MHQ Vol.28 No.1 - 2015 Autumn

Autumn 2015

V-J DAY

70 Y EA R S

The Quarterly Journal of Military History

Inventing the Mideast War and Influenza, 1918 Invasion of the Sea Peoples

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“I think we could make it pretty hot for the Turks in the Gulf.” —Gertrude Bell, 1914, page 25

The Quarterly Journal of Military History autumn 2015 volume 28, number 1

Contents THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY Autumn 2015, Volume 28, Number 1

Features 28 Why Japan Agreed to Unconditional Surrender

76 Peace and War

by Richard B. Frank

How European players in the great game to carve up the Middle East created a world of chaos

The endgame challenge of World War II: How to force Japan—with millions of its men still under arms and still undefeated—to accept unconditional surrender

by David Fromkin

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38 Japan’s Radical Postwar Turnaround

98 A Little Rebellion

by Tomoyuki Sasaki

by Neil Shea

From militarism to pacifism

Frustrated by debt, a depressed economy, foreclosures, and unresponsive power elites, the legendary embattled farmers of Massachusetts stage a revolt that resets the new nation

44 Pale Horse by Michael S. Neiberg

97 Extra Round

The influenza pandemic and the apocalyptic climax of the Great War PORTFOLIO

52 Food as Patriotism by K. M. Kostyal World War I posters turn the tables in America

■ MHQ Digital

58 Bring In the Germans

Tablets and Readers Subscribe at historynet.com/military-history-quarterly-digital

by Dennis Showalter Needing to build a modern army, the Nationalist Chinese government sought the advice of veteran German officers

66 Raiders of the Lost Bronze Age by Eric Cline Civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean—in Greece, Egypt, and the Near East—abruptly collapsed in 1177 bc. But were the mysterious marauding ‘Sea Peoples’ to blame?

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Departments 5 Letter From MHQ 6 Flashback 12 Comments 14 Ask MHQ After the A-bomb

22 Experience Eyewitness to Hiroshima

24 HistoryNet Reader Excerpts from our sister magazines

25 Behind the Lines Gertrude Bell, nation maker

At the Front 15 The War List Tools of victory in World War II

17 Battle Schemes The invasion of Da Nang, 1858

18 Laws of War The Peace of Westphalia, 1648

20 Weapons Check Thunderbolt II

38

Culture of War 83 Museum Watch 84 Classic Dispatches Ward Just in Vietnam

88 Artists J. M. W. Turner’s Waterloo

92 Reviews The American Expeditionary Force’s trial by fire; Steve Inskeep’s Jacksonland; airpower in the Mediterranean in World War II

COVER: Knotting his Rising Sun headband, a kamikaze pilot prepares to make the ultimate sacrifice. A futile gesture: Within a year Hirohito had agreed to an unconditional surrender (p. 28). (Collection of T/5 Donald R. Houk, U.S. Eighth Army) ABOVE: A camouflaged soldier in Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force participates in a live fire exercise. Since Japan’s defeat in World War II, its forces have been consigned to internal defense only (p. 38), but things may be changing. (Franck Robichon/EPA/ Corbis) BACK COVER: As America plunged into the First World War, the U.S. Food Administration launched a poster campaign, preaching “Food Will Win the War” (p. 52). (Adolph Treidler/Library of Congress)

MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History (ISSN 1040-5992) is published quarterly by World History Group, LLC, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176-6500. Periodical postage paid at Leesburg, Va., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send subscription information and address changes to: MHQ, P.O. Box 422224, Palm Coast, FL 32142-2224. Single copies: $19.95. Yearly subscriptions in U.S.: $74.95; Canada: $99.95; Foreign: $99.95 (in U.S. funds only). Copyright 2015 by World History Group, LLC, all rights reserved. The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole or in part without consent of the copyright owner. MHQ is a registered trademark of World HistoryGroup, LLC.

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“MAY ALL PEOPLE GIVE PRAISE TO KING RAMSES III,” a cartouche on his tomb at Medinet Habu proclaims. Reliefs on the walls of this vast pharaonic mortuary also extol Ramses’s triumphs in 1177 bc against the hordes of mysterious invaders that scholars call the Sea Peoples. But who were they, and were they really as much victims as victimizers? Eric Cline takes a new look at one of history’s great end times—the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean—on page 66. (Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)

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Letter From MHQ Both Sides Now?

O

ne truism about military history is that the victors are usually the ones who write the history, with all the predictable biases, distortions, selfpromotion, and self-serving hyperbole that one might expect. Accounts by the losing side might be no more trustworthy, but accounts of a defeat by the defeated are less likely to be written at all or to be widely disseminated, owing to such factors as destruction of records and sources, reluctance to declassify records, language barriers, cultural differences, plain embarrassment, or ongoing hostilities. The deplorable outcome of these factors is history that is literally one sided: incomplete and unbalanced and, consequently, inaccurate. Decades may elapse before more complete or more accurate accounts, from both winners and losers, about decisive events can emerge and clear up the questions that go along with historical accounts—especially those produced in the immediate aftermath of a war. In our time, that situation appears to be changing. We live in an age when, thanks to computer memories and Internet connections, scholars on all sides may be getting unprecedented access to records and other documentary evidence hitherto concealed or classified, or simply not distributed beyond file drawers where they have languished for decades. That is good news and a valuable time saver for historians researching events with an eye to writing a more accurate and up-to-date account. But some cautions are in order; lest one believe that we are entering a state of archivenirvana, consider this stubborn obstacle: Organizing, cataloging, and digitizing document collections remains a tedious and time-consuming—and expensive— task. So while essential information about what the opposition was thinking, planning, and doing before, during, and after a conflict might well reside in an archive or collection or someone’s personal records, it might not be accessible for historians’ use anytime soon. Not in digital form, anyway; in some major public archives and libraries, the percentage of the collection that is digitized and hence available to any student or scholar with Internet access is likely less than 10 percent. This is not a hopeless situation. Brilliantly written, diligently researched, and reasonably accurate works of military history continue to be published every month. But the limitations on accuracy stand as a strong reminder that published history is not inert but—at any given time—incomplete and always subject to future revision, by both winners and losers.

—Michael W. Robbins [email protected]

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Flashback

GULF OF THAILAND 1977 Vietnamese “boat people” seeking asylum in Thailand are turned back by Thai Marine Police. TODAY Many thousands of Asians, Africans, and Middle Easterners fleeing war and poverty are attempting to cross open seas to other Asian countries or to Europe, but some nations are reluctant to welcome a flood of new refugees. Eddie Adams/Associated Press

MONTE CASSINO, ITALY 1944 Casualty of war, the 1,500-year-old abbey founded by St. Benedict is bombed to ruins by Allied forces during the Italian campaign. TODAY Millennia-old antiquities in Iraq and Syria are being destroyed by ISIS in a purge that the Iraqi antiquities minister calls the “erasing of human history.” Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

ARMENIA 1915 As the Ottoman Empire collapses in World War I, Young Turk forces begin persecuting Armenians in Anatolia, forcibly deporting them or holding public executions like this hanging in a town square. An estimated 1.5 million died in the Armenian holocaust. TODAY In this centenary year of the massacre’s inception, a number of nations, including Turkey and the United States, still have not officially recognized the killings as genocide. Lebrecht Music & Arts/Corbis

Comments Mission Equality

Combat volunteers aboard USS Intrepid survived a deadly kamikaze attack in 1944.

but also because of their shared Catholicism and their mission for equality for all Americans, particularly for those who fought the “two-front” war: in-country and at home. My dad’s mission included rescuing a dozen farmworkers from a ranch—in the middle of the night, by himself—where they were being held as

Frequent Contributor, Repeat Winner Congratulations to Noah Andre Trudeau, who on May 18 received the Army Historical Foundation’s 2015 award for excellence in U.S. Army history writing (journals and magazines) for his MHQ story “An American Fandango in Monterrey” (Spring 2014). Trudeau described the army’s successful strategy in attacking the well-defended Mexican town in 1846. A 2012 AHF award winner, for his MHQ article “Hard War on the Southern Plains,” Trudeau is the author of many works on the Civil War and is currently finishing a book about Abraham Lincoln’s visit to the war front in March–April 1965. The AHF Distinguished Writing Awards program was established in 1997 to recognize authors who make a significant contribution to the literature on U.S. Army history.

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forced labor in the early 1950s. Fleming stirred again the evident pride I have in my father and those like him; there were surprisingly many of them, despite Hollywood and media portrayal of our country then. My mom, who was a writer and a teacher in inner-city schools, also would have enjoyed Fleming’s work. She and her fellow Tehachapi High School students marched out of class to buses waiting to take them to protest the removal of their Japanese-American friends to internment camps. Mary Jane Evans, too, and many like her, not only thought but acted in harsh disagreement with and disgust for the racial inequality of the 1940s. I hope you relay my sentiments to Mr. Fleming for such an inspiring piece of history shared. Patrick Evans Fresno, California Tom Fleming responds: Thanks so much for your wonderful letter about the attempts (and the occasional

TOP: U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

What a great piece was Thomas Fleming’s “From Separate and Unequal to Shipmates”! My dad, George Duane Evans, was a decorated, wounded combat aviator and squadron leader of B-25s in North Africa and Sicily sorties in World War II. He was once escorted by the famous Red Tails, the black pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group, and he later wrote a glowing report of the Tuskegee Airmen. After the war, my dad advocated for the Nisei soldiers, the 442nd Combat Battalion, in Northern California and had the honor of two Japanese-American namesakes because of his advocacy for Japanese-American vets who returned to find homes and farms long gone and encountered prejudice, despite their courageous service. Like Fleming, my dad cited his Catholic faith as an influence on his perspective of equality in America. He eventually worked for Governor Ronald Reagan for a year and did so, in part, because Reagan, when he was serving in the army, stood up to President Franklin Roosevelt and advocated for the Nisei. My dad also briefly worked with President John F. Kennedy and felt a kinship with him, as many vets did, because of Kennedy’s combat service on PT-109,

Contributors Roger L. Vance Editor in Chief

LEFT: © NINA BRAMHALL

Worthy of the label Renaissance man, David Fromkin has been an attorney, both with the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and with a private New York firm; a foreign policy adviser to Hubert Humphrey in his 1972 presidential primary campaign; a scholar of international relations at Boston University; and an author of highly regarded books that examine 20th-century history through the lens of law and large personalities. He brings his own large, unique perspective to this issue’s “Peace and War” (page 76), excerpted from his best seller, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914–1922.

In his most recent novel, American Romantic, he returns to the Vietnam of the early 1960s, “when the war was not quite a war, more a prelude to war.” In this issue of MHQ, though, he is deep in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and the war is very, very real (page 84).

Michael A. Reinstein Chairman & Publisher Dionisio Lucchesi President William Koneval Associate Publisher

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY Michael W. Robbins Editor Barbara Sutliff

Art Director

Eric H. Cline has been studying the Late Bronze Age for longer than he cares to admit. His first introduction to the period was at the age of seven, when his mother gave him a book about the Trojan War. He is now

Ward S. Just has done almost every kind of writing a writer can do. He has been a journalist, playwright, prolific novelist (18 titles), and NaWard S. Just Eric H. Cline tional Book Award finalist. In the 1960s he covered the conflict professor of classics and anthropolin Cyprus for Newsweek and the ogy and director of the Capitol ArVietnam War for the Washington chaeological Institute at the George Post, and the latter coverage helped Washington University. A Fulbright inspire one of his most acclaimed scholar and National Geographic novels, A Dangerous Friend. As he Explorer, Cline is an active field artold one interviewer, people forget chaeologist, as well as a historian how many novelists started out in of the ancient world. His article in journalism—Graham Greene, Mavis this issue on the always intriguing Sea Gallant, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Peoples (page 66) is adapted from and of course, Ernest Hemingway. his most recent book, 1177 bc: The His own early years as a journalist Year Civilization Collapsed, which gave him “the soil” for his novels, received a Pulitzer-Prize nomination like the remembered “smell of povand is currently being translated into erty in a village, a charcoal smell.” 10 languages.

K. M. Kostyal

Senior Editor Elizabeth G. Howard

Managing Editor Jennifer E. Berry

Senior Picture Editor Jon Guttman Research Director David T. Zabecki Chief Military Historian Contributing Editors O’Brien Browne, Thomas Fleming, Adrian Goldsworthy, Victor Davis Hanson, Alistair Horne, David Kahn, John A. Lynn, Allan R. Millett, Williamson Murray, Robert L. O’Connell, Geoffrey Parker, Douglas Porch, John Prados, Willard Sterne Randall, Elihu Rose, Stephen W. Sears, Dennis E. Showalter, Ronald H. Spector, Barry Strauss, John M. Taylor, Noah Andre Trudeau Online/Digital

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Comments successes) of your father and mother and friends to fight the awful crime America committed against Japanese Americans during World War II. It’s good to hear how many people reached

deep into their spiritual selves to discover an equality that they were ready and even eager to recognize. I think our Catholic faith had quite a lot to do with it. I also think MHQ deserves some ap-

plause for telling my version of the story. We welcome your comments. Visit MHQmag.com or e-mail [email protected]. Letters are edited for length and clarity.

■ Ask MHQ

Fatal Fallout Q

What happened to the U.S. soldiers and reporters who cleaned up and reported on the HiroshimaNagasaki tragedy? How many of them died of nuclear fallout and cancer? Sandra C. Eschelbach Kalamazoo, Michigan

A

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These U.S. Army soldiers in the wreckage of post-explosion Hiroshima in late 1945 were among the thousands unwittingly exposed to lingering radiation that caused illness and premature death.

About 40,000 occupation troops were stationed in or around Hiroshima from October 6, 1945, to March 6, 1946, and 27,000 in Nagasaki from September 11, 1945, to July 1, 1946; 12,000 troops were stationed in outlying areas and an estimated 118,000, including post-bombing survey crews, passed through the irradiated areas. At least 23 American prisoners of

war were held in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, and the Japanese included about a dozen of them among those commemorated at the Hiroshima memorial. While radiation exposure varied widely among the post-bombing occupiers, experts believe that hundreds of them died prematurely from the effects of radiation and that others suffered from

organ, skin, and blood disorders, including cancers, in the decades that followed.   Jon Guttman, HistoryNet’s research director, is the author of many military histories. Something about military history you’ve always wanted to know? Send your question to [email protected], and we’ll have an expert answer it.

AKG-IMAGES

It may never be ascertained precisely how many premature American deaths were the result of exposure to lingering radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since regulations forbade notetaking throughout the Manhattan Project. Also, the exact nature of radiation aftereffects were not really understood until well after the bombings, and even then, it took a long time before the government acknowledged and took steps to compensate the “atomic veterans” who were exposed. Only in 1988 did Congress pass legislation to compensate 13 such veterans. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency did record how many Americans were in the vicinity:

At the Front ■ The War List 15 ■ Battle Schemes 17 ■ Laws of War 18 ■ Drawn and Quartered 19 ■ Weapons Check 20

■ The War List

American Tools of Victory Marc G. DeSantis describes some of the vehicles, aircraft, electronics, and basic resources that helped tip the balance in the final years of World War II.

from the invasion beaches. American production exceeded 10,600 of these versatile transports.

Radar Radar had given the Royal Air Force the edge in the Battle of Britain by alerting its airmen to the approach of Luftwaffe aircraft. Britain shared its technology with the United States, including the advanced cavity magnetron, which made powerful microwave airborne radar a reality and proved invaluable in spotting prowling U-boats in the Atlantic. American engineering and industrial muscle made large-scale deployment of this cutting-edge radar possible.

Landing Ships and Craft The oceangoing 1,500-ton Landing Ship, Tank (LST) could deliver cargo directly to any strip of open beach. It could also carry the smaller Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel (LCVP). Capable of ferrying a rifle platoon from ship to shore, the LCVP took part in nearly all Allied amphibious invasions and was vital to the success of D-Day. Food When war came, the United States increased its food production and helped feed other Allied armies and civilian populations in addition to its own 11.5 million servicemen. While some countries experienced strict wartime food rationing, the diet of ordinary Americans generally got better, as the economy and wages improved in the wartime boom. When Germany’s U-boats threatened to starve Britain into submission, American food assured survival, and the Soviet Red Army relied heavily on the United States for canned meat and dehydrated vegetables and eggs.

U.S. COAST GUARD/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

C-47 Based on the legendary Douglas DC-3 civilian airliner, this robust twin-engine transport aircraft could carry 28 soldiers or 6,000 pounds of cargo. Reliable and easy to maintain, it was crucial to the invasion of Normandy. Allied paratroops jumped from C-47s and captured important targets inland

[

■ Supply Lines

LSTs close in on Leyte Island, delivering men and matériel for the 1944 Allied offensive to retake the Philippines. Hastily constructed sandbag piers speed the offloading process.

To conserve dwindling timber for building warships, 16th-century Venice dug ditches around its oak forests, banned grazing livestock within them, and forbade tree-cutting without a license.

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At the Front

An F6F-3 Hellcat aboard the USS Yorktown in the Pacific, 1943. The versatile and forgiving Hellcat featured a powerful engine and heavy-caliber machine guns; it could also carry conventional bombs and rockets.

four-wheel-drive jeep was used in all theaters of war. It carried ammunition and supplies, carted wounded to aid stations, served as a taxi and staff car, towed light artillery, and was small enough to be flown into battle in gliders. Over 650,000 had been manufactured by Ford and Willys-Overland in the United States by war’s end.

Subs Gato-class submarines, along with the derivative Balao and Tench classes, strangled Imperial Japan by drastically slashing the country’s imports of oil and other raw materials. These large American subs also destroyed about half of Japan’s merchant ships and roughly two-thirds of its tankers by the close of 1944. U.S. subs sank more than 1,300 enemy ships in World War II. Fuel The United States alone produced five billion barrels of oil during the war, enough to satisfy its own demands and 70 percent of its Allies’. The Axis powers produced much less. Limited fuel hindered Japanese pilot training and precipitated a steep decline in the quality of its air arm. Even though German

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armament production increased almost until the end of the war, Germany’s fuel shortages limited its army’s mobility and caused a lot of motorized equipment to be abandoned.

F6F Hellcat Grumman’s carrier fighter was designed to meet and defeat Japan’s fabled Mitsubishi A6M Zero. Though not outstanding in any one area, it was an all-around excellent machine with an enormous success rate. Hellcat pilots downed 5,156 enemy warplanes, accounting for about 75 percent of all U.S. Navy and Marine aerial victories. The resilient F6F was also easy to fly, and its ability to absorb damage and bring its pilot safely home enabled many young pilots to survive long enough to become proficient combat fliers.

Liberty Ships These sturdy 7,100-ton freighters carried vital military cargoes across the U-boat–infested Atlantic and beyond. (They were also on the Murmansk Run.) Though Liberties were slow—they averaged 11 knots—their elementary design speeded production. American shipyards turned out some 2,700 Liberty ships during the war, more than making up for the cargo ships sunk by the enemy. MHQ

U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Jeep The original all-terrain vehicle, the tough, go-anywhere

■ Battle Schemes

(1858) French and Spanish ships crowd Da Nang Bay in this Vietnamese map showing the joint expeditionary force sent in 1858 under the pretext of punishing the emperor of the Tu Duc Reign for the execution of two Catholic missionaries. The Europeans prevailed in the Battle of Tourane (Da Nang) and held the city for a year and a half before capitulating under siege. But French emperor Louis Napoleon did not relinquish his imperial ambitions for the region (he had first attacked the port in 1847), and by 1864 France had established the colony of Cochinchina in southern Vietnam. The French confiscated the map in September 1859 from the home of a military official, translated and numbered the labeled sites to assist them in later attacks.

MUSÉE DES ARCHIVES NATIONALES, PARIS

Igniting a Colonial Campaign

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At the Front

The Peace of Westphalia (1648) by Marc G. DeSantis

T

he Thirty Years’ War began in 1618 as a religious conf lict among Catholics and Protestants in Germany and ultimately engulfed much of Europe. The multiplicity of warring parties made for a lengthy war and increased the difficulty of reaching a comprehensive peace. As the war raged on, the suffering was particularly unbearable in Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. Combatant armies lived off the land and plundered freely. Plague and famine followed in their wake. “We live like animals, eating bark and grass,” one despairing entry in a German family Bible read. “Many people say that there is no God.” Finally in 1643, peace negotiations began at the Congress of Westphalia, and for five years the diplomatic dance went on in the Westphalian towns of Münster and Osnabrück, even as the fighting continued. The lengthiest negotiations in modern European history, they involved some 176 plenipotentiaries representing

194 rulers, including those of the Papacy, Brandenburg (the future Prussia), and other German principalities. The central concern for most participants was preserving a balance of power in Europe. As the Swedish delegate, Count Johan Adler Salvius, explained, the “first rule of politics is that the security of all depends on the equilibrium of the individuals. When one begins to become powerful…the others place themselves, through unions or alliances, into the opposite balance in order to maintain the equipoise.” The talks frequently stalled when a success or reversal on the battlefield altered the calculus of one power or another at the negotiations. Cardinal Jules Mazarin, France’s chief minister, refused to consider an armistice as the talks dragged on. “His Majesty and his allies do not envisage reducing the fire of war by a truce but extinguishing it totally by means of a good peace,” he proclaimed. Finally, as France became gripped by the Fronde—a series of civil wars that began in 1648—it suddenly considered reaching accord with its neighbors more critical. In fact, the threat of civil insurrection was on the rise across Europe. All sides to the Westphalian negotiations had come to see the ongoing war as too costly in blood and treasure to continue. Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III was key to peace. He was the one ruler who

Delegates meet in Münster, as negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia near conclusion.

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could make the necessary concessions to bring the other powers to agreement. Pressure on him increased when the Swedes laid siege to Prague, the former capital of the empire, in July 1648, and by year’s end, the Peace of Westphalia had been concluded. The peace was really a series of agreements among some or all of the participants. As early as January, a peace agreement had been reached between the Spanish and the Dutch. Two further treaty documents were sworn in October: The Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugense (Peace of Osnabrück) ended the war within the Holy Roman Empire and between the empire and Sweden; the companion Instrumentum Pacis Monasteriense (Peace of Münster) settled affairs between the empire and France. The Westphalia peace did not end the fighting between Spain and France, however, and their war would continue until 1659. But Ferdinand agreed to refrain from helping his Spanish Habsburg cousins in their ongoing war with France.

R

eligious tensions had started the Thirty Years’ War, and religious considerations were an important component in ending it. The Peace of Westphalia reinstated the religious freedom guaranteed by the 1555 Peace of Augsburg but nullified by the 1629 Edict of Restitution, and religious tolerance was expanded to include Calvinists. The congress also decided that property would be deemed Protestant or Catholic based upon what it had been in the “normative year” of 1624. Territory was of course a critical part of the Westphalian negotiations. The Holy Roman Empire lost the most, relinquishing some 40,000 square miles in all. Sweden received extensive territories that gave it a stranglehold over the Baltic. France gained Alsace (but paid a hefty 1.2 million thalers as part of the bargain), and its claims to Toul, Metz, and Verdun were recognized. Brandenburg acquired eastern Pomerania, while Bavaria retained the Upper Palatinate. Both the United Provinces of the Neth-

FRITZ GROTEMEYER/AKG-IMAGES

■ Laws of War

PIET VAN DER HEM/WARREN BERNARD

erlands and the Swiss Confederation, already de facto independent nations, had their independence formally recognized by the treaty. The Peace of Westphalia had its most profound effect in the realm of statecraft: It created an international system organized around the idea of consenting states, each enjoying a formal equality with the others. There would be no authority—no emperor or pope—greater than the nation-state, and national interests would take precedence over religious ties in formulating state policy. The era of political alliances based on religion was over. In its place a classic balance-ofpower arrangement arose in which temporary coalitions were formed to restrain the grand ambitions of aggressor states. With the Peace of Westphalia, Germany became a congeries of principalities, with some 300 princes acknowledged as possessing “territorial sovereignty in matters ecclesiastical as well as political.” At the same time, both France and Sweden were granted the right to intervene in German affairs. These conditions effectively prevented the formation of a German nation-state for 200 years and made German territories a battleground for outside powers. Not until the late 19th century did Prussia create a German nation-state. The Prussian desire to make up for centuries of disunion and establish Germany as a great power fueled a militarism that ultimately destabilized the European balance of power achieved in Westphalia. In 1761 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that the Westphalian settlement upheld order and security in Europe. “This Imperial constitution will certainly, while it lasts, maintain the balance in Europe; no prince need fear lest another dethrone him. The peace of Westphalia may well

[

■ Drawn and Quartered

Neutral nations watch the bloodbath of World War I, as combatants already in the war battle it out in this poster from a 1915 issue of The New Amsterdammer.

remain the foundation of our political system forever.” Forever is a long time, and while concepts promulgated by the Peace of Westphalia still define geopolitics, alliances based on religious and ethnic ties have

become increasingly prevalent, fracturing the still sometimes fragile notion of a nation-state. MHQ Attorney Marc G. DeSantis is a frequent contributor to MHQ’s Laws of War.

■ Speaking of…Illusions The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient —Robert Lynd, writer (1879–1949) and dangerous of human illusions.

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At the Front ■ Weapons Check

A-10 Thunderbolt II a.k.a. “Warthog” by Chris McNab

Laser target designator system (LANTIRN)

Pylon (or wing station), one of 11 that can carry a wide variety of ordnance

First flown in 1972, the Fairchild-Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II was an ultra-aggressive concept from the outset. It is essentially a flying gun—a seven-barrel rotary 30mm cannon wrapped in a subsonic airframe. Its main purpose is to deliver devastating ground attacks against vehicles and structures, primarily with its gun. The weapon system alone weighs 4,029 pounds and fires 3,900 rounds a minute. At a mile range, the A-10 can put 65 armor-piercing (depleted uranium) and incendiary rounds onto a tank-size target in one second of destruction. The aircraft around the cannon is equally impressive. Everything about the A-10 is designed for maximum survivability, from the pilot’s titanium-armored cockpit to the two turbofan engines that, mounted on the upper part of the rear fuselage, reduce the aircraft’s heat signature in order to help foil heat-seeking missiles. The A-10 has endured to this day, carrying out potent ground-attack missions in conflicts from the Gulf War in 1990–1991 to post-2001 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its combat record and unique capabilities have kept the aircraft in service despite regular moves for its retirement.

Rocket launcher, 70mm, air-to-ground

GPU-29, 250-pound bomb In addition to its cannon, the A-10 can carry 16,000 pounds of ordnance, from the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guided bomb to the Maverick air-to-ground missile.

“Pave Penny” targeting pod

Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. His latest work is The Book of the Poppy (History Press, 2014), commemorating the recent centenary of the onset of World War I.

LANCE CHEUNG/U.S. AIR FORCE/LEGION PHOTO

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General Electric TF34-GE-100A turbofans take the aircraft to a maximum speed of around 500 miles an hour.

The fuel tanks are self-sealing and protected with a fire-retardant foam system to prevent fire during crash-landings.

The pilot sits in a titaniumarmored “bathtub” that can withstand even 57mm cannon hits.

Refueling port Chaff/flare dispensers (mounted under wing) The General Electric 30mm GAU-8/A Avenger Gatlingtype cannon has an effective range of about 1,300 yards and a maximum range of more than 3,500 yards.

Air-to-air missile

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Experience On the Ground in Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 Eyewitness to—victim of—the horrific events at the dawn of the Atomic Age by Michihiko Hachiya

D

r. Hachiya was at home and awake early on a morning that was “still, warm, and beautiful,” as he wrote in the daily diary he kept. At the time, he was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, and as befits the trained scientist he was, Hachiya was also an alert observer who was able to focus on the smallest details of events around him and to record them carefully, even in this unique event. The hospital was located less than a mile from the hypocenter of the world’s first atomic bombing and his house was a few hundred yards from the hospital, where he and his colleagues witnessed and treated the many effects of the bomb on the dazed and damaged survivors who came to the hospital. Severely wounded himself, Dr. Hachiya nevertheless recorded his actions, thoughts, feelings, and conclusions about what happened on that day and in the days that followed. 6 August 1945 The hour was early; the morning still, warm, and beautiful. Shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden as I gazed absently through wide-flung doors opening to the south. Clad in drawers and undershirt, I was sprawled on the living room floor exhausted because I had just spent a sleepless night on duty as an air warden in my hospital. Suddenly, a strong flash of light startled me—and then another. So well does one recall little things that I remember vividly how a stone lantern in the garden became brilliantly lit and I debated whether this light was caused by a mag-

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nesium flare or sparks from a passing trolley. Garden shadows disappeared. The view where a moment before all had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy. Through swirling dust I could barely discern a wooden column that had supported one corner of my house. It was leaning crazily and the roof sagged dangerously. Moving instinctively, I tried to escape, but rubble and fallen timbers barred the way. By picking my way cautiously I managed to reach the outer hall and stepped down into my garden. A profound weakness overcame me, so I stopped to regain my strength. To my surprise I discovered that I was completely naked. How odd! Where were my drawers and undershirt? What had happened? All over the right side of my body I was cut and bleeding. A large splinter was protruding from a mangled wound in my thigh, and something warm trickled into my mouth. My cheek was torn, I discovered as I felt it gingerly, with the lower lip laid wide open. Embedded in my neck was a sizable fragment of glass which I matter-of-factly dislodged, and with the detachment of one stunned and shocked I studied it and my bloodstained hand. Where was my wife? Suddenly thoroughly alarmed, I began to yell for her: “Yaeko-san! Yaeko-san! Where are you?” Blood began to spurt. Had my carotid artery been cut? Would I bleed to death? Frightened and irrational, I called out again: “It’s a five-hundred-ton bomb! Yaeko-san, where are you? A five-hundredton bomb has fallen!” Yaeko-san, pale and frightened, her clothes torn and bloodstained, emerged

from the ruins of our house holding her elbow. Seeing her, I was reassured. My own panic assuaged, I tried to reassure her. “We’ll be all right,” I exclaimed. “Only let’s get out of here as fast as we can.” She nodded, and I motioned for her to follow me. The shortest path to the street lay through the house next door so through the house we went—running, stumbling, falling, and then running again until in headlong flight we tripped over something and fell sprawling into the street. Getting to my feet, I discovered that I had tripped over a man’s head. “Excuse me! Excuse me, please!” I cried hysterically. There was no answer. The man was dead. The head had belonged to a young officer whose body was crushed beneath a massive gate. We stood in the street, uncertain and afraid, until a house across from us began to sway and then with a rending motion fell almost at our feet. Our own house began to sway, and in a minute it, too, collapsed in a cloud of dust. Other buildings caved in or toppled. Fires sprang up and whipped by a vicious wind began to spread. It finally dawned on us that we could not stay there in the street, so we turned our steps towards the hospital. Our home was gone; we were wounded and needed treatment; and after all, it was my duty to be with my staff. This latter was an irrational thought—what good could I be to anyone, hurt as I was. We started out, but after twenty or thirty steps I had to stop. My breath became short, my heart pounded, and my legs gave way under me. An overpower-

BETTMANN/CORBIS

In the near-complete devastation of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb, only modern reinforced concrete buildings remained standing.

ing thirst seized me and I begged Yaekosan to find me some water. But there was no water to be found. After a little my strength somewhat returned and we were able to go on. I was still naked, and although I did not feel the least bit of shame, I was disturbed to realize that modesty had deserted me. On rounding a corner we came upon a soldier standing idly in the street. He had a towel draped across his shoulder, and I asked if he would give it to me to cover my nakedness. The soldier surrendered the towel quite willingly but said not a word. A little later I lost the towel, and Yaeko-san took off her apron and tied it around my loins. Our progress towards the hospital was interminably slow, until finally, my legs, stiff from drying blood, refused to carry me farther. The strength, even the will, to go on deserted me, so I told my wife, who was almost as badly hurt as I, to go on alone. This she objected to, but there was no choice. She had to go ahead and try to find someone to come back for me. Yaeko-san looked into my face for a moment, and then, without saying a word, turned away and began running towards the hospital. Once, she looked back and waved and in a moment she was swal-

lowed up in the gloom. It was quite dark now, and with my wife gone, a feeling of dreadful loneliness overcame me. I must have gone out of my head lying there in the road because the next thing I recall was discovering that the clot on my thigh had been dislodged and blood was again spurting from the wound. I pressed my hand to the bleeding area and after a while the bleeding stopped and I felt better. Could I go on? I tried. It was all a nightmare—my wounds, the darkness, the road ahead. My movements were ever so slow; only my mind was running at top speed. In time I came to an open space where the houses had been removed to make a fire lane. Through the dim light I could make out ahead of me the hazy outlines of the Communications Bureau’s big concrete building, and beyond it the hospital. My spirits rose because I knew that now someone would find me; and if I should die, at least my body would be found. I paused to rest. Gradually things around me came into focus. There were the shadowy forms of people, some of whom looked like walking ghosts. Others moved as though in pain, like scarecrows, their arms held out from

their bodies with forearms and hands dangling. These people puzzled me until I suddenly realized that they had been burned and were holding their arms out to prevent the painful friction of raw surfaces rubbing together. A naked woman carrying a naked baby came into view. I averted my gaze. Perhaps they had been in the bath. But then I saw a naked man, and it occurred to me that, like myself, some strange thing had deprived them of their clothes. An old woman lay near me with an expression of suffering on her face; but she made no sound. Indeed, one thing was common to everyone I saw—complete silence. All who could were moving in the direction of the hospital. I joined in the dismal parade when my strength was somewhat recovered, and at last reached the gates of the Communications Bureau. MHQ From Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6–September 30, 1945, by Michihiko Hachiya, translated and edited by Warner Wells, M.D. Copyright © 1955 by the University of North Carolina Press, renewed 1983 by Warner Wells. Foreword by John W. Dower © 1995 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu.

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HistoryNet Reader

A sampling of decisive moments, remarkable adventures, memorable characters, surprising encounters, and great ideas from our sister publications

A Mere Rabble-Rouser

The Most Awful Thing

Jaw-Dropping Air Campaign

Adolf Hitler had shown little interest in talking to foreign reporters, but in late 1931, when he was widely seen as Germany’s next leader, he finally agreed to meet with Dorothy Thompson, a savvy American reporter with a keen eye and a crisp style.

Planning military operations around an unprecedented weapon was not easy, given the veil of secrecy concealing it even from those charged with its use. Fleet Admiral and Chief of Naval Operations Ernest J. King could not tell his staff—not even his intelligence chiefs—of the atomic bomb’s existence.

A big bridge known as the Dragon’s Jaw was a key focus of Rolling Thunder, the 1965 air campaign against North Vietnam intended to destroy enemy infrastructure. One attack squadron commander said the bridge “stood out from everything else so well that we felt we just had to get it. After a while it became a symbol, to both the Vietnamese and us.”

“Now this is very, very secret, what I’m going to say to you,” Admiral King told Captain William Smedberg, his intelligence head, in early summer. “I want you and your staff…to tell me when you think the Japanese will surrender if the most awful thing you can imagine happens to them in, say, the next two or three months.” Smedberg had no idea what King was talking about. He supposed “the most awful thing” was a big earthquake. Japan had a long history with them, and he knew the Allies had discussed packing a line of freighters with explosives and detonating them along a fault line. The Interim Committee, an advisory committee on the political and policy effects of the bomb, submitted its recommendations to President Truman, proposing to use the bomb against Japan as soon as possible, without warning, and against a target that would demonstrate the weapon’s “devastating strength.” The weapon “should be used against Japan at the earliest opportunity…on a dual target, namely, a military installation or war plant surrounded by or adjacent to homes or other buildings most susceptible to damage.”

The Dragon’s Jaw, near Thanh Hoa, a village south of Hanoi, bustled with enemy troops, supplies, trains, and vehicles. Despite hundreds of bombs dropped on it, holes blown through it, pulverized approaches around it, and sagging beams beneath it, the bridge— overbuilt and repaired around the clock—remained operational. The steel span, 540 feet long and 56 feet wide, was supported by a central concrete pier 16 feet thick. It had a 12-foot center strip for a rail line flanked by 22-foot roadways. High hills at both ends provided solid-rock anchors and channeled attacking planes into predictable paths. Over the summer of 1965, 19 pilots went down on missions around Thanh Hoa, including Commander James Stockdale, who got an unusual view of the bridge when he was trucked across it as a captive. “All passage was single-file due to cumulative bombing damage,” Stockdale said. “I could look up in the reflected light and see that the girders had been twisted and bent by impacts, probably 500-pounders.”

Thompson did her homework, interviewing German politicians and Nazi supporters, watching Hitler’s speeches, and reading Mein Kampf. She recognized that he was a “magnificent propagandist” and orator. She understood his political beliefs: “a mixture of fascism, racialist philosophy…antisemitism and muddled socialism.” But she wasn’t prepared for the man she met, who seemed so…pathetic. “He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones,” she wrote. “He is inconsequent and voluble, illpoised, insecure.…His movements are awkward, almost undignified and most un-martial….The eyes alone are notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroid—they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.” Thompson looked at Hitler and saw a nonentity, a mere rabble-rouser incapable of leading a great nation. He didn’t carry himself like a powerful politician, and he certainly didn’t seem capable of becoming what many people feared—a future dictator of Germany. He didn’t even possess the political skill necessary to charm an interviewer. From “Dorothy Thompson Underestimates Hitler,” by Peter Carlson, American History, October 2015

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From “Truman Takes Charge,” by Jonathan W. Jordan, World War II, September–October 2015

From “Slaying the Dragon,” by Don Hollway, Vietnam, October 2015

For more about HistoryNet magazines, go to HistoryNet.com.

Behind the Lines Iraq’s Queen Mother Unlikely nation-maker Gertrude Bell redrew the map of the Middle East by K. M. Kostyal

ROGER-VIOLLET/THE IMAGE WORKS

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n 1908 a British engineer-geologist effectively reengineered geopolitics—and daily life—for the foreseeable future. On the morning of May 26, George Reynolds and his crew struck oil in western Persia. In the following decade, the region took on more meaning to the Western world than merely a patchwork of empty deserts, Ottoman territories, and tribal fiefdoms. Yet in the early 20th century, that was what it was. One person who understood that reality was a middle-aged, Oxford-educated Englishwoman (a rarity in that time) named Gertrude Bell. In the years just prior to Reynolds’s strike, Bell had become well acquainted with Tehran, Constantinople, Damascus, and the desert world of what was then called the Near East. Assembling her own small caravans, she had crisscrossed Syria and gained fame as an explorer with the 1907 publication of her travels, The Desert and the Sown. The vastness of the desert and unbridled exoticism of the Near East suited Bell better than the carefully contrived British society of the time, and like George Reynolds, she would leave a lasting mark—for better or worse—on the region. Bell initially came to the Near East in 1892, visiting family friends in Tehran. Her pedigree stood her in good stead in her early travels. The Bells, Newcastle iron manufacturers and industrialists (her grandfather had brought aluminum manufacturing to Britain), were among the empire’s wealthiest moguls, and Gertrude moved freely among the Bell in 1921, on the eve of the Cairo Conference called by Winston Churchill. She wears her signature large hat and feather boa.

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Behind the Lines diplomats tending British interests across the Near East, Europe, and India. While diplomats generally had little interest in tribal affairs, Bell found those affairs and intrigues a source of endless fascination. She drank coffee in Bedouin tents, befriended the fiercely territorial and secretive Druze, swallowed lambs’ eyeballs at Arab feasts, and, having ventured into Arabia’s brutal Najd Desert at the age of 46, spent weeks in Ha’il as a semicaptive guest of the ruling Rashid family. It was 1914, and her time in captivity was well deployed. She came away convinced that family strife would dismantle the Rashids’ power and leave their enemy, Ibn Saud, victor in Arabia. Unbidden, she reported her findings to a British official in Constantinople, who wired the foreign secretary to say that “Miss Bell’s journey, which is in all respects a most remarkable exploit, has naturally excited the greatest interest here.” As war threatened, she was asked for her impression of political conditions in Syria, Iraq, and Arabia. “Syria…is exceedingly pro-English,” she reported, while “Iraq would not willingly see Turkey at war with us and would take no part in it… Kuweit depends for his life on our help and he knows it…I think we could make it pretty hot for the Turks in the Gulf.” Despite her growing reputation, when war came, Bell did what other British women did—volunteered in the Red

earlier on a visit to Hogarth’s excavations at Carchemish, on the Syrian-Turkish border. Both Bell and Lawrence understood that the Arab tribes were key to the region and should be courted and cajoled by the British. Bell served in Cairo only briefly before she was asked to move to Iraq. “The intention was that having thoroughly mastered…the intricacies of Arab politics in the Hejaz she should now work on tribal questions from the Iraq side,” her friend and mentor Sir Percy Cox wrote. Bell would do that, and more, for 10 years to come, among other things writing dispatches for the inter-intelligence Arab Bulletin that have become legendary.

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ell was arrogant, headstrong, chainsmoking, opinionated, and generally indispensable. She moved easily in the company of men and enjoyed hosting her own social events, including what were known as the “pleasant Sunday afternoons of Miss Gertrude Bell,” where Frank Balfour, Sir Edgar Bonham Carter, and other British officials mingled with Arab intelligentsia. Fluent in Arabic and sympathetic to the cultures of Mesopotamia, Bell became known to the people of Iraq as khatun, or queen. “As long as I am here I can get all the new stuff [intelligence], but much of it walks in on two feet, in the shape of a sheikh down from Nasariyah or elsewhere, and when I am

Her boundaries defined a nation that had not existed Cross. Then in late 1915 archaeologist David Hogarth wrote from Cairo to say that her expertise on Arab tribes was needed there. Hogarth was working at a newly formed information-gathering agency that would shortly become the Arab Bureau. Elated, Bell set sail. In Cairo she became reacquainted with the “little fellow”—T. E. Lawrence—a young archaeologist she had met several years

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gone there will be no one to collect it,” she wrote early in her Iraqi tenure, when the Arab Bureau lobbied to bring her back in Cairo. From Iraq, she still advised on the tribal situation, and “Lawrence, relying on her reports, made signal use [of them] in the Arab campaigns of 1917 and 1918,” David Hogarth reported. In 1919 Bell left Iraq briefly for Paris and the peace conference called by the

Allies to address the postwar world and divvy up among them the lands of the vanquished Central Powers. Along with Faisal—Lawrence’s compatriot in the Arab Revolt—Lawrence himself, and others, Bell watched and offered opinions on European mandates and the best way to move forward on the Arab Question. “Our Eastern affairs are complex beyond words,” Bell wrote to her father from the conference, “and until I came there was no one to get the Mesopotamian side of the question at first hand.” Bell’s British colleague (and later nemesis) in Iraq, A. T. Wilson, more or less agreed: “[No] one except Miss Bell had any first-hand knowledge of Iraq or Nejd, or indeed of Persia. The very existence of a Shia majority in Iraq was denied…, and Miss Bell and I found it impossible to convince either the Military or the Foreign Office Delegations that Kurds in the Mosul

MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY/THE IMAGE WORKS

Bell often planned social gatherings that allowed British officials to mingle with prominent Arabs. Among the guests at this 1922 desert picnic is the new king of Iraq, Faisal I (foreground, far right).

vilayet were numerous and likely to be troublesome, that Ibn Saud was a power seriously to be reckoned with.” Even before the conference, Bell had been asked to draw the borders for a potential state of Iraq, and she had included within it the provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. Her boundaries defined a nation that had not existed, and the mere concept of a unified Iraq did nothing to ensure its cohesion. The majority Shia were rural, seminomadic tribal peoples, while the Sunni, favored by the British and the Ottomans, were often wealthy and urbane. Tensions between the two sects only grew in the newly proclaimed Iraq. Bell attempted, sometimes covertly but always cautiously, to mediate between the two and at the same time to quell the Arab nationalist fervor for independence. “Whatever our future policy is to be we cannot now leave the country in the state

of chaos which we have created, no one can master it if we can’t,” she wrote her father in August 1920. But Britain was paying an enormous cost to administer Iraq, impelling Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill to call a conference in Cairo the following year to discuss the future of Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. At the conference Bell and Lawrence successfully lobbied Churchill to support Faisal as Iraq’s first king; he had recently lost his Syrian homeland and its kingship when he attempted an uprising against the French mandate. Bell was convinced Faisal could lead Iraq, but he proved a poor choice. An outsider, he lacked any real following in Mesopotamia and the talent for the enormous task of uniting and controlling it. As Iraq foundered on a sea of uncertainty, Bell became less and less the great

khatun. Her increasing despair was exacerbated by her father’s situation. The vast family fortune had melted away in the face of bad decisions, labor strikes, and a generally changing world. Increasingly, Bell turned to archaeology and the establishment of a museum in Baghdad to house the new nation’s antiquities, but depression dogged her. She was two days away from her 58th birthday, when in the heat of a Baghdad summer, she took an overdose of sleeping pills that ended her life. On her 1892 trip to Persia, 24-yearold Bell had written her cousin, “Are we the same people I wonder when all our surroundings, associations, acquaintances are changed?” If she had never been disabused of British superiority or its imperial mandate, Bell nonetheless had surely been changed by—and had profoundly changed—Iraq. MHQ

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Surrendering can be a very personal act, as it is for these Japanese army officers, each laying down his sword in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1945.

Japan

Why agreed to

Unconditional Surrender The endgame challenge of World War II: How to force Japan—with millions of its men still under arms and still undefeated—to accept unconditional surrender

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS, IND 4845

By Richard B. Frank

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japanese surrender 1945

T

What factor might undermine the will of the American people to see the war through to unconditional surrender? The navy, led by Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, had studied ways to wage war with Japan for nearly four decades and believed that invading the Japanese home islands was sheer folly. Naval planners calculated that Japanese defenders would inevitably outnumber any conceivable American expeditionary force and that Japan’s terrain would negate American advantages of firepower and mobility. This reasoning propelled naval officers to identify massive casualties as the factor most likely to undermine American popular commitment to the goal of unconditional surrender. Thus, the navy advocated ending the war by a campaign of blockade and bombardment. But what were the full implications of the strategy of blockade and bombardment? While much attention has been paid to the bombing of cities, little scrutiny has fallen on what an effective blockade would have entailed for the Japanese. For centuries, naval blockades served as a legitimate strategy under an evolving international regime that tacitly allowed for a blockad ing power to halt importation of “contraband” (weapons and supplies related to war making) but not to block other items, especially food for ciArchitects of Japan’s final defeat, these senior officers debated the means to achieve unconditional vilians. In the First World War, Britain changed the surrender: (left to right) General of the Army Douglas MacArthur favored invasion of the Japanese rules to include food, even for homeland; Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz harbored grave doubts about it; Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King civilians. This was the stanopposed invasion as “sheer folly”; and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall believed it was “essential.” dard under which U.S. straters as the U.S. national war aim. Far from being just egists contemplated the proposed blockade of a slogan about victory, it was an essential element in Japan—a strategy that ultimately aimed at killing the coming two years of planning for an enduring countless Japanese, mostly noncombatants, by postwar peace. Unconditional surrender afforded starvation. the legal authority—well beyond established interThe army under George C. Marshall had national law of military occupation—that would never invested the same intellectual capital in permit a profound internal reorganization of the examining conf lict with Japan. Not until the Axis nations. Thus, dropping the goal of unconlate 1930s did it explore the prospect of war with ditional surrender would have produced a very Japan and conclude that invasion might be necdifferent postwar transformation of Japan. essary. By 1944 invasion seemed essential, given The challenge of devising a military strategy to the army’s bedrock conviction that the longer achieve unconditional surrender fell to America’s the war dragged on, the more public support Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their debates on the subfor unconditional surrender would waver. The ject from 1944 to the spring of 1945 ultimately United States could not afford to wait for the produced an unstable compromise between two long-term effects of a blockade. conflicting visions. At one key level, the conflict The Joint Chiefs merged these two conflicting between the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army centered views into a strategic plan in May 1945. They auon a political rather than a strictly military issue: thorized the continuation and intensification of

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NATIONAL ARCHIVES (2); U.S. NAVY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; OPPOSITE: U.S. AIR FORCE/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

he haunting specter of nuclear annihilation has cast an ominous shadow over most accounts of the end of the Asia-Pacific War. But though the nuclear issue will linger as long as those weapons exist, that singular focus neglects at least two other nightmare scenarios that were emerging in Japan in 1945. One involved the American plan to invade Japan; the other, a bombing campaign of Japanese cities to accompany the ongoing sea blockade. Discussions of those strategies usually focus on incendiary attacks on Japanese cities, but the most terrifying outcomes would have resulted from new targeting directives that the United States considered in August 1945 and their implications for Japan’s population. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had proclaimed “unconditional surrender” of the Axis pow-

A rail yard about 25 miles southwest of Hiroshima was methodically demolished on August 14, 1945, in a single bombing raid by B-29s of the XXI Bomber Command.

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japanese surrender 1945

the ongoing blockade and bombardment until November 1, 1945. At that point, the United States would launch Operation Downfall, a two-phase invasion of the Japanese homeland. The first step, Operation Olympic, set to begin on November 1, called for the Sixth Army’s seizure of approximately the southern third of Kyushu, southernmost of the main Japanese home islands. Olympic would take over air and naval bases to support a second phase, Operation Coronet, in which two armies would secure the Tokyo-Yokohama region. Coronet was tentatively set to launch March 1, 1946. In a supporting policy paper, the Joint Chiefs pointed out that the overall Allied war aim remained unconditional surrender, and with it a program of far-ranging political changes in Japan that would ensure it never again posed a threat to peace. As the chiefs acknowledged, however, unconditional surrender was an alien concept in Japan. Indeed, by Japanese count, in some 2,600 years no government had ever surrendered to a foreign power. Moreover, the chiefs noted, throughout the entire course of the Pacific war, no Japanese military unit had ever surrendered. There was no guarantee that the Japanese government would

In August 1945, days after Hiroshima was nearly leveled by the first American atomic bomb, a survivor wheels past the domed industrial exposition building— one of a few structures left standing.

In some 2,600 years, no Japanese government had ever surrendered to a foreign power surrender—or that, if it did, the Japanese armed forces would comply with surrender. Thus, the chiefs recognized that even if a two-phase initial invasion succeeded, the United States might be faced with the absence of an organized capitulation of Japan’s armed forces. In that case, the Allies would have to find and defeat, unit by unit, what was then estimated to be four to five million Japanese under arms in the home islands, on the Asian continent, and across the Pacific Ocean. This made the potential casualties under Downfall appear a modest down payment on the final cost of a complete Japanese defeat. In an April 1945 memorandum, the famously reticent Admiral King underscored the fact that the chiefs had achieved merely an unstable compromise. He stressed that he agreed only to the chiefs issuing an order authorizing the invasion, so that the option would be available in November. NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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But he cautioned that the chiefs would come back to review the actual need for an invasion in August or September. President Harry S. Truman, deeply concerned about potential U.S. casualties, gave hesitant approval to Olympic in June 1945.

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he intelligence estimates for Operation Olympic projected that by November 1, 1945, Kyushu would hold just six Japanese field divisions, and only three in the southern Kyushu target area. The Japanese were expected to deploy piecemeal a total of eight to 10 field divisions, or 350,000 troops, against Olympic, supported by 2,500 to 3,000 planes. These estimates allowed the invasion a comfortable three-to-one or better superiority of troops and planes at the time of the landing. But from July 9 and continuing well into August, U.S. radio intelligence unmasked a massive buildup of Japanese forces in the homeland, including a huge bolstering of Kyushu, centered in the proposed landing areas. By war’s end, intelligence identified 13 of the 14 existing Japanese field divi-

MacArthur deprecated the intelligence and affirmed that Olympic remained viable sions (nine in the southern half of the island) and five of its 11 brigades on Kyushu. The final revised estimate on August 20 credited the Japanese with all 14 field divisions and 625,000 troops on Kyushu. An adjusted picture of Japanese airpower also emerged. It was equally bleak. A Washington-based intelligence committee figured Japanese homeland air strength at 5,911 aircraft—nearly twice the highest earlier projections. The intelligence center for the Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet Headquarters calculated that on August 13 the Japanese had readied 10,290 aircraft for homeland defense—more than triple the highest previous projection. The actual total was still worse, about 10,700. Based on this rapid intelligence gathering from July to August, it appears very likely that further radio intelligence would have disclosed within a few more weeks all, or virtually all, of the Japanese deployments on Kyushu.

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As this collage of alarming intelligence accumulated, it was passed to civilian and uniformed leaders, who realized its political significance. An assessment of Japan’s highest-level diplomatic messages, prepared by naval intelligence, was disseminated to all senior policy makers on July 27. It stressed that the combination of military and diplomatic intercepts indicated there was no chance that the Imperial Army would agree to any terms acceptable to the United States so long as the emperor’s soldiers retained confidence in their counterinvasion plans. By July 29 Major General Charles A. Willoughby, intelligence chief for General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, declared that the increasing Japanese strength on Kyushu threatened “to grow to [the] point where we attack on a ratio of one (1) to one (1) which is not the recipe for victory.” The intelligence disclosures served to reinforce the view of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, who regarded Operation Olympic as unwise. Senior staff officers of the Joint Chiefs in Washington shared Willoughby and Nimitz’s doubts about Olympic. On August 6, the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Joint War Plans Committee of the Joint Chiefs forwarded a report, “Alternatives to Olympic,” to the Joint Staff Planners, a body just below the Joint Chiefs themselves. Noting the alarming fresh intelligence estimates of Japanese preparations on Kyushu, the committee recommended that commanders formulate “alternate plans and submit timely recommendations.” The committee itself was looking at alternatives. On August 7 General Marshall sent a dispatch to MacArthur, with a copy to Fleet Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff. In essence, it asked whether MacArthur still supported Olympic in view of the intelligence revelations about Japanese preparations. In his reply, MacArthur deprecated the intelligence picture and emphatically affirmed that Olympic remained viable. After receiving MacArthur’s August 9 message, Admiral King moved to intervene decisively in the controversy over Olympic. He packaged the exchange between Marshall and MacArthur and sent it to Nimitz, asking for his comments and requesting that a copy of them be sent to MacArthur. Thus, King intended to make good his April prediction to the Joint Chiefs that they would be reconsidering the invasion strategy in August or September. Exactly what would have ensued from King’s call for a showdown over invasion strategy remains uncertain, because on August 10 the Japanese

U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Many Japanese, both civilian and military, were surprised, stunned, bewildered, outraged, and overcome by Emperor Hirohito’s decision to accept unconditional surrender.

japanese surrender 1945

proffered their first authentic peace proposal, agreeing to the terms set forth in July’s Potsdam Proclamation—but with the critical exception that the Allies would agree to make the emperor supreme not only over the Japanese government but over the occupation commander. This would have given Hirohito veto power over the proposed occupation reforms, which were the chief objective of an unconditional surrender. The response skillfully accepted the Japanese proposal but insisted that the emperor be subordinate to the occupation commander. Hirohito finally accepted these terms on August 14. While the Japanese government bowed to the emperor’s decision, the compliance of the Japanese armed forces remained uncertain

for several days. And during that interval, some factions of the Japanese military attempted a coup. Meanwhile, active debate in the United States over the invasion strategy had continued. On August 13 Marshall seriously examined a drastic revision of Olympic that would have involved using all available nuclear weapons as “tactical” support during the invasion. Soviet plans to invade Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese home island, may also have revived interest in an alternative invasion site, probably in northern Honshu. But then another development—a second nightmare scenario that was marching in tandem with atomic weapons—may have redirected or even halted the controversy over an invasion strategy.

U.S. ARMY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Japan’s surrender was formalized on September 2, 1945, when officials of all the governments involved in the Pacific War, including the Japanese foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu (below), signed the historic document.

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Critical changes in the American strategic bombing program had been implemented in August 1945. At that time, the Twentieth Air Force, based in the Marianas, was a B-29 force, with 1,002 planes at its command. The Eighth Air Force was withdrawing from Europe, reequipping with B-29s and long-range fighters, and redeploying to Okinawa, a process expected to extend into early 1946. When the buildup finished, the two air forces would muster 1,648 B-29s and almost 1,000 long-range fighters. Preliminary investigation of the strategic bombing campaign in Germany indicated that by far the most effective targeting involved transportation and oil. A new set of air force operational directives, issued on August 11, 1945, reflected these conclusions. They assigned 178 Japanese targets to the Twentieth Air Force and 41 to the Eighth Air Force. Significantly, the new directives prioritized transportation (67), particularly rail targets, over cities (35), euphemistically called “urban industrial areas.” The remaining targets included aircraft industry (36), munitions storage (41), arsenals (7), oil storage (17), and chemical plants (16). Staff officers figured that crew fatigue and a lack of crew replacements would probably limit monthly bomb delivery to about 50,000 tons. That meant that between mid-August and early November, American bombers would nearly match the total tonnage (157,000) that had been delivered by B-29s between November 1944 and early August 1945. Moreover, greatly improved visual bombing accuracy and enhanced electronic aids promised to multiply the devastating effects of this tonnage. Far from moderating the bombing effects on the Japanese population, the shift of target priority from cities to the rail transportation system threatened to produce an immensely greater catastrophe, as it would disrupt the already critical food supply. Since 1944 the American blockade had effectively cut off seaborne food imports, and by 1945 Japan’s own food production was collapsing. The overall food shortage had supercharged a black market that siphoned away even more foodstuffs from any controlled distribution system. Owing primarily to a projected shortfall in the autumn 1945 rice harvest, the nation would face a second nightmare in 1946, worse than atomic weapons: mass starvation. In June 1945 Japan’s leaders had proclaimed their resolve to fight on to the end. But they had understood that even if they could defeat or badly bloody an initial invasion of Japan—with enormous Japanese casualties—and thus achieve a negotiated settlement that preserved their rule, vast numbers

of Japanese would perish of starvation in the “peace” of 1946. Even this dire scenario assumed that food, especially rice, could still be moved from areas of surplus production to areas of food deficit. Normally Japan’s food was moved mostly by ship, but by August 1945 Japanese sea transportation was near extinction as an organized system—which left only the nation’s modest rail system. If the new Allied bombing directive were to destroy the rail system, then almost half the population—basically everyone in Tokyo and those to the southwest on the main island of Honshu— would face death by starvation.

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n September 2 Japan formally surrendered. As the American occupation began, U.S. authorities soon realized that Japan’s food situation verged on catastrophe, with some estimating that 10 million Japanese might starve to death. Led by MacArthur, in perhaps the noblest moment of his checkered career, the occupation command convinced a reluctant Washington to ship large quantities of food supplies to Japan. This additional food, aided by Japan’s rickety national food-rationing system, barely managed to forestall massive death by starvation and malnutrition. For three years, Japan’s population remained on a very marginal diet. The stark consequences of the use of nuclear weapons will continue to focus the attention of later generations on the end of the Asia-Pacific War. Yet, as appropriate as that attention may be, these other two nightmare scenarios ought not be neglected. With the evidence now available, one nightmare recognized at the time—that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would produce stupendous Japanese and American casualties—is validated. Indeed, American leaders were seriously reconsidering the wisdom of that course as the war ended. By contrast, however, the nightmare that would have resulted from the redirection of the strategic bombing campaign and its lethal interface with Japan’s ongoing food crisis was not grasped until hostilities ceased—at least not by the United States. We now know that Japan was at least delivered from that nightmarish outcome. MHQ Richard B. Frank is currently working on a trilogy about the Asia-Pacific War, 1937–1945, and on the U.S. National World War II Museum’s Road to Tokyo exhibit, slated to open December 2015.

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Japan’s Radical Postwar Turnaround From Militarism to Pacifism By Tomoyuki Sasaki

Looks like a modern army, but Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force (SDF), formed in 1954, is constitutionally limited to maintaining internal security—for now.

CHRIS STEELE-PERKINS/MAGNUM PHOTOS

japan’s pacifism

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he history of modern Japan until 1945 is a history of war and military expansion. Starting with Okinawa in 1879, Japan controlled Taiwan, Korea, Karafuto, the South Pacific Mandate, and Manchuria. By the eve of the Pacific War, it had grown into a large colonial empire. Defeat in the war and the subsequent U.S. occupation, however, dismantled the empire, abolished the imperial army and navy, and ended military conscription. Since then Japan has not waged a single war. Postwar Japan did, however, begin rearmament in 1950 under the order of the U.S. occupation forces, and it established a new military organization—the National Police Reserve, predecessor of the present-day Self-Defense Forces. But it has carefully maintained civilian control of this military organization and has never used it to threaten other countries. This

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is a radical social and political turn away from Japan’s traditional militarism, and a number of developments account for the change. First of all, at the most fundamental level, the constitution of Japan, promulgated in 1946 and enacted the next year, prepared a firm theoretical ground upon which to promote pacifism. Approved by the Japanese Diet, this constitution was written by the American occupiers, who upheld demilitarization and democratization as the foremost goals of occupation. Together with popular sovereignty and respect for fundamental human rights, pacifism constituted a crucial principle of the constitution. The preamble recognized the “right to live in peace” for “all peoples of the world.” Article 9 specifically renounced war as a sovereign right of the nation; banned the nation from possessing “land, sea, and air forces and other war potential”; and rejected the right to belligerency.

Of course, the constitution alone does not explain why Japan managed to change so radically in the post–World War II era. A second factor was the extreme physical devastation brought about by the war. American airstrikes at the end of the war destroyed most major cities and metropolitan areas—Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagoya, to name a few. The two atomic bombs dropped in August 1945 killed thousands of people not only as the direct effect of the bombing but also through radiation-induced diseases. Many people also died in the process of repatriation from the former colonies, and many families were separated. The Japanese were simply exhausted from a war that had lasted 15 years, beginning with the Manchurian Incident of 1931. Also, as Cold War tensions mounted between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, it was not realistic for war-devastated Japan

to envisage its future as a military power. These conditions made it rather easy for the Japanese people to accept and support the new constitution. At the same time, the harrowing experiences at the end of the war allowed many Japanese to see themselves mainly as victims of the war rather than as victimizers who had caused their Asian neighbors immeasurable suffering. In addition, a number of people and organizations in Japan were committed to defending pacifism. The Socialist Party was one of the most enthusiastic advocates of the constitution and a major critic of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. Though the Socialist Party was out of power for most of the postwar era (it took power in 1994 for the first time since 1947), it managed, with other other oppositional parties, to maintain a hold on at least one-third of the seats in the Diet, which enabled it to prevent the LDP from revising the

The extent of the destruction of Japan’s cities in World War II by B-29 incendiary raids is shown on this U.S. Army Air Forces postwar graphic. (Each city is paired with a same-size U.S. city.)

THIRD REPORT OF THE COMMANDING GENERAL OF THE ARMY AIR FORCES TO THE SECRETARY OF WAR/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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japan’s pacifism

Japan’s SDF is now largely equipped with domestically produced weaponry, like this Mitsubishi Type 74 main battle tank.

constitution—a constitutional amendment had to be approved by at least two-thirds of the Diet before going to a national referendum. Intellectuals also played a crucial public role in the media, critiquing prewar and wartime militarism and endorsing postwar pacifism. Furthermore, the teacher’s union, conscious that schoolteachers in wartime Japan had contributed to mobilizing students for the state’s war effort, energetically engaged in peace education. Backed by these organizations as well as politically conscious individuals, peace movements flourished. They gained momentum during the 1960 protest—one of the largest in the history of modern Japan—against the renewal of the U.S.Japan Security Treaty, which, among other things, allowed for U.S. military bases in Japan. Then in the following decade, protests intensified against both the Vietnam War and the growth of military bases (both American and Japanese). From the

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1950s to the 1970s Japanese citizens also contested in court the legitimacy of the continuing presence of U.S. forces and the Self-Defense Forces. In 1959 the Tokyo District Court ruled that the American forces stationed in Japan constituted the sort of “war potential” that was banned under Article 9 of the constitution and were therefore unconstitutional. In 1973 the Sapporo District Court deemed the SDF unconstitutional and ordered the removal of an SDF missile base from the plaintiffs’ town. Though these rulings were overturned by higher courts, allowing both the American forces and the SDF to maintain their legal legitimacy, they confirmed that peace movements were helping to disseminate the constitutional spirit of pacifism nationwide. Finally and paradoxically, the presence of American forces on Japanese soil permitted Japan to embrace pacifism. Japan regained sovereignty in 1952, but it returned to the international community as the United States’ Cold War ally, protected

FRANCK ROBICHON/EPA/CORBIS

by America’s enormous military might. Because of this particular condition, postwar Japan managed to keep military expenditures relatively low and the size of the SDF relatively small. This helped reinforce the idea that Japan was a peaceful country, even if the peace it enjoyed was actually made possible in part by American arms. While not discrediting or underestimating the importance of the efforts Japanese people made in advancing pacifism, we should nevertheless recognize that postwar Japan has never achieved complete demilitarization but has depended on military power for the maintenance of peace. The Japanese constitution remains intact to this day, although since the 1990s the government, in the name of contributing to international peace efforts, has extended the scope of the SDF’s activities beyond Japanese territory. The SDF has offered disaster relief in many countries, as well as participating in United Nations peacekeeping

operations. It also supported the United States’ war in Iraq in noncombat areas until 2009. In 2014 Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet revised the interpretation of the constitution so that Japan could exercise the right not only to individual but also to collective self-defense—though scholars of law in Japan generally agree that it is impossible to draw this interpretation from the constitution. In sum, a gulf is widening between the ideal of unarmed peace, which many Japanese once thought the constitution advocated, and the reality of the nation’s growing use of the military. The time will soon come for the Japanese to consider seriously how to bridge this gulf. MHQ Tomoyuki Sasaki is an associate professor of history at Eastern Michigan University. His specialty is modern Japan and East Asian history. He is the author of Japan’s Postwar Military and Civil Society: Contesting a Better Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

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I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death. —Revelation 6:8

Pale Horse The influenza pandemic and the apocalyptic climax of the Great War by Michael S. Neiberg

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PAUL THOMPSON/FPG/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

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n 1918 they called it Spanish flu—not because it originated in Spain but because Spain, a neutral nation in the ongoing European conflict, did not censor its press as the nations at war did. Spanish newspapers could report freely on the rapidly spreading virus that was killing so many people. By the summer of 1918 Spain’s own king had fallen critically ill from influenza, cementing the link in the public mind between the influenza pandemic and Spain. ✭ It’s possible, however, that the disease originated in the United States. Some evidence indicates that the initial outbreak Some people thought it occurred in rural Kansas in March 1918. From there, the disease easily had arisen from a plot by traveled to the massive army base at their wartime enemies Fort Riley in northeastern Kansas, then spread through other American military camps, where tens of thousands of men were in wartime training. Infected soldiers took the disease with them as they moved to other bases overseas, and by year’s end cases had begun to appear in New Zealand, India, and Russia. ✭ Soldiers reported symptoms that included headache, fever, body aches, prostration, and a cough that often developed into pneumonia. Sometimes the disease

Preventive propaganda aimed at a new enemy—influenza— a 1918 poster featured this gauze-masked Red Cross nurse and warnings to avoid “Worry, Fear and Fatigue,” and “tak[ing] any person’s breath.”

influenza in world war i

produced discoloration of the skin as the body became progressively deprived of oxygen. Some people thought it had arisen from a plot by their wartime enemies, either through sabotage or by poisoning water supplies. Others attributed the disease to divine vengeance—punishment of mankind for having started a war that seemed to have no end. Medical professionals knew better. They had worried about just such a pandemic even before the start of the war. An 1890 flu pandemic had hit the United States hard and struck communities with few resources to fight it. Doctors were concerned about the impact of another such pandemic in wartime. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had even funded a 1916 study titled “Epidemics Resulting from Wars” that featured case studies of disease transmission during wars through the centuries. It warned that although the conditions for pandemics existed in peacetime, “this danger is ten times as great in large assemblages of troops during a war….In war times it is often impossible to take the necessary precautions, since the attention

of the commanders is directed toward very definite objects, to which all other considerations are subordinate.”

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t about the same time the Carnegie report was published, a relatively isolated outbreak of flu had, coincidentally, moved through the Eastern Front, although it did not kill nearly as many people as the flu would kill two years later. It did, however, immobilize a key Austro-Hungarian commander, Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin, at a critical moment during the Russian Brusilov offensive, suggesting that small microbes might well play a huge role in shaping the outcome of the war. But none of the armies then engaged in the war took any active steps to deal with a future large-scale outbreak. As the Carnegie report correctly predicted, they were, understandably, too fixated on trying to win the war. Although no one knew it at the time, the 1918 influenza

America’s cities take on the terrors of the plague, as the disease spreads and regular routines collapse. Here, members of the Red Cross Motor Corps collect casualties of the pandemic on the streets of St. Louis.

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ATLAS ARCHIVE/THE IMAGE WORKS (2)

outbreak presaged something much more deadly. In wartime, doctors knew, the dangers of pandemics increased dramatically. In past wars, disease had killed far more men than combat had, as health conditions deteriorated and the unhygienic atmosphere of battlefields and military camps led to the rapid spread of all kinds of diseases. From 1914 to 1917 doctors had observed outbreaks of measles, dysentery, cholera, and diphtheria at rates far greater than what they saw in peacetime. They saw as well the inadequacy of military medical staffs to treat these outbreaks. The side that reacted most effectively to the next outbreak might well win the war. As the United States prepared to enter the war, American doctors worried about the possibility (some said near-certainty) of a much more widespread outbreak of infectious disease than in wars past. A large-scale epidemic could reduce or even destroy the ability of the American army to help win the war. Leading American doctors like Rufus Cole, head of the new Rockefeller Institute in New York City, and the widely respected William Henry Welch soon began to raise awareness of the disease threat and to disseminate possible treatment protocols to army doctors. Cole and Welch were among the leaders Fighting the illness at Fort Porter, New York, medical personnel arranged beds alternating in the newer, more scientific methods of head to wall then foot to wall, so patients wouldn’t breathe on one another. treating infectious disease. As early as 1914 they had begun to develop ways to inoculate sachusetts, one of the worst-hit army installations, reported and immunize people against such viruses, but their work was in September 1918: still in its early stages and had yet to make a major impact on This epidemic started about four weeks ago, and has developed so rapidly the practical treatment of soldiers and civilians in the era of the First World War. The newest developments in medical that the camp is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till it has science had not fully penetrated everyday medical care in an passed….These men start with what appears to be an ordinary attack of era when thousands of doctors lacked even bachelor’s degrees. LaGrippe or Influenza, and when brought to the Hosp. they very rapidly Few army doctors had the level of medical knowledge of a develop the most visc[i]ous type of Pneumonia that has ever been seen. Cole or a Welch, and fewer still placed priority on the study Two hours after admission they have the Mahogany spots over the cheek of virology. bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending Specialists in epidemiology, however, realized what they were from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish facing in 1918, as more and more American soldiers began to the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then report sick with fevers as high as 103 degrees, a darkening of the until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is skin, and violent coughs. Typically, such symptoms began to horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these appear within just a day or two of exposure. Often, influenza poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves. We have been turned to pneumonia, causing men to drown in their own averaging about 100 deaths per day, and still keeping it up. There is no doubt fluid. The disease seemed to hit young, healthy men with an in my mind that there is a new mixed infection here, but what I don’t know. unusual ferocity, creating special problems for the military. At American experts on influenza, and on viral epidemiology some army posts, like Camp Sherman in Ohio, half the men generally, went to Camp Devens and to hard-hit cities like were infected. A physician stationed at Camp Devens in Mas-

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Philadelphia. But they could do little more than watch helplessly as their worst nightmares came true. They met with many well-meaning doctors who cared deeply for their patients but lacked the special scientific knowledge for effective treatment. Training army doctors and nurses in modern epidemiology posed another overwhelming challenge, and specialists in influenza were soon in high demand inside the army and navy. When Cole and Welch went to Camp Devens, they were shocked to see the extent of the problem. They knew, moreover, that, even with their expertise, they could do little to help. They could recommend measures for isolating the worst cases and try to convince public health officials inside and outside the military to take the flu epidemic seriously, but they had little authority to force their ideas on a bureaucratic and sclerotic army medical system. They also knew that isolating active cases and even the extreme measure of banning all public gatherings might slow but not stop this pandemic. The doctors did not have the luxury of time. Engaged in a vast and hard-fought war, the U.S. military had to keep training men for duty in Europe. Officials in port cities like Philadelphia and Boston, where soldiers were likely to gather, rarely had the resources or the know-how to deal with the expanding crisis. Thus, the influenza epidemic was sure to spread. And spread it did, eventually infecting from a quarter to a third of the American army and more than 40 percent of the navy.

Ludendorff later blamed the flu for the failure of his 1918 campaign The disease hit the U.S. Army in two waves, the first from roughly March to July 1918 and the second from August to November. The second wave was much more deadly than the first, although it did have one small silver lining: Soldiers who survived the first wave developed an immunity to the second wave and were thus much more likely to survive. The pandemic affected both sides in World War I and began to have an impact on the conduct of the war by late spring 1918. Doctors tried a number of solutions, including distributing quinine, administering nose and throat sprays, making surgical masks mandatory for anyone coming into contact with infected people, and hanging sheets as partitions in barracks, as a way to slow the spread of the disease. Officers and soldiers turned in desperation to tea, herbs, cigarettes, brandy, and a variety of homeopathic remedies, in hopes that something,

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anything, could kill the virus that caused this awful disease. Nothing worked.

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he first German soldiers afflicted with the disease in large numbers served in units fighting on the Western Front as part of General Erich Ludendorff’s massive campaign to win the war in the spring of 1918, before the American army arrived in large numbers and before the suffering German home front collapsed. His March 1918 offensive drove men hard, even as their supplies began to dwindle, creating a precarious situation for the men’s health. In May, German soldiers began to complain about what they called “Flanders fever” or blitzkatarrh (lightning cold, referring to its sudden onset), just as the demands on them to move quickly and fight harder increased. There is no clear evidence to sustain the belief, common in Germany in 1918, that this wave of the flu hit the Germans harder than it hit their enemies. It is possible, though, that German soldiers suffered more because of the twin burdens of combating the flu and simultaneously conducting a brutal offensive. Ludendorff himself alternated between denying that the flu impacted German operations and bemoaning the strength the disease sapped from his men. “It was a grievous business,” he later wrote, “having to listen every morning to the Chiefs of Staffs’ recital of the number of influenza cases and their complaints about the weakness of their troops.” Ludendorff later blamed the flu for the failure of his 1918 campaign, though he also had strong motivations to find an excuse for his own failures. At the same time that American, British, French, and German soldiers were fighting the war, they were struggling to fight off the deadly microbes. Thousands fell ill. In late July the flu seemed to ebb a bit, providing solace to the suffering soldiers of all sides as well as the medical personnel who treated them. Meanwhile, Allied armies had begun to turn the tide of the war, first pushing the Germans back at the Second Battle of the Marne in mid-July, then winning a decisive victory at Amiens on August 8. The great distinguishing feature of the Amiens victory was the 12,000 Germans who gave themselves up rather than fight to the end. To the Allies, it seemed proof that German soldiers were realizing they had no chance to win; they were merely trying to survive by surrendering. At the end of the battle, Kaiser Wilhelm II himself noted, “We have reached the limits of our capacity.” While it will never be known for sure, it seems logical that a large number of the men who surrendered were suffering from flu and physically incapable of fighting any longer. Shortly after Amiens, the number of soldiers reporting sick began to decrease, leading to hopes that the worst was over. Then, as more infected Americans arrived at port cities like Brest and Bordeaux, the disease began to kill again. The American Expeditionary Force quarantined thousands of

U.S. ARMY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

The flu heaped additional horror on the miseries suffered by soldiers in the trenches, like these men of the U.S. 132nd Infantry Regiment fighting north of Verdun. Some estimates blame half the American military deaths in Europe on the illness rather than the war.

men in Brest, and although on the surface a life in Brest might have seemed preferable to being sent to the Western Front, men were dying of the flu in Brest hospitals by the hundreds. Between September 14 and the armistice on November 11, the American Expeditionary Force suffered 316,000 cases of flu. The American 88th Division alone had 2,254 men out of 18,000 sick with the flu in late September. The navy lost 5,027 men to the disease, more than twice the number it lost to enemy action. In all, as many as 46,000 American soldiers may have died in the pandemic. Determining how the virus affected the war is no easy task. Not all armies kept exact records and not all commanders treated the flu in the same way. The Canadians, for example, reported 50,000 cases of influenza in total, both civilian and military, but also reported thousands of other soldiers ill under the generic category of “disease.” Fragmentary evidence suggests that men at the front may have suffered less than men in rear areas, but it might also be true that frontline soldiers,

unwilling to abandon their comrades, might have underreported their disease.

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ost armies reacted slowly and poorly to the spread of the flu, perhaps for the reasons articulated in the Carnegie Endowment report. Drs. Cole and Welch found army doctors unwilling at first to take their advice on how to treat and contain the disease. Many officers assumed that the influenza virus would be no different from other diseases that swept through the trenches from time to time. There had also been influenza outbreaks in 1915 and 1916, and many officers thought that the 1918 outbreak might be no worse than those two. The end of the first wave in 1918 may have inspired confidence that the worst was over, leading armies and societies to take few precautions against another wave. By the time they realized how deadly the next wave of the flu would be, it was too late.

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Just when the war seemed to arrive at its critical turning point, many officers on all sides reacted too slowly to the disease, unwilling to risk anything that might reduce the combat power of their units. Men who should have been quarantined instead went to the front with their units. Periods of rest, moreover, became few and far between. Some commanders at first refused to accept the importance of the disease, although they soon had to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem. The German army, for example, had more than 500,000 flu cases in October 1918. By that point, AEF commander General John Pershing had awakened fully to the dangers of the disease. In the first week of October, 6,160 American soldiers had died from influenza. In mid-October, Pershing warned the army staff that inadequate hospital facilities threatened to undermine his offensive in the Meuse-Argonne. Pershing and Army Chief of Staff Peyton March then debated whether to send the maximum number of soldiers from American training camps to France or quarantine soldiers showing any symptoms. Finally, acknowledging that sick soldiers were of no use to the AEF and could well infect healthy ones, March decided to send only half of the 90,000 replacements Pershing had expected for November. Pershing agreed, even though that decision meant fewer soldiers for his army. Pershing thus had to lead the largest offensive ever fought by the American Expeditionary Force while dealing with the flu outbreak. No one knows the exact number of men with influenza in the U.S. Army at the time of the offensive, and the numbers officially reported are almost certainly too low. Some scholars have used the flu to explain the straggler phenomenon that hit the AEF in the midst of the Meuse-Argonne campaign. Tens of thousands of soldiers, perhaps one in 10, simply walked away from their units for periods of days or even weeks. It is possible that these men suffered from flu and simply needed rest. The vast majority of the stragglers returned to their units within a few days, suggesting that their disappearance likely had more to do with a need for rest than any desire to desert permanently. The army decided not to punish the men severely, perhaps also an indication that it understood they were not cowards but were struggling at the limits of their physical endurance.

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auging the impact of the flu on soldiers merely by looking at the reported numbers is problematic, since the flu interacted with other factors. In the United States, the flu temporarily immobilized some units and for a time halted new inductions into the army. But the American system proved resilient enough to withstand the outbreak relatively well. The Canadian military also proved resilient, with just 776 reported deaths. The death rate among men exposed to the virus in the Canadian army was considerably lower than that in the overall Canadian populace. In the American and Canadian armies, morale held up, despite the fact that the horrors of the flu compounded the horrors of the battlefield. Burying men who caught the virus, the similarity of the darkening of the skin to the victims of

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gas exposure, and the reality that a man could get influenza at any moment all weighed on soldiers. Still, American and Canadian troops generally received quality care and could see the successful end of the war in sight. The worst wave of influenza to hit the Canadian army, moreover, struck after the victory, just as Canadian soldiers were moving into occupation duty in garrisons on the Rhine River. Similarly, although the British Army reported as many as 30,000 cases of influenza in June 1918 alone, the virus did not damage the morale or effectiveness of the British Expeditionary Force. It seems likely that the British were hit harder by the first wave of the flu, which was unbearably agonizing for 72 hours but then usually passed, than by the second wave,

OTIS HISTORICAL ARCHIVES/NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE

Ground zero: Camp Funston, part of Fort Riley, Kansas, reported the first major outbreak of the virulent new disease in spring 1918. Some 1,100 men fell ill, and the afflicted filled an improvised hospital.

which killed the infected far more often. In Germany, by contrast, the worst of the influenza pandemic hit just as the German army was beginning to face the inevitability of its own defeat. It may have led the German government to slow the movement of men from the disease-ravaged Eastern Front to the Western Front, as a way of trying to contain the outbreak. Moving the infected soldiers west would also have meant transiting them through Germany itself, thereby increasing the spread of the pandemic on the home front, where morale had already begun to waver. Many German soldiers who caught relatively minor cases of influenza used it as a justification for desertion, simply walking away to seek rest and isolation. To thousands of soldiers

and civilians alike, the pandemic seemed another sign of the change in German fortunes, alongside the news of retreating armies and the sharp drop in food supplies at home. The timing also suggests that the German army suffered relatively more from the second, more virulent, strain of influenza. By the time of the armistice, one battalion in the German army was suffering an average of 12 deaths per day from influenza. Thus, even though it appears that the British Army suffered more total flu cases than the German army (approximately 1.2 million compared to 900,000), the Germans suffered greater effects than the Allies because of the timing of the flu outbreak and the context in which it struck. Although no one knew it for certain at the time, the most deadly period of inf luenza in Europe coincided directly with the last four months of the war. Almost as soon as the warring parties signed an armistice, the second, most fatal, wave of the f lu stopped. A third wave followed in 1919, taking with it the lives of millions more but not infecting those already exposed in the first two waves. In the end, the misnamed “Spanish flu” may have killed more people in a four-month period than the war killed in four years. It killed a few famous people, such as the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who caught the disease while recovering from a shrapnel wound, and the Austrian artist Egon Schiele. Their deaths, as well as the deaths of millions of soldiers and civilians alike, must be understood as the consequence of a cataclysmic world war. MHQ Michael S. Neiberg is the author of The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris in 1944. His most recent book is Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe.

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PORTFOLIO

F O OD A S PAT R IO T I SM

World War I Posters

Turn the Tables in America by K. M. Kostyal

A Created for the U.S. Food Administration, war posters like this one mirrored the administration campaign proclaiming “Food Will Win the War.”

s the First World War engulfed the country, the publications director of the United States Food Administration told a group of state officials, “All you gentlemen have to do is induce the American people to change their ways of living.” It was time to take the fight to the American family and enlist its appetites in the war effort. “Economy of food is patriotism,” government posters preached. “Without it democracy is doomed.” ✭ Poster art was one of the most effective ways to get the message across, and in that regard, the United States had an impressive arsenal at its disposal. Right after war was declared, Charles Dana Gibson, president of the Society of Illustrators and a popular illustrator himself, convened the group in New York City to discuss how they, as artists, could aid the march to victory. Soon thereafter, Gibson was heading up the Division of Pictorial Publicity for the U.S. Committee on Public Information. Volunteers in the division included George Bellows, James Montgomery Flagg, N. C. Wyeth, and other acclaimed artists. All waived any payment for their work on poster campaigns to influence the hearts, minds, and stomachs of America’s homeland.

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Food sent overseas fed American troops—and a hungry Europe, as this poster attests. Herbert Hoover, newly appointed head of the U.S. Food Administration, declared that while the “prime objective” in feeding Europeans was saving lives, the secondary one, “of hardly less importance, [was] to defeat Anarchy, which is the handmaiden of Hunger.”

War posters “give some idea of the flavor of the period,” Joseph Darracott of Britain’s Imperial War Museum says. “Their unabashed sentiment would not be possible today.”

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mhq signpost 2013

James Montgomery Flagg’s poster of Columbia sowing “the seeds of Victory” (left) became almost as famous as his Uncle Sam “I Want You” image. The National War Garden Commission pushed Americans to grow and can their own fruits and vegetables, and after the armistice, to turn war gardens into victory gardens, so that American food could continue to feed a devastated Europe.

Food posters were often aimed at American “housewives,” encouraging them to forgo meat and wheat products in the family diet, as they were needed for the troops overseas. Everyone, from adults to small children, was also admonished to clean their plates.

52: HENRY RALEIGH/UNITED STATES FOOD ADMINISTRATION/NATIONAL ARCHIVES; 54: TOP: HERBERT ANDREW PAUS/UNITED STATES FOOD ADMINISTRATION/ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BOTTOM LEFT: FRANCIS LUIS MORA/THE W. F. POWERS COMPANY/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: L.C. CLINKER & M. J. DWYER/HEYWOOD STRASSER & VOIGT LITHOGRAPHY COMPANY/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; 55: WILLIAM CRAWFORD YOUNG/UNITED STATES FOOD ADMINISTRATION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; 56: JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG/NATIONAL WAR GARDEN COMMISSION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; 57: TOP LEFT: MAGINEL WRIGHT BARNEY/NATIONAL WAR GARDEN COMMISSION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY/ UNITED STATES FOOD ADMINISTRATION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BOTTOM: PARKER CUSHMAN/UNITED STATES FOOD ADMINISTRATION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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Bring In the

Germans Needing to build a modern army, the Nationalist Chinese government sought the advice of veteran German officers by Dennis Showalter

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etween 1927 and 1938 a hundred or so German officers, active and retired, served as advisers to the Nationalist government of Chiang Kaishek. Their involvement went well beyond the

usual spheres of tactics, doctrine, and training. The Germans not only worked at modernizing China’s armed forces, they were instrumental in the country’s industrialization and the government’s integration into a world economy. Above all, the Germans contributed decisively to creating the core of the Nationalist army—the divisions that checked the Japanese at

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Shanghai in 1932, bloodied them in that same city in 1937, and

A sea of stahlhelm—German steel helmets—speaks to the influence the German military example had on Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army.

china’s german advisers

The German advisers came to China for a spectrum of reasons, personal and professional. More often than might be expected, an interest in Chinese culture motivated bored men whose careers in the German military had been unceremoniously terminated in 1919. The opportunity to shape a modern army from the ground up was reinforced by a desire to institutionalize the lessons of the Great War—an opportunity severely restricted at home by the Versailles Treaty, which also forbade Germany from sponsoring military missions. Their advisers then officially went to China as private contractors and at the request of the Chinese, though they were approved by the Weimar government. Chiang Kai-shek was the force behind the German presence in China. His condign dismissal of his Soviet advisers in 1926 was not entirely a result of his break with the Chi-

The emerging Nationalist army emphasized German military mobility, spirit, and discipline society while sustaining Chinese culture and identity. The German Second Reich that arose after reunification in 1871 had combined exponential economic growth with a central government strong enough to control the federal states. Even its defeat in the Great War reflected a heroic stand against long odds. Chiang believed that the German militarism so harshly criticized in the West would be a positive integrating force in a China where a sense of a commonweal had atrophied to near nonexistence. German-Chinese cooperation also benefited both nations on another level: China possessed large, and largely undeveloped, supplies of raw materials. A resource-straitened Germany had heavy-industrial products, weapons in particular, that China badly needed. A trade relationship had every chance to develop into a financial-developmental connection. And Germany’s relative pariah status in the international community gave China diplomatic leverage unobtainable with any other firstworld power.

Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang with members of the Western press in Nanjing, 1937. By year’s end the invading Japanese army had terrorized civilians with the Rape of Nanjing.

nese Communist Party. Soviet methods and doctrines were increasingly too revolutionary in the Chinese military—and political—context. Since his days commanding Whampoa Military Academy, Chiang had sought to create a core army that would be both politically loyal and militarily effective. The emerging Nationalist army emphasized German military ideals of mobility, spirit, and discipline, underpinned by a willingness to take heavy casualties. Chiang also saw the German example and the Prussian tradition as alternative matrices for a revolution that would modernize China’s economy and

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AKG-IMAGES/IMAGNO/AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES

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he first German adviser on the ground in China proved an ideal choice. Max Bauer was a general staff officer with wartime experience in organizing munitions production and a record as a postwar right-wing putschist. He had know-how, connections, and unusual skill as an intriguer. Hired by Chiang in 1927, Bauer urged that China’s military and industry be modernized simultaneously, with weapons imported only until China could build its own factories. This fit Chiang’s thinking closely, and Bauer’s influence was further reinforced by his emphasis on modernizing in a Chinese context—working to create a national identity that would transcend regional and familial ties. Bauer’s death from smallpox in 1929 left most of his work in a theoretical stage. (Some historians speculate that he may have been deliberately infected by opponents who thought he was contributing too much to the centralization of China, which they rejected.) At the time of his death, the deputy he had selected, retired lieutenant colonel Hermann Kriebel, was still en route to China, but Chiang thought enough of Bauer’s judgment that he appointed Kriebel as Bauer’s successor. Kriebel arrived as Chiang was refocusing his attention on an immediate problem: the renewed outbreak of civil war. Kriebel lacked Bauer’s broad gauge and situational awareness, and he was given no time to develop either quality. His tactical thinking was focused sometime around 1915, and he had even less engagement with Bauer’s (and Chiang’s) concept of commercial and industrial development. His indifference even to small

BUNDESARCHIV, BILD 102-11214; PHOTO: O.ANG

his few connections between details and policy was his insistence that the still pervasive Japanese military influence at unit level be reduced or removed. Wetzell arranged German-delivered lectures for officer cadets; expanded opportunities for Nationalist officers to attend schools in Germany; and worked to update the artillery school’s retrograde approaches to gunnery; and he moved toward standardizing the army’s hodgepodge of weapons—German models preferred. Of even more long-range significance, Wetzell expanded the German-focused training program for the infantry in the face of Chiang’s constant and destabilizing need for troops. Two of the divisions that came under close German supervision at this time formed the core of the 1932 Shanghai confrontation, when Chiang’s troops shocked the Japanese by holding on for over a month. The unexpected success was widely and legitimately credited to German influence: a defensive system whose labyrinthine trenches, machine gun nests, and barbed wire evoked the Western Front and the tactics of defense in depth—fall back under pressure, then counterattack locally as opportunity develops. The stand at Shanghai generated a rush of patriotic enthusiasm that did much to consolidate Chiang’s still shaky leadership position. It also established Wetzell’s status as an instructor, a tactician, and to a degree a planner. Yet Chiang, committed to a strategy “seventy per cent political, thirty per cent Hans von Seeckt transformed the German military after World War I and enjoyed military,” grew increasingly dissatisfied with Wetzell’s narrow operational focus. great influence with Chiang during his two years in China. For Chiang, the success at Shanghai only arms replacement and ammunition resupply was a throwback highlighted chronic shortages in equipment and a near-random to the 19th century. Kriebel lasted only a year in China, and logistics system that made replication on a larger scale, such as in May 1930 Chiang replaced him with Georg Wetzell, who an all-out war with Japan, impossible. Shanghai had been an had distinguished himself as a staff officer during the war. unavoidable eye-opener to current operational shortcomings Retired as lieutenant general in 1927, Wetzell was recomand to future possibilities. Still, Wetzell remained oblivious mended by his wartime boss, General Erich Ludendorff. Wetzell to the importance of industrial development in producing the arrived in country as the civil war reached its climax—and kind of army Chiang sought. Wetzell’s disinterest in defense German influence in China sank to its nadir. In its first engageeconomics also diminished his standing with German busiment, the showpiece of the German mission, an improvised ness, with the German military (the Reichswehr), and with lehrdivision (demonstration division), was committed to battle the German government. against superior numbers and inadequately supported. Wetzell In the spring of 1933, with Chiang obviously looking for a inherited the damage of its failure and set about to address new face, Adolf Hitler sent him Hans von Seeckt, whom Wetzell Nationalist military backwardness—with real success. One of had also suggested. He had hoped to rebuild his position with

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Chiang by presenting Seeckt as a temporary honored guest, the close relationship between Seeckt and Chiang—a relationship mentor, and troubleshooter. Chiang had other ideas. As early nurtured by Seeckt’s broad interests in Chinese history and as 1923 he had considered inviting Seeckt to China. Now he culture and by the deep and favorable impression he had made sought advice on army reform, where Seeckt had made his on Madame Chiang. In the new Reich, the China lobby remained reputation. Seeckt’s response reflected the “less is more” constrong. Hitler’s rearmament projects demanded raw matericept he had applied from necessity and principle in creating als—preferably from remote, difficult-to-check sources, such the Reichswehr. He recommended large-scale demobilization as China. In the summer of 1934 Seeckt brokered a treaty with and replacement of masses of poorly trained and equipped Chiang confirming the exchange of raw materials for industrial troops with a small, highly trained elite based upon the exproducts, particularly matériel. One of the first “equal treaties” isting demonstration brigade, put that recognized China as a full under close German supervision. negotiating partner, this stands as Train it with modern weapons and Seeckt’s greatest achievement during in modern methods, he advised, his time in China. It gave him face and make it the matrix for small, and inf luence unrivaled by any high-tech field forces built around foreigner in the Nationalist orbit. trucks, tanks, and aircraft. When Chiang met with senior Essentially, Seeckt’s proposals officers, Seeckt sat by his side. When represented an extension of WetSeeckt traveled for health reasons, zell’s concepts rather than their he enjoyed the use of Chiang’s prirevision. But Seeckt’s name and vate railway car and an honor reputation carried massive weight guard at ever y station. Then in military circles among the NaSeeckt’s health collapsed entirely. tionalists. Officers who disliked He left China in March 1935. Both or distrusted the pedestrian and he and Chiang expected he would unsophisticated Wetzell considreturn, but he died in December ered Seeckt a light bringer. Seeckt’s 1936. In China, memorial services suggestions would become the celebrated his achievements. basis for Nationalist military deSeeckt’s successor, Alexander von velopment until the Chinese were Falkenhausen, came from the top submerged by the war with Japan. drawer. He had served in China Seeckt left China in July 1933 during the Boxer Rebellion and as with no plans to return, as his ala military attaché in Japan and had ready fragile health had suffered Alexander von Falkenhausen had had previous developed a serious interest in both badly from the humid climate. But countries’ cultures. During World military experience in China and Japan and had headed after his departure, relations beWar I he planned the 1918 defense the army officers school at Dresden. tween Chiang and Wetzell eroded of Jordan that bloodied Britain’s to such a point that Chiang threatened to replace the German nose, and he retired from the Reichswehr in 1930 as a major mission with a French one. With the enthusiastic urging of the general. Initially, he had accepted the familiar rationalization German War Ministry, Seeckt returned to China in April 1934 of working with the Nazis for the sake of the nation, but as the and began regularizing the relationship between Chiang and Third Reich consolidated its power, Falkenhausen began conthe advisory team. He established his own role as sole contact sidering an overseas mission. In May 1934 Falkenhausen departed with Chiang and responsible to him for the functioning of the for China. The prudence of his decision to relocate was confirmed advisory team, now to comprise a permanent staff of both when his younger brother, a member of the paramilitary SA, Germans and Chinese; a chief responsible for its functioning was murdered a month later in Hitler’s “blood purge.” would act as Seeckt’s second in command. This systematic As was to be expected from a man with general staff training, reorganization was at right angles both to Chiang’s general Falkenhausen took pains to inform himself of China’s politics, preference for the flexibility of informality and to the patterns history, and geography. More than any of his predecessors, of intrigue endemic to any Chinese bureaucracy. But it brought Falkenhausen could cope with the courtlike dynamics of order and structure to the advising function at a critical point high-level Nationalist politics. He impressed Chiang, the sein China’s history. nior officers and officials with whom he interacted, and not Seeckt paid increasing attention to greater Sino-German least Madame Chiang. commercial connections as a preliminary to underwriting the Falkenhausen’s arrival was well timed. The campaign against industrial base that would support Nationalist China’s new milthe Communists was ending; relations with Japan were less itary and stabilize its politics. Trade, not tactics, was the focus of antagonistic; conflicts within the Nationalist movement were

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LEFT: AKG-IMAGE/IMAGNO; RIGHT: BUNDESARCHIV, BILD 146-2008-0155; PHOTO: OTTO KROPF

china’s german advisers

stabilizing. In December 1934 Chiang introduced an army reorganization plan based heavily on Seeckt’s recommendations. It called for organizing 60 “new divisions” that would have German advisers and be trained in German methods and equipped with German-style weapons. They would be China’s frontline force; by 1937, 20 of them were combat ready or close to it. In August an agreement enabled China to order military supplies from Germany and pay for them with raw materials, while a loan of 100 million reichsmarks sweetened the deal. Small arms, light artillery, and ammunition provided the bulk of deliveries, and the new divisions enjoyed scales of equipment—some of it transferred from the Wehrmacht—unprecedented in the experience of modern China.

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hina’s overall defense capacities also reflected increased German influence: Ground was broken and foundations laid for everything from steelworks and coal mines to textile mills and electronics factories. Long-neglected arsenals were refurbished and retooled to produce modern small arms and artillery. A network of field fortifications, nicknamed China’s Hindenburg Line, was constructed between Shanghai and Nanjing. Plans were prepared for the military use of railroads and communications systems. Much of the program was embryonic, but in terms of its emphasis on detailed planning, step-by-step progress, and technical competence, the bureau-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

A sound detector manned by Nationalist soldiers directed the firing of the German-made antiaircraft guns used to defend Chongqing during the relentless Japanese bombing of the city.

cratic configuration was a model for Chiang’s long-projected reconfiguration of China’s administration. And the imports and the factories gave China a field army that at least stood a chance against Japanese invaders when war broke out in 1937. As Sino-Japanese relations turned again for the worse and Germany wavered about which Far East power to support, Falkenhausen’s primary concern became how best to bolster China’s chances to withstand the invasion. In August 1935, with Japanese pressure in north China increasing, Falkenhausen advised Chiang that only firmness would deter Japan. He warned against proposals to withdraw from the north and abandon the coast, which would mean sacrificing the developing industrial structure and the vital capacity to import arms. Instead Falkenhausen recommended using the new divisions as the core of a flexible defense based on interior lines and featuring swift, sharp counterattacks complemented by guerrilla actions. In July 1937 he informed the German embassy that the Chinese infantry was good and Chinese morale high; the army could be expected to put up a hard fight. Falkenhausen’s ideas strongly resemble the strategic principles Seeckt sought to implement in Germany during the 1920s. The applicability of Falkenhausen’s ideas to China’s strategic situation sufficiently impressed Chiang that they formed the basis of the defense plans drawn up during 1936 and 1937. They provided for all-out resistance to inspire a war of attrition that Japan could not hope to win in the long run.

As a larger war looms and Hitler allies with Japan, German military advisers are recalled from China, departing Hankou in 1938.

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ROBERT CAPA/INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY/MAGNUM PHOTOS

china’s german advisers

Chiang committed to an attritional fight that earned the description ‘Verdun of the East’ The Great Wall should be the first line in the north, Japanese coastal landings should be resisted to the limit, and above all the Japanese forces in Shanghai should be destroyed. Falkenhausen’s principles and Chiang’s implementations of them met their acid test in August 1937. The attack was spearheaded by the two best divisions in the Nationalist army—the 87th and 88th. They sported German helmets, rifles, and “potato masher” grenades. They were imbued with German tactical doctrines based on the storm troop methods of World War I. And like their predecessors, they scored initial successes but at high losses of quality personnel. The Japanese held and reinforced. Chiang committed more and more of his new divisions to a head-to-head attritional fight for Shanghai that earned the description “Verdun of the East.”

PICTURES FROM HISTORY/THE IMAGE WORKS

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he German advisers, some 70 of them at that time, made a major contribution. They were sent where they were needed and went where they were sent, which was often the front line; Falkenhausen himself lived for days on hard-boiled eggs and cognac at the front. A Japanese nickname for the battle for Shanghai was “the German war,” but in fact it became more and more a Chinese war. In the process the Nationalist army reverted to form, accepting levels of casualties that in particular exsanguinated the “new divisions.” Barely trained replacements, funneled in from everywhere, had no hope of implementing sophisticated foreign tactics. That only encouraged a growing pattern among Chinese commanders of reverting to their tactical roots, and as an example, ignoring German recommendations for surprise attacks and prompt counterattacks as opposed to holding in place to the last man. Lower-ranking resistance to German advice reflected Chiang’s own determination—increasingly irrational by German standards and eerily prefiguring Hitler—to hold Shanghai rather than cut losses, seek better positions, and regroup for a better time. Falkenhausen was sharply and openly critical of synergistic Nationalist shortcomings in tactics, logistics, and command. And as the core of the modern army it sought to create died in Shanghai, the German military mission in China further eroded. As late as November 1940 Germany made attempts to reconcile the Asian combatants, but Japan increasingly seemed the better—and more congenial—bet. In early 1938 the Reich had recognized the northeastern state of Manchukuo and prohibited shipment of war matériel to China. In May the German mission was recalled and formal military contact with China came to an end. Yet some of its legacy remained. German-style

Armed with German “potato masher” grenades, a Nationalist soldier readies for street fighting during the months-long Battle of Shanghai in 1937.

helmets and “broom handle” Mauser pistols were familiar Chinese equipment throughout the war, and traces of Seeckt’s and Falkenhausen’s strategic advice was evident in Chiang’s war planning before and after Pearl Harbor. The German military mission to China became a footnote in history, but what might have happened had the Third Reich underwritten the militarist, authoritarian elements of the Nationalist movement? What if Hitler had cultivated the ideological and institutional similarities between Chiang’s visions and the fascisms of 1930s Europe? A Japan too enmeshed in China to implement a Pacific thrust, a Chinese Communist Party crushed by a Nationalist army built on the German model—the possibilities for counterfactual and alternative history are engaging and as yet unexplored. MHQ Dennis Showalter is professor of history at Colorado College. His recent books include Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk (2013) and Hitler’s Panzers (2009).

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Raiders of the Lost Bronze Age? Civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean—in Greece, Egypt, and the Near East—abruptly collapsed in 1177 bc. But were the mysterious marauding ‘Sea Peoples’ to blame? by Eric Cline

GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/THE ART ARCHIVE AT ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

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cross the river from Luxor, on the west bank of the Nile near King Tut’s tomb, is Medinet Habu, site of the mortuary temple of Ramses III. On one wall of the temple, chiseled into the blocks, is a huge picture with an accompanying inscription. The text records that in the eighth year of Ramses’s reign, 1177 bc, the Egyptian pharaoh faced a coalition of invaders in a double battle—one by land and one by sea. ✭ Depictions of the battles are so detailed that scholars have published analyses of individual people and even their boats. One panorama shows foreigners and Egyptians engaged in a chaotic naval battle; some casualties are floating upside down and clearly dead, while others are still fighting fiercely from their boats. The invaders wear no uniforms, no polished outfits. The ancient images portray one group with feathered headdresses and others sporting skullcaps, horned helmets, or bare heads. Some have short pointed beards and are dressed in kilts, either bare-chested or wearing tunics; others have no facial hair and wear skirt-like garments. Armed with sharp bronze swords, wooden spears with metal tips, and bows and arrows, they come on boats but also on wagons

Ramses III towers above captive Philistines (on right) in this relief from his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. The three tiers of prisoners are awkwardly bound, some with arms above their heads. Other reliefs here record more victories over Sea Peoples.

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sea peoples

oxcarts, and chariots, accompanied by their families. The Egyptians won both the land and sea battles, which is why Ramses recorded this on the walls of his temple, as well as in other documents:

The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at [one time]. A camp [was set up] in one place in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjekker, Shekelesh, Danuna, and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting.

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he places reportedly overrun by the invaders were famous in antiquity. Khatte, also called Hatti, is the land of the Hittites. Its heartland was located on the inland plateau of Anatolia near modern Ankara, and its empire stretched west to the Aegean coast and southeast to northern Syria. Qode is probably located in what is now southeastern Turkey—possibly the region of ancient Kizzuwadna—while Carchemish is a well-known archaeological site in southern Turkey. (It was first excavated almost a century ago by a team of archaeologists that included T. E. Lawrence, who was trained as a classical archaeologist at Oxford before his exploits in the Arab Revolt.) Arzawa was a land familiar to the Hittites, located within their grasp in western Anatolia. Alashiya may have been what we know today as Cyprus, a metal-rich island famous for its copper ore, while Amurru was located on the coast of Syria. According to Ramses’s inscriptions, no country was able to oppose this invading mass of humanity. Resistance was futile. The great powers of the day—the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, the Cypriots, and others—fell one by one. Some of the survivors fled the carnage; others huddled in the ruins of their once proud cities; still others joined the invaders, swelling their ranks and adding to the apparent complexities of the various invading hordes. Each of these groups was on the move, each apparently motivated by individual reasons: some perhaps for spoils or slaves, while others may have been compelled by population pressures, drought, or famine to migrate eastward from their own lands to the west. Ramses gives us the names of the invading groups; some we have heard of before, from previous Egyptian records, but others are new. They include five different factions: the Peleset, Tjekker, Shekelesh, Danuna, and Weshesh; a sixth group, named the Shardana, is mentioned in another relevant inscription. All of them are far more shadowy than the lands they reportedly overran. They left no inscriptions of their own and are therefore

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known textually almost entirely from the Egyptian inscriptions. Ramses describes them as coming from islands, from across the sea, from the north, so early French Egyptologists dubbed them the Sea Peoples. Only one group, the Peleset, has been more narrowly identified: Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphics, believed (probably correctly) that they were the biblical Philistines. Although scholarly debate continues on the others’ identities, most experts agree that the land and sea battles depicted on the walls at Medinet Habu were probably fought nearly simultaneously in the Egyptian delta or nearby. Possibly the images represent a single, extended battle that occurred both on land and at sea, and some scholars have suggested that both represent the Egyptians ambushing the Sea Peoples’ forces. In any event, the end result is not in question, for at Medinet Habu, Ramses quite clearly states that he won the day and defeated these peoples, who had overrun all of the other lands of the eastern Mediterranean. The inscription on his mortuary wall claims:

Those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and soul are finished forever and ever. Those who came forward together on the sea, the full flame was in front of them at the river-mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore. They were dragged in, enclosed, and prostrated on the beach, killed, and made into heaps from tail to head. Their ships and their goods were as if fallen into the water. I have made the lands turn back from [even] mentioning Egypt: for when they pronounce my name in their land, then they are burned up. In a document known as the Papyrus Harris, Ramses repeats the news of his victory and again names his defeated enemies:

I overthrew those who invaded them from their lands. I slew the Danuna [who are] in their isles, the Tjekker and the Peleset were made ashes. The Shardana and the Weshesh of the sea, they were made as those that exist not, taken captive at one time, brought as captives to Egypt, like the sand of the shore. I settled them in strongholds bound in my name. Numerous were their classes like hundred thousands. I taxed them all, in clothing and grain...each year. This invasion in 1177 bc was not the first time that such Sea Peoples had attacked Egypt. They had invaded 30 years earlier, in 1207 bc, during Pharaoh Merneptah’s reign. He too names the various groups who made up the Sea Peoples, and he too claims to have defeated them. Merneptah also describes ongoing battles with the Libyans, located just to the west of Egypt. In a text found at the site of Heliopolis, northeast of Cairo, as well

WWW.BIBLELANDPICTURES.COM/ALAMY

No ancient site has ever been identified as their origin or departure point as in another inscription known as the Cairo Column, he says, quite possible that the Shardana only went to Sardinia and gave “The wretched chief of Libya has invaded [with] Shekelesh and their name to the island after they had been defeated by the every foreign country, which is with him, to violate the borders Egyptians. As for the Eqwesh, some scholars have suggested of Egypt.” A longer inscription found at Karnak, near Luxor, that they are Homer’s Achaeans, that is, the Mycenaeans of gives the names of the individual groups among the invaders: the Bronze Age Greek mainland. If this is correct, they are “Eqwesh, Teresh, Lukka, Shardana, Shekelesh, northerners probably the same people Ramses III identified as the Danuna coming from all lands.” Merneptah’s inscriptions include no in his Sea Peoples inscriptions two decades later. more than a very general idea of where the battle or battles With the other names, scholars generally accept Lukka as a were fought. He says only that his victory was “achieved in reference to peoples from southwestern Turkey, in the region the land of Libya”—also called Tehenu. Merneptah’s inscripknown during the classical era as Lycia. The origin of the tions indicate there were five groups in this earlier wave of Teresh is uncertain but might be linked to the Etruscans in Sea Peoples: the Shardana (or Sherden), Shekelesh, Eqwesh, Italy. The origins of the Tjekker and Weshesh are unknown; Lukka, and Teresh. The Shardana and Shekelesh are present speculation has ranged from Italy to Turkey. in both this invasion and the later one during Ramses’s time, Of all these foreign groups, only the Peleset have been idenbut the other three groups are different. In all, between the two tified—as the Philistines, who, according to the Bible, came sets of invasions in 1207 and 1177 bc, we have nine different from Crete. The linguistic identification was apparently so groups of Sea Peoples named by either Merneptah or Ramses III obvious that Champollion had suggested it early on. In 1899 or both: the Shardana, Shekelesh, Eqwesh, Lukka, Teresh, archaeologists working at Tell es-Safi, a site in southern Israel Peleset, Tjekker, Danuna, and Weshesh. believed to be the biblical Philistine city of Gath, identified Again, we know little about these groups, beyond what the specific pottery styles, architecture, and other material reEgyptian records tell us, and we are not certain where they mains as Philistine. originated: perhaps in Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy, We do not know if all of the earlier invaders were or the Aegean or western Anatolia, or possibly killed by Merneptah in 1207 or if some survived, even Cyprus or the eastern Mediterranean. but we can probably assume the latter, since No ancient site has ever been identified as several of the groups returned in the second their origin or departure point. We think invasion 30 years later, in 1177. That year, as of them as moving relentlessly, overrunRamses boasted, the Egyptians were again ning countries and kingdoms as they went. victorious. He made certain the Sea Peoples In Merneptah’s inscriptions, the Shardid not return to Egypt a third time, but dana, Shekelesh, and Eqwesh are specifihis was a pyrrhic victory. Although Egypt cally identified as being “of the countries of under Ramses III was the only major power the sea,” while the five groups are together to successfully resist the onslaught of the described as “northerners coming from Sea Peoples, New Kingdom Egypt was never all lands.” The latter is not too surprising, the same again. For the rest of the second for most lands with which the New Kingmillennium bc successive pharaohs were dom Egyptians were in contact (except content to rule over a country much diminfor Nubia and Libya) lay to the north of ished in influence and power. Egypt became Egypt, but this is such a generic descripa second-rate empire, a mere shadow of tion that scholars still dispute where they what it had once been. It was not until the were from and where they dispersed to days of Pharaoh Shoshenq, a Libyan who after their defeat. founded the 22nd Dynasty about 945 bc— The identification of the Shardana and who is probably Pharaoh Shishak of and Shekelesh as “countries of the sea” is the Hebrew Bible—that Egypt rose to any one reason some scholars have suggested sort of prominence again. they are linked with Sardinia and Sicily, Beyond Egypt, almost all of the other Pharaoh Merneptah’s triumph in a respectively. But there isn’t any real arcountries and powers in the Aegean and chaeological basis for locating them there. Near East during the golden years (ca. battle with Sea Peoples in 1207 BC is Moreover, even if there is such a link, it is 1500–1200 bc) of what we now call the Late recorded in this stele.

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Adriatic Sea ITALY

BULGARIA

ALBANIA Troy

GREECE

Aegean Sea

To Sardinia 180 mi/290 km

MYCENAEANS Mycenaeans

SICILY

A much younger civilization than that of the Hittites or Egyptians, the Mycenaeans became upstart powerbrokers in the Aegean and Mediterranean in the late second millennium. They overwhelmed the advanced Minoan civilization of Crete and may have been among the invading Sea Peoples.

Pylos

Thebes Mycenae Tiryns

CRETE

DE AGOSTINI PICTURE LIBRARY/A. DAGLI ORTI/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

Mediterranean Sea

LIBYA

TEHENU

Enameled brick figures from Medinet Habu characterize the range of prisoners, from throughout the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, taken by Ramses III.

A Burnished Age The Bronze Age saw an unprecedented flowering of civilizations across Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean. Trade, diplomacy, and culture flourished, as did territorial wars among rival kingdoms. By the early 13th century, though, a new and more insidious enemy—the Sea Peoples—had appeared on the scene. The origins of these obscure, marauding groups remain unknown, though they apparently came from far and wide—some from the north and west, perhaps as far as Sicily and as near as western Anatolia; still others from islands that could have included Cyprus. Only one of these groups, the Peleset, has been conclusively identified—as the biblical Philistines.

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Hittites Based in central Anatolia (present-day Turkey), the Hittite Empire swept west to the Aegean and south into Syria. For much of the second millennium BC the Hittites were a major regional force, vying with Egypt and keeping lesser kingdoms, like Ugarit, under Hittite vassalage.

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Philistines The Philistines established Philistia on what is now the coast of Israel toward the end of the Late Bronze Age. Pottery recovered from their cities, built on the ruins of destroyed Canaanite cities, indicates they may have been associated with the Mycenaeans. Whether the Philistines perpetrated the Canaanite destruction is unknown.

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Heliopolis Cairo

Egyptians Ramses III ruled a civilization that had existed on the banks of the Lower Nile for nearly 2,000 years. His father, Ramses the Great, had fought the Hittites to a draw at Qadesh in 1274 BC, stopping their spread south. But the younger Ramses faced new and more amorphous threats.

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Map by Steve Walkowiak/SWmaps.com

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Bronze Age withered and disappeared, either immediately or in less than a century. In the end, it was as if civilization itself had been wiped away in much of this region. Many if not all of the advances of the previous centuries vanished across great swaths of territory, from Greece to Mesopotamia. A transitional era began—the world’s first Dark Age. It would last at least one century and perhaps as many as three in some areas.

ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

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arly Egyptologists were baffled by what brought an end to these civilizations. Then, in the 1860s and 1870s Gaston Maspero and other French scholars postulated that the Sea Peoples were responsible. Even though the theory was based solely on the epigraphic evidence from Egypt, it remained popular until nearly the modern day and was invoked every time archaeologists at relevant sites subsequently uncovered a destruction level. However, such surmises may not be entirely accurate, for while one can almost always tell that a site was destroyed, determining when it happened or who ruined it is not always possible. In fact, aside from the Egyptian texts and inscriptions, which give conflicting impressions, we have no clear evidence that it was the Sea Peoples’ fault, nor do we understand much about them. Did they approach the eastern Mediterranean as a relatively organized army, like one of the more disciplined Crusades intent on capturing the Holy Land during the Middle Ages? Or were they a loosely or poorly organized group of marauders, like the Vikings of a later age? Or refugees forced out of their homes by a series of unknown events and seeking new lands? Did they attack and ultimately vanquish many of the already weakened kingdoms, or did they settle down in the eastern Mediterranean much more peacefully than has been previously assumed? A wealth of new archaeological data has become available in the past few decades and requires a rethinking of the old ideas. First of all, we are no longer certain that all of the sites with evidence of destruction were razed by the Sea Peoples. Instead, it now seems quite possible that they were as much the victims as the aggressors in the collapse of civilizations. Recent studies and reexaminations of old data suggest that the early decades of the 12th century bc were not a particularly good time to be alive in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, for a variety of reasons, including climate change. During the past decade, cores taken in wet or swampy areas in northern Syria, Cyprus, and Israel allowed scientists to extract pollen dating to the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. Based on their examination of these data, they have concluded that in all of these regions there was a prolonged period of drought, which began as early as 1250 bc and lasted for as long as 150 years in Israel and up to 300 years in coastal Syria and Cyprus.

Egyptians and Sea Peoples tangle in a naval battle in this Medinet Habu relief. The Egyptians, taller and often armed with bows, arrows, and spears, are prevailing. Sea Peoples casualties are depicted as upside down or overboard figures.

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This clay tablet letter incised with cuneiform script bears the seal of the king of Carchemish and dates from the 12th century BC, when the interconnected networks of trade and prosperity that had prevailed in the eastern Mediterranean for over 300 years were collapsing.

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PHILIPPE MAILLARD/AKG-IMAGES

sea peoples

‘If you do not quickly arrive here, we will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land’ Separate studies by other scientists involving oxygen isotope data from Israel, carbon isotope data in pollen cores from western Greece, and sediment cores from the Mediterranean confirm that the entire area was suffering from drought during this period. This helps explain the references to famine and the requests for grain found in Hittite, Egyptian, and Ugaritic texts. (Ugarit was a city located on the coast in northern Syria.) In the mid-13th century bc, an unnamed Hittite queen wrote to Ramses II, “I have no grain in my lands.” Sometime thereafter, the pharaoh Merneptah said that he had “caused grain to be taken in ships, to keep alive this land of Hatti”—the land of the Hittites. Yet the relief efforts to Anatolia seem to have been in vain, for the Hittite rulers continued to request grain and other food supplies from Egypt and elsewhere. One letter sent to Ugarit sometime between 1220 bc and 1190 bc ends dramatically: “It is a matter of life or death!” The supplies being sent by the Egyptians to the Hittites frequently seem to have been shipped via Ugarit, but the texts from this site indicate that even it was suffering. One letter from Merneptah found in the house of a merchant mentions “consignments of grain sent from Egypt to relieve the famine in Ugarit.” The king of Ugarit also wrote in a letter that, “[Here] with me, plenty [has become] famine.” Even cities farther inland suffered; one letter sent to Ugarit says, “There is famine….If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land!”

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garit figured prominently in earlier scholarly speculation on the demise of the Late Bronze Age. Archaeologist Claude Schaeffer, excavating at Ugarit in the 1930s, believed he had found evidence of an earthquake massive enough to have caused regional chaos. His suggestion met with skepticism, since it was unlikely that a single earthquake could have been responsible, but Schaeffer may have been partially correct—except that it wasn’t one earthquake; it was a swarm of them. Reexamination of destruction levels from sites in Turkey, Israel, and Greece suggests that a series of earthquakes—what archaeo-seismologists call an “earthquake storm”—occurred over 50 years, from about 1225 to 1175 bc. Such a storm takes place when a fault line unzips bit by bit, releasing pressure and strain with each earthquake rather than all at once. Damage that can only be attributed to earthquakes at the end of the Late Bronze Age has been found at sites stretching across this region, including Mycenae and Troy. In addition to earthquakes, it is clear that a number of sites were destroyed by warfare during the same 50-year period. Ugarit and Tell Tweini in northern Syria, for example, have

arrowheads embedded in the walls or found elsewhere on the site, amid piles of debris and burned homes and buildings. The destruction of many of these sites was most likely at the hands of invaders, perhaps even Sea Peoples arriving by ship. In one famous letter the Ugarit king writes: “Now the ships of the enemy have come. They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land.” But in other cities the reason for destruction is not as clear. At Hazor in Israel, for example, the palace and the temple buildings were set on fire and destroyed; the rest of the city remained essentially untouched. The same seems true at other cities, including Megiddo in Israel and Mycenae. Internal rebellion by the lower classes, rather than invasion by external forces, has long been suggested as a possible reason for the end of the Bronze Age in Greece, with peasants, farmers, and others attacking the citadels at Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes, and elsewhere as food and other essential supplies ran low. The preponderance of new evidence suggests that the Sea Peoples may well have been responsible for some of the destruction that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age but that they were probably part of a much larger equation. It now seems that a combination of events, both human and natural, coalesced to create a perfect storm. This glorious age that had flourished from the 15th to the 12th centuries bc came to an end in a full-blown systems collapse. Such a collapse can take up to a century from beginning to end, as we’ve seen from Old Kingdom Egypt to the Indus Valley to the Maya. Usually it includes a collapse of the central administration and of the centralized economy, a disappearance of the traditional elite class, and a general population decline, together with shifts in settlement patterns. There is also typically no single, obvious cause for the collapse, and a “dark age” frequently follows. This describes perfectly the situation at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. While the pictures and inscriptions left by Ramses III and Merneptah concerning the Sea Peoples put a human face to the catastrophe, the invaders may have been as much victims as oppressors. However large or small their role, the magnitude of the overall disaster was enormous. The rapid demise of civilizations at the end of the Bronze Age resulted in a loss such as the world would not see again for more than 1,500 years, when the Roman Empire collapsed. MHQ Eric Cline is a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University. This article was adapted from his most recent book, 1177 bc: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) and is reproduced here by permission of the press.

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Peace and War How European players in the great game to carve up the Middle East created a world of chaos by David Fromkin

T. E. Lawrence and Abdullah ibn Hussein, former compatriots in the Arab Revolt, meet at Hussein’s camp in Amman, Jordan. During the 1921 meeting, Abdullah was declared ruler of Transjordan, one of the British protectorates in the Middle East. COLONY PHOTO DEPARTMENT/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

carving up the middle east 1922

International lawyer David Fromkin came at his prescient work—A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914–1922—from a legal perspective. In it, he examined events that led to the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the ramifications of treaties, territorial realignments, imperial ambitions, and early nation making in the wake of that demise and of the Great War. Although Fromkin’s book came out in 1989, his conclusions are even more relevant today, as longstanding sectarianism and regional resentments fueled by European map drawing and miscalculations keep the Middle East at a constant boil.

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ast of Suez, British prime minister David Lloyd George and his colleagues were the authors of a major chapter in history. The establishment of Allied control in the Middle East marked the climax of Europe’s conquest of the rest of the world. It was the last chapter in a tale of high adventure—of sailors daring to cross uncharted oceans, of explorers tracking rivers to their source, and of small bands of soldiers marching into the interior of unknown continents to do battle with the vast armies of remote empires. The venture had begun centuries before, in the wake of Columbus’s galleons, as Europeans streamed forth to subjugate and colonize the lands they had discovered in the Americas and in the waters to the east and west of them. It continued through the 19th century, as Britain assumed the empire of India, and as the Great Powers divided the continent of Africa between them. By the dawn of the 20th century, East Asia apart, the Middle East was the only native bastion that the Europeans had not yet stormed; and, at the end of the First World War, Lloyd George was able to proudly point out that his armies had finally stormed it. For at least a century before the 1914 war, Europeans had regarded it as axiomatic that someday the Middle East would be

The Middle East was the only bastion the Europeans had not yet stormed occupied by one or more of the Great Powers. Their great fear was that disputes about their respective shares might lead the European powers to fight ruinous wars against one another. For the government of Britain, therefore, the settlements arrived at by 1922 were a doubly crowning achievement. Britain had won a far larger share of the Middle East (and Britain’s rival, Russia, a much smaller one) than had seemed possible beforehand; but even more important, the powers seemed

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prepared to accept the territorial division that had emerged in the early 1920s without further recourse to arms. Thus the troubling and potentially explosive Middle Eastern Question, as it had existed in world politics since the time of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition, was successfully settled by the postwar arrangements arrived at by 1922. A major issue that had been at stake was where Russia’s political frontier in the Middle East would be drawn. By 1922 the question was solved: The Russian frontier was finally drawn to run with a northern tier of states that stretched from Turkey to Iran to Afghanistan—countries that maneuvered to remain independent both of Russia and the West, along a line that continued to hold firm for decades. The other great issue at stake since Napoleonic times had been what would eventually become of the Ottoman Empire—an issue that was resolved in 1922 by the termination of the Ottoman Sultanate and the partition of its Middle Eastern domains between Turkey, France, and Britain. Such was the settlement of 1922. the settlement of  was not a single act or agreement or document; rather, it was the design that emerged from many separate acts and agreements and documents that date mostly from that year. Russia’s territorial frontier in the Middle East was established by the draft constitution of the U.S.S.R. promulgated at the end of 1922, while Russia’s political frontier emerged from the treaties it signed with Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan, and, to some extent, from the trade agreement it signed with Britain in 1921. The deposing of the Ottoman Sultan and the establishment of a Turkish national state (confined to the Turkish-speaking portion of the dissolved empire) were effected by unanimous votes of the Turkish Grand National Assembly on November 1 and 2, 1922. Turkey’s eventual frontiers in large part grew out of the armistice it signed with the Allies in the autumn of 1922, followed by a peace treaty with the Allies signed at the Swiss city of Lausanne the following year. Some frontier questions remained unresolved, however. Turkey’s frontier with Syria, for example, was established only at the end of the 1930s. The rest of the former Ottoman domains in the Middle East were partitioned between Britain and France by such documents as France’s League of Nations Mandate to rule Syria and Lebanon (1922), Britain’s League of Nations Mandate to rule Palestine, including Transjordan (1922), and the treaty of 1922 with Iraq, which Britain intended to serve as an affirmation of a mandate to rule that newly created country. Within its own sphere of influence in the Middle East, Britain made its dispositions in acts and documents that also, for the most part, date from 1922. It placed Fuad I on the throne of Egypt in that year and made Egypt a nominally independent protectorate by the terms of the Allenby Declaration of 1922. It established a protectorate in Iraq by treaty that year with that country—a country that Britain had created and upon whose throne Britain had placed its own nominee, Faisal. By the terms of the Palestine Mandate of 1922 and Winston

BAKER VAIL

For centuries the Ottoman Empire held critical swaths of the Middle East in thrall. After the Ottoman disintegration in World War I, victorious European powers created boundaries where none had existed. France and Britain maneuvered within the League of Nations and elsewhere to gain mandates to rule these proto-nations; boundaries for newly formed, unmandated nations in the Caucasus remained fluid.

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By 1936 the British military was fighting in Palestine again, suppressing a new Arab revolt aimed at British authority and the influx of Jews arriving with the growing Zionist movement.

UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD/CORBIS; OPPOSITE: AKG-IMAGES/IMAGNO

Churchill’s White Paper, Transjordan was set on the road to a political existence separate from that of Palestine—Abdullah, appointed by Britain, was to permanently preside over the new entity by a decision made in 1922, while west of the Jordan, Jews were promised a National Home and non-Jews were promised full rights. Independence or autonomy for the Kurds, which had been on the agenda in 1921, somehow disappeared from it in 1922, so there was to be no Kurdistan: It was a nondecision of 1922 that was, in effect, a decision. In 1922, too, Britain imposed frontier agreements upon Abdulaziz Ibn Saud that established boundaries between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait. Thus Britain—like France and Russia in their spheres of the Middle East—established states, appointed persons to govern them, and drew frontiers between them; and did so mostly in and around 1922. As they had long intended to do, the European powers had taken the political destinies of the Middle Eastern peoples in their hands—and they did so by the terms of the settlement of 1922. …. from a british point of view, the settlement of 1922 had become largely out of date by the time it was effected. It embodied much of the program for the postwar Middle East that the British government had formulated (mostly through the agency of the British negotiator Sir Mark Sykes) between 1915 and 1917. But the British government had changed, British official thinking had changed, and in 1922 the arrangements arrived at in the Middle East did not accurately reflect what the government of the day would have wished. Giving France a League of Nations Mandate in 1922 to rule Syria (including Lebanon) was a case in point. In 1915 and 1916 Sykes and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had viewed with sympathy France’s claim to Syria and had accepted it. But in 1922 Britain’s prime minister, foreign secretary, and officials in the field were all men who had said for years that to allow France to occupy Syria was to invite disaster. Even within its own sphere in the Middle East, the British government was unhappy about the dispositions it was making in 1922. In 1914, 1915, and 1916, Lord Herbert H. Kitchener, field marshal of the British Army, and his lieutenants had chosen to sponsor the Hashemites—Hussein of Mecca and his sons—as leaders of the postwar Arab Middle East. By 1918 British officials had come to regard Hussein as a burden, who was involving them in a losing conflict with Ibn Saud. By 1922 British politicians and officials had come to view Hussein’s son Faisal as treacherous, and Hussein’s son Abdullah as lazy and ineffective. Yet, in Iraq and Transjordan, Faisal and Abdullah were the rulers whom Britain had installed; Britain had committed itself to the Hashemite cause. Palestine was another case in point: In 1922 Britain accepted a League of Nations Mandate to carry out a Zionist program that it had vigorously espoused in 1917—but for which it had lost all enthusiasm in the early 1920s. It was no wonder, then, that in the years to come British

In December 1917 British general Edmund Allenby took Jerusalem, then all of Palestine. A month before, Britain had promised Zionist Jews a homeland there.

officials were to govern the Middle East with no great sense of direction or conviction. It was a consequence of a peculiarity of the settlement of 1922: Having destroyed the old order in the region and having deployed troops, armored cars, and military aircraft everywhere from Egypt to Iraq, British policymakers imposed a settlement upon the Middle East in 1922 in which, for the most part, they themselves no longer believed. the middle east became what it is today both because the European powers undertook to reshape it and because Britain and France failed to ensure that the dynasties, the states, and the political system that they established would permanently endure. During and after the First World War, Britain and its Allies destroyed the old order in the region irrevocably, smashing Turkish rule of the Arabic-speaking Middle East beyond repair. To take its place, they created countries, nominated rulers, delineated frontiers, and introduced a state system of the sort that exists everywhere else; but they did not quell all significant local opposition to those decisions.

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carving up the middle east 1922

In the Middle East there is no agreement on the rules of the game

be seen to be in a situation similar to Europe’s in the fifth century, when the collapse of the Roman Empire’s authority in the West threw its subjects into a crisis of civilization that obliged them to work out a new political system of their own. The European experience suggests what the dimensions of such a radical crisis of political civilization might be. It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity. It took nearly a thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political organization and nearly 500 years more to determine which nations were entitled to be states; whether civilization would survive the raids and conflicts of rival warrior bands; whether church or state, pope or emperor, would rule; whether Catholic or Protestant would prevail in Christendom; whether dynastic empire, nationstate, or city-state would command fealty; and whether, for example, a townsman of Dijon belonged to the Burgundian or to the French nation. These issues were painfully worked out through ages of searching and strife, during which the losers were often annihilated. It was only at the end of the 19th century, with the creation of Germany and Italy, that an accepted map of western Europe finally emerged, some 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete. The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or so long lasting. But its issue is the same: Marking an otherwise invisible border in the desert, a barbed wire fence goes up how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identities for themselves after the in 1938 between French-mandated Syria and British-mandated Palestine as a way to collapse of an ages-old imperial order to which keep potential guerrilla fighters from joining the Palestinian Arab revolt. they had grown accustomed. The Allies proposed countries or the men who claim to be rulers are entitled to a post-Ottoman design for the region in the early 1920s. recognition as such. In that sense, successors to the OttoThe continuing question is whether the peoples of the region man sultans have not yet been permanently installed, even will accept it. MHQ though—between 1919 and 1922—installing them was what Author and historian David Fromkin has also had a career as both the Allies believed themselves to be doing. a military and civilian lawyer. Among his dozen books are The King It may be that one day the challenges to the 1922 settleand the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret ment—to the existence of Jordan, Israel, Iraq, and Lebanon, for Partners (2007). This article was excerpted from A Peace To End All example, or to the institution of secular national governments Peace, by David Fromkin published by Henry Holt and Company, in the Middle East—will be withdrawn. But if they continue in LLC. Copyright © 1989 by David Fromkin. All rights reserved. full force, then the 20th-century Middle East will eventually

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AKG-IMAGES/ULLSTEIN BILD

As a result, the events of 1914–1922, while bringing to an end Europe’s Middle Eastern Question, gave birth to a Middle Eastern Question in the Middle East itself. The settlement of 1922 resolved, as far as Europeans were concerned, the question of what—as well as who—should replace the Ottoman Empire; yet even today there are powerful local forces within the Middle East that remain unreconciled to these arrangements—and may well overthrow them. …. Continuing local opposition, whether on religious grounds or others, to the settlement of 1922 or to the fundamental assumptions upon which it was based, explains the characteristic feature of the region’s politics: that in the Middle East there is no sense of legitimacy—no agreement on the rules of the game—and no belief, universally shared in the region, that within whatever boundaries, the entities that call themselves

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QMUSEUM WATCH

Drawing in Silver and Gold

© THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON

Leonardo’s Bust of a Warrior (ca. 1475) is among the detailed metalpoint drawings in this exhibit of works from the 15th through the 20th centuries. British Museum, London, September 10 through December 6

Culture | classic dispatches Reconnaissance, Central Highlands, Vietnam, June 1966 by Ward S. Just

About six months into his tour covering the war in Vietnam for the Washington Post, correspondent Ward S. Just, then 31 years old, joined a reconnaissance patrol of the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, in Kontum Province in the Central Highlands. Commander of the 101st’s 1st Battalion was Major David Hackworth, who told Just that he was sending a “recondo” unit deep into the mountains of South Vietnam to find a North Vietnamese base camp. Just’s response: “Hackworth was so cheerful about the prospect of heading into the mountains that I instantly asked to go along. He said fine, then introduced me to Captain Lewis Higinbotham, commander of the 42-man Tiger Force platoon.” They helicoptered into the target area north of Dak To, which was “rugged and uneven, high hills and thick jungle laced with trails.” In those hills, on those trails, here is what happened when they made contact with the enemy.

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t 2:30 in the afternoon the first grenade crashed down the ridge line. It went wide with a thump. Then thump! Thumpthump! Again, closer. In the first 15 minutes, three died and six fell wounded. The firing came from three sides, hitting the Americans at all points on the trail. The men guarding the packs at the top of the trail scattered under a hail of machine-gun fire. Only a few actually saw the enemy, who were maneuvering and firing as they maneuvered. Higinbotham at his command post halfway down the line knew the danger of the situation better than anyone else. He collected the first reports from his sergeants. The reports were only that there were a lot of enemy, and it was impossible to tell how many. Higinbotham called Hackworth at battalion headquarters and requested artillery fire and air support. It would come in the next four hours, 1,100 rounds of 105 and 90 rounds of 155 artillery. There would be air strikes, and the noise would be as if the world were coming apart. No one knew then and no one knows now how many North Vietnamese there were. They did not have mortars, so the unit was probably company-size or smaller. But they had grenades and small arms and automatic weapons, and good cover to shoot from. They fought from concealed positions and they had the element of surprise and knowledge of the terrain. It was, after all, their base camp. American artillery shells fell in a wide semicircle just beyond the American positions. They were hitting at the ridgeline and beyond, but the Vietnamese fire did not lessen. The planes attacked with a roar and without warning; because of the heavy

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cover they could not be seen. One fist-size piece of shrapnel landed two feet from Higinbotham, but he did not cease talking into the field phone, precisely locating the positions of heaviest enemy fire. While the shells were landing, Americans were dying; a half dozen in the first half hour, another six in the five succeeding hours of combat. In the command post, enemy rifle fire was hitting five feet high. We were all down, scanning the jungle and watching that part of the trail we could see. Behind us, down the line, men were maneuvering and shouting at each other. Higinbotham was superbly cool, talking quietly and easily into the field telephone which was the only link with safety. As long as the artillery held out the Vietnamese could not advance; that was our theory, desperately clung to. Meanwhile the rifle fire got heavier and closer. The bullets were sounding: Pop! Captain Chris Vurlumis had left the command post to crawl up the trail toward the heaviest fighting. Pellum Bryant, the senior noncommissioned officer, was below rallying the dozen or so who had fallen under his command. One of the other sergeants was dead. Bryant was the only unwounded man in his eight-man squad. Pinned down by an enfilade of fire, he had huddled in an enemy foxhole. When the fire slackened, he poked up his head and fired bursts. It was Bryant alone who was protecting the rear flank. By 4:30 in the afternoon, after two hours of fire, the situation was almost lost. The fight had been following a rhythm, with heavy bursts of fire and then silence except for an occasional rattle of a machine gun. The Americans had been pushed back into a tiny area about the size of a basketball court, with Higinbotham and the radio as its nucleus. Bryant was now fighting just a dozen yards to the rear. Hackworth, speaking with Higinbotham, said there was a full company of infantry a mile away. He was ordering them to reinforce. “You’ve got to try it,” Higinbotham said over the radio. For the first time, his voice cracked and became unsure. He seemed like a 26-year-old advertising account executive or civil servant or department store clerk, or a good old boy at the night baseball game, but not a captain of infantry in the U.S. Army. “If you don’t get up here soon, we’re all gonna die. If you don’t get up here soon, I’m gonna melt.” There was another crackling over the telephone; Hackworth had gone off. Then barely audibly, but precisely, as if he were reading from a piece of paper, Higinbotham said: “Dear God, please help me save these men’s lives.” It got worse after that, and for Higinbotham it was the worst

FRANCOIS SULLY/ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, HEALY LIBRARY, UMASS BOSTON

Washington Post correspondent Ward S. Just (right) shares a story with Airborne officers participating in Operation Hawthorne, June 1966.

time of all. It was his first patrol with the Tigers. He didn’t know the men, either their names or where they came from or how long they had been in Vietnam. Now he had gotten them into this. Higinbotham sat with the radio, his back against a tree, and prayed that it wouldn’t be as bad as he thought it was. The sniper fire came closer, nipping the tops of the branches of the bushes. The artillery seemed to be hitting indiscriminately, as Higinbotham called it closer to the American lines. But there were no lines any more. There was only a group of men huddled silently on a trail that led nowhere down from a ridge line that did not even show on the map. Bryant was on his own, and so was Vurlumis. Higinbotham was worried about the artillery, and the tactics were taking care of themselves. A wounded infantryman, his voice loud as a bullhorn, was calling from the left flank. “You’ve got to get me out of here!” He was repeating it. The voice was strong and deep, but it cracked with agony and pain. He repeated it again and again. As he screamed and moaned I moved forward. I went forward about five feet and then stopped, still safe. The wounded man was probably 20 yards away, although the jungle was so thick it was impossible to tell. I had the idea that I might save his life.

I looked around at the others and then the wounded man screamed, and was silent. I waited for a minute and then crawled back the five feet. I had spent 20 minutes deciding whether to get the wounded, who had been screaming and pleading for help. Now I didn’t have to think about it. He was dead. Vurlumis had given me a .45 pistol and now I took it out of its holster for the first time. I was lying on my stomach handling the .45, having dismissed the wounded man from mind. It was easier holding a .45 pistol.

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ifteen yards in front of the command post there was a dip that plunged almost straight down into the ravine. From that direction a voice came: “Airborne!” No one answered. Higinbotham and the radio operator and I looked at the spot where the voice came from. The radioman unhitched a grenade from his ammunition belt, and cradled it like an apple. The voice could belong to anyone, but the odds were better than even that it belonged to a North Vietnamese. I thought of identifying questions to ask. The only two that came to mind was the name of the manager of the New York Yankees, and whether Marilyn Monroe was dead or alive.

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Culture | classic dispatches on the trail firing at the Charlies and I looked over and asked him how his ammo was and he was dead.” Higinbotham said nothing, did not comment on Vurlumis, and continued to talk the artillery in. “I don’t think there’s anybody else back there,” Washburn said. “I mean, any Americans.” That meant that the command post, and the seven of us, were the front. There was no protection up the trail. The cries of the wounded were getting louder as the men pulled back into a tighter circle. The command post was filling up with wounded, those who could crawl back or who were carried back by the medics. I would hear only secondhand the horrors endured by the men up the trail; they had been under heavy bombardment for more than three hours. There was no firing from the command post because the enemy could not be seen. But then came the grenades. They were coming closer, just off the mark. That was when the awful fear set in. It was the fear of sudden realization that the North Vietnamese were lobbing grenades and there was no way to stop them.

101st Airborne soldiers take a short break between attacks on their position in a former Viet Cong base camp north of Dak To in early June, 1966.

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SGT BERNIE MANGIBOYAT/U.S. ARMY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

My mind wouldn’t work. I thought of asking who wrote the Declaration of Independence, but then figured that a trooper probably wouldn’t know the answer. Then I remembered that I didn’t know the name of the Yankee manager. Stengel was dead. Or not dead, retired someplace. These thoughts were moving so slowly I could almost see them in my mind’s eye. I was closest to the dip and now aimed the pistol straight at it, or just above it. The radioman had not thrown the grenade and all of us were in a state of suspended animation. But then a voice said, “Christ, don’t shoot,” and a sweat-drenched head appeared over the lip of the ravine. The head belonged to an American. There were now seven in the command post, and a 360degree defense. We had been joined by a young rifleman. Still inexplicably careful about journalism, I asked his name; it was Private First Class Sam Washburn, of Indianapolis. Washburn had dived over a bush and told Higinbotham: “I got two Charlies and the captain got one. The captain’s dead. We were lying

EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY

Cleared landing zones in the Central Highlands allowed 101st Airborne troopers to land reinforcements and evacuate wounded.

The faces were all drawn up tight, and there was no talking. A company of reinforcements was on its way, but had got lost. No one knew whether it would arrive in time. Hollow-eyed and distracted, the men moved slowly as in a dream; or perhaps it was me, clammed up and lying flat in that taut circle. In Vietnam if you are 30 years old you feel an old man among youngsters. I was thinking about being 30, and holding an automatic pistol I didn’t know how to fire, when Washburn leaned over and very quietly, very precisely, whispered “grenade.” He probably yelled it, but I was switched off, half-deaf from the pounding of the artillery and the 500-pound bombs and it seemed to me that the warning came in a whisper. Then he gave me a push. There was a flash and a furious burst of fire; the grenade had landed a yard away. I couldn’t get my feet down. I was lying on my back, almost standing on my head, and my feet wouldn’t come down. Through the numbness and the red haze, I could see Washburn firing, although his hand was blown to pieces, and the radioman using his grenade launcher. Higinbotham was firing, too; but my legs wouldn’t come down. Then they were down and I yelled for a medic. “I’m hit!” “You’re OK,” Higinbotham said. “The hell I am,” I said. “I’m hit.” “I mean it,” he said.

“Christ almighty there’s blood everywhere,” I said. “You’re all right.” “Goddamnit I’m not.” There was very little pain, just shock and a terrible feeling of relief. I was out of it. The terror was in the knowledge that you might lose control. You had to keep control, and you could feel it slipping away. You were half-crazy looking at the firing. The medic had scrambled up and I called for morphine. My arms and legs were shaking uncontrollably. The medic tackled me and punched the needle into my arm and began to bandage my head and back. The morphine restored the control. My hands and legs were still shaking but I was all right. Higinbotham was grinning. The medic said to take it easy. When the shaking stopped fatigue came. “You’re all right,” Higinbotham said. “I’m not all right, goddamnit,” I said. But we were both laughing, me from shock and Higinbotham from the fact that the attack had been thrown back. The grenades fired by Terry Grey, the radioman, had done it. “Where are the VC?” I asked. “We stopped the bastards,” Higinbotham said. MHQ Excerpted from To What End, by Ward Just, PublicAffairs 2009, © Ward Just. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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Culture | artists Mr. Turner Visits Waterloo After a pilgrimage to the scene of Britain’s great triumph over Napoleon, the artist puts his own visionary stamp on the meaning of victory by Peter Harrington

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER/TATE, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK (2)

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he ultimate victory over Napoleon at Waterloo aroused intense passions among the British, and many set their sights on a trip to the immortal field. Writers, poets, and artists recorded their experiences as they visited places made famous by the events of that June day in 1815—Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, Mont-St.-Jean, Plancenoit, and La Belle Alliance. Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and Lord Byron each produced memorable poems on the battle and the battlefield. A thriving tourist business emerged to serve visitors. Locals who claimed to have witnessed the fighting made a good living as guides recounting the events in vivid detail. One English visitor noted that local boys earned pocket money by climbing the tree under which the Duke of Wellington had observed the climax of the battle and removing sprigs for souvenirs; the visitor himself used a chisel to pry a bullet from a tree and even pocketed a few fragments of human bone that he dug up with a stick. Two months after the battle, the celebrated English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) walked the killing fields. A sketching tour had brought him to Ostend with the intention of traveling down the Rhine, but he could not ignore the urge to make the pilgrimage to Waterloo. After two days in Brussels, he traveled the eight miles to the site and spent Saturday, August 16, riding over the battlefield, making numerous sketches in the course of the day. Two of his sketchbooks, known today as the Guards sketchbook and the Waterloo and Rhine sketchbook, attest to

his fascination with the place. They include views of the Charleroi-Brussels road passing through the village of Waterloo and of the field and the road from Brussels to Nivelles, viewed from the different ridges. At La Haye Sainte, where a battalion of the King’s German Legion had put up a stout resistance against the French, Turner sketched the walled farmhouse from different angles. Like his fellow countrymen who had roamed the field, Turner was particularly drawn to the large farmhouse of Hougoumont, the site where British foot guards and other allied troops had withstood continual assaults by the enemy throughout the day. At one stage, the French had broken through the north gate, but men of the Coldstream Guards

J. M. W. Turner’s Field of Waterloo (opposite) captures the chaotic carnage and loss that follows battle. Turner’s self-portrait at 24 (above) was painted about 16 years before his visit to Waterloo.

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Culture | artists had managed to close it again under a withering fire. The fury of the fighting was still evident in the ruined farmhouse, and Turner sketched it along with the other notable buildings, the road, and the surrounding landscape. On several

pages he drew plans for a painting with penciled notations, such as “1500 killed” and “Entrance Gate of Hugomont [sic] forced three times,” obviously taking information from Charles Campbell’s Travellers’ Complete Guide through Belgium

and Holland. Reading it must have intrigued Turner with the visual possibilities: “The crops of corn were trodden to the earth: arms, accouterments, tumbrils, cannons, horses and human bodies were strewed in every direction and all ‘worse desolation’s withering trace.’” Ideas for a painting were percolating in Turner’s mind when he arrived back in England a month later, and going through his sketches, he settled on a suitable theme that would communicate his impression of the battle.

Sketches by Turner of the field of Waterloo and Hougoumont and the farmhouse there

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few months prior to Turner’s visit, the London publisher Edward Orme had issued The field of Waterloo, as it appeared the morning after the memorable battle, a colored aquatint print after a sketch by the Scottish artist John Heaviside Clark. Clark had witnessed the event firsthand and recorded the horrific aftermath of the fighting, the field strewn with the bodies of the dead and dying, attended by surgeons, women, and other soldiers. Whether Turner saw Clark’s print is unknown, but Clark’s approach shared some striking similarities to what Turner planned. He would have none of the gallant charges, heroic last stands, and valiant defenses that graced the walls of so many galleries and coffee shops in London. For him, it was more about the “harvest of war,” the slaughter of 40,000 men in an area of barely three square miles during a single day. In his watercolor The Field of Waterloo, no living soul is seen, only the entangled corpses of soldiers from both sides, mixed with the carcasses of horses and destroyed guns on the foreground ridge above La Haye Sainte. As if to make an accusatory comment about the shared responsibility for this carnage, Turner included the initials GR III, for George III, on an overturned cannon, and just below, a cavalry pennant with Napoleon’s initials embroidered on it. In his large oil painting, also titled The Field of Waterloo, Turner recorded the aftermath of battle. Night has fallen, but Hougoumont is still engulfed in flames. It is a ghostly ruin standing off

TATE, LONDON

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(DETAIL) JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER/TATE, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

in the right distance like a scene from a gothic novel. But it is the foreground of the painting that grabs the viewer’s attention. The carnage that filled the earlier watercolor is now witnessed for the first time by women with babies in arms, in search of their fallen men. One searcher carries a lighted torch that illuminates the central vignette, while another woman swoons at what she sees, and another appears to cling to the body of a man. In typical Turner fashion, the ominous storm clouds in the background are strikingly lit—in this work not by lightning but by rocket flares, fired to aid in the search and rescue of the wounded. The symmetry of the flares almost suggests a heavenly visitation. When the painting was exhibited in 1818 at the Royal Academy, responses were mixed. One reviewer in the Annals of the Fine Arts wrote that he felt he was looking at “a drunken hubbub on an illumination night.” Others looked more kindly on Turner’s avowed antiwar statement. The Examiner noted: The poetry of Mr. Turner’s Field of Waterloo is mainly in its magical illustration of that principle of colour and claire obscure [chiaroscuro]…in exhibiting at night the fiery explosions and carnage after battle when the wives and brothers and sons of the slain come, with anxious eyes and agonized hearts, to look in Ambition’s charnal-house, after the slaughtered victims of legitimate and illegitimate selfishness and wickedness…. [Turner] has often, too, as here, considerable power over our sensibilities, in the general look and action of his figures, miserably as they are drawn.

It is these sensibilities that tap into the emotions of the viewer even today. Turner was not ashamed to show his audience the true face of battle and remind them that victory always comes at a high cost. MHQ

Women in the throes of despair dominate the foreground of Turner’s painting. One critic considered the work “allegorical” rather than a specific depiction of Waterloo’s aftermath.

Peter Harrington, a frequent contributor to MHQ, is curator of the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection at Brown University. He writes and teaches on military art and artists.

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Culture | reviews The AEF’s Trial by Fire Americans in the Crucible of Combat, 1917–1918 By Edward G. Lengel, 457 pages. University Press of Kansas, 2015. $39.95.

Reviewed by Dennis Showalter

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n his classic study of the D-Day campaign, Russell Weigley constantly uses the phrase “well brought up” to describe divisions entering the theater of operations. By this Weigley means formations whose training, doctrine, leadership, equipment, and higher command structures were, if not optimal, at least as near state of the art as possible in the circumstances. Edward Lengel might well have chosen “stepchildren” as a catchword for the divisions of the American Expeditionary Force, whose painful introduction to the battlefields of World War I is the subject of this no less outstanding volume. “Red-headed stepchildren” might have been an even better characterization. Lengel summarizes their familiar problems: ineffective equipment, inappropriate doctrine, inflexible organizations, inadequate officers and training, inexperienced men. He adds two factors overlooked in traditional AEF mythology. One was the strained relations—to put it mildly—between the Americans and their war-experienced mentors, the French in particular. Lengel highlights the Americans’ sense of saving the day at the last minute, their frequent dismissal of the poilus as burned-out, prone to panic, and reluctant to fight. But using French records, Lengel establishes the French as first-rate combatants, skilled alike in minor tactics and larger combined-arms operations. Their officers, moreover, were formidably willing—at least for public consumption—to embellish reality in praising the performance of American troops who had everything to learn. The confidence of inexperience limited the Americans’ ability to benefit systematically by observing their veteran allies. And that inexperience was red meat to the Germans who faced them. Lengel makes effective use of German records to show that in the “little war” of patrols, raids, and small-scale attacks that characterized the In a hasty retreat from the St. Mihiel salient, September 1918, Germans abandoned gear like this phone being tested by a U.S. signal officer.

U.S. ARMY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Thunder and Flames

Americans’ early tours in the front line, the Germans consistently set the pace in battlecraft, initiative, and effective courage. The Americans were more than willing to fight. They simply did not know how, even against the third- and fourth-rate German divisions holding down the relatively quiet sectors that were the AEF’s test beds. The AEF’s higher command and staffs, right up to General John J. Pershing, were no less caught up in the mechanics of combat and in logistics on scales heretofore unimagined at West Point or Leavenworth. AEF divisions were on their own, and Lengel does a masterful job describing how, from Seicheprey and Château-Thierry through Belleau Wood to Soissons, Americans learned by experience, observation, and sometimes pure serendipity. But too often the lessons learned

Jacksonland President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab By Steve Inskeep, 421 pages. Penguin, 2015. $29.95.

Reviewed by Kevin Baker

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f all the instances in which America cheated and robbed Indians of their lands, the expulsion of the Cherokee Nation has always seemed the most shameful. This is because the Cherokees were most like us, or at least, most like what we said we wanted Indians to be. One of the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Southeast, Cherokees frequently intermarried with whites, allied themselves with the United States during the War of 1812, and readily adopted European manners of dress, living, and making money. They came up with their own written language, thanks to Sequoyah (George Guess), their own newspaper, and their own constitution and government, based closely on that of the United States. When the rights guaranteed them under treaty were threatened, they took their case to the Supreme Court—and won. It availed them nothing. Evicted from lands they

were on the basis of two steps forward, one back. Their tactical deficiencies remained: poor cohesion and worse liaison, ill-defined objectives, misplaced initiatives. Their casualty rates were severe—on the scale of 1914–1915. Too many officers in too many positions were still not up to their jobs. Tactical cooperation with the French was, if anything, growing worse. When the American First Army went into the line at St. Mihiel in September 1918, its doughboys had passed their initial tests with credit, given where they had begun 18 months earlier. They were ready—ready for a second course whose field-gray instructors charged high tuition. Historian Dennis Showalter is a frequent contributor to MHQ and the author of “Bring In the Germans” in this issue.

had held for millennia, most were forced on the “Trail of Tears,” a death march that through hunger and disease killed many—perhaps even a majority—of the 15,000 Cherokees forced to Oklahoma. In his first venture into history, Steve Inskeep, cohost of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and an awardwinning investigative journalist, revisits this decades-long saga, largely through the stories of two of the most able leaders on both sides—Andrew Jackson, the seventh president; and John Ross, the canny, young, first-and-only “principal chief” of the Cherokee. It is not too much to say that this is a great history. In an understated, straightforward style, Inskeep quickly expands the scope and depth of Jacksonland to the grand tragedy it was—one that presaged the greater tragedy of the Civil War. Even as he deplores Jackson’s ethics and racism, Inskeep acknowledges Jackson’s ingenuity, audacity, and iron will. He led a ragtag band of men south to crush both the Creek Nation in Alabama and the British at New Orleans; established an American Deep South (“Jacksonland”); carved out a personal fortune in land, cotton, and slaves; and held the Union together as president.

Like many Cherokee leaders, Ross owned slaves, and he amassed his own small fortune. He and others in the “Cherokee Regiment” even fought courageously for Jackson against the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, sending that tribe to a fate the Cherokees would later share. Yet Ross, who was actually three-quarters Scottish, battled brilliantly and always peacefully for his people and followed them into exile. En route, he endured what can only be described as the gestapo tactics of the state of Georgia. Even after Jackson had refused to enforce Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling that the Cherokees were indeed a sovereign nation, Ross had pleaded with the president to let the Cherokees become Americans and stay on their lands. But Georgia had already passed laws refusing to let Cherokees bear witness in court and turning their lands over to a lottery for whites. Animated by his desire to see American whites and whites only dominate the fertile lands of the South, Jackson hid behind states’ rights and a pretended concern for the tribe’s welfare and sent the tribe on its way. Inskeep quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, who was touring America about that time: “The Americans of the United

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Culture | reviews

Kevin Baker is a past contributor to MHQ. His most recent book is the historical novel The Big Crowd, about the greatest unsolved murder in mob history.

The Mediterranean Air War Airpower and Allied Victory in World War II By Robert S. Ehlers Jr. 536 pages. University Press of Kansas, 2015. $39.95.

Reviewed by Conrad C. Crane

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obert S. Ehlers Jr. is a rising star in the field of airpower history. His award-winning first book, Targeting the Reich: Air Intelligence and the Allied Bombing Campaigns, revealed much new information about the process that

shaped and controlled the Combined Bomber Offensive, especially concerning the British role in that process. Now he has taken on another too often neglected part of the air war, the campaign in the Mediterranean. But this book is about more than just how Allied airmen perfected tactics and techniques that would bring victory in other theaters as well. Some historians have argued that the Allies won simply because of their overwhelming resources; in fact, it was the superior way they were able to employ

Determined to seize the rich farmland of the central South, which the Cherokees had occupied for millennia, President Andrew Jackson defied the supreme court and forced some 15,000 Cherokees on the “Trail of Tears” death march to the Oklahoma territory.

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HERBERT TAUSS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

States,” he wrote, had managed to remove the Indians “with marvelous ease, quietly, legally, philanthropically…without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. To destroy human beings with greater respect for the laws of humanity would be impossible.”

U.S. AIR FORCE/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

B-24 Liberators of the U.S. Army Air Forces Fifteenth Air Force attack rail yards at Alessandria, Italy, in April 1944 as part of its strategic campaign to cripple the German war effort in Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

those resources in joint and combined arms warfare that made the biggest difference. Ehlers’s book “is about the proper role of airpower within a given historical, geographical, and grandstrategic context and the ways in which it came together with ground and sea power to bring the Allies a resounding series of victories—and the Axis a series of catastrophes.” Most of the Axis’ difficulties resulted from poor strategic choices, a primary focus for Ehlers and a fine analytical structure around which to organize each chapter. In the “Negative Alliance” between Germany and Italy, the two partners were often headed in opposite directions. A majority of the book describes battles in North Africa, as Erwin Rommel tried to achieve ever-expanding strategic goals with a force increasingly

hamstrung by air strikes—strikes that destroyed too many irreplaceable vehicles even as raids from Malta decimated Rommel’s logistics flow across the Mediterranean. The Axis’ failure to take or neutralize that island bastion was one of the greatest blunders of the war. If there is a flaw in the book, it is that Ehlers covers so much that he cannot fully develop every aspect of what he includes. He describes each major ground campaign from Italian East Africa through German surrender, including the support of Balkan partisans. His account of the strategic bombing campaign of the Fifteenth Air Force is particularly intriguing. While the Eighth Air Force— the other major air element of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe—has its own museum and will soon get an HBO miniseries, the Fifteenth has struggled to re-

ceive appropriate recognition for its key contributions to the destruction of the Luftwaffe, the Axis oil industry, and the transportation system, despite the fact that it was actually the more accurate bombing force. Based at a series of airfields around Foggia, Italy, the Fifteenth had advantages in overcoming the omnipresent problems of European weather, since aircraft approaching key targets from the south could fly between weather fronts instead having to fight through them. Perhaps this excellent book will help inspire the full coverage that the “forgotten Fifteenth” deserves. Conrad C. Crane is the author of Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II, a revised edition of which will soon be released by the University Press of Kansas.

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Culture | reviews The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939–1945 by Alan Allport, 424 pages. (Yale, $40).

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pproaching World War II as a social history of those who served in the PBI (poor bloody infantry), Allport examines the British Army’s evolution over the six years of conflict. Essentially a “large, well-run country estate” in 1939, its public-school educated officers held the new war recruits—most of them working class and often barely educated or out of their teens—in disdain, as did Winston Churchill. The new infantry returned the favor, and a them-and-us mentality developed. That is one part of Allport’s story, but he also addresses the experiences of these young recruits, who suddenly found themselves in lands far removed from the orderly, “whitefaced” world of Britain—North Africa, Italy, India, Burma. Quotes from memoirs, diaries, and letters convey the fear,

One officer, Christopher Seton-Watson, who was often at the sharp point of the fighting, summed up the German soldier versus the British soldier as the product of “a nation with war and military discipline in its bones” versus “a nation that can outfight and outmanoeuvre its opponents and at the same time laugh and be careless and refuse to be crushed and dehumanized.” And that is the picture Allport paints of the PBI.

War Antiquity and Its Legacy by Alfred S. Bradford, 192 pages. (Oxford, paperback $24.95).

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s part of the Oxford Ancients and Moderns series—created to “illustrate that how we think about the past bears a necessary relation to who we are in the present”—Bradford goes into the deep recesses of Western civilizations in a quick survey of wars from the second millennium bc through the 20th century. He then moves on to consider the philosophical arguments made throughout history regarding the morality and inevitability of war—from Plato to Cicero to early 17th-century Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius to more contemporary thinkers and their ruminations on the bombings of World War II. The book ends with short chapters examining war writing and Before hitting the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, war images, but it is the first chapter on the Iliad British soldiers share a laugh over a French guide book. that is the most powercourage, confusion, and bravado of men ful. Bradford sees Homer’s vast poem as fighting far from home and not at all the key to Western concepts of warfare, certain whether their leaders are leading and he dissects its notions of heroism, them toward victory or just to death. The loss, brutality, and pervasiveness. “In heroes that emerge in Allport’s overall the world of Homer,” Bradford writes, picture are the NCOs, who in the teeth of “war permeates everything and involves combat, kept their men moving forward. everyone.”

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The Russian Army in the Great War The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 by David R. Stone, 368 pages. (University Press of Kansas, $34.95).

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tone, a military historian who focuses on Russia, explains in his introduction that this book is “a brief synthesis of scholarly research on Russia’s experience in fighting the First World War.” As such, it begins with the shape, makeup, and character of the Russian army in 1914 and ends with a quick look at the new Soviet militarism under the Bolsheviks. In between, Russia’s victories and reversals—in Galicia, Poland, the Carpathians, and the Caucasus—are described from a military, political, and geopolitical perspective. Threading through this is Stone’s theme of “contingency… the impact of specific events and individual choices…on history’s direction.” He frequently offers brief what-if scenarios, particularly as regards the turns the war might have taken in the Romanovs’ favor, and what those turns might have meant for Russian—and world—history.

The Oxford Illustrated History of World War II edited by Richard Overy, 400 pages. (Oxford, $45).

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hile this volume does have scattered illustrations, it relies mostly on the writings of university historians to probe the causes and implications of total war. These scholars bring depth to the typical narrative of World War II, tracing its roots and outcomes to economic conditions in the post–Great War decades, territorial ambitions, diplomatic trends, and geographic realities. The conduct of the war in European and Asian theaters is examined as are the national interests that led to alliances and the ways in which total war absorbed civilian as well as military life. A final chapter describes the personalities and circumstances that led to the next long-running conflict—the Cold War.

AKG-IMAGES

Browned Off and Bloody-Minded

Subscriber Bonus Section [pages –]

JAMES F. GIBSON/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Extra Round

Whiling away the tedium of war, Federal soldiers— including members of the French nobility who had joined the Union cause—play dominoes at Camp Winfield Scott, in Yorktown, Virginia, during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign.

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subscriber bonus special

A Little Rebellion Frustrated by debt, a depressed economy, foreclosures, and unresponsive power elites, embattled farmers in Massachusetts stage a revolt that resets the new nation by Neil Shea “What, gracious God, is man that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct? It was but the other day that we were shedding our blood to obtain the constitutions under which we now live,—constitutions of our own choice and making,—and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them!” —George Washington on Shays’s Rebellion “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.”

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n September 26, 1786, Captain Daniel Shays, a respected veteran of the Revolutionary War, entered Springfield, Massachusetts, at the head of a column of several hundred armed farmers, many of them also veterans. They marched in good order to fife and drum, some carrying muskets, some clubs, and others, following behind, wearing fresh green twigs in their caps, makeshift badges of resistance. The Shaysites, as they were called, had come to defy the power of a state they believed was oppressive. In their eyes, Massachusetts’s political leaders, who just a decade ago had loudly championed freedom and inalienable rights, were now replacing British tyranny with a domestic version of their own: Taxes were three times higher than they had been on the eve of the revolution, a credit crisis had thrown the state economy into chaos, and property foreclosures and court proceedings against debtors—most of them farmers—had skyrocketed. Around towns like Springfield and Northampton, frustrated farmers had begun forcibly closing courthouses to prevent justices from sending more

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HOWARD PYLE. HOWARD PYLE’S BOOK OF THE AMERICAN SPIRIT. HARPER & BROS: NEW YORK & LONDON, 1923

—Thomas Jefferson on Shays’s Rebellion

Shay’s Mob in Possession of a Court-house ran in Harper’s a century after the populist “rebellion.” Despite its brief moment, the uprising left a lasting mark on America.

The Shaysite army moves on Massachusetts militia guarding the federal arsenal in Springfield in this somewhat inaccurate depiction. In fact, a heavy January snow in 1787 made maneuvering difficult.

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shays’s rebellion 1786–1787

farmers to jail or seizing their property. The closures were aggressive but not deadly, and Shays and the militia commander opposing him, Major General William Shepard, a veteran himself, wanted to keep things that way. While the opposing forces both numbered several hundred men, Shepard’s militia were better armed and better trained. But as Shepard knew, the rebel cause was extremely popular in the area, and he secretly worried that his men might desert or defect. In a show of strength—and perhaps to calm his own nerves—he had placed a cannon outside the court. The farmers seemed unimpressed and called it the “government’s puppy.” Some of them may have wanted to take on the militia, but Shays kept them in check. Several times he marched his men through the militia lines, past the cannon and rows of bayonets, allowing no violence, nothing more than shouted curses. During three days of tense negotiations, Shepard and Shays, along with court justices, met and traded demands while their men faced off. In the end, the Shaysites won some concessions—that the court not conduct business or take action against debtors. By September 29 the standoff was over. Henry Knox, the nation’s newly appointed secretary of war and a Bostonian, was critical of the rebels but passed credit to Shays. The rebels, he wrote in October, were “exceedingly eager to be led to action, but the prudence of their leader prevented an attack on the Government troops.” At least for the time being.

The farmers came to see government as an ever more insufferable evil and Boston as a den of thieves

with labor or crops. To survive, they increasingly needed cash, especially for debt payments. But as an economic depression deepened and the credit crisis wore on, little cash was available. Rural leaders called on the state to, among other things, print paper money to relieve some of the burden. The merchantdominated legislature refused. By 1785 court proceedings against debtors had risen sharply. Daniel Shays himself was summoned to court twice for failure to pay debts. Many men like him, veterans who had risked their lives for the nation only to be paid with near-worthless paper certificates, now suffered the same fate as Shays. Adding to the gloom, Massachusetts was awash in war debt. The state owed creditors nearly $5 million—an enormous sum at the time—and while the colonies had banded together to fight the British, they felt no urgency to join Massachusetts in paying down its obligations. After the war, state legislators decided to reduce the debt rapidly by raising poll and property taxes—and accepting only gold and hays’s Rebellion presented the first serious challenge silver for payment. To the farmers, these new taxes were more to government power and social cohesion in the wake severe than taxes had been under the British. Small towns and of the Revolutionary War. Thousands of disillusioned villages pleaded for relief, but in 1786 the government, headed Shaysites had arranged themselves into a patchwork of by newly elected governor John Bowdoin, a merchant himself, militias and mobs, and in some of their more heated rhetoric, routinely sided with commercial interests. they had promised to destroy the Massachusetts government. With tax collectors pressing in on them and debtors courts Most of them were yeomen, subsistence farmers who owned humming along, the farmers came to see the government as small plots of land in the central and western parts of the state. an ever more insufferable evil and Boston as a den of thieves. They relied on systems of barter instead of cash and took pride Soon, believing they had exhausted all options, the farmers in rugged conservatism, community, and self-reliance. On the took up arms and marched. other side of the social divide stood the retailers, wholesalers, As tensions rose in 1786, leaders in Massachusetts and beyond and political elites of the eastern cities and towns. Thoroughly faced a dilemma. The national army stood invested in modern commerce, they sought at some 700 soldiers, not nearly enough to profit and prosperity and counted on govconfront thousands of Shaysites. Henry ernment for nothing so much as the presKnox and others succeeded in convincing ervation of order. Congress to raise new troops, suggesting The merchants had amassed a large trade disingenuously that they were needed to deficit with Britain, importing more goods fight Indians on the frontier. But Congress, than they could sell, and the resulting glut while enthusiastic, was never able to raise led to a credit crisis that mauled Amerimoney, and Knox’s new troops failed to can markets. On both sides of the Atlanmaterialize. tic, tradesmen began demanding cash for Bowdoin had assumed his state militias goods, and in Massachusetts, this hunger would be enough to handle the farmers, but for hard currency was passed westward to he soon realized that militiamen sometimes farmers, the very people who had never would not turn out against the Shaysites, much relied on it. Shays fought hard for independence with whom they were sympathetic. SudFarmers found they could no longer barin the revolution only to find the new denly, neither the state’s nor the country’s ter for food or supplies or pay off their debts nation an inhospitable place.

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military systems were reliable. In desperation, Massachusetts army had failed to pay him years of wages. Yet in 1786, as his politicians determined in late 1786 to hire a private army neighbors grew restless and conflict seemed certain, Shays of 4,400 troops to protect the courts and campaign against initially laid low on his farm in Pelham, some 70 miles west the rebels. That army would be funded by subscription, and of Boston and 40 miles northeast of Springfield. Finally, in Bowdoin put down the first cash—250 pounds. Other wealthy September, he accepted command at Springfield, faced down merchants were soon convinced, coerced, or cajoled into subShepard’s militia, and emerged as one among many of the rebel scribing, and leadership was given to Major General Benjamovement’s leaders—but the one after whom it was named. min Lincoln, commander of He remained reluctant, or the state militia. Despite the perhaps cautious, about the ignoble distinction of having “rebellion” right up to the lost an entire army to the Britturn of the year. But soon ish at Charleston during the after news of Lincoln’s private revolution, Lincoln was still army spread, Shays seems to popular and trusted among have committed fully to the the Massachusetts elite. On rebels’ cause, saying it was January 19 of the new year “in their power to overthrow Lincoln headed west from Bosthe present constitution.” He ton into the face of a wicked also reportedly said that he snowstorm. He was 1,400 men planned to march on Boston short of the planned 4,400, but “to destroy the nest of devthere seemed no time to lose. ils who by their inf luence Word of the private army’s make the court enact what approach quickly spread to they please, burn it, and lay rebel territory, and while the town of Boston in ashes.” some of the Shaysites tried “Not worth a Continental” reflected the general attitude Shays realized that the rebagain to reason with the govels, mostly rural people, didn’t toward paper notes issued by the Continental Congress. Even after ernment, others were simply possess the weapons they the revolution, lack of a consistent monetary policy on the state or enraged. Many of them had needed. But Springfield had federal level continued to affect farmers like Shays. already noticed maddening them. The 10-year-old federal similarities between their state and the British colonial arsenal there was stocked with several thousand muskets, government. But now hired troops—summoning memories artillery pieces, and tons of powder and shot, so while Lincoln’s of Britain’s Hessian mercenaries—were driving toward their mercenaries moved west, the Shaysites moved south toward homes. Some believed Lincoln’s army meant to expel them Springfield, believing they could dislodge Shepard’s force from their land and reduce them to servitude, and the timing defending the arsenal. of the march, in the middle of a hard winter, did little to allay The rebels mustered some 2,500 men, divided into three their fears. regiments. They planned a three-pronged attack, with Shays and Captain Eli Parsons advancing from the east and north, hays was a reluctant rebel. Before his march on Springwhile Captain Luke Day pushed in from the west across the field, he had refused an earlier offer of command Connecticut River. Shepard knew the attack was coming. Infrom his friends and neighbors as they marched on a deed, he was surprised the rebels hadn’t attempted it before. courthouse in Northampton. He also appears to have But he did not know the shape it would take. This time his stayed out of other court closings and frowned on the force was only half as large as the rebels’, and while he had use of violence. He had seen plenty at Bunker Hill, Saratoga, access to the arsenal’s matériel, it was federal property and thus and Stony Point. Shays had been a colonial militiaman at the legally off limits. Ignoring that, Shepard positioned howitzers outbreak of the revolution and rallied to the patriot cause after and cannons outside the arsenal, began to build blockhouses, Lexington and Concord. He spent five years at war, becoming a and sent anxious pleas to his superiors for reinforcements. captain respected by his men. In one apocryphal account, Shays On January 24, when Shays’s and Parsons’s men arrived had been presented with a ceremonial sword by the Marquis outside Springfield, it was blanketed in several feet of snow. de Lafayette, as a token of honorable service. The same story Day’s force waited across the river, having sealed the road to says that Shays, needing cash, soon sold the sword. What is the west; Shays had cut Shepard’s lines of communication in true is that at the time of his retirement from the army in 1780, other directions. The next morning, Shays and Day both sent Shays was landless and impoverished by his service to the new messages to Shepard. Day demanded that the state militia country. Aside from the demands of his rank, which required lay down its arms and disperse or he “would give nor take him to pay for most of his own supplies and equipment, the no quarter.” Shays asked the same of Shepard but made no

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THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM; OPPOSITE: JEAN LEON GEROME FERRIS/PRIVATE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

shays’s rebellion 1786–1787

The impetus for the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia came in part from Shays’s Rebellion—a stark warning of just how disunited and powerless the fledgling United States was.

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shays’s rebellion 1786–1787

threat, offering to send his own forces home if Shepard agreed to terms for the relief of farmers’ debts. Later in the day, men loyal to Shepard intercepted a message from Day to Shays that made it clear Shays had hoped their two forces would launch a simultaneous attack on the arsenal, but in his response Day indicated he planned to wait till the next morning. Unaware of Day’s plan, Shays began moving his forces toward the arsenal along the Boston Post Road. Shepard sent an aide-de-camp out to meet Shays and warned that he would fire if the rebels kept coming. The rebels were defiant. “That is all we want by God,” one of Shays’s lieutenants reportedly proclaimed. Shays ordered his men forward. The farmers, many of whom had never seen combat, advanced quickly despite the deep snow. On Shepard’s order, artillerymen elevated their guns. The first shots, a warning, flew over the rebels’ heads but did not stop them. The next rounds, volley after volley of grapeshot, tore through the rebel lines. Four men died almost instantly, some 20 more were wounded. The insurgent force collapsed in a chaos of blood and smoke, without the rebels having fired a shot. Shays tried briefly to hold his men together, but the farmers panicked and Shays soon fled with them back into the hill country, where he began gathering the pieces of his broken army. With the rebels’ ranks diminished by defeat and more men dropping away each day, Shays attempted to bargain with Lincoln, sending him messages even as he moved the rebels

‘What stronger evidence can be given of the want of energy in our governments than these disorders?’ farther north toward the small village of Petersham. Shays asked pardon for all his men and officers and called for a truce until the state legislature considered yet another petition for redress of grievances that the rebels had just sent off to Boston. Lincoln, sensing an advantageous end, refused. The general knew the rebels were greatly weakened, but he took no chances. The surrounding country was full of Shaysite sympathizers who had supported the rebels in their escape after Springfield. Lincoln also understood that his own resources, and the monthlong enlistments of his troops, would soon run out. When he learned on February 3 that Shays’s men were headed for Petersham, he pushed after them. That evening, well after dark, the mercenary force began a 30-mile march over roads piled with snow. Initially, the weather was clear, but after midnight temperatures dropped. Soon a blizzard was howling down, and the men staggered

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through deep drifts, their ranks slowly stretching out into a long, disorderly line. But by midmorning the following day, Lincoln’s force was bearing down on the unsuspecting rebels, who again fired not a shot. Some 150 of them surrendered on the spot while the rest, including Shays and other leaders, fled into the wintry forest and eventually into New Hampshire and Vermont. Satisfied, Lincoln chose to let them go. Whether he realized it or not then, he had broken Shays’s Rebellion.

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he Massachusetts uprising lasted barely six months. And though many American yeomen shared the frustration of their Massachusetts neighbors, the rebellion had not spread to other states, as some had feared. In another era Shays’s Rebellion might have been quickly forgotten. But it occurred at a peculiar moment in America’s early development, and its effect was profound. The failure of Massachusetts’s political leaders to control the uprising early, and of Congress to deal with it later, illuminated serious flaws at the state and federal level. The state legislature had routinely inflamed unrest by focusing on the demands of urban merchants and businessmen to the exclusion of rural citizens. More disturbing, militiamen sympathetic to the rebel cause had refused to turn out when called up. Congress under the Articles of Confederation had proved all but powerless in the face of a domestic emergency and in protecting federal property. Like Massachusetts, it had not been able to raise public money for an army or to unite states in common cause against the insurgency. Even before the rebellion, a convention had been planned to determine the role of the federal government, and when the delegates convened in Philadelphia in late May 1787, Shays’s Rebellion was on their minds. “What stronger evidence can be given of the want of energy in our governments than these disorders?” George Washington had written to James Madison. The unrest had drawn Washington out of retirement and brought him to Philadelphia. For those delegates who wanted a robust central government, the rebellion became a cautionary tale and a rhetorical cudgel at the convention and in the months to come, as they worked to convince states to ratify the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton mentioned Shays by name in the sixth of his Federalist Papers. And James Madison argued that “the insurrections in Massachusetts admonished all the States of the danger to which they were exposed.” The fight to ratify the Constitution was longer and in many ways more virulent than the short-lived rebellion of Massachusetts farmers. But that local uprising helped spur the 13 disparate states to think beyond their own borders and concerns and define just what it meant to be united states. MHQ

Neil Shea is a contributing editor with the American Scholar and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He also writes regularly for National Geographic. Though from Massachusetts, he is probably not related to Daniel Shays.