Center for a New American Security

Today is the 67th anniversary of "Goddammit, Rangers, Lead the Way." If you are able, and especially if you are a youngish man thinking of trying your hand at Rangering, watch the first 25 minutes or so of Saving Private Ryan today. All of the rest of you should at least raise a glass for the Boys of Pointe-du-Hoc and all the other men who fought that day in Normandy. (And boy, think whatever you wish of Ronald Reagan, but the "Boys of Pointe-du-Hoc" speech is incredible.)

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As far as yesterday's fighting in the (occupied) Golan is considered, let me just say this, speaking as someone whose own research on the fighting in southern Lebanon is highly critical of the Israeli Defense Force and who has never been hesitant to criticize anyone's military forces (including my own) when they deserve it: You can have whatever opinions you wish to have about Israeli policy or the plight of the Palestinians, but if the IDF units did in fact employ escalation of force as is currently being described, starting with non-lethal means and then proceeding to lethal force, you can't ask any more of them tactically and operationally. That will infuriate some of you unable to divorce consideration of tactics and operations from the strategies and policies they serve, but there it is.

(Considering both Israel's leaders and Syria's leaders might want Bashar al-Asad to stick around for a while longer, a friend in Beirut only half-jokingly suggested yesterday's events were staged on both sides to take the attention off the crimes of the al-Asad regime against its own people.)

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I'll be traveling internationally for the next few days and will likely not be blogging very much, if at all. On the flights, though, here's what I'll be reading:

1. The manuscript for Daveed Gartenstein-Ross's new book.

2. Kissinger's On China. People who actually know a lot about China and know better books about China might make fun of me for this, but I know next to nothing about China and figured it might be a good time to learn something.

3. Bob Kaplan's forthcoming essay for the National Interest on John Stuart Mill and the Arab Spring. (Bob was kind enough to slip me a copy last week at the CNAS conference.)

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Speaking of the annual CNAS conference, if you did not attend, you can still watch a stellar conversation about Afghanistan and Pakistan moderated by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and featuring LTG (Ret.) Dave Barno, Amb. Anne Patterson, Steve Coll and Bing West on C-SPAN online. The five discuss, among other things, this report (.pdf) I co-authored.

You can also watch, here, the panel on internet freedom and the Arabic-speaking world for which I served as the jester. Shadi Hamid and Richard Fontaine were both excellent, and Colin Kahl, as the panel went on and as he veered off the script, just starting owning it. Highly entertaining.

I was home on block leave one year and in the Kinko's on Brainerd Road when this old man walked past me wearing a hat that read "Congressional Medal of Honor Society." With a high degree of trepidation, I asked him if he was, indeed, a recipient of the Medal of Honor. He said that he was and that he was just making some photocopies of his commendation for folks who had written to him requesting a copy. That was how I met Desmond T. Doss, who saved 75 men at Okinawa. Now buried in the Chattanooga National Cemetery just a few rows down from another Okinawa veteran, my grandfather, Doss was profiled in today's Washington Times. An incredible story of bravery and faith:

On the morning the assault was launched, Desmond suggested to his platoon leader, Lieutenant Goronto, that the men say a prayer. “I believe prayer is the best life saver there is,” he said. “The men should really pray before going up.”

 

“Fellows, come over here and gather around,” the lieutenant said, “Doss wants to pray for us.” Actually, Desmond had meant that each man should observe his own moment of prayer, but the men of the unit humored him and stood by while Desmond read a passage from his Bible. Then they set about their grim business.

 

According to one participant, the assault on Maeda Escarpment was “all hell rolled into one.” It was seven days and nights of bitter struggle with rifles, bayonets, hand grenades, knives and fists. The men of Desmond’s battalion advanced to the top eight times, and each time they were driven back by furious Japanese counterassaults. But the ninth assault held, and the ridge was taken, yet at a terrible cost. The battalion had arrived on April 29 with 800 men; a week later, there were 324 left standing.

 

Desmond was in the thick of things throughout, the only medic assigned to the attack. As the battle line shifted across the top of the escarpment, Desmond stayed behind, retrieving wounded men in the face of enemy fire. He carried them to the edge of the escarpment and lowered them one by one on a litter suspended from a rope. Others who were too badly wounded to move he treated on the spot, sometimes within yards of enemy-held caves. Officers motioned for Desmond to come off the ridge but he refused. Throughout the brutal assault, when wounded soldiers cried “Medic,” Desmond Doss came.

 

Pfc. Doss continued his heroic actions through the battle on Okinawa, suffering numerous wounds. On May 21, during a night attack, he was giving aid to wounded soldiers when a grenade landed nearby and seriously wounded his legs. Five hours later, litter bearers came to rescue him, but on the way to an aid station they were attacked by an enemy tank and Desmond gave his place in the litter to a more seriously wounded troop. While awaiting help, he was wounded in the arm by a sniper, and knowing he could not stay any longer on the battlefield, he fashioned a splint out of a rifle stock and crawled 300 yards to safety. The men of his unit, who had thought Desmond was dead, wept when they saw him return.

The Greeks have not gotten much good press recently, but today, we should give them some:

Greeks around the world are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the emphatic Ohi! (No!) Day.

 

It was on this day in 1940 when the Greek government answered "No" to a request by Mussolini to enter Greece on behalf of the Axis Powers.

Dorothy Rabinowitz has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal arguing that we need to stop coddling American Muslims, who really, Rabinowitz reasons, haven't had such a bad go of it since the September 11th attacks. In my paper edition of the Journal, Rabinowitz's op-ed is accompanied by a helpful 3x5 picture of Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan, which, hey, is a fair thing to do since he is obviously as representative of American Muslims as these guys are representative of gun-owning American Christians like myself.

At the beginning of her op-ed, though, Rabinowitz also has some tough words for Tom Hanks, who reportedly said in an interview with Time Magazine, which I confess to not knowing was still published, that the war in the Pacific was one of "racism and terror". I didn't find those words in the interview itself, but Hanks did apparently say those words in other interviews.

Now, obviously, the first question that comes to mind is, who the hell Tom Hanks is to be lecturing us about the war in the Pacific? And is he trying to say our grandfathers were anything less than übermenschlich in their personal conduct and attidues toward their fellow man while at war? Whereas contemporary combat-veteran readers of this blog occasionally write in to bemoan the lack of pornography on deployments, it's a well-known fact that our grandfathers slogged it out across the Pacific with steely-eyed purpose, pausing only to thank their (Christian) god for such a blessed opportunity to get shot at by suicidal Japanese light infantry. The idea that racism might have played a role in relations between opposing sides, or that terror might have had something do with the fire-bombing of Tokyo in 1945 is seditious, right? Right?

Look, I'll make my own thoughts known in a second, but it is worth pointing out that when Tom Hanks talks about racism having played a big role in the combat between U.S. and Japanese soldiers in the Pacific, he is hardly saying something controversial. When John Dower published War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War in 1987, I suppose it might have been controversial then. But now? Hardly.

On the other hand, after reading Dower, one should also read combat memoirs of the war in the Pacific, the best of which is almost certainly E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed. Sledge's memoir is noteworthy for its brutal portrait of combat and -- in light of Dower's thesis -- the complete lack of any discussion of race hatred toward the Japanese as a motivating factor in combat. Sledge was a native of Mobile, Alabama and presumably knew something about racism, but you don't really find much in his first-person narrative of the war in the Pacific to support what Dower argues. My own grandfather grew up in Mullins, South Carolina in the 1930s before fighting in the Pacific and also presumably knew something of racism. But aside from that time in the 1970s when my Aunt Susan drove home in a new Toyota, I don't think he ever exhibited any unkind post-war feelings toward the people of Japan.

At this point I'm going to take a step back and open things up to the readership, which has probably read a lot more history of the Second World War than I have. But my general sense is that Rabinowitz, for all the grief I have given her, might be right if she's arguing that the theme of racism is a little overblown in our contemporary understanding of the Second World War. One could make a mighty strong argument in the other direction, of course, given some of the less attractive things we did as a nation during that era. But my hunch is that race hatred really wasn't the motivating factor among combat infantrymen that Dower thinks it was. I fought in Afghanistan, against some Arab foreign fighters and remnants of the Taliban, more or less right after the September 11th attacks, and I found that the normal combat motivations, like not letting down your buddies, was a lot more prominent than any "hey, let's go take it those Arab Muslims" sentiment. But maybe my experience is, like that picture of Nidal Hasan, unrepresentative.

Thoughts?

First off, I apologize for not yet posting anything today. I spent the morning running the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure with some guys from my rugby team. We raised $430, so many thanks to the readers who donated. The race was not terribly fun, though. They kept us standing around for an hour while everyone from Joe Biden to some Eastern European monarch spoke, and when Joe Biden is the one who speaks for the least amount of time, that's not good. You know what else isn't good? When the pre-match ceremony is longer than the race itself. Still, a good cause is a good cause.

Second, thanks for your patience with the new blog design. I'm getting used to it myself, and we have a lot of kinks to still work out, mainly with the comments and the RSS feeds. I promise you we'll be on that like white on rice come Monday morning, but again, please have patience.

Finally, if you, like me, will be attending some barbecues later today, be sure to remember to raise a glass for the boys of Pointe du Hoc. (I noticed a few tan berets in the audience behind the president today in France. A few years ago, one of my old squad leaders brought me back a vial of sand from Omaha Beach that sits on my bookshelf in Tennessee.) The readers of this blog, meanwhile, might be interested in these cool maps and documents from the D-Day landings.

Looking for a good history of the Second World War? Like all others, this one focuses too much on Western Europe and gives the United States too much credit. Otherwise, it is seven shades of brilliant. (h/t Checks with Chart)

It wasn't just 1776 and all that. Drawing on an old TIME Magazine article, David Axe offers a nice history lesson on Danger Room about American insurgents in the Second World War...

By the time the U.S. forces came back, [Colonel Russell] Volckmann and his band had already cleared the Japs [sic] from a large portion of northwestern Luzon's mountains. Throughout the Luzon [liberation] campaign Volckmann and his Ilocanos — short, dark-skinned, sensitive northern Filipinos — worked on their own within the planning orbit of Lieut. General Walter Krueger's Sixth Army. With air support they swept around the western and northern coasts of Luzon, ranged down the west bank of the Cagayan River and kept the Japanese nervously watching on every side.

(Abu Muqawama finds the way TIME casually used the word "Japs" to describe the Japanese in 1945 to be highly amusing. It wasn't that long ago, folks! Once, when he was very small, Abu Muqawama asked his grandfather if they called 'em "Japs" when he was fighting in the Pacific. His grandfather said, no, they preferred "Nips" instead, which funny because it at once betrays a certain degree of cultural/historical familiarity yet is just as politically incorrect. Kinda like "Hajji," really.)

For soldiers and civilians in southeast England, the dominant memory of that night was less the terrible glow in the western sky than the predawn explosions as the British blew up their own bridges to slow the anticipated German advance, and the almost medieval sound of church bells ringing the alarm over the countryside in the middle of the night.

Great, haunting book review on the Blitz.

Abu Muqawama has a question: why have both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times enlisted two radical leftists -- Mark Kurlansky and Colm Toibin, respectively -- to review novelist Nicholson Baker's new revisionist history of the Second World War (in which Churchill is revealed to be a madman and the Nazis apparently responsive to non-violent negotiations)? Why not get a serious historian of the Second World War, who might be able to point out, as Glenn Altshuler did -- not a serious historian of WWII, per se, but a very serious academic historian nonetheless -- the book's infuriating methodology and selective use of sources?

Instead, in the New York Times today, Colm Toibin has high praise for Nicholson Baker's new account of the Second World War II, calling it "an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified."

What a bunch of rubbish. You don't need to cherry pick the facts to make that argument. You do, however, need to be delusional to make the arguments Baker makes about pacifism in the face of the Nazi threat.

And Abu Muqawama wonders what Toibin's grandfather -- a veteran of the IRA; Toibin hails from a staunchly republican family -- would have thought of his grandson's idea that civilians should never be targeted in wartime. Because targeting the British civilian infrastructure is exactly what the IRA did in the years after WWI (when Toibin's grandfather was interned in a Welsh prison).

Abu Muqawama wishes a book review editor would do as the Boston Globe did and hire an actual academic historian (Kurlansky writes good pop history, though his book on 1968 is one long love letter to the soixante-huitards) -- preferably one of the Second War War, such as Tom Childers or John Keegan -- to run roughshod over Baker's fantasy history. What a bunch of -- oh, Happy Easter, everybody.

P.S. This title is stolen from the way in which Leon Wieseltier describes Baker's last novel, a fantasy about assassinating George W. Bush.

Update: FFT (Former Flatmate Theo) points out that William Grimes smacked Nicholson Baker around in the New York Times Arts section a week ago. Muddled and often infuriating, “Human Smoke” sounds its single, solemn note incessantly, like a mallet striking a kettle drum over and over. War is bad. Churchill was bad. Roosevelt was bad. Hitler was bad too, but maybe, in the end, no worse than Roosevelt and Churchill.