Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars
Edited by Colonel Matthew Moten. New York: Free Press, 2011. 384 pp. Intro. Maps. Notes. Index. $27.99.
Reviewed by Colonel Robert Killebrew, U.S. Army (Retired)
Between War and Peace is an excellent collection of essays that investigates how America ends its wars. Ending wars has been the subject of scholarly and policy inquiry at least since the publication of Fred Iklé’s Every War Must End in 1971 (Columbia University Press), and attempts to capture war termination in military planning have led to planning for an “end state” and other lamentable bureaucratic quagmires. In fact, and as Between War and Peace shows, key decisions about postwar policies are almost never military ones, since, in the American system, civilian policymakers reserve those decisions for themselves. The armed services then execute postwar decisions to occupy, administer, police, or demobilize.
An introduction and a first chapter that alone are worth the price of the book lead off the volume’s 16 essays. In his literate and striking introduction, the editor, U.S. Army Colonel Matthew Moten, comments that, “In the time between war and peace it is easy to lose sight of the objectives for which one embarked on war in the first place.”
In “Six Propositions,” historian Roger Spiller observes that wars are known more for their limitations than their excesses. He writes, “Every war should be designed so that the strategic effect it produces contributes to the nature of the peace that will inevitably follow, and on no other basis.” (Emphasis in the original.)
The next chapters are rich in historical content and should please any policymaker, military or civilian. The essay treating the postwar ramifications of America’s early wars, particularly the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, is especially absorbing. Not enough study is given, for example, to Major General Winfield Scott’s daring march across Mexico and the campaign that led to the taking of Mexico City, the subsequent military government he imposed, the impact in the army of the growing Mexican guerrilla movement, and his relations with peace commissioner Nicolas Trist—a forerunner of the military-civilian conundrums of today.
The Civil War’s aftermath saw the Army trying to impose law and order across a defeated but defiant South under inept President Andrew Johnson while radicals initially controlled the Congress then eventually acquiesced to the return of Southern white power.
America’s hostile relations and conflict termination with its natives is covered in an excellent essay on the Seminole Wars and “The 300-Year War” dealing overall with the American Indians. This is painful reading, being a history of broken treaties and machinations to push the Indians out of territory coveted by whites. More footnotes would have helped this chapter (and others). Did President Ulysses S. Grant meet secretly with Army leaders in 1875 to find ways to provoke the Sioux into war? The author claims so, but the assertion cries for attribution.
The essay on the Philippine insurrection and the Army’s subsequent pacification program is very well done, and deserves careful reading, perhaps followed by Max Boot’s excellent work on the subject. This is truly the story of soldiers “feeling their way” into counterinsurgency, lessons from which, alas, did not become part of the Army’s core doctrines until they were relearned, painfully, in Vietnam and later in Iraq. Perhaps the lessons have finally stuck.
Essays on 20th-century wars are likewise readable and add detail and depth to their subjects. The follies of the Armistice in 1919 are well known; President Woodrow Wilson’s isolated role in the negotiations and his abrasive relations with Congress are less understood, but they were key in the U.S. refusal to join the League of Nations. The U.S. role in policing West Germany during the post-World War II constabulary period makes fascinating reading, as does the chapter dealing with policy toward Japan immediately after the war. The chapter on the Korean War is less about policy than about the Allies’ use of air power to attempt to break a stalemate at the peace table in the latter stages of the war. But it makes interesting reading nonetheless.
The Cold War chapter is absorbing, dealing with U.S. policy during President Ronald Reagan’s buildup as American leaders slowly realized that Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was a new kind of opponent with new ideas about the U.S.–Soviet power relationship. More than any other of these excellent essays, this one leaves the reader wanting more.
Vietnam and Desert Storm are wars perhaps too recently fought from which to draw historical lessons. The essay on Vietnam seems focused on debunking recent “revisionist” histories that suggest the war was winnable; while the author focuses on the costs of political turmoil inside the United States at the time, the subsequent Cambodian genocide and Soviet adventurism in Asia and Central America are not mentioned.
Likewise, in the chapter dealing with Operation Desert Storm, the author’s contentions that victory “achieved nothing of importance” (the Kuwaitis might disagree) and that postwar efforts to promote liberal values “have made little headway” may be premature. The current Arab Spring, which had not manifested itself when Between War and Peace went to press, illustrates the challenge of drawing conclusions from recent “history.” In each of these cases, as the late Chinese premier Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution, it is probably “too early to tell.”
Between War and Peace suffers slightly from its wide scope and diverse authorship. But there are thought-provoking insights in every chapter. Moten has done a masterly job of gathering a top-notch team of scholars to guide us through American military history. This book should be on every military reading list.
Turning the Tide: How a Small Band of Allied Sailors Defeated the U-boats and Won the Battle of the Atlantic
Ed Offley. New York: Basic Books, 2011. 478 pp. Intro. Illus. Appens. Notes. Bib. Index. $28.99.
Reviewed by Richard Snow
We tend to think of naval battles as fairly contained events. During the Battle of Midway, American aviators stopped a Japanese advance across the Pacific in a matter of minutes, and even in Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson’s day, a decisive engagement lasted only a few hours. So although the campaign Ed Offley writes about is known as the Battle of the Atlantic, very few people today perceive it as such. Rather, it is seen as a series of brief, fierce actions fought in steep seas spanning six years and 30 million square miles.
In this thorough and scrupulous operational history, Offley brings focus to the diffusion by closely examining two battles within the greater battle, fought only a couple of months apart. The former stands for everything that went wrong for the Allies when they were losing; and the latter is, if you will, the Gettysburg of the Atlantic War.
The Battle of the Atlantic is also set apart from conventional naval encounters by the aims of its participants. No braver fighting sailors than the men on board the Third Reich’s U-boats ever put to sea, but they weren’t there to do battle with other warships. Their dismayingly capable leader, Grand Admiral Karl DÖnitz, believed (correctly, in history’s judgment) that Germany had one chance to win the war, and that was by destroying the freighters and tankers that were bringing oil, food, arms, and eventually troops east across the Atlantic to nourish the European fighting fronts.
His weapon was the U-boat, and the most effective weapon against it was a simple one: a depth charge, 300 or so pounds of TNT dropped on top of it by a surface vessel or an airplane. But to get that ship or plane to the right place involved the most strenuous efforts of logic and imagination, of constant improvements in radar and direction finding, and of code-breaking skills that to this day seem almost superhuman.
Turning the Tide ably sketches in the background and then sends the reader out on board two convoys in March 1943: HX2329 and SC122. Both have to fight their way through the Greenland air gap, 800 miles of ocean beyond the protective reach of Allied bombers. The merchantmen have escorting warships, but not enough of them, and for days the U-boats, formed by DÖnitz into temporary fighting groups called wolf packs, slash at the convoys, and in the end sink 21 ships against the loss of a single submarine.
This bleak result greatly alarmed Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He summoned Admiral Max Horton, in charge of Western Approaches Command, and asked him what he was going to do about it. Horton was direct; he didn’t have enough escorting warships to guard his freighters: “Give me fifteen destroyers and we shall beat the U-boats.” Churchill said, “You Admirals are always asking for more and more ships and when you get them things get no better.” Horton was ready for this. He had conducted painstaking combat simulation exercises showing what a difference “support groups” of destroyers would have made during the battle. He handed Churchill the results. Churchill looked through them. “You can have your fifteen destroyers; we shall have to stop the Russian convoys for the present.”
The prime minister was as good as his word, and the next big convoy battle, the ordeal of ONS5 in early May, was, as Offley puts it, “. . . the clash that would change the course of the Battle of the Atlantic.”
It might not have seemed so at the time to its Allied participants, because it was fought out amid every misery the ocean has in its fearsome vocabulary: gales, freezing seas, blinding fog, but now there were enough escort ships, and everything else was coming together, too. Long-range planes cruised overhead, radar worked well, and so did naval intelligence. The convoy made it through with a loss of 13 of its ships—but it cost DÖnitz seven U-boats to sink them.
Offley recounts the struggle of ONS5 meticulously. We follow each merchant vessel and each U-boat and understand what they are up to; but we also get a sense of what it must have been like for the submariner in his dank little world and the watchman on his sleet-flailed bridge.
There were still a lot of U-boats left after ONS5 made port, and the rest of Offley’s book summarizes how the Allied antisubmarine effort finally prevailed. At the end, the author returns to the U-boats that attacked the March and May convoys. The German submarine fleet in general suffered losses of three in four boats during the war; but the veterans of those 1943 battles took almost unimaginable casualties: 88 percent. As Offley concludes toward the end of his valuable book, “For the men of the U-boats, valor and initiative in combat proved to be as poor a guarantee of survival as was overall combat experience.” Trained in the hardest of schools, their opponents had finally gotten just too good.
When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans
Paula J. Caplan. Boston: MIT Press, 2011. 320 pp. Notes. Refs. Index. $27.95.
Reviewed by David G. Brown
This controversial work appears to be Dr. Paula Caplan’s attempt to propel the suffering of returning veterans toward a national discussion. To achieve this she makes several charges. First, that those dealing with the aftermath of the horrors of combat need not be labeled as having a mental disorder. Second, that traditional treatment approaches (e.g., psychotherapy and psychiatric drugs) are not only ineffective but harmful and isolating, which keeps the truth about war “under wraps.” This prevents noncombatants from understanding the emotional magnitude of war and ultimately protects the government from dissenters. Finally, given the ineffectiveness of traditional approaches, she argues that we should provide guidance for community members to learn to listen effectively, which will prompt veterans to share their stories, educating the public and accelerating a national discussion and healing process for returning veterans.
Caplan’s ambitious book is replete with successes but also missed opportunities. While she does a fine job of providing civilians and laymen with insight into the ethos of the veteran and the challenges of treating the emotional carnage of war, her criticism of behavioral-service efforts in the military and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is so heavy-handed that her attempt at optimism in her closing recommendations appears gratuitous.
Caplan’s advocacy for service members is commendable. She repeats an argument heard at many roundtable forums and wounded-warrior events that the effects of war trauma should be addressed without the label “mental illness.” Her chapter, “Being a Veteran,” is useful, packed with important references and wonderfully insightful quotes from war correspondent Ernie Pyle. In it, she discusses the arduous task of unlearning hypervigilance and violence and highlights eight common feelings and experiences of war.
Her plea to “learn from listening to vets” is consistent with many of the resilience, recovery, and reintegration programs available throughout the United States and overseas communities, especially those that have peer-to-peer components. She discusses the safe conditions for expressing emotional intensity and clarity that exist among peers in combat, versus the isolation and alienation that so many returning veterans feel after leaving active duty. This phenomenon of emotional intensity is often new and more beneficial to male combatants than to female ones, Caplan aptly notes.
She then chronicles the shortcomings of traditional approaches to treatment. She charges that the standard treatment of talk therapy and drugs is often harmful and adds to veterans’ burdens by isolating them behind therapists’ closed doors, making them drug dependent and eventually causing them to believe that they have “gotten over it.” This is a controversial point for which an equally convincing counterargument could be supported with research, outcomes measures, symptoms reduction, and objective and subjective satisfaction surveys, as mandated by the Joint Commission.
However, Caplan’s ultimate failure comes in chapters four and five, in which she chronicles a multitude of initiatives, approaches, and interventions by uniformed and veteran psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers in what I consider to be an inaccurately stark narrative. If we claim to support the troops, we cannot also conduct character assassinations on the very people who are tasked to treat their fellow service members. Paradoxically, by painstakingly documenting situations that she identifies as failures, Caplan actually demonstrates many of the exhaustive efforts being made to assist the needs of these service members.
Had she afforded the same collegial tenor of respect, compassion, and acceptance to those who serve in a clinical capacity as she does to those whom she is seeking to assist, she would have a much better product and could have offered her community-outreach and national-discussion aspect as an additional campaign to “transforming the cultural landscape.” After all, clinicians are not the enemy. Many are in uniform or were serving in the same locations as the people they treat and were targeted by the same snipers, mortars, landmines, and improvised explosive devices.
As so many remain dedicated to seeking, leading, and best practices among the DOD, the Veterans Administration, and nongovernmental organizations while bridging gaps in services, reducing redundancy, and fostering synergy to provide for those who serve, I welcome Dr. Caplan to the struggle. I also offer her the following words from Ernest Hemingway, in response to her own citation of his work: “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
The Ablest Navigator: Lieutenant Paul N. Shulman, USN, Israel’s Volunteer Admiral
J. Wandres. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010. 174 pp. Illus. Notes. Gloss. Bib. Index. $32.95.
Reviewed by Paul M. Foer
The first admiral to serve in Israel’s new navy just before and after that country declared its independence in 1948 was a 1944 U.S. Naval Academy graduate and lieutenant (junior grade) from New York, a fact that has been conveniently neglected, ignored, or suppressed in Israel, according to J. Wandres, the author of The Ablest Navigator.
Paul Shulman, the son of a wealthy attorney and an executive of Hadassah, the international women’s Zionist organization, grew up in comfortable surroundings. When Shulman was still a midshipman, David Ben Gurion, the man who would become Israel’s first president, personally encouraged him to one day serve the incipient Jewish state. He demurred, saying his future was with the U.S. Navy—but that was not to be the case.
Shulman was dubbed “the ablest navigator” in his 1940 preparatory-school yearbook, referring to a quote from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbons, who wrote, “The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” He comes across as a man of no special intellect, talents, or skills other than determination, which made him a competent and by-the-book naval officer. But despite impressive research, The Ablest Navigator never really gives a sense of who Shulman was and leaves questions about his story unanswered.
Shulman served in the Pacific during World War II on the USS Hunt (DD-674) when it survived the disastrous Typhoon Cobra in December 1944, which sank several other ships. While still on active duty after the war, he became increasingly concerned about the plight of Jewish refugee ships trying to run the British blockade and reach Palestine. This galvanized the Zionist sentiments that his parents held so strongly, and through contacts with the Jewish Agency and the Haganah—the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces—he was brought on to purchase and outfit refugee ships.
Oddly, Wandres’ book does not begin with any of this. Instead it opens with his daring and unusual Israeli commando operation that sank the Egyptian navy’s flagship, Al Emir Farouq, a 1,440-ton sloop, off Gaza in October 1948. This was a high point for the new navy and of Shulman’s role in it. Unfortunately, at this point the author’s narrative becomes sketchy. During this period Schulman seems to have traveled between New York, Europe, and Palestine/Israel to assist with refugee ships.
While skippering a former Canadian corvette soon after the state of Israel was declared in 1948, Shulman was involved in the attack led by the Haganah’s leader, Ben Gurion, against the ship Altalena, which was supplying weapons to the Irgun (a Zionist paramilitary offshoot of Haganah), at that time still led by Menachem Begin, Ben Gurion’s political rival. The Altalena was destroyed mainly by shore-based fire, and some on board were killed.
The incident remains controversial, and Shulman’s involvement is made all the more interesting because he engaged other American Irgun volunteers. Remarkably, only two pages are devoted to the incident. Wandres could have referred to Begin’s book, The Revolt, which provides many details from his perspective, but this is not even mentioned in the bibliography.
The Ablest Navigator focuses more on how Shulman received little recognition or honor in Israel and less for his naval exploits. Other American Jewish volunteers are mentioned, especially Colonel Mickey Marcus, a West Point graduate who helped lead Haganah forces to open the road to Jerusalem in 1948. Marcus was killed by friendly fire from a sentry who mistook him for an Arab intruder. The story was made famous in the film Cast a Giant Shadow starring Kirk Douglas, but Wandres and others suggest that he may have been murdered by Israeli officers who were unhappy with Marcus’ competition. He goes briefly into the incident, but is it another detour or is it central to Shulman’s story?
Wandres demonstrates how Shulman, who, like Marcus, did not speak Hebrew, was ignored by political appointees and others in the military, even though the latter had little or no naval experience. Ben Gurion chose him, but the question remains, was he perhaps using Shulman while appeasing his staff and appointees, or was he simply unable to support him?
The author touches upon but does not fully explain the complicated issue of Shulman’s service in another nation’s navy while a U.S. citizen. Shulman eventually settled in Israel with his family, started a construction company, and oversaw renovation to the Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus in Jerusalem in the 1960s.
It is perplexing that Wandres’ final chapter critically describes various aspects of modern Israel’s history that are only tangentially related to Shulman’s biography. For example, he writes that “Soviet authorities responded by opening the gates wide in the 1970s. Among the thousands of Russians who emigrated were educated, experienced professionals. However, when these new settlers reached Israel, many found it daunting to make their way.” Then follows a four-page appendix about a ship that had nothing to do with Shulman.
The Ablest Navigator contains a number of photos, some of which are historically important, such as the cover photo of Shulman and Ben Gurion examining a sextant. A few depict only building facades in which clandestine meetings or business dealings to purchase blockade-running ships took place. The best beg for enlargement. The helpful footnotes, glossary, bibliography, and other documents could have been made even more valuable had a chronology been included. These are a few other shortcomings of this biography of a man who made history but was largely unknown until this well-researched but uneven book was written.