Category: Military History

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A President’s Troubling Surprise: The Manhattan Project

Atom bomb

Historians tend to write about the causes of events, not about whether those events should have happened. They don’t usually ask if the American colonists should have declared war against Britain or whether Robert E. Lee should have decided to lead the Confederate army.

But some subjects are so momentous that historians have difficulty avoiding moral questions. That is the case with Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, a decision that continues to be controversial.

According to Tsoyushi Hasegawa, there has long been a debate between orthodox historians and revisionists. The former argue that it was necessary in order to avoid the loss of thousands of lives in an invasion of Japan. The latter say it should not have been used because Japan was essentially defeated already and the actual purpose of the bombings was to send a message to Stalin.[1]

In this and two following posts I want to look afresh at some of the elements that fed into Truman’s decision. I do not attempt to decide whether Truman should have authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although I may help some readers think about it. Continue reading “A President’s Troubling Surprise: The Manhattan Project”

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Was Mikhail Gorbachev a Hero? Yes.

Reagan and Gorbachev

“The West likes him. The people of Russia, not so much.” That has been a theme in tributes to Mikhail Gorbachev,  the former head of the Soviet Union, who died yesterday, August 30.

You may know more about Gorbachev than I did a few years ago when I wrote a paper about him for a class about modern European history.  But perhaps sharing some of the history I learned will reveal why the West is grateful to him, even if the people of Russia  are not.

Gorbachev never intended to break up the Soviet Union. He simply didn’t know that perestroika (restructuring the USSR’s economy) and glasnost (openness of speech) would result in cataclysmic change. Continue reading “Was Mikhail Gorbachev a Hero? Yes.”

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Why Do We Have Wars?

Why do we have wars

If you are like me, you think of peace as both the ideal and the natural state of humanity. Wars interrupt this peace. They are aberrations that usually occur because “bad” people—aggressive government leaders—try to expand their territory, and other governments respond with force.

Jeremy Black, an emeritus history professor at the University of Exeter, has written a book that undermines this view, at the same time challenging many claims of military historians.

Let me caution that I do not urge most of my readers to go out and buy his book, A Short History of War. Black summarizes as many conflicts as he can fit into a 258-page book, and for those of us unfamiliar with military history it is what journalists call “listy.” What makes the book valuable is that Black helps us think broadly and objectively about war and violence (closely related but not synonymous terms). Yet because most of the book consists of examples, gleaning his message takes some efforts of interpretation.

I’ll try to summarize his major points. Continue reading “Why Do We Have Wars?”

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A Clash of (Agri)cultures

Chief Massasoit

Some years ago, in preparation for a conference, I read Harvard College’s 1650 charter. I learned that the school’s goal was “the education of the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness.”

So Harvard was chartered to serve Indian as well as English youth? That surprised  me. My knowledge of Massachusetts Indians had stopped in elementary school, with Squanto aiding the Pilgrims.[1]  So I wondered, what was the relationship between Massachusetts settlers and Native Americans?

I am learning the answer, as I audit a course on U.S. agricultural history.[2]  Agriculture is an important part of the story of that relationship, which fell apart in a disastrous war in 1675. “No problem vexed relations between settlers and Indians more frequently in the years before the war than the control of livestock,” wrote Virginia DeJohn Anderson in a pioneering article on the causes of the conflict known as King Philip’s War.[3] Continue reading “A Clash of (Agri)cultures”

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War Was the Backdrop of the Western Canon

Roman soldier

This nation, like much of the world, owes an enormous debt to ancient Greece and Rome. Our political framework, our political philosophies, even our government buildings reflect theirs. Many of our noblest ideas descend from the thinking of Greek philosophers, and Latin words and concepts pervade our language. The epic and lyric poetry of the ancients, their public rhetoric, their art, their musings, their values, and their histories have shaped the way we think and write and govern.

That said, we tend to ignore an unpleasant fact: The ancients were almost constantly at war. To a large extent these societies were designed for war. (They also relied heavily on slavery, but that is a topic for another day.).

Just as words like stoicism and sophistry come from the Greeks, so do the terms Pyrrhic victory and Achilles’ heel. Continue reading “War Was the Backdrop of the Western Canon”