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Military History and Its Fictions

Author(s): Roger SpillerSource: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Oct., 2006), pp. 1081-1097Published by: Society for Military HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4138196

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Roger Spiller*

Abstract

The conception and practice of militaryhistory,once regarded asthe foundation for any understandingof war, has responded cau-

tiously to the momentous intellectual and contemporarydevelop-ments of the past halfcentury.While our conservative habits have

encouraged a degree of professional maturity s a field,military is-

tory's intellectualauthorityhas declined as other disciplines have

taken more adventurous approaches to the study of war andassumed a more prominentrole in contemporarymilitary riticism.Yet because of militaryhistory's ntellectualprogress, the power of

militaryhistoryto range beyond its conservatism and to address

contemporarymilitaryproblemsis greaterthan ever.

ALLmilitary historybeginswith a story.So, here's one: On the islandof Sumatra, there lives a hill-dwellingtribe that calls itself the

Creech.The tribe has no chief, no matriarch,no warleader.Instead,thetribe looks for its guidanceto the one person known to all as the Mem-

ory Priest. The MemoryPriest serves as the collective memory of thetribe.At certainappointedtimes, feastdaysandsuch, the MemoryPriestis called upon to recite the tribe'sgenealogies,triumphsand transgres-sions, debts incurred,paid,and defaulted.Severaldays,perhapsas muchas a week, may be necessary for the MemoryPriest to recount all he

knows of the tribe'shistory.

: This essay is a highlyedited version of the keynote address of 18 May2006 givenat the annual meeting of the Society for MilitaryHistoryat KansasState University.

RogerSpillerwas the GeorgeC. MarshallProfessorof MilitaryHistoryat the U.S.

ArmyCommandand GeneralStaffCollegeuntil 2005 and is now adjunctpro-

fessor of history at the University of Kansas. From 1997 to 2005, he was aTrusteeof the Society forMilitaryHistory.Hisworksinclude (as editor)TheDic-

tionary of American Military Biography (Westport,Conn.: GreenwoodPress,

1984), and, most recently,An Instinctfor War:Scenes from the Battlefields of

History (Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress, 2005).

The Journal of Military History 7() (October 2()()6): 1081-98?

Society for Military IlistorvA 1081



ROGERSPILLER

Now,the MemoryPriestis called to this role at birth.As soon as heis sentient, he is taughtthat he is the embodimentof Creechhistory.Hislife is completely taken up with learning all that is known about thetribe'sgenealogyandwithkeepingabreast of all that happensin the tribe

from the moment of his birth. Aside fromlearningthe bloodlines of his

tribe, all the historyhe learns is new.The Creechhave been characterizedas "anoutwardlyplacidpeople,

occasionally displayingfits of violence. Biting themselves in order toshow remorseis not unknown,and clawingtheir faces is commonplace.

They are also untruthful and unreliable, prone to thieving, gossiping,gambling,and sudden spasmsof the most aggressivebehavior."

The MemoryPriest is above all this. He has no other duties. He is

cared for,cosseted in fact, because he holds within his mind the tribe's

very identity, its view of itself as a society. One might think, then, that

the MemoryPriestis so honored because he offers the tribe its one reli-able anchor in an otherwiseprecariousway of life by bindingtheir indi-

vidual and familyhistories together.In one way, this is true, but not in the way the Memory Priest

believes. That is because even though the Memory Priest thinks he

knows all the facts aboutthe tribe, there is one fact he does not know,a

secret that has been withheld fromhim his whole life. He does not know

that afterthirtyyears

havepassed,

and he isfinally

an old and toothless

man, the Creech will assemble on a special day to hear the MemoryPriest recite their history once more. When he is finished, when his

memoryis finallyemptied,he will be killed,roasted,and eaten. Thus are

the Creech purified of their past. All debts are forgiven, insults and

resentments forgotten,crimes absolved-all historydisappears.The next male child born into the tribe will be namedthe new Mem-

ory Priest,andas he growshe will come to believe that indeedallhistory

begins with him. But while the MemoryPriest lives out his comfortable

days,behind his back the rest of the tribe revels in its

conspiracyand

looks forward o the day when he will die and all shame and failure,all

record of unpleasantness,will disappearonce more and relieve them of

the burdensof their history.Youcan find this story in the travel writerPaul Theroux'scollection

of short pieces entitled Fresh Air Fiend.1 The story may not be true.

Sumatracounts no tribewith any such name as the Creech,or any of its

linguisticvariants. Norcan one find, searchingthroughthe ethnologiesof Sumatraor any other part of Indonesia,any of the more than three

hundredethnic groups claimingthis particularcustom.

1. Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings, 1985-2000 (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin,2000), 448-49.

1082 * THE JOURNAL OF



- MilitaryHistoryand Its Fictions

If the story is a fiction, it is not the first time Theroux has playedtricks with us. He has written two books of fiction that pretend to be

autobiography, and he is not above casting real people-including the

Queen of England-in fictional form. And he is not at all apologetic.2 The

fact of it is that this dividing line between fact and faction-between factand everything else, has never been as hard and as fast as we would like

to think. And all too often, when we take refuge behind that wall of fact,what we are really doing is avoiding the risk of imagination.

The recent uproar over James Frey's best-selling book, A Million Lit-

tle Pieces, no doubt amused Theroux.3 He would have been delighted at

Oprah Winfrey's discomfort at being publicly flummoxed by that book,and by Nan Talese's clumsy defense of her decision to publish it as a

memoir.4

In the course of that very public controversy, just one critic that I

know of pointed out that Fry's book was only the latest entry in a literarytradition that reaches back to the eighteenth century. The book generally

regarded as the very first novel in English, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Cru-

soe, was first published as an autobiography and taken as such. Oprah'sresearchers might have told her, if they knew, that the lately rejuvenatedTruman Capote's In Cold Blood was not a straight piece of reportage, but

what he called "novelized history," a form he claimed, rather breathtak-

ingly,to have invented. Of

course,he did

nothingof the kind. The

ghostsof E"mileZola, Ernest Hemingway, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and who

knows how many others, would rise to dispute such a claim.5I'm fond of Theroux's little story, how it navigates its way through

fiction toward truth. It is a kind of parable, a cautionary tale for all of us.

How the pride of knowledge blinds us to the reality that we don't know

quite as much as we think we do, the illusion that we are up-to-datewhen we are prisoners of tradition. How we don't matter as much as we

think. As with the Memory Priest, these fictions pervade the reality in

which wemilitary

historians work.

2. See Theroux's interview with Salon, page 2, at http://www.Salon.com,accessed 18 April 2006.

3. James Frey, A Million Little Pieces (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,

2003).4. Timothy Noah, "Did Nan Talese Lie to Oprah?"at http://www.Slate.com,27

January2006, accessed 19 April 2006.

5. Nancy Milforddid, in "Allthe shouting about 'A Million Little Pieces' is partof a

longdebate that dates to the beginning of writing,"WashingtonPost Book World,

5 February 006, T.10.Fora countervailingiew,see MichikoKakutani'sBendingthe Truth in a Million Little Ways," New York Times, 17 January 2006, at

www.nytimes.com (accessed 17 January 2006), who seems less interested in literarytraditions than in dilatingupon what she sees as modern society's increasingly casual

regardfor truth.

MILITARY HISTORY * 1083



ROGERSPILLER

Almost instinctively, we historians disapproveof the conflation offact and fiction we see in the work of Theroux and others.Wesay thatwe answer to our own intellectualtraditions,so what has any of this todo with us? Wesay our canons of practiceareguidedby a different-we

might even say higher-purpose: the pursuit of truth about the past.

Regardlessof which school or method we follow,we are careful never to

straytoo farbeyond Leopoldvon Ranke'sdictum: to recount the past asit actuallyhappened.Even thoughvon Rankecould not followhis own

rule, it still serves us as a kind of intellectual conscience. The oldscholar'sfingerwags over our shoulder when we are at our desks: stayclose to home, he insists, no adventuring oryou.6

Fortunately,historians have gone adventuring.The conception and

practice of history has traveledto places far fromthose von Rankepre-scribed. Whatwould he think of books like Simon Schama'sDead Cer-

tainties, UnwarrantedSpeculations, for instance, or other excursions

into counterfactualhistory,alternativehistory,novelizedhistory,exper-imentalhistory?' Especiallysince the SecondWorldWar,historianshave

posed for themselves an ever-expanding range of interpretive and

methodologicalquestions, produced a dizzying variety of approaches,divided and subdivided nto schools, camps,and tribes-all in an atmos-

phere of unprecedented intellectual and global ferment, a worldwide

quickeningof

pulse.The

pointis

arguable,of

course,but I think there

never was a time when the possibilitiesfor the advancementof histori-cal understandingwere so promising,or so challenging.8

In a world now so beset by war,this is particularly rue of the prac-tice of military history, where the interrelationshipbetween past and

present is so acute, and where the connection between thought andaction can sometimes be startlinglydirect. We must live with the possi-bility,less remote than one mightthink, that othersmay act on what we

say and write, and that those actions may have mortal consequences.

This possibility is not one that much troubles the sleep of many of ourcolleagues in other fields of history. Even political historians are not

likely to feel this responsibilityquite so keenly as one who studies war.We cannot evade this responsibility,nor should we wish to.

This responsibility mposesa certainurgencyon the work we do. Weare more than others obligedto look beyondour immediate interests tothe worldbeyond-to other disciplines for any intellectual,conceptual,

6. Indeed,even in von Ranke's wntime,other scholarswerealready onceiv-

ingof

historyin

radicallydifferent

ways.See Isaiah

Berlin,Vico and Herder:Two

Studies in theHistoryofIdeas (NewYork:VikingPress,1976),xvi-xix,xxiii.7. Simon Schama,Dead Certainties,UnwarrantedSpeculations (NewYork:

Knopf,1991).8. PeterNovick,ThatNobleDream:The"Objectivity uestion" nd theAmeri-

can HistoricalProfession Cambridge: ambridge niversityPress,1988).





or methodological advantage that might advance our work. But, we arealso obliged to be alert to the shapes and forms of war as it unfolds in the

present. Rather than be content with a casual relevance in our work to

the conduct of war in our own time, shouldn't we face our connection

with the present more directly? Have we met these obligations?These questions were on my mind recently when I surveyed the sev-

enty volumes or so of the Journal of Military History (don't ask why; the

answer is embarrassing). I'm not sure that what one finds in the journal

perfectly reflects the state of military history in the United States at any

given time-much less military history as practiced elsewhere around

the world. A comprehensive view would have to take into account books,

dissertations, many other journals, and popular media, too. But the mod-

ern practice of military history in the United States corresponds roughlyto the history of the journal itself, and if nothing else the journal has

been the one venue in which military history has been consistently wel-

comed for the past six decades. At least, then, we can think of the jour-nal as a window that has been open during a formative time in the life of

our field.

What should we expect to see? Should we see the intellectual cur-

rents in other fields of history, or even other disciplines, reflected, how-

ever dimly, in the journal's pages? To what extent, if any, does the

contemporaryworld of war make itself felt in the

journal? And,should

we find answers to these questions, do they really have much to sayabout the vitality of military history as thought and as practiced now?

Although the American Military History Foundation had been estab-

lished several years before, the first numbers of the journal came out in1938. The founders framed their interests broadly, as "the stimulation

and advancement of historical study of all that relates to war with appro-

priate emphasis upon American history."''A good deal of military historywas being written already, but one could not then speak of military his-

toryas a field. As

Harvey DeWeerd,one of the most

important figuresin

the early history of the foundation, wrote in the summer of 1940, "the

objective study of warfare has not been a recognized branch of knowl-

edge in this country."10With a new war on the horizon, the founders went about their work

with a some dedication, and all too soon, war was everybody's preoccu-

pation. Throughout the journal's war years, few articles appeared that

did not in some way speak to the war in progress. Wartime articles com-

9. Journal of the American Military History Foundation [hereinafter cited as

JAMHF]3, no. 1 (Spring 1939): n.p.10. Harvey DeWeerd, "Intellectual Preparedness,"JAMHF4, no. 2 (Summer

1940): n. p.




ROGER SPILLER

monly dealt with subjects in the near present or even anticipated issues

that lay ahead. As early as 1943, Alfred Vagts was writing about military

occupation, and even before the Combined Bomber Offensive began, the

journal pointedly ran a review of Giulio Douhet's Command of the Air.

In that same issue, an essay by A. F. Kovacs on the fall of France antici-

pated interpretations that would only appear in book form years after

the war. Toward the end of the war, historians were already contributingarticles on campaigns barely over. In the summer of 1945, Ben Blak-

eney's survey of the Japanese High Command could have served as a

prosecution brief for the Tokyo War Crimes trials yet to come.

But the war was not long over before the journal's contributors'

interest in the present seemed to wane. A new "antiquarian" section

appeared, and alongside reviews of singularly important works such as

Bernard Brodie's The Absolute Weapon, one could now find reviews on

the latest books on pistol and revolver shooting, formation badges, and

insigniae. For several years, the journal was full of articles derived from

the armed forces' massive official history projects. From time to time,articles would address issues of the day such as the ongoing debate over

unification of the armed forces, and there was even one article that

examined the rationale for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.11But on the whole, one can see a relaxing of that sense of immediacy

that had been soapparent

in thejournal's

wartimedays.

EventhoughAmerican foreign and defense policies and structures were radically

changing, none of the journal's contributors were moved to expressthemselves on these developments. If we can imagine a reader whose

knowledge of contemporary military affairs depended solely on the jour-

nal, that reader would have been wholly ignorant of the integration of the

armed forces, the emerging Cold War, the Chinese civil war, postwar

occupation and reconstruction, the strategic bombing surveys, or-

except for one reprinted speech by Justice Robert Jackson on Nurem-

berg-a whollynew

stagein the

historyof the laws of war.

11. See, for instance, Jean Montry, "UnoccupiedFrance and GermanWarEcon-

omy,"Military Affairs [formerlyJournal of the American Military History Founda-

tion; hereinafter cited as MA] 6, no. 2 (Summer 1942): 89-96; Edward S. Mason,"Economic Factors in MilitaryAction,"MA 6, no. 3 (Autumn 1942): 133-42; H. A.

DeWeerd,"TheFederalizationof ourArmy,"MA6, no. 3 (Autumn 1942): 143-52; andHuman Roudman, "Evolution of New Fleet Tactics," MA 7, no. 4 (Winter 1943):

197-201;Alfred

Vagts,"AMemoir of

MilitaryOccupation,"MA

7,no. 1

(Spring 1943):16-24; S. L. A. Marshall,"Reviewof The Command of theAir, by Giulio Douhet,"MA

7, no. 1 (Spring 1943): 44-46; A. F. Kovacs, "MilitaryOrigins of the Fall of France,"MA 7, no. 1 (Spring 1943): 25-40; John North, "Lessons of the North African Cam-

paign," MA 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1944): 161-68; Ben Bruce Blakeney, "The Japanese

High Command,"MA9, no. 2 (Summer 1945): 95-113.




- Military History and Its Fictions

Not even a new war was enough to stir the journal's contributors. In

the pages of Military Affairs, as the journal was then called, the Korean

War did not exist. Neither did China, or the new arms race. The Soviet

Union was invisible until 1957, when Raymond Garthoff contributed an

essay on "The Soviet Image of the Enemy." That was the only such arti-cle until three years later, when the journal ran a piece by James Atkin-

son on the Soviet theory of war. Colonial wars of liberation in Indochina

and Algeria went unremarked altogether during the 1950s save for one

essay on Mao's military thought.12

Finally, in 1960, the journal devoted an issue to irregular warfare, but

if readers entertained an interest in this subject they would have to look

elsewhere. Not until 1968 did the journal turn once more to contemporary

affairs, with the publication of the proceedings of a joint session between

the American Historical Association (AHA) and the now renamed Ameri-

can Military Institute on "Contemporary History and War,"chaired byPeter Paret. Charles MacDonald of the Army's Office of the Chief of Mili-

tary History read a paper explaining his organization's plans for an official

history of the war in Vietnam. C. P.Stacey, Leonard Krieger,and John Shyoffered comment. The comments had a sharp, barely civil edge to them,and exposed the long-standing fault line between official and academic

military history, between those whose work required them to sail so close

to thepresent

and those whoenjoyed

a comfortable distance from their

studies. What had been for nearly a generation a wary relationshipbetween the two camps had by 1968 been thoroughly poisoned by the war

itself. Krieger,in particular, questioned whether those in government ser-

vice, having bound themselves to the government's flawed policies and

strategic miscalculations, had surrendered any hope of scholarly indepen-dence-a suspicion that is still very much alive today. But it was the inter-

section of past and present that most disturbed Krieger, that dangerous

point where one left fact for the fictions of the present.13The truth of the matter was that these

suspicionsfell on all

militaryhistorians at the time, no matter whether they were in government ser-

vice or not, and regardless of what they studied. Nor would these suspi-cions abate. Just take a look at the Society's most recent newsletter,which records a Society roundtable at the last meeting of the AHAwhere

12. RaymondGarthoff,"The Soviet Imageof the Enemy,"MA21, no. 4 (Winter

1957): 161-74; James Atkinson, "The Impact of Soviet Theory on Warfareas a Con-

tinuation of Politics,"MA 24, no. 1 (Spring 1960): 1-6; Francis F. Fuller, "MaoTse-

tung: MilitaryThinker,"MA 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1958): 139-45; see also, IrregularWarfareIssue, MA 24, no. 3 (Autumn 1960).

13. Peter Paret, "Introduction," n "Session on ContemporaryHistoryand War,"MA 32, no. 1 (Spring 1968): 1-2; Leonard Krieger,"OfficialHistory and the War in

Vietnam:Comment,"MA32, no. 1 (Spring 1968): 16-19; and John Shy, "OfficialHis-

tory and the War in Vietnam: Comment,"MA32, no. 1 (Spring 1968): 13-15.




ROGERSPILLER

these suspicions were very much in evidence.14Almost fromthe begin-ningof thejournal,one can find contributorsremarkingalmost as a mat-ter of course on the less-than-complimentary attitudes of their

colleagues toward their work. So the growthof militaryhistory duringthe sixties must havepuzzledour critics. In 1954, thirty-sevenuniversi-ties offeredcourses in some varietyof militaryhistory,but by 1960, thatnumber had more than doubled. Between 1949 and 1952, the UnitedStates had produced about one hundred doctoral dissertations in thefield of military history.Between 1961 and 1970, five hundred were fin-ished or in progress.15 But, just in the middle of this period, John K.Mahon gave it as his opinion that "most academic historians" were"revoltedby the idea" of studyingwar.Those of us who came into the

professionin theseyears

have no troubleagreeing

with Mahon.16 was

earnestlycounseledon severaloccasions to takeup a more humane fieldof study.I thoughtat the time, and still do think, that all this was tanta-mount to confusing physiciansfor the diseases they treated.

So the disapprovalof colleaguesseems not to have deterredmilitaryhistorians at all afterVietnam. On the contrary,studies in militaryhis-

tory exploded. Theirgeographicalscope, chronologicalrange,scholarlydepth, and methodologicalbreadth defied criticismof the field.

At the same time, contributors o the journalseemed as detachedasever from

contemporaryevents. In the

yearsafter

Vietnam,militaryhis-

torians seemed as happyas their fellow citizens to forgetabout the war,althoughno one would have been so bold as to claim that his work wasfree of its influence. In the decade or so after the war,only six articles

appearedthat dealt directly with the war.17At a time when American

14. RandyPapadopoulos,"BroachingMilitary History to Wider Audiences: AHA

Roundtable Session," Society for Military History Headquarters Gazette 19, no. 2

(Spring 2006): 3-5.

15. See Paul Scheips, "Military History and Peace Research,"MA 36, no. 3(October 1972): 92-93, referencing a survey conducted by Stetson Conn, who was

then Chief Historian of the Army.16. Mahon is quoted by Theodore Ropp, "FortyYears of the American Military

Institute,"MA35, no. 3 (October 1971): 90.

17. Paul Schratz, "ACommentary on the Pueblo Affair,"MA35, no. 3 (October

1971): 93-95; Ronald Schaffer, "The 1940 Small Wars Manual and the "Lessons of

History,"'MA 36, no. 2 (April 1972): 46-51; Ronald Spector, "GettingDown to the

Nitty-Gritty:Military History, Official History and the American Experience in Viet-

nam,"MA38, no. 1 (February1974): 11-12; George Herring,"Review of TheMyLai

Massacre and itsCover-Up: Beyond

the Reachof

Law? The Peers Commission

Report with a Supplement and Introductory Essay on the Limits of Law, by Joseph

Goldstein, BurkeMarshall,and Jack Schwartz,"MA41, no. 2 (April 1977): 98; GeorgeC. Herring,"AmericanStrategyin Vietnam: The PostwarDebate,"MA46, no. 2 (April1982): 57-63; and Robert J. Graham,"Vietnam:An Infantryman'sView of Our Fail-

ure,"MA48, no. 3 (July 1984): 133-39.

1088 * THEJOURNAL F



-Military History and Its Fictions

national security strategy and the doctrine and organization of the

armed forces were undergoing a sea change, when the Army was a vir-

tual laboratory of social and professional dysfunction, when arms control

and disarmament were finally being taken seriously, and when wars in

the Middle East and the rise of modern terror were attracting world

attention, military historians did not respond in the pages of their lead-

ing professional journal. As if by common agreement, military historians

stayed as far away as possible from a direct engagement with contempo-

rary military affairs.

One could argue that the work of military historians during the last

generation was too vast, simply too energetic, to be accurately repre-sented in the pages of any one journal. I would agree that this is so, but

it was not always so. Before the sixties, the journal could claim some

authority as the voice of military history, but not after Vietnam. In sev-

eral issues during the decade that followed, the journal carried assess-

ments of the state of military history, beginning in 1977 when the

institute commemorated its fortieth anniversary. Surveys by Theodore

Ropp, Allan Millett, and Gunther Rothenberg fairly bulged with new

titles and approaches.1" No doubt, graduate students on the eve of their

comprehensive examinations were plunged into depression after seeingthe scope and variety of works they now had to master.

All the varieties ofhistory

wereentering

a time of intellectualexper-imentation, relaxing their inherent conservatism and narrowness of

view. Not only were the old divisions between historical fields dissolving,so too were those between history and other disciplines. Historians were

exploring new-or what was said to be new-interpretive and method-

ological territories.

Military history seemed ready made, perhaps overdue, for these

advances. As long ago as 1940, Harvey DeWeerd had written, rather sar-

castically, "it is unfortunate that war is not so academically minded, not

so inclined to observe thepolitely

artificial boundaries of our fields of

learning.""1 Although military historians were as attracted as ever bydrums and trumpets, books were appearing in the 1970s that defied easyclassification. On which shelf would one place Paul Fussell's The Great

War and Modern Memory? What appeared to be a survey of British

18. Theodore Ropp, "MilitaryHistorical Scholarship since 1937," MA 41, no. 2

(April 1977): 68-74; Allan Millett, "The Study of American Military History in the

United States,"MA 41, no. 2 (April 1977): 58-61; Gunther Rothenberg, "European

Military History in America: The State of the Art,"MA41, no. 2 (April 1977): 75-78.

See also Edward M. Coffman, "The New American Military History,"MA 48, no. 4

(January 1984): 1-5; and John Whiteclay Chambers, "Conference Review Essay: theNew Military History: Myth and Reality,"MA 55, no. 3 (July 1991): 395-406.

19. HarveyDeWeerd,"The Total Science of War," AMHF4, no. 4 (Winter 1940):

n.p.




ROGERSPILLER

literature during World War I spawned its own minor industry in books

that addressed the idioms by which cultures coped with their experienceof war. Do a quick search of Amazon for books containing the words "and

memory," and you'll see what I mean. Surely one of the most important

titles of the seventies was John Keegan's The Face of Battle, military his-

tory certainly, but strangely for a field so preoccupied with battle, one

that treated the subject in ways that had been only superficially

attempted before. The same is true of Eric Leed's No Man's Land, which

came out a few years later. Where would von Ranke place such books?20

Including Peter Paret and Michael Howard's translation of On War

with these books might seem perverse, but one could argue that their

work was as much a literary triumph as an exercise in military history-and its publication had much to do with not only a rejuvenation of mili-

tary theory, but also a new and much debated stage in the historiographyof the Vietnam War. And could military history lay an exclusive claim

even to the new second edition of The Makers of Modern Strategy when

it contained such pieces as Howard's "Men Against Fire in 1914" and

Michael Geyer's "German Strategy in the Machine Age"-pieces that

could just as well be regarded as intellectual history?21These advances were real. Of course, one could find precedents,

broad analytical works that treated military affairs in their widest con-

text, usingtools and methods and

insightsfrom other

disciplines.The

difference in the seventies was that so many works were now drawing on

a much wider and more complex foundation of knowledge-so many

works, in fact, that they now constituted a movement. And now the

movement had a name, for better or worse-the new military history,one that aimed at understanding the phenomenon of war as a whole, not

just its parts.22I think it important to emphasize here that these historians were not

simply reacting to intellectual fashion. They could as easily have taken

as their model HansDelbrfick,

whoupon finishing

his Geschichte der

20. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York:Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1975); John Keegan,The Face of Battle (New York:Viking, 1976); Eric

Leed, No Man's Land: Combat & Identity in World WarI (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1979).21. Carlvon Clausewitz,On War,ed. and trans. MichaelHowardand Peter Paret

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976); Peter Paret, ed., with the collab-

oration of GordonA. Craigand Felix Gilbert, The Makers of Modern Strategy:From

Machiavelli to the NuclearAge (Princeton,

N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1986).22. See Peter Paret's discussion of the "new military history" in his Under-

standing War:Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992): 209-26, and especially 220. An argumentcould be made that the trend toward new military history as it was being defined in

the 1970s was well underway in the United States and elsewhere long before.




- MilitaryHistoryand Its Fictions

Kriegskunst in 1920, wrote that he would "have no objection if this work

... were to be classified in the category of works of cultural history."23Theodore Ropp's bibliography of the hundred leading works in military

history contains any number of titles predating the "new military his-

tory" that would fall under that heading.24Nor do I believe Russell Wei-

gley was prompted to write The American Way of War, or Gerald

Linderman his The Mirror of War, or Peter Paret his Clausewitz and the

State because they were enamored of the new wave of cultural studies

then sweeping the profession. I would guess John Shy did not write A

People Numerous and Armed only because he was interested in new

theories of learning.25

Inevitably, some worried that the "new military history" had gonetoo far, whether the field had experienced a "paradigm change"-a ques-tion that in itself said much about the field's sensitivity to intellectual

currents. If indeed there had been a "gestalt shift," were Michel Foucault

and Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish very far behind? Had military his-

tory deserted the battlefield, as some feared? Judging from the range of

books published in the last decade or so, clearly not. Military historians

seem as interested as ever in battles and leaders, but they are bringingto their work a sensibility that earlier work did not possess. Look at

George Rable's study of Fredericksburg or Peter Maslowski's biography,

Looking fora

Hero,for

example.Rable's book is far from the narrative

descriptions that once dominated the field, and Maslowski's study of one

soldier's life is cast in its broadest political, cultural, and psychologicalcontext. If there is a new orthodoxy in the practice of military history,works such as these might well represent it.2'

Of course, traditionalists and modernists will snipe at one another

from behind their parapets, but the field has grown too much to be con-

tained by any one school or method. In 1981, the American Military

23. Hans Delbrfick,History of the Art of War,vol. 4, The Dawn of Modern War-

fare, trans. WalterRenfroe,Jr. (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1985), x.

24. Theodore Ropp, "MilitaryHistorical Scholarship since 1937," MA 41, no. 2

(April 1977): 72-74.

25. RussellF.Weigley,The American Wayof War:A History of United States Mil-

itary Strategy and Policy (New York:Macmillan, 1973); Gerald F. Linderman, The

Mirror of War:American Society and the Spanish-American War (Ann Arbor: Uni-

versity of Michigan Press, 1974); Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (New York:

OxfordUniversity Press, 1976); John W.Shy,A People Numerous and Armed:Reflec-tions on the Military Struggle for American Independence (New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1976).26. George C. Rable, Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! (Chapel Hill:University

of North Carolina Press, 2002); Peter Maslowski and Don Winslow, Looking for a

Hero:Staff Sergeant Joe Ronnie Hooper and the Vietnam War(Lincoln: University of

NebraskaPress, 2004).




ROGERSPILLER-

Institute listed 517 members; a decade later, the number had grown 300

percent, and now the society has over 2,200 members.27 By now, one

would hope, all would agree with Peter Paret that "the claim that onlycertain parts of the subject are important, that history concerned with

other parts is marginal and old-fashioned, is destructive of scholarshipand inhibits genuine understanding."28

So: a great body of knowledge, and a body of talent to use it. Our

response to academic fashions has been measured, judicious, conserva-

tive-perhaps even too conservative. If we have not gone off into mad

deconstructing, neither have we retired into a fortress of tradition. Our

faith in fact, our passion for detail, for the mastery of our subject, have

not given way to the hypertheorizing that has bedeviled so many of our

colleagues. But if military history has reached a certain intellectual

maturity, what has been the result? We can agree that military historymatters to us, but we may be living a great fiction: that it matters to any-one else. Should it matter?

It should matter.

I want you to consider the caliber of military commentary you see

every day, commentary which is remarkable for its ignorance of history;its lack of perspective; its child-like sense of causation, contingency, and

the play of chance; its talent for reduction. We can watch self-styled

expertsdeliver

judgmentsbased on

nothingmore than their own imme-

diate personal experience, often translated to the level of a general prin-

ciple. We are back in Sumatra with Paul Theroux's Memory Priest. The

past has been forgiven. History begins anew, every twenty-four hours.

And we, by our acquiescence, by our reluctance to engage the questionsof war in our own time-are we like the Creech, reveling in our secret

knowledge?In a world so much at war, does not our discipline impose an oblig-

ation on us to bring our knowledge to bear, to matter more than we

have? Ourprofessional upbringing

has conditioned us to recoilagainstinvolvement with the contemporary world. We have been taught, and

rightly so, to be suspicious of drawing lessons from the history we study.All too often, we have seen military history treated as a rummage bin of

evidence to prove preconceived notions. But is there no other means by

27. See Leslie Anders, "Retrospect:Four Decades of American MilitaryJournal-

ism,"MA 41, no. 2 (April 1977): 62-67, for a look at the proliferationof other jour-nals and magazines carryingarticles on military history. See also, D. K.R. Crosswell,"An

Analysisof Reader

Responsefor

MilitaryAffairs,"MA

45,no. 3

(October 1981):144. John Whiteclay Chambers, "Conference Review Essay: The New MilitaryHis-

tory: Myth and Reality,"Journal of Military History [hereinafter cited as JMH] 55,no. 3 (July 1991): 398. I am indebted to RobertBerlin, Executive Directorof the Soci-

ety for MilitaryHistory,for supplying up-to-date membership figures.28. Peter Paret, "MilitaryPower,"JMH53, no. 3 (July 1989): 284.





which the historically trained mind can be used? Do our obligationsextend only to the verge of the present and no farther?

Historians since Thucydides have said no, that they must extend

their gifts into the present. Niccol6 Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz,

Hans Delbriick, J. F. C. Fuller, B. H. Liddell Hart-the list is quite long-were not imprisoned by their discipline. They did not take refuge in the

fiction of their secret knowledge. They were not reluctant to engage the

great questions of war in their own time. To them, engagement did not

mean the abandonment of their scholarly principles, the preservation of

some supposed detachment from the influence of the present. Clause-

witz and Delbriick in particular were careful to draw a distinction

between the attainment of knowledge and the use of it, between military

history and what they called military criticism. They held that while his-

tory and criticism served different ends, scholars could serve both with-

out violating their professional oaths. Indeed, they felt it essential that

they do so. What they had in mind was not the application of military

history so much as the application of the military historian. Military crit-

icism was another means of advancing an understanding of war.29

Very few modern military historians have ventured into the world of

criticism. What, after all, keeps us in our studies? Some say it is only

right that we keep our distance from the present. Contemporary history,as Leonard

Krieger arguedin

1968,is a contradiction. We should not

address a problem until it is over. But how can we tell? As we watch the

newest round of exchanges between the United States and Iran, could we

say that the atomic age is over, or merely embarking on a new chapter?Could we say that the Vietnam War is over, when it still casts such a

shadow over the conduct of the present war? And can we reasonably saythat the war in Iraq is a new war, or a continuation of the first Desert

War? Another argument has it that other disciplines-international rela-

tions, or security studies-are better suited to deal with the present.

Once, military historycould claim

primacyas the foundation for

anyunderstanding of war, but other disciplines have pressed their claims

more successfully. I can find no intrinsic reason why this should be so,

except for the willingness of their practitioners to involve themselves in

the questions of the day.In the main, military historians have been far too modest about their

gifts. The speculative instinct that is at the heart of all criticism is in con-

stant play in the practice of history, and it is especially evident in the

practice of military history. When we address the past, we never do so

with a blank mind. We have been taught to keep our speculations in

29. See Peter Paret's discussion on Delbriick'sdistinctions between the militaryhistorian and the Militdirschrisftsteller, or Kritik, in his "HansDelbriick on MilitaryCritics and MilitaryHistorians,"MA30, no. 3 (Winter 1966): 148-52.




ROGERSPILLER

check, but our interpretations, our criticisms, would be impossible with-

out allowing some play of what has been called the historian's favorite

secret question: "What if?" Think of any often-debated historical issue,in which the problem is not so much knowing what happened as in

explaining what happened. In the task of interpretation, we find the verysame speculative elements we see in criticism itself, the actual use of the

educated imagination. And yet we have been reluctant to use these gifts.In the spring of 1993, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton

sponsored a symposium on "The History of War as Part of General His-

tory," during which Russell Weigley read a paper on "The American Mil-

itary and the Principle of Civilian Control from McClellan to Powell."30

Weigley's paper is, I think, a fair example of the kind of scholarship that

conforms to Delbriick's conception of military criticism. Weigley had

come to Princeton to register a serious complaint, that at least since the

Korean War "conflict and bickering between soldier and civilian had

become perennial impediments to the formation of a coherent American

foreign and military policy." The catalyst for Weigley's complaint was, as

he put it, "a series of vocal military objections to civilian policies in the

immediate aftermath of the Cold War." He was particularly critical of

General Colin F. Powell, then serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, for his opposition to any American intervention in the conflict in

Bosnia-Hercegovina. Just before the presidential election of 1992, Pow-

ell had publicly reiterated his long-standing aversion to limited inter-

ventions during an interview with the New York Times. This was

followed ten days later by an op-ed piece in the Times under Powell's

own byline, entitled "Why Generals Get Nervous." At the same time,President-elect Bill Clinton's campaign promise to liberalize Pentagon

policy toward the enlistment of homosexuals had created a toxic envi-

ronment for the new administration even before the inauguration.

Immediately after the inauguration, when President Clinton mooted the

questionof

usinghis executive

powersto set this new

policyin

motion,opposition from serving and retired general officers was fierce and pub-lic. To Weigley, the generals' very public opposition to their commander

in chief posed a direct challenge to the American tradition of civil-mili-

tary relations. He finished his essay with an ominous warning: "The prin-

ciple of civil control of the military in the United States faces an

uncertain future."

As far as I can tell, Weigley's paper was the first instance in recent

times in which this issue was raised so directly and frankly in a public

forum. More than a decade later, we understand very well that the Clin-

30. Russell Weigley, "TheAmerican Militaryand the Principle of Civilian Con-

trol from McClellan to Powell,"JMH57, no. 5 (October 1993): 27-58. The proceed-

ings of the symposium were published in this issue of the journal.




- Military History and Its Fictions

ton presidency beganits relationswith the Pentagonwith severalstrikes

against it, and some scholars believe that civil-militaryrelations neverachieved a proper equilibrium, that when the Clinton administrationdealt with the Pentagon, t was alwaysas a supplicant,never as a master.

A considerablebody of scholarship since has addressed modern civil-militaryrelations,but none that I have seen quite reveals the depth of

personal contempt anddisdainof the PresidentI heardexpressedalmost

daily, routinely,and off-handedlyby militaryofficers I dealt with duringthese days, from the rank of captain to four-stargeneral. In his paper,Weigley had compared General Powell's reluctance to use force withGeneral GeorgeB. McClellan's.At the time, I thought this comparisonwas apt on several levels-and I still do.

In addressinga question of such contemporaryimportance, had

Weigleystepped beyond his role as a historian? Some certainly thoughtso. The proceedingsof the Princeton conference were published a fewmonths later in the Journal of Military History, and Weigley's paperexcited a rebuttalby one of Powell's ong-timeassistants. LawrenceWilk-erson accused Weigleyof allowing"hispassionget the better of reason"

by indulgingin "sweepinggeneralizations [that defy] the more circum-

spect principles of professionalhistorians."1 As Wilkerson'sdefense ofPowellmade clear,historians should stay in their play rooms and leavethe

reallyimportantpeopleto the business

theyknow best. Forthe most

part,we have obligedMr.Wilkersonand his friends.They have been safefromany criticism fromus.

So, yes, Weigleyhad taken on the task of militarycriticism, and to

my mind this was longoverdue. I wouldarguethathis use of militaryhis-

tory in this way, to inform an issue of contemporaryimportance, fol-lowed in the best traditions of Delbriick and others, using their

knowledgeof military history as the foundation for educated criticism.

Weigley'spapercertainlydid not create this controversy,but the expert

wayin which he framedit contributed to a

depthof

understandinghat

a newspaperarticle or television segment could not equal. Afterward,RichardKohn,PeterFeaver,OliHosti,and other scholarspublishedtheirown critical examinationsof the issue, and inaugurateda decade'sworthof valuableresearch and analysis on a question that is still very much

alive today,as Secretaryof Defense Donald H. Rumsfeldcould attest.32

31. Lawrence Wilkerson, "Communications to the Editor,"JMH58, no. 3 (July

1994): 577-79.

32. Seeespecially

Richard Kohn, "Out of Control: The Crisis in CivilMilitaryRelations,"The National Interest, vol. 35 (Spring 1994): 3-17; Kohn, "The Forgotten

Fundamentals of Civilian Control of the Militaryin Democratic Government,"John

M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Project on U.S. Post-Cold WarCivil-MilitaryRelations, Working Paper No. 13, HarvardUniversity, June 1997; and Kohn, "The

Erosion of Civilian Control of the Military in the United States Today,"Naval War




ROGERSPILLER

But, have you noticed? In all the publicity about the public criticisms of

military policy by several recently retired generals, few writers seemed

aware that anything like this had happened before, or that civil-militaryrelations in the United States required a more subtle understanding of

the past than ever.Are there today no questions in which the military historian's knowl-

edge might be usefully engaged? I think we could all make a very longlist. The origins and conduct of the present war should have awakened

us to the danger of acting as if history never happened, and the conse-

quences when scholars turn their backs on contemporary affairs. More

than a decade after the end of the Vietnam War, Douglas Pike spoke bit-

terly of "the total failure of the academic community" to come to gripswith the war as it was being fought. "Scholars and academics opposedthe war,"he wrote, "but did so in ignorance. With no basis of knowledge,the counsel was rooted in error, in the field their advice was dismissed,as it should have been, as worthless." And so, "when a high-level offi-

cial-such as Robert McNamara-wanted to know what Ho Chi Minh

would think about a matter ... he would interview himself, asking what

he would do if he were Ho Chi Minh." This was, Pike wrote, "the worst

kind of ignorance-what Aldous Huxley calls vincible ignorance: that

which one does not know and realizes it, but does not regard as neces-

saryto know."33 We are

verywell

acquaintedwith this kind of official

thinking today. When high-ranking officials run out of arguments, theytend to throw up their hands and say, "history will judge." Well, here,Pike is history, and his judgments on our predecessors should keep us

awake at nights. Do we have a judgment like this, waiting for us some-

where in the future?

So I would like to propose an experiment for you. Set aside some of

your time each day to give the same kind of disciplined attention to con-

temporary military affairs as you do to your other work. You should not

beput

offby

thethought

thathigh

officials have access to more and bet-

ter information than you do, or have the advantage of intelligence theycannot reveal. I can assure you from personal experience, those advan-

tages are highly overstated. Look for a question that particularly engages

College Review 55 (Summer 2002): 9-60. See also Ole R. Holsti, "AWidening GapBetween the Military and Civilian Society? Some Evidence, 1976-1996," John M.Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Project on US Post-Cold WarCivil-MilitaryRela-

tions, WorkingPaperNo. 13, HarvardUniversity, October 1997; and also Tom Ricks,"The

Widening GapBetween

Militaryand

Society,"Atlantic

Monthly, July 1997,67-78.

33. Douglas Pike, "Conduct of the Vietnam War:Strategic Factors, 1965-1968,"in The Second Indochina War:Proceedings of a Symposium held at Airlie, Virginia,7-9 November 1984 (Washington: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1986),99-119.





your own interests. Try your hand at writing a piece of criticism under a

deadline you've given yourself. Try to rid yourself of the notion that youare somehow betraying your scholarship. Remind yourself that you are

not applying history in some superficial or tendentious way, that you are

really applying yourself, your own highly educated judgment, and thatwhat you are doing has its own long and honorable and useful tradition.

Along the way you will find that what you are learning to do is only dif-

ferent, but not more difficult, than the work you ordinarily do. Then look

for venues in which you can exercise your newly acquired skills. There

are more than ever; find one that suits your tastes, and take the plunge.

Then, perhaps, just perhaps, the Creech will not come for you one

day. And you will not be roasted and eaten after all.


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