The Great War: Why the Germans Lost World War I

W.J. Astore

To mark the 100th anniversary of World War I, which began in the summer of 1914, I’m posting this essay, which I wrote as a graduate student in 1992. I’ve decided not to edit it since I believe my general conclusions remain sound. Germany may have had the best military during World War I, but that wasn’t enough for the Kaiser and crew to win the war.

Today, the U.S. should learn from Germany’s mistakes, especially since we are as fond in 2014 of boasting about having the world’s greatest military as the Kaiser was of boasting about his a century ago in 1914.

Strategy is the relationship between national means, ends, and will. Given the results of the Great War, one might question whether any country followed a sound strategy. As J.F.C. Fuller observed, at war’s end “Britain was bankrupted and France bled white; Russia and Germany were in the throes of revolution; the Austro-Hungarian Empire had vanished; the Ottoman Empire had been dismembered; Italy was distraught; and every other country in Europe was scorched by the fiery blast – an epoch had gone up in flames.” However, there were – at least in the short term – winners and losers. The winners prevailed because their strategies were sounder in balancing means and will with ends than those of their opponents.

Strategies at Sea During the Great War

Britain’s strategic ends in 1914 were to maintain the balance of power in Europe and her hold over her Empire. Her chief means were the ships of the Royal Navy. A German victory on the continent threatened these ends and means. A victorious Germany would dominate Europe, and she might build an even larger navy, one which would threaten the Empire or even Britain itself. With her will fortified by news of Germany’s violation of neutral Belgium, Britain declared war on Germany on 5 August 1914.

At the outset of the war, the Royal Navy gained command of the sea and never lost it. Enforcing a loose or distant blockade against German merchant shipping, the Royal Navy slowly constricted the economies (the means) of the Central Powers. Meanwhile, Britain’s command of the sea ensured that supplies, and eventually troops, came safely from her Empire and America.

As elaborated by Admiral Jellicoe, the navy’s strategy was: 1) neutralize any hostile action of the German High Seas Fleet; 2) protect Entente trade, while blockading German trade; 3) protect Great Britain from invasion. In brief, the navy’s strategic ends were to prevent the German fleet from affecting the war’s course, and through blockade, to erode Germany’s means and will to fight.

The Royal Navy has been criticized for not doing more with its command of the sea, but Jellicoe and Beatty were understandably cautious. They had the German fleet encircled, and they controlled the choke points to the Atlantic and Mediterranean. With excellent intelligence of German fleet movements, they stymied German attempts to break-out. While the Royal Navy might have preferred to fight another Trafalgar, a battle of annihilation between dreadnoughts, they never took risks that threatened naval supremacy in the home waters. They triumphed by putting political ends first, and by using their means – the superior fleets of the Royal Navy – to erode the economic means of Germany and the will of her people. Their “indirect approach” contributed significantly to the collapse of the German homefront in October 1918.

In contrast to the British, who balanced naval means with national ends, the Germans wasted their High Seas Fleet. The wisdom of building such a fleet was questionable to begin with. Despite Mahan’s warning that it was probably impossible for a land power to divert enough human and material resources to challenge the Royal Navy’s command of the sea, Tirpitz and Kaiser Wilhelm II persisted. For them, a navy was a way to gain influence and win friends. They saw their imitation of the Royal Navy as the sincerest form of flattery, but the British were not appreciative. Germany was living in a fool’s paradise, believing she could have a fleet that rivaled Britain’s without making Britain a rival.

The resulting rivalry polluted German naval strategy. Expecting the Royal Navy to mount a close blockade or launch a preemptive strike against her bases, the High Seas Fleet sat put and lost the initiative. Forced to fight with an inferior fleet at Jutland, Scheer tried to steer Jellicoe’s dreadnoughts onto a series of submarine-laid minefields, hoping thereby to destroy the Grand Fleet’s cohesiveness and defeat it in detail. He failed, and the Germans never broke the blockade which eventually sapped their will. Surprised that war had been declared, left without a role to play in the Schlieffen Plan due to poor interservice cooperation with the army, the High Seas Fleet was a means whose main end became self-preservation, its only goal being to intimidate Britain during peace negotiations (to be held after the German army won the war on land).

German naval strategy reflected the defects of strategic mirror-imaging. To challenge the Royal Navy, the German navy believed it had to be just like it. Billions were spent from 1895-1914 on a surface fleet, devouring funding for innovations like the submarine (only 25 seagoing subs were ready for service in August 1914). In the end, the Germans only drove the British to improve; even worse, by allocating a large percentage of her industrial resources towards naval production, Germany fatally weakened herself on land. She tried to be a great land and sea power simultaneously, but the only country in history able to afford the exorbitant costs has been the United States during, and perhaps after, World War II.

Another country whose strategic mirror-imaging absorbed scarce resources to little end was the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. The Soviet naval push only spurred the US Navy to improve, which surged to 600 ships under John Lehman. A bankrupt strategic policy led to a bankrupt Soviet economy. Today, the Soviet aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov sits in drydock, a second big carrier is up for sale, apparently to China or Iran, and a third was scrapped before completion. According to the London Times (Oct 1992), there are no Russian naval ships presently in the Indian Ocean or the Mediterranean. Strategy is the art of the possible, not the striving for the impossible. Before one embarks on an end, one must be able to afford the resources or means to achieve it. Germany in the 1900s and 1910s, and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, embarked on an end they did not need and could not afford.

The bankruptcy of German naval strategy was best shown in 1917 with the decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. The Germans gambled they could wear down the will of Britain before American troops reached the continent. What they apparently failed to realize, however, was that the very entry of the US into the war would reinforce the will of the Entente Powers. Meanwhile, Britain muddled through the U-boat crisis and reformed her naval strategy, learning that the defensive was a more effective means of destroying submarines than the offensive, and that destroyers were better used guarding convoys than the Grand Fleet. The Germans had expected a short war in which navies would scarcely matter. Caught in the stalemate of the Western Front, she found she couldn’t improvise an effective maritime strategy.

Strategies on Land on the Western Front

Turning to land warfare on the Western Front, and keeping in mind the definition of strategy as relating means, ends, and will, one must first recognize the changing nature of warfare. The American Civil War marked a revolution in warfare. Militaries no longer fought solely against other militaries but also waged war against an enemy’s economy and will. In hindsight, the stalemate on the Western Front owed everything to modern industrialism. Ironically, in 1914 most Europeans had believed a long war of attrition was impossible because of modern industry. In Schlieffen’s words:

A nation’s existence depends upon the uninterrupted continuation of trade and industry, and a quick decision is necessary to start the wheels of industry turning again. A strategy of attrition is impossible when the maintenance of armies of millions requires the expenditure of billions.

What people failed to foresee was, once hundreds of thousands of men were killed in 1914, nations were willing to pay billions and gear their economies for war rather than negotiate from a weak position. Since the war was one of economic mobilization, those countries with underdeveloped economies, e.g. Austria-Hungary, had the most trouble fighting it. Here the alliance system was crucial. As Paul Kennedy has observed, Britain kept France fighting, France and Britain kept Italy fighting after Caporetto, and Germany kept Austria-Hungary fighting. Ivan Bloch, the self-made Warsaw banker, turned out to be right: the ultimate decision was in the hands of starvation of home populations. The Central Powers starved first.

This fate was by no means obvious, however. Until the middle of 1918, the Central Powers appeared to be winning the war. Despite fundamental strategic flaws, Germany, with Austria-Hungary marching reluctantly behind, broke Russia, threw the French army into mutiny, and sowed despair in England. Germany’s tactical and operational brilliance, however, could not conceal, and in fact contributed to, an underlying strategic rot.

This rot was revealed in the words of the Kaiser. “The soldiers and the army, not parliamentary majorities and decisions, have welded the German Empire together,” Wilhelm declared. “I put my trust in the army.” But the army, beginning with von Moltke the Elder, had subordinated grand strategy to operational art. Reinforced by Schlieffen, this trend reached the height of military absurdity under Ludendorff in 1918, when victory on the battlefield became the means and end of Germany’s strategy, as well as the balm which would restore the flagging will of Germany, Austria-Hungary, even Turkey! In the Great War, Germany experienced a fundamental breakdown in civil-military relationships. With the military determining policy, Clausewitz’s dictum that war as a form of politics became tragically twisted to war as the only form of politics.

This debasement of politics was not complete until 1917. By Christmas 1914, Germany realized her strategic nightmare had come true: a two-front war of attrition loomed. Adopting a defensive stance in the West, Falkenhayn sought victory in the East, nearly achieving a knockout blow against Russia at Gorlice-Tarnow in May 1915. With Bethmann-Hollweg, Falkenhayn hoped to translate a limited military victory in the East into a political settlement with Russia. Frederick the Great had institutionalized this concept of fighting limited wars for definite political ends. However, despite her losses on the battlefield, Russia failed to see the wisdom of negotiations. Despite criticism by Hindenburg and Ludendorff that he had failed to grasp the total military victory in the East that was still within reach, Falkenhayn turned to the West and Verdun in 1916.

Falkenhayn’s strategic concept for Verdun was simple: by attacking French national pride at Verdun, he would force them to bleed themselves dry in counterattacks. Britain would then be compelled, before her new armies were ready, to come to the aid of France, exposing herself to decisive German counterattacks. Falkenhayn made two errors here. First, and most importantly, he did not coordinate his strategy with Hotzendorff’s in Austria-Hungary. As a result, the Central Powers lost their advantage of interior lines and their chance to defeat Russia in 1916. Second, Falkenhayn failed to explain his strategy to his subordinates. His desire to avoid casualties and unnecessary sacrifice was subverted once Germany’s national pride was inflamed. Expecting a loss ratio of 2.5:1 in his favor, the actual ratio was a grim 1.075:1.

Verdun was the Great War’s equivalent to Kursk in World War II. While the Germans gave better than they got, it was they who could least afford the price. Like the Soviets in 1943, the French had learned. Petain refused to waste his troops in poorly planned attacks, preferring to rely on artillery and firepower rather than elan to retake ground. In the end, Falkenhayn failed to enforce his will on the Entente. He did not force Britain to launch an offensive prematurely, and Russia surprised him by launching the Brusilov offensive in Galicia. For his failure, Falkenhayn was sacked and Ludendorff effectively assumed command of the German war effort.

1917 was a banner year for the German war effort. In the West, the Germans wisely retreated to the Siegfried Line, shortening their front and creating a defensive barrier which withstood Nivelle’s disastrous offensives and Haig’s bullheaded assaults at Third Ypres. With Russia in chaos, Ludendorff could finally concentrate all his resources on the Western Front for the “Victory Offensive” in 1918.

Here again, however, German strategy failed to relate means to ends. Ludendorff simply didn’t have the means in 1918 to conduct a decisive offensive in the West, and his end was unclear even to himself. All will be solved once we pierce a hole, he stated. Attacking along the seam separating the British and French armies, the Germans failed to exploit their initial successes due to Ludendorff’s vague and shifting strategic aims and shortages of manpower and transport. Like Napoleon in 1815, Ludendorff desperately committed his superbly trained troops one last time. But like Napoleon, the coalition arrayed against him was too powerful. Primacy in operational art was not enough to overcome economic blockade and the bigger battalions of fresh troops arriving daily from the Empire and the US. Shattered by the Entente’s counteroffensive at Amiens on 8 August 1918, and faced with national starvation, the German homefront collapsed.

Why the Entente Won — And Germany Lost

The Entente had won. But was this due to superior strategy? Clearly, the Entente suffered some of the same strategic shortcomings as the Central Powers: a breakdown in military-civil relations, with the military reigning supreme; a cult of the offensive as the ultimate arbiter of war; and a lack of contingency planning. Moreover, the Entente achieved a level of tactical proficiency approaching Germany’s only in mid-1918, if then. But while it’s been fashionable to attack the “donkeys” and “British butchers and bunglers of World War One,” on the whole Britain and France properly balanced means and ends with will.

Developing a strategy wasn’t easy, though. Kitchener caught the confusion of his colleagues when he exclaimed: “I don’t know what is to be done – this isn’t war!”. He came to realize, as Michael Howard has pointed out, that Britain had to “make war as we must; not as we should like.” Like Sherman during the American Civil War, Kitchener knew it would be a long war, and he oversaw the expansion of the British Army from Haldane’s six divisions in 1914 to seventy divisions in 1918. Pursuing a strategy remarkably similar to the Union’s in the Civil War, the Entente wore down the tactically superior German army on the battlefield as Grant had worn down Lee’s army in 1864. Through economic blockade, the Entente strangled the German economy as Scott’s Anaconda Plan had suffocated the Confederacy.

The Entente strategy was hardly this clear-cut, however. Many in Britain preferred an indirect approach, but this seemed to fail at Salonika and Gallipoli. And while Kitchener may have seen the need for waging a costly war of attrition, most Entente leaders still placed their faith in the offensive. The Somme, Third Ypres, the Nivelle Offensives: these and other offensives forced the Germans to use up men and materiel, but their primary end was not attrition but breakthrough and decisive victory. Haig for one pursued offensives long after they were feasible, and wore down his own army in the effort. Nivelle did the same. That their costly offensives bore fruit was more by accident than design. The strain they put on Germany forced her to take desperate measures, the deadliest being her decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917.

Besides blundering into the bloody, tedious, but effective combination of attrition warfare on land, economic warfare at sea, the Entente demonstrated other strategic edges versus their opponents. With the rise of Lloyd George and Clemenceau, the Entente gradually reasserted civilian control over policy and the war’s course, obeying Clausewitz far better than their German counterparts. The Entente also waged coalition warfare more effectively than the Central Powers. While distrust and stubbornness existed within the Entente, France and Britain tended to work towards the same end, unlike Germany and Austria-Hungary, who were usually fighting uncoordinated battles on different fronts against different enemies.

Finally, the Entente used a wider array of strategic means in pursuit of their ends. The British were especially clever in their use of propaganda to strengthen public will at home and to convince the US to enter the war. In short, the Entente recognized more clearly than the Central Powers the widening dimensions of strategy. Battles were only one means to victory, and not always the most important when compared with political, economic, intellectual, and psychological means. The “genius” of the German military was evident but restricted to operations; the Entente bumbled about on the battlefield but used a wider array of means, under firmer political control, to wear down the will of Germany.

Yet despite her defeats in the First and Second World Wars, too much has been made, at least in the American military, of German battle skill. In Vietnam, one might argue that like Germany, American grand strategy was irredeemably flawed no matter how many victories we won on the battlefield. And while the operational brilliance of our victory in Desert Storm is clear, we must not let it blind us to our need to balance needs, ends and will in strategy.

11 thoughts on “The Great War: Why the Germans Lost World War I”

My father was an Ober Lieutenant ( 1st Lt.) in the Austro-Hungarian army in WW I. He led a company in battles in the Italian Alps and was wounded in the head by shrapnel. As a child I would often sit on his lap and put my finger on the depression in his forehead where the shrapnel entered and ask him about it.. He died when I was twelve years old and I never thought I would be involved in a war that could do that to me. At age 18 in early 1943 I entered the U.S. Army Air Corps in WW II.
I remember the line from the film, The Thin Red Line, where the soldier on Guadalcanal or one of those god forsaken islands so many suffered and died on saying before he was killed “What does this all mean? Why are we here?…..”‘
So what difference does it make who made the most mistakes. Who had the most efficient army? Who should have invested in the land based army rather than the navy? The dead don’t care, the rulers learn nothing and the killing goes on.
Just as I never thought that I would go to war ( because that was” the war to end all war” I never imagined that my country would be involved in perpetual war against the world. I was proud of my service but now I question if the three years of my youth were wasted because our current and past leaders only learned to wage unending wars because they could. And our citizens sit quietly by.

On the tiny island of Iwo Jima in the Pacific Ocean 7000 of our soldiers were killed. That was more than died in the D-Day landings in Europe in which many more troops were involved. In addition 19,000 men were wounded. Most of these casualties were men no older than twenty one. Can you imagine yourself dying at that age? This poem was posted on a wooden plaque at the entrance to that cemetery for those young men on this benighted island. Imprint it on your mind and shed a tear, as I have many times, for them and where we are now.

“…make war as we must; not as we should like”! Why, Col. Astore, you could scarcely know that Donald Rumsfeld would steal your lines (or, more properly, those of Michael Howard) for one of his more infamous performances! Any war is a war of attrition of the flesh and blood assets on the ground, of course. The madness of the slaughter between the German and Allied trenches in WW I is the image seared into our minds and helped promulgate the popular notion that surely Mankind would never repeat this; thus “The war to end all wars.” I now turn to cinematic depictions of this war. I was first exposed to Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 “Paths Of Glory” during my brief stay at Syracuse University, fall of 1966. For those who have never seen this, I cannot recommend it too highly. It’s based on a true incident wherein French troops were sent across hellish open terrain to assault the German position, The Ant Hill. Unfazed as they sat safely far behind the lines by the fact that the assignment was impossible, French generals decided the units involved must be punished. Men were randomly selected and executed by firing squad for “cowardice.” A tremendous summation of military “justice” in a nutshell. The film was banned from exhibition in France for decades!

I only fairly recently saw 1969’s “Oh What A Lovely War.” A very fine British production, but the highlight really is the opening depiction of the rulers of Europe (most of whom were related to one another by blood or marriage, by the way)–Kings, Kaisers, Prime Ministers, dictators–strutting about in their uniformed finery over a map of Europe, leading up to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. How nonchalantly they would soon throw the youth of their respective nations into a meat grinder! Tsar Nicholas, of course, would be in for a rude surprise as the Bolsheviks unveiled the strategy of “revolutionary defeatism” (of “their own” military leadership, that is).

Finally, I would recommend a fairly recent French production, “Joyeux Noel.” This depicts the spontaneous “Christmas Truce” of the first winter of the war, when troops from both sides fraternized and shared meals, drinks and cigarettes. Their superiors were so horrified at this conduct–even though it was only for a night and a day–that measures were taken to ensure it would never be repeated. Who knows how history would have been altered had the lower-ranking troops prevailed in extending the truce and defied their leaders more vigorously? But the war was still relatively young and the fervor of “patriotism” prevailed. And hundreds of thousands would soon go to their graves or return home mutilated for life. Oh, what a lovely war indeed.

By the time I came back from Vietnam in early 1972, I understood utterly what Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce meant when he defined “patriotism” as “combustible rubbish, ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name,” and “patriot” as “the dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.” So I became an ex-patriot for the rest of my life. Now that I live abroad, I qualify as an expatriate ex-patriot occasionally compelled to compose poisonous polemics in vitriolic verse, like:

Spitting Image

Expatriate ex-patriots expectorate
When REMFs proceed to hide behind the troops
Exhorting more to die for those who met their fate
In service to a penis pride that droops
Each time a petty presidential potentate
Ignites a war, and in his panties poops.

A great essay, to which I wholeheartedly concur. However, it should be pointed out that without the “Miracle on the Marne” in early September – which allowed the Allies to exploit an inopportune gap between Kluck’s 1st and Bülow’s 2nd armies – Germany might well have prevailed in 1914. It was that close.

Aside from that costly tactical error, Germany made other strategic mistakes in addition to its ill-conceived naval and logistics plans. Firstly, it suffered from the pervasive view that German military prowess was innately superior – an attitudinal product of the Franco-Prussian War and of cultural currents brewing within Germany. Consequently, the so-called “two-front war” warnings were not heeded. Secondly, Germany failed to recognize the danger posed by the misguided omnipotence of Europe’s aristocracy. Its initial reluctance to embolden Austria-Hungary soon faded, giving way to bombastic pride and questionable loyalties. Aggression was the order of the day, and the lives of millions of commoners were no match for the self-righteous delusions which afflicted German leadership… until, of course, the end.

Every time I hear that Great War slogan: “A War to End All War” I think of today’s version: “Pre-emptive War,” which, in effect, means having a war now so as not to pass up the opportunity. Then I think of that anti-slogan we had back in Vietnam: namely, “Fighting for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity.” Pure doublethinking, oxymoronic, schizophrenic insanity. In truth, nations avoid wars by not indulging in them, although it does not seem that those in positions of political power in the United states have any inclination or incentive to avoid anything. Quite the opposite. They operate on the moral midget, Madeleine Albright, principle: “Why even have this superb military you’re always talking about if you won’t use it?” Now stand by for Amazon Amateur Hour coming to the world stage in 2016, with You-Know-Her cackling in unrestrained glee: “We came, we saw, he died.” Sure glad I don’t live in that idiot country any longer.

And is there not every day still hanging over our heads the Damocles’ sword of war, on the first day of which all the chartered covenants of princes will be scattered like chaff; a war of which nothing is certain but the absolute uncertainty of its outcome; a race war which will subject the whole of Europe to devastation by fifteen or twenty million armed men, and which is not raging already only because even the strongest of the great military states shrinks before the absolute incalculability of its final result?
Friedrich Engels, March 1891

The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war. Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national Governments are one as against the proletariat!
Karl Marx, May 1871

About the following sentence which concludes the essay: “And while the operational brilliance of our victory in Desert Storm is clear, we must not let it blind us to our need to balance needs, ends and will in strategy.”

Not long after this “brilliant victory” over the hopelessly outclassed Iraqi Army in Operation Desert Slaughter, I had the good fortune to attend an evening lecture by novelist Kurt Vonnegut at the University of California, Irvine. Mr Vonnegut spoke of seeing television pictures of shell-shocked Iraqi conscripts who had somehow survived low-altitude, point-blank saturation bombing by fleets of B-52s. He remarked especially about how the Iraqi survivors would approach U.S. forces with their hands placed on their heads in the traditional attitude of surrender. Many Americans, he said, found this horrific situation humorous. Then he said to us: “We Americans once looked just like that when the German Army overran our positions at the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.”

Mr Vonnegut went on to remind us that thousands of poorly trained GIs like himself wound up prisoners of war of the Germans, with Mr Vonnegut and several of his friends placed down in a slaughterhouse cellar in Dresden the night allied bombers fire-bombed the city. Hungry and thirsty after three days of not hearing or seeing anything from their German captors, he told us of how he and his friends forced their way out of the cellar only to come out upon a scene that he said “looked like the surface of the moon,” with rocks and rubble still glowing red from the heat of the fire storm that had literally sucked all the oxygen out of the atmosphere of the city, asphyxiating thousands before burning them to ashes. This experience, he said, formed the basis for his novel Slaughterhouse Five.

At the end of his lecture, Mr Vonnegut thanked us for attending. Then he came out from behind the speaker’s podium, silently placed both hands upon his head, and literally cringed into a pathetic posture of fear and surrender. I count that evening as one of the most memorable of my life.

So much for Operation Desert Slaughter which, far from concluding or deciding anything, merely began a two-decade U.S. assault on Iraq about which Noam Chomsky said in his book Failed States: “The catastrophe in Iraq is so extreme it can barely be reported.” The U.S. military finally left Iraq at the end of 2011, waiting until after dark to make a last-minute dash for the border with Kuwait. No cameras allowed. That much, the U.S. military did learn from Vietnam: “Never let them see you run.”

A great essay! Many of those commenting on it above, however, seem to have the impression that everybody knows what happened so why go over it. They don’t. Nor do they know what happened in World War II. (As for Korea? Ha!) The ignorance of the American people is incalculable, and it grows worse everyday. History is subsumed into social studies or something else.

History is perhaps the most neglected subject in our curriculum. Did MacArthur, for example, know that the shogun Hideyoshi, after gaining control of a unified Japan decided to conquer Korea while he was at it. The Japanese, as skilled in the use of the musket as a European army. routed the Koreans, but then were forced to withdraw when the Chinese (not Communists at the time) intervened with overwhelming force.

Then was LBJ aware that the Mongols, after the unprecedented feat of conquering China, decided to overrun little Vietnam? Not used to fighting in jungle terrain and harassed by guerrilla warfare, the mighty Mongols withdrew. (Like the mighty Red Army from Afghanistan, like the mighty American Army from Iraq, Afghanistan, and still counting.)

Unfortunately those who would profit must by essays like Mr. Astore’s never read them. Nor do they read much of anything. There’s too many shows on TV.

A little anecdote that illustrates the foregoing. A former priest who had worked in El Salvador gave a talk at a Catholic school. He told of soldiers breaking up a demonstration and one of them tossing a grenade that landed in a baby carriage. One sweet young Catholic school girl was not at all upset. She was made of sterner stuff. “But, she said, that baby could have grown up to be a Vietcong.”

I can remember when another former schoolgirl, the infamous Vietnamese Madam Nhu (or Dragon Lady) would blithely dismiss the Buddhist monks who set fire to themselves — in protest of her brother-in-law Ngo Dinh Diem’s corrupt Saigon government — as a “barbeque.” I thought of her again recently when an American version of her — Mad Dog John McCain’s former running mate, Sarah Palin — called the waterboarding of “terrorists” a “baptism.” Personally, I have never forgiven the North Vietnamese for releasing Bomber John and inflicting him back upon the United States. Poetic justice, I know, but still even justifiable revenge ought to have some statute of limitations …

And speaking of the lessons of history, I can also remember when Henry Kissinger went to China to get Mao’s co-operation with the American retreat from Vietnam. When he got his appointment with The Great Helmsman, Kissinger started off with a little phony small talk: “Of course, you don’t expect anything of me and I don’t expect anything of you.” Mao cut him off, saying simply: “If I expected nothing of you, I would not have invited you; and if you expected nothing of me, you should not have come.” Ouch! Then, later, Kissinger asked Chinese Premier Chou En Lai what he thought of the French Revolution of 1789. “Too soon to tell,” replied the Chinese statesman. Or, as William Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” Americans for the most part, though, pretty much subscribes to Henry Ford’s dismissive view of history as “bunk.” Americans know that history exists. They just don’t think it applies to their “exceptional” selves.

As I understand Japanese history, the feudal Japanese shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched the invasion of Korea for the same reasons the Catholic popes loudly urged the European kings to send their homicidal younger brothers on Crusade to the so-called “Holy Lands”: namely, to get the belligerent bastards the hell out of the home country where they would do nothing but plot and scheme and fight to take political power for themselves. The popes wanted temporal power for themselves and found in foreign military crusades the way to achieve effective control over secular European royalty. The Saudi Arabian monarchy follows the same policy today in sending its domestic malcontents abroad on Jihad to trouble foreign lands instead of revolting against their own repressive government. This ancient principle of pre-emptive domestic statecraft Hideyoshi well understood. He more than likely didn’t want to “win” anything in Korea so much as he wanted to lose in Korea those troublesome samurai who wanted his own position in Japan. In this, he pretty much succeeded, setting the stage for Tokugawa Ieyasu to eventually unify Japan, boot out the Catholic troublemakers, and close Japan to foreign influence for two-and-a-half centuries.

As you know, Mr. Gallager, the Japanese have a proverbial saying about a cuckoo (“hototogisu”) that wouldn’t sing. They use it as a metaphor for the three great Japanese Shoguns who eventually unified feudal Japan — Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu — each of whom had their own characteristic way of dealing with the recalcitrant bird. Respectively in turn, they said:

We often think — for justifiable reasons — that rulers do not know the lessons of history. While true in many cases, we often base our analyses on what we suspect these rulers wanted to achieve, taking them at their own word regarding their motivations. This constitutes a category error of the first rank. Think “WMD” and “spreading democracy” in Iraq, as prime examples. Rulers lie, just to keep in practice; just so they won’t forget how. As George Orwell pointed out in “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” (the book-within-a-book in 1984) the purpose of perpetual war has nothing to do with announced objectives like gaining territory or military “victory,” but rather with keeping the hierarchical (i.e., pyramid) structure of society intact. So if Hideyoshi really wanted to send his principal rivals off to die in Korea, then he succeeded like the biblical King David who wanted the wife of a general and so sent the poor cuckold off to the front lines where he would likely die in battle. Again, taking rulers at their word about what they intend to achieve in any given circumstance leads to a misreading of human nature and history that a more cynical view would not so easily mistake.

Just one possible, contrary view of Japanese, European, and United States history.