'Crisis on Omaha'

(Via Michelle Malkin.) A major reason that modern media's war reporting is so awful is that most people don't understand anything about military tactics and strategy. Even the way we now view the D-Day landings shows this. We tend to obsess over Omaha Beach for the simple reason that this was where the Allies encountered the strongest resistance on June 6, 1944, and thus where the most first-day casualties occured.

However, even if the assault on Omaha had been stopped on the beach, this doesn't mean the Normandy invasion would have failed. The German defenders around Vierville and Colleville would have been outflanked to their east by the British and Canadian forces who landed at Gold, Juno and Sword beaches, and by the American forces who landed at Utah Beach to the west, to say nothing of the two U.S. airborne divisions operating on the Carentan Peninsula. Failure at Omaha would have been a very bad thing, but not likely fatal to Eisenhower's plan.

At the same time, it can be argued that Omaha was largely a failure, despite the fact that U.S. forces finally gained the beachhead. The assault was thrown hours behind schedule by the failure to move farther inland on the first day, and the loss of men and equipment (especially amphibious tanks) was so great that most of the U.S. forces in the sector were not fully combat effective for days afterward.

While the resistance and casualties at Omaha have made it a focus of non-military minds, the most important development on D-Day was the failure of the British to seize Caen as originally planned. Instead Caen, a hub of transportation in the area, became the strong point of German resistance. This prevented the envelopment of the key port at LeHavre, and delayed the breakout from the Normandy beachhead by weeks.

About casualties

The media's current fetish about casualties, especially the ideas that death in war is "senseless" and that heavy casualties indicate military failure, demonstrates how sadly our education system has failed to teach military history. As the D-Day experience shows, heavy casualities and military success are not incompatible, and the relative absence of casualities doesn't necessarily mean that operations are more successful. British losses on June 6, 1944, were light in comparison to those suffered by U.S. forces at Omaha, but this was in part because British commanders didn't push as aggressively toward Caen as they might have. A rapid, all-out assault toward Caen might have been more bloody, but if it had succeeded, it would have hastened the defeat of the Germans.

The modern media likes to portray military losses as "senseless" or "useless" unless these deaths are connected with the achievement of some great objective. But as Bruce Catton observed about the Civil War, combat deaths seldom occur in glorious situations. An incoming mortar shell hits or bullets find their targets, soldiers die, and that's it. There's no ostentatious heroism involved, and the soldier, by his death, did not contribute to the achievement any military objective.

This gets back to Patton's famous maxim: "The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other son of a bitch die for his." Casualties are inevitable in the process of destroying the enemy, but it is the destruction of the enemy (not the avoidance of casualties) that is the objective of military effort.

Many great generals -- including Patton, Douglas McArthur, U.S. Grant and "Stonewall" Jackson -- have been accused of being callous toward the suffering of their own troops, simply because they were aggressive in the pursuit of military objectives, and greater aggression often entails greater casualties, at least in the short term. But if aggression hastens victory, and victory brings the end of war, a willingness to sustain heavier casualties in the short term may save more lives in the long term.

A failure of education

All this is lost on modern American media, and on much of the civilian audience, because military history is not properly taught in our schools, which now focus almost entirely on political and social history.

The 21st-century American is permitted to think himself well-educated if he can recognize the preamble of the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address. Yet what does he know of Trenton or Yorktown, Chancellorsville or Chickamauga? Nothing. The eloquent words of Jefferson in 1776 would have been of no effect if the British had defeated Washington in 1777, and Lincoln's fine phrases in 1863 would have been forgotten, if the armies of Grant and Sherman had been beaten in 1864.

Why, then, are American children allowed to graduate and receive diplomas without having learned anything at all about military history or military science? The first and most obvious cause is the the feminization of education.

History lessons are now taught with the idea of engaging the attention of girls and, despite feminist fantasies about "equality," girls generally have little interest in military matters. Boys who might otherwise thrill to tales of Washington's daring Christmas night crossing of the Delaware or the Battle of Midway, are instead subjected to feminist-approved identity-politics lessons on the glories of the Niagara Conference, Susan B. Anthony, suffragettes and Eleanor Roosevelt.

The cultural legacy of Cold War-era pacifism is also heavily implicated in the abandonment of military education in U.S. schools. Campus Marxists and Soviet sympathizers (e.g., Eric Foner) entrenched themselves in academic bastions in the '60s and '70s, and have greatly influenced how history is now taught.

The flagrant anti-American bias of academia (e.g., Ward Churchill) is only the most gaudy fruit of this poisoned tree. Less noticed is the success of the campus Left in propagating the teaching of "social history," which focuses on the lives of the lowly and short-shrifts the achievements of great men, including military leaders. Marxist "social history" tends to celebrate subversion and to focus on the victimization of those who can be portrayed as heroic martyrs -- Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, etc. -- of America The Oppressive.

The treachery of the Left

The military ignorance of students educated in schools dominated by the Left is not accidental, nor is it without political consequence. One does not have to be a bloodthirsty imperialist jingo or a paranoid conspiracy theorist to see how U.S. military defeat fits into the Left's agenda. Defeat tends to demoralize a nation and to discredit national ideals.

No other nation in history has been identified so closely with free-enterprise capitalism as the United States. To defeat, demoralize and discredit America is therefore, in some sense, to discredit capitalism itself. This is why the harshest criticism of the U.S. military since the 1960s has come from advocates of an all-powerful Welfare State.

And this is also why any student of World War II ought to study the perfidious role played by the Communist Party USA and its "Popular Front" dupes in the years leading up to U.S. entry into the war. (Daniel Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left might be a useful starting place.)

For most of the Thirties, CPUSA and its dupes cried out for opposition to fascism. But when Hitler and Stalin made their secret deal for the partition of Poland (and Soviet annexation of the Baltic states), suddenly the anti-fascist propaganda fell silent, and the same people now denounced as "war mongers" anyone who supported U.S. aid to the Allies.

This overnight conversion of the Left to the cause of pacifism was only temporary, however. It lasted 21 months, until June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Immediately, the CPUSA-led Left went from denouncing "warmongers" to demanding U.S. entry into the war.

The Left thus had been successively pro-war, anti-war, then pro-war again (perhaps inspiring the latter-day flipflopping of John Kerry & Co). But while the American Left's position vis-a-vis war and peace had changed twice in less than two years, this was only because its Communist Party leaders had always been following orders from Moscow.

This is a lesson well worth remembering in our current era. While the hard-core Left was always anti-war -- the ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoldering and no U.S. military response had been announced when the Left mounted its first anti-war protest on Sept. 29, 2001 -- leading Democrats played a cynical game.

Remembering the 1991 Gulf War (where a quick Allied victory had tended to politically discredit the war's opponents), leading Democrats figured on a repeat performance and so, in 2002, voted to authorize force against Iraq. Yet as soon as U.S. forces ran into their first setback (the ambush at Nasiriyah and the sandstorms of March 25-26) Democrats began decrying a "quagmire" and pronouncing the war a failure.

The Democrats' motives in this were as transparent as those of the CPUSA in the 1930s and '40s. Failure (or, at least, the perception of failure) in a war led by a Republican president would tend to politically benefit the Democratic Party. This, and only this, was the explanation of the conversion of the pro-war Democrats of 2002 into anti-war Democrats in 2003 and thereafter.

It is one thing to argue sincerely against war, or to make honest criticism of U.S. foreign policy. Both in their original support for the war and in their current opposition, however, most Democrats have been neither sincere nor honest. And I strongly suspect that opponents of the war who now support Barack Obama will be in for a rude awakening should Obama be elected.

Democrats are now demanding immediate withdrawal from Iraq. If Obama becomes commander-in-chief, however, he will discover (if he does not already realize) that pursuing such a policy is as militarily impractical as it is politically dangerous. Nothing would benefit Democrats more than being able to claim they had "fixed" the Iraq war, correcting the failures of the Bush administration. The election of President Obama is therefore almost as likely to result in permanent occupation of Iraq as would the election of President McCain.

Those who don't know history . . .

UPDATE: Jimmie at Sundries Shack has a nice D-Day post. Online references for D-Day tend to be thin on details. The best is probably the Encyclopedia Britannica D-Day page. I'd recommend Cornelius Ryan's classic The Longest Day, a book I first read as a schoolboy. Another classic, William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is also very helpful in understanding the origins of the Nazi regime, its initial military success and its subsequent defeat.

Jonah Goldberg's recent Liberal Fascism includes a pretty thorough debunking of liberals' revisionist postwar claims that they had always opposed Mussolini and Hitler. On the other hand, Bill Kauffman's Ain't My America offers an equally thorough debunking of another bit of liberal revisionism, namely the claim that the "America First" isolationists were motivated by fascist sympathies. It is worth noting how the Left, after spending nearly two years (Sept. '39-June '41) in the anti-war cause with the America Firsters, turned so viciously on its erstwhile allies, smearing them as anti-Semites and closet totalitarians, all the while ignoring the genuine totalitarianism and anti-Semitism of Stalin's regime.