled.

It seems to me that there are two lessons here. The first: while the "fog of war" is an ever-present battlefield feature, it increases with the speed of the operation.

The second? Proofread before you hit that "send" button!

Challenge to the readership: can you think of any other moments in which a garbled transmission, a misunderstood order, or a plain old typo affected the course of a battle?
 

The theme of this column lately has been the way that Americans are keeping alive the memory of World War II. The results are in, and the verdict is "wow!" The recent exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston entitled "War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath" placed World War II at the center. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, recently hosted its annual International Conference on World War II, gathering scholars, veterans, and interested observers from all over the world. I was privileged to speak at both of these events, and each time I came away dazzled at the amount of interest that the war continues to generate, nearly 70 hears after the guns fell silent.

After Houston and New Orleans, my next stop was Minnesota, where I paid a visit to the beautiful Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. In January, I received an invitation to speak at the Dr. Harold C. Deutsch World War II History Round Table, which has held monthly meetings for decades at the Fort Snelling History Center in St. Paul. I never met Dr. Deutsch, but I know him as one of the giants, a dean of military history in the United States, and an expert on the German army in World War II. He founded the roundtable many years ago, and after my visit, I don't think he could have a better tribute than the organization that bears his name.
When I was in New Orleans, I remember being amazed at how invested the crowd was in the topic. The enthusiasm in the room was palpable, and the questions from the participants kept me on my toes. The World War II History Round Table was more of the same. I was speaking on what I consider to be a fairly arcane topic. It wasn't D-Day, or Patton, or the Battle of the Bulge. Nothing that a "typical American audience" could sink its teeth into. I study the Wehrmacht, and I try to analyze the writings of German army officers in the original German, attempting to uncover subtle shades of meaning that might not be obvious in English translations. Sure, go ahead and laugh. A thrill a minute? Maybe not to most people, but it is for me.

And once again, this is what made my jaw drop about my trip to Minnesota. Here I was, speaking about the strategic relationship between the Allied landing on the island of Sicily and the German offensive at Kursk. It's a complex topic, requiring a careful analysis of a very small period of time in the summer of 1943. Early in the evening, I am a bit worried about the audience. How many people are going to come and hear this talk? My host, Professor Joe Fitzharris from the University of St. Thomas, assures me that there will be a good turnout. But Joe is a friend of mine, a nice guy. Maybe he's just trying to let me down easy.

We drive out to the Ft. Snelling History Center that night. I notice a fair number of cars in the parking lot. We walk into the building. Again, a bunch of folks in the lobby. And then we enter the hall. Are there 250 people here? 300? 400? The room is packed. Enthusiastic. Once again, it's all ages. Scholars. Older veterans. Ordinary folks. High school kids and their moms. It's unbelievable.

Understand: they're not here to hear me. They come to hear about World War II. They want to learn. They want to know. They show up every month, and they've been doing so for decades.

Oh, have I mentioned? This was Minnesota in January. I will let you imagine the weather. Not as bad is it could be, not quite Moscow or Stalingrad. But it's bad. Bad enough to imagine all the reasons why a reasonable Minnesotan might say, "Naw… I'm not going out tonight." But they did come out, and their interest and questions made for a great night of history.

And so, sitting here in warm Corinth, Texas, I want to take this opportunity to put on my stocking cap and scarf, button my coat, and offer my respect to the good folks at the Harold C. Deutsch World War II History Round Table.
 

    Last week I told you about the incredible photo exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston. "War/Photography:  Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath" was a jaw-dropper, featuring images that went well beyond the battlefield.  Photographs of young soldiers in training, civilians on the homefront, war photographers, the sadness of separation, sweetness of homecoming:  this show had it all.  It also had something that I can't say I "enjoyed," exactly, but I still supported:  the cost of war.  The dead.  The suffering.  The mangled.  No one in his or her right mind should ever celebrate war.  Even the victors should pause and reflect on whether it was all worth it.  Indeed, maybe the victors need to do it more than anyone.

    One week later, I was a lucky man again when I was invited to speak at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, LA.  The Museum was hosting its annual International Conference on World War II.  This one was devoted to "Stemming the Nazi Tide:  The End of the Beginning, 1942-1943," part of the Museum's 70th Anniversary Conference Series.  Once again, it was an out-of-body experience.  My colleagues on the podium were a who's who of authors and scholars, including Gerhard Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Rick Atkinson, and the guru of Eastern Front studies, David Glantz.  Heck, I don't have to tell any of you how great these guys are.  It was an honor even to be among them. 

    When I think back on it, however, it was the crowd who blew my mind.  There were veterans galore, of course, men who had been there, who were proud of it, and who still liked getting together to talk about it.  I knew they would be in attendance, and I loved them all.  What I didn't expect, however, were the hundreds and hundreds of people from all walks of life who still think that World War II matters.  The students asking one earnest and perceptive question after another.  That enthusiastic high school teacher from Arizona who is fighting the good fight in the educational trenches, reminding her students that world history didn't suddenly begin in 1995.  She told me about her World War II class, and suddenly I would have given anything to be back in high school.  Individuals of all ages who could throw down on various details of the war, on tanks, aircraft, equipment, and doctrine.  T-34s and KV-1s. Shermans and Tigers.  Stumorviks and Stukas.  It just didn't stop.

    After a few hours in that reception hall, in the midst of a loud, happy throng all talking at once, I actually got giddy.  World War II is an intoxicating topic that has kept me interested for decades, and it is wonderful to have a moment that reminds me of something I tend to forget:  I am not alone.

    Oh, and have I mentioned the star of the show:  the Museum itself?  If you haven't seen it yet, my advice is to stop what you're doing, book a plane to NOLA immediately, and plan to stay for 3-4 days.  The Museum was undergoing a renovation while I was there, and now it's done.  So be sure to look up when you enter the U.S. Freedom Pavilion.  Your eyes aren't deceiving you.  That's a B-17 hanging from the ceiling.

    That's what I'm talking about.  A B-17, right there over your head.  What an airplane.
What a museum!

    More next week:  yet another group keeping the flame alive.

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I've said it many times: I'm a lucky guy. Beautiful wife. Wonderful family. I get to live in Texas. (No offense to the other states. I've lived in a few and they're not bad at all.)

Another way I'm lucky is that I get invited to speak a lot. I fly around the country on someone else's dime and per diem and I see incredible sights. I meet great people, all because people think I know something about World War II. Shhhh…. Don't tell anyone, or they'll all want in.

In the last few weeks, I've been invited to three places that have reinforced the notion that military history, and especially the study of World War II, have never been more popular. We historians sit around a lot and mope about the modern age, which seems determined to forget the history of the past century. You can't blame them. War is so unpleasant, and the industrial-strength wars of the 20th century have been the most unpleasant of all. Even so, the entire purpose of history is to encourage memory, and it sometimes demoralizes even the most ardent history professor when you utter the words "Battle of the Bulge" in class and a lot of students stare at you blankly.

That is why my past few weeks have been so energizing. At the end of November, I spoke at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. On Veterans Day, the museum opened an incredible new exhibition titled "War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath." When I saw it, my jaw dropped. Think about every famous war photograph you've ever seen, not just from World War II but from the Crimean War to the present. Then imagine being in a room with every single one of them. I'm pretty hard-headed about this stuff—I've been teaching military history for years. Even so, my mind reeled.

I don't want to belabor the exhibit with too many words. A picture is worth 1000 words, as they say. But let me share a few of the images, and urge you all to get out and see this before it closes on February 3rd.

Just for starters, let's think about why the United States won World War II. How about this 1942 photo of the Douglas Aircraft Co. Plant, Long Beach, California?

Or, let's say you aren't satisfied with U.S. material abundance as the source of wartime victory. You want heroes? How about Lieutenant Brink Bass, a U.S. Navy pilot in the South Pacific? Here he is as an ordinary guy getting his service haircut.

And here he is a bit later, transformed by the camera. Lieutenant Bass: war god.

Or perhaps you're a hard-headed type, someone who doesn't go in for heroic poses or photographs. Here is the harsh reality of war, a photograph of the aftermath of the fighting at Buna on New Guinea.

Like I said, it is an amazing exhibit, and I learned more in a couple of hours than I thought possible.

More next week: another group keeping alive the memory of World War II.

I have been writing this column for years, and if your attention hasn't drifted, you probably know that I am not that fond of war movies. I say it every year at this time. Don't like them, don't watch them, don't care to discuss them

And then I turn around and write yet another column about war movies! Am I a hypocrite? Maybe. But it might be more correct simply to plead nolo contendre, "no contest." You're an adult, you're conscious, you live in America: chances are you see a war movie or two. This Christmas, sitting around with "the fam"—my wife and daughters who are visiting us from various parts of the country—I saw two movies dealing with World War II, one about the start and one about the end.

It is easy enough to make light of The Sound of Music. It is so earnest. The lovely Julie Andrews as a governess. Christopher Plummer's widower Captain Von Trapp. A blended family that can harmonize like pros at the drop of a hat. The Songs! The Alps! The hills are alive!

It's corny, sure, but when I watched this movie on ABC tonight, it struck me as pretty serious stuff. Even this relatively simple musical has some big themes. Nazi terror. Personal danger. The Anschluss. Indeed, at one point, Captain Von Trapp sings the haunting air "Edelweiss," defending the independence of Austria and defying the notion of a Nazi takeover of his native land. "Bless my homeland forever," Plummer sings. He begins to weep as he sings the song, and he cannot continue. Andrews joins in to assist him, and eventually so does the audience.

It is a powerful scene, however jaded you might be. It expresses a basic truth. No one wants to be oppressed by anyone. Freedom is a right, and the urge to live free is a universal one. Damn straight, I thought. Suddenly, The Sound of Music didn't seem so trivial. Sure, I realized, there were millions of Germans (and Austrians) who supported Hitler, but there were also a sizable number who didn't, and their voices need to be part of the narrative we tell.

It is equally easy to scoff at the entire notion of White Christmas. Bing, Danny, and the "Haynes Sisters" all add up to an amazing musical, sure. The dance sequence with Danny Kaye and Vera Ellen ("The Best Things Happen When You're Dancing") is absolutely exquisite, one of the greatest ever filmed.

But the plot… that's another story. The narrative of General Waverly (ably performed by Dean Jagger) and his failed ski resort in Pine Tree, Vermont, seems like a classic example of "who cares?" Hundreds of thousands of Americans—and millions of men worldwide—died in World War II. Many millions more had their lives shattered: horrible injuries to body and mind and spirit that would never heal. The ripple effects among loved ones, parents and wives and children, were equally tragic. As I've written here many times, no one should ever romanticize World War II. Those who fought it paid some heavy dues, and the bill kept coming due for the rest of their lives. So it isn't snowing? Who cares?

But even here, there were moments in the film that made me reconsider taking such a hard line. That scene early on where the men of the "151st Division" (and I'll bet that General George C. Marshall WISHED there were 151 divisions in the U.S. Army!) are gathered for their Christmas show is a case in point. The setting is Europe, and presumably the Ardennes, in December 1944. Bing, looking a little old to be a captain in the wartime U.S. Army, sings the men the classic title tune. "May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white." The soldiers are young—far too young to be facing death. They are silent. Some stare off into space. Some lean on their rifles, clearly moved.

Schmalz? Of course it is! Hollywood has sold schmalz to the world for a century now, at a very tidy profit. But even a silly Hollywood film can touch a basic truth. In World War II, a lot of men on all sides spent Christmas of 1944 wishing that they were somewhere else. Somewhere far, far away. Somewhere called home.

We can take the same broad view about the rest of the film. Forget about the general and his ski resort. He's not the first guy who made a bad business investment! Let us call to mind all those men (and not a few women) who gave up the best years of their lives to fight this horrible war. They did their duty, they fought, and they suffered. Some were brave and some were cowards, some had their bodies broken and some saw their best friends die. Postwar emotions ran the gamut from pride to shame, from denial to anger. At the end of the day, General Waverly wasn't exactly unique. A lot of men had trouble fitting back in to peacetime. The more you'd invested in the war, in fact, whether time or emotion or heroism, the harder it was to forget.

It's the ultimate hokey scene—the General in his old uniform and the men from his now defunct division singing, "We love him, we love him…" But at the end of a war, it's exactly what society needs to tell those who fought. The ones who charged enemy positions without fear, and the ones who spent entire nights cowering in foxholes waiting for the next shell to blow them to smithereens. War places cruel demands on a chosen few, and the rest of us should, at the very least, try to understand.

It is Christmas Day as I write this… Night, actually. Like any person of good will, I have a single wish for all of humankind: let us have peace.

Last week I made a startling claim about the uniqueness of the Pacific War.

Well, startling for me, anyway. I've come up in a school that distrusts the very word "unique." Most historians eschew the concept. Indeed, the very job of a historian is to compare events from various epochs and to show how all events of the present owe something to those of the past.

As a card-carrying historian, I get that. But even so, I still think that the Pacific War was unlike anything before or since. At sea, the distances involved dwarfed any previous military conflict. Consider the battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, for example. The deployment area was some 450,000 square miles, more than the American states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico combined. As a result, traditional notions of fleet battle, with battleships steaming line ahead and exchanging gunfire with their counterparts similarly arrayed, never came into play. Rather, the opposing fleets stayed hundreds of miles apart and the aircraft carrier became the principal weapon of destruction. The encounter at the Coral Sea in May 1942 was a milestone for that reason, the first naval battle in history in which the hostile ships never came within sight of one another.

While the fleets and carriers were roaming free over a major portion of the globe—maneuver personified, we might call it—the fighting on land was of a very different character. Here, individual islands witnessed one brutal battle of attrition after another, with Japanese soldiers fighting to the last man and U.S. forces having to vaporize them one by one with superior firepower. Today, we tend to see the typical battle as a "storm landing," an amphibious assault on a tiny island, with the Japanese defending on the water's edge and the Americans landing under fire. Think of Tarawa in November 1943, for example. But anyone with a cursory understanding of the Pacific knows that it is filled with larger islands like New Guinea and Leyte, and here the Japanese had no prospect of defeating a landing. On the big islands, U.S. forces often landed unopposed, then had to confront a series of heavily fortified ridges, hills, and caves in the interior. Finally, there were many islands like Peleliu, where the Japanese decided to follow both strategies: carrying out a murderous defense at the water's edge as well as a fight to the death in the interior. Any way you sliced it, it could take months for U.S. infantry to wipe out Japanese resistance. It was a ugly business of brutal close assaults, demolition charges, and flamethrowers.

In close quarters like these, the conditions were horrid for both sides. Historian Ronald Spector put it best when he wrote that the "real enemy" in the Pacific wasn't a hostile army. It was the jungle. Let us take Guadalcanal, for example. It was an island covered by tropical rain forest: razor-sharp grasses, crawling vines, ferns bigger than a man, tangled roots, giant hardwood trees that blocked out the sun. On "the Canal," as U.S. combatants called it, the heat and humidity was such that your men could make something like one to two miles per day before exhaustion set in. The Japanese didn't have it any easier than the Americans did. Tales of the Japanese being skilled at jungle warfare are mythological. Sure, they might have trained for it a little better, but they weren't raised in it any more than a boy from Cleveland, Ohio was, and there were just as many jungles on Japan as there are in America—that is to say, none. Visibility for both sides was nil, a few hundred yards at most. It was a world of giant ants, massive wasps, and mosquitos that gave you malaria. Quinine (the standard anti-malarial medicine) was always in short supply. American scientists, ever inventive, did manage to devise a synthetic substitute called Atabrine. Unfortunately, rumors had already spread among U.S. troops that Atabrine suppressed your sexual desire or made you impotent. So there was that. A more immediate threat was the humidity. It was a constant, clinging menace to you, your rifle, your clothing, your skin, and your feet. One nasty word: fungus.

Jungle wasn't the only problem in the Pacific, however. Even a non-jungle island like Iwo Jima could be a nightmare. Iwo was a hunk of volcanic rock four miles long by two miles wide, made up of gritty, irritating ash that stunk like sulfur. That was bad enough, until you realize that the entire island was honeycombed by Japanese tunnels, some as deep as 75 feet. U.S. troops have fought in some rotten places since 1945, from the Chosin Reservoir in Korea to the Iron Triangle in Vietnam to the Shar-i Kot valley in Afghanistan. As bad as they were, none of them was worse than Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal.

The point I am making here is that the Pacific Theater was a mess. Whether jungle island or tiny coral atoll or volcano: the fighting was never less than horrible, dehumanizing, and brutalizing. Both sides wound up doing what troops often do in such circumstances: committing atrocities. The Japanese mutilated American dead and the Americans began collecting body parts from Japanese corpses.

I don't want to appear naive or overly negative here about the way that we should remember the war. Hell, my dad fought on Guadalcanal. I have no problem at all with emphasizing the heroic side of the struggle in the Pacific. I thrill to the U.S. flag-raising on Iwo Jima, for example, and photos of the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri make me proud to be an American.

At the same time that we remember this war in the ideal sense, however, we should also take note of the real. Indeed, it is precisely the horrible reality of the Pacific War that brings the acts of heroism on both sides into sharper focus.

A last point. What we need to avoid above all costs is romanticizing any of what happened. It is too easy to neglect the horror, the brutality. Too easy to forget, or to gloss it over. Too easy to turn the South Pacific into…well, South Pacific.

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No historian is supposed to use the word "unique."

After all, everyone knows that nothing is completely unique. Human beings have been living on planet earth for a long time, and every historical event hearkens back to something that happened a long time ago. Alexander the Great invaded Afghanistan (although he called it Bactria) in ancient times; so did the Soviet Union and the United States more than two thousand years later. Both Charles X of Sweden and Napoleon I of France invaded Russia, and both of them came to grief. Hitler tried it too. Both the French and the United States attempted to pacify Vietnam, and both of them failed. Like the Bible says, "There is nothing new under the sun."

But from 1941–1945, something happened that I would say was unique. Something unlike anything that had happened before or since.

I am speaking of World War II in the Pacific Ocean. Once Japan had conquered its "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere," it set up a defensive perimeter in the Pacific, fortifying hundreds of islands in the Solomons, Gilberts, and Marshalls. Backing the perimeter would be huge naval and air bases on the island of Truk in the Carolines and Rabaul on New Britain. Once established in its perimeter, Japan was certain that the U.S. would have no choice but to accept a fait accompli. After all, no U.S. president in his right mind would sacrifice tens of thousands of young Americans in bloody frontal assaults on one obscure island after another, nor would the American people stand for it. Japan viewed the U.S. as a commercial nation, one that knew how to read a balance sheet, how to weigh costs and benefits. By contrast, Japanese superiority in the spiritual realm, bravery, and willingness to die would make the difference. The spirit of Japan, they called it: Yamato-Damashii.

A sensible strategy? Perhaps. But it fell apart early, on day one in fact, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Intended as a surprise blow by the Japanese leadership, it appeared to be something very different to the American people: a "sneak attack," a devious stroke carried out at the very moment that Japanese envoys were in Washington to negotiate. The very next day, President Roosevelt gave a short speech to Congress. While it barely stretched beyond the 7-minute mark, it summed up the mood. Pearl Harbor wasn't just an operational defeat. It was a crime, Roosevelt said, a "date which would live in infamy."

Americans went from antiwar to rabidly prowar overnight. They were now determined to do the very thing that Japan felt they would refuse to do. They demanded a war to the death against Japan, fighting across the vast Pacific Ocean one island, one atoll, one jungle at a time. And they lived up to that pledge, on places like New Guinea or Tarawa.

Oh…and one little detail. That Japanese raid that smashed the U.S. Pacific Fleet? It missed one little detail. Look at this photograph. Tell me what you see. Tell me what is missing.

More next week.

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Last weekend, I met a hero.

Oh, I know, "hero" is a cliché of military history. I've always been skeptical of the term. How do you judge a hero? What is the qualification? Do you have to blow up a tank with your bare hands? Hold a lost position all by yourself? Be Audie Murphy?

I've thought about this a lot. My dad spent 18 months of his life on the island of Guadalcanal with the Americal Division. He never gave me a lot of details or told a lot of stories, except for that time when he met Eleanor Roosevelt—the moment that let the entire Citino family share in the American dream. But Dad was a medic, and I know enough about World War II to know that he did some pretty heroic things in that time. And he was my hero, anyway.

This weekend I met another hero: James Megellas, U.S. Army LTC (retired). Maggie, as his friends call him (and I hope he'll include me in the list) was a Wisconsin boy, mid-way through his senior year at Ripon College when Pearl Harbor happened. He graduated ROTC in 1942 and accepted a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the army infantry. Originally assigned to the Signal Corps because of his math skills, he wanted to see combat and volunteered to become a paratrooper.

And what a paratrooper! By the end of the war, he had fought at Salerno, at Anzio, in Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands, and the campaign into Germany. Along the way, he became the most decorated officer in the 82nd Airborne Division: a Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, Presidential Citation w/cluster, the Belgium Fourragère, six Campaign Stars, and Master Parachutist badge. In 1945, General Jim Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne, selected him to receive the Military Order of Wilhelm Orange Lanyard from the Dutch Minister of War in 1945, the first American so honored by the Government of Holland.

If there was a defining moment in this heroic career, it came in September 1944. Jim jumped into the Netherlands as part of Operation Market Garden. Ordered to seize the two critical bridges at Nijmegen, Jim's company had to cross the Waal river in flimsy boats while under murderous machine gun and 20mm antiaircraft fire. If you're trying to picture this, think four words: A Bridge Too Far. The movie. Robert Redford in front of the boat reciting the "Hail Mary." The chaplain in the back chanting "Thy will be done." A bunch of young boys certain they were going to die, but doing what they were told to do, anyway. Maggie was there.

On Saturday, at the University of North Texas, he gave a talk about that horrible day. He's 95, but in some ways he's still the same young platoon leader in that boat. You could still see the emotion, the fire. The same determination to do what had to be done. Jim doesn't romanticize war, or relish it. He told the crowd about friends, young men he had known for years, cut down by random bursts of fire. An officer who said, that morning, "I'm not gonna make it." They all tried to reassure the poor fellow, but they knew a deeper truth about war: you know when your number's up. Maybe it's truths like that one that led Jim to write a book nearly 60 years later, All the Way to Berlin (2003), one of the best books on war I have ever read (and you should read it too). Maybe that's why, at the age of 89, Jim agreed to travel to Afghanistan and visit his old outfit, the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The young men there gave him a hero's welcome, and he's been back two times since then.

It wasn't until the very end of the war, Jim told the audience, that he actually realized what it had all been about. What they had been fighting for. The cause for which his friends had died. His battalion liberated a concentration camp. A patrol reported back that they had just come across a German installation of some sort. "A bunch of skinny guys," the man said. Jim went forward and came across a concentration camp, with inmates in the advanced stages of malnutrition, many close to death (and many who would soon die). In that room in Denton, Texas where Jim was speaking this weekend, you could have heard a pin drop.
I don't go in much for "greatest generation" rhetoric. But in this case, I will make an exception. Thanks, Jim.

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Last week, I wrote a teaser about the 1940 campaign. For most military historians, the German victory in France remains a kind of gold standard: a rapid, decisive, and relatively bloodless victory that smashed the French army and drove the British from the continent in a humiliating evacuation that was without parallel in modern times. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) survived, but only by abandoning all of its vehicles and equipment and carrying out a hasty evacuation from Dunkirk. Even the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had to remind his countrymen that wars were not won through successful evacuations. He got that right.

Even this great German victory was not without problems, however. No military operation works perfectly. The great German philosopher of war, Karl von Clausewitz, summed it up nicely. "Everything in war is very simple," he wrote, "but the simplest thing is difficult." His point, which no student of history can dispute, is that war always seems simple in theory. We are here; they are there; we need to go there. But how to get "there" is the problem.

Consider an airborne plan in the 1940 campaign, the one that had German paratroopers (Fallschirmjägern) landing on targets in Belgium, the small towns of Nives and Witry (hence the "Niwi" landing). The point was to seize crucial crossroads in the Ardennes Forest in order to smooth the passage of the great German armored offensive through Belgium, unhinge the local defenses and clear a path to the Meuse River. The faster the Panzers reached the Meuse, the more likely it was that the French defenders would be surprised and unprepared, and the greater the chances of a breakthrough in this sector.

The plan seemed logical enough. One reinforced company of paratroopers would land at Nives to support the advance of the 2nd Panzer Division. Another one would land at Witry in the attack sector of the 1st Panzer Division. But the operation itself turned into a classic embodiment of what the U.S. military would call a SNAFU ("situation normal all fouled up," although "fouled" really isn't the word). Everything that could go wrong in the Niwi operation did go wrong. The landing lacked sufficient transport aircraft, and so the Luftwaffe's commander, Hermann Göring, hit on the bright idea of using Fi 156 liaison aircraft (the famous Fieseler Storch) to carry his paratroopers forward. The Storch could carry only two men in addition to the pilot, however. With 400 men in the initial landings, a landing supported by a handful of transport planes had suddenly grown into 100 aircraft flying in two waves, with a round trip of two hours each. Clausewitz would no doubt have shaken his head and chuckled. A simple idea had become a monster.

The Germans went forward anyway, as modern military establishments tend to do. Once a plan has taken weeks or months or years to work out, few commanders will simply abandon it. The Storchs took off early on the morning of May 10th, 1940, flying low to avoid detection and antiaircraft. The northern group almost immediately flew off course due to navigation errors and small arms fire from the ground, and most of the southern group flew into a random fog bank. When it emerged into the clear, it spotted a large flight of Storchs. Breathing more easily now, it fell into formation behind them, without realizing that they were the main body of the northern group.

When all was said and done, the northern group arrived well over strength, but nowhere near Nives, and the southern group at Witry landed with precisely five planes—nine men in all. The former group had a relatively easy time, spreading out and driving back the Belgian forces in this sector. The Witry force, by contrast, spent the day in a relative panic, with its commander later writing that he felt like a "highwayman" as he and his tiny band did their best to block the road from Neufchâteau to Witry. They were a small enough force that they could have been arrested. Somehow they managed to survive, however, and they still held the road by the end of the day.

On the surface, the Niwi landing is a classic example of a battle against the odds. A bold action on one side can always paralyze a hesitant enemy. Everyone recognizes the advantage of acting decisively, and the history of World War II is filled with similar heroic exploits.

But let us go one level deeper. As the Panzers crossed the border into Belgium—a gambit that required an immediate breakthrough of light Belgian defenses and a rapid passage of the Ardennes–they ran into unexpectedly tough resistance. The German 1st Motorcycle Battalion motored into the village of Bodange and suddenly came under heavy fire from a series of elevated positions. The Germans had to go to ground, call in heavy weapons fire, and eventually summon their field artillery. Only then were they able to get forward, but even so, they had lost a full day of their scheduled advance.

It wasn't until later that they found out why. Early on the morning of May 10th, the Belgian high command sent orders to that tiny force at Bodange to retreat if attacked. The orders never arrived, however. The Belgians didn't know it, but a small enemy force had cut their communications links to the rear: nine German paratroopers occupying the road from Neufchâteau to Witry. Since those brave Belgian boys never got their orders to withdraw, they stood and fought, and they almost disrupted the German plan altogether.

Consider it: a plan of one million men, nearly ruined because of nine misplaced paratroopers. Like Clausewitz wrote a century earlier, none of this is as simple as it looks.

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Military historians love to emphasize the planning process. They like to talk about "perfect plans," showing how the genius of the great commander can manifest itself even before the shooting starts. A good plan, we argue, can overwhelm the enemy, leading to quick victory and avoiding high casualties. We all know that war is horrible, and we all like to think that a perfect plan can bring things to a conclusion before the fighting becomes too unpleasant or bloody.

Exhibit A in this civilized view of warfare is the German operational plan for the invasion of France and the Low Countries in 1940. Fall Gelb, they called it: "Case Yellow." I've spent a lifetime talking, teaching, and writing about it, and I will never tire of it.

How do you defeat a hostile coalition that outnumbers you? Maybe you launch a feint into central Belgium by Army Group B, while your main thrust (Army Group A) actually sends all of your Panzers through the forbidding and densely forested terrain of the Ardennes. The enemy won't be expecting this, because the Ardennes is impassable to tanks and supposedly "impregnable." He swallows your feint whole, rushing north to meet it with his entire strength. As a result, your southern drive through the Ardennes encounters only reserve formations, second line troops, and old men. You smash them, and the next thing you know, your Panzers are cutting clear across the rear of the Allied armies fighting north in Belgium. You reach the English Channel, slicing their lines of communications to ribbons, and cutting them off from supply. Oh sure, some of the enemy manages to evacuate from Dunkirk. Disappointing, yes, but not so much when you realize that they only escaped by abandoning all their tanks and equipment. Even allowing for the failure at Dunkirk, you have just won one of the most decisive victories in all of military history.

Bravo.

I am no more immune to this portrait than anyone who studies the war. But as I have come to analyze Case Yellow more carefully and to know it more intimately, I have been forced to acknowledge a number of ideas that were first put into print by the great Prussian philosopher of war, Karl von Clausewitz. A career of warfighting in the Napoleonic wars had left Sir Karl feeling pretty jaundiced about the notion of a perfect plan. He'd seen enough supposedly foolproof plans that failed, enough "brilliant" commanders claiming to have the solution, enough of the random events that screwed up even the best planned military operation. Downed bridges. Weather blowing up suddenly: storms, blizzards, fog. Messengers carrying important dispatches who got sick, or got lost, or whose horse pulled up lame. Regiments that didn't get their orders, who were supposed to march in sequence and who instead showed up simultaneously at a crossroads claiming precedence on the one route forward. Clausewitz wasn't all that impressed with anything claiming to be a perfect plan. He knew that war is not chess. Here are the profound words of the great sage himself, taken from his book Vom Kriege ("On War"), published in the 1830s:

Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war…. Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.

Nota bene: "Real war" is different from "war on paper." The actual campaign rarely, if ever, mirrors the campaign plan. And, we might add, it rarely resembles the precisely conceived and perfectly executed plan that the military historian likes to portray in his books. Sitting in your study decades later, Napoleon or Moltke or Schlieffen or Patton might look like idiots, and it is easy to spot their "errors." Clausewitz reminds us that none of this is as easy as it looks, and that we should be careful before we call any general a moron.

But, we might ask, what about 1940? Wasn't this an example of military genius on one side wiping up the floor with a hapless adversary? Wasn't this the ultimate chess game, with the Germans being the masters and the French the novices? Wasn't Case Yellow the perfect campaign?

The answer to that question is, "no." No operational plan is perfect. Treating war as chess is a mistake, if only because in chess, no one is shooting at you. In war, even if you succeed, you should be humble and hesitate to claim any sort of omniscience. Even in the 1940 campaign, a lot of things went wrong for the Germans. What we usually see as a pushover contained its share of problems, mistakes, and SNAFUs.

Imagine being a German paratrooper, a Fallschirmjäger. Part of the German army's elite. Smart. Aggressive. Focused rigorously on the mission. A model soldier. On the eve of the great offensive in the west, you and 400 of your comrades are preparing for an airdrop into the Ardennes, to drop into the rear of the defenders and pave the way for the great Panzer drive. Your objectives: the villages of Nives and Witry.

No army in the 20th century had better troops. And no army wasted them on a more senseless mission.

Tune in next time.

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Over the last few weeks, I've been writing about the Italian campaign in Ethiopia (1935–36), one of the many wars between the two world wars. We often speak of the "interwar" period, but in fact it was chock full of conflict: the Russo-Polish War, the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, the Japanese invasion of China, and many more. While it may have been interwar, it clearly wasn't anything approaching "peace."

The point I've been making is that analysts of the day took the Italian war very seriously—far more seriously than we do today. While anyone conversant in the history of World War II tends to laugh at the Italian armed forces, they were actually the first in history to carry out a mechanized campaign, with tanks, trucks, and aircraft working together in relative harmony. The Italians ended a long-running debate about whether such a thing was even possible, showing the traditionalists, conservative nay-sayers, and horse cavalry fanatics that a new age had dawned in military affairs, and that the future of warfare belonged to the machine. The Italians attacked with tanks, used ground-support aircraft to help break through Ethiopian defenses and harry the enemy as he attempted to retreat, and employed air transport assets to supply their forward elements and to leapfrog their headquarters formations forward hundreds of miles at a bound. All in all, it was an admirable achievement, and any standard military history should applaud it. If there's one thing we historians love, it is progress, and this campaign seemed to be a living embodiment of the concept.

But there is one last factor we have to discuss, in order to treat this campaign as seriously as it deserves. We need to delve into the morality of it all. As a historian who lives in the world of logic and cause and effect, I am not at all comfortable handing down condemnations. A wise man once said, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," and I try to keep that admonition in mind at all times.

Still, this was an ugly campaign, and the Italians arguably crossed a series of lines in conducting it. Machine guns and heavy artillery against poorly armed feudal levies? Strafing and bombing runs against an enemy almost completely devoid of antiarcraft weapons? It's easy enough to answer with the stock phrase, "fortunes of war." After all, more sophisticated forces have been winning battles for centuries, slaughtering their adversaries on the process. Nothing to see here, move along. Mussolini's nineteen-year-old son Vittorio, an Italian air force pilot, even called it a "magnificent sport." He was nineteen and feeling the adrenaline, so no one should treat him too harshly. But what kind of society celebrates such words?

And it gets worse. The Italians repeatedly dropped poison gas on the Ethiopians. It was something that later European air forces in World War II would refrain from doing, almost certainly from fear of reprisal. But the Italians had no need to fear Ethiopia on this score. Haile Selassie had neither the scientific base nor the delivery systems to hit the enemy in kind, and the Italians knew it. As to Ethiopian preparation for chemical warfare—gas masks, protective clothing, decontamination procedures—we can sum it up in a single word: zero.

Put yourself into the shoes of an Ethiopian soldier. You are a young man who has answered the call of your local Ras and marched out to defend the empire. The Italians don't scare you. You have been hearing the tales for years about the last time the Italians invaded. How your fathers and grandfathers smashed them at Adoua. You march off confidently, ready to shine in the eyes of your family and loved ones. Then, even before you have a chance to prove your valor, a small flight of Italian aircraft appears overhead. A small stick of bombs dropped, but no real explosions. Stillness at first. Then a whiff of something strange. A sickly sweet smell. What is happening? A sudden panic—you can't breathe! What are your last words as you die a horrible, choking death? If you're like most young soldiers, you probably cry out for your mother.

Let me ask my readers. Who is more admirable? The well-trained technician raining down chemical death on a hapless enemy? Or a young boy bravely trying to defend his own home?

I'll tell you how I feel, and you are free to disagree. I was born an Italian American on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio, in the midst of an ethnic melting pot of Irish, Italians, and Hispanics. I don't apologize for who I am. I love being Italian.

But at the same time, I'm a historian, and the Ethiopian Campaign can't help but make me sick. Invasion. Mechanized slaughter. Air attack. Poison gas. Hell, after the victory, Italian occupation troops had orders to round up and shoot as many Coptic Christian priests as possible, in order to reduce the possible of resistance amongst the recently conquered Ethiopian population.

We often treat Mussolini as some sort of clown. He was hardly that. The historical record shows that he was deadly serious—as serious, in his own way, as Hitler. And that anonymous Ethiopian warrior fighting to defend his family? I have a word for him, an ancient and honorable word: hero.
 

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Last week I wrote about the Italian campaign in Ethiopia (or Abyssinia, as many in the world still called it) in 1935–36. It barely registers in the western historical consciousness today. After all, there are two things that military historians in the U.S. have little respect for: the Italian army, and the fighting quality of the African "natives."

The point I've been trying to make in these last few posts, however, is that this campaign deserves more attention than it usually gets. First, it was more evenly matched than we usually think. Ethiopian "natives," even if fighting as feudal levies more loyal to a local chief ("ras") than to a central government, were a tough enemy. They were savvy, hardy, and capable of prodigious marches in the high altitude of the Ethiopian plateau. The Italian army invading this forbidding country was mechanized, to be sure, but in a very light way, spearheaded by thinly armored "tanks" that barely register as such. Virtually all of its infantry was truck-mobile (i.e., motorized, rather than mechanized) and very fragile in combat. Indeed, the opinion of the day was that this was going to be one hard campaign.

No doubt, there were some things to admire in the Italian military achievement. The invaders displayed genius in areas of planning, organization, and supply. They built roads galore through the wilderness, as their Roman ancestors had and as they continue to do today in the United States. They were the first army in the world to operate large motorized and mechanized units in the field, after all the years of discussion, debate, and dissent. They were the first to demonstrate that it was possible to keep an "army on wheels" supplied, fed, and in command over vast distances—distances much larger than any European army was likely to face, and in much rougher country. They were the first to demonstrate the awesome power of the air arm, which had done something that no European force had done for decades: carry out a successful pursuit. Italian fighters and bombers had apparently replaced the cavalry, taking on a mission that the horse could no longer perform.

Indeed, they did more than that: air forces could be used to supply the ground component. After the fight at Mai Ceu, the Italian Eritrean Corps (20,000 men) force-marched around the left flank of the disintegrating Ethiopian army to Dessie, cutting themselves loose from their supply lines on the ground. Italian aircraft supplied the vast column for the entire 200-mile length of the march, even dropping livestock by parachute. Supplied with over 113 tons of airdropped supplies, the Eritreans made it to Dessie in less than a week, an average of over 30 miles per day.

The exclamation points on this success? Marshal Pietro Badoglio transferred his army headquarters by air to Dessie on April 20, a true innovation. Twelve heavy Caproni-133 bombers brought the marshal and his entire army staff 110 miles forward in just 90 minutes. To a world accustomed to World War I maneuver rates, this was not merely impressive. It was positively insane. More than a hundred miles in an hour and a half? As my high school daughter likes to say nowadays: are you serious? This was nothing sort of a new paradigm, a veritable revolution in military affairs. Consider Badoglio's final lunge from Dessie to Addis in the last days of the war. Setting out from Dessie on April 26 with a gigantic motorized column, including some 1,700 trucks, the force made over 250 miles in just 10 days, facing steep ascents, sudden plunging ravines, and everything in between. Badoglio called it, in the bombastic Fascist style, "the March of the Iron Will."

That's how they saw it at the time, in 1936. A few years later, a lot of things had happened. A much larger conflict had broken out, and it would enter the history books as World War II. The Ethiopian War now seemed positively quaint to most western analysts. This new war was intense, European-on-European fighting. The real thing, as it were. Blitzkrieg (allegedly). Fall Weiss. Barbarossa! In this new war, the Italian army soon looked like a joke. The "not ready for prime time players," a parody commanded by a clown and led in the field by amateurs. It is an unfair and simplistic picture, but so ingrained now that it will take generations to pass away, if it ever does.

The point here is not to rehabilitate the reputation of the Italian army—probably impossible in any event. It is merely to reiterate a point I've made here a few times: history is not merely "what happened." It's what people think happened. In 1936, a lot of people thought that the Italian army was pretty formidable, and that the "Ethiopian campaign" was some kind of classic achievement.
I wonder: what ideas do we hold today that might look foolish in a decade or so?

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Last week I had some fun here, talking about a mighty warlord of the 1930s deciding to launch a war against a smaller and weaker adversary, and in the process precipitating World War II. Trying to be clever, I saved what television producers call the "reveal" for the end. Was it Hitler? No way! Hirohito! Nope.

No. The real warmonger of the mid-1930s was none other than the Duce, the lord of Italy, the "first Fascist": Benito Mussolini. And the land he was invading? Well, let's just say that it isn't a place that we Americans tend to think about a lot today. It was Abyssinia. Or Ethiopia. Even now, historians can't seem to decide what to call it.

Whatever. It was a big country. Mountainous. A land filled with brave men. We like to refer to them today as "warriors," but that strikes me as a loaded term. It is how imperialists and interlopers have traditionally referred to the "natives"—primitive and underarmed and outclassed. Tribesman who were easy meat for western armies. It's almost a term of military contempt.

In this case, I would recommend dropping all that baggage. The armed population of Ethiopia was simply…brave. Were they as well armed as a modern western army? Of course not. Tanks? No. Planes? No. I think Emperor Haile Selassie I owned a single trimotor aircraft, in fact. Antiaircraft guns, one of the main signifiers of modern armament in the 1930s? Unfortunately not.

But did the Ethiopians have firearms, aggressive commanders, and troops who were reasonably well trained in modern tactics? Did their army understand how to use the terrain to best advantage (then, as ever, a principal aspect of the military art)?

You bet.

And this is the point, I think, of the campaign of 1935–36. Although we largely ignore it today, the invasion of Ethiopia was the subject of a great deal of interest at the time. The Ethiopians had a martial reputation very different from their portrayal by modern writers. They were then known as one of the few colonial peoples in the last century to inflict a major defeat on a European power—these same Italians, in fact—at the battle of Adowa in 1896. Their land was remote, mountainous, and forbidding in the extreme. Most of the informed military opinion of the day spoke of the upcoming campaign in terms of its difficulties, not its alleged ease.

And they were right—easy it wasn't. On October 3, 1935, an Italian army of some 100,000 men (General Emilio de Bono in overall command) invaded Ethiopia from Italian Somaliland. His force included nine full divisions, supported by tanks and the modern aircraft of the Italian air force (the Regia Aeronautica). The main thrust, under de Bono himself, came from the north, based on the Eritrean base of Asmara. A second, much smaller, came from the south under General Rodolfo Graziani, operating out of Somaliland with Mogadishu as its base.

The northern advance crossed the border without incident, but soon bogged down. Part of it was de Bono's cautious nature. Part of it was the need to build a supply road back to his base. Part of it was the horrendous terrain. The Ethiopians took advantage of Italian hesitancy, however, and by December they were across the entire Italian front in force. They launched a series of powerful counterthrusts, which came close to breaking the Italian front. They never did manage to coordinate their attacks, however, and after some fairly dark nights, de Bono was able to marshal enough firepower to rout them.

In December, Marshal Pietro Badoglio replaced de Bono as the commander in the north and launched a series of multi-corps assaults that crushed the Ethiopian main force. Playing a conspicuous role here was the Italian air force. From the first day of the war, it operated with total impunity, harrying Ethiopian ground troops and bombing rear areas. Its real value, however, soon revealed itself: completing the destruction of already defeated Ethiopian forces as they were attempting to retreat. It was "magnificent sport," in the words of Mussolini's 19-year old son and Italian air force pilot, Vittorio. After the last great battle, at Mai Ceu (May 31—April 1, 1936), all that remained was the speedy occupation of the vast Ethiopian plateau. Badoglio entered Addis Ababa on May 5.

The campaign in the south was very different. The Ogaden Desert was the theater, and much smaller armies were in play. Italian commander General Rodolfo Graziani led a much more mobile force than Badoglio's, organized into smaller task forces (gruppi) of tanks, armored cars, and truck-borne infantry, along with considerable support from the air. All this was very much in tune with the times. This was the era of the prophets, the Fullers and the Liddell Harts, preaching a new gospel of mechanization as a way to break the deadlock of trench warfare. Mobility was all the rage.

Did it work in the Ogaden? Yep.

Sure it did. Maybe.

Despite all his advantages in weapons and mobility, Graziani moved very slowly. Perhaps this was an omen for his later career in the Western Desert during World War II, but to be fair, it was also a warning sign to anyone who believed in a magic solution called "mechanization." Graziani advanced in fits and starts. He paused repeatedly, then destroyed a clumsy and poorly supplied Ethiopian counterattack at Dolo. After that he sat for months. Not until April 18, six months into the war and two weeks after the destruction of the main Ethiopian army at Mai Ceu, was he prepared to resume his advance. Even then, his force took ten full days to chew through the Ethiopian positions in front of Negelli.

So, let's add it up. Certainly, a triumph for the Italians. Total victory. A big win, the sort that ended with a parade through the streets of the enemy's capital, and the hostile commander fleeing into exile. It was exactly the sort of win that had become extremely rare in the past half century.

The world was impressed. Observers of the campaign, both civilian and military, praised the Italian army, its efficiency, its drive, and its ability to improvise in such a difficult environment. Herbert Matthews of the New York Times called the conquest of Ethiopia "a difficult job superbly done," and that would sum up the tone of much of the contemporary reportage.

All this is very different from our view today. Too many writers simply laugh at the Italian army. But perhaps this campaign is a classic example of confusing OUR thoughts (those of us who are alive today) with THEIR thoughts (those who were living then). It raises the question of what we should be about as historians. Is our job to lecture past generations about what they ought to have thought? Or should we try to figure out why they were thinking the way they were?

If you've been reading this column for long, I hope you know that I subscribe to that latter point of view. Was there a actually a time in history when it made perfect intellectual sense to respect the fighting qualities of Mussolini's Italian army?
More next week.

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