Guantánamo, USA: The Untold History of America's Cuban Outpost
Stephen Irving Max Schwab. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009. 367 pp. Illus. Appens. Notes. Bib. Index. $34.95.
Reviewed by Alan McPherson
Among the hundreds of U.S. overseas military establishments, the naval base in Guant
namo, Cuba known as "Gitmo," derived from its acronym GTMO is unusual. It is not only the first overseas U.S. base but also the only one where Washington maintains no diplomatic relations. Its various roles are what Stephen Schwab investigates in this broadly researched, carefully argued book.Schwab fills a substantial gap in scholarship on the subject; little exists in monograph form. Thus the author is able to narrate Gitmo's great milestones: its conception and birth after 1898, the political struggles from 1903 to 1933, its expansion during World War II, the postwar ideological line in the sand, and its recent role as a site of political polarization.
Throughout, Schwab wrestles with two themes. One uses the base as a window into U.S.
Cuban relations. Like Jana Lipman in her recent Guant namo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (University of California Press, 2008), Schwab argues that Guant namo has "been both a source of friction and a center of compromise." The former is more obvious than the latter Ra l Castro captured its personnel in 1958, and Fidel Castro cut off its water in 1964 but no Cuban leader has seriously attempted the return of the territory into Cuban hands. Schwab supports the base's legality, enshrined in bilateral treaties from 1903 and 1934.Schwab's other theme is Guant
namo's role beyond Cuban affairs. Here he defends the continuing existence of the base by charting the useful not vital services it has rendered since it was founded. After the deep natural harbor helped the U.S. Navy blockade Santiago in 1898, the base at Guant namo sprang up to guard the Windward Passage leading to the Panama Canal. During World War II Guant namo was a hub in the interlocking convoys fighting German U-boats. In just two years the base handled 17,678 ships. The Cold War then made it simultaneously most and least useful. Nuclear weapons and squadrons everywhere, including the Caribbean, made the Panama Canal largely obsolete militarily. But because it was located in Cuba, Gitmo remained a symbol for all sides of the conflict. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the base reverted to more practical purposes: hosting detention camps for refugees and interrogation facilities for enemy combatants. Though the base itself is legal, Schwab argues, some exploited its fuzzy status. Most notoriously, the George W. Bush administration claimed it lay beyond the reach of U.S. laws and the Supreme Court.Explaining Guant
namo's extra-Cuban roles is the book's most original contribution. At various times it served as a coaling station, repair facility, postal station, Red Cross base, communication nexus, post-hurricane relief center, Coast Guard detachment, and site for gunnery exercises and amphibious warfare training. This explains why it continued to exist despite the world's condemnation. After all, notes Schwab, unlike mainland bases, Guant namo has "no natural political constituency, or, to put it bluntly, there is no pork barrel' on that base." So Schwab praises administration officials secretaries of the Navy, members of the base's general board, and especially President Theodore Roosevelt who waged the difficult battle to fund it adequately.The book's only weakness is the relatively scant attention it pays to the Cuban side. Schwab is understandably hampered by a lack of Cuban documents since 1959. Yet there are too few Cuban voices in an early chapter titled, "Cubans Resist U.S. Base Acquisition." The mere mention of Cuban resistance comes nine pages into the chapter, and its depiction, almost entirely based on U.S. documents, remains thin. For instance, Schwab fails to explain why, during a span of 15 days in May and June 1901, the Cuban constitutional convention dropped its objections to the base provisions in the Platt Amendment. Research into Cuban newspapers, documents, and memoirs would certainly have answered this key question.
Overall, Guant
namo, USA is poised to be the definitive history of this unusual military base. It does what all good history should: it pulls readers out of the present, in which controversies about detention centers dominate, and reminds them that "Gitmo" has been and continues to be so much more.Cruise of the Dashing Wave: Rounding Cape Horn in 1860
Philip Hichborn. Edited by William H. Thiesen. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010. 144 pp. Illus. Appen. Gloss. Bib. Index. $24.95.
Reviewed by Howard J. Fuller
"If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time," notes the narrator of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, "then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more." Human beings thrive on adversity, and few experiences are more trying than a long sailing voyage. This is one of the central reminders from mid-19th century ship's carpenter Philip Hichborn in his record of rounding Cape Horn. As editor William H. Thiesen observes in his introduction, logbooks and nautical diaries were typically "colorless lists of sailing data," whereas Hichborn "focuses on the living conditions and social life aboard one of the period's better-known clipper ships." The result is an engrossing drama which puts modern-day popular hits like Big Brother or Lost, obsessed with how claustrophobic and even hazardous conditions bring out the best and worst in people, to shame. This is not only real; it is maritime history in the finest tradition.
Hichborn was 21 when he signed on for working passage on board the Dashing Wave, a wooden-hulled, 1,200-ton merchant vessel only seven years old but already struggling against the relentless natural forces of decay. Pumping the bilges was a daily task, patching leaks, mending sails
with the real work required back at dockside. Aside from the captain himself, the carpenter was responsible for the ship's safety and therefore for the lives of everyone on board.To illustrate this point, in one instance the pumps had given out, and within 30 minutes of rough seas the Dashing Wave had already taken on 17 inches of water, engaging the entire watch. "The crew are very suspicious of the vessel," wrote Hichborn, "and wish to know how much water every time she is sounded."
The next day . . . I rigged a stage over the bow [a piece of board about five feet long]. Charles Howard and I went down on it with oakum, mallet and irons, and found her very much opened in the wood ends on the port bow as far down as we could get. . . . There was not much sea but considerable swell. When I was on the stage I would go down, at times clear under, and come up wet as a drowned rat. . . . Charlie has been fishing for three years, and knows a shark when he sees it. I was driving away, with my legs in the water up to my knees, when all at once he cried, "For God's sake jump for your life," which you can bet I did. None too soon, for lo and behold a large shark sped by.
As the Dashing Wave continued her journey around Cape Horn to San Francisco, tensions developed among the crew and between Hichborn and Captain David R. Lecraw (who was barely on speaking terms with his second mate). Foreigners
all referred to as "Dutchmen" were the most frequent targets; the more different you were, the more vulnerable. At one point a "boy" falls from a yardarm onto the deck, in "a mangled heap." Here, too, the ship's carpenter saw to the sorrowful process of burial at sea.Meanwhile, everyone suffered. "The captain is awfully afraid he won't get work enough done for his money," Hichborn comments bitterly. Most of the crewmen, like their ship, were in a battered condition by the time they reached the Pacific. Yet "they had cheek enough to ask the man with broken ribs to come on deck to work when he is spitting blood every day."
In addition to Hichborn's account, Thiesen has included a fascinating collection of appendices. A glossary of nautical and slang terms is always welcome, but there are also biographies of Hichborn and of the ship, an interview with the captain's daughter, a bill of fare, and a full sail schematic of the Dashing Wave. Another section offers the reader the perspective of "Lyman H. Ellingwood, Passenger" who also found the captain to be "an old fogy, disagreeable to everyone" and the sailors themselves "not always an awful set" (though the carpenter and sailmaker likewise "consider themselves above the sailors").
Perhaps what is missing from the documentation of this particular voyage is any discussion of what was happening to the rest of American society in 1860; namely, the election of President Abraham Lincoln and the coming secession crisis leading to the Civil War. Hichborn only notes, "I was thinking about the election the other day, and was wondering who could be the President, and if he were the man for me and our family." But this momentary reflection of his life back in Boston is soon swallowed up again by the pressing, daily misery of life at sea; endless cold, inescapable damp, poor food, and often harsh company.
Thiesen explains that he discovered Hichborn's manuscript while researching his previous work, Industrializing American Shipbuilding: The Transformation of Ship Design and Construction, 1820-1920 (University Press of Florida, 2006), at the National Archives; but why was it even located in Record Group 19, from the old naval Bureau of Construction, Equipment, and Repairs
Hichborn went on to pursue a successful career in the U.S. Navy as a naval constructor, and "It is entirely possible that [he] learned many of the lessons of good management during the time he served on board Dashing Wave." He also presumably felt it was his mission to help elevate the condition of the men who live and serve on the water adversity be damned.America in Vietnam: The War that Couldn't Be Won
Herbert Y. Schandler. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. 209 pp. Map. Illus. Notes. Bib. $39.95.
Reviewed by Lewis Sorley
Dr. Herbert Schandler has been a respected scholar and teacher of the Vietnam War for many years. This book, unfortunately, does not represent his best work.
The author states that a chapter he contributed to Robert McNamara's book, Argument without End, was criticized for not going beyond the Tet Offensive of 1968. In that chapter he had called the idea of a U.S. military victory in Vietnam "a dangerous illusion." One of the rationales for writing the present book, says Schandler, was "to revise and expand the history beyond 1968." Thus, it is surprising to find that of the book's 178 pages of substantive material, only 42 deal with matters after that date. All the rest rehash well-worn material, often repetitively. Even the author acknowledges this, writing in the preface that "almost every paragraph of my work probably has been examined in an entire book based on detailed original sources and copious research."
But what is new, and the apparent real reason for this volume, is fallout from the author's two trips to Hanoi
in 1998 and 1999 to discuss the war with communist officials. Schandler thus revisits various aspects of the war, interpolating comments by those with whom he spoke, usually finding himself in agreement with their arguments and outlook.So thoroughly is this the case that the author posits as the thesis of this book his conclusion that "nationalism was Ho [Chi Minh]'s and his followers' primary objective." Nowhere does he examine how such nationalism related to the communists' relentless cruelty and viciousness toward their supposed brethren in the south as manifested in a deliberate and calculated program of assassinations, mass executions, kidnappings, terrorist bombings, impressments, and indiscriminate shelling and rocketing of population centers, causing the deaths of some 465,000
Douglas Pike's estimate, along with another 935,000 wounded innocent civilians, in the course of pursuing their "liberation." Instead, Schandler refers to "so-called North Vietnamese aggression" and manifests throughout an undisguised disdain, if not contempt, for the South Vietnamese and their government. There emerges one central theme: the author's dogged insistence on the thesis advanced in the subtitle the notion that Vietnam was, for the South Vietnamese and their allies, a "war that couldn't be won."Schandler focuses almost exclusively on the early years of the United States' involvement in the war, a period when the war of attrition, search-and-destroy tactics, and body count as the measure of merit provided much to criticize. But when he belatedly (and in brief compass) gets to the later years, he shifts his focus to Washington, virtually ignoring the war of population security, clear-and-hold tactics, providing
finally modern arms to the South Vietnamese, and rooting out the enemy infrastructure among the rural populace.Nor does he give any weight to the reinstitution of village governance, comprehensive land reform, miracle rice and other economic advances, or the battlefield bravery and prowess of the South Vietnamese armed forces as they turned back the communists' 1972 Easter invasion. Abandonment of the ill-fated South Vietnamese by their sometime American allies, as mandated by the U.S. Congress, while the communists continued to receive generous support from their Soviet and Chinese patrons, also more or less escapes Schandler's notice. Such omissions and oversights are, of course, essential to sustaining his version of causes and effects as the war came to an end.
What this volume, probably his valedictory work, most clearly and poignantly illustrates is how deeply Schandler has been affected by those visits to postwar Vietnam and his conversations there with communist officials who took part in the conquest of South Vietnam. He has, apparently, largely adopted their view of the conflict, and of its origins, nature, course, and outcome, to include the myth of an "unwinnable" war.
Captains Contentious: The Dysfunctional Sons of the Brine
Louis Arthur Norton. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 185 pp. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by George C. Daughan
This book is a welcome addition to the small but growing body of literature on the long-neglected Continental Navy. The author chooses five officers
John Manley, Silas Talbot, Dudley Saltonstall, Joshua Barney, and John Paul Jones to illustrate the common characteristics of an uncommon bunch, the Continental Navy's fighting captains. Norton deftly portrays the career of each, showing what they had in common and to what extent they are a representative sample.He begins, appropriately enough, by emphasizing their fundamental commitment to the cause of liberty. Although their personalities and motivations were complex and varied, they shared a profound belief in the ideals of the American Revolution. To be sure, they fought for fame, glory, and honor, but their strongest moral guide, what moved them to fight under miserable conditions against great odds, was a deep sense of patriotism. Five is admittedly a small sample, and the captains of the Continental Navy, from Nicholas Biddle to John Barry to Abraham Whipple and Lambert Wickes, were a diverse group, but Norton succeeds in showing that those he selected were representative of the group as a whole.
Norton's captains emerge as an acrimonious lot, often unruly, independent, aloof, and self-indulgent. At the same time, with the exception of Saltonstall, they were great warriors: prudent, cunning, and unrelenting in combat. Their less-than-admirable qualities, Norton suggests, were partly responsible for their success in battle, often against more powerful opponents.
Avarice of rank was a common characteristic that at times led to conflicts with other members of the service that served neither the captains nor the Navy. Norton recounts the sad story of Joshua Barney, who refused to serve in Washington's new Federal Navy because Silas Talbot was placed ahead of him
mistakenly, Barney thought on the seniority list. When Secretary of War Henry Knox pointed out that Talbot's appointment in the Continental Navy predated his, Barney would not relent, and he was lost to the fledgling service, not rejoining it until late in the War of 1812. One of the country's finest fighting captains was thus out of uniform over a matter of wounded pride.Talbot himself had a dispute over rank with Thomas Truxtun, which Norton describes in vivid detail, as well as the disgruntlement Jones felt at times over the ranking he received. Norton also criticizes Manley's rush to resign his army commission in April 1776 out of "frustration and hubris" to receive a commission as captain in the new Continental Navy.
As diverse as the captains were in other respects, Norton finds them all narcissistic, aggressive perfectionists. And of these, narcissism stands out as the most prominent trait. It led them to act heroically at times, but it also caused them to be quarrelsome, often ill-natured, and narrow-minded. Norton maintains that acrimony was far more prevalent among them than among their British counterparts.
As with Joshua Barney: Hero of the Revolution and 1812 and Norton's other work, Captains Contentious is a pleasure to read, particularly his delightful sketches of the captains. Very little has been written about either Manley or Saltonstall, so these portraits are especially welcome. Saltonstall is best known for his part in the disastrous Penobscot Bay expedition. Norton gives a vivid description of the battle, and while he does not exonerate Saltonstall, he shows the many difficulties under which he operated. Manley's dispute with Hector McNeil and Jones's support of his fellow Scot are likewise described judiciously, while coming down on Manley's side. Jones himself is given his due as a courageous, skillful fighter, but Norton also reminds the reader of Benjamin Franklin's admonition to Jones not to "criticize and censure almost everyone you have to do with."
This is an engrossing book, written by a veteran historian at the top of his game.
Operation Phantom Fury: The Assault and Capture of Fallujah, Iraq
Dick Camp. Osceola, WI: Zenith Press, 2009. 320 pp. Illus. Appens. Bib. Index. $30.
Reviewed by Captain Alexander Martin, U.S. Marine Corps
It's not popular to claim we won the war in Iraq, but we did. During seven years there we swiftly toppled a dictator in the longest overland campaign in Marine Corps history, successfully countered a dynamic insurgency, defeated al Qaeda in what they themselves christened the "frontline" in their own war on the West, and despite all the setbacks, helped the Iraqi people build their own sort of democracy. And while to what degree this success will persist depends on events yet to occur, from strictly a military perspective, our actions in Iraq were a tremendous, if unlikely, victory.
The reasons we won are many and, like war itself, complicated: the surge, U.S. Special Operations Command raids, American persistence, Iraqi resolve, and no doubt, the autumn 2004 campaign. Dick Camp's book tells that battle's story.
By the spring of that year, Fallujah
a fetid city in the heart of the Sunni Triangle was overrun by criminals, assassins, al Qaeda, and insurgents bent on ending the occupation and undermining the rule of law. It was openly hostile to Coalition forces and soon became al Anbar Province's (and to a large extent Iraq's) center of gravity. Tensions culminated with the ambush and murder of four Blackwater contractors in March 2004. President George W. Bush famously responded, "Heads must roll." And so it was that the city was to be taken back as part of a larger national stabilization movement. Only this time, future stability required immediate force.The first push into Fallujah was botched. Marine commanders were not consulted, and their advice was ignored. Washington ordered action then lost its nerve and ordered the Marines back. The enemy declared victory, and the situation worsened. By autumn, however, the plan to retake the city was inked, rehearsed, and readied. This time there would be no stall, and the Second Battle of Fallujah began. It would be the largest urban action for the Marine Corps since the Battle of Hu
during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam.Camp sets the battles' political stage very well, describing the tensions among the U.S. Administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, Iraq Coalition Force Commander, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and aptly avoids commenting on the war's domestic political controversy. This technique keeps his work close to what matters most in getting to the truth of a battle: write of the strategy and of the men who execute it.
As Camp shows, the true adversary in Iraq
the transnational enemy that viewed Iraq as a battlefield in the larger war of fundamentalist Islam versus the godless West was first defeated in those cold November days. Victory in Fallujah showed that we were still capable of dealing death and taking back ground.Camp writes of war's men and methodology as only one who has been there can. I especially liked his treatment of some of the nation's most brilliant combat leaders, including Marines General James N. Mattis and Colonel Willard A. Buhl, and his skill in telling a story that reads less like a history than a thrilling novel.
The First Battle of Fallujah was a lesson in how political clumsiness can be mistaken for political discretion and demonstrated the consequences, on the ground, of extreme cautiousness at such extreme times. The second battle was a reminder that the American military machine is still the most lethal in existence. Both lessons instruct that, first, as a matter of ethics and just war, when a battle is waged, it must be decisive and swift; and second, to paraphrase my former professor and Hoover Fellow, Victor Davis Hanson, war is like water. Its properties through the ages have not changed (fear, violence, chaos, and carnage), but its velocity has. Rifled barrels, machine guns, precision-guided bombs, and drones kill more people, faster than ever. And third, that war is war is war.
Camp frames these important lessons using discussions with generals and statesmen at the strategic level on how best to fight and those with lance corporals and lieutenants at the tactical level on how best to kill and stay alive. He reminds us that Fallujah was no different from Marathon or Marjah, and that war is indeed like water.