Blog 4 History

Men of Fire: Grant, Forrest, and the Campaign That Decided the Civil War by Jack Hurst
(Basic Books, 2007)
Hardcover, 11 maps, photos, notes, bibliography.
ISBN=978-0-465-03184-9
$27.95

Jack Hurst can write. His writing is lively, vivid, and entertaining. His research, though not as in-depth as I would like, was adequate. Hurst’s narrative style is easy and fun to read.  He is telling you (the reader) a story, but one grounded in research; this is not fiction.  His 450+ page study of Grant’s Forts Henry and Donelson campaign is welcomed — even if somewhat flawed.

Grant is a historical figure who I rarely get enough of; new and refreshing biographies of course.  But this book follows along with the recent trend to take one campaign, one year, or one event, and look at it in detail.  So much the better!

The themes are endless: Grant’s struggle to be a part of a great and desperate struggle so he might make a name for himself.  Halleck’s insatiable desire to promote himself, and then there’s Forrest, who never really seems to fit in.

Though Forrest becomes a fairly important figure during the Civil War, it takes an awful lot of bending and shaping and primping to make him Grant’s equal at this time.

Hurst’s goal, I think, was to create a kind of protagonist and antagonist narrative where two strong and determined men face off.  This never materializes as Hurst failed to give Grant that worthy foe who can narratively hold his own during the winter 1862.

In fact, this would have been a far more interesting story had Hurst focused on Forrest and his part in wrecking Grant’s plan to attack Mobile in 1864.  Forrest’s continual havoc wreaking in Grant’s rear contributed to the untenable consideration of taking Mobile before 1865. During 1864, Sherman would call Forrest “the very devil.” And call for his destruction… that would have made for a drama that Hurst ultimately sought but failed to reach.

It was announced after a study that “surely a grade of 33 in 100 on the simplest and most obvious facts of American history is not a record in which any high school can take pride in.”

There’s been some discussion on Dimitri’s blog that I think is a bit misguided. Dimitri asks, “what has happened to the student body culturally and sociologically.”

As a public school social studies teacher I run into a plethora of different kinds of students, and I feel that, generally, today’s students are as ready for learning as they were when I was in school. I also feel that social studies teachers are doing a vastly better job teaching history than they were 20 years ago.

It is a fallacy that students have progressively “lost” their knowledge or concern for history or that there is some kind of decline in our culture. It is also a fallacy that today’s liberal dominated universities, or inept high school teachers, are to blame.

The above quote did not come from any recent study. The 1990s? No. 1970s? No. 1950s? No, it came from a 1917 study by J. Carleton Bell and David F. McCollum, “A Study of the Attainments of Pupils in United States History,” Journal of Educational Psychology 8 (1917), 257-74.

Studies that bemoaned the ignorance of students also took place during WWII (New York Times, 1942), and again in 1976 (New York Times).

So, I argue that it is not a reflection of our society today or teachers, but simply a trend that is both exasperating and frustrating, especially for me as a history teacher.

I have started to spend time in class addressing student’s lack of interest in history. Having an open discussion with my students. It’s not that they do not care (some indeed do not), but that it does not seem to apply to life nor their current social environment.

I think the issue is about maturity. I was one of those students in high school who did not like history, and to this day I cannot even recall who my history teacher was. Apparently he was so bad I have had to suppress all memory of that class.

So we can argue that it is bland and boring books, poor history teachers, and the decadence and decay of society. But I suspect the answer too complex for a simple causation.

Other sources: Sam Wineburg’s “Historical Thinking and other Unnatural Acts.” (2001)

This is an article by Rick Atkinson, author of The Day of Battle, an excellent book that I am completely enjoying and will report on in more detail later.

Land of the Cyclops

By Rick Atkinson

Few Sicilian towns claimed greater antiquity than Gela, where the center of the American assault was to fall. Founded on a limestone hillock by Greek colonists from Rhodes and Crete in 688 b.c., Gela had since endured the usual Mediterranean calamities, including betrayal, pillage, and, in 311 b.c., the butchery of five thousand citizens by a rival warlord. The ruins of sanctuaries and shrines dotted the modern town of 32,000, along with tombs ranging in vintage from Bronze Age to Hellenistic and Byzantine. The fecund “Geloan fields,” as Virgil called them in The Aeneid, grew oleanders, palms, and Saracen olives. Aeschylus, the father of Attic drama, had spent his last years in Gela writing about fate, revenge, and love gone bad in the Oresteia; legend held that the playwright had been killed here when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald skull.

Patton planned a different sort of airborne attack by his invasion vanguard. On the night of July 9–10, more than three thousand paratroopers in four battalions were to parachute onto several vital road junctions outside Gela to forestall Axis counterattacks against the 1st Division landing beaches. Leading this assault was the dashing Colonel James Maurice Gavin, who at thirty-six was on his way to becoming the Army’s youngest major general since the Civil War. Born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants and orphaned as a child, Gavin had been raised hardscrabble by foster parents in the Pennsylvania coalfields. Leaving school after the eighth grade, he worked as a barber’s helper, shoe clerk, and filling station manager before joining the Army at seventeen. He wangled an appointment to West Point, where his cadetship was undistinguished. As a young officer he washed out of flight school; a superior’s evaluation as recently as 1941 concluded, “This officer does not seem peculiarly fitted to be a paratrooper.” Ascetic and fearless, with a “magnetism for attractive women,” Jim Gavin was in fact born to go to the sound of the guns. “He could jump higher, shout louder, spit farther, and fight harder than any man I ever saw,” one subordinate said.

His 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, had staged in central Tunisia. Gavin harbored private misgivings about the Sicilian mission — “many lives will be lost in a few hours,” he wrote — and with good reason. The 82nd had received only roughly a third as much training time as some other U.S. divisions. The amateurish Allied parachute operations in North Africa had been marred by misfortune and miscalculation. No large-scale night combat jump had ever been attempted, and so many injuries had plagued the division in Tunisia — including fifty-three broken legs and ankles during a single daylight jump in early June — that training was curtailed. Much of the husky planning had been done by officers who had no airborne expertise and whose notions were suffused with fantasy. Transport pilots had little experience at night navigation, but to avoid flying over trigger-happy gunners in the Allied fleets, the planes, staying low to evade Axis radar, would have to make three dogleg turns over open water in the dark. Airborne units had yet to figure out how to drop a load heavier than three hundred pounds, much less a howitzer or a jeep. An experimental “para-mule” broke three legs; after putting the creature out of its misery, paratroopers used the carcass for bayonet practice. Still, the ranks “generally agreed that training proficiency had reached the stage where the mission was ‘in the bag,’” wrote one AAF officer, who later acknowledged “possible overoptimism.”

At about the time that Hewitt’s fleet neared Malta, Gavin and his men had clambered aboard 226 C-47 Dakotas near Kairouan. Faces blackened with burnt cork, each soldier wore a U.S. flag on the right sleeve and a white cloth knotted on the left as a nighttime recognition signal. Days earlier an 82nd Airborne platoon had circulated through the 1st Division to familiarize ground soldiers with the baggy trousers and loose smock worn by paratroopers. Parachutes occupied the C-47s’ seats; the sixteen troopers in each stick sat on the fuselage floor, practicing the invasion challenge and password: george/marshall. Dysentery tormented the regiment, and men struggled with their gear and Mae Wests to squat over honeypots placed around the aircraft bays. Medics distributed Benzedrine to the officers, morphine syrettes to everyone.

As the first planes began to taxi — churning up dust clouds so thick that some pilots had to take off by instrument — a weatherman appeared at Gavin’s aircraft to affirm Commander Steere’s prediction of lingering high winds aloft. “Colonel Gavin, is Colonel Gavin here? I was told to tell you that the wind is going to be thirty-five miles an hour, west to east,” he said. “They thought you’d want to know.” Fifteen was considered the maximum velocity for safe jumping. Another messenger staggered up with an enormous barracks bag stuffed with prisoner-of-war tags. “You’re supposed to put one on every prisoner you capture,” he told Gavin. An hour after takeoff, a staff officer heaved the bag into the sea.

Copyright © 2007 Rick Atkinson from the book The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson Published by Henry Holt and Company; October 2007;$35.00US; 978-0-8050-6289-2

Rick Atkinson was a staff writer and senior editor at The Washington Post for more than twenty years. He is the bestselling author of An Army at Dawn, The Long Gray Line, In the Company of Soldiers, and Crusade. His many awards include Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and history. He lives in Washington, D.C. www.thedayofbattle.com.

I am not in agreement with some that Ken Burn’s new doc The War is “disappointing.” It seems nothing qualifies as “good” unless it dresses down our values, sacrifices, and struggles in order to present some kind of allusive “fair” or “appropriate” presentation. We must under-score our glory and success in order to HIGHLIGHT our mis-steps and injustices. This doc was forthright in its approach and did not pretend to be more than it is: a celebration of American spirit and fortitude, even when the going got tough. That’s good enough for me even if Ken Burns could have covered more and other things. It is what it is and had it focused on those other things more exclusively, I suspect, then some of you would have been delighted by it. World War II was “The War,” and if you ever had the pleasure to ask any of our elders (I had a grandfather who fought in it) who lived through it and truly felt the world was “in doubt,” then you would understand what this film was about. It’s about bigger issues and bigger ideas like: survival, tyranny, oppression, and yes freedom. Oh wait, that would not be politically correct today. Yes, Burns could have focused on the outright injustice black soldiers and civilians faced during and after the war. But that was not what this doc is about. And that’s ok, plenty of you out there already emphasize that and downplay the rest. It was about a world at war and a desperate struggle between autocratic nations and democracies. Should we forget the injustice? NO! But it does not over-shadow the rest, and is at best a subplot.

Finally, ok, don’t watch it tonight and the rest of this week. However, that is a symptom of a problem of some parts of this country and academia. For all you know tonight’s episode might surprise some of you.

This just in, “Students Know Less After 4 College Years…”

According to a report released yesterday by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the average college senior at the 50 colleges and universities polled did not earn a passing grade.

I guess this is news to someone…

This was brought to my attention recently by a fairly heady student for a general U.S. History class in a public school. This student asked me how should Robert E. Lee’s success as a commander be measured? By how many times he persuaded inept Federal generals to leave the field and retreat, or by, say, casualty rates? This student had done some research and discovered that Lee, though commanding the field after many a battle, rarely inflicted a “higher” casualty rate. His casualties were almost always less and that was because he was almost always out-numbered.

I have to admit I was taken back by such an intelligent analysis. From what I came up with, Lee suffered a 20% casualty rate while only inflicting a 15% rate; even when facing Grant the butcher, Lee suffered higher rates of casualties. For the South, which could not afford the rate of casualties Lee was inflicting, was Lee their best option as a commander? Should casualty rates be factored in when judging Lee’s performance?

I am pretty sure I have read somewhere arguments similar to this so I am in no way trying to present this as something original. What I would love is some feedback and pointing in the right direction to answer this excellent question by a student.

Have to admit I knew nothing of F.R. Ankersmit, he has presented some theories on historiography and historical narratives. He describes narrative logic as “narratio.” Which is to say narrative logic is not found in time, but in “narratio,” or the narrative text taken as a whole. The narratio does not represent anything but itself. Heady stuff, not sure what it means…

But at times his writing makes sense, for example, is his belief that the “point of view” of the historian and how history is presented is key. Ankersmit’s historical narrative or ‘narratio’, is different from other narratives in its ability to accommodate contradictions without being self-contradictory. A historians relationship with his research is the crucial element in creating a proper historical text. Historians must interpret his facts, “rather than factualizing his interpretation.”

Ankersmit’s “Six Theses on Narrativist Philosophy of History”

Historical narratives are interpretations of the past.

Narrativism accepts the past as it is. In the form of a tautology: it accepts what is unproblematic about the past. What is unproblematic is a historical fact.

Narrativism is the modern heir of historism (not to be confused with Popper’s historicism): both recognize that the historian’s task is essentially interpretative (i.e., to find unity in diversity).

Narrative language is not object language.

The statements of a historical narrative always have a double function: 1) to describe the past; and 2) to define or individuate a specific narrative interpretation of the past.

The roots of historicity go deeper than is suggested by either modern historiography or current philosophy (of history).

About a million soldier casualties (killed/wounded) in the Civil War, give or take. I was asked by one of my students what of civilian casualties? I had included in my lesson some information and quotes from Gen Curtis in Arkansas, and soldier quotes, describing the horrific conditions in that state alone. So when the question was asked I was not sure what to say. Having looked at the Trans-Mississippi region in my studies, I would be shocked in civilian deaths as a result of the war were not significant.

So the question in my mind, how do we determine collateral damage during the Civil War? Does the starvation of civilians or their murder by bushwhackers count as “casualties”? I would argue it does.

In June of 1862 Gen. Curtis described the situation in eastern Arkansas, “I leave nothing for man or brute in the country passed over by my army,” he informed his superiors, “except a little saving to feed the poor, which will hardly save them from suffering.”

Confederate bushwhackers and guerrillas brutally targeted suspected Union sympathizers and burned cotton wherever they found it, causing civilian morale to “plummet” throughout the state. The combined effect, according to one historian, was economic “collapse, social upheaval,” and the general “collapse of social institutions,” according to William L. Shea.

“Women and children are houseless,” wrote a soldier with the Second Wisconsin Cavalry, “with little to eat or wear.”

There is no way to know at this point without further research what the true effects of the war were on civilians and what kind of price they truly paid.

Does anyone know of any reliable studies that try to estimate civilian casualties and what about collateral damage, do I have a valid argument?

There’s an interesting post at Dimitri Rotov’s blog concerning history as a “narrative,” and how it implies that historians must write “linear.”  This confuses me as narrative does not imply linear, it only suggests “a[n] account of events, experiences…”

Narratives can be non-linear (I prefer the term “fractured”). The key element to a narrative style of writing, as Shelby Foote demonstrates, is the ability to tell a story. Too often history books become dry and untenable (especially for my high school students) because they are decidedly non-narrative in form. There is no attempt to tell the story of history, only to present its cold, hard, and dead facts (though facts are rarely found).

To me to suggest that history should be written in the “narrative” form simply implies that it should be written with an attempt to tell “the story.”

To tell the story, to me, means that the combination of micro and macro is brought together. When a battle narrative intertwines the reactions, emotions, and thoughts of regular soldiers, generals, and bystanders it is then reaching the level of a “narrative.”

The story of the battle is in the details that go beyond what regiment was making what maneuver, but in the human story involved in the details.

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things,” observed the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. “The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.”

An interesting piece from our greatest living military historian (IMHO), Victor Davis Hanson, who exams and bemoans the decline and neglect of military history and the study of war on college campuses. I quote:

The academic neglect of war is even more acute today. Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs. In 2004, Edward Coffman, a retired military history professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the faculties of the top 25 history departments, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He found that of over 1,000 professors, only 21 identified war as a specialty. When war does show up on university syllabi, it’s often about the race, class, and gender of combatants and wartime civilians. So a class on the Civil War will focus on the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction, not on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. One on World War II might emphasize Japanese internment, Rosie the Riveter, and the horror of Hiroshima, not Guadalcanal and Midway. A survey of the Vietnam War will devote lots of time to the inequities of the draft, media coverage, and the antiwar movement at home, and scant the air and artillery barrages at Khe Sanh.

And again:

Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief these days, that wars aren’t necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The first Gulf War took few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait; doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than World War I did. And more Americans — over 3.2 million — lost their lives driving over the last 90 years than died in combat in this nation’s 231-year history. Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isn’t just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage them — which makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, “War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.” Wars — or threats of wars — put an end to chattel slavery, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism.

And a final time:

Military history reminds us of important anomalies and paradoxes. When Sparta invaded Attica in the first spring of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides recounts, it expected the Athenians to surrender after a few short seasons of ravaging. They didn’t — but a plague that broke out unexpectedly did more damage than thousands of Spartan ravagers did. Twenty-seven years later, a maritime Athens lost the war at sea to Sparta, an insular land power that started the conflict with scarcely a navy. The 2003 removal of Saddam refuted doom-and-gloom critics who predicted thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, just as the subsequent messy four-year reconstruction hasn’t evolved as anticipated into a quiet, stable democracy — to say the least.

To read more.