On the term “assault rifle”

German troops in the Battle of the Bulge carrying (inset) The Sturmgewehr-44, the original assault rifle

Years ago* I wrote an Amazon review for a book on the militarization of American police forces, and among the biggest surprises that came my way when lots of people chose to comment on that review was the accusation that I was “liberal” or otherwise anti-gun because, in the course of describing the military equipment increasingly adopted by even small local police forces, I had used the term assault rifle.

This struck me as an odd reaction. Assault rifle, I thought, may be an awkward politics-adjacent term with probably too-broad connotations but it still denotes a specific thing as precisely as possible. I found it entirely appropriate to use, not least since the author of the book I was reviewing used it, but I still found myself avoiding it over the next few years. Eventually, I became annoyed enough by online arguments about guns—all of which, on both sides, shared a highly emotive imprecision in how they talked about the subject—that I started a blog post with the same title as this one, only to abandon it in incomplete draft form a year or two ago. Why bother?

Well, over the weekend Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons** posted an excellent “mild rant” on precisely this topic: “What is an ‘assault rifle?’” Like me, he was surprised to find himself getting flamed for using the term; like me, he discerned that this had a lot to do with political rather than technical, definitional factors; but unlike me, he took a firm line and expressed it well.

McCollum starts with an assault rifle’s three basic characteristics:

• It has select-fire capability, i.e., it can fire in more than one mode, e.g. fully automatic, semi-automatic, and/or burst

• It feeds ammunition from detachable magazines, as opposed to a belt or internal magazine

• It fires an intermediate rifle cartridge, i.e. a cartridge larger than a pistol cartridge but smaller than full-sized rifle cartridges

This is succinct and technically precise. Stray from these parameters, he notes, and what you have is not an assault rifle. Civilian AR-15s, for instance, that fire an intermediate rifle cartridge and use detachable magazines but can only fire in semi-automatic are not assault rifles—they are simply semi-automatic rifles. An automatic weapon fed from a belt is not an assault rifle, but a machine gun—even if it fires an intermediate cartridge, like the M249 SAW.

Because that third factor—the intermediate cartridge—is decisive. For example, a select-fire weapon with detachable magazines that fires a full-sized rifle cartridge is a light machine gun (like the BAR or Bren); a select-fire weapon with detachable magazines that fires pistol cartridges is a submachine gun (like the Thompson, the MP40, or the UMP). In fact, the term submachine gun was coined to distinguish the smaller, one-man “trench brooms” developed near the end of and immediately following the First World War from the big crew-served belt-fed machine guns—the Maxim, the Vickers, the Spandau—that had already become horribly familiar. Take a look at when the term submachine gun originates and becomes more common. Firearms terminology can be messy, but as in so many other things, a little understanding of history helps.

This is especially true of the term assault rifle. As McCollum points out, assault rifle is a translation of the German Sturmgewehr, a term coined—according to some stories by Hitler himself—to distinguish a newly developed service rifle from its predecessors. The rifle was the Sturmgewehr-44 or StG-44. It was select-fire, fed from a detachable magazine, and it fired an intermediate cartridge, a shortened version of the 7.92mm Mauser rifle round. This proved its key innovation, both for practical reasons (modern infantry combat typically occurs within a few hundred yards, making a rifle that can hit a target 2,000 yards away a waste for all but snipers) and economic ones (reducing the amount of raw materials per round, giving Hitler’s war machine literally more bang for its buck).

Whoever coined the term, it was a helpful designation for a new thing—no previous weapon did precisely what the StG-44 did in the way the StG-44 was designed to do it, and it set the standard for a whole new variety of firearms. Whatever their design, military rifles ever since have been defined according to the StG-44’s characteristics.

And yet there’s that pesky Sturm.***

The word had appealing propaganda value to the Germans and retains it in English, assault being “scary military language” to a large class of politically active people. This has laden a useful and specific term with political connotations. As McCollum notes, assault rifle is often mentally bundled up with assault weapon, virtually meaningless verbiage used for legislation intended to create a “blanket prohibition on firearms that had a military appearance” (emphasis mine), usually related to accessories that don’t materially alter the lethality of the weapons in question.

The result is two political camps: one that, operating either in ignorance or bad faith, makes sweeping statements about vaguely defined “assault weapons” in pursuit of even more sweeping legislation, and another camp that has reacted to this rhetoric by avoiding the term assault rifle in the belief that it using it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. As McCollum puts it, they think calling an assault rifle an assault rifle is “surrendering to the people who want to ban guns.”

But the opposite is actually true. McCollum:

We should use the term assault rifle in its technically proper context because to do otherwise would be to essentially surrender the use of language to people who are deliberately misusing it in an attempt to pass legislative agendas.

McCollum is right. If our language is to have any set meaning, it depends on knowledgeable people of good faith to insist on precise definitions and careful usage. Changing our vocabulary to avoid words tainted by political debate is to play an Orwellian game that those of good faith can’t win. And, as should be clear anywhere you care to look, there is far more at stake in this than a single firearms term of art.

More if you’re interested

CJ Chivers’s The Gun is a deeply researched and authoritative history of automatic weapons from the Gatling gun through the first truly automatic weapon, the Maxim gun, through the submachine gun and light machine gun eras until settling into the dueling developments of the AK-47 and AR-15/M-16. Along the way he gives brief space to the StG-44 and notes its crucial role in the rise of the assault rifle. I highly recommend it.

Speaking of the StG-44, Forgotten Weapons has done several great videos on the rifle over the years. You can check out two good ones, including a range demonstration, here and here, and a comparison with a more famous early assault rifle, the AK-47, here.

Notes

* By a weird coincidence, I posted that review ten years ago today.

** I think I discovered Forgotten Weapons while researching the Griswold and Gunnison revolver for Griswoldville. I had seen demonstrations of reproduction pistols but McCollum offered a solid history and technical breakdown that proved very helpful. You can watch that here. Subsequently, when casting about for names for minor characters in my most recent book, The Snipers, I settled on “McCollum” for a member of the team that makes the climactic assault.

*** Apparently some people want to translate Sturmgewehr using the most literal cognate available in English: storm. But as several native German speakers point out in the comments on McCollum’s video, assault is a standard, unremarkable, accurate translation for Sturm. The “storm” the German word is related to is not the kind predicted by the local weatherman, but the kind undertaken by medieval infantry scrambling up siege ladders or Washington’s Continental regulars at Yorktown—storming the ramparts. This obviously means “assault.”

The King's Choice

King Haakon VII (Jesper Christensen) and the Norwegian government meet while on the run in The King’s Choice

A few weekends ago I coincidentally watched two movies about kings and resolved to review both of them. The first was The Lost King, the story of how Richard III’s grave was found. Here, after a regrettable delay, is the second—The King’s Choice.

The Second World War in Europe began with Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, but after this initial blaze of violence the war—at least from the Western perspective—settled into months and months of inactive “phoney war.” Britain and France were technically at war with Germany but there was little shooting. That changed dramatically in the spring of 1940.

After protracted diplomatic wangling, Germany invaded both Denmark and Norway on April 9. Infantry and armor attacks as well as history’s first paratrooper assaults overwhelmed the Danish border, and King Christian X chose to capitulate the same morning. But across the Skagerakk, the strait separating Denmark and Norway, his younger brother King Haakon VII reacted differently.

The King’s Choice (Kongens nei) tells Haakon’s story. Opening on the day before the invasion, when word of the sinking of a German ship in Norwegian waters arrives in Oslo, the film follows Haakon (Jesper Christensen) and Olav (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), his son and heir, and the German ambassador Curt Bräuer (Karl Markovics) as Germany launches its invasion and Norway scrambles to respond. Haakon faces difficult choices: Escape to Britain? Evacuate his family but remain behind himself, like his brother in Denmark, and face occupation? Capitulate, and head a German puppet government under the loathsome Vidkun Quisling? Haakon determines early on to resist, but faced with the overwhelming might of the German war machine, how much resistance is appropriate, for how long, and to what end? Simultaneously, Olav struggles to reconcile his duty as the Crown Prince with his strained devotion to his father. Both are burdened with choosing what is best for Norway.

Bräuer’s parallel struggle is especially interesting. An awkward choice as a diplomat, Bräuer speaks little Norwegian but admires Norway and its people and sincerely desires peace. He also believes, naively, that the conflict brewing up between Nazi Germany and Norway can be resolved by men of goodwill, and that if he can present moderate terms to Haakon personally, before it is too late, the war can be halted if not prevented. Where Haakon and Olav’s story is one of finding strength to face an enemy, Bräuer’s, tragically, is one of disillusion.

The film nicely balances these character studies with the events of the opening days of the invasion. As Bräuer’s diplomatic woes play out in the background, Haakon, Olav, the royal family, and the Norwegian parliament flee Oslo. They fall back repeatedly, working their way farther north and ever closer to the Swedish border with the Germans only a few hours behind them. Escape and exile beckon, and death is a constant danger. At one point, Haakon, Olav, and their families narrowly escape German bombing, and at another, only the dedication and bravery of the young reservists manning a roadblock hold back a German paratrooper assault as the royals and government escape to their next hiding place.

These sequences—and a truly brilliant early action scene depicting the defense of Oslofjord and the sinking of the German cruiser Blücher, which looms out of the nighttime murk like some primeval monster—are the only combat in the film. The King’s Choice is a film of hastily called nighttime conferences, ad hoc meetings, and breathless situation reports. But the filmmakers use the sparse action judiciously, punctuating the movements of Haakon, deepening the crisis surrounding Bräuer, and raising the stakes for both—and for the people of Norway. By the time Bräuer finally receives his audience with the king, the potential consequences of the king’s choice are abundantly clear.

It further helps that the central performances are so good. Jesper Christensen will probably be most familiar to viewers in the Anglosphere as Mr White of the Daniel Craig Bond films. He plays Haakon as a strong, principled man keenly aware of his own vulnerability and the longterm ramifications of his choices. His duties toward the people weigh on him—especially since, unlike his older brother, he was not born to the throne but chosen by the people—and as he nears seventy years old he struggles manfully to withstand the bodily pains worsened by the political pressures placed upon him. Repeated scenes in which he tries to stretch and ease his bad back provide a perfectly understated human note.

Markovics (who played the lead in The Counterfeiters, a powerful German film you should watch if you haven’t) offers an excellent counterpart as Bräuer, a principled man who is nonetheless deeply deceived about his position and the forces at play in the conflict. And Christiansen as Crown Prince Olav, who feels pulled in multiple directions by his loyalty to his father, his love of his family, and his duty to the people of Norway, brings both tension and respect to his relationship with Haakon, with past hurts and family troubles only further complicating the king’s position during the invasion.

I was only passingly familiar with the role played by Haakon and the Norwegian government in 1940, so I can’t say whether the film’s interpersonal dramas are accurate or even fair. I will note that both Haakon and Olav, regardless of their differences, real or imagined, are presented respectfully. But like a comparable British film, Darkest Hour, such drama heightens the action and offers a way for the viewer to grasp the personal and emotional stakes of the geopolitical maneuvering. I certainly intend to study Haakon and his family in more detail in the future.

The King’s Choice is a finely dramatized sliver of World War II history, one very often overlooked in the American memory of the war. Like all the best films about the war, it brings the viewer into the uncertainty of the moment and underscores the principled courage of leaders who withstood aggression and guided their people through the darkness. It is well worth seeking out.

More if you’re interested

Two other Norwegian war films that I’ve seen in recent years are Max Manus: Man of War and The 12th Man, both of which concern the Norwegian resistance. I reviewed each briefly on the blog here and here. Haakon briefly appears in the former. And as a good companion film to The King’s Choice I’d recommend 9. April, a Danish movie that follows a company of bicycle infantry from the last midnight hours before the German invasion to the King of Denmark’s capitulation later that day. I gave it a full review here and it is available in its entirety, at least for now, on YouTube here.

Oppenheimer

When I reviewed the new Mission: Impossible a few weeks ago, I rather lamely called it “a whole lot of movie.” I should have saved that description another week or so for Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer is an accurate title. Despite the big budget, world-historical sweep, and powerful story, it’s fundamentally a character study tightly focused on J Robert Oppenheimer. Fortunately, its subject, by virtue of his unique role in American history and the course and conduct of World War II, gives the film both scope and depth. And though the film’s marketing leaned heavily on the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, and the Trinity test, the film encompasses a huge swath of its protagonist’s life.

The film is told through a pair of overlapping and interweaving flashbacks in the 1950s but begins, chronologically, with the American Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) studying at Oxford in the 1920s. He bounces around through the rarefied world of quantum physics, from Oxford to Germany and back to the US, where he introduces this strange new subject to American universities in California. Study of quantum theory grows rapidly. So does Oppenheimer’s noncommittal involvement with radical leftwing politics—supporters of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, labor organizers who want to unionize laboratory assistants, overt Communists. He develops an unstable, on-and-off sexual relationship with the Communist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) but moves on and marries Kitty (Emily Blunt), a divorcee with an alcohol problem. He also butts heads with other scientists at his university, who object to his tolerance and occasional endorsement of Communist projects, especially when such projects intrude into the classroom and the lab.

The war comes, and Oppenheimer is approached to head the Manhattan Project. His contact with the military and government is General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), a bullheaded tough who gets Oppenheimer everything he wants, most specifically a brand new lab complex and supporting town in the remote New Mexico desert. This third of the film shouldn’t need much explanation—it is the literal centerpiece of the story and leads to the film’s most stunning, exhilarating, and terrifying sequence.

The final third covers Oppenheimer’s postwar life. Recruited by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) to work at Princeton and given a key role on the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer’s past threatens to ruin him when the US military detects the Soviets’ first atomic test. Every every former member of the Manhattan Project comes under scrutiny. This event, Oppenheimer’s caginess and seeming indifference to the security of the Manhattan Project, and personal conflict and callousness toward Strauss, a former admirer, cause Strauss to turn on him. After Oppenheimer is denounced as a probable Communist agent, an AEC tribunal unearths all of his former sins and picks them over minutely. Even former close associates like Groves and Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), who vigorously assert Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States, make damning concessions about his unreliability and strange behavior. Oppenheimer loses his security clearance and his job.

But Oppenheimer, indirectly, has his revenge. When Strauss is appointed to President Eisenhower’s cabinet and sits for senate confirmation hearings, his scapegoating of Oppenheimer and underhanded manipulation of the AEC costs him his cabinet position.

That’s the story of Oppenheimer in chronological order. But this being Christopher Nolan, it is not told so straightforwardly. It’s easy to get hung up on the structures of Nolan’s films, and in my original draft of this review I labored through how Oppenheimer works and why it works so well, but that’s spending too much time on how the story is told. The real strengths of Oppenheimer are its masterful technical execution and its performances, especially the central one by Cillian Murphy.

Oppenheimer looks brilliant. Much has been made, quite rightly, about the film’s IMAX cinematography.* Nolan and DP Hoyte van Hoytema use IMAX’s resolution and shallow depth of field to maximum effect, capturing everything from an atomic explosion to the irresolution and doubt on a man’s face with startling immediacy. Oppenheimer is also beautiful—New Mexico landscapes, the stately traditional architecture of old college campuses,** and the black and white of Strauss’s sequences are all stunning to look at. Additionally, the costumes, sets, and props are all excellent. If “immersion” in an “experience” is what brings you to the movies, Oppenheimer’s 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s are as immersive as Hollywood gets.

I’ve seen a few people complain about the wall-to-wall score, especially in the first half, but I honestly didn’t notice that. Ludwig Göransson’s music, like the intercutting flashbacks, helps establish and sustain the film’s dramatic momentum early on. It’s also a good score, not nearly as punishing and concussive as previous Nolan film scores. And unlike, say, Tenet, I could hear all of the film’s dialogue, so no complaints with the sound design and sound editing here.

My one technical problem is with the editing, which reminded me of some of Nolan’s earlier films, especially Batman Begins. Conversations often play out in unimaginative shot-reverse shot style and it sometimes feels like all the pauses have been cut out of the dialogue. Some scenes barely have room to breathe. I noticed this especially clearly with the handful of jokes and one-liners in Nolan’s script, where timing is crucial. Fortunately this evens out by the middle portion of the film concerning Los Alamos, but it gave Oppenheimer an odd, rushed feel in the first third.

As for the performances, Oppenheimer rivals those crazy CinemaScope productions of the 1950s and 60s for its huge cast. Nolan, not unlike Oppenheimer himself, built a small army of amazing talent for this movie, with even small roles played by well-known actors. Perhaps my favorite is Gary Oldman as Harry Truman, who appears for one scene that can’t last more than three minutes. And Oldman is excellent, turning in a rich, complicated performance despite his limited screentime and Nolan’s understated writing.

The same is true of everyone else in the film. Robert Downey Jr is excellent as Strauss, playing him sympathetically but still as a clear antagonist. Downey has said that he understands where Strauss was coming from and so didn’t play him as a villain, and it shows. His performance is the perfect counterbalance to Murphy. Other standouts include Benny Safdie as H-bomb theorist and engineer Edward Teller and Matt Damon as Leslie Groves. Groves’s and Oppenheimer’s odd-couple working relationship is one of the highlights of the film. Emily Blunt makes the most of an underwritten role as Oppenheimer’s difficult, morose, alcoholic wife—who nevertheless comes through when it counts—and Josh Hartnett and David Krumholtz were especially good playing two different kinds of colleague to Oppenheimer. I also enjoyed the many, many historical cameos, including Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer), Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), and, in a slightly larger role, Tom Conti as Albert Einstein.

But as I hinted above, this is Murphy’s movie. He appears in almost every scene across all three hours and remains continuously interesting. He plays Oppenheimer as a cipher; as we watch, we feel we understand him from scene to scene, but—as becomes especially clear at the end—our impressions don’t add up in any satisfactory way. What we get is an unpleasant character full of flaws: a resentful outsider, an arrogant insider, an adulterer, a recklessly naïve and self-regarding political do-gooder, a man with astonishingly bad judgment and enormous blind spots, who can devote himself to a project that will inevitably result in mass murder and celebrate its completion only to reverse himself later, who chooses the wrong moments to stand on principle and whose one moment of keen self-awareness comes when he realizes he is being approached with an offer to spy for the Soviets and refuses—a good decision that he still manages to bungle. And yet he is undoubtedly brilliant at what he does, people as different as Einstein and Groves like him, and he sees a crucial project through to completion.

This tension is never resolved, and Oppenheimer only becomes more inscrutable as the film progresses. When Edward Teller wishes he could understand him better, he could be speaking for the audience. As one of Oppenheimer’s rivals in the race for the Bomb might have suggested, the more we see of him, the less we actually know. No wonder he rubbed people the wrong way.

The film opens with an epigraph explaining, in brief, the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods as a gift for mortals and was punished by being chained to a rock where birds would peck out his liver all day, every day, for eternity. This myth is apropos—especially since Nolan’s source material was the Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus—and I found myself reflecting on Oppenheimer as a Greek tragedy. Oppenheimer is a hero who has achieved great things for a thankful citizenry but is undone by his own past sins. He has no one to blame but himself. In this way, Oppenheimer also becomes a human metaphor for the entire project to split the atom. The film’s final moments make this clear in a genuinely chilling way.

I’m struck that, of Christopher Nolan’s twelve films, three are Batman movies, three are contemporary thrillers, three are near-future sci-fi action adventures, and three are historical films. Of the latter, two concern World War II. After seeing and thinking a lot about Oppenheimer, I can see the attraction of the period for Nolan. What other modern event offers such a variety of combinations of the technical, theoretical, and personal—and with such high stakes? World War II is ideal Nolan country. I hope he’ll return soon.

In the meantime, Oppenheimer is a great film—excellently produced, powerfully acted, and thematically rich. I strongly recommend it.

*As of this writing I still haven’t had a chance to see Oppenheimer in IMAX, because the one screen near me has been jampacked during every showing except the one that gets out at 2:00 AM. I hope to see it as it was intended soon and will amend this review if seeing it in IMAX alters my judgment in any way.

**If Nolan wanted to make a spiritual sequel to Oppenheimer, another period film about amoral Communist-adjacent theorists and their world-destroying experiments, his next project could be Bauhaus.

The Twilight World

Filmmaker Werner Herzog and Japanese soldier HIroo Onoda (1922-2014) upon his surrender in 1974

Werner Herzog is a filmmaker famously drawn to the obsessive, the fanatical, and the single-mindedly self-destructive. He also, based on my limited engagement with his filmography, appreciates grim irony but can tell ironic stories with great sympathy. So the story of Hiroo Onoda—a man we’ve all heard of even if you don’t know his name—is a natural fit for Herzog’s fascinations as well as his set of storytelling skills.

Onoda, a junior officer in the Imperial Japanese Army stationed on Lubang, a small island in the Philippines near the mouth of Manila Bay, took to the jungles after the American invasion began in late 1944. He had been specially detailed for acts of scorched earth sabotage—dynamiting a pier, rendering an airfield useless—and, having completed those objectives, to carry on the struggle against the enemy using “guerrilla tactics.” He had three other soldiers under his command. One turned himself in to Filipino forces in 1950, five years after the end of the war. The other two were killed, one in the mid-1950s and the other in 1972. Onoda held out alone until 1974, the next to last Japanese soldier to surrender.

Herzog met Onoda during a trip to Japan in 1997. This novel, The Twilight World, published in 2021, seven years after Onoda’s death at the age of 91, is the result of that meeting and Herzog’s enduring fascination.

Herzog explains, by way of prologue, the embarrassing circumstances that led to his meeting Onoda. He then begins Onoda’s story in 1974, with Norio Suzuki, a young adventurer whose stated goal was to find and see Hiroo Onoda, the yeti, and a giant panda, “in that order.” Suzuki camped out on Lubang until Onoda found him. Suzuki convinced Onoda to pose for a photograph and insisted that the war was over—long over. Onoda agreed to turn himself in if Suzuki could bring his commanding officer from thirty years before to Lubang and formally order him to stand down.

The novel then returns to the fall of 1944, the fateful days when a twenty-two-year old Onoda received his orders. Frustrated in his attempts to carry out his acts of sabotage, Onoda and his three subordinates move into the jungles and slowly figure out how to survive as guerrillas. They give up their tent, set up caches of ammunition, move repeatedly from place to place, crack coconuts, and attack isolated villages for food and supplies. Onoda broods. He lost his honor in failing to complete his objective, and the bravado of a final banzai charge would be absurd. What to do?

Herzog narrates this story dispassionately and without embellishment. His style is minimalistic but deeply absorbing. Michael Hofmann’s English translation reads like a cross between a screenplay—I wondered often while reading if this novel hadn’t begun life as a screenplay—and the stripped-down style of late Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men and, especially, The Road. Herzog evokes mood and character through small, telling details and sharply observed environments.

This simple, direct approach proves richly rewarding. Most interesting to me were the ways in which Onoda and his comrades try to make sense of their own situation as the years pass. Evidence that the war is still going on are, from their perspective, plentiful and obvious. The Filipinos are still trying to kill them, aren’t they? And Onoda and his men regularly spot squadrons of American warplanes—ever larger and more sophisticated as the years pass, but still headed northwest toward mainland Asia. Herzog is here able to use the dangerous tool of dramatic irony for maximum pathos.

Most interesting, to me, were Onoda and company’s wrestling with repeated rumors that the war had ended. The American and Philippine militaries dropped leaflets explaining that the war was over. Onoda and his men interpreted mistakes in the leaflets’ Japanese typography as evidence that they were fake—a ruse. The Filipinos left a newspaper in a plastic bag at one of Onoda’s known resting points as proof that the war was long over. This, too, Onoda interpreted as a fabrication—what newspaper would ever print so many advertisements? Thus also with news heard on a transistor radio. Even when relatives of the holdouts travel to Lubang and call to them to come out over loudspeakers, Onoda finds reasons to believe they are being lied to. The Twilight World is, in this regard, one of the best and most involving portraits of the insane logic of paranoia that I’ve read.

But Herzog is, thematically, most interested in the passage of time. The scale of Onoda’s tenacity is almost unimaginable—twenty-nine years in the jungle. Twenty-nine years of surviving on stolen rice, of annual visits to Onoda’s hidden samurai sword to clean and oil it, of eluding Filipino police and soldiers, of watching American aircraft fly north, of attacking villages and avoiding ambush. What is that like?

In Herzog’s version of this story, after his initial commitment to his guerrilla campaign Onoda settles into a routine in which the years pass like minutes. In the jungles of Lubang Island, Onoda comes into some kind of contact with eternity. One is tempted to call this contact purgatorial, but Onoda is neither purged nor purified by his experience. Neither does this timelessness offer the beatific vision or even an experience of hell—if it had, Onoda might have surrendered in 1950 like his most weak-willed soldier. Instead, this eternity is an impersonal, indifferent one of duty lovelessly and unimaginatively fulfilled, forever.

I’ve seen The Twilight World accused of making a hero out of Onoda or of reinforcing a preexisting impression of Onoda as a heroic romantic holdout—an absurd accusation. As with many of Herzog’s other subjects, whether the self-deluded Timothy Treadwell or the innocent Zishe Breitbart, Herzog relates this story out of pure interest. Herzog, laudably, wants to understand. That he presents Onoda sympathetically does not mean that he condones his actions. If anything, the intensity with which Herzog tries to evoke Onoda’s three decades in the jungle is an invitation to pity and reflection. That’s certainly how I received it.

I’ve also read reviewers who fault Herzog for either downplaying or refusing to acknowledge Onoda’s violence against the Filipinos of Lubang Island. Onoda and his men’s depredations have quite justifiably received more attention in the last few years, notably in this spring’s MHQ cover story, rather provocatively if misleadingly titled “Hiroo Onoda: Soldier or Serial Killer?”

But Herzog does acknowledge this side of Onoda’s story. An early incident in which Onoda and his men attack villagers and kill and butcher one of their precious water buffalo is especially vivid. By the end, Onoda is walking into villages and firing randomly in the air, just to remind them he’s around. None of this is presented as heroic or even necessary. When Filipino troops try to ambush and kill Onoda and his men, the reader understands why.

Perhaps all of this is why Herzog begins his novel with a curious—but quintessentially Herzog-esque—author’s note:

Most details and factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.

Seen in this light, and not forgetting that The Twilight World is a work of fiction—based on a true story—Hiroo Onoda’s bleak years in lonely touch with eternity are a fitting subject for a filmmaker who has spent his career teasing the mythic out of the real. The Twilight World is one of the most interesting and most involving books I’ve read this year, a testament not only to the strength of the dark and ironic story it tells but to the skill and cleareyed compassion of its storyteller.

The Snipers has arrived!

No, that’s not a subject-verb disagreement. The Snipers is my latest published work, a short novel set during the Battle of Aachen in October 1944. I’m pleased to announce that, after the final rounds of proofs and revisions, it is now available on Amazon!

I announced The Snipers and its subject here earlier this month. Last week I posted a recommendation of the three non-fiction books I acknowledge in the author’s note at the of The Snipers. Check those posts out if you’d like to know more or look at the book’s page here. In the meantime, here’s the description from the back cover:

October 1944—It has been four months since D-day and the Allies are pressing through Germany’s last defenses. As the US Army makes its first move against the historic German city of Aachen, one unit finds itself stymied by a tenacious German sniper. With losses climbing, the commander calls up sharpshooter Sergeant JL Justus. His job: find and kill the sniper.

Weary from four months of fighting, Justus wants little more than a good smoke and some hot chow. But the assignment bothers him for other reasons. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how does he shoot so accurately and quickly? Can Justus and his buddies find him before many more men are killed? And in a battle like the one for Aachen, is finding the sniper even possible?

The Snipers is an evocative, thrilling, and moving short war tale from Jordan M. Poss.

One certainly hopes, anyway.

You can add The Snipers to your Goodreads reading list here. And if you’d like to order a copy, either in paperback or Kindle format, please use the buttons below.

I’m quite excited about this short novel. My hope is that it will be an exciting, entertaining, and thought-provoking short read. Please give it a look and let me know what you think. Hope y’all enjoy!

Three books behind The Snipers

My new novella The Snipers, a story set in northwestern Europe during World War II, arrives soon. Just waiting on the final proofs! In the meantime, I wanted to recommend three books that I made sure to cite as inspirations in the author’s note at the back.

These are not detailed campaign histories and give little or no attention to the political and strategic situations playing out at the highest levels of the war. One is a memoir, one is a short, narrowly focused history by a veteran, and the other is a grab-bag of anecdotes, reminiscences, and explanations for the public of what the infantrymen went through. They’re all excellent, and together they gave me some of my strongest impressions and understanding of what fighting in Europe from Normandy to Germany was like.

If You Survive, by George Wilson (1987)

Of these three books, this is the one I read most recently. George Wilson joined the 4th Infantry Division as a replacement platoon leader shortly after D-day. The title of the book comes from the pep talk his first commanding officer gave him as a brand-new second lieutenant plunked into combat in Normandy’s bocage: “If you survive your first day, I’ll promote you.”

Wilson survived Normandy, the breakout, the race across northern France, the Hürtgen Forest (about which more below), and finally the Battle of the Bulge.

Wilson’s descriptions of the fighting in Normandy and elsewhere are excellent, driving home the shock, horror, waste, and occasionally exhilaration of battle, but the standout chapters in his book narrate the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest. Though now overshadowed in public memory by the Battle of the Bulge, the result of a German offensive that occurred shortly afterward, the Hürtgen Forest saw tenacious, tooth-and-nail German defense in a rugged, densely wooded landscape sewn with pillboxes and minefields and raked by artillery set to burst among the treetops.

One of the strongest impressions Wilson’s memoir gave me had to do with the incredible turnover rate in personnel among frontline combat units—the attrition. During Wilson’s eighteen days in the Hürtgen Forest his company took 167% casualties. As Wilson relates it, men cycled in and out of his unit so quickly that he could not get to know them all and sometimes doesn’t try. Some replacements arrived and were killed or evacuated to a field hospital the same day, often within hours.

This is a scenario I’ve read about in other books and seen dramatized in a variety of films, but Wilson, with his straightforward, unembellished, but dramatic and moving style, makes you feel it.

The Hürtgen Forest is not the setting of The Snipers but it does figure into the story near the end, and Wilson’s If You Survive has a lot to do with how I present it. It’s an excellent lesser-known memoir that deserves a broader readership.

The Boys’ Crusade, by Paul Fussell (2003)

Paul Fussell may be familiar to you if you’ve ever taken a course on World War I. His literary study The Great War and Modern Memory is still standard reading. But Fussell did not write about war as a detached, ivory tower academic. Like Wilson, he fought across northwestern Europe from Normandy to Germany, in Fussell’s case as an infantry platoon leader in the 103rd Infantry Division. He was twenty years old when he first saw combat.

The Boys’ Crusade is not a memoir, though it is strongly shaped by Fussell’s own experiences, which he has written about more directly elsewhere (especially Wartime and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic). Instead, it briefly narrates the campaign across northwestern Europe with an emphasis on the experience of ordinary soldiers, most especially the very young men like Fussell who constituted most of the combat infantry. Though a short, fast read, The Boys’ Crusade is full of vivid detail about what it was like to fight in the bocage or the forest or through villages and cities, to deal with officers, to march and march and march, to lead, to follow, to wallow in mud and snow and sleep in the rain, to deal with civilians, to yearn for women, to be tired and scared all the time—and what it was like to experience all of this at the age of eighteen, or nineteen, or twenty.

I’ve included a few passages that made a particularly strong impression on me the first time I read it some years ago and that, along with other books and more study, undergird what I try to evoke in The Snipers.

Here’s Fussell on the appearance of GIs after they had been at the front for a while, away from regulation-happy officers and the nitpicking of the parade ground:

There was one advantage of being in an attack, and only one: there, a soldier was seldom troubled by the chickenshit to be met with in the rear. At the real front there was no such thing as being “out of uniform,” for the soldier looked like a tramp with individual variations all the time, and officers were indistinguishable from the lowest dogfaces. Neither wore anything like insignia, and to look as dirty as possible was socially meritorious.

The two best approximations of this that I’ve seen on film are in one old and one recent movie: Battleground and Fury. (Really stop and look at the infantrymen in Fury sometime. Whatever else you think about that movie, it brilliantly evokes the lived in, raggedy, hard-eyed reality of the dogface in northern Europe.)

Back to Fussell, who notes that appearance was also an easy way to pick out replacements, the guys who hadn’t been in it yet:

Newcomers were regarded with a degree of silent contempt, and replacements were the most conspicuous newcomers. There were many signals by which new arrivals could be detected. Cleanliness was one of them. Soldiers or officers in new or neat clothing, not yet ripped in places or grease-stained all over from C- and K-rations, were easy to spot as targets of disdain. Company officers wearing gold or silver bars on shirt collars were clearly unacquainted yet with the veritable law of the line that unless officers’ insignia were covered by a scarf, enemy snipers would pick them off first. (Probably quite false, but believed by all.) The helmet net could become a low-social-class giveaway by the absence of a worn-out portion at the top; when the helmet was taken off and placed upside down on the ground, the net should be worn away. In many infantry divisions, rumor held that if the chin strap of the helmet was fastened and worn in the correct way, the wearer ran the risk of being beheaded by a close explosion, which, it was said, would tear off helmet and head at once. This probably began as a practical joke, like sending a newcomer to get a left-handed screwdriver, but it was widely believed.

That’s is a pretty representative passage, offering both general observations as well as vivid specifics while also conveying the mixture of boyish jocularity, protective exclusivity, half-believed superstition, and grim realism of the frontline GI.

And, finally, the opening of Fussell’s chapter on the Hürtgen Forest campaign:

If today an eighty-year-old survivor of the Boys’ Crusade were asked to indicate his worst moment as an infantryman, he might answer “Omaha Beach.” And then as an afterthought, he would be likely to add, “No, Hürtgen Forest”—less publicized and cine-dramatized but equally unforgettable, at least for the few participants still living.

This is a book well worth reading. I recommend it to students all the time as a short, accessible, but blunt and truthful explanation of the infantryman’s war.

Up Front, by Bill Mauldin (1945)

Bill Mauldin served with the 45th Infantry Division in Sicily and Italy, where he was wounded during the Monte Cassino campaign, before landing in southern France and advancing through western Europe. But he was most famous as a cartoonist, publishing a single-panel cartoon about two ordinary infantrymen called Willie and Joe. His characters first appeared in the divisional newspaper but were eventually syndicated in Stars and Stripes and published back home in the States. Willie and Joe became immensely popular and well-known, and Mauldin’s cartoons got a lot of attention—not all of it positive. He had a rather famous one-way feud with Patton, who thought the cartoons disrespectful and a threat to discipline.

Shortly after the war Mauldin collected some of the best of the cartoons in this book, Up Front, and supplemented them with a loosely structured running commentary. Though dismissive of his own writing, Mauldin brilliantly and succinctly explains to the civilian reader what the men streaming home from the military in 1946 had been through. Everything is here: the danger, the frustration, the destruction, the distance from home and family, the camaraderie and affection, the bottomless unfulfilled appetites for women and booze, the physical misery, the joy of simple comforts, the irony, the exhaustion, the plight of civilians, and most especially the tedium. If war is proverbially 99 hours of boredom punctuated by one hour of sheer terror, Mauldin deftly conveys that.

And, perhaps most importantly, he conveys the humor that sustained the GIs and bonded them together—not only the gallows humor you might expect but a great deal of pure silliness. A strong sense of the absurd and a gift for improvisation were just as important for survival as ammunition and good leadership.

I could share any number of samples, but this is the passage I always think of as the one that most strongly affected my understanding of the war—making me able to imagine some of what it was like—when I first read it as a kid:

Dig a hole in your back yard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and, so there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire.

Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you.

After ten or twelve miles (remember—you are carrying the shotgun and suitcase) start sneaking through the wet brush. Imagine that somebody has booby-trapped your route with rattlesnakes which will bite you if you step on them. Give some friend a rifle and have him blast in your direction once in a while.

Snoop around until you find a bull. Try to figure out a way to sneak around him without letting him see you. When he does see you, run like hell all the way back to your hole in the back yard, drop the suitcase and shotgun, and get in.

If you repeat this performance every three days for several months you may begin to understand why an infantryman sometimes gets out of breath. But you still won’t understand how he feels when things get tough.

I discovered Up Front one day in middle school while tagging along with my mom in an antique mall. I spotted an old copy lying on an end table, for sale. I had never heard of Bill Mauldin but I loved comic strips and cartoons and World War II history, so I excitedly showed it to Mom. She bought it for me. I can’t be more thankful. This more than any other book laid the foundations for my understanding, however imperfect, of the experiences of GIs in Europe during World War II.

That first copy was a very early printing. I read it so much that the dust jacket eventually crumbled away to nothing, but I still have the book as well as a more recent facsimile reprint from WW Norton that includes a foreword by Stephen Ambrose. It is also included in toto in the Library of America’s excellent two-volume collection Reporting World War II. It is well worth taking the time to read.

Conclusion

Though The Snipers is not directly inspired by anything in these books, they helped shape my understanding of what the war was like for the young men who lived and fought through it. I strongly recommend all three of them—for starters. Thanks for reading, and I hope y’all will check out The Snipers when it arrives!

Coming soon: The Snipers

I’m excited to announce the upcoming publication of my latest book, a World War II novella titled The Snipers.

The Snipers takes place during the Battle of Aachen in October of 1944. Four months on from D-day, the Allies are pressing into the western edges of Germany and slowly, laboriously penetrating the Siegfried Line. Aachen, the former chief residence of Charlemagne and one of Germany’s most prestigious and historical cities, is heavily defended, and as the US Army enters the outskirts of the city one unit comes under devastating sniper fire. Their battalion commander, unable to slow the offensive, instead calls up the leader of his reconnaissance squad, Sergeant JL Justus for a special assignment—find and kill the German sniper harrying the men of Charlie Company.

Justus has only two men left in his squad after the continuous slog from Normandy to Germany, and he has just settled down to some much-deserved rest in reserve as other units push into the city. But he has sharpshooting experience from the weeks following D-day and the boys under fire need him. And so he and his buddies Whittaker and Porter load up and enter the city.

Justus, a Georgia boy with an abiding interest in the Civil War and a wry sense of the absurd, has his doubts about the mission. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how is he supposed to find him? Can he do so before many more men are killed? And why is the commander of Charlie Company so certain that there is more than one sniper?

The rest of the story, which takes place across a single day of block-by-block, house-to-house fighting through the rubble of a once-beautiful city, will challenge and shock Justus in more ways than one. I hope it will do the same for the reader.

I’m quite excited about this one. I may related the genesis of the story here sometime soon, but for now I’ll say that once I had it in my head it stuck with me and wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d gotten it down in writing. My hope is that it will prove a brisk but involving action story, both thought-provoking and poignant and with a dash of humor, ideal for reading in two or three sittings. At 35,000 words, it’s a little less than half the length of my previous World War II novel, Dark Full of Enemies.

The first paperback proofs of the novel arrived just this afternoon. I’ve included a gallery below that I hope y’all will accept as a preview. Pending tweaks and final corrections—which should be minimal thanks to the efforts of friends and beta readers who have already looked at the manuscript and provided helpful feedback—I hope to have The Snipers out and available on Amazon before the end of the month, just in time for the Independence Day holiday.

Last week I reorganized my website’s Books page to divide full-length novels like Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville from short fiction, and to add The Snipers. You can look at the dedicated page for The Snipers, with paperback and Kindle purchasing links (not yet activated), here.

Thanks for reading! This one came together unusually quickly and I hope y’all will check it out once it’s available. Stay tuned!

Kershaw on history and junk psychology

Last night I listened to several episodes of The Rest is History’s back catalog while I worked on a project, among them an excellent two-part interview with Sir Ian Kershaw, one of the preeminent experts on Nazi Germany and author of the two-volume biography Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis.

After introducing Kershaw and talking about his background as a medievalist who stumbled into expertise on the Third Reich, hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook turn toward the interview’s main subject: Hitler himself. In discussing Hitler’s ideas and motivations, they raise the questions of popular myth and psychology (at approximately the 28:00 mark in Part I of their interview), especially as causal factors in major historical events:

Holland: Because it becomes almost a kind of comfort, doesn’t it, the idea that you can explain what Hitler does, say, come across some core psychological flaw. So people often talk about “Was Hitler’s grandfather a Jew? Was this something that he worried about?” or something like that—

Kershaw: That answer to that is no he wasn’t.

Holland: So the answer to that is the grandfather wasn’t Jewish and Hitler didn’t worry about that. So that as an idea is a nonsense.

Kershaw: That’s right. I think these psychological theories are best treated in a very critical and conservative fashion. That is to say, that, again, it’s an easy operation for any biographer to take up psychological theories which are usually non-provable because the subject had never been on a psychologist’s couch even, and then read into that an entire intricate and complex historical development. And I tried my best in the biography to avoid that and discarded the various psycho theories of Hitler—mainly in footnotes rather than in the text itself—and I’ve never had very much trouble with those ideas whether it’s Hitler or anybody else for that matter. So I think what we have to deal with are political processes that explain these things rather than psychological hangups.

I’ve written a lot about what Chesterton called “the inside of history.” Understanding what mattered to people of the past, and how and why, is one of the crucial tasks of the historian. But it is another thing entirely to pretend to actual psychological insight or even diagnosis of psychological problems. These are almost always, as Kershaw notes, unfalsifiable. Such theories or explanations are pretty weak stuff on a purely personal level and make for misleading history, but made to bear the weight of historical causality they become positively nefarious. And the more causal weight, the worse.

To stick with the topic in question, stated baldly, such theories—that the Holocaust happened because Hitler had some kind of self-loathing about being part Jewish or (a deeper cut for a certain kind of amateur) because the doctor who failed to save his dying mother was Jewish—sound properly silly. But this kind of history is simple, and therefore easy to repeat and spread, and therefore almost ineradicable when it reaches the popular level. Here there be monsters—the monsters of popular myth.

Last spring I read the late John Lukacs’s The Hitler of History, a historiographical study, and blogged about it twice along similar lines: on the too-easy explanations of Hitler as madman and Hitler as Antichrist. For more on Chesterton and “the inside of history,” see here.

Sticks and stones... so to speak

Speaking of odd and colorful stories that you wouldn’t be able to make up—or that might strike you as unlikely—here’s an, er, oddball anecdote from the memoirs of Heinz Linge, With Hitler to the End, which I read earlier this week.

Heinz Linge was Adolf Hitler’s valet or body servant for ten years. He interacted with Hitler daily, often being the first to see him in the morning, and accompanied him everywhere (in an introduction, historian Roger Moorhouse notes that millions of people probably recognize Linge’s face without even knowing it, so often is he standing just behind Hitler in photographs). He was also the first man into Hitler’s chambers in the Führerbunker following Hitler’s suicide, and the man who personally lit the fire to cremate Adolf and Eva Hitler’s bodies.

The point is that Linge was really, really close to Hitler, in the way of personal servants. When he was captured by the Russians during the attempted breakout from Berlin, his proximity to Hitler made him a person of intense interest. Which leads to this unexpected item:

In Russian captivity under interrogation I was often asked if I had seen Hitler’s genitals, and if so had they been normal. I had no idea why the Russians wanted to know this, but I told them what I knew. Naturally I had not seen Hitler fully naked even once. When the Russians interrogators [sic] alleged that Hitler ‘had only had one ball’ I had to laugh, and for doing so they gave me a whipping.

Anyone who was once a fourth-grade boy with an interest in history and a healthy appreciation of potty jokes will recognize here a joke that, for Linge, has gone horribly wrong. Stalin and the Soviets really had no sense of humor.

Again—you couldn’t make this stuff up.

I conclude with a hilarious Armstrong and Miller sketch on this very topic that, like so much of their stuff, brings together formal perfection with lowbrow humor in a way that hits my comedy sweetspot.

On “realistic” war stories

An astonishing true story from the Battle of Suomussalmi, recounted in William R Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40:

In one such skirmish two Red tanks attacked a Finnish squad caught in lightly wooded terrain near the village [of Suomussalmi]. A lieutenant named Huovinen taped five stick grenades together and crawled toward the tanks; his friend, First Lieutenant Virkki, intended to provide covering fire, despite the fact that he was carrying only his side arm. At a range of forty meters Virkki stood up and emptied his 9 mm. Lahti automatic at the vehicles’ observation slits. The T-28s replied with a spray of machine-gun fire, and Virkki went down. Those watching felt sure he had been killed. But he had only dropped down to slap another magazine into the butt of his weapon. That done, he jumped up and once more emptied his pistol at the tanks. Altogether this deadly dance step was repeated three times, at which point the Russian tankers seemed to become unnerved. They turned around and clanked back to the village. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Huovinen had been crawling closer to them from the rear and now had his arm cocked to throw the grenade bundle. Just at that moment the tank nearest him put on speed and retreated. He lowered his grenades in astonishment. Surely there were not many instances in modern warfare of tanks being repulsed by pistol fire.

Beyond the obviously astonishing outcome of this incident, there are lots of factors that can “explain” what happened. The Finns attacked in the way they did because, though the Finns had the Russians surrounded in this incident, the Russians were still vastly numerically superior. The Finns had no armor and very few effective anti-tank weapons, hence the improvised anti-tank grenade mentioned here. And the Russians had little coordination between their armor and infantry, hence the lack of infantry support for these tanks. It was desperate on both sides.

But put this in a movie and you’ll hear howls about “realism” and what either the Finns or Russians or both “would never do.”

I think it was in an episode of Core Curriculum on the Iliad some while ago that I observed that there’s almost no such thing as a “realistic” war story, true or fictional, owing to the bizarre and random things that happen in the chaos of warfare. Read any war memoir and you’ll come across incidents that defy imagination—things that, again, if you put them in a movie, would get people crying foul.

So I’m always a little forgiving of war movies that do “unrealistic” things, because in real life soldiers are seldom at peak performance, seldom operate in ideal tactical conditions, seldom do the 100% correct thing in the heat of the moment, seldom have the knowledge granted to a moviegoer by an omniscient camera, and seldom have the kind of training we modern couch potatoes expect of SEALs. Even soldiers that are lucid and cool-headed when the unforgiving minute comes sometimes do the opposite of what their training drilled into them if the situation demands it. And that’s not even accounting for the random, the coincidental, the improvised, and the unpredictable—like a lone lieutenant’s pistol fire scaring off two tanks. But these are the things that make real life interesting.

I should finish Trotter’s book later today and highly recommend it, both for its excellently presented history of a conflict little known outside Scandinavia and for its continuous parade of hair-raising stories.

I conclude by deferring to two authorities on fiction and weirdness:

Per Mark Twain, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

Per TV Tropes, reality is unrealistic.

The Bomber Mafia

The Sandman, a B-24 Liberator, flying through the smoke above the Ploiesti oil refineries in Romania, August 1, 1943

War is hard on idealists. It proves especially cruel to those modern idealists who have turned so often to technology, inventing new weapons or instruments of war, in hopes of saving lives. One thinks of Richard Gatling, inventor of the first practical machine gun, who developed his weapon after seeing thousands of men on both sides of the Civil War wasted with wounds, disease, and in the stand-up slaughter of battle itself. The firepower his Gatling gun offered, he believed, would “supersede the necessity of large armies.” He could not have foreseen how wrong that hope would be.

Gatling died the same year that the Wright brothers first flew, and just over a decade later both tools—the machine gun and the airplane—would raise the scale of slaughter in modern warfare to unimaginable heights. The devastation of the First World War, with twenty million dead to little perceivable gain, shocked the sensibilities of a world confident in its so far uncontested forward progress.

Idealists and theorists

The Bomber Mafia, half of the subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, came along in the aftermath of that war. Surveying the destruction of the war and cognizant of the possibilities of more war in the future, a band of renegade pilots at the out-of-the-way Maxwell Field (now Maxwell-Gunter AFB) in Alabama gradually built a new doctrine of air power. These pilots noted the knock-on effects on the American aviation industry after the destruction of a ball-bearing factory in Pittsburgh and theorized that, by precisely targeting industries critical to an enemy’s military production, fleets of heavy bombers could cripple the enemy and end the war quickly and with little—or at least less—battlefield bloodshed.

Their fervency—Gladwell refers to members of this inner circle as the “true believers”—and their insistence on their as yet untested theories earned them their nickname, which was not meant to be flattering. But the Mafia stuck with it, and the key to their strategy was a piece of technology, a top secret precision instrument called the Norden bombsight. The bombers of the First World War dropped bombs pretty much indiscriminately, and sometimes even by hand. For the Mafia’s idea to work, they would need to be able to drop bombs accurately onto specifically selected targets; the Norden bombsight promised to deliver that.

The bombsight was the invention of Carl Norden, a Dutch engineer who fervently believed in the possibilities opened up by his work. The bombsight was an extremely complex analog computer that factored in speed, altitude, windspeed, and even the rotation of the earth on its axis to enable a trained bombardier at high altitude to site, aim at, and hit targets on the ground—an unimaginable feat during the First World War. The Norden required only clear skies and daylight.

Norden is another of the idealists in Gladwell’s book, and offers a striking contrast to the hotshot pilots of Maxwell Field. Where one of Gladwell’s other focal points, Haywood Hansell Jr, was a chivalrous Southerner, a career Army officer, and scion of six generations of leaders in both the US and Confederate armies, Norden was a private, hard-driven, exacting technician, and a deeply religious man. What the two had in common—through Hansell’s chivalry and Norden’s Christianity—was a moral concern to make warfare as quick, humane, and bloodless as possible. Precision daylight bombing could take the ever-expanding scope of modern warfare and reduce it, shrinking it back toward the old ideal of warriors fighting only other warriors, a throwback to the centuries before Sherman or Napoleon.

Tellingly, Gladwell notes, Hansell’s favorite book was Don Quixote.

Reality ensues

The Bomber Mafia’s doctrine was the result of this confluence of theory and technology, and they finally got their chance to test their ideas with American entry into the Second World War. Members of the Bomber Mafia held key strategic positions in the Eighth Air Force in Europe. These men resisted pressure from the British to join the RAF in “de-housing” or “area bombing”—euphemisms for indiscriminate nighttime bombing of heavily populated urban areas—in favor of carefully planned large-scale daylight raids on key factories, exact implementation of the Bomber Mafia’s dearly held doctrine.

But reality intervened. The fleets of bombers required for these raids had difficulty coordinating their attacks and were vulnerable to flak and German fighters, and weather proved a persistent problem, either fog delaying the start of bombing missions in England or clouds obscuring the targets over Europe. Worse, and more fatally for the Mafia’s doctrine, high altitude flight plunged the crews and equipment of American bombers into temperatures as low as -60° F, causing the oil in Norden’s precision instruments to congeal ever so slightly, introducing just enough friction and throwing off their tolerances just enough to rob the bombers of their vaunted accuracy.

The peak of the Bomber Mafia’s career came with two raids on Germany on August 17, 1943. The first raid targeted the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg and was a diversion meant to draw off the fighters that would inevitably attack any large formation of Allied bombers. If the Messerschmitt plant could also be destroyed, so much the better. But the second raid, timed for slightly later in the day, was the main effort and aimed at a ball bearing factory in Schweinfurt—precisely the kind of industry-crippling target the Mafia had developed their ideas around. After weather delays, the two missions launched, now several hours apart, leaving plenty of time for the Germans to regroup and attack again.

Both raids were savaged. Here’s Gladwell’s description of just one B-17 on the mission to Regensburg; the bomber was

hit six times. One twenty-millimeter cannon shell penetrated the right side of the airplane and exploded beneath the pilot, cutting one of the gunners in the leg. A second shell hit the radio compartment, cutting the legs of the radio operator off at the knees. He bled to death. A third hit the bombardier in the head and shoulder. A fourth shell hit the cockpit, taking out the plane’s hydraulic system. A fifth severed the rudder cables. A sixth hit the number 3 engine, setting it on fire. This was all in one plane. The pilot kept flying.

Between them, the two raiding forces lost sixty bombers—meaning over 550 airmen—with many more heavily damaged. The Schweinfurt ball bearing factory was damaged but quickly repaired. Civilians were killed anyway. A second raid two months later met with similar results and took similar losses.

Tinkerers and pragmatists

The failure of precision bombing brought other characters with opposite qualities to the fore.

Carl Norden and his meticulously crafted bombsight gave way to a team of chemists working for the NDRC, the National Defense Research Committee, the same government agency that would produce the atomic bomb. Rather than the high-minded principles and moral qualms of Norden, these chemists were simply curious. They heard about an odd chemical reaction at a paint factory that produced intense fires and started poking into it, looking for ways to amplify the effects of the reaction—hotter, more intense, longer burning fires. They brought in architects to mock up German and Japanese towns and repeatedly bombed them, carefully assessing the relative effectiveness of different flammable compounds. They tinkered with and tested these new incendiaries and eventually produced a weapon far more destructive than the fire-starting bombs dropped on German cities by the British—napalm.

Pragmatist Curtis LeMay (left) arrives in the Marianas to replace idealist Haywood Hansell (right) in early 1945

In the air, the Bomber Mafia came to the end of its run. Hansell had transferred to the Pacific to lead precision bombing of Japan from the Marianas, and tried carefully to target Japanese industry the same way and for the same reasons he had in Germany, and with the same limited results. In the incident with which Gladwell opens his book, after several months of this Hansell was brusquely notified of his replacement by a former subordinate and philosophical opposite, the commander of the Regensburg raid—Curtis LeMay.

LeMay, a hardbitten and taciturn Ohioan (the murderous Midwesterner is something of an American military tradition, it seems), had embraced area bombing in Europe and, with the new technology of napalm at his disposal and knowledge of the highly combustible materials used in traditional Japanese architecture, immediately launched a campaign of firebombing in Japan. The “longest night of the Second World War” alluded to in the subtitle of the book is the night of March 9-10, 1945, in which LeMay’s long-range B-29 Superfortress bombers targeted Tokyo—not an industry or war-critical facility or defensive installation, the city of Tokyo itself. More than 300 bombers hit the city over the course of

almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles.

As many as 100,000 people were killed—burned alive. And LeMay would go on to bomb a total of sixty-seven Japanese cities with similar effects, all months before the atomic bombs that ended the war were even ready.

Why? Because it worked. LeMay believed so, and Gladwell even quotes Japanese historians who express a grim gratitude for the bombing in the belief that it shortened the war and prevented either Japan’s annihilation or its partition by the Soviets. The failure of the Bomber Mafia to circumscribe the destruction and provide a surgically precise ending to the war by destroying enemy logistics opened the door to the cold-blooded and amoral pragmatists, the people who care only about what works—a lesson in the amorality of technology.

But at what cost? This is a profound question that Gladwell raises but to which he refuses to provide easy answers, because there are none. The terms of the question itself, and the real-life consequences to which it alludes, should bother us.

Praise and criticism

For such a slender book there’s still a lot I’m leaving out in my description of The Bomber Mafia. Gladwell’s account of American pilots flying “over the hump” from India to China on their way to Japan is harrowing, and points to his strengths as a writer and storyteller—the hook, the unusual angle, the seemingly out-of-place but illuminating side topic, and above all the telling detail. His writing is also exceptionally brisk and vivid. See the block quotes above for a couple examples.

I appreciated that Gladwell did not succumb to the easy accusation of racism in the bombing of Japan that is prevalent in a lot of discussions of the war today. I also liked the sense of moral, philosophical, and even theological seriousness Gladwell brought to the topic. He even frames “the temptation” of the subtitle—the question of whether to use indiscriminate area bombing just to get results—as equivalent to the deals for power that Satan offered to Jesus in the wilderness. Jesus, famously, said no. The Allies and the US military, on the other hand…

Tokyo burns again, May 26, 1945

Furthermore, Gladwell brings human character and personality to the fore in this book in a refreshing way. I’ve seen a few reviewers fault Gladwell for supposedly reducing the tensions within the US military over targeting civilians to a personality clash. That’s not really what’s going on; Gladwell uses Hansell and LeMay and others as avatars of the deeprooted philosophical differences, of two different approaches to the use and morality of technology in warfare, and what’s refreshing about it is his recognition that, on top of all this, personality still matters. Character may not be destiny, but it is nonetheless a large part of it.

But The Bomber Mafia is not a perfect book, of course. While imminently readable, it sometimes reads like the transcript of a podcast—which, in a way, it is, as Gladwell first developed this story as an audiobook. That genesis shows most clearly in how Gladwell uses sources: rather than quoting or citing books, he always introduces outside information by way of interviews (e.g. “I talked to so-and-so about such-and-such, and he said…”). Gladwell has clearly done a lot of research into this topic and found a striking way to present it, but the approach of the writing is sometimes a little too informal. But that’s a relatively minor nitpick.

Some reviewers have faulted Gladwell for insufficient coverage of the issues involved in strategic bombing. Certainly The Bomber Mafia is in many ways a cursory look at the subject, but Gladwell in no way means this story to be exhaustive. He has done what he’s good at—found enough loose threads and unusual approaches to bring fresh insight and raise good questions. More seriously, I’ve seen at least one review accusing Gladwell of glorifying and promoting more recent American bombing. Such a reviewer can’t have been paying much attention; Gladwell clearly presents the horror and death resulting from area and firebombing, and goes out of his way to note the hesitations and sometimes outright refusals of American pilots to participate, incidents he presents as indicative of a troubling change in American air strategy.

These are issues worth considering, but The Bomber Mafia is mostly excellent—a great surprise in my reading. Most surprising to me was the sympathy Gladwell evoked in me for Curtis LeMay (I am ever more the old-fashioned anti-pragmatist as I get older and as I study more and more what warfare since the collapse of chivalry has meant for the innocent). And there is again the set of questions Gladwell advances, both explicitly and implicitly, about morality, technology, warfare, and what it takes to win.

Conclusion

Thanks to its readability, its vivid attention to personality and what it was like for those who lived through these events, its exceptionally lucid explanation of complicated ideas and technologies, and its clear-eyed awareness of the consequences of the technologies it describes, The Bomber Mafia is an outstanding introduction to an important historical topic that still raises hard questions about morality and technology, about ends and means. I look forward to recommending this to students not only in my US and Western History classes, but in a course like Technology & Culture as well. This is worth checking out, and the Memorial Day weekend might just be the best time to do so.

Lukacs on Hitler as Antichrist

Several weeks ago I shared a longish passage from the late John Lukacs’s 1997 study The Hitler of History in which Lukacs warns against thinking of or describing Hitler as insane or mad. Doing so, he argues, absolves Hitler from responsibility for his actions. Likewise with thinking of Hitler as demonic.

I finally finished The Hitler of History today. It’s excellent, and I highly recommend it if you’d like a deep dive into some of the history of the study of Hitler. But a passage in the final chapter—indeed, in the very last pages—jumped out at me. In concluding the book, Lukacs returns to his warnings against the folly of ascribing madness or demonic power to Hitler but notes that there is one spiritual parallel that can, in some circumstances, be appropriately applied—and not only to Hitler, but to other populist leaders in the age of mass politics, a point he makes clear in this chilling footnote:

In this respect we ought to, again, reject the “demonization” of Hitler, or the temptation to attribute to him the qualities of being “diabolical” or “satanic.” To the contrary, we can see elements in his career that bear an uncanny reminder of what St. John of the Apocalypse predicted as the Antichrist. The Antichrist will not be horrid and devilish, incarnating some kind of frightful monster—hence recognizable immediately. He will not seem to be anti-Christian. He will be smiling, generous, popular, an idol, adored by masses of people because of the sunny prosperity he seems to have brought, a false father (or husband) to his people. Save for a small minority, Christians will believe in him and follow him. Like the Jews at the time of the First Coming, Christians at the time of the Antichrist—that is, before the Second Coming—will divide. Before the end of the world the superficial Christians will follow the Antichrist, and only a small minority will recognize his awful portents. Well, Hitler did not bring about the end of the world, but there was a time—not yet the time of the mass murders but the time of the Third Reich in the 1930s—when some of St. John’s prophecies about the Antichrist accorded with this appearance and this appeal. And it may not be unreasonable to imagine that in the coming age of the masses he was but the first of Antichrist-like popular figures.

Let the reader understand.