Read American History Revised Online
Authors: Jr. Seymour Morris
American History Revised (63 page)
But every situation is unique, and none of these experiences necessarily applied to Iraq, a country in far worse shape than anyone thought. If Kosovo were used as a model, 500,000 troops were needed to secure Iraq. But the United States did not have 500,000 troops, so this number could not be the “magic number.” Nor could it be 2.5 million troops, following the German example. Whatever the number, Iraq would have to conform to American reality, not the other way around.
In the end, it may be that there was no magic number. In a 2006
Time
magazine cover story on the chaos in Baghdad, journalist Aparisim Ghosh wrote, “Conventional military tactics don’t work in an asymmetrical conflict. Sheer numbers and firepower count for very little.”
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Naturally, the bill was audited. After going over all the accounts, the government auditors found that Washington’s figures were off by less than one dollar.
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It should be noted, however, that the USSR was an ally only insofar as it served its own self-interest. Take Pearl Harbor, for example. While there were numerous warning signals that the Japanese might attack, the White House was uncertain where and when it might occur. Russia, on the other hand, knew the exact hour of the Pearl Harbor attack from its master spy Richard Sorge-and kept quiet.
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Nor do we remember the European city that suffered equivalent “total destruction”: Cologne. There, in under thirty days, the Allies dropped the equivalent of one and a half times the Hiroshima bomb. A single B-29 plane delivers a bomb payload of ten tons of TNT, meaning that a single raid by five hundred planes unleashes five thousand tons. The power of the Hiroshima bomb was 12,500 tons, or 2.5 raids. The Nagasaki bomb was 22,000 tons, or 4.4 raids. Cologne suffered the equivalent of 3.8 raids.
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What if we go backward in time rather than forward? Such was physicist Robert Oppenheimer’s approach to the “million lives” issue: had his team succeeded in building the bomb two years earlier, he said, well over a million lives would have been saved.
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Two other factors made the assassination relatively easy to accomplish: the distance, and the behavior of the car. The fuzzy newspaper photographs of the presidential motorcade give the impression of faraway distances, whereas in reality the distances were quite short. When Oswald fired his second shot, the president was only 150 feet away, equivalent to forty-five feet with the aid of a 4X rifle scope. It does not take a super marksman to hit a visual target forty-five feet away. By the time Oswald got off his final shot (the fatal one), Kennedy was 265 feet away (sixty-six feet through the rifle scope). In behavior that defies every rule of presidential security, the limousine driver responded to the second shot by slamming on the brakes to see what was going on. The vehicle came to a virtual halt, thus giving the assassin a stationary target. With four seconds to aim at a target sixty-six visual feet away, Oswald had strong odds in his favor.
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This is in sharp contrast to our “good” war, World War II, in which two-thirds were drafted, and only one-third were volunteers.
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This stands in sharp contrast to FDR’s administration. In planning for the occupation of postwar Germany, for example, the U.S. Army prepared a 400-page manual and followed it to the letter. On the other extreme is America in World War I: it didn’t even have a battle plan, let alone a postwar plan. It sent General John J. Pershing to France with 300,000 troops and basically told him, “Start fighting!”
Not What You Think
Sometimes, I am not sure of what I absolutely know is so!
—Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein,
The King and I
H
ere is a story that appears regularly in history books:
He was only one of many men who gambled everything they had for the cause of freedom. Thomas Nelson, educated at Eton and Cambridge University, returned home to Virginia to take over the family plantation, sign the Declaration of Independence, and succeed Thomas Jefferson as governor of Virginia. Appointed commander of the Virginia militia, he provided the money to supply and arm his soldiers. At the Battle of Yorktown, where his Virginia militia provided a third of the rebel army, he recommended to Washington that they unload artillery fire upon a stately house that Cornwallis had made his military headquarters. “Whose house is that?” Washington asked.
“Sir, it is my house,” Nelson replied.
Nelson lost everything, not just his house. After the fighting stopped, Nelson was unable to repay the $2 million in debts he had incurred arming his men, and his political enemies in the Virginia legislature refused to indemnify him, even though George Washington had written, “To Governor Nelson, the highest praises are due.” His health failing
,
Nelson with his wife and eleven children moved to a small farm where he died eight years later. He was so poor that his sons were forced to bury him secretly in an unmarked grave, lest his creditors seize his body as collateral for their unpaid loans. Yet despite his riches-to-rags saga, he never regretted his efforts in the Revolutionary War. “I would do it all over again,” he told a friend.
A wonderful story, except it’s too good to be true. It was presented this way on the Internet, where so many unchecked facts appear, to get people feeling patriotic. But not for long: within days, history bloggers cleared the air with their more extensive research on what actually happened.
Go back to the story and read again: do you really think a patriot so esteemed by George Washington could be sabotaged and abandoned like this? Hard to believe.
Obviously there is more to the story. Nelson’s colleagues knew full well he had been “gilding the lily”—and they didn’t like it. The house being shelled was not his house, but his uncle’s. The artillery firing on the house was not Washington’s, but the French artillery’s (which Washington and Nelson had no control over). The house was not demolished, it was only grazed, and it stands today, fully restored and open to the public as part of the Colonial National Historical Park. While it is true that Nelson was cash-poor and flat broke, so, too, were Washington, Jefferson, and just about every other Southern patriot. Nelson died as one of the largest landowners in Virginia, and regardless of how his dead body was disposed of by his sons, after all the debts were paid, they still managed to inherit several plantations.
That Thomas Nelson was a true patriot, there is no doubt. But there is no need to embellish the story with myth—the story is powerful enough as it is. One of the reasons Thomas Jefferson and John Adams spent much of their waning years writing to each other was to set the record straight and leave a written record of what had actually happened during the Revolution. They recognized the “distinction between history as experienced and history as remembered.” If they neglected to put down on paper what they had experienced, later historians might be tempted to add layers of fiction to make a better, but not quite accurate, story. According to the historian Joseph Ellis, “Adams realized that the act of transforming the American Revolution into history placed a premium on selecting events and heroes that fit neatly into a dramatic formula, thereby distorting the more tangled and incoherent experience that participants actually making the history felt at the time.”
“History,” said Tolstoy, “would be an excellent thing if only it were true.”
The use of history as propaganda is
widespread—“the invention of tradition,” Eric Hobsbawm called it. American history books for young children extol the revolution of the thirteen colonies against a tyrannical British empire. In fact, the colonies were essentially ruled by small cliques of white Protestants and wealthy landowners. The “free” society was not found in the colonies, it was found in England. Women in England had more rights than women in the colonies; Catholics and religious minorities also had more rights, and slavery was already illegal.
Or take the Boston Tea Party. We all know the image of patriots dressed up as Indians throwing crates of tea overboard. A great panorama, but it misses a deeper, more interesting “real” story. The patriots did not dress up as Indians so they could whoop and holler while they performed their task. To the contrary, they were obsessively secret and quiet about it all. They deliberately recruited fifty youths who didn’t know one another, painted their faces so they couldn’t recognize one another lest they chirp when subsequently interrogated by the British, and told them to keep their bloody mouths shut. They waited until low tide, so the boxes wouldn’t make a lot of racket splashing into the water. When the boxes landed on the sand or in shallow water beside the ships, the youths stomped on the tea to make it unusable. And they instructed that no “collateral damage” be done whatsoever. Explained one participant, “Entire silence prevailed, no clamor, no talking. Nothing was meddled with but the teas on board. Having emptied the whole, the deck was swept clean, and everything put in its proper place. An officer on board was requested to come up from the cabin and see that no damage was done except to the tea.”
When the angry British tried to round up the “terrorist” rebels, they couldn’t find anybody; they had vanished. All in all, a masterfully planned guerrilla operation, one rarely equaled by the U.S. military in more than two hundred years. Is not this brilliant operation more interesting than the patriotic superficiality of most books? Is it not more germane to the first-year teachings of our cadets at West Point?
In the early 1980s, Americans were transfixed by the TV miniseries
Roots
, the epic story of Alex Haley’s maternal ancestors’ progress from Africa to American slavery to the present. It all made for an engrossing story—but not altogether accurate. One wishes Haley had had the courtesy, in relating the story of his mother’s ancestry, to tell us something about his father’s side of the family. Going back twelve generations, he would have arrived not in Gambia but in Ireland.
Before we rush to conclusions that may be unwarranted, it pays to observe carefully. What we think we see or understand, may not be so. Said cowboy actor Will Rogers, “It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you do know that ain’t so!” In the 1800s, the regional coalition that constituted half the states of America
met to discuss their growing desire to secede from the national government in Washington. In a dispute over the overriding issue of the day, there could be no reconciliation; despite the coalition’s desire not to have to go to war, the national government, headed by a strong-minded president, seemed determined in its point of view, even to the point of hostilities. The tension got so bad that many states felt they had no choice but to leave the Union and set up an independent republic.
It didn’t happen. We are talking not about the Civil War, but about New England in 1812. The issue was whether to go to war against Britain. New England was antiwar, but finally relented and joined President James Madison and the congressional leaders such as Henry Clay who wanted war.
Another example of rushing to conclusions concerns the military contribution of Afro-Americans. In one particular war, laws in America forbade blacks to bear arms, though they were perfectly free to serve in the military as cooks, gravediggers, and other menial functions. America’s commander-in-chief, careful about such distinctions and nervous about arming former slaves, refused to accept them into his army. As a result, hundreds of them signed up with the enemy. Caught by surprise that Afro-Americans were fighting on the side of the British, General George Washington changed his mind and started recruiting them at the end of 1775. The result was many hundreds of badly needed recruits.
Before we say, “Oh yes, I know what you’re talking about,” it pays to listen and observe carefully, lest we be fooled. This was the mistake made by the Germans at a critical moment in World War II. They were so impressed by one American general, and followed him so closely, that they ignored warning signals that General George Patton was not the one who would be the commanding general of the invasion of France. As a result, they were completely fooled when General Eisenhower landed at Normandy.
Still another example of narrow-mindedness: We think we (the United States) won World War II, right? Wrong, it was one of our allies that did most of the fighting. By looking at our past from our own narrow perspective, we often miss out on the truth. In any endeavor, it pays to look at all the evidence carefully. Often the clues can be quite basic. Take Pearl Harbor, for example. Hundreds of books have been written about the debacle, seeking a rational answer to how America, despite numerous hints and intercepted messages, could be caught so flat-footed. More important than the narrow Watergate-style question “What did FDR know and when did he know it?” is the character of the man himself. Back in 1923, “writing with the authoritativeness of one who had been assistant secretary of the navy,” FDR had written an article for
Asia
magazine in which he argued that it was “technologically impossible for Japan to attack America’s Pacific coast.”
