Category Archives: Military & War

The Fall of Berlin 1945

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I so thoroughly enjoyed Antony Beevor’s history of the siege of Stalingrad I ordered The Fall of Berlin 1945. I’m about halfway through the 430 page book and, like Stalingrad, it’s a page-turner. No work of fiction –movie, novel, TV documentary series– could ever capture the scope and horror of these events.

As with all (most?) non-fiction books, I’m reading with a marker in hand, highlighting the passages I want to save. Like so much of the history I’ve read, I’m finding eerie parallels to current events. Nazism and Trumpism; Hitler and Trump the most obvious example.

“We may go down, but we will take the world with us.” — Adolph Hitler (1945)

“(Hitler’s) monstrous vanity could not allow him to lose a foreign capital, even one which he had totally destroyed.”

“The Soviet armies advancing in huge, long columns were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, their T-34s churning up the earth as they dipped and rolled with the ground, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, Lend-Lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, open Chevrolets with tarpaulin-covered mortars in the back and tractors hauling great howitzers, all eventually followed by a second echelon in horse-drawn carts.”

“The population at large saw nothing of Hitler. He had disappeared from the newsreels, and they heard only Hitler’s very last broadcast on 30 January, marking twelve years of Nazi government. His voice had lost all its strength and sounded completely different.”

“Berlin’s population in early April (1945) stood at anything between 3 and 3.5 million people, including around 120,000 infants. When General Reymann raised the problem of feeding these children at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery bunker, Hitler stared at him. ‘There are no children of that age left in Berlin,’ he said. Reymann finally understood that his supreme commander had no contact with human reality.”

“On the evening of 12 April 1945, the Berlin philharmonic gave its last performance. It is said that after the performance, the Nazi party had organized Hitler youth members to stand in uniform, with baskets of cyanide capsules, and offer them to members of the audience as they left. “

“The only promise Hitler has kept is the one he made before coming to power. Give me ten years and you will not be able to recognize Germany.”

“A smaller size of (German)steel helmet had been manufactured for boy soldiers, but not nearly enough were produced.”

“On the morning of Saturday 21 April, just after the last Allied air raid had finished, General Reymann’s (Berlin) headquarters (was) swarmed with brown uniforms. Senior Nazi Party officials had rushed there to obtain the necessary authorization to leave Berlin. […] Over 2,000 passes were signed for the Party ‘armchair warriors’, who had always been so ready to condemn the army for retreating.”

“An intensive artillery bombardment of Berlin began at 9.30 a.m., a couple of hours after the end of the last Allied air raid. Hitler’s SS adjutant, Otto Günsche, reported that the Führer, a few minutes after having been woken, emerged unshaven and angry in the bunker corridor which served as an anteroom. ‘What’s going on? he shouted at General Burgdorf, Colonel von Below and Günsche. ‘Where’s this firing coming from?’”

“(Hitler’s) severe personality disorder, even if it could not quite be defined as mental illness, had certainly made him deranged. Hitler had so utterly identified himself with the German people that he believed that anybody who opposed him was opposing the German people as a whole; and that if he were to die, the German people could not survive without him.”

“In the (Berlin) cellars and air-raid shelters distinctive subcultures had grown up during two years of heavy air raids. […] The ‘cellar tribe’ as one diarist called these curious microcosms of society, produced a wide variety of characters, whether in markedly rich or poor districts. Each cellar always seemed to have at least one crashing bore, usually a Nazi trying to justify his belief in the Führer and final victory.” […] “Many cellar tribes developed a particular superstition or theory of survival. For example, some believed that they would survive an almost direct hit by wrapping a towel round their head. Others were convinced that if they bent forward at the first explosion, this would prevent their lungs from tearing. Every eccentricity of German hypochondria seems to have received full expression.”

STALINGRAD The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943

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I’ve only read a handful of history books (crime fiction is my passion) but they’ve all be great reads. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century; Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civ89l War Era; Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869; and Wires West: The Story of the Talking Wires. I’m currently reading STALINGRAD The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor.

(Wikipedia) “Stalingrad is a narrative history written by Antony Beevor of the battle fought in and around the city of Stalingrad during World War II, as well as the events leading up to it. The book starts with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the subsequent drive into the Soviet Union. Its main focus is the Battle of Stalingrad, in particular the period from the initial German attack to Operation Uranus and the Soviet victory.” Continue reading →

China Is a Paper Dragon

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In a recent article in The Atlantic (China Is a Paper Dragon) David Frum writes about a 2018 book by Tufts University professor Michael Beckley. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.

Following are some excerpts from Drum’s article and Beckley’s book:

American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”

Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school. (Beckley)

Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories. (Beckley)

More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places. China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital. More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms.

“World War Wired”

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Following are a few of my favorites nuggets from an essay in the New York Times by Thomas Friedman:

“On the first day of the war, we saw invading Russian tank units unexpectedly being exposed by Google maps, because Google wanted to alert drivers that the Russian armor was causing traffic jams.”

A large-scale modern war will be livestreamed, minute by minute, battle by battle, death by death, to the world.

Russia, has an economy that is smaller than that of Texas.

The musician and actress Selena Gomez has twice as many followers on Instagram — over 298 million — as Russia has citizens.

Vladimir, the first day of this war was the best day of the rest of your life.

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.”

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I recently finished Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson, considered by many the best single-volume history of the American Civil War. I wouldn’t know where to begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this book. We all know how the story ends, right, but I was on the edge of my seat till the final page. The mark of a truly great story-teller.

We all know about Union general William T. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and his “march to the sea.” My simplistic Hollywood understanding of that chapter in the war was changed by this book, especially by this excerpt from Sherman’s memoirs.

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman had told Atlanta’s mayor after ordering the civilian population expelled from the occupied city. But “when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker.” Until then, though, “we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” Union armies must destroy the capacity of the southern people to sustain the war. Their factories, railroads, farms—indeed their will to resist—must be devastated. “We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . [and] make them ‘so sick of war’ that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

— Memoirs by William T. Sherman

The passage reminded me of a passage from a novel by Robert K. Tanenbaum:

“Peace is best. You should make every sacrifice to secure peace. When you absolutely must go to war, however, you must try to kill all the enemy you can as quickly as you can, holding nothing back, until they have surrendered or you have been defeated utterly. It is a great fraud to think otherwise and it prolongs the agony. It would be better if people said, if we fight, we are going to boil babies in their own fat and blast the skin off nice old ladies, so they die slowly in great pain, and we are happy to do this, because what we fight for is so important. And if they conclude that it is not as important as that, then they should fight no more.”

— Robert K. Tanenbaum, Act of Revenge

War as video game

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America’s Army is a video game “conceived by Colonel Casey Wardynski, the Army’s Chief Economist and a professor at West Point, the idea was to provide the public with a virtual soldier experience that was engaging, informative, and entertaining.” I got curious about this when I started seeing recruiting videos on some cable channels.

Not suggesting there is anything wrong with this approach, just that it got me thinking about what motivates a young man or woman to enlist in the military. Sebastian Junger alludes to this in his 2010 book, WAR.

“War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know.”

“War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”

So, is it “defending the homeland,” or the rush of surviving a firefight? Or something far more complicated?

Who would win a war between the Confederacy and the Taliban?

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In a chapter titled Amateurs Go To War, Battle Cry of Freedom author James M. McPherson describes the South’s strategy:

“Jefferson Davis […] early in the war he seems to have envisaged a strategy like that of George Washington in the Revolution. Washington traded space for time; he retreated when necessary in the face of a stronger enemy; he counterattacked against isolated British outposts or detachments when such an attack promised success; above all, he tried to avoid full-scale battles that would have risked annihilation of his army and defeat of his cause. This has been called a strategy of attrition — a strategy of winning by not losing, of wearing out a better equipped foe and compelling him to give up by prolonging the war and making it too costly.”

I shared this with my friend (and historian) Bob Priddy, suggesting parallels to the Taliban strategy in Afghanistan. Bob’s reply:

You have come to a realization that the American military has not come to grips with since time began. We still fight our wars as if it was Breed’s Hill (not Bunker Hill), with one side barricaded and visible and the other side marching resolutely forward, sacrificing enough bodies that eventually the marching force will overcome the barricaded force by surviving numbers or will fall back, weakened and puzzled at the lack of success. It’ why we “lost” Vietnam. It’s why our two-decade effort at nation building in Afghanistan ultimately failed. The parallels of Vietnam and Afghanistan are marked.

We can’t make good Republicans (no snide comments about that phrase) and good Democrats out of people who see no such things, never have, and have never wanted them.

Jefferson Davis ultimately failed because he never had the cunning or the tools the Taliban has — although the white supremacist philosophy never lost. The Confederacy did. But white supremacy lurks in the philosophical underground tunnels of our time. We can be grateful that its ride into Washington in January was not as successful as the Taliban’s ride into Kabul.

Poor planning and inept leadership saved us this time.

“Afghanistan Meant Nothing”

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That’s the conclusion of Laura Jedeed, a freelance journalist who deployed to Afghanistan twice — once in 2008, and again in 2009-2010.

I remember Afghanistan as a dusty beige nightmare of a place full of proud, brave people who did not fucking want us there. We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter. […] It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant we left.

And now, finally, we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening. The Taliban is surging in and taking it all back. They were always going to do this, because they have a thing you cannot buy or train, they have patience and a bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them.

I am Team Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban. It’s Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever. There is no third team.

Rambo III: Freedom Speech

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We knew how Afghanistan was going to end way back in 2008. In this scene from Rambo III Richard Crenna warns the Russian commander how stupid it is to start a holy war in the middle east in the name of freedom.

And this from 2009. Matthew Hoh, a former marine saying Afghanistan is not worth U.S. lives.

“I feel that our strategies in Afghanistan are not pursing goals that are worthy of sacrificing our young men and women or spending the billions we’re doing there,” Hoh said. “I believe that the people we are fighting there are fighting us because we are occupying them — not for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al Qaeda, not because of any fundamental hatred toward the West. The only reason they’re fighting us is because we are occupying them.”