Vietnam, A False Half Century Remembrance

Oh, how I hate the political season. Oh, how I really hate the present election of 2012. We are plumbing new depths of idiocy, foolishness, and outright lies. We are even reinventing history to suite the needs of a politician’s reelection bid. History is not what it used to be.

How to untangle the web spun by candidate Obama? How to deal rightly with one of the most contentious conflicts in US history? How to get that history right again? How to do this without getting once again rhetorically stuck in the impenetrable jungles of Southeast Asia? God, what a mess.

The long tangled tale of Vietnam, and how the elites of the US got hopelessly ensnared there really begins at World War Two. The rapid fall of France in WWII and the guerrilla struggle by the Vietnamese against the Japanese occupation set the stage for all that followed. Granted, even before this proximate cause, there were the even deeper events of World War One that tolled the end of colonialism.

France’s attempt to reclaim its Southeast Asian possessions after WWII was always going to be a dicy proposition. With the emergence of Hồ Chí Minh and the nationalist uprising, France’s attempt to reassert its prerogatives became Quixotic. HarryTruman, the US President recognized this and attempted to steer France away from reconquest. Unfortunately, post-war France was having none of it. With bigger fish to fry; the Marshal Plan, Setting up NATO, Containing the Soviet Union, Dealing with the “loss” of China, etc. Truman let La Belle France reoccupy Vietnam in exchange for French compliance with US goals in Europe. The linking of French efforts in the Far East with US interests only became stronger after the Korean War. By the end of France’s long twilight struggle with the Vietminh, the US was footing almost all of the bill.

It was all to no avail tough as France colonial forces ran up against one of the greatest military tacticians of the late 20th Century: Võ Nguyên Giáp. At Điện Biên Phủ, France suffered a military and psychological defeat that ended the grand illusion of French Indochina. Enter Eisenhower, and the next fateful decision.

With Ike, the US came out of the shadows and became a direct belligerent against Ho and his Vietminh. In a combination of bad faith, direct interference, bold planning, and more than a little dumb luck, the US was able to set up an anti-Communist regime in the southern rump of Vietnam. This cold war “success” was both ephemeral and ultimately Pyrrhic.

Little did Ike know that the regime of Ngô Đình Diệm was a disaster waiting to happen; a ticking time bomb. The very Catholic, and rather strange Diệm, was a Mandarin through and through. His bachelor ways, and aloof style grated on the Buddhist masses. His over-reliance on his bizarre and operatically corrupt family became a slow-motion train wreck for US interests. The whole sorry business started unraveling just as JFK settled in the Oval Office.

JFK’s handling of Vietnam made the situation much worse. Ever the Cold Warrior, John F Kennedy used the Southeast Asian rump nation of South Vietnam a testing ground for his new idea of Special Warfare. Enter the Green Berets, and clandestine warfare; an attempt to beat the Communists at their own guerrilla warfare game. It was not a rousing success.

JFK could never overcome the central issue that the Diệm regime was corrupt, dysfunctional mess. Ngô Đình Diệm managed to bring to the fore all the downsides of monarchal rule with none of the benefits. It all ended badly with the US green-lighting of the assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm and others in his clan. That was all Jack Kennedy, all the time.

But even as JFK did add fuel to the fire that finally became a conflagration in 1968 to 1969; he did inherit that fire from Ike. Ike’s policy “success” baited a bear trap that two Democratic presidents stepped right into. It took Richard Nixon, an anti-Communist’s anti-Communist to extract the US from the steel jaws of Vietnam. It also took an anti-war movement hammering away at Nixon almost every day to effect that  withdrawal.

A correct accounting of the US-Vietnam conflict, the long war, would be from 1945 to 1975; a huge swath of time. It is our thirty years war. And just like the war fought in Germany from 1618 to 1648 Vietnam was a brutal, nasty, overlong affair. And just like the German War the people who suffered most were the civilians.

It does a disservice to all those who had to endure that conflict. It does a disservice to the maimed and the dead. It does a disservice to victims of that war. It does a disservice to the Veterans. It does a disservice to the displaced, to refugees, to those uprooted and dispersed to foreign lands. It does a disservice to those who remained in Vietnam; who had to contend with the refuse of war, the unexploded bombs, the mines, and more subtle, more silent maimers and killers like Agent Orange. It does a disservice to ignore that history, to pretend it did not count because a hack politician needs to reach out to a section of the voting public. It is an unfortunate state of affairs.

Still, such a state of affairs is typical politics in 2012. Such tawdriness is a matter of course for our political duopoly. I can not be too harsh on Barack Obama because I am quite sure the Republican, Mitt Romney, will make an equally cynical play for the votes of Veterans. Both candidates can and will play fast and loose with the history of Vietnam because we, the citizens of the United States, don’t do history-- we do myth.

And because we only do myth, because our knowledge of Vietnam is formed by Rambo, or Full Metal Jacket, or Platoon, or some combination of those movies and others, our collective “memory” of Vietnam is plastic. Because we only do myth, not history, politicians can fudge even the most basic parts of history. Who cares? It is after all just a number, a good round number, a half century. Who cares if it’s totally bogus, we have an election to win.

The Less Know December Event Of World War Two, 70 Years On.

The Seventieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor just passed us on December 7, 2011 and there were many remembrances of that date in the press, plus the blogosphere. But almost no one in the U.S. Remembered a much more significant anniversary that happened just a few days earlier, on the 5th of December.

We citizens of the US don’t do history well. We barely do our own history. Other’s history, we don’t do at all. So it no surprise that no one in the US marked December 5, 2011; but I guarantee many Russians did.

While the attack on Pearl Harbor was critical, it brought the US into World War Two and most likely sealed the fate of Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers, the real action was on the Eastern Front. December 5th marks the end of Operation Barbarossa and the beginning of the Soviet counter attack that saved Moscow.

Operation Barbarossa began, in the balmy days of June. Hitler had just put a hurting on Yugoslavia and was now ready to invade Russia. He was aided in the aim by Joseph Stalin, who insisted on doing absolutely nothing to prepare for the assault.

Stalin ignored every last indication of Hitler’s malign intent. He ignored the intelligence. He ignored the warnings printed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He insisted on following every jot and tittle of the Nazi-Soviet pact lest he anger the Nazi regime. He literally helped to supply the invasion that crashed through Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941.

When the invasion did come, Stalin went into a three day funk. He locked himself into his room and took no callers. Most people would have done the same. The first days of the invasion were utter disaster. The Nazis chew up Soviet men, material, and land at a frightening pace. Most of the front line Soviet assets were gone by day three. The Red Army barely had a pot to cook in. Air power was vaporized on the ground, tanks, artillery, and men quickly followed when they lost air support. The Wehrmacht was turning Russia into their own personal playground, and there was not much the Red Army could do about it-- other than retreat.

And retreat the Russians did, further and further into the homeland. By November Nazi units were at the suburbs of Moscow. But then the greatest and longest serving of Russian Generals intervened: General Winter. The Nazi had no response to this greatest of Russian strategists and tacticians, no invading army since the Mongols did. Nazi soldiers were dying in alarming numbers, felled not by bullets, but by the god-awful cold. The Nazis were lightly clad in summer issue, worthless protection against the fierce Russian winter.

The lack of preparation for the Russian winter, plus the long logistical supply line to the front slowed the Nazis to a crawl. To add to the Nazi misery, the Russians had thrown up a fearsome defensive ring around Moscow that further impeded the Wehrmacht’s progress. Their vaunted Blitzkrieg literally frozen in place, the Nazis were forced to slog out the battles with rife fire and artillery support. It was then that Stalin plus the generals Zhukov and Vasilevsky unleashed a very unpleasant surprise: Red Army forces from the frozen lands of Siberia.

Thanks to the vast Soviet spy network those forces were released Asia to Europe. The Soviets learned that the Japanese were of no concern, so off to Moscow those men went. The Nazis were rather put off when the white-clad, and expert winter fighters, of Siberia came crashing through there lines.

Unfortunately Stalin waisted much of those troops by dispersing them in a general offense all along the front line. Moscow was saved, but the Wehrmacht lived to fight another day. It would be three, long bloody years before the Soviets would finally break the back of Nazi offensive capabilities at Kursk. It would be four years until the Soviets were able to mount an offense of their own. That offensive would see Berlin fall to the Red Army, but only after much pain, destruction and death.

On December 5th, 1941 crushing Hitler was hazy and distant wish of the Soviet people. By the slimmest of margins, Russia was able to save its capitol city from Nazi occupation. By January of 1942, the sacrifice of millions of Russian citizens had bought the Soviet Union a reprieve.  The Germans had been pushed back seventy miles and Moscow had been turned into an armed fortress. Little did Stalin know that all these preparations were for naught. Little did he know that Moscow would never again be under such a direct threat. Stalin had survived, the Soviet Union had survived; by the narrowest of margins. The next test would come in the south, not in Moscow. It would come in a city that bore the dictators name: Stalingrad.

Pearl Harbor Seventy Years Later

Seventy years, that is how long it has been. The "Greatest Generation" is almost gone. Those still surviving are now in their nineties. It is a different nation because of the sacrifice they made.

The US entered the war a great power, it exited the war as one of only two superpowers. It entered the war with a small, decrepit military. It exited the war with the most modern and one of the largest militaries in the world. It entered the war making razor blades. It exited the war making nuclear weapons. It entered the war with a small middle class, and a weak economy. It exited the war in a boom economy lead by an ever expanding middle class.

Pear Harbor was the real beginning of that transition from potential greatness to manifest greatness. It is as clear a dividing line that history ever provides. There is pre Pearl Harbor US, and there is a post Pearl Harbor US.

That transition was accomplished by millions of citizens both famous and obscure. It was accomplished at Pearl Harbor starting on December 8, 1941. The US went from disaster to triumph in only four short years. The Axis powers never saw it coming. Only Yamamoto understood the tiger whose tail he was pulling. Only Yamamoto saw the inevitable end that the Empire of Japan was driving toward. But not even Yamamoto saw what Oppenheimer saw at Trinity. Fortunately for Yamamoto, he did not have to witness Shiva's dance on his homeland, he died before that awful event.

It is entirely appropriate that the bookends of the Pacific War are both set aside as places of memorial. The USS Arizona, and the impact sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are scared places; places of reflection. We need to remember these places. We need to remember what happened. We need to remember the shock, the horror, the pain and the death. We need to remember the sacrifice with humility.

Operation Barbarossa

One June 22, 2011 an important anniversary passed us by. It passed us by without any hoopla whatsoever. We in the US don’t do our own history, were not about to observe someone else’s history. But that history is critical, it is the turning point of one of the greatest conflicts of the 20^th century; World War Two. On this date seventy years ago, on the 22^nd of June, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. In a single stroke one of the greatest land battles of history began. This was the Ostfront of WWII, this was killing fields of the “Good War.”

As Dan Carlin points out in his “Ghost Of The Ostfront” series, this was a war between two utterly evil political systems; Communism and Nazism. It was a battle of annihilation, a battle to the death. No quarter was asked or given. 

Once you actually look or listen to the facts of this war, it becomes an amazing story. The entire US effort in Europe becomes a sidebar, a diversion, something barely worth mentioning. Our greatest general, Ike, would be a third tier or at best a second tier general in the Soviet Armies.  

The four years of war on the Ostfront cost the Soviet Union almost thirty million lives. That is the population of the Greater New York City and Los Angeles County together. Losses among the Germans and their allies was also gargantuan.

Even when you limit the narrative to the year of 1941, the history of the Russian front still defies imagination. Until they were halted by the very greatest Russian general of them all, General Winter, the Germans had swallowed up a huge chunk of real estate. It was an area roughly 1200 km by 800km. Only the triple whammy of winter, unpreparedness, and a brilliant counter offensive by fresh Siberian troops saved Moscow. 

It is no exaggeration to say that it was the Soviet Union that broke the back of Nazism. It is no exaggeration that the men and women who fought for Russia were a breed apart. If our US WWII Veterans are the “Greatest Generation,” then what do we call those Soviets who fought, and defeated the Nazis, in the greatest land war of all time? What of their suffering, what of their sacrifice, what of their bravery? It is true that they fought for one of the worst dictators in history; but what of it? They fought for the Motherland, and against a Nazi terror that was even worse than Stalin’s depredations. 

Many historians are wont to claim that with the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had inevitably lost the war. That view, in my opinion, is anachronistic. It has the benefit of hindsight. The results of Operation Barbarossa balanced on a knifes’ edge, especially in 1941. A few winter coats here, a better plan there, better management of resources over here, and the results could have been far different. What would of happened to the Soviet war effort if Stalin had stayed in his funk for longer? What if Stalin had decided to abandon Moscow to “safer” ground? What if the Japanese had not concentrated their efforts in Asia, and had decided to kick Russia when it was down? The only reason those Siberian troops arrived to surprise the Nazis was because Japan had signed an Armistice with the Soviet Union. No Armistice, no Siberian troops, no counter offensive, and who knows what happens in the spring of 1942? 

History is a lot more dynamic than most US citizens supposed, many times it rests on the most random of events. It is not quite the fluttering of butterflies wings in Peru, but it is very close.The what-ifs that surround the war in the east are numerous. You could spend numerous lifetimes working out the counterfactuals surrounding the “Great Patriotic War.” Granted most people do not have much enthusiasm for such pallor games, but at the very least we should honor the efforts of Soviets. They deserve our gratitude for their sacrifice, they took the brunt, and somehow survived. Without their suffering our world would be much different today.

One Hundred and Fifty Years Latter; Fort Sumter.

There something oddly amusing, almost cute in a perverse way, that the Southern Citizens of the USA can still manage to be so charmingly dishonest and disingenuous about why the US fought the worst war in its history. They have done such a good job that Keith Olbermann reports that up to forty percent of US citizens feel that the Civil War, as we damn Yankees are wont to call it, was not about slavery. KO is, of course, apoplectic about this datum, outrage is his calling, his raison d'etre. It’s his schtick. I am not very surprised. In almost every state of the Union, what passes for History in schools is nothing more than a fifty-fifty mix of hagiography and trivia. It is only more so in the South. Real History, because it involves real people, is much more conflicted and messy. All sorts of inconvenient facts get in the way of our preferred narrative.  Both in the North and the South, we much rather kowtow to the marble edifices we have created for our preferred narratives than deal with the grubby realities of the real people who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The conflict of the mid-nineteenth century was all about slavery. Remove chattel bondage from the discussion and you have a lover’s tiff about tariffs between Dixie and the North. The Peculiar Institution of Dixie was big business. It was huge. It was a monster. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the value of slaves in the South outstripped the entire value of Northern economy by several fold. Enormous amounts of wealth was locked up in human bodies. The claim that slavery was a loosing proposition, headed for the dust bin of History, is simply wrong.

Strip away moral considerations and slavery is very profitable in an agricultural setting; especially in labor-intensive items like sugar and cotton. Even  today, labor is still considered the largest controllable expense of any business. Slavery drives the cost of labor down to near nothing. The slaver does have to offer food, clothing and lodgings for the slaves, but none of this has to be any good. The slaver can feed the slaves slop, dress the slaves in rags, and house the slaves in hovels; and they did. Forget Gone With The Wind, that was Hollywood, slaves lived a Hobbesian existence. It was an institution enforced with brutal efficiency and overarching racism. It was brutal and brutalizing. It was also very, very, very profitable.

The Achilles’ heel of slavery was that this profitability was on hand for only a very select few. Only the thin crust of the very upper Southern planter elite made any real money from slavery. The vast majority of Southern whites were either too poor to own slaves or had the resources to own a few. These people had no real pieces in the game. They did have the vicious racism of their betters, and they had a dream. They had a dream of climbing the economic ladder and becoming gentleman planters too. It was this dream that caused the South to attempt to keep spreading slavery to new lands.

It was in this expansion that South and North came into conflict. It is also here that you, gentle reader, must forget all that pious nonsense them damn Yankees spout about the Abolitionists. The conflict between North and South was mainly economic. Northern settlers, the free men of the free soil, were dead set against competing against slave labor. For most supporters of the Republican Party the antipathy toward slavery was two fold: it was economic and deeply racist. The racial fear and the economic fear of African -Americans fed each other. Even when you look at the Abolitionist movement, the level of fear, distrust, and outright toxic hatred of African-Americans is phenomenal. After the Civil War, more than a few prominent Abolitionists became rabid supporters of Jim Crow. Being your bothers’ keeper only went so far for some Abolitionists.

The constant hunger for new land by both Northern and Southern pioneers is what finally moved the nation to war. More than anything else, it was the constant breaking of compromises by the South that led to the fracture. Southern pioneers’ insistence on bringing their “property” into places where it was not wanted  and legally prohibited, finally caused the North to draw a line. The election of Lincoln was that line. Slavery was to stay put. It was not placing one foot forward from where it was. There were to be no more bleeding Kansas, the North was done with that.

Unfortunately, the South was not done with that. The South correctly interpreted the election of Lincoln as a slap in the face. How they reacted to that slap was what caused the death of almost three quarters of a million men. The South went into high dungeon. The South went berserk.  After the fact, the South, in typical fashion, blamed the North for this temper-tantrum. Dixie still teaches  the conflict of 1860-1865 as “The War of Northern Aggression;”  but all the aggression came from the South in 1860-1861.  Remember , the only “aggression” Fort Sumter offered was sitting in Charleston harbor. It was the South Carolina fire-eaters who decided to shell the fort when the Union tried to resupply the position.

Once free of the hated “aggressive” Union fort, South Carolinians went on an orgy of secession and legislating. And what did the newly “liberated” state of South Carolina concern itself with? Laws about slavery.  Specifically these new laws were all about supporting, defending and entrenching the Peculiar Institution into the warp and woof of South Carolinian law. To even speak out against slavery was made a crime in South Carolina. By enshrining slavery in the law, South Carolina was showing exactly why it was attempting to secede from the Union.

Forget the nonsense about States Rights, that was and continues to be a McGuffin. The  right that the South was so fiercely defending was to hold men and women in chains. The right that was being defended was to treat people as property--full stop. Every other conflict between North and South was based on this one institution of the South, the Peculiar Institution of slavery. At first, this prime mover was implicit in the war. Later, via the Emancipation Proclamation, this prime mover was made explicit. To ignore or deny this central fact is an act of astounding intellectual dishonesty.

It takes several quantum leaps in cognitive dissonance  to pull this off; this denial of the centrality of slavery to the Civil War. It takes putting cognitive dissonance on massive amounts of steroids to pull this off. It takes deliberate ignorance and toxic amounts of racism to pull this off. It takes a deliberate policy of feeding children with lies at home and the classroom to pull this off. It takes teaching children something other than history. It takes teaching them a deliberately distorted concoction of half-truth, spin, hagiography, and outright lies as history. It takes teaching a perversion of history to willing fools to perpetuate this numbskullery.

If this Nation is ever  to really progress, to become a more perfect Union, it really has to come to grips with the long, sad history of the Middle Passage. In many ways we are still undergoing that passage. No part of the nation is clean. All have been soiled by the perversion that was slavery. It was not only the planter aristocracy of the South that made fortunes from the bitter tears of African-Americans. Many a New England dynasty was built on shipping human flesh from Africa to the New World. The heroes of the narrative are painfully few, the scoundrels are legion. We are still dealing with the toxin of the racist narrative that made slavery possible. It is a toxin that still sickens the politics of the nation.

In many ways, the election of Barack Obama has only made the toxin stronger. There has been a vicious blow-back from the usual suspects of the right. They are not as crude as George Wallace, or Bull Conners, or the other yellow-dog racists of yore. The new bigots hide under a thin patina of respectability. Still it is not too hard to scratch the surface and find the vicious hater beneath. All you have to look at is a salient datum to find the redneck, all you have to do is look at the forty percent who claim slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War.

Snakes creeping out Bangkok - Asia-pacific - Al Jazeera English

Snakes creeping out Bangkok - Asia-pacific - Al Jazeera English

The Battle Of Trenton, Or No Holiday for Hessians

This Sunday, December 26, 210 Marks the Anniversary of the battle of Trenton. If this Revolutionary War battle name does not jog one’s memory, ask yourself why Washington crossed the Delaware in the first place. Those now famous Hessians he fought were encamped in winter barracks in Trenton, New Jersey.

Washington achieved tactical and strategic surprise that day, routing the Hessians and raising the moral of his troops. It was a near run thing. Washington was delayed by foul weather. It was deep winter and New Jersey after all. Washington wanted to strike at midnight but the weather delayed the attack to dawn and caused some artillery units to be left behind.

Still the dawn attack was a very unpleasant surprise to the Hessians. The Hessian commander had some intelligence that Washington was up to something and was screaming for more troops and a change of venue, but he had no idea where or when Washington might strike. Thus when he was given his early wake up call, the Hessian commander was out of sorts.

The Hessian troops were not too happy either. They were sober, but the lack of a dawn post had left them bleary eyed, and lethargic. They attempted resistance, but tactical surprise and bad moral in the Hessian troops wrong-footed the mercenaries. The Hessian resistance quickly collapsed.

As battles go Trenton was minor both tactically and strategically. The real impact was psychological. After being pushed out of both New York and New Jersey moral was low in the Colonial Armies. Trenton was a much needed shot in the arm. Spirits rose after Trenton as did much needed recruitment and reenlistment efforts.

As for the British, they were shocked and dismayed by the news from the Garden State. Pacifying New Jersey was turning out to be a much taller order than suspected. Who knew such a small state could cause so much trouble? The Militia of New Jersey was especially irksome to the British, bloodying the noses of the Red Coats in several engagements.

The winter of 1776-1777 was none too jolly for British. The forces of King George III were getting the first taste of what was to be a long attritional struggle with an opponent that was often down, but never out.

So happy Delaware River crossing day. Hopefully December 26 will mean more to you than the first day you can return some of those awful gifts your clueless friends and relatives gave you.  “ A fruit cake; you shouldn’t have. No. Seriously. You really shouldn’t have. I’m allergic to the nuts.