One of the first entries I made on this blog dealt with amphibious operations, traditionally labeled the most complex of all military undertakings (The American Way of War, July 24th, 2009).  There's good reason for that.  They require advance planning, and you're asking for trouble if you're scrambling at the last moment.  They require logistical support of a high order, and doing one on the cheap is practically a guarantee of failure.  In war, all things may be dicey–"contingent" is our  current buzzword–but amphibious ops just might be the diciest of all.

I've been thinking about that post a lot lately, however, and I've concluded that I just might have been wrong.  After all, for all the complexity, it isn't easy to find a failed amphibious operation in World War II.  Dieppe?  Sure.  The conception was weak, the planning helter-skelter, the firepower insufficient.  But after that?  One success after the other, at least for the Western powers. 

There was a type of operation in World War II that often did fail, however:  the airborne attack.  Even when it did succeed, friendly casualties were usually massive.  Let's review the record.  The Germans had some success early on, with drops in Norway and the Netherlands in 1940.  In both cases, however, the results were more mixed than most folks realize.  In Norway, one surprised German company landed directly on top of a Norwegian strongpoint at Dombås.  The Norwegians raked it with fire, surrounded it, and took it prisoner. In the Netherlands, airborne landings around the Hague ran into Dutch antiaircraft fire, and the same thing happened, with over 1,200 German airborne troops becoming POWs.  Finally, every aficionado of the airborne arm knows what happened on Crete in May 1941:  a successful campaign to seize the island–airborne's one clear wartime triumph–at what the Germans regarded as an unacceptable cost. 

And then there is the Allied airborne record.  Here the record really isn't mixed:  it's pretty bad.  Take the Sicilian landings in July 1943 (Operation Husky), for example. The British 1st Airlanding Brigade, tasked to seize the Ponte Grande south of Syracuse, saw most of its gliders land in the Mediterranean with the loss of everyone on board; only 54 of 144 aircraft landed in Sicily at all.  Instead of 1,700 men at the bridge, fewer than 100 made it, and they would be overrun by Italian defenders later in the day.  The U.S. 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment was supposed to jump on the high ground north of Gela, the Piano Lupo, but few landed anywhere near it.  Colonel James Gavin wasn't even sure whether he was in Sicily at all, or what continent he was on.  A drop to reinforce the Gela bridgehead the first night went badly, with dozens of gliders and transports shot out of the sky by friendly ground troops with a case of the jitters.  The same thing happened to the British a few days later, when a landing at the Primosole Bridge ran into a wall of friendly flak en route. 

A mixed picture in Normandy.  A disaster in Arnhem.  I could go on.  Suffice it to say:  here was a highly complex form of war requiring careful coordination between land and air, precise intelligence about the enemy's dispositions, and a great deal of luck.  Its margin of error was zero, and you started paying the price the moment you left the airplane.

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A few months ago I wrote a piece on this blog about the May 1941 German airdrop on Crete (Judge Not: Colonel Andrew's 'Mistake' at Maleme, October 11th, 2009).  The thrust of it was a defense of LTC L.W. Andrew's actions on Hill 107.  Usually blamed for abandoning the position and thus allowing the Germans to seize the crucial airfield at Maleme, he was, I thought, more a victim of war's uncertainty than anything else. 

Not everyone agreed with me, I know, but I have always tried to avoid what I feel is a simplistic "blame the general" approach to military history.  War is a highly complex undertaking, and modern war especially so.  A million things can go wrong in any large-scale encounter, and just enough of them usually do go wrong to scramble even the most skillfully laid plans.  I have always felt that there are a lot of people–scholars, buffs, and operators alike–who like to quote Clausewitz on chance and uncertainty and the "fog of war" and then turn around and claim that what General X should have done in a given historical situation was "perfectly obvious."  It just doesn't compute to hold both of these points of view simultaneously.
 
At the same time, I have come to realize that, occasionally, it is hard to avoid blaming the general.  And Exhibit A for this notion would have to be LTG Lloyd Fredendall, US II Corps commander during the Tunisian campaign, a man  best known for his role in the near-debacle at Kasserine Pass in February 1943.  Holed up in the vast underground bunker complex he had built at "Speedy Valley," 100 miles from where his men were fighting and dying at Sidi Bou Zid on the first day, Fredendall seemed to go to pieces as one piece of bad news from the front followed another.  Witnesses speak of him chain smoking, perhaps even drinking, and muttering to his subordinates, "They have broken through and you can't stop them."  As Rommel's Panzer spearheads approached Tébessa, the principal US supply base in Africa, Fredendall began preparing for a bug-out.  He was clearly on the verge of abandoning his headquarters; indeed, he had already ordered the demolitions prepared.  Only a timely defensive stand–as in "just in time"–by the men and the field grades under his command saved him from that ignominy.  After the battle, Ike would kick him upstairs and back to the states for a training command.  His replacements, General George S. Patton and then General Omar S. Bradley, would show that there wasn't all that much wrong with II Corps that solid leadership could not fix.

Sure, this or that point of the "Fredendall indictment" might need qualification.  Chain smoking?  Didn't just about everyone in the army chain smoke in this era?  Despairing words?  Doesn't every general utter a few from time to time?  But in the end, even I have to admit that it's tough to find much good to say about a general described by one of his own armor commanders, General Ernest Harmon, as a "physical and moral coward."

I offer a challenge.  I don't care if you actually believe it, or just do it as an intellectual exercise:  give me your best defense of Fredendall.  Am I being overly harsh here?

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For me, the most interesting aspect of writing and teaching military history is the "operational problem"–a battlefield conundrum in which there are two or more logical alternatives but no tidy or perfect solution.  As I mentioned last week, my "US Army in World War II" class has been taking an extended walk through America's s inaugural campaign of the war, that slow grind across North Africa from TORCH to Tunisia.  We're right about in the middle–the winter of 1942-43.  The "race to Tunis" had failed, and the Allies were gearing up for a major campaign in 1943 to clear the Axis out of their Tunisian bridgehead.

It was a rough time for Eisenhower.  He was no longer an "untested" commander; he'd been tested alright, and frankly, no one was really happy with the results.  At one point, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General Marshall, had to light a rocket under him, telling him to "give your complete attention to the battle in Tunisia," which begs the question of what he HAD been doing.

So it was a dispirited Ike who now had to make the first call of the next campaign:  where to deploy.  Two major mountain ranges define the battlespace:  the Western (or "Grand") Dorsal stretches from the northeast to the southwest, the Eastern Dorsal runs north-south, and together they meet in the north to form an inverted "Y".  It was a complex problem, as such thing usually are.  The textbook solution might well have been to deploy on the Western Dorsal, containing the steepest mountains and thus the most easily defended.  But with the drive on Tunis having petered out just short of its objectives deep in eastern Tunisia, choosing the Western Dorsal meant going back and giving up hard-won forward positions.  It meant gaining security, but only by sacrificing ground that would have to be fought for again.  Extending a line along the Eastern Dorsal, by contrast, kept Ike as close as possible to Tunis, and it also guarded against a nightmare scenario in which the Germans launched a hook around the southern Allied flank and broke into their rear.  The Allies held only a shallow series of coastal enclaves in Africa, so that could have been a catastrophe.  But a forward deployment also meant serious vulnerabilities:  units thinned out beyond reasonable limits along a 250-mile front, no real theater reserve to back them up, and huge stretches of the line having to be held by the French XIX Corps, poorly equipped, undersupplied, and not configured at all for high intensity combat against a modern opponent.  It also meant bringing forward the green US II Corps, under the command of General Lloyd Fredendall, and inserting it into the line on the right.

Ike chose the Eastern Dorsal.  It was a gutsy move, it has not gone uncriticized, and it nearly proved disastrous.  But like I said at the top:  it was a problem without a perfect solution.

How about it, armchair generals.  As the old wargame boxes used to say, "What would YOU have done"?

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I've been taking my "US Army in World War II" class through the Tunisian campaign lately.  Nearly forgotten today (certainly compared to other campaigns of that war, especially the fighting in Normandy), it deserves more attention than we usually give it.  No campaign that I've studied better illustrates the complexity of modern military operations.  Indeed, they are always more difficult in reality than they appear to be in theory.

Consider this.  You land an immense Allied force on the Mediterranean shore of North Africa on November 8th, 1942.  Your objective: Tunis.  Unfortunately, to ensure a safe landing out of the range of German air power in Sardinia and Sicily, your closest units (the "Eastern Task Force") have to land over 500 miles away from the objective.  The units most distant (General George Patton's "Western Task Force") actually land in another ocean altogether, the Atlantic.  They're 1000 miles away from Tunis, and might as well be on another planet for the opening stages of the campaign.  The much ballyhooed (by historians) "race for Tunis" really isn't much of a race, or at least it shouldn't be.  The Germans begin transferring troops there by air almost immediately after your landing, on November 9th, to be precise.  You're already in motion, too, moving smartly along the Algerian coast to the east:  an amphibious landing in Bougie 100 miles from Algiers, a combined amphibious landing/paradrop at Bône, 125 miles more. 

So far, so good.  As the Allied commander (either the supremo, US General Dwight D. Eisenhower, or the British 1st Army commander, General Richard Anderson), you're eating up the miles, and there is no opposition to speak of in front of you. Who knows?  Maybe you'll take Tunis after all.
 
From the start, however, you're also finding it difficult to concentrate troops forward, to get the men from their landing zones hundreds of miles away up to the front over an indifferent or altogether inadequate road network.  Your lines of communication are immensely long, and get longer with each step forward.  As a result, huge numbers of your men have to stay behind to help bring the supply, fuel, and ammo to the fighting units.  Guarding that mountain of supplies you've brought along takes thousands of troops, and pilfering by the local population–from petty theft to grand larceny–is a serious problem from day one.  It all adds up to a huge drain on the amount of combat power you can get forward.  By December, the quartermaster is telling you that you have 120,000 men in North Africa, but fewer than 12,000 of them are actually at the front.  You make a pretty good run at Tunis after all–the Germans are having their own difficulties deploying there–but in the end you lose the race. 

To later historians and readers, it all seems to so simple.  Land a huge force, get them forward, overwhelm your enemy, and be done with it.  But the great Prussian sage Clausewitz had this one exactly right:  "In war," he wrote, "everything is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult."

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Last week I introduced the subject of the Romanian Army in World War II, and the key role it played in the fighting on the Eastern Front.  My intention was not to praise or condemn the Romanian Army–simply to point out its importance.  No one will ever be able to call it the best army out there.  Its equipment was outmoded, and its training standards were nowhere near Great Power status.  Nevertheless, the Romanians held huge sectors of the front for most of the war, and as Germany's largest ally in the East, they contributed an important share of Axis manpower.  There can be no comprehensive history of Barbarossa–its battles, its campaigns, even its atrocities–without paying some close attention to the Romanians.  Unfortunately, history has all but written them out of the story.  In fact, the Romanians often seem to get scapegoated for the defeat, with the collapse of their armies on the flanks of the Stalingrad position being exhibit A.  It is a ridiculous notion, unless you're an author with an ax to grind. 

And that is the key point.  The historical reputation of the Romanian Army in World War II has been fixed, apparently forever, by a handful of references in the German memoirs, especially those of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories.  It is a book that sits on the shelf of  every Eastern front scholar or buff.  I plead guilty to owning a copy myself, a particularly well thumbed one, at that.  Like all the other German memoirs, however (Guderian's Panzer Leader comes immediately to mind), this one has historical holes big enough to accommodate a King Tiger.  Manstein gives us the Romanians as primitive drones who had difficulty thinking for themselves and who lived in constant fear of the Russians.  "In difficult situations," he writes, "this was liable to end in a panic."  But to be fair, foot soldiers lacking heavy weapons and antitank guns have every reason in the world to panic under a tank attack.  Likewise, Manstein mentions the practice of disciplinary flogging.  Sure, that's a bad idea.  But remember, his Wehrmacht dealt with its disciplinary problems by executing its own soldiers wholesale.  He does admit that the Romanians did their duty "as best they could," but only when they "submitted to German military leadership."  Meaning his own, of course.

Lost Victories is still a crucial account of the war, and so are the other memoirs.  On operational matters–deployment and maneuver of divisions, corps, and armies–they are as good a source as you can find.  But Manstein has an agenda, actually several of them:  defending his generalship and reputation, hiding his participation in war crimes, and blaming others for everything that went wrong. 

Lost Victories should come with a warning label:  Use with Caution.

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They crossed the Soviet border on June 22, 1941, heading east.  While the attacking spearheads made good progress, there were also difficulties from day one.  Their generals weren't exactly surprised.  Campaigning in this part of Europe has never been easy.  The terrain was tough, the distances involved were vast, and logistics in this relatively underdeveloped land were nightmarish.   And then there was the adversary:  a Red Army that, while not particularly skilled or well trained, had enough manpower and modern equipment to cause any attacker some serious trouble in the field.  The campaign started out in mobile mode, but soon bogged down into positional fighting that bled both sides and exhausted the invading army even as it was battering its way forward towards its strategic objectives.  In the end, the Russian campaign would consume it altogether.

Ah yes, any student of the war might say:  the Wehrmacht in Russia.  Such a well known story.  Dramatic early victories, sudden turnabout.  Ultimate defeat. 

The only problem is that I am talking about the Romanians.

They have gotten short shrift in histories of World War II, even those that specialize in the Eastern Front.  And yet they played a key role in this greatest of all military struggles.  Without them, the Barbarossa campaign of 1941 becomes nearly impossible, and 1942's Operation Blue becomes absolutely impossible.  The Romanian Army had nearly 700,000 men under arms in 1941 and 1.25 million by the summer of 1944.  Romanian troops fighting in the Soviet Union outnumbered all of Germany's other allies combined.  They also won their share of operational victories.  They struck east towards Odessa in the summer of 1941 and took the city after a gruesome 73-day siege.  They played a major role in the Crimean campaign, with their mobile units spearheading General Erich von Manstein's drive on Kerch, and with their infantry assisting in the gritty fighting to reduce the fortress of Sevastopol.  They fought in the Caucasus, playing a key role in the conquest of Anapa and Novorossiysk. 

During the 1942 campaign, they contributed two full armies (3rd and 4th) to the Axis order of battle.  The Germans themselves only employed four (the 6th, 4th Panzer, 1st Panzer, and 17th, with German 2nd Army also taking part in the opening assault on Voronezh).  The role they played was crucial–not to smash through Soviet defenses, but to cover immense flanks, hundreds of miles long, along the Don river and in the wide-open Kalmuk Steppe.  It was a task for which the Wehrmacht no longer had sufficient troops.  Yes, the Romanian formations were vaporized in the opening moments of the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, but then again, German resistance to that assault was no thing of beauty, either.

If you want to know the Eastern Front, you need to spend more time with the Romanians.

Next week:  what we think we know, and why.

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A long time ago my Dad handed me a book.  It was a green hardback published in 1943–I can still see it clearly in my mind's eye–entitled Guadalcanal Diary, by journalist Richard Tregaskis.  I didn't know much about the author, but I knew something about the topic.  Dad had been in the U.S. Army during World War II, part of the "Americal" Division, and he had spent more time than he cared to remember on Guadalcanal.  The Diary was (and is) a great book–required reading on the war, really.  It's about the Marine effort on the 'Canal, but more than that, it's about men under fire.  I learned how they acted, what they ate, the disparaging terms they used for their Japanese opponents–the whole nine yards.  It opened a world to me of reading books about the war, studying them for a lifetime, and eventually writing them myself.  It was a big hit with the public, deservedly so, and remains popular today with the World War II reading audience.  Hollywood even turned it into a movie in 1943, with William Bendix playing what the New York Times called "the inevitable Dodger fan from Flatbush" and Lloyd Nolan as a tough-as-nails sergeant.

Dick Tregaskis wrote another book about World War II that has never been made into a movie, however.  Invasion Diary appeared in 1944, and dealt with the invasion of Sicily, the landing on the Italian mainland at Salerno, and the subsequent gritty fighting for Italy.  Although the larger scale of the campaign makes it a little less immediate than the Guadalcanal book, it's still a terrific read, and it is chock-full of the same kind of soldierly detail that made the earlier work so popular.  Even so, it can't be denied that it never quite caught the same kind of fancy among the reading public. 

And the reason for that, I think, is to be found on p. 208 (in my current edition, the one issued by Bison Books).  Tregaskis was attached to (I guess today we'd say "embedded with") the 509th Parachute Battalion under the command of LTC Bill Yarborough, during the fighting for Monte Corno.  It was November 22, 1943, and both sides were exchanging artillery fire.  Tregaskis had already been under fire on a number of occasions, but this time his number came up.  The scream of incoming fire, a bright light, a sudden explosion.  He knew he'd been hit, but he didn't know how badly.  That realization came slowly.  He could think coherent thoughts, he noted, but when he tried to call out for help, only gibberish came.  His right arm, he would later write, felt like "a foreign body" to him, and hung limply.  He could see his helmet, blown off by the force of the explosion, and he could clearly see the holes torn in it by the shrapnel.  He remembered thinking, illogically, what a "fine souvenir" it would make. 

It turned out Tregaskis had a head wound, a bad one, and how doctors put him right forms the last, harrowing chapter of the book.  It's tough reading:  an adult having to learn how to speak and read all over again.  He eventually triumphs, but it's a rough road.

Perhaps–and this is not to be uncharitable, but merely to state a fact–the story that Dick Tregaskis had to tell in 1944 was more reality than many of the home folks wanted to read. 

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You can break down the U.S. war effort in World War II by the numbers, and most of them are pretty impressive.  Tanks, aircraft, ships, weapons and weapons systems of all sorts:  the "arsenal of democracy" supplied them all in abundance, essentially out-producing the rest of the world both friendly and hostile in the course of the war.  It was this abundance of materiel that allowed the U.S. military to pursue its preferred strategy of applying overwhelming combat power directly against the enemy's main force and crushing it. 

But there was one area where it had consistent problems:  finding enough manpower.  The country had a good-sized population, to be sure, 133 million in 1941, compared to 80 million Germans (1939 population) and Japan (105 million, also in 1939).  But those countries managed to deploy somewhere around 300 divisions and 100 divisions, respectively, in the course of the war.  And as every student of the conflict knows, the U.S. limited itself to just 90 (actually 89, once the 2nd Cavalry Division was inactivated in early 1944).  That was nowhere near the 200 divisions General Lesley McNair estimated the army would need, an estimate he made the day before Pearl Harbor, and farther still from the 334 division army envisioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in early 1942.

It is often called a mistake, and indeed, there were times in this war–many times–that U.S. commanders wished they had another division or two to plug into a gap, or to relieve a front line division that was starting to feel the pinch of losses, fatigue, or demoralization.  By late 1944, with gigantic, infantry-heavy campaigns taking place in the Philippines and Western Europe simultaneously, the U.S. Army had been stretched about as far as you could stretch it.

But what were the alternatives?  Take those original impressive population numbers.  Now consider that one of the basic Allied strategies was to have the U.S. serve as the industrial arsenal for the alliance.  That means bodies–lots of them–in the factories.  Then take that war with Japan.  That's going to require a navy–a big one that was eventually some four million strong.  Now subtract the requirements for the U.S. Army Air Forces (another two million plus).  What does that leave?  Army Ground Forces that, by March 1945, numbered some 2.5 million men.  Subtract support personnel, and you wind up with… somewhere around 89 divisions to do the actual fighting.

It's not really a mistake if you have no choice. 

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My good friend Christian Ankerstjerne has sent me the following link, a 1932 paper by then-MAJ George S. Patton on "The Probable Characteristics of the Next War."  Feel free to download it from his site, www.weaponsofwwii.com.

Thanks, Christian, and nice website!

A few weeks ago I was pretty hard on U.S. air power advocates in the interwar era.  Inventing a new form of war out of whole cloth, they came up with some pretty specious concepts like "precision daylight bombing" that failed to survive the test of real-world operations.  "As always," I wrote then, "it was the men at the point of the spear–the bomber crews–who paid the price when doctrine clashed with reality" (Wild Blue Yonder II, Sunday, November 1st, 2009).

But the more I thought about that post, the more I came to see that it was a bit unfair.  Indeed, the disconnect between doctrine for how wars are supposed to be fought and they are actually fought was present in spades within the U.S. Army as well.  Not only that, it was present to an astonishing degree in ALL the military establishments that found themselves at war after 1939.

The U.S. Army, for example, came up with a unique armored doctrine that envisioned tanks actually avoiding tank-to-tank combat on the battlefield.  Beating enemy armor was the job of another vehicle altogether, the "tank destroyer"–big gun, lightly armored, sometimes open-topped.  The U.S. would abandon this concept after the war, and no one else copied it–for good reason.  The British army came into the war enamored of light armor, "tankettes", and independent "jock columns," all of which were unable to stand up to the pounding inherent in modern combat.  The French intended to fight a rigidly controlled "methodical battle," and instead found themselves in a maneuver contest with the Wehrmacht in 1940.  It went badly.  The Soviet Army had a well formulated and ambitious interwar doctrine called "deep battle"–and indeed it did spend the better part of the first two campaigning seasons moving deeply.  Unfortunately all the movement was in reverse.  The Imperial Japanese Army devised perhaps the most mistaken idea of all:  that the "warrior spirit" of their officers and men would make up for a clear inferiority in material and technology.  Their casualty statistics–even in places like Guadalcanal, where the numerical odds were fairly even–were staggering.

Even the Germans, usually pegged as the ones who "got it right" in the interwar era, came up empty.  They trained and equipped their army to fight short, sharp campaigns of maneuver and destruction that would–eventually, at some future point, who knew when?–force their enemies to sue for peace.  They had some success, up to a point.  And then, of course, they wound up fighting a war of attrition on a global scale.

We often excoriate armies for getting ready to "fight the last war."  In some sense, they all do that.  It's unavoidable.  The real problem, however, is that they train based on mistaken notions of what the next war will be like.  And they always will, until someone devises a way to peer into the future.

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Let me start with a confession:  I don't really like war movies. 

Yeah, I know that makes me suspect in the World of Guys.  It also makes me suspect in the world of military historians.  You want talk about war movies?  Sit around with a bunch of historians of war and wait.  Ten minutes or so into the conversation, I promise that someone will drop in a quote from Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, or Patton.  For my students, the film Starship Troopers remains a kind of cultural touchstone, discussed, praised, and quoted constantly.  I get asked at least once a week what I think about Saving Private Ryan (answer:  I don't.  I still haven't seen the film all the way through).  For whatever reason, I just didn't get the war movie gene.  To me, most of them are a waste of time in a world of tight schedules and an unlimited number of good books. 

But this holiday season I sat down and watched one in its entirety: Inglourious Basterds, by critically acclaimed director Quentin Tarantino.  It wasn't my idea.  I got a call from Variety magazine asking me to comment as a historian on it, and it seemed like a good idea to see the thing before I went on the record.

My review?  In the classic form of the traditional marquee blurb, "I laughed.  I cried.  But mainly, I winced."

I winced for a lot of reasons.  The movie isn't "history" at all, of course.  I don't think it's any longer a spoiler to mention that Brad Pitt leads a fictional squad of U.S. Jewish G.I.'s on a crazed vengeance raid in occupied France.  They act like American Einsatzgruppen: smashing in heads with baseball bats, scalping their victims, carving swastikas in foreheads of the survivors, etc.  At the end of the film, certain Very Important Nazis  are killed by the "good guys" in a manner that beggars belief.  To be fair, Tarantino doesn't mean it to be history (I don't think).  Rather, he's created a sort of warped revenge fantasy.  But if you ARE watching it for history, this film arguably abuses the concept of "taking liberties."

The longer I thought about it, though, I had to admit that someone born in 1958, as I was, grew up in the 60s and 70s watching some pretty dumb war movies.  In films like The Dirty Dozen or The Great Escape, American soldiers were tough and smart and handsome and they routinely did impossible things.  The Germans were unredeemingly stupid and pretty much stood around and got shot.  In other words, in many ways these films were a lot like Tarantino's (although no critic, to my memory, ever praised The Dirty Dozen for its artistic merit). 

I still don't like war movies.

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I consider myself a scholar, and I spend a lot of time reading the most complex and challenging books I can find on World War II.  I also try to stay in touch with popular culture, however.  It is the common language spoken by all Americans, and it often addresses issues in a clear and fundamental way that a more intellectual approach cannot touch.

And so, rather than discuss issues of strategy and tactics this time out, praising this general and criticizing that one, identifying "correct" and "incorrect" decisions made by both sides during World War II, let me turn to the words of that great American artist and philosopher, Harry Lillis ("Bing") Crosby.  On the December 21, 1944 episode of his popular weekly radio program, the Kraft Music Hall, Bing had a few things to say after crooning a typically tender version of "Silent Night".  I think that his remarks are worth repeating, and will always resonate as long as we have loved ones at war: 

"On our fighting front, there are no silent nights, but there are plenty of holy nights.  I'm sure that all of us are offering up prayers for the gallant gang of American kids to whom anything that has to do with peace still seems very far away. 

'God, grant unto us an early peace and victory founded on justice, and instill into the hearts and the minds of men everywhere a firm purpose to live forever in peace and goodwill toward all.'"

I'd like to join "der Bingle" in wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays.  And I'll simply add the fondest wish of all for our very troubled world:  Peace.

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Hitler was a bad guy.

Talk about stating the obvious.  We can call Hitler many things.  Fanatic.  Megalomaniac.  Warmonger.  War criminal.  Mass murderer.  No one fits the bill like the Führer.
   
And yet, there was one rather obvious crime that this world-class criminal refused to commit.  And I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why.  My students ask me the question every single semester, and after 25 years of college teaching, I have to confess that still don't have a really satisfactory answer.

Why didn't Hitler use poison gas in World War II?

He certainly did everything else.  Unprovoked aggression (multiple counts).  Terror towards civilian populations in occupied areas.  And the greatest mass murder of all time, the "Judeocide" that most people refer to as the Holocaust.

But he didn't drop poison gas on civilian populations during bombing raids by the Luftwaffe.  He didn't even use it tactically against enemy troop concentrations.  The conundrum becomes even tougher to explain when we remember that this is a man who himself fought in a war that featured the liberal use of poison gas.  Chlorine, mustard, phosgene:  World War I saw them all used in abundance, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers on all sides died a horrible choking death, or spent the next twenty years of their lives in the most painful suffering imaginable.  World War II, however, a war that dwarfed the previous one in virtually every category of cruelty, almost completely eschewed this particular variety of  horror.  It remains a puzzle.

I currently am privileged to have as a graduate student a captain in the US Army.  He's an interesting guy–as most of the officers I've met tend to be.  He currently works in military intelligence ("MI," I've learned to call it).  Like just about anyone in the army today, he's done more than one tour in our current Global War on Terror (that's "GWOT", sometimes pronounced ironically as a question, "G-what?"), and at one time in his career he was a specialist in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare (and yes, that's usually referred to as "NBC").

The Good Captain's take on Hitler's tentativeness is this:  there was no "value added" for Hitler in using gas.  By the 1940s, just about any literate society could produce various forms of poison gas.  Thus, there was no real advantage to Germany in introducing it into the war.  Countermeasures would immediately follow, for which Germany had no more effective response than any other combatant.  And that went equally for the vesicants like mustard gas as well as the new "nerve" agent just discovered in Germany's Wuppertal-Elberfeld lab in 1939–the deadly compound that we know as Sarin.

When it came down to it, Hitler was a man who knew no limits, and who made his decisions relatively free of moral considerations.  Sarin didn't strike him as particularly inhumane or ghastly.  It just seemed… ineffective.

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I've been doing a lot of macro-level discussion here of late–big picture, high strategy stuff.  Today, I'd like to dip down into the micro.

Men (and today, women) fight wars.  They are, we are always told, ordinary individuals who find themselves in the most extraordinary situations imaginable.

The Battle of Midway was one of those situations.  It featured two immense fleets sailing hundreds of miles apart, each one desperate to find the other first (the Holy Grail of carrier warfare in that era).  That wasn't as easy as it sounds–the area to be searched was roughly 100,000 square miles.  The battle narrative should be familiar to all students of the war.  The initial disaster for the Americans.  The death ride of Torpedo Squadron 8.  Fifteen planes in.  Fifteen planes destroyed.  And then, the turning of the tide:  a group of SBD Dauntless dive bombers, frustrated by not finding the Japanese, low on fuel, and already thinking of heading for home, spotting a lone Japanese destroyer hurrying to rejoin the main fleet and following it in. 

What followed was one of the most destructive 15 minute periods in the history of war, as a handful of naval aviators destroyed three Japanese aircraft carriers, and broke the power of the Japanese carrier arm.  To U.S. ears, the names of the sunken vessels, Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu, should always have a magical ring.  They would be joined later that day by a fourth carrier, Hiryu, and the victory would be complete.

An improbable win, certainly.  Evenly matched fleets don't normally produce such lopsided results.  But the most improbable moment of all–one of the war's great stories–was the amazing experience of Ensign George H. Gay, Jr. of Waco, TX.  He was the pilot of a Devastator torpedo bomber in VT-8, and like every single man in his squadron, he experienced the terror of being shot down at sea.  With his plane hit and losing altitude, he momentarily considered crashing into the nearest carrier (the Kaga).  And then he splashed.  Every pilot knew that your chances weren't good in the middle of the Pacific.  There were a lot of ways to die before you got picked up, IF you got picked up at all.   Gay sat there bobbing up and down in the water, in the middle of the Japanese fleet, probably thinking his life was over, trying desperately to hide under his seat cushion.  And then he saw a sight, one that quite literally NO one else on Planet Earth could ever  claim to have seen:  those Dauntlesses hurtling down out of the heavens, pulling out of their dives at the last second, and raining destruction onto the crowded decks of three Japanese carriers.

Ensign Gay saw the US Navy win World War II in the Pacific.  Not a bad day at all.

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Last week we touched on the subject of the Mediterranean Campaign, and the general disrespect it continues to endure in both the popular and historical mind.  A lot of you posted some very good thoughts on the blog in the past week, and I can't disagree with any of the things you said.  The necessity to secure the Foggia air complex in Southern Italy for raids on the Ploesti oilfields; the need to give the US Army some badly needed combat experience before it fought the "main event" in Western Europe, as it were; a way to relieve some pressure on the Soviets, then battling it out with the cream of the German armored forces at Kursk; a need to keep inter-Allied peace–folks have justified the Mediterranean campaign on all of these counts and more.

I just don't think any of them was the main reason we operated in the Med.

In fact, I think the real reason is easy to explain.  The brain trust of the US Army, led by Chief of Staff extraordinaire General George C. Marshall, had a fairly simple strategy for this war.  Assemble massive force.  Invade Europe.  Destroy the Wehrmacht.  The cross-channel invasion was the heart of it, and Marshall had plans drawn up for emergency invasions of the continent in 1942 (Operation Sledgehammer) and 1943 (Operation Roundup).  But staff studies had shown him that ANY cross-channel op was going to be one of innumerable problems and bewildering complexity.  It required not only detailed intelligence about the Germans, but precise knowledge of such arcana as the weather patterns and tides along the coast of the Cotentin or the Pas de Calais, hardly common knowledge in US military circles.  It also required a great deal of specialized equipment, LSI's and LST's, as well as duplex drive tanks and engineering vehicles of every description.  They hadn't even been invented yet, let alone produced

In other words, it wasn't going to happen soon.  Not in 1942, and not in 1943.  Stalin could and did complain about that, be he was just going to have to wait. 

So, let's say you're the President of the United States, and you've been at war nearly a year without firing a single anti-Axis shot in Europe.  The heck with Stalin's complaints.  The press at home is screaming for some action, hollering the two most frightening words in the US political lexicon if you happen to be an elected official:  "Do Something!" 

Moreover, you want to do something.  The country needs it, and so does the army. So, what do you do?  You look around at the available options, and…  you invade North Africa.  And when that's done (successfully, with thousands of German and Italian POWs), in early 1943, then what do you do?  You look around and survey the realistic opportunities–and you invade Sicily.  You sure aren't going to be fighting the Germans anywhere else for a while.  And when that's done?  What's next?  Just look at the map. 

We like to think of ourselves as free agents, doing what we wish to do.  All too often, however, circumstances force our hand.  Never is this more true than it is in war.

The Mediterranean campaign was unavoidable. 

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Talk about not getting any respect.  The long Allied campaign in the Mediterranean–from the TORCH landings in November 1942 to the drive into the Po river valley in 1945, from Morocco to Milan, as it were–was the ultimate "sideshow," and even today it remains the classic example of an unappreciated campaign. 

It's easy to make the case.  In 1942, a war to destroy German and Japanese aggression suddenly changed course to confront a mere nuisance:  Italy.  The result was a mountain of manpower and materiel devoted to some questionable strategic goals.

A comparison with what was taking place on the Eastern Front is instructive.  While vast armored battles unprecedented in their fury were raging on the Volga and in the Caucasus in late 1942, Anglo-American forces were swatting a strategic gnat–tiny Vichy French forces in Morocco and Algeria.  Even though the campaign ended successfully with the Axis surrender at Tunis, the vast majority of the POWs taken there were Italian.  The summer of 1943 saw more of the same.  The Wehrmacht and the Red Army grappled at Kursk in one of the greatest armored clashes of all time, while the western Allies were invading Sicily. 

They overran the island, sure–which did lead to Mussolini's fall–and there was an exciting "race to Messina" between General Patton's 7th Army and General Montgomery's 8th, a race won, inevitably, by the hard-charging American.  But war is not a race, and the campaign ended in frustration with the defending Germans escaping to the Italian mainland. 

Of course, every student of the war knows that we followed them there.  Montgomery's crossing into Calabria (Operation Baytown) was vintage Monty, a huge build-up and men and materiel for what proved to be an unopposed landing.  A simultaneous landing at Salerno by General Mark Clark's 5th Army (Operation Avalanche) nearly turned into disaster when German Panzer formations positioned close to the beach launched a counterattack.  Even after Monty and Clark linked up, the task ahead was daunting:  mountains, rivers, and terrain seemingly designed by the Almighty for tactical defense.  The Volturno.  The Rapido.  The Gustav Line.  Monte Cassino.  Another landing at Anzio in early 1944 that only resulted in more stalemate.  Somewhere, there is a quote from Napoleon that Italy, as a boot, "has to be entered from the top."  The Allies were fighting their way up from the toe and the heel, and sometimes the fit was just too tight.

It's a damning operational resumé.  American historians usually blame the British for conceiving it, especially Winston Churchill. And yet, the more deeply we study it, the harder it becomes to assign any blame at all.  Indeed, it is almost impossible to see how the Mediterranean could have been avoided.  "Sideshow"?  How about the "inevitable campaign"?

Tune in next week for more.

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