Battling the Worst Tendencies of Popular Military History

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The New York Sun

Writing about war without writing about blood is a habit that richly deserves to be kicked, and we should be pleased that both academic and popular military historians have lately been giving it such a vigorous booting. To describe war solely in the terms of chess games, or in any style disregarding the misery, maimings, and fouled trousers of actual combat, is obtuse, even obscene.


The corrective tendency of the last two decades has begotten numerous grunt’s-eye accounts of war, of which the late Stephen Ambrose’s best work is a recent high example and Alex Kershaw’s new book, “The Longest Winter” (Da Capo Press, 336 pages, $25) the logical and lamentable extension. It tells the story of a platoon of fewer than 40 men who held off a German advance for a few crucial hours during the Battle of the Bulge. Mr. Kershaw says his book is meant to tell the platoon’s story and with it the story of the Ardennes offensive in 1944. But these goals are not easily compatible, and his contrived narrative reveals more about the pitfalls of popular history than about that last pivotal battle of World War II.


Sixty years ago this month, in the Ardennes in Belgium, the American military suffered its most devastating intelligence failure – one that dwarfs in potential consequence the present one in Mesopotamia. Germany silently amassed a huge army and launched a surprise armor attack on five American divisions. The plan was to push fast to Antwerp – the Allies’ essential port – and split the Allied front. Hitler prepared Operation “Wacht am Rhein” (“The Watch on the Rhine,” after a famous patriotic German song) in secret for months, hiding the operation from even senior officers. Relying on poor weather to cover movements and baffle Allied air superiority, the Germans caught the Allies unaware and captured the key river crossings.


Mr. Kershaw’s subjects, the Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon of the 394th regiment of the 99th infantry division, led by 20-year-old Lieutenant Lyle Bouck, fended off and slaughtered huge numbers of SS and paratroopers at Lanzerath – a small village that was key to the German breakthrough of the Allied line as the wings of two American corps met up there – before being captured. They took casualties, including two gruesome head wounds, but suffered not a single death. Their efforts held back the Germans long enough to give Allied command a chance to respond.


Mr. Kershaw’s account of the platoon’s stand at Lanzerath is gripping and unsentimental, but it occupies too small a portion of the book. The rest details their grim captivity in German POW camps and military hospitals, the efforts to free them, and the campaign decades later to bedeck the platoon with medals. (There is also a painfully and needlessly long prelude about their training in America and deployment to England, including a bizarre anecdote about London hookers – the “Piccadilly commandos” – and a young Angela Lansbury.)


Dropped in among the story of the platoon are passages detailing the progress of the battle and war more broadly, but these are thin soup compared to the hearty retellings of the trials Bouck and his men faced. The unstated premise of military history in this vein is that battles are fought by men, and that to tell the fighting men’s story is to tell the story of the battle. Mr. Kershaw’s 2003 work, “The Bedford Boys,” about the small town of Bedford, Va., and the soldiers it sent to Omaha Beach, profited from this on-the-ground, embedded narrative voice. But that book was as much a portrait of a community as a history of a battle. “The Longest Winter” suffers from being slave to a platoon with one remarkable day to its credit, then a long period languishing in prison camps and conducting valiant offensives against scurvy and gangrene while the decisive moments of the Bulge happened miles away.


A reader would guess from Mr. Kershaw’s emphasis that the Allies quashed the Ardennes Offensive with hard-fought position-holding by in fantry. In fact, a swift movement by Patton’s Third Army, as well as pitiless Allied bombing when the weather cleared, doomed the Germans: That battles are fought by men does not prevent them from being won by machines. This skew in presentation is a direct consequence of an oral historio graphic method that shuns operational strategic analysis in favor of direct reporting of the experience of soldiers. The books that feed the present craze for such popular military history may help readers understand what it was like to hear bullets or shiver with fear while awaiting mortar fire. But the feeling of what happened does not always, or even often, provide any serious insight into why a battle or war went the way it did.


Mr. Kershaw is not an academic historian, and he draws overwhelmingly on interviews with surviving veterans. This is popular turf, for it allows the nonacademic to compete on equal terms with the primary source-delving professors. Oral history has its power, but it is invariably more entertainment and appreciation than analysis. It is also far from the only way to write popular military history, or even history whose tone is appropriate to the experience of battle. Ernest May’s “Strange Victory” (2001) showed that bracing prose and bold, high-level analysis can live in harmony on the same page. And less recently, John Dower’s “War without Mercy” (1987) combined the opinions and experiences of soldiers with broader argument about the war in the Pacific. Neither these nor countless other scholarly histories demand exceptional effort from a reader, and they provide a more nuanced understanding of World War II than “Longest Winter” provides.


Mr. Kershaw’s background as a biographer – he wrote well-received books on Jack London and Robert Capa – may explain his inclinations. As a historical genre, biography is lax; in choosing an individual life as subject, a biographer can too easily ignore the questions of scope, relevance, and methodology on which the best historical writing stands or falls. By choosing an essentially biographical method, Mr. Kershaw has avoided having to judge the implications of, say, the differences in equipment or command styles – essential topics when considering the Bulge. Applied to another battle, this evasion would have been merely a limitation. But this particular battle was not decided in any important way by personal heroism, and certainly not by the heroism of one platoon. Mr. Kershaw’s account is therefore a distraction from its own subject – a worthy story, but one that diverts from a larger one sorely in need of telling.


There are other flaws with Mr. Kershaw’s book. In leaning too heavily on interview material, it uncritically reproduces not just veterans’ poignant quotes but their cliches as well. The sections about the publicity campaign to decorate the platoon reek of bureaucratic wangling – however justified – and seem unworthy of the same men’s gallantry on the battlefield and in the camps. The author seems not to know German (the text is peppered with minor illiteracies), and I cannot warm to a writer who condescends to his readership with footnotes unpacking the abbreviations “USO” and “WASP.”


Although “Longest Winter” illuminates the shortcomings of canned, popular histories as a genre, it is not worthless: It chronicles a platoon’s history from birth to dissolution and beyond, and it shows that valor takes many forms and that men suffer horribly under command-level failures. One could ask for less in a good book about war.



Mr. Wood is a writer and political analyst currently in northern Iraq.


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