The Guns are Silent

Last night, finally finished the Atkinson trilogy on WWII.  So much to ponder.  The honorable horror of a righteous battle; the randomness of terrain and weather undoing the best laid plans; the variations of personalities in military leadership and which traits should be most honored and cultivated; the need and the risk of training armies on strategies.  That last concept still gnaws at me.  I can't hide behind a philosophy of defensiveness preparation only.  My personal experience is far from being an army brat ... my father went to military school, trained recruits at Army Air Corps in Biloxi; I sent my sons to military school where they visited West Point on school outings; and part of my career in government oversaw funding levels for the state national guard armories.  I think before these books I would have said of myself, I support readiness.

What a very fine line it must be in a commander to distinguish between being prepared to lead the good battle and just being anxious for a fight.  Wavering between those two extremes is evident in Atkinson's writing of the Allied and Axis generals.  I hate reading about the pettiness, the vanity, the vainglory of many of these men.  As the author introduces each, he makes them American (or French or British) by calling out their home towns, hobbies, and education.  But so many were "graduates" of WWI, and, no pun intended, entrenched in strategies that were outdated.  

Ike emerges as the genius of the war for his support logistics over his maps.  America for its ability to gear up and meet the materiale demands, after many delivery snafus early on, carried the campaigns.  The sheer volume of everything and the variety of the "war effort" at home just contrasts too too brutally with the loss of manufacturing capacity in the USA today.  

But the battles would again be so different.  War today is not Viet Nam and those soldiers, like me, are too old to be battle ready leaders.  One has to look at the Middle East to see how both house to house primitive and how electronic war now is.  There are no shields, no bayonets.  We were appalled when Dan Rather and the other correspondents brought Nam to the nightly TV news; there are no real time transmitting cameras in drones to transmit.

I also ponder whether future battles will be aimed at conquering minds instead of territories.  When Atkinson describes the meetings of the Allied leaders, in Casablanca to Yalta, he shows hints of fighting for thought dominance, a whiff or stench Churchill and Roosevelt could not fully intuit.  

All wars are catastrophic, all wars are local, all wars stem from an urge to dominate, all wars are inevitable.

Post script:  after these ye many months in ready the trilogy as my equivalent of a missed college elective in American history, first I feel that I have cut too many gym classes and grown heavier and lazier in preferring a book on my lap to a garden trowel in my hand, but second, feel short-shifted in not gaining any knowledge of the Pacific campaign.  Hopefully by starting the Making of the Atomic Bomb next I will continue my scholarship.