TEXAS RANGERS

In 1823 Stephen F. Austin hired ten men he called “rangers” to conduct a raid against the Indians. On 24 November 1835 the Texas legislature created a police force of three companies, fifty-six men each, known as Texas Rangers. Their numbers and reputation rose and fell, influenced by threats to the Texas Republic and governmental economy. Organized along military lines, the rangers had no uniforms in the nineteenth century. Later they began to wear suits with the ubiquitous cowboy hat.

Rangers served in the Texas Revolution as scouts, but their numbers remained small. In December 1838 Mirabeau B. Lamar, president of the Republic, added eight companies. Until the Mexican-American War the rangers were Indian fighters. During his second presidency of Texas, Sam Houston used 150 rangers under the command of Captain John Coffee Hays to protect the frontier from Indian raids, and the rangers gained a reputation for toughness and dedication to duty.

After Texas became a state, from 1848 to 1858, the rangers had no official duties since the United States controlled the border and the frontier. In January 1858 Senior Captain John S. “Rip” Ford led attacks on Indians from the Red River to Brownsville. During the Civil War and Reconstruction the rangers contributed little to law and order, but subsequently they pacified the border with Mexico and stopped various feuds in the state. Between 1890 and 1920 the state legislature dramatically reduced the number of rangers.

The Mexican Revolution changed the situation. Reacting to Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, rangers killed approximately five thousand Hispanics from 1914 to 1919. Shocked, the state legislature set new standards of recruitment and professionalism. In the 1920s the rangers dealt with riots, labor strikes, the Ku Klux Klan, and oil strikes. The Great Depression marked a low point in the organization’s history. Because the rangers supported her opponent in the Democratic primary, Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson fired all forty-four rangers. The new force was only thirty-two men.

In 1935 legislators created the Texas Department of Public Safety and administratively combined the rangers, the highway patrol, and a state crime lab. The five companies of rangers were restored, and qualifying examinations and behavioral standards were instituted. Between 1938 and 1968 Colonel Homer Garrison Jr. shifted the rangers’ focus to detective work. During that time, in response to World War II, fears of sabotage, the civil rights movement, and urbanization, the number of Rangers increased.

After 1968 the rangers worked closely with local police and improved their recruitment, training, and scientific methods. By 1993 the ninety-nine officers included two women, and by 1996 Texas had 105 rangers.

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA)

China, 2001
After a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. EP-3 Aries reconnaissance aircraft in international waters off China, this IKONOS image of the crippled U.S. plane sitting on the parking ramp of an airbase on China’s Hainan Island shortly after it landed there became an icon for the crisis between the U.S. and China. (The Chinese pilot ejected from his plane, which then crashed in the ocean, but he was never found.) The image also demonstrated the ability of commercial satellite imagery to quickly tell a story in a denied country. The Chinese government eventually allowed U.S. officials to dismantle and retrieve the plane using a Russian transport aircraft.

 

The NSA is a key institution within the U.S. intelligence community. The NSA’s predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), was established within the Department of Defense (DOD) under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 20 May 1949 by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson. In theory, the AFSA was to direct the communications intelligence and electronic intelligence activities of the signals intelligence units of the army, navy, and air force. In practice, the AFSA had little power.

On 24 October 1952 President Harry S. Truman signed a (later declassified) top-secret, eight-page memorandum entitled “Communications Intelligence Activities,” which abolished the AFSA and transferred its personnel to the newly created National Security Agency. The creation of NSA had its origins in a 10 December 1951 memo from Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith to National Security Council executive secretary James B. Lay stating that “control over, and coordination of, the collection and processing of Communications Intelligence had proved ineffective” and recommending a survey of communications intelligence activities. The study was completed in June 1952 and suggested a need for much greater coordination and direction at the national level. As the change in the agency’s name indicated, the role of the NSA was to extend beyond the armed forces, to be “within but not part of DOD.” In 1958, the NSA was also assigned responsibility for directing and managing the electronics intelligence activities of the military services.

Communications and Electronic Intelligence Operations

The charter for the NSA is National Security Council Intelligence Directive (NSCID) 6, “Signals Intelligence” (SIGINT), of 17 January 1972. It directed the NSA to produce SIGINT “in accordance with the objectives, requirements and priorities established by the Director of Central Intelligence Board.” The directive also authorized the director of the NSA “to issue direct to any operating elements engaged in SIGINT operations such instructions and assignments as are required” and states that “all instructions issued by the Director under the authority provided in this paragraph shall be mandatory, subject only to appeal to the Secretary of Defense.”

SIGINT includes two components: communications intelligence (COMINT) and electronic intelligence (ELINT). COMINT includes diplomatic, military, scientific, and commercial communications sent via telephone, radio-telephone, radio, or walkie-talkie. The targeted communications might be relayed via satellites, ground stations, or cables. ELINT includes the signals emitted by radar systems as well as by missiles during testing.

At the end of the twentieth century, NSA’s headquarters at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland housed approximately twenty thousand civilian employees in three buildings. The NSA budget was approximately $4 billion annually. The NSA has two major directorates: the Directorate for Signals Intelligence and the Directorate for Information Assurance. In addition to the employees serving at NSA headquarters and NSA facilities oversees, the director of the NSA also guided (through the Central Security Service that he also heads) the SIGINT activities of approximately eighteen thousand army, navy, and air force signals intelligence personnel. Those military personnel were largely responsible for manning U.S. SIGINT ground stations around the world, some of which control and receive data from signals intelligence satellites, while others intercept signals from a variety of antennae at those sites.

The most important U.S. signals intelligence satellites are those in geosynchronous orbit, which essentially hover 22,300 miles above points on the equator. From that vantage point they can collectively intercept a vast array of signals from most of the earth. Some ground stations intercept the communications passing through civilian communications satellites. Other ground stations, such as those located in Korea and Japan, target high frequency military communications in their part of the world.

Military personnel from air force and navy SIGINT units (the Air Intelligence Agency and Naval Security Group Command) also occupy key positions on board aircraft used to collect signals intelligence, including the air force’s RC-135 RIVET JOINT aircraft and the navy’s EP-3 ARIES reconnaissance planes. Both planes intercept communications and electronic signals. Another version of the RC-135, designated COMBAT SENT, focuses purely on electronic signals such as radar emanations.

Naval vessels, including surface ships and submarines, have been employed for decades to monitor communications and electronic signals. Ships were employed to intercept Nicaraguan communications during the Reagan administration (1981–1989) while submarines conducted highly secret intercept operations near and within Soviet waters from 1960 until the end of the Cold War. In addition a joint CIA-NSA organization, the Special Collection Service, conducts eavesdropping operations from U.S. embassies and consulates across the world, partly in support of CIA operations in those countries and partly for strategic intelligence purposes.

Specific Operations

Although the details of NSA intercepts are generally highly classified, information about some successes have leaked out over the years. The NSA intercepted Britain’s communications during the 1956 Suez Crisis, Iraq’s communications to its embassy in Japan in the 1970s, and Libya’s communications to its East Berlin People’s Bureau prior to the bombing of a West Berlin nightclub in 1986. Eavesdropping operations from the U.S. embassy in Moscow during the 1970s, the intelligence from which was designated Gamma Gupy, picked up conversations from senior Soviet leaders as they spoke from their limousines.

In addition, intercepts allowed the United States to piece together the details concerning the sinking of a Soviet submarine in the North Pacific in 1983. In 1988, intercepted Iraqi military communications led U.S. officials to conclude that Iraq had used chemical weapons in its war with Iran. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, COMINT and other intelligence reports indicated that some Saudi leaders were considering attempts to pay off Saddam Hussein.

The NSA’s eavesdropping operations were often highly risky. In 1967 the USS Liberty, a ship operated by the navy on behalf of the NSA, was bombed by Israeli aircraft during the Six DayWar in the Mideast. In January 1968, North Korea captured the USS Pueblo, holding its crew for approximately a year. In April 1969, North Korea shot down an EC-121 SIGINT aircraft. In 2001, the People’s Republic of China detained the crew of an EP- 3 after it was forced to land on Chinese territory after a collision with a Chinese fighter.

Assuring the Integrity of Intelligence

The NSA has a second major mission, originally known as Communications Security (COMSEC), but renamed Information Security (INFOSEC) in the 1980s and, subsequently, Information Assurance. In its information assurance role, NSA performs the same basic COMSEC functions as it did in the past. It creates, reviews, and authorizes the communications procedures and codes of a variety of government agencies, including the State Department, the DOD, the CIA, and the FBI. This includes the development of secure data and voice transmission links on such satellite systems as the Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS). Likewise, for sensitive communications FBI agents use a special scrambler telephone that requires a different code from the NSA each day. The NSA’s COMSEC responsibilities also include ensuring communications security for strategic weapons systems so as to prevent unauthorized intrusion, interference, or jamming. In addition, the NSA is responsible for developing the codes by which the president must identify himself to order the release of nuclear weapons. As part of its information assurance mission, the NSA is also responsible for protecting national security data banks and computers from unauthorized access by individuals or governments.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aid, Matthew M. “The Time of Troubles: The US National Security Agency in the Twenty-First Century.” Intelligence and National Security 15, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 1–32.

Aid, Matthew M., and Cees Wiebes, eds. Secrets of Signals Intelligence during the Cold War and Beyond. London: Frank Cass, 2001.

Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization. New York: Penguin, 1983.

———. Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War to the Dawn of a New Century. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

THE BATTLE OF FRIEDLAND, 13-14 JUNE 1807

Prelude

After Eylau, 8 February 1807, Napoleon was forced to return to winter quarters to rest, reequip, and rebuild his depleted forces. French conscripts and a growing number of foreign troops augmented his armies, dispersed throughout Europe, to almost 600,000. An army of observation in Germany backed up the Grande Armee in Poland, a total of nearly 400,000 men, though only 100,000 would participate in the summer offensive. To support this operation the emperor brought Massena from Italy to Poland and ordered Lefebvre, who had been diverted south to guard communications, to renew and speed up the capture of Danzig. After an old-fashioned, three-month siege the fortress surrendered on 27 May, easing Napoleon’s supply problem and releasing 20,000 men to fight against Russian General Bennigsen, who had rebuilt his forces to about 90,000 regulars and some 8,000 Cossacks.

The siege of Danzig 18 March – 27 May 1807. This well-defended major port was invested and then besieged by X Corps primarily Confederation of the Rhine troops under Marshal Lefebvre. As shown in the illustration this was a formal operation with parallels opened communication trenches dug and siege batteries including the heavy mortars shown in the centre foreground established. After several efforts to relieve the fortress failed the garrison negotiated surrender on good terms.

Again, Napoleon intended to destroy Bennigsen by cutting him off from his base at Konigsberg. After repelling a Russian offensive and driving Bennigsen out of his fortified camp at Heilsberg on 10 June, he divided his forces. He sent Murat and Soult, with Davout in support, to capture Konigsberg, while Lannes probed along the west side of the AIle River. On 13 June Bennigsen discovered Lannes and ordered several divisions across the river to destroy what he thought was an isolated division. Advance elements clashed during the evening near Friedland, a small town 43 kilometres south of Konigsberg, and during the night the Russians built up to 60,000 men. Fighting from well-chosen positions Lannes held until the first reinforcements from Mortier’s corps appeared on the morning of 14 June. Soon, some 35,000 French were in action. Napoleon arrived shortly after noon with almost 50,000 men behind him. He realized immediately that the Russians were in an impossible position – outnumbered, on the wrong side of an unfordable river and connected to the rear by just three pontoon bridges.

THE BATTLE OF FRIEDLAND, 13-1 4 JUNE 1807 Attempting to destroy Lannes’s corps Bennigsen pushed several corps across the River AIle on the evening and night of 13 June. But Lannes held, was reinforced, and when Napoleon and additional forces arrived in the afternoon, the Russians were caught with their backs to a river and suffered very heavy casualties.

By four in the afternoon Napoleon had 80,000 men available and an hour later he gave orders to attack. The first assault went in on the right along the AIle, followed by a frontal attack in the centre pressing the Russians into the curvature of the river. General Senarmont, I Corps’ chief of artillery, advanced a 30-gun battery by stages into canister range to open up on the packed Russians. Fighting in Friedland and environs lasted into the night. Russian losses were at least 30,000, but French casualties were not light: 10,000 in all, 1,400 killed.

 

Friedland was no easy victory, but it did much to revive the morale of the army shaken by Eylau and the miseries of winter in Poland. It introduced a new style of battle tactics, with massed artillery paving the way for the infantry assault. Also, Friedland was the first battle in which a major part of his army had not been French, illustrating the emperor’s increasing manpower problems. But for the moment the Grande Armee could rest and look with pride on its exploits since leaving the encampments along the Channel two long years before.

Aftermath

The battle also ended the Third Coalition. On 7 July, at Tilsit, the two emperors met on a raft afloat the River Niemen to arrange the future of Europe. Losing about one third of her territory, paying a heavy indemnity, with her army reduced to 42,000 and French garrisons in her cities, Prussia effectively became a French satellite. The tsar, aligned with the French, agreed to join the Continental System – Napoleon’s attempt at economic warfare which banned British trade with French-controlled areas. At Tilsit Napoleon stood at the zenith of his power.

Italian Long-Range Bombing Raids

On July 9, 1940, three SM82s staged the first Axis air raid on Gibraltar, all returning safely from their 2,100-mile round trip (the first of seven such visits by summer 1941, none involving more than three aircraft). Perhaps their most remarkable mission was an attack by four SM82s against oil facilities on Bahrain and the Arabian mainland in October 1940, a 2,800-mile round trip launched from the Dodecanese, staging through East Africa. This particular operation was headed by Ettore Muti (known to the Arabs as the ‘green-eyed Djinn’), another living embodiment of the Fascist ideal of the ‘man of action.’ He had been a spy, a bodyguard for Mussolini’s sons while they themselves were serving as bomber pilots in the Ethiopian campaign, and a pilot flying literally hundreds of bombing missions over Ethiopia, Spain, and Greece.

A formation of four Italian Savoia Marchetti SM82 aircraft (one an unloaded pathfinder) of the 41st Group did actually bomb oil installations at Manama, near Bahrain on October 19th 1940. These were long range variants of a development of the SM 79.

The mission flew from Rhodes, via Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and the Persian Gulf to its target, returning via Saudi Arabia and the Red Sea to a refuelling point (pre-positioned by a fifth aircraft) in Zula, Eritrea. All aircraft then successfully returned to Rome. The aircraft flew 2400km in 15.5hrs before reaching Zula.

Six oil wells were set alight, and other installations damaged, each of the 3 loaded bombers having dropped 1500kg of light (15 – 50kg) incendiary and explosive bombs.

 

LINK

Celtic war chariot

Reconstruction of a Celtic chariot (after Stuart Piggott). The essence of the vehicle is its light flexible construction designed for speed and easy maneuverability.

The Celtic war chariot impressed a number of observers. Diodorus describes how (for journeys and in battle they use two-horse chariots, the chariot carrying both charioteer and chieftain. When they meet with cavalry in battle they cast their javelins at the enemy and then descending from the chariot join battle with their swords’. The absence of any reference to chariot warfare in Gaul during Caesar’s campaigns suggests that as a means of fighting it was no longer of significance. When, however, he crossed the Channel to Britain, he found the chariot much in evidence. He was sufficiently impressed by the novelty of the tactics involved that he gave an extended description of British charioteering, stressing in particular the agility of the charioteer, who, by virtue of long practice, could run out along the chariot pole between the horses and could check and change direction in a moment. The speed with which chariots could move the combatant from one point of the field to another was particularly effective and led Caesar to make the shrewd observation of a military man that ‘They combined the staying power of infantry with the mobility of cavalry.’ In Britain his chief opponent Cassivellaunus was able to muster 4,000 chariots, which, if used together, must have been a formidable sight.

Sufficient is known of these machines from the archaeological remains of their metal fittings and from depiction on contemporary coinage to appreciate their lightness and efficiency. The chariot was essentially a platform, carried on a pair of iron-tired, spoked wheels circa 0.9 metres in diameter, linked by a pole and yoke to two small ponies. The sides were low double hoops of bent wood or wickerwork, while the front and back were open for ease of access. The war chariot of this kind was a specialized version of the two-wheeled vehicle which became popular in the Celtic world in the fifth century BC and was used from then on in funerary ritual. Its ultimate inspiration may well have come from the Etruscan world. There is no reason to assume that the funerary vehicles were war chariots. Structurally they were similar, but it is more likely that the vehicle used in burial was a parade vehicle symbolizing the high status of the deceased, though it might have been possible to convert one to the other.

Diodorus, as we have seen, says that, when the chariot teams meet with opposing cavalry, the combatants first throw their javelins and then descend from the chariot to join battle with their swords. Caesar adds that the chariots then moved off but returned when necessary to pick up the warrior and carry him to another part of the field. The chariot driver was evidently a skilled person and of vital importance to the well-being of the warrior he served. Diodorus records that the elite ‘bring into battle as their attendants free men chosen from among the poorer classes whom they use as charioteers and shield bearers in battle’ (Hist. 5.29).

A remark of Pausanius’ throws some further light on the battle order. He mentions the trimarcisia (literally ‘three riders’) as a Celtic fighting unit, implying that the warrior elite were accompanied by two supporters. In this case we are dealing with a cavalry unit. The supporters would stay behind the ranks as battle proceeded ready to dash to their master’s assistance if he needed a fresh horse or was wounded and, if he were seriously injured, to take his place in the battle line.

The chariot team and the trimarcisia imply a close and practised relationship between fighting men bound by obligation and honour, much as a knight and squire worked together in medieval warfare. In this context it is possible to understand the depth of the antagonism between the British queen, Cartimandua, and her husband Venutius when she left her husband in favour of Vellocatus, who was described as his ‘armour bearer’. Not only was she publicly dishonouring Venutius, but she was weakening him by removing a trained and trusted member of his fighting entourage.

Book Review: Panthéon de la Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War.

Mark Levitch. Panthéon de la Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. 224 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8262-1678-6.

Reviewed by Martha Hanna
Published on H-War (July, 2009)
Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine

A Pantheon Co-opted

In Panthéon de la Guerre Mark Levitch tells a fascinating tale of artistic vision, cultural politics, and Franco-American relations, and he tells it very well. He traces the intriguing, and often sad story of a patriotic work of art, conceived in 1914, completed in 1918, and then reconstructed after 1945 to mean something very different. The piece of art, as his title and subtitle suggest, was the Panthéon de la Guerre, a massive panorama of the Great War, imagined, executed (with considerable help from a retinue of artists and artisans), and introduced to the Parisian public by two elder statesmen of the French art establishment, Pierre Carrier-Belleuse (1851-1933) and Auguste-François Gorguet (1863-1927). The finished product was to be a permanent–and enormous–memorial to a nation in arms. Given the intended primary audience, and the patriotic ardor of the artists who executed the project, France’s contribution to the war–represented most poignantly by the carefully rendered portraits of countless fallen poilus–was to assume center stage.  And this is indeed how the Panthéon de la Guerre appeared when President Raymond Poincaré officially opened the panorama to public viewing in October 1918. Yet, this is not how the Panthéon appears now in its permanent home in Kansas City, Missouri. Rather, the Panthéon, much reduced in size and radically reconfigured, was reassembled at the height of the Cold War (under the guidance of a one-time doughboy and Missourian artist, Daniel MacMahon) to commemorate the idealistic vision of Woodrow Wilson, and to acclaim the central role the United States played in 1917 (and beyond) in defending the cause of freedom. How a work of French patriotic art became an icon of American political orthodoxy is central to the story Levitch traces with elegance, insight, and intelligence.

Too old to fight, Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet did what many of their generation did; they chose to contribute to the French war effort by deploying their particular talents to reinforce a message of patriotism. To this end, they created a massive visual tribute to the men (and occasional woman) of France who sacrificed themselves to the national cause; to the nation’s gallant allies, and to the statesmen of the Entente cause who supervised the war effort. The noncombatant mobilization of France’s cultural elite was a central element of the national war effort; writers and scholars devoted much of their intellectual energy to defining what was at stake in the war and why unwavering resolve was critical to the nation’s very survival. But artists could contribute to the war effort in a way that most writers could only envy; they could provide both a visual representation of the land ravaged by alien, barbaric invaders, and a moving tribute to the men-in-arms and their many international allies who fought to liberate France from the enemy’s merciless grip. This, at least, is how Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet imagined their artistic enterprise. The Panthéon de la Guerre would be a work of art of unprecedented scope: “Measuring an astounding 402 feet in circumference by 45 feet high, the Panthéon contained about five thousand full-length portraits … [its] largest section and principal focus was a Parthenon-like ‘temple of glory’ dedicated to French heroes … animated portraits of about four thousand figures, mostly bemedaled soldiers, many of whom had been killed.” (pp. 5-8). If the “temple of glory” constituted a memorial to some of the 1.4 million French men who died in the war, the rest of the panorama celebrated the multinational alliance that fought on the side of France. The Serbs and Montenegrans, Portuguese and Italians, British, Russians, and Americans: all were given space on this paean to the power of international cooperation. Indeed, as the war lasted longer than anyone had anticipated in 1914, new political alliances and revolutionary upheavals forced the artists to modify their original vision. By 1917, Russia was no longer the secure French ally it had been at the outbreak of war; and if Russia’s role, muddied by the Bolshevik Revolution (sinisterly portrayed and with explicit anti-Semitic inflections in the final vision), could no longer be represented as that of a  steadfast ally, then America’s entry into the war was both cause for celebration and occasion for artistic improvisation. Woodrow Wilson, his wartime confidant, Colonel House, and other prominent Americans had to be inserted into a work of art that was ,and would remain for the next seventy years or more, always subject to revision.

When the Panthéon opened in October 1918, it was housed in a custom-built site large enough to contain the enormous circular structure, and situated in the very shadow of the Invalides. To recoup their costs–this was, after all, a commercial venture as much as an avowal of patriotism–the artists charged admission to all but uniformed soldiers. This did not deter the crowds who flocked in the immediate aftermath of the war to the site; indeed, more than eight million visitors marveled at the display while it was in Paris. Some went to see memorialized the son or husband whose portrait could be discerned on the staircase of heroes. Levitch notes that “the Pantheon’s portraits … not only contested the war’s facelessness but also offered consolation–private and public–by refusing to treat the war’s losses as a mass death…. By making portraiture the touchstone of the entire work, the artists, on an unsurpassed scale, privileged the human face and individual expression as a form of resistance to the anonymity of modern war” (p. 72). Grieving civilians were not the only ones to seek solace or inspiration in this unusual work of art. Many who went to see the panorama were soldiers recently released from the trenches, awaiting passage home to Australia, or America, or, no doubt, Angoulême, Arras, or Arles. Whether French or foreign, these soldiers were (as far as we can tell) ardent admirers of the work of art that rendered homage to their collective efforts. One Australian soldier enthused: “A book could not describe it–the sentiment, the glory and the art it contains” (p. 84).

By the mid-twenties, however, public interest in the Panthéon was well near spent, and it was no longer a reliably profitable venture. Perhaps its money-making potential could be best exploited if it were to travel abroad, finding new audiences (with well-lined pockets and a taste for patriotic bombast) across the Atlantic. And thus it was that the Panthéon was dismantled and shipped to the United States in 1927, in a crate so huge as to warrant wondrous headlines in its own right. Not since the transportation of the Statue of Liberty had the French sent America such a vast, and popularly heralded piece of public art. Yet American audiences were not as enthusiastic as the Panthéon’s new owners had calculated. From 1927 until 1940, the panorama traveled a circuit, like a once-famous lounge singer in search of increasingly elusive applause, from New York to Washington, Cleveland, Chicago, and San Francisco. A proud and dignified work of patriotic commemoration thus became a spectacle that could lure audiences only with the accouterments of vaudevillian entertainment. When the Panthéon was displayed at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933-34, the ticket-buying public was enticed by the promise that for the price of admission they could also wander through a facsimile of a devastated French village, see the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand traveled on his fateful day in Sarajevo, and marvel at remnants of the Red Baron’s famous tri-plane. By the time the exhibit closed in San Francisco in 1940, American audiences were as weary of the Panthéon de la Guerre, and its increasingly irrelevant fascination with an old war as the French had been more than a decade earlier.

Gathering dust in a storage locker in Baltimore, threatened by decay, neglect, and imminent destruction when the financially troubled owners of what was by 1952 an enormous artistic white-elephant could no longer make their payments, the Panthéon was rescued by the entrepreneurial vision of Daniel MacMahon, who imagined that the panorama could be restored to patriotic service as decoration for one still-unadorned wall in the Memory Hall of the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City. Reconstituted in its new site, however, the Panthéon would be only one-sixteenth its original size and fundamentally reconfigured. In America’s memorial to the Great War, it is not surprising that the American contribution to the war, of peripheral interest to Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet, became the mural’s central focus, and France’s valiant poilus and the visual rendering of the western front that had been a much-admired feature of the original artwork were either reduced in significance or ignored entirely. Moreover, the participation of leading Democrats in the war was particularly noted when the panorama was installed in Harry Truman’s home state. In keeping with a practice that dated to the war years, and continued into the 1920s, MacMahon did not hesitate to cover over some of the original portraits in order to insert likenesses of political heroes of the day. Both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Truman, rendered in their youthful incarnations as doughboys, joined Woodrow Wilson and other Democratic luminaries in the mural in Memory Hall. Remnants of the original painting that could not be used were either consigned to the dustbin of history or, in later years, that cyberspace emporium of the odd and the idiosyncratic, E-Bay, where a fragment of the work sold for the modest sum of $99.

As an art historian, Levitch is appropriately attentive to the aesthetic characteristics of the Panthéon. He shows how the style of artistic representation evolved with the war itself; thus soldiers whose portraits were recorded in October 1914 were rendered in pastels, with none of the lines and rough-hewn edges that would come to convey the weariness of soldiers who witnessed the interminable horrors of trench warfare. But, Levitch is not interested only in the formal qualities of the Panthéon. Indeed, his interpretation is more rightly understood as an exercise in careful cultural analysis, informed by, but not limited to, the artistic dimension of his subject.  He notes, for example, both the neoclassical and inherently conservative character of the artwork as created during the war years. Winged Victory acclaimed the poilus’ sacrifice. The  visual practice of panorama, much more associated with the nineteenth century than with the twentieth, reduced the chaos and incoherence of the war by offering reassurance that everything could  be contained and ordered in one sweeping visual display, and the heroic individual occupied pride of place in a vista that ignored entirely such essentially modern military innovations as tanks, airplanes, and poison gas. Furthermore, like the most conservative commentators of their day, the French artists either refused to recognize the genuine contributions of French socialists to the war effort (Henri Barbusse was not, for example, represented on the stairway of heroes) or portrayed those men of the Left who could not be ignored–the Bolsheviks, above all others–in crude and vicious anti-Semitic stereotype. Yet, for all its conservative intentions, the Panthéon acquired a modernist dimension despite itself. Levitch concludes his narrative of the mural’s troubled history with a reflection on the quintessentially modern fate of this overtly patriotic undertaking. Physically disassembled, reconstructed, and re-ordered to mean something its original authors could neither have imagined nor intended, the Panthéon de la Guerre constitutes not an immutable and eternal vision of the Great War, but positive proof of the plasticity of public art.

Levitch’s analysis is well grounded in the relevant scholarship, and is, in the main, very persuasive. That the Panthéon became in its sorry passage from Paris to the plains of Missouri a symbol not of French valor and national resolve, but an expression of Cold-War American  triumphalism is compellingly argued. I would, however, take issue with his argument that by the mid-1920s the French lost interest in the extraordinary panorama, and the tale it told of collective, heroic resolve largely because the Panthéon offered a sanitized and exclusively civilian vision of the war that front-line soldiers rejected once they became capable of finding their own voice: “The Panthéon’s unreconstructed, home-front view of the war lost credibility as veterans started narrating their own experiences and increasingly played leading roles in the construction of the war’s memory” (p. 79). Without doubt, the work of art articulated–as did many of the essays, books, and public lectures produced by other distinguished civilians too old to fight–an interpretation of the war often identified as that of civilians alone, an interpretation that denounced the barbarism of the enemy, and consecrated the heroism of the poilu. But it is by no means clear that during, and immediately after the war this “civilian” vision was one that front-line soldiers rejected out of hand, or deemed radically incompatible with their own attitudes towards the war. As Levitch demonstrates, front-line soldiers flocked to the site in 1918 and 1919, embraced its representation of their experience, and applauded its respect for their collective sacrifice. And they did so, I would argue, because the message the Panthéon presented–conservative, heroic, and in many ways defiantly anti-modern–was not fundamentally at odds with how French soldiers understood the war while they were fighting it. Indeed, in their wartime correspondence and trench newspapers, they made much the same point. The enemy was, they were convinced, a threat to French civilization, and the poilu was deserving of civilian respect.

That French soldiers came to embrace a more explicitly tragic and more jaundiced view of the war during the mid-to-late 1920s–a view that questioned whether the war had been a cause worth fighting for; a view that obscured their own wartime consent–was not a function of their ability at last to find their own voice. Whatever might have been the case in Britain and Germany, French soldiers did not wait until the late 1920s to narrate their own experiences of the war. They had been busy doing so from almost the first day of the war; every day, in letters, trench journals, and trench newspapers, they wrote honestly, passionately, and at great length about the horrific nature of the war, and the necessity of French victory. What changed in the 1920s was how French veterans re-imagined their own war experiences. As Leonard V. Smith has recently argued (and, in fact, so recently as to make his argument unavailable to Levitch) in The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (2007) French veterans–or, at least, those who wrote about the war a decade after its conclusion–did come, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, to represent the Great War as tragedy. But this interpretation was not one that would have made sense to French soldiers during the conflict or immediately after the Armistice. I suspect that the Panthéon de la Guerre lost its ability to draw paying French crowds not because it offered a naive, even insulting civilian interpretation of the war. Rather, it represented a vision of the war that French soldiers and civilians alike had once shared, but that a decade later seemed hopelessly dated, and more than a little embarrassing. It was high time to ship this relic of another age to a distant land. And, the story that Mark Levitch reconstructs of that passage, and all that it can tell us about art, the commercialization of war culture, and the arc of international politics in the twentieth century is one well worth reading.

Book Review: Blogwars: The New Political Battleground.

David D. Perlmutter. Blogwars: The New Political Battleground. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxv + 246 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-530557-9.

Reviewed by Gerry Lanosga (Indiana University)
Published on Jhistory (July, 2009)
Commissioned by Donna Harrington-Lueker

Personal or Politicized: Blogging and Politics

Entering the debate over blogs and their meaning is fraught with risk. For starters, the world of blogs, by its very nature, is a moving target–constantly changing, never quite settling. Moreover, partisans in the fray often seem hopelessly polarized. Political communication researcher David D. Perlmutter, a blogger himself, is perhaps more aware of these realities than most. His book, Blogwars, deftly handles the challenges, embracing the chance to make one of the first scholarly passes at the realm of political blogging.

Perlmutter acknowledges up front that he is a fan of, and optimist about, blogs and the role that they can play in democracy, but he is cautious not to overstate the case. Neither a triumphalist nor a naysayer, he strives to analyze blogging in its proper contexts. Historians and other scholars will particularly appreciate his long view as he steers around the simplistic argument about whether blogs are really revolutionary or not. In fact, Perlmutter suggests, they do not have to be one or another. To argue, as he does, that blogs are having a significant impact on politics does not require that one agree they are overthrowing everything that came before.

That said, blogs do represent a clear break from past constraints dictating that mass media content could be produced only by industries. Now, any motivated individual with access to a networked computer can be both creator and consumer of content. Perlmutter contends that political blogs are changing the practice of politics in America not by accident or fad, but by tapping the true power of interactivity to establish personal connections with readers and to form online political communities.

The result is an online environment that allows for spirited battles–thus Perlmutter’s title–over political offices, ideas, and issues. “War,” he writes, “pervades the political bloglands” (p. 47). But where some critics are pessimistic about Balkanization of audiences, Perlmutter argues that the intense partisan grouping afforded by blogs is a good thing: “It is a socially useful war of ideas that, despite its more distasteful projections, is improving rather than detracting from democracy in America” (p. 47).

Perlmutter lays out this argument in a nicely crafted preface, five chapters, and an “afterpost.” His evidence is mainly a series of case studies of different blogs and episodes–which he calls “blogthroughs”–that brought blogs to prominence in the political and public mind. He cites the oft-mentioned examples of Senator Trent Lott’s resignation as Senate majority leader and Dan Rather’s botched investigation of President George W. Bush’s National Guard service–two cases in which political bloggers exerted a significant influence–but also makes the case that bloggers are more likely to exercise political influence on the local level.

In chapter 1, Perlmutter provides an overview of political blogs and readers, and explores the paradox of how the blogosphere can be filled with aggressive partisanship and yet also serve to build bridges. As he tells it, his interest in blogs dates to 1996 when he was studying presidential Web sites and, as an afterthought, began looking at personal political sites. “Many were raucous and crude,” he writes, “but they offered a new form of public affairs media, a private news bulletin sent from one individual to, potentially, the whole world. Personalized mass political communication was finally possible” (p. 3).

As he points out, such communication had been largely the province of elites for thousands of years up to this point. People who in previous eras would not have had any political capital can now “write memos to the powerful that instantly become public documents” (p. 5). That capability has prompted many online enthusiasts to declare a revolution, but Perlmutter finds the evidence mixed for wholesale changes in the way we think about and practice politics.

On the one hand, political content on blogs is not radically new, blogs can be viewed as just another medium for a rather old impulse toward political expression, and blogs are not forcing the abandonment of other means of political communication. On the other hand, there are some groundbreaking characteristics of blogs: namely, a hyperlinking structure that is nonlinear with endless feedback potential, and the ability to enable ordinary people to engage in mass communication. It is not a complete revolution, Perlmutter acknowledges, but it is a significant development that has “turned the traditional dynamics of the media producer-media consumer relationship on its head” (p. 12).

The fact that politicians frequently court bloggers and sometimes become bloggers themselves is testament to the impact of blogs. Also telling is the sometimes intense “blowback” against blogs from mainstream media organizations. Perlmutter rightly puts this in the context of previous media “revolutions” that met resistance from existing media. With radio as with blogs, for instance, the arrivistes were criticized and degraded: “New media tend to generate fulminations among the elites of the old, and professional status is often a key point of contention. In each case, including radio, the rude innovator eventually became part of the mainstream; so will blogs” (pp. 34-35).

As for concerns about Balkanization raised by such authors as Cass Sunstein and Robert Putnam, Perlmutter contends there is no evidence that today is more partisan than other eras. Moreover, he asserts, partisanship can bring groups together as well as divide people into groups: “The ‘dividing us’ argument often fails to take into account that a centripetal force can also be centrifugal” (p. 39).

In the remaining chapters, Perlmutter sketches the early uses of the Internet in politics, the ascendance of blogs in the last decade, and the significant roles bloggers have come to play as both external observers of politics and internal political professionals (sometimes becoming politicians themselves). For politicians, blogs can be used to bypass the traditional media to establish personal connections with voters–Perlmutter calls it “polblogging” and draws parallels to the ancient Roman notion of commilito, the personal bond among soldiers and their leaders. Earlier politicians, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his fireside chats, recognized the power of these personal connections, Perlmutter writes, and blogs represent the perfect venue for establishing them.

Perlmutter believes political blogs (or “bloglike forms”) are here to stay and that they will stimulate citizen participation in politics. And bloggers, he points out, are no longer just a virtual influence. Recounting a meeting of bloggers with President Bush in the White House, he writes: “Bloggers had literally entered the corridors of power. I believe they will never be shut out again” (p. 211).

While Perlmutter’s argument and evidence are generally sound, there are naturally difficulties that arise in an analysis of an evolving new medium. Writing in early 2008, for instance, Perlmutter predicted this “blogization of politics” would continue in the impending presidential election (p. 106). He was not necessarily off the mark, but one wonders how he would retool his work in light of President Barack Obama’s successful use of newer social media tools, such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition, where Perlmutter sees politicians’ use of blogs as a potentially positive way to connect with people, critics might see it as co-optation and dominance by elite voices in a medium touted for its potential benefits for populist political participation. Incursions of commercialization also raise concerns in this regard, but Perlmutter does not address that issue.

Another difficulty that can bedevil this kind of research is the transient quality of new media. Some blogs are here one day and gone the next. For instance, Perlmutter lauds independent blogger Christopher Frankonis’s investigative work in Portland, Oregon, but does not seem to be aware that Frankonis abandoned his blog in 2005, partly because of financial reasons. The blog is cited as a prime example filling a void left by “the corporate press,” but its disappearance raises questions about the viability of such reporting by bloggers (p. 124). Likewise, Perlmutter extols a blog called Democracy for Virginia. That, too, has been out of business since 2005 (Perlmutter’s timeline is slightly off here–a bill noisily opposed by Democracy for Virginia was introduced in 2004, not 2005).

Examples like this do not defeat Perlmutter’s well-argued case, but they do moderate it somewhat. In fairness, he acknowledges as much in the preface: “Much information will be dated by the time you read this book. But that is the point. A blogger’s work is never done, nor, I hope, is that of a student of blogs” (p. xxii). Perlmutter, in fact, tempers his argument with a number of caveats throughout the book. He reminds readers, for instance, that the online environment is still in its childhood. He is well aware, as well, that political bloggers are a minority, and so-called A-list bloggers–those who regularly command large audiences and attention from media and policymakers–a tiny one. He knows that the majority of political bloggers tend to be upper income, white, and male–not, in other words, very representative of the general population (though they also tend to serve as influentials or opinion leaders who have an extra-proportional effect on others). He knows that there are issues of inequality that contravene our hopes for an inclusive online public sphere. He knows that blogs are so many and so varied that “a basic rule of discussing blogs is that everything one says about blogs is true and at the same time false” (p. xxii). And, finally, he knows that no one really knows where blogs will go from here. He calls Blogwars his “first extended post in what I hope will be a long thread of speculative conversation about a fast-moving phenomenon whose direction, development, and destinations are unknown and probably unknowable” (p. xxiii).

Despite the criticisms and caveats, this is, after all, a very good first extended post. It is a measured and meaty look at new media and political participation that is worthwhile for multiple audiences–scholars, students, journalists, new media practitioners, political professionals, the voting public. Perlmutter makes a good case that blogs matter and that they are not a flash in the pan. In the end, he argues that the important thing is that new technologies, such as blogs, offer the potential for ordinary people to have big political impacts: “With luck, wit and skill, a blogger can capture the nation’s attention…. There is something very hopeful, and very American, about the possibility of such bootstrap success in the global marketplace of ideas” (p. 204).

THE AIR WAR IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

Denied access to Continental Europe by France’s collapse in 1940, Britain and eventually the United States had to concentrate their efforts in the Mediterranean. In the long run this strategic reality allowed the Anglo-American powers to build up their capabilities, numbers and battlefield knowledge to the point where they could confront the Wehrmacht more equally. The British recognized the advantages of a Mediterranean strategy; the Americans had to be dragged into committing themselves to that theater. Air power played a number of important roles in the Mediterranean. It proved particularly useful in the defense of Malta and in reaching out from that island to attack Rommel’s supply lines to Libya. When RAF capabilities provided a modicum of protection to Malta, Allied air and sea power devastated Axis convoys. When, however, the Luftwaffe turned the tables on the British, as with the arrival of Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 in November 1941, Rommel’s supplies arrived with few losses. Thus, the air situation on Malta had a direct and palpable influence on the course of ground operations in Libya and Egypt.

 

In the desert the RAF was under the command of one of the most innovative and imaginative commanders of the Second World War, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder. He proved an apt student of the actual conditions of war. The RAF in the Middle East gave priority to tasks which the air staff had regarded with disdain throughout the interwar period: first, it would gain air superiority; second, it would attack Axis supply lines; and third, it would support the army in its ground battles with the Afrikakorps. Deployment of British air power to the Mediterranean involved a great logistic system that flew aircraft across the great expanses of central Africa and then up the Nile valley.

 

Under Tedder’s leadership the RAF proved an innovative and effective instrument of military power in the Mediterranean theater. But no matter how effective it was, air power could not make up for the severe deficiencies in British Army doctrine, training and intellectual preparation. The results showed all too clearly in the Gazala battles of May and June 1942; air power alone could not override the British Army’s incompetence and the German army’s battle effectiveness. Moreover, in spring 1942 the Luftwaffe had sufficient resources in theater to contest with the RAF directly over the battlefield. Nevertheless, claims on both sides were at times dubious.

 

The appearance of Bernard Law Montgomery, one of the nastiest but most effective generals of the war, ushered in a new era in RAF-army co-operation. Montgomery understood the value of co-operation with the RAF, and Tedder fully supported his subordinates in developing it. By collocating his headquarters with Montgomery’s, Air Vice Marshal Arthur Alan Conningham, commander of RAF ground support forces in the theater, provided the desert army with unheard-of responsiveness. But Tedder also understood the need for a wider air campaign to drive the Luftwaffe from the skies and to prevent the arrival of the supplies on which the Afrikakorps depended.

 

It was air power in its widest applications that helped the Eighth Army overcome the Afrikakorps’s battle effectiveness at EI Alamein in late October 1942. Even before the battle, the RAF had severely damaged Rommel’s supply lines across the Mediterranean and disrupted movement between ports in Libya and the front line. Equally important, RAF fighters established air superiority, so that the air commanders could concentrate the RAF on impeding the movement of Rommel’s forces and on support of the ground battle. Montgomery’s victory was quite different from early British victories in the desert. In a sustained battle of attrition in which air power provided direct support as well as interdiction strikes for Commonwealth troops, Montgomery’s Eighth Army broke the Afrikakorps, first by denying it mobility and then by fighting the battle on British terms. EI Alamein heralded the bold stroke of Anglo-American sea power, Operation Torch, against French North Africa – a strike which occurred on the far side of the African continent from Egypt.

 

Hitler replied to Torch by flying paratroopers over to seize Tunisia and then following up with major reinforcements – far larger forces than those he had denied Rommel in summer 1942. Rommel’s retreat across Libya was sufficiently skilled to get his forces to Tunisia and to launch a surprise attack in January 1943 on the exposed and ill-trained American forces at the Kasserine Pass before the British caught up from the east. Moreover, the Luftwaffe gave Allied air forces in Algeria serious trouble, while the arrangements between air and ground in Algeria were considerably behind the procedures that the desert air force and army had already worked out.

 

In fact, the reinforcing Axis forces in Tunisia were in an impossible strategic position. Once Allied air forces had sorted themselves out, they imposed a stranglehold on Axis supply lines. Ultra decrypts provided detailed intelligence of the movement of those supplies by sea and air; by the end of March, Allied air attacks had closed down the movement of shipborne supplies. The Luftwaffe then made a desperate attempt in April and early May to supply hard-pressed Axis troops by an aerial bridge, but this was no more successful than the Stalingrad effort. The results were even more devastating, as Allied fighter forces, alerted by decrypts, consistently intercepted and decimated transport formations. But Axis leadership in the theater, did not do much to help; Johannes Steinhoff, the great German ace, traveling through Italy in early 1943 on his way to take up command in Tunisia, was astonished by the luxury and comfort of Kesselring’s staff. The great man himself, according to Steinhoff’s memoirs, was completely out of touch with combat conditions and was sickenly optimistic. Ultra decrypts indicated that Kesselring was pressing his fighter pilots throughout the battle to act with the fanaticism of the Japanese. Not surprisingly, the Luftwaffe suffered casualties that it could not afford.

 

German troubles in the theater were, however, only beginning. With the collapse of the Tunisian pocket, Allied air forces turned their attention to destroying German and Italian air power throughout Sicily and southern Italy in preparation for Operation Husky – the code name for the invasion of Sicily. By now Allied aircraft based in North Africa were attacking industrial targets in northern Italy. The response of US air commanders in the Mediterranean to actual combat conditions indicates that they were better able to adapt in that theater than was the case in England. As early as May 1943, Major-General James Doolittle, commander of the Twelfth Air Force in the Mediterranean, was warning General Hap Arnold, commander of the US Army Air Force, that large formations of heavy bombers would not survive against strong Luftwaffe opposition unless accompanied by long-range escort fighters.

 

The preparation for the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and that of Italy in September 1943 precipitated the last great air battles in the Mediterranean. By now, the Luftwaffe was unable to stand up to Allied numbers. In his depressing memoirs covering the fighting over Sicily, Steinhoff records the terrible pressure on German fighter squadrons, where the new pilots died almost immediately, while the experienced simply lasted a bit longer. For a loss of over 1,000 aircraft in July and August, the Luftwaffe achieved little but to deplete further its own force structure and make it less able to withstand the swelling pressure of the Combined Bomber Offensive.

POPE JULIUS II’S LEGACY

Pope Julius II in armour exhorting Emperor Maximilian, King Louis XII of France and King Ferdinand of Aragon to war on Venice

 

Raphael (attrib.), Julius II: this drawing is thought to be a contemporary copy of the portrait in the National Gallery, London, rather than a preliminary sketch.

 

In justice it must be noted that Julius himself declared at various points that his warmongering in Italy in defence of the rights of the Church was only the prelude to a great campaign against the infidel. It was reported, for instance, he had said that Agnadello was nothing to the victory he would win against the Turks. Cardinal Sigismondo Gonzaga reported in June 1509 that the Pope was commissioning many galleys at Civitavecchia, and that he himself had ordered six at Ancona which should be ready within a few weeks. He understood that Julius was determined to set forth in person; his plan was to give thanks to the Madonna of Loreto, then to tour the conquered lands in Romagna and make Bologna his base for organising the crusade; he hoped to celebrate Mass in Constantinople within a year. This objective was never entirely lost to sight. Even in his lowest hours in the Romagna in the spring of 1511, Julius allegedly asked the King of Scotland’s ambassador to persuade Louis XII to make peace and to launch a campaign against the infidel, in which the Pope would take part in person. It was in line with this papal resolve to settle the problems of Christendom expeditiously in order to face the long-standing external enemy that Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros (1436–1517; a cardinal since May 1507, founder of the University of Alcalá and commissioner of the first polyglot Bible) vigorously led the troops – much to the annoyance of regular officers – at the siege of Oran in 1509, and declared that the smell of gunpowder was sweeter to him than all the perfumes of Arabia.

 

It should be clear that, even if Julius’s excesses of ferocious zeal and frequent lapses of self-control exposed him to serious criticism and mockery, he stood essentially within a long tradition, even a canonical tradition, that obliged the leaders of the Church to resort to arms – though preferably not to cause bloodshed by their own hands – when the Church was in danger. Even humanist writers endorsed this. In Julius II’s own time Paolo Cortesi, in his book De Cardinalatu (On the Cardinalate), had drawn upon the canon law tradition to itemise the occasions that should rightly drive a cardinal to war. In the course of discussing the moral qualities desirable in a cardinal, Cortesi listed under the heading ‘Fortitude’ nine such occasions when it might need to be applied, among them schism, heresy, sacrilege, attack on or nonrestitution of Church lands and cities, sedition, failure to pay taxes, etc. He gave as his example Julius II’s recent declaration of war against Venice, and the Romagna campaign in the spring of 1509 led by Cardinal Alidosi, even if fortitude was not a virtue very appropriate to Alidosi.

 

The portrayal of Julius in the famous anonymous dialogue Julius Exclusus is, of course, a gross if not wholly undeserved caricature. First printed in 1518, but previously circulating in manuscript, it was then and later usually attributed to Erasmus, in spite of his emphatic denials. Recently the English humanist Richard Pace has been nominated as the author, and Pace in his dialogue on education, De Fructu (1517), indeed claimed to have written an anti-Julius text some time between the death of Julius and election of his successor (February–March 1513); other parallels between the two dialogues, including a certain theatricality characteristic of Pace, have also been detected. Since Pace was Cardinal Christopher Bainbridge’s principal secretary and even had the skill – unusual then for an Englishman – of being able to write Italian as well as Latin, which he did on the cardinal’s behalf, and in an italic hand, the attribution is particularly interesting. For Bainbridge, like Julius, was also a bellicose character, and, although Pace may not have been with him in the military campaign against Ferrara in the spring of 1511, he must have appreciated that on this account Bainbridge was highly favoured by the Pope. Bainbridge was still alive in February 1513; Pace dedicated to him his translation of Plutarch’s Lives the following year, and mentioned him gratefully in De Fructu. So the purpose and motivation of Pace (if it was he) in risking his career by writing such a malicious diatribe against his patron’s patron remains obscure.

 

Various facets of Julius’s behaviour under the stress of war, as we have seen from Venetian and Bolognese sources, provoked surprise and shocked comment among contemporaries. But in general he was proceeding on traditional lines, though with rather stronger personal commitment and less restraint than his predecessors. Even the idea of taking nearly the whole papal court with him to the war zone or expected battlefield, as in 1506 and 1510–11, was not an innovation: had not Pius II tried to do just the same when he set off for Ancona in 1464? In December 1512 the preacher at the opening of the fourth session of the Lateran Council praised Julius to the skies for his conduct of ‘just war’ and his territorial gains for the Church. The neo-Latin poet Marco Girolamo Vida composed between 1511 and 1513 an epic ‘Juliad’ celebrating the Pope’s martial deeds, though unfortunately no trace of it survives (he went on to write his epic about the life of Christ). Fulsome praise for Julius’s bellicose character and achievements, unlike the formulations quoted at the beginning of this chapter of Machiavelli and Giuicciardini, both of whom wrote from a semi-ironical or at any rate secular point of view, was the summation of the distinguished Jesuit theologian and historian Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621) at the end of the sixteenth century. Bellarmine praised Julius for ‘recovering a great part of the ecclesiastical kingdom, which was done by diligence and virtue, imitating with great labour the virtue and diligence of famous and holy men, partly with his own armed forces, partly with the help of allies’.

A TESTIMONY OF A VETERAN

A testimony of a veteran who fought as an Oberfeldwebel in Jaeger-Rgt. 20./10. Luftwaffen-Feld-Division, pretty much for the duration of its existence as far as we can tell. He was lucky to survive the war and his time in a Soviet camp. He was horrified by his experiences partly because I do not think he was really prepared for them. I believe he actually started the war in 1939 as technical sergeant in 6./Jagdgeschwader 53. Going from fixing airplanes in the rear (Jagdgeschwader 53 wasn’t even used in the Polish Campaign) to manning the front-line trenches in front of the Soviet Oranienbaum pocket must have been quite a shock. Moreover, he was responsible for the lives of the men under his command, and none of them had any real front line combat experience. As he used to say he could not even understand “how he was allowed to live while all his friends died.” I can’t help but think that he still felt responsible for some of them dying.

What was the problem with the Luftwaffen-Feld-Divisions?

I think the key was training – the Luftwaffen-Feld-Divisions received little or none before they were tossed into the line and chewed up. Examine the late-war Heer formations and I think you see similar results. Some of the last line named infantry divisions like “Ulrich von Hutten” and others received fairly decent equipment (especially given the state of the war at that point), but were inadequately composed of replacement personnel around cadres of experienced NCOs. They too were given little time to train (both small and large unit training is required, not only do you have to know how to fight with your platoon, but you Battalion CO better know how to coordinate with the support units of your regiment too). In essence, a large-sized formation cannot fight effectively without practicing some coordination, no matter how well trained, armed, or motivated the “Einzelkaempfer”. For an example of the Luftwaffen-Feld-Divisionen in action, specifically the 9. and 10. Lw.Feld.Div., read _Tragodie um die Treue_ and the descriptions of all those Luftwaffen-Feld-Div. soldiers scattering as SS-Pioner-Bataillon 11 tries to plug the holes in early 1944.