(I finally got around to finishing this rather lengthy post.)
Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace. Lt. Col. Grossman is an extraordinary thinker and writer. He discusses how in mortal threat situations the body often knows better than the brain what to do to survive. He notes that person-to-person violence is the “universal phobia”, in a literal not metaphorical sense. Virtually all people experience acute phobic-type responses when faced with intentional, personal violence. The unique nature of soldiers and policemen is that they “run toward gunfire” instead of away from it. The book is largely built up out of case-studies from military and police experience with “deadly force encounters”, a/k/a gun-fights. The key elements for survival and victory are (1) training and (2) a realistic appreciation of what will happen to the mind and body before, during and after the fighting. Grossman describes state-of-the art training being employed by the United States military and some of our police forces. He emphasizes the moral element — the person charged by society with the use of deadly force must believe in the rightness of his cause, and the person who is asked by society to face deadly force on its behalf should be given the tools and training and respect he needs to survive and prevail, physically and mentally. There is far more of value in this book than this short paragraph can do justice to. Very highly recommended. Grossman’s earlier books On Killing : The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society and Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill : A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence are also very good. (Grossman’s website is here.)
Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army’s Art of Attack 1916-1918. Griffith is a vigorous and opinionated writer. He convincingly takes on the conventional wisdom, demonstrating that the British Army in World War I was not led by a bunch of dolts who sent their men to die in the mud year after year out of bullheadedness and ignorance. To the contrary, the British leadership dealt with the horrendous novelty of World War I reasonably well under the circumstances. It was the circumstances that caused a “reasonable” performance to still mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of men. And, partially contra Griffith, some of what the leadership did can be attributed to bullheadedness, such as pressing on with the Passchendaele battle even when the whole battlefield had been reduced to liquescent mud. Nonetheless, the British leadership were not impervious to the reality they faced. They were constantly trying to innovate, to introduce new weapons and tactics to survive and overcome the stalemate of trench warfare, and their performance improved throughout the war. The British artillery in particular became a fearsome instrument. (Ernst Junger’s book Storm of Steel has barely a page in it where someone isn’t killed by the British artillery.) Griffith notes that in the closing years of the Great War the British showed sharply increasing combat skill, much of the time. In particular, it is often forgotten that the last 100 days the British were attacking all along the line, and the Germans were in retreat. Mobility had returned to the battlefield, and it was the British who had restored it. This achievement is under-appreciated, and if it is not remembered a false lesson of abject futility is taken away from World War I. Griffith attacks what he sees an excessive regard among American military historians, and the American military, for the German achievement in the war, and for the German military more generally. This view is probably best exemplified by the response to Bruce Gudmundsson’s book Stormtroop Tactics : Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918. Gudmundsson’s book is brilliant, and has been very influential in American military circles. However, if it is read in a vacuum, a false impression is created that only the Germans were responding creatively to the new conditions of trench warfare. Also, as Griffith notes, the Germans gained much of their edge by creating elite formations, which may have been superior to their opponents, but they were unable to raise the army as a whole to this pitch of skill. The follow-on waves of under-trained infantry attacking behind the first wave of elite stosstruppen resembled “crowds going to a football match”, and were on many occasions blown to bits by the British artillery. So, Griffith convincingly teaches us not to over-credit what the Germans managed to do in the war. Eliot Cohen, reviewing another book by Griffith about the Great War, had this to say:
Despite the writings of a few defiant historians outside the mainstream, the popular image of the British Army in World War I is one of soldiers exhibiting great valor sacrificed to the near-criminal stupidity of their high command — “lions led by donkeys,” in a memorable phrase. The current work makes an important contribution to a different view. [Griffith] is a prolific and provocative historian of tactics, a subject disdained by too many students of strategic affairs, and he has … [explored] the ways in which the British army adapted to the challenges of trench warfare. The reader comes away with two unsettling questions. If the British (and presumably other) European armies changed their approaches to war as quickly and well as is suggested, was the slaughter of World War I simply unavoidable? And if historians are only now unraveling the workings of battle in 1914-18, how certain can today’s experts be that they fully understand the workings of modern warfare?
Cohen’s unsettling questions are unsettling because we know the answers, and we do not like the answers. Incidentally, Griffith notes the odd gap in our historiography of the Great War, the absence of a scholarly history, in English, of the French Army in World War I. It now appears we will soon be blessed with one, Pyrrhic Victory : French Strategy and Operations in the Great War by Robert A. Doughty, a very well regarded historian of the French Army, i.e. this and this . Perhaps Doughty will give us a further volume on French tactics at some point.
Joseph Ratzinger, God and the World. I started it in the Fall, before I had any idea he’d be Pope. This is the third in a series of interviews with Cardinal Ratzinger. The fact that he is able to answer with this sort of clarity and modesty when speaking off the cuff is interesting, and shows the depth of his scholarship (and wisdom) and his style of thinking, which is at once traditional and yet aware of the modern world and its challenges. For a person who is supposedly a hard-headed proponent of orthodoxy, he is much more open to discussion and even “thinking out loud” than one might expect. Ratzinger is a man who comes off as sound on dogmatic theology, and moral theology, without being “dogmatic” in any simplistic sort of way. Of course, anyone either within or without the Church who is hoping for some basic change in long-standing theological or moral principles will find little cheer. Finally, Ratzinger seems to be a more practical and dour man than his predecessor. John Paul II was a man of preternatural cheer rooted in a deep personal prayer and an all-embracing sense of the Divine, mystical dimension of life and the world. This led him to make optimistic pronouncements which were cheering to the faithful, but also seemed at odds with the empirical facts. Ratzinger is not of that sort of mind. I expect a more focused and practical and disciplined approach — a more German approach — to the papacy from Ratzinger. I loved John Paul II and I miss him. But Joseph Ratzinger is a tough and brilliant man and I have great hope that he will serve the Church and humanity very well in whatever time he is granted as Pope. I pray for the Pope every day.
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