Military History

Help us understand what a military historian does. What sort of problems interest you?

The discipline of military history has clear-cut rubrics, or subdivisions. There's logistics, there's grand strategy, there's tactics, there's what we call operational history about how divisions fight battalions, or how horsemen fight, and then there's economic/social military history -- gender, race, class -- as it pertains to war. All of these are traditional military history. As military history came into its own, it seemed to me that operational history, tactical history, strategy, and especially the experience of what it was like to fight were pushed away, and military history, to be acceptable, had to be social history.

What I was trying to do was to bring the question of tactics, strategy, and the face of battle (to use John Keegan's term) back into the mainstream, and do it in a different way, so that [military history] wasn't seen as just a "Prussian military officer," but was seen as something that [involved] strategy or tactics, or [that examined how] the experience of battle rippled out or affected communities; that it was not just an esoteric science.

[24:01]One of your recent books is Ripples of Battle. Let's talk a little about that as a case study. You focus on three battles important in history. You begin this exercise with a quote from Churchill: "Great battles change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods in armies and in nations." In this book, one of the battles you focus on is Okinawa, and the story you tell has ripple effects within World War II, beyond World War II, but also among families, your own family.

Yes. I was trying to show that there is something abnormal about a battle. You put a bunch of mostly young men throughout history is a confined space, in a confined time, and the stakes are one's life, and you see ghastly things. Those impressions then affect them for their long span of life in a way that maybe even getting married or having children, or farming, or buying your first car do not. A lot of literature and drama and philosophy come out of that. So I wanted to make that argument first.

It's not predicated just on numbers of dead. Plague and earthquake kill many more people than wars do sometimes, but they don't involve these issues like culpability or preventability or human agency. So I wanted to look at three of them -- a modern one at Okinawa, one at Shiloh, and then a Greek battle at Delium, to show that the same issues were constant through time and space.

In the case of Okinawa, I had grown up hearing about how this battle had killed a young Swedish-American farm kid at 23, just after he got his bachelor's degree in 1945. Nobody wanted to talk about it, nobody knew exactly how he [died]; they were all dead now. So I wanted, as a personal odyssey, to reconstruct and explain how that death had affected all these people I know, but then lead that as an entry into the battle itself.

And this was your namesake, the person you're named after, and was a cousin.

It was. It was my father's first cousin. His mother died in childbirth and his father left, so he grew up with my father. They were the same age, same height, looked almost identical, and they had joined the Marine Corps together. They had gotten in a fight with an officer and my father took the rap, and as punishment, they put him in these new experimental B-29s, which turned out to save his life. To stay in the 6th Marine Division, if you look at the casualty ratios in Okinawa of the 29th Marines, was a death sentence. Nobody knew that at the time.

So I was interested in how he died. I knew that it would be almost impossible, because 83 percent of his battalion that went up Sugarloaf Hill were dead by the time he died, and this being 58 years later, I didn't think there would be anybody alive. But I found, actually, seven people who were there when he died.

The battle over Okinawa, a major island near Japan, occurred toward the end of the Pacific war. Over ninety days, the Japanese lost probably 100,000; we lost 12,000 solders; maybe another 100,000 civilians were killed. It was a horrendous battle to take a well-fortified island, and the costs and casualties were quite heavy, but it was important for moving on to Japan.

It was. It was a funny battle that started on April 1 and ended July 2, and then sixty days later the war was over. The American people didn't know what was going on for two reasons: One, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died right at the beginning of the battle, and then Europe was liberated, and the war was over in early May. So while their attention was focused on Europe, they didn't realize there would be 50,000 casualties, 350 ships hit, 5,000 sailors killed, 7,000 marines and air force, the worst fighting of the entire war. In fact, there were days where Okinawa was the worst day for the Americans in World War II. So that was striking.

What was even more striking was its the purpose. It was to get a gigantic island 350 miles from the Japanese mainland. We, today, worry about the atomic bomb, but we have no idea what Curtis Lemay was thinking, bringing in 3,000 B-29s, and rather than having to fly 1,500 miles from the Marianas, they could fly three sorties a day. And although they had almost burned down the cities of Japan already, they could do this day in. And then why not bring all the B-17s in, and even the B-24s, and even the Lancasters. In his mad mind, he had this idea of 15,000 bombers 350 miles from Japan. It would have been a holocaust. And I try to discuss that.

We worry about the bomb, and the moral implications of that, but ...

The dropping of the atomic bomb ...

Yes, in August. But we have completely forgotten that that generation asked different questions. We killed over 100,000 Japanese solders, they and us together killed 100,000 Okinawans, and then we had 50,000 American casualties. And when this was all going on, we had a bomb that was almost ready for production; it was tested in July. So why didn't we just hold off and use this bomb, and then we wouldn't have had all these people dead? So that generation's call was not don't use the bomb, but use it earlier.

It had an enormous effect on what we envisioned for Japan, because there were suicide boats, there were suicide submarines, there were suicide battleships, the Omoto, and there were suicide planes, there were suicide corpses. The Americans had never, ever experienced anything like that. It made Iwo Jima look like a picnic, if I can say that. There were still 12,000 kamikaze planes on the Japanese mainland, and there was a militia of 5 million people. It would be staggering to see Okinawa replicated at a magnitude of, say, 10 or 20.

So this impacted on the decision about the atomic bomb?

It did. You can't understand the dropping of the atomic bomb unless you read about what went on in Okinawa. The Japanese militarists had written instructions that one man can take ten out, or take a tank, and they had had a year to fortify the island. It was designed by the Japanese to show the Americans that "we can make life so horrible for you, and you can't take casualties like we can, that you better think about a negotiated surrender of ours, rather than an unconditional surrender." The militarists could stay in power with the threat that "If you try to invade the mainland, it will be another Okinawa." And they were successful in that way.

So in a way, this is a first run for what we're now encountering in terms of suicide bombers in the Middle East.

Yes it was, for two reasons: One, the tactic of putting a man in a plane and trying to blow up things, or a person on the ground trying to do it; and, more importantly, the whole idea that a Western, affluent, bourgeois society cannot suffer the same degree of casualties as a militaristic society. So, make war so terrible that even though we lose ten times more than you do, your loss is felt more grievously.

The only thing I can't quite understand about the Islamic fundamentalists who are terrorists is that they didn't really learn the lessons, as we saw the other day in Fallujah, that the West always has a response to this. Now, it may be horrific, but it will draw on its capital, its technology, its discipline, to come up with a remedy. The only thing that stops the full implementation of that remedy is usually a sense of self- or moral restraint. Something about suicide bombing is a liberating experience for a Westerner. When they encounter suicide bombing, it's almost as if, "If these people are going to do this to us, then there's no other way to win the war, but to unleash the dogs of American militarism." That's what we did, and we'll probably do it again if it happens again.

You write that "The pool of those who wish to kill themselves in service to a lost cause is finite despite professed fanaticism."

Yes, it's so funny that we had this idea that every Japanese person wanted to be a kamikaze. In fact, there were about 7,000 people that did. Most Japanese hated the tactic, and after the war the people who had inaugurated the tactic were despised. They had to finally get people out of the universities who were English majors, of all things. They had to indoctrinate people. Today, it's kind of nostalgic, and even Japanese people look back in glory. But not at the time, and there was a finite number. The final kamikazes, the biggest problem in the latter days of the campaign was that they were not flying their missions. The fighters who went along with them were instructed to shoot them down if they didn't go.

I think you're seeing the same thing after three years in the West Bank, that if you start looking at the profile of suicide bombers, we're seeing a lot of people now who are under psychiatric help, who are in a messy divorce that's impugning their honor, they're caught with adultery.

There is a finite number, whether it's in Japan or the present-day West Bank, who are willing to do that. If the West is against suicide bombing (because it doesn't seem to be a Western phenomenon), if they're willing to recognize that and to put up deterrents and to wait it out, [they can] then use it to their own advantage. It's not a successful [long-term strategy].

In doing research on Okinawa for this book, you actually found someone who sent you a memento.

Yes, I was talking to a lot of these people about how Victor Hanson was killed. One of them said, "Didn't you get my letter?" Well, his letter was sent in 1945, so I went out and found an old letter of my grandfather's. But he sent me a copy of it. Now he is 87, and he was 30. Another one said, "Why didn't anybody call me when I had Victor's ring?" I said, "What ring?" and he said, "You know, he was so proud of his Legionnaire ring that he wore it in training at Guadalcanal." I said, "No!" and he said, "He had a premonition that he might die, and he wanted us to take it back." I said, "Well, what would he do ... he didn't know classics." He said, "No, but he had a Roman Legionnaire... " I was a classicist, so I was interested in him, as well. And then he muffled, and he said, "Let me go off, away from the phone, and I'll call you back." He called me back a little bit later and said, "I have it here. I remember now that I called your grandfather, and he didn't speak English well, and he didn't want to come to the phone. I have it and I'll mail it to you." Well, I didn't know whether it was age or senility, but sure enough, this thing came. I had pictures of him, and you could see it on his finger. They had cut it off. When he [was shot] down [over the water], he was bloated the next day, and they cut it off his finger. So it came in the mail and I put it on this [chain], so here it is. That's his ring.

This is almost Greek, or mystical!

It is. For me it is, yeah. I wear it around my neck twenty-four hours a day.

That history would bring you back to the personal.

It does. It does. I remember the name, and, of course, I never met him, but when I went to school my father went out to the barn and said, "Here's his briefcase. Here's his baseball bat. Here's his papers. Now your job is ... I don't want to talk to you about it, I don't want to know anything about it .... " He couldn't talk about it. He just said, "You're supposed to be a better person." Well, growing up in this small rural community, every time I went to the doctor there would be a very attractive nurse in her fifties he had dated, and said, "I was in love with Victor Hanson." Or I'd go meet some guy, "You know, this guy was 6'2"; you're only 6'1"." You know: "He spoke Swedish; you don't speak a word." That kind of stuff. My whole life I was haunted by him -- and yet, a wonderful person.

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