In a comment on Tactics Too, Donald Fleming wondered if the title might be a reference to the granddaddy of all modern strategy board games, Avalon Hill's Tactics II:



Bingo! That's just what I was thinking.

I confess, however, that I never owned or played a Tactics II. I cut my teeth on Bismarck (first published in 1962), which was actually not a bad recreation of the Royal Navy's hunt for the German battleship in May 1941.



I must have been nine or ten when I played it. I don't think I read C. S. Forester's nonfiction novel Sink the Bismarck for another couple of years, nor did I finally watch the 1960 docudrama Sink the Bismarck! until quite recently--last evening, in fact. Yet it gave me a feel for both the history and dynamics of the operation that was as good as if not better than these more traditional media forms.

Any war game, whether board- or computer-, is only as good as its design, and the second Avalon Hill game I owned showed a lot of the genre's weaknesses. Good games more or less recreate and reward playing by the operational and tactical rules of the campaign or battle they recreate.



Gettysburg (1964) did not, and its "fight until one side is eliminated" victory conditions invariably had the winning side chasing the last cavalry unit owned by the losing side 'round and 'round the map board until it could, literally, be cornered and destroyed.

Perhaps one of the better ways to use the computer games ZU mentions would be to have students critique them in light of what they learn from other sources.

Note: Avalon Hill is now defunct but remains beloved by many wargamers. The Avalon Hill Collection, for example, pays homage to the company and has good thumbnail summaries of most of its strategy board games.

A previous post, Tactics Too, has provoked some useful discussion of the extent to which tactics can and/or should be taught in military history courses and the means by which this could be done. Unmentioned so far is the staff ride, a focused battlefield tour that is used not only to discuss what happened historically but also to generate insights into some of the perennial issues of military leadership. The staff ride was pioneered by the German general staff in the late nineteenth century and adopted by other armed forces, including those of the United States. It was revived in the 1970s at the U.S. Army War College, chiefly by Prof. Jay Luvaas and Colonel Harold W. Nelson, and is now widely used; e.g., at West Point, where it is used to teach military history to cadets.






The photos above show COL Robert Doughty taking cadets on a tour of the region of Sedan, France, where in May 1940 German panzer divisions ruptured the French defensive lines. While I doubt that either my department's budget or that of my students would permit staff rides at so great a remove from Ohio, it does seem feasible to take students on staff rides of such places as Fort Meigs, a reconstructed War of 1812 fort near Toledo, Ohio; Perryville, a Civil War battlefield about five hours' drive from OSU in central Kentucky; or even Gettysburg, which is almost exactly seven hours' drive from OSU.

And that's just OSU. Other colleges and universities have their own opportunities. It might also be rewarding to pool our resources and offer staff rides to locations at which instructors and students from several colleges could rendezvous.

Resources for staff rides abound. See, for example:

USMA Department of History web page on the staff ride.

The Staff Ride, an official US Army publication by historian William Glenn Robertson (available in pdf format here).

The Cowpens Staff Ride and Battlefield Tour, an example of the genre.

Gettysburg: A Battlefield Guide, by Brooks D. Simpson and myself, which incorporates staff ride techniques into a guidebook for general readers.

"Zu," an OSU undergraduate who maintains Zu's Musings, offers a modest plea for more attention to tactics in military history coursework:

"Whenever a serious talk about tactics comes up, I always feel like I am on the outside looking in. In all of my history classes, whenever we have enough time to talk about a specific battle, it's usually just glossed over. I think this is a disservice." He adds, "I think that they should have a class based purely on tactics."

This has got me reflecting on my own exposure to history at the operational and tactical level. With the exception of Wick Murray's courses in European history, I don't recall getting much battle history in my undergraduate or graduate studies. Personally I didn't need it anyway. By the time I was seventeen I was pretty well self-educated in this regard, and indeed, in that respect I did not strike myself as unusual. I guess I have always assumed that you need professors and coursework to supply aspects of your education that you can't do on your own, and given the wealth of attention to commanders and battles in popular books, magazines and the History Channel, this didn't seem an area in need of special attention.

That said, there's no particular reason to assume that undergraduates will have made military history their hobby since the time they learned to read, which is basically how I acquired my fund of knowledge on operations and tactics. Nor are there guarantees that this auto-didactic approach will result in an accurate grasp of military tactics. Anyway, Zu has some interesting suggestions about how a course emphasizing tactics might be devised.

The Army has cleared four of the five top officers who had authority over the Abu Ghraib prison at the time of the abuse scandal. Guess which one got nailed.

Bitch PhD, one of the best of the legions of anonymous academic bloggers, says that the outcome is not really surprising, but should be.

The Combined Arms Research Library at the Command & General Staff College has a useful Select Bibliography on the Warrior Ethos.

A US Army web site commemorates Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith, who won the Medal of Honor--posthumously--in the course of organizing and conducting the defense of a position against over one hundred Iraqi combatants near the Baghdad airport on April 3, 2003. The site includes a Flash presentation that explains in detail the military action for which SFC Smith won the medal as well as a number of video segments, including an interview with SFC Smith's widow.

MAJ Robert L. Bateman continues to write a series of Letters from Baghdad at the rate of about one per week. The Gunners of Gun-Trucks #1 and #3 got by me when it first appeared, but ought to be required reading for those who don't know what time it is in the debate on women in the military.

Friday the 22nd was the 35th anniversary of Earth Day. Believe it or not, the U.S. Army celebrates Earth Day too, and--depleted uranium rounds aside--with more seriousness than one might initially be inclined to believe:



"JAKARTA, Indonesia Apr 23, 2005 — Chinese President Hu Jintao urged Japan on Saturday to reflect on its World War II aggression and back up its recent apologies with action, pressing Beijing's relentless campaign for redress from Tokyo for its handling of wartime atrocities." Full Story

On H-War the number of responses re "the canon of military history" is up to fifteen, and tends now to divide between objections to and defenses of the concept of a canon in this or any academic field. The responses are very thoughtful and worth reading. You can find them easily by linking to the H-War Discussion List for April 2005/sorted by subject and then reading the messages under "REPLY: The Canon of Military History?"

My inspiration for using the term "canon" goes back to a discussion in my department some years ago concerning a prospective hire in a certain field. The field was one of the oldest in academic history but in recent years had undergone revolutionary expansion and reorientation, to the point where its original intellectual boundaries and orientation were considered almost passé.

The question arose whether a particular candidate, whose work was at the "cutting edge" of the field, yet retained the ability to train graduate students in the older tradition, or "canon." I will omit the department's verdict on this point as irrelevant for present purposes. Besides, it's a question that military historians ought to address as a field. Granted that we wish the field to grow and expand intellectually and to open itself to new voices and approaches, is it nonetheless advisable--even indispensable--for historians to share a basic common understanding of the field and its intellectual landmarks?

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 (link not yet active)

Like George W. Bush, Polk was an officer in the National Guard, or rather the Guard's progenitor, the state militia. Click the image for details.



Other useful sites concerning Polk:

James Knox Polk - White House site on U.S. presidents.

James K. Polk Home - Web site for Polk's only surviving private residence.

James Knox Polk - Part of The Hall of Forgotten Presidents

James Knox Polk's Inaugural Address - Polk's wish list. Memo to the rest of humanity: "Our Union is a confederation of independent States, whose policy is peace with each other and all the world. To enlarge its limits is to extend the dominions of peace over additional territories and increasing millions. The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government."

The U.S.-Mexican War, 1846-1848 - How Polk achieved a good chunk of his wish list. Guess Mexico didn't get the memo.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Once military historians accept their relative position within the academy instead of railing impotently against it, it becomes possible to think realistically and strategically about how to build the field. Sure, the situation is tough--but things are tough all over. Ask any Asian historian. In most U.S. departments you'll find approximately one of then, straining under the burden of teaching everything there is to teach about the world's largest, most populated continent, to say nothing of the one with its oldest civilizations--and almost certainly assigned to teach the world history survey as well.

The situation of military history is tough, but surely no tougher than that, and certainly should not be analogous to the pre-political situation of the average Malaysian peasant (who form the subject of Scott's Weapons of the Weak).

What "weapons" do we military historians have available to us?

First, we can create strategic partnerships with faculty in other fields. I have mentioned Asian history but there are plenty of others, most particularly women's history, for reasons I'll deal with another time. Indeed, about the only fields that have no need to partner with us are the "golden children" of most history departments: United States history and European history, which at least within the American academic community are considered essential to gaining a high place in the rankings. And yet US and European history are at present the traditional, almost the only, areas of strength for academic military history.

Second, we can reach out to every working historian we can find whose work intersects with military history. Some will be glad of our attention and support. Some will disdain it. No matter: As Gandhi argued, the hand of cooperation is initially rejected because it is mistrusted. Keep extending it--keep choosing to cooperate, over and over again--and sooner or later we will begin to win over the skeptics.

Third, we can take appropriate advantage that the benefactors to colleges and universities in the United States (and probably elsewhere) are chiefly people who made their fortunes by inheriting it or, more usually, by building it themselves--and that either way their political values are conservative. It's unlikely that a college/university development office would encourage them to give money to support a military history program or endow a faculty chair in military history. Such offices basically pursue the agenda they are given by their institution's deans and department heads. But there is no reason at all why, say, the Society for Military History could not partner with such benefactors, build endowments, and create strategic partnerships with history departments willing to hire in military history. Sure, some departments might be resistant to such partnerships based on misconceptions about the field or political antipathy to it--but attention to Weapons 1 and 2 lays the groundwork for Weapon 3.

Fourth, we can make use, selectively and carefully, of the generally conservative mood of the United States in political terms to ensure that college and university officials who oppose military history on narrowly political grounds are reminded that they serve a larger society and that the larger society can and just might oblige them to pay a price for that kind of politically-motivated intransigence. Use of Weapon 4 will never work if done as a cudgel. The field of academic military history will first have to do the serious work of getting its own house in order and of removing the legitimate intellectual objections to our enterprise. That, I feel confident, will get us much further on our path than many of us think it will. Until that work is well advanced, those who oppose the field on political grounds can find intellectual cover to hide their opposition. But once the intellectual cover is removed, conservative political power can be used as leverage--just as historians of women, race, and ethnicity employed it during the 1960s.

Indeed, I think that from an objective point of view, the prospects of academic military history are good. Certainly that was the assessment of John Lynn, Jeffrey Grey and myself in our discussions at the Charleston SMH. And in any event, what are the reasons not to build the field? What are the reasons not to take constructive action? What are the reasons not to emulate the bold Great Captains whom so many of us secretly and not so secretly admire?

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10

A perennial question among linguists is, "Can a native speaker of a language make a mistake?" (For example, were I to say, "There ain't no way I make mistakes when I talk English," on what grounds could my speech be impeached since English is my first language?)

Perhaps some similar rule exists concerning the most pre-eminent of the Founders of the United States, since nowhere at Fort Necessity National Battlefield did I ever see a breath of criticism concerning 22-year old Colonel George Washington's choice of position or conduct of the engagement there in July 1754. An American platoon leader in Iraq would be relieved--and some have been--for being in charge during incidents in which their unit was ambushed and suffered several casualties. About half the soldiers who fought under Washington became casualties in this campaign, all of them had to surrender, and oh by the way Colonel Washington's conduct triggered a major war--but Washington himself escaped official censure then and, so to speak, now. Neither the park brochure, introductory film, signage, or web site has anything critical to say of him. The facts are laid out, yes, but the inference that Washington made any serious error is never drawn. Nor are visitors encouraged to draw it for themselves.







A question for military historians: Do we care? Should we?

As Victor Davis Hanson noted in a recent column, a Google search using the keywords "Bush" and "Hitler" yields a lot of hits: 1.35 million when he tried it a month ago, 2.66 million when I did so just now. Many of these results are no doubt frivolous or accidental, but a good many are direct comparisons between the U.S. president and the Nazi dictator. At the top of the list, for instance, is a site explicitly devoted to Bush/Hitler Links.

I tried a Google search using the keywords "Bush" and "Polk." Google scarcely knew what I was driving at. The top result was to a printer-friendly map to the Polk-Bush Garage somewhere in San Francisco. The next seven results had nothing to do with President James K. Polk, either (except in the sense that Polk County, Florida, visited on several occasions by President George W. Bush, was named for the eleventh president). But starting with the ninth result I began to find what I was looking for.

George Bush == James K Polk? In this post, Bush is equated with Polk because of the allegedly deceptive way in which the two presidents led the United States into war. Personally I find this comparison inapt, or at least uninteresting. I'm much more intrigued by the way in which these two presidents drew the United States into wars of choice--in the case of George W. Bush, a conflict which, by his own statement, was a preventive war; in the case of James K. Polk, a conflict which could have been avoided but for his administration's insistence upon acquiring the lands that became the Mexican Cession (the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming).

Or as Jack Hurst puts it in a 2004 review of John Siegenthaler's biography of Polk:

Although this is a book about Polk, the comparisons between our 11th president and our 43rd are implicit throughout, and even at times overt.

For example, Seigenthaler says in an interview that the first preemptive strike controversy in American history came in Polk's war with the Mexicans, not Bush's war against Saddam Hussein. As in the current conflict, the antiwar movement against Polk gradually grew stronger as the war wore on. And then as today, the sentiment of some in Congress verged on imperialistic: "Some people in Congress said, 'Let's just take it all,' " Seigenthaler says of the All-Mexico movement at the time. "In the early days (in Iraq), when it appeared that we were going to be welcomed with kisses and flowers, not missiles and AK47s, that same idea was there: We'll take it all, and we'll hold it all--whether we're talking about oil, or a foothold in the Middle East."

There are more personal similarities, too, as the book shows. Polk and Bush each were born into wealthy and politically connected families: Polk's great-uncle was a Revolutionary War patriot allied to William Blount, "North Carolina's foremost power broker of the day." Both presidents appear to have been undistinguished soldiers: Polk, a militiaman, eventually became a colonel but "did little to earn the rank." Like Bush, Polk expected stringent loyalty from his minions, seemed to attach little importance to the concerns of other countries, and showed little fear of fighting two or more wars at a time.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

(click photo for closeup)