Category Archives: War

Devil at My Heels

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deveil-at-my-heelsThis book is the autobiography of Louis Zamperini written with David Rensin. “Lucky Louie” escaped from a juvenile delinquent life to become an Olympic runner and later a U.S. Army bombardier in the Pacific during World War II. He was on a plane that crashed on a search mission and Louis and two others survived to begin a long drift in two rafts. One man died, but Louis and the pilot survived to be captured by the Japanese and imprisoned. They were treated inhumanely and lived in squalid and deprived conditions. Louis was treated as a war hero after being freed and was freed again from an alcoholic life by the efforts of his wife to get him to attend Billy Graham speaking events. The life story is fascinating and the book tells it exceptionally well.

A more complete description of what is in the book is given in my review of “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand. That book was selected by the Northern Colorado Common Read (NCCR) as the book of the year for 2012. I do not understand why they didn’t select “Devil at My Heels” instead. The autobiography is a better and more believable book. The first person writing is easier to read and there are additional interesting details. Continue reading →

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

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unbrokenThe copy of the book by Laura Hillenbrand I read was purchased by the Friends of the Westminster Colorado Public library. The book was selected by the Northern Colorado Common Read (NCCR) for this year and there were several discussion sessions that included meetings with veterans. The book is the story of Louis Zamperini. He was saved from a delinquent childhood by a bother who convinced him to try out long distance running. He broke the high school record for the mile. He was a star on the University of California track team where he met a mysterious Japanese man named Jimmie Sasaki who later turned up as a Japanese military official. Louis finished seventh in the 5000 meters at the Berlin Olympics. He soon was a bombardier on raids over Japanese targets in the Pacific, and perhaps the brutal training and running of the 5000 meter “torture chamber” prepared him for what was in store.

Louis participated in several bombing runs against Japanese targets, and was one of three who survived a plane crash in the Pacific. They had two small rafts and meager supplies; the survival kit did not make it to their rafts. One of the other men ate the entire supply of chocolate the first night, which left them with no food. Louis caught an albatross that landed on his head, the meat was so putrid they couldn’t eat it, but they did catch a small fish with a hook baited with the meat. Sharks circled the rafts for almost the entire 47 days of drifting. The sharks occasionally resorted to trying to jump into the rafts and had to be fended off with the oars.

The men teetered on starvation with only an occasional fish, bird, or the livers from a couple of small sharks to keep them barely alive. They roasted under the sun, and rains came just often enough to keep them from dying of thirst.

The men fired a flare to attract a plane, which turned out to be Japanese. The plane made several strafing runs, shot up the rafts, but miraculously missed the men. One raft couldn’t be saved and became a sun shade. They patched the other raft despite the fact the sandpaper in the patching kit was not waterproof and the sand had fallen off. One of the men died shortly before the raft drifted up to an island where a Japanese boat took the two survivors captive. Continue reading →

The Cross and the Crescent: A History of the Crusades

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crescentI’ve always believed I am quite poorly informed about the Crusades and have read that Muslim resentment continues to this day about the many invasions to “cast the infidels out of the Holy Land.” I don’t think my understanding of the crusades improved much after reading this book by Malcom Billings. There is significant detail of people, alliances, paths taken to the various battle sites, battles, and outcomes. What the Crusades accomplished for the Catholic Church still seems to me to be a mystery. The Church certainly sent several Crusades of tens of thousands of loyal worshipers off to what was death or slavery for many or most. Crusaders often had to give up everything to fund their preparations to arm and equip themselves and their entourage for a brutally hazardous trip for the honor of dying on the journey, fighting to the death or being enslaved in a faraway location. The book was prepared as a companion to a BBC radio series, and perhaps the radio shows in combination with the book would have left me feeling a bit more comfortable.

I’m not going to try to sort out the overwhelming amount of information about the countless Crusades, but there were some interesting factoids, and I did learn a few things. For example, the Pope Urban II “preached” the first crusade in 1096, and a key figure was a very strange sounding man called Peter the Hermit. The beginning of that crusade was consistent with what happened on many of the crusades. There were 800 Jews slaughtered by the crusaders as they were setting out for the Holy Land.

There are references to towns at various locations along the path to the Holy Land being sacked and inhabitants raped and murdered during many of the crusades. It seems the Crusaders often contained bands of murderous thieves. On the other side there were the Knights Templar who were generally quite admirable and the Knights of Saint John, or Hospitalers, who dedicated themselves to caring for the sick and injured.

I challenge anyone to keep up with the numerous popes “preaching” Crusades and threatening to cast anyone failing to answer the call from the church. There was one remarkable time when there were three claiming to be pope, and they were calling for Crusades to support their claim to the position.

Many of the battles were over some location where there was supposed to be a religious relic to be recovered. It sounded as if there were enough “splinters of the true cross” that someone could have assembled several crosses. Two gruesome relics were the decapitated heads of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. There were also numerous references to pieces of bones of various saints. The battles were often sieges against massive castles, and the book has photographs of the remnants of many of those.

It sounded as if the greatest challenge to crusaders was to survive the trip to the battle. The journey was long and the paths often took them over mountain ranges with brutal weather and little food to be scavenged. Many of the crusaders and their horses and other livestock died on the way. Then they faced well rested and equally dedicated foes intent on killing them. The battles were vicious affairs. There was one description that so many arrows were launched at the crusaders that it wasn’t uncommon for someone to survive but “look like a porcupine” with all the arrows that had struck them. There were some acts of kindness, but mostly victors slaughtered the fallen indiscriminately. The only survivors of a defeated city, regardless of whether the defeated were Christian or Muslim, would be sold into slavery. The value of slaves plummeted because of the Crusades. One man was sold for the “price of a shoe” in a time when there was such a glut of slaves.

I mentioned some interesting factoids. Richard the Lionhearted defeated the followers of Isaac Ducas Comnenus, who called himself “Emperor of Cyprus” and had made an alliance with Saladin (I include these details to demonstrate the level of detail in the book). The “Emperor” was brought before Richard and said his only request was, “…that he might not be placed in fetters and manacles of iron.” The King “…ordered fetters and manacles of silver and gold be made for him.” Richard died of infection after he was shot by a crossbow bolt during a siege of a castle in Aquitaine (just as portrayed in the Russell Crowe movie “Robin Hood”).

A good example of the senseless brutality was a battle where Christians fought alongside Muslims against a Crusader assault on the town of Beziers. The Crusaders won and 7000 people from the town packed themselves into the church. The church was ordered to be burned, and when told that there were Christians in the church the “…papal legate then made a remark that has resounded through the centuries. ‘Kill them all, God will know his own’.”

Perhaps the most interesting factoid was the siege of Kerak by Saladin against “…Reynald of Chatillion who had been Prince of Antioch…” Reynald was hosting a wedding party when Saladin’s forces arrived, and the festivities continued while the artillery barrage pounded the walls. The bridegroom’s mother sent some dishes from the wedding feast to Saladin’s tent. “He chivalrously responded by enquiring where the newlyweds were sleeping, and gave orders to his artillery to ease up on that part of the citadel!”

I’ve been interested in the insanity of the “Children’s Crusade,” and there were only a couple of pages with little information about the Crusade. A shepherd named Stephen preached a Crusade in 1212 for children based on what he said was a vision of Christ. There is a picture of the Crusade, which was said to be consisted of thousands of children aged 6 to teenagers, riding hobby horses on their way to the Holy Land. The only survivors I noted were those who were loaded into ships that sailed to Egypt where they were immediately captured on arrival and sold into slavery.

Popes did not learn from the insanity of the Children’s Crusade. There were Crusades being “preached” by Popes as late as 1798.

Crazy Horse and Custer

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crazy-horseThe subtitle of this book by Stephen E. Ambrose is “The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors,” and it provides a wealth of information about the two main characters and details their similarities and differences. Crazy Horse lived a simple life and strived to do what was best for his people. Custer behaved outlandishly to attract attention and surrounded himself with an entourage that catered to him while his troopers lived a hard life with poor food. Custer’s actions were always designed to improve his reputation and status. Custer’s only military strategy was to attack regardless of the risk to the men under his command. His eventual defeat resulted from the fact Crazy Horse was a better strategist and had vastly superior forces that were well organized for one of the few times in the decades the Native Americans warred against the whites. (Note that Ambrose called them “Indians,” and I have a problem with that name because it derived from Columbus seeing natives in what he thought was Indies and that name has survived since that error was made. However, I will use the term the author uses in the remainder of this review.)

I began reading this book on the recommendation of a friend and with a warning from the librarian who declared the book was said by her husband, an Ambrose fan, to be his worst. More important to me is a negative review on Amazon by a Sioux that “What Mr. Ambrose states in his book is mostly fabrication about the Sioux Nation.” I found the descriptions of the Indians and Crazy Horse to be fascinating. It actually makes me sad that a member of the Sioux Nation was moved to give the book a one star ranking, because I had increased my admiration of that tribe from the reading of this book. The most remarkable observation Ambrose makes is that whites were amazed that the Indians could consume as much as ten pounds of meat in one meal.

Crazy Horse began life as “Curly” and Custer began as “Autie.” Crazy Horse was raised in the tradition that led him to want to be a Sioux warrior, and Custer became known as “a born soldier” as a little boy. Crazy Horse and his people had no use for the concept of private property while the whites believed that the concept of private property was the key to economic freedom. Autie learned early that currying favor with the politically powerful gained advantage, and that is how he made it into West Point. Crazy Horse learned that bravery of actions and outcome was all that was important to a warrior.

Custer finished last in his West Point class, and seemed to be able to curtail his lack of discipline in both actions and dress just in time to prevent expulsion. He loved attention and was an expert at getting it. He went from long flowing hair to shaving his head and wearing a toupee. As his hair grew back he acquired the nickname of “Curly,” which was the name first given to Crazy Horse.

Custer attracted attention of superiors in the Civil War because he was the opposite of cautious. Custer ordered and led charges while others held back. He often lost large numbers of soldiers killed, but seemed impervious to injury himself. He led a headlong charge into Jeb Stuart’s Confederate cavalry at Gettysburg and might have changed history. Stuart was to hit the Union lines from the rear to coincide with Picket’s charge from the front. Custer’s undermanned charge sent horses and men crashing into the Confederate calvary, and disrupted what probably would have been devastating to the Union soldiers lined up to repel Picket to the front. Custer lost 481 men killed, wounded, or captured of his 1,700 man force, but he was promoted to Major General and Jeb Stuart was mortally wounded. Custer lost more than a third of his men at the Wilderness. His aggressive “tactics” stopped Lee’s flight and was a key in forcing the Confederate surrender at Appomattox despite the loss of 377 men. His successes in battle were always brutal and bloody. Custer’s younger brother Tom was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions in the battles that led to Appomattox. His brother would follow him and die with all the other selected staff members at the hands of the Sioux.

On a personal family note, one of Custer’s competitors for senior military attention was Judson Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick, or “Little Kil,” was the commanding general of the “mounted calvary” unit in Sherman’s army that included Elijah Tilton, my Great Uncle by marriage to my Great Aunt Rachael Brooke, and two of their sons. The two sons survived, but Elijah did not.

Custer led the Grand Review in Washington to celebrate the defeat of the Confederacy. The end of the Civil War left only the Indian wars for Custer to gain the military recognition he craved, and there was little positive recognition due for the U.S. army and calvary in those wars. The book observes that, “…no campaign the Army ever undertook matched the Hancock campaign of 1867 for sheer stupidity.” The soldiers spent years chasing the Indians, and many of them never saw a hostile Indian in the field except in the rare instances that the Indians believed they had a strategic advantage. Custer and his troops unsuccessfully pursued Indians in the central U.S. while the Indians “…had a fine time…” striking mail stations, wagon trains, and railroad workers. The whites defeated Indians not by direct conflict but by killing the buffalo herds that provided the Indians food.

There is detailed information about Libbie (Elizabeth) Custer and her relationship with Custer. Custer did everything to be in her company, and once was even court martialed for abandoning his post to reach her. Libbie was completely loyal to him, and used her beauty and charming personality to advance his career. She accepted the fact that Custer ordered that she be killed if threatened to become an Indian hostage. She dedicated her life to advocating that he was a hero who died in the service of the country.

There is an interesting comment by Sitting Bull who became part of the Wild Bill Cody show and was later shot in the back and killed by an Indian policeman that “…the white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.” Annie Oakley observed that the money Sitting Bull made “…went into the pocket of small, ragged boys.” Sitting Bull was eventually shot in the back and killed by an Indian policeman.

There are details about Custer positioning himself in politics. There are implications that he pushed his soldiers and their mounts to exhaustion and ordered the fatal attack on a Crazy Horse’s massively superior force because he hoped to have a major combat victory would earn himself a nomination in the Democratic convention. He was said to have laughed just before his death, and one has to wonder whether his brother, the hand-picked staff, and the others in his command thought it was all that funny.

Crazy Horse eventually agreed to come in to a reservation, but tried to resist when he realized he was going to be locked in a small cage with no toilet. He was stabbed with bayonets, and died within a few days. Not a great story in our historical legacy, but a worthwhile book to consider.

Better Angels of Our Natures, Why Violence has Declined

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Guest Review by Kathy London

better -angelsI keep running into references to Steven Pinker’s book, so, even though it came out in 2011, I think it was worth a look today.

Pinker sets out to demonstrate that violence has decreased over history and continues to decrease today. Pinker views the decline of violence as one of the most significant and least appreciated developments in history. But he knows most people will refuse to believe it.

Because of preconceptions about violence in the past and today, Pinker must present lots of data – and the evidence is extensive. So this is a long (812 pages of text) and leisurely (84 pages of notes, plus references and index) book.

The book is full of stories as well as studies and statistics. Pinker says “if narratives without statistics are blind, statistics without narratives are empty”. Using sources from Shakespeare to the Bible to Saturday Night Live to word searches across 5 million digitized Google Books, Pinker shows how integrated into everyday life violence was in the past – slavery, rape, murder, feuds, wars, and torture. Europe in the Middle Ages seems especially horrific; enough to ruin any romantic vision of medieval knights.

Pinker is writing about a trend that spans millennia, starting well before written history. Can we learn anything about our pre-human ancestors from the behavior of apes today? Maybe. Lethal raiding among chimps is shockingly brutal.

Are human beings basically good or bad? Pinker presents extensive psychological evidence. This doesn’t seem, strictly speaking, necessary to prove his point on decreasing violence. Pinker feels probability and statistics are counter-intuitive, so you need to see this evidence in detail. He tells me more about power-law distributions than I really wanted to know. There are a lot of words on crime, deterrence, and how to test for reality – and Pinker admits the data present a rat’s nest of implications.

There was no idyllic past. Evidence piles up that hunter-gather societies, once considered peaceful, murdered a substantial percentage of their populations through raids, ambushes, and terrorism (including cannibalism).

With the rise of agriculture and states, a government monopoly on force to protect citizens replaced feuds and personal vengeance. While this was a significant step in reducing overall violence, governments committed mass violence against their citizens: torture, prison, execution, starvation, and slavery.

The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment brought many violent state institutions to an end, though tyranny and war between major states continued.

The Twentieth Century has often been labeled “the most violent century”. The first half was certainly a cascade of world and civil wars: a “hemoclysm”. But the second half of the century avoided war between major powers and led to the astonishing fizzling out of the Cold War. So what does the hemoclysm tell us about long-term trends? Nothing. 

To convince you, Pinker presents data from earlier wars and atrocities that killed more people than Twentieth Century wars. Of the 21 worst things people have ever done to each other, 15 were before World War I. If you rate atrocities by the percentage of the population killed, only one Twentieth Century war even makes the list: quite a surprise. (By the way, the Tang Dynasty rebellion is rated as the worst atrocity: in eight years the rebellion resulted in the loss of two thirds of China’s population – a sixth of the total world population at the time.)

Pinker concludes that five cultural developments decrease violence over time:

1 – State monopoly on force to protect citizens replaces feuds and personal vengeance.

2 – Gentle commerce makes it better to tolerate others than kill them.

3 – “Feminization” of society, or the moving away from “manly honor”. (Think of the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr for manly honor.)

4 – Expanding sympathy for others from kin to tribe and beyond.

5 – Reason, with a broad trend towards self-control and orientation to the future.

Pinker doesn’t claim today’s violence is acceptable or even that the historical trend will continue. This offers little comfort to today’s victims of violence. But it offers perspective and hope. Pinker’s book is well worth the time it takes to read.

PS: Pinker continues to find hopeful trends. For data since WWII and mostly since 1970, see his article here.

Syria, the Spanish Civil War, and NATO

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I’ve read two separate warnings about Syria that make that civil war even more frightening. The first by Patrick J. Buchanan observes that the Spanish Civil War was “…the Great Rehearsal for World War II. He asks in his title whether the Syrian conflict is a “Dress Rehearsal for a Mideast War?” The other warning is that NATO might be drawn into the conflict if Turkey pursues retaliation against Syria for shooting down one of its planes.

The brutal Spanish Civil War began in 1936 and lasted three years. It pitted Franco’s Fascists against an agglomeration of Socialists, Anarchists, and both Stalinist and Trotskyite Communists. Stalin sent emissaries and officers to command the Nationalists (while he emptied the Spanish treasury of gold as payment for the help). Mussolini sent troops to fight with Franco and Hitler sent his Condor Legion. The planes of the Condor Legion gave air support to Franco and also firebombed the non-military town of Guernica.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt publically claimed neutrality about the war, primarily because he did not want to lose the Catholic vote. Some factions of the Nationalists were persecuting, torturing, and murdering Catholic priests. FDR said, “We shun commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars…” FDR did approve shipments of military supplies to France and understood that they would be sent to the Spanish Nationalists.

The NATO connection is the source of the other recent warning that history could be in the process of repeating. Politicians had established vast national alliances in the early 1900s in what was thought to be a counterbalance against the threat of war. The alliances instead caused the domino effect leading to World War I when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. I’ve always had trouble mentally following the complicated series of events that followed. The assassination led to the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia and Serbia appealed to its Russian ally for help. Russia began mobilizing its army. Germany took the mobilization to be a threat and declared war on Russia. They attacked France through neutral Belgium because France was Russia’s ally. The violation of Belgian neutrality brought Great Britain into the war. The United States joined the war a bit later.

NATO was originally established to oppose the now defunct Warsaw Pact. Turkey, a member of NATO has called for a full meeting to discuss the Syrian downing of a Turkish fighter jet and claims that another was fired on by the Syrians. Syria has a formal defense pact with Iran and is heavily supplied and supported by Russia. The Russians and Chinese have blocked all UN efforts to take action against Syria.

The news out of Syria today does not encourage that the situation will improve. Three senior government officials have been killed in a bombing, creating speculation that others will probably now chose to join the defectors in Turkey. There is a prediction that Assad will go into hiding or to a country that would harbor him “within 36 hours.”Russia is thought to believe a collapse of the Assad regime would be an opening for the U.S. to gain power in the Mideast. I don’t know that I agree. Iran, al Qaeda, and Hezbollah are probably ready to fill any vacuum.

The Syrian army recently was reported to have pulled chemical weapons out of storage. An escalation of hostilities has the ominous possibility of some desperate Syrian commander deciding Saddam Hussein was justified in using chemical weapons against Kurdish villages.

I won’t speculate about the outcome, but I have this disturbing image of someone intentionally carelessly smoking inside an ammunition bunker.