Recently in History Category

I'm currently reading about the naval aspect of the Revolutionary War, and am finding it incredibly interesting. The Revolutionary War is one of those periods in history about which I should know far more than I actually do; it's marked by some truly larger-than-life people and events.

One such person is John Paul Jones, a name familiar to me since grade school, but about which I actually knew very little until now. I knew he was famous in regard to the colonial Navy in some way, but that's about it. I just finished reading about the battle that made him a household name for generations to come--the fight between his ship the Bonhomme Richard and the HMS Serapis. Jones' ship was outgunned and outclassed, but he stubbornly (or stupidly, I suppose) refused to surrender, shouting the famous "I have not yet begun to fight" (or a phrase along those lines; history is uncertain about the exact words--but they were Fightin' Words, whatever they were).

Anyway, I thought it was a fun and inspiring story, so if you're not familiar with it, you might enjoy reading a short recounting of the battle.

One aspect of the battle not mentioned in that brief version of events is that the French-captained frigate Alliance, a member of Jones' squadron, showed up on the scene mid-battle and fired several broadsides... into the Bonhomme Richard. A bit of research on my part has not turned up a satisfactory explanation for this. The author of the book I'm reading believes that battlefield confusion on that scale is unlikely, and that the Alliance hoped to sink the Bonhomme Richard, finish off the badly damaged Serapis, and claim credit for the kill. (I'm sure there's a joke about the French in there somewhere waiting to be told, but I'll nobly refrain.)

Interesting stuff!

update: Here's a much more detailed description of the battle, if you're up for a longer read. It seems to chalk up the Alliance incident to incompetence, not treachery.

A couple of quick notes again today.

If you've got some time to spare, you really ought to read Losing the War, about the general weirdness, horror, and confusion that was World War II. It's incredibly lengthy, so if time is limited, I suggest starting in on the second half of the piece, which is where the most interesting discussion material surfaces.

I read this last week and have been pondering it ever since. (I may comment on parts of it at more length in the future if I can muster the will to do so.) At any rate, it has some terribly insightful perspectives on how and why the war was perceived as it was. Well worth the read.

On a different note, Kim and Jon have posted their much-anticipated dual-reviews of Left Behind and The Da Vinci Code, and the results are spectacular.

There, that's two (three, if you count the book reviews as separate entities) items for you to read today, which should tide you over until I post some real content here one of these days.

Today, July 3, marked the close of the three-day battle between the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg in 1963. The day's most famous event was Pickett's charge.

Gettysburg is a remarkably fascinating battle. It was a decisive battle, in the sense that it marked a crucial turning point in the war, and thus fascinates military historians. It was a relatively "even" battle, in the sense that it might have gone either way, and so it makes an inherently dramatic story. It also seems to represent all of the beauty and horror of the Civil War: the qualities of courage, strategic brilliance, and idealism counterbalanced by an equal amount of death, slaughter, and failure.

Touring the Gettysburg battlefield during a family vacation years ago remains one of my fondest vacation memories. There is something uniquely humbling about standing on ground where men fought and died; somewhere in the back of your mind, you wonder what it must have been like in the chaos of battle. Could I have done it?

The anniversary is an excellent excuse, at any rate, to watch the amazing film Gettysburg, one of my favorite war movies. If you're up for some summer reading, Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels is considered the definitive Gettysburg novel. And I must also recommend the computer game Sid Meier's Gettysburg!, which does a great job of both being a good game and walking you through the pivotal battles of the campaign.

I'm reading with interest Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which relates the events of World War I's opening month. The author has a penchant for making amusing side comments:

"The special motive of the Force under your control," [Kitchener wrote to the commander of British forces], "is to support and cooperate with the French Army... and to assist the French in preventing or repelling the invasion by Germany of French or Belgian territory." With a certain optimism, he added, "and eventually to restore the neutrality of Belgium"--a project comparable to restoring virginity.

"Virginity :: Belgian neutrality"--it's got a certain ring to it. The possibilities (for tasteless jokes, at least) are endless. Have you heard of the True Love Waits program? Imagine pledging to maintain Belgian neutrality until marriage. Thank you, I'll be here all week.

(Hey, I never promised these blog posts would be worth reading.)

[Note: the following is a personal reaction to John Keegan's A History of Warfare--it's not intended as a comprehensive review of the book.]

Is it possible to write a comprehensive history of human warfare? I wasn't sure quite what to think when I first saw John Keegan's A History of Warfare. How could one hope to adequately address such a topic in a 400-page book? Having enjoyed several of Keegan's other works of military history (his Six Armies in Normandy is one of the best accounts of D-Day and the battle for France that I've read), and intrigued by the audacity of any book claiming to relate the entire history of war, I picked up A History of Warfare and began to read. I finished reading it last week. Not only does it live up to its title--it does indeed trace the history of war from prehistoric times through the Cold War--it is an important book that, despite its military-history title, ought to be read by anyone with an interest in anthropology, sociology, or history. I'll record just a few of my thoughts on the book.

I'm in a link-dispensing mood lately, it seems. Here's a cool article discussing the question of who would win in a European knight vs. Japanese samurai deathmatch. Admit it--you've often wondered. (Link first spotted over at Joshua Claybourn's blog.)

Sixty-five years ago yesterday was Kristallnacht.

Yesterday marked the anniversary of Hirohito's famous surrender announcement, which effectively brought World War 2 to an end. The announcement makes for an interesting read, both for what it says and for what it quite specifically does not say. (Just as interesting is the story, which I cannot find online, of the attempted Japanese government coup that almost stopped the surrender broadcast.)

I posted some World War 2/Japan thoughts earlier this month, so I won't rehash them. But this seemed like a reasonably important date to remember.

As some of you may know, I enjoy reading books of military history, particularly when the topic has something to do with World War II. Lately (that is, in the last year or so), I've made my way through a number of books about different aspects of the Pacific War and have learned quite a bit in process. A few of the observations that have struck me as I've read up on the topic:

• It is almost impossible for me to comprehend the sheer horror of the fighting that took place on tiny islands throughout the Pacific. As the saying goes, war is hell--but this part of the war seems to have taken place on a particularly nasty circle of the Inferno. Even if 99% of a typical soldier's experience was spent sitting around bored on the deck of a ship or doing uneventful guard duty, the 1% which involved slogging across bomb-cratered, malaria-infested beaches and jungles while doing battle with invisible, seemingly invincible enemies sounds like pretty much the worst experience I can conceive of a human being enduring.

  The strangeness of my own historical situation makes reading about this all the more surreal: here I am, sitting on my back porch on a summer day sipping a Mountain Dew, reading calmly about how US landing craft launching an amphibious assault on Tarawa got stuck on coral reefs before reaching the beach and sat there for hours taking Japanese fire until nearly every single man had been blown to pieces or drowned in the bloody shallows. And that was before they even set foot on the island.

  This sort of thing is so far removed from my life experience, I don't even know quite how to process it.

• You would think that the prospect of a massive, all-out war against an implacable foe would inspire military leaders to put aside differences and egos and work together... but you'd be wrong. On the other hand, maybe it's natural to expect that in such a critical, high-pressure time, people will fight furiously to make sure that we don't ruin everything by doing the "wrong thing." There were an awful lot of unknowns and firsts in the Pacific War.

• Interestingly, all of the historians I've read on the Pacific War come more or less to the conclusion that the use of the atomic bomb was an appropriate decision to make, historically speaking (or, if not appropriate, at least highly defensible). The most interesting take on the question of the atomic bomb that I've read thus far has been in George Fiefer's Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb. In the book, Fiefer argues that the battle of Okinawa was simply so horrific in terms of casualties (more civilians died at Okinawa than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that it left Allied leadership desperate to pursue any course of action that might offer an alternative to an invasion of mainland Japan--an invasion that, extrapolating from the experience of Okinawa, had the potential to be the biggest bloodbath in history. (The book is also interesting in that it devotes considerable attention to the plight of the native Okinawans, chronicling their cultural near-annihilation first by Japanese occupation and then by the actual US-Japanese fighting on the island.)

  If anyone can recommend a historical counterbalancing point of view arguing that the atomic bomb wasn't a defensible action, I'd be really interested in reading it.

• Before I began reading up on this topic, I was under the very vague impression that after Midway, the Japanese navy just sort of withered away, never to trouble the Americans again--which made the whole US victory seem to rest on one rather lucky event. On the contrary, Midway seems really to have been the beginning, not the end, of the Pacific struggle in earnest; I've now read about the dozens upon dozens of brutal naval battles that occurred nearly every time US forces advanced to their next objective. It seems to have taken the Imperial Japanese Navy a lot longer to die than I thought--they pulled off plenty of victories, minor and major, throughout the year or two after Midway, even as the tide turned against Japan's efforts.

  As a related side note, it is interesting to read about the rapid evolution of American naval tactics and technology throughout the war. The US was markedly inferior in many aspects of technology, training, and tactics at the beginning of the war, but American forces can be observed slowly but steadily adapting to counter (and ultimately overcome) Japanese superiority in each of those categories. That process of adaptation--and the way that wars so often coincide with huge leaps forward in technology--is part of what makes military history so interesting to me.

• Among the books I've read on this subject, in case you're interested:
  
  
  
  • The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July-August 1945 by Stanley Weintraub (an interesting look at the frantic planning, negotiations, and decisions made in the final weeks of the war with Japan, on both sides of the conflict)
    
  • Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb by George Fiefer (mentioned above)
    
  • A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II by Gerhard Weinberg (one of the best comprehensive World War II histories I've read)
    
  • Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower (a look at Japan's political and cultural situation in the immediate aftermath of the war)
    
  • Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan by Ronald Spector (a more straightforward military history; still reading this one)
    

Thoughts? Any books to add to my reading list on the topic?

Yesterday, Michele and I accompanied our friends Jay and Elizabeth to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Grand Rapids Public Museum. We'd been meaning to go for some time, and finally got around to doing so when Jay took the initiative and secured us tickets. The Dead Sea Scrolls are an example of something that I find fascinating but about which I know next to nothing, so I was looking forward to learning a bit about them.

All in all, I was quite pleased with the exhibit, which was educational and accessible at the same time. There were about a dozen scrolls fragments, most of them fairly small, which seemed (from the information provided) to be reasonably representative of the many different types of manuscripts recovered at the Qumran site. Much of the exhibit focused on the lifestyle of the Qumran community, which most scholars apparently believe to belong to the Essene branch of Judaism. According to the exhibit, the Qumran community was small, entirely male, and rigidly ascetic.

What I wasn't expecting was that the exhibit would have an emotional affect on me. It was difficult for me to read about the lifestyle and history of the Qumran community without feeling a shiver of sadness at the thought of the community's ultimate fate: destruction at the hands of the Roman army. They believed so strongly in their interpretation of the will of God that they chose to separate themselves from normal society, subject themselves to an ascetic lifestyle in a hellish desert environment, and devote their lives to preparation for the Armageddon they expected to arrive at any moment. As one of the exhibit's plaques rather glibly pointed out, they probably faced the onslaught of the Roman army with the firm, and quite understandable, belief that the Apocalypse had arrived.

It makes me sad to think that their Armageddon came and went, heralding not the final victory of Good over Evil but rather the bloody end of Jewish resistance to the hated Roman rule, another footnote in the brutal history of the Middle East. Certainly, Armageddon did not end in the way Qumran community confidently expected. What thoughts went through their minds when they heard reports of Roman soldiers descending on their isolated community? Were they ecstatic at the fulfillment of their prophecies, or did they panic in fear at the thought of being caught unprepared by the End? Did they charge defiantly from their caves and houses, secure in their knowledge that victory would be theirs? Did their faith waver at the sight of Roman spears and shields? In the ensuing slaughter, did there come a point when they realized how horribly they had been wrong? Did they die without understanding the religious implications of their defeat, or did they die feeling betrayed by God?

Maybe I think about this stuff too much.