"Americans,
denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics,
inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war – against militarism,
against fascism, against bolshevism. In the postwar age, uneasy,
disliking and fearing the unholiness of Communism, they have prepared
for jihad. If their leaders blow the trumpet, or if their homeland is
attacked, their millions are agreed to be better dead than Red. Any kind
of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people.
Because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they
are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve
in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must.
For
legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions – as its prophets
have long proclaimed.
Except that in this world are tigers.
Before
1939 the United States Army was small, but it was professional. Its
tiny officers corps was parochial, but true. Its members devoted their
time to the study of war, caring little what went on in the larger
society around them. They were centurions, and the society around them
not their concern.
When so ordered, they went to war. Spreading
themselves thinner still, they commanded and trained civilians who
heeded the trumpet's call. The civilians did the fighting, of course –
but they did it the Army's way.
The volunteers came and went, and the Army changed not at all.
In
1861, and 1917, the Army acted upon the civilian, changing him. But in
1945 something new happened. Suddenly, without precedent, perhaps
because of changes in the emerging managerial society, professional
soldiers of high rank had become genuinely popular with the public. In
1861, and in 1917, the public gave the generals small credit, talked
instead of the gallant militia. Suddenly, at the end of World War II,
society embraced the generals. And here it ruined them.
They had
lived their lives in semi-bitter alienation from their own culture
('What's the matter, Colonel; can't you make it on the outside?') but now
they were sought after, offered jobs in business, government, on college
campuses.
Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they
wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there
came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the Army the
civilians hadn't liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their
hearts to tell the public to go to hell.
It was perfectly
understandable that large numbers of men who served didn't like the
service. There was no reason why they should. They served only because
there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service
was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be.
But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from
true professionals but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was
much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited
twenty years for leaves and eagles. In 1945, somehow confusing the
plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the
Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.
The
generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few
heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without
acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could
alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or
weakened it even more than it did – but it could not have changed its
nature.
But the generals could not have retained their new
popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very
important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall
rationalized, America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a
bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be
popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more
men would enlist.
In
a truly liberal society, centurions have no place. For centurions, when
they put on the soldier, do not retain the citizen. They are never
citizens to begin with.
There was and is no
danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave
Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have
always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around – the
liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the
military, but acquiescence of the military toward the liberal view of
life.
Domination and control society should
have. The record of military rule, from the burnished and lazy
Praetorians to the juntas of Latin America, to the attempted fiasco of
the Legion Etrangere, are pages of history singularly foul in odor.
But
acquiescence society may not have, if it wants an army worth a damn. By
the very nature of its mission, the military must maintain a hard and
illiberal view of life and the world. Society's purpose is to live; the
military's is to stand ready, if need be, to die.
Soldiers are rarely fit to rule – but they must be fit to fight.
The
values composing civilization and the values required to protect it are
normally at war. Civilization values sophistication, but in an armed
force sophistication is a millstone.
Without its tough
spearmen, Hellenic culture would have had nothing to give the world. It
would not have lasted long enough. When Greek culture became so
sophisticated that its common men would no longer fight to the death, as
at Thermopylae, but became devious and clever, a horde of Roman farm
boys overran them.
The time came when the descendants of
Macedonians who had slaughtered Asians till they could no longer lift
their arms went pale and sick at the sight of the havoc wrought by the
Roman gladius Hispanicus as it carved its way toward Hellas.
The Doolittle Board of 1945-1946 met, listened to less than half a hundred complaints, and made its recommendations.
The
new legions carried the old names, displayed the old, proud colors,
with their gallant battle streamers. The regimental mottoes still said
things like "Can Do." In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots
– there was money for these – the troops looked good. Their appearance
made the generals smile.
What they lacked couldn't be seen, not until the guns sounded.
There
is much to military training that seems childish, stultifying, and even
brutal. But one essential part of breaking men into military life is
the removal of misfits – and in the service a man is a misfit who cannot
obey orders, any orders, and who cannot stand immense and searing
mental and physical pressure.
For his own sake and for that of
those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment
of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles
from home, and that he may be killed in the next second.
It was
not until the summer of 1950, when the legions went forth, that the
generals realized what they had agreed to, and what they had wrought.
The
Old Army, outcast and alien and remote from the warm bosom of society,
officer and man alike, ordered into Korea, would have gone without
questioning. It would have died without counting. As on Bataan, it would
not have listened for the angel's trumpet or the clarion call. It would
have heard the hard sound of its own bugles, and hard-bitten, cynical,
wise in bitter ways, it would have kept its eyes on its sergeants.
It
would have died. It would have retreated, or surrendered, only in the
last extremity. In the enemy prison camps, exhausted, sick, it would
have spat upon its captors, despising them to the last. It would have
died, but it might have held.
The recommendations of the
so-called Doolittle Board of 1945-1946, which destroyed so much of the
will – if not the actual power – of the military traditionalists, and
left them bitter, and confused as to how to act, was based on experience
in World War II. In that war, as in all others, millions of civilians
were fitted arbitrarily into a military pattern already centuries old.
What
the Doolittle Board tried to do, in small measure, was to bring the
professional Army back into the new society. What it could not do, in
1946, was to gauge the future.
The military have the
preponderance of fact with them as far as Korea was concerned. Korea was
the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by
professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had
small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers
statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought
by men whom the Army – at its own peril – had given neither training
nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to
fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.
The Army needed legions, but society didn't want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.
But
the sociologists are right – absolutely right – in demanding that the
centurion view of life not be imposed upon America. In a holy, patriotic
war – like that fought by the French in 1793, or as a general war
against Communism will be – America can get a lot more mileage out of
citizen-soldiers than it can from legions.
No one has suggested
that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional
Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of
war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for
reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one
for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come
aboard only when the ship is sinking.
The other answer is to give
up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a
resultant hope of order – our own decent order – in the world. But
America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a
forlorn hope that we should be left alone.
In the first six
months America suffered a near debacle because her Regular Army fighting
men were the stuff of legions, but they had not been made into
legionaries.
America was not more soft or more decadent than it
had been twenty years earlier. It was confused, badly, on its attitudes
toward war. It was still bringing up its youth to think there were no
tigers, and it was still reluctant to forge them guns to shoot tigers.
Many
of America's youth, in the Army, faced horror badly because they had
never been told they would have to face horror, or that horror is very
normal in our un-sane world. It had not been ground into them that they
would have to obey their officers, even if the orders got them killed.
It
has been a long, long time since American citizens have been able to
take down the musket from the mantelpiece and go tiger hunting. But they
still cling to the belief that they can do so, and do it well, without
training.
The problem is not that Americans are soft but that
they simply will not face what war is all about until they have had
their teeth kicked in. They will not face the fact that the military
professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are
distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a
war is won. Free society cannot be oriented toward the battlefield –
Sparta knew that trap – but some adjustments must be made, as the
squabbling Athenians learned to their sorrow.
The sociologists
and psychologists of Vienna had no answer to the Nazi bayonets, when
they crashed against their doors. The soldiers of the democratic world
did."
- Every line of this was cut out of T.R. Fehrenbach's 1963 book This Kind of War, and specifically from Chapter 25, entitled Proud Legions.
This is my more concise, but obviously
less rich edit, with some minor rearrangements to emphasize a point.
