January 17, 1945

International Herald Tribune:

MOSCOW - Warsaw fell today [Jan. 17] before the Russian hurricane which shattered the German line in Poland and pushed to within 15 miles of the Reich border. The order of the day, issued by Marshal Josef Stalin, testified to the utter defeat of the Wehrmacht on the Polish frontier. It proclaimed the liberation of Warsaw after more than five years of Nazi domination. Fourteen European capitals have now been freed from German occupation.

"Liberated" and "freed" are still the commonly used verbs for this landmark in the war. Here is what liberation looked like:



The photo is by Leonard Sempolinski, a Polish photographer riding with the Russians. His pictures of Warsaw after its destruction are unforgettable. For some reason this was the only one I could find online. Some other photos of the ruins are here, but they were taken later. In mid-January a heavy snow was falling, and it drifted thickly and finished the picture of the dead city as a miles-long cemetery, white on the blackness of "crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns."

The pianist Władysław Szpilman, who returned to the city after its liberation, described one small bit of it in his memoirs:

I was walking down a broad main road, once busy and full of traffic, its whole length now deserted. There was not a single intact building as far as the eye could see. I kept having to walk round mounds of rubble, and was sometimes obliged to climb over them as if they were scree slopes. My feet became entangled in a confused mess of ripped telephone wires and tramlines, and scraps of fabric that had once decorated flats or clothed human beings now long since dead.

A human skeleton lay by the wall of a building, under a rebel barricade. It was not large, and the bone structure was delicate. It must be the skeleton of a girl, since long blond hair could be seen on the skull. Hair resists decay longer than any other part of the body. Beside the skeleton lay a rusty carbine, and there were remnants of clothing around the bones of the right arm, with a red and white armband where the letters AK [Home Army] had been shot away.

There are not even such remains left of my sisters, beautiful Regina and youthful, serious Halina, and I shall never find a grave where I could go to pray for their souls.

The Soviets had paused outside Warsaw, on the banks of the Vistula, all winter while the Nazis and the AK battled to the death within. It was not the Soviet strategy to batter their heads against a city, and they had reached Warsaw after a dramatic advance that had perhaps outrun supplies. But the decision to let the slaughter of patriotic Poles go on in the city certainly was to Stalin's political advantage.

On January 17, Warsaw's war was over. Or was it? It is easy to talk of VE day and VJ day in the United States. The further you get from us, the less clear those things become. When did Warsaw's war end? The war in Europe began when Germany attacked Poland, followed soon, by agreement, by a Soviet stab in the back. In 1945, one of the two conquerors pushed the other out of Poland and settled down to own it. Was it over then? Or in 1989?

* * *

On January 17, 1945, word spread in Auschwitz that the camp was to be evacuated. The next day, the Nazis began moving people out.

Those in the sick ward figured they'd be shot when the rest departed, and a few of them who could do so thus got up and rejoined the general population, after bidding farewell to their comrades. Some 20,000 or so then marched out under guard. As it turned out, only a handful of them survived the ensuing death marches up and down central Europe.

The British and Americans would find the pitiful remnant, and the corpses of the last of the dead, when they overran Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald later in the spring. Those were not death camps, but it was where the death trail ended, and the sight and smell of it so infuriated the liberators that Americans in some cases killed disarmed German guards who had surrendered. War crime?

When the Russians got to Auschwitz they said nothing about it in public until after the end of the Third Reich. The few inmates left behind by the SS, including the sick ward, were abandoned, not shot. But the Russians then moved them into other camps. One of the January 17 sickroom patients did not get home until October. His name was Primo Levi.

In between, between the German departure and the Russian arrival, he lived through a chapter from Dante. Twelve of them remained in the tiny sickroom. The heat was off and temperatures fell below zero. Broken men staggered outside -- living corpses the Nazis had neither herded off in the death marches nor dispatched with a merciful bullet. Rotted with dysentery, they crawled through the filth of the grounds or feebly brawled with each other over putrid potatoes, "cursing in Yiddish between their frozen lips." Sporadic shellfire rained down, and when it did the zombies clawed at the sickroom walls for shelter, but the inmates barricaded themselves within.

Death was within, too. Two of the 12 died, including a Hungarian chemist who spent his last hours in delirium, repeating only the slave's obedient "Jawohl! Jawohl!" over and over till in the middle of the frozen night he toppled from his bunk to the floor, dead. On January 27, Levi and a Frenchman decided to carry the Hungarian corpse outside. As weakened as they were, they lifted the dead man easily -- he weighed so little. As they tossed his body in the snow, the Russians arrived.

When did Levi's war end? Did his war ever end? He was found dead in 1987 on the floor of the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin. The coroner called it suicide. Elie Wiesel said, "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier."

* * *

On January 17, 1945, the Germans, besieged in Budapest by the Red Army, withdrew from the western half of the city, across the Danube, to concentrate on defense of the east half. Traffic clogged the five beautiful old bridges over the river, and the next day, once it was over, the Germans blew up all five. As the Soviets liberated the evacuated western half of the Hungarian capital on January 17, they arrested Raoul Wallenberg, first secretary of the Swedish legation in Budapest.

Wallenberg is said to have saved more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews by initiating an unorthodox plan to give Swedish passes to Jews to protect them against deportation. In some cases, he was said to have climbed aboard trains waiting to leave for the death camps and pushed bundles of Swedish passes to the Jews within, then harangued officials on the train until they honored the passes.

The Soviets may have suspected he was working for the Americans. Perhaps he was. In 1957, under international pressure, they released a document they claimed to have found in their archives stating that "the prisoner Wallenberg, who is known to you, died last night in his cell." The document was dated July 17, 1947, and was signed by Col. Aleksandr L. Smoltsov, then head of the Lubyanka prison infirmary. The note was addressed to Viktor Abakumov, the Soviet minister of state security. Rumors persisted, however, that he was still alive even at that date.

When did his war end?

But Not Forgotten

It's not uncommon, even in reading reputable sources on the Pacific part of World War II, to encounter this:

The only American carrier to survive the war was USS Enterprise.

I don't know how that ever took root. It ignores "Stripe-Stacked Sara," the USS Saratoga.



The Saratoga (above) was one of the sleeker-looking carriers in the old fleet (if you can stand the top-heavy profile). That's because her keel had been laid during World War I as a battle cruiser, but after postwar armaments treaties limited that class of ships, the Navy switched it over and made an aircraft carrier out of it. Aircraft carriers turned out to be the major punishing weapon in the next war, and battle cruisers played a relatively small part. The Japanese Kaga (begun as a battleship) and Akagi (battle cruiser) underwent the same conversion, for the same reason, and their planes led the attack on Pearl Harbor. So much for creating peace by restricting armaments.

The Saratoga dealt a lot of pain and took a lot of harm during the war, but she came through it in one piece (unlike her twin the "Lady Lex", which went to the bottom at Coral Sea).

Here's what the Saratoga looks like today:



In relatively shallow waters off Bikini atoll. After the war, the government was curious what nuclear bombs would do to warships, so they parked a bunch of them at Bikini and set off a few bombs. Saratoga actually survived the first blast, but the second one did her in on July 25, 1946.

In the Ruins of Empire

[posted by Callimachus]

Nineteen-forty-six was the year the present began. That's the way it's always been in my life. In high school and college, as a student of history, I took courses with titles like "Crucial Years" that covered "1945 to the present." They began when the shooting stopped at the end of World War II. You never had to take a course in World War II, or the inter-war period, so it was genuinely possible to think the world began in 1946.

It's convenient for the organizers of curricula and the writers of textbooks to break up the world like that. So 1945 joins other convenient "zero" dates that punctuate history: 1914, 1815, 1776, 1492, 1215, 476.

In the unconscious, Dali-esque mental calendar in my head, the gap between 1946 and "today," sixty years later, actually seems smaller than that between 1946 and, say, 1936.

That is false, of course. In my daughter's education, 2001 is likely to replace 1945. Those of us alive and adult now know just how false that will be.

Maybe awareness of that is why my reading after Sept. 11 took a turn back to 1945, and to break through the artificial barrier and thread the present with the past.

Gregor Dallas' excellent book takes a big whack at this wall. The book pictured above, Ronald H. Spector's "In the Ruins of Empire," compliments it like a matching bookend. Whereas Dallas concentrated on Europe, Spector, who also wrote the well-received Eagle Against the Sun, looks at the end of the war in Asia.

(He also earned his props to do this by writing an insightful work on the Vietnam War.)

I had been interested for some time in the complexities of race and imperialism in the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and Indonesia. I hadn't been able to find anything good on the topic until I heard about this book.

I bought it sight-unseen online. Had I picked it up in a bookstore, however, I might have put it right down again. The blurbs on the back cover tell of "a resounding lesson for our time about the failure of postwar operations in countries we were little prepared to reconstruct ... a cautionary tale that should be read by anyone interested in how we need to think about future involvements in distant lands we enter at our peril ... dismal accounts of civil war and mass slaughter, much of it provoked by the blundering victorious powers ... a painful lesson ...."

Some of this was written by fellow historians (the author of "Nixon and Kissinger" is among them) who apparently failed to read the book first, or else who came to it with brains scrambled by Iraq rage. How would you "reconstruct" jungle islands that never saw World War II battles in the first place? But the reviewer has eyes firmly fixed on the present.

But this book is not yet another bid to pillage the historical record for weapons to bash Bush with. Spector wrote in the wake of Iraq and obviously is aware of it. His choice of words and the framing of certain scenes reflects that awareness. But he is genuinely interested in his historical topic for its own sake, not as a cudgel to punish the present.

This review, which includes the memorably descriptive phrase "When the Japanese formally laid down their arms in mid-August 1945, the entire continent of Asia immediately became shrouded in a thick fog of peace," gets the gist of the story's strangeness:

Friends and foes became hard to distinguish. Before they could be repatriated, some idealistic Japanese soldiers - and not a few who feared indictment for war crimes - deserted the Imperial Army and stayed behind to battle for Indonesian independence. Others fought alongside the Vietminh against the French and the British in Vietnam, while those still wearing the Imperial chrysanthemum stood guard - fully armed and with bayonets fixed - when U.S. forces landed at Inchon to begin the occupation of Korea. Many of Chiang Kai-shek's generals, having attended the Japanese military academy, used Japanese troops to fight the Communists. Spector, a professor of history and international relations at George Washington University, reports that the Japanese patrolled rail lines and broke a Communist-led strike in Shanghai and that as late as November 1946, some 80,000 Japanese troops were operating under Chiang's command.

Often the victors were simply clueless, trying to govern with limited intelligence as they groped around in the dark. Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru once mocked the U.S. occupation in Japan for "its generally happy ignorance of the amount of requisite knowledge it lacked." Despite the services of a very competent OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), the United States was remarkably ignorant of the region. Armed only with "a few pages on Korea" from a 1905 travel guidebook, for example, and with no knowledge of the language, U.S. occupation forces hired former Japanese occupiers and suspected Korean collaborators to explain life on the peninsula to them. A confused U.S. proconsul in Seoul declared to a stunned Korean populace that the Japanese would continue to govern the country. It took months to undo the damage.

When Spector does address Iraq directly, toward the end of the book, he notes that the "lessons" supposedly learned in that recent war often conflict one another ("Only a long occupation can succeed." "A long occupation leads to resentments and rebellions.")

Turning back to his historical topic, Spector writes, "On all of these generalizations, the story of the liquidation of Japan's empire casts a bright light of ambiguity." And don't ever trust any history book that tells you otherwise. Where Spector is willing to make his own generalizations they can seem bland at first, but they really are crucial insights for people tearing their hair out with rage over Iraq, and with American "defeat" and "failure" there:

The successes and failures in East and Southeast Asia in 1945 and 1946 were often the result of factors far beyond the power of generals and soldiers to halt or redirect.

He quickly adds the very definition of "success" and "failure" is dicey in this situation. Success for whom? By what path? For how long?

Another no-brainer lesson that yet seems to have been forgotten: "Occupations proceeded most smoothly where soldiers of the occupation force found a basis for at least limited cooperation and friendship with the locals," and "where the occupiers and the occupied shared common, or at least compatible, interests."

As the entire American experience in Iraq attests; from the Kurdish welcome to the early cooperation from Shi'ite provinces, to the recent turn-around in Anbar. Finally, there's this warning:

The most deleterious effects of the Allied military presence developed not through blunders or misjudgments of those charged with carrying out the occupations, but when the highest levels of government acted indecisively, had mistaken notions or no notions at all about what was actually happening on the scene, and neglected or ignored reports from the field.

In places where the situation in Asia could offer some guidance in Iraq, the record is too mixed to read. Some critics decry the disbanding of the corrupt Iraqi army after Saddam's fall because it eliminated the only force capable of keeping order. The Allied use of Japanese troops to keep order after the surrender in Tokyo might be an example of an alternative policy. But the results there were mixed: Such policies were violently opposed by horrified local populations, whom the Japanese sometimes continued to brutalize. But in some other cases the Japanese did essential work in keeping order.

Nonetheless, there is room to notice more degree of sameness between now and then than Spector describes. The collapse of Japan was a "catastrophic success" for the Allies, yet the postwar disposition of the Japanese Empire was a problem that loomed for years. Apparently no one had a plan for it.

The American and British leaders formed their policies with a constant glancing back at a war-weary public that only wanted an end to fighting and the troops brought home. Other political considerations interfered with clear thinking.

And the major differences ought to be noted. In Iraq, America appeared in force for the first time in history in 1991, and left at once. Twelve years later it returned to overthrow an indigenous dictator.

In Asia in the 1940s, the Japanese chased out European colonial overlords from Asian nations, then ruled themselves with varying degrees of local complicity and general brutality. Then the Allies defeated Japan in Japan, and turned up to occupy the outposts of its empire with the old colonial authorities in tow.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson was how completely the mythical power of the Europeans dispelled. Once the local population had seen them defeated by Asian -- the Japanese -- the British, Dutch and French never could hope to rule uncontested again.

A few more lessons ought to be noted. One is the radically different career of the Philippines -- the only American colony in the region, and outside the purview of Spector's book (it had been liberated before the surrender). There, as Spector notes, the local population fought aggressively against the Japanese invaders alongside the Americans, and continued to resist in some cases after the American defeat. That exception is a telling clue to the effectiveness of the light-handed rule of American colonial policies.

The stories in Spector's book also affirms the strong anti-colonial mentality of America, a point hammered home as well in Derek Leebaert's fine history of the Cold War. Americans, from Roosevelt on down, were bluntly unwilling to help France and Britain re-establish their empires, and were unwilling to shed their own blood or anyone else's in such distasteful work. Ho Chi Minh, among others, looked on the Americans as liberators at first -- from the French as well as the Japanese.

But the pressure on Western Europe from the Soviets and national communist parties convinced Washington its priorities lay in strengthening the economies of Britain, France, and the Netherlands. And if that meant propping up the corrupt colonial empires in Asia, so it must be. That was, in Asian terms, a tragic mistake, a "failure," and most of the Americans working in Asia who knew anything about it warned the government so. But was there a better choice?

Germany and Iraq, Part 4

[posted by Callimachus]

"No country can regain its self-respect nor progress to maturity in democratic processes in the presence of large occupying forces. ... Allied control over Germany should be exercised through leadership and not through command." [Lucius D. Clay, July 19, 1946]

"In the long run, the American people will never tolerate an area under American control in which there is chaos and hunger." [Clay, paraphrasing, and agreeing with, U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson]

WHAT WORKED

Lucius D. Clay, to me, is a key to why the U.S. occupation of Germany worked. But that may be because I find it easier to latch on to human personalities than historical abstractions.

Clay's great historical moment came during the Berlin airlift, but what he did as U.S. military proconsul in Germany during the two years before that may have been more important. He was the right man for the job -- and a lot of that was pure luck. But what mattered most was that he worked in a matrix -- not of a "well-planned" or "organized" occupation regime, but rather one that had the full support and engagement of the political and civilian leaders of America.

Clay had to deal with an occupied nation partitioned between four powers and armies with different agendas. His own bosses, as he said, didn't know what they wanted. In the reverse of the situation in modern Iraq, the people of the occupied country stood firmly for their unity, while the occupiers -- especially France -- favored of permanent partition, and all were in some degree committed to a weak Germany. Clay inherited a job with no blueprint for success and impossible, conflicting expectations of what it would look like. The press, as always, made things more difficult than they needed to be. That kicked up popular objections at home, and some politicians tried to capitalize.

Son of a U.S. senator and descendant of Henry Clay and himself, Lucius Clay was a West Pointer, a career military man, but one with a solid understanding of politics. That in itself is harder to find in America today than it once was. West Point may be more open to Americans of all backgrounds today, but when it stopped being, among other things, a career path for sons of the political elite, a certain cross-pollination stopped happening.

Clay was brusque, arbitrary, and every bit as independent as MacArthur was in Japan, but with two fewer stars than MacArthur he had to fight harder for his autonomy, and he had to exploit the bureaucracy rather than brushing it aside as his colleague in Japan did. Consequently he makes for a less stellar biography.

Another quality that set him apart from anyone now available for the job in Iraq was that, thanks to the New Deal and the war, Clay's generation had grown up managing things on a national scale. In 1940, he became head of the emergency Defence Airport Program and organized the building or expanding of more than 250 airports, anticipating America's entry into World War II. When the war began, Clay became Director of War Department Material. He also served on the Munitions Assignment Board and the War Production Board.

But until he was appointed military governor in Germany, Clay had no intention of going there and had done no research on the place. "I truly wasn't the least bit interested at that time," he said later. "I didn't care what they did in Germany. I hadn't thought about it. It wasn't going to be my responsibility, and I was still hoping that one of these days I'd be back in the combat Army."

He never saw JCS 1067, the crucial document outlining U.S. policies and goals in occupied Germany, till he got on the plane to cross the Atlantic and assume his job.

He came to Germany knowing next to nothing about what he would face when he got there. As far as I can tell, he never learned to speak German. And he never considered that a handicap. "You don't think about handicaps when you're given a job in the Army. You go do it. Period."

It was a job for a man with civilian sensibilities but with military authority and discipline. Clay had all that. Many of the civilian candidates mentioned for the post before it was offered to him had inevitable deep ties to the big U.S. banking and industrial firms that would necessarily be involved in the occupation. Clay did not.

From the start, he insisted the military government in Germany be removed from the control of the General Staff, the better to create a civilian-heavy corps not serving purely U.S. military purposes and tangled in Army red tape. In part this was to have more of a free hand in making decisions. In part, too, he wanted to lure the kind of minds who would not happily work for a G5 within a military system.

This, and his realization that the German people needed a hand up, not further punishment, swung him into alignment with the State Department. Clay was a New Deal Democrat, but in the Roosevelt administration, State was the bastion of conservatism. It was dominated by blue-blood New Englanders, Skull and Bones alumni, and headed by conservative Republican Henry L. Stimson. The suspicion in the more left-leaning branches of Roosevelt's government was that State secretly prefered Hitler to Stalin. In some cases it may have been true. The New Dealers, Roosevelt and Clay among them, believed for too long Stalin was someone you could do business with and that the Soviet Union was just another country, playing by the same rules.

Together, Stimson and Clay steered German occupation away from the original draconian plan that technically governed it. Clay also spent much of his time fighting off Army chiefs of staff, ignoring protocols and the tactical command structure.

Clay had the power to order fundamental changes in the German social fabric. Clay used this power selectively. When it came to the German media, he kept a close eye on it, but to nurture it, not quash it. It was not censored, but protected.

Party-owned newspapers had been the norm in pre-war Germany. Clay banned them outright (by refusing the licenses without which a newspaper could not publish). Not just for the anti-democratic parties, but for all of them.

During a key phase at the start of the occupation, a U.S. military-run newspaper was the main media outlet in the American zone. But it was a freewheeling and independent minded operation, as conflicted in its mission as the U.S. itself, and eventually it caught on with the Germans and gave them an example of a free press at work, yet one not determined to destroy the occupation authorities.

Later, Clay made a point of inviting reporters from the fledgling German papers to his press conferences. At first they stood agog as the American newsmen peppered the man in uniform with prying questions. Later, they joined in.

Clay was a native of Marietta, Georgia, then still a pretty little town in the red hills of Georgia and not a bedroom enclave for Atlanta. It still had much old architecture, only because Sherman's armies passed through it during a wet spell, which prevented them from burning it down entirely.

Clay was shaped by his unique American experience, and the nightmare memory of an old war. He inherited the Southerner's contempt for scalawags and carpetbaggers. Thus he sought to keep his distance from the Germans he placed in local control, and to keep German operations segregated from U.S. ones, because he wanted these men to be leaders of a future independent Germany, and he feared too close association with the Americans would taint them as collaborators in the eyes of the Germans.

He need not have worried. The Germans just weren't like that. It was one case where C. Vann Woodward's "burden of Southern history" really did play a role in current events. But it turned out to be beside the point.

I think many of the points ticked off against the Bush Administration are not the reasons historians will find for faulting him: Lack of a firm plan, and uncertain expectations for what you want from an occupation, are not on their own a recipe for failure. Nor are they a guarantee of success. In a situation so large and shifting and malleable, no amount of preparation guarantees anything.

Without any deep background understanding of the nation or the situation, with a set of instructions devised more out of domestic political needs than German realities, with a sensitivity attuned to a different occupation in a different time and place, Clay yet succeeded in his job.

Clay was able to rely on a government and a nation that, no matter how confused it was about what it wanted, was in the habit of throwing its best resources into a job. Important positions and advisorships in Clay's office were filled by university presidents, leading professors, and former governors. Among those who had a hand in reconstruction of Germany was the poet Archibald MacLeish.

It never would have occurred to the Bush administration to approach leading major university presidents and poets to work in rebuilding Iraq. It never would have occurred to presidents or poets to offer. We have been at war for 5 years now. Unless you're tied by love to one of the fraction of a percent of Americans who serve in uniform, what material difference has this fact made in your life?

It was left to John McCain, the president's old enemy, to say the thing that needed to be said about Iraq, the thing Clay's generation would have understood implicitly:

In Iraq our national security interests and our national values converge. Iraq is truly the test of a generation, for America and for our role in the world. Faced with similar challenges, previous generations of Americans have passed such tests with honor. It is now our turn to demonstrate that our power, ennobled by our principles, is the greatest force for good on earth today. Iraq's transformation into a secure democracy and a force for freedom in the greater Middle East is the calling of our age. We can succeed. We must succeed.

[Part 1, part 2, part 3]

Germany and Iraq, Part 3

[posted by Callimachus]

Is it necessary to lay out the evidence that the Americans entered Germany in 1945 with no solid plan for occupation, unrealistic expectations of what they would find, and conflicting goals for their mission? I'm not aware of any modern history of the period that says otherwise.

Here's a standard summary, from a book published in 1982:

Scholarship in recent years has pointed to a general muddle on the part of U.S. agencies involved in planning the German occupation. The problem started at the highest level with President Roosevelt's reluctance to prepare for an occupation during wartime, a reluctance that increased as his health declined. Lacking presidential leadership, several government agencies adopted widely differing positions, ranging from openly reconstructionist policy at the State Department to a punitive, destabilizing scheme at Henry Morgenthau's Treasury Department. Given the failure to reconcile these differences, America's forces entered Germany without a coherent national policy, a situation that reduced the chances for cooperation among the victor nations. [James F. Tent, "Mission on the Rhine"]

The president "failed to establish clear guidelines for his policymakers. The War Department supported neither side consistently, seeking above all to minimize its role in the future occupation." The writings of some of the people highly placed in the occupation project are flush with moral idealism and transformational progressive thinking would be worthy of any modern neo-con. JCS 1067, the eventual declaration of U.S. purpose and tactics in occupied Germany, was "ambiguous."

Secretary Morgenthau was convinced that it embodied his approach. State and War Department officials had inserted certain loopholes, which they expected would allow a positive approach. Thus VE Day -- May 8, 1945 -- found Americans still lacking a consensus on postwar plans for Germany.

Osmer White, the Australian journalist who covered the fall of Hitler from inside the U.S. military, essentially disliked Americans and American ways. He seems to have found himself instinctively sympathetic to the Soviet economic system, though not to Stalin's totalitarian ways. But there is the ring of hard truth in his description of the American occupation, and it is borne out by other testimonies, including some from the men actually in charge.

Of all the occupying Powers, the Americans showed themselves the most inept at the business of governing a conquered country. They maintained little or no continuity of policy. They never succeeded in making up their minds whether they wanted to administer stern justice or indulge Christ-like charity. They did not, indeed, make up their minds about anything except the 'superiority' of their own intentions. Germans must be ruthlessly disciplined into loving and respecting liberty. They must be punished for their crimes as a nation, but innocent women and children must on no account suffer. German industrialists who were guilty of warmongering and supporting Hitler must be dispossessed, but on no account should collective ownership -- Communism -- be the result of that dispossession. The American Military Government must not involve the United States in the messy byways of European politics, but Europe must, of course, be prevented at all costs from going Red!

Desperate to feed civilians in a region swollen by refugees from the East, the Americans turned to men who had held senior positions in the Nazi food distribution office. Seeking indigenous leadership to manage the local affairs of the German states that fell under their control, the Americans turned to members of pre-1933 conservative Catholic parties. But, while not National Socialist, many of them had formed alliances with them in a shared fear and loathing of the communists, and some had voted for the act enabling Hitler to take complete control of Germany.

In each case the home front press howled. But in each case it's hard to see a cleaner path through the conflicting goals and tactics of such an occupation. Certaibnluy anyone who tried to think through a better plan for Iraq in our times will recognize the conundrum:

• Rebuild the physical infrastructure of the country -- but don't give too many contracts to the few multinational corporations who are capable of doing the job, and which have extensive political connections;
  
  
• Put an "Iraqi face" on the reconstruction -- but only hire the most competent people to do the work to avoid waste and minimize boondoggles;
  
  
• Remove all Saddam's toadies from their jobs -- but don't alienate the Sunni minority from which they largely were drawn;
  
  
• Get the job done as fast as possible, the sooner to end the occupation -- but don't waste a penny of the taxpayers' money;
  
  
• Crack down on lawlessness and disorder and sabotage -- but don't do anything that could be seen as cruel or overzealous by our friends or look bad on Al-Jazeera.
  

As White wrote:

The unhappy executives of this American 'policy' in Germany were set to work for the achievement of all these inimical aims, vigorously and simultaneously; but as soon as they made progress in one direction, they were instantly restrained by torrents of criticism that they were making no progress in the other direction.

As Lucius D. Clay, U.S. military proconsul in Germany after the surrender, later put it: "Even Washington didn't really know what it wanted."

[to be continued]

Germany and Iraq, Part 2

[posted by Callimachus]

(continued from here)



WHY WAS THERE NO GERMAN INSURGENCY?

Even when the civic structure of the country imploded, the Germans did not explode into chaos and anarchy. Why? The expectations of everyone from Eisenhower to the newspapermen -- that the Germans would vigorously resist the occupiers -- turned out to be wrong.

Some reasons are obvious. So obvious, apparently, that they tend to be overlooked. The German cities lay in ruins, and the countryside was starving. The few calories the Germans absorbed in a day were used up in the business of surviving until tomorrow. All war is cruel and always civilians suffer most, but the modern anti-war voices who decry the 2003 American invasion of Iraq as exceptionally harsh simply don't know much about history.

Would-be diehards from the Nazi regime certainly tried to stir things up. They could have found supporting civilian populations in remote rural areas. But they lacked the sort of sophisticated cellular and Internet communications now available to the most brutish terrorist in the Middle East. They also lacked a sympathetic domestic media, so essential to the struggle, and there was no flood of foreign cash to keep them supplied and fed.

The fear of the Soviets often is cited as a reason for the docility of the Germans in the West. True, Hitler's propaganda had been effective in terrifying the Germans about the hordes from the East. When the Russians reached the outskirts of Berlin, a wave of suicides swept the city in numbers that perhaps never will be told.

But in the crucial early stages of the occupation, after the initial orgy of rape and looting had ended, it was the French who imposed the most harsh terms on their subject regions. The Cold War did not open visibly for a year or two, and the Soviet zone actually got back on its feet more rapidly than the western zones, thanks in part to the experience of the Soviets in collective economics and mass control.

Rather, I think, a crucial overlooked element in the German experience was the hordes of "displaced persons" (DPs, in the language of the day) -- concentration camp survivors and former slave laborers for the Reich, liberated in 1945 and ravaging in packs, looting and exacting vengeance all the way and often with no more homes to return to. The Allied military government after the cessation of hostilities estimated the number of homeless foreigners in Germany at 5 million. The number employed by the Reich (mostly as slave labor) was twice that, so the number of DPs might have been higher.

The Australian journalist Osmer White portrays this as the second time authority collapsed in post-war Germany:

Military government units moved into populated areas as soon as the fighting ceased and they were able, despite the flight of the people who had exerted civil authority, to establish a semblance of order and begin to restore essential services. But when the slave labourers and POWs started to clog the roads in uncounted thousands, looting their way from town to town and village to village, the situation became impossible to control.

The DPs' habit of terrorizing the populace put the native Germans firmly on the side of order. And while the Allied infantrymen initially sympathized with the victims of Hitler, the average soldier eventually came to side with the German householder. Stephen Ambrose noted that of all the peoples the American G.I.s encountered during World War II, they identified most with the Germans, whom the American soldiers regarded as "clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-class in their tastes and life-styles ... just like us."

A report from Europe in the August 1947 issue of "Commentary" noted:

[F]or Americans especially, the individual German is an attractive person. These children were charming little people; they were pathetic in their need ... yet they did not whine or pester; they stood there quietly, with trust in their eyes. And the American heart went out to them. As for the adults, they strike most Americans in Germany as decent, pleasant, rather kindly people, who respect their parents, love children, and lavish affection on pets; they are admirably clean and orderly, and have all the solid qualities favored by Ben Franklin.

Yet perhaps there was more to it than circumstances. White, writing about Germany immediately after the conquest, keeps returning to the puzzle of the sudden "docility" of a people who had fought so hard and so long.

In general neither British, Americans nor Russians had much trouble in exacting obedience from German civilians. German civilians were only too anxious to obey. Theirs was a wordless docility of a people reduced to complete dependence. When proclamations were posted up, groups would gather about them, read slowly and carefully, disperse quickly. Then, when military government had been formally established, queues would form and wait patiently for hours for the most trivial permissions. Was it permitted to do this ... to do that? Was it permitted to work thus ... or so? Was it permitted to visit one's uncle in the country? To seek food from friends on a nearby farm? To cut wood for fuel? To drive a horse and cart, ride a bicycle, walk to the next town? To draw money from the bank if the bank opened? Send a letter by hand to a friend? Buy, sell things?

He gropes toward the core of it, but doesn't quite find it. With Saddam for comparison, perhaps the answer is more clear. Hitler destroyed his political and ethnic enemies. But he left the cultural and civic institutions of Germany largely intact. He meddled, and he "purified," according to his conceptions, but he did not destroy them. The universities, the churches, the industries, the social clubs -- all were to some extent corrupted, but not destroyed. That would have come later, and as fate had it, he never got the chance. In the meantime, Hitler ruled the Germans partly through their natural inclination to order and their fondness for systematic group work.

Which is the opposite of the personal tyranny and rule by terror as applied by Saddam. Working secular institutions that were able to resist Saddam in any degree were rare, and peripheral, such as the antiquities museum. Even the Shi'a religious hierarchies had to live in exile. They maintained their coherence there, however, and after Saddam fell, they were the only ones capable of quickly setting up a power and authority structure in liberated Iraq.

An incident White records from Mainz seems to me to summarize much. It was standard U.S. practice, when they met any level of resistance in a German town or district, to pull back and bring in the heavy guns to pound the place to rubble:

Sniping from an upper window was holding up clearance of a suburban block. Infantrymen were waiting round for the inevitable tank to come and do the job, when a massive woman, waving a white flag on a broomstick, emerged from the house opposite that from which the sniping was coming. She crossed the road and disappeared inside. In five minutes she emerged, leading the snipers by their ears. They were her sons, aged twelve and fourteen, who were obeying the orders of their Hitler Youth group leader to die like valiant young werewolves -- until mother asserted the more direct authority.

In the Middle East today, perhaps she would be proudly proclaiming her sons as martyrs and urging others to go and do likewise.



[to be continued]

Germany and Iraq, Part 1

[posted by Callimachus]

"We were very lucky, General MacArthur and myself, that we came out of an occupation as well as we did." [Gen. Lucius D. Clay, military governor of the U.S. Zone of Germany 1947–49]

I often read two things:

• The Bush Administration made an appalling and inexplicable error when it overthrew Saddam and took charge of Iraq without a plan for running and fixing the country, and without even an informed expectation of what Americans would find there once the war ended or a plan for addressing those conditions.
  
  
• By contrast, the American reconstruction efforts in defeated nations after World War II were an example of how to do it right.
  

Both could be true. But they don't dovetail together as well as people assume, when they don't study the history.

West Germany was a faithful American ally through the Cold War, and the united Germany is a rock of stability in the center of Europe. Iraq doesn't seem to be headed down that path. Yet almost all the things cited as American mistakes in Iraq also were done in Germany.

HOW MANY IS ENOUGH?

The notion that funneling more troops into the country automatically would have equaled a good outcome, for instance, strikes me as simplistic and unconvincing. Certainly there were too few in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. But you could stand a GI on every streetcorner in every city in Iraq, and the resistance would simply thrive behind their backs, in the homes. You could invade the homes, and the resistance would take to the swamps. If not the swamps, the mountains. Or the desert. Numbers alone mean nothing.

Post-war Germany often is cited as a counter-example to modern Iraq: Germany was occupied in 1946 at a ratio of troops to civilians about 10 times greater than currently is the case in Iraq.

Yet the French zone, where the ratio of troops to civilians was by far the highest among the allies, also had the most problems with resistance activities and civil unrest -- in large part because there were so many French troops there, sucking up resources from a hungry countryside and getting into proportionately more scraps with the locals. The notion that Americans should move in Iraq and Afghanistan with a light footprint makes a certain sense: especially given Gen. John Abizaid's now-famous warning that American troops would be considered an “antibody” in the Arab world.

It seems to me a case where you encounter one set of problems by doing it one way, but if you make the opposite set of choices you run into a different set of obstacles. Which seems to be the most common thread in such occupations, whether it's Germany 1946 or Iraq 2006.

The Allies over-occupied Germany, for a variety of reasons, some of them purely punitive. By 1946, even the U.S. Army acknowledged all it really needed in Germany was two mobile divisions and a combat command. That was because a real insurgency never developed in Germany. But the absence of a resistance was not necessarily a function of the numbers of invading troops.

THE CRUCIAL WEEKS

The Allied occupation was not fully in place until about a year after the war ended. In the interim there was plenty of opportunity for a resistance or an insurgency to grow up in Germany. Elements of the German army -- tens of thousands of men -- simply melted into the civilian population, which willingly hid them -- as happened in Iraq.

Even though Eisenhower tried to be scrupulous about scrubbing out any pockets of resistance that had been left behind once the Allies invaded Germany, much of the country was open territory for months. The Australian newsman Osmer White, reporting from the front as Patton advanced, had to ride back to army headquarters to file his newspaper articles. The round trip sometimes amounted to more than 200 miles. "Often unit command posts had dropped thirty or forty miles behind the action, even in the Eifel and Hünsruck where the conflict was much less diffuse than it was over the river. I would sometimes travel for an hour or more through sparsely populated areas without sighting a single American soldier.

For weeks I laboured under the delusion that this nerve-racking business of rushing back and forth to the 'front' was dangerous. Sooner or later, I thought, the German civilians would snap out of their stunned docility and start a guerrilla war. One of these fine spring mornings I was going to run into a burst of machine-gun fire or a grenade pitched out of a top-storey window ... even a wire stretched from tree to tree round a sharp bend, or a nest of mines planted overnight at a crossroads.

Elsewhere, he speculated, "I am convinced that if the German people had shown the spirit to wage a partisan campaign behind the Allied spearheads which split the country, or if the German general staff had been able or willing to regroup and concentrate substantial forces in the Bavarian mountains, Hitler would have made good his last maniacal promise to bring all Europe down in chaos should his arms fail."

Anyone who chased Patton's tanks and motorized infantry to Chemnitz, or, for that matter, followed the thrust westward from the Middle Rhine towards Berlin, could not have failed to realize how desperately thin on the ground the forces of occupation were spread. They hadn't the manpower to control a hostile civilian population.

In Iraq, remember, the first signs of trouble began within weeks of the fall of Saddam, and by the time the coalition began to make and enact plans to restore security in Iraq, the “security gap” had yawned and the country descended into looting, street crime, and organized sabotage.

A 'HARD PEACE'

Eisenhower himself apparently expected a full-scale resistance movement in Germany after Hitler's fall. As head of the invading army from the West, his beliefs and expectations shaped American policy toward the Germans. He had seen his own men die from fanatical resistance by hopelessly outnumbered Germans, and he naturally concluded the Germans were a warlike people who would never surrender and never submit. He helped harden the American policies in late 1944.

What's interesting is not just how wrong he was about the Germans. But also how close his prediction came to the conditions the Americans met after another invasion, sixty years later, in Iraq. Eisenhower foresaw great difficulty in maintaining public services and utilities in occupied Germany, and he thought the Allies ought to refuse to be responsible for the humanitarian situation after an invasion:

[I]t may well be that the German Army as a whole will never actually surrender and that we shall enter the country finding no central German authority in control, with the situation chaotic, probably guerrilla fighting and possibly even civil war in certain districts. ... If conditions in Germany turn out to be as described it will be utterly impossible effectively to control or save the economic structure of the country ... and we feel we should not assume the responsibility for its support and control.

In part as a consequence of these fears, and in part out of desire to collectively punish and de-fang the Germans (rooted, paradoxically, in the "Just War" doctrine), the Americans and their allies marched into Germany with a plan on paper for a draconian "hard peace." The document governing this, Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067, issued Nov. 9, 1944, presumes merciless victors imposing a Carthaginian peace on a resisting German population.

Germans lived under daily curfews and strict travel restrictions. Meetings of more than five persons were banned, effectively killing political activity. They had to surrender even their hunting rifles and ceremonial arms; mails and the media were under strict censorship; children prohibited from joining anything that might look like Hitler Youth, even Boy Scout troops.

Armed resistance, sabotage, and possession of weapons were defined as capital crimes in SHAEF's Proclamation no. 1. The victorious allies held German POWs for years after the fighting stopped, in contravention of international law, in part (as Churchill said frankly) as insurance against popular uprisings. By June 1945, the Americans also had detained 30,000 civilians in internment camps, and by the end of the year the number had shot up to 100,000.

UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

Yet somehow, Eisenhower's gloomy anticipation of a Germany collapsing into disorder never got through to the civilian authorities who were in charge of planning the occupation. When Lucius D. Clay, the U.S. proconsul appointed to oversee the American zone of occupation in Germany, got to Europe, he found a U.S. Control Council in place in Paris, "organized by government ministries, all on the theory that they were going to go in and take over an existing German ministry from the top and administer it." Clay said later:

Well, within a week it was clear to me that this was just a lot of damn foolishness. That there weren't going to be any German ministries in existence, and if there were, under our instructions they would never be allowed to serve, and that we were going to have a far more chaotic condition than was visualized by this rather academic organization.

Before he got to Europe, however, Clay had been under the usual illusions. Asked what he thought he would find in Germany, he answered, "I knew pretty much the type and kind of physical destruction we were going to find. But I don't think I appreciated that there would be a complete breakdown of government (and all other services, really), largely through unconditional surrender."

"The totality of the German collapse took the invaders by surprise," White wrote. "They had expected that basic civil administration would continue to function and were nonplussed when it fell apart."

Compare this to the situation in Iraq in 2003:

Contrary to popular belief, the United States and the United Kingdom did undertake extensive planning for postwar Iraq. Unfortunately, this planning focused on humanitarian relief and was based on the assumption that the institutions of the Iraqi state, including police, could be relied upon to keep the state functioning and to maintain order after the overthrow of the regime. Prewar planning did not envisage the need for an extensive program of work in Iraq’s police and justice sectors.

Most of the administrative structures of central and local government had collapsed when the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) and its successor, the CPA, took over the administration of Iraq in April and May 2003. Whereas prewar planning had envisaged merely the removal of the top-level Ba’athists and regime loyalists, most of the security sector institutions evaporated overnight. The intelligence and security agencies, Ba’ath Party organizations, and paramilitaries went underground. Many soldiers simply left their units, and police officers went home. The disappearance of the state and party institutions left the country open to a wave of looting and disorder, exacerbated by organized sabotage.

Although coalition military planners had hoped to use some Iraqi army units for security and reconstruction tasks, the armed forces had effectively “self-demobilized,” and their infrastructure was devastated both during combat and during the looting that followed the collapse of the regime. Coalition officials also decided that it would be unconscionable to retain any of the secret police agencies that were so heavily associated with Saddam’s regime.

to be continued ...

Pearl

[posted by Callimachus]

It wasn't the politicians. It wasn't the hardware (though the sailors will tell you the ships had a will of their own). It wasn't the sociological context of Japanese-American competition. It was the men:

Most of the men who were burned were unrecognizable.

U.S.S. Arizona

About 0830 the Pennsylvania called by semaphore and sent a message "Senior destroyer officer report aboard". This message was interrupted by signalmen having to lie down due to terrific gun fire from enemy and own ship and came in two attempts.

U.S.S. Cassin

Had not a single order been issued – and very few had to be, in fact, – it is believed that every job would have been carried out by someone who saw the need for the task.

U.S.S. Helena

Chief Boatswain E. J. Hill, U.S. Navy, killed in action, is deserving of the highest commendation possible to be given for his skill, leadership and courage. At the height of the attack he led his line handling details to the quays, cast off the lines under fire, and then swam back to the ship. Later, while on the forecastle attempting to let go the anchors, he was blown overboard and killed by the explosion of several bombs. His performance of duty and devotion to duty was outstanding.

U.S.S. Nevada

Ensign H.W. Sears, D-V(G), U.S.N.R., who was ashore when the attack started, made his way back to the Navy Yard, but could only get aboard the U.S.S. Phoenix. As that vessel started out, Ensign Sears asked the Commanding Officer if he needed a turret officer. The answer being in the negative, Sears, as the Phoenix passed near the U.S.S. West Virginia, dove over the side and swam to the West Virginia.

U.S.S. West Virginia

REEVES, T.J., CRM(PA), deceased, was outstanding in his conduct in that upon being forced to abandon Main Radio, at request of Gunner PHARRIS, he assisted in a burning ammunition passageway, attempted to continue the flow of ammunition until overcome by smoke and fire.

U.S.S. California

[from a collection of offciers' action reports submitted in the days after the attack, found here]

Salute

[posted by Callimachus]

If this doesn't move you, you have icewater in your veins.

We have seen the same old warbird, every year, when it comes to the airshow near here, usually in late July. And it usually makes an overpass of our house during its flights. It's a sound you never hear anymore and you'll never forget. Sure, there are still propeller planes in the skies, but nothing with an engine that big. It growls like a Norse god trying to decide if he's pissed off or not.

You can hear one of them in the sky now, if you're lucky enough to live near an airport. Imagine hundreds of them in the air at once. Imagine what that sound meant to a boy in some English field in 1942, watching the crews head for the Channel to bomb Hitler. Imagine what it meant to the Japanese boy who saw the massive flyover the Americans made sure to show them coincidentally with the surrender in 1945, as a terminal exclamation point on the lesson in defeat.

I'm ambivalent about some of the missions they were sent on, but never about the men who flew them. Or about my fascination with the technology of their design and the manufacturing marvel that built them.

This summer, when they were here, my photographer son took some pictures. Here are a few of them. The last shows one of the old breed:

Among the Dead Cities

I so agree with the core of the ethical case presented in A.C. Grayling's "Among the Dead Cities" that I'm surprised how unsatisfying I find the book overall and how much I want to argue with the author.

A.C. Grayling grew up in postwar England, enthralled by the war, and he dreamed of being a fighter pilot. He built models of Spitfires and Lancasters and ran around in the yard with his arms out, dogfighting imaginary Messerschmitts. Yet he grew up to be a philosopher, not a fighter, and he's written a book that argues that much of the Allied air war -- British bombing of German cities and the U.S. bombings of Japanese cities, including the A-bomb attacks -- was an unjustifiable moral crime.

Whether we like it or not, this likely will be the judgment of the future: The area bombing campaigns will be seen as a black mark on a generally just Allied war against fascism and Japanese militarism. Which is not to say I would write such a book. As long as we still greet at family gatherings the veteran pilots and bombardiers, as well as some of the hundreds of thousands of American men whose lives were spared because Japan did not have to be conquered hill by hill, we who benefit from their bravery risk showing disrespect in condemning them via an academic exercise in ethics.

Grayling treads carefully, but I believe sincerely, around this pit. I think he passes the essential test to write this book, for those who can tolerate his conclusion. He is not a neo-Nazi and he denies he is a pacifist. He takes every opportunity his text presents to declare the Allies waged a just war. He never says the moral failure of the area bombing campaigns rises to the level where it overwhelms the justness of the Allies' war.

Nor does he blame the bomber crews or doubt their bravery, though he does mention in his conclusion that, in a perfect world, they would have refused missions known to be aimed at civilians and demanded to be sent against military targets.

Grayling's central precept is that "the means used to conduct the war must be proportional to the ends sought." This notion is not entirely accepted today, he acknowledges, but he shows it to be the essential quality of a just war, as that concept has evolved since Aquinas.

He does not claim the Allied area bombings of 1942-45 were a war crime, in that they violated any international laws then binding on the combatants. But he shows that they would have been considered such if judged by provisions set out by the victorious Allies themselves at the International Military Tribunal, the overseers of the Nuremberg Trials.

He is not concerned here with law so much as morality. Grayling's non-pacifist stance allows him to invoke the doctrine of double effect: "No wrong is committed by the belligerent if the harm he does to innocents is an unaviodable ancillary to military operations -- even if such harm can be foreseen." In other words, if the primary goal is good and legitimate, the negative secondary effect, even if foreseen, is -- not good, but not wrong.

This, too, is a controversial notion and one rejected outright by strict pacifists, for it legitimatizes some collateral damage. Grayling says the proportion doctrine applies:

Take the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: if these were claimed to be attacks on targets of military value, assuming there to have been industrial units or military barracks in these cities which 'military necessity' demanded should be destroyed, dropping an atom bomb on them is the equivalent to chopping off a man's head to cure his toothache, such is the degree of disproportion involved.

He lists the large arguments in favor of such bombing, then pushes them back. Was area bombing worse than what the Germans did to the Jews or the Japanese did in Nanking? Certainly not. But "the fact that a wrong is less than a competing wrong does not make it a right."

Did bombing civilians hasten the end of the war and thus spare the Allies greater battlefield casualties? Some say so. But saving military lives by substituting civilian ones is, Grayling says, like using civilians as human shields on the battlefield.

What's left among justifications are the lesser ones of whether the bombing did in fact have a military objective important enough to justify the civilian deaths and wanton destruction of culture and property. Grayling enlists the many historians who have argued effectively against this conclusion.

I can agree with Grayling about the moral error of the destruction of German cities and the firebombing of Toyko. But I part ways with him on his condemnation of the atomic bombs as identical to the obliteration of Dresden and Hamburg.

Yet I admit he scores points. "Bomber" Harris, who led the air destruction of Germany's cities, believed the air raids themselves would end the war in Europe, defeating the aggressors while sparing hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from death and wounds in an invasion.

This also is the common reason put forth in justification of the use of atomic bombs on Japan. And in the case of Japan, it's arguable (though not uniformly accepted) that it did hasten surrender. Nobody today argues this with regard to Germany. Yet as Grayling already has explained, saving military lives by substituting civilian ones is not morally acceptable, even if it works.

But if the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki really brought the war to a quick end, and spared Japan an invasion or a long starvation blockade, didn't that also save civilian lives? Perhaps ten times as many as were lost? Not just in Japan but in the wide swath of Asia it still occupied in 1945?

The need to wrap up World War II quickly and face the Cold War, which already had begun in 1945, is a grim fact of realpolitik, but not a justification for the A-bombs. There were other and more humane motives for ending the war sooner rather than later.

The option of setting off a bomb in an unpopulated area in view of Japanese leadership, which Grayling favors, seems to present the enormous risk of it not working.

The oddest section of the book is the chapter titled "Voices of Conscience," where he describes the opposition of British pacifists during the war to the bombing of German cities. He focuses on the Committee for the Abolition of Night Bombing, which formed in the summer of 1941 and in the spring of 1942 reorganized as the Bombing Restriction Committee.

He describes and quotes from its criticisms at length. Then he writes that the point of the chapter is to prove the bombing campaigns were controversial at the time and that the objections to them were spelled out and known to the organizers of the bombings. It is a point in the legalistic case he is building against the bombings.

But it feels like more; Grayling quotes extensively throughout his book from the British pacifist novelist and committee member Vera Brittain, who is an eloquent and principled figure even to a non-pacifist. In his own conclusions, he defers to her entirely in certain key matters, writing (probably correctly) that no one could say it better than she did. Yet she was a pacifist, and Grayling claims not to be; he claims to find certain cases of civilian deaths in war morally acceptable, and certain wars justified.

Which makes his choice of voices in this chapter all the more puzzling. He notes, correctly, that not all in the committees were pacifists. But with the exception of the Bishop of Chichester, those he focuses on, and quotes, tend to be absolute pacifists. Most of them would disagree vehemently with his distinguishing one type of war as good and another as bad.

He describes them as:

... people for whom it mattered that the war should be not only a justified one, but a justly fought one, and to whom therefore some of the Allies' actions were unacceptable.

Which makes them sound like a realistic lot who essentially agree with his propositions, not the kind of pacifists who wouldn't even fight Hitler.

As they are meant to be witnesses in his case, it is pertinent to question the competence of the witnesses. Grayling does not, but by consulting other sources we can. These individuals did not spring out of obscure and apolitical lives once news of the Allied bombing reached them.

Grayling quotes much from the organizer of the anti-bombing committee, Corder Catchpool, a British Quaker. Catchpool spent the years after World War I in Germany with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee, "Set up to further the task of reconciliation between the combatant nations. He remained in Germany for a time after the Nazi regime came to power, but his help for Jews attracted the attentions of the Gestapo, and he was arrested and interrogated by them. He returned to England soon afterward."

And there he carried on freely, denouncing the government, publishing, organizing, and opposing the war against the Nazis. Which speaks volumes about the nature of dissent and free societies, which you'd think a philosopher would at least notice, but Grayling seems not to.

"He had no illusions about Nazi Germany," (No? Then why did he claim in 1937 that National-Socialist philosophy "definitely repudiates" world-imperialist ambitions) "but he adhered to his Quaker pacifist principles despite that." I grew up among Quakers, and I am not aware that their principles include standing up for a cause only in a place where doing so won't get you arrested by the Gestapo.

Catchpool was an absolutist pacifist who welcomed the fall of France in 1940 as "the happiest day of my life" because one less nation was at war, and in 1944 he wrote, "I cannot pray for an Anglo-American victory, not even for a quick one." When the German concentration camps were uncovered late in the war, Catchpool did not condone them, but he seemed more concerned that their revelation was "a godsend to our authorities just at this juncture, and that the most is being made of them."

Such attitudes and such minds were what moved George Orwell to the famous conclusion that, in this war, a pacifist was objectively pro-fascist.

Another anti-bombing campaigner cited by Grayling, Stuart Morris, an Episcopal canon, was naive enough that in 1937 he had joined The Link, a British Nazi-sympathizer organization, and a year after the Munich agreement pronounced himself in favor "of giving a great deal more away [to Hitler]. I don't think Mr. Chamberlain has really started yet on any serious appeasement." Morris stood at a by-election in May 1941 on a platform calling for a negotiated peace with Hitler. Shortly before Christmas 1942 he was arrested in possession of "secret details about how Britain would respond to a serious challenge to its position in India." [Ceadel, "Semi-Detached Idealists']

If these were the most vocal opponents of the anti-bombing movement, it's no wonder even Eleanor Roosevelt dismissed their concerns as part of their airy world-view. They happened to be among those who were right about the bombing of civilian targets. But at the time their leadership of the cause rather damaged it than advanced it, by making it odious by association. It's an oft-rehearsed scene in American history -- think of the Abolitionists.

Grayling's book also has an annoying tendency to pick tangential fights and then walk away from them. He hints the defenders of Capt. Henry Wirz, of Andersonville notoriety, are merely a pack of kooky neo-Confederates (they aren't). Even more aggravating, he introduces the notion that the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender in World War II had the effect of "prolonging the war considerably, with consequent great destruction and loss of life," after having pre-emptively backed away from it by saying those were questions for "a different book." His discussion of what does, and does not, constitute just cause for starting a war reads like a line-by-line critique of the Bush Administration's handling of Iraq, but nowhere in it does Grayling step up and mention either by name.

He brings up the Morgenthau plan -- a proposal ginned up in the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., and temporarily sanctioned by Roosevelt, to dismantle German industry after the war and turn the defeated nation into a demilitarized agrarian region. But Grayling's text nowhere notes that Harry Dexter White, who drew up the plan on Morgenthau's orders, was spying for the Soviet Union and the idea of a passive Germany fit White's vision of a post-war world in which planned economies would rule and the Soviets would dominate Europe. The plan was approved heartily by the Kremlin; it was the British and the U.S. State Department that opposed it.

White's double-dealing is borne out by the VENONA transcripts, even without reference to the Mitrokhin archive, which further bolsters it though that source is not universally accepted. But Grayling, in a footnote, dismisses all this as a whim of "revisionist and neo-Nazi historians" and makes it out to be mere McCarthyism, though he refutes it only with the unsurprising refusal of White's children to believe their father had been a traitor.

Grayling's misstep into the Morgenthau plan is part of an unconvincing section in which he attempts to prove wartime American blood-lust against Germans. In fact, most of the evidence he musters for that seems to me cases of political and publishing mavens trying to whip up anti-German sentiment in a population itself largely of German ancestry that had no particular race hatred for the Germans. Certainly the Americans' animosity toward the Germans was many levels below the mutual viciousness felt by the Americans and the Japanese (see John Dower's excellent book on this).

For the most part Grayling avoids making any explicit connection to modern events; he has drawn his case so narrowly around World War II that his conclusions hardly can be plugged into current event without burying them in a blizzard of caveats. Perhaps it's just as well; in the passage where Grayling tries to explain why all this should matter today, he cites the wording of U.S. military manuals from the 1990s suggesting civilian morale can be a factor in a military campaign.

Ah, those American barbarians! What would have been more interesting is to examine how air power in Afghanistan and Iraq is vastly more careful and conscientious than it was in World War II. But that seems not to interest Grayling. He skips over more pertinent modern examples of Russian bombing of Grozny or the Kurdish towns that were gassed by Saddam in the headlong rush for the easy American target, even if it's only a crime of word-choice.



Not only is the thinking in this book difficult to apply to current issues, it has limited relevance even to World War II. Grayling seems to regard as acceptable military strategy the Anglo-American bombing of French and Belgian cities, such as Caen (above, with Canadian troops at a religious service in 1944), which meted out firestorm destruction worse than many German cities suffered.

The goal in leveling Caen was to kill the German troops in it and allow a breakout from Normandy; the citizens of the town were warned in advance by leaflets that the bombs were coming. Nobody wanted to kill a lot of Frenchmen, as a military objective or otherwise. Yet nonetheless they died in the thousands and a medieval city was blown inside out, with tragic loss of historical and architectural treasures.

Further, because the British front was so close to the town, the bombers deliberately dropped their explosives a safe distance beyond the front, to avoid hitting their own men, which means the bombs apparently missed not only the British troops but the Germans as well and simply fell into the old city to no good purpose.

Grayling declares precision bombing aimed at specific military targets as legitimate and morally acceptable. This exempts most of the raids by the American air forces in Europe from his indictment, since they targeted German oil facilities and similar targets. The American bombing campaign "proved highly effective" and "was proportionate and pertinent; it could also legitimately claim to be a necessary part of the effort to defeat Germany. The area bombing of civilian populations was not necessary."

But this has problems, too. The Americans, in avoiding the heavy concentration of anti-aircraft fire around military targets, dropped from high altitudes and often with little ability to really aim for what they were after. The fact that such military targets as rail junctions and large-scale processing and manufacturing industries tend naturally to be surrounded by dense blocks of homes meant this tactic could be, and often was, as lethal as deliberate city-bombing.

And how do the ethics of air power apply to a ground war? The U.S. Army pushed through central Germany in the spring of 1945, with the German military before it mostly reduced to small ill-trained units, but when the Americans met any sustained resistance they pulled back, called in artillery, and blasted whatever was in front of them, whether it was a wooded ridge or a farming village.

The experience of Neuhof in the Frankenhöhe was typical of hundreds of other small German towns. The 92nd Cav. Recon Squadron reached it toward evening on April 15 and ran into a battle group of young SS soldiers north of the town. The Americans held off and pounded the town with artillery all night. In the morning, they waited for the fog to lift, then blasted Neuhof with phosphorous shells, setting everything ablaze. They attacked again at noon with infantry and tanks, but they still met resistance, so they poured more artillery and tank fire into the town. They finally took it at 5 p.m. that evening.

By that time only a few buildings still stood intact in Neuhof, most of the ancient village having been reduced to a glowing pile of ash and shattered stone. Cries from the wounded, strewn about with a dozen or so dead, intermingled with shouts for help from those still fighting fires and the occasional shots from American tanks to create a Dantesque atmosphere. [Stephen G. Fritz, "Endkampf," p.170]

In measuring the "proportion" and "double effect" rules, a philosopher can be content with images of cutting off heads to cure toothaches. A military commander in the field has to deal in more tangible material. Am I more responsible for protecting the lives of the men in my command than I am for those in the enemy's ranks? Yes. What about their civilians? If I kill 50 enemy soldiers and 1 civilian, is that proportionate? Are 10 civilians? If we have a 60 percent chance of killing Hitler if we bomb a certain city of 20,000 on a certain date without warning, is that legitimate?

These are questions more pertinent to the modern face of warfare. But Grayling's book is mute on them. In the end he's shone such a narrow shaft of illumination that "Among the Dead Cities" doesn't add much to what Billy Sherman said about war and hell.

April

Two lilacs out of the dead land have followed me all this month.




She was old enough to be mother to many of them -- her own daughter turned 20 in 1944 -- but she was sexuality personified, with that low, sultry, German-heavy voice, yet she was sure and at ease in that masculine world of the U.S. Army. She crooned "Lili Marleen" to the boys (and, believe it or not, also performed on the musical saw) as the snow drifted down in Luxemburg. None of them ever forgot it. She was fearless; she wore a GI's uniform and stayed so close to the front lines she almost got caught up in the German push when the Battle of the Bulge began. “Eine Mutter Teresa," Billy Wilder would say later, "aber mit schöneren Beinen.”

Maria Magdalena "Marlene" Dietrich had found herself on the other side of things more than once. Born in Berlin's Schöneberg neighborhood, she acted in German movies and cut records while dancing as a chorus girl in cabarets and in stage plays. She got her break in 1930 with the first European talkie, "Der Blaue Engel." Josef von Sternberg plucked her from a play, where she had only one line, to be his Lola Lola.

The studio heads at UFA weren't impressed. One director's assistant quipped, "The ass isn't bad, but don't we also need a face." But Sternberg insisted. And Marlene found herself in the part.

"Der Blaue Engel" premiered April 1, 1930, in Gloria-Palast, Berlin, and it was an instant hit. The next day, Dietrich departed for America, and Hollywood, aboard the SS Bremen. The German studio had thought her a mere tramp and not offered her a contract.

She was a good German girl who hadn't wanted to go to Hollywood in the first place, and if it weren't for the ambitions of the men in her life, perhaps she would not have gone. She came home again and spent the winter of 1930 in Berlin. When her contract with Paramount was running out two years later, she made plans to return to Germany for good. Her mother even rented an apartment for her in Berlin. But that was in 1933.

Hitler swept to power that year, and Marlene changed her plans. On her trip to Europe that year, she never set foot in Germany, and she renewed her Paramount contract. In 1937 she applied for American citizenship.

Her loyalty to a country came second to her loyalty to a place. That place was Berlin -- and Berlin, unlike Rome, is not an eternal city. It always was a robust, artificial place, the closest thing to an American city in old Europe. The Berlin Marlene knew was the decadent Weimar Republic capital, a heady mix of high and low. Its people had that rarest of German qualities, a sense of humor -- albeit "gallows humor." The Nazis despised Berlin. They didn't like humor, or trade unions, or homosexuals, or outspoken people with opinions, or Jews -- and Berlin was full of all of them.

They didn't like "Der Blaue Engel," either. They called it "mediocre and corrupting kitsch." But they liked Marlene. She was a blonde goddess, an Aryan queen. Hitler wanted her “heim ins Reich zu holen.” In 1936, Goebbels offered her 200,000 Reichsmark per film to come home and be a star in Germany. She replied cynically she would return only when one of her many Jewish friends could accompany her.

When artists and intellectuals began to flee Germany after 1933, they found Marlene already here to greet them. Many of the people involved in the making of "Der Blaue Engel" ended up exiles. Others who remained ended up dead.



The other shade is, in some ways, as unlike Marlene as a human could be. Yet his image in his time, like a movie star's, was made up in part of unforgettable visuals: the perfect white-bearded soldierly figure, mounted on his gray stallion, Traveller. Devout, humble, reserved, aggressive on the battlefield, unfailingly courteous off it. Robert E. Lee was the model of a Southern gentleman.

Lee and Deitrich. Both in their times forced to choose between two loyalties. They chose differently; he chose home, she foresook it. Both traitors, but both heroes.

***

In April 1861, Lincoln quietly approached a cavalry colonel on leave, Robert E. Lee, the former head of the U.S. Military Academy, about heading up the North's army in the war that had just erupted at Fort Sumter. Lincoln must have had a feeling for Lee's divided loyalties, because he chose Francis P. Blair, from the Baltimore gentry family that will give Lincoln the token "Southerner" in his Cabinet, to take the message to Lee. Blair's coach clattered across the Potomac bridge to Arlington House, where Lee had taken a leave of absence from the military to put his wife's inherited estate in order.

He had spent most of his 54 years toiling in the obscurity that was the professional U.S. Army in the 19th century. But his father and uncles had helped forge the American union with their own blood. I've seen the house where "Lighthorse Harry" Lee plotted his escapades as he played cat-and-mouse with the British in the snowbound Pennsylvania countryside in the Valley Forge Winter.

Robert E. Lee in 1861 thought the secession of the Deep South states was a tragic mistake, and unjustified by the constitution. He thought the same when Virginia, in the wake of the Fort Sumter attack, followed them out of the union. He had no special fondness for slavery (he would be among those who argued the South should surrender the institution for the sake of winning the war). But when Blair made his offer, Lee turned him down. Instead, he resigned his U.S. Army commission and offered his services to his home state, Virginia.

"With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen," he wrote to his sister on April 20, 1861, "I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword."

Another Virginia horseman who served the South looked back years later on the decision faced by men such as Lee. As he wrote, he had open before him "The University Memorial, which recorded the names and lives of the alumni of the University of Virginia who fell in the Confederate war," some 200 of them:

“[A]nd some of the noblest men who figure in its pages were Union men; and the Memorial of the Virginia Military Institute tells the same story with the same eloquence. The State was imperiled, and parties disappeared; and of the combatants in the field, some of the bravest and the most conspicuous belonged to those whose love of the old Union was warm and strong, to whom the severance of the tie that bound the States together was a personal grief. But even those who prophesied the worst, who predicted a long and bloody struggle and a doubtful result, had no question about the duty of the citizen. ... The most intimate friend I ever had, who fell after heroic services, was known by all our circle to be utterly at variance with the prevalent Southern view of the quarrel, and died upholding a right which was not a right to him except so far as the mandate of his State made it a right; and while he would have preferred to see “the old flag” floating over a united people, he restored the new banner to its place time after time when it had been cut down by shot and shell."

Lee must have known he was risking everything, including his neck. Arlington was sacked and looted, and turned into headquarters for officers superintending the defenses of Washington. The government took the home, under pretext of Mrs. Lee not paying her taxes, and turned it into a cemetery.

The government may have pardoned Lee, but the people of the North never did. An Ohio newspaper, trying to parse out the proper punishment, suggested "he be hung first and then banished." When Lee was made president of Washington College in Lexington, Va., a Northern minister wrote:

We would as soon send our son to a pest-house for health or to a gambler's den for education, as to send him to this villainous college -- Altogether he stands out the most inexcusable, vilest traitor of the whole crowd of criminals whom he headed -- Every student who receives a diploma at his hands should be hissed through life--A more flagrant, indecent, unspeakable outrrage than his election has never been perpetrated in the name of education."

Why did he do it? Principle, yes. But in his heart, he knew where was "home." And that's where he went to take his gun and stand duty when war came. I think millions of men did that, on both sides, in April 1861. Those who happened to find themselves on the other side of the line, when the line took shape, made their way to where they felt they belonged. That is how people are.

***

When World War II broke out, Marlene Dietrich's career had passed its prime and she had reached that point in the Hollywood trajectory where her best roles were deliberate parodies of herself. She had never stopped thinking in German, and never bothered to Hollywood-ize herself.

Yet when America went to war against Germany, she threw herself into war work with a will. She was one of the first celebrities to raise war bonds, and she followed the troops through North Africa and into Europe in a USO revue. She rolled into liberated Paris with De Gaulle. She recorded anti-Nazi records in German for the OSS -- the precursor of the CIA.

Why do all this? She famously replied, "aus Anstand" – a German phrase that rolls up both "decency" and "the right thing to do."

And some of those boys she sang to near the front then climbed into B-24s and rained down incendiary bombs on Berlin, where her twice-widowed mother, Frau Von Loesch, still lived.

When she met American generals, she would quietly plead with them to get to Berlin, after it fell, and find her mother.

Lt Gen James M. Gavin, US Army retired, then the 82nd Airborne Division's commander and I were two who heard Miss Dietrich's request. Another, Lt Col Albert McCleery, has since died.

Col McCleery and I were in the first American column to enter Berlin on 1 July 1945. Once inside city limits Col McCleery made a beeline for the Von Loesch address, found Miss Dietrich's mother alive and well, but meagerly fed and caring for a 95-year old aunt. Word was sent to Paris to her daughter, who immediately caught a flight to Berlin on the military shuttle, as she was in the USO then. When her estimated time of arrival was known at Berlin's Tempelhof airport, I gathered up Frau von Loesch and two photographers, and took them to meet her.

Frau Von Loesch was instructed to stand alone on the runway's great cement apron and I asked the tower to have a shuttle taxi up for her. When her daughter burst from the plane, it made for one of the most touching reunions of the war.

Later, when Gen Gavin and I were in London, two terrible messages were forwarded to us - the Army had selected the 101st Airborne Division to be the regular Army's postwar airborne unit so the 82nd would be dismantled and Frau von Loesch had died. As our plane flew us back to Berlin, Gen Gavin, softspoken as always and with his own grief about seeing the division which was so much a part of him consigned to oblivion, turned to me and said: "Do everything you can about her". He did not say her name, but it was obvious that he meant Frau von Loesch. After all, the nonfraternization regulation was in existence and no legal interrelationships were possible between Americans and Germans, even concerning burial of dead.

Once on the ground in Berlin, we learned that Miss Dietrich was flying in. There was not much time. I got four 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers to go to a nearby cemetery and dig a grave. A German undertaker was contacted to perform his role, which included the hiring of three professional mourners, who were part of such ceremonies.

Under the cover of darkness, the four paratroopers went to the second-floor flat once occupied by Frau von Loesch, where her body lay in a plan coffin. They took the coffin down the steep stairs, placed it reverently in a truck and transported it to the cemetery, where it was placed in a grave. The sun was about to come up on the dreary scene, so they went into hiding.

Marlene Dietrich arrived, escorted by Time magazine war correspondent William Walton. He had jumped with the 82nd in Normandy and since he was a member of the press, attending a German funeral would not be held against him. The graveside finalities were short. Miss Dietrich cried constantly. At the end of the service, she and William Walton cast handfulls of dirt on the coffin, turned their backs and walked away. That night, the four paratroopers filled in the resting place. It was a macabre scene, as the cemetery had been heavily bombed by artillery. Only the grave of Frau van Loesch was intact.

The cause of death was heart failure. “Ich fühlte," Marlene said, "dass ich nicht nur meine Mutter zur Grabe getragen hatte, sondern dass es das Deutschland, das ich liebte, nicht mehr gibt.”

Berliners never made peace with her while she lived. The press told ugly stories about her, but bad publicity wasn't needed. She felt she was a Berliner, but Berliners felt she was always somewhere else during their long half-century of suffering. When she visited the city in 1960, she was pelted with tomatoes and eggs and told “Marlene, hau ab,"and “Bleib wo du bist.”

She resolved not to go back, and she didn't. She died in Paris in 1992. Some 3,500 turned out for a memorial service in La Madeleine, but there was no official acknowledgement in Berlin. Yet she wanted to be buried beside her mother, in Friedenau Cemetery, in Berlin-Schöneberg. And so she was, in a coffin draped with an American flag.

Political leaders in Berlin-Schöneberg in 1996 tried to name a street for her -- an unglamorous small industrial strip -- but even that ran into insurmountable opposition. A year later, developers named a complex for her in a project they were erecting in what had been a windswept wasteland in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. "She finally found a place in the anonymous glitz of the new Potsdamer Platz," historian David Clay Large wrote, "primarily because there was no living constituency there to keep her away."

One of her online biographies explains, "That her taking the side of the 'enemy' was itself a form of love and loyalty to her homeland, represents an understanding ever elusive in Germany." As it certainly would be anywhere.

Lying and Spying

This observation builds on an excellent post by Neo, explaining the semantics of lying, and pondering on the mindset of people who apply it to the war in Iraq, on the notion that "The President told me something that (apparently) turned out not to be true, therefore he lied."

In truth, the hallmark of a lie is that its locus is in the speaker. To be lying, the speaker must be aware of the falsehood of the utterances. So whether or not something is a lie has nothing to do with the listener, and everything to do with the teller.

But many listeners in our day and age have lost sight--not just of truth vs. relative truth, or objective vs. subjective truth--but of any truth-falsehood distinction outside of their own perceptions. So the new definition of a lie has become: something that fooled me. Something that I heard and thought was true, and then discovered wasn't true. It made me angry to be jerked around like that. So it's a lie.

There's little I can add to her thorough presentation. But I have been thinking about the "Bush Lied Lite" claim that the administration "cherry-picked" the evidence of Saddam's involvement in terrorism or his acquisition of WMD.

No one, I hope, is so blind to evidence to believe that Saddam had forsaken his dream of wielding a menacing military power. He'd have taken a nuclear weapon any way he could get it, and the best you can say on his behalf was that he was biding his time in the hope and expectation that he could undermine the sanctions regime and split the alliance against him, with the aid of useful idiots abroad, and resume his race to build up a WMD arsenal.

That observation, pertinent or not to the topic at hand, never should be left out of any discussion of the WMD issue.

Now I'm no expert in espionage, except what I've read about it in broader histories of other topics. But it seems to me to be essentially the business of discovering what the other fellow is up to. There are fundamentally two types of mistake you can make at it: to fail to perceive a threat, or to perceive one that does not exist.

Of the two, the former is more catastrophic -- think Pearl Harbor, or Sept. 11 -- and so if the two errors represent the Scylla and Charybdis of the system, the conscientious espionage worker will strive to sail between them, but tack slightly closer toward the error of over-assumption.

The intelligence trade has two components: collection and analysis -- call them hands and head. Agents in the field will gather a mass of data and information: tips from credible sources, rumors, the gleanings of wiretaps and intercepts, newspaper reports. Among them will be some true facts, and some wrong ones and some good guesses, and some bad guesses, and some deliberate deceptions planted by the other side.

It's the analysts' job to try to weed through them and find the best bits of information and use them to construct a coherent picture of what the other fellow is up to. Of course it's "cherry-picking." That's the whole nature of this part of the business. And, again, there likely will be a bias toward seeing something rather than not seeing it.

Americans never have been good at this, frankly. Especially the analysis part. It's part of why we still rely so much on foreign intelligence services to pass along information to us (something you can discover by reading between the lines of the various domestic inquiries into the misleading U.S. intelligence on Iraq).

In World War II, the British had the best-balanced espionage. Americans had decent intelligence-gathering (especially as a result of code-cracking), but iffy analysis. The French, before they got knocked out, had superb espionage in Nazi Germany, but they lacked the political will to act on it. The Soviets also had a vast network of spies -- in the capitals of their nominal allies Britain and America. They didn't know anything about Germany and didn't seem inclined to do anything but accept the tips dutifully passed along to them by the governments in London and Washington. Their analysis was worse than the Americans'.

An intelligence agency can build up a picture that vastly over-rates an enemy's strength and capabilities without any outside political interference. In fact, it seems to be a systemic tendency. Alan Pinkerton, McClellan's spymaster in the Civil War, consistently over-estimated the strength of Confederate forces, which accounts in part for McClellan's cautious ineffectiveness.

An even more remarkable example of American intelligence error turns up at the end of World War II. The U.S. convinced itself Hitler was preparing a vast, impenetrable "national redoubt" in the Alps, a self-sufficient Alpenfestung where he and his most rabid followers planned to hold out for years.

The situation that led to this mistaken belief was structurally similar to the run-up to the Iraq War intelligence fiasco:

• A previous failure to perceive an enemy threat. In World War II, it was the Nazi concentration and attack in the Ardennes in late 1944 that led to the Battle of the Bulge. In Iraq, it was the realization, after the 1991 war, that Saddam was much more dangerously armed and capable than the West had suspected.
  
  
• An image consistent with the known character of the enemy. The Allies knew Hitler had sworn there never would be "another 1918" in Germany; he would fight to the last, and he had legions of fanatical followers. The mountains of Bavaria were the birthplace of Nazism and exerted a romantic, almost mystical pull on the party leaders. Furthermore, the Allies knew the Nazis had, in fact, moved some armaments factories underground in other places to escape Allied bombing. In Iraq 60 years later, Saddam did covet WMD and had gone to tremendous lengths to acquire them. His secretiveness and evasions in the face of inspections were legendary. The sanctions against him were known to be porous, and he continued to probe for a hole in them, as when he approached Niger about uranium.
  
  
• Deliberate deception. Saddam gave every indication that he had potent weapons, even while he officially denied it. He blustered like a man with a hidden arsenal -- he would have been a fool not to, given his neighborhood. In World War II, Goebbels, when he learned of the American hysteria over the Alpenfestung, set up an entire propaganda office to encourage them to think it was true.
  

It is not necessary to presume some coldly calculated political deception behind such a self-sustaining deception. It requires no presidential plotting. When the Alpenfestung hysteria was at its peak, in February and March 1945, America effectively had no president. FDR was dying and incapable of guiding policy, which was created instead from the rival State and Treasury departments (both heavily infiltrated by Soviet agents). Militarily, Eisenhower was on his own in Europe, brushing aside the agendas of the British and French and determining targets for the U.S. armies that by now formed the bulk of the fighting force on the western front.

The notion of a Nazi Alpenfestung arose in Switzerland, which had in fact used its natural topography to turn itself into a fortress state. The Swiss, observing across the border into the Tyrol, imagined they saw the Germans doing the same thing. In fact, the Germans had begun to scout defensive locations along the old World War I frontier of Italy as their armies in the peninsula slowly withdrew to the north. Many leading Western intelligence agents were based in Switzerland, as well as newspaper correspondents. The stories began to percolate.

The more the Americans thought about it, the more alarmed they became. A look at the map revealed the Alps as a natural focus of retreat for the hundreds of thousands of German troops still undefeated in northern Italy, Hungary, and Bohemia. There were known to be old salt mines and tunnels deep into the mountains. The prevailing weather would neutralize the Allies' great advantage in air power. It all began to make sense. Soon the stories had grown to tell of monstrous fortifications, underground factories, secret airfields, armies of slave laborers, stockpiles of supplies.

Hitler and the top Nazis and surviving generals would retreat there as the pincers closed around Berlin, and from the Alps they would lead a resistance that could hold out for years. They would hope for a split among the Allies, or gain time to develop a dreaded secret weapon. To storm the Alpenfestung would cost the Allies more casualties than Normandy, would drain vital resources needed in the Pacific, and still likely would leave behind fanatical Nazi remnants who would keep alive for generations the myth of unvanquished National Socialism.

Never mind the obvious evidence that the Nazis at this stage of the war lacked material capabilities to construct such an empire along the hundreds of miles of mountains from Lake Constance to Carinthia.

Allen Dulles, Office of Strategic Services representative in Bern, initially was skeptical of the Alpenfestung reports, but he dutifully passed them up to Washington anyhow. But by February 1945 he was writing as though the redoubt was a reality and something to be deeply concerned about, even though he admitted "it is impossible to put your finger on the particular area where the foodstuffs are being collected, or where these underground factories are being prepared."

Maj. Gen. Kenneth Strong, head of intell at SHAEF, by March 1945 also was treating the Alpenfestung as a reality, despite the obvious paucity of real evidence. "[R]eports of deep dugouts, secret hiding-places, underground factories, and bombproof headquarters were confusing and unconvincing. No single piece of information could be confirmed." But, he added, "After the Ardennes, I was taking no more chances."

Once the idea became fixed in the minds of the U.S. military and espionage leaders, every new observation was fitted into it. Aerial observation of long trains headed south in Germany were seen as confirmation of the Alpenfestung. In fact, they were full of looted art treasures being sent south for safekeeping.

Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the huge map that hung in Ike's headquarters, labeled "Reported National Redoubt." Every new tip and observation within the suspect area was marked with a red dot. Naturally, red dots proliferated within the space, and didn't exist outside it, and you had to get much closer to the map to see that most of them were marked "unconfirmed."

In fact, the idea was never more than a lark to the Germans. Hans Gontard, the SS Sturmbannführer in the border town of Bregenz had begun feeding the hints into Switzerland. When he saw reports out of Washington taking them seriously, he laughed at the gullible Americans. He described the deception to the gauleiter of Tyrol, who realized that this actually was a good idea, and he sent a memo about it to Martin Bormann in Berlin.

But Hitler may never have heard of it. Bormann wisely pocketed the memo, realizing that the Führer at that point still was intent on a military victory, not a defeatist retreat. Only Goebbels used the idea, and only for propaganda to terrify the Allies.

The idea of a Nazi Götterdämmerung high in the aeries of the Alps seemed to fit Hitler's self-dreams so much better than his eventual fate, to die like a rat amid the drab canals of Berlin. "Allied military officials were thinking more like the Nazis than the Nazis themselves," writes Stephen G. Fritz, who opens his "Endkampf" with an excellent brief account of the redoubt hysteria.

The Americans convinced themselves that the redoubt was real -- or that the likelihood of its being real was too great, and the consequences too serious, to be ignored.

The decisions had consequences. Eisenhower, by wheeling his armies southward, deprived Churchill and Montgomery of their dream of marching to Berlin. This was more a British fantasy than a realistic strategy by early 1945. But the Alpenfestung hysteria did cause Eisenhower to hold back Patton from marching on to Prague, and if he had done so Patton might have kept the Russians out and spared the one Eastern European nation that hadn't already been lost to the pleasures of a Soviet utopia.

The depletion of Western Allied forces in northern Germany also opened the door for the Russians to make a rush toward Denmark (and the rest of Scandinavia) after the fall of Berlin, which they in fact tried and might have accomplished had not Montgomery deliberately blocked them on the Lüneburg Heath. The Cold War might have been fought along a different Iron Curtain line, with different results.