War

EVERY JULY FOURTH AMERICANS say they like revolution. But it’s best not to take them too seriously. They don’t really mean it.

What they like is the American Revolution. Only they’re under the impression the American Revolution wasn’t really a revolution at all. Real revolution is bloody and fearful. Ours is believed to have been more like a tea party—a Boston Tea Party. As the Daughters of the American Revolution explained, in a pamphlet issued to aliens who might be misled into taking our rhetoric seriously, “A revolution usually means an attempt to tear down or overturn a government or wreck the existing institutions of a country. The American Revolution did none of these things.”1

To be sure, the American Revolution was different from the other great modern upheavals in France, Russia, and China—but not as different as people think. As the historian Crane Brinton has observed, there was “more than the touch of the reign of terror” in the American conflict.

The extent of the barbarism can be measured in the treatment of loyalists, the Americans who stayed true to the king. They were not treated well. Countless loyalists were tarred and feathered. Thousands were forced to turn over millions of dollars in property without compensation. More than eighty thousand were driven to flee for safety to Canada, where many spent the remainder of their lives in poverty. One scholar has calculated that the American Revolution even produced more émigrés than the French Revolution: twenty-four émigrés per thousand of the population, compared with five per thousand for France.*2

The loyalists, of course, are seldom mentioned because they lost, and America is not terribly fond of losers—especially losers who didn’t amount to much of an opposition. And in popular lore never was there a more useless opposition than the loyalists. Two hundred years later they are practically invisible. Children are taught that the war pitted Americans against foreigners in a classic battle for self-determination. The loyalists are rarely even mentioned.

Of all the nonsense spread about the Revolution, this is the most preposterous. The Revolutionary War actually pitted American against American and sometimes, as in the case of Benjamin Franklin, father against son. Only a minority of the people supported the Revolution; John Adams estimated about a third of the population was actually hostile to the idea; another third, indifferent.

The belief that loyalist opposition to the Revolution constituted an insignificant threat to the cause is widespread but spurious. Loyalists played a major role in the war. One statistic is telling: Almost as many Americans fought for Britain as fought against Britain. In 1780, when there were nine thousand patriots in Washington’s army, eight thousand loyalists served in the British Army.3

Unlike the loyalist, the minuteman is well remembered—unfortunately not very accurately. It is widely believed that the minute-man who came to the defense of his country in its greatest hour of need was drawn from the ranks of the middle class. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, in commemorating Concord, “Here once the embattled farmers stood,/And fired the shot heard round the world.”

This very comforting belief has little foundation in fact. While Americans like to think it was the average fellow who came to the rescue of the country, scholars have found that the average minute-man was, economically speaking, below average. The average American was middle-class. According to Robert Gross’s study of the Concord militia, the average minuteman, after 1778, was poor, landless, out of work, and out of hope. If Gross is right, the minute-man’s decision to volunteer did not come at the expense of his career. If anything, the war provided men with opportunities for social advancement they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

Many a minuteman wasn’t really a volunteer anyway; many were paid to fight. When the yeoman farmer didn’t want to heed the call of the militia, he frequently hired a substitute to do his fighting for him.4

The idea that Americans don’t need to prepare for war because in a pinch they can always rely on the citizen militia stems from another misconception involving the minuteman. It is based on the belief, as a military man once lamented, that Lexington and Concord proved that “the old squirrel rifle from the mantelpiece will repulse any foe.” In truth, Lexington and Concord proved, if anything, just how unreliable the minuteman was without thorough training.5

While every boy and girl is taught to think of the minuteman as a great shot, evidence suggests he wasn’t much of a sharpshooter after all—at least not at Lexington and Concord. Stewart Holbrook estimates that “not one American in ten hit a redcoat that seething day.”* More redcoats than Americans were killed and wounded in the battles, but that was only because the Americans outnumbered the British by about two to one. Concludes Holbrook: “That [the Americans] wreaked as much destruction as they did was because there were so many of them shooting.”6

Further confusion surrounds the actual behavior of the minute-man at Lexington when they came under fire. Some authors say they “stood their ground.” Others insist they “confronted” the redcoats. The fact is, according to the minutemen’s own leader, Captain John Parker, they scattered—as they were told to. “Upon [the redcoats’] sudden approach,” recalled Parker in a deposition given after the incident, “I immediately ordered our Militia to disperse and not to fire.”

Parker did not say whether at the time he had remarked, as we’ve been taught to believe, “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” Chances are he did not. As with many other famous quotes, this one has a dubious pedigree. It did not surface until 1858. The person who brought it to the attention of the world was Parker’s grandson.7

In contrast with the heroic image of the minuteman is the sad picture of the original army recruit. While the minuteman could just spring to arms successfully overnight, the average soldier had to work hard just to achieve mediocrity. As the story goes, he finally becomes a great soldier, but it takes nothing less than the intervention of a stern Prussian taskmaster, the legendary Baron Friedrich von Steuben, to make him one. The truth is the minuteman probably was not as good as people think, and the army recruit not as bad.

Misconceptions abound not only about the people who fought the war but about the kind of war they fought. Myth to the contrary, the Revolution was mainly fought—by both sides—in the classic European style. Guerrilla warfare was rare. As one historian indicates, the American Revolution was not England’s Vietnam—at least not as far as military tactics go—and George Washington was not Ho Chi Minh—at least to the extent that Ho was a guerrilla chieftain. In the end the Americans won not because they had amassed a great guerrilla army but because they had learned how to use a regular army to beat a regular army. Historian Don Higginbotham says the Americans deliberately rejected the option of a guerrilla war because they feared its consequences: “A guerrilla war that might achieve independence but wreck the institutions of society in the process would be a hollow victory; Americans had no wish to win the war and lose the peace.” He points out that it’s not certain the Americans would, in any case, have won such a war. The British had just as much experience fighting guerrilla wars as the Americans. Both had had the experience, after all, of fighting Indians.8

Equally as surprising as the myths about the conduct of the Revolutionary War are the myths about its leaders, many of whom are overestimated. Everyone remembers John Paul Jones’s contribution on the high seas and that he supposedly remarked, “I’ve just begun to fight”; almost no one recalls that after the Revolution John Paul Jones, defender of liberty, became a well-paid mercenary in the service of the great Russian despot Catherine the Great. Also forgotten are that Alexander Hamilton submitted to blackmail after he had seduced an associate’s wife;* that Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution, used his public position to enrich his private firm and was accused of war profiteering; that Silas Deane, one of the negotiators of the Franco-American Treaty of Alliance, used inside diplomatic information to make himself rich; and that Paul Revere was charged with cowardice for his role in the Penobscot expedition, the worst naval disaster of the Revolution.9 (One military committee ruled that his conduct was “crityzable”; another that it was not.)

Revere was for the most part a hero, but his role in warning of approaching redcoats has been exaggerated. Thanks to Longfellow, everyone thinks Revere rode alone through the woods when the British started in on Lexington and Concord. Actually two others—William Dawes and Samuel Prescott—also made the trip. Revere did not even make it to Concord. After warning Lexington, he ran into a British patrol and was captured.10

Ethan Allen, of Green Mountain Boys fame, is probably the most overrated revolutionary hero; he may even qualify as another Benedict Arnold. Allen is commonly thought to have accomplished wonderful things for his country, not least of which was the storming of Fort Ticonderoga in a sensational raid of derring-do. But if Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison are to be believed—and few historians are more respected than they—Allen deserves to go down in history as one of its great scoundrels. Commager and Morison report that in the middle of the war, unbeknown to his contemporaries, Allen opened secret negotiations with the enemy, apparently to try to secure royal recognition of more than a quarter million acres of disputed Vermont land his family claimed. At one point he even promised to take Vermont out of the war in return for certain land concessions. The British wouldn’t go along, however, and the deal fell through.

Some Allen supporters have suggested he was only trying to put pressure on Congress to guarantee Vermont statehood. Maybe, but just communicating with the British during the war was considered a crime; Allen himself had a hand in sending to the gallows a man who had committed this very offense. Had his dealings with the British been discovered, Allen might have faced a similar end.11

A curious legend about Benedict Arnold, by the way, is that when he was about to die, he put on his old American uniform. One author even has Arnold saying, “Let me die in my American uniform in which I fought my battles. God forgive me for ever putting on any other.”

Nice story—if it were true, but it isn’t. All the evidence suggests it not only didn’t happen but couldn’t have happened. After he died, his wife wrote that Arnold was delirious his last three days and was entirely unable to swallow or speak.12

The War of 1812 is neither celebrated nor scorned. It’s simply ignored. Its chief significance, in the popular understanding, is that it occasioned the burning of Washington, D.C. This is remembered as a great and dastardly deed and for some time afterward constituted a major black mark against the British. What is usually left unsaid is that the British burned our capital only after Americans had burned one of their parliaments.

The American attack occurred near Lake Ontario, at York, the capital of Upper Canada, at the end of April 1813. Washington was set afire in the summer of 1814.

To be fair about it, the Americans acted without orders, and their superiors didn’t even know what was happening until after the attack. In contrast, the British officers not only were aware of the burning of Washington but ordered it. Still, to say the British were therefore more culpable than the Americans is simply the American viewpoint. The British see things differently.13

Another controversy between the British and the Americans is the question of the circumstances surrounding Thomas Macdonough’s victory on Lake Champlain. Everyone agrees Macdonough, an American, won, but they don’t agree about which side had the superior fleet. American historians frequently claim that Macdonough was outgunned and outmanned. British historians say just the opposite: that the American forces were superior (it being better to be defeated by a larger force than by a smaller one).

The fact is both sides were about even. Each had a frigate and a brig and almost the same number of gunboats (twelve for the British, ten for the Americans). In addition, the British had two sloops; the Americans, a sloop and a schooner. The British had more long guns, but the Americans had a far greater number of short cannons. What all this meant was that the Americans could fire more pounds of ammunition, but the British could fire what they had from farther away.14

Unlike the War of 1812, the war for Texas’ independence is the focus of a number of enduring myths, most having to do with the brave stand taken at the Alamo in 1836 by the likes of William Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett—themselves the subject of myth.

Americans living in the Southwest know the basic story better than others, but everybody knows the essential fact that the defenders of the Alamo fought to the last man. Americans usually don’t like celebrating losses, but this defeat was different because it ended on a sublime note. The moral: If you have to lose, this is the way to do it.

How did the last defenders actually die? How did Davy die? Not, as it turns out, in the midst of battle. According to historian Dan Kilgore, overwhelming evidence indicates that Crockett and several Texans were captured by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and then executed; they did not die fighting to the end. If Mexican General Manuel Fernández Castrillón had had his way, they would have been spared. Santa Anna overruled Castrillón and had them killed.

The question is why anyone ever started the myth that the defenders had fought to the last man anyway. The real story of the Alamo is good enough as is. The defenders had shown remarkable courage in fighting at all rather than surrendering right from the first; the 182 Americans holed up in the old church were vastly outnumbered by more than 6,000 Mexican troops. Even considering the low quality of the average Mexican recruit in those days, the odds of victory were negligible. Some have suggested the Americans remained only because they expected to be rescued by reinforcements any day, but that doesn’t diminish the bravery of the men who stayed rather than run.

Travis is remembered in a vague way mainly for the line he allegedly drew in the dirt at the outset of the fight; only those willing to fight for Texas independence, he supposedly said, should cross it. Well, he may have said such a thing, but it’s doubtful. The anecdote apparently relies on an account published nearly forty years later by a man who got the story from his parents, who in turn claimed to have gotten it from one Moses Rose, who hadn’t crossed the line and had fled.

It’s a good thing Travis isn’t remembered for much else because the rest of his story is not particularly heroic. Before going to Texas, he lived in Alabama, where he killed a man who made advances on his wife. A short time later he left his wife and son to move to Texas at a time when she was pregnant. When he arrived in Texas, he lied about his family, swearing under oath in one place that he was a widower and in another that he was a simple bachelor.15

The Mexican-American War, which was precipitated by the war for Texas independence, is not the subject of any major myths. It is barely even recalled, probably for the better. A war for pure territory, as this war was, is not the kind of war Americans care to celebrate or mythologize, nor should they.

The Civil War has been both celebrated and mythologized. The only trouble is that no two historians seem to agree on what is truth and what is fiction. They agree in general that slavery was a fundamental cause of the war, but that’s about all. Was the conflict “irrepressible”? Were “natural causes” to blame? Were the abolitionists at fault? Don’t ask historians. They don’t agree. All this proves, if anyone needs such evidence, is that one person’s truth is another person’s myth. This is, of course, true about most historical arguments, but seemingly truer about the Civil War than about many others. “There must be more historians of the Civil War than there were generals fighting in it,” historian David Donald has observed. “[And] of the two groups, the historians are the more belligerent.”16

But if there is no consensus on what caused the conflict, people have agreed on what didn’t cause it. No respectable person today blames the war on a slaveholders’ conspiracy as contemporaries did. Neither does anyone attribute the war to fanatical Republican politicians, as once was the fashion. Except for historian E. B. Smith, no one recently has seriously argued that the war was caused by a blundering generation of pompous, self-interested, fanatical politicians.

One still does hear the self-flagellating idea that slavery was harsher in the United States than anywhere else in the modern Western world and that, therefore, only here was war required to root it out. The classic statement is made by one Frank Tannenbaum in an influential little book called Slave and Citizen, published in 1946. As Tannenbaum puts it, slavery in Latin America was milder than in the United States, and manumission (the release of slaves), easier. “The principle of manumission,” writes Tannenbaum, “provided Latin American slavery a means of change. The denial of manumission [in the United States] encrusted the social structure in the Southern states and left no escape except by revolution, which in this case took the form of a civil war.”

Would it were so, for the American Civil War would then be easy to explain. It isn’t. Thorough investigation has revealed that while the Civil War was exceptionally violent, the abolition of slavery in Latin America occasioned serious disruption as well. David Brion Davis, who has studied slavery more closely probably than any other living person, has discovered that the abolition of slavery in Brazil and the Caribbean closely followed the pattern of the United States. In Brazil, says Davis, “there was a radical abolition movement, an underground railroad, and sectional cleavage,” just as in North America. And abolition brought down government leaders; in the case of Brazil, it ended the monarchy. In the Caribbean British planters threatened secession when the crown ordered the slaves freed; the planters relented only after they realized it would be suicidal to resist in the face of overwhelming British military superiority.

Only in the United States did abolitionism lead to civil war, but that may have been for any number of reasons. One scholar has even suggested that federalism may have been to blame.17

Other Civil War myths concern the famous Bixby letter, the Andersonville prison, and Jefferson Davis’s “dress.” Although the celebrated letter to Mrs. Bixby sounds like Lincoln, scholars say there’s no proof he wrote it, read it, or even signed it. Like most of the letters he sent to strangers, this one, addressed “to the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle,” may have been written by one of his secretaries. Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, indeed, claimed he had written the letter, though it’s unclear whether he meant he had composed it or just penned it.*

Whoever wrote it, it was a beautiful letter—but it was also a beautiful hoax. According to War Department statistics, only two Bixby sons were killed, while one deserted, one was honorably discharged, and one was captured and became a Confederate.18

As for Andersonville, it was a vile prison. It may have been the worst prison. But it wasn’t the only prison where captured soldiers died cruel and needless deaths. POWs died in northern prisons, too. In fact, death rates in POW camps in the North and South were comparable. Of the 195,000 Union soldiers imprisoned in the South, 15.5 percent died in prison; of the 215,000 Confederates imprisoned in the North, 12 percent died in prison.

More POWs died in Andersonville than in any other prison—more than twelve thousand in all, more than a hundred a day. But it’s not as if the South had deliberately planned things that way. The Confederates just couldn’t afford to do better. While rations were meager, records show that the prisoners received the same amount of rations as the Confederates who guarded them.19

As for Jefferson Davis, for all his humiliations, the Confederate president did not disguise himself in his wife’s clothing to try to avoid capture. When he was arrested, he was wearing regular clothes, including a man’s hat. All the pictures showing him dressed like a woman, all the cartoons—all are wrong. “I was in the party that captured Davis,” Captain James H. Parker wrote later, “and saw the whole transaction from its beginning. I now say, and hope that you will publish it, that Jefferson Davis did not have on, at the time he was taken, any garments such as are worn by women.”

No one knows how the rumor got started. But we know how it spread: by military officials. They got it from hearsay. Reporters got it from them.20

By almost any standard, the Spanish-American War ranks as a minor conflict, but it’s the source of major confusion. Not even the famous Rough Riders are accurately remembered. Everybody thinks the Rough Riders charged around on horses, whereas they actually fought on foot because their horses had mistakenly been left behind in Florida. The impression that the Rough Riders formed a major part of the land forces is also common but untrue; they numbered just a few hundred men out of an army of more than sixteen thousand. Teddy Roosevelt is remembered for charging up San Juan Hill, though he probably went up nearby Kettle Hill. He himself is responsible for the confusion. Although originally he spoke of Kettle Hill, years later he talked about San Juan Hill. Finally, textbook writers almost always say that the war marked America’s entrance onto the world stage, but in truth it had been there long before. Thomas A. Bailey was one of those writers, but he later recanted, remarking: “The flash of Dewey’s guns merely spotlighted a maturation that had long since taken place. The irony is that we finally won belated acceptance into the great power ‘club’ by thrashing a second-rate power in two naval engagements that cost us only one life.”21

Admiral George Dewey is thought to have made a reputation for himself in the war, and he did that; but it didn’t last. Two years later it was smashed like the Spanish fleet. Once again Dewey did the smashing. Americans had liked Dewey and talked about running the war hero for President in 1900. But when he announced that he was interested in the job, he blundered badly. He told reporters that he had worried at first he wasn’t well enough qualified, but that then he had looked into the office a bit and discovered he could do the job all right despite his own modest abilities. He said that “the office of the president is not such a very difficult one to fill,” and that was the last anyone heard of Admiral Dewey. After his remarks no one wanted to run him for President—or anything.22

World War I is not now so much a source of myth as it once was. No one today seriously believes, as contemporaries did, the claim of Allied propaganda that the Germans were guilty of unprecedented murder and mayhem of civilians. As is now well known, many of the atrocities attributed to the Germans were simply made up; besides, both sides committed horrible acts. What’s more, a lot of people in the 1930’s believed Wall Street had pushed America into the Great War to save bankers’ loans, but by the 1940’s almost no one responsible held this view. It didn’t make much sense. The billions in loans made to the Allies were considered safe; bankers thought the Allies were winning and would repay the money after victory. Besides, it’s unlikely the Congress would ever have agreed to send American boys off to certain death in a foreign land just to salvage the fortunes of a few financiers.

Yet myths remain, as befits a war about which there was so much confusion that Americans weren’t even sure when it ended. Everyone now knows this war to end all wars ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. Indeed, on that day Americans celebrated the war’s end, but not vigorously. The country had already gone through one celebration—four days earlier—when a United Press dispatch falsely reported the war was over. It wasn’t; soldiers were still dying in battle. However, the country didn’t know that until the next day, when the wire service finally put out a correction.23

The commonest erroneous beliefs about World War I are that the sinking of the Lusitania touched off American intervention, that submarine warfare was invented by the Germans, and that Germany was bankrupted by the Versailles Treaty.

While the sinking of the Lusitania heightened anti-German feeling, it did not precipitate American intervention, which didn’t occur for another two years. (The Lusitania was sunk in 1915.) When the ship was struck, 128 Americans died, but the Lusitania wasn’t an American ship; it was British. The ship wasn’t struck without warning; before it sailed, the Germans issued a warning that it would be targeted by submarines. As if all this weren’t enough, the Lusitania was carrying small arms and ammunition; it wasn’t exactly an unarmed passenger ship, as propagandists asserted.24

The belief that Germany was bankrupted by the Versailles Treaty was advanced by the foremost economist of the century, John Maynard Keynes, and is frequently considered the chief cause of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Actually, Germany was responsible for Germany’s economic troubles; the demand for war reparations made at Versailles had little to do with the matter. The First World War cost Germany about $100 billion; war reparations only came to about $32 billion. Undoubtedly the reparations demanded in the Versailles Treaty strained the German economy, but it was probably already ruined by war. As a comparison, consider this: Germany spent almost as much on World War I as the United States, forty years later, spent on Vietnam. (America spent about $120 billion.) Put another way, German outlays during the war equaled the entire United States budget in 1965.

That Germany was bankrupt after the war, for whatever reason, is taken for granted by almost everyone, but it may not be true. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith has suggested that the German economy was adequate to support the country’s population after the war. He has even argued that the Germans could have met reparations demands if they had so desired by accepting a lower standard of living. This would have been an unpleasant development, says Galbraith, but not an impossible one.

It may be that Galbraith is being iconoclastic just to be so. In that case the conventional wisdom may be true. The fact is no one can ever know for sure. To prove that Germany could have afforded to pay war reparations, one would have to do one of those computer studies that show how history might have happened. Such studies are notoriously unreliable. One is reminded of the study a few years ago that suggested America would have been better off building canals than railroads. It was done by the same fellow who subsequently reported that computer analyses show that slavery wasn’t very harsh. He may be right in both instances, but he didn’t have to tote that barge or lift that bale.26

An interesting footnote to the stories about the First World War and its aftermath touches on a myth involving the United States and Russia. It is widely believed that Americans and Russians have never clashed in battle, but they did fight on two occasions, with casualties on both sides. In 1918 and 1919 five thousand American troops were sent to northern Russia, and nine thousand to Siberia. Ostensibly American troops went to Russia as part of the effort to defeat Germany: Troops in the north were to stiffen local opposition to the Germans; troops in Siberia were to help keep open the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which was being used to rescue cornered Czech troops. American soldiers were under orders not to take sides in the Russian Revolution, then in full swing. But inevitably they did. Gradually drawn into the internal conflict, Americans ended up fighting on the side of the counter-revolutionaries against the Bolsheviks. In the campaign in northern Russia there were five hundred American casualties; in the Siberian operation, thirty-six Americans died.27

Unlike World War I, World War II is still very much a source of outlandish myths, most having to do with Pearl Harbor. One hears from time to time, for instance, the old charge that Franklin Roosevelt deliberately exposed the fleet in Hawaii to provoke a Japanese attack. It just isn’t so. Warnings had gone out to the fleet commanders to be prepared for war prior to the attack, but the commanders never anticipated Japan would strike Pearl Harbor. The military reasoned that before Japan targeted American possessions, it would first exercise its muscle in its own backyard, taking over such likely marks as Thailand, British Malaya, or the Dutch East Indies.

Just prior to the attack there had been several events that might have alarmed an alert commander. A couple of hours before the attack a Japanese submarine had been spotted and destroyed. Less than an hour before the attack radar picked up signs of approaching aircraft. But no one thought the appearance of either the submarine or the planes was significant.*

There had been one hint that the Japanese might assault Pearl Harbor. Eleven months before the “day of infamy” the American ambassador to Japan had picked up a rumor that the Japanese planned a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It was unfortunately only one of many wild rumors then circulating and didn’t attract much attention. Rumors contradicted each other; no one knew which rumors to take seriously.28

Few Americans believe the false stories about Pearl Harbor, but other major myths about World War II are widespread and worth mentioning. These include myths about German war preparations, Hitler, Jews, and the atomic bomb.

Nazi propaganda is responsible for the widely held conviction that Germany (in historian A. J. P. Taylor’s phrase) “had armed day and night from the moment Hitler came to power.” Among other things, Americans believe that in the prewar days Hitler put the German economy on a wartime footing, that German factories operated at 100 percent capacity, that Germany had an advantage over the Allies because of its war preparations, and that the Nazis turned the German economy into a ruthless, efficient machine.

All this is (Taylor again) “pure myth.” The United States government, after an exhaustive postwar investigation, came to the conclusion that through most of the war years the German economy was run by incompetent Nazis, that war preparations were nil. Right until the end of the war the economy was still geared to civilian needs. The Germans seemed almost bent on wasting valuable resources. In 1943 they imported fifty thousand Ukrainian women to do household chores. As late as 1944 they were still employing servants in large numbers—as many as 1.3 million. Even at the end of the war German war factories mainly operated only in daytime; few bothered with nighttime shifts.

The famous blitzkrieg attacks, so feared in the West, were dictated by German economic conditions. The German economy couldn’t support sustained warfare, so the military had to resort to lightning-quick strikes to achieve prompt victories. The Germans took advantage of the intervening lulls to restore depleted stocks in time for the next attack. This was for a time a successful strategy, and that was fortunate for the Nazis; they couldn’t fight and win any other way. They couldn’t afford to.*

The Allies were far better prepared for war. In 1941 Britain, with 70 percent of the national income of Germany, outproduced the Nazis in virtually every armaments category except torpedoes and small arms. It produced twice as many aircraft as Germany, a thousand more tanks, five thousand more big guns. If any people deserves to be remembered as efficient and productive, it is not the Germans but the British.29

As misleading as the belief in German war preparedness is the related conviction that Hitler nefariously plotted in advance to make war on all Europe in order to take over the world. Indeed, it is sometimes suggested he plotted Germany’s conquest of the world years earlier from inside the walls of prison while he was mulling over the German humiliation at Versailles. There is no evidence at all that this is true. As Taylor reported in 1960, Hitler seems to have drifted into world war one small victory at a time and himself seemed surprised the early triumphs came so easily. People find this hard to fathom, however, and believe it somehow excuses Hitler’s behavior. As Taylor wrote, “Somehow people regard planning war as more wicked than waging a successful war unplanned.” That, of course, is nonsense.30

Whether Hitler planned the war or not, everyone knows that at the 1936 Olympics he snubbed Jesse Owens. As the story goes, after Owens won one gold medal, Hitler, incensed, stormed out of Olympic Stadium so he wouldn’t have to congratulate Owens on his victory.

Such a performance would have been perfectly in character, but it didn’t happen. William J. Baker, Owens’s biographer, says the newspapers made up the whole story. Owens himself originally insisted it wasn’t true, but eventually he began saying it was, apparently out of sheer boredom with the issue.

The facts are simple. Hitler did not congratulate Owens, but that day he didn’t congratulate anybody else either, not even the German winners. As a matter of fact, Hitler didn’t congratulate anyone after the first day of the competition. That first day he had shaken hands with all the German victors, but that had gotten him in trouble with the members of the Olympic Committee. They told him that to maintain Olympic neutrality, he would have to congratulate everyone or no one. Hitler chose to honor no one.

Hitler did snub a black American athlete, but it was Cornelius Johnson, not Jesse Owens. It happened the first day of the meet. Just before Johnson was to be decorated, Hitler left the stadium. A Nazi spokesman explained that Hitler’s exit had been pre-scheduled, but no one believes that.

Several other misconceptions about the 1936 Olympics are prevalent. Not only was Owens not rebuffed by Hitler, Owens wasn’t shunned by the German audience at the Berlin stadium either. Baker reports that Owens so captured the imagination of the crowd it gave him several ear-shattering ovations.

Owens had been prepared for a hostile reception; a coach had warned him in advance not to be upset by anything that might happen in the stands. “Ignore the insults,” Owens was told, “and you’ll be all right.” Later Owens recalled that he had gotten the greatest ovations of his career at Berlin.

No aspect of Hitler’s Germany has possibly received more attention than the treatment of the Jews, but myths remain. When at the end of the war Edward R. Murrow conducted a well-publicized radio tour of the Nazi death camps, it seemed everybody finally became convinced of their existence. The wonder is that it took so long. Evidence that Jews were being slaughtered by the millions had been abundant and overwhelming for years.

The news did not just trickle out in the waning hours of the Nazi empire. The first slaughter took place in 1941, when about half a million Jews were killed by mobile Nazi murder units. In July word of the deaths reached the American Jewish press and was reported in New York City’s Yiddish dailies. In October 1941 The New York Times carried an article on the machine-gunning of thousands of Jews in Poland and the Ukraine. In the summer of 1942 a German industrialist, at risk to his life, leaked word to the Allies of Hitler’s systematic plan to exterminate the Jews. In the months following, mass meetings were held in New York and several other cities to protest the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” One magazine published an article unequivocably entitled “Murder of a People.”

The news of the Holocaust did not, however, make big news during the war. A historian who has made an exceptionally detailed study of the matter says that “the mass media treated the systematic murder of millions of Jews as though it were minor news.” Even The New York Times routinely published stories on the Holocaust deep on the inside pages. It was on page twelve, in four short column inches, that the Times reported the extermination of four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews in 1944.

The mistaken public impression that news of the Holocaust did not come until after the war is thus easily explained: It wasn’t until after the war that the news made the front pages. Less understandable is why that was so. Perhaps genocide on such a scale was so unprecedented that journalists couldn’t quite believe it was true. Putting the story on the back pages gave it less credence. Too, they may have remembered the stories of German atrocities in World War I that turned out, after the war, to have been nothing more than war propaganda. No one likes to be taken in twice.

The prevailing belief that the American people would have tried to do something to stop the Holocaust and would have tried to save the Jews if the situation had been understood is possible but doubtful. (Elie Wiesel: “Was the free world aware of what was going on? Surely not; otherwise it would have done something to prevent such a massacre.”)

Government leaders did in fact know—and did nothing. They told Jewish groups that pressed for action that the only way to save the Jews was to win the war and that they were doing that as quickly as possibly. When FDR was asked to bomb the death camp at Auschwitz, the military said it couldn’t spare the planes to do the job, even though bombers were hitting targets just fifty miles away. David Wyman, the leading expert on the American response to the Holocaust, says the government could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews without harming the war effort if it really wanted to, but it didn’t want to. American leaders, particularly in the State Department, says Wyman, did not want to face the possibility that the Jews, if rescued, could end up in the United States. He says American Jewish leaders themselves didn’t vigorously pursue plans to rescue the Jews because they were preoccupied with dreams of building a Jewish homeland in Palestine.32

The chief confusion about the atomic bomb has to do with the decision to drop it on Japan. Paul Johnson, like many popular historians, contends it was a necessity, disagreeable as it may have been, because it undoubtedly saved lives. The claim is that but for the bomb, the United States would have had to invade the Japanese islands and at frightening cost; the military estimated at the time such an effort might cause up to a million American casualties and perhaps as many as ten to twenty million Japanese deaths. (The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed fewer than half a million people all told.) Skeptics are assured the Japanese intended to fight to the last man, as indicated in a secret document approved by the Japanese Supreme Council on June 6, 1945, which revealed the government’s intention to “prosecute the war to the bitter end.” Further, it’s said that Japan had made plans to dispatch ten thousand so-called suicide planes and, in a desperation move, was prepared to field a civilian militia of thirty million.

Yet doubt remains, not least because the United States government itself concluded after the war we hadn’t needed to drop the A-bombs. In 1946 the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, after an exhaustive study, found that the Japanese were about to surrender when the bombs hit. “Based on detailed investigation of all the facts,” says the survey, “and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” On June 20, 1945, the emperor and leading members of the Supreme War Direction Council had secretly decided to end the war. John Kenneth Galbraith, a member of the survey team, says that nothing more insurmountable than the “usual bureaucratic lags” kept the Japanese from suing for peace immediately.33

The often-repeated allegation that the decision to drop the atomic bomb was horrid in light of the known effects of radiation is misinformed. No one knew anyone would die of radiation. Not even those who created the bomb in the first place knew that. When the Japanese began reporting that victims were dying of radiation poisoning, scientists insisted the Japanese must be lying. The scientists had told the United States press that the radioactive effects of the bomb would be minor. They refused to believe they were wrong. One colonel reacted angrily to a Tokyo commentator’s lament that the people of Hiroshima were “doomed to die of radioactivity.” Said the colonel: “That’s kind of crazy. I would say this: I think it’s good propaganda. The thing is these people got good and burned—good thermal burns.”

Only slowly did scientists become convinced of the accuracy of the initial reports. Years later one of the leading experts in the Manhattan Project, Dr. Norman Ramsey, recalled in an oral memoir how surprised everyone was by what happened. “The people who made the decision to drop the bomb made it on the assumption that all casualties would be standard explosion casualties…. The region over which there would have been radiation injury was to be a much smaller one than the region of so-called 100% blast kill…. Any person with radiation damage would have been killed with a brick first.” As one historian concluded, “The men who made the Bomb did not know what it was.”34

Two or three other myths that came out of the war, less important but well known, continue to cause trouble and are worth refuting. That bombers won the war in Europe is the theme of countless Hollywood movies and is the conceit of the U.S. Air Force, but it is without foundation. While tactical air strikes helped immeasurably in the war, strategic bombing runs helped little, if at all. Galbraith says the bombing campaign was probably the “greatest miscalculation of the war.”

Naturally, not everyone agrees with Galbraith, and that, of course, is how he likes it. But he has the impressive support, again, of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, of which he was a leading member.

Two of the survey’s findings seem especially convincing. First, the survey discovered that German economic production actually increased after the bombing campaign got fully under way. The common delusion that production decreased—it just had to—is belied by the statistics. The monthly production of panzers, for instance, steadily rose during the war, from 136 in 1940, to 316 in 1941, to 516 in 1942, to 1,005 in 1943. In the final two years, despite massive bombings, the Germans produced some 1,500 panzers a month.

Second, the survey found, much to the surprise of its own members, that even factories directly hit by bombs weren’t put out of action, at least not for very long. The Germans, it seems, learned they could quickly rescue the machinery in bombed-out factories and simply set up shop nearby.

As if all this weren’t discouraging enough, Galbraith insists the bombing campaign may have even helped the Germans increase production. By bombing German cities, the air force helped destroy the urban service economy; this in turn freed waiters and others to man the country’s labor-short factories, located on the outskirts of cities. Ironically, the American air force was helping the German generals achieve what they couldn’t on their own: a war-based economy. That, if Galbraith is correct, may explain, partly anyway, how the Germans were able to produce more panzers at the end of the war than at the start.35

The self-sacrificing spirit of Americans during the war, frequently noted, is exaggerated. Rationing was often undermined by extensive black-market dealing, which was observed at the time. Soldiers complained the folks back home didn’t take the war seriously enough. Americans at home agreed. In 1945 Dr. George Gallup found that six in ten Americans believed they hadn’t made significant sacrifices during the war. Some of those who claimed they had seemed not to understand the meaning of the word “sacrifice.” A waitress in Dayton, Ohio, complained, “All my boy friends have gone overseas; so I can’t get married.” A stenographer in Detroit grumbled, “I’ve had to get along without nylons.”36

Myths about Vietnam are less prevalent now than earlier, but one in particular has hung on.37 Americans still seem to believe the country’s leaders slipped into war in ignorance of what they were getting into. This isn’t true. Both Kennedy and Johnson had been warned repeatedly that the effort to save South Vietnam from communism could cost the United States dearly and might very well result in failure. When Kennedy authorized the dispatch of seven thousand troops to Vietnam, he was told by General Maxwell Taylor that “there is no limit to our possible commitment.” Kennedy himself seemed to recognize the danger. As he told Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”

Americans who still insist Kennedy and Johnson really didn’t understand the sacrifice the war would require may be interested in the remarkable warning General Charles de Gaulle issued in May 1961. In a private conversation with Kennedy the French president warned that a land war in Asia could not be won.

You will find that intervention in this area will be an endless entanglement. Once a narion has been aroused, no foreign power, however strong, can impose its will upon it. You will discover this for yourselves. For even if you find local leaders who in their own interests are prepared to obey you, the people will not agree to it, and indeed do not want it. The ideology which you invoke will make no difference. Indeed, in the eyes of the masses, it will become identified with your will to power. That is why the more you become involved out there against the Communists, the more the Communists will appear as the champions of national independence, and the more support they will receive, if only from despair. We French have had experience of it. You Americans want to take our place. I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire, however much you spend in men and money.

Claims that the American military misled American leaders into believing war could easily be won are widespread but unfounded. Early in the war Johnson was told by his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earl Wheeler, that victory in Vietnam would take seven hundred thousand to a million soldiers and extend over seven years. As Paul Johnson has remarked, “[President] Johnson went into the war with his eyes open.”38