I’ve often wondered about why it is that Americans are raised to believe that we have a particular genius for war. Although we have been on the winning side in quite a few contests of national survival, most of the time there is some “but” to it, some relief pitcher who came in and finished the game when the starter couldn’t go there whole way. On other occasions we were the relief pitcher, with the starter already having gone eight difficult innings.

Yeah, I know. Cut the baseball analogies already. Moving on…

In the Revolutionary War, George Washington wanted to take the offense, but he knew he didn’t have the strength to carry it off, so he mostly went for a hit and run approach designed to tire the British out and kill time until the French could get in. The British had bigger fish to fry in Europe, limited resources, and limited political support for waging the war, so it wasn’t necessarily that they lost as much as they quit. Sure, Saratoga. Big American win. Sure, Yorktown–with the help of the French Navy. The rest of the war was more equivocal.

The War of 1812–did you know we had a War of 1812? Few people do, probably because it’s very hard to explain in a sentence or two why we got into it, what we were hoping to accomplish, and what we got out of it, or even how and why we won. And then at the end, as Yip Harburgh wrote in “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” “Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson.” It is telling that the national slogan for the war started out as “On to Canada!” and ended up as “Not one inch of territory ceded or lost!” The British had Napoleon to worry about and needed their money and soldiers to deal with emergencies closer to home, and despite the fact that they got to burn Washington, sought peace.

The Civil War, Americans vs. Americans, was a showcase for military ineptitude, and even Robert E. Lee, who was probably the one authentically great general in the conflict, marched the irreplaceable cream of his army across an open field right at the Union center at Gettysburg. You could populate a Hall of Fame of Bad Generalship solely with generals from the Civil War, be it George McClellan (”There are millions of rebels out here! Send reinforcements!”), Ambrose Burnside (”Okay, everyone, charge down into that big hole”), or John Bell Hood (”I think I will teach my soldiers what manhood is by ordering them to make a frontal attack on entrenched positions”). It took nearly five years for the Union to realize that they would win the war not by chasing after Richmond, but by destroying the enemy’s ability to fight.

In the First World War, we were the relievers, coming in fresh after both sides had battered themselves to pieces. Even so, we had to do our learning. I imagine a conversation between Marshal Foch, the leader of the alliance, and General John Pershing, head of the American Expeditionary Force, that went something like this:

Foch: What is your plan, general?

Pershing: See those German trenches over there? The ones lined with machine gun nests? We’re going to run at them really fast.

Foch: Yeah, okay, look–it’s a great plan, really it is, but we’ve been at this since 1914, and I’ve gotta tell you, it doesn’t work. They sit in their trenches drinking hot cocoa and schnapps, and as soon as we get into No Man’s Land, they open up with those guns and everyone dies before they’re halfway across. We tried every variation on this that you could possibly think of, and no matter what we do, you get a result that is, well, it’s very demoralizing.”

Pershing: Yes, but we’re Americans!

Foch: *sigh* Okay, fine. Go ahead. Be my guest. We’ll talk after. Bon Chance!

In World War II, you can contrast the wonderful D-Day invasion with the grossly botched Italian campaign, or Eisenhower’s unilateral (undertaken without consulting Roosevelt or Churchill or anyone else) decision to slow the Allied effort in the West so that the Russians were able to sweep Eastern Europe and take Berlin. This saved many British and American lives, but immensely complicated the postwar situation and helped shape the Cold War. There is also a strong argument to be made that if Eisenhower had not let Field Marshal Montgomery screw around with clearing out Antwerp, and had ignored him on the unlikely Market Garden end-around into the Netherlands, the war could have ended in 1944 and many, many more lives would have been saved. In any case, the Russians did much of the heavy lifting against the Nazis–they lost about 11 million in the military and maybe another 11 million civilians. The U.S. lost under 420,000 in combat and less than 2,000 civilians–that’s in Europe, Africa, and Asia combined.

Korea, Vietnam, the less said about these conflicts the better. Ditto the current Iraq and Afghanistan. That leaves what as the big American wins? The Mexican War, the Spanish-American War (we won the war easily, but lost more troops to mosquitoes–also, the subsequent Philippine insurgency was the last guerrilla war we’ve won to date), and Gulf War I? Grenada? The incursion into Panama to get Noriega? If you want to talk about those last two, we could also throw in, as counterweights, our less than gloried (and in many ways tragic) two minutes in Somalia and Libya, or the simply brilliant attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages.

In the 1981 military comedy “Stripes,” Bill Murray says, “We’re American soldiers! We’ve been kicking ass for 200 years! We’re 10 and 1!” I’ve always wondered about how they arrived at that record.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 5:51 pm and is filed under The Political Mindscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.