The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (17 page)

In many of our wars, this country has committed strategic mistakes far greater in number and consequence than anything seen in Iraq. Perhaps the worst was to send thousands of American crewmen in daylight bombing raids over occupied Europe in 1942–44. To visit American cemeteries in Europe today is to walk among thousands of graves, marked with the shared information “8th Army Air Force” and the dates of those killed between 1942 and 1944. Prewar dogmas of the “bomber always gets through” blinded zealous proponents of strategic air power. Ignoring its critics, ossified Army Air Force planners sent hundreds of highly trained crews to their deaths on slow, unescorted bombing runs in broad daylight, amid thousands of German flak batteries and Luftwaffe fighters—and achieved very little in return until early 1944. By August and September 1943 the Wehrmacht may have been shooting down B-24 Liberators and B-17s almost as quickly as replacement crews and planes arrived in England. Before the war ended, more than ten thousand American bombers and escort fighters were lost to enemy flak, aircraft, and accidents—in a strategic bombing campaign deemed a “success.” Sending air crews over Europe in 1943 was analogous to British officers in the First World War ordering their men “over the top” to be slaughtered during the initial minutes of the Somme offensive of 1916. That said, where and how exactly was a previously unarmed, inexperienced, and unprepared United States supposed to attack Nazi Germany in 1942–43, if not largely through the air and on the periphery in North Africa and Sicily? Before we in hindsight damn the stupidity of our Army Air Force generals, remember that every flak gun transferred westward to shoot down B-17s, every German fighter redeployed over Europe, every factory bombed in Germany, meant that our allies on the eastern front had a greater chance to stop, defeat, and destroy the great majority of Wehrmacht infantrymen who fought in the Second World War.

Even more regrettable was Admiral Ernest King’s initial decision in 1942 not to use American destroyers and destroyer escorts to shepherd merchant ships across the Atlantic to Great Britain. German U-boats had a field day, torpedoing slow-moving cargo vessels right off our east coast—which was lit up each night, almost as if to silhouette undefended American targets at sea and enhance submarine torpedo accuracy. King persisted despite ample evidence from the First World War that the convoy system had worked, and despite pleas from veteran British officers that their own two-year experience in the war had taught them the folly of sending unescorted merchant ships across the Atlantic.

We often read of the tragedy of the September 1944 Arnheim campaign. Impossible logistics, bad weather, lousy intelligence, tactical imbecility, and much more doomed operation Market Garden and led to the infamous “a bridge too far” catastrophe. Thousands of Anglo-American troops were needlessly killed or wounded—even after the Allies had recently crushed an entire German army group in the west (although they had tragically allowed one hundred thousand Wehrmacht troops to escape at the so-called Falaise Gap). The foolery of Market Garden, which sought to push tens of thousands of Allied troops over a sole, narrow road toward the Rhine, also ate up scarce resources, manpower, and gasoline at precisely the time the American Third Army was nearing the Rhine without much major opposition. Once the Allied armies stalled for want of supplies, they were unable to cross the border of the Reich for another half year—in which the majority of Americans lost on the Western European front died. The Germans used the breathing space after their victory in Holland to rush defenders to the so-called Siegfried Line, which had been theretofore mostly undefended, and to refit once-shattered Panzer divisions. No senior planners involved with the Operation Market Garden disaster were sacked, despite the fifteen thousand allied casualties.

Had General Douglas MacArthur in late 1950 listened to both superiors and subordinates, he would not have sent thousands of G.I.s with long vulnerable supply lines into the far reaches of mountainous, wintry North Korea—on his gut instinct that hundreds of thousands of Chinese “volunteers” would not cross the Yalu River and that his troops would be “home for Thanksgiving.” When Mao ordered the massive People’s Army to invade, the longest retreat in the history of U.S. forces ensued, with thousands of American casualties—and hysterical cries back home both that the war was now “lost” and that we had been stabbed in the back by Communist sympathizers. The real mystery was why and how any informed public could believe that a rather small American army could drive an enemy four hundred miles distant in frigid cold into the sanctuary of a hostile, eight-hundred-million-person Communist country—and not expect abject catastrophe to ensue.

Our tactical decisions have remained even more error-prone. Grant was still sending ranks of soldiers against entrenched Confederate positions for most of the horrific summer 1864, despite Sherman’s angry protests against the folly of such assaults in a rapidly changing war of massed firepower. Had our greatest general of the age continued with another Cold Harbor–type assault, and had Sherman not taken Atlanta, Lincoln would have lost the autumn election of 1864, and the country might have been permanently divided. In the First World War, despite our assurances that our well-trained riflemen could broach enemy positions, seasoned British and French commanders warned novice American planners against mass attacks into the German rapid-firing artillery, machine guns, tanks, and poison gas. Americans died in droves before we got it right by early 1918.

For all its surprises and mistakes, D-Day was carefully planned and a brilliant success; its immediate aftermath was often a near disaster. Within a week of the landings, Allied army groups leaving Omaha Beach stalled in the hedgerows for over six weeks. We suffered tens of thousands of casualties while Americans were flummoxed by entrenched, camouflaged German positions amid the narrow lanes and thick hedges. Apparently no planner had thought much about the terrain or navigability of the
bocage
—although the area in Normandy beyond Omaha Beach was well-traveled and should have been familiar to American officers, many of them veterans of the fighting in France during the First World War. In the end, lower-echelon officers and enlisted men jerry-rigged spiked-battering rams on Sherman tanks to break through the underbrush. Finally exasperated generals called in B-17s to blast holes through enemy lines to break out of the confining landscape.

Outgunned

H
OW ABOUT WEAPONS
parity? America has a reputation for technological prowess and machine mastery. The phone and electric lightbulb were singular American innovations; the Wright brothers invented the airplane; Richard Gatling the first modern successful machine gun. As we have seen, no other culture is so adept at marrying man and machine in war. Nevertheless, in nearly every one of our major wars, American troops initially entered combat with arms inferior to their more experienced enemies. In this regard, Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, and the present Middle East conflicts are exceptional; these were our first major land engagements in which American weaponry at the outset was superior in almost every category. Yet sophisticated American infantry battalions often found their initial complex models of M16 rifles far less dependable than the less complex, less accurate, and less lethal AK-47s used by the Viet Cong and regular North Vietnamese regiments.

We sent a million troops to Europe between 1917 and 1918 with weapons qualitatively inferior to both our German enemies and French and British allies. We had no tanks—and would never produce our own in any numbers until the war was well over. We relied for the most part on British- or French-designed machine guns and artillery. European airplanes were far better than American Dayton-Wright and Curtiss models. Only the American model M1903 Springfield rifle, and later the Browning automatic rifle (BAR), proved fit for the rapidly changing technological conditions of the western front.

Our initial ill-preparedness was in some sense still worse in both the Second World War and Korea. The United States went to battle in 1941 equipped with far fewer aircraft carriers in the Pacific theater than the Japanese. Wildcat frontline fighters were inferior to the Japanese Zero; obsolete Brewster F2A Buffalos were rightly known as “flying coffins.” The Douglas TBD Devastator bomber was a death trap, its pilots essentially wiped out or rendered impotent at the Battle of Midway trying to drop often unreliable torpedoes into the wind at net speeds of not more than sixty miles per hour. American-designed Lee, Grant, and Stuart tanks—and even the much-heralded reliable Shermans (“Ronson Lighters”)—were intrinsically inferior to most contemporary German models, which had far better armor and armament, as well as a lower profile. With the exception of the superb M1 rifle and heavy bombers like the B-17 and B-24, it is hard to rank any American weapons system as comparable to those used by the Wehrmacht, at least until 1944–45. We never developed guns quite comparable to the fast-firing, lethal German .88 artillery platform. Our antitank weapons of all calibers remained substandard. Most of our machine guns and mortars were reliable—but of First World War vintage.

The American military learned immediately in Korea that our first-generation jet fighters—F-80 Shooting Stars—could not match Russian MiG-15s. For much of the summer of 1950, North Korea enjoyed air superiority, as Communist pilots often flew jets against our own propeller-driven fighters. Even improved Sherman tanks and newer M24 Chaffee light tanks through much of 1950 were outclassed by the Second World War–vintage Russian T-34s and T-85s. Indeed, it was nearly inconceivable that the abjectly poor North Koreans would have had access to tanks in 1950 superior to those of the Americans, despite our reputation as the recent winners over sophisticated Japanese and Germans. The United States, despite the harsh lessons of the Second World War, would not produce the world’s preeminent tank until the appearance of the Abrams in the early 1980s.

Poor Leadership

H
AVE THERE EVER
been lapses in military leadership like the ones that purportedly marred the Iraq effort? The “revolt of the generals” against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—in which a number of retired generals publicly lambasted the Pentagon chief for not listening to their prewar warnings—was nothing compared to the “revolt of the admirals” which led to Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson’s forced resignation in the midst of the bitter first year of the Korean War.

Johnson himself, remember, had come to office following the removal (or resignation), and then probable suicide, of Secretary James Forrestal, whose last note included a lengthy quotation from Sophocles’
Ajax
. Johnson’s successor, the venerable General George Marshall, lasted less than a year—hounded out by Joseph McCarthy, and an object of furor in the wartime 1952 election that brought in Eisenhower (who did not defend his former superior from McCarthy’s slanders). The result was that four different secretaries of defense—Forrestal, Johnson, Marshall, and Robert Lovett—served between 1949 and 1951, all with radically different agendas and ideas about how to reshape the military to confront an array of new global challenges. At one point Secretary Johnson advocated ending the Marine Corps altogether, with some initial encouragement from President Harry Truman.

Critics of the Iraq War wonder how the workmanlike Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, on whose watch Abu Ghraib occurred and the insurgency grew, rose to command all coalition ground forces in the first place, or later why General George Casey persisted in tactics that were aimed more at downsizing our forces than going after the enemy and fighting a vigorous war of counterinsurgency. But surely these armchair critics can acknowledge that such controversies over personnel pale in comparison to past storms. Lincoln serially fired, ignored, or bypassed mediocrities like Generals Burnside, Halleck, Hooker, McClellan, McDowell, Meade, Pope, and Rosecrans before finding Grant, George Thomas, Sherman, and Philip Sheridan—all of whom at one time or another were under severe criticism and nearly dismissed. Before the Battle of Shiloh, Sherman was felt to have been crazy and unreliable; after the victory, it was Grant’s turn to be accused of everything from drunkenness to gross incompetence.

The Second World War was little better. By all accounts the sacrosanct General John C. H. Lee set up an enormous logistical fiefdom that indulged in perks and privilege while American armies at the front were short on manpower, materials, and fuel. To this day military historians cannot quite fathom how and why Major General Lloyd Fredendall was ever given an entire corps in the North Africa campaign, or why John Lucas was given command of the Anzio landings. The former’s uninspired generalship led to the disaster at the Kasserine Pass and his own subsequent removal; the latter lost an opportunity to either take Rome or surround several German divisions in Italy. Thousands of dead and wounded paid the price for the lapses of each.

Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, a competent officer, was bewildered by the unexpected Japanese resistance on Okinawa, and unimaginatively plowed head-on through fortified enemy positions—until killed in action on the island, the most senior-ranking officer to die by enemy fire in the Second World War. The plodding generalship of charismatic Mark Clark in Italy often proved disastrous—perhaps analogous to the slothful command of General Henry Halleck, who, after the victory at Shiloh, took de facto command from Grant of Union forces in the west, only to let the retreating defeated Confederate army escape annihilation.

The story of the U.S. Army at war is one of frequent sacking, sidetracking, or ostracizing of its highest and best-known commanders in the field—Grant after Shiloh, Douglas MacArthur in Korea, Patton in Sicily, and William Westmoreland in Vietnam—for both good and awful reasons, and not until thousands of Americans had first tragically died. Iraq and Afghanistan are peculiar in that there have been so few personnel changes, much less a general consensus about perceived military incompetence. In comparison to past conflicts, the wonder is not that a gifted officer like General David Petraeus came into real prominence relatively late in the present war, but that his unique talents were recognized quickly enough to allow him the supreme command and latitude to alter the entire tactical approach to the war in Iraq.