Wars and rumors of war, small clashes and major conflicts—the long catalog of man's belligerence runs on with no end in sight. Historians mine the past for new insights into old battles; novelists reconstruct past fights and speculate about future confrontations; scientists and engineers collaborate in the production of ever-more devastating weapons. All the while, politicians and military leaders fantasize about defensive technology in deep space and surgical missile strikes so accurate that there will be few civilian casualties no matter how fierce the fight.
Year after year the quarrels continue, and a spate of books—memoirs, scholarly tomes, histories, novels, coffee-table picture albums—adds to the record of military adventures. Some, not worth an inch of space on a library shelf, appear and disappear unnoticed. But the number of worthwhile and readable volumes is always a welcome surprise. The profession of arms may lose public support in times of peace, but books about practitioners of that profession—their triumphs and their disasters, on land and at sea—are produced at an impressive pace. No segment of the armed forces escapes scrutiny.
Throughout most of history that tribe has been exclusively male. Now, necessity, plus feminist pressure, has changed the membership—at least in Western nations. We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese is unimpeachable testimony that the toughness and courage needed to deal with danger and the daily probability of death is shared equally by women and men. In interviews with Dr. Elizabeth M. Norman, Army and Navy nurses caught in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II tell stories of war at its worst. Those nurses did more than merely persevere; they helped build hospitals, cared for the wounded, took up arms when necessary, and toughed out the awful conditions in internment camps. The men they tended and occasionally fought beside built them a well-earned monument on Bataan. It remembers them as "The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor."
As rugged in their own way as those "Angels," The Women Who Wrote the War proved themselves the equal of even the most daring of their male competitors. Martha Gellhorn, Margaret Bourke-White, Shelley Mydans, Annalee Jacoby, Dorothy Thompson, Janet Flanner, Maggie Higgins—the roll call of women war correspondents is a roll call of talented and tenacious journalists. Their achievements and their drive to get the story are recorded by Nancy Caldwell Sorel, herself a journalist, in a book rich with anecdotes—some fresh, some familiar. "How can you work against a dame?" asked one male reporter as he filed a story from Aachen. This book offers the answer: only if you are as good and as tough as she.
For men in uniform, of course, war has always been hell. An immense literature on the subject stretches back across centuries, but new reminders keep coming. Few are as vivid as Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War by Mark Bowden. Part fact, part fiction, this after-action report of U.S. Rangers fighting in the mean streets of Mogadishu seven years ago, honors the memory "of ninety -nine American soldiers trapped in an ancient city and fighting for their lives." This is an authoritative picture of Rangers and the men of Delta Force who like to brag that they are "faster, stronger, smarter, and more experienced than any soldiers in the world."
Marines who were sent to the Caribbean to train the Garde d'Haiti surely shared the Army Rangers' confidence in their own abilities. But those abilities were little help, as the Marines tried to turn Haiti's comic opera troops into a professional military force. The country's top officers had been sent packing, equipment was obsolete or in disrepair, and learning the Creole patois was a slow process for the Marine instructors. The sad truth, according to Charles T. Williamson's The U.S. Naval Mission to Haiti: 1959-1963, was that the mission was probably doomed from the start. Colonel Williamson's even-handed account records hard-won victories as well as unfortunate failures. But before they came home, he and his fellow Marines "were frustrated by seeing so much time, money, and effort being wasted in what they saw as a lost cause."
Unlike that failed mission in Haiti, World War II landings on South Pacific islands are remembered by U. S. Marines with unfailing pride. Books about the battle-scarred units that fought for those islands now tend to be twice-told tales. Fragments of War: A Marine's Personal Journey is a welcome exception. Like many of his buddies, Bertram A. Yaffee, a tank commander, often was scared out of his wits. On the beaches of Bougainville, Guam, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, Yaffee fought his own claustrophobia as desperately as he fought the Japanese. Even as his guns helped silence the enemy, long-ago college courses in history and philosophy helped Yaffee survive the confining walls of his tank. Plutarch and Heraclitus came to mind; so did Spinoza, Martin Buber, Bertrand Russell, and many others remembered from student days. In this unusual memoir, those men came to the aid of the son of an illiterate Lithuanian immigrant.
No one would argue seriously that First Division Marines who made "the walk out" from Korea's Chosin Reservoir in November-December 1950 scored a true victory. But "no finer men have ever claimed the title of U.S. Marine," said Proceedings reviewer retired Marine Colonel Allan R. Millett. The saga of their "attack in another direction" is told with justifiable pride throughout the Corps. Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950, by Martin Russ, is composed of interviews with Chosin survivors—from generals to privates. Millett gives high praise to the author's "keen ear for Marine talk and Marine values." Hard as the author is in his assessment of the Army's performance in that campaign, Colonel Millet is confident that Russ is consistently "right about the feckless combat performance of almost every Army unit with which the First Marine Division shared its ordeal." Was the ordeal worth the cost? In The Korean War: No Victors, No Vanquished, historian Stanley Sandler responds with an emphatic "Yes." Sandler also argues that the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union can be traced to President Harry Truman's 1950 decision to send troops to the aid of South Korea.
Vietnam, another Asian war, taught the United States some bitter lessons. Historians tend to focus on the confusion of U.S. policy and the embarrassment of final failure. The second half of the war, from Tet to the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the fall of Saigon, gets far less attention. In A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, Lewis Sorley addresses that area of neglect. Those were the years when General Creighton W. Abrams made a dramatic change in U.S. strategy and tactics. Abrams' "one-war" concept put equal emphasis on all aspects of the conflict: military operations in the field, improvement of the South Vietnamese armed forces, and the security of population in the countryside. In 1969 and 1970, said Proceedings reviewer retired Army Lieutenant General John H. Cushman, it was possible to conclude that the one-war concept was winning. The fact that such optimism soon faded was no fault of Abrams. "His authentic wisdom, abiding humility, and indomitable will," said Cushman, "made him one of our greatest soldiers."
Students of a more recent war will find equal profit in Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War, by Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. Schneller, Jr. "The book's theater-level perspective," said Proceedings reviewer retired Rear Admiral Riley D. Mixson, provides "revealing insights into some of the lesser -known, yet vital contributions of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps to the success of Desert Shield and Desert Storm." The authors combine well-deserved praise of the naval services with well-documented criticism. If the theater commander-in-chief did not properly appreciate the Navy's power-projection capabilities, the problem was exacerbated by the Navy leaders' prejudice against the unified commander's operational control. "Although the principal focus of this book is on the Navy," said Mixson, "the authors capture the significant contributions of the total joint force."
With its detailed study of the Navy's preparation for Desert Storm, Desert Shield at Sea: What the Navy Really Did, by Marvin Pokrant, is an invaluable companion to Shield and Sword. Planning amphibious operations and working out the problems of Joint Forces Air Command, said Proceedings reviewer retired Admiral Richard Macke, meant dealing with "a Pandora's box of differing political masters, wavering political policy, conflicting rules of engagement, and other hurdles." Success in dealing with this meant that "Desert Shield probably accomplished more toward the evolution of true joint warfare than any other single event."
Success in dealing with a peacetime problem proved far more difficult to achieve. A Glimpse of Hell, by TV news producer Charles C. Thompson II, paints a vivid picture of the causes and consequences of the 1989 explosion in No. 2 gun turret on the USS Iowa (BB-61). The catastrophe, the author argues, can be blamed on officers and enlisted men alike. The botched investigations that followed, and the rush to find a scapegoat, said Proceedings reviewer Norman Polmar, "will stand as a blot on the U.S. Navy's record." Explosion Aboard The Iowa by Richard L. Schwoebel, a scientist from the Sandia National Laboratory, describes a thoroughly objective examination of the accident. Unlike the Navy's investigators, Schwoebel and his team refrained from jumping to questionable conclusions. They found the Navy's theory that it could all be blamed on a homosexual lovers' quarrel utterly unsatisfactory, and despite constant Navy interference, they demonstrated that the explosion had almost certainly been caused by technical problems and an insufficiently trained gun crew.
Colonel Seamon writes the Books of Interest column for Proceedings.