“Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!” shouts a triumphant U.S. Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. (as played by Best Actor Oscar winner, George C. Scott in 1970’s Best Picture, Patton) while watching the March-April 1943 Battle of El Guettar in Tunisia, North Africa. This “gotcha!” exclamation implies the American general gained the key to victory over the German-Italian Axis forces he mistakenly thought were then commanded by Rommel from reading Rommel’s own impressive account of his development as a daring, tactically-innovative troop commander fighting French, Romanian, Russian and Italian units in World War I.

An avid reader of all things military history—his extensive, personally-annotated military history library was donated to the West Point Library—the real Patton probably did read Infanterie greift an, published by then-Lt. Col. Erwin Rommel in Germany in 1937, two years before World War II began and four years before Rommel earned his nickname, “The Desert Fox”. But the first English language edition—heavily abridged and edited by (understandably) anti-German wartime military censors only initially appeared in 1943.

What is certain, however, is that Patton never read this excellent, insightful, and revealing new English translation—which is much truer and exceedingly more faithful to Rommel’s highly nuanced, original German account than the extremely poor, indifferently translated wartime 1943 and 1944 English editions. Comparing Zita Steele’s (pen name of award-winning writer-historian-editor, Zita Ballinger Fletcher) brilliant new translation of Rommel’s classic book is akin to comparing Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a fourth-grade “Dick and Jane” grammar book. Steele’s deft translation finally does justice to Rommel’s original German text.

Bringing the Original Text To Life

Rommel’s original text comes vividly alive through Steele’s superb German-to-English translation and his account of how he reacted to and developed his innovative small-unit tactics to consistently defeat the forces arrayed against his own unit is exceptionally well-revealed in her new book. Usually outnumbered and outgunned, German mountain ranger assault troops under the young Rommel, time and time again overcame their enemies’ superior numbers and greater firepower to achieve their often daunting objectives. Steele consistently, and much more correctly, translates “German alpine troops” as “mountain rangers,” thereby better capturing the true nature of these, in effect, early versions of what would eventually be known as “special operations forces”.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Rommel describes how and why he developed the tactics he used to prevail in each engagement, revealing his constant development as an innovative troop leader. This excellent new translation traces the gradual but proceeding development during combat in France and in the mountains of the Eastern Front of the young Rommel whose later operational genius would suddenly burst forth upon the Belgian, French and North African battlefields of World War II. This translation demonstrates the roots of Rommel’s operational genius, showing “how Rommel became Rommel.” 

Rommel As A Person

Steele also reveals Erwin Rommel as a person, with the all-too-human flaws he possessed. Although the enduring image of Rommel was that of a homebody “family” man, a devoted, doting husband to his wife Lucie (they married in 1916), his relationship with another woman produced an illegitimate daughter, Gertrud, in 1913, whom he manfully acknowledged and for whom he provided financial support.

Additionally, Steele presents a convincing argument—based on Rommel’s admitted life-long insomnia and recurrent nightmares—that he suffered from PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. Given his WWI wounds, the nightmarish combat he endured in that war, and the loss of many close friends, that diagnosis seems completely credible. Coincidentally, Patton’s best biographer, Carlo D’Este, concludes—very convincingly—that Patton also suffered from PTSD. This reviewer strongly concurs with both authors’ “diagnoses.”

Was Rommel A Nazi?

Steele also delves into THE question involving Rommel: Was he or was he not a “Nazi?” Although it is a historical fact that Erwin Rommel was never a member of the Nazi Party, his promotions by Adolf Hitler always beg the question of was Rommel a “secret” Nazi, whether an official member of the Party or not? Steele concludes—correctly in this reviewer’s opinion—that Rommel was definitely not a Nazi. Clearly, Rommel personally benefited from Hitler’s support and indulgences, but so did other non-Nazis if they served Hitler’s interests when that service was beneficial to the Nazi dictator. Rommel was enough of a non-Nazi that he paid the ultimate price—Hitler’s toadies forced the field marshal to commit suicide on Oct. 14, 1944 in the wake of the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler of which Rommel knew but of which he was not an integral part.

Zita Steele’s new book which is based on her new, insightful, nuanced and authoritative English translation of Erwin Rommel’s classic of military history 1937 book, Infantry Attacks, is a hands’-down, “must-have” book in any military history enthusiast’s library. It not only makes earlier English translations of Rommel’s book obsolete, it’s a “classic” account of World War I combat. Above all, it’s an insightful preview of one of the most famous commanders of World War II—and how he learned his trade! Buy it! Read it! Enjoy it!

ERwin Rommel: First War

A New Look At Infantry Attacks
By Zita Steele

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When it comes to George A. Custer and the June 25, 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, everyone seems to be an “expert”. Even those who may never have read a single book on the battle seem convinced they know exactly why Custer lost the western frontier’s most infamous battle and, in the process, got his regiment needlessly wiped out.

Their narrative usually goes something like this: Foolishly declining a last-minute offer to take rapid-firing Gatling guns with him, Custer’s outsized ego, reckless bravery and overly ambitious quest for glory led to his egregiously bad tactical decisions—including dividing his regiment into four smaller “battalions” in the face of the enemy’s known superior numbers—and prompted him to disobey his commander’s written orders by prematurely launching his regiment a day earlier than planned in a doomed attack. They believe overwhelming numbers of enemy warriors annihilated his regiment to the last man in a brilliantly planned, expertly fought and shrewdly executed trap. Capt. Myles Keogh’s wounded horse, Comanche, they always point out, was the only living thing to survive the massacre. 

In short, “everybody knows” that Custer lost because he was a blustering egomaniac with presidential ambitions who was “out-generaled” by the superior tactical skill and battlefield command of Lakota leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Those who think they know for certain that’s exactly what happened to Custer at the Little Bighorn battle should heed this sage advice from an eminent historian: “It’s not what we don’t know about history that leads us astray; it’s what we think we know—but isn’t true—that causes the mischief.”

The truth of what really caused Custer’s defeat in the most famous battle between Indians and the U.S. frontier army during the western Indian wars is best revealed by examining Custer’s critical tactical decisions that long, hot, dusty day in June 1876. His decisions must be evaluated within the context of what Custer actually knew at the time he made them—and, importantly, what he did not know. 

First, it’s important to quickly dismiss some of the Little Bighorn “red herrings” (on the surface seemingly plausible but misleading distractions). The battle’s most important ones include: 

The Myth of “Indian Commanders”

The oft-read claim that “the Lakota and Cheyenne fought under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse,” implying there was an Indian chain-of-command controlling the warriors’ tactics and maneuvers, exposes egregious ignorance of how Native Americans fought. Indians fought as individuals, fighting if they felt their “medicine” was good, opting out if they judged otherwise. No Indian commanders issued orders and exercised command authority (although some warriors voluntarily followed war-proven successful leaders, like Crazy Horse and Gall, who led purely by example). The best description of how the Lakota and Cheyenne fought Custer at the Little Bighorn is to imagine a hornet’s nest suddenly disturbed—within moments, clouds of angry hornets pour out, swarming and stinging whatever disturbs them, their numbers increasing with each passing minute. Furious that Custer’s attack threatened their families, Lakota and Cheyenne warriors simply swarmed their village’s attackers as they confronted, defeated or annihilated each threat in turn.

Gatling Guns Fantasy

Those who claim rapid-firing Gatling guns could have saved Custer know less about those weapons and their limited capability than they do about Native American warfighting. Three main deficiencies would have prevented these early “machine guns” from having any positive impact on the battle: transportation, targets and crew vulnerability. The guns were mounted on heavy, awkward, large-wheeled artillery piece carriages and pulled by 4-horse teams of “condemned” cavalry mounts (horses deemed unfit for troopers’ mounts but capable of dragging heavy loads). On vehicles susceptible to frequent break-downs, the weapons could not possibly have kept pace with Custer’s regiment’s 30-plus-miles-per-day rapid reconnaissance to fulfill his primary mission: find the Indians’ main camp as quickly as possible and prevent the highly-mobile tribes from scattering into the vast landscape. Trying to drag the clumsy guns over rough terrain and still move fast enough to find the elusive tribes would have been impossible. The guns would have moved slower than Custer’s large pack train of cantankerous, stubborn mules which were so slow that they failed to arrive on the battlefield until after Custer was already dead. Even if the Gatlings had miraculously been present on Last Stand Hill, they needed targets to shoot at—moving around the battlefield on fast, agile Indian ponies, the Indians fought mainly on foot once in range of trooper’s weapons, concealing themselves in every fold, depression and gully the broken terrain offered while firing rifles, muskets and bows and arrows at Custer’s trapped troopers. Unlike the famed 1896 Anheuser-Busch lithograph, Custer’s Last Fight, which graced thousands of saloons across the US, the Indians did not foolishly attack in close-packed masses. Thus the Gatlings would have had no targets to “mow down” with rapid fire. Indeed, the “lack of targets” is supported by the low number of Indian casualties in the battle which may be as few as 31 killed plus a few dozen wounded of an estimated 1,500-2,000 Indians who fought! Finally, Gatling crews had to stand upright to fire the weapon, the crews presenting themselves as vulnerable targets to be quickly shot down by hidden Indian marksmen as the tribesmen closed in on the pinned-down troopers.

Terry’s “Coordinated” Tactical Attack Plan

Those who try to force a modern-warfare template onto the 1876 Great Sioux War campaign typically claim that Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry’s three-column advance (Terry-Custer column moving west from Ft. Lincoln in Bismarck, ND; Colonel John Gibbon’s column moving east from Ft. Ellis, MT; and Brig. Gen. George Crook’s column—the campaign’s strongest force—moving northwest from Ft. Fetterman, WY) through central Montana where the main village of “hostile” Lakota and Cheyenne was presumed to be, was intended to be a tactical attack plan for a coordinated military assault on the Indians by all three forces. Yet it’s clear from Terry’s orders to Custer (see “Terry’s Orders to Custer” sidebar) that they are instructions regarding how to find Indians, not a tactical plan on how to fight them once found. It verifies that Terry’s wide 3-column approach was solely intended as a sweep through the vast area to locate the main body of Lakota and Cheyenne and prevent their escape, not a plan of tactical maneuver for a simultaneous, triple-pronged attack. In fact, Terry hoped there would be no fighting and that the Indians—once found, surrounded and prevented from escape—could be peacefully escorted to Dakota reservations. Terry’s hope that Gibbon’s column would arrive north of the Little Bighorn valley on June 26 as Custer arrived from the southeast that day was meant for Gibbon to be a stand-off “blocking force”—not a tactical participant in a coordinated two-pronged assault with Custer’s regiment to attack and destroy the Indians—hemming in the Indians so they could be corralled and escorted to reservations. In the event, the Gibbon column (by then accompanied by Terry) did not even arrive until June 27, further making the “coordinated attack” claim irrelevant. Also Crook’s third column had already turned back, fought to a standstill in the June 17 Battle of the Rosebud by most of the same Indian warriors who—heavily reinforced by hundreds of new arrivals who’d “jumped” their Dakota reservations—defeated Custer on June 25.

7th Cavalry “Wiped Out”

Although certainly most legitimate Indian Wars historians know better, too many historically ignorant “Custer experts” keep repeating the mistaken claim that Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment was “wiped out to a man” in the battle. They mistake the fact that the five companies under Custer’s immediate command (companies C, E, F, I and L), the “battalion” he personally led after reorganizing his regiment into four battalions (see “Custer’s Reorganization for Combat” sidebar) were wiped out (13 officers, 193 troopers and 4 civilians—210 total killed) for his entire 600-strong regiment (31 officers and 566 troopers) being annihilated. Actually, the 7th Cavalry Regiment that day suffered 52-percent casualties: 16 officers and 242 troopers KIA or died of wounds; 1 officer and 51 troopers wounded—horrendous losses, but far from the regiment being “wiped out to a man” in the battle.

Other egregious “red herrings” include the idiotic idea that somehow Custer’s “foolish attack” was because he craved a dramatic victory since he wanted to run for U.S. president—as if any serving officer removed from command because he’d so enraged the Grant administration by his (valid) claims to Congress of the administration’s corruption could ever hope in his wildest dreams to be a valid presidential candidate. Custer not only had to beg for reinstatement to regimental service on the eve of the 1876 Sioux Campaign, but also had to convince his mentor, Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan, to intercede for him with Grant—a request only granted shortly before the campaign began.

Other improbable “red herring” reasons for the defeat include those Custer-contemporary bigots looking for a convenient scapegoat to excuse the disastrous defeat of the cream of the frontier army by so-called “primitive savages” by egregiously inflating the impact of the cavalry’s M1873 carbine’s weak expended-shell casing extractor that caused weapons to jam. The problem was real, but well-known and documented as affecting only as few as about 1-in-300 carbines. That it was not a major problem during the battle is supported by archaeological evidence from Dr. Doug Scott’s extensive 1991 Little Bighorn battlefield excavations which found very few carbine shell casings that evidenced any tell-tale scratches indicating manual extractions. 

When the easily dismissed “red herrings” are wisely ignored, “human error” comes to the fore as the culprit in the 7th’s defeat—the series of command decisions made by Custer himself that determined the 7th Cavalry’s fate. Although he’s pilloried for his decisions based on the battle’s disastrous outcome, an examination of those decisions—assessed within the context of what he actually knew and didn’t know at the time he made them—reveals that most were consistent with what any combat-experienced frontier army officer would have made, and none were irredeemably disastrous…except for the final and ultimately fatal, decision he made at about 3:30 p.m. on June 25, 1876. 

Sunday, June 25, 1876, was a long, hot, dusty day full of crucial decisions Custer faced at critical points during his—and half of the troopers in his 7th Cavalry Regiment’s—final day of life. The day began early. Custer had the regiment begin a night march following a wide, recent Indian trail at midnight—but by 5 p.m. that afternoon, Custer, his brothers Capt. Tom and Boston, his nephew Autie Reed, his brother-in-law Lt. James Calhoun (L Company) and half the troopers in the 7th’s 12 cavalry companies were dead on a bleak Montana hillside or soon to die about four miles southeast behind hastily dug entrenchments on Reno Hill. Hindsight is 20-20, but if the critics knew only what Custer knew—and didn’t know—that day, would their judgments be as harsh? 

Here’s what Custer actually knew. His primary mission was to find the main Indian village and prevent Indians from escaping and “vanishing” into the vast landscape. Plains Indian warfare experience taught that the most difficult problem for frontier army commanders was finding Indians, not fighting them. At the start of the campaign, each of the three Army columns sent against the Indians in 1876 (Custer’s cavalry regiment, Col. John Gibbon’s column of infantry and cavalry, and Gen. George Crook’s cavalry and mule-mounted infantry) on their own was considered sufficient to defeat any Indian force expected to be encountered. The three widely-separated Army columns were intended to locate the Indians, not combine and fight them in a coordinated battle. Only after the full scope of the disaster was realized did Custer’s commander, Gen. Terry, later create the fiction that Custer and Gibbon were to attack simultaneously on June 26. Moreover, when Terry tumbled to the fact that the army would demand a scapegoat for the worst disaster in the western Indian Wars did he then create the self-serving narrative that “glory-hunting Custer rashly attacked prematurely, disobeying his orders.” 

Custer was told he would face, at most, 500 to 800 Indian warriors. The present for duty strength of the 7th that day was about 600 soldiers—31 officers and 566 troopers—plus Indian Scouts, quartermaster employees e.g., mule skinners, and several civilians, including newspaper reporter, Mark Kellogg. Custer had written discretion to move against the Indians as he saw fit. His orders from Terry gave him full latitude in making tactical decisions (see “Terry’s Orders to Custer” sidebar).

Finally, perhaps Custer’s most fatal “knowledge” was that he had successfully attacked a Cheyenne village under Chief Black Kettle on the Washita River (November 1868)—a small part of a much larger combined Indian encampment that may have rivaled in size the June 1876 Little Bighorn village—and he had prevailed against heavy odds by dividing the 7th into several battalions, striking the surprised village from multiple directions and preventing probably overwhelming Indian retaliation during his withdrawal by using captured Cheyenne women and children as hostages.

However, the bloody result of Custer’s command decisions on June 25 was clearly affected by information he did not, or could not, know. Crook’s column, which at over 1,200 Soldiers and hundreds of Crow Indian allies was the most powerful of Terry’s three converging columns, was fought to a standstill by possibly 1,000 warriors at the day-long Battle of the Rosebud, about 30 miles from the Little Bighorn River, the week before on June 17, 1876. Crook retreated without informing the other columns that the Indians were in strength and fighting, not fleeing. 

The number of Indian warriors opposing Custer at Little Bighorn was likely between 1,500 to 2,000 (two to three times more than what he had been told). Their ranks were swollen by new arrivals streaming in from Dakota reservations. Indian reservation agents purposely concealed the number of their “missing” Indians since that knowledge reduced their reservation “head count,” prompting drastic cuts in rations and supplies. The Little Bighorn village—probably, at its peak, about 1,000 lodges—was likely the largest-ever concentration of Plains Indians—a unique congregation lasting only a few days since game, grass for the huge pony herd and local resources would force the village to move after those had been exhausted. This historical accident—a congregation of, perhaps 7,000-8,000 Indians (up to 2,000 warriors) in 1,000 lodges (tipis) is the overriding factor leading to Custer’s defeat.

Terry’s Orders to Custer 

On the morning of June 22, 1876, during their final meeting before sending Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment off on a “reconnaissance in force” mission to locate the main village of Lakota and Cheyenne, Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry, overall campaign commander whose mission was to find the Indians and force them to reservations in Dakota territory, issued written orders to Custer: 

The Brigadier General commanding directs that, as soon as your regiment can be made ready for the march, you will proceed up the Rosebud [i.e., travel south in this region where rivers and creeks run north] in pursuit of the Indians whose trail was discovered by Major Reno [Custer’s second-in-command] a few days since. It is, of course, impossible to give you any definite instructions in regard to this movement, and were it not impossible to do so the Department Commander places too much confidence in your zeal, energy, and ability to wish to impose on you precise orders which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy.[emphasis added] He will, however, indicate to you his own views of what your action should be, and he desires that you should conform to them unless you shall see sufficient reasons for departing from them. He thinks that you should proceed up [south] the Rosebud until you ascertain definitely the direction in which the trail above spoken of leads. Should it be found (as it appears almost certain that it will be found) to then turn toward the Little Horn, he thinks that you should still proceed southward, perhaps as far as the headwater of the Tongue, and then turn toward the Little Horn, feeling constantly, however, for your left, so as to preclude the possibility of the escape of the Indians to the south or southeast by passing your left flank. The column of Colonel Gibbon is now in motion for the mouth of the Big Horn. As soon as it reaches that point it will cross the Yellowstone and move up at least as far as the forks of the Big and Little Horns. Of course, its future movements must be controlled by circumstances as they arise, but it is hoped that the Indians, if upon the Little Horn, may be so nearly inclosed by the two columns that their escape will be impossible.

The Department Commander desires that on your way up the Rosebud you should thoroughly examine the upper part of the Tullock’s creek, and that you should endeavor to send a scout through to Colonel Gibbon’s column, with information of the results of your examination. The lower part of this creek will be examined by a detachment from Colonel Gibbon’s command. The supply steamer [Far West under captain Grant Marsh] will be pushed up the Big Horn as far as the forks of the river if found to be navigable for that distance, and the Department Commander, who will accompany the column of Colonel Gibbon, desires you to report to him there not later than the expiration of the time for which your troops are rationed, unless in the meantime you receive further orders.

Custer’s Reorganization for Combat

After he was informed that the 7th had been seen by several small Indian parties and therefore assuming the main Indian camp would be warned, Custer abandoned his plan to hide the regiment all that day for a June 26 attack and instead move immediately against the Indian village before it could flee. Therefore, about noon on June 25, at the base of the “Crow’s Nest” peak in the Wolf Mountains from which the 7th’s Indian scouts had seen the main Lakota-Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn 15 miles away, Custer reorganized the regiment for combat by dividing it into four battalions plus 35 Indian Scouts.                    

Custer’s Decisions
re: John Gray’s Centennial Campaign calculated timeline 

9:00 p.m., June 24, final bivouac (near today’s Busby, Mont.)

Scouts report finding a fresh Indian trail, making it all but certain the main village is in the Little Bighorn valley.

Custer decision

Launch the 7th along that trail just past midnight, June 25.

Assessment

The decision is totally consistent with Custer’s primary mission to find the hostile Indians’ village as quickly as possible. 

9:00 a.m., June 25, Crow’s Nest vantage point (15 miles from Little Bighorn village)

Accepting his scouts’ word that they can see the village’s huge pony herd (although neither he nor his chief of scouts, Lt. Charles Varnum, could make it out), Custer now knows the camp’s location.

Custer decision

Hide the regiment all day in the Wolf Mountains, concealed by the rough terrain, then move at night to strike at dawn, June 26 (the day he was told by Terry that Gibbon’s column should reach a blocking position north of the Indian village). 

Assessment

Hiding the regiment for a dawn surprise attack on the unsuspecting village the next morning was prudent, consistent with Terry’s orders and confirming Custer’s plan conceived the night before. (Gibbon’s blocking force was intended to intercept fleeing Indians after Custer’s attack, not to participate in the 7th’s assault as an element in a coordinated attack as often erroneously assumed and as Terry falsely claimed afterwards—revealingly, when Terry wrote his orders, he of course had no idea Custer would decide to attack the village on June 25. Terry wanted the Indians found and kept from escaping.)

10:30 a.m., base of the Crow’s Nest

Custer learns that three separate small Indian groups had recently spotted elements of the regiment.    

Custer decision

Do not risk waiting, make an immediate attack on the village before it can be alerted and escape the approaching army columns. 

Assessment

Since experience taught that Indians invariably scattered and disappeared into the landscape if warned of an enemy’s approach, any experienced frontier army officer likely would have made this same decision. Custer could not have known that the Indians that spotted him were on their way to other distant locations and therefore none had alerted the village.

12:00 p.m., one mile north of Crow’s Nest

The approach to the village prompts reorganizing the 7th regiment’s companies for combat.                  

Custer decision

Divide the regiment into 4 battalions (see “Custer’s Reorganization for Combat” sidebar). 

Assessment

Sub-dividing a cavalry regiment into battalion-sized maneuver elements was a common Plains warfare army tactic. Custer successfully fought this way at the Washita (1868) and Crook used similar tactics at the Rosebud (June 17). Notably, Col. Ranald MacKenzie, who usually fought his regiment as a single unit, used such “battalion” tactics in his most famous victory—Palo Duro Canyon, Texas vs. Comanches and Kiowas (1874), where MacKenzie’s stunning victory ended Comanche power forever and forced the tribes onto reservations.

2:30 p.m., 4 miles east of Little Bighorn River 

While Capt. Frederick Benteen’s battalion continues to scout for any Indians who might be south of the Little Bighorn valley, Custer’s and Maj. Marcus Reno’s battalions surprise a few Indians who immediately flee in panic toward the still-unseen main village. Scout/interpreter Fred Gerard shouts to Custer, “Here are your Indians! Running like devils!”  

Custer decision

Assuming these Indians certainly will alert the village, Custer immediately launches Reno’s 3-company battalion to directly attack it from the south while flanking the village by leading his own 5-company battalion to the high bluffs towering over the east bank of the river. Via messenger, Custer orders Benteen’s 3-company battalion to quickly rejoin the command. 

Assessment

Taking immediate action now that the village is certain to be warned likely would have been any frontier army commander’s decision. Still unaware of the village’s unprecedented size, attacking it unexpectedly from two directions (while summoning reinforcements—Benteen’s battalion) seemed tactically-feasible given what Custer—who had not yet seen the huge size of the village—then knew regarding Indian numbers. 

3:30 p.m., atop bluffs east of the river 

Seeing Reno’s attack begin to bog down and becoming hotly engaged by warriors in the valley and with Benteen’s battalion still missing, Custer faces his most crucial decision—ride directly to Reno’s aid—which likely would have ended with Custer, Reno and eventually Benteen and the Pack Train, in effect the entire regiment, besieged on Reno Hill—wait for Benteen, or continue his attack from another direction.

Custer decision

Maneuver against the village from another, unexpected direction by leading his battalion farther north where the Indian women and children were fleeing, with the possibility of—like at the Washita battle—capturing them as hostages to dissuade Indian attacks. 

Assessment

None of Custer’s command decisions—up to this point—had put the 7th on an irreversible course to disaster. Options that would have led to his gathering the entire regiment on defensible high ground still remained possible. However, his decision at about 3:30 p.m. to continue north finally sealed his and his regiment’s fate. Recent scholarship suggests Custer had still not seen the huge size of the entire village when he made this decision (he had likely viewed the valley from further east—probably Sharpshooter Ridge—and not from the better (higher) vantage point known as Weir Point). Lacking this vital intelligence, still thinking the opposing Indian force was only one-half to one-third its actual size and denied critical knowledge about the Indians not fleeing but standing and fighting from Crook’s Rosebud battle, Custer made his last—fatal—decision.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Brigadier General Bruce C. Clarke should have been on leave in Paris, enjoying a well-earned break from the nearly constant combat he’d been in since the D-Day breakout in late-July launched the Allied sweep across France led by the tank unit he then commanded—Combat Command A (CCA), 4th Armored Division. When that Allied “Blitzkrieg in Reverse” brought the European war’s front line to Germany’s doorstep that autumn, however, Clarke had been promoted to Brig. Gen. and given command of CCB, 7th Armored Division—a troubled outfit Clarke had quickly whipped into shape. 

But, instead of relaxing in Paris, at 2:30 p.m., Dec. 17, 1944, Clarke was on the top floor room of a school in St. Vith, Belgium, a town controlling a vitally important crossroads in the northern sector of the Ardennes Forest region of France, Belgium and Luxembourg. Standing alongside Maj. Gen. Alan W. Jones, the beleaguered and overwhelmed commander of U.S. 106th Infantry Division defending this sector of the Allied front line, the men used binoculars to observe swarms of German infantrymen backed by panzers approaching the town’s eastern outskirts.

These were lead elements of the massive German Ardennes Offensive—soon to be called The Battle of the Bulge. The vital St. Vith crossroads sat squarely in the path of the German main attack. After a few tense minutes, Jones turned to Clarke and said, “You take command, Clarke. I’ll give you all I have…I’ve lost a division quicker than any division commander in the U.S. Army.”

If the vital crossroads and transportation network at St. Vith was going to be held and the German advance delayed or stopped, it was up to Bruce Clarke do it.

A Dire Situation

Jones’ dire assessment of “losing his division” was unfortunately on target. When the German offensive began at 5:30 a.m., Dec.16, 1944, the 16,000 infantrymen of his untested 106th Division had held their assigned 22-mile-wide front-line sector—including the Schnee Eifel high ground east of St. Vith which included part of the German Siegfried Line (West Wall) defenses—for only four days.

Soon, two of Jones’ three infantry regiments (422nd and 423rd) were surrounded and cut off by the rapidly advancing Germans. The cut-off regiments surrendered Dec. 19 in the largest surrender of American troops in the European Theater.  Clarke’s situation when he took command of St. Vith’s defense looked equally dire. Ordered to the Ardennes early that morning, Clarke’s CCB had traveled 80 miles south over frozen roads, the last few miles pushing their way east through roads clogged with U.S. units fleeing west.

Only a portion of Clarke’s tankers and armored infantrymen had reached St. Vith by late afternoon Dec. 17. If you were Bruce C. Clarke facing that desperate situation, what would you do? Here are your most likely courses of action:

1. Fortress St. Vith 

With overwhelming German numbers of troops and tanks pouring off of the Schnee Eifel and threatening to engulf St. Vith as your unit barely trickles into the town, establishing a fortified perimeter which can be strengthened by more of your units as they slowly arrive could turn the town into an island of resistance, thereby blocking the Germans from capturing the crossroads. However, this would mean that your defenders would inevitably be surrounded and cut-off. Unbeknownst to you at the time, this is the exactly the defense the 101st Airborne would adopt at Bastogne, further south.

2. Mobile defense 

Divide the entire area around St. Vith into “defensive zones/sectors,” within which you would create teams of tanks-infantry to carry out an active mobile defense, trading space for time, when necessary, but if necessary, giving up terrain and fixed defensive positions in order to prolong your defense of the St. Vith overall area as long as possible.

By controlling the overall area, you would deny the Germans free, unfettered use of the vital crossroads, thereby delaying the enemy offensive’s main attack as long as possible.This is the tactic you successfully used in winning the September 1944 Battle of Arracourt, France, the largest American tank battle of the war prior to the Battle of the Bulge. 

3. Withdraw west 

With the inevitably impending surrender of the 106th’s two full infantry regiments on the Schnee Eifel, there seems no reasonable chance your much smaller Combat Command (brigade equivalent) can possibly stop the German main attack and deny them full use of the St. Vith road network.

Moreover, you know that the remainder of 7th Armored Division (CCA and CC Reserve) under your division commander, Brig. Gen. Robert Hasbrouck, is forming on the west bank of the Salm River obstacle. Therefore, the tactically prudent decision is for you to withdraw your CCB west behind the Salm River while you still can, adding your combat command’s strength to Brig. Gen. Hasbrouck’s gathering force for the presumed planned Allied counterattack. 

What is your decision, General Clarke?

Even before Allied intelligence soon confirmed it, Clarke’s combat experience convinced him this thrust toward St. Vith was the German main attack—it overlapped and paralleled the Ardennes’ “classic invasion route,” the Losheim Gap. Since the “impenetrability” of the rugged Ardennes region was primarily due to its primitive road network, whoever controlled the roads and crossroads controlled the Ardennes. Therefore, holding—or, more importantly, controlling the area surrounding—the few but vital road networks would delay, likely fatally, any rapid German advance through the Ardennes.

Moreover, Clarke’s stunning September 1944 victory at Arracourt in which his brilliant mobile defense of that area by his outnumbered combat command defeated two panzer brigades and major elements of two panzer divisions (Clarke lost 55 tanks/tank destroyers; Germans lost over 200 panzers/assault guns) gave him a virtual “blueprint for victory” at this similar combat scenario at St. Vith. Clarke wisely chose Option 2, Mobile Defense.

Outcome

From Dec. 17 through Dec. 23, Clarke’s CCB, 7th Armored Division conducted a brilliant mobile defense of St. Vith and the surrounding area, delaying Gen. Hasso von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army for a critical week during the Battle of the Bulge. Although Clarke relinquished the town of St. Vith on Dec. 21, his unit controlled the overall area until Dec. 23 when it was ordered to withdraw behind the Salm River. Historian Russell Weigley judged that “more than any other of the many defensive stands in the Ardennes…it was the battle of St. Vith that bought the time required by Allied generalship to recapture control of the [Bulge] battle.” 

Although the heroic Siege of Bastogne (Dec. 20-26, 1944) is the most remembered of the Battle of the Bulge engagements, the 101st paratroopers successfully defended the besieged town against the Germans’ supporting attack; Clarke’s defense of St. Vith blunted and fatally delayed the enemy main attack. Later, Clarke summed up what it took to persevere and win at St. Vith: “The job of a commander in a battle when attacked by an overwhelming force is to prevent the confusion from becoming disorganized, and to eliminate command and staff inertia so that the reaction to crises can be swift and effective.”

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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In February 1943 the Waffen-SS came to Yefremovka, Ukraine, a tiny, ethnic Cossack village west of Kharkov in the USSR’s Ukrainian SSR. Specifically, the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) descended upon the unprotected and totally defenseless village—then a Soviet collective farm. When the LSSAH left hours later, nearly 1,000 old men, women and children from that village and hundreds of others rounded up from surrounding hamlets had been brutally murdered, including more than 100 civilians who had been herded into Yefremovka’s small local Orthodox church.

Trapped inside the church, they were horrifically and mercilessly burned to death. Two of the few survivors of this massacre—a mother (my wife’s grandmother) and her 8-year-old daughter (my future mother-in-law)—survived only because a Wehrmacht (German Army, not SS) transport driver warned them to hide in an underground root cellar while—risking his own life had his humanitarian act been discovered—he deliberately parked his truck over the cellar entrance to conceal them during the massacre. This disgusting mass slaughter was exactly the manner in which Hitler’s vaunted Waffen-SS consistently fought World War II.

Killers, Not Soldiers

From the very beginning of the war, these cold-blooded killers, masquerading as soldiers in uniform, murdered their way through combat on the war’s Eastern and Western fronts, starting with the May 28, 1940 Wormhoudt Massacre in France during which the LSSAH forced 87 British and French POWs—captured while serving as rearguard to the heroic Dunkirk evacuation—into a barn, then tossed hand grenades inside slaughtering 81 and wounding 6 of the helpless POWs. Countless other examples of Waffen-SS war crimes abound throughout the whole war.

Indeed, shortly after the Normandy invasion, from June 7–17, 1944, the 12th SS Panzer Division (Hitlerjugend) murdered 158 Canadian POWs. The Waffen-SS’s most notorious war crime atrocity was the infamous Dec. 17, 1944 “Malmedy Massacre” at Baugnez Crossroads, Belgium where LSSAH’s Kampfgruppe Peiper brutally executed 84 unarmed POWs, primarily G.I.s of the 7th US Armored Division’s 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion.

A few US soldiers survived and escaped the slaughter. When I interviewed one of the massacre’s several survivors four decades later, he somewhat ashamedly, but understandably admitted, “Even today, I don’t like Germans very much.”

The same day as the Malmedy Massacre, Hitler’s Waffen-SS proved to be “equal opportunity murderers” with another massacre of U.S. POWs not far away. The LSSAH perpetrated the “Wereth Massacre,” the beating, torture and execution of 11 Black soldiers in two batteries of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion near Wereth, Belgium.

These horrific atrocities are only some examples of the Waffen-SS’s numerous war crimes, which happened throughout the duration of the war from start to finish—especially on the Eastern Front where their fanatical embrace of Hitler’s racial lunacy classified “Slavs” and Jews as “subhumans” who the Waffen-SS routinely murdered.

Misguided “Fan Base”

Yet perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the Waffen-SS’s story is that, starting a few decades after World War II, an admiring, fawning “Waffen-SS fan base” has emerged, mainly amongst younger military history buffs in the U.S. and the UK who celebrate the widely-acknowledged tactical/operational expertise and genuine military prowess of the Waffen-SS, but who stubbornly ignore the disgusting record of war crimes of these “killers in uniform”.

Having no “skin in the game” as the World War II generation did, these Waffen-SS “fans” admire them chiefly because the Waffen-SS had “cool” camouflage uniforms and innovative tanks and small-arms weapons. Sad and sorry reasons to celebrate and admire war criminals.

Waffen-SS vs. Soviet INfantry

UK-based author Chris McNab’s mission in writing another meticulously-researched, expertly-written, and highly informative book in Osprey Publishing’s excellent “Combat” series is not to detail the endless examples of the homicidal Waffen-SS’s countless war crimes—his job in this dual examination and insightful analysis of two opposing combat formations is to compare and contrast, within the context of the Rostov-on-Don and Kharkov battles of 1942–43, the composition, arms, equipment/weapons/tactics, training and combat records of both opponents, and to present and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each combatant formation.

As usual, McNab—a regular author for MHQ—does an outstanding job in accomplishing that mission in only
80 pages.

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by Chris McNab, Osprey Publishing, 2023

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Of course, McNab brings out the contrasting ideological motivations and inspirations of the elite Waffen-SS units and the standard Soviet rifleman—the USSR’s version of what in the U.S. could be called the typical “G.I.”—particularly pointing out that while each member of the Waffen-SS swore an oath to Adolf Hitler personally, his Red Army counterpart pledged to “my last breath to be faithful to the people, to the Soviet Motherland, and the Workers-Peasants’ Government [aka The Soviet Union].”

Waffen-SS fighters fought for Hitler, waging a racially fueled war of aggression and conquest, while Red Army soldiers fought to defend their homeland against a ruthless enemy invader murdering his way across their nation.

How the Tables Turned

McNab’s expert analysis clearly reveals that in the beginning of the Eastern Front clash between the two combatants the more tactically skilled and better-trained, ideologically-motivated Waffen-SS volunteers held the early advantage over their mostly conscripted Soviet riflemen opponents defending their country, families and homes.

However as the war dragged on, Red Army soldiers and, importantly, their commanders and leaders at all levels—most of them fortunate survivors of Stalin’s disastrous Red Army purge of 1936–1941 but inadequately prepared for warfare in June 1941—learned valuable lessons in fighting, commandership and the tactical-operational art.

Arguably, the eventual Red Army victory in May 1945 over Hitler’s legions as the Soviets snuffed out the last vestiges of Nazi resistance in the rubble of Hitler’s capital, Berlin, might be attributed to a triumph of Soviet “mass” (overwhelming numbers of troops and weapons) over a more skilled but greatly outnumbered German opponent—as Stalin famously said, “Quantity [mass] has a quality all its own.”

Yet Red Army commanders had learned via blood and sacrifice from 1941–1945 how to fight and above all how to win against Hitler’s best. The Waffen-SS, clearly, were ruthless killers, but they inarguably were excellent teachers.

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It’s easy to take the World War II Allied victory on D-Day for granted somewhat—the concept of an invincible wave of Allied soldiers trampling over desperate troops of defending Germans is steadily becoming embedded in popular history. We are now so far removed from those events that victory may seem to us to have been a foregone conclusion. But can we truly appreciate the human cost of that victory—the horrors that Allied troops had to overcome to secure those beaches, the savagery of the battle against strong and tenacious defenders, and the staggering loss of life that ensued?

Those are the questions that Ernie Pyle, speaking to us from the annals of history, seems to ask us in this heartrending account of his impressions of the D-Day invasion. He described the following scenes because, he wrote, “I want you to know so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.” As those who fought in World War II pass on, let us take his words to heart. We can reflect on what Allied soldiers fought and died for as we envision the grim reality he describes below. 

Who Was Ernie Pyle?

World War II Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, Ernie Pyle (1900-1945), was America’s most famous combat reporter of the war, his columns carried in 700 daily and weekly newspapers across the U.S. Universally beloved by the G.I.s whose stories he faithfully reported to the folks back home, Pyle lived amongst them, sharing their meager rations, dodging enemy bullets and shellfire, and enduring the troops’ collective misery. 

After a stint in London covering the Battle of Britain in 1940, Pyle returned to the European Theater in 1942 as a Scripps-Howard newspaper correspondent when the Allies invaded North Africa. He accompanied G.I.s as they fought to capture Sicily in 1943 and then slogged with them up the rugged terrain in Italy in 1944. Pyle’s most famous column, written during the Italian campaign, is “This One is Captain Waskow,” a poignant account published Jan. 10, 1944 of infantrymen’s reactions to the Dec. 14, 1943 death of their much-admired company commander, Capt. Henry T. Waskow, during the Battle of San Pietro. In April 1944, Pyle left Italy for England as one of 28 war correspondents to accompany American forces in the Normandy invasion. In January 1945, Pyle went to the Pacific Theater to report the war against Japan that America’s soldiers, sailors and Marines had been fighting since December 1941. By then, Pyle was on the verge of being emotionally exhausted from the strain of combat but persevered, covering the invasion of Okinawa. On April 18, 1945, while accompanying the Army infantrymen of the 305th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division as they cleared the tiny island of Ie Shima (today Iejima) just off the northwestern coast of Okinawa, the jeep carrying Pyle came under Japanese machine gun fire. After taking cover in a ditch, Pyle raised his head slightly as another burst of Japanese fire raked the road. Ernie was hit in the left temple, dying instantly. As a tribute to Pyle, the division’s soldiers erected a monument at the spot which reads: “At this spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle.” He was eventually buried in Hawaii’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu. 

A Walk Across Omaha Beach

Ten months before his death on Ie Shima, however, on the night of June 5-6, 1944, Pyle crossed the English Channel amidst the vast Allied Normandy Invasion fleet, arriving off Omaha Beach on D-Day. Due to the intense struggle to capture the beachhead, Pyle and his fellow war correspondents had to wait offshore until permitted to land on Omaha on June 7, 1944—D-Day plus 1. His account here of what he saw there is taken from his 1944 book, Brave Men. 

While you might think that Pyle’s late arrival on Omaha Beach was a drawback, it resulted in one of the most powerful passages describing World War II. Pyle tells the story of the thunderous clash of nations that occurred on D-Day by revealing objects that he saw on the beach—enemy obstacles and fortifications, equipment and soldiers’ personal belongings.

Even after all these years, Pyle’s writing allows us to hear the sheer silence of Omaha Beach. We can feel the magnitude of devastation—and witness the quiet heartbreak of many thousands of people embodied in the personal effects of men whose lives were extinguished as they came ashore. 

“And Yet We Got On…”

Owing to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn’t arrive on the beachhead until the morning after D-Day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore…After it was over it seemed to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all…

I want to tell you what the opening of the Second Front in one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you. Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves.

The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions they had been working on for months… They could shoot parallel with the shore and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire. Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach… 

Our only exits from the beach were several swales or valleys… The Germans made the most of those funnellike traps, sowing them with buried mines… All this was on the shore. But our men had to go through a maze nearly as deadly before they even got ashore. Underwater obstacles were terrific. Under the water the Germans had whole fields of evil devices to catch our boats. Several days after the landing we had cleared only channels through them and still could not approach the whole length of the beach with our ships…

The Germans had masses of great six-pronged spiders—made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high—just beneath the surface of the water, for our landing craft to run into. They had huge logs buried in the sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just below the water. Attached to the logs were mines. In addition to these obstacles, they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in the checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand…And yet we got on.

I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France. It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead…

I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. I walked slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite. The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it… For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that were not visible, for they were at the bottom of the water—swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost. There were trucks tipped half over and swamped, partly sunken barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and the small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.

The Things They Left In the Sand

On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out… In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away life belts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved. In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges… On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it. We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of the sum total. 

Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.

But there was another and more human litter. It extended in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach. This was the strewn personal gear, gear that would never be needed again by those who fought and died to give us our entrance into Europe.

There in a jumbled row for mile on mile were soldiers’ packs. There were socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, hand grenades. There were the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out—one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.

There were toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. There were pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes…There were torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits, and jumbled heaps of life belts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it down again. 

Soldiers carry strange things ashore with them… The most ironic piece of equipment marking our beach—this beach first of despair, then of victory—was a tennis racket that some soldier had brought along. It lay lonesomely on the sand, clamped in a press, not a string broken. 

Two of the most dominant items in the beach refuse were cigarettes and writing paper. Each soldier was issued a carton of cigarettes just before he started. That day those cartons by the thousand, water-soaked and spilled out, marked the line of our first savage blow.

From Brave Men by Ernie Pyle, published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 1943, 1944 by Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance. Copyright © 1944 by Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Copyright renewed 1972 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.”

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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“Varus! Give me back my legions!” shouted the enraged Roman Emperor Augustus according to ancient Roman historian Suetonius in The Twelve Caesars.

Augustus was raging against his losing commander in one of Rome’s greatest military defeats—the disastrous Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, c. September 9 CE. Publius Quinctilius Varus, governor of Rome’s Germania province (modern-day northwestern Germany) since 6 CE, known for favoring mass crucifixion as his preferred “crowd control” method, was tricked into leading three Roman legions (XVII, XVIII and XIX) plus six cohorts of Germanic tribesmen auxiliary troops and three cavalry squadrons—about 20,000 soldiers—into a fatal, days-long “ambush” by tens of thousands of Germanic warriors.

Formed primarily of four of the era’s 50 Germanic tribes (Cherusci, Bructeri, Marsi and Chatti), the trap was cleverly planned and orchestrated by a turncoat, Arminius (c. 17 BCE – 21 CE), a Cherusci tribesman prince and adopted Roman citizen. Varus’ legionaries, traveling in a thin column stretching from nine to 12 miles long, were encumbered by thousands of civilian camp followers who sloshed alongside them through the mud of the rain-soaked, dense forest bordered by swamps (near today’s Osnabrück, between the Ems and the Lippe Rivers). 

The ambush struck Varus’ column when it was most vulnerable. The weather, terrain and the tribesmen’s fortified ambush positions robbed the three Roman legions of their usual keys to battlefield success: mobility, flexibility, and tactical cohesion. The Germanic warriors’ swords, long lances, axes and javelins annihilated Varus’ entire command within three days.

While a few Romans fled or escaped capture, all 20,000 were killed, ritually executed after capture, or enslaved. Senior Roman officers captured alive were singled out for gruesome tortures before execution. Many Roman commanders—notably Varus himself—chose suicide. The strategic result of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest was that it permanently ended Rome’s northeastward expansion at the Rhine-Danube River barrier, altering Europe’s future development. British historian and military theorist J.F.C. Fuller wrote that, had the battle not occurred and failed to stop Rome’s expansion [eastward to the Elbe River, possibly beyond]: “The whole course of our history would have been different…There would have been no Franco-German problem…no Charlemagne, no Napoleon, no Kaiser William II, and no Hitler.” After losing Varus and his legions, Roman leaders had no intention of expending further efforts in blood and treasure trying to expand northern European dominions east of the Rhine.

But the Romans would have their revenge.

This excerpt from The Annals of Tacitus, written by famed Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus and translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb in 1906, recounts what happened when Germanicus Julius Caesar (Emperor Tiberius’ adopted son) marched into Germany to avenge the honor of the empire.

The Roman soldiers make a gruesome discovery—the remains of Varus and his legions. At a time when forensics were nonexistent, we witness the Romans trying to piece together their own past by using eyewitnesses and examining the terrain. Because they lacked the technology we now benefit from, the Romans were unable to identify skeletal remains. In a particularly moving passage, Tacitus describes how this lack of closure added to their sense of agony—and also fueled their desire for retribution. 

Ironically, while seeking revenge, veteran Roman commander Aulus Caecina Severus nearly falls prey to the same fate as Varus. In a truly chilling passage, the Germans stalk Caecina through the woods near the Rhine as he suffers from gruesome nightmares of the slain Varus trying to pull him into a swamp, and his men began to lose their nerve.

Arminius—the executioner of Varus and his legions—is circling them and seems to take sadistic pleasure in waiting for the dark forest to take its psychological toll on the Romans before moving in for the kill. But Caecina—a veteran of 40 campaigns—isn’t going down so easily, and the Romans’ desperation to make it home alive proves stronger than their fear. 

Read Tacitus’ account of what happened below.

Finding Varus’ Legions

Lucius Stertinius [Germanicus’ legate, a high-ranking Roman general] was dispatched by Germanicus with a flying column [in 15 CE] and routed the Bructeri [rebellious Germanic tribe in northwestern Roman Germania] as they were burning their possessions, found the eagle [standard] of the XIX legion which had been lost [along with XVII and XVIII Legions] with Varus.

The troops were then marched to the furthest frontier of the Bructeri, and all the country between the rivers Amisia [Ems River, emptying into the North Sea] and Luppia [Lippe River, a Rhine tributary] was ravaged, not far from the forest of Teutoburgium [Germany’s Teutoburg Forest], where the remains of Varus and his legions were said to lie unburied.

Germanicus upon this was seized with an eager longing to pay the last honor to those soldiers and their general, while the whole army present was moved to compassion by the thought of their kinsfolk and friends, and, indeed of the calamities of wars and the lot of mankind.

Having sent on Caecina [Aulus Caecina Severus, another of Germanicus’ legates] in advance to reconnoiter the obscure forest passes, and to raise bridges and causeways over the watery swamps and treacherous plains, they visited the mournful scenes, with their horrible sights and associations.

Varus’ first camp with its wide circumference and the measurement of its central space clearly indicated the handiwork of three legions. Further on, the partially fallen rampart and the shallow fosse [encircling moat] suggested the inference that it was a shattered remnant of the army which had there taken up a position.

In Grief and anger

In the center of the field were the whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Near, lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads, prominently nailed to the trunks of trees. In the adjacent groves were the barbarous altars, on which they had immolated tribunes [military rank below legate and above centurion] and first-rank centurions [commanders of 80 and up to several hundred legionaries].

Some survivors of the disaster who had escaped from the battle or from captivity described how this was the spot where the officers fell, how yonder the eagles were captured, where Varus was pierced by his first wound, where too by the stroke of his own ill-starred hand he found for himself death [i.e., committed suicide]. They pointed out too the raised ground from which Arminius had harangued his army, the number of gibbets [execution gallows] for the captives, the pits for the living, and how in his exultation he insulted the standards and the eagles.

And so the Roman army now on the spot, six years after the [9 CE] disaster, in grief and anger, began to bury the bones of three legions, not a soldier knowing whether he was interring the relics of a relative or a stranger, but looking on all as kinsfolk and of their own blood, while their wrath rose higher than ever against the foe.

In raising the barrow [burial mound] Caesar [i.e., Germanicus Julius Caesar] laid the first sod, rendering thus a most welcome honor to the dead, and sharing also in the sorrow of those present…

The barbarians Return

Soon afterwards Germanicus led back his army to the Amisia, taking his legions by the fleet [ship transport on the Ems River], as he had brought them up. Part of the cavalry was ordered to make for the Rhine along the seacoast. Caecina, who commanded a division of his own, was advised…to pass Long Bridges [where extended causeways and bridges over otherwise impassable terrain existed] with all possible speed. This was a narrow road amid vast swamps…Around were woods on a gradual slope, which Arminius now completely occupied, as soon by a short route and a quick march he had outstripped [Roman] troops heavily laden with baggage and arms…

The barbarians attempted to break through the outposts and to throw themselves on the engineering parties, which they harassed, pacing around them and continually charging them. There was a confused din from the men at work and the combatants.

Everything alike was unfavorable to the Romans, the place with its deep swamps, insecure to the foot and slippery as one advanced, limbs burdened with coats of mail, and the impossibility of aiming their javelins amid the water. The Cherusci [another rebellious tribe], on the other hand, were familiar with fighting in fens [wetlands]; they had huge frames, and lances long enough to inflict wounds even at a distance.

Savage shouts and flickering fires

Night at last released the legions, which were now wavering, from a disastrous engagement. The Germans whom success rendered unwearied, without even then taking any rest, turned all the streams which rose from the slopes of the surrounding hills into the lands beneath [low-lying areas]. The ground being thus flooded and the completed portion of our works submerged, the soldiers’ labor was doubled…

This was Caecina’s 40th campaign as a subordinate or a commander, and with such experience of success and peril, he was perfectly fearless. As he thought over future possibilities, he could devise no plan but to keep the enemy within the woods, till the wounded and the more encumbered troops were in advance…

It was a restless night for different reasons, the barbarians in their festivity filling the valleys under the hills and echoing glens with merry song or savage shouts, while in the Roman camp were flickering fires, broken exclamations, and the men lay scattered along the entrenchments or wandered from tent to tent, wakeful rather than watchful. 

A ghostly Nightmare

A ghastly dream appalled the general [Caecina]. He seemed to see Quinctilius Varus, covered with blood, rising out of the swamps, and to hear him, as it were, calling to him, but he did not, as he imagined, obey the call; he even repelled his hand, as he [Varus’ apparition] stretched it out to him. 

At daybreak the legions, posted on the wings, from panic or perversity, deserted their position and hastily occupied a plain behind the morass. Yet Arminius, though free to attack, did not at the moment rush out on them. But when the baggage was clogged in the mud and in the fosses, the soldiers around it in disorder, the array of standards in confusion, everyone in selfish haste and all ears deaf to the word of command, he ordered the Germans to charge, exclaiming again and again, “Behold a Varus and legions once more entangled in Varus’ fate.”

As he spoke, he cut through the column with some picked men, inflicting wounds chiefly on the horses. Staggering in their blood on the slippery marsh, they shook off their riders…trampling on the fallen. The struggle was hottest around the eagles, which could neither be carried in the face of the storm of missiles, nor planted in the miry soil.

Caecina, while he was keeping up the battle, fell from his horse, which was pierced under him, and was being hemmed in, when the first legion threw itself in the way. The greed of the foe helped him, for they left the slaughter to secure the spoil, and the legions, towards evening, struggled onto open and firm ground. 

A General’s Plea to stop deserters

Nor did this end their miseries. Entrenchments had to be thrown up, materials sought for earthworks, while the army had lost to a great extent their implements for digging earth and cutting turf. There were no tents for the rank and file, no comforts for the wounded. As they shared their food, soiled by mire or blood, they bewailed the darkness with its awful omen, and the one day which yet remained to so many thousand men.

It chanced that a horse, which had broken its halter and wandered wildly in fright at the uproar, overthrew some men against whom it dashed. Thence arose such a panic from the belief that the Germans had burst into the camp that all rushed to the gates…

Caecina, having ascertained that the alarm was groundless, yet being unable to stop or stay the soldiers by authority or entreaties or even by force, threw himself to the earth in the gateway, and at last an appeal to their pity, as they would have to pass over the body of their commander, closed the way. At the same moment the tribunes and centurions convinced them that it was a false alarm. 

Having then assembled them at his headquarters, and ordered them to hear his words in silence, he [Caecina] reminded them of the urgency of the crisis. Their safety, he said, lay in their arms, which they must however use with discretion, and they must remain within the entrenchments till the enemy approached closer, in the hope of storming them; then there must be a general sortie; by that sortie the Rhine might be reached.

Whereas if they fled, more forests, deeper swamps, and a savage foe awaited them, but if they were victorious, glory and renown would be theirs. He dwelt on all that was dear to them at home, all that testified to their honor in the camp, without any allusion to disaster…

Fury And the Light of Day

There was as much restlessness in the German host with its hopes, its eager longings, and the conflicting opinions of its chiefs. Arminius advised that they should allow the Romans to quit their position and, when they had quitted it, again surprise them in swampy and intricate ground. Inguiomerus [a Cherusci leader and Arminius’ uncle], with fiercer counsels, heartily welcome to the barbarians, was for beleaguering the entrenchments in armed array, as to storm them would, he said, be easy, and there would be more prisoners and the booty unspoilt.

So at daybreak they trampled in the fosses, flung hurdles [logs or branches to help cross the moats] into them, seized the upper part of the breastwork, where the troops were thinly distributed and seemingly paralyzed by fear. When they were fairly within the fortifications, the signal was given to the [Roman] cohorts [units composed of multiple 80-man centuries], and the horns and trumpets sounded. Instantly with a shout and sudden rush, our men threw themselves on the German rear, with taunts, that here were no woods or swamps, but that they were on equal ground, with equal chances. 

The sound of trumpets, the gleam of arms, which were so unexpected, burst with all the greater effect on the enemy, thinking only, as they were, of the easy destruction of a few half-armed men, and they were struck down, as unprepared for a reverse as they had been elated with success.

Arminius and Inguiomerus fled from the battle, the first unhurt [Arminius was assassinated six years later by rival tribal leaders], the other severely wounded. Their followers were slaughtered as long as our fury and the light of day lasted. It was not till night that the legions returned, and though more wounds and the same want of provisions distressed them, yet they found strength, healing, sustenance, everything indeed, in their victory.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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From 1854 to 1860, America’s newspaper headlines screamed bloody murder. Sensationalist headlines read: “Bleeding Kansas!” “Sack of Lawrence!” “Pottawatomie Massacre!” “Battle of Osawatomie!” “Marais De Cygnes Massacre!” “Much Blood Spilt!” “Murder and Cold-Blooded Assassination!” Purportedly they were relaying news of an incredibly bloody and deadly clash of anti- and pro-slavery forces fought along the Kansas-Missouri border. 

No single event in the nation’s drift toward Southern secession and the armed conflict that would inevitably follow paved the road to war more than the hyped-up strife that took place for six years from 1854-1860 in eastern Kansas and western Missouri along the border between the state and the new territory.

A Media Myth?

Dramatic headlines would deepen the nation’s rapidly developing North-South rift, dividing those who fervently opposed further extension of what they realized was the country’s “original sin”—the curse of slavery—and those who stubbornly supported maintaining African Americans in chattel bondage as both constitutionally legal and essential to clinging to their wealth, livelihood and way of life. No rational person today can argue against the fact that slavery was an evil that had to be eradicated from the United States, nor can anyone deny that pro-slavery forces were fighting on the wrong side of history. The duty of historians is to investigate, determine the historical facts and accurately report those facts—in particular, historians must not perpetuate myths. 

The overblown headlines, created and promoted by partisan newspaper reporting on both sides, misrepresented what was actually happening west of the Mississippi River along Kansas territory’s eastern border. Newspapers championing both sides of the deeply-entwined “slavery-states’ rights” issue filled their papers with fabricated “atrocities” and overly-sanguine accounts of “pitched battles” in which casualties were actually either miniscule in number or often completely nonexistent.

This apparently horrific partisan struggle pushed the nation into its bloodiest war more than any pre-Civil War conflict, but was simply a fabrication created by the burgeoning national newspaper industry and capitalized upon by the ambitious new Republican political party to help it rally a nationwide electorate to win the White House in the 1860 U.S. presidential election.

The historical irony of so-called “Bleeding Kansas” is that over 10 times more Americans were murdered in the streets of San Francisco, California, in one year—1855—than were ever killed for their political beliefs during the 1854-1860 Border War. Simply put, “Bleeding Kansas” is an easily-disprovable albeit long-enduring myth. 

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act was a patched-together compromise hammered out by Illinois Democrat Senator Stephen A. Douglas and then-President Franklin Pierce, a “northern Democrat” opposed to Abolitionism but willing to compromise to dampen northern and southern firebrands. The act ostensibly promoted construction of a transcontinental railroad and the accompanying economic benefit of opening millions of acres of land to new settlement.

However, it included the “popular sovereignty” concept (introduced in the 1850 Compromise but as yet untested), permitting Kansas and Nebraska territory settlers to decide by popular vote whether they would enter the Union as “free” or “slave” states. Well-meaning—but not well-considered—“popular sovereignty” essentially made obsolete previous Congressional attempts (1820 Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850) to alleviate rising North-South sectional tensions regarding slavery’s spread. 

In hindsight, the 1854 act inevitably created the political conditions in Kansas territory that, predictably, devolved into violence as pro- and anti-slavery factions clashed to influence the “popular sovereignty” vote’s outcome regarding statehood. Although initially assumed that Nebraska would become a “free state” and Kansas would enter as a “slave” state, once the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed all bets were off. “Popular sovereignty” made Kansas territory a free-for-all for anti- and pro-slavery factions. Henceforth, whichever side of the slavery question wanted to prevail in Kansas would have to fight for it.

Inevitably, violence erupted along the Kansas-Missouri border in 1854, and nationwide newspapers consciously and deliberately propelled what were in fact relatively minor border clashes into a major, national political issue. The term “Bleeding Kansas” itself originally appeared in 1856 in abolitionist editor Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to falsely describe the struggle as being one of “innocent” Free-state settlers unjustly harassed by evil pro-slavery Missouri “Bushwhackers,” thereby deliberately stoking the fires of North-South sectional passions.

Newspapers Weigh In

Yet, the truth is that despite the amplified claims of partisan newspaper editors, neither side in the Border War held a monopoly on ruthlessness and violence in pursuit of their opposing political causes.  

Between 1840 and 1860, printed newspapers—daily, weekly, quarterly and periodically—underwent an explosion of overall numbers and the amount of copies printed annually. While the U.S. population then rose 180%, newspaper numbers increased 250% with total annual printed copies expanding nearly 500%. 

Propelling this phenomenon were ground-breaking (labor-saving and cost-cutting) advances in printing technology. Truly “industrial scale” printing resulted from the Fourdrinier paper-making machine (U.S. introduction in 1827), which created continuous rolled paper in massive quantities and the steam-powered, continuous-feed, rotary printing press (invented in 1843 by American Richard M. Hoe).

No longer limited by laboriously printing single sheets, countless copies of a page could be produced daily. By the 1850s, illustrations were prominently featured, enhancing visual appeal, while increased staffing (typically, 1-2 in the 1820-30s; 30 in the 1840s; and 100 by the 1850s in larger papers) made it possible to fill more pages with more stories of national, regional and local interest. Advances in railroad transportation sped distribution. Improved communications (telegraph) meant widespread “breaking news.” The resulting “media blitz” was a newspaper revolution.

That era’s most influential newspaperman, New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley (editor from 1841-72), explained in 1851 how the phenomenon’s nationwide spread mirrored the country’s growth: “[T]he general rule…was for each town to have a newspaper, and, in the free states, each county of 20,000 or more usually had two papers—one for each [political] party. A county of 50,000 usually had five journals…and when a town reached 15,000 inhabitants…it usually had a daily paper and at 20,000 it had two.” 

Citizens today would expect media sources to strive diligently to present the news as straightforward facts and allow the public to draw its own conclusions. However, in the mid-19th century, political partisanship in newspapers was the norm, not the exception. The “Bleeding Kansas” myth resulted from unashamedly biased newspaper reporting—each paper aggressively politically partisan and firmly committed to championing its favored side in that conflict. Editors blatantly chose sides, some aligning with the new, anti-slavery Republican Party, while others backed the then pro-slavery Democratic Party. Partisan editors graphically described the “Border War” as a war of annihilation waged by pro- and anti-slavery factions to determine Kansas territory’s future statehood status as a “free” or “slave” state. 

Exaggerated Casualties

Readers nationwide became morbidly mesmerized by the “terrible casualties” reported and impatiently stood by to purchase “hot off the press” papers recounting the latest atrocities. Right was irrevocably on the side the competing newspaper editors supported, while the opposing side was accused of incredible acts of violence. 

These attention-getting headlines sent circulation soaring. The atrocities described were either exaggerated or fabricated to stoke the flames of political hatred and animosity. This “spin,” in contemporary parlance, favored a particular cause or political party. A century-and-a-half ago, political parties and their media allies ignored the truth and outrageously manipulated facts.

Editors profited by exaggerating the trans-Mississippi border conflict. Both sides developed derogatory names for each other; anti-slavery newspapers condemned pro-slavery forces—primarily from Missouri—as “Border Ruffians,” “Bushwhackers” and “Pukes,” while the Kansas partisans were known as “Redlegs” and “Jayhawkers.” 

Created in 1854, the new Republican Party—formed of former Whigs, Free Staters and anti-slavery activists—finished a surprising second in 1856 with its first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont. In the 1860 presidential election, the party made maximum advantage of the headline-gathering Border War to expand its mainly regional electorate into a party with widespread national appeal. The new political party was eager to capitalize on the Border War to create a national voter base to promote the party’s 1860 presidential ambitions. 

When the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed in 1854, 15 states (and three territories west of the Mississippi) still permitted slavery, while the abominable practice was illegal in 17 states and five territories.

With the handwriting on the wall regarding slavery’s ultimate survival, Southern states’ slave power block was desperate that Kansas become a slave state. Correspondingly, Northern anti-slavery forces, led by committed Abolitionists and anti-slavery activists, were equally determined that Kansas become free.

A Rush On Kansas

Frantically, residents of Kansas territory’s neighboring slave state, Missouri, fearful that a “free state” Kansas on its western border, combined with the established free states of Illinois on its eastern border and Iowa on its northern border, would surround the border slave state on three sides—becoming a runaway slave magnet—rushed “settlers” across Missouri’s western border into contiguous eastern Kansas to “vote-pack” Kansas into the Union as a slave state. Although the statewide population of Missouri was then split between pro- and anti-slavery adherents, the pro-slavery faction firmly held state power in Missouri’s capital, Jefferson City.

Adamantly opposed to slavery, the Boston-based Abolitionist, New England Emigrant Aid Company—generously financed by wealthy northeastern businessmen such as Eli Thayer, Alexander H. Bullock and Edward Everett Hale—quickly organized an anti-slavery settler movement. The Emigrant Aid Company funded the settlement of eastern Kansas, rapidly packing it with heavily recruited, anti-slavery settlers, and well-armed them with numerous Sharps .52-cal breech-loading rifles.

Both sides therefore—not just pro-slavery Missourians as is often claimed today—raced to populate Kansas territory with their ideological followers. Both sides unconscionably “packed” Kansas with adherents who obediently “stuffed” ballot boxes with votes to control the election. Anti- and pro-slavery adherents were equally guilty of vote tampering, voter intimidation, ballot-box stuffing and election malfeasance. 

The stage was thus set for a bitter fight for Kansas’ statehood status: two well-armed opposing factions holding unwavering political positions faced off in what, according to the era’s terminology, was dubbed a “War to the Knife, and the Knife to the Hilt!” Yet the truth of the 1854-1860 “Bleeding Kansas” Border War is much different than what we accept today as “conventional wisdom.” 

How Bloody was the Struggle?

Conventional wisdom only holds up until someone actually does the math. That someone is historian Dale Watts in his ground-breaking article “How Bloody Was Bleeding Kansas?” published in the Summer 1995 editionof Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains. Watts’ exhaustively-researched article discovered “Bleeding Kansas” produced only a small fraction of the politically-motivated deaths of anti- and pro-slavery forces both sides widely claimed. 

Using historical documents and meticulously examining 1854-1860 death records, Watts determined which deaths were “political killings” (i.e., murders by a pro- or anti-slavery partisan because of the victim’s opposing political stance) or due to apolitical motivations (e.g., land disputes, personal animosity, or common criminality, robbery or homicides). Contemporary accounts nearly always overestimated the conflict’s deaths.

For example, the Hoogland Claims Commission 1859 report outlandishly claimed “the number of lives sacrificed in Kansas during [1854-1855] probably exceeded rather than fell short of two hundred.” However, Watts’s research verified the casualty record generally confirmed by Robert W. Richmond’s 1974 conclusion that “approximately fifty persons died violently [for political reasons] during [Kansas’] territorial period [1854-1860].” 

Watts’s independent research revealed that of 157 documented violent deaths from 1854-1860 in Kansas territory, only 56 were attributed to the Kansas-Missouri political struggle. For historical comparison, Watts noted that in the contemporary “gold rush-era” California alone, a total of 583 people died violently in 1855, and at least 1,200 people were murdered in San Francisco between 1850 and 1853. This violent death comparison makes Kansas Territory seem almost calm given its small number of political killings recorded during the much-hyped Border War.

Single-digit Casualties 

Significantly, Watts shows that of those 56 murders, 30 were “pro-slavery” advocates, including the only woman slain, Sarah Carver, whose husband merely professed to be pro-slavery while there were 24 anti-slavery proponents killed. One victim was an ostensibly neutral U.S. Army soldier while one was an officer whom both sides tried to claim. Moreover, some allegedly “bloody battles” (called “wars” and “massacres” at the time) were essentially bloodless or resulted in single-digit casualties. For example, in the June 1856 “Battle” of Black Jack not one person was killed. 

No “Bleeding Kansas” engagement produced more than five deaths. Anti-slavery radical John Brown and his sons killed five allegedly pro-slavery settlers during his notorious “Pottawatomie Massacre” from May 24-25, 1856 along Pottawatomie Creek. The attackers used broadswords to hack their neighbors to death in retaliation for the nearly bloodless “sack” of Lawrence three days prior. 

Even the inaptly-named May 21, 1856 “Sack of Lawrence” produced only two casualties—one on each side. This incident is not to be confused with the later Lawrence Massacre during the Civil War in August 1863 by Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill’s raid that killed over 160, mostly civilians. The 1856 incident essentially consisted of Douglas County Sheriff Samuel J. Jones leading a force of about 800 citizens to Lawrence to enforce a legal warrant, and the damage to property consisted of the razing of the Free State Hotel (then used as headquarters of Kansas’ anti-slavery forces) along with the residence of anti-slavery firebrand, Massachusetts-born Charles L. Robinson who was elected Kansas’ first state governor in 1861 and in 1862 became the first U.S. state governor—and only Kansas governor—to be impeached. A single pro-slavery man was killed by being crushed in a collapsing building and a single anti-slavery man suffered a non-fatal injury. 

Watts’s research proves conclusively that “Bleeding Kansas” was a myth that grew from fabrications in biased newspapers and fueled by political parties seeking to promote partisan interests. Nearly a million Americans would die making war on each other in the subsequent Civil War, which was in large part precipitated by the 1854-1860 “Bleeding Kansas” Border War.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Ever since the Continental Army came into being on June 14, 1775, America (the United States of America after July 4, 1776) has been protected and defended by countless legions of officers and enlisted men who’ve dedicated their lives to performing years of selfless service to the republic.

Most of them have served, essentially, anonymously—for every famous Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, or George S. Patton there are thousands whose names are known and remembered only by their families, descendants and service buddies. Throughout this country’s history, these dedicated men and women formed the backbone of America’s military forces—ground, air and the sea services. 

The fact that their names never became famous is, to them, of no great consequence. Fame and renown are not why they faithfully served for years-long careers. To them, it was a “calling” (historians use the phrase “military priesthood”) that drew them to dedicate the most productive years of their lives to selfless service to their country.

Even though we’ll likely never read or hear many of their names, those of us today enjoying the freedoms they protected—and sometimes fought, bled or died to preserve—owe them a debt that can never be repaid.

An Unsung Vietnam War Hero

One of these members of the legions of the “selfless service unknowns” is Philip Gioia, author of Danger Close!: A Vietnam Memoir. Gioia, a Virginia Military Institute (VMI) 1967 graduate, served on active duty in the Army from 1967–1977. He did two combat tours in Vietnam: his first with 82nd Airborne Division, February-April 1968 (then medically-evacuated for wounds); and his second in 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) April 1969-April 1970 (again medically-evacuated, this time for malaria). During his two tours, Gioia received two Silver Stars for valor, a Bronze Star with “V” for valor, and two Purple Hearts.

Although marketed as “A Vietnam Memoir,” that doesn’t capture the book’s true nature. In fact, Gioia doesn’t get to Vietnam until page 214 when he arrived at Chu Lai under mortar attack via U.S. Air Force C-141 transport during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

His riveting Vietnam combat accounts are compelling, exceptionally revealing of the war’s combat experience; yet, focusing only on Vietnam sells the memoir short—it’s much more than just another “Vietnam memoir” among an ever-expanding number in that crowded genre. 

A Life Diary

In fact, Gioia’s book is greatly enhanced by an unusual format. Although presented in chronological order divided into 22 chapters, he eschews most books’ “standard” narrative format. Instead, Gioia’s book presents his life (from his 1946 birth into an Italian-American family in Greenwich Village, New York City to shortly after he leaves Army active duty in 1977) in short (from paragraph-length to several-pages-long), single-topic descriptions revealing memorable events and notable experiences shaping his upbringing, character and values.

The effect of this unusual format creates a “life diary” of Gioia’s first 30-some years. Each of the memorable vignettes describing events and experiences essentially is a revealing “diary entry,” so by the time he enters VMI in 1963 readers understand why he chose the path of military selfless service. The “life-diary entry” format, although unusual, works!

Gioia’s father was a career Army Transportation Corps officer who, due to Italian language fluency served in World War II’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Therefore, Gioia grew up a “military brat”—child of a career service member. Although frequently moving growing up (living in New York, Japan, Italy, West Point, Virginia, Alabama), the experience exposed him to the wider world and taught him self-sufficiency while, importantly, internalizing the guiding concepts “Duty, Honor, Country.” Readers will completely understand his decision for military service as he’s commissioned an Infantry 2nd Lieutenant upon his 1967 VMI graduation. 

Jump School and Ranger School

Gioia’s entry onto active duty at Fort Bragg, North Carolina with the 82nd Airborne Division is superbly-recounted, and his detailed, several-chapters-long accounts of experiences at Fort Benning, Georgia, at the 3-week Airborne School, followed by the grueling, physically- and mentally-demanding 9-week Ranger course at Benning, Dahlonega (“mountain” phase), and Eglin Air Force Base, Florida (“swamp” phase) is the absolute best, first-person account of these two demanding army training courses I’ve ever read (this reviewer attended both). Advice to anyone wondering what “Jump School” and “Ranger School” are really like is: Read pages 120-188 of Gioia’s book! 

Gioia’s account of his selfless service in two Vietnam tours is detailed and typical of the experiences of a combat infantry officer troop leader. Yet each of the approximately 3 million Americans who served in Vietnam (ground, air and naval) uniquely experienced the war and Gioia can only recount how he fought and endured his own Vietnam War. Phil’s superb Danger Close! does that exceptionally well. 

If asked, “When did America lose the Vietnam War?” most respondents with some knowledge of the war would likely answer, “April 30, 1975.” That day, North Vietnamese Army tanks crashed through the gates of the Republic of Vietnam’s Presidential Palace in Saigon and celebrated a communist victory in the Second Indochina War (1955-1975). Certainly, that day was the end of the shooting war.

But when exactly did the U.S. and its allies lose their ability to win the war? When did defeat become inevitable in America’s efforts to preserve a democratic South Vietnam in the face of North Vietnam’s relentless, ruthless aggression? The answer to that question is key—determining when America lost reveals how and why the decades-long effort failed.

The “Usual Suspects”

If asked to pinpoint the date when the U.S. irretrievably lost the war, some historians would suggest the following “usual suspects”:

Nov. 2, 1963 – Those recognizing the importance of political leaders’ influence might single out the day when South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was killed in a coup. President John F. Kennedy knew of preparations for the coup and his administration supported the overthrow of Diem, who was assassinated in the process. Diem’s murder removed the struggling democracy’s “last, best hope,” as some have called Diem, the only leader whose charisma, popularity, willpower and effectiveness rivaled that of North Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh.

Nov. 22, 1963 – Some tout Kennedy’s assassination as the date the war was irretrievably lost because they believe he would have kept the U.S. out of Vietnam’s “quagmire” or have beaten the Viet Cong insurgency with U.S. Army Special Forces troops, the “Green Berets,” eschewing a massive buildup of conventional forces. However, those are conjectures rather than certainties.

Democrat Kennedy politically could not afford to “lose Vietnam,” especially after another Democratic president, Harry S. Truman, was castigated as the one who “lost China” to Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949. Speculation that Kennedy would not have backed up South Vietnam with whatever U.S. military support was necessary to match Hanoi’s escalation ignores the reality of Cold War politics.

Aug. 1, 1964 – Many are convinced the U.S. lost due to a misguided military strategy that focused too much on overwhelming firepower in a futile conventional war to destroy the communist insurgency through attrition. They believe it would have been more effective to emphasize less brutal methods to win the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese and weaken the Viet Cong’s influence in towns and villages. For people with that view, the fateful date might be the day that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the leader most closely associated with the attrition strategy, assumed leadership of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, commanding all U.S. combat forces inside South Vietnam.

Aug. 2 and 4, 1964 – In the Gulf of Tonkin incident, North Vietnamese gunboats attacked a U.S. destroyer that suffered just one bullet hole. Two days later, two destroyers fired in the direction of signals that appeared to be emanating from approaching North Vietnamese vessels, but were not. These alleged “attacks” prompted an Aug. 7 joint congressional resolution authorizing President Lyndon B. Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” This gave Johnson permission to escalate the smoldering insurgency into a full-blown and—many historians have claimed—ultimately unwinnable war.

March 8, 1965 – Those believing that the introduction of U.S. “boots on the ground” was the fatal mistake might champion the date when the 9th Marine Regiment, 9th Expeditionary Brigade, 3rd Marine Division, came ashore at Da Nang as America’s first combat troops in Vietnam. From that point, the U.S. was “all in” and the quagmire became inevitable, some would argue.

The Long View

Historians placing Vietnam within the context of the global Cold War might take a longer view that pushes a presumed foreordained U.S. failure further back in history. They might suggest these key historical mileposts:

June 1924 – Nguyen Sinh Cung (Ho Chi Minh’s birth name) was rebuffed in 1919 when he pleaded Vietnam’s case for independence from colonial ruler France at the Versailles peace conference after World War I. Shunned by Western powers, he became a committed communist. That month he attended the Fifth Congress of the Soviet-led Comintern (Communist International) in Moscow. Thereafter radicalized into much more than a “Vietnamese nationalist,” Ho Chi Minh cleverly manipulated Vietnamese popular support for independence to propel his single-minded effort to establish a communist Vietnam.

Sept. 22, 1940 – Imperial Japanese forces occupied Indochina, ruled then by the Nazi-backed Vichy France government. The Japanese invasion united competing Vietnamese factions of the resistance to French colonial rule into a solidified “nationalist” crusade. Japanese imperialism gave Ho Chi Minh the unifying spark he needed to build support for a prolonged resistance to defeat all foreign intervention.

Feb. 22, 1946 – The U.S. deputy chief of mission in Moscow, George F. Kennan, sent his “Long Telegram” to Washington explaining the roots and basis of Soviet expansionism, eventually prompting the April 7, 1950, National Security Council policy paper 68, establishing “containment of communism” as U.S. Cold War policy. This policy ensured that the U.S. would become involved in opposing the communist takeover of Vietnam.

May 7, 1954 – The humiliating defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu by Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh independence fighters led to an agreement, signed July 21 in Geneva, partitioning the former French colony into a communist-controlled North and a democratic South. Inevitably, the United States—committed to NSC 68’s global containment policy, recently demonstrated in the Korean War at the cost of over 36,000 American dead—stepped forward to replace French imperialists and to create and defend a Southeast Asian democracy.

All of the dates listed above are important Vietnam War milestones, but they are not the most significant. To understand why, it’s necessary to first address the enduring but egregiously wrong “popular wisdom” about the war.

What Popular Wisdom Gets Wrong

Historians who claim the U.S. lost the Vietnam War due to a failed warfighting strategy are correct. However, they are wrong if they claim Vietnam was lost because Westmoreland adopted a conventional war strategy rather than a revolutionary war/insurgency strategy.

The communists did not win through a classic revolutionary guerrilla war of national liberation in which South Vietnam’s government was toppled by a widespread popular insurgency of disaffected citizens overthrowing a hated regime. Instead, the Vietnam War was a brutal war of conquest mounted by communist North Vietnam to overthrow South Vietnam’s democratic (and admittedly imperfect) government, initially by guerrilla warfare tactics, but ultimately by a conventional warfare invasion strategy.

From 1954 through 1968, North Vietnam pursued a military strategy incorporating guerrilla war tactics. That effort failed miserably. As early as 1966, Hanoi was forced to replenish its South Vietnamese Viet Cong cadres with northerners brought down via the Ho Chi Minh Trail running through Laos and Cambodia. The communists’ early-1968 Tet Offensive, which relied heavily on Viet Cong forces, was a military failure with catastrophic VC losses. In many places the offensive’s losses virtually eradicated the VC “infrastructure,” eliminating local political and administrative “shadow government” personnel.

Committed to winning a decades-long war, Hanoi’s leaders simply changed their overall strategy and turned to outright invasions using overpowering NVA conventional forces (infantry, armor, artillery) to conquer the South. With U.S. combat forces still fighting in support of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, this new strategy also initially failed. During Easter weekend in 1972, the communists launched a widespread infantry-armor-artillery offensive that achieved early successes, but beleaguered ARVN forces, bolstered by overwhelming U.S. firepower, rallied to totally crush the invasion, inflicting 100,000 NVA casualties.

However, in 1975—after all American combat forces were withdrawn and the U.S. had dramatically reduced financial support for South Vietnam’s military—a similar-sized NVA conventional force executed essentially the same invasion strategy, but this time conquered South Vietnam that April.

For purely propaganda reasons, Hanoi cynically argued that its conquest was led by South Vietnamese VC insurgents—claiming its 1975 victory was the triumph of a “revolutionary war of national liberation,” even though depleted VC ranks between 1968 and 1975 were increasingly filled by North Vietnamese troops filtering south and operating from sanctuaries in officially “neutral” Laos and Cambodia. Additionally, the January 1973 Peace Accords allowed thousands of communist troops to remain inside South Vietnam’s borders, pre-positioned to participate in the final assault.

Facing overwhelming U.S./ARVN firepower throughout the war, North Vietnamese forces necessarily employed guerrilla tactics (including ambushes, hit-and-run attacks, sabotage, assassinations). To actually win the war, Hanoi abandoned its guerrilla strategy of fomenting insurgency and instead was compelled to turn to an invasion by conventional forces to overthrow the South Vietnamese government.

The North Vietnamese communist dictatorship was willing to pay any price in blood and treasure to ultimately conquer the Republic of South Vietnam. Significantly, Westmoreland, on the other hand, was never given the mission of winning the war, only of preventing the South Vietnamese from losing it—two profoundly different missions.

Contrary to popular wisdom, the war was lost due to a combination of failures in strategy, geographic ignorance and a lack of national will. Each of those three factors is associated with a date that marks a defining event inevitably leading to America’s defeat.

Strategy for Failure

Oct. 25, 1950 – America’s defeat in Vietnam was due to a fundamental error in judgment that has bedeviled military campaigns throughout history: refighting the last war. Political and military warriors leading American efforts in Vietnam based U.S. strategy on their last conflict: the 1950-53 Korea War.

America’s Vietnam War leaders were misled because of coincidental, superficial similarities. The Korean War was also fought in a divided Asian nation with a communist North, supported by China and the Soviet Union, attacking a democratic South backed by the U.S. Thus, American leaders assumed Vietnam was merely a rematch.

The date when the result of one president’s decision later compelled the U.S. to commit to a strategy doomed to fail in Vietnam was Oct. 25, 1950. On that day, in response to Truman’s fateful order a few weeks earlier to his theater commander in Korea, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, to cross the 38th parallel dividing the two Koreas and invade North Korea, the first counterattacks against United Nations forces were launched by 300,000 Chinese troops.

 Suddenly, due to Truman’s misjudgment, Americans were in a major war with Mao Zedong’s communist China. For the remainder of the three-year-long Korean War, U.S./U.N. forces fought bloody, costly battles before the fighting finally ended in a stalemate with a July 1953 armistice

A decade later U.S. leaders, profoundly influenced by their woeful experience in Korea, were determined not to repeat that mistake in a new anti-communist Asian war. Fear of another Chinese intervention set the parameters governing U.S. ground combat operations in Vietnam. Primarily intended to give China no possible excuse to replicate its Korean War incursion, American ground combat was restricted to actions solely within South Vietnam. North Vietnam would be off-limits for ground forces—or even the threat of them—throughout the war.

Those restrictions did not apply to U.S. air operations. North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia were bombed extensively, although the Hanoi area and the key port at Haiphong were not targeted until late in the war when it was too late to be decisive.

Restricting the ground war to South Vietnamese territory meant U.S. military commanders could never win the war outright. They could only keep South Vietnam from losing it, if possible. This was the defining strategic element in the U.S. defeat: American forces were confined to the strategic defensive. Although U.S. and ARVN forces did conduct offensive operations within South Vietnam, the U.S. permanently surrendered the strategic initiative to North Vietnam, which could totally control the tempo of combat by sending troops and war materiel southward whenever it wanted.

The result was a brutal, localized war of attrition that dragged on as long as both sides possessed the will to continue. Hanoi had the “weapons” it needed to continuing fight as long as it took to win: a ruthless disregard of heavy casualties and a tightly controlled population without the freedom to protest.

The Geography of Defeat

July 23, 1962 – Some critics of America’s strategy in Vietnam compare the failure there to successful campaigns against communist-led insurgencies elsewhere in Asia, most notably the British counterinsurgency victory in Malaysia (1948-60) and the defeat of the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines (1945-54). But victory over those insurgencies owed as much to the countries’ unique geographies as to innovative counterinsurgency tactics and strategy.

Malaya (today’s Malaysia) is nearly surrounded by water—the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca. Only a narrow 65-mile-wide neck of land connects Malaya with Southeast Asia. The Philippines, an island nation, is surrounded by water—the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea. Government control over the sea and narrow land approaches helped those countries strangle their insurgencies. Their much-vaunted counterinsurgency strategies were essentially irrelevant as the insurrections died on the vine.

The South Vietnamese government, however, had only the South China Sea on its eastern/southern border as a buffer. It shared a long, highly vulnerable land border with Laos and Cambodia all along its western side—the Achilles’ heel of U.S.-South Vietnamese efforts to defeat the North Vietnamese invaders. The Viet Minh fighting the French and later NVA-Viet Cong forces attacking South Vietnam occupied remote jungles in eastern Laos and Cambodia. They used them as marshalling bases and access routes for funneling troops, ammunition and equipment from North Vietnam into all regions of the South.

This intricate network of footpaths and dirt roads, called the Ho Chi Minh Trail system, was literally the communists’ “highway to victory.” If the Americans and South Vietnamese could stop the movement of troops and materiel down the trail, communist military operations in South Vietnam would be doomed. With the trail open, however, Hanoi could prolong the war as long as it wished, control its tempo and eventually win.

On July 23, 1962, that geographical “win” for North Vietnam was assured when Kennedy administration negotiators signed the International Treaty on the Neutrality of Laos with 13 other nations pledging “to respect” the “sovereignty, independence, neutrality, unity and territorial integrity” of Laos, which was in the midst of a communist insurrection. The other signatories included China, the Soviet Union, North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

Years before the treaty was signed, the NVA had occupied areas of eastern Laos and Cambodia. After the document was signed, the North Vietnamese expanded their control and further developed the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

More than any other event, the Laos treaty all but guaranteed that the U.S. would eventually lose the Vietnam War. Efforts to overcome the treaty mistake through major U.S./ARVN incursions into Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971 were too little and years too late.

The Death of U.S. Will

July 1, 1973 – Despite strategic and geographic failures, there remained as late as 1973 a slim chance that America’s national will—the inherent spirit to overcome adversity and eventually triumph —might win out and prevent a communist takeover of democratic South Vietnam. Failures in war-fighting strategy and missteps in redressing geographic disadvantages might have been overcome if Americans had retained faith in the mission to save South Vietnam from communist aggression.

The deterioration of the American public’s willingness to persevere and win in Vietnam, as reflected in the resolve of its elected leaders, was not precipitated by a single, specific event. It eroded over time.

Even so, one event, in particular, was a serious blow to public support for the war: The communists’ Tet Offensive, which began Jan. 30, 1968, struck military bases and cities throughout South Vietnam. Although the attackers suffered a military defeat with heavy losses, the extensiveness of the assaults and high U.S. casualties came as a shock to many Americans.

There were also “doom and gloom” press reports and commentary that had demoralizing effects on the public. Support for the war, already declining in Gallup opinion polls, dropped to 40 percent in the months after Tet, compared to 50 percent a year earlier, and never recovered.

The real dagger in the heart of the country’s national will was congressional passage of the Case-Church Amendment, signed into law on July 1, 1973. Named for principal sponsors Republican Sen. Clifford P. Chase of New Jersey and Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the amendment (attached to a bill funding the State Department) prohibited further U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia without specific prior approval by Congress. This was, in effect, a death sentence for the Republic of Vietnam.

The Nixon Question

Although defeated in 1972 when first proposed, the Case-Church Amendment was reintroduced in January 1973 and passed in June. President Richard Nixon, politically hamstrung by the ongoing Watergate fiasco—springing from the June 17, 1972, break-in and burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building—was unable to prevent its passage. The Case-Church Amendment was followed by the crippling November 1973 War Powers Resolution severely limiting the president’s ability commit military forces to combat.

Support for the war, already declining, dropped to 40 percent in the months after Tet, compared to 50 percent a year earlier, and never recovered.

Arguably, Nixon still had the power to overcome such congressional obstacles and possibly “snatch victory from the jaws of defeat” if he had still been president in 1975 when North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. Nixon, technically, could have been legally and fully justified in employing overwhelming U.S. air and naval firepower to protect South Vietnam and enforce provisions of the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords, egregiously violated by North Vietnam’s unprovoked invasion.

Nixon knew that the Paris Peace Accords were meaningless unless backed by American military power if necessary, according to his national security adviser and later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. In his 1994 book Diplomacy, Kissinger explained: “We [he and Nixon] took it for granted that we had the right—indeed, the responsibility—to defend an agreement in the pursuit of which 50,000 Americans had died…Terms that will not be defended amount to surrender…Nixon and his key advisers announced their intention to defend the agreement on innumerable occasions [emphasis added].”

Without U.S. military power backing up the treaty, the Paris Peace Accords amounted to mere words on paper. Congress, controlled by politicians committed to ending the war, focused its attention on Nixon’s presidency rather than on the struggling Republic of Vietnam facing obliteration by communist North Vietnam.

Weakened by the Watergate scandal and facing inevitable impeachment and Senate conviction, Nixon was forced to resign. After he left the White House on Aug. 9, 1974, his successor, Gerald R. Ford, politically crippled by being an appointed vice president after elected Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in a corruption scandal, was neither inclined to nor had the political standing to order the U.S. military back to South Vietnam.

Three Factors

The final vestige of America’s national will to save the South—an effort that killed 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese—died on Aug. 9, 1974, when Nixon boarded the presidential helicopter for the final time.

Incompetent strategy, ignorance of geography and a lack of national willpower combined to hand the communists running North Vietnam a victory in a war that was, at its beginning, America’s to lose.

The next time you hear someone blathering about why or, in particular, when the U.S. “lost” the Vietnam War, ask them about Oct. 25, 1950; July 23, 1962; and July 1, 1973. After noting their blank stares, explain it to them.

Jerry Morelock is senior editor of Vietnam magazine.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Vietnam magazine.

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General George S. Patton Jr. (November 11, 1885—December 21, 1945), America’s best-known World War II battle commander, was famously nicknamed “Old Blood and Guts” for his aggressive and daring leadership style—an image deliberately cultivated through ostentatious uniforms and profanity-laced “motivational” speeches to his troops. Patton led American soldiers to victory in campaigns from November 1942 to May 1945 in North Africa, Sicily, France, Belgium, and Germany.

However, to gain some insight into how Patton himself viewed the war, the Library of Congress’s Patton Papers includes six boxes of photos and negatives that Patton personally took during the war and sent home to his wife, Beatrice.

The 11 “coffee table-sized” photograph albums Beatrice created and donated to the library provide a fascinating snapshot of what caught Patton’s eye as images worthy of capturing in personal photographs. Here’s a look at how George Patton saw World War II.

Today, sadly, a vast number of Americans seemingly have heard of only one valor award—the Medal of Honor. This narrow-minded focus unfairly diminishes the honors of Vietnam veterans and others awarded different valor medals. Ask the “person on the street” to name another medal awarded for heroism besides the Medal of Honor. Perhaps some people will think of “the Purple Heart,” awarded for wounds or death in combat. Only a few would be able to cite the armed services’ second-highest valor award, the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy/Marine Corps’ Navy Cross, the Coast Guard Cross, or the Air Force/Space Force Cross.

The Silver Star might vaguely “ring a bell” with some, but many would likely be hard-pressed to describe its significance and probably wouldn’t know it is the third-highest valor award for all military services. The military’s Bronze Star Medal and Commendation Medal with “V” (for valor) devices are arguably beyond the ken of most Americans.

Yet the heroism those awards represent is no less deserving of recognition than the valor of the celebrated few who have received the Medal of Honor. Although the Medal of Honor is appropriately placed atop the “Pyramid of Valor” all valor awards reflect the bravery, blood and sacrifice of America’s finest, often earned at the price of their lives in desperate combat with communist forces in Vietnam and other foes elsewhere.

As a result of the general public’s unfamiliarity with the military and a focus on the Medal of Honor, the carefully crafted Pyramid of Valor is collapsing into a single “all or nothing” award.

Some people believe that a service member’s heroism must be rewarded with the Medal of Honor to be properly recognized, and therefore the family or other advocates will call for a medal upgrade by claiming that the courage and sacrifice of someone previously recognized with the Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross or Silver Star is being unfairly denied the Medal of Honor.

Those whose knowledge of military awards is limited to the Medal of Honor think even the nation’s second-highest valor awards, the service crosses, are somehow insufficient recognition. Anything less than the Medal of Honor is considered an insult to the service member’s valor, an “injustice” or not equal to the heroic actions that took place. This attitude diminishes the true heroism of tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans whose valor was justly recognized by medals less prestigious than the Medal of Honor.

The Medal of Honor, created in 1861 during the Civil War, was first presented in March 1863 to six members of Andrews’ Raiders, who captured a Confederate train in Georgia in 1862, an action re-created in the 1956 film The Great Locomotive Chase. (Some acts of valor that took place prior to the Andrews’ raid were recognized with the Medal of Honor after the war.)

The Medal of Honor was the only valor award a heroic service member could receive and wear on his chest from the Civil War until the Distinguished Service Cross was established in January 1918 in the midst of World War I. The other valor recognitions during that period were limited to a “mention in dispatches” and a written “certificate.” Thus, if a medal was to be awarded, it had to be the Medal of Honor, regardless of circumstances and the degree of valor exhibited.

Of the 3,530 Medals of Honor awarded up to 2021, more than 2,000 of them were presented before World War I for a variety of acts such as capturing enemy flags, rescuing comrades under fire, standing steadfast in the face of an enemy attack and delivering dispatches through hostile territory. That wide range of heroics, ranging from true blood sacrifices “above and beyond the call of duty” to relatively mundane but nonetheless valorous acts, convinced U.S. military authorities that a hierarchy of valor recognition was necessary to ensure that a fair and equitable system of medals was created. 

The Pyramid of Valor began to take shape just as the U.S. entered World War I when the military and Congress added not only the Distinguished Service Cross but also other awards for heroism that didn’t quite meet the Medal of Honor’s exceptionally high bar.

Second tier: The Distinguished Service Cross, created in 1918; Navy Cross, 1919; Air Force Cross, 1960.

Third tier: Silver Star, established in 1918 as the Army’s Citation Star, became the Silver Star in 1932 (available for the Air Force after it became a separate service); authorized for the Navy and Marine Corps, 1942.   

Fourth tier: Distinguished Flying Cross, all services, for aerial achievement or valor, created in 1926, retroactive to 1918; Bronze Star, 1944, for meritorious achievements or valor.

Fifth tier: Purple Heart, created by George Washington in 1782 as the Badge of Military Merit for “meritorious action” but little used and converted in 1932 to a medal honoring the wounded and killed.

Sixth tier: Air Medal, established in 1942 for aerial achievement or valor.

Seventh tier: Commendation Medal, for meritorious achievement, service or valor, introduced in the Navy (and Marines) in 1944, in the Army in 1945 and the Air Force in 1958.

Medals that may be awarded for either achievement or valor (the Bronze Star, Commendation Medal, etc.) include a “V for valor” device when presented for heroism.

Medal of Honor Awards

3,530—Total Medals
3,511—Individuals
1,523—U.S. Civil War
110—Spanish-American War
126—World War I
472—World War II
146—Korean War
262—Vietnam War
20—Afghanistan War
8—Iraq War
Current as of June 30, 2022.

All of our Vietnam War heroes who earned any of those medals should be remembered for their courage and sacrifice—not simply the one in 10,000 whose actions resulted in an award of the Medal of Honor. The attitude that somehow the Medal of Honor is the only worthwhile valor medal is a regression to 1861 when it was just that: “one or none” and egregiously unfair to history and our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

Don’t let a tunnel-like focus on the Medal of Honor lead us to unfairly ignore the valor of heroes whose bravery was recognized “only” with awards of the Distinguished Service Cross (or Navy, Air Force variants), Silver Star, Bronze Star/Commendation Medal with “V” device or Purple Heart. All those heroes must be celebrated and honored.

—Jerry Morelock is senior editor of Vietnam magazine.

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This article appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of Vietnam magazine.

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In Moscow’s Kremlin late on August 23, 1939, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin stood in the background beaming proudly as his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, and German dictator Adolf Hitler’s Reich minister for foreign affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the USSR.

Known variously as the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, this notorious treaty negotiated by the two cynical dictators was in reality a death sentence for millions, as it paved the way for World War II in Europe.

This sudden, unexpected rapprochement between two seemingly implacable enemies — Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union – not only shocked leaders throughout Europe and the world, it also sent Hitler’s and Stalin’s propagandists into frenzied efforts. They now had to portray as “friends” the countries and political systems they had demonized for years.

In addition to the treaty’s main provision of guaranteeing neutrality if either side went to war against a third nation, the pact contained secret protocols dividing Eastern European countries (Poland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland) into German and Soviet spheres of influence. On September 1, only nine days after the document was signed, Hitler launched the invasion of Poland — precipitating the beginning of World War II in Europe when Britain and France responded September 3 by declaring war on Germany. In accordance with the pact’s secret protocols, Stalin’s Red Army invaded and occupied eastern Poland September 17.

what hitler gained from the pact

Historians typically emphasize the advantages Hitler gained in the pact, in that it transformed potential Soviet interference during the Poland invasion into active cooperation. Yet decisions made by both Hitler and Stalin led to the creation of the most cynical — and deadly — treaty in history.

Hitler, history’s most notorious political predator, decided to seek the Nazi-Soviet Pact for the apparent immediate advantages it promised. Despite the Western Allies’ wartime propaganda claim that Hitler had a “master plan” for world dominance, he seldom thought more than one move ahead, preferring instead to rely on his “instincts” to guide his typically spontaneous actions. The German dictator assumed that Britain and France, faced with a Soviet Union neutralized by the pact, would permit his armies to conquer Poland as they had meekly acquiesced to his 1938 occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Another major factor in Hitler’s decision to seek a treaty with Stalin was his desire for a trade agreement between Germany and the USSR. Millions of tons of Russian grain, oil and other vital war materials otherwise unobtainable by Germany were promised (and were scrupulously delivered by Stalin) in exchange for German technical equipment and assistance. Hitler correctly judged that these huge stockpiles of Soviet goods would be a hedge against a British naval blockade if war erupted.

Finally, despite the pact’s secret protocols giving Stalin a free hand in extending Soviet influence into Eastern Europe, Hitler was convinced he could quickly overrun these gains when he eventually turned his German armies toward conquering the USSR.

what stalin gained from the pact

Although Stalin’s decision to agree to the pact with Hitler shocked world leaders at the time, in retrospect his strategy was sound. The Soviet dictator was unimpressed with Britain’s and France’s lukewarm attempts at forging an anti-Hitler alliance with the USSR and assumed the two countries merely wanted his Red Army to fight Germany for them if war came – and undoubtedly he was right. Additionally, the pact’s secret protocols guaranteed that Germany would not interfere with Soviet territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe (the Baltic nations, eastern Romania and Finland) and would hand the USSR eastern Poland virtually without a fight.

Furthermore, the pact would protect European Russia from a German threat while the Red Army secured its Far East border with Japan. The Soviet vs. Japanese Battle of Khalkin Gol (May-September 1939) on the Manchukuo-Mongolian border was still playing out as the pact was being negotiated. General Georgi Zhukov’s Red Army victory at Khalkin Gol eventually led to the vitally important April 1941 USSR-Japan Non-Aggression Treaty that postponed all-out war with Japan until August 1945.

Stalin’s decision to approve the Nazi-Soviet Pact may have been egregiously cynical, but it was brutally logical.

Despite the dictators’ euphoria at forging the pact, both men made critical misjudgments.

Hitler’s bad call

Hitler’s first miscalculation was assuming that Britain and France — seemingly cowed by the infamous Munich Agreement and then left bereft of any hope of assistance from the USSR in blocking Nazi aggression by the Nazi-Soviet Pact — would idly stand by as Germany overran Poland. Britain and France instead declared war on Germany.

However, Hitler’s fatal misjudgment — at least in part the result of Stalin’s subsequent strict adherence to the pact’s provisions — was underestimating the Stalinist regime’s ruthless resolve and its surprising ability to mobilize the full fury of the Soviet people to oppose the German invasion that began June 22, 1941. That misjudgment prompted the greatest clash of arms in history, the fighting on World War II’s Eastern Front, and resulted in the catastrophic defeat of Hitler’s Nazi Germany in May 1945.

Stalin’s blunder

Stalin’s misjudgments, meanwhile, proved to be more about duration and timing – serious, but not fatal to the USSR.

Unlike Hitler, Stalin was not surprised by Britain’s and France’s declarations of war. In deed, he expected them. However, he incorrectly believed the belligerents would exhaust themselves in a prolonged struggle in Western Europe, leaving the Soviet Union as Europe’s most powerful country. Instead, Hitler’s western offensive that began in May 1940 defeated France in six weeks and left Britain battered and reeling.

Stalin next miscalculated the timing of Hitler’s now-inevitable attack on the Soviet Union, incorrectly assuming Germany would finish off Britain before invading the USSR. He compounded this mistake by naively thinking he could delay the German attack by mollifying Hitler through strict adherence to the pact’s provisions and by prohibiting the Red Army from taking any actions to prepare for the invasion that might be misconstrued as a provocation. The result was a Red Army ill-prepared to oppose the June 1941 German juggernaut and staggering Soviet casualty lists in the Eastern Front’s initial battles.

Yet with Japan held at bay by the 1941 Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, the USSR fought only a one-front war against Germany. Perhaps as many as 30 million Soviet soldiers and citizens perished in the effort to achieve final victory — but it was a price in blood that Stalin was willing to pay.

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In the late 1990s, prompted by the popularity of the film Saving Private Ryan and the push to build the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, the realization that America’s World War II generation was rapidly disappearing entered the nation’s collective consciousness. In virtual panic mode, multiple efforts erupted via websites and other media to capture the wartime stories and accounts of surviving veterans before it was too late.

Today, a generation or more later, the focus on preserving veterans’ memories inevitably has shifted to another vanishing warrior cohort—those who fought our war in Vietnam.

Although approximately 9 million Americans served worldwide on active duty in U.S. military forces during the Vietnam War era (1954-75)—around 10 percent of the corresponding age group—only about 3 million Americans of all military services served in-country in land forces, flew air missions over Vietnam or sailed in the country’s surrounding waters during those years. By 2019, it was estimated that about 775,000 of those 3 million “in-country vets” were still alive. Since then, an average of about 400 have died each day.

Capturing and preserving the first-person accounts of their Vietnam service must be a national priority.

Vietnam War veterans themselves can help in that effort by writing memoirs recounting their service, as Dennis D. Blessing Sr., a combat veteran of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), has done with his concise but engaging new book, Vietnam in My Rearview: Memoir of a 1st Cavalry Combat Soldier, 1966-1967. Importantly, the author begins his account with a very revealing point. There is no “single” Vietnam War experience representing all who served, as Blessing notes:

Somewhere, sometime…someone, no doubt, will say: “This guy got it all wrong!” Each American soldier’s experience in this war was different, whether you were humping through the jungle or one of the multitudes of support forces, each of us has his own story…After 54 years since my time in Vietnam I may not have everything exactly right, but this is my story as remembered with the help of my 212 letters home…Writing this book gave me an opportunity to tell the full story of what it was like for me to serve as a combat soldier in an infantry unit in Vietnam…[and]…has helped me in some ways to come to terms with a war I often found hard to understand.

That insightful observation—that no two Vietnam veterans’ experiences were, nor could ever be, exactly the same—is the most profoundly important point that readers should take away from Blessing’s well-written memoir. Aided by his 212 letters home, thankfully preserved, Blessing has published an excellent account of his tour as a combat infantry “grunt” with the 1st Cav. The book provides a snapshot, naturally viewed through his personal lens, of his unit during his 1966-67 tour.

Blessing has done an admirable job of taking readers on his personal “Vietnam War tour.” The very minor errors found by this Vietnam vet in no way detract from his well-written narrative. What he recalled as “Flagstaff” beer was “Falstaff.” His explanation of “left shoulder vs. right shoulder” unit patches was very clear and concise, but he unfortunately got them reversed. The current unit of assignment patch is worn on the left shoulder, while the patch of the unit where one served in combat is worn on the right, not vice versa. However, those are insignificant errors and easily ignored.

The book stands as an articulate and compellingly written example of what Vietnam War vets ought to be striving for: recording their experiences, stories, thoughts and, eventually, efforts to come to terms with the war, their service in it and how it affected their postwar lives.

Blessing included a 15-page glossary of about 300 common terms. Some of them, as all Vietnam vets will recall, come from the Vietnamese language, frequently used by American service members. His list ranges from “Artillery Forward Observer” through “Beaucoup Dinky Dau” (really crazy) and “Sinh Loi” (sorry ’bout that) to “‘Yards” (GI slang for Montagnard tribespeople).

So, come on, Vietnam War vets! Follow Blessing’s outstanding example. Pick up your pens or stubby pencils or computer keyboards and start recording your own Vietnam War experiences…before it’s too late!

Vietnam in my rearview

Memoir of a 1st Cavalry Combat Soldier, 1966-1967
by Dennis D. Blessing, Sr., McFarland, 2021

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Why, one must ask, would a healthy young man in the prime of life throw his body onto a live grenade and simultaneously pull a second one underneath himself, knowing it meant his certain death?

On Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967, while desperately battling North Vietnamese Army regulars near Vietnam’s Demilitarized Zone during Operation Beacon Hill, U.S. Marine Pfc. Douglas Dickey, 2nd Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, did exactly that. Knowing he would surely die, 20-year-old Dickey leapt on the grenades, smothered the blasts with his body and saved the lives of five Marines in his platoon. For Dickey’s selfless “final valiant act” he posthumously received the Medal of Honor.

The reason why Dickey consciously dove on those grenades cannot be known with absolute certainty yet can be surmised by reading an excellent new book, A Final Valiant Act: The Story of Doug Dickey, Medal of Honor, by retired Marine Lt. Col. John B. Lang. A Naval Academy graduate and decorated combat veteran of the Gulf War, Iraq War and operations in Somalia, Lang has crafted a compelling, detailed and comprehensive examination of Dickey’s life, woven into the lives and too-often tragic deaths of comrades in 2nd Platoon.

Lang takes readers to the platoon’s annual postwar reunions, moving reminders of the courage and sacrifice exhibited by Dickey and his fellow fallen Marines. The author also provides an excellent “snapshot” of the Marine Corps in northernmost South Vietnam in 1967—then facetiously termed “Marineland” (think “Disneyland” with live ammo) by their Army counterparts. The Corps does everything in its own unique manner, Lang emphasizes.

Importantly, this book provides readers the best insight into the life and experiences of a Medal of Honor recipient since the acclaimed autobiographies of World War II Army hero Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back, and U.S. Special Forces officer, Roger H. C. Donlon, the Vietnam War’s first recipient and author of Beyond Nam Dong.

Reading Lang’s book, we get to really know Dickey. He wasn’t a natural athlete, as revealed at Marine boot camp, where his struggles with the physical training test led to a delayed graduation after a miserable, humiliating stint in the dreaded “Physical Conditioning Platoon.” What Dickey lacked in physical skill, he made up for in grit, guts and determination. He was a dependable, hard worker on his family farm in western Ohio and with his Marine squads in Vietnam. A genuinely nice guy, he was someone friends and colleagues knew always “had their back.”

Dickey knew exactly what he was doing when he unhesitatingly leapt on those grenades and understood precisely what it would cost him, as Lang proves through eyewitness accounts revealed in his book.

The testimony of 2nd Platoon’s Navy hospital corpsman, Greg “Doc” Long, echoes the recollections of several other eyewitnesses. Long “saw Doug look down at the first grenade. Then he saw Doug look up—and glance into the faces of the men around him who were trapped in the grenade’s blast area—they were his friends. ‘He kind of glanced around before he dove on the grenade,’ Long said… ‘he fell on top of [the first grenade]—and looked up—and here come another [grenade],’ Long said, ‘and he grabbed that one.…I remember him turning his head and looking me right in the face…And it seemed like forever and we were just looking at each other. I mean, he knew he was going to die…And he had this pacified look on his face…I was just starting to think, “Whew! They’re duds!”—when they exploded.’”

Dickey’s body absorbed the full blast of the two Chinese stick grenades. He died instantly. Long lamented how close Dickey came to avoiding this supreme sacrifice. He was killed just three days before he could have gone home.

Dickey did, of course, go home to Greenville, Ohio—his broken body traveled there in a military casket. He was laid to rest with full military honors in the town’s Brock Cemetery on Friday, April 7. It seemed like all Darke County turned out to honor Dickey. By the end of the war, 24 more young Darke County men joined Dickey in Brock and surrounding village cemeteries.

Dickey’s self-sacrifice was not the first time a U.S. Marine had done the exact same thing in nearly exact circumstances. On Iwo Jima on Feb. 20, 1945, 17-year-old Marine Pvt. Jack Lucas threw his body on an enemy grenade, then, like Dickey, grabbed a second grenade and pulled it underneath his body. Incredibly, Lucas survived the explosions and lived an additional 60 years.

The World War II Marine provided an answer to the question of “why” anyone would dive onto live grenades: “I saw two grenades over in front of my buddies…I hollered ‘Grenades!’ to alert my buddies,” then jumped onto them as they exploded.

Dickey dived on those grenades to save his buddies. Everything about Dickey, as told in Lang’s outstanding book, leads to that conclusion: “Fifty-eight Marines eventually earned the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War,” he writes. “Forty-four of those were posthumous awards. They went to young men who, like Douglas Dickey, died saving their buddies.”

Added confirmation comes from former Marine Colin “Mac” McClelland, who related a prophetic anecdote from the time he and Dickey were discussing an article “in Stars and Stripes about a Marine or soldier who had just been awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor for diving on a grenade to save his comrades…And I remember [Dickey] straight out looked at me—right in the eye, and said, ‘You know, Mac, I’d do it.’ And I said, ‘Are you serious? …You won’t know that!’ And [Dickey] goes, ‘Yes, I do. I would.’” On Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967.  V

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This article appeared in the December 2021 issue of Vietnam magazine. For more stories from Vietnam magazine, subscribe and visit us on Facebook.

An inside account of a bold raid to free POWs

In a variation of an old medical joke, the bottom line of Who Will Go: Into the Son Tay POW Camp is this: “The operation was a success…but the patient was a ‘no show.’” Author Terry Buckler gives readers an inside view of the meticulous planning, execution and disappointing outcome of the famous Nov. 21, 1970, Operation Ivory Coast, the U.S. Air Force-Army Special Operations mission targeting North Vietnam’s Son Tay prisoner of war camp 23 miles west of Hanoi. Buckler, a U.S. Special Forces sergeant, was the youngest participant in the raid, conducted to free the POW camp’s 65 American captives—who, unfortunately, had been moved to a different location four months prior.

This massive U.S. intelligence failure made the tactically successful raid an abysmal strategic failure, which provided ammunition to President Richard Nixon’s critics in the media and Congress. However, the planning and execution phases were outstanding, and all of those involved truly deserved high praise. The raid went like clockwork. Unexpected glitches inevitably popped up, proving the old military axiom that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy,” but quick thinking and instinctive reactions by the raiders and their leaders won the day.

Although several books have been published on this high-profile raid—Ben Schemmer’s The Raid (1976) and raider John Gargus’ The Son Tay Raid (2007) come to mind—Buckler, a Silver Star recipient for his actions that day, provides a collection of personal accounts, numerous photographs and informative articles that, when read along with one of the broader accounts, helps flesh out the historical record.

The words of the Son Tay raiders, their faces in photographs and insights gleaned from Buckler’s narrative provide a more complete picture of what happened in the Vietnam War’s most famous American raid. Who Will Go is not a standard historical account of the Son Tay Raid, although it covers all aspects of the operation, but it is, in effect, a comprehensive “yearbook” of the participants and their activities.

Finally, as Buckler’s book shows, the “successful” Son Tay Raid can be seen as somewhat of a parable for America’s involvement in the entire Vietnam War. Extremely competent and superbly trained U.S. forces, like those that carried out the raid, “won” every major battle they fought, but the “wins” proved irrelevant to the final outcome. V

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Undoubtedly, most Vietnam War helicopter pilots would consider any mission they flew without drawing enemy fire to be a resounding success. But not David L. Porter and his fellow U.S. Army aerial scout pilots flying daring “hunter-killer” combat missions. They would deem missions with “no enemy fire” to be dismal failures. The scout pilots’ raison d’etre was to tempt enemy ground troops and anti-aircraft gunners to fire at the vulnerable scout “hunter” light observation helicopters, or LOH, thereby exposing enemy positions to attack by the scout’s “killer” partners—typically heavily armed AH-1 Cobra helicopter gunships.

In effect, aerial scout helicopters were the hunter-killer missions’ “juicy bait” dangled tantalizingly in front of enemy ground troops to get them to “bite” and unleash streams of automatic weapons fire. Seeming to defy common sense (not to mention self-preservation), “success” for scout pilots literally meant “taking fire.”

Porter’s excellent Taking Fire!: Memoir of an Aerial Scout in Vietnam is a concise, detailed and well-written 174-page account of his experiences as a young scout helicopter pilot during a 1969-70 combat tour in Vietnam with the air cavalry troop of the famed 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the “Blackhorse Regiment,” based in Quan Loi, between Saigon and the Cambodian border.

During his 364-day tour in Vietnam, Porter flew “around 200” aerial scout missions while assigned to hunter-killer team duty. He describes those missions’ tactical concept: The Hunter-Killer tactic was developed over time because of the requirement to find and destroy an elusive enemy in terrain that masked the enemy from traditional reconnaissance techniques…

The operation stipulated two basic tactics: finding the enemy; and, once he was found, fixing and fighting him. The Hunter-Killer Team was designed around two aviation components: 1) The Hunter—one OH-6 Scout LOH flying at low-level, searching for VC, reporting his observations to the overhead Cobra; and 2) The Killer—one AH-1G Cobra flying at altitude, providing cover for the Scout below, reporting scout observations, and if necessary, reacting to enemy contact.

The capabilities of both aircraft meshed perfectly to support Hunter-Killer work. The LOH was small, quick, hard to shoot down, and elusive. The gunship was lightning-fast, heavily armed, and lethal. Hunter-Killer operations drew heavily on the skills of the pilots involved and demanded extraordinary team work and trust from both participants.

Porter’s hunter-killer team missions were inherently dangerous. Each was potentially fatal. Porter’s four Distinguished Flying Crosses and Air Medal with a “V” for valor device attest to his courage.

As a bonus for Vietnam War history buffs, Porter’s book goes beyond his combat adventures to also recount his experiences in the Army from induction in 1968 through the end of his Vietnam tour, including his time at the U.S. Army helicopter flight school in Fort Wolters, Texas, and Fort Rucker, Alabama. It is a fascinating, firsthand account of military service in that era.

There is an exceptionally detailed rendering of “daily life” in Vietnam for a first lieutenant in the 11th Armored Cavalry’s air cav troop—in-country processing; living and working conditions; infrequent but potentially deadly surprise mortar/rocket attacks; good and bad interactions with subordinates, peers and superiors; leadership lessons gained by direct experience; and—perhaps predictably given the American GI’s propensity to attract pets, primarily canines—a description of the “unit dog,” a mongrel pooch inevitably named “Scout.” (My field artillery battery’s pet dog, “Frag,” unfortunately met an ironic end when a nervous infantryman standing perimeter duty one dark night tossed a fragmentation grenade at some suspicious noise outside the wire. It was “Frag” wandering around sniffing discarded C-ration cans.)

Porter’s memoir is a solid account of a combat assignment in Vietnam that has too often been overlooked.

This reviewer’s only complaint is the number of minor errors of the type that occur frequently in today’s publishing business and which should have been fixed by publisher McFarland’s editor. These small but nonetheless irritating mistakes unnecessarily detract from his otherwise excellent narrative. For example, the French Southeast Asian empire was in “Indochina” not “Indonesia;” the standard Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army mortar was the Soviet/Chinese “82 mm” not “81 mm”; the 1972 Battle of An Loc was during the failed NVA “Easter Offensive” not “the final collapse of South Vietnam” in 1975. However, these editing mistakes should not detract from Porter’s superb and informative memoir. V

Jerry Morelock is senior editor of Vietnam magazine.

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Plenty of authors and publishers try to boost sales by larding book titles with such undeserved adjectives as “unknown,” “forgotten,” or “secret.” But Ed Sherwood is completely justified in using “hidden” in the title of this book. Courage Under Fire accurately captures the treatment that U.S. government officials and most military histories of the Vietnam War have given the Battle of Tam Ky (also known as Operation Lamar Plain) fought from May through August 1969 by the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) in Quang Tin Province south of Danang. Sherwood, a participant in the bloody battle and now, with this book, its most authoritative chronicler, documents how President Richard M. Nixon, General Creighton Abrams Jr., the commander of U.S. military operations in Vietnam, and other U.S. officials deliberately and literally “hid” the costly operation from all public scrutiny.

The reason that the valor and blood sacrifice of the men in the 1st Brigade of the “Screaming Eagles” at Tam Ky has been deliberately hidden for decades is simple. As Operation Lamar Plain got underway on May 15, headlines in the United States were dominated by the division’s “meatgrinder” Battle of Hamburger Hill (officially, Operation Apache Snow, or the Battle of Dong Ap Bia) some 100 miles northwest of Tam Ky, which left more than 620 of the 101st Division’s 3rd Brigade troops killed or wounded. The politically embattled Nixon administration couldn’t afford to publicly acknowledge that 525 additional American soldiers had been killed or wounded in the Battle of Tam Ky, coming as it did immediately on the heels of the debacle at Hamburger Hill. Nixon was elected on a promise to end the Vietnam War, not to prolong it indefinitely. Tam Ky had to remain “hidden.” 

Sherwood has written one of the best, most comprehensive accounts of Vietnam War combat published to date. He masterfully places the fighting within that post-Tet ’68 stage of the war’s strategic, operational, and tactical frameworks with the knowledge and skill of a soldier-participant (and Purple Heart recipient). A platoon leader (3rd Platoon, Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry) in the Tam Ky battle, Sherwood writes from invaluable firsthand knowledge, but he has also mined official records, interviewed dozens of other veterans of the battle, and crafted a compelling narrative that readers will find engrossing from beginning to end.

Sherwood brings the combat actions of his fellow soldiers dramatically to life. Throughout the book (and in informative, helpful appendixes) he introduces readers to his fellow soldiers in D Company, “Geronimo” battalion, and we learn their names, backgrounds, and fates—we come to really know and care about the men we sent to fight and die in Vietnam.

Like most such “operations” in the Vietnam War, Tam Ky consisted of months of intense and often brutal small-unit actions. Counted day by day, the casualties may have seemed somewhat small compared to those in World War I or World War II, but the numbers of dead, wounded, and missing on both sides gradually but inexorably mounted into the hundreds or thousands. How could that have happened? Sherwood’s detailed chronicle provides the answer—for Tam Ky and, as it stands as an example, for essentially all such engagements in the Vietnam War. When the military objective was simply to find and kill as many of the enemy as possible, operations inevitably dragged on until one side or the other, having had enough, withdrew.

Sherwood has included many extremely useful strategic, operational, and tactical maps, as well as nine appendixes and a glossary. These additions extend this book’s usefulness and enrich any further study of the Vietnam War. 

If I were still teaching military service school and civilian university courses on the Vietnam War, Ed Sherwood’s Courage Under Fire is the one book I would select as required reading on how the war was fought. 

Jerry Morelock, a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War, is a prize-winning military historian whose books include Generals of the Bulge: Leadership in the U.S Army’s Greatest Battle, The Army Times Book of Great Land Battles from the Civil War to the Gulf War, and, as a contributing editor, Pershing’s Lieutenants: American Military Leadership in World War I.

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This article appears in the Spring 2021 issue (Vol. 33, No. 3) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: Reviews | Courage Under Fire: The 101st Airborne’s Hidden Battle at Tam Ky

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Readers seeking a realistic, authentically staged re-creation of the conditions that Maj. Harry Smith’s D Company Aussie soldiers endured at the August 1966 Battle of Long Tan are encouraged to watch director Kriv Stender’s combat-action film, Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan.

When you watch this movie you are experiencing Australia’s deadliest battle in the Vietnam War as close as one can possibly get—at least, without getting shot at. Danger Close was filmed in northern Queensland, Australia, at tropical/subtropical locations that closely parallel the terrain of the abandoned rubber plantation at Long Tan in South Vietnam’s Phuoc Tuy province, where the battle took place.

The two-hour film stars Travis Fimmel (best known to American audiences for his role as “Ragnar Lothbrok” in the long-running History Channel series, Vikings) as Smith and Luke Bracey (Hacksaw Ridge) as his right-hand man and closest confident, Sgt. Bob Buick. Anthony Hayes plays Smith’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. Colin Townsend, and veteran actor Richard Roxburgh (Moulin Rouge, Mission Impossible: 2) is contentious Brigadier Oliver David Jackson. All the actors portray actual participants in the battle, although Stender’s characterizations of them are somewhat dramatized to propel the film’s plot and artistically accentuate actual incidents of physical and moral courage faced by the protagonists.

In addition to presenting the combat in gut-wrenchingly authentic detail, the film emphasizes the vitally important role that the “Kiwi” (New Zealanders) artillery played in providing the “danger close” fire support that prevented D Company from being overrun by waves of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong attackers. It also shows the courageous actions of Royal Australian Air Force helicopter Flight Lts. Frank Riley and Bob Grandin who volunteered to brave enemy fire and “socked in” monsoon weather to deliver lifesaving ammunition to D Company.

To this Vietnam combat veteran, Danger Close deservedly joins the ranks of exceptionally well-made, authentically re-created Vietnam War films, such as Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and We Were Soldiers (2002).

Jerry Morelock is senior editor of Vietnam magazine.

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This article appeared in the December 2020 issue of Vietnam magazine. For more stories from Vietnam magazine, subscribe here and visit us on Facebook:

Sarah E. Wagner’s excellent book, What Remains, is an exhaustively researched account of America’s quest to account for, recover and identify service members lost in combat so families can be reunited with the remains of their loved ones. Wagner, an associate professor of anthropology at George Washington University, reveals her heartfelt and moving interactions with families of the Vietnam War’s missing in action, bringing to life their—sometimes ongoing—struggles to deal with tragedy and loss.

Yet, for this Vietnam War vet, one important part of Wagner’s book reopens a decades-old wound that continues to fester. Wagner rightly identifies scientific forensics as a landmark achievement that has co-opted the entire MIA issue.

In 1998, three years after “normalizing” relations with the still-repressive government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, President Bill Clinton announced that the hallowed remains of an unknown service member buried in a Vietnam War crypt at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery would be removed from that sacred ground and subjected to DNA testing to positively establish the fallen warrior’s identity. Clinton’s secretary of defense, William Cohen, justified the tomb’s desecration: “We disturb this hallowed ground with profound reluctance…[but] yield to the promise of science with the hope that the heavy burden of doubt may be lifted from a family’s heart.”

Indeed, the disinterment and DNA test proved that the remains were those of Air Force 1st Lt. Michael J. Blassie, killed on May 11, 1972, when his aircraft crashed near An Loc, north of Saigon close to the Cambodian border. However, during the years when those remains, buried in 1984, rested in peace anonymously as the Vietnam War’s revered “Unknown Soldier,” they were an honored and respected national symbol, like the “Unknowns” from World Wars I and II and Korea. While unidentified, the remains, “in honored glory,” at Arlington National Cemetery, transcended family ties because they belonged to every American as an enduring symbol of courage, sacrifice and the ultimate cost of freedom.

Blassie still rests in “honored glory,” but his gravesite in Section 85 in a remote corner of Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, Missouri, “among a sea of marked graves” is seldom, if ever, visited, as Wagner explains: “Standing at the marked tombstone [an observer] was struck by the profound difference in circumstances. Blassie had gone from having hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people visit his grave each year at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, to this quiet, almost unsung existence…there was something poignant about that change.”

“Poignant,” indeed. Blassie went from an “Unknown” representing all who served to simply a much-beloved family member numbered among the more than 58,000 who perished in Vietnam. Compare the desires of Blassie’s family, which demanded the Unknown’s body be disinterred and DNA tested, with the position of the mother of another service member whose remains might have been the ones in the Arlington crypt. Althea Strobridge, 78 years old, opposed opening the crypt, saying she would be proud just knowing that her son might possibly be the Vietnam War’s Unknown Soldier.

Simply because forensic science can do something doesn’t mean it should do it—often the “greater good” is served by science exercising appropriate and thoughtful restraint.

Military service is this nation’s least “individual” undertaking. The individual must, of necessity, always remain “expendable,” to be sacrificed, if necessary, for the greater good—the mission that must be accomplished for the nation to survive. Wagner’s book shows how, over time, that principle of supreme sacrifice by the individual has been turned on its head.

During World War II, individuals were asked to sacrifice for the good of the nation as a whole. Now, the greater good of the nation is secondary to recovering, identifying and returning the remains of the individual.

Wagner points out that the Vietnam War greatly precipitated that role reversal, even though the number of Vietnam War MIAs is only a tiny fraction of the MIAs of earlier wars—World War II: 78,000; Korean War: 8,154; Vietnam:1,500 at this point. Wagner explains, and celebrates, the way the advances in science and the concurrent political pressure exercised by Vietnam War advocacy groups for prisoners of war and MIAs changed everything.

Forensic science, which Wagner’s extensively researched book seems to revere above all else, did indeed return Blassie’s mortal remains to his surviving family’s bosom. But that cold, calculating scientific process simultaneously robbed the entire Vietnam War generation of an honored and revered “touchstone” at Arlington National Cemetery for all who served.

Despite its research strengths, Wagner’s book suffers from dry and densely written text and wording that unnecessarily taxes reader comprehension. However, the book was written for Wagner’s academic peers, anthropologists and related scientists, not for the general reading public, so it’s perfectly understandable she would lace her text with terminology and phrasing instantly understandable to her colleagues.

Even so, What Remains is an important and well-researched book on the history of America’s evolving care (recovery, identification and burial) of its “honored dead.”

This extensively researched, well-written book was a pleasant surprise. Instead of a dry, boring, statistics-filled diatribe against the “black rifle,” as the M16 has been called because of its color, I discovered a thoroughly documented, fascinating case study of the tragically flawed process of introducing the assault rifle into combat in 1965.

Faced with the task of providing U.S. Marines and soldiers with a weapon comparable to the enemy’s Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifle, the Defense Department rushed the still-experimental XM16E1—a small-caliber, high-velocity weapon capable of full-automatic fire—into production and field use in Vietnam when it “wasn’t yet fit for service,” the authors note. Later versions, notably the M16A1 introduced in 1967, corrected many of the flaws, which could have been done earlier because they had been clearly identified by extensive, pre-issue testing.

The Defense Department’s egregious failures with the M16 reveal an astonishing, unforgivable story of bureaucratic incompetence and malfeasance. Indeed, the authors use the M16’s “misfire” fiasco to present an overall critique of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War: “To a large extent, the flawed decision-making that accompanied the introduction of the M16 rifle into combat operations by U.S. Army and Marine units in South Vietnam, beginning in 1965, was symptomatic of similar questionable decision-making that became the tragedy of the war in Vietnam in terms of its ultimately disappointing outcome.”

They add that the flawed introduction of the M16 is “the tale of a well-intentioned but nevertheless misguided campaign by a global superpower, resulting in the loss of more than 58,300 American lives.”

Tragically, as the authors exhaustively document, some of those deaths were undeniably due to XM16E1 malfunctions. Unconscionably, senior commanders (from battalion leaders to the highest levels of the Army and Marines) blamed their troops for their own deaths, falsely insisting that failure to properly clean and maintain their weapons caused the malfunctions.

However, the “malfunction problem was the result of decisions made by people far from the shooting,” the authors point out. “Adding to the basic problems of design deficiencies and unsuitable ammunition was a basic lack of planning for the deployment of a new weapon.”

For example, the first M16 cleaning instructions were not provided until mid-1967, and the troops received no weapon-specific cleaning kits or lubricants. There were also no bore brushes and no chamber brushes. There was a lack of cleaning rods, and the initial-issue aluminum cleaning rods were easily broken. “Sometimes even magazines were in short supply,” according to the authors.

Serious problems afflicted the XM16E1, including: unchromed chambers and bores, which rapidly corroded in Vietnam’s hot, humid climate, regardless of frequent cleaning, and unsuitable powder ammunition, dangerously increasing the rate of fire, causing buffer/bolt malfunctions, firing pin breakages and excessive chamber/bore fouling.

Yet, the weapon’s most serious—often fatal—deficiency was its tendency to not fully eject its expended shells, which testing revealed was responsible for 90 percent of the rifle jams. In the event of such a malfunction, which would often occur when firing the weapon in combat, the rifleman had to push out the unextracted shell with a cleaning rod—if he had one.

This deadly deficiency led Marine Maj. Dick Culver to describe the XM16E1 as a “magazine-fed, air cooled, single shot [emphasis added], muzzle ejecting shoulder weapon.”

The authors are not “weapons buffs” with axes to grind. Duryea, who died before the book’s publication, was a retired Army colonel and test officer (1964-66) for M16 prototypes. Orkand is a retired lieutenant colonel. Both served in Vietnam, leading troops of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in combat. Tellingly, Duryea (Silver Star and Bronze Star with a “V” device for valor) relates that “my first casualty in Vietnam was one of my men being killed by return fire at night when his [XM16E1] jammed after firing one round at a group of approaching NVA [North Vietnamese Army] soldiers.”

The “villains” in the XM16E1’s “misfire” are legion: Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his systems analysis-obsessed, but military-ignorant, “whiz kids” riding roughshod over any resistance; entrenched “gravel bellies” wedded to long-range, large-caliber, semi-automatic-only rifles; ordnance department officials resisting small-caliber, high-velocity, automatic weapons for all infantry soldiers; Defense Department and corporate executives obsessed with lowering production costs; all levels of civilian/military leaders who, through ignorance or malfeasance, neglected to provide troops with the necessary training, instructions, maintenance materials and equipment; and senior commanders who ignored their duty to their troops and blamed their own men for the weapon’s gross deficiencies.

This excellent book’s only minor deficiency is not the authors’ fault: Misfire suffers from too-frequent, inexcusable redundancy due to sloppy, inattentive editing by the publisher.

 This feature originally appeared in the April 2020 issue of Vietnam magazine. To subscribe, click here.