FRESH PERSPECTIVE ON PATTON THROUGH HIS WORLD WAR II PHOTOGRAPHS
Patton’s Photographs: War As He Saw It. Kevin Hymel. Potomac Books, Inc. 172 pages; photographs; notes; index; $39.95.
Reviewed by Col. Cole C. Kingseed, U.S. Army retired
Gen. George S. Patton Jr. emerged from World War II in resplendent glory. One of the principal architects of the defeat of Nazi Germany, few commanders have been more praised, detested and misunderstood than Patton. Alone of the members of the Allied High Command, he has weathered the test of time with his reputation intact in the 60 plus years since V-E Day. From Martin Blumenson's The Patton Papers to Carlo D’Este’s Patton: A Genius for War, the Patton persona as the war’s best American operational commander persists to the current day. Attempts to derail the myth, such as Stanley Hirshson’s General Patton: A Soldier’s Life, have largely been unsuccessful. With that in mind, why yet another book on the controversial general?
In Patton’s Photographs: War As He Saw It, author Kevin Hymel has done what I thought was virtually impossible. He has written a book about Patton that provides a fresh perspective to the enigmatic commander of the U.S. Third Army in World War II. Like his mentor, the late Martin Blumenson, who provided a superb foreword, Hymel uses Patton’s photographs and diaries to provide insight into his subject’s personality and character. The final product is an engaging portrait of an immensely human George Patton not seen since the publication of Blumenson’s own Patton: The Man Behind the Legend, 1885-1945.
The existence of Patton’s photographs has been known for some time, but few people outside the family have ever viewed the collection in its entirety. Occupying 15 albums in the Patton Collection at the Library of Congress, the photographs were taken by Patton to preserve the personal records of the places he passed through during World War II. Hymel came across the photographs while researching Patton in 1996. Selecting the best of the collection, he then decided to check the albums against Patton’s diaries and letters and discovered that they provided an entirely new dimension to one of history’s most dynamic commanders.
To Patton, always an amateur photographer, history was everything. Hence he began to take photographs in North Africa when his Western Task Force stormed the beaches of Morocco and continued until days before his tragic automobile accident in December 1945. His purpose was to “help some future historian to write a less untrue history than usual.” According to Hymel, Patton’s hobby illustrates both the “victorious face of war—Sherman tanks with hedgerow cutters welded to their hulls, slicing through the Norman countryside … and defeat—smashed German tanks, hapless prisoners of war and bodies strewn across the landscape.”
The Patton who emerges from these pages is a commander of remarkable contradictions. In some photographs, Patton appears as the triumphant warrior, an image that he desperately sought to cultivate from his days as a cadet at West Point. In others, a deeply religious Patton is inconsolable as he visits the grave of Capt. Richard Jensen, a personal aide killed in North Africa. While in political limbo following the slapping incidents during the campaign in Sicily, Patton made a special pilgrimage to Corsica to visit the birthplace of Napoleon and to touch the couch on which the French emperor was born. The caption accompanying the photograph describes a man deeply passionate about history and his own destiny.
Hymel sees an interesting pattern to the Third Army commander’s photographs. Initially Patton concentrated on command posts, commanders and ancient ruins. As the war progressed, Patton viewed the war up close, focusing on attacking American GIs, dead enemy soldiers and combat action on the front line. As Allied forces entered Germany, Patton began injecting humor in his captions, often attributing sarcasm into conversation among senior Allied officers. With the war over, his photographs took on a more historic and ceremonial nature, as they had during his idle times in North Africa and Sicily.
Another interesting aspect of Patton’s Photographs is the use of sidebars. In each chapter, Hymel includes his own analysis of important people and incidents in Patton’s life. The topics range from Patton’s devotion to his wife Beatrice; his lifelong friendship with Harry (Paddy) Flint, a regimental commander who was killed while leading his men in house-to-house fighting; his English bull terrier Willie, whose ferocity never matched his owner’s expectations; and Patton’s own preparation for the Battle of the Bulge, which according to Hymel, began three weeks before the Germans launched their offensive in the Ardennes on December 16, 1944.
In the final analysis Hymel has added an important chapter in the historiography of one of World War II’s most renowned commanders. Without losing sight of the Allied commander whom the Germans most feared, Hymel gives a fuller portrait of the man behind the legend.
We are in Patton’s debt for providing a photographic journey through war’s darkest crucible. We are in Hymel’s debt for making Patton’s hobby accessible to the American public.
COL. COLE C. KINGSEED, USA Ret., Ph.D., a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, is a writer and consultant.
COMPELLING AND ENLIGHTENING HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR
The Cold War: A New History. John Lewis Gaddis. The Penguin Press. 333 pages; photographs, index; $27.95.
Reviewed by Lt. Col. Mike Burke, U.S. Army retired
By coincidence, I find myself writing this review on the 60th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, an event that marked the beginning of the Cold War, the longest conflict in our country’s history. For those of us who lived through it, the war was the defining experience of our lives, shaping where and how we lived and worked. But people under 25 or 30—college students and the vast majority of today’s soldiers, for example—see it very differently, as just another distant war in the long series of wars that have marked our country’s history.
Thus, John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale and perhaps the country’s premier Cold War historian, set out to create a brief, popular history of the conflict for those who did not experience it firsthand. This book is the result, and it very well meets this need.
Gaddis offers a compelling, enlightening history of the politics and people who created, sustained and eventually dismantled the truly global Cold War structure. He begins with the disposition of forces at the end of World War II, arguing that Stalin’s desire for territory under his control or influence in Eastern Europe began the conflict, and that resistance by western powers to this expansion of the Soviet empire, under the generally successful doctrine of containment, stopped him.
The most important factor in maintaining the balance of power between adversaries was the fear on both sides of a nuclear war. That single fact, in Gaddis’ view, shaped actions both large and small as both sides maneuvered for advantage within this strategic straitjacket. At the same time, enormous differences in ideology, the uses of history and the place of the individual likewise influenced events. Thus, the Cold War was as much an intellectual as a political struggle.
Gaddis argues that the Soviet government really believed in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, expecting their enemies to collapse from within through the contradictions and inequalities inherent in capitalism. He points out that Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev was absolutely convinced of this, and that this fundamental error in his thinking guided many of his decisions, like placing missiles in Cuba or trying to face down the western powers over Berlin.
Gaddis sees the twin doctrines of realpolitik and detente, with which he associates Henry Kissinger and his acolytes most prominently, as strategic dead ends, more about maintaining the status quo than forcing change, and he rightly cheers their demise in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He credits the gradual movement towards human rights in the 1970s as pressuring the Soviet bloc in the direction of more open societies. The universal impulse to freedom, he contends, could simply not be kept in check.
Gaddis points out that the successful end of the Cold War was not inevitable. It took, in his view, remarkable men and women to see a way out of the nuclear balance of terror that so many of us lived with for so many years.
What readers of this book will remember the most is Gaddis’ contention that four extraordinary people came to prominence in the 1980s, each able to see through the status quo and visualize a world in which the Cold War no longer existed. Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan are his heroes, each creating conditions in their own countries and beyond that would eventually lead to the end of the war.
He credits the pope with using the Catholic Church as an agent for change and creating a desire for freedom among the Poles. This led directly to the Solidarity movement in the early 1980s, a force beyond the power of the Soviet and the Polish governments to suppress. Thatcher gets the credit for challenging western European social welfare states and successfully encouraging deregulation and even greed; this profoundly challenged Marxist notions of exploitation of the masses. Gorbachev gets the credit for the policy of perestroika, or restructuring, in the Soviet Union that eventually led the way to the dissolution of the Soviet empire.
Gaddis’ real hero is Reagan, whom he frequently praises as a visionary leader and who, he says, believed in “the power of words, in the potency of ideas and in the uses of drama to shatter the constraints of conventional wisdom.” He discusses Reagan’s frequent speeches, aphorisms and the like, showing how they collectively altered public opinion in the United States or overseas, and how this oratory led directly to the end of the war.
While many readers will readily accept this view of Cold War history, particularly Reagan’s role, others may well think that these four were simply lucky in their enemies. Gorbachev’s response to the unrest in the countries bordering the western alliance appears clumsy and ineffectual. And certainly Deng Xiaoping, China’s post-Mao leader who brought his country its current booming market economy, deserves at least as much credit as any of Gaddis’ four. Gaddis devotes some space to Deng, but he does not grant him the same halo as he does the others, which I do not think is fair. While many regard China as a new potential aggressor nation in Asia, it is far more an economic than a military threat to the United States and its allies, and that seems an improvement—of sorts—to me.
Though the book’s subtitle calls it a “new history,” it is really a very old and complex history of a large struggle between two powerful adversaries. Gaddis must pack a great deal into a small space. Names and events follow each other in quick succession. By necessity, much gets left out. There is no mention, for example, of the Seventh Army, the Seventh Fleet, REFORGER (return of forces to Germany), and the other institutions that shaped generations of service members, and I found that disappointing. But he has the great historian’s gift of being able to impose a coherent narrative over a hugely contentious period in our history.
The most important thing missing is how it all felt: what was it like, for example, to live under constant Stasi spying in East Germany, or under fear of a midnight knock from Stalin’s secret police? What was it like to live through China’s great leap forward? And what was it like to live under the constant and profoundly real threat of nuclear annihilation? At the time, even that silly crouching under a desk at school was a deadly serious exercise. But Gaddis must concentrate on the political, not the personal, and that limits his impact. This seems an unfortunate omission in a book that credits individual political actors with the most important roles of all.
I grew up moving from one Cold War base to another during my father’s Navy career; my uncles were mostly career officers as well. And my own Army service was shaped almost entirely by the Cold War. I was in Nuremberg when the Wall came down, rendering 40 years of our division’s general defense plan efforts useless in a week. I recall listening to a BBC report about the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact—while I was standing in the Iraq desert during the last Gulf War. For me, and I bet for all those who served during this decades-long conflict, the war was as personal as it was political.
And without understanding that dimension, the intended readers of Gaddis’ powerful book will miss the war’s larger resonances, its profound effects on the way we live and think today. Many in our country look on the current war—”the Long War,” as some are already calling it—as a kind of replacement for the Cold War. Such a view gives us a ready-made enemy we can cast in ideological terms and a strategy that justifies much of the current force structure and political status quo. No one seems capable of imagining an end. Gaddis’ book holds a mirror up to our contemporary actions and forces us to ask ourselves if what ended the Cold War might well serve us now.
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.
TRENCHANT ANALYSIS OF COUNTERINSURGENCY WARFARE
Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. David Galula. Praeger. 146 pages; $29.95.
Reviewed by Col. Robert B. Killebrew, U.S. Army retired
David Galula, an officer in the French Army, lived an eventful life that qualified him to publish this short book drawn from experiences in China, Greece, Indochina and, most of all, Algeria. This is a soldier’s book, written by a professional with a classical military education in a spare, Gaelic style. Finely honed and edited, it achieved virtual word-of-mouth cult status in the period after the rise of the Iraqi insurgency, partly because of its value in analyzing counterinsurgency warfare and partly because nothing so complete was available in U.S. military doctrine. For awhile, it was nearly impossible to find. Reprinted now and available at Amazon.com or at the Command and General Staff School, where it is widely read, it has become required reading for students of warfare generally, and especially for soldiers and policymakers dealing with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
For older veterans, Galula’s book is a trip back in time to the flood of anti-guerilla studies that came out in the mid-1960s (his first publication date is 1964). Many of his prescriptions—insurgency as a protracted study, a battle for the population, the apathetic center—have surfaced and resurfaced in other works once familiar to American soldiers. If by the end of 1960 the Algerian insurgency had been broken except for “tiny, ineffective bands,” as he says, then both the French tactical success in Algeria and the American tactical success in South Vietnam came too late for governments that had already decided to disengage from the war—a caution for our present campaigns.
Although Galula’s understanding of counterinsurgency is grounded in the “revolutionary war” frameworks of his day, of communist subversion and Mao’s “People’s War” doctrines, they are nevertheless generally applicable, with a few changes, to today’s Islamic insurgencies. His scope ranges from a discussion of the characteristics of revolutionary war in general (“the battle for the population is a major characteristic of the revolutionary war”) to a prescription for a phased campaign for destruction of a revolutionary insurgent movement.
The book is laced with trenchant observations that speak to our own time as well as the counterinsurgent campaigns of the 1960s. On propaganda, for example (curiously not addressed in the current draft of the U.S. Army/U.S. Marine counterinsurgency manual), he notes, “The insurgent, having no responsibility, is free to use every trick; if necessary, he can lie, cheat, exaggerate … The counterinsurgent is tied to his responsibilities … he is judged on what he does, not on what he says … A counterinsurgent can seldom cover bad or nonexistent policy with propaganda.” Clearly, this aspect of current counterinsurgency operations has not changed; one wonders whether our capability to mount an effective counterinsurgency propaganda campaign has in fact improved since 1964, or whether the modern “information operations” moniker provides any better approach.
On “victory,” he points out that “a victory is not the destruction in a given area of the insurgent’s forces and his political organization, [but] … is that plus the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population, isolation not enforced upon the population, but maintained by and with the population.” Hence in Iraq, by Galula’s measure, victory will come not only when insurgent forces are destroyed in a given space, but when the Iraqi people and their security forces turn against the insurgent and isolate him from the public.
Many of Galula’s other points concerning actual counterinsurgent operations will be covered in the forthcoming Army and Marine counterinsurgency doctrine. In his writings, though, several issues stand out for special mention. The first is Galula’s repeated refrain that the simplest, the most fundamental point is that in counterinsurgency, military and political actions cannot be separated, and that military action, though essential, is not the main line of action and cannot be the mainstay of a counterinsurgent campaign. Because of that, a combined political-military strategy is essential—one that not only consists of military action to find and destroy insurgents, but one that also deals with the population, to identify supporters, to extend the government’s reach, and to build local civic and security institutions that can be counted on to protect the people from reprisals by the insurgent. Here Galula makes his plea for simplicity. “Simplicity in concept and in execution are important requirements for any counterinsurgency doctrine,” he points out, with an eye toward the simplest and yet most demanding tenet of counterinsurgency—winning the trust and loyalty of the people.
Second, because the political, police and judicial and military arms must act in concert, Gaula spends considerable effort to discuss the methods by which concerted action can be achieved. He begins his discussion with the obvious conclusion, “A single boss must direct the operations from the beginning until the end.” But which boss? Because it is the most capable in wartime, he points out, the military initially appears to be the most logical candidate for the single command, and the military should understand it will probably shoulder nonmilitary tasks at first, until other agencies are capable of doing the job. “To confine soldiers to purely military functions while urgent and vital tasks have to be done, and nobody else is available to do them, would be senseless,” he says, but they should be so employed for as short a time as possible, and if possible under civilian control. The political power must dominate.
The inescapable conclusion is that the over-all responsibility should stay with the civilian power at every possible level. If there is a shortage of trusted officials, nothing prevents filling the gap with military personnel serving in a civilian capacity. If worst comes to the worst, the fiction, at least, should be preserved.
In Galula’s concept of counterinsurgency operations, “mobile” forces and “static” forces, in support of political activities and supported by a vigorous and targeted propaganda campaign, focus on a specific territory to either eliminate entirely the insurgency force—which he believes is unlikely—or to prepare the population for longer-term counterinsurgent operations, political, police or military. His concept of the static unit bears elaboration. While political and law enforcement activity proceeds, and the mobile unit continues its unlikely campaign to bring the insurgents to a stand-and-fight battle, the static forces are to “establish a grid of troops so that the population and the counterinsurgent political teams are reasonably well protected, and so that the troops can participate in civic action at the lowest level, just where civilian political personnel [are] insufficient in number.” This is the most important unit in the counterinsurgent campaign, he believes, and may vary in size from a battalion to a platoon and even to an individual policeman, depending on the situation.
He would group such mobile and static formations under a territorial command, the political and military borders of which should coincide at every level, even if from a military point of view they might be less than desirable. “Failure to observe this principle would result in confusion that would benefit the insurgent,” he points out. Ultimately, he says, the objective is to reduce the insurgency to bands of “roving bandits” caught between successive nets of counterinsurgent forces, as the Chinese Communists liquidated the surviving Nationalist forces in China in 1950-52.
For military leaders and policy wonks looking for help in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency, Galula’s theories on counterinsurgency filled a conceptual gap that has since begun to be closed. Battlefield practice in Iraq and Afghanistan today and emerging Army/Marine Corps doctrine recognize and practice many of his tenets concerning military operations and civil populations, restraint of force and other tactical details. Military leaders acknowledge the primacy of political aims over military objectives. Military leaders and theorists interested in future warfare should read Galula for sharp, concise insights into counterinsurgency war. Others should read him as well. Galula’s work, as well as the United States’ practical experience in fighting insurgencies from the Philippines through Vietnam and El Salvador, all highlight the necessity of robust political participation and leadership in counterinsurgency strategies. American history has examples of successful political-military campaigns, the best being the marriage of military and political authority in the Army’s campaigns in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. A more modern case would be the CORDS (civil operations for revolutionary development support) campaign overseen by Robert Komer in Vietnam; his Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance in Vietnam (RAND, 1972) makes for fascinating, if disheartening, reading.
Clearly, we had these lessons to relearn during the invasion of Iraq, where confusing lines of authority and inadequate political planning dominated the first year of the war. Fortunately, the present U.S. ambassador and the ranking military commander there have become an effective team. With a strong country team now on hand, strategies, command lines and priorities have apparently been sorted out. For the wider war, though, and despite the beginnings of reform, the State Department is still inadequately prepared to play an equal role, let alone a leading one, in future counterinsurgencies. America’s eventual success in the continuing struggle against radical Islam may well depend on State’s ability to play a more forceful role in such wars of the future, and on Congress’ willingness to support State’s getting the funding and legislative support it needs for a thorough update of its policies and capabilities. It is hoped that Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare has readers on Capitol Hill and in Foggy Bottom as well as in the military services.
COL. ROBERT B. KILLEBREW, USA Ret., was an infantryman for more than 30 years and now writes and consults on defense issues.