Category Archives: Reviews

Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025

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suicide-of-superpowerBefore I get into the review, I have an announcement for frequent readers. I’ve decided to spend less time on reading and reviewing books and more time working on my new book about the Rocky Flats Plant and the Cold War. We intend to maintain a regular once a week schedule for expressions and commentaries, which might be associated with something that I’m drafting for the book. We will continue to do book reviews when we feel the urge, but it undoubtedly won’t be once a week. That notice made me want to spend more time working on the Rocky Flats book and less time on this review. This might be a short review for such a long and data-rich book.

The book by Patrick J. Buchanan is not a fun book to read. It chronicles numerous aspects of American life and government that are in decline or collapse. It is well over 400 pages of despair. I was curious whether Buchanan would provide any hope at the end of the book, and I must say the hope offered by the final paragraph is tepid, at best. “And the crises that afflict us—culture wars, race division, record deficits, unpayable debt, waves of immigration, legal and illegal, of people never before assimilated, gridlock in the capital, and possible defeat in war—may prove too much for our democracy to cope with. They surely will, if we do not act now.” It’s tough to find a positive message in that, especially with our dysfunctional government and (commentary alert) lack of leaders willing to submit themselves to our increasingly brutal election process.

I must admit that I’ve never been a “Buchanan fan,” although I also admit that reading this book made me admire his ability to identify and explain important historical facts despite that they aren’t fun reading. I’ll give the example of “Fruits of Free Trade” that begins on page 15. Buchannan mentions it could be more appropriately titled, “An Index of the Decline and Fall of Industrial America.”

  • From 2000 to December 2010, industrial production fell for the first time since the Depression and America lost 3 million private sector jobs
  • One in three manufacturing jobs disappeared
  • We ran trillions of dollars in trade deficits
  • China now holds the mortgage on America
  • Etc.

The most disturbing comment is that “…the cumulative current account deficit of the United States from 2000 through the third quarter of 2010 exceeded $6 trillion. To finance it, we had to borrow $1.5 billion abroad every day for ten years.” (Emphasis added) Continue reading →

Inside the Nazi War Machine

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nazi-war-machineThis book by Bevin Alexander has a subtitle, “How Three Generals Unleashed Blitzkrieg Upon the World,” and is an excellent book for people interested in military history. The three generals were Erich von Manstein, Heinz Guderian, and Erwin Rommel, and they developed a military strategy that opposed that of the German high command and Hitler. My simplistic summary is that they refused to fight battles on a wide front. They led with concentrated panzer attacks against the widely-spread “penny packets” of French tanks. They almost always outpaced the infantry divisions that followed. They refused to slow the assault to allow consolidation of the flanks, which the high command believed would be vulnerable to counterattack. The conventional thinking was that the French army, which was “…the most formidable and best-equipped army in Europe…” with their British, Holland, and Belgian allies would pinch in from the sides and capture the tanks and soldiers in the deep penetration. The remarkable outcome was that the massive French army mostly just surrendered at the shock of how quickly the center of their front had been destroyed by Nazi fire power. The Luftwaffe supported the attacks with old and slow Stuka dive bombers that could precisely target French tanks or other forces that stood in the way. Static warfare that had been the norm throughout World War I was replaced by “maneuver warfare,” or Blitzkrieg.

The book portrays how the German generals continually successfully implemented their concentrated assaults and refused to acknowledge orders from the high command to stop and allow the supporting troops to catch up. Overall military organization is also described as being valuable to the Germans and paralyzing to the French. German commanders believed they should lead from the front where they could quickly recognize situations presented by opposing forces and terrain and make immediate adjustments. French units couldn’t deviate from existing orders without written orders, which often took days to be prepared and delivered. The German commanders also had the admiration and support of their soldiers, which resulted in achieving sometimes incredible results. Rommel was said to insist on being in the first vehicle going forward in an assault. Once he insisted on standing on the middle of a bridge important to a planned attack that was under bombardment by British bombers. He wanted it known how valuable the bridge was to German plans and risked his life to demonstrate it. Continue reading →

Westward Migration – History and Recreation of Traveling the Oregon Trail

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oregon trailThe Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck offers three travel tales braided together. There is the westward migration of Americans starting around 1840; the tale of Buck’s own crossing of the old trail with a mule team and wagon; and memories of his father’s horse and mule, wagon and carriage adventures – and unresolved father issues.

Buck decided to make “an authentic crossing of the Oregon Trail.” In preparation he read many travel diaries and historical accounts. The trail “has been meticulously charted and marked, with long, undeveloped spaces now preserved as a National Historic Trail” but also crossing private land. I was surprised to learn that, “except for two bad stretched of suburban sprawl,” the trail is generally accessible, especially since much of the way is now farm and ranch roads or even paved highways.

Early in the book Buck presents a lengthy story of the brother who accompanied him. The brothers woes of unemployment after the Republican Recession of 2008 and temporary crippling in a building accident segues into the 1840s and 1850s, when “families were disrupted and lives destroyed by the financial panics and bank failures that recurred every decade” further aggravated by “religious squabbling and labor strife” and the political issue of slavery. Migration west became “a safety valve that prevented a calamitous society from imploding.”

Pioneer knowledge has been lost
Buck recounts his efforts to obtain a wagon and mule team – somewhat hard to do since no one does this sort of trip anymore. He’s lucky to have his childhood familiarity with livestock and Amish and Mennonite friends who use horses for farming.

But horses aren’t suited to a long hard trip. Draft horses of the 1800s were “agrarian mastodons” while mules were smarter, tougher, and “the common phrase ‘stubborn as a mule,’ [is] a classic example of a man ascribing stupidity to the beast instead of to himself.”

Buck provides a lot of information about mules. “No less a figure than George Washington was America’s original maharajah of mules… [students don’t know] that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump. Washington was a land developer.”

I enjoyed this part of Washington’s life, which I hadn’t read about before. Europeans viewed Washington as a hero for defeating the despised British, so in 1785 the king of Spain sent him donkeys as breeding stock for working mules. I’ve met little burro donkeys with backs a bit higher than my waist and big riding donkeys – so different – so I found the descriptions delightful.

Buck also shares his efforts to recreate a suitable wagon, and even diagrams of the triple-tree design for hitching a three-mule team to a wagon. I didn’t know that the term “Conestoga” refers to an eastern cargo wagon that played almost in role in the western migration, or that the first factory assembly line produced wagons, not Ford cars. There’s even a side trip through how building the famous eastern canal system helped evolve a practical wagon.

After a hundred pages, the journey west begins
There’s a lot of information from trail diaries on the trip west. Runaway teams, disease, and hunting accidents caused frequent injury and death. Bridges are a special hazard for mules, which “can get a third of the way across… look sideways… panic… and overturn the wagon or crash into cars in an attempt to escape.” Covered bridges prevented this by blocking the animals view – and I thought they were just pretty! Buck includes a story of his father getting a terrified team across a bridge with his kids help.

RVs are a special hazard for Buck. They would often drive slowly very close to the mules to take pictures or drive ahead to stop, nearly blocking the road, to take more pictures as Buck drove by. He calls RVer men who wanted to make jokes about the wagon as “himbos,” as a play on “bimbos.”

An amazing woman pioneer
The westward migration was a huge change from fur traders and “backwoodsmen like Daniel Boone [who] could disappear into the great forests for months alone. Carrying just a small haversack, a musket, and a long knife.” But in 1836 there was “enormous prejudice against” white women going west with their husbands. This led into a wonderful tale of Narcissa Prentis, the firs white woman to cross the Rockies. She married a fellow missionary – apparently for the convenience of both – and sent installments of her diary back east with various fur traders they encountered who were headed that way. (People seemed to take the burden of delivering letters very seriously.)

Continue reading →

Value Families or Family Values?

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way we really areAre collapsing family values the cause of America’s troubles?

  • Dire pronouncements on the future of American families.
  • Single moms worry their sons are doomed to lives of violence.
  • Pundits propose harsh penalties against people in “non-traditional” families.
  • Real wages are falling.

If this sounds like the latest news, consider The Way We Really Are  – published in 1998.

A family historian and faculty at Evergreen State College, Stephanie Coontz states her goal is to

“complicate an issue that the consensus proclaimers argue is so self-evident only a fool would disagree”.

Beaver Clever’s All-American “breadwinner family” where father works away from the home and mother raises the children is only 150 years old. In the breadwinner family, women’s access to economic and political roles is restricted, but historically productive work was part of mothers’ work. Breadwinner men’s nurturing is restricted, but historically fathers were part of daily parenting of children. Continue reading →

Engineering Communism

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engineering-communismThe subtitle of the book by Steven R. Usdin is, “How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley.” I’ve always been interested in why Americans spied for the Soviet Union, and this book tells me at least two of them eagerly spied and believed in Communism to their deaths. The book tells how Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, members of the Rosenberg spy ring, provided technical details of radar, antiaircraft aiming devices, and the proximity fuse to the Soviets during World War II. The KGB, a Russian abbreviation for “Committee for State Security,” helped them escape when the spy ring began to crumble. The KGB then helped them overcome Soviet bureaucracy to build electronics industry with new identities. Barr became Joseph Berg and Sarant became Phillip Staros. Their story is extraordinary because the two led happy and productive lives behind the Iron Curtain while most defectors “…were despised and distrusted by their Soviet counterparts…and quite a few drank themselves to death.” Neither ever admitted their espionage activities. Barr did readily acknowledge that he felt greater loyalty to the USSR than to the United States “…because the Soviet Union was the only nation on earth trying to build the communist utopia he fervently believed in…” Neither Barr nor Sarant ever indicated any remorse that the secrets they passed to the Soviets were used against American pilots and soldiers in Korea and Vietnam.

Barr and Sarant learned engineering at the City College of New York (CCNY). The two were among the half of the 100 engineering students who were communists. Their informal cell, which was led by Julius Rosenberg, included Barr, Sarant, Morton Sobell, Max Elichter, Bill Danziger, and Bill Perl, and all would eventually spy for the Soviet Union. Sobell, Elichter, and Danziger landed jobs the Navy Bureau of Ordnance. Barr started at the Civil Aeronautics Authority and had to hide his Communist affiliation because the Hatch Act barred government employment to anyone belonging to certain organizations, including CPUSA. Barr did distribute literature encouraging fellow employees to join the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians (FAECT). The KGB used FAECT and other similar organizations to recruit agents. By 1940 Lieutenant General Pavel Fitin, head of Soviet foreign intelligence, commanded a covert force in the United States that exceeded the number of FBI agents.

Barr worked at Fort Monmouth and eventually went to work for Western Electric, where he worked on perfecting the Norden bombsight. He was allowed to carry classified documents to his home to “work overtime”

The book mentions that the FBI finally began to wake up to the Soviet espionage threat “…around the time of the Soviet victory over the Nazis at the epic battle of Stalingrad…” The FBI ballooned to 4,380 agents, and many of them were working on surveillance of suspected Soviet activities. Continue reading →

America’s Plans for War Against the Soviet Union, 1945-1950

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I’ve mentioned that I have been working on a book to explain the decision to build the Rocky Flats Plant where nuclear weapon components were manufactured from 1953 until 1989. The 15 volume set edited by Steven T. Ross and David Alan Rosenberg contains a wealth of information about the war plans created by the military that helps explain that decision. First and foremost is the belief that the objective of the Soviet Union was to select a time when they could invade Western Europe to begin the process of imposing Communist control of the world. The set, which consists of oversized books, “…reproduces in facsimile 98 plans and studies created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

The JCS in 1945 believed that Moscow was not ready to launch a Third World War until they had rebuilt their war machine, but as prudent planners they had to prepare for armed conflict on a global scale earlier than expected. The plans, which were all classified Top Secret or Secret and occasionally were also marked to contain Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) restricted data, were of course all declassified before the series was published. I will warn that you won’t find the volumes on Amazon, or at least I didn’t. My local public library was able to find several of them on interlibrary loan. I’ll give all the detail I know about Volume 1 at the end of this review if a reader wants to try to obtain the volume by the same process.

American war plans included:

  • Emergency War Plans for a conflict during the next fiscal year
  • Mid-Range War Plans for a war two to five years in the future
  • Long Range War Plans for a war five to ten years in the future
  • Industrial Mobilization Plans describing a general war to provide guidance for military and economic mobilization planning
  • Special studies, which describe a global conflict in order to guide long range fiscal planning

Supporting papers included:

  • Estimates of Soviet power (and their overwhelming advantage in men under arms)
  • Logistic feasibility studies of American war plans (which were often  found to not be feasible)
  • Examinations of the impact of atomic weapons on the future of modern warfare (which were not encouraging for the protection of American cities and offensive capabilities)

America and Allies no match for Soviet army:

All of the war plans recognized that the huge Soviet and Satellite armies would be able to overwhelm the relatively small allied forces. Earlier plans listed “…the possession and, until 1949, a presumed monopoly of atomic weapons…” and a large and expanding industrial base to be the main advantages of America and its allies. The plans virtually conceded that the Soviet armies could decisively and quickly take Western Europe and most of the Middle East. The allies hoped to be able to establish and maintain “…bases in Great Britain, Egypt, Japan, and possibly northern India and Greenland, from which to launch the strategic air offensive…The liberation of Western Europe would not be the result of direct military operations, but rather a function of the presumed Soviet collapse under the combined weight of the atomic and conventional aerial attack and the counteroffensive against the southern regions of the USSR…the United States would not seek to defend or recover any positions on the Asian mainland, a position that remained unchanged even after the start of the Korean War.”

As an example of an individual plan, the first was “JIS 80/7, 23 October 1945, Russian Capabilities.” The Joint Intelligence Staff prepared this report “To estimate the Russian political situation with particular emphasis on aims and potentialities for expansion of her sphere of influence by means short of war, by 1 January 1948…” World War II had left the Soviets at a high level of political prestige, but weakened by massive destruction and loss of life. A major weakness was the lack of an atomic bomb capability.

I’ll give you a flavor of what the plans included by summarizing “JCS 1477/1 30 October 1945, Over-All Effect of Atomic Bomb on Wartime Organizations.”

The plan states that the greatest effect of development of the atomic bomb was the security of the United States after another country acquires that weapon. It was noted that an aggressor nation with atomic weapons could “…achieve the effects of Pearl Harbor on a vast and relatively complete scale.”The risk presented by another country acquiring the weapons “…emphasizes the importance not only of readiness for immediate defense, but also for striking first, if necessary, against the source of threatened attack.” The only defense against atomic attack is by destroying the carriers in flight, and lessons from World War II indicated that defense cannot be total. Some planes would get through and cities would be destroyed. It was estimated at the time of the report (30 October 1945), that, “…the United States has a head start which is roughly estimated as the equivalent of five years of technological advantage.” (That estimate wasn’t far off.) It was also stated that the U.S. had control of “…major sources of uranium and other essential ores.” (That statement turned out to be incorrect.) It was recommended that there be an accumulation of a “…stockpile of atomic bombs and other new weapons sufficient to implement United States strategic war plans.” That last statement is an example of why the series goes a long way in supporting the decision to build Rocky Flats.  

I may post reviews of some other volumes, but you’ll have to wait for me to finish the book before you see my full assessment of what is include.

Information on the series:

Steven T. Ross and David Alan Rosenberg, editors, America’s Plans for War Against the Soviet Union 1945-1950, A 15 volume set reproducing in facsimile 98 plans and studies created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, A Garland Series, 1989-1990. The information in this posting is from Volume 1, which has a subtitle of The Strategic Environment.