There's a War to Be Won

Introduction
 
Young men who joined the Army in the summer of 1958 were the last of the brown-shoe soldiers. The mode militaire that year was green/black and brown/browner. What you got was a World War II set of uniforms, plus a kind of business suit in green with black shoes and boots to set off the toot ensemble.
 
We didn’t know who we were. Were we real soldiers, with our nifty, tight-fitting Ike jackets, brothers—at least in the mirror—of the men who’d rolled with Patton, stormed ashore on the beaches of Normandy, thrashed the Japanese in the biggest land battles of the Pacific war, conquered wherever they went, then returned home to march in triumph through a thousand cities and towns? Or were we a green blank page on which other wars, other victories were going to be written?
 
Here was an existential dilemma few of us were prepared for as we spat on our boots and diligently polished in neat little circles, torn between the soporific relief of witless routine and upright irritation at the way the Army squandered the valor of youth on chickenshit. The fact was, the brown uniforms had a history, a history of success. They were what real soldiers wore, looked like, won wars in. The green one was better cut and made of better material; not a mark in its favor to your budding warrior.
 
The man in the White House was a five-star general, but one so determined not to show partiality he never went to Army-Navy games during the eight years of his presidency. The team he’d once played on now had to do without him. The entire fifties was a lost weekend for the Army. Soldiering seemed a relic, a gesture to a remote past.
 
The ethos of American life was drawn from the burgeoning suburbs, teeming with the degreed or college-aspiring new middle class, that were shooting up within a mile or two of the nearly white Interstates decreed by the president-general. From those flat, placid tracts war seemed too disgusting to thrust on people. Better to let death tech handle it—shiny planes, ships, nuclear weapons.
 
The Army—grim-visaged war at its nastiest; war with a human face, and maybe your brother’s, husband’s or son’s—was yesterday’s news. To smarten them up for the Organization Man Zeitgeist, soldiers got a whole new look, just like the nation’s defense policy. If he messed up his deferments or was just unlucky, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit would do a couple of years of reluctant military service first in a green flannel suit. All one seamless web.
 
Many of us, veterans and new soldiers alike, grieved when in 1959 we had to turn in our Ike jackets, brown boots and other souvenirs of a bygone age, a bygone war, and got an extra green uniform in return. Where was the romance, the illusion of difference and danger, in this dull garb? When the Army said good-bye to its World War II uniforms it seemed to turn us into epigones, the diminished descendants of a once-proud martial race.
 
Caught in our time warp, we brown-booters were a war too late and a war too early. No one ever resolved our existential dilemma. For me, however, the passage of time would bring a step back, instead of a lurch forward.
 
I was increasingly captivated by a growing awareness of the deeds of the World War II Army. More than that, I began to sense in it hidden depths, powerful historical currents, plumb lines to significance, lost anchors of character. I now believe that that army was one of the supreme American achievements of the twentieth century and that it is filled with lessons about the people of this country.
 
The army that fought the war had first to be imagined and willed. In 1939 it simply didn’t exist. Just imagining it and willing it into existence was a brilliant, thrilling adventure of the spirit. Nothing like it had ever been done before. It will probably never happen again. It represented a kind of artistry. Like great architecture or poetry or music, it truly expressed the spirit of its age. It was optimistic, inventive, idealistic and almost frightening in its ambition, for had it failed, what a crash there would have been. The world would shake from it yet.
 
I’ve relied heavily on the eighty-nine fat volumes of the Army’s official history, known generically as “the Green Books” (even though seven are blue, for the Army Air Forces). The Army historians did a wonderful job. Their work is an intellectual monument, but like most monuments more often looked at than into.
 
There is an aspiring frankness to some volumes that puts them far ahead of all other official histories. All the same, even the best volumes play down personalities. Given the fact that many of the people involved were still alive, this was understandable, inescapable and right.
 
To fathom many of the more controversial or complicated events of any war, however, it’s necessary to have an accurate picture of the people involved—their temperaments, their idiosyncracies, their relationships with key figures, their individual strengths, weaknesses and experience.
 
The wartime Army was a great institution, yet, as Emerson taught us, “an institution is but the shadow of a man.” For the Army as a whole, that man was George C. Marshall. At the theater level, the man was Eisenhower or Clark, MacArthur or Stilwell. For the ordinary soldier, the man was likely to be his platoon sergeant or company commander. They were the Army to him.
 
To understand the personal side of the Army’s story, I’ve relied on diaries, unpublished memoirs and postwar interviews conducted by the official historians. The 1970s and 1980s brought a rich harvest of oral histories. I researched these extensively.
 
The oral histories can be fascinating in their seeming frankness. They have a relaxed, unbuttoned quality that can spark exciting, illusory ideas that yes, this must be just how it was. They need to be used with care and checked against contemporaneous records.
 
Documentary sources too sometimes need careful handling. Several wartime generals had black belts and graduate degrees in the production of “posterity papers.” Soldiers blazed no trails in this; politicians refined the art of archive massage long before military men acquired the bureaucratic moxie to do it too.
 
Some readers may feel that the tone of this work is overly critical at times, too eager to leave the author’s grubby fingerprints on the reputations of great men. We live, nevertheless, in a critical age and this is a work of its time.
 
That said, I believe that soldiers, like writers and artists, deserve to be judged not by their worst work but by their best. What they do is so difficult to get right, so easy to get wrong, that elementary justice makes it the only standard worth using.
 
This book sets out to describe how the wartime Army was created, how it went to war, what it did when it got there and why it was so good it never lost a campaign; I count the fall of the Philippines as being essentially a campaign fought by Filipinos under American direction. The wartime army lost only one battle out of more than a hundred fought around the world, at Sidi-bou-Zid, in Tunisia. It suffered only one other major check, the Rapido River crossing.
 
The annals of war have nothing to show that compares with this. No army ever compiled such a record of victories. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the Army did most of the fighting. Ground troops saw far more combat than airmen, sailors and marines combined.
 
I have tried to describe these events and cast what light I can on their meaning, although across the path of every writer falls the shadow of Zeno the Stoic’s Three Propositions.
 
First, said Zeno, no one can truly know the meaning of anything. Second, even if we discovered the meaning, we couldn’t explain it to anybody else. And third, even if we found a way to explain it, those we explained it to would get it wrong.
 
War, the crucible in which people have found the ultimate test of nerve and will, of solidarity and isolation, of the individual and the society, of fear and exhilaration, is so ripe with meaning it seems to overflow with it, to burst with it, like life itself. But what is it really? Ah, if only we knew … ourselves.