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The Reaper
06-05-2008, 12:43
I like the way he thinks.

The expectation of perfection and low cost in wartime is an impossible dream. Certainly, we should strive for it, but accept that we will never reach it. Along with fate and chance, the enemy gets a vote as well.

This tendency and false expectation of a clean, sterile, error free war are going to cost us plenty in the long term, and provide a very big opportunity for our opponents to exploit us.

TR

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/06/the_bad_war.html

June 05, 2008
The Bad War?
By Victor Davis Hanson

NORMANDY, France -- Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.

Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War': How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World." Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.

Maybe then the subsequent world war, and its 50 million dead, could have been avoided. Taking that faulty argument to its logical end, I suppose today a united West might live in peace with a reformed (and victorious) Nazi Third Reich!

On the left, the novelist Nicholson Baker in a book of nonfiction, "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization," builds the case that the Allied bombing of German cities was tantamount to a war crime.

Apparently there was no need to, in blanket fashion, attack German urban centers and the industry, transportation and communications concentrated inside them. From Baker's comfortable vantage point, either the war was amoral or unnecessary -- or there must have been more humane ways to stop the flow of fuel, crews and equipment for the Waffen SS divisions that invaded Europe and Russia.

In the luxury of some 60 years of postwar peace and affluence -- and perhaps in anger over the current Iraq war -- Buchanan and Baker and other revisionists engage in a common sort of Western second-guessing. The result is that they always demand liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection.

Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany and thus an understandable pretext for the rise of the Nazis, who played on German anger and fear.

Those accords may have been flawed, but they were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917 -- or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War. What ultimately led to World War II was neither Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis' pain and anguish.

The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. That way, the Allies would have demonstrated to the German people that their army was never "stabbed in the back" at home, as the Nazis later alleged, but instead defeated by an Allied army that was willing to stay on to foster German constitutional government and its reintegration within Europe. The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II -- and 60 years without war have followed.

Had Nicholson Baker been alive in 1942, I doubt he would have had better ideas of how to stop the Nazi and Japanese juggernauts that had ruined Eastern Europe, Russia and large parts of China and southeast Asia other than using the same clumsy tools our grandfathers were forced to employ to end fascist aggression.

A Nazi armored division or death camp stopped its murderous work not through reasoned appeal or self-reflection, but only when its fuel, supplies and manpower were cut off.

I am currently visiting military cemeteries in France, Luxembourg and Belgium, some of the most beautiful, solemn acres in Europe. The thousands of Americans lying beneath the rows of white crosses at Normandy Beach, at Hamm, Luxembourg, and at St. Avold in the Lorraine probably did not debate the Versailles Treaty or worry too much whether a B-17 took out a neighborhood when it tried to hit a German rail yard.

Instead, our soldiers were more worried that they had few options available to stop Nazi Germany and imperial Japan -- other than their own innate courage. The dead in our cemeteries over here in Europe never bragged that they were eagerly fighting the "good" war, but rather only reluctantly finishing a necessary one that someone else had started.

They and those who sent them into the carnage of World War II knew Americans could do good without having to be perfect. In contrast, the present critics of the Allied cause enjoy the freedom and affluence that our forefathers gave us by fighting World War II while ignoring -- or faulting -- the intelligence and resolve that won it.

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman once scoffed at the peacetime wisdom of postwar critics that came across as mass-produced, feel-good "bottled piety." Others might call it ingratitude.

Surgicalcric
06-05-2008, 13:47
Good read Sir. Thanks for posting it.

It would be nice to have a crystal ball and be able to see into the future when making decisions but thats just not in the cards. Must be nice to armchair quarterback decisions made from the comfort of ones office or library...

I would like to hear, for pure entertainment sake, how Buchanan and Baker would have prevented the war or prosecuted it when it finally came to our shores. I am sure we would have lost WW-II but am extremely thankful real men were up to the task instead of these two knuckleheads. I just wish we had a few more of them around today to make the hard right decision over the easy wrong...

Crip

Moving Target
06-05-2008, 13:53
Great article. Many people still need to learn that war is an imprecise business run by fallible humans, and mistakes will be made as such.

It's one thing to sit on the sidelines making snide comments about how you would have done better, and quite another to be at the front with your life on the line, or making decisions you know will cost people their lives.

echoes
06-05-2008, 15:21
I just wish we had a few more of them around today to make the hard right decision over the easy wrong...

Crip


Crip,

What an outstanding statement!:)

In my very small civilian opinion, I believe that ya'll SF Men answer this call, no question!
I hope that history indeed shows the facts...that there were Our Brave Soldiers who fought this war on "their" soil, rather than here at home...and kicked a**!:lifter
Holly

abc_123
06-05-2008, 17:51
The expectation of perfection and low cost in wartime is an impossible dream. Certainly, we should strive for it, but accept that we will never reach it.

So true.

Just like in project managment.... 'Good', 'Fast' and 'Cheap' are all things that customers want... all at the same time.

Not to digress, but when working software implementations on the civilian side, when faced with a customer was that was getting an unrealistic expectation of the progress that the project should have made by any given period of time...At an appropriate point in the discussion, I lsometimes pulled out a big paper triangle with those words written on the points of the triangle. I then told the customer to grab a hold of two of the points but that I got to hold the 3rd.

It is impossible for the customer to have all three.

Goggles Pizano
06-06-2008, 06:37
Great post Sir thank you!

I wonder if Buchanan and his ilk take into consideration the Germans had jet power available to them by 1942/3 and could not employ it in mass production because of decisions made by Hitler? Moreover what of the V1 and V2 bombs with the Germans racing to find nuclear power? I am thankfull there were men with the requisite measure of testicular fortitude available to thwart the evil of that time and to save this world.

JMI
06-06-2008, 06:52
The Versailles Treaty was a mistake in hindsight. It was way too harsh, IMO. And occupy Germany? With what troops and treasure?