In 1950, when North Korean troops moved into the South, President Harry Truman was clear about the need to take action: “Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, twenty years earlier.” He may well have been right. There is no doubt that Stalin, like Hitler, was gambling on an easy victory; in Stalin’s case, though, he was prepared to pull back his support for North Korea once it became too costly. There is little evidence that Hitler would have dropped his demands in Europe even in the face of stronger opposition from the democracies. He was determined upon war sooner or later. President Kennedy, whose senior thesis and then book Why England Slept was on British appeasement, had Munich in mind when he debated with his advisers how to deal with the Soviet Union over its missiles in Cuba. The 1930s, Kennedy said, “taught us a clear lesson; aggressive conduct if allowed to go unchecked, ultimately leads to war.” Wisely, though, he used a naval blockade rather than outright war to put pressure on the Soviets. A few years later, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, again used the analogy, this time with Vietnam. He did not want to be like Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who dealt with Hitler. He knew that if he got out of Vietnam, he told his biographer, “I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression.”
When Johnson had to decide whether or not to commit ground troops to Vietnam in 1965, the debate within his administration relied heavily on analogies. As Yuen Foong Khong of Oxford University has shown, Munich, the Korean War, and the French defeat in 1954 all were called in to support what were intense arguments. On the one hand were those like Robert McNamara; Dean Rusk, the secretary of state; and William Bundy, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs, who argued that both Munich and Korea encouraged a greater American presence in Vietnam. As Bundy put it, the lesson was that “aggression of any sort must be met early and head-on or it will have to be met later and in tougher circumstances. We had relearned the lessons of the 1930s—Manchuria, Ethiopia, the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia.” What they had also learned, and this complicated the decision, was that China was likely to intervene if war came too close to its borders. That, in the end, was to limit the American response in Vietnam in a way that it had not been limited in Korea.
The most prominent advocate against sending the troops was George Ball, an undersecretary of state. In the spring of 1965, he warned that even with half a million troops the United States “may not be able to fight the war successfully enough.” The analogy he used was the French war in Vietnam, which had ended with the surrender of its garrison at Dien Bien Phu. “The French,” he pointed out, “fought a war in Viet-nam [sic], and were fully defeated—after seven years of bloody struggle and when they still had 250,000 combat-hardened veterans in the field, supported by an army of 205,000 South Vietnamese.” He also warned that, in the eyes of many Vietnamese, the Americans had simply replaced the French as the colonial power. Like President Bush was to do later with the analogy between Algeria and Iraq, Ball’s adversaries concentrated on showing where the Americans were different from the French. France had been divided over the war and its political leadership was weak and unstable. The American public generally supported the war, except for a few clergymen and academics, and the administration was determined to stay in and win. Furthermore, most “knowledgeable” Vietnamese knew that the United States was there not for its own selfish ends but to defend the independence of South Vietnam. In the battle of the analogies, Ball lost. As Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador in South Vietnam, said to great effect, “I feel there is a greater threat to start World War III if we don’t go in. Can’t you see the similarity to our own indolence at Munich?”
The Vietnam War in turn was to produce its own set of analogies. Two main ways of drawing lessons came out of that unhappy experience. The lesson that tended to find favour with liberals and Democrats but also with parts of the military was that the United States should never have got involved in the first place. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and then Johnson had allowed the United States to slide into a war without clearly defined aims and where crucial American interests did not appear to be at stake. The result had been a loss of moral authority for the United States as it increasingly found itself cast as an imperialist bully and as its soldiers committed atrocities such as the massacre at My Lai. The important lesson was that the United States should avoid getting drawn into such conflicts again. The other lesson, more appealing to the right, was that the war in Vietnam could have been won if only the United States had been prepared to go all out, bombing North Vietnam into submission and putting even more troops on the ground. The press and public opinion should have been managed better to prevent the sort of sniping and defeatism that had undermined the war effort at home.
In 1991, as the Bush senior administration contemplated taking action against Hussein, Vietnam came into play as an example of how not to do it. Colin Powell, who had fought in Vietnam, had been drawing lessons ever since. If the United States ever fought another war, it should go in with overwhelming force and with clear goals. It should never again get drawn into an open-ended conflict that bled the armed forces and created dissent at home. Munich was part of the justification. Certainly in his invasion of Kuwait, Hussein was the undoubted aggressor, and military action did stop any further attempts at meddling with his neighbours. Iraq was left severely weakened and willing to cooperate, if grudgingly, with United Nations arms inspectors.
When the new Bush administration focused on Iraq after September 11, it too used the Munich analogy, but its relevance was much more tenuous. In the 1930s, Hitler headed one of the most powerful countries in the world. As the American scholar Jeffrey Record put it, “Hitler was neither weak nor deterred; Saddam was nothing but weak and deterred.” In 1991, Operation Desert Storm was over almost before it started. In 2003, it took three weeks to defeat Hussein completely with a relatively small force; four years to defeat Hitler with the combined forces of the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Although both the Bush and Blair administrations tried to portray Hussein as a menace to the world in the lead-up to the invasion, their evidence, as we now know, that he possessed weapons of mass destruction was flimsy at best. And the assertion that Hussein was somehow allied with Osama bin Laden was absurd to anyone who knew history. Hussein was a secularist, Bin Laden a religious fanatic. There had been no love lost between the two men and, indeed, Bin Laden had repeatedly called upon Iraqis to overthrow Hussein. We can learn from history but we also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.
CONCLUSION
HISTORY CAN HELP US to make sense of a complicated world, but we must always be careful if it offers explanations that are too simple. And we must always be prepared to consider alternatives and to raise questions. We should not be impressed when our leaders say firmly “History teaches us” or “History will show that we were right.” They can oversimplify and force inexact comparisons just as much as any of us can. Even the very clever and the powerful (and the two are not necessarily the same) go confidently off down the wrong paths. It is useful, too, to be reminded, as a citizen, that those in positions of authority do not always know better.
In 1893, the British naval commander in the Mediterranean, Vice-Admiral George Tryon, decided to take personal command of the summer naval manoeuvres. When he ordered an about-face of two parallel rows of battleships, his officers tried to point out that there would be a collision. A relatively simple calculation demonstrated that the combined turning circles of the ships were greater than the distance between them. While his officers watched in dismay, his flagship Victoria was rammed by the Camperdown. Tryon refused to believe that the damage was serious and ordered the nearby vessels not to send their lifeboats. The Victoria sank, taking him and 357 sailors with it. The Charge of the Light Brigade, when the flower of the British cavalry rode straight into the mouths of the Russian guns, is an equal reminder of human folly,
not just of Lord Cardigan who led the charge but of the system that allowed him to be in command. As David Halberstam, the American journalist, said in the last piece he ever wrote, “It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude.”
Nor should we think that we will always be right. As John Carey, the distinguished British man of letters, puts it, “One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.” Think of the arguments over the position of the earth and the sun, of the conviction, apparently supported by science, that so many Victorians had that there were superior and inferior races, or the calm assumptions even a few decades ago that women and blacks could not make good engineers or doctors.
If the study of history does nothing more than teach us humility and scepticism, then it has done something useful. We must continue to examine our own assumptions and those of others and ask, where’s the evidence? Or, is there another explanation? We should be wary of grand claims in history’s name or those who claim to have uncovered the truth once and for all. In the end, my only advice is use it, enjoy it, but always handle history with care.
FURTHER READING
THERE IS A LARGE and growing literature on the uses and abuses of both history and memory. The following is a list of some of the works I found most useful.
Abu El-Haj, Nadia. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and the Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002.
Appleby, R. Scott. “History in the Fundamentalist Imagination.” Journal of American History 89:2, 2002.
Bacevich, Andrew J. “The Real World War IV.” The Wilson Quarterly 29:1, winter 2005.
Bell, Duncan, ed. Memory Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Cannadine, David, ed. What Is History Now? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Carr, E.H. What Is History? London: Macmillan, 1961.
Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of History, rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Delisle, Esther. Myths, Memories and Lies: Quebec’s Intelligentsia and the Fascist Temptation, 1939–1960. Westmount, QC: Robert Davies, 1998.
Evans, Richard. In Defence of History. London: Granta, 2000.
Fischer, David Hackett. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.
Gardner, Lloyd C., and Marilyn B. Young. Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam or, How Not to Learn from the Past. New York: New Press, 2007.
Gillis, John R., ed. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Greary, Patrick J. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Halberstam, David. “The History Boys.” Vanity Fair, August 2007.
History & Memory (journal).
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Howard, Michael. Captain Professor: The Memoirs of Sir Michael Howard. London: Continuum, 2006.
———. “The Use and Abuse of Military History,” RUSI Journal 107, February 1962.
Judah, Tim. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
Karlsson, Klas-Göran, and Ulf Zander, eds. Echoes of the Holocaust: Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe. Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press, 2003.
Khong, Yuen Foong. Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decision of 1965. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Lebow, Richard Ned, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudia Fogu, eds. The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Lowenthal, David. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
May, Ernest R. “Lessons of the Past”: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Murray, Williamson, and Richard Hart Sinnreich. The Past as Prologue: The Importance of History to the Military Profession. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers. New York and London: Free Press, 1986.
Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston and New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2000.
Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. London: One World, 2006.
Record, Jeffrey. “The Use and Abuse of History: Munich, Vietnam and Iraq.” Survival 49:1, spring 2007.
Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
Winter, Jay, and Antoine Prost. The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Yoshida, Takashi. The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China and the United States. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK grew out of an invitation I received from the History Department at the University of Western Ontario to give the Joanne Goodman lectures in the fall of 2007. The series, named in memory of a history student who was tragically killed in a car accident, date back to 1966 and have had a distinguished roster of lecturers. It was an honour to be among their number and also a wonderful opportunity to reflect on a subject of my own choosing. I am grateful to the faculty and students at Western who sat through my lectures and helped me to refine my thinking through their questions and comments.
I was very lucky to have found in Jonathan Weier an outstanding research assistant who in the end became more of a collaborator. I am also grateful, as always, to those friends and family who discussed my ideas with me and who read my drafts with such patience. They make a long list but I should single out for special mention my brothers Tom and David; my sister, Ann; my brother-in-law, Peter Snow; and my nephews Dan and Alex; as well as my agent, Caroline Dawnay. My mother, Eluned, as usual was an excellent critic and proofreader. Bob Bothwell has taught me so much about history over the years that it is difficult to thank him adequately. Yet again, he was kind enough to read my manuscript and give me his advice. I have also benefited greatly from being at Oxford University and talking to my many colleagues who are interested in the ways in which history is used. The students at St. Antony’s have patiently listened to me talk and sent me much valuable information. Finally, but not last, are those who brought this book into being: Michael Levine, my Canadian agent, and staff at Penguin Group Canada, editorial director Diane Turbide, editorial assistant Elizabeth McKay, production editor Sandra Tooze, and freelance copy editor Judy Phillips. Thank you all.
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