�Americans at War� is a compilation of selected works from Stephen Ambrose, chock-full of essays taking the reader through American warfare, how it affected people then, how it shaped the country to come, and the world at large.
There�s a load of quotes from Ambrose in this �review,� since I feel his words express the situation just fine on their own. Truthfully, to my reader (Hi, Scott!), I patched all this together on the fly and thus you may feel free to pass over my pedestrian comments. Please pay attention to Ambrose's intellect, not my lack of.
Moving on, unfortunately, Ambrose passed away due to cancer last year, so we can only presume how he would write about Gulf War II. However, we can glean a bit of his ideas from these works.
As Ambrose discusses how he became interested in history it becomes clear that a first-rate teacher is essential, their knowledge fueling their passion. I've had more than a few, from Coach Loeber in high school to Mr. Smothers in college, not to mention a home environment where my parents encouraged such study among my siblings. I spent one spring break with my father driving around Civil War battlefields in Virginia, at Antietam and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, discovered a future in the media during Gulf War I and now work in my dream job at CNN for Gulf War II.
Perhaps the most important question of them all, "how do wars happen? and how do men do it?� are the focus of why this book is necessary:
"Ardent patriotism was rampant during (World War II); everyone pitched in. Mother ran a Cub Scout troop; we had our victory garden; she sent her boys out gathering milkweed pods (for making life jackets) and collecting old newspapers and tin cans; she worked an eighty-hour day in the local pea cannery (alongside German POWs captured in North Africa). She made a hot meal for us every night, and she insisted on a clean plate - my sharpest memory of those meals is groaning at the sight of another meal of tuna fish and noodles with stale potato chips crumbled on top, only to hear Mother say, 'Think of the poor starving children in Europe.' She wrote to Dad every day, and she did volunteer work for the Red Cross.
"How she did it, I don't know. But I know that she did. So did millions of other American women. As much as the men, they made victory possible; more than the men, they held the American family together." (p. 181)
After a couple of "insiders" in the Pentagon and State Department voiced disagreement with our military's outline, the media went nuts and announced Bush's war plan was a failure and troops were bogging down in a quagmire. Hogwash. Infighting among leaders goes back to when Thor clubbed his partner on the mammoth hunt over a dispute over stone or bronze arrowheads.
One of the intriguing discussions comes with the end of World War II, as Ambrose takes an interesting view of how the atomic bomb worked for Americans and the Japanese:
Ambrose says he "had never imagined I could do such a thing as contribute to the world's knowledge," (Introduction, p. x), but wow, has he, becoming the ultimate "pop history" best-selling historical author in the 90s. He went beyond the written word to do something about chronicling history by founding the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, which is also dedicated to the Pacific theater of operations during World War II.
God bless you, Mr. Ambrose, and my your writings help you live on and teach Americans and the world about some of the most important subjects mankind will ever encounter.
"All nations make war in their own way. The American way is the theme of these essays. 'Hitler should beware the fury of an aroused democracy,' Dwight Eisenhower wrote his brother Milton on the day World War II started. That is the theme of the American way. After four decades of study, what impresses me most is how far superior democracy is to all other forms of government in making war. Hitler was sure that the opposite is true. He believed that a totalitarian government was inherently and overwhelmingly more efficient than democracy, with its squabbling parliamentarians representing this or that interest group. That is true enough during peace time, but when war comes and everyone in the democracy becomes a member of the team, eager to do his or her duty, ready to accept and exercise individual initiative, the result is an explosion of power�" (Introduction, p. xiii)
Writing in the early 90s about the future of warfare, War in the Twenty-First Century, Ambrose notes that because of the age of war on television, people will demand less death and destruction than previous conflicts were allowed. Undoubtedly you recognized this even more so in Gulf War II as the embedded journalists brought war live to the living room, and we saw our troops half a world away performing their duty without question and with honor. Thankfully there were fewer casualties than many predicted, on both sides, but if the conflict had dragged on it�s not hard to predict the reaction:
"Perhaps less well known is the way servicemen's wives with young children coped with the war. My mother's experiences, if not typical, were at least commonplace enough to provide an example. My dad, a doctor in a town of one thousand people in central Illinois, joined the navy the day after Pearl Harbor. I was six years old when the war began; I had a brother two years older and another two years younger. Mother, then thirty-one years old, was determined that we would stay together as a family as long as possible - so she and my brothers and I became camp followers. We lived in Chicago, Iowa, Florida, and Wisconsin. When Dad went to the Pacific in 1944, she went by train to San Francisco to see him off; we boys stayed with various relatives. "Had there been TV coverage of the Battle of Verdun (1916), it is possible to argue that the peoples of France and Germany would have created antiwar movements that would have led to a stalemated settlement in 1917. Had there been TV images of American boys stacked up in rows in the snow around Bastogne in December 1944, there might well have been an antiwar movement advocating a negotiated settlement with Hitler." (p. 247)
Ambrose especially touches on the notion of civilian discomfort at home affecting soldiers overseas. No where was this more prevalent than during Vietnam, where many on the Left, and the media, gleaned their �power� and ideas that America is to blame first for the world�s ills. This idea was rejected during Gulf War II by Americans who learned on 9/11 that there are real enemies with unimaginable goals of destruction for Western civilization. But that doesn�t change the fact that protests during Vietnam, and before American troops ousted Saddam Hussein, emboldened our enemies and contributed to weakening our resolve and thus the deaths of our troops:
"Because of the strength of the antiwar movement in the United States, the government - under both Lyndon Johnson and (Richard) Nixon - had imposed many restrictions on targets in the air war, which, naturally, infuriated the airmen. This policy had little effect on public opinion - the doves and foreign critics still charged that the U.S. Air Force was carrying out a barbaric, terrorist campaign - but it was a great help to the North Vietnamese. They knew what was off-limits. �" (The Christmas Bombing, p, 205-206)
Remember this while the media harps about a few civilian casualties in Iraq, in perspective:
"In the Pacific, Roosevelt relentlessly pressured General Mitchell and General Arnold to bomb Japanese cities. He was a strong advocate of night area low-level attacks with incendiaries designed to burn up Japan's cities. This was done with terrifying results: the March 9-10, 1945, raid on Tokyo, during which two kilotons of bombs were dropped, resulted in a holocaust with more casualties than were caused by the atomic bombs." (The Atomic Bomb and Its Consequences, p. 127)
Remind the Arab press and antiwar loonies (such as Rep. Charlie Rangel) who claim we purposefully targeted civilians, that if we really wanted to hit the innocent, we would be able to decimate them in staggering numbers. Our precision targeting of installations next to homes, churches and hospitals saved thousands upon thousands of civilians who were placed in harm's way by Saddam and his goons. "Eisenhower hated giving in, hated putting politics first, but he was sensible enough to do it. He wasn't happy. 'The French continue to be difficult,' he complained to Marshall. 'I must say that next to the weather I think they caused me more trouble in this war than any other single factor.' � British troop leader Gen. Montgomery waited until the Germans pulled from the Battle of the Bulge before counterattacking, as the chance to cut off the Germans slipped away. . . . Patton was furious. Had it not been for Monty, who was claiming credit for a great victory - seen by the Americans as a missed opportunity - Patton wrote in his diary, 'We could have bagged the whole German army. I wish Ike were more of a gambler, but he is certainly a lion compared to Montgomery. Monty is a tired little fart. War requires the taking of risks and he won't take them.'" (Victory in Europe: May 1945, p. 119)
Since every day is Bash the French Day, we touch on how many enjoy profit over ethics, then and now in their support of Saddam's regime and their oil contracts over liberation. American tanks that were sunk on D-Day stayed there far too long with troops inside:
"For three decades, those tanks sat on the bottom of the Channel. Local fishermen knew their location; the wrecks were prime fishing areas. The fishermen refused to divulge the spots until embarrassed into doing so by the local mayors, who pointed out to them that the men whose bones were inside had come over to France to liberate them and deserved a proper burial. In the past ten years, all the tanks have been pulled out, the bones buried." (D-Day Revisited, p. 97)
During the war we�re clouded by the fog of battle and conflicting reports. Afterwards, we have time to reflect:
"In the 1960s and 1970s Western scholars, including myself, tended to look at American policy when fixing the blame for the Cold War. Partly this was because we could study American documents but no Soviet documents; we knew what went on in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, but not in Stalin's or Khrushchev's. Partly this revisionism was a response to the Vietnam War; young scholars extended their disapproval of that conflict backwards in time and successfully selected evidence from American archives that seemed to show American responsibility for the Cold War." (The Cold War in Perspective, 243)
Now that Iraq has fallen, we're already seeing the human rights atrocities of childrens' jails, illegal business between Saddam and France and Germany, the obvious signs of terrorism bred in the country, and everyone knows he had weapons of mass destruction; it's only a matter of time before we figure out where they are. Too bad our insta-news demands every answer minutes after Baghdad fell, but one hopes when the history books are written this will be a blur. " American policy makers felt that it was necessary to shock the Japanese into surrender. Actually, it was more necessary to give the people who were running Japan, the military, an excuse to quit. That was the great contribution of the atomic bomb. . . . With the Japanese military eliminated and the American lust for revenge satiated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the military occupation of Japan and the remaking of that country was successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams. That the United States and Japan are allies today is the result." (The Atomic Bomb and Its Consequences, p. 132, 133)
Ambrose then provides lessons for today�s Iraqi �conquest� from Gen. Douglas MacArthur's heading of occupying forces in Japan after World War II:
"In Japan, where he was a virtual dictator, MacArthur revealed a die no one had suspected. His politics, in regard to Japan, turned out to be liberal and democratic. While running the fairest and most honest military occupation in all history, he allowed the Japanese to write their own, hopefully new, constitution. When the end product turned out to be a warmed-over version of the old constitution, MacArthur and his staff took the document in hand and completely rewrote it. He then submitted it to the Japanese people who after full deliberation adopted it. The constitution is exactly what MacArthur said it was, 'undoubtedly the most liberal in history.' It combined the American executive system and the British parliamentary one. The emperor was no longer deified, but became the symbol of the state and the unity of the people. Supreme power resided in the Diet, elected by universal franchise. MacArthur gave the Japanese, for the first time in their history, a bill of right. He saw to it that Japanese women got a new status, with equal opportunities in employment, coeducation, marriage, voting and property rights." (General MacArthur: A Profile, p. 150)
In respects to the book itself, Ambrose has been my favorite non-fiction historical writer for over a decade, and I'll spend years catching up with the brilliance of his work. He has a down-home, American view, and presents facts so that you never doubt where he stands in history. He also unapologetically leans to the United States� point of view:
"A hundred and twenty-eight years ago Abraham Lincoln said that we were the last great hope of mankind. We still are." (The Cold War in Perspective, 243)
One problem, though, with the compilation that doesn't have anything to do with Ambrose, but the publisher, is that the book needs maps. Badly. Tracing the rivers and cities of the campaign for Vicksburg, the reader needs to be able to follow the action up and down the Mississippi River and southern Mississippi, as well as Custer in Montana for his Last Stand, Normandy in discussion of D-Day and MacArthur in the Philippines and Korea.
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