Originally posted at Edge of the American West.
On this day in history (Tokyo time), units of the Imperial Japanese Navy mounted an assault on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. English language accounts of the attack, whether scholarly or popular, have focused on the American side of things, usually with a nod to Japanese treachery. But it is the Japanese side that is actually—in military terms—the more interesting. Like the Germans in 1940, the Japanese showed with devastating the effect the value of a new method of warfare. The attack on Pearl Harbor rewrote the doctrine on naval warfare, and much of the next three years consisted of both navies, Japanese and American, desperately deciphering the writing.
What was revolutionary was not the use of airpower. Or, to put it more accurately, it was not simply the use of airpower. Aircraft carriers had appeared in all the world’s navies in the interwar period and were now integral parts of the fleet. The short-ranged and slow planes flying off an aircraft carrier were, however, largely incapable of inflicting substantial damage on the main line of a battle fleet, Billy Mitchell, notwithstanding. Against the enormously thick armor of the battleships—designed to protect against shells coming in at supersonic speeds—the puny bombs carried by those aircraft did little damage. Thus, the aircraft carrier became an adjunct to the heavies, used for scouting and observation. The battle line charged forward while the aircraft carrier lurked in the background, a second-class citizen.
What changed in the run up to WWII was the pace of technological innovation and doctrinal experimentation. The basics of the aircraft carrier and been settled in the 1920s and remained similar throughout the war, changing only in size. But aircraft changed rapidly and dramatically in the 1930s, a pace that accelerated in the late 1930s. Planes went from being slow short-ranged biplanes to fast long-ranged mono-wings. Plane generations shifted from year to year, and a plane that was cutting-edge one year might be obsolescent the next. The two navies which took the greatest advantage of this were the American and Japanese. Both, surrounded by massive oceans, had a vested interest in naval excellence, and both worked feverishly to figure out how to use these new weapons.
As a result, doctrine sped along with technology. The challenge was to deliver massive amounts of ordnance at extended range against armored, maneuvering ships which, annoyingly, would shoot back. The settled result in both navies was the creation of three kinds of aircraft: dive-bombers, torpedo planes, and fighter escorts. The first, dive-bombers, would attack from high in the sky diving towards the target and releasing the bomb at the last moment before pulling up. Torpedo planes, on the other hand, would attack from low, angling towards their target and releasing a torpedo which would drive the rest of the way in and hit the ship. Fighter escorts would protect the first two groups on their way to the target and as they attacked.
That was the theory. In practice, it proved enormously difficult for either dive bombers or torpedo planes to find or hit their targets. The Pacific was a big ocean and fleets—no matter how large—were an infinitesimal part of it. Even if found. warships did not *want* to be hit, and did everything they could to avoid it. They shot at the planes. They twisted and turned to avoid the bombs and torpedoes. They launched fighters to counterattack. They sailed into rain squalls. They kept their lights off at night. All of these things meant that the attacking aircraft usually scored an extremely low percentage of hits. Later in the war, at Midway, American planes mounted hundreds of attacks on the Japanese fleet and scored fewer than ten direct hits (all bombs, no torpedos). And Midway was an overwhelming American triumph.
In planes and aerial doctrine, then, both the Japanese and American Navies were similar. Neither had an enormous advantage in plane technology overall. The Japanese torpedo bombers, the Nakajima B5N (“Kate” its US identifier) was better than the American Douglas TBD Devastator. The torpedo it dropped was *much* better. The American Douglas SBD Dauntless was a better plane than its Japanese counterpart, the Aichi D3A (“Val”). The fighter escorts on each side were so different as to be nearly uncomparable. The Japanese Mitsubishi A6M (“Zeke”, though better known as the “Zero”) was a lightweight, highly maneuverable, long ranged fighter plane that achieved those qualities by sacrificing any armor protection at all, either for pilot or plane. The American Grumman F4F Wildcat was not particularly maneuverable, rather short-ranged, and pretty heavy, but its toughness and heavy armament were legendary. Whereas Zeros tended to dissolve into flames under fire, the stories of Wildcats making it home after being hit by hundreds if not thousands of rounds of ammunition are too many to recount.
Where the Japanese surpassed the Americans was not in their use of the planes but in their use of the carriers. Whereas the American carriers were deployed singly, as part of a larger squadron including battleships, the Japanese put their carriers together—for the most important missions—as a single large striking force. Early in 1941, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander-in-chief of the Japanese Navy, organized the First Air Fleet, consisting of all of Japan’s carriers. The First Air Fleet, and most particularly the six heavy carriers composing the Kido Butai, or Mobile Striking Force, would be the hammer of the fleet. Off their decks could fly more than 300 warplanes, a larger number than that of any other fleet in the world. What they could not achieve in individual accuracy, the Japanese aimed to make up in numbers.
It was this fleet that sailed to attack Pearl Harbor. A British attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in 1940 had suggested to the Japanese that such an assault was possible. The reasons leading to the attack, and the events of the attack itself, have been detailed innumerable times. For the purposes of this post, however, the critical thing is that the new Japanese doctrine worked well. The 353 aircraft launched from the decks of Kido Butai savaged not only the fleet at anchor in Pearl, but also the aircraft and equipment ashore. It was perhaps the easiest possible target: a naval base taken by surprise, with ships at anchor, boilers dark. Having said that, even such an overwhelming assault failed to destroy critical parts of the base: the American submarine pens, the fuel oil farm, and, most critically, the American aircraft carriers. Such was the inefficiency of air attack in 1941.
It was, nonetheless, a spectacular success for the Japanese. They had demonstrated to themselves and to the world the effectiveness of concentrated naval airpower. Kido Butai would roam the Pacific over the next six months, hammering target after target and ranging as far as Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean and Australia in the southern Pacific. But the Americans were fast learners and in this new naval doctrine loomed the seeds of Japanese defeat. If the benefit lay not in who could amass an extra ship or two, but an extra fleet or two, then the Americans had a decisive advantage,
not only in the production of carriers and planes (24 American vs. 16 Japanese during WWII) or planes (over 300,000 for the U.S. vs. 75,000 for the Japanese) but in the industrialization of pilot training (several hundred thousand vs. 15-20,000). By 1945, the “Murderer’s Row” of the American 3rd and 5th Fleets, with 8-10 carriers and over 500 planes, roamed the Pacific, hammering the Japanese as Pearl Harbor had been hammered. The six carriers of Kido Butai did not live to see that day.
Part I (Army),here
Part II (Air Force) here
The services remain largely stuck in their efforts to transform for the 21st century. The Army, though moving closer towards developing an institutional knowledge of counterinsurgency, remains wedded to purchasing high technology equipment and weapons more suited for large conventional war. The Air Force has attached itself to the F-22 air superiority fighter and now, rather than regrouping, spends much of its time desperately seeking an enemy or a mission for that fighter. The Navy has made a few, intermittent steps towards revamping itself, but without any overarching strategic vision.
This slow transition has made the United States vulnerable. Most particularly, in Iraq, the inability of the Army to handle—at least at first—an insurgency meant that the United States was bogged down in that country for several years. Only as the Army developed counterinsurgency tactics on the fly did the situation improve. But the slowness meant that one of the original goals of the Iraq invasion—to serve as an object lesson to states that might oppose the U.S.—was utterly undercut. Iran and North Korea—for example—knew that there was and is no realistic chance that the U.S. will invade them in the near future and risk the same sort of protracted war as in Iraq.
The slow transition also has the potential to make the United States vulnerable in the future. War often sees revolutions in tactics and strategy that catch militaries unaware. The machine gun in WWI, blitzkrieg and the aircraft carrier in WWII were all game-changing weapons that left the old ways of war in the dust and mud (quite literally in the case of the battleships of the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor). Should another such revolution happen while the U.S. military continues at least to glance back to the Cold War, America could find the military superiority it takes so for granted to have disappeared.
One of the most critical underlying stories of last night’s election is the continuation of a regional electoral realignment that started in the 1960s and reached partial fruition yesterday night. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won election to the Presidency by winning every southern state, a spine of states running up the Appalachians to New York, several Midwestern industrial states, and only one state west of the Mississippi (Texas). This was the last gasp of the old Democratic coalition, built on the “Solid South” and the Rust Belt.
That coalition was decisively fractured by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Republican exploitation of disaffected white southerners. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” effectively started to split the Solid South away from the Democrats. Slowly, over the next several decades, the southern realignment meant the disappearance of southern Democrats at all levels. Southern Democratic Senators and Representatives lost elections, left for the GOP, or retired. By the late 1980s, the south was consistently voting Republican at a national level (with several exceptions). Pushed out of their traditional base, the Democratic Party faced an enormous challenge to establish a new base from which to fight elections. Without such a base, the Democrats would go into each Presidential cycle at a built-in deficit to the Republicans, as both Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis discovered.
Part I (Army),here
Part II (Air Force)here
Like the Army and Air Force, the Navy avoided moving away from the comfort of its Cold War strategy. During the first post-Soviet, the admirals clung to the philosophy that had driven acquisitions during the Cold War. That strategy had been based on controlling the sea, following the precepts of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Navy built a large fleet that would, when war started, wrest control of the oceans from the USSR and her communist allies. The main theaters of battle were the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the western Pacific, and the Persian Gulf. The main threats were Soviet attack submarines, missile-armed surface ships, and attack planes flying from land. To fight in these theaters and against this enemy, the Navy built a fleet of aircraft carriers, attack submarines, and cruisers optimized to defend against air attack. Allied to that was submarines carrying a larger proportion of the American nuclear deterrent, whose job was to deter a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s the Navy responded to shrinking defense budgets by reducing the fleet rather than changing it. Thus, instead of 15 aircraft carriers, the Navy went down to 11. Similar reductions occurred in the number of attack submarines, cruisers, and ballistic missile submarines. This was the Cold War strategy, miniaturized. Despite the fact that no other nation in the world has anywhere near the naval power needed to dispute American control of the oceans (the sum total of the world’s aircraft carriers are fewer than the number the United States currently deploys), the U.S. still operates a fleet aimed at fighting exactly such a battle.
Also posted at The Jamestown Project blog
Why is Barack Obama winning this election? Just over a week before the election, the Democratic nominee enjoys substantial leads in most polls, popular and electoral both. That is no guarantee of ultimate victory: the only poll that counts is November 4th, as Thomas Dewey found out to his cost in 1948, but nonetheless, right at this moment, the Illinois Senator is clearly ahead.
How did he get to this point?
There is an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine from this past weekend, looking at the inner workings of the McCain campaign and the five different narratives that they’ve tried to push to the American people since summer 2008. None of them have caught hold, leaving the McCain people scratching their heads. But what is absent from the article is any sense of WHY none of these narratives have worked. The reporter quotes the McCain as thinking that the media is in the tank for Obama, makes note of Sarah Palin’s horrendous inexperience, and indirectly points to McCain’s baffled and angry performances in the debates. But there is no sense that the Obama campaign may have played a role. The article imputes that it is the McCain campaign’s mistakes that are responsible. In this formulation, McCain is losing, rather than Obama winning.
I write this post to argue with that formulation, by focusing on one particular strategy of the Obama campaign. Before I talk about that, though, let me look at the larger, systemic factors that are hindering the Republicans this election cycle. First, the nation is undergoing a partisan realignment. In the 1970s and 80s, the South realigned from the Democrats to the Republicans. 1976 was the last gasp of the old Democratic “Solid South.” (Look at Jimmy Carter’s winning electoral map and imagine a Democratic candidate getting that layout today). The 2000s have been about the northeast and far west solidly realigning to the Democrats. In the 1950s and 60s, California was reliably Republican. Now, it is just as reliably Democratic. In the 1990s, more and more northeastern states have become reliably Democratic, to the point that a Republican Congressperson from a northeastern state is a rare bird, indeed (see Clinton’s electoral map in 1996). That partisan realignment is helping Obama. Also helping Obama is, of course, President Bush, who has the lowest approval ratings of any President in modern history, and has historians arguing whether he is the worst President ever or only in the top-5 worst.
Part I (Army),here
The United States Air Force has been the poster child for avoiding the cold war transition. Perhaps more than any other service, the USAF has insisted on purchasing weapons and promulgating doctrines that would be just as applicable in 1978 as in 2008. The capabilities have changed, but the mind set has not.
The “fighter mafia” within the Air Force, still aglow after its decades-ago triumph over the “bomber mafia,” has acquired more and more technologically advanced fighter planes, such as the F-22 Raptor, and the F-35 Advanced Strike Fighter, brimming with Mach-speed capability and stealth features, and designed to dominate the air against any and all comers.
The problem has been several fold. First, there aren’t any “comers.” There are no rivals to the United States for air superiority anywhere in the world. The Russian Air Force is a generation out of date, with pilots who get little in the way of training flights. The Chinese Air Force is better, but is a handmaiden to the dominant Chinese Army. Nowhere in the world is there an air force that could offer a sustained challenge to the current USAF, let alone the next generation. Second, the programs have fallen prey to the same procurement issues that dogged the Army and Navy. A lack of effective contractor oversight, allied with the continual addition of expensive new features by the Pentagon far into the acquisitions process, has sent the price of new planes skyrocketing. An F-15 Eagle, the previous generation air superiority fighter, cost about $43 million dollars per plane (in 1998 dollars). The F-22, its successor, costs roughly $187 million (2006 dollars), about four times as much.
Third, and most important, the Air Force is vulnerable to a revolutionary transformation now underway, one which the top brass of the service are ignoring or downplaying. Like the battleship commanders in the 1930s tried to ignore the rise of the aircraft carriers until it was too late, the current Air Force is trying to sideline a paradigm shifting air weapon that could displace most current planes. I speak of the unmanned aerial vehicle, remotely controlled by a ground-based controller. 
UAVs have continuing and spectacular advantages over manned planes. Keeping pilots alive and comfortable requires a lot of equipment and weight in current planes. It limits the maneuvers they can undertake. It shortens the time those planes can be aloft. UAVs suffer little from those limitations. They can be smaller, maneuver more quickly, and be in the air longer. At the moment, UAV development is still deeply in its infancy, akin to manned flight in the years after the Wright Brothers carefully lifted off from Kitty Hawk. But it will progress rapidly, as did aviation. Within the next few decades it is likely that unmanned planes will have displaced manned planes as the dominant aerial weapon. Other countries, like India think so.
If the Air Force (like the Navy) stays locked into its Cold War mindset, it risks getting leapfrogged by countries like India or China. Neither of those is likely to catch up to the United States in conventional planes, so they have every incentive to try a game-changing play by committing wholesale to UAVs. Low-cost remotely controlled vehicles could present a serious threat to American air superiority and air operations through sheer numbers, let alone the advantages that each UAV would have in maneuverability and range. And the United States military has gotten deeply used to having air superiority; so used to it that they now assume it to be the case. Such an ominous scenario is not likely anytime soon, but in the medium term it is all too likely. The Navy discovered the dominating value of carrier aviation on December 7, 1941, much to America’s cost. It would be wise for the Air Force to avoid such a similarly harsh lesson.
Presidential candidates, for good or ill, are crucially defined by war. That is as true in 2008 as previously, but the superior candidate in this election is not the one everyone thinks.
Perceptions of the candidate and, less obviously, perceptions by the candidate are influenced by their experiences of war. In recent elections, the images of George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole were shaped by their relationship to World War II. Similarly, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and John Kerry found themselves defined by the Vietnam War. And it is not just any war that does the defining. Instead, it is the generational war, the dominant war of a particular era: Vietnam, for example, rather than Panama.
What wars define the candidates of 2008? For Senator John McCain, the answer is easy: Vietnam. His years as a POW are foundational to him, and the McCain campaign and McCain himself highlight those experiences as much as possible. Senator Barack Obama, by contrast, came of age in a military era that, as much as anything, was about recovering from Vietnam. The two candidates’ differing martial experiences has led to a media narrative that gives the advantage of experience to McCain.
But what is not discussed as often is how the wars shape not just the perceptions of candidates, but their outlooks. Wars mold how candidates view the world. The war that shaped President Bush’s viewpoint and those around him—Cheney and Rumsfeld particularly—was the Cold War, the decades-long struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, almost immediately after 9/11, the administration looked for a nation to blame. The target became not Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but Iraq. This was a classic Cold War reaction, when guerrilla or terrorist movements around the world were fronts for one side or the other. So the Bush administration found itself simply unable to believe that Al Qaeda had acted without some kind of state support. There had to be an “axis of evil.” Iraq would become an example of the perils of being part of that axis.
Originally posted here, here, and here.
“Lafayette, we are here.” Part I.
On this day in 1918, the United States launched an attack against the German trenches in the Meuse-Argonne region of northern France. It was the largest American effort since the Civil War; in absolute numbers it was the largest operation the United States had ever undertaken. For all that, it was a sideshow to the larger war. After the stagnation of 1916-1917, 1918 had become the year of resolution. The Germans, fresh from their victory over the Russians, had transported hundreds of thousands of soldiers back from the eastern front to the western. They knew that they had a limited amount of time to take advantage of the numbers, before millions of freshly-trained American soldiers arrived in France in late 1918 and 1919. General Erich von Ludendorff, the German Supreme Commander, threw the dice with a series of massive offensives starting in March. For a moment, the Germans broke through and the war looked like it might end before the Americans could make a difference. The crisis was serious enough that the American commander, General John J. Pershing, unbent from his insistence that American units would fight only as part of an American army under an American commander, and began sending divisions piecemeal to shore up the French and British lines. The American reinforcements, resolute defense by the French and British troops, and general exhaustion on the German side enabled the Entente to hold its lines. By late May 1918, the Supreme Entente commander, General Ferdinand Foch, was thinking about large-scale counterattacks.
Foch envisioned a series of hammer-blows all along the German lines. His hammers were to be the British Expeditionary Force and the French Army, strengthened by further injections of fresh American troops. General Pershing flatly refused. The emergency was over, he argued, and in any counterattack, American troops would fight as a single army, responsible to an American commander, not a foreign one. President Woodrow Wilson, Pershing’s commander, had been insistent that “the forces of the United States are a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved.” Pershing aimed to carry that order out to the letter. Foch fumed and argued but he had no leverage. America had come into war not as an ally, but as an “associated power,” fighting against the Germans, but not necessarily for the British or French. That meant that Foch could not order Pershing to do anything; he could only ask. At a meeting, Foch demanded if Pershing was willing to see the defenders pushed back to the River Loire, south of Paris itself. Pershing responded that he did not care where they Americans fought, only that they fought as a unit. To this rule, he made only one exception. The 369th (Colored) Regiment would fight with the French. The “Harlem Hellfighters,” as they came to be known, fit uneasily in a largely racist Army uncomfortable with the notion of blacks as combat soldiers. The 369th had not been allowed to participate with New York’s 42nd National Guard Division, the “Rainbow” Division, because, it was explained to the 369th’s commander, “black is not a color in the rainbow.” In France, Pershing felt that the 369th could be dumped on the French, with their experience commanding “colonial” troops.
Foch’s misgivings about this were not merely related to the difficulties it created in planning. He was also concerned that the Americans had little experience of trench warfare and would thus find fighting on the Western Front hard going. Foch needed the Americans to carry their weight, and he wasn’t sure that they could. The airy pronouncements from American officers that they would break out of the stagnant trench warfare that the Europeans had allowed themselves to be mired in and return to a more chivalric “open warfare” reassured Foch not all. It sounded identical to the assertions of French officers in the pre-war era. The French had discovered in 1914-15 that assertions, like men, died easily in the mud and blood of the Western Front. Machine guns respected no-one’s chivalry. The British and French had painfully learned, over the course of three years, how to mount effective assaults against heavily-defended trench systems. But to Pershing, trench warfare simply reflected Old World incompetence. The strapping sons of the New World had arrived, and they would show the Europeans how to do it. Pershing was wont to make such pronouncements in staff meetings with Foch and General Douglas Haig, the BEF commander. It remains a mystery that one or both of them did not punch him squarely in the mouth as a result, but that can perhaps be laid to Haig’s dour Scottish phlegmatism and Foch’s sense that France, wearied by the slaughter of millions of her young men, needed the Americans more than the Americans needed the French.
Pershing got his way. The Americans would fight as a single army, though the units that had been sent as reinforcements during the German spring offensive would stay with the French and British. Foch rewrote the plan to put the Americans far out on the right of the British and French lines. Their job would be to reduce two salients, bulges in the defensive line, to ensure that the main French assault would not have Germans on its flanks. The first of these, the St. Mihiel salient, would be attacked on September 12th. After reducing this, the Americans would immediately turn to an attack in the Meuse-Argonne, about 20 miles to the east of St. Mihiel. There, as part of a larger assault, the Americans would cover the flank of the main French assault. The second attack would be much larger, initially comprising about 180,000 American soldiers, essentially the entire AEF. The attack was scheduled to start with an artillery bombardment at 11:30 PM September 25th. The next morning, the American infantry would go “over the top” and into the assault.
“Lafayette, we are here.” Part II
The American plan was flawed from the beginning. First, the attacks were spaced too closely together in time. To be successful, offensives in 1918 had to be complex, highly-planned and rehearsed, and heavily supplied. There was plenty of time to plan, supply, and train for the St. Mihiel assault, but not for Meuse-Argonne. American units would have to be pulled out of the St. Mihiel attack, have their casualties replaced, and retrain for the Meuse-Argonne, in the space of about ten days. This was simply not enough time. Second, the attacks were spaced too closely in distance. St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne were next to each other on the front, supplied by the same road network. Even worse, that road network ran through Verdun, the site of near continuous fighting in 1916-17. Heavily damaged and only partially repaired, the roads were simply not up to the task of supplying two major assaults. At the attack on Amiens in August, 1918, the British had built up a stockpile of 6 million artillery shells in the weeks prior, and fired all of them and more during the attack. The Americans would not be able to do the same.
The attack on St. Mihiel pushed off on September 12th. It was a spectacular success. Within four days, the Americans had captured all their targets, 15,000 German POWs, and 400 artillery pieces. The victory raised the stock of the Americans, and Pershing, in the eyes of the French. French President Raymond Poincare visited the salient to congratulate the U.S. forces, though it should also be noted that he owned a small chateau in the liberated territory. Only some skeptical voices within French military intelligence pointed out that the Germans had actually been in the middle of evacuating the salient at the moment of the American attack, and thus had been unprepared to fight resolutely in defense. Given this, American casualties had been worryingly high, with 4,500 dead. “Open warfare” had succeeded, but at some cost.
The turnaround for the next attack turned into chaos. A traffic jam stretched back miles from the Meuse-Argonne line, carrying the critical supplies and men. Tens of thousands of trucks vied for space with 90,000 horses and mules pulling wagons. Some of the artillery got into place only hours before the shelling was due to start, at 11:30 PM on September 25th. That night 2700 guns started firing the artillery barrage, while roughly 600 tanks idled behind the lines and about 800 airplanes waited for light to take off. In the front trenches, infantry regiments sat, prepared for H-Hour, 5:30 am, when they would assault the German lines.
Let us pause for a moment and examine the challenge of their task. In front of them lay a sophisticated defensive system, consisting of trenches and strong points and barbed wire and artillery and machine guns. Allied to that system the German defensive doctrine, which specified exactly how German units should react to an attack. The doctrine, defense in depth, had come out of the hard lessons of 1916. There, at the Battle of the Somme, the Germans had defended their trenches by concentrating most of their troops in the front lines. That, they discovered, made them susceptible to the overwhelming barrage of British artillery fire, unlike anything the Germans had seen before. The “storm of steel,” (stahlgewittern) as the Germans called it, had inflicted heavy casualties. Thus the Somme, while a disaster for the British, had also been a disaster for the Germans. The result was a new doctrine. The front lines would be held lightly by forces that were only expected to slow down an attack. Behind the front lines would be the artillery, which would hammer attackers, and the Eingreif (counterattack) units. The latter, in the case of a successful assault, would launch an immediate counterattack (der Gegenstoss) before the victors could get settled in their gains. If that immediate counterattack did not work, the reserve German forces would build up to a deliberate counterattack (der Gegenangriff) a few days later. The idea was to spare the German defenders from the artillery barrage while enabling them to recover any lost terrain. The new defensive strategy worked well. The French Nivelle offensives of Spring 1917 (named after the French commander Robert Nivelle) failed catastrophically because Nivelle, not understanding the new German methods, put his faith in overwhelming French artillery bombardments slaughtering the defenders. It was the unfortunate French poilus who died by the hundreds of thousands for his error. A British assault at Passchendaele in fall 1917 met the same fate, made even worse by the soupy mud created by an unprecedented rainfall in September and October.
But even as the German doctrine succeeded, a counterdoctrine began to develop. The two main proponents of this new doctrine were British Generals Henry Rawlinson and Herbert Plumer. “Bite and hold” assumed that the Germans would mount a counterattack as soon as a British assault showed signs of success. Their idea was explicitly to provoke that counterattack. The British would bite off the front of the German defensive system, and then immediately turn it into a defensive position of their own. The British would thus be ready for a German counterattack, and, Rawlinson and Plumer hoped, hold that assault off while inflicting heavy casualties on the Germans. After a few weeks, during which the Germans would reorganize their defensive system with a new front line, the British would repeat the process. No more breakthroughs to Berlin; instead, steady, if slow, progress. The way to defend against this, of course, was to push heavy concentrations of German defenders up to the front lines. That, however, would bring them within the range of British artillery units, who would be only too happy to slaughter them as they had at the Somme. “Bite and hold” worked well at the Battle of Messines Ridge in August 1917 when a British attack, commanded by Plumer, captured a large chunk of the German defensive lines with relatively low casualties. It had worked again at Amiens in August 1918, when Rawlinson’s attack had cracked the entire German defensive line.
In a sense, “bite and hold” was the antithesis of “open warfare.” British infantry went into battle heavily weighed down, carrying extra ammunition, equipment, and weapons so that they could set up a defensive perimeter quickly. Soldiers at Amiens had carried a larger load than those at the Somme. But at Amiens, they were escorted across the battlefield by a creeping barrage of artillery fire that kept German heads down, and hundreds of tanks working to suppress German machine guns. There was no possibility that they could break out into the open terrain behind the defensive system and advance quickly. It simply was not possible. The Americans scoffed at this blinkered mentality and asserted that they would handle it differently at Meuse-Argonne. They would break into the German lines, and then expand outward, pushing the Germans before them into the open terrain behind the trench system. Pershing’s objective for the first day of the attack was the main German railhead at Sedan, forty or so miles behind the lines. Such a distance was otherworldly in a war where advances were measured in yards, not miles. The British and French winced when they heard the Americans’ confidence; it reminded them of their own confidence in 1914. Haig and Foch worried that Pershing had planned another Somme or Passchendaele, one that would end in sanguinary failure.
They were right, and wrong.
Lafayette, we are here. Part III.
The Germans knew an attack was coming. They could read a map as well as anyone, and the situation in theater was particularly obvious. The St. Mihiel salient had been a problem for the French and Americans, and an American attack had reduced it. What was next? The French Army held the center of the line, near the river Aisne. The terrain here was flat and, once the Aisne was crossed, without natural barriers until an attacking army hit the River Meuse. Just beyond the Meuse lay a tempting target: the German rail junction at Sedan. Capture that, and the network that supplied the German armies in France would be cut in half.
But along the western line of that open terrain lay one forbidding feature: the Argonne Forest. Heavily wooded and on rocky ground, the Argonne was seemingly purpose-built for defense. If the Argonne remained in German hands, any French advance to the west would be taken under flanking fire by German machine guns and artillery, potentially crippling it. The Germans figured that any major offensive in the area would have to kick off with an assault on the Argonne.
Who would do it? That too was obvious. The massive traffic jam of American troops and supplies behind the lines was clearly apparent to German reconnaissance planes, and trench raids brought back prisoners for interrogation who spoke not French, but English with a peculiar accent. The German commander in the area, General Max von Gallwitz, was determined to give the Americans a stout welcome. He organized four defensive lines, fourteen miles deep and anchored by the Kriemhild Line at the rear. The Kriemhild was part of the larger German defensive system, the Hindenburg Line, that stretched from Switzerland to the Channel. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, the last organized German defense before the Heimat.
The American assault thus faced a daunting task. The German defenses were well-built and anchored in woody, uneven terrain that would make it difficult for the attackers to spot them. Worse, through the middle of the American attack lay the Meuse River, which meant that American forces would be cut off from each other as they assaulted. Whether Foch handed Pershing such a awkward position as a reward for the American General’s intransigence is speculative: tempting, but speculative.
The American plan of attack was to make the main effort to the east of the Argonne, while the French Fourth Army launched a supporting assault to the west of the forest. There would be a limited assault in the forest, to keep the German units there busy, but Pershing hoped that the side attacks would force the German defenders in the Argonne to retreat or be outflanked. That was the plan, and it survived about as long as plans normally do in warfare. In any case, at 5:30 AM the morning of September 26th, 600,000 American soldiers launched the assault after the overnight bombardment. There was a heavy fog as they attacked, which made it difficult for the German defenders to see them coming. The main goal of the infantry in the attack was to follow as closely behind the “creeping barrage,” an artillery bombardment that slowly crept forward through the German defenses and forced those defenders to keep their heads down. It was a delicate task: follow too closely and the shells would kill your own men. Follow too far away and the German machine gunners would be able to get out of their dugouts and scythe down the advancing soldiers.
That first day, things went reasonably well. The fog and the barrage combined to reduce the effectiveness of the German defenders, and the American assault got into the first and second defensive lines without overwhelming casualties. In the French Fourth Army, the American 369th (Colored) Regiment performed extremely well, reacting perhaps to their snub and to French officers who treated them with some respect.
But there were some ominous portents. First, it was becoming clear that the artillery bombardment had not knocked out most of the German machine gun posts, and they were beginning to inflict casualties. In all, 9 Medals of Honor were awarded for actions on September 26th, a sign that there was sustained German resistance. Second, the American infantry was finding it enormously difficult to stay up with the barrage. Crossing the broken ground went slower than the commanders had expected. The infantry had no quick way of communicating back to the artillery units (they only had carrier pigeons), and so they dropped farther and farther behind the bombardment. Finally, the tanks used were breaking down at a rapid rate, leaving the infantry to handle strongpoints by themselves. Nonetheless, by the end of the day, Pershing had the sense that the attack was a success. The question that remained was could the Americans handle the inevitable German counterattacks and keep advancing?
In a word, no. German attacks the next day pounded into the American lines and brought the advance to a complete halt. von Gallwitz threw in his reserves as quickly as he could. Added to this was the start of several days of heavy rain, which bogged down everyone and thus worked to the German advantage. Most critically, the rain turned the supply roads behind the attack into quagmires and the logistics chain, which (under the organizing power of Colonel George C. Marshall) had been barely keeping pace, broke down almost completely.
What the Americans were discovering was the intricate knowledge necessary to fight this kind of war, and how much of it they lacked. The Germans would fire heavy gas bombardments at attackers to force them to put their masks on. The filters in the masks blocked the gas but did not allow enough air in for a soldier to keep moving. Experienced soldiers knew when they could take the masks off, quickly advance, and then put them back on. The Americans didn’t. The Americans were not prepared for the heavy casualties in their junior officers and non-commissioned officers. Those Captains, Lieutenants, Sergeants, and Corporals lead from the front and were thus frequently the first shot down. In experienced units, men far down the command structure understood what to do when their commanding officers were killed; American units frequently didn’t. The legendary exception to this, of course, was Corporal Alvin York who, after three officers and NCOs senior to him were killed, led the seven remaining men in his unit to the capture of 132 Germans. York got the Medal of Honor for his valor and the privilege of seeing Gary Cooper play him in a 1941 movie.
Pershing had gotten his American attack and he was, to his deep chagrin, in danger of it failing. The Germans, however, could not take advantage of the American weakness. The soldiers in the Meuse-Argonne area were worn down by four years of fighting and, in a sign of their bad morale, were often taking any opportunity to surrender to the Americans. They, and the rain, had halted the American advance, but they did not have the strength to push the Americans back. And Ludendorff could not shift substantial reserves into the area. Foch’s general offensive had put pressure all along the German line. To the north, the French had advanced deeply into German defenses, and the British had broken into the Hindenberg Line itself. Ludendorff felt his army shifting underneath him, and on 28th September, he told the Kaiser that it was time to ask for an armistice.
Negotiations were opened, but the war continued. Pershing, desperate to demonstrate his Army’s abilities, paused the assault, rebuilt his supplies, and rotated three fresh divisions into the line. He relaunched the attack on on October 4th and this time the Americans pushed the Germans back. Overwhelming force proved too much for German exhaustion, if at the price of heavy casualties. In the process, they rescued the “Lost Battalion,” a unit of the 77th Division who had gotten surrounded and cut off in the Argonne on October 2nd. Nobody realized they were out there until their last carrier pigeon, Cher Ami, made it back to her coop with a message pleading for help. The pigeon was wounded in the breast, blinded in one eye, and had one leg shot off, but recovered to receive the Croix de Guerre from the French, a wooden leg to replace the one he had lost, and the personal farewell of Pershing, who came and saw the pigeon’s boat off when it left France.
By October 14th, the Americans had successfully broken into the Kriemhild Line and achieved the objectives of the revamped offensive. It had cost them 117,000 wounded and dead, roughly half of all American combat casualties in the war. It had demonstrated to the French and British that the Americans could hold their own on the Western Front. Pershing had won his American battle. As part of Foch’s larger offensive, the attack had destroyed the last organized German resistance in the west. By the middle of October, what defense remained to the Germans was ad hoc and essentially futile. They were no longer fighting for victory but, as Ludendorff put it, for “better Armistice terms.”
None of the three main Democrats in the primary campaign had any substantial military knowledge. Rather than attempt to run another war hero, the Democrat voters decided that Iraq would neutralize the national security issue. But that required a candidate who was not tainted by Iraq. Hillary Clinton voted for Iraq war in 2003 in order to shore up her credentials on the military/foreign policy side, but in 2008 that vote haunted her during her primary campaign, especially as her main rival, Barack Obama, had voted against it. But the same problems remain: the most important name on Obama’s National Security advisory group is former Senator Sam Nunn, a Southern Democrat in the Scoop Jackson mould. To find military expertise, Obama was essentially forced to reach back to a dying breed of conservative, southern Democrats, because there are currently no senior Democrats with anywhere near Nunn’s credibility on defense matters. But Nunn is 69 years old, barely younger than John McCain, and is of an older generation of Democrats which means that he carries substantial political baggage within the party.
The Republicans, by contrast, settled on fantasy. The party fought successfully to use patriotism as an electoral wedge, especially critical in the 1960s to appeal to a newly susceptible South. That use of patriotism was overtly connected to the virtue of the American military and American soldiers and sailors. The image was a black and white one of good against evil. The enemies of American valor and might were always painted in the darkest shades possible, without any acknowledgment of complexity or nuance. Thus, America fought an “evil empire” in Ronald Reagan’s words, or an “axis of evil” in George W. Bush’s. The point of this fantasy was to win elections, not truly to develop security strategies. But that electoral strategy paralleled a genuine interest and connection with both the military and military matters. The overall policy drew on the containment policy developed during the Truman administration, though also making efforts at rollback in strategically critical areas, like Central and South America. This interest and involvement was reality-based, and acknowledged the complexities of America’s global context. Thus, it was a Republican President who withdrew from Vietnam and opened China. It was a Republican President who negotiated substantial arms control treaties and oversaw the fall of the Cold War.
There were two critical factors here. First, the two strategies—the electoral and the reality-based—always existed somewhat uneasily and in a state of cognitive dissonance. Ronald Reagan could speak of the “evil empire” and joke that “bombing [of the Soviet Union] would begin in five minutes” while also discussing the total drawdown of nuclear weapons with Mikhail Gorbachev in the Reykjavik Summit of 1987. Second, the Republicans have come to be seen as the party with military expertise, whether each individual candidate actually had military experience. Thus Bob Dole had a heroic military career and George W. Bush, to put it politely, did not, but they were both helped by military issues during the elections they contested. This credibility of the Republicans has been so strong that even during 2004, when the Democrats ran a certified war hero to oppose Bush, the Democrats were still on the defensive on national security.
Continue Reading »
The Jamestown Project- Small Tent April 16, 2009 dsilbey
- Votes Have Consequences, or Regionalization (continued) April 14, 2009 dsilbey
- What A Regional Party Looks Like April 7, 2009 dsilbey
- What Defeat Looks Like March 31, 2009 dsilbey
- The Wrong Question March 30, 2009 dsilbey
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