To the Limit of Endurance: A Battalion of Marines in the Great War
Peter F. Owen. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. 248 pp. Maps. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $32.50
Reviewed by Major Brian A. Ross, U.S. Marine Corps
The combat service of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in World War I has received much attention from scholars in the past few years, as evidenced by the wave of recent books published on the subject. Many of these works examine the operational movements of large, division and brigade-level AEF units, while others relate the more personal narratives of front-line U.S. servicemen engaged in a life and death struggle on the Western Front.
Peter F. Owen's book, To the Limit of Endurance, fills an important niche in this rich historical scholarship. The author, an active duty Marine Corps officer, combines two essential aspects of military history, the individual and the unit, into a deeply compelling story of the Marines and officers of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment (or 2/6) during service in France with the legendary 4th Marine Brigade, 2nd Division, AEF. From its formation at Quantico in 1917 to its mustering out in 1919, 2/6 participated in the five major Marine Corps engagements in the war—Belleau Wood, Soissons, Saint-Mihiel, Blanc Mont, and the Meuse-Argonne. Given this breadth of experience, Owen contends this particular battalion "represents the best the AEF could be in 1918" and serves as "an important case study on the readiness and resilience of all American infantry in the First World War."
Owen's study of a single battalion is exceptional. It provides a unique prism through which a close evaluation of the difficult training and harsh combat of small-unit infantry is possible. More important, these unit experiences are told from the lowest level, through the sights, sounds, and smells the battalion's officers and enlisted men witnessed. In utilizing a treasure trove of surviving personal papers and oral histories from 2/6 Marines (two battalion officers, Thomas Holcomb and Clifton B. Cates, later became Commandants of the Marine Corps) together with the requisite unit operational histories, the author's command of the historical material is convincingly evident.
The reader is quickly immersed in the life and times of 2/6 Marines as they train for combat. This preparation, first at Parris Island, later at Quantico, and ultimately in France, while rightfully emphasizing rifle marksmanship, inexplicably failed to account for the use of supporting arms like artillery and machine guns. When 2/6 finally engaged in combat, this gross oversight resulted in staggering casualties among the Marines, often as high as 70 percent. Unit training, including the use of the rolling barrage and tanks, did eventually improve, resulting in more effective combat performance. Yet, Owen argues, a corresponding transformation interestingly occurred in the battalion's fundamental character as well. Because the unit's companies were necessarily replenished with new replacements after each bloody battle, the once cohesive battalion of Quantico and Belleau Wood days became, in Owen's words, a "coldly efficient but brittle machine." In the end, Owen concludes the remaining stalwarts—their ranks continually devastated by shot, shell, and disease—endured, not as a result of superior firepower, but through sheer grit and individual determination. This book is an emotional roller coaster ride; a story of the grim realities of close combat at the small unit leader level and of the individual human capacity to persevere in the face of great hardship.
Criticisms of this book are minor and unrelated to content. While Owen superbly describes the movement of forces and the order of battle in the written word, some of the maps seem too small in scale and overly cluttered. No doubt meant to clarify the operational situation for the reader, these illustrations caused me to sometimes scratch my head in confusion.
Despite this mild irritation, readers will find much to like here, from examinations on personal leadership, unit morale, and attrition tactics, to discussions on the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of war from a personal and small-unit perspective. A welcome and fitting addition to the scholarship on the Great War, To the Limit of Endurance deserves a well-earned place in any military book collection.
Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front
Todd DePastino. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. 352 pp. Illus. $27.95.
Reviewed by Eric Smith
To many American servicemen during World War II, he was more famous than General Dwight Eisenhower, more controversial than General George Patton, and more beloved than President Franklin Roosevelt.
Baby-faced Bill Mauldin was just 23 years old and a lowly Army sergeant when he achieved his young life's ambition—to become a rich, renowned cartoonist. (By March 1945, "His syndication orders were up sharply, his advance book sales were surging toward $100,000, and the Book-of-the-Month Club had made [his book] Up Front a selection for July." Mauldin had collected almost $100,000 by April and won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.)
How he did this, and how he handled (or sometimes mishandled) the tidal wave of celebrity that swept over him, is the subject of this fine biography by Todd DePastino, a college professor and editor of a collection of Mauldin's wartime cartoons.
As a boy being raised in the hardscrabble, Depression-era Southwest, Mauldin resolved early on that he would somehow use his artistic talent to make a lot of money.
After the Nazis marched into Poland, however, Mauldin temporarily sidetracked his career and joined the National Guard. By 1943 he was in Italy with the 45th Division, serving officially as an infantryman but actually as a cartoonist for the division's newspaper and later for Stars and Stripes.
Watching his fellow GIs slogging up and down muddy mountains under fire, Mauldin employed his brush to create two memorable characters—Willie and Joe—who perfectly embodied the weary rifleman's timeless cynicism about military authority and phony patriotic rhetoric.
When Mauldin received the Pulitzer Prize (as well as a stern lecture from General Patton) for his irreverent cartoons, his career was launched, but not all of his problems were solved. His biographer is quite honest here about the false starts, professional setbacks, and marital conflicts Mauldin endured in the postwar years.
Eventually the artist became a widely syndicated political cartoonist, earning once again the money and acclaim he richly deserved. Mauldin was so consistently good at his craft that he won his second Pulitzer only months after landing a newspaper cartooning job in the late 1950s.
As a cartoonist myself, I appreciate DePastino's deft incorporation of the details of Mauldin's drawing style into his narrative. As distinctive as that style was during the Willie and Joe era, with thick, fluid brushstrokes and inky shadows, it changed over the decades into something softer and subtler. All of this is accurately noted and described by the author.
Although Mauldin's early artwork was unsophisticated (the book is profusely illustrated with cartoons, photos, and sketches from all periods of his life), he quickly developed into a superb draftsman. Whatever he drew—especially the battered jeeps, M-1 rifles, and dented helmets of his combat characters—virtually jumped off the page with graphic authenticity.
Mauldin's biographer turns out to be a skilled stylist in his own right. His writing is clear and lively and, except for the first tedious chapter, the easily readable text proceeds smoothly and logically.
This is not always the case with other biographies today. Some authors seem to have concluded that the "modern" way to present a subject's life is to load up each page with the mundane minutia of the subject's everyday existence. Then they render it in painstaking and too often mind-boggling detail. Making few if any distinctions between important and irrelevant events, they leave it to readers to make whatever sense they can of a person's life and career.
This thoughtful author, on the other hand, takes the trouble to organize and interpret—not simply relate—the major themes of Mauldin's life, and the book is all the better for it.
We learn, for example, that although he was just lucky at times, Mauldin's spectacular success was no accident. At every juncture he planned for it, trained for it, schooled himself for it, and put in prodigious hours of work to advance himself.
In the latter days of his career, Mauldin considered himself more of a writer than a cartoonist, but in the end he will be remembered for the power and authority of his incomparable drawings. This excellent biography will surely help to keep that memory alive.
Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games.
Tennent H. Bagley. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. 313 pp. Appens. Notes. Index. $28.
Reviewed by Andrew G. Wilson
Spy Wars is the personal account of one of the KGB's leading antagonists—Tennent Bagley—head of the Central Intelligence Agency's counterintelligence section targeting Soviet Russia during the height of the early Cold War, and his role in one of the key counterintelligence episodes of the Cold War. Drawing from primary and secondary source material, interviews, as well as—and most important—personal involvement, Bagley leads the reader through the Byzantine world that is counterintelligence, what he calls the "maze of mirrors."
Focusing on early Cold War CIA operations in Poland and the controversial defection of Soviet agent Yuri Nosenko in 1964, Bagley's work touches on a number of counterintelligence operations during the 1960s and 1970s. He contends that the accepted myth created by the CIA about Nosenko would significantly impact the agency's later ability (or inability) to resist and ferret out Soviet penetration operations well into the 1980s.
After a brief overview of his distinguished naval family, his stint in the Marine Corps, and recruitment into the agency, Bagley outlines early CIA activities in Poland. But it is Nosenko's May 1964 defection that is the centerpiece and raison d'etre for the book.
As the author clearly explains, the Soviet Union had a long history of using agent provocateurs to further its intelligence goals. After an extended period of debriefs and interrogation, Bagley and many of his associates concluded that Nosenko was possibly such a KGB plant and not a true defector. In addition, Nosenko's claims raised doubts among many of the CIA's senior staff about the claims of an earlier senior KGB defector, Major Anatoly Golitsyn, who crossed over in 1961. In essence, the U.S. intelligence community split into two camps. Should they believe the claims of Golitsyn (many of whose claims proved valid), or those of Nosenko? Additionally, scores of Nosenko's claims appeared to overlap and/or downplay those being made by Golitsyn.
When Golitsyn defected, he said the KGB would send another defector to pass disinformation meant to counter the information he had been providing. Could Nosenko be that agent? Golitsyn further claimed that the KGB had a senior level mole active within the CIA. Could Nosenko be a Soviet plant to not only discredit Golitsyn's information, but also obscure the alleged mole? The head of CIA's Clandestine Service's Counterintelligence Staff, James Jesus Angleton, believed much of what Golitsyn said. While he and Bagley believed the mole to be a distinct possibility, many others (later to produce the official CIA version of the story) believed the two to be overly paranoid. Angleton had become a lightning rod within both the CIA and the wider intelligence community, and his team's perceived witch-hunt in hopes of identifying the alleged mole created much bad feeling throughout the agency. One other key and quite interesting question addressed in the book was whether or not Nosenko was meant to serve as a messenger from the KGB to deny Soviet involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In the end, Bagley's assessment was and remains that Nosenko was a pathological liar whose tales were accepted at near face value by many of the CIA's senior staff despite clear gaps and inconsistencies. In addition, according to Bagley, this institutional inclination to fall victim to group pressure and whitewashing of apparent false statements from a defector would eventually lead to such intelligence failures as Aldrich Ames. The Nosenko case resulted in a reduced emphasis or willingness to consider or seek out the possibility that a mole might be working within the agency.
The strength of this work is not that it sets the record straight or clears any names associated with the Nosenko file per se, but rather that it explains in minute detail the complexities, pitfalls, risks, impact of individual personalities, and potential controversy associated with most counterintelligence operations and investigations. In addition, Bagley provides in the appendices the professional assessments of other former senior KGB officers highly critical of Nosenko's credibility and the accepted CIA version of the affair.
Spy Wars is a complicated work that requires a good deal of focus. A solid understanding of the intelligence world would greatly enhance a reader's appreciation of Bagley's tale. Nonetheless, the book will provide the armchair spy handler with a fascinating story. It should be required reading for all government policy makers and congressional staff to remind those individuals that intelligence in and of itself is not a silver bullet to counter all the nation's threats, or the intelligence community's tribulations.
What We Need: Extravagance and Shortages in America's Military
Barrett Tillman. St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2007. 256 pp. $27.95.
Reviewed by Captain Timothy J. Lockhart, U.S. Navy Reserve (Retired)
Every student of the military will agree—and disagree—with something in What We Need. That situation probably suits Barrett Tillman, because he wants readers to rethink the transformation currently underway in the U.S. military. Contrary to many leaders of that transformation, the author bluntly advocates acquiring "less exotic hardware in favor of more personnel—not less."
Tillman makes the case that in the war on terrorism "traditional American strengths," including sea control and air supremacy, "are largely negated against the willing flesh of jihadists." He calls for focus on five key areas: people, training, logistics, infantry equipment, and objectivity—that is, being honest about what we are doing to man, train, and equip our forces.
Given its missions, Tillman says, the active-duty force should be about 2.5 million people, far more than the current 1.5 million. He acknowledges that achieving that increase would require reinstituting the draft, which he estimates would need to bring in about one-eighth of those (including women) turning 18.
What Tillman does not acknowledge—and one of the main reasons for the transformation he argues against—is the extremely high cost of significantly increasing the number of military personnel. In fact he claims, "we do need to spend more on the military, but probably not a great deal more." Although he advocates savings in other areas, especially by foregoing purchases of high-tech, high-cost aircraft, ships, and weapons systems, the author never explains how the United States would pay for an active force two-thirds larger than at present.
He argues convincingly that all military personnel need more—and more effective—rifle and pistol training. He makes the interesting suggestion that NRA and other civilian firearms instruction can help to prepare American youth for military service and maintain the "trigger skills" of reserve and active-duty personnel.
Discussing logistics, the author shows how a lack of cargo capacity is not always the problem; sometimes the acquisition system is. "[E]verybody in combat zones wants more socks," Tillman writes, adding in his colorful style that will entertain some readers but put off others, that "not provid[ing] such basic items [several years into the war on terrorism] represents a freaking outrage."
The "Guns and Gear" chapter allows Tillman to display expertise in the pros and cons of various firearms. The author is not a fan of the M16 rifle nor its 5.56mm cartridge, claiming the rifle is difficult to maintain and its round does not have enough stopping power. In support of this he quotes extensively from U.S. troops who used the weapon in Afghanistan and Iraq. Realizing the difficulty of completely replacing the M16, he recommends that "selected units be allowed to carry M14s" and "a more lethal 5.56 round . . . be procured."
In his discussion on "Objectivity" Tillman argues for "truth in advertising" about the cost and capabilities of high-tech platforms, especially aircraft. He cites Vice Admiral Tom Connolly's 1967 statement that "[t]here is not enough thrust in Christendom to make [the F-111B] into a Navy fighter." Connolly's frank assessment ended the aircraft program but cost him a fourth star, Tillman claims, adding that the Navy honored Connolly's honesty by naming the F-14 the Tomcat.
Tillman concludes the book by offering "Some Suggestions" and "Guessing the Future." Among his proposals are dropping the Army's Future Combat System and buying fewer stealth aircraft while investing more in minesweepers, electronic countermeasures, close air support, airlift, and aerial tankers. He predicts the "greatest revelation" in 21st-century warfare will be at sea, where "[a] new generation of ships, weapons, tactics, and doctrine remain untried in combat." As he puts it, "We do not know how well we have prepared until we have to sink and get sunk."
An experienced military analyst, Tillman has written almost 40 books and more than 500 hundred articles published in International Defense Review, Proceedings, and USAF Fighter Weapons Review. His writing honors include the Admiral Radford Award for Naval History and Literature.