An observation about the dangers of contemporary histories.

 

 Saddled British donkeys, turn of the prior century, waiting for a hack.

I've noted this before, but it's a dangerous matter, when writing history, to rely too heavily on the first hand observations of those close to events.  Indeed, I've sent it out here, in a slightly different form:

 Holscher's Seventh Law of History.  No accurate history can be written until 60 years have passed since the event.

A really thorough history of  an event cannot be written close in time to the event.  Indeed, several decades must pass from the event's occurrence before an accurate history can be written.

That may sound shocking (although at least historian Ladislas Farago noted this in the introduction to his early biography of George S. Patton; Patton:  Ordeal and  Triumph) but its true.  Close in time to an event, authors tend to be too much men of their own times with their views colored by the context of those times. Such influences tend to remain at least as long as twenty years after an event occurs.  Direct participants in an event have a stake in what occurred, which also tend to inform and color their views.

Beyond that, however, and very significantly, authors who write close in time to an event, including those who participated in it, tend to simply accept certain conditions as the norm, and therefore diminish their importance int their writings or omit them entirely.  Conversely, they tend to emphasize things that were new or novel, for the same reasons.  Given that, early written records tend to overplay the new and omit the routine, so that later readers assume the new was the normal and they don't even consider the routine.

Take for example the often written about story of the German army during World War Two.  Only more informed historians realize that most of the German army was no more mechanized during World War Two than it was during World War One.  Fewer yet realize that a fair number of German soldiers remained horse mounted during World War Two for one reason or another.  Period writers had little reason to emphasize this, however, as it really wasn't novel at all at the time, and not very dramatic either, and reflected similar conditions in many armies.

This doesn't mean that early works and first hand recollections aren't valuable.  Rather, it means that a person cannot base his final view on those early works, however.  It also provides the answer as to why later historical works on a frequently addressed topic are not only valuable, but necessary.  Rick Atkinson's and Max Hasting's recent works on World War Two, for example, really place the conflict in context in all sorts of ways for the very first time.  The plethora of new books on the First World War that were at first regarded as revisionist are in fact corrective, and likewise the war is coming into accurate focus for the first time.

 

 Cavalryman, Ft. Riley Kansas, 1942.

I don't mean to rehash myself, and goodness knows I don't need to, as I blabber here enough.  But this is something that occurs to me again and again, in terms of writing history.  Contemporary accounts of things are naturally geared towards the dramatic and unusual, not the routine and normal.

News accounts from World War Two emphasized the mechanized nature of the German army, as mechanization was new and spectacular.  The fact that most of the German forces weren't mechanized wasn't interesting to contemporary journalist, as that was the long historical norm.  You can't expect, really, the average journalist to write that most of the German troops he was viewing were walking, or that the Germans deployed cavalry in France.  You'd have expected the Germans to do that, as every army would have done that.

For that matter, you wouldn't get too excited, if you were writing about farms, noting that men were in their fields plowing with horses in the 1940s.  Men had always done that, so it was hardly worth noting.  That there were new tractors and automated implements would be more interesting.

If you are writing about daily living today, you probably don't write about how many ink pens, or pencils, you have in the house.  Computers are still new enough, even now, that they're the exciting thing. That the old writing tools are around, probably doesn't interest you that much.  But they are.

The point generally is that, when looking at history in any context, you have to recall that the mundane and normal of the times often goes unrecorded, the weird unusual and spectacular does. But that colors our view of what was written about any one time, and often the mundane and normal of the past is what would interest us now.

The "Greatest Generation". Admiring the generation while disliking that monkier.

WESTMORELAND. O that we now had here
    But one ten thousand of those men in England
    That do no work to-day!
 
KING. What's he that wishes so?
    My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
    If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
    To do our country loss; and if to live,
    The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
    God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
    By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
    Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
    It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
    Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
    But if it be a sin to covet honour,
    I am the most offending soul alive.
    No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
    God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
    As one man more methinks would share from me
    For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
    Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
    That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
    Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
    And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
    We would not die in that man's company
    That fears his fellowship to die with us.
    This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
    He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
    Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
    And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
    He that shall live this day, and see old age,
    Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
    And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
    Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
    And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
    Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
    But he'll remember, with advantages,
    What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
    Familiar in his mouth as household words-
    Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
    Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
    Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
    This story shall the good man teach his son;
    And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered-
    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition;
    And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
    Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

 From Henry V.

 Members of the 4442nd Regimental Combat Team in action in Italy. The 4442nd's enlisted ranks were entirely made up of Japanese Americans, largely recruited from internment camps.  It is the most decorated unit in the American Army of World War Two.

The recent anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, which commenced on June 6, 1944, and which started the nine month period in which the Allies in the west marched towards Germany, and into it (while of course the Soviets marched  in from the east at the same time) has caused a lot of public recollection of the nation's World War Two veterans. And that's a good thing.  But one of the things we hear a lot in such recollections, not by the veterans themselves, but by those recalling them, is the term applied to them by Tom Brokaw in his book about their generations; i.e., "The Greatest Generation".

It may be a minor thing, but the term has long bothered me to a certain extent.  I was surprised recently when author Rick Atkinson, who wrote the phenomenal three volume series on  the American Army in the ETO during World War Two, The Liberation Trilogy, stated the same thing, in much blunter terms, in an interview on the occasion of the release of his third volume, The Guns At Last Light.  He flatly stated that they aren't the "greatest" generation and was slightly condescending regarding the term.

I don't mean to suggest that the American generation that fought World War Two isn't highly admirable, I think they were, but I am glad to hear at least Atkinson make that comment.  Here's why.

For those with long memories, or perhaps just for those who grew up in the 60s and 70s, "the war" meant World War Two.  We all knew a lot of World War Two veterans.  So, "the war" was World War Two.  Even when Korean War veterans like my father spoke of "the war", they meant World War Two.

A soldier comforts a comrade grieving over the death of a wounded comrade.  Fought using a mix of new and World War Two weapons, the Korean War caught the American Army off guard when it featured conventional combat recalling World War Two and World War One.  It never achieved the status in the public's mind that World War Two had, and it quickly seemed to be forgotten by the nation during the booming 1950s.

Unless people were speaking in the present tense.  In that case, the "war" was the Vietnam War, which the country fought actively from 1965 to 1973, and which came to its final end the year before the nation's bicentennial, in 1975.

 

American soldiers in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.  Fairly significantly younger on average than their World War Two counterparts, they were also better educated and more ethnically diverse.  In spite of the common myths about them, they had volunteered for service in Southeast Asia in fairly significant numbers and their desertion rate was one of the absolute lowest of all time for a U.S. War (the Mexican War has the highest) up until the wars following 1990.

It's important to remember that life went on for the survivors of World War Two, who remained active in public life well into the 1980s, and in many instances well into the 1990s.  And they resumed, or in many instances sort of started their lives, after World War Two.  Indeed, one of the greatest films of all time, for those who like to follow movies, is 1946's The Best Years Of Our Lives, which dealt with the subject of restarting a life while that topic was still a bleeding wound in American society.  It's stunning, watching it, to realize the war had just ended when the film was made.

When I was a young, it was common to call this generation "The Depression Era Generation", and in some ways that term is a better one than "The Greatest Generation", as it includes the larger population of men and women  and it stretches the generation out a bit on both ends, including people whose age or occupation exempted them from service in World War Two, or who were a little to young to serve in it.  Be that as it may, a feature of this generation is that they'd grown up in an era of economic strain and deprivation that's nearly unimaginable now and went on to fight a war that was so Titanic we frankly can't imagine it now.

Food line, 1937.

None of that is  news, nor is it news that a "baby boom" followed the war as that generation returned home and made up for nearly 15 years of lost time.  

It's Holscher's Fourth Law of History that "war changes everything." and this is certainly true of World War Two and the generation that fought it as enlisted men (it's often forgotten that the oldest American commander in the war had been in the Army during the Spanish American War, and that there were plenty of old soldiers in World War Two in every army).  The war opened up education and opportunity, following the war, for the survivors of it in a way that had not existed before. Very often missed by current commentators, the war and the Depression produced a political outlook in that generation that was quite Liberal in political orientation, while remaining socially conservative.  That expressed itself in a definite comfort with the Federal government being active in funding and expanding education, with education otherwise remaining traditional in its structure.

The net result was that the fortunes of those who fought World War Two were fairly good following the war, although for a variety of reasons, and by the 1950s this was expressing itself to even a greater extent in the fortunes of that generation's children, who were reaching university age.  For the first time in American history a university education went on from being a privileged to a middle class expectation.

And its here were, I think, we return to the term "The Greatest Generation."  The Depression Era Generation was a great one, and suffered and rebuilt in ways we can hardly imagine, but pretty early on, as a generational characteristic, that was lost on their children.

This is a broad statement, of course, and nothing that can be said about any one generation is true of everyone in the generations, which is extremely important to remember. But it is also the case that people grow up in an environment and accustom themselves to it, unless they are aware its abnormal.  The Depression Era Generation regarded the Depression and World War Two as abnormal, which it certainly was, and they reminded their children of that quite a bit.  Their children grew up in a time of economic plenty and educational opportunity, and regarded that as normal.

In our society, we're accustomed to speak of youthful rebellion as a norm, and something that repeats itself every generation.  But there's no good evidence of that whatsoever. By and large, that doesn't occur, and quite often the difference between one generation and another is thin indeed.  But the difference between the youth of the Boomers and the lives of their parents was vastly different.  And this seems to have at least contributed to the massive social upheaval in the western world in the 1960s and 1970s.

During that period, it was pretty common for those in their early adulthood to hold the World War Two generation in contempt, and those holding that contempt were their children's generation.  Individuals certainly admired the lives of their individual parents, but there was a pretty widespread contempt as a generational aspect.  Frequently the World War Two or Depression Era generations were regarded as "squares" or the like, with their children probably not even grasping the extent to which their parents lives had been transformational.  Contempt tends to be returned, and to some extent in this case it was, but with not much of an effect.  A person can't take this too far, of course, but that it was a feature of the climate of that times can't be really denied.

This really began to change in the 1990s.  By that time the aging Boomers had abandoned revolution themselves and were looking back to an imagined more conservative time for  guidance.  In doing that, the generation began to redress some things had felt guilty about from its youth.  In regards to the Vietnam War, it's interesting how the Boomers who fought that war, and who had been vilified to some extent for doing so, were suddenly regarded as heroes.  And shortly thereafter, the same generation rediscovered their parents and were awestruck by the ordeals that their parents had endured.  With a short view of history, they went from regarding their parents as squares to their being "The Greatest Generation".

But are they?  Well, that's a pretty long claim, and a person has to look at it pretty carefully. For one thing, if that claim is a valid one, does it apply to those in that generation form any of the Allied nations of World War Two?  The Great Depression, for example, was even worse in Canada than the United States, and Canada entered the war in 1939.  Shouldn't the term apply to them as well?  And certainly it must to the generation of British youth who served in the war.

 

The Winnipeg  Rifles land in Normandy, June 6, 1944.  Up until late war, Canadian solders serving overseas, including my Uncle Terry who participated in Operation Overlord, were all volunteers for overseas service.

Those British youth, it should be noted, if university educated (which only a tiny minority were) had infamously declared in the early 1930s that they'd never serve in another war, turning their back on the sacrifices of the UK during World War One. But when the time came, they more than rose to the occasion.

What about Soviet youth?  No European nation had suffered more in the first half of the 20th Century than the Russians, although often at their own hands. Those who fought as young men in the Red Army had grown up in a period of horrifying oppression and deprivation, and they died in droves during World War Two.  Over 80% of all German battlefield deaths were due to the Red Army, and yet at the same time, but at the same time the Red Army served a political leadership that was as evil as any that the world has ever produced.

Taking it out further, however, is The Greatest Generation greater than the generation that fought the Civil War?  That seems a pretty tall order.  Or what about the generation that fought in the Revolution?  For those men, who signed up to fight on the side of the Continental Congress, they were taking a step which arguably made them criminals for a crime punishable by death. And even if the British did not take that view, at the time they engaged to serve the new nation, the volunteers did not know that and could not be assured that the view of Parliament would not change. 

Union cavalry, Civil War.  By the second year of the Civil War those entering the service had no illusions about winning quickly, but they showed up anyhow.

And what of the generation that fought World War One?  Recently I've heard a couple of interviews of authors who wrote on that generation of Americans and their findings are shocking by modern standards.  That generations seemed to have regarded the war as one more hard bad thing in a hard life, not expecting much going in, and not expecting much going out.  If they aren't perceived as great it might be because they expected nothing much out of life other than hard work, and World War One was just one more example of it.

First Division Victory Parade, Washington D. C.  The sign nearby is still urging the public to "Save Food".

Sometimes the term The Greatest Generation is used ironically by those now in the Boomer generation to castigate the youth of today.  No doubt the world and our nation has changed enormously since 1945, but much of the change that commentators now complain about came about due to the "revolution" that that very generation brought about.  If the youth of today do not seem to have the values and views of the generation that fought World War Two, and which we now so admire, perhaps the generation that brought so many changes about and created the world that the youth of today are living in should take stock of that, and no doubt many do.

But also, that just sells the youth of today short.  There are plenty of reasons to worry about things, including culture and society, but to assume that people would not rise to the occasion is to assume a lot without much evidence.  What we have seen is that today's youth has volunteered to fight in three wars in 25 years and it has done so without compulsion.  No draft exists today, as it had for every American War since the Spanish American War leading up to the first Gulf War. Indeed, the war in Afghanistan is the first American war that has ever been fought in which the combatants were 100% free of some sort of compulsory service at some point.  There has not been a draft since 1973, but the last soldier brought into the Army via conscription retired only last year, that being a long serving NCO who had first come into the Army as a conscript.  Up until 1865 every American male had some sort of compulsory militia duty and there were still men who had entered service in that fashion, or through Civil War conscription, serving as late as the Spanish American War. This current generation of servicemen is therefore really unique.

Solder of the 1st Infantry Division, with M14 rifle, in Afghanistan.

All that goes to say, I suppose, that some generations rise to their times, and some sink.  The World War Two generation certainly rose to theirs, but then the one that immediately followed and served in Korea did as well. The one that had fought World War One also had, and certainly the Civil War generation did as well. The current generation lives in the richest times the country has ever known, in spite of a widespread assumption to the contrary, and while it faces a lot of challenges, those challenges aren't of its making.  All in all, they're doing well. 

Epilog

Recently the Federal Court interviewed some of the seventy (that's right, seventy) World War Two veterans who are still serving on the Federal Bench.  I'll comment on that elsewhere, but one of the questions the interviewer asked is whether they thought they were the Greatest Generation.  The answers were interesting.

Federal Judge Tom Stagg, a Nixon appointee who plans on serving on the bench until he dies, sure thought so:

Q. Do you consider yourself to be part of a “Greatest Generation”?
A. Compared to what I see today, yes. I think you get duty pounded into you, or did in those days, and you learn it as boy, as a Boy Scout, as a member of a military unit. You have assigned duty and you have to do it. You even want to do it. I would no more have stayed home during World War II. I can’t imagine doing that. This is my country. I’m proud of it.

They didn't all feel that way, however.  Here's the quote from another serving Federal Judge who is a World War Two veteran:

Q. Do you like the phrase “the Greatest Generation”?
A. I don’t like it. I think it glosses over the imperfections of the American society in that time. They forget that we were terribly racially biased in the Army. Black troops were treated miserably. … This is part of the Greatest Generation that isn’t mentioned, and I’ve seen terrible things that the military did. That inevitably will happen. I think it’s overblowing the character of the people who were in the Army, were in the Navy, in the Air Force. Which is not to diminish what they did, or in any way detract from their contributions, but I think to blow up any particular generation as the Greatest Generation is a mistake.

Judge Leonard Wexler, however, also agreed with the Greatest Genreation tag:

Q. Do you like the phrase “the Greatest generation”?
A. Yes, I like it. I think it fits. We were the greatest generation. I mean, everybody was united. Everybody stood together. I’ll give you an example. When I got home and I would take the train, a Brooklyn kid, I had a cane, everybody would stand up to give me a seat. Everybody was so nice. I really felt good that we were a great country at one time, united.

Judge Jack Weinstein sure didn't, however:

Q. Do you like the phrase “the Greatest Generation”?
A. It’s nonsensical. Every generation is great. We responded to difficulties of the depression and the war, and people I see today are responding to other problems. Every generation has greatness, and it has despair and has things that it should be ashamed of doing. For us, it was no different. I remember seeing things that were absolutely disgraceful—the way African Americans were treated and the way women were treated. Ours was not the greatest generation.

Judge Arthur Spatt agreed with the term, but had a more nuanced view:

Q. Do you feel you were part of a “Greatest Generation”?
I think the greatest generation was this country as a whole. It was united. Everybody worked toward one goal, whether it was giving up your food, rationing, or becoming an air raid warden on the block to make sure the lights were out at night. Everybody participated, with a full heart and no dissent. So, when in the history of this country does this ever happen?

Recalling, or not, Operation Overlord (D-Day)

One of the major syndicated columnists has an article in today's paper decrying the lack of knowledge that college graduates in the United States have of World War Two.  Having noted this myself in the past, and having found it even more profound in regards to World War One, I can understand his frustration.  It isn't right that there can be college graduates who lack at least a basic college level understanding of history, and for that matter literature and science.  I've stated here before, I'm sure, the basic point that for most people college is a type of training program for an anticipated job, but still broader knowledge should be held by college graduates in any field.  Ironically, this may be even more the case today than it was in earlier eras prior to the Internet, as a certain level of easy information allows the ignorant to become really ignorant, by informing themselves with erroneous information easily.  In prior eras when information was harder to come by there was probably actually a higher chance that a person seeking out information would get the correct information, as it's just harder to publish in print than electronically.

 

U.S. Troops on the hotly contested Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944.

Anyhow, this topic came to my mind in a slightly different context given as June 6 of this year is the 70th Anniversary of Operation Overlord, that being the operational name for the Allied landings on the Norman coast of France in 1944.  Given as I was at work, I didn't catch all the stuff running on television, but I caught some and caught some of the print stuff here and there that was out recalling the event. 

I appreciate that this great event, the largest amphibious landing ever accomplished in warfare, and the largest one that shall ever occur, is still recalled. Still, I think that there are a few things that somehow get misrepresented that are important, and that those recalling the events should be aware of. So, in that spirit, here goes.

Operation Overlord was an Allied, not an American, Operation

There seem to be some people who labor under the belief that D-Day was an American operation. That's frankly absurd.

 Canadian troops landing at Juno Beach, Operation Overlord.

The major troop contributors for Operation Overlord were the US, the UK, and Canada.  The US, by 1944, had become the largest single western Allied nation in the war in Europe by that time, but the British effort was huge and the French effort would soon expand enormously.

In addition to the US, UK and Canada, at least France had ground troops involved in the form of some special units of Free French troops.  Polish paratroopers were to have been committed to followup airborne operations in the British sector of operations (where Canadian paratroopers did participate in landings) but the followup drops were cancelled, something very common in airborne operations.

At least the US, UK, Canada and France contributed ships to the operation.  In the air, the air forces of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were all in action.

The US effort was huge, no doubt, but the Canadian one was enormous in the context of the size of the Canadian population, and unlike the American effort nearly 100% of the Canadian troops had volunteered for service in Europe.  The British effort at that point in the war was so vast that the UK had truly gone down to the absolute bottom of its manpower reserves, a massive effort.

Something this taps into which some people seem to be jingoistic about is the following.

The United States did not "win World War Two".

There's a certain type of jingoism out there that asserted the US won World War Two.  No, the Allies did.

The US effort, as noted,  was massive.  But for some reason some people simply fail to grasp how big the Allied effort as a whole was, and the extent to which other nations were impacted.

The British effort was so deep that it basically wrecked the British economy and put an end to the British Empire.  Rationing in the UK would extend into the 1950s as a result of World War Two.  The Free French effort expanded from 1943 forward, even if it would never see the restoration of a French army the size of the of the one defeated by the Germans in 1940. 

The Soviet effort was colossal, and is something that Americans simply tend not to look at.  Over 80% of all German battlefield deaths were sustained fighting the Soviets. That doesn't mean that our effort was unimportant (which I think some people secretly fear would be the result of looking at the Soviet effort) and the USSR could not have sustained its effort without first British, and then American, material support.  But this just goes to show the extent to which the war was an Allied effort.

It should be noted that when we look at the war against Japan, the equities of who did what are quite different.  In the war against the Japanese, the US, UK, India, New Zealand, Australia, and China were the major Allied powers.  The USSR did come in at the end, to be sure, but the US has a better claim really to being the singularly most important nation in the war against Japan, although the other Allies were indeed major contributors.  Japan had more troops committed against China during the war than against any other power, which makes sense given that it was fighting in China prior to 1939 and had never failed to achieve a negotiated peace with Nationalist China, like it had hoped to.

The basic point is, however, that when looking at the Second World War, it isn't really possible to look at one nation and claim that it won the war.  Without the British refusing to surrender in 1940, the Soviets likely would have been defeated by the Germans (with Italian, Hungarian and Romanian assistance) in 1941 (with the likely assistance of the Japanese, who didn't abandon plans to take on the Soviet Union until well into 1941).  Without the massive Soviet contribution of ground forces in 1940 to 1945, it'd be difficult to see how the western Allies could have dislodged the Germans in 43 to 45 from western Europe.  Without the huge material contribution to the Soviet Union by the British and the Americans, it is difficult to see how the USSR could have sustained its war effort in those years.  It was truly an Allied effort.

D-Day brought the Allies back to Europe.

This is a historical canard that goes back to the early histories of Operation Overlord.  Its never been close to true, and its odd how it's persisted.

 U.S. troops crossing the Rhine in assault boats.

The western Allies returned to Europe with the invasion of Sicily, a joint British and American operation, which took place in August 1943, just under one year prior to Operation Overlord.  The successful capture of Sicily from the Germans and Italians was followed up by Allied landings in Italy in September, 1943.  The US captured Rome coincidentally with Operation Overlord.

There's a tendency to overlook the Italian campaign for some reason, and that's likely because it didn't have the obvious impact that landing in France did.  Landing in Normandy actually positioned the main force of the western Allied effort within striking distance of Germany.  That was hugely significant.  It was quite clear that there was no earthly way that the Allies were ever going to be able to push up from Italy into France and then up into Germany, and some have even questioned if the entire Italian campaign was a waste of time, effort and blood.  It probably was not, but what is actually the case is that landing in Normandy gave the Allies a straight, if bloody, path into the Third Reich.  The war would last less than a year after that and while it saw a lot of hard fighting, the landings were indeed a critical factor, perhaps the critical factor, in ending the war in May 1945.

It wasn't, it might be noted, the last amphibious operation in Europe during the Second World War.  Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, started a couple of months later in August, 1944.  Like the invasion of Italy, Operation Dragoon has been criticized as unnecessary, but it probably wasn't.  Dragoon allowed the Allies to commit troops to France from the Mediterranean, where the Allies had a massive effort already underway, and in the end troops committed to Dragoon advanced so far that they caught up with the forces that landed in Overlord and formed the right flank of the Allied advance into Germany, when the time came.  Dragoon was a big operation, which, like Overlord, featured the deployment of airborne troops and landing craft.

Operation Overlord is often regarded, and probably rightly, as the opening of the second front in Europe that resulted in the final German collapse.  But to the extent that it is truly a second front there can at least be a debate.  The Germans, British and Italians had never really ceased being engaged in some ground combat due to the war continuing on in North Africa with the Germans and Italians being too over extended to be able to bring on a concluding result there. With the commitment of  American troops to that effort in 1942, that front became a bigger one. The war had returned to the European mainland in the west by 1943.  Operation Overlord, however, allowed the drive in Europe to form a campaign that undoubtedly sped up the end of the war and which made it possible for the Allies to win in 1945.

The French are a bunch of chickens

One persistently irritating comment that seems to get inserted into anything concerning France, including landing on it, is that the French are weenies.  This is simply incorrect.

As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, France has a martial record which is pretty significant, including a large number of fights they've gotten into, not all wisely, since World War Two. We can accuse the French of being many things, but cowards is something they are not.

In regards to D-Day, the common theme is that we saved the French from the Nazis, to whom they'd cowardly surrendered, and they should be eternally grateful.  Well, that just doesn't accurately reflect the record, for good or ill.

France did of course surrender to the Germans in 1940.  But it isn't as if they just gave up.  France found itself to be the battleground against an army that was highly mobile and had already proven itself in battle.  Basically, France was outfought.

While it may be naive, most of the armies of early World War Two expected a new war against Germany to repeat the experience of World War One, and didn't take battlefield mobility to be a foregone conclusion.  France planned on fighting behind the Maginot line, and in fact the line did really hold well. France had failed in its desire to extend it into Belgium, and so the Germans were able to do an end run around it, repeating the early history of World War One. The difference this time is that the Germans retained battlefield mobility, which they hadn't in 1914.  France was flat out defeated on the battlefield.

Even at that, however, a remarkable number of Frenchmen kept on fighting.  Sure, there were French collaborators, and that's a story that itself has never been fully developed. But quite a few Frenchmen decided to illegally take up arms and keep fighting with the British, either over the channel, or in France itself.  That's pretty darned brave and quite remarkable.  Following Operation Torch in North Africa those numbers grew, as the standing French army began to defect to the Allies.

That it was a defection tends not to be noted.  France was a defeated nation, under partial occupation, and at peace when the Allies landed on French colonial soil in 1942.  The legal obligation of French troops in 1942 was to fight the Allies, and some did, but not for long, and by and large French units defected wholesale to the Allied cause.

For that matter, some French forces, including naval forces, had years earlier.

There was no fighting on the British and Canadian beaches.

It's unfortunately the case that there is very little attention paid, in some American treatments of the landings, to the British and Canadian beaches and air landings, and there is by extension a belief that the Americans had the hard beaches and nothing occurred on the other ones.

In reality, the landings overall were amazingly successful, which is a tribute to the extremely effective overall nature of the planning, naval bombardments, etc.  But all the landings were opposed.

It may be the case that the perception exists that the Americans had the hard targets as it turned out that Omaha Beach featured the toughest fighting, and it was really the only beach where the  Germans were able to set the Allies behind for some time.  Omaha was an American beach.  The fact that it was stoutly defended turned out to be bad American luck, but it doesn't mean that there was no fighting on the other beaches, there was.

Additionally, one thing that's somewhat overlooked by Americans is that the British and Canadians were the beneficiaries of experience in landing on coast France due to the enormous Canadian raid at Dieppe. The scale of the raid was so huge that it's difficult to actually conceive of it as a raid. The British landed Canadian troops at Dieppe in such numbers that they actually landed vehicles and armor on the beaches, a far greater operation than a conventional raid.  The goal of the August 1942 raid was to actually seize a port on a temporary basis. While it was a failure, the lessons learned in the huge effort were not lost on the British or the Canadians, who had effectively participated in what amounted to a seaborne invasion of France on a prior occasion.  As part of this, they equipped themselves with specialized armor that they also offered to the US, but which the US largely rejected. The equipment they deployed was accordingly unique and very effective, resulting in very effective beach operations.  Contrary to what some might suppose, this also aided the British and Canadian forces in moving rapidly off the beaches, a goal that they very much had in mind given their prior experience in amphibious operations.

Montgomery didn't know what he was doing.

This is a matter of opinion, rather than a "fact", per se, but having said that, this common American belief is ill founded in my view.

In the American folk view, and in quite a few historical works as well, Field Marshall Montgomery, the commander of the British forces, was slow moving in his command style and as a result British troops moved slowly.  In the most romantic view of this topic, American generals, particularly Gen. George Patton, were quick thinking, quick moving commanders, and the British reluctance to follow our lead caused the war to last longer than it should have.

In reality, American generals like Patton (and Patton wasn't alone in favoring high mobility) were a minority.  Nearly ever American general who favored speed was a cavalry office, and cavalry officer formed a minority of high ranking American officers.  The Army was dominated by infantry officers.

Most American infantry officer believed that the war in France would resemble that of World War One, with advances being slow moving, slowly developed affairs. They opposed cavalry branch officers who thought that the way to progress was to dash forward and exploit any opening.

This is important in the context of this story as it is well known that the Allied advance ground down to a slow moving one only shortly after D-Day. This is commonly blamed on the Norman bocage, and on Montgomery. The bocage did prove to be a huge problem, but Montgomery was no more slow or fast moving that U.S. senior commanders were.

Indeed, Montgomery had a proven ability to bring around combat results, but his style required careful planning and training.  This was largely because Montgomery was used to working with much thinner resources than any American commander was, and he was required to do so.  He was very effective on the offensive, but he couldn't afford to waste anything in one, and didn't.  He operated in this fashion in Europe as he had in North Africa and the Mediterranean.  He didn't "break out" of Normandy, but then the American infantry commanders didn't either.

It was the armor that did break out, under Patton's command.  The difference here, however, was that Patton was a cavalryman and when he got rolling it tended to panic his fellow infantry commanders who often wished he, and those who shared a similar view, would slow down.  He deserves a lot of credit, but not to Montgomery's discredit.

The Operation wasn't named "D-Day"

As a minor note, operation which we often hear called "D-Day" wasn't called that.  It was called Operation Overlord, as noted above, and the operation can be best described as a large scale amphibious landing in Normandy.

"D-Day", in military parlance, is the day on which an operation is to occur, with days before and after it being referred to in relation to it. The day an operation occurs is D-Day.  The day after it commences is "D+1", the day before it occurs is "D-1".  And so on.

Likewise, the hour a military plan commences is H-Hour.  It's just the way these periods of time are referred to.  June 6, 1944, became D-Day as it was the day Operation Overlord did commence for the ground forces landing on the beaches (for the air element, it commenced in the very late night of the day prior).  There were a lot of D-Days during World War Two, however, as every Allied operation commenced on some day.  The fact that we remember it as D-Day shows what a big operation this particular one was.

The Novelty of the Normal, and the Banalty of the Unusual... a writing dilemma.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

G. K. Chesterton.

One of the problems anyone trying to write a historical novel is faced with is that not only do you have to get the material details of time correct as well as the spirit of the age, but also you have to somehow handle the modern sensibilities of the reading audience.  Or do you? It's actually quite a problem, although many people, not appreciating how their own views are part of the context of a time, may not grasp that.  It's particularly a problem for a writer of the current era.

I'll get into more detail on the particular dilemma addressed here in a second, but I'd note, for example, a couple of novels that attempt to do this, and which are very well known, but in my view are not equal in their handling of this problem.  Both the novels The Killer Angels and True Grit are historical novels, set in distinct historical novels, and both were hugely successful.  But, frankly, as good as The Killer Angels is, in terms of viewpoints of the characters, set forth as internal thoughts, it just doesn't quite get there.  That is, it really doesn't have the mindset of characters of that period, at least uniformly, set forth all that well.  It's sort of a mix of modern and mid 19th Century views, which perhaps is not surprising given the enormity of the attempted task.  True Grit, on the other hand, succeeds in it brilliantly.  Written as a fictional memoir of a middle aged woman looking back on the great adventure of her teenage years, the book achieves this in part by simply assuming that the reader knows certain things that the reader frankly is not likely too. References to local events are one such thing, but others are occasional theological references from the narrators strictly Presbyterian view.  Chances are most modern Presbyterians wouldn't know what she's referring to, unless they looked it up, let alone non Presbyterians.  But it adds a lot of credence to the book.

Indeed, True Grit is so remarkable in this context that it's difficult to appreciate how well this is done, without reading the boo, although a person can get a bit of the flavor of it from the most recent, Coen Brothers, version of the movie. The author, Charles Portis, makes references to three different Christian denominations in the book, referencing the Methodists and the Catholic church in addition to the Presbyterian.  Examples of Presbyterian theology are so specific that Portis  is obviously familiar with it, and his characters subtle disapproval of Methodism likewise shows not only the character of the fictional narrator, but a bit of the spirit of the times and location.  That the narrator bothers to note the religious affiliations of other characters is likewise a skillful reflection of the times and characters.  Such elements are so integral to character that they are picked up a bit in both films, although only very briefly and in a very muted fashion in the first one. It's reinserted true to the book in the Coen Brothers film to such an extent that some commentators have noted the religiosity of the movie and even that it has a subtle Christian tone; something that is all the more remarkable as the Coen brothers are Jewish in faith.  It speaks a lot for their "ear" for the times and the characters they are portraying in their films.

Another novel that does this very well is Little Big Man.  Remembered now principally for the movie, the book is much better and a type of masterpiece.  One of the amazing things it achieves is to be able to present the late 19th Century Plains Indian World through their eyes, something that has rarely been done. The book closest to it is the audio biography of George Bent, and it's notable that the novel came so close to the same spirit of observation set forth in that biography, but with a lot more topics to address.

I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

More specifically, however a really big problem for the current author is that in the past 20 years the view points of popular media have shifted so dramatically on matters of what were common morality that addressing them in a historical novel is now a problem of epic proportions.  When this really started is hard to say, but judging by television, probably sometime in the 1980s.  If a person judge by films, probably a bit earlier.  By books, perhaps a bit later. But the problem is now well developed.

What this problem is, quite simply, is that standards of earlier eras, which are often retained standards for large segments of the current population, are not "quaint" or antiquated, for the most part.  They're neither so in context, or in reality.  And, in any one era, what seems to be a "modern" view, often will be regarded as  a quaint novel oddity of a later era.

For example, and taking the last item first, Prohibition was once regarded as a "progressive" movement.  To its founders, living in the alcohol soaked 19th Century, the movement was part of the same social progressiveness that advanced emancipation of the American slaves and the franchise for women. We, today, tend to view Abolitionist, Prohibitionist, and Suffragettes as three distinct groups, but they weren't.  Most early Suffragettes had been Abolitionist. And may Prohibitionist were Suffragettes.  We seek the movement to ban alcohol as some sort of weird fantastical delusional movement, but at the time, many political "liberals" saw the Prohibition movement as part and parcel of the same movement that sought to secure the right to vote for women, and to advance such other social causes as early Workers Compensation, child labor laws, hour of work laws, and the like.  Indeed, these movements were often much more related than we can conceive of today; one of the thoughts behind prohibition, for example, is that it stood a good chance of reducing violence against women, as men were drinking so much all day long.

A view that looks sappy now, but common then.  A husband dries out, once the town goes "dry", and ceases to be a problem to his wife.

Looked at properly, therefore, a movement like Prohibition isn't really as silly as it now seems.  People like to believe that it was advanced by large, overweight, Victorian bitties, but in reality, it was advanced first by radical social reformers who were in favor of radical social equality and who saw drying up the supply of alcohol as part of that.

Suffragette and pro prohibition demonstrator, Rose Sanderman (her name is misspelled on the photo).

While on this topic, ie., Prohibition, the complexity of these matters is well demonstrated by its actual, as opposed to imagined, history.  First of all, it had support in surprising places.  Prohibition was pushed over the top, in terms of Congress, by Wyoming Senator and Civil War Medal of Honor Winner Francis E. Warren. Warren wasn't a naive sentimentalist.  He'd been in Congress for eons and had seen war up front and close.  He was, however, a shrewd politician.  If Warren was backing it, it wasn't a naive act at the time.  And even if it meant that Kemmerer Wyoming, ironically located in a region of the state with a high percentage of Mormons, became the epicenter for regional bootlegging, it also meant that Warren felt, probably correctly, that he had the support of most Wyomingites on this issue.

 

Long serving Senator from Wyoming, Francis E. Warren.

Secondly, Prohibition, in actual medical health terms, was a actually a stunning success.  I'm not a teetotaler myself, but in actuality, Prohibition did pretty much what its backers claimed it would.  It dried up a huge problem and had demonstrable health benefits for the nation.  The popular myth is that the whole country was awash in bathtub gin, but it really was not.  In actuality, the amount of drinking, illegal or otherwise (Prohibition did not actually dry up all legal sources of booze) plummeted and the amount of alcoholism in the country not only greatly decreased, it never returned to pre Prohibition levels.  In fact, Prohibition was so effective in reducing the consumption of certain types of hard alcohol that their popularity has never returned.  

The point here is that a movement that seems "quaint" to us, might not only have been far from naive, but moreover it may have addressed a genuine problem that was present in society, or which may even now remain present.  Prohibition actually did take on the general widespread acceptance of public drunkenness and end it.  The drinking culture that emerged post Prohibition was not the same one that existed before it.  And the people who were backing it weren't doing it in a vacuum, but chances are high that that they were also backing the franchise for women and Indians, the early predecessors of Social Security, and the like.

Even the effort to repeal Prohibition isn't well understood.   The effort came about, sort of oddly, as politically liberal upper class women started to oppose it, which essentially caused them to be allied to demographic groups in the country who had never supported it.  Never popular amongst those of close Irish, Italian, German or Polish descent, these groups found common cause with an upper class movement. This made the effort to repeal Prohibition both conservative, ethic, and liberal, all at the same time.  And those opposing the repeal did so on sincere moral, and health, positions.  Just opposing Prohibition's repeal didn't make a person some sort of Victorian.  It might just make a person a physician.  Oddly enough, just as the effort to repeal it made for strange bedfellows, the effort to keep it did too, as even a group like the Klu Klux Klan came in to oppose repeal, probably mostly because ethnic Catholics supported repeal.  

This, it should be noted, is yet another aspect of these sort of topics.  Just because a view changes doesn't mean a lot of people don't continue to hold it.  Prohibition, for example, is no longer the law of the land, but a lot of people do not drink, and some of those people don't drink for the very reasons that caused people to back Prohibition.

 Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

G.K. Chesterton

Okay, well so much for Prohibition, but what does that have to do with anything modern or current?  Well, perhaps quite a bit.

Anyone who is at least 45 years old or so has seen a massive public shift about certain types of conduct, particularly in regards to relationships between men and women, but even in regards to all sorts of deeply held beliefs.  This is most evident in terms of television, which has undoubtedly sought, for mercenary reasons, to push the envelope on such things as it gets people to watch.  The impact of such things is subtle, and perhaps not very permanent, but it is real.  Even such a popular television show as Friends displayed conduct which, even in the early 1970s, would have been regarded as deeply immoral.  Indeed, the "norm" portrayed on Friends and many other such shows would have been regarded as abnormal in many earlier eras, or at least scandalous.

As this isn't an editorial on shifting moral standards, I won't get into that too much further, but I would note that it seems that television has taken this to a new level in recent years as the number of channels has expanded greatly.  Perhaps the most prevalent examples of this are found on TLC, which seems to be dedicated in recent years to promoting the odd and portraying the normal as odd.  This, again, presents a problem for the historical novelist.

For example, a popular TLC show follows The Duggers.  The Duggers are a family that lives somewhere in the American South and which has a large number of children, something like 19 or so.  They are also, as the show makes fairly plain, members of a Protestant evangelical church.  All this, apparently, entitled them to a television show, but why?

Nineteen children is a lot of children by any measure, but it isn't really as freakish as television would like to suggest. Large families have been the norm for most of civilized history.  At least some of my relatively recent ancestors came from families where a married couple had up to 12 children.  Twelve isn't 19, of course, but you can see it from there.  There's something more than a little odd about a society finding a married couple having children to be so novel that it merits a television show.  Likewise, there's something odd about a television show finding that the same couple holds a deeply held religious set of beliefs to be novel.  When belief become novel, that's a bit distressing.  Perhaps its not as distressing, however, as basic biological facts being regarded as massively odd, which is essentially the point of the show.  

So then, what does a novelist do with this?  Up until extremely recently, having a lot of children in a married household wouldn't be worth noting.  Maybe having only one child in a married household would be.  And the fact that if there were two in the household that they would be married would be an assumption, not the opposite.  Indeed, in many localities, including Wyoming, cohabitation was illegal for most of the 20th Century, and for good reason as the state didn't want to bear the costs of children that might result from an unmarried union, and feared for what the mother of a child abandoned by the father, and potentially by her own family, would have to do in order to get by.  Again, the law wasn't naive, it served a legitimate purpose.

In a modern novel, however, such as in any one of McMurtry's set in Texas or Mexico of the 19th Century, the opposite would be portrayed as true.  I don't mean to suggest that everyone in the 19th and early 20th Century was a saint, that'd be far from true.  But in order to make the novels apparently interesting to certain readers, it's been necessary, in his judgment, to introduce what must have seemed to be a certain unseemly element at the time, but which now, because of shifting standards may not.  In his novel Horseman, Pass By, for example (his best novel in my view) he does not do this, but does portray the typical reactions to a young man to young women, in a rural setting, pretty accurately, even by today's standards, and also portrays the relationship between two middle aged single people pretty accurately as well.  By the later stages of the Lonesome Dove series, however, he's had to resort to the semi bizarre.

Getting back to the television example, in the last couple of years TLC has treated viewers to a polygamist family that they follow around, which seems rather extreme (particularly because the male figure in the family is constantly grinning in a rather weird way and seems to be hyperactive in a distressing fashion).  Sister Wives follows this family around presenting them as a model of family standards, in stark contrast to the polygamist groups that have otherwise been in the news, making a subtle argument that polygamy is normal than normal, or perhaps even the epitome of conservative standards. Polygamy having lost its luster, perhaps, this year they're following some young Amish and Mennoite men and women around as they abandon their faith in a show telling titled Breaking Amish.

Its this last item that inspired this post in the first place.  I've never met an Amishman, that I know of, although I've very occasionally met Mennonites or Hutterites.  Suffice it to say, I'm not in either of those groups, but I know a little about them.  I'm not going to dwell on their religious beliefs, and TLC doesn't even scratch the surface on them, but they're complicated and have utterly nothing to do with being "old fashioned" or "quaint". They don't live in the past, as TLC seems to think.  Indeed, in the real world they're afflicted with some particularly modern problems, some of which are unique to farmers, and some of which are unique to groups which are very closely related, biologically.

Perhaps, in some ways, the most telling aspect of the outlook of the show's makers is the frequent insertion of quotes from the Bible in a fashion that would seemingly demonstrate that the person inserting them not only does not understand the text in terms of Amish or Mennonite beliefs, but probably doesn't understand them in relation to Christianity as a whole.  The message therefore becomes, in a way, that not only are people who isolate themselves in a cloistered community odd and missing out, but that anyone who doesn't embrace modern secularism does as well.  It's interesting to compare this to the same use of quotes from the bible in the Coen version of the film True Grit.  That film starts off with a quote from proverbs, that being "The wicked flee when no man pursueth", setting the tone for the start of the film.  The use of the quote, not one that is one that commonly comes to many person's minds, is brilliant in effect and impact.  TLC, however, stretches or misconstrues the quotes it wants to make, perhaps because the underlying tone of the series is to criticize the religions its referencing through the quotes.

 Catholic Church, New Mexico

At any rate, there's something basically disgusting about following around a collection of very young people, who are likely not very representative of their demographic, in a manner that essentially suggests that these people need to come out of their isolated group so they can "make their own decisions", while exposing them to some conduct, or having them engage in some conduct, that's either questionable or even reprehensible.   Perhaps the only benefit of this effort, and an accidental one at that, is that it shows American urbanites to perhaps been just as freakish or naive as the show obviously wishes to portray the Amish as being.  Indeed, this is so much the case that to at least some degree the show unintentionally makes the Amish and Mennonite isolationist practices look pretty good in comparison to the cheap materialism that those being "broken" are exposed to in the show.  Again, this isn't to comment on Mennonite or Amish beliefs, about which I know only a little (but more, I suspect, than the producers of the show do) but rather to point out that popular entertainment has reached a point where it doesn't grasp any standard, not just some standards.

 Catholic Church, Trampas New Mexico

Finally, taking one further example, albeit this one a prime time example from a major network, one of the various networks has a television show entitled Parenthood.  I'm sure the show conceives of itself as showing the trials and tribulations of modern parents, but what it really is best defined as would be as a species of prime time soap opera. As such, it gives a stunning example of the topics under discussion here.

In the most recent episode of Parenthood, amongst the various other plots that are centered around the fictional extended Braverman family, we find a young woman engaging in sex with a new boyfriend on their second or third date, to be woken up early in the morning by her mother who is giddy to find out about this. That same mother is now living with one of the high school teachers of her high school aged son, who (the son that is) uses the vehicle of his aunt's cancer to seduce his former sympathetic girlfriend, also high school aged, who had been seeing a college aged young man.  In terms of the evolution of thought or standards, almost every single thing depicted in this show would have been regarded as far from normal even relatively recently.  For much of the 20th Century, in fact, a good deal of it would have been regarded as illegal.  Both the illegal and legal aspects of it (and it all would have been illegal a century ago) would have been regarded as scandalous behavior.  Now, it's depicted as maudlin or even sympathetic, and all as normal, a massive departure from common views of even relatively recently, and probably still a departure for many now.

But what's a writer to do with this?  If a person takes McMurtry's approach, the writer would get out ahead of it and wallow in it.  But that seems like a misrepresentative approach.  If a person takes the approach taken in True Grit or Little Big Man, particularly True Grit, they'd flat out present the views that where held as views.  That seems the better approach.  And perhaps that also serves the purpose of not only been less exploitative, but more exploratory in some meaningful fashion.

On one final note on this, as more of a postscript as opposed to anything else, I can't help but note that after I started writing this the news about Gen. Petraeus broke. At first blush, the reaction to the news of his affair, and his resignation due to it, might seem to counter what's noted here. But, in reality, it does not seem to.  It is true that the reaction shows that there remains at least a segment of society which publicly adheres to the older standards and which continues to recognize the concept of shame. But what is telling about this is that it only seems to apply to those in the highest office.  It's odd, and indeed its a bit of a reversal of the historic norm.  Conduct which nobody would have publicly acknowledged two or three decades ago is now very openly engaged in now, except in high office.  Perhaps ironically, in high office conduct which was not unknown in prior decades is now exposed to huge scandalous effect, when earlier it was simply ignored.  Prior to this scandal, for example, President Clinton nearly lost his office due to his sordid affair with Monica Lewinsky.  But nobody seems to have been too concerned with JFK's conduct with Mimi Alford, assuming that Alford's recent revelations are true.  Likewise, if the rumored conduct about FDR are correct, everyone seems to have turned a blind eye to it.  I'm not saying that these alleged affairs should, or should not have, been exposed, if they were real, but it's interesting that we've gone from an era when affairs were regarded as wholly illegitimate, and kept secret for the most part, even though they were not infrequent, to an era when they're routine amongst average people, relatively rare amongst those in power, and career enders in high office, but not private office, if discovered.  Again, not an easy set of standard evolutions which are easy for a modern writer to take into account.

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Epilog:

Since I first published this entry in November, there's been a couple of times during the past year when something vaguely connected to it popped up.  Indeed, I did an entry that was fairly connected with it entitled "Fame."  

What causes me to republish it, and add the epilog, however is that in the past couple of weeks we've been treated to Amanda Bynes, former child actress, basically melting down, or  perhaps pretending to melt down, in public, with the predictable paparazzi like following of that, while at the same time it's been announced that Gen. Bryan T. Roberts, commanding general of the Army's Ft. Jackson, is being charged with adultery by the Army.

Now, I don't mean to excuse Gen. Roberts, but it is again interesting to note that in the case of Army officers and politicians, people expect the old moral standards to apply, but in regards to everyone else, they seemingly do not.  It's odd.