The task of the military historian is beginning to look a trifle odd because the world is moving out from under him. Statesmen who have at their disposal intercontinental missiles with atomic warheads are not apt to find much nourishment in studies of conventional strategy. The lessons of even the most recent war—painstakingly studied and evaluated with profound thought—seem as out of date as an instruction in the tactical necessities of the Carthaginian war galleys. Only an optimist can believe that men will never again make war, but the one certainty seems to be that they will not again make war as they made it in the past. What is there, outside of the field of purely antiquarian interest, for the military historian to say?
Quite a lot, actually; for the ends which are sought by international violence are just about what they always were, and if the means by which these ends are to be gained have changed beyond recognition, the method of applying them still has to follow certain basic principles. Also, it is still necessary for a nation that wins a victory to do a little thinking about the uses to which the victory will finally be put.
In any case, the military historians continue to write, and they bring out books that deserve attention. In Key to Victory, Lieutenant Commander P. K. Kemp examines the ways in which Britain (with, it must be said, a little help from outside sources) exerted control of the sea lanes during World War II and the results that flowed from that control, and he writes in terms that are eminently meaningful today.
Commander Kemp is no old sea dog talking in terms of battleships and the Nelson touch. When he speaks of sea power, he means the manner in which a nation or an alliance denies to its enemy the use of the sea as a means of transport while retaining it for its own use. This remains “sea power” even though the airplane, the island base, intricate shore-mounted installations, and sundry other modern devices may be just as important as the water-borne fighting ship; and Commander Kemp quite rightly sees it as the great essential to victory in the war against the Axis powers. In the end, he argues, Hitler was defeated just as Napoleon was; he was not free to use the sea lanes and his opponents were, so that his conquests on dry land eventually became meaningless and the war was brought home to him with a force he could not match.
Key to Victory:The Triumph of British Sea Power in World War II, by Lieutenant Commander P. K. Kemp. Little, Brown and Co. 383 pp. $6.00.
Specifically, says this writer: back in 1940, when only England stood between Germany and final triumph, Hitler could not quite starve the British Isles into submission or mount the invasion which would have mashed the last center of resistance. He came fearfully close to it, but he never quite made it, and England’s situation even in her darkest hour reminds Commander Kemp of the remark made 150 years earlier by the Earl of St. Vincent, who was First Lord of the Admiralty when Napoleon was meditating a cross-Channel thrust. Being asked about the possibility of an invasion, St. Vincent drily said that invasion was a military question on which he was not competent to express an opinion; all he knew was that an invasion could not come by sea.
So in North Africa, where Rommel would have gone on to finish his conquest if the Axis had had real control of the supply lines across the Mediterranean; so also with Russia, to whom the flow of essential supplies was maintained in spite of appalling obstacles; and so finally with the great tide of soldiers and munitions that came from America, from Canada, and from Australia to tip the balance against the man who appeared to have conquered Europe. The story would have been very different if the seas had been a barrier for the Allied powers and not a highway.
That there were serious gaps in this highway from time to time is of course obvious. The straits to which the British were driven in the Mediterranean did at times look like the beginning of the end; the fearful losses in the North Atlantic sea lanes brought even Churchill himself to the verge of despair; and the story of the convoys to Russia contains chapters that still put a shiver down one’s back, even at this distance in time. But the gaps were always bridged, somehow, and the endurance and heroism that bridged them compel one’s dazzled admiration.
That Hitler was never able to exploit these gaps adequately was at least partly due, Commander Kemp believes, to the fact that Hitler had no real notion of what sea power meant. The one German in high command who might conceivably have won the war for him was, says Commander Kemp, Grand Admiral Raeder, commander in chief of the German Navy in the early years of the war and a man who understood clearly how a genuinely balanced navy—submarines, surface ships, and airplanes, working to a coherent plan based on genuine sea strategy—could have turned the tables. Hitler never comprehended what Raeder was talking about, displaced him finally with Doenitz, and in effect reduced the Navy to a submarine service. The German submarines did great things, but unsupported they were never quite enough.
For Britain’s failure to maintain her armed forces in the decades preceding the outbreak of World War II, this writer has strong condemnation. The explanation of the shabby deal at Munich, he insists, is to be found in the report Britain’s chiefs of staff gave Prime Minister Chamberlain when Germany was preparing to swallow Czechoslovakia. Without qualification, these men said that England was not ready for war and that any involvement in war with Germany at that time would probably lead to defeat. In effect, Chamberlain was told that he had to avoid war at all costs. He did it, to the total destruction of his own reputation; and Commander Kemp feels that he could not possibly have done anything else.
Naturally enough, this book concentrates on the British side of the story. As a picture of the war as a whole it is of course inadequate; what the armies did, in Russia or in France or elsewhere, is merely sketched in, and the manner in which control of the seas was finally won is described largely—though by no means entirely—in terms of what the British Navy did. But that, after all, is the story Commander Kemp selected, and he has told it very well. He is insistent in pointing out that sea power is not just a matter of navies. “In modern war,” he says, “the true exercise of maritime power depends nearly as much upon the exertions of land and air forces as it does upon naval.” But it is still sea power.
Mistakes of Strategy
By BRUCE CATTON
Samuel Eliot Morison takes a broader view in his compact, thought-provoking little book, Strategy and Compromise. That is, although he too concerns himself primarily with sea power, it is the strategy of the entire war which engrosses him, and he discusses not so much what happened at sea as the basis on which strategic decisions were reached and the results that rame from them.
Both British and American readers, Mr. Morison remarks, seem to like to be told that their own country’s strategy was bad, and that their leaders made many stupid and costly mistakes. The difficulty, however, is to prove that alleged strategic errors were really errors, for the proof usually rests on the assumption that “if we had done something different the enemy would still have done the same thing that he actually did,” which usually is not true and in any case is unproven. Having said this, Mr. Morison goes on to assert that America and England were definitely mistaken in their wartime appraisal of Russia. AngloAmerican policy toward Russia during the war was based on two assumptions, both of which, says Mr. Morison, can now be shown to have been false: that Stalin would make a separate peace with Germany if not sufficiently supplied with war materiel and appeased by political concessions and that if we treated Russia “honorably and generously” Communist hostility would end and we would find Russia a dependable friend once the war ended.
Strategy and Compromise, by Samuel Eliot Morison. Little, Brown and Co. 120 pp. $3.00.
Essentially, the basic American strategic decision of the war was to “put forth our first and best efforts to the defeat of Germany.” In this decision, the British and American governments remained in agreement throughout. Where the arguments came was in the question regarding the way in which this strategy was to be made effective.
The original American idea was to land an army in France in 1942 and get on with the invasion of continental Europe. To this the British objected violently- partly because they did not believe the Americans could possibly be ready for such a large operation so soon and partly because they were obsessed with the desire to find some backdoor approach to the German stronghold. In the end, the American plan was shelved, and the North African invasion was substituted, with the cross-Channel operation deferred until 1944. This, Mr. Morison believes, was a correct decision; the trouble was that one step kept leading to another, culminating in a painful, step-by-step advance up the Italian boot, which he believes cost a good deal more than it was worth.
What finally happened—the major plan for beating Germany by a cross-Channel invasion in 1944—was a compromise between the original American idea, Churchill’s concept of “pecking away at the perimeter of Festung Europa until a weak spot was found,” and Sir Alan Brooke’s plan to crawl up Italy. It was probably a good compromise; it would not have been arrived at if Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and their advisers had not put constant and tactless pressure on for the cross-Channel invasion. If this move had been postponed, as Mr. Morison says, “London would have been laid flat by the V-1 bombs and V-2 rockets,” since no defense had then been laid out against these missiles, and without an invasion of Europe the launching sites would have remained intact.
So the major decisions, as far as Europe was concerned, seem to have been fairly sound. How about the Pacific?
Here the great mistake was made by the Japanese. In 1942, says Mr. Morison, the Japanese refused to rest content with what they had won and devote themselves to consolidating the immense conquests they had made. Instead, they embarked on a new, more ambitious program, trying to seize Tulagi in the Solomons and Port Moresby in New Guinea, trying to take Midway Island and the western Aleutians, and trying to take New Caledonia, the Fijis, and Samoa in order to cut the line between the United States and Australia. They overextended themselves; on each point they were defeated. The conversations between American and British war-planners took a crucial turn, just here. The Americans agreed to go along with the Mediterranean operations and to postpone the crossChannel operation; in return, they won agreement that America should take the offensive in the Pacific. As a result, they beat Japan more rapidly than anyone had dared to hope would be possible and did it—despite recent British protests—without, actually, withdrawing any strength from the European offensive.
And, at last, we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and Japan surrendered.
Was this a strategic error? Unquestionably, it obviated the need for an actual invasion of Japan, and it may have saved a good many American lives. But over the long pull? Mr. Morison has a thought that may be worth pondering:
“It was probably unfortunate that the war in the Pacific ended so abruptly. Had it lasted two or three months longer, proper preparations could have been made for the surrender of the Japanese armies in China. As it happened, the Communists profited by the confusion in China, and obtained most of the surrendered Japanese war materials. A slight prolongation of the war, moreover, would have enabled General MacArthur to carry out an operation that he had planned, to liberate the Dutch East Indies; and one can well imagine how much better it could have been for us—and, as I believe, for the Indonesians themselves—if an Allied army had been in Indonesia when the war ended.”
Strategic decisions affect not only the war itself, but what comes after the war. Sometimes the point is worth remembering.
Reconstruction
By BRUCE CATTON
It might, indeed, have been worth remembering in that crucial war of the American people, the Civil War that was waged between 1861 and 1865. That war was fought, apparently, on the pious belief that once secession had been crushed and slavery had been ended, both sides could pick up the old threads and go on to rebuild a once-broken but now-restored Union. In the end the picking-up process turned out to be rather intricate.
This process brought with it the unpleasant period known as Reconstruction, in which a good many bad things happened; and a highly informative and eloquent sidelight on some of these bad things is contained in Jonathan Daniels’ new book, Prince of Carpetbaggers.
Mr. Daniels here considers the checkered career of a Union brigadier general named Milton Smith Littlefield. Littlefield, who was a notorious figure in the 1870’s but who has been almost completely forgotten by a slightly ungrateful nation since that time, was the archetype of the Yankee who went south after Appomattox to try the incompatible jobs of recementing the Union, doing justice to the emancipated Negro, and winning power for the Republican party and personal profit for himself. He did his best in all of these fields, and in the end all of his ventures failed, and for a time he was the great personal villain of the postwar story as far as good southerners were concerned.
Prince of Carpetbaggers, by Jonathan Daniels. J. B. Lippincott Co. 320 pp. $4.95.
Littlefield was a New York-born middle westerner who lived in Michigan and Illinois before the war, became an officer in an Illinois regiment, fought at Shiloh, served as Sherman’s assistant provost marshal in Memphis early in 1863, and then went to occupied territory in the Carolina sounds and in Florida, where he helped to organize Negro regiments for the Union Army. At the end of the war—after getting his eyes opened, apparently, as to the financial possibilities by serving on timber-rich Edisto Island, South Carolina, .and then retreating to Philadelphia to open a profitable lumber company—he struck the powers in Washington as a deserving soldier and a right-minded Republican and found himself, presently, drifting about in North Carolina, organizing new voters for the party and trying to make a dime or two out of the revival of southern industry and commerce.
Littlefield was a child of his time, and he did the best he could. His motives seem to have been mixed. He had a genuine desire to see the new Negro citizen brought forward into full citizenship; he wanted to restore the shattered Carolina economy; he wanted also to make money for himself, and he had intimate connections with powerful financial interests up North. In the end practically everything failed, Littlefield became a fugitive from North Carolina with a price on his head, and only the shadowy figures in the background got what they wanted.
Personally, Littlefield seems to have been a likable, picturesque sort of character, suave but never quite too obviously the slick operator; but he is important, not as a person, but as a type. He was the sort of person (that is to say) bound to move into the vacuum which the war left in the South, and the vacuum was there chiefly because no one had bothered to do much thinking about what would be done with the victory after it had been won. North and South alike, all anyone wanted to do with the Civil War was win it; what might come afterward was something that could be taken up later, and the tragedy was that it opened the way for the sharpshooters, who had the help not only of northerners who wanted political power and a quick dollar but also of southerners who had exactly the same ends in view.
And it is this point that Mr. Daniels makes very clear in a book which stands out as one of the most readable, provocative, and smoothly written works ever devoted to the whole miserable Reconstruction era. The carpetbagger was not merely the creation of greedy and conscienceless Yankees, although these were behind him in full measure; he also dealt with equally greedy and conscienceless southerners, and what gave him his destructive leverage was the fact that, as Mr. Daniels puts it, he discovered the latent possibilities in “the indissoluble union of Americans meeting with a profit motive.” There was money to be made in the reconstructed South by the corruption of legislatures, the inflated use of the credit of bankrupt states, the creation of new corporations which some day, somehow, would make money for someone other than the trusting stockholders—and the carpetbagger rode to wealth on the discovery of this truth. In his ride he had allies in the South as well as in the North.
Mr. Daniels tells a significant story—possibly apocryphal, probably in its essentials true. After the crash came—after the South had regained control of its affairs and the carpetbaggers had retreated once and for all—a former Confederate who had at last become a trusted emissary of the state of North Carolina went North and sought Littlefield out in his home to urge him to go back to North Carolina and stand trial for his innumerable misdeeds. Littlefield, according to the story, gave the former Confederate a huge stack of papers on his desk, which showed just what he had been up to during the Reconstruction period and whom he had been up to it with. Then Littlefield said:
“Read the papers. Read them, and afterwards, if you will give me North Carolina’s guarantee that all those others involved with me in these matters will be brought to justice with me, I’m ready to go back and stand trial.”
The North Carolinian, says this story, read the papers, and then got up sadly and said:
“General, I respect your condition. I do not think we will trouble you any more.”
As Mr. Morison says, we won the war with Japan in jig-time and left an all but insoluble problem for the postwar generation to deal with. It was in the grand tradition. We did the same thing in the Civil War. The strategy that brings victory is fine, but now and then a nation at war ought to think about the strategy that will help make the ensuing peace worth its cost.
