Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors
Randall J. Stephens, Associate Editor
 
 
  Volume VI, Number 4
 

WAR MYTHS: AN EXCHANGE
--John Mosier, "War Myths"
--Victor Davis Hanson, "An Overextended Argument"
--Dennis Showalter, "Comment on Mosier's War Myths"
--James S. Corum, "Myths of Blitzkrieg--The Enduring Mythology of the 1940 Campaign"
--John Mosier, "Rhetoric or Reality? A Few Problems with Military History"

ARMAGEDDON: AN INTERVIEW WITH SIR MAX HASTINGS
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

THE STATE OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY: A FORUM
--Pauline Maier, "Disjunctions in Early American History"
--Edward G. Gray, "The Promise of Empire"
--Don Higginbotham, "Continuity and Change in Early American Studies"
--Peter S. Onuf, "Comments on Pauline Maier's 'State of the Field'"
--Paul A. Rahe, "Political History's Demise?"
--Jack Rakove, "An Agenda for Early American History"
--Pauline Maier, "Rejoinder"

Clark G. Reynolds, "Time for Reality to Replace 'PDB' History"

Robert H. Holden, "What Is Your Anthropology? What Are Your Ethics?"

Derek Wilson, "History over the Water"
 
 
 

Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

WAR MYTHS: AN EXCHANGE 

In recent years, a new voice has entered the crowded field of 20th-century military history to challenge conventional wisdom. John Mosier’s The Myth of the Great War (HarperCollins, 2001) argued, among other things, that American involvement saved the Allies from a German victory. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Mosier’s sequel, The Blitzkrieg Myth: How Hitler and the Allies Misread the Strategic Realities of World War II (HarperCollins, 2003), continued his assault on standard military historiography, this time claiming that both sides in the European theater of World War II were seduced by the myth that Blitzkrieg tactics were the decisive way to victory. Mosier’s books amount to a challenge to military historians to admit that they have been propagating myths, and we wondered whether Mosier’s revisionism had prompted a rethinking of 20th-century military history. To get at this, Historically Speaking asked Mosier, a professor of English literature at Loyola University, New Orleans, to draft an essay that would introduce his views, especially on World War II, to our readers. We then asked three prominent military historians—James Corum, Victor Davis Hanson, and Dennis Showalter— to comment. Professor Mosier’s response concludes our exchange on “War Myths.”

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

WAR MYTHS 
John Mosier

To begin with a confession of sorts: my original intentions with both The Myth of the Great War and The Blitzkrieg Myth were pretty ordinary.1 For British and American readers, the First World War was almost totally the story of the British Expeditionary Force on the 15% of the line it occupied; my aim was to explain what had happened on the other 85%. This story had never been told in English, and parts of it were obscure even for French readers. What emerged from mostly French sources—and from exploring the actual battlefields—became a narrative at odds with the prevailing view of the war: the Germans had essentially beaten the Allies in combat for nearly four years. Only the intervention of the United States, first by supplying materiel (from 1914 on) and then by sending 2 million men to France, had forced the Germans to quit.2 

The Blitzkrieg Myth was begun with the unexceptionable intention of providing English and American readers with the first accurate account of the Maginot Line. Along the way another controversial argument emerged: the war in Europe was mostly fought—and entirely written about—to conform with military theories developed in the 1920s, theories that can’t withstand serious scrutiny. 

I say this to make clear that I was simply following the facts, trying to shape accounts that conformed to the reality that was being uncovered. While I was surprised by how much of the received wisdom was flat out wrong, intellectually I had encountered this situation before. By analogy, it was what Thomas Kuhn had argued with respect to science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. What happens, he had observed, is that “an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way.”3 In the 1920s tank and airpower enthusiasts both postulated a new form of warfare aimed at breaking through the enemy’s defenses. The only real difference was the means chosen. Men like J.F.C. Fuller saw the tank as the great answer, while aviators like Emilio Douhet believed in the primacy of the strategic bomber. Those more sober analysts who wanted to spend some of the national defense budget on guns and fortifications were resigned to the scrap heap of history. Both men emphasized that success was a function of using a new technology to break through the enemy’s defenses and engage him in his unprotected areas. The only real difference was in the means chosen: one group put all their money on tanks, the other on strategic bombers. Both men— together with their numerous disciples and fellow travelers—were totally wrong. 

How totally wrong? Douhet claimed that ground to air defenses were useless. There was no point in having antiaircraft guns: the bombers would always get through. By the 1930s this was treated as established fact. But when I examined the records of the French antiaircraft defenses around Paris in the First World War, I found their gunners had shot down a significant number of German planes.4 And when I started looking at the specifications of the strategic bombers of the 1930s, I discovered that no one actually had a plane in production that could reach a potential enemy’s major cities and drop enough bombs to annihilate them as everyone was claiming at the time. 

These theories took time to percolate through the military and the civilian layers of the European governments, which accounts for why, in apparent contradiction, both the French and the Germans (and the Czechs and the Finns) built extensive fortifications. What posterity knows as the Maginot Line was planned in the 1920s and mostly built by 1934. These fortifications have always been taken as the concrete symbol of a defeated and defeatist France; interestingly enough, the Germans at first attempted to replicate them as the practical solution to maintaining the integrity of their border with Poland, and then they heavily fortified their western frontier. 

Paradoxically, Germany was the country least influenced by the fashionable new theories. Despite Göring’s importance after the National Socialists came to power, the air force remained totally subordinate to the army, which meant that the Luftwaffe, unlike the air forces of France and Great Britain, was essentially a tactical air force whose missions would be flown in support of objectives defined by the ground forces. There were numerous inconsistencies on both sides, but in the main, this split explains one of the major reasons why the Germans were so successful in 1939-1940 and why the Allies weren’t. Seeing airpower as primarily tactical, the Germans developed both weapons systems (the dive bomber and portable antiaircraft systems integrated into the ground forces) and a command and control system to support that aim. The Allies, on the other hand, let their air forces fight their own parallel war.5 

Right from the start of the war, strategic bombing was a failure on several different levels, one key reason being that no one except the Germans had paid any attention to the efficacy of ground to air defenses. And when it came to tactical airpower (bombing the enemy’s troops as opposed to his cities and factories), the Allies failed to coordinate their targets with the ground fighting. To make matters worse, when the Allied air forces operated tactically, they used the principle of level flight bombing. But level flight bombers lacked the accuracy required to destroy ground targets. Tactically it was a disaster, and the results were hardly better when the Allies turned to strategic bombing. Historians acknowledge that the Allied strategic bombing campaign in Europe was hardly a howling success. What fascinated me was not what was a rather obvious fact, but why so many intelligent men believed that strategic bombing would actually work.6 

But it’s the ground war that fascinates military historians. Although the only “new” military reason for German successes lay primarily in their integration of air and ground forces, the concept of the Blitzkrieg quickly became intertwined with the ideas Fuller had postulated. In other words, it was all about tanks, and for good reason: the Germans had air superiority everywhere in the first part of the war (September 1939 through possibly December 1941), but hardly anywhere from 1942 on. 

Fuller had opined that there could be no doubt that the major reason for the French defeat in 1940 was that they spent all their money on the Maginot Line, and the Germans spent all theirs on tanks. Basically, with modifications, this became holy writ. At first the argument was that Germany had built tanks and the Allies hadn’t, just as Fuller had said. When the numbers revealed this to be untrue, the argument became that the Germans had better tanks. And when the superiority of German equipment was questioned, the argument shifted again, to where it is today: only the Germans understood how to use tanks in combat. Thus we return to the by now almost mystical concept of the Blitzkrieg: the Americans and the Russians prevailed, finally, because they produced more tanks than the Germans did; quantity overcame quality. 

It is true that the Allies, collectively, produced many more tanks (and motorized vehicles) than Germany did, but the observation is highly misleading, and nothing else in this account is true at all. Although more mechanized than it had been in 1914-18, operationally the German army was entirely conventional, its tactics pretty much the same as earlier, the only difference being that tactical airpower had largely replaced heavy artillery. The Germans had always been better at integrating the arms of the services, and now, as weapons became more specialized (and deadlier) that integration gave them an enormous advantage on the battlefield. 

It’s easy to see why the Allies pounced on the idea that the Germans had secretly developed some entirely new approach to warfare: this absolved or at least excused them from their early defeats, as well as from paying any serious attention to tactical developments in the German army during the First World War. But the underlying motivation wasn’t entirely based on selfjustification and propaganda. The Allies really were surprised in 1939-1940. They had been wallowing in a sort of self-congratulatory complacency after 1918, had convinced themselves that they had beaten the German army at every turn, and hadn’t bothered to study the very real successes the Germans had scored. That the victories of the first year of the Second World War were the result of the application of these new theories of warfare seemed logical enough, and, like any good explanation, this one had the virtue of being simple and easy to understand. 

But upon any close examination of the actual events themselves, the whole notion that there was some new and revolutionary means of warfare collapses. There’s no single fact involved here; rather, it’s the cumulative weight of numerous small ones, which is why I chose Pushkin’s quip that men prefer one great lie to many small truths as the epigraph to the book—and I should add that the many small truths come in many different sizes and shapes. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll single out a few of what seem to be the most significant. 

Between the wars, the German army devoted a great deal of time and money to the construction of fortifications, and Hitler’s accession of power hardly changed this. This observation pretty much invalidates the notion both of defeatist France’s emphasis on static defenses and aggressive Germany’s reliance on mechanization, particularly when coupled with the low level of German tank production. The army began the war against Poland in September 1939 relying on obsolete Czech tanks, and hundreds more were pressed into service for May 1940, facts which suggest that the army high command had hardly embraced some new form of warfare.7 

Once the war with Poland began, the German plan was the opposite of some great armored thrust. Instead, it envisioned a broad front advance on three sides, and the actual planning maps the Germans used show armored and mechanized divisions scattered along these fronts, while the most important advance—from East Prussia towards Warsaw—was entrusted almost entirely to infantry divisions. These same maps make clear that the most rapid advances were actually made by the infantry.8 

The Polish campaign was not quite the walkover that everyone claimed. Nor did it happen at some dizzying speed. The Poles knew that they could not hope to defeat Germany, but had counted on Allied offensives relieving the pressure on them, provided they could hold out for two weeks. But the British strategic bombing offensive of September 1939, like the French armored offensive of the same period, was a complete failure. Instead, at the start of the third week Poland was attacked by the Red Army, an aggression that sealed its unhappy fate. Poland fell in six weeks not because of the application of new theories of warfare; but rather because of Hitler’s agreement with Stalin and unintentional Allied demonstrations of how these new theories totally failed in the face of prepared ground and ground to air defenses. 

After Poland, both sides spent months in intensive internal wrangling, Hitler with his generals, the French and British with each other, and the focus was largely on the Baltic, where the Finns were (by December 1939) forcing the Red Army to a bloody draw. Again, the details of the Finnish war call into question the prevailing theoretical constructs: the Soviet Union had an enormous tank force specifically designed for offensive warfare, and the doctrines to match; the Finns hardly even had antitank weapons, and yet they were able to force Stalin to a surprising stall. Meanwhile, the Allies were obsessed with Scandinavia, to the exclusion of any serious consideration of how to fight a war in Western Europe, one reason why the only military not caught by surprise in May 1940 was that of the Netherlands.9 

In both Belgium and the Netherlands the Germans did use previously untested means, mainly airborne delivery systems (and, at Eben Emael, shaped charges). But this hardly proves anything: anyone reading Life magazine could have forecast the use of airborne troops; moreover, the Germans had begun the last war with another technological innovation that had caught the Allies by surprise, motorized super-heavy artillery. But these surprises couldn’t be repeated with any assurance of success, and even that success was costly. The May fighting was a much closer contest than is usually suggested. In the Netherlands operation, for instance, the Germans basically lost their air transport capability, and their elite airborne troops took heavy casualties, even while fighting a small country whose troops were woefully equipped and not particularly well trained. 

What is significant here is that at the same time, the fabled German armored sweep was running into major problems. There were significant armored battles in Belgium. In the first great tank battle of the war, fought around the Gembloux Gap in Belgium, French tanks scored what the Germans themselves thought was a tactical victory over two German armored divisions. That the armor of the misnamed French Corps de Cavalerie more than held their own against the panzers of the German 17th Army Corps at Gembloux and that the French 3rd armored division and 5th motorized infantry division then fought the Germans to a bloody draw on the heights of the Meuse suggest that the whole notion animating accounts of 1940 is fundamentally awry.10 

Myths are believed because they provide us with coherent and convincing explanations of complex events. That’s true here: if the German tactics were conventional and predictable, the means used tried and proven, why were the Allies routed? The answer is that in terms of morale, courage, and leadership the Allied governments were bankrupt. Their collective instinct all along had been to cave in. They backed into the war more or less by default, and the moment things started going wrong, they panicked. Nothing new there. The same thing had happened in August 1914. But in 1914 the French government’s panic and flight empowered the two men responsible for the defense of the country: by default, Gallieni, the military governor of Paris and the most respected senior officer in France, became head of state, and Joffre, the army chief of staff, assumed independent control of the army. And across the Channel the British Cabinet, having let itself be drawn into the war, quickly realized the catastrophic effects of a precipitous British withdrawal: Kitchener went to France and told Sir John French he had to stand and fight, regardless of the consequences. 

By May 1940 the civilian leadership in both countries had accomplished one thing: they had ensured that their militaries would be run by men who were properly docile and subservient to the leadership. There were no Gallienis at the top in either army. There were plenty of French soldiers willing to fight on, the proof being that over 100,000 of them were killed in action in May and June of 1940. The Allies lost militarily alright, but for political reasons: their governments quit.

That takes us back to Finland and the Netherlands. One of the reasons the Allies panicked and quit so promptly was the prevailing hysteria in the 1930s with regard to strategic bombing—a prime example of how military theorists influenced public policy. It was widely believed that whole cities would be leveled to the ground in a few hours. The Soviet Union began its aggression against Finland with a surprise bombing of Helsinki, thus following the prevalent theory, and totally failed to destroy the city. The Finns—and their leaders—felt they had no choice, so they fought on. So did the Poles. By contrast, the leaders of the Netherlands felt they had a choice, so they quit the war. And the moment there was a setback on the battlefield, as there certainly was on May 15, 1940, the French and the British leadership went into a panic. 

It’s certainly tempting to see this panic as the logical result of governmental ineptitude, and indeed there’s no shortage of English and American writings characterizing the degeneracy and incompetence of the Third Republic. True enough, but this was also the case in 1914 (or in 1870 under Napoleon), and the example of the Netherlands suggests that a great deal of this panic was the result of an exaggerated fear that had been steadily built upon all through the 1930s. 

Judging both from the Finnish war and Soviet tank production, Stalin and his generals (the few of them he didn’t murder) had embraced the new theories of warfare, while Hitler, whose military acumen was much better than it is usually made out to be, initially did not. Both men exercised their usual wicked shrewdness: they understood the leaders of the Western democracies, and neither one was much bothered by the presumed horrors of strategic bombing. Stalin hardly cared how many Soviet citizens might be murdered during a conflict: by June 1941 he had already killed 15-20 million of them. Hitler apparently realized that Germany could absorb the deaths of 300,000-400,000 of its citizens (roughly the total number of deaths caused by the Allied strategic bombing campaign) without any real impact on the war effort, and he was right. 

But as the war progressed Hitler became Fuller’s best pupil, repeatedly ordering great armored thrusts that had no chance of success whatsoever. The two best examples of this are Normandy and the Ardennes. Despite the amazing success of the Normandy landings, the months rolled by with the Allies still cooped up on a small section of the coast. In the conventional wisdom, the German hold was broken when the Americans “broke out,” thus fulfilling the classic promise of armored warfare. 

The problem is that they broke out in the wrong direction. If you’re on the northern coast of France, you can’t get to Paris by heading northwest.11 What snapped the German defensive line was Hitler’s insistence on an armored offensive that aimed to cut the Allied forces in two. To do this, the Germans had to strip their dwindling reserves, and when the attack was a failure, the German position in France imploded. 

Undeterred, Hitler then ordered a whole series of equally disastrous operations, the most famous being the Ardennes offensive of December 1944, in which armored columns were going to thrust right through to Antwerp (in the event, they got almost to Dinant before literally running out of gas). From the American and German point of view this story has been extensively analyzed, the consensus being that the attack bogged down almost immediately and had no chance whatsoever of accomplishing anything at all. That the countervailing myth is still alive and well, and particularly in Great Britain (with the British saving the day for the inept Yanks), is a good example of how tightly embedded into the narrative the Blitzkrieg myth has become, with even American analysts conceding that tanks weren’t used properly. 

But in this instance, it’s not fair to blame Hitler alone. In the rarified atmospheres of the high commands on both sides, planners disregarded terrain and geography, aiming to hurl massed columns of armor around as though Europe was a giant sandbox. In In the rarified atmospheres of the high commands on both sides, planners disregarded terrain and geography, aiming to hurl massed columns of armor around as though Europe was a giant sandbox. In December 1944 Hitler tried to move his enormously heavy armor along a series of narrow roads and over numerous flimsy bridges: an examination of the attack routes through Luxembourg suggests that the terrain was simply ignored. And in their D-Day planning, the Allies had proceeded as though Normandy, with its canalized roads and ubiquitous hedgerows, was the ideal terrain for mechanized warfare. 

To conclude with two near perfect examples of how none of this worked, consider Patton’s stalled drive at Metz and Montgomery’s failed Market Garden offensive, both in September 1944. Metz was a good example of how the whole notion of Blitzkrieg collapses on close inspection. The Metz fortifications were too big to be driven around, too solid to be bombed into oblivion. Fortunately for the American soldiers charged with the task, the defenders consisted of the dregs of the German army, and the fortifications themselves largely antedated the First World War. That being said, it took nearly three months to work around this position —an ominous portent of what would lie ahead for the Allies, who were already running out of infantry.12 

Market Garden—both the operation itself and the conventional accounts of it—is the clearest instance of pursuing tactics based on failed ideas. A massive airborne drop would secure all the key bridges along the highway running from Belgium to Arnhem, and possession of the bridge at this last city would enable the Allies to cross the Rhine and leapfrog deep into Germany. The airborne forces could not on their own hold the bridges even if they seized all of them intact, so the “Garden” part of the operation involved dispatching an armored column straight up the road to consolidate the advance and beat off any German attacks. 

The phrase “straight up the road” is no exaggeration, and therein lies the problem. From De Grote Barrel to Eindhoven is 26 kilometers. There is one highway, which in 1944 was even scragglier and narrower than it is today. The ground on either side is basically a marsh, there is no other highway parallel with the road, and 11 kilometers from the border a solid town sits astride it. There’s no bypass around Valkenswaard: it literally blocks the highway, with its solid brick houses butting on the street. Even had the British been faster to move, even had the road been undefended, the idea would still have been problematic, given the soft shoulders and swampy ground. 

It is often argued that if Eisenhower had given either Patton or Montgomery the proper resources, their offensives would have been successful. In economics, there’s a name for this fallacy—opportunity cost or, in the rather more elegant phrase of the French economic thinker Frederick Bastiat, “that which is seen, and that which is not seen.” What proponents of Patton (or Montgomery) see is their hero’s lack of resources hindering his drive into Germany. What they do not see is how the Germans could have responded to such a concentration by redirecting their own forces, something they were quite good at, even given the overwhelming Allied superiority in the air. 

What’s fascinating is not just that the Allies opted for this approach, but that they assumed that by definition it would work; to make the situation even more curious, subsequent accounts of Market Garden place the blame either on the airborne units or on the British (or both).13 That the objectives of the ground operations were entirely unrealistic and the means chosen inherently unsound suggest the extent to which the rather crude and simplistic notion of Blitzkrieg has taken hold. It was not ineptitude or incompetence that doomed the Allied and German offensives, it was adherence to a failed theory. 

John Mosier is professor of English at Loyola University, New Orleans. He has two books scheduled to appear in 2006: a study of the German army (Henry Holt) and of Ulysses S. Grant (Palgrave). 

1 The Myth of the Great War (HarperCollins, 2001), The Blitzkrieg Myth (HarperCollins, 2003), abbreviated from here on as MGW and TBM. To save space, I’ll point to the relevant spots in both books rather than the voluminous sources cited and discussed, citing only those not mentioned in either book. Many readers (and reviewers) professed astonishment that certain secondary sources had been left out, inferring that I was ignorant as to their existence. Not so: see TBM, 292-93, where the word “charitable” is a euphemism. I would also recommend taking a look at MGW, 363, where I explain why I do not share the current obsession with “primary” sources. 

2 That my points both astonished and angered many military historians is a good illustration of the provincial and Anglocentric nature of this subdiscipline, whose antics would make for a grimly amusing book. One telling counterfactual to the conventional wisdom: it was, after all, von Hindenburg who claimed, when he was interviewed by the young American journalist George Seldes, that the performance of the American troops in the Argonne forced the Germans to an armistice. See You Can’t Print That! The Truth Behind the News, 1918-1928 (Garden City, 1929), 24-40. Seldes’s career spanned the century, and when his accounts were repackaged and issued as Witness to a Century (Ballantine, 1987), the book became a best seller and was praised by the Columbia Journalism Review. Needless to say, the von Hindenburg interview was reprinted in Witness (96-101). 

3 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1970), 92. The failure to apply Kuhn’s ideas—which I believe are now basically taken for granted in the history of science and also in the social sciences—is an interesting measure of the intellectual isolation of military historians, particularly in Great Britain. Nowhere are Kuhn’s ideas more relevant than in military history—or in the science of war. 

4 The money quote: “For my part I maintain—and war experience has already confirmed me in my opinion—that the use of antiaircraft guns is a mere waste of energy and resources.” Emilio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (Office of the Air Force History, 1983), 55. There is no clearer testimony to the remarkable power exerted by Douhet over air force planning than the note attached to this comment by Douhet’s United States Air Force editors: “Since this was written, in 1921, antiaircraft fire has been greatly improved in both range and accuracy and has become immeasurably more effective. Still, this does not alter the essential validity of the author’s premise and argument”(55, n3). Nonsense: in 1918, for instance, the 64th Anti- Aircraft Regiment (charged with protecting Paris) shot down one out of every five German planes it observed flying over that city—hardly a negligible rate of loss, and broadly comparable with aircraft losses from ground fire in the next war. Data derived from the summary of daily actions presented by Les bombardements de Paris (1914- 1918): Avions, Gothas, Zeppelins, Berthas (Payot, 1930), 44-45. See the summaries of their ideas in TBM, 15-24. Such extravagant claims were hardly restricted to obscure theorists; see, for example, Liddell Hart on “tanks that swim” and other fantasies (presented as sober production realities) in The New York Times, February 1, 1933: 15. A month earlier, in London, the January 2, 1933, edition of the Times had explained to its readers that there was “no protection for city population against deadly bombs,” and that “air defense [was] impossible” (15). 

5 Insofar as there’s any tactical deployment concept contained in the term Blitzkrieg, it was combined arms warfare, something the Germans had developed in the First World War, one reason I gave short shrift to the numerous studies “explaining” the concept in terms of Fuller, Guderian, De Gaulle, and so forth. Failing to understand the evolution of German tactical thinking during the First World War, the Allies were thus hit doubly hard in 1939-1940. Military analysts, failing to understand how German doctrine had developed in the first war, then replicated the process all over again. For a practical illustration of combined arms tactics in 1914-18, see the discussion in MGW, 55-66. There’s no doubt that the Germans absorbed the lessons regarding combined arms by the end of the war (at the very latest). See, for instance, the divisional organizational tables of the units operating in the Baltic in 1919, first published in Josef Bischoff, Die Letzte Front: Geschichte der Eisernen Division im Baltikum 1919 (Schützen Verlag, 1935), 263-64. A more detailed and comprehensive display of the organizational charts is to be found in Reichsministerium, Der Feldzug im Baltikum bis zur Zweiten Einnahme von Riga (Mittler und Sohn, 1937), 143-159. Much of the key to the success of German troops in the Second World War is to be found in the vicious combats of 1919-1921—routinely ignored by historians, who have by and large followed the lead of Robert G. L. Waite, who sees the whole thing in such political terms as to demilitarize it entirely: Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany, 1918-1923 (Harvard University Press, 1952). As a result, the only comprehensive study of the situation is to be found in Dominique Venner, Baltikum (Editions Robert Laffont, 1975), recently reissued as Histoire d’un fascisme allemand (Pygmalion, 1996). 

6 This idea bothered some readers, who brought up the strategic bombing campaign against Japan as the obvious counterfactual. Leaving aside the rejoinder that I’m not sure it accomplished anything other than killing hundreds of thousands of civilians (as an island nation with no natural resources, Japan was uniquely vulnerable to naval interdiction), the point confuses chronology: by late 1944, strategic bombing became technically feasible, but it wasn’t at any point in the 1930s, or through the first part of the war. Of late there has been an attempt, mostly (and not surprisingly) by British analysts, to argue that the strategic bombing campaign was actually successful. See, for example, the comments by Frederick Taylor in Dresden: Tuesday, March 13, 1945 (HarperCollins, 2004), 413. This claim seems stretching it considerably. See the discussion of the actual results of the air war in Europe in TBM, 196-208; for the theoretical reason why not, see the next to last paragraph of this essay. 

7 To summarize the data: in 1939-1940 two out of every three German tanks deployed were the obsolete Marks I and II, essentially armored machine gun carriers. The Mark III, which was intended to be the main battle tank, constituted only one out of every eight tanks, and the Mark IV, the only tank with anything approximating a decent gun, only constituted 9% of the tank force. Interestingly, the proportion of Marks III and IV was lower in May 1940 than in September 1939. See the discussion in TBM, 44-51. 

8 See the account in TBM, 62-77. In The German Army, 1939-1945 (Cooper and Lucas, 1978), Matthew Cooper makes somewhat the same overall point on pages 173-74. 

9 Accounts of Finland and the Scandinavian fetish: TBM, 78-101. That the Dutch were not caught by surprise is one of those small facts that strikes me as standing much conventional history on its head. 

10 These battles, when mentioned at all, are simply dismissed, a tactic in military history that goes back to the previous war, when operations that contradicted the “victorious BEF rising out of the bloody stalemate” myth were simply written out of the record. But numerous local histories, eyewitness accounts, and commemorative markers make the violent and prolonged nature of the conflict along the heights of the Meuse quite clear. See the discussion in TBM, 131-33 and 139-141. 

11 See the account of the stall (TBM, 223-26), the breakout (227-230) and Hitler’s disastrous offensive of August 3, 1944 (231-37). The interesting thing is the consistent refusal to plan for the actual battlefield, i.e., to modify plans based on the terrain, a principle which animates not only the plans of Hitler and the Allies, but the conventional accounts of these campaigns as well. I think this goes back to Fuller’s preachments. 

12 Patton, like Rommel, was a competent enough officer, and I appreciate the remarks by his surviving staff officers that he really did understand the importance of combined arms tactics (as did Rommel, who after all wrote one of the best infantry training manuals), but much of their reputations are based on folklore—my point being that the fantasy is fueled by the theory. In the new dispensation, it was not enough to win, it was necessary to win in ways that conformed to the fashionable theories. For Rommel, see, especially, TBM, 166-69; for Patton, see 257-59. 

13 See the account in TBM, 248-257. The surviving airborne troops I’ve talked to are unanimous in corroborating what my account reveals: despite the (mostly British) problems, they seized their objectives and held them. Parenthetically: Ryan titles his excellent account, A Bridge Too Far (Simon and Schuster, 1974), but as the whole point of the plan was to seize the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem, this is stretching it a bit, as well as shifting the blame to the airborne units.
 
 
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

AN OVEREXTENDED ARGUMENT 
Victor Davis Hanson

John Mosier’s revisionist examination of the First World War has a great deal of merit. Most historians, especially in the United Kingdom, have both underplayed the critical role of the American army that began arriving in force in 1917 and under appreciated the record of qualitative superiority of the German army over its Allied counterparts. After all, when Russia was at last knocked out, German armies, undefeated on two fronts, combined in the West against exhausted and depleted enemies, only to lose the war in less than two years. Mosier is absolutely right to emphasize these facts and to argue that only the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) accounted for victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. 

Yet there is a fallacy of overextending that argument, as for example, when he emphasizes that the British only occupied 15% of the battle line on the Western Front—as if the allocation of terrain is a better gauge of military efficacy than, say, the relative numbers of Germans killed by the British or the contribution of British technology in critical areas like tank or aircraft innovation. This larger question of the proper credit for the Allied victory in the First World War can never be properly adjudicated, since it hinges of fundamental and often intangible questions of emotion and human nature. Is credit for victory (in any context) to be given to those who hold off the enemy, while suffering horrendous casualties, only to be saved by late arrivals? Or do the laurels deservedly belong to their eleventh-hour rescuers, without whose timely appearance in force the previous sacrifice would have proven in vain? “They” say we came late, suffered little, and stole the show; “we” retort that we arrived in the nick of time to save them from defeat in their own war. Both claims have merit and I don’t see how Mosier or any others will quite settle the relative arguments, although he is to be congratulated for emphasizing the other side of the often forgotten equation . . . . 

Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His A War Like No Other, a military history of the Peloponnesian War, will appear from Random House in 2005.

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

COMMENT ON MOSIER’S WAR MYTHS 
Dennis Showalter

John Mosier’s academic credentials are in literary history—a field where subjectivity is highly valued. Two years ago he did a survey history of World War I, approaching the subject as an intelligent generalist with a set of highly original ideas. He took the trouble to read and analyze the great body of tactical and operational literature published by French soldiers and academicians in the interwar period, still relatively neglected in the Anglo-and German-centered approaches that dominate the English-language work in the field. He made a correspondingly useful contribution with a detailed account of the Franco-German combat from the aftermath of the Marne in 1914 to the end of Verdun in 1916. More generally Mosier also called attention to the fact that for most of the war it was the French who held most of the front—and did most of the dying. 

That led Mosier to the German army. He used casualty figures to buttress his argument that the Germans were much more successful at killing Allies than vice versa. Mosier attributed that achievement essentially to the German army’s success at systematic technical and tactical innovation. By contrast, French and British generals are described as “solving” battlefield problems by throwing shells and bodies at them, then concealing the gruesome results from their governments and their peoples. The Allied victory, according to Mosier, depended on an American Expeditionary Force whose commander, General John J. Pershing, saw through the pretensions of his counterparts and insisted on fighting the war in his own way.

In fact the German army of World War I was nothing like the tempered and perfected instrument of Mosier’s text. Mosier’s notion of Verdun as a German victory was not likely to be found in the ranks— or the headquarters—of the divisions and corps who fought there. Nor were the Somme and Passchendaele anything but killing grounds for the German army as well as the British Expeditionary Force. Mosier’s argument that the German retreat in 1918 was essentially a voluntary withdrawal rather than a consequence of Allied offensives is seriously overstated. The operational military problems posed by the Great War were general. The Germans had no secret recipe. What superiority they demonstrated in particular cases was relative rather than absolute. To misunderstand those points is to misunderstand the nature of the war . . . . 

Dennis Showalter is professor of history at Colorado College. His most recent book is The Wars of German Unification (Arnold, 2004).

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

MYTHS OF BLITZKRIEG—THE ENDURING MYTHOLOGY OF THE 1940 CAMPAIGN
James S. Corum

The first great Blitzkrieg campaigns of World War II have provided a fertile field for the growth of military myths. There are many origins of military mythology, but the major myths that arose from the 1940 campaign originate from two sources: the need for the defeated powers to explain a disastrous campaign and, much later, the need to find historical justification for current military theories. Of the five most important myths of the 1940 campaign, some were refuted decades ago, but others seem to have an enduring appeal and still affect the way military historians and theorists conceptualize warfare. 

Myth 1: Blitzkrieg was a strategy. In the early years of World War II the form of war that quickly became known as “Blitzkrieg” became a major topic of discussion by British and American soldiers, journalists, politicians, and most of the educated populace. The rapid German conquest of Poland, the speedy campaign in Norway, and the fall of France and the Low Countries demanded an explanation. While the German victory in Poland could be explained by the enormous advantages of population, wealth, and technology that the Germans enjoyed, the defeat of the British and French in Norway and northern France in 1940 signaled a genuine revolution in warfare. Why had the British and French succumbed so easily to the Germans? The answer was quick in coming: the Germans had employed a long-prepared Blitzkrieg strategy against the Western allies. 

Yet there really was no such thing as a Blitzkrieg strategy. Blitzkrieg, a term coined and popularized by journalists in the early years of World War II, was not commonly used in the Wehrmacht before or even during the war. Campaigns led by armored and motorized spearheads that aimed to outflank and destroy the enemy forces were known in German military doctrine as Bewegungskrieg (translation: war of maneuver). Maneuver warfare, to use the correct term, included several concepts such as combined arms (the effective use of infantry, artillery, tanks, engineers, and motor vehicles in concert) and joint operations (operational coordination of air and ground forces to attain an operational objective). The Germans were well trained in both the combined arms tactics and joint operations necessary to carry out a war of maneuver, and this operational method fit in well with the preference to fight short and decisive wars. But a tactical and operational method cannot in itself be called a strategy. 

In fact, while the Wehrmacht had long thought through the plans for a war against Poland, it was well behind the planning curve in the Scandinavian campaign. There had been no prewar planning or even a serious effort at intelligence gathering for a campaign in Norway. Only in December 1939 did the Germans put together a planning staff for the Norway/Denmark operation. It was a hurried and incomplete effort, and as late as three weeks before the invasion the German staff still lacked intelligence as to the location of some of the Norwegian airfields. It was still a successful effort because the British and French plan to intervene in Norway (started before the Germans) was worse than the German plan. 

The long-prepared German plan for the 1940 offensive was a fairly cautious piece of work, essentially a rehash of the 1914 Schlieffen Plan. In a lucky stroke for the Germans, a stray plane carrying a copy of the plan crashed in Belgium in January 1940, so a new plan had to be created—one that was based on von Manstein’s concept of concentrating most of the mechanized forces for one great breakthrough in the Ardennes. The German plan relied on poor French leadership to work, and in this assumption the Germans were quite correct . . . . 

James S. Corum, a professor at the U.S. Air Force School of Advanced Airpower Studies, is also on the faculty at the Army War College. He is the author of The Roots of Blitzkrieg (University Press of Kansas, 1992) and The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918-1940 (University Press of Kansas, 1997). 

 
 
 

Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

RHETORIC OR REALITY? A FEW PROBLEMS WITH MILITARY HISTORY 
John Mosier

James Corum’s dissection of some of the more prominent myths of May 1940 complements chapters 5 and 6 of The Blitzkrieg Myth. Like Matthew Cooper, Corum and I are clearly skeptical not only about the idea of “Blitzkrieg as a strategy,” but also about the related bundle of claims.1 My reservation is that as the concept is usually described, Blitzkrieg is a tactic, not a strategy, one reason it is so easily debunked by anyone who looks at the evidence. 

Myth (or legend) is an imprecise term. There are also falsehoods (or lies) and false ideas. False ideas are a mixture of truth and lies, and thus have great persistence. Technically speaking, I believe they are not myths. A myth is a false idea whose support derives from literary or folkloric beliefs. The Guderian legend cited by Corum is a false idea whose appeal comes mostly from a literary myth: the lone hero does battle against powerful forces. Whether those forces are monsters or monster bureaucrats of the Reichsheer, it’s the same myth: Shane, Guderian, Beowulf, or Spider Man. 

The term falsehood comes from Polybius: “There are two kinds of falsehood, the one being the result of ignorance and the other intentional . . . we should pardon those who depart from the truth through ignorance, but unreservedly condemn those who lie deliberately.” 2 A contemporary French revision speaks of simple and complex lies. 

It was only in the 1980s, as I was trying to write the first reasonably objective accounts of the development of the cinema in Poland and Hungary after 1945, that I became aware of the pernicious effects of complex lies on our understanding of history . . . . 

1 Matthew Cooper, The German Army, 1939-1945 (Stein and Day, 1978), 113-122. 

2 Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Penguin, 1979) Book 12, paragraph 12 (pages 432-33).

END OF FORUM
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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

ARMAGEDDON: AN INTERVIEW WITH SIR MAX HASTINGS 
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Can there be anything new to say about the collapse of the Third Reich? Sir Max Hastings, one of Great Britain’s most respected military writers, convincingly shows that there is much more to the end of the Third Reich than speculations about mystery weapons and accounts of those murky final days in Hitler’s Berlin bunker. Hastings’s Armageddon (Knopf, 2004) is an impressive and disturbing account of the defeat of Germany from September 1944 to May 1945. This was nothing short of a cataclysm, and Hastings recounts some of the “extraordinary things that happened to ordinary people” on both fronts. What emerges is a picture of suffering, degradation, dignity, and profound moral complexity. 

Hastings was an award-winning foreign correspondent for many years, reporting from more than sixty countries for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard. He has presented historical documentaries for BBC TV, including most recently (2003) on Churchill and his generals. He has written eighteen books on military history and current events, including Bomber Command (which won the Somerset Maugham Prize for nonfiction), The Battle for the Falklands, and Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy. He was editor-in-chief of the British Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard, from which he retired in 2002. Donald A. Yerxa, editor of Historically Speaking, interviewed Hastings in the Boston offices of the Historical Society on December 1, 2004.

Yerxa:What drew you to the write an account of the battle for Germany?

Hastings: It was a bit of unfinished business. Twenty years ago, I wrote Overload: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy which ended in September 1944. I have always had a nagging fascination with what happened afterward, in particular with why the Allies didn’t win in 1944. At the beginning of September 1944, most of the Allied leadership, with the notable exception of Winston Churchill, was completely convinced that the war was going to be over by the end of the year. In the West, the Germans seemed completely beaten. The Western Allies had overwhelming superiority in tanks, aircraft, everything—you name it. So I wanted to look at this question of why we didn’t end the war in 1944. Second, and almost as important, virtually all the books that have been written about this period look at either the Eastern or the Western fronts. And I wanted to set the two in context: to see what happened to the Western Allies in the context of what happened with the Soviets. This nearly overwhelmed me because it is such a huge subject. (My wife, by the way, warned me not to write books that people can’t hold up in bed.) One has to remember that the last months of the Second World War witnessed the greatest human cataclysm of the 20th century, and trying to cover all that ground did prove to be a big task. But, I must add, it became utterly fascinating. 

Yerxa: Could you comment on your claims that the Germans and Russians in World War II were better warriors, but worse human beings?

Hastings: This is a very important truth. When I wrote Overlord, I caused quite a lot of controversy by saying flatly that man for man, the German army was the best in the Second World War. This claim is generally accepted now, but when I first made it in 1984, it wasn’t. British and American veterans took umbrage. When I was writing Armageddon, my assessment of the German army was confirmed. The evidence is so clear: again and again small numbers of Germans managed to hold up for hours, days, weeks much larger numbers of Allied soldiers. But I also realized that there was an important corollary: if we wanted British and American soldiers to fight like the Waffen- SS, they would have needed to become people like the Waffen-SS. And then, of course, the very values for which the whole war was fought would have been out the window. We have good grounds today to be enormously grateful that American and British veterans mostly preserved all the inhibitions and decencies of citizen-soldiers. In the main, these veterans never thought of themselves as warriors. They were bank clerks, laborers, train-drivers, and so on thrust into uniform to masquerade as warriors for a time. They wanted to do their duty and do it right, but equally they wanted to live to come home and share the fruits of victory. All this is very admirable, but of course you do pay a price because it takes much longer to win a war against German fanatics. 

In the East, we had an ally who had nothing like the same concern for human life. Eisenhower, to provide an obvious example, was criticized for falling to reach Berlin in the last weeks of the war. I think he was absolutely right. Berlin was designated inside the Soviet zone. What would Eisenhower have said to the mothers and wives of American or British soldiers who had died to achieve a symbolic triumph? Joseph Stalin, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, and Marshal Ivan Konev were perfectly happy to see 100,000 Soviet soldiers die to achieve the great symbolic triumph of taking Berlin. 

Having said all this, we have to be humble about the relative roles that the Western Allies had in the final defeat of the Germans. To be sure, the United States played an enormous part in providing the munitions and the transport that enabled the Soviets to reach Berlin as well as the British to keep fighting. But when one looks at the raw numbers, the Soviets paid the blood price. I don’t mean that the war was a happy experience for British and American veterans; it was very terrible. But in ballpark terms, during the course of the war, American and British ground troops killed about 200,000 German soldiers, while the Russians killed about 3.5 million. The United States, Britain, and France together lost about 1 million dead in the war. The Soviet Union lost 27 million dead. Although we can be grateful that on the whole—with some notable question marks around strategic bombing—the Western Allies did preserve civilized values through the war, we needed the help of some very uncivilized people in order to bring down the Nazi tyranny. Had it not been for the Soviets who were prepared to lavish these huge quantities of blood, then an awful lot more American and British boys would have had to die to defeat Hitler. 

Yerxa: Would you provide a very brief assessment of the military and strategic leadership of the Allies? Who stands out positively and negatively? 

Hastings: The more I study military history, the more I come to the conclusion that the sort of people you need to win your wars are seldom if ever going to be ones you would call normal human beings. If you start with those people who win Congressional Medals of Honor or Victoria Crosses, many are regarded with deepest suspicion by other soldiers around them, who know they are made of weaker clay, and whose only ambition is not to win medals but to get home alive. I have been astounded to find how unpopular a lot of so-called heroes have been with those around them who have just been terrified by them. They have been awed by the qualities they have displayed but do not want to have any part of it themselves. 

Now if you look at the command level, a significant number of great generals have verged on being unhinged. If you read Zhukov’s memoirs, he sounds quite rational, and you might be fooled into thinking he was a normal human being. But there is not a shred of evidence that the Soviet generals were anything but brutes. Only brutes could have prospered in Stalin’s universe of blood. While Zhukov was probably the most effective Allied commander in the Second World War, his effectiveness was a function of his absolute ruthless treatment of his own men, never mind the enemy. Zhukov handled huge forces, millions of men, with a confidence that few, if any, Allied commanders could match. He drove forward in Operation Bagration, the Russian campaign of the summer of 1944 that Williamson Murray has called the greatest ground operation of the war. Soviet commanders handled their armies with much more panache and aplomb than the Western Allies in the last year of the war. But they also did so with an absolute indifference to losses. To provide one striking example, one need only refer to the Soviet invasion of Romania, which the Russians considered one of the easiest operations of their war. The Romanian army collapsed; the Germans retreated rapidly; and the Red army took Romania in a fortnight. The Soviets lost more people in the Romania operation alone than the British and Canadian armies did in the entire northwest Europe campaign. 

George Patton, commander of the U.S. 3rd Army, was undoubtedly the most imaginative American commander in Europe. It is a pity that he wasn’t either holding down Omar Bradley’s job as commander of the 12th Army Group or in charge of Courtney Hodges’ 1st Army, because there was never any chance that the 3rd Army’s southern axis was going to be the line of advance into Germany. Patton’s sense of driving urgency might have got the Allies into Germany faster. But given his behavior in the famous “slapping incidents” in Sicily—when on two occasions he slapped men claiming combatfatigue and called them out as cowards— there was no chance he would get to lead the primary drive into Germany. Moreover, Patton was hopeless in dealing with allies. With his absolute contempt for Field-Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery and hatred of the Brits, it would have been very difficult to put Patton in any role where he would have to work closely with them. So it was probably inevitable that Patton was relegated to a subordinate role, but I think the conventional wisdom that he was a great pursuit commander is correct. Although it must be mentioned, that in the hard, close fighting there was not much evidence that Patton could get a better performance out of his people than any other American commander. He, too, was faced with the limitations of citizen armies. General Hodges was a pretty pathetic figure. He shouldn’t have been commanding an army in Europe. General Jacob “Jake” Devers, head of the U.S. 6th Army Group in southern France, was a more impressive commander than either Hodges or Bradley. 

Montgomery, like Patton, possessed an uncongenial personality and was somewhat unhinged. How could you be such an intelligent man, as he undoubtedly was, and believe as late as 1944 that the Americans had no idea how to make war and that he should be in charge of all American forces? By this stage, not many Americans would have said they were better soldiers than the Brits, but they had certainly seen nothing in the British performance to suggest that the British were better than they were. 

Eisenhower has been so much criticized. It is true he wasn’t a very great battlefield commander. But he displayed tremendous ability in holding together the alliance through to 1945, when by that stage the British and the Americans were almost sick of the sight of each other. We hear this line nowadays in Iraq that the British and American are natural allies, but all alliances are difficult. And in the Second World War, the British and the Americans found it very difficult to work together. To this day, the British are haunted by a nagging sense that we think we ran the world better than the United States does. And sometimes we are stupid enough to let it show. Americans, in turn, sometimes claim that the British are rather plodding and pompous. So it did require the genius that Eisenhower displayed to keep these people speaking to each other. 

Yerxa: What about the German military leadership? 

Hastings: It is ironic that all the German generals complained after the war how impossible it was to work with Hitler. Several remarked that it was a tragedy that the Western Allies didn’t reach Berlin before the Russians. Yet if the German generals had done exactly what Hitler had ordered them to do, the war would have been over a lot sooner. They couldn’t help themselves from trying to frustrate some of Hitler’s mad ideas. Until the very end they used their best professional skills in the West as well as the East. But despite their skill as soldiers, the German generals deserve the contempt of history for their failure to act effectively against Hitler. The bomb plot of July 1944 was pretty feeble. When I asked middle-ranking officers in 2002 why they fought on to the bitter end, some responded that they had sworn an oath. They still felt that their oath to Hitler had some validity. Very commonly they also would say that they had to keep the Russians out of Germany. That may be so, but why try to thwart the Western Allies? It only made sense to fight to the end in the East if you were going to help the Americans and Brits enter Germany. They have no good answer for this. I have been very impressed with a journal I discovered in my research kept by a Danish journalist, Paul von Stemann, who spent the war in Berlin. He made a lot of interesting reflections about German behavior in the last stages of the war. Stemann noted that in the last year the German people lapsed into an almost catatonic state; they seemed morally and physically paralyzed, incapable of any constructive action to avert this great steamroller of fate that was bearing down upon them. It is such a puzzle to account for how this extraordinary paralysis was matched by a willingness to keep fighting. 

Yerxa: Did the memory of 1918 play into this? 

Hastings: Actually, there was a terrific concern on the Allied side about not repeating 1918. One of the most interesting marginal issues at the end of the war concerned the decision to conceal to the world the extent to which the Allies had broken the German signals traffic, the Ultra business. They obviously didn’t want everyone to know how successful the British and Americans had been at code breaking. There was a subplot to this. The British did not want the Germans to know that their codes had been broken, because they did not want to give German generals the excuse to say what they had said in 1918: they hadn’t been fairly beaten; there had been a stab in the back. Certainly Churchill and others were very anxious that the German people have absolutely squarely in their minds the fact that they had been beaten.

Yerxa: Would you speak a bit more to the tensions between the Americans and the British in the last stages of the war? 

Hastings: There was the feeling among the Brits that it was terribly unfair that they had suffered so much since 1939 and were so weary and were still being hit by rockets, and here were all these rich, healthy, clean, young Americans pouring off the ships to claim the rewards of victory from the Old World without, as the Old World saw it, having borne their share of the Old World’s pain. Most Brits were either openly or secretly bitter because they felt their nation had been pushed to the side of the stage. Churchill thought this more than anyone. By 1945 he was very sore with Roosevelt. He felt that FDR failed to understand the menace of the Soviets, and he was weary of Roosevelt’s insults at the Allied summits where he made it clear that he was more interested in talking with Stalin than Churchill. I agree with Roy Jenkins that while Churchill pleaded logistical reasons for not attending Roosevelt’s funeral, by that stage he had no appetite to attend. Churchill believed that FDR had let them all down since he was the only one with the power to exercise some restraining influence on Stalin. Maybe Roosevelt couldn’t have done it, but he didn’t even try. And Churchill was pretty sore about that. 

Yerxa: One of your major arguments is that English and American writers tend to downplay the extent to which Allied victory in 1945 depended upon the ability of Stalin’s armies to accept a level of human sacrifice necessary to defeat Hitler. Further, you argue that the Allied victory was morally compromised by this dependence upon Stalin, who was as much a monster as Hitler. Was there any “good” alternative available to the Western Allies? Realistically speaking, could unspeakable tragedy have been averted? 

Hastings: There were some, including the head of the British Army, who disliked the Russians so much that they would have preferred to have been beaten on their own in 1941 than to enter into any relationship with the Soviets. I’m not making a serious suggestion of this kind, but the fact was that even with the United States in the war, the vast might of the Red Army was needed. Without the Russians, we would have beaten Hitler in the end, but it would have been a terrible process that would have cost an awful lot more British and American lives. All I am really suggesting is that we should be more willing to acknowledge the moral price we paid. Eisenhower could justly call his memoirs Crusade in Europe because the Western Allies had indeed been fighting with remarkable unselfishness for the freedom of Europe. But in order to destroy the Nazi tyranny, we did ally ourselves with an equally evil tyranny. 

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have had anything to do with the Russians. But I am saying that before we get too pleased with ourselves about the great achievement of the democracies in the Second World War, we ought to recognize what a dirty business it became to have to throw away Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and all the other Eastern European countries as the Soviets’ blood price. Churchill was obliged in the end to recognize that, having entered the war in the hope of freeing the whole of Europe, he had to settle for freeing half of it, sacrificing the other half to the Soviets. Churchill felt so savage about the loss of Eastern Europe in 1945 that he seemed to be willing to consider anything to save the Poles. But the blunt truth—as FDR perceived—was that the only way to deny the Soviets their conquests in Eastern Europe was by fighting them. Virtually no one in either the United States or Great Britain had any appetite for a war against the Soviets. In this sense, Roosevelt was entitled to say that he was the realist and Churchill was the fantasist in not being prepared to face this reality squarely. 

Yerxa: What is your reaction to the phrase “the good war?” 

Hastings: Insofar as any war is a good war, the Second World War was a good war because we can say unquestionably that Nazism was an appalling evil. If one wants to take an optimistic view, what we can say is that World War II did not finally achieve its objectives until the late 1980s when the veterans had their real reward with the collapse of the Soviet tyranny belatedly in the wake of the Nazi tyranny. So one can reasonably argue that the true end of the war was the late 1980s.
 Yerxa: You make a compelling case for the moral complexity of the end of the war in Europe. Have military writers tended to embrace a simplistic view of World War II as a triumphalist crusade? 

Hastings: There are two types of military history. One is what one might call romantic military history. I was talking to the military historian Russell Weigley shortly before he died about a very well known historian who had a lot of success writing books about the American fighting man. Weigley said that he was sad to see a respected historian raising monuments rather than writing history. In the same breath, Weigley noted that a veteran told him that these books made him feel good about himself. A huge amount of it is produced, and it sells very well. There is nothing wrong with this romantic military history as long as we recognize its limitations. It is a celebration. This is not just an American phenomenon. Every year in Britain we celebrate the Battle of Britain without asking many hard questions in our media about its limitations. The Battle of Britain was a success within certain limits. The bald truth is that if Hitler hadn’t invaded the Soviet Union, he could have come back in 1941 and invaded Britain. Having said that, I take an intensely romantic view of veterans. I always feel privileged to talk to people who experienced things beyond anything I have encountered in my own life. But we must also ask the hard questions. We should not be surprised that many people in their eighties who have lived through this era want to imbue what happened to them with a romantic aura. God knows, I would if I’d been through what they’ve been through. 

Romantic military history, then, clearly has limitations. For example, in any given battle about one-quarter of the men who were fighting would lose their bowels in their trousers. These are the things that romantic historians don’t care to dwell on, but it is just one of the sordid realities that you try to come to terms with. And, of course, there are military histories that attempt to analyze what happened. The first generation of people who wrote military history after the Second World War didn’t write too much about the nittygritty because they were writing for people who had been there and knew it all. They knew what a Sherman tank did, what a Flying Fortress was like. But now my generation is writing for a lot of people who do not know these things. So I try to explain things like how battles were fought and how armor and infantry worked together. I include a very good line in the book from an American officer: “A few men carry your attack, and all the rest sort of turn up at the objective later.” This is a profound truth. You cannot expect more than a small minority in a unit to be real fighters. The rest are not cowards, but they certainly aren’t as brave as those few. This is true of all armies. So this other kind of nonromantic military history needs to pick things like this apart and analyze them for the benefit of people who, thank God, have never had to be on a battlefield. When I write a book, of course, I think about what will sell, but I also ask myself: “What can I tell people that they don’t know already?” So in this book, for example, I say virtually nothing about Hitler in the bunker. We’ve been over all that. Far better to talk about aspects of this part of the war that people haven’t thought much about. 

Yerxa: What about the other side of this coin? What about those writers who are also unwilling to embrace moral complexities not because of celebratory sentiments, but because they want war to yield to higher, almost purist, moral standards? 

Hastings: I don’t buy such arguments at all. Of course, no war is morally perfect. One of the worst diseases of our time is the notion that we must pursue moral absolutes. Most of life is about making very difficult marginal choices about morality. It is never going to be 100 %, and that’s why we should always exhibit some sympathy for our rulers when they make decisions about peace or war. I happen to be a critic of the Iraq business. There well might be a case to be made for using force against the North Koreans, Iranians, or someone else who threatens the peace of the world with weapons of mass destruction. What caused some of us to say before the Iraq war began that we were skeptical about going in was that we were fearful that it would compromise the case for using force in a better cause. So it is madness, I think, to say that nothing is worth the use of force. When civilized societies lose the strength of purpose to be prepared to use force for relatively good causes, we might as well all give up because we’ve had it. We must have the confidence to make these decisions, but obviously every time we use force in a cause that is not very good, it weakens our ability to muster the will of our society to use force in a better cause. In the current situation, a lot of us are very worried about what the Iranians are doing with their nuclear capability. And we do feel pretty sore toward Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld because we feel they have made it harder to use force on something that looks as if it may really matter. 

Yerxa: What would you like the reader to take away from the book? 

Hastings: Although I write military history, above all I am interested in what happened as human experience. And if I were asked to give one good reason to read my book, it would be that we have stupid people who don’t know any history saying today that we live in a terrible world: 9/11, al Qaeda, and so on. It bears saying again and again that we are an incredibly privileged and pampered generation. One need only spend five minutes considering the experiences of what people went through in the Second World War as a whole—especially in the final cataclysmic phase when more than 100 million people were, as I say in my book, “locked in bloody embrace”—to conclude that we are so very fortunate today. I am always fascinated listening to people describing what happened. Tom Brokaw called these people “the greatest generation.” I’d phrase it a bit differently: it was the generation to whom the greatest things happened. One never ceases to be amazed by the summits of courage that some men achieved and the depths of baseness that others plumbed. I do believe that in order to set our own experience in proper context, we need to understand what happened to them. I would especially hope that the message of humility comes through. The only case for writing books of this kind is to teach a new generation something about what happened to a previous generation. Every time I write a book like this, I listen hour after hour to the experiences of hundreds of men and women who have endured things mostly far beyond our experience. And I always come away from listening to them having learned something. I was especially moved by the story of Michael Wieck, an East Prussian Jew who suffered terribly under the Nazis and miraculously survived to welcome the Red Army as his deliverers when they stormed Königsberg in April 1945. The Russians didn’t give a damn for the yellow stars on his family’s sleeves. They regarded them as Germans. He ended up in a Russian concentration camp where he had ghastly, unspeakable experiences. He eventually escaped to the West in 1947 when he was seventeen years old. And after I listened to his terrible experiences for three or four hours, I remarked that he must have felt his childhood was stolen from him. “No I don’t feel that at all,” he said. “I’ve met so many people who have so-called normal childhoods, but whose lives have been completely screwed up. In my case, since 1947 I have had a wonderful life. My childhood was different from other people’s childhoods, but you won’t hear me say that it was somehow stolen from me. I feel no ill will of any kind toward either the Russians or the Germans.” I was profoundly moved by such generosity of spirit from a person who had suffered so much. 

It is always about humility, about being so grateful for what we have, and also about being hugely impressed by the dignity and generosity of spirit with which many people have endured far worse things than we will ever have to. I write less and less in my books about which division went where and so on, because I really don’t think that matters much unless you are writing for West Point or Sandhurst. What humans did and what happened to them is what really counts, and what really matters is trying to teach ourselves something about how previous generations have behaved that might help us to behave, if not better, at least a little less badly.

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THE STATE OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY: A FORUM

No field has attracted more attention in recent decades than early American history. But does the outpouring of scholarly and popular work signal a healthy field? On April 30, 2004, respected historian Pauline Maier offered her views on the state of the field at a National Endowment for the Humanities forum. We reprint (with permission from the NEH) a slightly edited version of Professor Maier's paper. To generate a conversation on this important topic, we circulated her paper to a number of prominent early Americanists and invited them to react. Maier concludes our forum on early American history with a rejoinder. <top>

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DISJUNCTIONS IN EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY
Pauline Maier

My assignment is to assess “the state of the field” in colonial and Revolutionary history. I am not going to do that book by book, topic by topic. That would be tedious, and I assume you know the basic story. In the past few decades, historical research has shifted by and large from political to social and then cultural history. Some of the most dramatic additions to historical knowledge have come in the history of slavery, including the slave trade and African-American history; in women’s history; and in the study of Native Americans. 

What I want to do in the brief time I have is to step back and call attention to three significant “disjunctions” that characterize the intellectual landscape with reference to early American history and, to some extent, American history in general. 

The first is between colonial and Revolutionary history, the two periods that are our focus today. In preparation for this occasion, I attended “state of the field” sessions on the colonial and Revolutionary periods at the Organization of American Historians’ meeting in Boston last March. In the second session, someone commented that the two fields seem entirely unconnected. The truth is, that’s been the case for a long time. 

When I began teaching in the late 1960s, my course on colonial America—really colonial British America—focused in good part on the “new social history,” particularly the demographic studies of communities first in New England, then the Chesapeake. In 1972 Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 appeared, awakening widespread consciousness of the demographic catastrophe among Native Americans that followed their first encounters with Europeans and the possible connections between New World foods and population growth in other parts of the world. Already some fine studies were available on the origins of American slavery; others studied that institution from a cross-cultural perspective. To be sure, I also discussed topics such as religion and the structure of politics and political institutions in British North America. 

Even so, after the term break, when I taught the American Revolution, the traditional successor course to colonial America, the difference was like night and day. The old Progressive interpretation of the Revolution, which stressed social conflict and elite manipulation of the masses, lay in tatters. Scholars were taking the ideas of the Revolution seriously, tracing their origins and revealing their impact on the evolution of political institutions. To be sure, any course on the Revolution has to include a discussion of pre- American society and of the Revolution’s social impact. I cannot, for example, imagine teaching the Revolution without citing Jack Greene’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (1988), particularly his emphasis on the “extraordinarily large number of families of independent middling status” in the British North American colonies: they were, he wrote, “proportionately substantially more numerous than in any other contemporary Western society.” (And every time I read that sentence aloud, I wonder whether Jack really needed those two contiguous adverbs.) Still, by and large the study of colonial America was social; the study of the Revolution political and ideological. 

Three plus decades later, colonial American history remains strikingly different from the study of the American Revolution, but for different reasons. Historians of early America are now more than ever anxious to avoid earlier emphases on the British settlers of North America, the teleology implicit in studying only those colonies that would later become the United States, and what Harvard’s Joyce Chaplin referred to in the March 2003 Journal of American History as “that persistent myth, American exceptionalism.” The most prominent public participants in the American Revolution were white men of European descent who founded the American republic believing that accomplishment marked a break from the patterns of European history and so was by nature “exceptionalist.” It’s no surprise, then, that, as Chaplin notes, many particularly noteworthy examples of recent post-colonial scholarship focus on the early national rather than the Revolutionary period. David Waldstreicher’s study of public celebrations, Joanne Freeman’s book on honor in the politics of the 1790s, and Jill Lepore’s A is for American are examples. 

What is “colonial history” today? . . . . 

Pauline Maier is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at MIT. Her American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) was a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.

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THE PROMISE OF EMPIRE
Edward G. Gray 

I would like to focus on the first of the three disjunctions” Pauline Maier describes in her provocative essay: that between colonial and Revolutionary historiographies. She is entirely correct, it seems to me, in noting that disjunction. She is also right in suggesting that the disjunction is much more than a chronological or narrowly thematic one: it rests on a longstanding methodological divide between social historians and historians of the institutions of government. The former are engaged by the longue durée of the colonial era; the latter, by the histoire evenementielle of the comparatively brief Revolutionary era. 

My own sense, though, is that far from growing more pronounced, this disjunction seems to be weakening. That’s the good news. The bad news, from Maier’s perspective, is that this weakening does not involve a return to the history of government. That is, to my knowledge, most young historians continue to avoid questions about the origins of the Constitution or the political thought of the founders or the power of the Continental Congress. Similarly, there has been very little recent work on the apparatus of colonial government —whether the New England towns or the colonial assemblies. Exactly why historians have lost interest in the history of governing institutions is obviously connected to contemporary debates about exactly what it is we mean by politics. And among academic historians, the answer has hedged toward a capacious definition in which politics happens in the bedroom, in the coffee house, on the street, on ships at sea, and at the geographical fringes of European dominion. This trend has seemed to me driven less by any coherent agenda than by momentum (scholars have never gotten jobs by ignoring academic fashions) and an appetite for novelty. Of course, one historian’s appetite for the new is another’s exhaustion with the old. My sense is that the current fascination with narrative —much of which falls under the rubric microhistory or, as Robert Darnton recently dubbed one sub-genre, “incident analysis”— comes not so much from some conscious postmodern nihilism as it does from a general exhaustion with over-argued academic writing.1 

While we may lament the trend-driven habits of the academy, it seems to me some recent developments have much to offer those of us who have been frustrated by the disjunction between work in the colonial and Revolutionary periods. Put differently, these developments promise to alter the historical landscape so that questions about the creation of the United States can no longer be divorced from important questions about the colonies. 

At the center of these developments has been the resurrection of empire as an explanatory device. The idea that events in the colonial and Revolutionary periods need to be understood in terms of the larger structures of the British Empire is not at all new; nor is there anything new about the idea that something called “empire” has long-term relevance in American history. What is relatively new is the notion that empire and all that it implied in the 18th century—the imperial bureaucracy, commercial networks, a distinct form of subjecthood, hierarchical legal and political regimes, etc.—allows us to view the whole disjointed 18th-century American past as a single, unified field of historical investigation . . . . 

Edward G. Gray, author of New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (Princeton University Press, 1999), is associate professor of history at Florida State University. He is the editor of Common-place (www.commonplace. org), an award-winning Web magazine devoted to early American history. 

1 Darnton, “It Happened One Night,” The New York Review of Books 51:11(June 24, 2004), 60- 64. 

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CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES 
Don Higginbotham 

I want to devote my space mainly to the first of the three “disjunctions” that Maier describes as characterizing early American history today: the tendency to separate colonial and Revolutionary studies, to see them as distinct or scarcely related. This development is relatively new. In their writings and training of graduate students, few if any distinguished historians until recently practiced such compartmentalization. Here one begins with Charles Andrews, the dean of early American historians in the first three or more decades of the 20th century. In the following generation of scholars one thinks of Samuel Eliot Morison, Curtis Nettles, Richard B. Morris, and John R. Alden. One also calls to mind a slightly later group of practitioners such as Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, both preeminent in the field. Others at or near retirement now such as Jack P. Greene and John Murrin also do both colonial and Revolutionary history. People entering the job market in the late 1950s, as I did, almost always found that advertisements about openings in early American history did not express a preference for candidates in pre-1763 America as opposed to post-1763, or vice versa. At my institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we were fortunate over many years to have two faculty positions in pre- 1800 areas. For thirty-five years my colleague John Nelson and I rotated graduate and undergraduate colonial and Revolutionary course offerings in order for both of us to keep current, as best we could, with new literature and changing interpretations. 

Another way of making the point about the once-pervasive link between colonial and Revolutionary history is to look at schools of interpretation. The imperial and Progressive schools lost much of their influence in the post-1945 years, but they always agreed on one thing: continuity. The imperialists saw institutional and constitutional developments that were in some measure persistent throughout the 18th century, just as the Progressives saw tensions and divisions in late colonial society that continued into the Revolution and led to the beginnings of political party development. In the 1950s the consensus academics, especially Daniel Boorstin and Louis Hartz, maintained that one could not understand the Revolution without an awareness of dynamic social and economic currents that were undermining “the old regime” well before Lexington and Concord. As much as Bernard Bailyn and Jack P. Greene might dissent from the emphases of the above-mentioned schools of thought, they nonetheless have continued to make powerful arguments for colonial America—the thirteen colonies, at least—remaining overwhelmingly British in the political and cultural realms, with the British heritage hardly ceasing to be the dominant one in the Revolution and the Federalist period . . . . 

Don Higginbotham is Dowd Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent book is George Washington: Uniting a Nation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

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COMMENTS ON PAULINE MAIER’S “STATE OF THE FIELD” 
Peter S. Onuf

The drafting and ratification of the federal Constitution should be a pivotal topic in American historical studies, linking colonial and Revolutionary history. Instead, Pauline Maier complains, the “disjunction” between the two periods has been growing; with the exception of a few senior historians, only political scientists and law professors till this neglected field. But I think she exaggerates. Recent historiographical developments suggest that the disjunction is disappearing. 

Before I elaborate this claim, let me briefly address the other two disjunctions Maier emphasizes, the one “between scholarly interests and those of the reading public” and the other “between historical scholarship and history as taught in secondary school.” Of course, these disjunctions have always been with us, but they don’t strike me as particularly severe now. As long as I’ve been in the business, historians have complained about failing to reach a general audience and about how we need to “return to narrative.” Yet all this time, even during the heyday of social science history, historians have been reaching a general audience. Jeremiads about our impending irrelevance have reinforced the powerful influence of best-seller lists, bicentennials, and high school curricula in shaping our agenda. Rants against American exceptionalism—the all-purpose pejorative for this pandering to the public—are themselves eloquent testimony to our continuing relevance and responsiveness. The danger is not that we will lose our readers, but that we’ll end up having nothing useful or difficult or discomfiting to say to them. 

Maier suggests that the profession as a whole has moved progressively—or, perhaps, regressively—“from political to social and then cultural history,” taking concluding potshots at “imagined communities” and the socalled “public sphere.” These missiles, to mix metaphors, seem misguided to me. Benedict Anderson and Jürgen Habermas, once fashionable, are easily caricatured these days, and it is undoubtedly the case that much silly and reductive work has been committed in their name. The complaint appears to be that big generalizations about print culture are not empirically grounded. But surely the return to politics and political culture should be welcome, particularly when historians move past print and dig deep in the sources. And students of national identity and nation-making provide a good antidote to exceptionalism— taking the “nation,” its singularity and its superiority, for granted—without indulging in America-bashing (another perverse and lamentable symptom of exceptionalism) or avoiding the subject altogether. New work on nation-building and political culture is in fact addressing the very disjunction Maier laments. This work promises to liberate us at last from the reductive influence of the ideological school on our understanding of the Revolution. 

Building on the neo-Whig resuscitation of political and constitutional thought, the republicanists located the real Revolution in a putative ideological transformation that antedated the war itself, making mere institutional developments seem epiphenomenal. The search for deep patterns in political discourse and their remote classical origins mirrored the social historians’ search for deep structures in society. Both approaches militated against political history. Both either insisted on the fundamental continuity between colonial and Revolutionary history, or stipulated a Revolutionary transformation that had little or nothing to do with politics in the conventional sense. The ascendancy of the republican revisionists was thus a disaster for political history in the narrow, conventional sense. Promising beginnings to the study of Revolutionary political mobilization— including Maier’s superb From Resistance to Revolution (1972)—could not be sustained, despite the extraordinary efforts of the new social historians to prepare the way. It was hard to take mobilization seriously when it had so little apparent connection to the deep cultural and social transformations that the study of political language supposedly illuminated. What was happening on the ground seemed epiphenomenal at best, and the relation between the real Revolution and the military conflict itself seemed increasingly tenuous. 

The problem with the revisionists’ conception of ideology is that it obscures contingency, and therefore the domain of political choice and action in which our subjects operated. They are instead depicted as prisoners of language, captured by a worldview that blinded them to reality. Or, to put the case more modestly, the revisionists mined the discourse of the period so effectively for deeper meanings, meanings that transcended immediate circumstances, that these circumstances themselves, the world as our subjects themselves understood it, faded from view. But there are good reasons to believe that the ideological wave has at last crested and that historians are returning to the Revolution. This could only happen when scholars stopped taking the ideas of the Revolution (as the revisionists understood them) quite so seriously and stopped assuming that the evolution of political institutions was itself in any meaningful sense ideologically determined. In short, the revival of the political history of the Revolution, now in progress, depended on the ultimate exhaustion of the republican synthesis . . . . 

Peter Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (University Press of Virginia, 2000).

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

I come at the question raised by Pauline Maier from a peculiar perspective. I was trained in ancient Greek and Roman history. In graduate school I took not one course in American history, and I paid it very little attention when I was an undergraduate. I stumbled into the field more or less by accident. Unhappy with the orthodoxy then current regarding the Spartan constitution, I set out to write a thumbsucker comparing the Spartan constitution, which I knew I did not fully understand, with the American Constitution, which I wrongly presumed was more familiar and easier for one such as myself to comprehend. I quickly discovered that modern constitutionalism is a slippery subject; my thumbsucker ran to 1200 pages and took me a decade to write; and I now hold a chair in American history and teach 17thcentury English history as well. This gives me an odd perspective on the early American field—not unlike the one recommended by Thomas Jefferson to his young correspondents, for my formal education and my subsequent self-education more or less tracks his suggestion that, to be able citizens, Americans need to know the history of self-government in ancient Greece and Rome, modern England, and America.

If I had been asked ten years ago to say something concerning the field of early American political and intellectual history, I would have been ecstatic. From the 1960s through the early 1990s there was a remarkable outpouring of books on American political thought, the American Revolution, and the American founding. Caroline Robbins, Edmund Morgan, Jack Greene, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood set the stage. J. G. A. Pocock proposed a grand and complex hypothesis concerning the origins and character of early American political thought. And, with funding from a variety of federal and state agencies and private foundations, a great many scholars—historians and political scientists alike—turned their attention to the evidence. At the same time, a host of editing projects made easily accessible the letters and papers of the most important figures in the period, the records of the Constitutional Convention, the writings of the Federalists and of the Anti-Federalists, and virtually every piece of evidence pertinent to the interpretation of the ratification process. The debates that ensued were vigorous and enlightening, and a generation or two of students became quite familiar with what had taken place in British North America in the period stretching from 1762 to 1800 and beyond. Within the field of early American political and intellectual history, the long bicentennial celebration was a remarkable scholarly success. 

The last ten years, however, have been something else. I do not mean to say that no good work has been done, but it would be an understatement to say that the pace has dropped off. Arguably, this was inevitable. To begin with, there was exhaustion. After 1990 no one was especially eager to attend yet another conference on The Federalist, and younger scholars quite naturally wanted to plow fields as yet untilled. Then, there is the fact that funding dried up. The bicentennial was over, and the various agencies and foundations moved on. This is, to some extent, as it should be: one cannot maintain the species of scholarly focus that existed in the bicentennial period for very long, nor should one want to. 

But things are, I believe, much worse than they should be. My evidence is anecdotal, but it confirms in every particular Maier’s sage observations. Indeed, everything that I have heard or read points to a single conclusion: within the history profession, there is a general turning away from early American political history and political thought. If one is a neophyte and if one wishes to make a career for oneself as an historian, one would be well advised to avoid the field . . . . 

Paul A. Rahe is Jay P. Walker Professor of History at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

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AN AGENDA FOR EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY
Jack Rakove

Scholars of a certain age, when asked to reflect on the state of their field, are entitled to wax autobiographical, so I begin by recalling my own association with Pauline Maier. When I started graduate school at Harvard in 1969, she was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her first book, From Resistance to Revolution, came out as I was starting my dissertation and helped shaped some of the questions I asked in its opening chapters. We had carrels in the same quarantined zone of Widener Library where typing was permitted and where we chatted about our common interests, like making sense of Samuel Adams. (I trace the origins of my own dissertation to a casual remark that our mutual mentor, Bernard Bailyn, once made to me over lunch: if you could explain what Adams was up to, you might account for 30 % of the causation of the American Revolution. Without yet knowing what multiple regression was, that number seemed big enough to warrant further thought.) A third of a century (and now many e-mails) later, our interests still overlap; she is working on the Constitution, as I have, and I am doing a book called Revolutionaries (not wholly unlike her second book, The Old Revolutionaries). Both of us are trying to bridge the gap between scholarship and lay readership that is the topic of her second “disjunction,” in the process shedding our common editor and publisher, hiring literary agents, and testing the market in a way that would have seemed inconceivable during the Nixon years. 

It should not surprise, therefore, that I respond favorably to most of Maier’s assessment of the state of early American history. The substantive points that matter most, I believe, are those concerned with her first disjunction, between the primarily social and cultural character of scholarship addressed to the colonial era proper, and the avowedly political emphases of the study of the Revolution. 

To start out as an early Americanist in the early 1970s was bliss. Both parts of the field were hot. The demographic studies of New England communities were just appearing, followed within a few years by a surge of similar work on the Chesapeake, as well as Peter Wood’s pathbreaking study of slavery in South Carolina, Black Majority. Nor was the study of colonial politics a neglected area. For my orals, I probably read a good twenty monographs on the politics of individual colonies—not the old institutional stuff against which the original Progressive historians had been reacting, but recent works with strong interpretive motifs by people like Gary Nash and Stanley Katz. 

But in the realm of politics, the real action lay within the Revolution, which is why I foreswore my original interest in recent American history and moved back two centuries. It mattered a great deal of course that Bailyn’s Ideological Origins had just appeared in its original two incarnations (as the introduction to that lonely initial volume of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, and then separately as a book). Then there was the stream of monographs by Gordon Wood, Richard D. Brown, Jere Daniell, Mary Beth Norton, and, of course, Pauline Maier. In this context, it seemed entirely plausible that an old, tried and true, seemingly exhausted subject like the Continental Congress might actually be ripe for reexamination. 

As I assess the state of the field three decades later, I can offer at least three main judgments. First, and easiest, the study of colonial politics, as it was conceived then, is dead. If there are important aspects of the history of American political development to be located in the colonial era, one would not know it from the historical literature. But the new interest in the nature of empires and imperialism, which can be seen as a collateral branch of Atlantic history, has opened up a more expansive way of thinking about the structure of politics and the nature of governance. 

Second, (as Maier, in passing, quotes me as observing), I think the reinterpretation of the American Revolution that was heralded by Edmund and Helen Morgan’s seminal study of The Stamp Act Crisis (1953) and then propelled by the work of Bailyn and his students in the late 1960s and 1970s has largely solved the major causal problems of explaining why the Revolution occurred. I know this judgment sounds presumptuous to the point of arrogance. But it may also offer a useful way of explaining why an account that emphasizes the fundamentally constitutional and political nature of the controversy has survived intact and largely unchallenged for a quarter-century now . . . . 

Jack Rakove is Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science at Stanford University. His Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Knopf, 1996) won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History.

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

REJOINDER 
Pauline Maier

The first of my “disjunctions”— between scholarship on colonial America and on the American Revolution—provoked more discussion in these thoughtful comments than anything else I said. Although I carefully stated that I was merely noting—not criticizing—that disjunction, some respondents inferred that I was complaining about it or found it frustrating. In fact, the tendency toward interpreting colonial America more broadly than the original thirteen colonies makes considerable intellectual sense. It avoids the obvious anachronism in defining the subject in terms of a future identity that most colonists did not foresee and wanted above all to avoid. But a colonial America defined as a history of all the peoples of North America or as part of the Atlantic world does not easily connect with the more nation-based study of the American Revolution. 

A disjunction in historical scholarship is not, however, a disjunction in history. Nobody since Thomas Paine has, I think, seriously argued that time began anew in 1776, such that all previous history could simply be forgotten. To put it another way, Edward Gray’s dream of a time when “questions about the creation of the United States cannot be divorced from important questions about the colonies” has long since been fulfilled. The profound penetration of a British identity beyond the political order into virtually every aspect of colonial life that Gray mentions is precisely what made independence so difficult to accept. Even a quick survey of debates in the Constitutional Convention shows how much delegates remained excolonists: both those who cited British precedents and those who denied their relevance testified to the continuing presence of the imperial past in American minds. Moreover, as Don Higginbotham notes, there exists a substantial older literature on the colonial background of the American Revolution. Those of us who teach and write on the Revolution can and do draw on that work—as well as some more recent books, such as John Butler’s Becoming American: The Revolution before 1776 (2000), which I probably ought to have mentioned. 

The current interest in empire might, as Peter Onuf suggests, lead scholars toward “a fresher sense of the geopolitical context and consequences of the Revolution.” But will it weaken or destroy the disjunction between scholarship on colonial America and that on the Revolution, as Gray and Onuf claim? I remain skeptical . . . . 

END OF FORUM

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TIME FOR REALITY TO REPLACE “PDB” HISTORY 
Clark G. Reynolds

The United States has been at war against Middle Eastern-based terrorists since September 11, 2001. Does the American public—much less professional historians and their students—know why? Other than the few specialists in Middle Eastern studies, are historians making serious efforts to learn and teach the causes, stakes, and prosecution of the current conflict? 

The short answer is, “No!” Professional and personal excuses for this failure by scholars will not do; their negligence, though understandable, is inexcusable. The major blame lies with the baby boomers who during the 1960s and 1970s sanctimoniously revolted against the consensus mainstream of American culture with their own “counter” (i.e., non-) system—an intellectual “cop out,” to use their own proudly trumpeted but pathetic phrase. 

The rebelling historians among this truculent generation, along with intellectuals of similar persuasion in other disciplines, set out to replace conventional approaches to the past with their own philosophical biases. Intolerant of other (mostly older) methodologies and explanations, they fostered a “new” deeply politicized and distorted outlook. It was and is much more (or less!) than a school of historical thought; indeed, it established a virtual dictatorship over the profession. 

These rebels—not revolutionaries, because their attack has floundered—condemned what they regarded as a narrow focus on “dead white males”: history’s winners. The “new social” interpretation of the past has focused instead on gender, class, race, and inequality. My own designation of this meanspirited, misguided, conceited, and selfrighteous movement is “PDB” history. 

The letters stand for the poor, dumb, bastard folk whose sorry plights and activities were customarily minimized by pre-1960s historians:

poor: the poverty-stricken, exploited, oppressed, ignored, disenfranchised, enslaved. 

dumb: the ignorant, under- and non-educated, dull-witted,blindly prejudiced. 

bastard: the illegitimate, outcast, criminal. 

The PDBs have indeed been the traditional losers of history—and not because of historians . . . . 

Clark G. Reynolds is distinguished professor emeritus of history at the College of Charleston. His most recent book is a biography of Joseph James Clark: On the Warpath in the Pacific: Admiral Jocko Clark and the Fast Carriers (Naval Institute Press, June 2005).

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WHAT IS YOUR ANTHROPOLOGY? WHAT ARE YOUR ETHICS? 
Robert H. Holden

We tend to think of the great ridge that rose up inside the historical profession some three decades ago, splitting historians into two camps, as some kind of epistemological event. Ancient disagreements about the nature (and existence) of truth suddenly became more extreme and divisive. Now, the biggest flags wave over the “relativists” on one side, and the “truth seekers” on the other. Smaller banners (“moderate historicists,” “constructivists,” “positivists,” etc.) fly here and there along the slopes of lower-lying ranges on each side of the great divide, itself breached by passes and tunnels excavated by historians loathe to commit themselves to either camp. 

But there is another way of looking at what divides historians. Who we think we are affects what we think we can know: “We are encouraged these days,” Thomas Nagel has pointed out, “to think of ourselves as contingent organisms arbitrarily thrown up by evolution. There is no reason in advance to expect a finite creature like that to be able to do more than accumulate information at the perceptual and conceptual level it occupies by nature.”1 

I argue (from the standpoint of philosophical realism) that disagreements rooted in different epistemological assumptions might also be understood as rival ways of answering the question, “Who is the human person?” I find it curious that even as we cram our journals with articles about “identity,” we don’t seem to acknowledge the deeper differences over how we define the most fundamental of all identities. I argue, furthermore, that these differences in philosophical anthropology have ethical consequences for the writing of history: different anthropologies lead to fundamentally different ethics of knowledge. And those ethics come into play whenever historians choose topics to investigate, apply methods of research, and propose interpretations. 

First, to the anthropological question. Of all the branches of philosophy, Henri-Irénée Marrou argued, historical knowledge depends most on that dealing with anthropology. He likened the historian’s chosen philosophy of man to an axle or a nervous system, so that what we write as historians “stands or falls” with our philosophical anthropology, our idea of the human person.2 Most historians agree that we need to take into account both the spontaneity and creativity of the individual person as well as the limits and conditions that restrict individual freedom. So, just who is this free being who makes history, including the ideologies and institutions that condition his or her very freedom? 

One reason that the question has excited so little interest among historians may be the extreme historicism that prevails today . . . . 

Robert H. Holden is associate professor of Latin American history at Old Dominion University. His most recent book is Armies Without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821-1961 (Oxford University Press, 2004).1 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986), 70. 

2 Henri-Irénée Marrou, El conocimiento histórico (Idea Books, 1999) tr. De la connaissance historique (Éditions du Seuil, 1954), 127. 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

HISTORY OVER THE WATER
Derek Wilson“I have no wish to make war on Russia . . . for I would be making war without a purpose, and I have not yet, thanks to God, lost my head, I am not mad.” - Napoleon Bonaparte to Prince Shuvalov, May, 1811. 

My favorite reading this past summer has been Adam Zamoyski’s 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow, a masterly narrative of that catastrophe of epic proportions which involved horrors and loss of life the like of which were not to be seen again in Europe until the trench warfare of 1914-18. Napoleon led his Grande Armée of 400,000 men across the Niemen in June. Six months later 10,000 half-starved and mentally-scarred troops straggled back into French territory, leaving behind in the snowy wastes of Eastern Europe not only the emaciated corpses of their comrades but the reputation of their “invincible” emperor. The irony at the heart of this tragedy was, as Napoleon himself had stated a year before the fateful campaign, that the war was unnecessary, ill conceived, and “without purpose.” The emperor had no dreams of conquering Russia, nor was he in pursuit of a more limited political agenda that might have included the liberation of Poland or the restoration of Finland to Sweden. However he might justify the folly of 1812 (and he produced a variety of reasons for the invasion to suit whatever audience he was addressing), his real motivation was emotional. He felt betrayed by Tsar Alexander; national and personal pride demanded a dramatic demonstration of French military power. 

Military history has been the dominant theme in the media over recent months. A BBC television series on famous British battles and a re-exploration of the trench warfare of 1914-18 have attracted large audiences, and the publishing houses have generated a tidal wave of books celebrating (if that is the right word) past conflicts. Earl Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, has produced a new study of the victory of Blenheim achieved by his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. Clive Ponting has offered a demythologizing of the Crimean War. Anniversaries have provided the opportunities for these books (1704 and 1854 respectively), but the big commemoration has been that of the 1944 D-Day landings. 

The numerous events in Normandy last June were on a vast scale. The queen and the U.S. president were there, as were 25,000 veterans of the campaign, thousands of relatives of members of the invasion force, and, for the first time, relatives of German soldiers. A 60th anniversary seems a strange one to mark so emphatically. In 1994 Operation Overlord’s half-century had been commemorated no less lavishly, and one might have thought that that would be the last major memorial event. 

I suppose the main reason for the 2004 commemoration was that there was still a sufficient number of the original combatants able to attend. Personal reminiscence adds poignant detail to the recording of major events. But it poses problems for the historian. He may easily be lured into the assumption that because he is collecting the memories of eyewitnesses what he records must be true. It may seem somehow irreverent to question the testimony of old soldiers who went through the kind of hell most of us can only imagine. But, of course, such memories are no less prone to partiality and unconscious distortion than the written records from which most of us work most of the time. 

The summer of 2004 saw a plethora of books based on first-hand accounts of D-Day and other World War II engagements. Publishers seemed to be falling over themselves to rush out versions of war histories relying for their impact (and presumed reliability) on interviews, diaries, and letters. When I was putting together the program for this year’s three-day Cambridge History Festival, I could very easily have filled every slot with authors promoting their contributions to the history of the two world wars. The prevailing fashion is certainly to move away from analysis and overview of military events—war seen from the vantage point of politicians and generals—and to record the passing reactions of the PBI, the “Poor Bloody Infantry,” the unsung heroes upon whose courage or faint-heartedness victory or defeat ultimately depend. For my money, the pick of the bunch is Professor Richard Holmes’s Tommy, which records in riveting detail the facts of daily life as experienced in the trenches of the Western Front in the war of 1914-18. 

It has scarcely been possible to contemplate “old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago” without frequent cross-referencing to that other war—the one currently being fought in Iraq. There are some inescapable similarities with Napoleon’s doomed attempt at the invasion of Russia. The big question being asked in the chancelleries of Europe in 1812 was “Why?” How could a military genius and astute politician like Napoleon Bonaparte commit all his military might to a campaign that had no clear objective and whose likely consequences had not been carefully considered? Most people in Britain are posing the same question today of their own leaders and are not satisfied with the official answers offered by London and Washington. No WMDs, no proven link with al Qaeda, unreliable military intelligence, no apparent analysis of what a post-Saddam Iraq might be like—how could sane national leaders plunge into a conflict for which they were so ill prepared? 

One fatality of the current conflict is Anglo-American relations. A recent poll revealed that more than 75% of those questioned no longer saw any value in the Special Relationship. Feelings about the U.S. government are at their lowest ebb since the Suez crisis of 1956. Britons view the Bush administration’s reactions to 9/11 as more emotional than rational. Again a comparison with the situation in 1811 has some relevance. Napoleon was outraged that the Russian czar with whom he had negotiated the treaty of Tilsit had abandoned the Continental System, was mustering troops on his border, and planning to extend his rule over the whole of Poland (partitioned in 1795). Napoleon was not unaware of the possible outcome of invasion, for Alexander had warned the French ambassador, “I would rather retreat as far as Kamchatka than . . . sign in my capital any treaty which would only be a truce . . . . Our climate, our winter will fight for us.” The French emperor paid no heed; national honor and personal pride were at stake. Does the comparison appear contrived? Consider a confidential report sent to Tony Blair in March 2002 by his special envoy to Washington (and recently leaked): “Military operations need clear and compelling military objectives. For Iraq ‘regime change’ does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge match between Bush and Saddam.” 

It might be argued that we in “old Europe” can have no understanding of the impact of 9/11. That would be a mistake; we are no strangers to terrorism. Scarcely a year has passed in recent decades which has not witnessed outrages in the name of Bader- Meinhof, Red Brigades, IRA, Basque separatists, Chechen freedom fighters, and other nihilists whose fanaticism blinds them to the greater imperatives of a shared humanity. It is not many years since the Brighton bombing provided Britain with a rerun of the Gunpowder Plot by aiming to assassinate the prime minister and her cabinet. These abominations were identical in kind with the strikes at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Only the scale was different. 

How do current events resonate with others that took place in distant times and places? How much use is knowledge of the past to those entrusted with guiding the present? Historians and philosophers have often been divided on the point. Lord Acton observed that those ignorant of history allow themselves “to be governed by the Unknown Past,” which agrees with George Santayana’s comment about those ignorant of the past being “condemned to repeat it.” However, A.J.P. Taylor wrote of Napoleon III: “Like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.” Clearly, knowledge does not insulate us against folly. It is how we understand and interact with what we know that matters. Yet, by the same token, we cannot base balanced judgments on ignorance, and there is no excuse for not knowing; so it does seem reasonable to expect our political leaders to have something of that understanding of the interaction of individuals and of nations which only history can teach. There was a time when most of our members of parliament were brought up in a system of liberal education that assumed young minds should be imbued with a working knowledge of the development of human societies. That is not true of the modern breed of British politicians. They are the product of a generation of schooling that steadily nudged history to the margins of the syllabus. Today the subject clings perilously to the school timetable. In fact, there is no obligation for students to be taught any history at all beyond the age of fourteen. 

How do we feel about the prospect of our future leaders being even more alienated from the past than those who currently occupy the benches of the House of Commons? I, for one, am horrified. That foreign affairs, to take just one aspect of government policy, should be decided by men and women with little or no understanding of how we have got to where we are now is little short of scandalous. The Commons vote that took Britain into the Iraq War was won with a narrow margin. The outcome might very well have been different if the majority of those who went through the division lobbies had had a working knowledge of Britain’s colonial past, our involvement in the Levant, and the emergence of the various cultures of Islam, to say nothing of what happens when dictators are removed from power and foreign ideologies (no matter how admirable) are imposed by force of arms. 

After the disaster of 1812 Napoleon ranted to anyone who would listen: “In six months’ time I will be back on the Niemen . . . . All that has happened is of no consequence; it was a misfortune; it was the effect of the climate; the enemy had nothing to do with it; I beat them every time . . . .” One fact history certainly teaches us is that statesmen and politicians never admit when they are wrong. 

Derek Wilson is a freelance author and broadcaster in the UK. He is the organizer of the annual Cambridge History Festival. His most recent book is Uncrowned Kings of England: The Black Legend of the Dudleys (Constable and Robinson, 2005).

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