Where the Buck Stops
O'NEILL, WILLLAM L.
Where the Buck Stops Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime By Eliot A. Cohen Free Press. 320 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history,...
...When getting the two generals to agree proved impossible, Clemenceau made the final decisions...
...During the Vietnam War President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara failed to question and prod the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...He still believed in winning the War with a single great offensive, a method that had cost both the British and the French dearly and had failed every time...
...In May 1947, as chairman of the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion held a twomonth series of meetings and interviews known later as "the Seminar...
...Lincoln kept close tabs on his generals, and ruthlessly sacked poor performers...
...The rifled musket, with up to 10 times the killing range of the smoothbore muskets used as recently as the Mexican War, produced enormous casualties...
...Cohen shows how Churchill, when he disliked a military proposal, habitually asked so many detailed questions—frequently in writing—that it had to be very good indeed to survive...
...We lost the Vietnam War, according to the normal theory, because President Lyndon B. Johnson tied his commanders' hands and attempted to micromanage operations personally...
...I hope this invaluable book comes to the attention of President George W Bush...
...Because this is a relatively short book on a massive subject, a good grasp of military history, particularly of the two World Wars, is necessary to fully understand it...
...He believes that what he calls "the 'normal' theory of civil-military relations" is utterly wrong...
...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" Although most of Eliot A. Cohen's book is devoted to four case studies, his thesis speaks to a contemporary issue of the highest importance...
...The Prime Minister led from the front quite literally, visiting it at least once a week and even more frequently at the worst times...
...The Army constructed a separate system of its own: 5,000 miles of lines that carried, in their peak year, 1.8 million messages...
...He had to arbitrate, too, between Pétain and General Ferdinand Foch, Army Chief of Staff in November 1917, and later Supreme Commander of the Western Front...
...Just as important, though, was his magnificent courage: "That indomitable spirit, when coupled with his skills at higher war leadership, made him the greatest war statesman of the century...
...He recognized the value of the new repeating rifles before Army Headquarters did, and pushed hard, albeit with limited success, to provide them for the whole Army...
...Cohen's well-written, absorbing critique of the normal theory is nothing short of crushing...
...By the end of the fighting in November 1918,1.4 million French soldiers and civilians would be killed and over 3 million wounded...
...It was completely unfit to take the field against regular armies, but its leaders refused to admit this fact or to make any serious changes...
...few others have mastered...
...Cohen's following essay, on Winston Churchill, is likely to receive the most criticism...
...A good officer in some respects, Foch disagreed with Pétain on just about every tactical and strategic issue...
...The first is Abraham Lincoln, now broadly regarded as an excellent commander in chief, but Cohen goes further than any hi storian I have read in showing how closely Lincoln managed the Civil War...
...The railroads moved and supplied troops with a speed and on a scale previously unimaginable...
...Churchill's "art of interrogation," Cohen concludes, was "a skill...
...The book's final example of a great war leader is Israel's David Ben-Gurion, although his problems differed entirely from those of the other statesmen cited...
...Supreme Command skillfully ties together the three great innovations of the Civil War—the rifled musket, the railroad and the telegraph—which made it the initial modem conflict...
...It began in March 1918, when the Germans launched a series of offensives so successful that the Allies would probably have been forced to sue for peace if the United States had not entered the War...
...In the spring before Clemenceau's election, elements of the French Army mutinied...
...Cohen thinks otherwise...
...If not for Ben-Gurion there would have been no IDF, and but for his ceaseless monitoring it would not have been so effective...
...The unequal dialogue failed to take place because they had nothing to say, a condition the Administration fostered by appointing pliable or consensus-oriented men to high commands...
...He is not well-known to Americans apart from his role in negotiating the Versailles Treaty after World War I. Yet he virtually saved France in the darkest months of World War I. When Clemenceau took office the nation and its Army were nearly exhausted...
...It took almost a year to restore the military's morale, which had collapsed after the disastrous Nivelle offensive that kicked off the rebellion...
...Ben-Gurion assumed the part not out of lust for power, but because he knew when Israel became a state Arab armies would attack it...
...In his four and a half fruitless years as the commander of American troops in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland hardly ever visited, or was visited by, McNamara or Johnson...
...The lightly armed Haganah had sufficient strength to protect settlements against Palestinian raiders...
...The dialogue is unequal because the leader of a democracy outranks his military chiefs...
...Before tackling Vietnam, though, he offers four examples of great war leaders who interfered constantly in military matters with outstanding results...
...But whether or not one shares Cohen's admiration for him, he offers a splendid example of what the author terms the "unequal dialogue" that takes place between an outstanding war leader and his senior commanders...
...Clemenceau, known affectionately as "The Tiger" for his relentlessness, thus infused the nation with his own fighting spirit and will to win...
...He backed both defense in depth and Pétain's plan to defeat the Germans with limited but frequent offensive operations—the tactics that would ultimately prevail...
...Clemenceau sacked French local commanders who failed to implement Pétain's defense in depth and purged the senior officers who resisted this and other directives, to the enormous benefit of future operations...
...Georges Clemenceau, who became the Prime Minister of France in November 1917, is Cohen's second example...
...General Philippe Pétain, the brilliant new French commander in chief of the Western Front, improved living conditions for the troops and pulled entire divisions off the line to retrain them in the new system of "flexible defense," also known as "defense in depth...
...Much in vogue today, this holds that the head of a democracy at war should leave strategy to the professionals and, after choosing good commanders, give them a free hand...
...But even partial comprehension will suffice...
...Together, he and Pétain enabled France to hold on until the Americans arrived, bringing victory with them...
...Space limitations prevent me from running through the list of decisions, both good and bad, made by the British Prime Minister during World War II...
...Churchill's reputation as a war leader has suffered severely at the hands of historians...
...Cohenjustly observes that Lincoln would have dismissed him early in the War, Clemenceau would have been constantly on his back, and Churchill would have brutally questioned the general until he started producing answers that made sense...
...This raised troop morale, but in addition it gave Clemenceau firsthand knowledge that he used to retire numerous incompetent generals...
...Time aftertime he illustrates Clemenceau's famous dictum that "war is too important to be left to the generals...
...For a country of somewhat under 40 million people this amounted to a 10 per cent casualty rate...
...Consequently, even though the scale of his operations was very small compared to the other war statesmen discussed here, the magnitude of Ben-Gurion's achievement is without parallel...
...Israel did not yet exist as a state, and his right to behave as a commander in chief had no basis in practice or theory...
...Nor would they take advantage of the 25,000 Jewish veterans who had served in the British military during World War II...
...In turn, of course, there would be no Jewish state...
...Thanks to Pétain's reforms, France survived the next great test...
...His achievement is summed up by Cohen in one sentence: "It was Lincoln's understanding of the interplay of war and politics, no less than his ability to absorb military detail and to read human character, that made him the greatest of American war Presidents...
...At its peak of mobilization, in December 1948, the renamed Israeli Defense Force (IDF) included over 92,000 men and women...
...Through discussions, interviews.meetings, and sheer force of will, Ben-Gurion took command of the Haganah, forced it to accept Jewish veterans, suppressed or absorbed independent outfits (regarded as terrorists by the British, but as freedom fighters today), appointed its commanders, and made the critical arms deal with Czechoslovakia that provided Israel with tanks, guns and aircraft...
...That proved disastrous, for the chiefs had no strategy beyond requesting more troops and bombing attacks...
...Foch opposed the flexible defense as well...
...The telegraph enabled Lincoln not only to monitor the Union's far-flung battlefields but to control his generals as no earlier head of state ever had...
...Developed by the Germans, it replaced the old method of packing the front trench lines full of troops with more fluid tactics, such as giving ground to the enemy, to extend his supply lines, exhaust his troops, and draw them into areas where French forces could savage them with overlapping fire...
...Far from micromanaging the War, Johnson paid little attention to military operations beyond setting sensible limits designed to keep China and/or the Soviets from intervening...
...The strategy that won the War, "a concerted offensive around the circumference of the South, thereby allowing the numerical and material superiority of the Union to come into play," was Lincoln's prior to its becoming Ulysses S. Grant's in the field...
...Nevertheless, it must be a real dialogue, with the leader willing to listen and the chiefs able to strongly argue their positions...
...Clemenceau strongly supported Pétain, who faced considerable resistance from conservative generals wedded to packing the front lines...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...Having established that the normal theory is completely wrong, Cohen goes on to show that America's military setbacks in the Cold War, and especially in Vietnam, occurred because the Presidents abided by it...
...He kept himself fully informed, sent personal representatives to field headquarters, and visited Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's telegraph office almost daily to read and write dispatches...
...The Israelis possessed no army, only the Haganah, a motley underground force comprised of about 10,000 infantry, plus assorted home guard and youth units...
...The author offers countless examples of what today would be called meddlesome interference, not to mention direct orders, that prove Lincoln was a handson commander in chief...
...A word of warning to the nonspecialist reader is in order, however...
...He made mistakes, but he was right much more often than he was wrong, and his inspired leadership contributed mightily to the Union's great victory...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
