Exploring Americans’ Relationship With War

Faith and Fear: America’s Relationship with War since 1945. Gregory A. Daddis. Oxford University Press. 496 pages. $34.99

By Ingo Trauschweizer

Why have Americans embraced war? Gregory Daddis argues in Faith and Fear: America’s Relationship with War since 1945 that it happened in the wake of victory, after 1945, when war seemed to offer ways to ensure global peace, guarantee access to the world’s markets, protect the homeland and establish liberal democracy abroad. While they had faith in the transformative power of war, Americans feared it coming to their shores, and that deepened their commitment to preparedness during the Cold War. The result was militarized foreign policy and a culture of war at the heart of American national identity.

The author is a leading historian of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military and contemporary American culture. Much like faith and fear are conjoined in his argument, Daddis the scholar was shaped by Daddis the soldier, a retired Army colonel who served in the global war on terror and taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. This, then, is a deep reflection on war and American culture grounded in the Army as well as the academy.

The cover of Faith and Fear shows a mushroom cloud, and one could assume the dawn of the nuclear age alone changed Americans’ relationship with war. Instead, Daddis argues, it was the intertwining of faith (in war to bring world peace) and fear (of enemies that would strike if the U.S. did not build up its defenses).

As Faith and Fear demonstrates, this mindset contributed to the emergence of the Cold War, Korean War and Vietnam War. The latter could have tipped us off; faith in war did not guarantee success. But often enough, it seemed to work, and the triumphs in 1991 over the Soviet Union and Iraq reassured Americans that Vietnam had been an aberration.

As Daddis shows, too, even when there was a loss of confidence, as in the 1970s, enough faith and plenty of fear remained. While the narrative ends with the Clinton administration, Daddis projects into the 21st century in his conclusion.

In the background looms a sense that the Army went to Afghanistan and Iraq because Americans feared more attacks after 9/11, wanted to take the war to the enemy and assumed that what happened after World War II could happen again: People were liberated and countries reborn as liberal democracies.

This is a thought-provoking book that recasts how we understand the Cold War, expands our discussions of war beyond the immediate politics of deploying armed forces and raises questions about entrenched militarization in American culture. Far from being dragged into wars by callous policymakers or careerist generals and admirals, Americans have followed a cultural logic that allowed for little else and let us see only what we already expected: lethal enemies and opportunities to spread our principles and values.

This led from internationalism and militarization of policy in the 1940s to trust in nuclear deterrence as the means to balance security and economic welfare in the 1950s. It led to wars (and the nuclear arms race) to prevent war and, later, to build or restore nations, as in Vietnam or Afghanistan.

When that failed, deterrence and fears of nuclear war came back to the fore, and the nation’s honor could be restored in war (in the 1980s) or a liberal world order had to be safeguarded (in the 1990s and beyond).

In this balance of faith and fear, strategy and the national interest may still be expressions of a political calculus, but they are rooted in culture. In Daddis’ telling, we still live in the shadow of 1945, even though the Cold War has long ended.

Ingo Trauschweizer teaches military and international history at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. His books include The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War and Maxwell Taylor’s Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam, an official title in the AUSA Book Program.

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Creating a World-Class Military Exhibition

Preserving the Legacy: Creating the National WWII Museum. Gordon H. “Nick” Mueller. Louisiana State University Press. 400 pages. $28.99

By Edward Lengel

Founded in 1917, Great Britain’s Imperial War Museum (now pluralized with multiple properties and branches) is arguably the first major museum devoted to military history. Following its creation, similar museums were founded throughout Europe, and in countries such as Australia and Canada. Many decades would pass before anything comparable appeared in the United States. However, since opening its doors to the public on June 6, 2000, the National WWII Museum in New Orleans has set a gold standard for military history museums, not only in the U.S. but internationally.

Credit for the museum’s creation goes first and foremost to two historians at the University of New Orleans: Stephen Ambrose and Gordon “Nick” Mueller. Ambrose, who passed away in 2002, conceived the idea of a “small D-Day Museum” over glasses of cheap sherry in a conversation with Mueller in 1989. Ambrose’s fame as a popular historian, already substantial, would grow exponentially over the following decade with the commercial success of multiple books coinciding with the 50th anniversary of World War II and, not insignificantly, the release of the movie Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Yet opening a museum—even a small one—dedicated to the American role in the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, was never a slam dunk. It took not only Ambrose’s advocacy and creativity, but Mueller’s substantial financial and administrative talents to make it happen, against often severe headwinds.

Preserving the Legacy: Creating The National WWII Museum, written by Mueller, is both exciting and invaluable for the lessons it offers. Other military history museums have appeared in the U.S. since 2000, such as the National Museum of the Marine Corps and the National Museum of the United States Army. Yet Mueller and other leaders of the National WWII Museum have never stood on their laurels. In the quarter-century since its opening as a relatively modest museum dedicated to one country’s participation in a military campaign, the National WWII Museum has become a physical colossus, stretching across massive buildings occupying multiple city blocks. More important than its size is the museum’s huge impact in preservation, public education, scholarship and digital innovation.

Preserving the Legacy shows how many people have contributed to the National WWII Museum’s tremendous success. These include donors, board members, veterans, scholars, staff and, yes, celebrity allies, such as Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Tom Brokaw, who writes the book’s introduction. The museum’s leadership since Mueller’s recent retirement has continued to maintain, if not exceed, his high standards. Above all, though, credit for this remarkable accomplishment belongs to Mueller himself. Preserving the Legacy is anything but self-congratulatory, although Mueller writes with understandable pride in what he and others have achieved. The book’s greatest value is not just as a testament to success, but as a manual of perseverance and the value of good old-fashioned hard work.

Edward Lengel is an award-winning historian and battlefield tour leader. He is the author of 14 books, including To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918, and Never in Finer Company: The Men of the Great War’s Lost Battalion. He holds a doctorate in history from the University of Virginia.

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Book Offers Insights into Early Days of Ranger Units

The Houdini Club: The Epic Journey and Daring Escapes of the First Army Rangers of WWII. Mir Bahmanyar. Diversion Books. 352 pages. $32.99

By Matthew Seelinger

Former Army Ranger Mir Bahmanyar tells the gripping story of the first Ranger units in his latest book, The Houdini Club: The Epic Journey and Daring Escapes of the First Army Rangers of WWII. In this work, Bahmanyar details the history of these early Rangers, from their establishment and training in 1942 to the disaster at Cisterna, Italy, during the Anzio campaign that led to the end of Ranger operations in the Mediterranean Theater.

Bahmanyar begins The Houdini Club by introducing readers to the Rangers’ commander, then-Maj. William Darby, a field artillery officer serving on the staff of the 34th Infantry Division in Northern Ireland who longed for a combat assignment. When the order was issued to organize an American unit patterned after British commandos, Darby jumped at the chance to lead the unit and immediately began training his men with the help of commando advisers. These men, all volunteers and many from the 34th Infantry Division, became the 1st Ranger Battalion, often referred to as “Darby’s Rangers.”

After discussing the disastrous British-Canadian raid on Dieppe, France, in August 1942, in which some Rangers participated, Bahmanyar switches to 1st Ranger Battalion operations, beginning with the Allied invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch, on Nov. 8, 1942. Here, in the capture of Arzew, Algeria, and a later raid on Sened Station in Tunisia, Darby’s tough training and discipline paid off as the Rangers proved especially adept at lightning-fast assaults and nighttime raids. These successes led to creation of two more Ranger battalions, with Ranger tactics seeing repeated success during the invasions of Sicily (Operation Husky) and mainland Italy (Operation Avalanche) in 1943.

As Bahmanyar explains through- out the book, Ranger combat often was intense, as Darby’s men engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Axis troops. Orders on some operations not to take prisoners were implied, if not outright official. Away from the battlefield, the discipline that made Rangers great combat soldiers often fell by the wayside as they engaged in looting, drinking and visits to local brothels.

As the war ground on in Italy, the Rangers’ effectiveness decreased as casualties mounted and replacements lacked the rigorous training of the original Rangers. Furthermore, Fifth Army began deploying Ranger battalions as line infantry, a role for which Darby’s men were never intended. The near annihilation of two of their battalions at Cisterna on Jan. 30, 1944, marked the end of the original Rangers. Bahmanyar contends the fiasco at Cisterna was more the result of poor intelligence than any failure by the Rangers, as they fought hard against German armor and infantry and inflicted heavy losses.

Interspersed throughout Bahmanyar’s narrative are the stories of the Houdini Club—those Rangers taken prisoner at Cisterna who made their escape to freedom. Their harrowing tales are summarized at the end of the book.

Readers may take issue with some areas of The Houdini Club. There are poorly constructed sentences and incorrect or inconsistent unit designations. Bahmanyar includes 14 maps, but they are located at the end of the book rather than within the text. Finally, the notes and bibliography are not in the book; instead, readers must scan a QR code to view them. Despite these critiques, The Houdini Club is a worthy read concerning the origins of Army Rangers.

Matthew Seelinger is the chief historian at the Army Historical Foundation and editor of the foundation’s quarterly journal, On Point.

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An Incomplete Study of an Unfinished War

 

Korea: War Without End. Dannatt, Richard and Robert Lyman. Osprey Publishing. 352 pages.  $35

By Col. Bryan Gibby

Korea: War Without End appears to be a new take on the “Forgotten War.” The authors—retired Gen. Richard Dannatt, a former U.K. chief of the general staff, and Robert Lyman, a veteran British military historian—stress that Korea was two wars: one endorsed by the United Nations to liberate the Republic of Korea (ROK) and a second, acquiesced to by the U.N. but driven by the United States, to overrun and conquer North Korea. The coda of the second war was the two-year negotiation period that concluded with an armistice, not a peace treaty—hence the subtitle “war without end.”

The book is organized in three parts: The First War for Korea, The Second War for Korea and Return to the Status Quo Ante Bellum. Each part begins with a lengthy vignette (identified as “Prologues”) focused on a tactical action of the respective period. The first four chapters cover the initial three months of the war: who started the war, why the North’s Korean People’s Army appeared so formidable and why the Americans struggled to contain their advance. The next four chapters are focused on Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The authors state that while Inchon was a “masterstroke,” the pursuit to the Chinese border at the Yalu River was an unnecessary (and illegitimate) expansion of the war from its original mandate, and hubris amplified by megalomania was the root of all evil that befell U.N. forces following Chinese intervention. MacArthur deserves criticism, but it is overwrought here. Part 3 consists of a chapter focused on the British 29th Independent Infantry Brigade Group along the Imjin River in April 1951, and a final chapter devoted to the remaining couple of years of the war. The vignette narratives are gripping, descriptive and reveal “the face of battle” popularized by the late military historian John Keegan. Analysis of individual battles and military operations generally is perceptive.

The critical flaw of this work is lack of balance. U.S. Gen. Matthew Ridgway gets credit for blunting the Chinese offensives and then assuming MacArthur’s place as the theater commander, but not much more is presented about how Ridgway then managed the war to fulfill Washington’s policy objectives to secure an honorable armistice. His successor, Gen. Mark Clark, is not mentioned, nor is Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Eighth Army’s last wartime commander. Both men played key roles in bringing the fighting to an end.

Despite the subtitle, the authors follow a well-established narrative tradition that began with T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, published in 1963, tending to center the narrative on simplistic generalizations that have solidified as myths, which the authors repeat uncritically, without citations or sufficient explanation. In addition to repackaging old interpretations, a serious omission is the coverage (29 pages) given to the last two years of the war. The authors touch on important issues in a perfunctory manner, such as the prisoner of war dilemma, interaction between air and ground operations, and South Korea’s increasingly proficient Republic of Korea Army. American use of airpower is criticized without appreciation that air (along with naval) superiority was considered the key element to prevent an escalation of the war, given the significant manpower disparity between the two sides.

Documentary sources are primarily British. The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum is acknowledged, but not the National Archives, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, U.S. Army Center of Military History or Eisenhower Presidential Library. The personal papers of MacArthur, Ridgway, Gen. James Van Fleet, Clark and Taylor were not consulted.

The Korean War is worthy of study and reflection, but this work misses opportunities to develop new insights while perpetuating misunderstandings of a conflict that could reignite with little warning.

Col. Bryan Gibby is deputy head of the Department of History at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York. He is the author of Korean Showdown: National Policy and Military Strategy in a Limited War, 1951-1952, and other publications dealing with the Korean War.