When are Battles Lost and Won?

Air University Review, November-December 1967

When are Battles Lost and Won?

Hanson Baldwin describes his latest book, Battles Lost and Won * as a “military panorama of World War II.” Of course, when a writer is ambitious and brave enough to try a one-volume treatment of eleven gigantic battles (actually, campaigns) scattered throughout so vast a war, he will have problems. To be at all successful, he must be both selective in his coverage and heavily dependent for his information upon the work of others. Baldwin, the distinguished military editor and analyst of the New York Times, has chosen to focus on land and sea warfare and to use primarily the publications and criticisms of the historical staffs of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. The only air fighting he treats at chapter length is the RAF-Luftwaffe encounter during the Battle of Britain and the Japanese suicide strikes against our naval forces off Okinawa.

Considered on Baldwin’s terms, the book has many merits. He notes that military history is “often written and read simply as chronology or tactical narrative with little accent on the human drama,” whereas in his view military history without drama is “incomplete.” His emphasis on the individual fighting man, where his sources permit, adds a dramatic element too often found only in novels about World War II. His passion for authenticity is attested to by the more than one hundred pages of footnotes and bibliography at the end of a five-hundred-page book. In that position, they will probably be overlooked by the general reader, which is regrettable, for many of the footnotes are rich in data and argumentation that would have added considerably to the text.

There can be few quarrels with Baldwin’s coverage of specific battles, documented as they are. But his work is open to criticism in one key respect: his approach does not take into account the point that the battles he discusses were not always lost or won within the time frame marked by the beginning and ending of the fighting. Rather, as in the case of his discussion of the battle for Corregidor, our struggle for that piece of real estate probably was lost in the niggardly budgets demanded by an isolationist nation in the 1920s and ‘30s. Another aspect of this same deficiency in Baldwin’s approach is his treatment of key personalities. For instance, General MacArthur’s most vulnerable period to criticism is overstressed by choosing the Corregidor battle as the subject of a chapter and ignoring his later manifold contributions.

This deficiency in perspective on Baldwin’s part is clearest in his minimal, one-sided treatment of the work of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Its mistakes get the biggest emphasis. Not without justice, Baldwin points out that Generals Marshall and Arnold were too optimistic in their expectations as to the combat potential of the B-17 forces in the Philippines when the war began; and it is true that troop carrier navigation in the paratroop operations in Sicily and Normandy was frightful. Yet only a few sentences cover the crucial role of American and Allied airmen in almost completely wiping out German air opposition before the Normandy invasion. No other Army Air Forces’ activities rate Baldwin’s consideration, except as discussed below.

Baldwin neatly applies Professor William R. Emerson’s most critical insights**about U.S. Army Air Forces’ strategic operations in Europe before D-Day to British and German airmen as well. In Baldwin’s view, there was a “general lack of prescience” among those airmen, too, about both the effectiveness of strategic bombing and the size of the effort required. However, in using Emerson’s critique, Baldwin leaves out an important point. He quotes Emerson on American airmen: “In particular, they failed completely to grasp the essential meaning of air superiority . . . if American airmen made mistakes, certainly they made fewer than did the airmen of any other nation…” Baldwin leaves out Emerson’s statement following the words “air superiority”: “This is not surprising; the second World War, after all, is the first, and so far the only, experience we have had of large-scale air war. During the 1920’s and the 1930’s, all that they had to go on was hunches and guesses. In such a pioneering venture, error is unavoidable.”

Baldwin’s omission of Emerson’s point becomes important only when one reads his account of the gallant but mistake-ridden Marine effort at Tarawa. Quite sensibly, Baldwin puts the battle in focus by describing it as an indispensable wartime test of the amphibious doctrine that Marine planners had worked out before the war. He quotes the Marine Corps historians on this score: “There had to be a Tarawa. This was the inevitable point at which untried doctrine was at length tried in the crucible of battle.” The same fundamental consideration should have been applied by Baldwin in evaluating U.S. Army Air Forces’ strategic operations in Europe.

Baldwin’s limited treatment of the work of the U.S. Army Air Forces may be no more than a matter of restricted perspective or lack of sufficient space. However, it also may be symptomatic of a problem affecting the full history of our service. Certainly one major theme in our history is the propaganda efforts of some of our early leaders, notably General William (“Billy”) Mitchell. As Professor Emerson pointed out in his Harmon lecture, the airmen of earlier years were right in their appreciation of the importance of aviation in future warfare and in their conviction that only airmen could direct aerial combat operations. Beyond these basic considerations, the airmen at that time could only be hypothesizing about air strategy (especially in its details) until they had tested these ideas in combat. When one considers that Mitchell alone hypothesized about air strategy in some 150 articles and three books, claiming as much as he could in the context of an interservice struggle over a tiny budget, critics such as Baldwin should find it easy to isolate claims unrealizable in World War II.

Hopefully, we airmen of this generation will do more than closely scrutinize the work of critics like Baldwin. Rather, we should be fully aware that our own published record is only piecemeal. We have yet to get down to the job of taking our own hard look at the record of our service in the decades since the Wright brothers’ first powered flight in 1903. We can learn an important part of the story by plowing through Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate’s seven volumes on our role in World War II. A few hours of reflection on the reports of the Strategic Bombing Survey might gain us an appreciation of the contributions of the B-17, B-24, and B-29 in the war. Only the true specialist in our history has gone to the National Archives to study Colonel Edgar Gorrell’s unpublished collection of data on the achievement of the Air Service, American Expeditionary Forces, during World War I. Much more accessible is Robert F. Futrell’s published work, The United States Air Force in Korea, 1950-53. Far shorter but also important reading is available in the works by Irving B. Holley on our World War I doctrine and aircraft development, Ideas and Weapons, and by Thomas Greer on air doctrine in The Development of Air Doctrine in the Army Air Arm, 1917-1941. Other scholarship has been done, but I believe the foregoing works are the most important. In any event, the scattered nature of what is available proves the point I wanted to make.

The theme of a full history might be the maturing of our service from the Wright brothers era until its strategic element became the cornerstone of our foreign policy in President Eisenhower’s administration or the lever by which President Kennedy forced Russian missiles out of Cuba. As Baldwin says, military history is more than “chronology or tactical narrative”; drama is essential to its telling. The inclusion of the recollections of the shrinking number of early aviation’s veterans should add drama to the projected history. The oral recollections of those who knew General Arnold, as gathered by the staff of the Columbia University Oral History Project, offer an excellent starting point.

Our service, then, is at the place in its development where its record is more than a collection of yesterday’s headlines. The struggle for recognition has ended. We can, if we wish, look long and hard at what we have done and produce a full record of our development. This will give critics such as Baldwin a far better basis than they now have for evaluating aviation’s role in past and present military policy. Far more importantly, the airmen of this generation might learn lessons from the full record which will equip them to win battles in any future wars.

United States Air Force Academy

*Hanson W. Baldwin, Battles Lost and Won: Great Campaigns of World War II (New York: Harper & Row, 1966, $10.00), 532 pp.

**Harmon Memorial Lectures in Military History, Number Four, “Operation Pointblank―-A Tale of Bombers and Fighters,” United States Air Force Academy, Colorado, 1962.

Contributor

Colonel Alfred F. Hurley (Ph. D., Princeton University) is Professor and Head of the Department of History, U. S. Air Force Academy. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1950, was commissioned from Officer Candidate School in 1952, and rated as navigator in 1954. His assignments have been as instructor, Air Force Observer Instructor School, James Connally AFB, Texas, to 1956; student, Princeton, to 1958; instructor in history, USAFA, to 1963; navigator and executive officer, 7499^th Support Group, Wiesbaden, Germany; staff officer, War Plans Division, Hq USAFE; and temporary member, Chairman’s Special Study Group, J-5, Joint Chiefs of Staff, until his assignment to the Academy. Colonel Hurley is author of Billy Mitchell―Crusader for Air Power (1964).

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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