VIVID, DETAILED ACCOUNT OF THE CAPTURE OF BAGHDAD
Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad. David Zucchino. Grove Press. 349 pages; maps; appendix; hardcover $24, softcover $14.
Reviewed by Lt. Col. Mike Burke, U.S. Army retired

“We don’t do cities.” Until our most recent war, this has been the unofficial but widely held Army attitude towards urban combat. The messy complexities and high casualties make fighting in built-up areas a kind of last resort. But capital cities are the enemy’s center of gravity, the symbolic home of the nation as a whole, and their capture is essential to a successful campaign.

The war in Iraq demanded the capture of Baghdad. Though the country’s smaller cities could be bypassed during the campaign from Kuwait to the capital, that city had to be invested and held. So Army leaders had to overcome their reluctance to fight in that kind of difficult terrain, this time by taking advantage of two things in which our Army stands peerless: superior armor and extraordinary soldiers and leaders.

Such is the background to Los Angeles Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner David Zucchino’s remarkable book about one commander’s utterly changing how we now regard combat in cities. Col. David Perkins, then commanding the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, led his troops on two “thunder runs,” high-speed armor incursions, into Baghdad on April 5 and 7, 2003. He anticipated that Iraqi resistance would be relatively light, and that if he and his men could remain overnight in the capital, the regime would fall and the war would end.

Perkins also intuited that the information war was as vital to victory as the actual ground combat: the only way to discredit the utterly false claims of the Iraqi government, in the person of “Baghdad Bob,” the Information Minister of the Baathist government, was to occupy the center of the capital and then broadcast that moment on television around the world. What he did not know, however, was that this aspect of the attack would rebound on him in an unexpected way.

Zucchino tells the story of the 2nd Brigade hour by hour over the three days of this mission. Embedded with the unit, Zucchino begins his story with the brigade’s arrival at Baghdad International Airport after three weeks of combat, from the border of Kuwait to the capital of Iraq. He spends little time setting the stage—he says almost nothing about the disposition of U.S. forces, the strategic plan or the intent of the corps and theater commanders—but jumps in, as it were, to Perkins’ column and follows it through the fighting. We know what the commanders and their subordinates know only as they know it; we follow the lead vehicles down the main highway to Baghdad, over the bridges and through the interchanges and finally to the complex of government buildings that is the brigade’s objective.

This mission is roughly comparable to seizing the National Mall area in Washington, D.C., as well as all the government buildings around it, but having to fight through the highways on the Virginia side to get there. Perkins used his infantry to secure a series of positions along the main highway into the city in order to guarantee resupply and used his armor to occupy the heart of the city. Armor thus became static and infantry dynamic, an inversion of the normal order of things.

Zucchino writes that Perkins deliberately chose this deployment in order to protect his forces within the capital from Iraqi counterattacks, which turned out to be much more fierce and prolonged than expected. Though apparently uncoordinated, the sheer volume and frequency of these assaults threatened to force the brigade to leave its positions, but air support and brave resupply convoys allowed it to maintain its hold and ultimately prevail.

The book records the actions of what must be every vehicle, every squad in the brigade, providing a vision-block view of the battle. This approach has its uses and limitations, with the larger operational view not always clear. But we experience the battle in an extraordinarily close and detailed way.

Zucchino clearly admires the individual bravery and professional competence of the soldiers, carefully re-cording the actions of those who fought the battle. The newspaperman in him lets him write the kind of vivid vignettes that both bring the complexity and horror of combat home and illuminate the individual personalities involved. One sticks in my head: a tank commander stops to take photographs of Iraqi dead, telling another soldier, “If my son says he wants to join the Army, I’ll show him this and tell him, ‘This is what the Army does.’”

After the battle, he was able to interview Iraqi fighters and civilians, so we get their perception of events. More important, we see what it is like to watch an oppressive and dysfunctional regime fall apart. The disorganization, contradictory orders, nonexistent morale and acts of sheer stupidity he records amply demonstrate the utter incompetence of the Iraqi leadership. Perkins had thus achieved his purpose, to get inside the regime and have it disintegrate from the inside out.

But confusion is not solely the province of the Iraqis. At one point, some of the brigade’s soldiers believe they are taking fire from an area away from the Republican Guard palace complex, outside their area of operations, and seek to return it. Knowing that the city contains a number of journalists who might be staying nearby, Perkins works with his chain of command and his embedded reporter, Greg Kelly of Fox News, to ensure that there are none in the building that seems to be the source of the shots. The reporter and his colleagues call all around the world, it seems, trying to track down the Palestine Hotel, where the journalists are staying, eventually determining that they are safe in shooting at that building; but they are wrong. Two journalists are killed, which is immediately reported on BBC radio, beginning an international incident that has yet to be resolved.

Many journalists cannot believe that an American commander did not know where the reporters were, and some still feel that the hotel was deliberately targeted. Zucchino meticulously sets the record straight, explaining in detail the many steps Perkins and his officers took to ensure they were not firing on reporters. If anything, this aspect of the story underscores the double-edged nature of the information war Perkins seeks to win. When neither side has perfect information, “winning” and “losing” might be utterly unrelated to the facts on the ground.

Both urban combat and the information war are now fixed features of the conflict in Iraq. This book demonstrates that the Army can win the first but lose the second.

This book belongs on the shelf next to a recent survey of the Army’s approach to combat in cities, Block by Block, published by the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. There, several campaigns against cities are dissected in detail, demonstrating the difficulty and frequency of such fighting. None of them, however, shows the kind of innovative thinking Perkins and his soldiers bring to this at once old and new form of battle. If armies conventionally prepare to fight the last war, we have clear evidence here that sometimes we end up fighting the first battle of the next.

LT. COL. MIKE BURKE, USA Ret., taught English at the U.S. Military Academy for eight years. He served with the 1st Armored Division during the Persian Gulf War.


COMBAT MEMOIR CONTAINS IMPORTANT LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP
Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters. Maj. Dick Winters with Col. Cole C. Kingseed. Berkley Caliber. 320 pages; black and white photographs; $24.95.
Reviewed by Kevin M. Hymel

The book and miniseries Band of Brothers portrayed Dick Winters as a World War II officer who led by example, saying little about himself, only giving directions and guidance to his men. Now Winters tells his own story of leading Easy Company and the 2nd Battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. The result, Beyond Band of Brothers, is a very human tale about frontline combat with all the misery and brotherhood that comes with it.

Winters led his company, and later the battalion, from the beaches of Normandy to Holland, Germany and Austria. While the story of his exploits is well known, this memoir provides a fresh perspective. Mostly, it answers the question many people ask him about charging enemy guns, attacking superior forces and commanding attacks in the snow: “What were you thinking?”

The answer is simple. He thought the same things anyone would who had a serious job yet valued life. He worried about not letting his men down and breaking under the strain of combat; he held his breath whenever there was a pause in the covering fire; he became bitter and distant as he saw more and more men die; and he beamed with pride at missions accomplished by his men. Through it all, he kept his cool and completed the mission.

He credits never breaking under the strain to his rise in the ranks, which eventually put some distance between him and the front line. He knew he was not immune, however, after seeing too many men succumb to the stress of war.

The book is more a lesson in leadership than a collection of war stories. Some of the best lessons come from small incidents, like Winters reassuring one worried soldier that he would do everything in his power to make sure that soldier made it home, or Winters counseling a blind soldier after a battle and the man’s sight returning, an event that surprised even Winters. A few reassuring words from a superior can calm a soldier’s nerves.

Then of course, there was Winters’ greatest strength—leading from the front. On almost every attack he either led it or oversaw its advance.

What set him apart from his fellow officers?

Although he never explicitly says it, he took his job seriously the entire time he was in uniform. He did not drink. While other officers lost themselves in the bottle, Winters studied field manuals and worked out tactical problems.

To this day he regrets his habit of putting his 1st Platoon in the van of every attack, whittling down its numbers at a greater rate than his other two platoons.

Winters wrote this book to answer all the questions people ask him about his World War II experiences, yet it will probably lead to more questions, with people wanting him to elaborate on certain passages. For example, he describes his first encounter with the enemy on D-Day in one sentence: “We destroyed two wagons and killed several Germans before the others escaped into the darkness.”

Reading this, many will want more detail, especially since it was portrayed in such an exciting way in the miniseries.

While Winters rose to the rank of major, his heart was always with Easy Company, which he called home from August 1942 until October 1944. As battalion commander, he continued to call on Easy because he knew and trusted its officers and, more importantly, its NCOs. Capt. Ronald Spiers may have commanded Easy longer than Winters, but Winters saw it through its initial actions and most of its combat.

Dick Winters has been considered a “marble man,” the unflappable hero in a time of crisis. Beyond Band of Brothers shows that he is very human, with all the same hopes and fears as anyone else, and in doing so, the book makes him an even bigger hero. Anyone familiar with Band of Brothers will relish this book, and those interested in leadership will find important lessons.

KEVIN M. HYMEL is associate editor of ARMY Magazine.


THE SHOCKING DEEDS' OF AN AMERICAN OFFICER
The Imperfect Spy: The Inside Story of a Convicted Spy. Lt. Col. Andy J. Byers, USA Ret. Vandamere Press. 256 pages; illustrations; copies of official documents; index; $24.95.
Reviewed by Maj. Gen. Edward B. Atkeson, U.S. Army retired

ARMY readers may recall an article in the July 1998 issue, “Debriefing a Former KGB Officer—Matters Past, Present and Possible.” There the fascinating career of KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg D. Kalugin was explored over a pleasant lunch at the Army Navy Club in Washington, D.C. Now, an account of the career of one of Kalugin’s most valuable agents has surfaced in our literature, complete with the general’s own testimony at the spy’s trial three years after the lunch. The former chief of the infamous First Chief Directorate of the KGB has served his adopted country well with his detailed testimony regarding that agent’s crimes against the same adopted country.

For Cold War intelligence afficionados, this work competes for a place among the first two or three books on their reading list. For human intelligence specialists, it may have even higher priority. It is the story of the highest ranking traitor in U.S. Army uniform since Benedict Arnold tried to sell West Point to the British. Had the Cold War turned hot, he might even have outdistanced Arnold in the annals of perfidy. For those of us who love our country and its army, it is difficult to grasp the shocking deeds of an American officer, with eagles on his shoulders, selling out his adopted land the way Col. George Trofimoff did. But the book is much more than that. It also amounts to a compendium of case histories of KGB intelligence techniques, of lax American security and of skillful, if delayed, FBI management of an extraordinarily difficult and complex case in our time.

Trofimoff was the son of a prominent White Russian who fled to Germany in the wake of the Communist Revolution. Too young to fight in World War II, he was raised without a clear sense of national identity. His liberation by Americans afforded him opportunities to apply his linguistic skills and to work his way into the U.S. Army. With the onset of deep disaffection between the former American and Russian allies, he found his skills in ever greater demand. All the while, he kept in touch with an adoptive foster brother, a Russian Orthodox priest, who later became Archbishop of Austria.

Taking the oath of allegiance to the United States in 1953, Trofimoff was commissioned and began to work his way up the ladder in U.S. military intelligence. From 1969 to 1994 he was running the U.S. Army element in the Joint Interrogation Center in Nuremberg. Continuing in a civilian capacity while retaining his reserve commission, he had access to some of the most sensitive information regarding Allied war planning. Unfortunately, his passion for high living and fast cars soon outpaced his regular salary. He considered himself lucky that his foster brother, the Orthodox priest, seemed able to underwrite many of his financial overdrafts. Soon he was meeting regularly with new “friends” in Vienna and elsewhere, usually receiving cash for his photographic work—thousands of pages, most marked “Secret.”

But Trofimoff began to feel the hot breath of West German counterintelligence down his back. As quickly as he could, he retired and shipped out for a less exciting life in the United States. He thought that a gated community in Florida was just about what he wanted, to live among respected former officers, with a nice house and a tennis club. His next-door neighbor was a retired lieutenant colonel named Andy Byers. Neither of the men anticipated that one of them might write a thrilling account of the other’s life of treachery and crime.

Some of the West German suspicions were apparently shared with U.S. intelligence, and, over a period of several years, the FBI put together a fascinating plan for Trofimoff’s self-incrimination. Employing a false flag technique, the Bureau began calling their quarry, offering additional payments for clarifications of information he was suspected of having previously provided to the KGB. For a while, Trofimoff resisted, but eventually the calls proved too tempting, and he even began to brag on the telephone about how he had done so well in his traitorous capacity. He stepped into a well-contrived trap, and it snapped up around him.

The details of the false flag operation will be particularly fascinating to counterintelligence officers. Others will be impressed with the breadth of the overall KGB operation, especially its use of the Russian Orthodox Church as an avenue of rewards to productive agents. Still others will be impressed with how an installation of high sensitivity, like the Joint Interrogation Center, could have become a treasure trove for exploitation by a spy living beyond his means. Trofimoff, now in prison, is not only a walking tragedy as a man, but also an example of how negligence and lack of security consciousness in sensitive installations can be disastrous to even the most careful military planning.

MAJ. GEN. EDWARD B. ATKESON, USA Ret., Ph.D., is a senior fellow at AUSA’s Institute of Land Warfare. He has written four books and more than 100 articles on military affairs.


A SUCCESSFUL CIVIL WAR PARTNERSHIP
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War. Charles Bracelen Flood. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 460 pages; maps; photographs; notes; index; $27.
Reviewed by Col. Cole C. Kingseed, U.S. Army retired

Military history is replete with successful partnerships that have shaped the course of the wars in which they fought. Whereas the majority of Civil War historians concentrate on Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, few battlefield leaders have been as successful as Union commanders Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Over the course of the bloody strife, their friendship won the Civil War. In the latest analysis of President Abraham Lincoln’s field commanders, Charles Bracelen Flood portrays his subjects as the most successful military team in American history.

Flood is no stranger to military history. The author of 12 books, including assessments of Lee’s final years, Nathanael Greene’s campaign in the Carolinas during the American Revolution and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Flood writes more for the general public than a scholarly audience. Though Grant and Sherman have attracted their share of biographers, Flood portrays these complex commanders in a dual biography that addresses their battlefield victories as well as insights into their personal lives.

Writing six weeks before the Battle of Bull Run, Sherman noted, “As soon as real war begins, new men, heretofore unheard of, will emerge from obscurity, equal to any occasion.” Flood concurs, stating that at the outset of the war, Grant and Sherman were two failed men with great potential. War provided the opportunity and each excelled. Sherman was first to witness combat, having commanded a brigade at Bull Run. Transferred to Kentucky to assist Brig. Gen. Robert Anderson, the hero of Fort Sumter, Sherman displayed a lack of confidence that led to his temporary relief from command and allegations of insanity. His return to combat was the result more of his political connections than acknowledgement of his martial abilities.

While Sherman’s future appeared cloudy at best, Grant’s star was ascendant. After seizing Paducah, Ky., where the Tennessee River flows into the Ohio, Grant then moved against Forts Henry and Donelson. Poorly constructed Confederate entrenchments at Fort Henry led to its capitulation on February 6, 1862. Grant then followed up his initial success with a monumental victory at Fort Donelson, where he earned his moniker “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. As the North’s most successful general during the first year of the war, Grant shattered the Confederacy’s northern defensive line across northern Tennessee and Kentucky.

Fate brought both commanders together at Shiloh in early April 1862, where Sherman’s calmness under fire earned the admiration of his senior commander. Grant viewed Sherman as a leader who was not only “an able and gallant defender” but a “true friend” who served as “my standby during that trying day of Sunday [the first day of the battle].” For his part, Sherman supported Grant when Union Gen. Henry Halleck soon relegated Grant to an insignificant post of deputy commander after the battle.

Flood makes a compelling argument that the friendship that was born in blood at Shiloh and the ensuing campaigns against Vicksburg and Chattanooga laid the groundwork for the decisive coordinated strategy that Grant implemented in the spring of 1864 to win the Civil War. In so doing, Flood explores familiar ground, but he makes his most provocative argument in his analysis of Sherman’s advocacy of a strategy to ravage the inner-Confederacy while a separate Union army countered Southern Gen. John Bell Hood’s advance into Tennessee in the fall of 1864. Sherman’s March to the Sea and subsequent capture of Savannah more than justified Grant’s professional judgment in his subordinate’s martial ability.

By the time of Lee’s capitulation at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, Sherman’s army had entered North Carolina, heading to reinforce Grant.

Two weeks later, Sherman accepted the surrender of Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s army. The war was finally over. In mid-May both Grant and Sherman stood on the reviewing stand during the Grand Review of the Armies of the Republic.

A more detailed examination of the war’s most successful partnership after the guns were silent would be a welcome addition to Flood’s provocative analysis. The cordial relationship that existed between the Union’s most successful commanders deteriorated somewhat as military exigencies gave way to political realities in the postwar era. Never comfortable in a political environment, Sherman did not adapt to declining military budgets and what he perceived as an increasingly dictatorial attitude by President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Grant’s accession to the presidency made little difference. Sherman soon transferred his army headquarters to St. Louis to put sufficient distance between him and his civilian bosses.

Unfortunately, Grant and Sherman contains a number of factual errors which detract from what is otherwise a highly readable and thought-provoking analysis of the chemistry that existed between these remarkable commanders. Better placement of the maps would also enhance the text. These observations aside, Flood has produced an insightful assessment of the tandem that proved virtually irresistible and played such a huge part in the Union victory. Individually, Grant and Sherman were formidable commanders, but it was their combined abilities and coordinated campaigns that proved decisive.

Sherman, whose campaign through Georgia and South Carolina devastated the South, gets the last word. Summing up his relation with Grant, he stated, “We were as brothers, I the older man in years, he the higher in rank. … He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now, sir, we stand by each other always.” Flood deserves immense credit for bringing this intriguing story to the American public. Without a doubt, Grant and Sherman is his best book to date.

COL. COLE C. KINGSEED, USA Ret., Ph.D., a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, is a writer and consultant.