D-Day Plus 70 Years

Origins:  Current Events in Historical Perspective, is a publication of the Ohio State University Department of History.  Here's the intro to the most recent piece, with a link to the complete article:

6/6/2014: Top Ten Origins: D-Day 70 Years Ago

By Greg Hope.  Greg is a U.S. Army captain who is doing his graduate work in preparation for his next assignment, as a military history instructor at West Point.

The Normandy Invasion (June 6, 1944) was the supreme joint effort of the Western Allies in Europe in World War II and remains today one of the best known campaigns of the war.

Code named Operation Overlord, it was a battle marked by its courage, meticulous planning and logistics, and audacious amphibious approach. It was also in many ways inevitable. Following Germany’s conquest of France in 1940 and declaration of war on the United States in 1941, a confrontation somewhere on the shores of Northern Europe became a waiting game, with only the date and location left to be answered.
On D-Day, over 125,000 British, American, and Canadian soldiers supported by more than five thousand ships and thirteen thousand aircraft landed in Normandy on five separate beaches in order to carve out a sixty-mile wide bridgehead. This foothold would be the launching point from which the liberation of France and Western Europe would proceed. Opposed by German units in strong defensive positions, the Allies suffered more than twelve thousand casualties on the first day of the invasion.

This year we mark the 70^th Anniversary of Overlord. To commemorate the battle, Origins offers ten of the most important things to know about the invasion.


Full article

Casablanca and the Politics of Sacrifice

This article originally appeared in World War II magazine, vol. 29, no. 1 (May/June 2014):75-76. Reprinted with permission.

The first time I saw Casablanca I was twenty years old, with a date on my arm and hope in my heart.  Unsurprisingly, I watched it through the lens of romance.  So too, for at least the first five viewings, should anyone watch this most beloved of American films.  The journey of its central character, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), from a deep bitterness about love at the beginning of Casablanca to a noble sacrifice of love at its end, is one of the most compelling plots in the history of cinema.  But after that, it is permissible to reflect on Casablanca’s \political content, just as film critics have been doing for over seventy years.

            If you have never seen Casablanca, then stop reading this column, get hold of the DVD, and return after you’ve watched it.  The rest of us may reflect on the film as it would have appeared to movie goers who saw it during its initial run.  Casablanca debuted at New York’s Hollywood Theater on Thanksgiving Day 1942, not quite a year after the United States entered World War II.  By February 1943 it was playing in over 200 theaters across the country.

            At one level, of course, Casablanca is indeed an extraordinary romance. It centers on Rick’s Café Americaine, whose clientele comes to drink, gamble, and attempt to buy and sell escape from Casablanca, in French Morocco, to Lisbon in neutral Portugal and departure to freedom in the New World.  (French Morocco was then under the control of Vichy France, the authoritarian, pro-German rump state established after France signed a humiliating armistice with Germany.)  Rick himself is hardened and bitter.  It transpires that Rick has come from Paris, where he loved and lost the beautiful Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman).  Then Ilsa suddenly appears in the company of her seeming new lover, resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid).  “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” Rick later glooms in a fog of liquor, “she walks into mine.”

            Laszlo is among those trying to escape to Lisbon, closely pursued by the menacing Nazi Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt).  In Casablanca Laszlo enjoys a fragile safety, because it is under the jurisdiction of Vichy France.  But Vichy is after all virtually a German satellite, and sooner or later Strasser will find a way to seize him.  Laszlo is saved only because Rick ultimately decides to discard his cynicism and, in an intricately planned gambit, ensure Laszlo’s escape.

            Few could miss Casablanca’s references to pre-war American foreign policy. Early in the film, Rick rebuffs an overture by the black marketeer Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet) to go into business together.  “My dear Rick,” Ferrari chides, “when will you realize that in this world today isolationism is no longer a practical policy?”  Warned by the Vichy police prefect Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) not to intervene on behalf of the weasel-like Ugarte (Peter Lorre), who is correctly suspected of murdering two German couriers carrying letters of transit—priceless to anyone seeking to flee Casablanca—Rick responds, “I stick my neck out for nobody.”  Renault observes, “A wise foreign policy.”

            Based upon those lines in the film, and its overall trajectory, some have theorized that Warner Brothers intended Casablancaas an argument in favor of American intervention in the war.  But that is an untenable interpretation.  Filming began only until May 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, and when the cameras started rolling the script was still incomplete.  Working at white heat—screenwriter Howard Koch remembered feeling that “the camera was a monster devouring my pages faster than I could write them”—Koch scarcely had time to craft a subtle propaganda film.  And director Michael Curtiz scarcely had the intention:  he simply wanted to make a love story.

            But as an affirmation of America’s goal in going to war, which was nothing less than to save the world from evil,  Casablanca had real power.  It is established early on that Rick once waged his own war against evil, running guns into Ethiopia and fighting in the Spanish Civil War, acts redolent of America’s intervention against Imperial Germany in World War I.  But like America, Rick retreated into a disillusioned isolationism:  “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

            Yet despite Rick’s initial renunciation of  any intent to stick his neck out for Laszlo in Laszlo’s attempt to escape Strasser by flying to Lisbon with Ilsa (who turns out to be his wife),  by the end of the film Rick has done exactly that, notwithstanding the fact that Ilsa is the great love of his life.  “Welcome back to the fight,” Laszlo tells him.  “This time I know our side will win.”  To protect Laszlo and Ilsa from capture before the plane can lift off, Rick shoots Strasser.  Then, with the plane safely aloft, Rick—joined by Renault, who evidently has also recovered his idealism—walks off into the night to make his way to the Free French garrison at Brazzaville:  “Louis,” he says, in one of cinema’s great lines, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”  The arc of the film, then, is an unmistakable journey from isolationism to intervention.

            But audiences would also have viewed Casablanca in more personal terms.  After explaining to Ilsa why he has decided that she should leave with Laszlo rather than remain with him, Rick continues, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”  Like Rick, millions of Americans were making a sacrifice on behalf of the greater good, either by leaving their loved ones to go to war or by watching their loved one depart.  And if by horrible chance the loved ones failed to re-unite, then, like Rick, they could yet console themselves with their own equivalent of Rick’s declaration to Ilsa:  “We’ll always have Paris.” 

The Moral World of Twelve O'Clock High

This article originally appeared in World War II magazine, vol. 28, no. 6 (March/April 2014):75-76. Reprinted with permission. 

Twelve O’Clock High, a justly celebrated film about the air war over Europe, shows barely any high-altitude violence. Even so, director Henry King and his actors expertly illuminate the complex burdens of commanding personnel engaged in the brutal grind of flying into combat repeatedly as the odds of survival shorten. The portrait they render of men under pressure achieves a timeless, unblinking clarity.

This is why, more than 60 years after its 1949 premiere, military educators still employ Twelve O’Clock High to talk about leadership. These conversations usually address such practicalities as command style, but the film offers insights on many other levels. During two years as a visiting professor at the U.S. Army War College, I showed my students—mostly colonels fresh from Afghanistan and Iraq— a key scene from the film in order to make them to think and talk about how the ethical reasoning in its imaginary world informs real-world officership.

           

Twelve O’Clock High begins with the fictional 918th Bomb Group returning from a disastrous raid against German submarine pens in St. Nazaire, only to have Bomber Command order a low-altitude run at the pens the very next day. Group commander Colonel Keith Davenport (Gary Merrill) protests to Brigadier General Frank Savage (Gregory Peck). “Those boys are flesh and blood. They’ll die for you but they gotta know they have a chance and they know they haven’t got one,” Davenport says. “They know a man’s chances run out in 15 missions. Somebody’s gotta give them a limit. A goal, some hope of living.” Savage reluctantly conveys Davenport’s misgivings to their superior, Major General Pritchard (Millard Mitchell), who with Savage confronts Davenport, an otherwise unimpeachable officer.

           
Here is where the film’s moral world comes into focus. The three officers, in the company of other men of the 918th, discuss the deadly mission, whose heavy losses they trace to a navigational error. Davenport tries to shield the man who made that mistake, but the mission’s navigator, Lieutenant Zimmerman (Lee MacGregor), steps forward. He forthrightly explains how his errors brought the 918th late to the target and into German anti-aircraft gunners’ sights. As soon as Zimmerman is out of earshot, Pritchard pressures Davenport to relieve him. Davenport refuses. Pritchard relieves Davenport, ultimately replacing him with Savage. Within hours, Zimmerman, off-camera, commits suicide.

           
This brief sequence, I explained to my students, puts three ethical reasoning systems into opposition. Davenport reasons deontologically; in his world certain actions are absolutely impermissible. To push his aircrews too far is to break faith with them. Anyone could have made the error Zimmerman did; Davenport will not sacrifice a man for that—though he can’t stop Zimmerman from literally sacrificing himself. Pritchard and Savage personify consequentialist reasoning; for them, ends justify means. If they must sacrifice entire aircrews to achieve a mission’s goal, so be it. As Savage will brutally tell the 918th, “Consider yourselves already dead.”

           
The vocabulary may be unfamiliar, but we all know these lines of logic. My students overwhelmingly declared themselves consequentialists, but I find more grist for the discussion mill in Zimmerman’s reasoning. Refusing Davenport’s protection, the doomed navigator takes ownership of his awful mistake based upon his character-based sense of right and wrong—what ethicists call aretaic reasoning.

You may not recognize this arcane term, but you do know aretaic reasoning—it is the selfless logic of leading by example. In 2009, General Carter Ham, a no-nonsense officer then commanding all U.S. Army forces in Europe, made public the fact that he was undergoing treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder arising from combat in Iraq. The army had been trying to encourage personnel with PTSD to seek treatment, but that campaign had run straight into a wall in the form of officers’ historic culture of stoicism. To break this cycle of denial, a high-ranking officer had to say out loud that he needed help and that he was getting it. Some attempted to dissuade Ham, but he would not—could not—remain silent. In making a personal stand, he helped shift the army’s culture.

When it comes to changing an organization, it is seldom enough to announce a new policy; for that policy to take practical hold senior leadership must act on it and personally model the behavior implicit in that policy. In Twelve O’Clock High Lieutenant Zimmerman’s display of moral courage quickly passes out of frame. But, as General Ham dramatically showed, we should not only recognize how much an example of such courage matters in a film but understand its importance in in real life.

Zimmerman’s stand resonates personally with me. In the same way that General Ham chose to go public with having PTSD, I have for many years felt morally obligated to be public about my having bipolar disorder. I want “normal” people to see that most of us with mental illnesses are not broken, but can and do lead productive, fulfilling lives. This has not come without cost:  an unscrupulous person once ruthlessly tried to exploit my candor. And like General Ham, I encountered discouragement from individuals who feared I placed myself at risk for exactly such exploitation. In strong contrast, my students at the Army War College accorded me respect and support. Among some faculty the reaction to my openness went even further.  It was expected that about 30 percent of officers returning from combat would have symptoms of Battle Stress Injury. The hope was that they would take advantage of the many forms of help available on campus. True, Battle Stress Injury is a type of wound, while bipolar disorder is an illness, but both conditions carry a social stigma that needs dispelling, and so in some quarters I was seen as something of a role model. In Twelve O’Clock High, the tragic arc of Lieutenant Zimmerman’s moral courage functions within the plot as a sideshow. But, as in the case of General Ham—and, I hope, myself—sometimes a sideshow can exert the power of a main event.

Los Hombres Armados

(Cross-posted from The Official Blog of the Society for Military History)

There’s a neighborhood bar not far from where I live.  I drop by often enough that the bartenders know me and automatically get me my beer of choice.  It’s a friendly place and easy to make conversation.

Back in mid-December the coverage of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was almost wall-to-wall.  One evening it was silently unfolding on one of the bar’s muted televisions. I noticed a Hispanic man watching the images, his eyes wet with tears.  A short time later we began talking and I found out why.

The man–I’ll call him Fernando–was thirty-eight years old and had grown up in El Salvador during its long civil war (1979-1992).  The conflict was between the right-wing government, with its death squads, and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMNLF), an umbrella term for several left-wing guerrilla groups.  Fernando’s parents were afraid of both sides.  For them it was simply a matter of los hombres armados:  the men with guns.

When Fernando was a little boy, he told me, his parents would sometimes take him from their house and spend the night hiding in the woods, with a hand cupped over Fernando’s mouth to keep him from crying out. We think of school shootings and civil wars as worlds apart.  But for Fernando, the former was irresistibly reminiscent of the latter.

I have since talked to Fernando on several other occasions.  We never speak of the civil war but it plainly haunts him.  At some point–I have never asked how–he acquired an M-16, perhaps because he eventually joined one side or the other.  Although he left the weapon behind him in El Salvador, he once told me he has never felt comfortable without it, and he alternates between having thoughts of violence and thoughts of running away.  He becomes tearful easily and indeed, never seems far away from weeping.  Although his case is undiagnosed, he almost certainly suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

As a military historian, I have never quite known what to make of Fernando’s equation of the Sandy Hook murders with his own childhood.  But it is the same equation that others make who have to live with the threat or reality of mass killing.  For military veterans present at the recent Boston Marathon Bombing, the scene resembled the aftermath of an IED blast.  People residing in neighborhoods wracked with gang violence must know the same fear that Fernando’s parents did.  Fernando is a reminder, I suppose, that although we define the boundaries of our field as centrally concerned with political violence, the lived experience of people caught up in violence is essentially the same.

My Twinkie

Back in June the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College chose my book The Hard Hand of War as "the book of the conference," meaning that all participants were asked to read it and a round table was convened specifically to discuss it.  That was a real honor and one I much appreciated.

Recently CSPAN-3 aired the roundtable.  Panelists included Susannah Ural, Keith Bohannon, Megan Kate Nelson, Brooks Simpson, and myself.  The whole thing is a bit over an hour in length, but for my money the most delightful moment in it occurred when Megan  remarked that the book was almost twenty years old, was still a standard work on the subject, and that it was "unusual for a book to have that kind of shelf life. . . . It's like a Twinkie.  It's still fresh."  I've never considered Twinkies to be exactly fresh, but they are certainly timeless.  I'm confident that they will survive a nuclear conflict, global warming, or pretty much any other calamity.  So it was really a very nice compliment.

The Society for Military History Has a Blog

The Society for Military History, the flagship organization for academic military history, has recently re-vamped its web site and added a group blog.  Contributors include Bob Bateman, Brett Holman, Jamel Ostwald, Brian Sandberg, and myself.  I also serve as the blog's administrator.

The blog will produce about ten posts per month:  on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays one week, then Tuesdays and Thursdays the next, then back to Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  The emphasis is on items that showcase or comment upon academic military history.

Someone recently asked me if my participation on this blog meant the end of my efforts on Blog Them Out of the Stone Age.  Not at all.  The chief impediment to regular posts on BTOOTSA continues to be the sharply limited time available these days (thanks in part to a one-year old daughter) and my discouragement over continued security issues on the primary blog.  Someday I'd like to get these resolved.  But it hasn't been easy, and my intention all along has been to author the blog, not get heavily involved on the technical side.

In the meantime, though, I'll try to post on BTOOTSA more regularly.  And of course I'll be posting on the SMH blog twice a month.

The Spirit of Independence

A guest post by COL (Ret.) Charles D. Allen.

I had expected a traditional 4th of July holiday with the trappings of local and national celebrations, fireworks, and displays of patriotism coupled with family events.  For many of us, the mid-week holiday extended the observance to the following weekend.
 
I took the opportunity to visit Mom and siblings in Cleveland and, as is my habit, I picked up an audiobook CD for the 600-mile roundtrip.  The selection this time was David Hackett Fischer’s award-winning Washington’s Crossing.  The book captured my attention so much that I drove straight through to my mother’s house.  The next two days were spent checking in with my mom and her cousin (among the last of that generation), watching my brother grill and spend time with his grandkids, and sharing late-night reminisces with my sisters. After a hearty Sunday breakfast (prepared by my brother), I hit the road having counted the weekend an American success.

I inserted the next CD and continued to listen to Fischer’s remarkable work.  The next chapter of the book recounted the attitudes and reactions of American colonials in New Jersey in the face of the occupation by British and Hessian troops. I then remembered seeing signs for Shanksville/Somerset PA on my outbound trip and felt compelled to visit the Flight 93 Memorial on the way home.  A quick check of the GPS gave directions and time to the site, so I departed from my normal route on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

The park entrance is 3-1/2 miles from the Memorial Plaza and the road winds slowly to the impact site. From the parking lot, the quarter-mile walk begins with display boards that detail the events of the morning of September 11, 2001.  Most haunting are the faces on the placard, “The Crew and Passengers of Flight 93.” At the end of the walk are 40 marble panels inscribed with each name and the existence of an unborn child.

As I looked around the unfinished memorial and its landscape, it was clear that the unremarkable countryside belied the remarkable feat accomplished by the passengers who boarded the plane in Newark, New Jersey. Among the names on the display and marble panels were those of Jeremy Glick, Tom Burnett and Todd Beamer who assumed leadership roles on the plane when the threat to the nation became clear. Tom on the phone told his wife, Deena, “We can’t wait…we’re going to do something.” Voice recordings captured the memorable words of Todd, who was about to lead the group: “Are you ready? Okay. Let’s roll!”
  
It is striking how this band of civilians embodied the same spirit of the New Jersey colonists in 1776. That spirit is captured in the third verse of “America the Beautiful”:

O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved and mercy more than life! 

This is important to remember each Independence Day—that our citizens are true heroes whom those in uniform have the honor to serve.