This post inaugurates a new category in the blog. For a clue as to its direction, click the postcard image of "As I Opened Fire," by artist Roy Lichtenstein:


(I got the postcard years ago at the Tate Gallery in London.)

The distinguished psychiatrist and author Anthony Storr once hypothesized that Winston Churchill's well-documented struggle with depression was a key element of his greatness as a leader:

In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished. Political leaders are accustomed to dissimulation. Even when defeat at the polls is imminent, or the policies which they support have been shown to be futile, they will, until the eleventh hour, continue to issue messages of hope to their supporters. In 1940, any political leader might have tried to rally Britain with brave words, although his heart was full of despair. But only a man who had known and faced despair within himself could carry conviction at such a moment. Only a man who knew what it was to discern a gleam of hope in a hopeless situation, whose courage was beyond reason, and whose aggressive spirit burned at its fiercest when he was hemmed in and surrounded by enemies, could have given emotional reality to the words of defiance which rallied and sustained us in the menacing summer of 1940. Churchill was such a man: and it was because, all his life, he had conducted a battle with his own despair that he could convey to others that despair can be overcome. [Storr, "Churchill: The Man," in Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice, and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind (1988), p. 5]

Notwithstanding Churchill's example and that of many others known to have had mental illnesses of various sorts--to say nothing of "normal" individuals--when it comes to explaining the views and behavior of historical actors, historians still tend to avoid psychology as an analytical tool. This is partly because early attempts at psychohistory were often deeply flawed. Partly it is because of the unexamined assumptions redolent in such throwaway lines as "You cannot psychoanalyze the dead." But much of it, I think, comes from a different sort of assumption: namely that highly functional people cannot, by definition, have significant mental or emotional disorders. Or to frame it in the reverse, that people with such disorders reveal crippling weaknesses that unfit them for significant historical agency.

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill conducted a survey at an American shopping mall in which respondents were asked to select causes of mental illness from a list. Only ten percent of respondents believed that mental illness had a biological basis involving the brain. A whopping seventy-one percent thought that it was caused by "emotional weakness." Sixty-five percent blamed "bad parenting." Thirty-five percent thought it was "sinful behavior," while forty-five percent thought that people "bring on their own illnesses." [Anne Sheffield, How Can You Survive When They're Depressed: Living and Coping With Depression Fallout (1998), pp. 270-71.]

Across the Atlantic, Rethink has been trying to counter a similar stigmatization of mental illness in Great Britain. It has an annual Rethink Week in which it ramps up its efforts in this regard. The focus of last year's Rethink Week was a statue of Churchill in a straitjacket which it sought to erect, temporarily, in Trafalgar Square. Denied permission to do so by the Greater London Authority, Rethink took the statue--festooned with a sash labeled "Prejudice, Ignorance, and Fear"--on a sort of guerrilla-theater tour of London's streets in defiance of the ban. Personallly I'm not wild about the statue or its heavy-handed symbolism--"a bit over the top" is the expression that comes to mind--but it does at least underscore the basic point.

Interesting recent debate on the ethics of torture. The two speakers were Prof. John Yoo (who teaches at Berkeley School of law, clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, and was deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department 2001-2003) and Prof. Jeremy Waldron (University Professor at Columbia University, who has critiqued the Bush Administration's approach to law in a forthcoming titled "Torture and positive law" that is to be published in the Columbia Law Review). A transcript is available at Ex Post. The debate is summarized and commented upon at Opinio Juris and Kenneth Anderson's Law of War and Just War Theory Blog (which is how I found it in the first place).

Just when you thought the world of Civil War prints had run out of kitsch: Springtime for Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Samuel Pepys was a naval administrator during the English Restoration and the first ever secretary of the Admiralty. He kept an extensive diary in code which was not discovered, deciphered, and published until the latter 1800s. The diary, which offers a fascinating picture of seventeenth-century England as well as an excellent window into the political, military, and naval affairs of the period, is being recreated at The Diary of Samuel Pepys.

MAJ Robert Bateman's most recent Letter from Baghdad is now online.

As a kid during World War II, my father read The War Adventure Series about the exploits of Dave Dawson, a dashing American pilot who flew with the Royal Air Force until the treacherous sons of Nippon bombed Pearl Harbor. After that he flew with the U.S. Army Air Corps. But either way, Dawson was always up to his ears in some secret mission on which the fate of great things depended. I read a couple of the books as a kid (Dave Dawson on Convoy Patrol and Dave Dawson at Singapore, to be exact). I was recently pleasantly surprised to find that the books are collectors' items--and bemused to learn that plans are in the works to revive the series. The first title? Dave Dawson at Umm Qasr: Fighting in Iraq with the Special Forces.

Deception is a fundamental aspect of war. The enemy systematically tries to mislead you as to his real intentions and capabilities, which leads to uncertainty and therefore often anxiety. The most formidable adversaries are usually masters of this. I once wrote on this subject using as my example Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest:

Warfare, despite its various refinements, touches basic human emotions. The most fundamental of these is fear. It is not difficult to imagine that Forrest's [prewar] days on the Mississippi frontier had educated him in the coarse art of instilling fear. The key was to rattle an opponent and keep him rattled. Forrest had an expression for it: "Keep up the scare." When he advanced toward [the Federal garrison at] Jackson [Tennessee] with kettle drums beating to simulate infantry, and when he suddenly swung on his pursuers at Parkers Crossroads, Forrest was doing his best to generate fear. There was nothing really novel in this approach: the violence of war can have no other purpose than the creation of fear through the threat of wounds and death. But Forrest was unusually clear-eyed about the value of inflicting fear. He did it instinctively and he did it well.

The experience of depression is often much like this. Joy simply drains out of life, replaced by listlessness, anxiety, even outright dread. The actual cause of the depression may be biochemical but the mind, spurred by the illness, searches for a circumstantial explanation and always finds it. In broad outline the illness "keeps up the scare" by playing on universal fears: that one is a failure, that one is unloved and unlovable, that life itself is meaningless. But the details are insidiously specific to each individual because the illness, in effect, knows what scares you most.

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

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

In a previous post, I alluded to having a mood disorder called bipolar disorder, once known as manic-depression.

Note the formulation: "I have bipolar disorder," not "I am bipolar." Though I'll need to sketch some background first, the thrust of this post turns on that distinction, and on the utility of combat as metaphor in making the distinction helpful.

Bipolar disorder is, strictly speaking, a malfunction of one's biochemistry whereby the mind is tricked into varying degrees of euphoria or despair with scant regard to the actual circumstances of one's life. I have often been discouraged by health care professionals from regarding it as a true mental illness at all. I tend, however, to regard such admonitions as well-intentioned efforts to spare me from the shame of mental illness. But rather than duck it, I'd rather work to dispense with the shame itself. If a tenured professor cannot summon the modest courage required to do so, then I don't know who could reasonably be asked.

Most of the stigma derives from the "mind/body split," the view that the mind and body are two almost completely different things and that the one does not influence the other: thus you cannot meditate your way out of a physical malady, on the one hand, and a physical malady does not affect the operation of your mind, on the other. While most people nowadays would reject so extreme a formulation, within broad limits the idea remains influential because it reflects our common experience of everyday life.

And because the mind is where we primarily locate our identities, a physical illness or impairment does not so readily shake our sense of who we are. There are always exceptions. An athlete might find her or his sense of self profoundly changed by the loss of a limb, for example. But a mental illness offers a fundamental challenge because it hits us where we are most intimately ourselves. The diagnosis of mental illness therefore confronts the affected individual with a basic choice: Is the illness something external to self, or is it a part of self? Most people, if asked, would promptly reply that the former is the correct formulation, but I have seen many instances in which people with bipolar disorder choose implicitly and sometimes explicitly to imagine the illness as a part of them. And why not? The whole thrust of the "mind/body split" argues that it is.

I have therefore always worked very hard to locate bipolar disorder as something external to myself, notwithstanding the fact that the biochemical fluctuations influence my moods and therefore my subjective experience of life.

As it happens, I can think of at least one other area of human life in which moods are artificially, systematically, and powerfully modified: war.

Indeed, I have found that war offers a very rich metaphor for understanding the illness and mobilizing one's resources to manage it. I consider myself to be in a permanent state of war against an enemy that will never cease in its efforts to kill me, one way or another--which is about as strong an "othering" of the illness as I can imagine.

"In war," wrote the Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, "the best strategy is always to be very strong, first in general and then at the decisive point." (On War, Book III, chapter 11) This point seems incredibly obvious, but like a lot of obvious points, it is easy to miss.

I have met my full share of people with mood disorders, for example, who were reluctant to take their prescribed medications because they thought they should be able to control the disorder by themselves. This sort of thinking is exactly like a general needlessly going into battle with only half his forces. Stupid, right?



Meet Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, a Civil War general who famously did go into battle with half his forces--and got his clock cleaned as a result. Indeed, as Clausewitz observes, "It seems incredible, and yet it has happened a hundred times, that troops have been divided and separated merely through a mysterious feeling of conventional manner, without any clear perception of the reason."

No self-respecting military historian wants to emulate Joe Hooker in any area of his life. Consequently, when a person with bipolar disorder is offered such things as medications, therapy, self-help books, support groups and/or the support of friends and colleagues, the correct response is not which of these resources to select. The correct response is to take as many of them as possible and to be continually on the lookout for even more.

Richard H. Kohn, a distinguished historian of the American military experience, has called it "the myth of the sleeping dinosaur": the idea that the United States has been slow to anger against the aggression of others but, once roused to action, has fought with fury and finality. This myth is the wellspring from which has flowed such notions as Douglas MacArthur's "There is no substitute for victory" or the commonplace that "The United States has never started a war."

In fact, however, the United States has sometimes fought for results short of victory--the War of 1812 is a case in point--and far more often than not has initiated conflicts that are subsequently repackaged as wars of self-defense. The War of 1812 was itself such a war of choice; so were the Spanish-American War, Philippine War, First World War (especially the U.S. decision to deploy a major expeditionary force to the European continent), Korean War, and Vietnam War. The point is not that these conflicts were morally questionable, though some of them were. The point is that the United States has used force for the same reasons of statecraft as other nation-states.

Still, a plausible claim of self-defense has always been important to the American public memory of its wars, which is why so many Americans persist in believing that Iraq was directly involved in the September 11 attacks or that U.S. forces did in fact uncover significant weapons of mass destruction after the Saddam Hussein regime was ousted. But regardless of their views on the Iraq War, the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that, if George W. Bush were not president, the United States would neither have gone to war with Iraq in 2003 nor would it now be responsible for the fate of that Middle Eastern nation. Courageous visionary or stubborn fool, Bush is rightly considered the indispensable pivot upon which these momentous events have turned. Americans at the time and historians ever since have had the same belief concerning James K. Polk and the Mexican-American War.

The parallel is all the more striking because neither man attained the presidency on the wave of some irresistible tide of public sentiment. Both prevailed in very closely-contested elections. The shift of a few hundred votes in Florida--or a single vote in the U.S. Supreme Court, if one is disposed to think that way--would have given Vice President Al Gore the presidency in 2000. A not much larger shift of votes in New York would have given Senator Henry Clay the presidency in 1844. Historian Gary J. Kornblith recently reviewed the 1844 election as a critical variable in "Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise" Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (June 2003):76-105. (You'll need a subscription to History Cooperative to access the online version). He concluded that Clay's defeat in New York could not be explained by any mistake on Clay's part. Indeed, the presence of the antislavery Liberty Party on the New York ballot alone cost Clay the votes that would otherwise have assured him the presidency--in much the same way that the Green Party did in Gore.

Given Clay's known opposition to the annexation of Texas as well as his Whig Party's aversion to expansionist ventures that would have courted war with Mexico, Kornblith assumes that a Mexican-American War under President Henry Clay would have been most unlikely. (No Mexican-American War, he continues, then no fateful re-injection of slavery as an issue in national political life, no disruption of the Second Party System, no formation of a sectionally-based Third Party System, no election of a president from the sectionally-based Republican Party in 1860, no secession crisis, and therefore no civil war in 1861.)

What kind of North America would have emerged from a Clay presidency? Kornblith suggests that it might have looked very much like this notional map of a "lesser United States" in historical geographer D. W. Meinig's fascinating The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (4 vols. to date), vol. 2, p. 215:



But Polk, not Clay, became president in 1844 on a platform that explicitly endorsed the annexation of Texas. Once inaugurated, he resolutely pursued a course of territorial expansion that courted war with Great Britain over the Oregon Territory and did, of course, achieve war with Mexico over the coveted region of upper California.

What did such a war mean for the American future? If you believe Kornblith, it meant among others things a major civil war some fifteen years hence. If you examine the map above, you'll see that it meant an historical trajectory somewhat but not totally different from the one that in fact occurred. Meining did not postulate an alternate trajectory by which the Republic of Mexico retained the area that in fact became the United States. He assumed instead that it would continue to exert only a tenuous political grip on its northernmost lands. By that logic, the Anglo-American Republic of Texas would soon be joined in similar fashion by an Anglo-American Republic of California and present-day Utah would most likely have become the "de facto Commonwealth of Deseret"--Deseret being the name preferred by the Mormon community who would shortly settle that region.

That is not, however, what most Mexicans think of when they consider the impact of Polk's presidency. And the high likelihood of additional Anglo settler societies--which might, to be sure, eventually have joined the United States as Texas did in 1845--does nothing to change the fact that in 1846 the United States, under Polk's direction, fought a war of choice--not to say a war of aggression--which it could easily have avoided. Americans have managed to reconcile this inconvenient fact with Professor Kohn's "myth of the sleeping dinosaur" chiefly by forgetting that the war ever happened--and also by forgetting that Polk--whom a Federalist Society-Wall Street Journal Survey on Presidents ranks tenth among chief executives--"near great" status just behind Eisenhower and ahead of Wilson--ever existed at all. Polk too clearly exposes a less than savory aspect of the American way of war.

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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.