Drill, Rank, Order, and Command
Discipline as it emerged in Europe is the attempt at the institutionalization of a particular type of courage through training and rote, and is manifested in the preservation of rank and order. This Western obsession with close-order drill is hinged on the fact that whereas all men are prone to bolt and run when the situation becomes hopeless, training and belief can alter such behavior. The key is not to make every man a hero, but to create men who by and large are braver than their untrained allies in withstanding an enemy charge, and in the heat of battle follow the orders of superiors to protect the men at their sides. Their obedience is given to a timeless and enduring civic system, not to a tribe, family, or friends of the moment.
How is discipline achieved and sustained over centuries? Greek, Roman, and later European armies found the answer through drill and a clear-cut written contract between soldier and state. Seventeenth-century commanders like William Louis of Nassau connected their preference for mass firepower directly to Greek and Roman writers of tactics who stressed the need for phalangites and legionaries to stay in close formation. The ability to march in order and line up in rank has immediate and more abstract advantages. Troops can be deployed and be given orders more quickly and efficiently when they march in close formations. Close-order columns and lines are the fountainheads of collective fire and make sequential volleys by rifle companies possible. But drill itself in a larger sense reinforces the soldier’s attention to commands. The willingness to march in step with his peers is at the source of a Western soldier’s readiness to do exactly what his commanding officer orders. A man who can find his spot in formation, march in cadence with his fellows, and keep rank is more likely to obey other more key orders, to use his weapons on command, and ultimately to defeat the enemy.
Westerners especially put a much greater emphasis on just this strange notion of keeping together in time:
But in fact close-order drill is conspicuous by its absence in most armies and military traditions. From a world perspective, indeed, the way Greeks and Romans and then modern Europeans exploited the psychological effect of keeping together in time was an oddity, not the norm of military history. Why should Europeans have specialized in exploiting the extraordinary possibilities of close-order drill? (W. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, 4)
McNeill goes on to give a variety of answers to his own question, but central to his entire discussion is the notion of civic community, or the idea that freemen enter a consensual contract with their military and thereby expect rights and accept responsibilities. In such an environment, drill is not seen necessarily as oppressive even to highly individualistic Westerners, but as an obvious manifestation of egalitarianism that brings all soldiers from widely varying backgrounds into a uniformly clothed, identical-appearing, and fluid-moving single body, where private identity and individual status is for a time shed. Drill, McNeill believes, was quite at home in “active, participatory citizenship that was the hallmark of the Greek and Roman concepts of freedom” (112). We might add that the close order of the Greek phalanx, where each man occupied a slot equidistant from another, was a reflection of the assembly hall, in which every male citizen held the same right as another—and both egalitarian bodies were ultimately fueled by the Greek countryside, where a checkerboard of farms, not vast estates, was the norm.
Adolescents who enter the freshman class at, for example, Virginia Military Institute are immediately shorn of their hair, deprived of their civilian clothes, and taught to drill and march in step—as prior class, race, or political loyalties fade into the columns of identically appearing, moving, and chanting cadets. Take the most vicious street or motorcycle gang, replete with Uzi machine guns and years of experience in shooting rival thugs, and it would not stand a chance in battle against a regiment of armed VMI classmates—none of whom have a single serious misdemeanor record of arrest or have fired a shot in anger their entire lives. Yet VMI cadets, unlike well-disciplined Nazis or Stalinist goose-stepping infantrymen, are fully apprised of the conditions of their service and are largely protected through a system of military justice from capricious punishment—and accept that gratuitous violence on their own part will be severely punished. Such is the power of drill and the discipline it spawns in creating civic loyalty from tribal and familial obligations.
Fighting in rank and formation is in some sense the ultimate manifestation of Western egalitarianism, as all hierarchy outside the battlefield fades before the anonymity of a phalanx of like-minded and trained peers. Presumably, the Carthaginians hired the Spartan drillmaster Xanthippus in the First Punic War for the same reason the Japanese enlisted French and German field instructors during the latter nineteenth century: to create soldiers, whether phalangites or riflemen, who could drill and march in rank and therefore fight in the deadly manner of Westerners—as both the Romans and the Americans were shortly to learn. Vegetius, some two millennia ago, outlined this peculiar Western emphasis on drill:
Right at the beginning of their training, recruits must be taught the military step. For on the march and in the battle line nothing should be kept safeguarded more diligently than that all the troops should keep in step. This can only be achieved through repeated practice by which they learn how to march quickly and in formation. An army which is split up and not in order is always in serious danger from the enemy. (Epitoma rei militaris 1.1.9)
Central to the European tradition of military discipline is the emphasis on defense, or the belief, as we have seen from Herodotus, that it is better not to run than to be an accomplished killer. Aristotle in the Politics (7.1324b15ff) relates the strange customs of nonpolis peoples who put unusual emphasis on killing the enemy—Scythians cannot drink from a ceremonial cup until they have killed a man, Iberians put spits around warriors’ graves to mark the number of men they had slain in battle, Macedonians must wear a halter, not a belt, until they cut down a man in battle—as in sharp contrast with the mores of the city-state. The Zulu army also belonged to this long tribal tradition, as its warriors received necklaces of willow sticks signifying the number of “kills” each had confirmed.
As Aristotle also pointed out, the Western emphasis on defensive cohesion, closely associated with drill and order, puts the highest premium on maintaining the integrity of a position or formation. All codes of military justice in the West clearly define cowardice first as running from formation or abandoning rank, regardless of the situation, not as a failure to kill particular numbers of the enemy. If an Aztec warrior found prestige in overwhelming and capturing a string of noble prisoners, a Spanish harquebusier or pikeman was heralded for keeping his place in line and supporting the cohesion of the line or column as it rather anonymously mowed down the enemy. In the context of the Zulu wars the British, like the Zulus, possessed a method of attack and a predictable manner of fighting. But the British system accentuated formation, drill, and order, and called courageous those who upheld those very values. In an abstract sense, soldiers who fight as one—shoot in volleys, charge on order as a group, retire when ordered, and do not pursue rashly, prematurely, or for too long—defeat their enemies.
The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 provides stunning examples of Zulu bravery pitted against British discipline. But whereas the Zulu military was often as brave as the British, no one would claim it was as disciplined:
The key invention is that of the state, that is, civil in contrast with kin-based social control. Civil government is the dividing line, the threshold, the horizon between that which is civilized and that which is not. Only the state can raise large armies. It alone can discipline and train men into soldiers rather than warriors. Only government can command, not request, and can punish those who do not feel like fighting that day. . . . The primitive warrior was without the backing of an organized, structured government. He was unwilling to submit to discipline, and incapable or impatient of obeying definite command. He discovered only the tactical principles inherent in animal hunting. . . . H
e was too immediately concerned with the engagement just ahead to plan campaigns instead of battles. (H. Turney-High, Primitive War, 258)
There were eleven Victoria Crosses awarded at Rorke’s Drift—one for almost every ten soldiers who fought. None were awarded on the basis of “kills,” though we have several eye-witness accounts of individual British marksmen shooting dozens of Zulus at great ranges. Modern critics suggest such lavishness in commendation was designed to assuage the disaster at Isandhlwana and to reassure a skeptical Victorian public that the fighting ability of the British soldier remained unquestioned. Maybe, maybe not. But in the long annals of military history, it is difficult to find anything quite like Rorke’s Drift, where a beleaguered force, outnumbered forty to one, survived and killed twenty men for every defender lost. But then it is also rare to find warriors as well trained as European soldiers, and rarer still to find any Europeans as disciplined as the British redcoats of the late nineteenth century.
NINE
Individualism
Midway, June 4–8, 1942
Now where men are not their own masters and independent, but are ruled by despots, they are not really militarily capable, but only appear to be warlike. . . . For men’s souls are enslaved and they refuse to run risks readily and recklessly to increase the power of somebody else. But independent people, taking risks on their own behalf and not on behalf of others, are willing and eager to go into danger, for they themselves enjoy the prize of victory. So institutions contribute a great deal to military valor.
—HIPPOCRATES, Airs, Waters, Places (16, 23)
FLOATING INFERNOS
THERE WERE TWO deadly places to be on the morning of June 4, 1942, during the first day of the battle of Midway—at that point the greatest aircraft carrier battle in the history of naval warfare. The first was on four Japanese aircraft carriers under aerial attack from American dive-bombers. All had their planes parked on their decks being refueled and rearmed when they were unexpectedly attacked. Gasoline tanks, high explosives, and ammunition were recklessly exposed to a shower of American 500- and 1,000-pound bombs. The hangar decks below were also littered promiscuously with munitions and torpedoes. Frantic crews tried in vain to switch their armaments from a planned land attack on Midway to a sudden impromptu assault on the newly located American carrier fleet a little less than two hundred miles to the east.
Under those rare circumstances of carrier vulnerability, a single 1,000-pound bomb that hit the targeted deck full of gassed and armed planes might trigger a series of explosions that could incinerate the entire ship and send it to the bottom in minutes—1,000 pounds of explosives ruining in a minute or two what five years of labor and 60 million pounds of steel had created. During the battle of Midway, three of the imperial Japanese prized fleet carriers—the Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu, all veterans of an unbroken string of Japanese successes during the prior six months— were precisely in that rare state of absolute defenselessness when American dive-bombers began their headlong plunges from as high as 20,000 feet, entirely unseen from below. In less than six minutes—from 10:22 to 10:28 A.M. on June 4, 1942—the pride of the Japanese carrier fleet was set aflame and the course of World War II in the Pacific radically altered. Unlike the great naval battles of the past—Artemisium (480 B.C.), Salamis (480 B.C.), Actium (31 B.C.), Lepanto (1571), Trafalgar (1805), and Jutland (1916)—Midway was fought in the open seas: once sailors lost their platform of safety, unscathed and burned orphaned crewmen alike would find neither shore nor small boats to pick them up.
The 33,000-ton Kaga (“Increased Joy”), with its arsenal of seventy-two bombers and fighters, was probably attacked first by twenty-five American SBD Dauntless dive-bombers of squadrons VB-6 and VS-6, led by the skilled pilot Wade McClusky from the American carrier Enterprise. Nine of McClusky’s planes made it through the horrendous antiaircraft defenses. All dived toward the carrier at more than 250 mph. Four bombs hit their target. Within seconds Japanese planes, gassed, armed, and ready for takeoff, instead began exploding, causing gaping holes in the flight deck and killing almost anyone in their general vicinity. Anything metal on deck—wrenches, pipes, fittings—simply became deadly shrapnel that shredded all flesh in its path. Two subsequent American bombs ripped apart the ship’s elevator and ignited all the armed planes waiting below on the hangar deck. One bomb blew apart the carrier’s island, killing all the officers on the bridge, including the captain of the Kaga.
Almost immediately, power went out. The Kaga stopped dead in the water and began exploding. Carriers seldom broke in two and sank quickly. They were not often caught and targeted by the huge shells of battleships and were among the most seaworthy of capital ships even when torpedoed—which was rare, given their protective net of cruisers and destroyers. Nevertheless, in minutes eight hundred of the Kaga’s crew were burned alive, dismembered, or vaporized into nothingness. Ship-to-ship air warfare, with its lethal combination of bomb, torpedo, machine-gun fire, and aviation fuel, even without the horrific shelling of sixteen-inch naval guns, could be an ungodly experience. Whereas the Japanese had done precisely the same thing to American battleships half a year earlier at Pearl Harbor, their own blazing carriers now were not at dock, but on the high seas, hundreds of miles from Japanese-held territory. Their slight hope of rescue and medical attention lay only with other Japanese ships, themselves under aerial attack and thus wary of approaching too close to the exploding and flaming carriers. A few officers chose to go down with their vessels, out of shame of disappointing their emperor.
At nearly the same time the Kaga was struck, her sister ship the 34,000-ton Akagi (“Red Castle”)—Admiral Nagumo’s flagship—with most of its sixty-three planes, was caught in exactly the same manner by Dick Best and at least five SBD dive-bombers of the 1st Division of Bombing Squadron VB-6, also from the carrier Enterprise. While this smaller group of airborne attackers had only 5,000 pounds of ordnance among them, the Akagi was likewise in the midst of launching at least forty fully gassed and armed planes heading out to demolish the Yorktown. At least two and maybe three of the Americans’ bombs hit the carrier. The explosions incinerated the Japanese planes as they were taking off and blasted holes throughout the deck before reaching the volatile fuel tanks and magazines below. Rear Admiral Kusaka recorded that the deck was on fire and anti-aircraft and machine guns were firing automatically, having been set off by the fire aboard ship. Bodies were all over the place, and it was not possible to tell what would be shot up next. . . . I had my hands and feet burned—a pretty serious burn on one foot. That is eventually the way we abandoned the Akagi—helter-skelter, no order of any kind. (W. Smith, Midway, 111)
Unlike those who are attacked in land warfare, men shelled and bombed on carriers at sea have little avenue of flight, their escape limited by the small perimeter of the flight deck. An infantryman subject to the hellish shelling on Guadalcanal might run, dig, or find shelter; a Japanese sailor on an exploding carrier at Midway had to choose from among being burned alive, suffocating inside the ship, being strafed and engulfed on a red-hot flight deck, or jumping overboard to drown, be burned on the high seas, or on occasion be attacked by sharks in the warm waters of the Pacific. The best hope of a Japanese man in the water was to be rescued by American ships, which meant life and safety in a prisoner-of-war camp in the United States. The worst nightmare of an American sailor or airman in the seas of Midway was capture by the Japanese navy, which spelled a quick interrogation, followed by either beheading or being thrown overboard bound with weights.
As for the attackers, unlike high-altitude “precision” bombing by multiengine aircraft at 20,000 feet and above, naval dive-bombers were far more likely to hit the target—if the pilots were not themselves engulfed by their own explosions, shot down, or simply unable to pull out of a dive that brought them within feet of the enemy deck. At Midway a single Dauntless dive-bomber closing to a thousand feet above the target with a 500-pound bomb would prove more lethal than an entire squadron of fifteen B-1
7s three or four miles above, despite each dropping 8,500 pounds of explosives.
One such bomb from one of the American dive-bombers plowed into the hangar and ignited the Akagi’s stored torpedoes, which immediately began to rip the ship open from the inside out. Unlike British aircraft carriers, neither the faster and more agile Japanese nor the American flattops had armored decks. Their wooden runways offered poor protection for the fuel, planes, and bombs in storage below—and themselves were easily ignited along with the planes preparing for takeoff. More than two hundred men from the Akagi were either killed or lost in seconds. A Japanese naval officer and celebrated pilot, Mitsuo Fuchida, on the Akagi recalled the general calamity inside the carrier:
I staggered down a ladder and into the ready room. It was already jammed with badly burned victims from the hangar deck. A new explosion was followed quickly by several more, each causing the bridge structure to tremble. Smoke from the burning hangar gushed through passageways and into the bridge and ready room, forcing us to seek other refuge. Climbing back to the bridge I could see that Kaga and Soryu had also been hit and were giving off heavy columns of black smoke. The scene was horrible to behold. (M. Fuchida and M. Okimiya, Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan, 179)
The best naval pilots of the imperial fleet were being slaughtered in a matter of minutes. Just as important was the loss of the most skilled flight crews in the Japanese navy, the rare and irreplaceable experts who had mastered with long experience the difficult arts of rapidly arming, maintaining, and fueling aircraft on a bobbing carrier.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 44
