Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The torpedo pilots from the three American carriers, as we have seen, were just as innovative, if soon subject to much of the same fate, given their inferior equipment and lack of experience. But by any fair measure, few naval pilots should have located the Japanese fleet at all. The Hornet ’s fighters and dive-bombers did not; 45 planes, or almost one-third of the initial 152 planes of the first American strike, never even saw the enemy. Radio contact with Midway was difficult, and no updated reports were forwarded to the pilots after takeoff to indicate that the Japanese had radically altered course away from Midway and were headed in the near-opposite direction. In the hour or more it took the Americans to reach the Japanese, the enemy carriers would be thirty or forty miles to the north from their last reported position, and thus in theory safe from the incoming bombers, which were at their limit of operations, low on fuel, and headed in the wrong direction.

  A number of American air commanders ignored standard operational orders and thereby found the Japanese through their own initiative. Jack Waldron, Hornet air commander of the Devastators, told his squadron, “Just follow me. I’ll take you to ’em” (W. Smith, Midway, 102). And he did, and to their deaths—rightly surmising that Nagumo would change course once he got reports of the American carriers. Waldron’s ingenuity ensured that he found the Japanese, that all his planes would therefore be shot down, and that the Japanese fighter cover would, in the process of the American slaughter, be ignorant of the dive-bomber peril far above. Had Waldron not changed course, he would never have found the enemy fleet, and thus it was likely that the Japanese would have much more easily beat off the other attacks and have been waiting for the SBDs.

  Similarly, when Wade McClusky, leading the dive-bombers of the Enterprise, arrived at the anticipated interception point 155 miles distant, his planes likewise found no Japanese fleet. Instinctively, he, too, made an instantaneous judgment that Nagumo’s carriers had changed course (he was helped by the wake of the Japanese destroyer Arashi, which was steaming to catch up to Nagumo’s force) and thus began making a long sweeping search north to the Japanese carriers, which he found at the limit of his bombers’ fuel reserves. Had McClusky not guessed, and guessed rightly—or had he circled while trying to radio for orders — Enterprise’s bombers, like Hornet’s, would have played no role in the fighting. Both the Akagi and Kaga would have escaped, and surely either the Enterprise or the Hornet would have quickly felt their wrath. No wonder that the captain of the Enterprise, George Murray, called McClusky’s initiative “the most important decision of the entire action” (G. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 260).

  During the actual bombing runs, individual American pilots made snap decisions to redirect their attacks contrary to their last orders, when they saw that crippled ships needed more attention or felt that their bombs might be better dropped on fresh targets. Improvisation ensured that the Hiryu was sunk and the heavy cruiser Mogami seriously damaged, both suffering devastating hits from American bombers that had been ordered elsewhere.

  Such freethinking American pilots in their recklessness and infectious enthusiasm could often be ineffective, if not downright dangerous, as we have seen in the failed shore-based attacks from Midway. A number of impromptu B-17 sorties were foolhardy, and one even attacked an American submarine. An unwise effort of B-24s on June 6 to fly at night to bomb Wake Island resulted in abject failure—the planes did not find the island and the mission’s commander, Major General Clarence Tinker, was never heard from again. Nevertheless, comparison between the Japanese and American scouting, fighter, and bomber pilots reveals far more capacity for initiative and adaptation among the Americans. At Midway, as would be true throughout the Pacific War, that autonomy paid off.

  INDIVIDUALISM IN WESTERN WARFARE

  The Americans would lose dozens of carriers, battleships, and cruisers in the three years following Midway to brave and brilliant Japanese sailors and pilots, as the United States sought to ruin Japan, rather than remove the threat of the Japanese military. On Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and in a number of naval actions off the Solomon Islands, thousands of Americans of all services would be slaughtered by well-planned and organized Japanese assaults. Yet the astounding fact remains: in less than four years, after being surprised and caught in a state of virtual unpreparedness, the United States—while devoting the majority of its forces to the European theater of operations, and without banzai charges, kamikaze attacks, or ritual suicides—not only defeated an enormous and seasoned Japanese military but destroyed the Japanese nation itself, ending its half-century existence as a formidable military power and indeed a modern industrial state. Japan’s navy, army, and air force had not merely lost the Pacific War but ceased to exist in the process.

  The result was that by August 1945 the Japanese nation was in far worse shape than it had been a century earlier in 1853 when Commander Perry arrived in Tokyo Bay and helped spur the original Westernization of Japan. A century of Westernization without liberalization had brought Japan not parity with, but destruction by, Western powers. Critical to that unprecedented and brutal American military achievement of some fortyfive months was a long tradition of reliance on individual initiative, which was in sharp contrast to a venerable Eastern emphasis on group consensus, obeisance to imperial or divine authority, and the subjugation of the individual to society. The beginning of the end for the Japanese was Midway, where they lost their best airmen and irreplaceable aircrews and the core of their carrier fleet—and, most important, in a mere three days had their confidence shattered to such a degree that they would now fear, rather than look eagerly to, engaging American ships on the horizon.

  Individualism had long played a role in Western military efficacy and usually manifested itself on the battlefield at three levels: from supreme command to the soldiers themselves to the larger society that fielded and armed its combatants. All cultures are capable of creating brilliant and highly idiosyncratic military leaders who exercise independence and intuition. Rome met a number of such gifted tribal commanders and Eastern monarchs—Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, Boudicca, Mithradates—whose skill often led to battlefield victories. But their individualism, and that of others to follow like them, was not characteristic of their cultures at large, but prominent only to the degree that they enjoyed absolute power. Thus, after their deaths—and all enemies of Rome usually died in battle or committed suicide—their wars of liberation collapsed, suggesting that their brand of monarchy, theocracy, or tyranny could rarely produce a succession of gifted military leaders, much less a nation of followers who could rely on their own initiative and autonomy to wage war.

  The same holds true of dynasts such as the pharaohs, the New World potentates in Mexico and Peru, and the Chinese emperors and Ottoman sultans, who likewise centralized military authority into their own hands and discouraged initiative on the part of their subjects, ensuring that the chance of victory lay not in military improvisation, but only in their own—often flawed—judgment. In contrast, generals like Themistocles, the Spartan genius Lysander, Scipio Africanus, the brilliant Byzantine Belisarius, Cortés, and moderns like George Patton and Curtis LeMay were at odds with their own state, surrounded by equally independent-thinking subordinates, and keen to exploit the initiative rather than merely the discipline of their own troops.

  Soldiers in the ranks of Western armies often exercised an independence of judgment not found in other societies. Here one thinks of the “old man” at the battle of Mantinea (418 B.C.) who stopped the battle to warn the Spartan high command of its unwise deployment; the brutal give-and-take among Xenophon’s Ten Thousand in Asia Minor (401 B.C.), who were as much a mobile democracy-in-arms as a hired band of killers; the various eccentric bands of Frankish aristocracy who bickered as much as they fought the enemy during the Crusades; the fractious admirals before Lepanto or career British soldiers in India and Africa during the nineteenth century, whose skill and imagination brought success despite mediocre higher command.

>   All people at times act as individuals, and as humans prize their freedom and independence. But the formal and often legal recognition of a person’s sovereign sphere of individual action—social, political, and cultural—is a uniquely Western concept, one that frightens, sometimes rightly so, most of the non-Western world. Individualism, unlike consensual government and constitutional recognition of political freedom, is a cultural, rather than political, entity. It is the dividend of Western politics and economics, which give freedom in the abstract and concrete sense to individuals and in the process foster personal curiosity and initiative unknown among societies where there are no true citizens and neither government nor markets are free.

  As we have seen in the case of Salamis and Cannae, an insidious individualism grows out of the larger Western traditions of freedom, constitutional government, property rights, and civic miliarism. The Athenian ekklēsia voted for the disastrous expedition to Sicily (415–413 B.C.) and then adopted decisive and heroic measures to keep Athens in the war for another nine years—in much the same way as the British Parliament in the nineteenth century or the American Congress during the twentieth authorized all sorts of political and economic policies that turned the war effort over to thousands of autonomous and freethinking citizens. From the assertion of the fifth-century sophist Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things” to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and drafted by Western jurists (“the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women . . .”), there is a 2,500-year tradition of personal liberty and innate trust in the individual, rather than the political or religious collective, unparalleled in the non-West. For good or evil, few Westerners believe that a sacred cow is more important than a human, that the emperor is superior to the individual person, that a religious pilgrimage is the fulfillment of a human’s life, that in war a suicidal charge is often required for an individual’s excellency, or that a combatant must risk his or her life to save the emperor’s picture.

  In contrast, Japan, in lieu of independent supreme commanders, innovative soldiers, and a sovereign legislature, relied on ironclad obedience, as have most Western adversaries of the past two and a half millennia. Rigid hierarchy and complete submission of the individual to the divinity of the Japanese emperor meant that the wisdom of a small cadre of militarists shaped policy largely without ratification or even knowledge of the Japanese people, who were never envisioned as free persons with unique rights that were natural at birth and protected by the state. Like the enormous armies of the ancient imperial East, all that centralized control and mass ideology led to a wonderfully trained, large, and spirited military, but one vulnerable to the counterattacks of a nation-in-arms, drawing on the collective wisdom of thousands of freethinking individuals.

  With the end of the Pacific War, the ruin of Japanese society, and the disgrace of the militarists, the final century-old roadblock to full implementation of Western-style parliamentary democracy and all that accompanied it was removed. The postwar introduction of constitutional government brought land redistribution. Freedom of the press and dissent, the emancipation of women, and the creation of a middling consumer class were also dividends of the American occupation. The result—if not a radical Japanese reinterpretation of the role of the individual and society—was at least that at the millennium Japan has one of the most well led, innovative, and technologically advanced militaries in the world—under the complete control of an elected legislature and chief executive and subject to civilian audit.

  If its past partial embrace of Western military research and development brought Japan near technological parity with European and American military forces at the turn of the century, its current far more comprehensive adaptation of Western political and social institutions has ensured it a military that is, at least tactically, the near equal of any in Europe today. In the next century Japan’s scientific progress in arms will not hinge entirely on foreign emulation, but be powered by the engine of its own free and liberal society—if it continues to encourage individual talent and initiative to a degree unknown at any time in its long and warlike past.

  TEN

  Dissent and Self-Critique

  Tet, January 31–April 6, 1968

  The expedition to Sicily was not so much a mistake in judgement, considering the enemy they went against, as much as a case of mismanagement on the part of the planners, who did not afterwards take the necessary measures to support those first troops they sent out. Instead, they turned to personal rivalries over the leadership of the people, and consequently not only conducted the war in the field half-heartedly, but also brought civil discord for the first time to the home front. . . . And yet they did not fail until they at last turned on each other and fell into private quarrels that brought their ruin.

  —THUCYDIDES, The Peloponnesian War (2.65.12–13)

  BATTLES AGAINST THE CITIES

  American Embassy, Saigon

  SAIGON WAS QUIET, as it should be during the holidays. There was a thirty-six-hour truce in effect for the Tet Nguyen Dan celebration and various festivals commemorating the lunar new year. In any case, the Vietcong rarely came into the southern urban centers of Vietnam to attack openly with sizable forces. All that changed suddenly and without warning in the early morning of January 31, 1968. The entire country of South Vietnam, or so it seemed from panicky reports that flashed into American headquarters in Saigon, had come under fire in a matter of minutes from enemy infiltrators. Cities, villages, even rural hamlets— more than one hundred in all—were being overrun. Such a scenario at first seemed preposterous to American commanders. They were convinced that the enemy would never attack en masse, and especially not after heavy bombing attacks during 1967 that had gradually turned the tide against North Vietnam.

  The center of American power in South Vietnam was the capital city of Saigon, supposedly a sacrosanct fortress. The bastion for this vast network of military and civilian support, MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam), was the American embassy, its walls of ugly concrete the consummate image of the strength and commitment of the United States to stop the communist incursion from the North and thereby allow for the eventual creation of a democratic, capitalist nation in the South. After the riveting success of World War II, two decades earlier, and the salvation of a capitalist, “free” South Korea in 1953, the American military during the first few years in Vietnam still operated with a sense of invincibility. In their eyes, the problem in Southeast Asia was not defeating the enemy, but finding him and then coaxing him to come out and fight, where he would then be promptly destroyed through overwhelming American firepower.

  But city streets were as inimical to the Western way of war as dense jungle. If the Americans wished to bomb and shoot openly and thereby incinerate thousands of communists, then the North Vietnamese would attack stealthily and at night, and not always with even the pretext of shooting exclusively at combatants. Indeed, the embassy, too, was a target—in fact, the first objective of the entire massive enemy offensive that began nationwide at about 3:00 in the morning on January 31. Some 4,000 Vietcong guerrillas, many in civilian clothes and soon aided by infiltration units from the regular army of North Vietnam, attacked nearly all the main South Vietnamese and American government installations in Saigon. Hundreds of small cadres attempted to storm the military headquarters of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the state radio and television stations, police compounds, government agencies, and individual homes of army, police, and American officials in a madcap plan to raise general insurrection among the population and thereby inaugurate the long-promised war of national liberation.

  Nineteen Vietcong commandos planned to force their way through the sealed American embassy grounds and overpower a skeleton detail of surprised and sleepy guards. Pulling up in a truck and taxicab, they blasted a hole in t
he compound wall, killed five American marines, and then began to fire grenades and automatic weapons against the heavy doors of the main chancery in a vain attempt to enter the offices of the embassy proper. What would the American public think, when in just a few hours television broadcasts sent the nation images of Vietcong peering from the windows of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s own office?

  It was not to be so. Within five hours helicopters had landed American airborne troops onto the grounds. The Americans killed all nineteen enemy infiltrators and secured the embassy. The enemy assault, like dozens more that morning against President Nguyen Van Thieu’s palace and other Vietnamese and American buildings, was a complete surprise and yet failure at the same time. As they urged on their troops, planners in North Vietnam boasted that the raids would signal a general uprising against the Americans and their “puppet” Vietnamese hosts:

  Move forward aggressively to carry out decisive and repeated attacks in order to annihilate as many American, Satellite and Puppet troops as possible in conjunction with political struggle and military proselytizing activities. . . . Display to the utmost your revolutionary heroism by surmounting all the hardships and difficulties and making sacrifices to be able to fight continually and aggressively. Be prepared to smash all enemy counter attacks and maintain your revolutionary standpoint under all circumstances. (L. Berman, “Tet Offensive,” in M. Gilbert and W. Head, eds., The Tet Offensive, 21)