HISTORY THROUGH THE EYES OF WAR

A. Scott Berg, ed., World War I and America: Told by the Americans Who Lived It (New York: Library of America, 2017) (From the 'Introduction': "Like the headwaters of a great river, several influences converged in 1914 until they created an unstoppable flow of events that produced one of the most cataclysmic torrents mankind had ever experienced. Streams of imperialism, nationalism, and militarism joined; and soon they surged through an intricate system of alliances until they created the First World War. It engulfed much of two continents and engaged the rest of the globe for four years; and its effects continue to permeate twenty-first century politics, economics, geography, and psychology." Id. at xxiii. "Wars are game changers, and the First World War catalyzed transformation in America that altered the country's nature--from the halls of government to the wheat fields then feeding the world. Upon America's entering the battle, President Wilson had told Congress, 'Politics is adjourned'; but every one of the wartime issues that would actually change America's identity invoked intense partisan debate and sometimes provoked violence. Redefinitions of government operations (if not new vocabulary altogether) left traces that exist to this day." "Almost overnight, the federal government enlarged--creating an alphabet soup of thousands of boards, agencies, committees, and commissions, The President recruited America's business titans to work in conjunction with the armed forces, establishing an infrastructure for a military-industrial complex." "This great military mobilization affected all races in America--separately and not always equally. . .  Surely, the [that is, African Americans] thought, making the world safe for democracy meant an end to disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and lynching at home in the United States. But military units, trenches, and burials remained segregated. . . . [W]hen black soldiers returned form the war, they found their opportunities were the same as when they had left, or worse; and whites across the country who feared the creeping acceptance of racial equality incited the most brutal race riots the nation had ever seen." "Female identity underwent several significant changes as a result of the war. . .  . After decades of speeches, petitions, and demonstrations, women finally received the vote for which they had long fought." "And the war revived an aspect to the American character that had lain dormant for years--xenophobia. . . ." Id. at xxviii-xxx.).

Jean-Vincent Blanchard, At the Edge of the World: The Heroic Century of the French Foreign Legion (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2017).

Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) ("Alternative history enthusiasts promote the preposterous idea that the United States might have won the war if it had thrown itself more heartily into the conflict. It is possible, of course, that a severe, expensive, long-term commitment by the United States, one with the full backing of the American people and a far greater investment of men and treasure, might have been able to prop up Thieu and his successors indefinitely. But the suppositions are not viable. America had no more appetite for colonial adventures or 'third world' conflict in 1968 than it has today. As some of the nation's more recent wars have helped illustrate, 'victory' in Vietnam would have been neither possible nor desirable. It would have required a massive and sustained military presence, and very likely a state of permanent war. Hue illustrates just how bitter that war would have been. "From the perspective of nearly half a century, the Battle of Hue and the entire Vietnam War seem a tragic and meaningless waste. So much heroism and slaughter for a cause that now seems dated and nearly irrelevant. The whole painful experience ought to have (but has not) taught Americans to cultivate deep regional knowledge in the practice of foreign policy, and to avoid being led by ideology instead of understanding. The United States should interact with other nations realistically, first, not on the basis of domestic political priorities. Very often the problems in distant lands have little or nothing to do with America's ideological preoccupations. Beware of men with theories that explain everything. Trust those who approach the world with humility and cautious insights. The United States went to war in Vietnam in the name of freedom, to stop the supposed monolithic threat of Communism from spreading across the globe like a dark stain. . . . There were experts who knew better, who knew the language and history of Southwest Asia, who had lived and worked there, who tried to tell Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon that the conflict in Vietnam was peculiar  to that place. They were systematically ignored and pushed aside. . . . America had every right to choose sides in the struggle between Hanoi and Saigon, even to try to influence the outcome, but lacking a legitimate or even marginally capable ally its military effort was misguided and doomed. At the very least, Vietnam should stand as a permanent caution against being to war for any but the most immediate, direct, and vital national interest, or to prevent genocide or wider conflict, and then only in concert with other countries." Id. at 525-526. Also, see generally, Linda Robinson, "The Beginning of the End," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/9/2017.).

David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).

Chris Dubbs, American Journalists in the Great War: Rewriting the Rules of Reporting (Lincoln & London: U. of Nebraska Press, 2017).

A. Roger Ekirch, American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017).

John Ferejohn & Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain (New York: Liveright, 2017) ("The short answer to the question of how war can promote the cause of democracy is simple: during wartime, when governments are desperate for manpower to help them fight more effectively, they may be forced to pay more attention to the common man." Id. at 1.).

Waldo Heinrichs & Marc Gallicchio, Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2017).

Michael Kazin, War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017) ("The debate about whether the United States should have fought the Great War was thus among the most consequential in the nation's history. But, despite a wealth of good scholarship, few contemporary Americans are aware of it at all. In the United States, observes one prominent historian, World War I is 'the forgotten war. . . . Considering the extent of the American contribution to the war, and its effect on American society, this is surprising.' Although combatants in the Second World War and the Vietnam conflict are memorialized in large and popular sites on the National Mall, the men who fought in the Great War--and the fifty-three thousand who died in battle--still have no such honor in stone. Alone among citizen of the former belligerent nations, Americans celebrate a holiday on the anniversary of the Armistice that makes no explicit reference to the war itself. When I ask why Veterans Day happens to take place on November 11, hardly any know the answer." Id. at xvi-xvii, citations omitted.).

Ray Moseley, Reporting War: How Foreign Correspondents Risked Capture, Torture and Death to Cover World War II (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017).

Cathal J. Nolan, The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2017) ("This book will not assess ongoing theoretical arguments over which is the preferable strategy in war: annihilation or exhaustion, seeking to win by an overwhelming blow against the enemy's main force at the outset or wearing down his will and capacity to continue fighting by raising his costs through attrition over time. The argument here is that whatever the initial choice, few battles in the wars among the Great Powers since the 17th century have proved to be more than locally or tactically decisive. In the largest wars fought among the biggest powers, a shared feature emerged instead: protracted stalemate born from a rough strategic balance, broken only after attritional wearing turned wars into contest of endurance. Exception were rare . . . " Id. at 67. "The problem with conclusions that claim to know the lessons of history is that history reaches so many different lessons. It is next to impossible to know which apply to contemporary events, about which perception and knowledge are are necessary thickly veiled. One is therefore as likely as not to apply the wrong lessons from history, while making entirely original mistakes. That said the main lessons to be drawn from this survey are ancient yet fundamental. First, be aware the vanity of nations and the hubris of leaders, civilian and military; but perhaps civilian most of all  [] Second, always be deeply skeptical of short-war plans and promises of easy victory, for they shall surely go awry as combat commences and descends into chaos, and an intelligent and determined enemy refuses to accept the initial verdict. [] Let us be done with all that, with talk and poses and lies about genius in war." Id. at 579.).

Aaron B. O'Connell, ed., Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2017) (Aaron B. O'Connell: "This volume is a critical appraisal of America's combat operations in Afghanistan, known in military circles as Operation Enduring Freedom, which began in October 2001 and ended in statement on December 31, 2014. It also a book about institutions and culture, one that explores the organizations that fight America's wars, and the ideologies that empower and direct those institutions. The overarching thesis shared among the authors is that problems of culture were central to the war's outcomes. Specific choices by politicians and military leaders certainly shaped the course of the war--President Bush under-resourced the effort because of Iraq, and President Obama may have stayed too long or left too soon--but in the end, the most consistently important factor was the persistent cultural friction that pervaded interactions between Americans and Afghans and among coalition members. Despite three-quarters of a trillion dollars and 13 years of trying, America and its allies could not convince Afghan rulers to adopt Western norms of governance or rural Afghans to break fully with the Taliban insurgency. We argue that differing complexes of ideas about governments, states, democracy, freedom, religion, and the law were at the heart of that failure to persuade. These cultural obstacles became mountains in themselves that no president, general, or military force could dislodge or work around." Id. 1-2. Aaron MacLean: "Ernest Gellner once observed, 'Men and societies frequently treat the institutions and assumptions by which they live as absolute, self-evident, and given.' Those raised in the West are as susceptible to this description as any other group, even despite the relatively recent arrival of their form of government on the historical scene. The result is that Westerners tend to consider liberal political institutions to be natural, when they are in fact the products of conscience, careful labor. Put another way, these institutions are artificial--works of art or, in another sense, products of technology. And, like all political institutions, they have a dark side, a foundation of coercion and violence that is easy to forget in lands characterized by sustained economic growth and the widespread satisfaction of individual aspirations. The result, as far as Afghan policy has been concerned, has been a forgetfulness of the role of force in building sustainable political system, and a related, deep-rooted assumption of more or less inevitable human progress toward a liberal political system." Id. at 215-216.).

Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. [] In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like 'domestic insurrectionists' and 'mercies savages,' the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new Republic.").

Thomas E. Ricks, "War Stories/Military History," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/28/2017, at 20.

Jennifer T. Roberts, The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Oxford & New York: Oxford Press. 2017).

Richard Slotkin, The Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution (New York: Liveright, 2012) ("Strategy is more than the mechanics of military operations. All war is a form of politics, in which force and violence substitute for the civil exercise of power. That is especially true of the American Civil War, which was not fought over territory but over fundamental questions of social order, political organization, and human rights. Through strategic planning, the leaders of the warring parties define the aims and purposes of the conflict and develop a combination of political actions and military operations designed to control the action and achieve their objectives--which are always ultimately political." Id. at xiv.).