Failure and Forgetfulness

Americans have short memories. Few things we remember as faintly as failure. Even on today, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, one of America's worst failures.

When the left would talk about the "quagmire" we face in Iraq, it's useful to remember; we've been here before.

In the early days of World War II, the US Army settled on the "Sherman" tank. Relatively small, easy to build in huge numbers, and with armor and a cannon that were quite competitive by early 1942 standards, it seemed until D-Day like an adequate decision.

You have to do some digging into history to realize how wrong that decision was:

the Third Armored Division, which began the Normandy campaign with 232 M4 tanks, would see 648 of its Shermans destroyed in combat, with another 700 knocked out of commission before being repaired and returned to service—a cumulative loss rate of 580 percent. Casualties among tank crews also skyrocketed, producing an acute shortage of qualified personnel.

Armored divisions suffered over 250 percent personnel casualties during the 11 months it took to drive from Normandy to the Elbe (and an Armored division had about 11,000 men, and most of the casualties came from the tank and rifle battalions that made up about half of their strength). US commanders expected to lose four or five Shermans (each with a crew of five men) for every German Panther or Tiger tank destroyed - in fact, the tactics, supply chain and personnel system adapted themselves to account for that assumption, in a calculus that seems positively ghoulish to us today (no American soldier has been killed by a through-the-armor shot on an M1 Abrams, ever, in two wars and two large "peacekeeping" actions).

So how much of that horrid episode do Americans remember today?

Also in the early days of World War II, with the US Pacific Fleet's battleships burned out and lying on the bottom of Pearl Harbor (itself a result of horribly-flawed decision-making), the navy's submarines had to take up the job of fighting the Japanese fleet. Unfortunately, due to interwar budgetary and business decisions, their torpedoes had an unfortunate tendency to bounce off their targets without exploding - as in, a majority of the time. Worse, the Navy's bureaucracy fought against solving the problem, insisting it was bad shooting or maintenance on the part of the subs' crews. The fiasco cost the lives of thousands of American submariners. Do we remember that fiasco today?

For the first two years of World War II, Army Air Corps bomber crews (flying B-17 and B-24 bombers) involved with trying to bomb Germany into submission through endless daylight raids over Germany's industrial heartland were assigned 25-mission tours of duty. Until late 1943, only very few men survived their entire tour; they were shot down in vast, flaming droves. The movie Twelve O'Clock High starring Gregory Peck is a classic that portrays some of the ghastly odds, dry fatalism, and the hopeless courage that kept that generation of Americans flying against odds that are, today, completely forgotten.

Victor Davis Hanson ties the story - both the movie and the original airmen - to today:

In juxtaposing the dreadfulness of what the airmen went through (centered around the bravery and eventual breakdown of group Commander Gen. Frank Savage) with the calm of the post-bellum English countryside, director Henry King reminds us how easily we forget horrors of the immediate past. No one in the town, or indeed back home in America, other than the families of the dead, recalled a Bishop, Cobb, Wilson, or the thousands of Savage's anonymous flyers who perished in doing their part to bring down the Third Reich. The tragedy of Stovall's war, King seems to suggest, is that the inferno in the skies was but a blink of the eye from its dividends of victory and rural tranquility — and that we all are of short memory, allowing even the worst nightmare to retreat into the oblivion of everyday life.

The numbers from World War II are numbing, when you think about them; 400,000 Americans were killed during the war. Do you remember even hearing that number in high school? Much less the specifics - the 3,500 dead submariners? The 50,000 who died in the "safe" Air Force? The 50,000 casualties we took advancing up the boot of Italy, a campaign most Americans never learn about?

But the cycle has begun again, says Hanson:

I fear the same may be said of Afghanistan and even Iraq in a year or two. Indeed, we already see how few talk of what it was like in the very dark days of September 2001. The country was reeling from 3,000 murdered; a trillion dollars were lost to economic dislocation; and the prospect of going 7,000 miles to the other side of the world to root out Dark-Age killers that had grown emboldened by a decade of American appeasement was considered too frightening.

Do we now remember the impassable peaks, the snowy haunts of the Taliban that were too high for us, or Kabul, the dreaded graveyard of all imperial expeditions? It was just a few months ago, it seems now, that we were admonished about the fury of retaliation to come for daring to fight during Ramadan, the impossibility of working with a nuclear and Islamic Pakistan, and the Wild West nature of Afghanistan's tribes so impossible to forge into the stuff of consensual government. And it was worse still than all that: the cries on the hard left of millions of refugees to come; the European warning about thousands of dead from indiscriminate American bombing; the need to adjudicate 9/11 by jurisprudence rather than arms; and the crazy conspiracy theories of pipelines, neo-cons, 'Jews,' Likuds, and CIA plots.

Have we also already forgotten the controversies, the buzz, and the insider conventional wisdom that consumed us during the days of uncertainty over Mullah Omar's televised rants; Osama's promises of an American graveyard in the Hindu Kush; the diplomats' trial balloon of a proposed coalition government with the wretched Taliban; the panacea of an all-Islamic peace-keeping force; Johnny Walker Lindh's conflicted high-school years; and a thousand other crises of the hour that sent our statesmen into all-night emergency sessions, our generals into desperate improvisations, and, yes, Americans into battle and on occasion to their deaths?

Well, some of us haven't.

But Hanson is right. It's more or less faded from public view.

Part of that's inevitable. And under normal circumstances, it's not only understandable, but desirable; it's unhealthy for a person to dwell on pain and loss eternally.

But tis, fo course, is not "normal circumstances". It's a war. We couldn't "Get over" Pearl Harbor until the cause was eradicated.

Do we remember all this and more when we talk nonchalantly now of elections in Afghanistan or the decency of the Karzai government? Is there a Frenchman or a German to be had at least to say in retrospect, "Yes, you were not the cowboys we slurred you as, but brought something good where there was only evil before"? Do we ponder if but for a second how improbable — indeed, how absolutely preposterous — it was at the time to even suggest that the Afghan people would soon stand in line hours to vote, freed from those who had so sorely oppressed them?

Have we forgotten what foul and cowardly folk the Taliban were — thugs who lynched women, shot homosexuals, blew up civilization's icons, destroyed a century of culture in Afghanistan, promised us death and worse, and then ran out of town in the clothes of women with what plunder they could carry? Do any of us recall the brave Afghans and Americans, both the planners in Washington who were libeled and the soldiers in the field who routed these butcherers?

Indeed, not only do Americans not recall that last, the Afghans; one presidential candidate bastardized their legacy for political gain.

And the cycle, says Hanson, will continue:

So, I think, it will be too even in Iraq, improbable as that may now seem to some. Already we have forgotten the long ride to Baghdad — when our ex-generals warned of thousands of dead to come in a deadly siege, and were trumped by relief workers who assured us of millions more refugees. Then there were the cries of defeat when our forces plowed through a windstorm — as our supposed Dresden-like shock and awe were suddenly mocked not as too terrible but as laughably impotent. We grow depressed now at the canned pessimism of our talking heads who predict failure in post-bellum Iraq — forgetting that these same prophets swore to us just months ago that thousands would die getting to Baghdad...Does anyone at all remember any of that? And where now are Joe Wilson, Richard Clarke, Hans Blix, and all the other wizards of the moment, come and gone off the media shows and best-seller lists, who assured us that we were either liars, fools, or naifs? Do we remember now how the old Wesley Clark once praised the team of George Bush, how the old Anonymous wrote an earlier book warning of Saddam's ties to al Qaeda, or how the old Clintonites a decade ago insisted that Saddam Hussein was brewing WMDs?

Yet despite them all, and after this bloody month of November, here we are now on the eve of elections — the most unlikely of all events in the last half-century of civilization. Just think of it: In place of the past Hussein mass murdering and the present ogres of Fallujah, we are to witness an effort to jump-start democracy in the heart of the caliphate of old, right between the world's worst two governments in Syria and Iran, amid treacherous folk like the Saudis, Jordanians, and al Jazeera cheering the insurgents on.

Perspective is difficult to get under the best of circumstances - and when we have media that is actively subverting perspective, it's harder still.

Anyway - read the whole thing.

Posted by Mitch at December 7, 2004 04:26 AM | TrackBack