"Isaac's Storm" by Erik Larson (1999)

Erik Larson has caught your attention in the past few years. "In The Garden of Beasts" was the first review you ever did for this blog and "Devil in the White City" is one of those books that even people who would never normally read a history book admit that they enjoyed. His books are all non-fiction, but they read like novels. And even though his use of maps is inexcusably terrible, you have enjoyed his work in the past. So when you saw "Isaac's Storm" for $1.00 you could not resist it, especially when you found out it was about Texas.

When you were 12 years old you went to Sea Camp for one whole summer week. No one believes you when you tell them, but Sea Camp was even cooler than Space Camp which you had gone to the summer before. Sea Camp had a looser schedule and more time to hang out and act like a hooligan. It was at Sea Camp that you saw your first dolphins while laying with your head hanging over the bow of a shrimp boat as it cut through the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The beauty of that trio of amazing creatures mere feet below your face as they bobbed effortlessly, frolicking in the wake of the boat was enough to drive away any silly phobia of sharks. From that moment on for years to come, you were an aspiring marine biologist.

Sea Camp was sponsored by Texas A&M at their Galveston campus and even at such a young age you noticed something about the city of Galveston; everyone there was obsessed with a hurricane that had hit the city almost a century before. Some of the buildings proudly sported "1900 Storm" plaques on their facades proclaiming that they had survived this legendary tempest. Every tour guide you had and every college student who had volunteered their time as a camp counselor would point out to you and the other campers how much the city had been changed by the great storm of 1900. The 8 foot high sea wall ringing the entire island was a direct result of the great storm, the houses on pylons were a response to the great storm, some buildings still bore the line of the high water mark from the storm (which was well above your head). At the time it was fairly interesting to you, but not nearly as interesting as the real live dolphins or the sea turtle hatchery or the cute girls who were actually paying attention to you at a party (granted, they may have only been paying attention to you because you'd been stung by a dead Portugese man-of-war that manged to make your chest feel like it was on fire when it brushed your skin, but they were paying attention by God!). But nothing those people told you about the great storm of 1900 could even come close to making you understand how immense a tragedy it was.

In order to tell the story of the storm, Larson must first tell the story of the science of meteorology. That sounds boring, but Larson, like any decent historian, is a master of making the mundane fascinating, somehow turning meteorology into a tale of impending doom. As he educates you on the finer points of the physics of fluid and gas and the unimaginable forces that come in to play when monster weather systems draw energy from both the heat of the sun and the rotation of the Earth itself, he intersperses his analogy-laden prose with shorter chapters that plot the course of the one specific storm as it was birthed over the plains of Africa. Larson's ubiquitous analogies are absent in these chapters. As he plots the course of the storm across the Atlantic ocean, he sticks strictly to the science and the analytical math alone, giving these passages an ominous foreboding and an authoritative significance. This is the storm the whole story is about.

"Isaac's Storm" unfolds like one of those disaster movies your mother loves so much. It is a jigsaw puzzle of a tragedy. Larson uses his talents at imparting history as if it were a novel to build suspense and draw you into the story even though he tells you multiple times that there is no happy ending. It focuses on one man's struggle to make the most of himself and in the very moment that he reaches his goals catastrophe takes everything from him. Isaac Cline had risen through the ranks of the fledgling and much ridiculed Weather Service in the later part of the 19th Century. He was well respected in his field and confident enough in his experience to make sweeping statements of absolutes. In a book he published a few years before the great storm that would take so much from him, he wrote that hurricanes were required by the laws of physics to turn north through Gulf of Mexico and avoid landfall anywhere in Texas. This is a story of what damage great hubris can bring. "Isaac's Storm" is a great reminder of exactly what pride goeth before. Larson writes the story as if this storm didn't target Galveston, it was after Isaac Cline, targeting him for his certainty.

The weather experts on the island of Cuba, men who knew a thing or two about hurricanes, tried to warn the US about the storm after it left their tropical shores a mess. They knew it was a big one and that the unusual September heat wave would only serve to strengthen the cyclone as it made its way across the relatively shallow Gulf of Mexico. They tried to warn the US but they were muzzled by the very men who should have been the most receptive to their experiences. Again, pride was the culprit here. Pride and a healthy dose of racism and arrogance. "These poor Cubans are such panic mongers see hurricanes in every cloud," was the way the American Weather Service thought about the situation. They banned all weather related communication out of Cuba from being transmitted over American telegraph wires. Consequently, the people of Galveston had no idea what lay in store for them. This is a tale of hubris.

As the 19th century came to a close two cities along the Texas shores were vying to compete with New Orleans as a second deep water port for shipping through the Gulf of Mexico. Houston and Galveston. In 1900, anyone who was the betting sort would have wagered good money on Galveston taking the crown. It was a city vibrant with life. An influx of both foreign immigrants and Americans seeking to find a city where they could make something of themselves swelled Galveston's population greater than any other city in Texas. It was easy to see that Galveston was on the precipice of something big. No one could have predicted that the precipice was really a cliff.

The morning of September 8th dawned with none of the traditionally recognized warning signs of an approaching storm. The wind was coming from inland and there was no brick-colored sky. Isaac Cline saw no reason to be worried. The waves breaking on the beaches of Galveston were deep rolling breakers, but no one knew that was a sign of an offshore hurricane. Issac and the rest of his team from the Weather Service, people who were experts in forecasting the weather, went about their day calmly, never guessing there was disaster in store for them before the next dawn would break. Soon rains began soaking the island and the wind picked up. The waves grew in intensity and began to damage some of the buildings standing on the beaches facing the gulf. Soon those waves began to demolish those buildings. The wind from the north grew stronger and stronger driving the water in the bay between Galveston and the rest of Texas higher on the northern shoes of the island. Galveston was flooding from both sides.

The homes along both shores began to receive even more damage as the day progressed and the wives who had been left home that day began to grow more fearful as the water crept higher and higher into their streets. The men who had left those women at home however, the men who were supposed to make the choices that could save lives, feigned disinterest and a distinct, almost ostentatious lack of worry. They couldn't be seen by the other men to be scared or worried lest their manhoods be questioned. They soon realized the seriousness of the storm when a popular restaurant and saloon had its roof collapse from the gale force winds. Several prominent Galvestionian men were crushed to death before the eyes of dozens of others and the waiter who was sent to find a doctor drowned in the flooded streets outside. Only now, when it was too late, did the men admit their fears and race home to be with their families and try to save their loved ones.

There was no escape though. The bridges supporting the rail lines linking Galveston to the mainland had been destroyed by the storm. In fact, one train that had tried to make it but instead had turned around to head back to the safety of inland had been swamped anyway, killing almost one hundred passengers aboard. No ship's captain could even think of reaching the city in this kind of storm. Galveston is not protected by any wetlands or barrier islands. There is nothing to absorb the brunt of any approaching storm. In fact, Galveston is a barrier island. Before the worst part of the hurricane reached the city, her streets were already completely flooded. Around noon, the anemometer at the weather station snapped off in the hurricane winds. Its last recording was of winds up to 120 miles per hour... and the storm was only going to get much much worse.

The power of this storm was unimaginable. The extraordinary change in barometric pressure alone rose the entire sea level around Galveston by almost three feet. Larson reminded you that one cubic yard of water weighs about 1,500 pounds which means that a wave 50 feet long and 10 feet tall weighs over 80,000 pounds. If that same wave is moving at 30 miles an hour it generates a forward momentum of over 2,000,000 pounds. One witness said the waves moving through the city that day were pouring into his second story window which was exactly 35 feet off the ground. Nothing could stand in the face of that kind of power.

These waves and incredibly strong winds destroyed so many structures that it turned the debris and rubble into a three story high ridge of shattered timbers, twisted metal, stone work, and human corpses. This ridge of debris moved north through the city scouring the earth below clean of anything. Parts of Galveston were scraped as perfectly as if a massive lathe had been used to level her. The winds became so strong as the storm began to make landfall that it would rip bricks from their mortar and fling them across the city perfectly horizontally. Gravity itself was no longer enough to force the flying debris towards the Earth. Debris spun through the air of Galveston like shrapnel from an artillery barrage. The wind drove the raindrops so fast and so forcefully that when they slammed into a horizontal surface they released enough energy to spark little bits of light. On that day in Galveston, rain fell like fireworks.

Houses collapsed with entire families huddling inside them. A massive Catholic orphanage that had stood on the shores of the city like a castle was taken apart stone by stone, like a child demolishing his Lego creations. For days afterwards, the bodies of children were found tied with rope to the nuns who had died trying to keep their charges safe until the very end. Elsewhere in the city, survivors told impossible tales of being swept out to sea on the flotsam of their neighborhoods only to be blown back to the skeleton of the city that had been destroyed by a storm no one knew was even coming that morning.

Isaac Cline watched as his house collapsed around him. His family, and fifty other neighbors who had unwisely sought refuge in the Cline house were either crushed in the collapse or thrown into an angry sea. Miraculously, Isaac and his youngest daughter clung to the lifeline of the remains of their house. Somehow, in the wrack and fury of the storm, tossed by waves and blinded by lightning, Issac found his brother, Joseph, who had saved Isaac's other two daughters. Isaac's pregnant wife was not so lucky. Her body was found days later only a few blocks from the footprint of their old home. Joseph had urged Isaac for hours before the collapse to abandon the house and seek safety in the higher ground closer to the middle of the island. In his arrogance, Isaac had refused to listen to Joseph, and his wife had paid the price. The two brothers never spoke again.

In the days after the storm roared over the island and moved ashore, funeral pyres had become the most efficient means of dealing with the piles of bodies littering what remained of Galveston. Somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 people had been killed. When you were twelve year old, they told you wrong. In the years after the storm the city hadn't built an eight foot sea wall, they had built one that rose seventeen feet above the beach around the entire city. Not only that, they made a titanic effort and raise the whole city, every building, road, wall, and lamp post even higher. They filled the space underneath with eleven million pounds of earth. But it wasn't enough. The Texas oil boom hit just after the storm destroyed the city. Houston dredged her bay to create the perfect deep water ports for the oil tankers that would soon be moving millions of barrels of black gold out of the state. Houston had stolen Galveston's crown in her moment of tragedy and eventually became the largest and richest city in the state. Today, Galveston is where the wealthy of Houston have their beach houses.

Almost exactly 108 years after the great storm of 1900 struck Galveston (and nine years after Larson wrote this book) hurricane Ike almost wiped the city off the map again. This time we knew it was coming and evacuated the population appropriately. Satellites and storm-spotting airplanes now help us better predict where deadly storms will go and how powerful they will be when they get there. But "Isaac's Storm" is a vivid reminder to never succumb to our own hubris. Nature is the most powerful force on Earth. Believing we can control her or predict her is a recipe for nothing but disaster.

There is a reason the people of Galveston still speak of the great storm of 1900 with awe. Because it was a monster. They still talk about it because they need to remind one another what the city lived through and they need to sound the alarm to the rest of us that hubris can summon the worst of nightmares. Some monsters are creatures of our own making and humility is a virtue that can save lives.






-On to the next book!




P.S. Here is a panorama of what was left of Galveston after the storm passed over. Only a few buildings are left standing in the heart of downtown, the rest is scoured clean all the way to the beach which merges seamlessly with the flat spread of the ocean. Pictures like this make it clear that the fact that anyone survived the storm at all is miraculous.

"All Creatures Great and Small" by James Herriot (1972)

There are few phrases you enjoy hearing more than "Hey, Sam, I got you a book!" Your long time friend Tim Crawford said this to you not long ago and since he is the single most well read person you have ever had the pleasure of knowing you were excited to see what literary gem he was going to bequeath to you. You were surprised when he handed you a copy of "All Creatures Great and Small." He was a touch giddy and smiling as he handed it over as if you should be equally excited and maybe even honored since everyone has heard of this classic. Naturally you felt like an ass for having no idea what it was. He told you that he had read it several times because it was so enjoyable adding the most interesting endorsement you've ever heard for a book. "I found it on sale at Book People. The woman who sold it to me told me that in the ten years she'd been working there, she'd never seen James Herriot go on sale. That's how good this book is." Within a few days you were buried in its pages and realized that Tim and the woman at Book People were right, this book never needs to go on sale.

"All Creatures Great and Small" is a memoir of a country veterinarian in northern England in the 1930's. James Herriot is not the author's real name, he changed his own name and those of many of the book's characters to protect their anonymity. Immediately after graduating from college Herriot finds himself in Yorkshire hoping for a job interview. His potential employer is nowhere to be found once Herriot arrives at the vet's office, so Herriot begins answering rings on the doorbell and dispensing advice and making diagnoses as if he had any real world experience at all, which he does not. Eventually Herriot's would-be employer arrives and, unsurprisingly, hires him on the spot.

Herriot is instantly smitten with the parade of rural characters revolving through the office doors. The Yorkshire Dales are the hills and mountains that form the border between England and Scotland and the folks who live there have never really felt they belonged to either country. This instills in them a fierce self reliance and thriftiness that rings familiar to your Texan heart. The way Herriot writes it, Yorkshire sounds almost like The Shire in the real world. The folks are humble and kind and hearty with an endearing loyalty to family and a love of food and drink. Some barely move a muscle to help the young vet perform his jobs and others literally chase after and tackle bulls with their bare hands to assist Herriot in his endeavors.

One elderly widow called Madame Pumphrey becomes smitten with Herriot and her precious Pekingese adopts him as his uncle. Tricki-Woo, because what else would you name an over pampered Pekingese, showers Herriot with care packages in the mail and invitations to posh parties attended by the very finest of Yorkshire's upper crust. Herriot's adventures in meeting such a cast of eccentric and lovable people made you laugh out loud often in public places.

It was simply one of the most charming books you've read in years. Each chapter forms it's own perfectly crafted story. The book is almost episodic, which is ironic considering it spawned more than one sequel, a movie, and a long-running British TV show.

Herriot writes his dialogue phonetically, like Mark Twain often did, to try and capture the particular pronunciations he heard while in his practice. When arguing the lineage of a cow to be examined by Herriot, one farmer begins debating with his sons. "She was bought in, wasn't she? 'Nay, nay, she's out of awd Dribbler.' 'Don't think so-- Dribbler had nowt but bulls." Quotes like that bring you into the story in a way that a more clean prose simply can't do. It forces you to sound out the words the way the people who are now long dead and gone said them at the time, it brings the language back to life for a brief moment. It serves to make you the conduit for a momentary resurrection, if not of the people, of the time and place they existed.

Each call on the office phone brings Herriot out to far flung highlands and remote farms dealing with everything from cows suffering from difficult birthings to a horse whose intestines are twisted up too badly to survive. Herriot's boss Sigfried and his brother Tristan (what in the hell kind of names are those in Yorkshire?!) help guide Herriot into his new life and ease his transition into the fabric of his adopted society. The farmers and their families suffer from a natural generosity and help to ease his transition too by heaping pounds of homemade bacon and sausages and butter on Herriot in addition to insisting that he "come in for a drink" after every job is completed.

Through the course of the book it is clear that Herriot has become smitten with more than just the citizens of Yorkshire Dales. The landscape of Yorkshire itself becomes as much a character as the people. The haunting lonely highlands and the suicidally steep valleys are clearly enchanting to him. He makes a spring day high in the Dales sound like a piece of heaven and a sudden blizzard on a barren farmland feel like a slice of hell. Herriot quickly adopts the landscape into his heart and revels in the knowledge that his job allows him the freedom to roam this new found glorious countryside. Even in the closing moments of the book, working side by side with his new beautiful wife, Herriot is more interested in describing the majesty of the land around them than the charms of his new bride. In the Dales that form the transition between England and Scotland, Herriot found his home.

But it is not only the land that serves as a transition in the book, a place where one nation becomes another, a region between urban and rural, it is the time that is a transition as well. The 1930's were an in-between era for the western world, a region between the two greatest wars in human history, a transition between the ancient and the modern ways of life. Herriot describes his charge as a country vet as almost sacred in this decade because most of the people in Yorkshire still relied on horses for everything from transportation to providing the muscle power to pull a plow or wagon. Cars were scarce and terrifyingly unsafe. Corporations hadn't yet taken over the raising of livestock so the health of an individual cow could represent and entire family's future well being. Medical practices that would become common place within a few years seemed new and alien. The art of veterinary science still featured a dramatic flare held over from a now bygone era, an era when it was natural for a vet to employ a "therapeutic compound" more for it's tendency to create an impressive puff of purple smoke to awe the farmers more than its tendency to actually heal anything.

The stories are no doubt embellished to the point they might be unrecognizable to the men and women who participated in them, but who cares? It matters less that Herriot got the facts right than that he got the feeling right. "All Creatures Great and Small" felt wonderful. It made you envious of a humble man who lived in a much harder time in a more unforgiving place doing much more difficult work. It's good to be reminded that a humble life can still be an enviable one and that making an impact right where you live can be far more meaningful than seeking false significance and fleeting fame on a larger stage.





On to the next book!

"Slave Nation" by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen (2005)

After reading "John Adams" by David McCullough last summer you began thinking about the odd contradictions of the existence of slavery in the United States even in the moment of its birth. You were fascinated by the juxtaposition of the image of America's Founding Fathers gathering together in Philadelphia in 1776 hailing from such wildly different backgrounds. The fact that some of the men who created a nation based on the idea that all people are created equal could own human beings and force labor from them at the threat of a whip or worse is something you cannot quite wrap your brain around. So, you've kept your eye open for any interesting books on the subject. When you opened this one in the store and saw that the introduction was by Eleanor Holmes Norton, you knew you had to read it.

World War One started with a random assassination that no one thought would be that big of a deal. It ended up being one of the single most influential events in modern political and military history. In 1772 an English chief justice ruled on a case before his court, a case as seemingly inconsequential as an assassination of an obscure royal family member 143 years later, but whose implications had ramifications that were possibly equally as momentous.

In October 1771, a slave named Somerset ran away from his master, an influential Virginian named James Stewart. Stewart and Somerset had been living in England for only two or three years when Somerset ran away. Before that they had lived in the British colony of Virginia. Slavery was still perfectly legal throughout the British empire, but more and more cases were piling up in British courts trying to clarify exactly how legal slavery was in England, on the island of Great Britain itself. No one was quite sure what the law would say about holding someone against their will. Several cases had been brought to the Court of the King's Bench, the oldest and highest common law court in England, but the chief justice, Lord Mansfield, had always managed to avoid having to rule in any clear cut way about the legal status of runaway slaves. He was always able to convince the owners to let their slaves go free rather than bargain that the courts of England would take the opportunity to outlaw slavery all together.

Feeling betrayed by his long time personal assistant, (not that Somerset would call himself an "assistant") Stewart hired slave catchers who caught Somerset and took him back to a ship bound for Jamaica, where he would be sold off. In his brief time in London, Somerset had made many influential friends. Some of those friends became his godparents and were quick to come to his rescue, bringing Somerset's case to Lord Mansfield and insisting that the captain of the slave ship had no right to hold Somerset, a British subject, against his will. Stewart refused to free Somerset as so many others had done under pressure from Lord Mansfield. The Chief Justice tried to reason with Stewart, warning him that he might not like the ruling if he forced the court's hand into making a clear judgment, but Stewart was being financed and encouraged by the slave traders of the West Indies who had a financial interest in clarifying the legality of their business model throughout the empire (how awful is it to think of the buying and selling of human beings as a legitimate business model?). Stewart's intransigence forced Mansfield's hand. He had to make a ruling.

On June 22, 1772, he did. "The state of slavery is... so odious, that nothing can support it but positive law... I cannot say that this case (or slavery in general) is allowed or approved by the law of England: and therefore the black (Somerset) must be discharged." You had to look up what the phrase 'positive law' meant in order to understand this ruling. Basically, it's the legal version of the status quo, a way of saying that 'it is that way because it's sort of just always been that way.' This ruling had huge ramifications throughout the vast British empire, upon which the sun never set. The Blumrosens say that this ruling is the spark that ignited the American Revolution which makes it even more shocking that you and most other Americans have never heard of it.

It is remarkable that so much hung in the balance over the actions of one man. By running away, Somerset was shaping the course of western civilization. But this was no Alexander, no Napoleon, no Genghis Khan. He was a simple slave, stolen from his homeland and thrust into an alien world. Then again, Somerset was not intending to set off any revolution. He merely wanted his freedom. His case is a reminder that everyday average people really can shape the world simply by doing what they know is right.

In the British colonies in North America, tensions had been mounting as Parliament enacted tax after tax on the colonists only to repeal each successive tax under outraged public protests from the colonists. Throughout the mid 1700's the British government was being seen more and more as a threat to the self-rule the colonists had come to love. Suddenly the highest court in England had described slavery as something so odious that it couldn't be allowed under any laws in England. Not only was the entire economic model of the southern colonies built upon slavery, but many industrialists from the northern colonies relied on the odious institution for their bread and butter as well. After the Somerset decision, colonies which would never have been interested in independence over some paltry taxes suddenly felt their very way of life threatened. When faced with the prospect of independence, everyone who profited from slavery had to ask themselves which they valued more, their identity as Englishmen and subjects of the crown... or the preservation of their very way of life.

As the flames of revolution began to spread, some of the northerners who usually identified themselves as antislavery were willing to compromise their values for the sake of independence. They were also motivated by the pragmatic realization that any law immediately abolishing slavery would inevitably flood the streets and fields of the South with uneducated, physically impressive, freed slaves who might understandably have vengeance on their minds. Not to mention that Massachusetts, the seat of the rebellion while the Continental Congress was in session, was occupied by British forces and under marshal law, so it was imperative that they secure allies in the struggle for independence. Virginia was the wealthiest, most populace, and arguably the most influential of all the colonies. Taking a hard line against slavery would have run Virginia from the conference and insured that Massachusetts would have remained a colony with an English boot on her throat.

In 1774 the First Continental Congress issued their Declaration on the Rights of the American Colonies. John Adams himself penned the fateful Article IV of the Declaration which declared colonial independence from Parliament's power, but not yet from the authority of the king. It was Adams' attempt to marry northern complaints of "taxation without representation" to the southern fears that Parliament would soon outlaw slavery, and Adams knew full well that Parliament would never accept it. He was right. Parliament was outraged by the Declaration and Article IV was the thing that assured that there would be a War for American Independence, and it was a direct result of the abolitionist John Adams trying to reconcile southern fears for the preservation of slavery with the rest of the colonies' desire for independence.

Within weeks, British forces were doing more than merely occupying Boston. They sought out colonial weapons caches and ammunition depots, beginning with those at Lexington and Concord. The bloodshed there, the shot heard 'round the world, made it clear that a Second Continental Congress would need to be assembled.

This Second Continental Congress would be the one to not only issue the Declaration of Independence, but also establish the Articles of Confederation, the first government of the United States. After the war ended and the revolution had birthed a new nation on this continent, the Articles proved too weak to hold the states together as a nation. The Articles of Confederation failed specifically because they created such a weak central federal government in favor of more powerful individual sovereign state governments. There was no concept yet in the newly formed United States of any American national citizenship, so the citizens of each state thought of themselves as Virginians or Georgians first, not Americans. Each state would retain its sovereignty in every situation... except one.

Each state was free to determine the legality of slavery within its borders, but the southerners who were founding the new nation insisted that they be guaranteed that slaves would be considered property even in states that outlawed the odious institution.The last thing they wanted was to visit a free state and have their slave run away claiming that the slave master had no legal claim to keep him in bondage against his will. Even though it was antithetical to their states rights mantra, the representatives from the slave states insisted that the free states recognize that slaves were property, not human beings. This was a direct result of the Somerset case in England four years before.

In 1787 the Constitutional Congress which had been called to replace the Articles of Confederation almost ended in a complete dissolution of the entire union. Tradition teaches that the main point of contention was a disagreement between the larger states and the smaller ones about whether representation in the new government would be equal or whether it would be based on population count (their compromise is why we have a Senate and a House of Representatives). The Blumrosens contend however, that the real issue was actually a fight between the slave states and the free states over the fate of land west of the Appalachians. Virginia had claimed the vast area for itself for future settlement, while the New England states insisted that the area be set aside for themselves and that slavery be declared illegal in these northwestern territories. In the end the northern states won. Slavery was declared illegal above the Ohio river. The lines of the future Civil War had been drawn and it was now only a slow march to the inevitable ctatstrophic bloodshed.

No one single thing can truly be christened as the single event that sparked the American Revolution, not even an extremely influential court case. But "Slave Nation" reminded you that, when considering the causes, and seeing past the inspiring rhetoric, we should all remember how important slavery was to the founding of the United States. The generation that Americans would come to refer to as our Founding Fathers were wrestling with an idea that seems today to be completely absurd, the notion that people could be property. But part of why that's such a ridiculous concept today is because of the very ideals those men introduced and the very language they used in becoming the founding fathers. And that's an inspiring thought. The Blumrosens reminded you that we should be just as free to mold the values of this nation to the realities of our day as the founders were free to shape a nation under the social influences of their own. Goodness can still come out of something evil. Inspiration can be found even in the darkest of moments. Perfection is not a prerequisite for greatness.




On to the next book!








P.S. As much as you love Thomas Jefferson, you also find him an epic disappointment. He said so many incredible things and illuminated countless wonderful ideas but he owned and sold human beings as property. Screw the morals of the day. He did it and he should have known better specifically because he was so enlightened! But the Blumrosens reminded you that Jefferson left the word 'property' out of the Declaration of Independence specifically because he knew that putting it in there could be used to defend slavery. If he had said "...Life, Liberty, and Personal Property" instead of "the Pursuit of Happiness", one of the founding documents of the nation would easily have been interpreted as sanctifying the evils of slavery for much longer than the 1860's. So, maybe you could cut old Thomas some slack from now on. Maybe re-read the last three sentences of this review occasionally.

"The Last Battle" by Cornelius Ryan (1966)

Once there was an Irishman named Cornelius Ryan. He wrote military history books in the 1960's. He probably wrote a lot of them, but you only know him for his most famous books about the Second World War, "The Longest Day" and "A Bridge Too Far." Sadly, you were introduced to Ryan through the movies they made from these two books before you were old enough to care about books about World War II. They were the kind of 60's classics where men who died simply grabbed their chests and fell over instead of the modern, more realistic and gory depictions of battlefield deaths you know so well today. These movies helped you when you were still young to be able to get an overview of the war from a vantage point that was both informative of the larger strategic picture and also still very exciting. They were part of what helped make you into the wannabe historian you are today. Somehow one of Ryan's books about the war has eluded your attention for years now, probably because no one ever made it into a movie starring John Wayne and Sean Connery.

"The Last Battle" is the story of the fall of Berlin to the Russians in the spring 1945. Ryan's perspective tends to linger a bit too long on the Western Allies considering the Russians were the ones who took the city, not the Americans or British, and the title of the book is wildly inaccurate considering that the horrifically bloody battle for the Japanese island of Okinawa had only just begun when Berlin fell and the war in the Pacific theater still had months to go and thousands of lives to expend, but, nevertheless, the book still makes an outstanding read. Modern authors like Anthony Beevor, James Bradley, and Stephen Ambrose stand on Cornelius Ryan's shoulders.

Other authors have tackled the same subject as "The Last Battle," and one or two movies have been made abot it as well ('Downfall' is by far the best) but Ryan wrote his account just twenty years after the events. For some reason, two decades seems to be the  historian's 'sweet spot.' Somehow, that amount of time is just enough to allow much of the sentiment and blind tribalism to have worn off after historical events but not so much time that all of the participants have died off. Despite the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union were facing off at the height of the Cold War during the book's publication, Ryan was given access and full-length interviews with some of the Russian military's greatest commanders during the war. This is even more remarkable when you remember that '66 was only five years after construction of the Berlin Wall, and only four after the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Very little communication existed between the academic minds of America and Russia in the 1960's. The history of the Eastern Front during WWII, which saw the vast majority of the fighting and the dying during the war, was almost completely unavailable to western historians.

The telling of the fight for Berlin is a huge undertaking. The Germans had been led to believe that the Third Reich could only fall in some kind of titanic struggle. They called it Gotterdamerung, or "the death of the gods", after Wagner's epic opera, and the Nazis were insistent that every single German would fight against the Russian onslaught. Consequently, "The Last Battle" is intensely depressing and violent in the extreme. But that's understandable.  It is, after all, the culmination of the bloodiest event in human history.

The grand scale of the battle forces Ryan to tell the story from multiple perspectives. With the story telling flair of a natural born Irishman, he unfolds the events through the eyes of some of the most influential leaders of the 20th Century as well as some of the lowliest civilians. Stalin, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Heinrici, and Zukhov lend their strategic bird's eye view while cloistered nuns, a mild mannered milkman, Communist resistance fighters, and a few fugitive Jews, stuck in hiding from the Gestapo for years inside the heart of Nazi Germany, relate how the events felt from a first hand perspective.

Berlin had never had an easy relationship with Adolf Hitler. Fewer than 30% of the city had voted for the Nazis in the '33 election which allowed Hitler to become the chancellor, the lowest percentage of any district in all of Germany. The cosmopolitan and liberal nature of the city didn't sit well with the racist, far right wing, exclusionary ideals of the Nazi party. Even at the height of his powwer, Hitler never could win over the hearts of the people of his capital city. Once he had conquered Europe, Hitler had plans to start all over again with Berlin  and rebuild the capital of the Third Reich into a new city, called Germania, constructed according to his own designs, with intimate assistance from his personal architect Albert Speer. Nevertheless, Berlin had become, in the eyes of every Allied soldier, the main target, the great prize whose capture or destruction must surely bring about the end of a terrible war.

By the spring of 1945, Berlin was an overwhelmingly female city, a stark reminder that most of the men had disappeared in Hitler's war. Berlin was also a city in ruins, with huge swaths of the metropolis destroyed by years of intense Allied bombing. The vaunted "pinpoint accuracy" of the waves of 4 engine heavy bombers had proven to be overly boastful and had been replaced by the more practical and achievable area bombings and Berlin had become a favorite target for Allied planners. The Americans would bomb during the day and the British would bomb by night. Whole neighborhoods had disappeared in the destruction raining from the skies, entire families vanishing in nightly infernos. But every morning the people of Berlin would pull themselves out from their bomb shelters, subway stations, and basements, and begin making their way into the city to claw their way through the rubble to work. Despite hours long commutes on foot through bomb craters and the debris of a city crushed from above, secretaries still typed away at typewriters, telephone operators still connected calls, teachers still taught classes, and life somehow went on with as much resemblance to the old days as could be mustered. All the while, every German knew that their enemies were closing in. The Allied noose was tightening around Berlin and no amount of Goebbels' propaganda could deny it.

Given the Cold War era in which Ryan wrote the book, it is understandable that he spends a significant chunk of "The Last Battle" on the political details of how Germany came to be divided amongst the Allied conquerors after the war. Sometimes small, seemingly insignificant decisions made by relatively minor officers in the first half of the 1940's, would echo and magnify with time, reaping enormous ramifications on the 1966 geopolitical landscape of the Cold War. Even as impressive a personality as President Roosevelt was unable to stem the tide of events once they were in motion. He was insistent that American forces be given post-war occupation of northwestern Germany with access to sea ports and sea lanes on the Baltic coast. FDR was certain that Britain, with their long standing relationship with France and the Low Countries, should occupy the southern areas of Germany. The president was also clear that Berlin should sit astride the dividing line between the American and Soviet halves of their defeated opponent. It never occurred to Roosevelt that Berlin should be isolated like an island 100 miles inside Russian occupied territory. In the end, the president got none of his wishes.

General Eisenhower knew that he was not responsible for the political landscape of post war Europe, that was for his civilian commanders to decide, but he was also aware that he had a responsibility to consider the military implications of his decisions and those did not always dovetail with the desires of presidents or prime ministers. Eisenhower had decided that Berlin was not worth the casualties its capture would incur. He could not justify the shedding of American blood (one of his generals estimated that taking the city would cost the Allies 100,000 casualties) to take territory he damn well knew would only be handed over to the Russians after the war. Why not let the Red Army suffer the casualties for the territory they would soon occupy? Ike's planning was also greatly influenced by the rumors of a huge buildup of German forces in the southern areas of Germany, rumors of preparations for the last stand of the Nazis in the formidable Alps of Bavaria and Austria. So convincing were these rumors that Eisenhower had come to see Berlin as an insignificant distraction from his main task of destroying Hitler's armies in the field. Prime Minister Churchill, Field Marshall Montgomery, Generals Patton, Hodges, and Simpson were insistent that Berlin represented a psychological victory over the enemy and should be given supreme importance. Eisenhower was willing to entertain their passions... right until the last minute.

The race was on for Berlin, and every Allied commander wanted to get his forces there first and with the most. All along the 350 mile Western Front, 4.5 million Allied soldiers were swarming into the countryside east of the Rhine river. Eisenhower had given priority to Omar Bradley's front making Bradley the first American general in history to ever command four field armies at the same time. The Anglo-American forces were advancing faster than any military forces ever had. Some units were facing continued stiff resistance along the approach routes to the Elbe river and the outskirts of Berlin, yet they were still able to make progress of twenty miles a day! A few American units even crossed over the Elbe and were within 30 or 40 miles of the German capital. As German resistance stiffened on the other side of the river, however, Eisenhower unexpectedly gave the order for all of his forces to hold fast along the line of the Elbe, to cease their advance. American commanders and soldiers throughout Europe were heartbroken. Ike had decided to refocus Allied efforts on the rumored buildup in the Alps to the south, at the Eagle's Nest around Berchtesgaden, where it was widely believed Hitler and his hierarchy would make a final stand. Eisenhower would keep his best airborne units ready to drop into the capital in case the government suddenly collapsed, but otherwise he would leave the grand prize to the Russians.

In the East, Stalin had assured the Anglo-Europeans that he too was not interested in Berlin. The difference was that Stalin lied. He had set two of his greatest generals on a race against one another to see who could take the city first. Marshals Zhukov and Koniev were wielding enormous forces against the last defenses the Nazis could throw at them. As hungry as the Americans and British were for the glory and honor of taking Berlin, the Russians were even more ravenous for revenge. Memories of the atrocities and massacres visited on their people by the Germans during the invasion of 1941 and evidence of abuse and ethnic cleansing during the subsequent years of occupation had driven many of the Red Army's soldiers to almost maniacal levels of obsession. It is useful here to remember that the Russians were the first ones to discover the existence of Nazi concentration camps. The citizens of Berlin would pay the price for Germany's sins. In April and May of 1945, Russian vengeance would be brutal.

The German defense against the Russians had been led for weeks now by, of all people, Heinrich Himmler. The chief of the Gestapo and the German SS had been placed in charge of Army Group Vistula by Hitler himself. He was wildly incompetent and completely unqualified for such a huge task. On March 22nd Himmler was replaced by General Gotthard Heinrici, a genius at defensive warfare and an unkempt officer who eschewed the stereotypical sharp dressed image of a German officer. Heinrici was not one of Hitler's favorites. His devout Christian faith was an ideological problem for all of the Nazi hierarchy and his insistence on ignoring clearly ludicrous orders was particularly galling to the Fuhrer, a man who was known for giving just such ludicrous orders. When Heinrici took over from Himmler, which suited Himmler just fine, he was appalled at the state of preparations. Nazi propaganda had made Berlin out to be an impregnable fortress. In reality, Heinrici found scant troops do to the job and almost no fortifications to speak of. He had performed miracles of defensive warfare before (famously saving the German withdraw from the gates of Moscow from becoming a rout) but this time it was clear to him that he was being asked to do the impossible.

To make his task even more difficult, Heinrici realized that he might well now be taking orders from lunatics and madmen, men who had lost all connection to reality.. After making his way through the ruins of Berlin Heinrici attended a staff meeting for the defense of the city. Hitler had made attendance mandatory. Heinrici would be briefing the German general staff as well as Hitler himself. The general knew it might mean his dismissal, as it had for the legendary Heinz Guderian, but Heinrici decided it was his duty to tell Hitler the blunt truth. The situation was bleak beyond description. Heinrici had neither the men nor the equipment to stop the Russians from breaking out of their bridgeheads and pouring over the river Oder. Suddenly the Fuehrer's underground bunker was filled with the voices of Hitler's cronies promising hundreds of thousands of men from the navy, the Gestapo, the Luftwaffe. They swore that they could stem the tide of the Russian advance and save Berlin. It was all fantasy. There was no hope. Yet Hitler, in the depths of his delusions, failed to even admit that his capital was even in any danger at all. He believed instead that the titanic Russian armies massing on his doorstep were merely some grand ruse, a feint intended to divert attention from the the true objective of the Russian offensive... Prague, Czechoslovakia! Heinrici and his personal aide left left the meeting with the distinct impression that they had been the only ones in the whole bunker who weren't completely insane.

Massing along the river Oder, waiting to pounce on Berlin, was a Russian army unlike anything humans have ever seen, and hopefully unlike anything we will ever see again. Ryan's description deserves to be quoted at length.

"In the ranks were troops who had stood at Leningrad, Smolensk, Stalingrad and before Moscow, men who had fought their way across half a continent to reach the Oder. There were soldiers who had seen their villages and towns obliterated by German guns, their crops burned, their families slain by German soldiers. For all these the assault had special meaning. They had lived for this moment of revenge. The Germans had left them nothing at home to return to; they had nowhere to go but forward."

Marshall Zhukov began this assault with the greatest artillery barrage of the entire war. So many heavy guns were flinging explosives against the German defenses that they created their own weather front. A hot wind blew through the streets of Berlin that night, pushed forward by Russian artillery and accompanied by the unmistakeable rumble of the war marching inexorably nearer. The Russians took longer than they thought to break through the defenses but eventually they smashed through by sheer weight of numbers. Vengeance was in the mind of every soldier and every commander. Casualties were hardly any concern. Nothing could stop the onslaught.

Meanwhile, the last full scale Allied bombing of Berlin began on the night of April 20th, Hitler's birthday. The British bombed at night while the Americans continued the destruction into the morning hours of the 21st. American aircraft would not return to the skies of Berlin in such numbers until the Berlin Airlift three years later. The last American bomb fell on Berlin (the 636th raid on the city in four years of constant bombing) at 9:30 AM, and promptly at 11:30, the Russians began a full scale artillery barrage on the city center. The shells fell amongst civilians heading for work, amidst women queuing up for groceries and other rationed goods, on streets filled with children drinking in the fresh air after suffering a terrible night hiding from bombs. As a birthday present to the fuhrer, the Russians had made the capital of the Third Reich the front lines of the greatest war in history.

No one could now maintain the denial that the city would become a battle ground. Still Hitler refused to allow the evacuation of civilians. Instead he ordered that everyone, regardless of age or disability be thrown into the fighting. No city had experienced this level of imminent dread, this fear of total annihilation since Carthage 2,000 years before. This was the end result of the insanity of invading Russia in 1941. Hitler's chickens, as they say, were coming home to roost. Sure, Germany had a few of their legendary generals left, but their armies were gone. They had melted in the snows outside Moscow, vanished in the crush of the disaster at Stalingrad, and disappeared in the thunder of guns at Kursk.  Any veteran units of major significance Hitler ordered into the battle for Berlin were pure fantasy. They simply did not exist. He might as well have been ordering divisions of unicorns or armies of elves into the fight. The once mighty Wehrmacht had been bled dry. There was nothing left. Meanwhile the Red Army had only grown smarter and stronger with every mile and every battle. The Russians had grown in strength and professionalism to become a juggernaut that was poised to crush the Third Reich. Stalin's military, which had struggled against Finland six years earlier whose Nordic soldiers were equipped with wooden skis and deer rifles, was now poised to defeat an legendary enemy who could field futuristic jet fighter planes and ballistic missiles.

The violence and depravity of the taking of the city was almost unimaginable. Hundreds of thousands died and incalculable numbers were raped. Children and the elderly were forced to fight the Russians with almost no weapons at all. The Red Army showed no quarter. The city was utterly destroyed. So enormous was the disaster that some of the ruins still remained after the fall of the Berlin Wall half a century later.

Hitler's madness had spelled disaster for Germany and her people. He could have spared them, the ones whom he had convinced were the master race. But he preferred to watch them all burn. He could have capitulated at any time. Unconditional surrender would have been far more preferable to the storm of destruction and rape that characterized the Fall of Berlin. But in his madness and delusion, he had now convinced himself that the people themselves had failed him, rather than the other way around. Hitler's capital city fell only a few days after he put a bullet into his own head. The remains of Berlin would go on to become the flashpoint for 50 years of Cold War tensions between the two greatest Super Powers in the world, The Soviet Union and the United States of America. Two nations which had grown to such power and influence because that was what the world had needed in order to crush the cancer of the Nazis.

You hope and pray that the world never sees anything like the Battle for Berlin ever again. It is hard to understand why that level of violence is ever needed in this world. But maybe is was a warning to all humanity in the moments before we unleashed the power of nuclear weapons. Maybe the Last Battle is what saved the world not just from the Nazis... but from complete destruction. Maybe the very violence of the Second World War is what kept us from eventually starting a third. If so, it may have been worth it... but only barely.





On to the next book!

"A War Like No Other" by Victor Davis Hanson (2005)

As a wannabe military historian you know just enough to know that there are some conflicts that you don't know anything about but you really should. Conflicts like the ones they talk about in classes at Annapolis and West Point... stuff from ancient Greece, or whatever. The Peloponnesian War is one of those conflicts. While visiting your neighborhood discount book store, you saw "A War Like No Other" for only $1.00 and figured it was as good a place as any to start learning. Fortunately for you, it was a phenomenal book. You recently heard on a great podcast that liberals aren't supposed to like Victor Davis Hanson because he's too conservative. As a self-described liberal, you're glad you didn't know you weren't supposed to like him before you bought the book. It would have been a damn shame to miss this one because of some stupid political prejudice.

The Peloponnesian War was fought between 431 and 404 BCE at the height of the Greek Golden Era. This nearly 30 year long war was waged between Athens and Sparta, two neighboring city states who had joined forces only 50 years before to repel the massive invading armies of Persia, turning Xerxes' soldiers back at the legendary Battle of Thermopylae (the one where all the good guys had amazingly photogenic abs). Rather than maintaining the alliance that historians often claim 'saved Western Civilization,' the two cities allowed their differences to foment tensions between them. Those tensions soon lead to war.

Sparta was an extremely militaristic society and was ruled by an oligarchy as well as a hereditary monarchy. Athens, on the other hand, was extremely democratic and about as egalitarian as any society at the time could boast. Sparta eschewed the worship of material wealth and had almost no notions of commerce or how to encourage a robust economy while Athens commanded a massive trade network complete with imperial colonies that brought in riches by the boatloads. The Athenians fostered a rich philosophical school of thought and encouraged individuality while Sparta preached an oligarchic appreciation of conformity and obedience. Of all the ancient societies, Athens is the one Americans and Western Europeans most identify themselves with. Athens, much like America, aggressively exported democracy, often through warfare, and formed the nexus of an expansive empire. Other city states throughout Greece and the rest of the Mediterranean, lead by Sparta, saw them as a threat to their more conservative ways of life. Democracy was a clear threat to monarchies and oligarchies, and the people in power in those societies were determined to resist any attempts to chip away at their power.

Athens was the undisputed master of the waves along the northern shores of the Mediterranean. Athenian ships, fast light vessels called triremes, were propelled by three levels of rowers and could crush any resistance neighboring states could hope to attempt. Sparta was a legendary land power. They had a dedicated warrior caste that devoted their whole lives to armed combat and the study of warfare. There were few armies who could hope to last more than a few moments in combat with the Spartans infantry formations, the hedgehog-like boxes of shields and spears called phalanxes. Fearing the growing influence of the Athenian empire, Sparta mustered its allies and invaded, hoping to draw the Athenians out from behind their protective Long Walls for a decisive battle. It is an age old rule of war that you do not meet your enemy where he is strongest. The greatest land power of the ancient world waging war with the greatest sea power meant that neither side would fight the kind of war the other was best at. This fact alone explains why the war lasted almost three decades.

Hanson's goal in writing "A War Like No Other" was to somehow personalize this war that ended two and a half thousand years ago, to make the reader experience a brief idea of what it must have been like to have lived or died during the Peloponnesian War. He certainly succeeded. Reading "A War Like No Other" gave you more than an academic sense of the chronological unfolding of events. It made a conflict that was already ancient history when Jesus lived feel like a visceral reality for you. Hanson contextualized the war, not just in a geopolitical way, but much more intimately. The claustrophobic and gory press of a hoplite soldier enfolded in a phalanx when the killing started, the fear of a civilian trapped inside a walled city during an outbreak of the plague, the gut-dropping horror of a stranded archer watching the fleet that had brought him to alien shores sinking just a few hundred yards away and knowing it meant that he was doomed, Hanson was able to make you feel all of these things from the comfort of your couch. He made it all personal.

Each side refused to play to the other's inherent strength. The Spartans were great at infantry conflict on open ground, so the Athenians rarely fought that way. They would pull their people, warrior and civilian alike, out of the open countrysides and behind protective Long Walls they had built to defend their city and its access to their ship building port called the Piraeus. The Athenians ruled the waves of the northern Mediterranean, so the Spartans refused to meet them on the high seas and would build fortress cities deep inside Athenian heartland to force a land war. All of this meant that the Peloponnesian War had to be fought like no other. It had to become what we call today an asymmetrical conflict. Suddenly the warriors who became the most important on the field of battle were no longer the heavily armored and well armed hoplites elites, but the lightly armed and almost unarmored skirmishers. These were highly mobile men with bows and slings, wearing none of the cumbersome protective gear that kept hoplites safe in hand-to-hand battle. They were deadly at a distance that made hand to hand combat obsolete. War had suddenly become a contest of mobility and maneuver.

The inefficiency of standard hoplite phalanx formations (or maybe rather the efficiency of the skirmishers and cavalry in dealing with them) forced the Greeks on both sides to adapt an come up with new battlefield tactics. Eventually the changes lead to the Greek tactics of deep infantry columns in favor of phalanxes, to strategic reserves of men placed just far enough away from the heat of battle for the exploitation of any breakthroughs, to cavalry forces that were well integrated with the foot soldiers, and exemplified the need to pay attention to all types of terrain instead of insisting on only fighting on flat open ground. With both sides relying on soldiers drawn from allied city states, vassals, and protectorates of the two main super powers, opposing generals often made battlefield decisions based on whether or not the outcome might foment insurrection within their enemy's own camp. The result was that war had now developed a political dimension as well as just being a military engagement. These innovations allowed Greece to produce even more fearsome warriors, paving the way for one particular Macedonian to conquer the known world. A century ago, the massive and tragically costly First World War taught us how to fight faster and more efficiently. A century after the Peloponnesian War Alexander the Great had learned similar lessons.

World War One destroyed the European traditional idea of classes. The Peloponnesian War did the same for Ancient Greece. The privileged class of men who had once embodied the ideals of valiant hoplite warriors had been replaced by farmers and working poor. Instead, the wealthy could just as easily be found rowing a trireme or patrolling the Attic countryside as cavalrymen. The conflict changed the face of Greek culture. Atrocities became the rule of warfare rather than the exception. Over the years civilians became just as legitimate targets as soldiers and sailors. Entire cities were often razed to the ground and their citizens either murdered en masse or sold into slavery. Hanson suggests that the title "Peloponnesian War" might be better changed to the "Thirty Year Slaughter."

Eventually Athens lost the war when their vaunted navy lost enough catastrophic battles in a row that production at the Piraeus couldn't keep up. As a result, the Athenians lost enough of their vassal states that they could no longer afford to keep rebuilding fleet after fleet. Sparta was able to achieve this victory by making a deal with the Devil. They had become financially backed by the hated Persians and could now easily afford to keep pace in the decades long battles of attrition. The very nature of the Athenian democracy may have played a role in her defeat as well. Generals and admirals had to return after campaigns and face a fickle public empowered by a pure democracy (one unfettered by any checks or balances). Flames of passion often lead to generals being executed or exiled, even when they were returning home victorious. Victory often requires sacrifice and the people of Athens vented their revenge at generals who might be seen as responsible for the loss of loved ones, even in victory. Therefore the leaders of Athens were rarely able to learn from their mistakes or even exploit strategic victories.

The Peloponnesian War, like most great wars do, changed the societies that fought it. The greatest change was the notion that tribalism, personal status, and tradition could ever trump the realities of military logic on the battlefield. Commanders who could think quickly and who could innovate became more valuable than the traditions of fighting the old "honorable" way. Thinkers were now more valuable than pure warriors, even in Sparta. But perhaps the most profound change in Greek society was how the average citizen came to think of the idea of war itself. Greek plays and literature from before the Peloponnesian War were filled with the vilification of enemy states, be they foreigner or fellow Greek city states. Instead, after the Thirty Year Slaughter, war itself was now seen as the enemy. War was no longer an arena in which honor or nobility were forged. War was simply evil, evil and horribly wasteful of precious human lives.





On to the next book!

"The Girls of Atomic City" by Denise Kiernan (2013)

One of the greatest things about having friends and family who read books is that you get to swap titles with them. Sure, it means that you sometimes never see some of your great books again, but you get to read new ones at no cost. One of the coolest things about having a brother and a mother who read a lot is that your brother often buys your mother really great books for birthdays and holidays and she often gives them right to you when she's done. This past Mothers' Day, Barry even went the extra mile and got her a signed copy of this one (geez, what a kiss ass!) so when she let you borrow "The Girls of Atomic City" you got to see the handwritten name of the author, Denise Kiernan on the title page every time you opened the book. So cool.

On August 6th, 1945 the sky above an ancient city called Hiroshima was briefly turned into a miniature sun. The flash of unleashed nuclear energy lasted less than one second. Only a tiny fraction of the enriched uranium inside the world's first atomic bomb had ignited in the fission reaction that released so much power, but that tiny fraction was enough. The resulting blast virtually wiped Hiroshima off the map. 100,000 people were instantly killed in that explosion (30 times more than were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor which justified American entry into the war) but the bomb that killed them hadn't rolled off a mass production assembly line. That bomb, and another one just like it which would destroy the city of Nagasaki one week later, were both products of one of the most massive and specialized military projects of all time.

In 1943 the United States built the largest military production facility in the world, squirreled away in the hills of eastern Tennessee. The surrounding cities were resentful of the influx of strange people with their secure government jobs (especially those who had been evicted from their homes to provide the acreage needed for the classified project). Tens of thousands of workers were brought in to live in a new city that had been hewn from the forests along the banks of the Clinch river. Most of them were women. They had been sworn to secrecy and told not to ask too many questions about what their jobs were. The workers came from all across the Eastern Seaboard and the Deep South. The job they were asked to do was to provide fuel for the world's first nuclear weapon, even though most of them did not know it. These women were refining uranium to a more easily fissile isotope. They were building an atom bomb. They were doing what Iranian scientists today keep ending up getting themselves assassinated for doing.

The government owned-and-operated city that sprang up in order to build the greatest weapon of all time was called Oak Ridge. The strictest secrecy was enforced at all times amongst the thousands of civilian employees there, even when they were off the clock. The Germans were reportedly looking into the science of nuclear energy as well. Many of the most influential minds driving the American project (known to history as the Manhattan Project) had, in fact, fled the fascist tyrannies spreading throughout Europe and were lending their knowledge to the Americans to defeat the governments of their own homelands. But the Americans were also aware that their ally, the Soviet Union, would love nothing more than to sneak a peak at the ground-breaking work being done in Tennessee and in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Officially tasked snitches were sprinkled throughout Oak Ridge and tasked with the duty of reporting anyone who talked about their jobs a little too much or who asked about other people's jobs a little too often.

The objective of the girls living and working in that Atomic City was so secret, in fact, that the government of the United States, a nation built upon the ideal of a free press, established an Office of Censorship (no, seriously, that was a thing). In June of 1943 the Office of Censorship sent a memo to more than 20,000 news outlets "asking" them to no longer publish or broadcast information about fission, atom splitting, atomic energy, atom smashing, or even mentioning radioactive materials. In the years leading up to the war, huge strides were being made in the field of nuclear research. Human beings were beginning to figure out what the power was that held all matter together, the power that fueled the stars that had inspired our imaginations for countless millenia. The American press had leapt to report these developments as enthusiastically as anyone else in the late '30s. After the orders from the Office of Censorship in 1943 all reporting on the subject abruptly ceased. Despite the Orwellian nature of these orders, the memos were sent because the people in authority decided that secrecy and censorship were acceptable offenses in the quest to shorten the war and bring everyone's loved ones home alive, and that was the ultimate goal of the Project.

The women ran huge bays of sophisticated gauges and instruments. They operated some of the largest machines the world had ever known, and they did it with superb ability and efficiency. In fact, unbeknownst to the women, one scientist challenged his highly educated male engineers to operate the calutrons better than the women who had no inkling what they were doing. The women's results from the challenge (a challenge they were unaware they were meeting) left the men in the dust. As the Washington Post put it in their review of this book, "Rosie, it turns out, did much more than drive rivets."

Propaganda posters extolling the virtues of discretion and secrecy dominated every sight line both in the factories and on the street corners. Patriotism in Oak Ridge walked hand in hand with secrecy. Armed guards ensured that no one wandered into areas they weren't cleared for. Checkpoints and badges were standard everywhere but a worker's front door. The FBI and military police ran counter-intelligence programs throughout the city, utilizing both uniformed and undercover agents to keep the project absolutely classified.

Work continued for years in Oak Ridge even though very few people knew exactly what that work was. The neighborhoods were prefabricated and cheap, intended to be temporary. The city was segregated and the black workers lived in hutments or trailers. Married black couples were often not even allowed to live together for reasons that Kiernan was never fully able to explain (possibly because there is no excuse that makes any sense in the 21st century). These restrictions and hardships made it difficult to create any sense of community, especially under the yoke of such strict surveillance and institutionalized distrust. But the women of Oak Ridge were able to forge a sense of community despite the hardships. The socialization and cohesion necessary for any true sense of community would never be possible for the Big Brother police state to provide. It was left to the women of the city to create a sense of solidarity and cooperation within Oak Ridge. Kiernan perfectly describes it as an "Orwellian backdrop for a Rockwellian world."

Despite the oppressive air of government control in Oak Ridge, people fell in love, as we are wont to do. Social organizations were formed and parties were thrown. People went on dates and attended dances. Marriages happened and babies were born. Relationships that would last decades were forged in the secret confines of the largest factory in the world. Somehow, despite all the obstacles, the women of Oak Ridge created a home for themselves.

On July 26th, 1945, just ten days after the first nuclear weapon had been tested in the deserts of New Mexico (a test which remained, like Oak Ridge, a complete secret), the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration. From the ruins of a defeated Germany, the joined governments of England, France, America, and Russia reiterated their determination to bring utter destruction to Imperial Japan, the only Axis nation still fighting. Japan, however, ignored the warnings.

On August 6th, 1945 all need for secrecy in Oak Ridge was destroyed alongside with the entire city of Hiroshima and 100,000 of its citizens (undoubtedly, even more died in the days and years to come). In a broadcast to the world President Truman himself, with only 82 days in office since FDR had died, told the world what had been happening for three years at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The words many in Oak Ridge had spent years avoiding saying were suddenly being uttered by the president of the United States for the whole world to hear. The world was changing for the people of Oak Ridge, just as the fruits of their years of labor were changing the world for everyone else.

Two days after Hiroshima was destroyed, the Soviet Union officially declared war on Japan. The next day, August 9th, 1945, the city of Nagasaki and tens of thousands of her citizens disappeared in another massive blinding fireball. The flames of nuclear war boiling above the city had been brought to the skies of Japan by the girls of Atomic City. The United States had not only used the first nuclear weapon in war against a populated city, we had done it twice. And a third bomb was ready to be used against a third Japanese city just 8 or 9 days later, but the Empire of Japan finally surrendered on August 14th.

The people who worked at Oak Ridge had dedicated themselves to working in ignorance of their goals because they had been promised that they were going to be shortening the war, that they would be saving American lives. They had done it. An invasion of the Japanese home islands would now no longer be needed to end the war. The nightmarish swarms of Kamikaze planes would not appear over any American invasion fleets as they had off the coasts of Okinawa. The waves of suicidal banzai charges, determined to die in defense of the home islands would never need to be mown down in the Japanese countryside by American soldiers and Marines as they had on Saipan and Guadalcanal. However controversial and regrettable the atomic bombings of two cities is, it is almost certain that had Japan not surrendered in August of '45 hundreds of thousands and maybe millions more people would have needed to die in order to induce any capitulation.

The workers at Oak Ridge did more to shorten the war than most munitions plant employees could ever dream of. Ironically, the people who helped build the first nuclear weapons carried a stigma with them that other munitions workers making more traditional weaponry did not bear. It is certain that the two bombs dropped on Japan killed hundreds of thousands of people, but over 80 million people died in World War II, maybe as many as 120 million (it's hard for crumbling governments to keep accurate records). Those millions did not die in a flash of nuclear light. No, they were killed the old fashioned way, with bullets, bayonets, and conventional bombs, with grenades, and artillery, poison gas, and the age-old weapon called hunger. Why would it be that the people who created one weapon would be stigmatized while the people who created all the others, the ones that did the majority of the killing, would not?

Because what the girls of Atomic City had done was different. They hadn't simply made a new kind of weapon. They had changed the world. And fair or not, what those women had done, in patriotic devotion and out of a desire to bring their loved ones home faster, had made the world a more terrifying place.





On to the next book!





P.S. It was amazing to you that something as monumental as the Manhattan Project was able to be kept secret by so many people. When conspiracy theorists claim fantastically complex cabals are able to keep secrets from the public, one of your best arguments against their theories is that so many people could never keep such an important secret. The girls of Oak Ridge make that argument a little harder for you to make. Your consolation prize however, and the thing that is important to remember is that this secret wasn't as well kept as the US government likes to admit. At least three different spies were placed in the upper ranks of the Project reporting directly to their handlers within Soviet Russia. Joseph Stalin knew exactly what was happening in what was supposed to be the most classified areas on Earth. Also, the secret at Oak Ridge only had to be kept for three years and then the president himself let the entire world in on it. Most conspiracy theories don't end with the president announcing the truth to the world.

P.P.S. The cutting edge of the engineering world today is dominated by another, more innocuous technology, 3D printing. Recently NASA simply emailed a 'recipe' for a wrench to the International Space Station and the astronauts there were able to print it up and put it to use fixing a problem in orbit. Last year engineers were able to completely build a car from the ground up using nothing but a large 3D printer. Where was that printer? The National Laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

"When Books Went to War" by Molly Guptill Manning (2014)

Anyone who has known you for very long knows that you love two things very much. You love books and you love World War II (and also you love your wife and your kids and dogs and Jesus and freedom and steak and America and musicals. Amen). So you were predictably extremely excited when you opened this book as a Christmas gift last month. It's not just a book about World War II, it's a book... about books in World War II! You hadn't even heard of it before. Liz found out about it and knew it would be a perfect Christmas gift for you. Your wife is the best. Always be nice to her.

One of the most insidious emblematic images of the evils of the Nazi faith (besides the horror of concentration camps) is the footage of burning piles of books. Throughout their rise to power in the 1930's the Nazi party and millions of Germans caught in their spell reveled in destroying any literature that did not fit the  ideals of pure Germanic thought. It's is shocking to students of history that these images came from Germany of all places, a nation that had long been synonymous with intellectual excellence and bastion of philosophical thought. The birthplace of the printing press had tragically become a funeral pyre for millions of books. It was censorship writ large. It is estimated that the Nazis destroyed over 100,000,000 books, and they did it with the blessing of universities that had formerly been some of the most impressive in Europe. They did it with cameras rolling and the world watching and they used children as props for their assault on free thought. Lines of students gathered in library courtyards and college squares to toss books into the waiting flames. Librarians and bibliophiles throughout the still free world referred to it as a bibliocaust.

As each succeeding European nation fell under Nazi occupation, Hitler's thugs would move in and burn historical archives, museums, and libraries. It is estimated that the Germans destroyed half of all the books in Poland and Czechoslovakia. No conquered nation would be allowed to retain their individual intellectual character. Hitler and the Nazis made war not just to claim territory or to defeat ancient enemies or to secure resources, they fought to destroy ideas, to crush democracy, and to stifle any spark of free thought. People and governments were no longer the enemy, ideas were, and books have long been the way human beings pass on knowledge and wisdom and ideas to one another. It was rapidly becoming clear that this would be a war of ideas.

After the United States entered the war, her citizens wore as a badge of honor their rights to free speech and a free press. They held high their dedication to free thought as a beacon of hope to the world, a contrast to the tyranny of Germany and Japan. Librarians throughout the US felt duty bound to protect books and to make it their mission to pass on knowledge. They formed a national book drive to gather millions of donated books to send to American soldiers. Soon they sparked a movement that made millions of people almost evangelical in preaching the power of the written word. As noble as the donation drive was, however, it was not enough.

In February of '42 (only three months after Pearl Harbor) influential publishers began meeting together in Manhattan to discuss how to use books to fight this new war of ideas. They formed the Council on Books in Wartime (seriously, that was a thing). Together with representatives from several publishing houses, they eventually numbered more than seventy members. The council began by simply suggesting books to the public, books that were considered imperative for reading to understand the war. These "imperatives" soon flew off the book shelves of American stores and helped a generation understand both the larger foreign policy aspects of the greatest conflict in human history as well as the small scale human sacrifices required of individual soldiers on the battlefields.

Simply suggesting good books, however, would not go far enough to contrast American ideals with Nazi censorship. The council decided that, in a war of ideas, books needed to be placed in the hands of the millions of Americans fighting that war across the globe. The council worked in conjunction with every major publishing company as well as the US War Department to begin printing books to be shipped out as part of a new monthly book ration for American soldiers. These new books were called "Armed Services Editions" (ASEs) and they were designed specifically with soldiers, sailors, and airmen in mind. Exact measurements were taken of the pocket dimensions of American military uniforms from all branches. The ASEs were created to easily fit inside any serviceman's pocket.

Even with severe paper rationing in place, the United States considered books to be as essential to winning the war as rubber or lead and the government provided tons of paper for the production of ASEs. The books were made with soft backs to save on weight and make them more portable. Soon every soldier was able to have at least one book on them at all times. The ASEs were compact enough to even be carried by men on the front lines. The pocket sized paperback book was born. Suddenly, the lonely boring foxholes pock-marking Africa and Europe and dozens of nameless islands throughout the South Pacific were filled with Americans snatching a few moments to escape the horrors and privations of war by cracking open a good book. The design of the ASEs was specifically tweaked to make them easily readable in low light and relatively durable even in harsh conditions. The council chose to bind the ASEs with staples, for example, since the traditional binding glue dissolved in the soupy atmosphere found in the tropical jungles where many American soldiers, sailors, and Marines found themselves stationed.

Almost any book was considered printable, and the members of the council would refuse to edit questionable passages from certain books. Rather than censoring content, the council would simply choose to not publish a title if it was found to be offensive. They took care not to offend any of the men who were risking their lives for their fellow citizens. If a Zane Grey novel painted Mormons in a bad light, the council simply picked another of Grey's books to publish. After all, there were plenty of Mormon soldiers fighting in America's Armed Forces. But the council's sensitivity ended with avoiding alienating certain demographics. The council even went so far as to publish some titles that had been banned in some of America's states and cities. Being a people who did not fear free thought, they had no interest in limiting the options for American soldiers. Their choices ran a wide range of genres and reflected the values of a society that was not afraid to allow its citizens to decide for themselves what to think, a society unafraid of information. A society that revered books.

The men devoured the ASEs when they were delivered. They were as good as a letter from home. The expectation was that as soon as a man finished his selection, he would pass it on. Books were swapped out and re-read over and over, especially the ones with good sex scenes. There is an old combat adage that war is characterized by long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. In those long spans of tedious boredom, Americans could count on ASEs to kill time and occupy their minds. One reporter told a member of the Council on Books in Wartime that every member of the council deserved the Distinguished Service Cross for their success in boosting morale and alleviating that constant boredom of the modern battlefield.

The council printed dozens of titles every month, some 1,200 titles by the end of the program. Some months, as many as 150,000 copies of each title were printed. Novels were favorites of the men in the field, but non-fiction titles were often just as coveted. The selections ran a wide swath of genres. The council published textbooks, dictionaries, poetry collections, biographies, and memoirs. Authors from Mark Twain and Ernie Pyle and Ernest Hemingway to Walt Whitman and Shakespeare and Plato were printed and shipped out into the hands of soldiers... soldiers who were children of the Great Depression, many of whom had never given much credit to the benefits of "book learnin." Eschewing any stereotypical egg-headed snobbery, the council showed great respect for the American soldier and expected him to possess a healthy intellectual curiosity. They were not disappointed. Soldiers would pass around their books as soon as they were done reading. Certain titles became highly sought after. "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn" was a particular favorite. "The Great Gatsby" was rescued from obscurity by being included in the list of ASEs published during the war. Before that, it was considered a flop.

From Alaska to Australia, from Egypt to France, from England to India and every tiny nameless island dotting the Pacific ocean, Americans could be found hunched over reading ASE's. The ubiquitous ASEs were given priority on the supply chain, even within a few days of amphibious invasions on some of the most remote islands on Earth. Within four days of the invasion of Saipan (a particularly brutal battle) the American invaders had built a library on the beachhead. Hospitals stocked ASEs right alongside bandages and antiseptics. Soldiers wrote to their favorite authors and often struck up friendly correspondences. Many wounded or psychologically traumatized men credited ASEs with helping them to recover more completely, to become again the men they had been before the war had broken them. It was charming for you to learn that "reading rations" were considered as essential to the American war effort as vodka was to the Russian Red Army. How is this a detail of the war that you hadn't known until now?

History has taught us that when societies begin burning books, even worse things are soon to follow. In their rise to power, the Nazis had destroyed an estimated 100,000,000 books. When the Americans came to the shores of Europe to free the continent from German occupation they brought with them, packed in crates, bundled in ration packages, and stuffed into pockets, over 120,000,000 books. Some of those books were written by the very authors the Nazis had banned. There can't be a much clearer contrast between the two sides' ideologies. The distinction between good and evil is rarely so stark.

After the war, millions of American veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill to go to college. The ASE program had perfectly prepared many of them to enter the world of academia. After all, they had already read the likes of Plato, Walter Lippmann, and Wordsworth while under fire on battlefields. For men with experiences like that, the Ivy League would be a cakewalk. In fact, students who were not veterans often complained that all of the veterans in their classes kept blowing the curves. Those veterans went on to graduate and create the most vibrant and influential economy the world has ever known.

One historian has speculated that the American armies of World War II were the most well read in history. The generation of Americans that fought the Second World War is often referred to as the Greatest Generation. It is entirely possible that they deserve that title because they were armed, not just with rifles and grenades and fighter planes, but because they were armed with books.






On to the next book!





P.S. At the end of "When Books Went to War" Manning lists all of the books that were printed as ASEs. It's been a long time since anything besides your own family has made you smile and swell with pride like reading that list did.