American History Revised (75 page)

We are talking not about Iraq and its refusal to let in the UN weapons inspectors, but about Japan and the League of Nations. Shortly after World War I, Japan had laid claim to the Caroline, Marianas, and Marshall Islands, generally known as Micronesia. The League of Nations refused to recognize Japan’s claim. The Japanese navy, however, had other ideas. It launched a massive military buildup on the islands and refused to allow any visitors. The situation got so bad that by as early as 1923, the U.S. Navy concluded that these military installations posed a threat to U.S. security, and General Billy Mitchell was warning his superiors that the next war would be a surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on a Sunday morning—a warning viewed as being so provocative that it got Mitchell court-martialed.

In the early 1930s, in response to the League of Nations’ demand to let in the inspectors, Japan told the world to “shove it” by withdrawing from the League. And, of course, Japan did attack Pearl Harbor on a Sunday morning.

1925
At the famous Scopes trial concerning whether evolution should be taught in schools, Clarence Darrow stated, “History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.”

Our Vietnam experience might not have fared so badly had our government strategists and military personnel paid more attention to previous experience.
Here are some stories that we later repeated in the mid-1960s:

“Intervention will begin on a small scale, but with each step forward in its demand for ships, men, money, and materials….If we intervene, going further as we succeed, we shall be swallowed up.” So wrote the number-two man to his boss, the American ambassador to Moscow, about a guerrilla war ten thousand miles away. The president of the United States, who had entered office saying, “It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal with foreign policy,” agreed. “In my opinion, to try to stop a revolutionary movement with ordinary armies is like using a broom to sweep back a great sea.” Later during his term, he lamented how much easier it was to get into a war than to get out of it.

It was the most unpopular war America had ever fought. In this mismatch between a world industrial superpower and a small agricultural country, the U.S. embarked on a venture “for reasons that were inadequate and ill-advised, if not confused.” Many American soldiers, feeling that their own patriotic obligation was self-defense of American shores, refused to go off to a foreign country and resisted the draft. Utilizing dated weaponry from a previous war, the army forces failed to mount a sustained campaign capable of knocking out the enemy from the north. To finance the war effort, the president had to go to great extremes to persuade Congress to enact a tax measure. Still, less than one third of the cost of the war was financed by taxation; the rest was financed by government borrowing.

Public opposition to the war grew bitter and widespread, especially among the well-to-do. There was loose management of American military supplies, much of which ended up in the hands of the enemy. The war was going badly, and despondency gripped the nation.

To relieve the boredom of the long campaign and especially to alleviate the excruciating pain of severe battlefield wounds, many American soldiers resorted to drugs. Soldiers returning home from this war faced daunting prospects. Many employers viewed them as unstable and unmanageable. A military newsletter advised men not to disclose their military service. With America beginning to encounter a serious drug-abuse problem for the first time, many people accused soldiers of having brought home a social ill that threatened to undermine the nation. More than 45,000 drug addicts did not improve the reputation of veterans, especially as the numbers continued to grow. A government study completed twenty
years later found that the number of veteran drug addicts had increased fivefold, to more than 250,000.

Sent off to fight in a blistering warm country, many soldiers fought bravely without any sense of purpose. “I am not afraid and I am always ready to do duty,” wrote one, “but I would like someone to tell me what we are fighting for.” The U.S. had stepped in after the departure of a defeated European colonial power, and soon found itself in an even deeper quagmire, fighting the local revolutionary leader it had previously supported and provided aid to. After years of frustrating fighting, topped by an ambush by a team of twelve-year-olds posing as women, a U.S. commanding officer went bonkers and ordered his troops to kill anyone in sight: “I want no prisoners. I want you to kill and burn—the more the better.”

After the massacre of innocent civilians, the U.S. was gripped by a dramatic trial that captured national attention. The commanding officer was court-martialed and sentenced to prison (though he was eventually set free because of “mental attitude”). Wrote America’s most famous novelist, “We have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world.”

This liberal president, who had just won reelection in the biggest landslide in history, expected gratitude for the many social programs he had inaugurated. But the moment he suggested college students might have to go overseas to fight, the honeymoon ended. Antiwar movements started up on university campuses throughout the country. An angry protest letter signed by two hundred college presidents arrived at the White House. A third of college students said they would not fight in any war unless America was invaded; more than another third said they would not fight even then. This exuberant president was dismayed.

The intellectual elite of this superpower formed a chorus urging that this war in a faraway land was morally wrong. The country’s most renowned politician spoke out in public: the war was “unjust in its principles, impracticable in its means, and ruinous in its consequences … conquest is an impossibility.” The country’s most influential writer urged “the thinking friends of government” to take action and seek peace.

Even the nation’s top general came to believe the war was unwinnable. Seeing no signs of an uprising by any of the local population, for whom the nation was fighting, he became discouraged by the
lack of sufficient troops to stage a quick military rout, and frustrated by constant civilian interference from above. “Without money, provisions, ships or troops adequate to any beneficial purpose,” he wrote his superior back home, he could not win. In another memo he complained of not being given free rein to do his job: “If you want me to do anything, leave me to myself and let me adapt my efforts to the hourly change of circumstances.” Several months later he wrote another report arguing “the utter impossibility of carrying on the war without reinforcement.” If he could not get more troops, he would like permission to resign.

Knowing that time was on their side, the small faraway country waged a war of attrition, led by a brilliant field commander in the south. An international military expert opined that in a war of numbers, the defenders were following the proper strategy, one based on the Chinese model: “to lose a battle to you every week until you are reduced to nothing.”

Leading politicians pleaded with the nation’s leader to be more flexible in negotiating a peace settlement, but the leader said no, the enemy must be taught a lesson and national pride was at stake. Protesters declared the war a violation of “those eternal principles of political justice which should be most dear” and that a military victory would be “an ill omen.”

A key figure in the administration denounced the war as “most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unjust and diabolical.” When news came that the American military had suffered a horrendous defeat, a liberal congressman who later became secretary of state leaped from his chair and clapped his hands.

No End in Sight.
The quote about “intervention” comes from the American consul in Moscow, concerned about America’s ill-fated venture in Siberia during 1918–19. The president, of course, was Woodrow Wilson.

Unpopular War.
Substitute Great Britain for the United States as the industrial superpower, and Canada for North Vietnam as the foreign country American draft resisters refused to invade, and you have the War of 1812.

Drug Problems.
There is a little-known dark side to the Civil War that has pervaded all our subsequent wars: the use of addictive drugs as painkillers. Hypodermic syringes were introduced into the United States in 1856, where they quickly became handy during the Civil War. Two thousand doctors equipped with syringes used the best available painkiller, morphine, on their wounded soldiers. When they didn’t have syringes, they used 10 million opium pills and 2.8 million ounces of powdered opium and other opiates
such as laudanum and paregoric. By the turn of the century, when scientists had figured out how to turn morphine into heroin, the Civil War soldier—like his Vietnam counterpart one hundred years later—became associated with drug abuse.

Fighting for What?
In 1898 the United States took over the Philippines from Spain, only to find that the local leader it had brought in from Hong Kong, Emilio Aguinaldo, had different ideas about freedom and independence: he wanted freedom from the Americans as well as from the Spanish. The commanding officer was Brigadier General “Hell Roaring Jake” Smith, precursor to Lieutenant William Calley of Vietnam fame. Further atrocities were committed after the completion of the Smith trial. The U.S. Senate launched an extensive investigation and heard testimony about American use of water torture, burning of towns, and other war crimes. Among the more interesting revelations was that the U.S. military had conducted no fewer than forty-four trials for military atrocities. Secretary of State John Hay to the contrary, it was hardly “a splendid little war.” The author Mark Twain had it right. Let us wave the flag, he said, “but with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”

Liberal President.
The president was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, trying to cope with isolationists such as the Hearst newspapers, Father Charles Coughlin, the Republican Congress, and the U.S. Senate, which thereafter retaliated by conducting an extensive investigation into munitions profiteering. The Senate even passed a law effectively forbidding the president to make loans to friendly countries resisting aggression.

Intellectual Elite.
Turn back the clock more than two hundred years and meet the powerful writer with “thinking friends,” Edward Gibbon, authority on the decline and fall of empires. England’s renowned politician who opposed the war in America was the former prime minister, William Pitt. The British field commander was General Sir Henry Clinton. His repeated pleas for more reinforcements were turned down by the war minister, Lord Germain, and his demand to be relieved of duty was rejected by King George. The American general using the Chinese model of warfare was Nathaniel Greene, and the British military expert who admired him was the governor of Quebec, a man obviously familiar with how to fight in the woods.

Dissent
. King George III was not about to listen to the leading politicians of the day, William Pitt and Charles Fox, even though one of them was his prime minister and the other had served briefly as his secretary of foreign affairs. Pitt declared the war was “most diabolical,” a violation
of “those eternal principles which should be to all Englishmen most dear,” and would result in a victory that “would be an ill omen for English liberty.” Charles Fox, the man who rejoiced in Cornwallis’s defeat, was Pitt’s major political opponent: the two men disagreed about virtually everything, but agreed fully that the war on America was a disaster that would result in loss of empire. For his radical views, Fox was forced out of office and became a leading opposition figure in Parliament. Two years after Yorktown, he returned to his old position as secretary of foreign affairs.