The Nine Wars of America

...An assault led by the Duke of Wellington's brother-in-law, Edward Pakenham, against American forces under the command of Andrew Jackson just south of New Orleans ended in disaster for the British...

...Five years after the end of the war, Secretary of State Dean Acheson publicly outlined an American "defensive perimeter...

...On January 1,1863, Lincoln "pulled off the propaganda master stroke of the war" by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation...

...All they appeared to have mastered was community singing...

...In 1925 he was court-martialed for "insubordination...

...Indeed, "even when the Armed Forces win wars they are criticized as robustly as if they had lost them...

...The best combat performance that day, " he says, "came from the Gatling gun battery and from the 9th and 10th cavalries—black regiments both...

...Perret believes that Pearl Harbor was " a failure" for the Japanese because AdFrom Black Sun to Roccasinibaldo" mirai Yamamoto had planned to sink our aircraft carriers, and it turned out they were not at Pearl...

...Class polarization was alleviated during the war years, says Perret, "for the only time in this century...

...into the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution—although unfortunately, we are reminded, it also marked the beginning of a legacy of wayward military contracting, of "cost overruns, failure to meet specifications, powerful friends at court, missed deliveries__" Jefferson was "a lifelong skeptic about reconciling military power with democratic habits," but his passion for engineering was stirred by the inventions of Robert Fulton: the modern submarine, the mine, the torpedo, the patrol torpedo boat, and the steam warship...

...In two weeks as many as 300,000 Chinese pushed the Americans back to the 38th parallel...

...Many of them had received only two months' training "during which they had never handled a rifle, fixed a bayonet or learned ho w to put on a gas mask...

...In pursuing the retreating North Koreans MacArthur strayed too close to the Yalu River...

...Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "A Short History of Mexico, " "Where Art Is Joy: Haitian Art—The First Forty Years" This book is wonderfully researched and brilliantly presented, but it has a somewhat misleading title...

...The General Staff examined his report in detail, and rejected it in detail...

...Nor did it confront us with enemies threatening our economic dominance...

...Our most romantic military adventure, Perret observes, was "inordinately expensive...

...To [Omar N.] Bradley, who had been forced to ration artillery shells, it came like a gift from the godsof war...

...On a Sunday morning in June 1950 Kim's Army struck south, virtually decimating the far weaker forces of the Republic of Korea and quickly reaching the outskirts of Seoul...

...At Buena Vista and Monterrey he prevailed over armies that outnumbered his 3-1...

...In Normandy it burned out German positions no matter how deeply entrenched...

...MacArthur's Inchon landing was one of the most brilliant amphibious assaults ever," Perret feels, but the General "proceeded to waste it" by liberating the capital, giving the Communists time to withdraw...

...Due to his efforts, the country achieved selfsufficiency in gunpowder in the space of a decade, just in time for its next clash of arms...

...He particularly condemns the policy of graduated response, inherited from the Cuban missile crisis...

...Yamamoto," according to the author, "would never have mounted such an attack to sink battleships.' The traditional American reliance on technology was in evidence throughout World War II...

...During the touch-and-go months from April through August 1862, "he was virtually his own general-in-chief, trying to direct the operations of 16 Unionarmies" from the telegraph office in the War Department...

...To North Korean dictator Kim II Sung, it conspicuously excluded South Korea...

...In addition, it imbued the land with a fierce nationalism: "Political ceremony merged with religious feelings and attitudes of worship...

...Twenty years before Vietnam, GIs used napalm...

...The millions of Northerners who bought War Bonds to finance the struggle became the "bedrock of the new middle class...

...He held the Continental Army together through sheer force of will until the greater incompetence of the British armies forced the high command in London to give up...

...Perret describes the exasperation of the military with the vacillation of the politicians who ran the war...

...The war left the new nation strong enough on land and sea to resist any likely challenges, free from the threat of foreign-backed Indian buffer states, and well on the way to industrial prosperity...

...Perret emphasizes that, from our earliest days, "Killing was something Americans preferred to hand over to machines...

...It was "the one weapon that made even the best troops in German and Japanese armies break and run...

...In the summer of 1814 Winfield Scott won a stunning victory at Chippewa Falls and then fought greatly superior British forces to a standstill at Lundy's Lane...

...He notes, too, the central role combat experience has played in molding the national psyche since the Revolution...

...Before leaving France, however, Fulton met a young chemist named Eleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours, who shortly thereafter came to the United States...

...Geoffrey Perret does not dispute, of course, that war has been important in American history...

...The War of 1812 began badly for the Americans with William Hull's surrender at Detroit to a considerably smaller British force—"the biggest capitulation between the Revolution and Bataan...

...Bythetime the Emperor agreed, the inventor had already moved on to Britain...

...The colonists won the War of Independence, Perret says, "because of Washington and despite his ineptitude both as a field commander and as a strategist...

...On a speaking tour...

...No other nation," he asserts, "has triumphed so long, so consistently or on such a vast scale, through force of arms...

...The General himself gave credit to his junior officers, the future commanders of the Civil War...

...Perret has a darker view of our Vietnam legacy...

...Two and a half years later, after Eisenhower threatened the use of tactical nuclear weapons, an armistice was signed...

...Two Draconian espionage acts silenced all dissent...

...To keep American losses as low as possible, the U.S...

...With that he turned the war for the Union into a moral crusade, to the indignation of Federal soldiers,-few of whom cared a fig for blacks or worried one bit about slavery...

...job opportunities were suddenly opened up to "millions systematically denied them for generations past: for young women, for blacks, for the handicapped...

...Texas had been annexed in 1845...

...The military's only visionary after World War I was William ("Billy") Mitchell, assistant chief of the Army Air Service...

...In fact, the psychological aftershock of the war has at times clouded a vital underlying reality—our continuing preeminence in the world arena...

...If anything good came out of the war, " Perret says, "it's hard to see what it was...

...Yet none of this, in Perret's view, implies a tradition of militarism...

...His entrepreneurial success catapulted the U.S...

...Nevertheless, I think it needs to be remembered that the conflict was a limited one, with limited aims and stakes, and our defeat hardly left us an invalid geopolitically...

...We are unique, he suggests, in our proclivity for bashing the military before and after hostilities...

...to the strategic bombers, finally to the atomic bomb...

...While the author tells the story of the conflict in a mere 25 pages, he does not scant the remarkable campaigns of Scott and Zachary Taylor, the sorry role of President James K. Polk, or the difficulty of negotiating rough terrain...

...Despite Wilson's belated swing to preparedness, mostofthe troops sentto Europe were not ready for trench warfare...

...I differ with Perret over the bombing of North Vietnam...

...The crack-up of Spain's empire afforded America the opportunity to grab what every imperialist power was supposed to have—overseas possessions...

...Perret claims that "Every bomb dropped amounted to a vote for Ho Chi Minh...

...Had an all-out air campaign been launched early, however, and had ground forces been allowed a more active role from the very start, the war might have been over before any of these factors had time to come into play...

...But he also makes it quite clear that "The postwar military had abandoned thinking about strategy to civilians__That left the Army and Marine Corps in Vietnam in 1966 with no one in uniform able to offer thinking that matched the scale of the challenge...

...The War Between the States, like the Revolution almost a hundred years before, owed its outcome in large part to thecharacterofonepersistent, supremely gifted man...

...This symbolic date assumed a talismanic importance in his mind that had nothing to do with military stategy...

...As soon as the American effort got under way, however, and war hysteria and jingoism gripped the country, his liberal convictions seemed to dissolve...

...Time and again the country looked to its technology to save American lives__" This preference emerged only 20 years after the Revolution, when Eli Whitney was commissioned to manufacture precision-engineered muskets...

...he began speaking of the red lines in the flag as being 'lines of blood, nobly and unselfishly shed.'" The following year, with Germany's announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare and the exposure of the notorious (and perhaps fraudulent) Zimmermann note—proposing a GermanMexican alliance and promising Mexico the return of all the territory it lost in 1848—U.S...

...Throughout the fighting he experimented with a series of bumbling commanders until he finally promoted Grant to lieutenant general at the beginning of 1864...

...The greatest beneficiary of the struggle (other than the freed slaves) was theFederal government, whoseauthority would be increasingly expanded at the states' expense...

...In the Civil War, it was the more able Abraham Lincoln who led the North to victory...

...In my view the bombing of Haiphong harbor and the country's irrigation dams should have been among the very first acts of American involvement...

...One of the members of the military court that found Mitchell guilty was his boyhood friend, Douglas MacArthur...

...The Federal government," says Perret, "did not try to stem the tide—it jumped into it...

...Soon the initiative passed again to the British, who set Washington afire in retaliation for the destruction of Canadian cities...

...President Woodrow Wilson's desire to keep the U.S...

...Earlier, Fulton had offered his services to Napoleon, drawing up a proposal for a fleet of steam-powered troop transports that could quickly carry a French invasion armyto British beaches...

...looked to the fast carriers...

...There was no doctrine, no theory that covered the bomb, but it was used anyway in response to that overriding imperative...

...The idea of perennial unreadiness is certainly seductive," he says...

...For his achievement he deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor...

...He foresaw the importance of strategic air bombardment in future combat, though he wrongly believed bombing alone could achieve victory, making field operations unnecessary...

...Those Enlightenment men, the Founding Fathers, would probably have found much of it distasteful.' In 1846 war with Mexico won territory that included all of what is now California, Nevada and Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado...

...neutral and negotiate a "peace without victory" began to founder, Perret tells us, by early 1916 when he "sprinted from the rear of the preparedness parade to the front...

...The Soviets unwisely boycotted an emergency UN Security Council meeting, thereby allowing the United States to prosecute the Korean War under the aegis of a UN Unified Command...

...The night before asking Congress for a declaration of war, Wilson spoke the now famous words, "Once lead this people into war, they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance...

...World War II decisively ended the Depression and launched an unprecedented economic boom...

...Jackson's victory settled the Louisiana Purchase, disputed by Britain, and his defiance of President James Madison's ordertoreturn 22 million acres of Indian land insured unhindered access to the Gulf of Mexico...

...involvement was clinched...

...In its depth and broad reach it marked the advent of a mature capitalist society and economy...

...President Harry S. Truman dismissed MacArthur, and the war deadlocked...

...He insisted that Seoul be retaken by September 25, the three month anniversary of the invasion...

...In the '20s he prophesied a war that would begin with a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines...

...The trauma of the Vietnam debacle continues to plague us...

...For one thing, it fits the American selfimage of a peace-loving people dragged reluctantly into war__Nice people are bound to be unready for war, or should be...

...It was a conflict we "lost" due to lack of will, the absence of a viable strategy, and the frustration of a military forced to fight with one hand tied behind its back...

...Scott's drive from Vera Cruz to Mexico City was described by the Duke of Wellington as "unsurpassed in military annals," and he dubbed Scott "the greatest living soldier...

...Air attacks may have been the best thing that ever happened to him" because they increased the North's morale, garnered worldwide support for the Communists, inflamed the antiwar movement at home, alienated our allies, and triggered massive economic assistance...

...The journalist Charles Dana called him "the greatest general we had...

...Still, he has written the best of all books on our nine wars...

...Rather, our attitude has been one of ambivalence: "fascination with the military combined with contempt for those who pursue military careers...

...Shortly before, he had sacked General George B. McClellan, who had performed badly at Antietam...

...Perret neatly explodes the myth of heroic Rough Riders storming San Juan Hill...

...The superiority of the white warrior over all men of darker hue was a central tenet in the imperialist's faith___It would take more than 50 years before black soldiers were able to overcome a stigma that took root in false accounts from Cuba.' By the turn of the century the United States had achieved world power status...

...Finally, there was Vietnam...

...The author would surely not agree with that at all...

...The Civil War claimed nearly 600,000 lives...

...Taylor was "abom, if limited, fighter," with no grasp of strategy, whose charisma endeared him to his troops...

...Intellectually, the military had disarmed itself...

...There were almost 13,000 American casualties, and a death toll of 11 per cent...

...And in his final chapter he argues forcefully against the contention that America has been consistently less prepared for war, militarily and psychologically, than its enemies...

...One reviewer has, in fact, called it a new history of "America's love-affair with militarism...

...When World War I broke out in Europe, America's eventual participation was almost inevitable...

...A year later American fortunes reached their high point when Oliver Hazard Perry defeated a British flotilla on Lake Erie...

...Mitchell charged the War and Navy Departments with, as he put it, "incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the national defense...