Grunts

by John C. McManus

  The trouble is that wonder-weapons and techno-vangelism push all the right buttons in American culture. Wonder-weapons are good business for defense contractors. They are career makers for field-grade military procurement officers. They appeal to the American public’s fascination with high-tech gizmos (if you doubt that, take a look at the latest line of video war games, cell phones, or PalmPilots, and then get back to me). For Washington politicians, wonder-weapons hold an irresistible lure, in much the same way a brand-new casino or a full slate of NFL games hypnotizes an inveterate gambler.

  For our friendly neighborhood congressman or senator, the latest super-ship, guided missile, or new-generation heavy bomber promises some very alluring prospects. They offer standoff weaponry that can supposedly protect the American people at home, as well as inflict surgical destruction on any enemy overseas, and they can do these wonderful things without requiring constituents to do much more than raise their television remotes for a collective cheer. More than anything, expensive new weapons systems offer precision war—desensitized, tidy, and impersonal—while risking the lives of, at most, only a few technical professionals who have, after all, signed up for this kind of thing. Best of all, for our national leaders in Congress and the White House, this version of techno-war is politically safe, negating the kind of soul-searching debates that naturally flow from the employment of ground troops. Of course, there is also the delightful prospect that said weapons system could be built in our congressman’s district or our senator’s state, creating local jobs. Needless to say, compared with the glitzy allure of the latest high-tech weaponry, there is little glamour (and usually not as much profit) for contractors and government officials alike in churning out rifles, machine guns, boots, and bullets for infantrymen. So priority often goes to the big-ticket stuff. I will readily concede that this mind-set has, in its own muddled way, somewhat enhanced American national security by making the United States the unchallenged world leader in military technology. However, the cost of this has been too great, and not just in dollars. The price of America’s fascination with new age warfare is a fundamental misunderstanding of what war is and how best to prepare for it.

  I will illustrate my point with one cautionary example of this misplaced thinking—namely, the planning for the Iraq War. Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense disregarded Army troop level recommendations and launched the invasion of Iraq without adequate manpower or planning for the ambitious mission of destroying Saddam Hussein’s regime, occupying the country, and forging a democratic future. Rumsfeld and his partners mistakenly believed that overwhelmingly superior technology, “shock and awe” weaponry, and mobility would win this war, not ground soldiers securing terrain and people, especially in Iraq’s many cities. Moreover, they failed to grasp that the effectiveness of technology and firepower is substantially diminished in urban areas, especially in the information age, when the killing of innocents by one errant bomb can cause a strategic setback. When one considers that, at the current rate of global urban growth, over two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050, this would seem to be an important point.

  Alas, Rumsfeld’s retinue simply figured, or hoped, that they would not have to fight in cities. They were dead wrong. In Iraq, the cities turned into the main arena of contention. Like many Americans, the Iraq War planners made the mistake of believing that, in war, technology trumps the human element rather than the other way around. They shrank from the fundamental reality that war is largely a contest of human will. It is also inherently ugly, vulgar, and destructive. Nor is this ever likely to change. When they dismissed the importance of these kinds of uncomfortable subjective realities that did not fit onto their spreadsheets, the terrible consequence was, of course, post-Hussein chaos, a pervasive insurgency, and a protracted, blood-soaked war.7

  Humanity’s Fatal Flaw

  Humanity has a fatal flaw and it will probably never go away. That flaw is the propensity to make war. I offer no explanation as to why humans have this terrible flaw. Perhaps a psychologist could attempt to forge such an explanation. As a historian, I can simply state the fact that wars have marred the entire span of human history. They continue to do so today. There is no reason to believe that the future will be any different. In fact, one could argue that war has been the most powerful causative force in human history. At times war can act as a remarkably constructive force for humanity (the defeat of Nazi Germany leaps readily to mind).

  Even so, war is like disease—a sad, immutable reality that is an inherent aspect of our troubled world. To ignore this reality and wish it might all go away is foolish in the extreme, quite similar to a cancer patient refusing treatment in the vain hope that the disease will disappear. It is far better to understand it and master it, much as doctors seek to triumph over a deadly disease. Only when we understand the true nature of war can we hope to prevent it. The nature of war is waste, destruction, barbarity, human anguish, depravity, and ultimate tragedy, not video monitors, joysticks, push buttons, and expensive gadgets. War cannot be sanitized or transformed, no matter how hard techno-warriors try to change it, from what it really is. War is an ugly beast that cannot be made to look nice through cosmetic surgery. War destroys youth. It destroys infrastructure. It destroys hopes and dreams. In its most common form, it is fought by small groups of frightened human beings (usually men), on the ground, in almost intimate fashion. Generally, war entails killing, the most taboo yet strangely all too common of human behaviors.8 Citizens of a free society must understand all of this. We cannot afford the luxury of turning our eyes from these realities, any more than a health care professional can afford to be squeamish at the sight of blood. For if we succumb to the belief that war is simply a bloodless technological problem, to be dealt with at a safe distance, employing only machines and new-generation weapons, we will continue to court disaster.

  In this book, I hope to make two major points. The first has to do with the importance of land power. In the late nineteenth century, Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American naval officer, wrote a significant book called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. Basically, Mahan argued that sea power equated to national power. The Royal Navy was his prime example, but he also clearly implied that the United States must follow the same path, especially through the construction of battleships. Mahan made his case by describing a litany of key naval battles. His argument for the importance of seaborne commerce, as protected by naval power, is indisputable.

  However, he greatly exaggerated the importance of battleships and the primacy of sea power in modern war. While accepting Mahan’s argument about sea power’s vital necessity (along with the subsequent arguments of aviation advocates for the importance of air power), I am asserting that land power is the most important element in modern war. More than anything else, land power equates to national power. My most powerful evidence for this argument is the simple realities of America’s recent wars. Obviously, American troops were highly dependent on air and sea forces for transportation, supply, and fire support. Planes and ships were of crucial importance in every war. I am not arguing otherwise. But the key word here is “support.” Ground forces, while dependent on much support, still took the lead in the actual fighting against America’s enemies. In fact, they did almost all the fighting and dying, even in World War II, when naval and air forces fought more battles than they have in all American wars ever since. In World War II, nearly two-thirds of American combat fatalities, and over 90 percent of woundings, occurred among Army and Marine ground forces. A generation later, some 58,193 Americans died in Vietnam. Over 53,000 of them died while fighting on the ground, in the Army or the Marines. Some 2,555 sailors lost their lives in that war, and it is a safe bet that a significant percentage of them were serving with ground forces as corpsmen or in special operations units like the SEALs. The unbalanced casualty ratios were even more pronounced in Korea, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq (well over 90 percent of American combat deaths in
those wars occurred among ground soldiers).9

  These numbers simply reflect the obvious fact that, from World War II through Iraq, most of the fighting in America’s wars took place on the ground. Is it not rational to say, based on these numbers, that in these conflicts land forces took a leading role? In my opinion, this is beyond question. Perhaps it is then reasonable to say that land power has proven to be the preeminent element of American power in modern times. I base this statement not just on casualty numbers but on the indisputable fact that when war has happened, ground troops, particularly infantry soldiers, have fought most of the battles. If this trend held up for more than sixty years, between World War II and Iraq, at a time of explosive technological growth, why would we have any reason to believe that the future will be any different?

  The second point I plan to make in this book has to do with the reality of combat. In modern wars, the actual fighting is the story, not simply an antecedent to larger strategic considerations. I will use an example to explain what I mean by that. I bristle whenever I hear the orthodox explanation as to why the Allies won World War II. It goes like this. Once the Big Three (the USSR, Britain, and the USA) were in place, Allied victory was then inevitable. The matériel, manpower, technological, and transportation advantages that the Big Three and their partners enjoyed simply guaranteed an Allied victory. No, they did not! They swung the probabilities in favor of the Allies. They did not make victory inevitable. To say so is to deny the importance of what took place on the battlefield. The Allies could not have won the war if their soldiers were not willing to fight, die, and sacrifice, in large numbers, under the most challenging of circumstances. Can machines or warehouses full of supplies force men to move forward, into a kill zone, at mortal risk to themselves, in order to attack and destroy their enemies? Certainly not. Only good leadership and a warrior’s spirit can do that. Material advantages can be very helpful (especially in the realm of fire support), but they cannot ever guarantee those vital ingredients of victory. From the Greco-Persian Wars through Vietnam, history is replete with examples of materially impoverished groups, kingdoms, tribes, or nation-states that triumphed over their better-heeled opponents.

  That aside, I believe that too many American policymakers have sought to avoid seeing war as it really is, not just out of a natural preference for technological solutions to difficult problems, but also out of fear and disgust. Because American culture generally values individuality and the importance of human life, the truly awful face of war, as embodied in ground combat, is simply too ugly for many of us to behold. It is instead somehow more comforting, or humane, to assure ourselves that such unpleasant things are relics of an earlier, more barbaric age, easily suppressed under the weight of modern technology. War need not mean actual fighting and dying by ground soldiers. Instead it can be prosecuted from a distance, with smart weapons, and brought to an amicable conclusion with mutually reasonable enemies. Of course, the only problem with this well-meaning notion is that wars never happen that way. Once unleashed from its Pandora’s box, the plague of war slimes us all, but none more so than the combatants themselves.

  In 1976, John Keegan published The Face of Battle, a truly landmark book. By investigating the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, Keegan delved, like no previous historian, into the stark realities of ground combat for the average soldier. He almost singlehandedly inspired the school of socio-military inquiry that focuses on the experience of the common soldier. Keegan made the salient point that firsthand combat accounts were rare until only the last few hundred years. The perspective of the average enlisted soldier was almost nonexistent until the nineteenth century. Instead we were left with traditional battle rhetoric—grand, sweeping charges, trumpets and glory, heroic generals, cycloramic drama. Keegan was one of the first historians to penetrate that battle rhetoric in search of the actual human story for the average participant.10

  With full acknowledgment of Keegan’s profound influence, I intend to employ the same approach to see how it holds up in a more modern time, for Americans from World War II through the present, at a time when there is definitely no paucity of sources from the common soldier. I have chosen to write about ten different battles or situations in recent U.S. history—Guam, Peleliu, Aachen, and the northern shoulder of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II; Operation Masher/White Wing, the Marine Corps combined action platoons, and the Battle of Dak To in Vietnam; the combat experiences of infantry soldiers in the Gulf War, the urban struggle for Fallujah; and, finally, the world of one infantry regiment fighting the counterinsurgency war in Iraq. Each chapter is based on a diverse blend of primary sources, some of them coming to light for the first time. I make liberal use of after action reports, unit lessons learned, official documents, personal diaries, unit journals, personal memoirs, letters, individual interviews, and even group combat after action interviews I conducted with Iraq War infantry soldiers. These sources help us puncture the clichés of battle rhetoric and discover what the modern battlefield smells like and looks like, how killing and fear affect the combatants, and how Americans behave in battle.

  I realize that I can be accused of stacking the deck in my favor by choosing only battles that illustrate my larger arguments. That is a fair point, even though my arguments evolved from studying these battles rather than the other way around. What’s more, I could just as easily have chosen dozens of other battles or situations that would have illustrated my arguments every bit as well. In making my choices, one of my key intentions was to pursue variety. So I opted for a rich blend, from amphibious invasions to urban combat to pitched battles, to mechanized warfare and its diametric opposite, counterinsurgency. I chose no Korean War battles because I saw in them nothing tactically different from World War II. Only the reader can decide if this was an oversight. In any event, my goal is to illuminate, in the most unvarnished way, the troubling world of ground combat, as experienced by American soldiers of recent times. Mahan made his case by discussing naval history. I will make mine by writing about land warfare, in a way that I hope does justice to Keegan’s methods.

  I want to be very clear that I am not writing all this from the perspective of a professional soldier or statesman. I do not base my arguments on personal experience, military training, or in-depth study at any military college. I am only a historian, trained in modern American military history, offering a perspective on the basis of that expertise. As such, I have constructed my arguments around the lessons modern history has shown us, nothing more, nothing less. And what are those lessons? They can be summed up in the words of one World War II combat soldier: “There is no worse place than where the Infantry is . . . or what it has to do. A war is not over until the Infantry is done with it . . . finished moving on foot more than the other, finished killing more than the other. And when it is all done, and the Infantryman is taken home again, some of him will remain in that place . . . forever.”11

  CHAPTER 1

  Guam, July 1944: Amphibious Combat Against a Self-Destructive Enemy

  W-Day

  THE UNDERWATER DEMOLITION TEAMS (UDTS) went in first. Their job was to blow holes through the coral reefs that served as a natural barrier for the American invasion force at Guam. With that accomplished, their next mission was to destroy obstacles and mines on the chosen landing beaches, and they were to do this in plain view of the Japanese defenders who sat in pillboxes, buildings, and bunkers, overlooking the beaches. Only a smokescreen and some covering fire from ships offshore would shield the Underwater Demolition Teams. Superb swimmers, trained explosives experts, and possessed of an adventurer’s mentality, these intrepid souls were the ancestors of U.S. Navy SEALs. For nearly a week before the invasion, they swept the area, paddling or swimming ashore, setting explosive charges, scouting enemy positions. They were seldom molested by the Japanese, who were often too busy taking shelter from naval gunfire to deal with the UDTs. Sometimes, the Japanese were just plain clueless, exhibiting a self-destructive penchant tha
t was to plague their defense of Guam like a veritable millstone around the neck. One group of Japanese soldiers was practically within spitting distance of a demolition team but did not fire a shot. “No one gave us orders to shoot,” one of them later explained to his American captors. In the days ahead, of course, most of his countrymen would resist their American enemies much more forcefully, but always within the context of a deeply flawed plan that played to American strengths.