"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.

"The Widow of the South" by Robert Hicks (2006)

You are heading to Tennessee in a week for another 'Tender Tennessee Christmas.' Your sister in law, Krystal sent you a text message the other day with a reading assignment. You are staying at her house in Franklin for the holiday and Franklin just happens to be the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. She told you to read "The Widow of the South," a novel about the battle, and when you got there, she would take you and the whole family on a personally guided tour of the sites mentioned in the book. Naturally, you had the book in your hand within 24 hours.

There once lived a woman who was incredibly famous, Oscar Wilde insisted on visiting her on his tour of the United States. She kept a constant vigil in her private cemetery and her perpetual presence amongst the graves of so many fallen boys brought solace to countless families in the shadow of tragedy, but she is almost completely forgotten today. While she lived, she embodied the mourning and bereavement millions of Americans felt in the wake of the extraordinary loss of life during the Civil War. Her name was Carrie McGavok and this book is not as much about the Battle of Franklin as it is about how she became this symbol of sorrow and unspeakable loss, a living memorial for an entire generation that had been sacrificed in a war few would ever understand. But this is no "The Killer Angels." Hicks makes no effort to pretend that his is a definitive historical fiction. It is a novel that just happens to feature some historical people and tries to create some explanations and some contexts for why they did what they did.

But before Hicks can ponder the meaning of all the sacrifice, he has to get to the battle itself. In November of 1864, Confederate Tennessee had been occupied by Union forces for three years. In May of that year, the soon-to-be-infamous Union general William Tecumseh Sherman outmaneuvered the Confederate Army of Tennessee out of the state they were named after. Soon, Sherman had chased the Confederates all the way through Georgia and into Atlanta. The Confederate general John Bell Hood (famous for leading a fearsome regiment of Texans, and whose monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol is one of your favorites) now lead the entire Confederate Army of Tennessee. Hood hit Sherman's supply lines in an effort to keep him from driving deeper into the heart of the Confederacy. After a few weeks, Sherman tired of chasing Hood and proceeded unmolested with his devastating March to the Sea. Hood saw an opportunity to move back where his own army had originated and reclaim Nashville and thus, Tennessee, for the Confederacy. Sherman had left a screening army to defend against this, but Hood was confident he could defeat it.

The two forces, Union and Confederate, skirmished with one another over the course of that summer and autumn, neither army ever seeing much of the other in the dense woods and rolling hills of northern Georgia and southern Tennessee. It was a conflict colored by quick battles involving few men. In the obscuring cover of the landscape, neither side could bring their full army to bear on the other. By November, Hood's men were into Tennessee and a race for Nashville had begun. Two Union armies were trying to reach the capital city and the defenses which had been built up for three years there. Hood's Confederate forces were desperate to stop the Federals from getting in place behind those formidable defenses. If he could meet the enemy in battle out in the open, Hood was confident he could destroy them. He had the legendary cavalry commander General Nathan Bedford Forrest running screening actions to hide his army's movement from the enemy and on the night of November 29th, Hood was just twenty miles from Nashville, with only one small river crossing to go before being able to take the city from the south. In a small scale battle at Spring Hill, he had outmaneuvered his opponent and as the sun set on the 29th, there were almost no significant Union forces between Hood's army and Nashville. His plan was to smash Union general Schofield's army on the 30th, (or at least keep it from joining the other Union army, lead by general Thomas) and then race through the town of Franklin, Tennessee, beating the bulk of the Union armies to the capital and declaring the entire state back in Confederate hands.

During the night, however, at Spring Hill, Schofield's entire army was somehow able to slip within a few hundred yards of the Confederate positions. They moved around the Confederate forces with only a few shots fired and blocked Hood's uncontested advance into Nashville. By 6:00 on the morning of November 30th (which means that you started reading this book exactly 150 years after the battle took place!) the Union forces were preparing defensive positions in the town of Franklin. Franklin was set on a hill and had an obvious command of the clear fields to the south. The Yankee troops knew their business and quickly made fortifications that were more than just random debris haphazardly thrown together. They constructed barricades that were taller than their heads, but which had gaps at the perfect height to fire through, making them almost impervious to enemy rifle fire. The Union troops cut down thorny Orange Osage trees and positioned them at the base of their fortifications to force the Rebel troops to stop their advance just as they became most visible to Union gunfire. Furthermore, many of the Union troops were armed with a new weapon, the Henry repeating rifle. This firearm was like the ones you always played Cowboys and Indians with when you were a kid. Unlike most weapons on the field in 1864, the Henry rifle could fire multiple shots without being reloaded. After trying one out on the grounds of the White House, President Lincoln himself had personally insisted that the Union mass produce these rifles and get them in the war as soon as possible. It wasn't a machine gun, but it was the closest thing they could get in 1864.

General Hood observed the Union defenses ringing the southern approaches to Franklin and the two miles of open space between his army and the Federals. He reckoned that this was his moment. He might have been furious about his officers allowing the Federal forces to slip past him in the night, or he might have been impetuous. But he was as aggressive as they came and wanted to hit Schofield's men while they were out in the open, before they could retreat to the safety of their prepared defenses in Nashville, and this was likely to be his last chance. At 4:00 in the afternoon he ordered his army to advance into the city of Franklin from the south, confident they would crush all resistance. There were more Confederate soldiers in Hood's charge that in Pickett's more famous one at Gettysburg, but Pickett's Union targets had been softened up by a massive artillery barrage. Hood's big guns weren't in place to offer his men any such help, while the Union had an entire battery of artillery placed in a fort on the opposite side of the river, perfectly positioned to fire down onto Confederate heads with impunity.

The Confederates advanced in good order over open ground and they must have been a sight to see. It is still to this day, the largest single infantry charge in the history of North America. The fighting was fierce from the beginning. The Federal skirmish lines out in front of the main line held on too long before withdrawing, so that as they made their way back to the main line of defense, the Confederates were right behind them. All along the line, Union troops couldn't fire on the lines of advancing enemy for fear of hitting their own troops.

The waves of Confederates crashed onto the Federal lines with a terrifying Rebel yell. The firing was so intense that smoke obscured everything farther away than ten feet. For a moment, although they were suffering under withering fire, the Confederates broke through the center of the Union line near the Carter House, but a reserve force, unseen by general Hood, moved up to fill the gaps and prevent a rout of Union forces. The Union salient around the Cotton Gin saw particularly savage fighting. Entire Confederate regiments simply disappeared under impossibly heavy fire. Half a dozen Confederate generals died in the fighting and seven more were wounded, but still the rebels refused to retreat. Time and again, they would surge forward to take the Union positions, only to be wiped out once more. As soon as replacement forces could be brought into place, they would be thrown into the fray and they would be destroyed. The fighting was only halted well after night fell and the combatants could no longer find one another in the darkness.

The battle was a disaster for the Confederate Army of Tennessee. In the span of just a few hours, and in the space of only a few hundred yards, they they had suffered over 9,000 casualties. With 1,750 men killed, Confederate losses were even greater than at the infamous Battle of Antietam, and three times greater than Pickett's Charge. The slaughter on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day 80 years later lasted nineteen hours and is revered as one of the bloodiest battles the Americans fought during the Second World War. The five hours at Franklin saw even more casualties than Omaha or Utah Beaches combined. Some dead Confederate officers were found afterwards still standing, still held upright by waist-deep masses of dead bodies pressed all around them, dead officers still commanding armies of the dead. Fifty five of the Confederacy's best brigade and regimental commanders were casualties in the battle, while the Union forces reported fewer than 200 troops killed. The Army of Tennessee was second in size only to Robert E Lee's Army of Virginia, and it had been gutted in one afternoon. The Confederacy couldn't hope to recover from the disaster of the Battle of Franklin.

As the sun rose the next day, Schofield's Union forces withdrew from the city towards Nashville, making the Battle of Franklin a technical victory for the South. But only a fool could think it had been anything but a catastrophe for the Confederacy. The ensuing Battle of Nashville was an undeniable defeat for Hood and his already crushed army. After Nashville, they limped back through Franklin on their way to Alabama. Hood had begun his campaign to take Tennessee with 30,000 men. One month later, he commanded only 15,000. The war would be over within another four months.

But "The Widow of the South" is not all about the agonizing moments of the Battle of Franklin. In fact, it is a 400 page book and the battle is over by one hundred pages in. Instead, the book is about how the people who lived through that battle, and all the other battles during that gruesome war, could possibly come to terms with such a shocking level of loss. It's a story about how people can learn to live on afterwards, even in the face of utter devastation and suffering. Hicks changes perspective and tenses from chapter to chapter, unfolding the events from several different points of view, and in several different styles.

One thing that characterized this book, and most books about the Civil War, is the use of the word "nigger." Even reading it in your own head, written in the pages of a good book, the word is like someone poking an exposed nerve. It is painful and disturbing in ways that make you uncomfortable. Something about the extraordinary weight of hatred and bigotry behind that word lends it a power greater than other epithets. When any one in the book (or in real life) uses the word, it conveys a deeper darkness to their character, a flippancy and dismissal when considering the plight of so many millions. It is a darkness that is the opposite of the qualities and values you want to embody yourself, and that you want to pass on to your children. Using the word here in this context, especially from the mouth of General Forrest who would go on to create the Ku Klux Klan after the war, is right. It is not frivolous or needless. It adds to the story in a way that helps establish an essential, if shameful, part of the fabric of the war itself, but that doesn't make it much easier to see in print.

The McGavock plantation, called Carnton, was less than a mile southeast of the Union line in Franklin, Tennessee on November 30th, 1864. General Forrest himself declared that the house would be used as a field hospital for the many wounded men he could already predict would result when Hood ordered a charge. As the carnage increased and the day wore on, wounded men were brought to the plantation house by the thousands. The lady of the house, Carrie McGavock is the titular character of "The Widow of the South," even though at the time of the battle she was not a widow. She and her husband had watched three of their five young children die over the last few years, each one taken by a different disease. As a result of this tragedy, Carrie had withdrawn inside her mind. She might have even gone a little bit insane. For years, she wandered the house in silence, shrouded in black and never venturing outside. But the battle brought her out of her mourning reverie. A house filled with dead and dying boys can do that to you.

In the hours and days after the battle Carrie was a woman transformed. She was always moving, always helping. She organized the volunteers to help ease the wounded soldiers' pain and often she was there to personally ease their final breaths. She brought comfort and a stateliness to a dark and terrifying situation. Her compassion and her intimate relationship with death (after losing three children) allowed her to treat her wounded guests with a respect that she carried on even after they had died.

Years later, Carrie heard that the man who owned hallowed ground that had been turned into a killing field had made a decision to plow the field up and plant crops there. She lead the effort to convince him to allow her to move the bodies resting there to her own home at Carnton where she re-buried almost 1,500 Confederate dead. As soon as the last body was interred, Carrie began walking the grounds of her private cemetery, the largest in the United States, checking off the names of the dead, keeping a constant vigil and acting as the memory of a nation. She carried her Book of the Dead, with the names of all of the soldiers with her as she walked her rounds. She did it for years afterwards, for decades, even after her husband died. Carrie McGavock became the Widow of the South. Carrie took orphaned children into her home and raised them as her own. She was looked at far and wide as a living symbol of grief, writing letters to the families of the dead buried beside her Tennessee home, and tending to the graves of so many of their loved ones.

There are other characters in the book, but they all serve as lenses through which to see Carrie. Her husband watched as she sacrificed herself to a greater cause, even at the cost of her own marriage. Her friend and former patient (and maybe the love of her life) Zechariah Cashwell, who had been as broken physically as the nation was emotionally, saw Carrie as the savior that made the catastrophe of the war make some sort of sense. For him, she was someone who proved that people can care about others, and that people can change for the better even in the face of tragedy. For Mariah, Carrie's lifelong servant and friend (and former slave), Carrie was the stability she needed in an unstable and awful time, just as she was for the rest of America.

The gratitude of a shaken nation eventually elevated Carrie to the level of a legend. She was compared to Boudica and Joan of Arc. It was predicted that generations of Americans would remember her name with reverence. But that's not what happened. Carrie was a part of a singular generation, one that needed her. As they aged so did she. When they passed away so did she, and her need to be there to help heal that generation passed on as well.

In the climactic scene of "The Widow of the South" Carrie confronts the man who owns the land that holds the bodies of so many soldiers and she tries to convince him that he shouldn't plow them over as if they were mere fertilizer for his crops. He reminds her that his own son was killed in the battle. His son had gone off to war and the war had brought him back home just to kill him in his own backyard. The father, who is clearly motivated in his desire to plow the battlefield over by enormous grief, reminds Carrie that he never believed in the cause his son had died for anyway. Slavery was wicked and, even worse, the men who lead the side that defended it were liars and incompetents. This man is ostensibly the antagonist of the entire book, but in this moment he becomes the most sympathetic of all Hicks' characters. He makes it clear that his son, and all the sons buried in shallow graves on his property had died in a foolish struggle to perpetuate a shameful way of life. His reaction made you wonder what the proper response is to the sacrifice of so many Confederate soldiers. Was it even a sacrifice, or was it just a waste? How do we honor those who died fighting for the wrong side? Maybe Carrie's is the only way that makes sense.

"The Widow of the South" was a reminder for you that sometimes the world needs those who are willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of others. Sometimes those who sacrifice themselves carry guns into battle, and sometimes they carry unspeakable grief so that others might let go of their own.





On to the next book!







P.S. Here is a google interactive map of the battlefield.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?t=k&ll=35.920544,-86.866279&ie=UTF8&om=1&msa=0&spn=0.023807,0.047207&z=15&hl=en&mid=zcZ7DPTsRKe4.kSwuYIv7L-Tg

P.P.S. This is a fantastic 10 minute presentation by a historian on the steps of the Carter House.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n574JQb-PWE&feature=youtu.be

"Throne of Jade" by Naomi Novik (2006)

You ended your review of the first book in this series, "His Majesty's Dragon," by saying that you intended to read as many of them as you could as fast as you could. It's been a few months and this is book #2. You do try to be a man of your word.

"Throne of Jade" opens with a scene that could have easily been extremely boring. Novik manages to make it exciting. Instead of the soaring aerial combat you were expecting, Novik places her protagonist, Laurence, in a boardroom filled with diplomats and politicians. Laurence made a name for himself by capturing a dragon egg from Napoleon's fleet a year or so before. When the dragon hatched, it attached itself to Laurence and the life long sailor had to learn how to ride dragons instead of frigates. But the dragon, named Temeraire proved to be more than the usual breed the rest of the English Aerial Corps flew. Temeraire is a Celestial, a gift intended to be from the Emperor of China to Napoleon, the Emperor of France. Laurence and Temeraire teamed up to become a formidable foe to the French. They had saved England from French invasion in a battle at the cliffs of Dover. But when the Chinese learned how their kingly gift was being used, in the hands of a mere soldier rather than an emperor, they made formal protests to the government of Great Britain and now Laurence finds himself stuck in stuffy room at the Admiralty, facing an accusatory Chinese prince and a British government that seems more than happy to sacrifice his relationship with his dragon for their political ends. Laurence is fed up and furious at being kept far from the heat of combat and far from his dragon.

To assuage the Chinese, who the British dare not enrage, the British Admiralty agree to send both Laurence and Temeraire to China to negotiate whatever ending might satisfy the offended Chinese while still maintaining vital British holdings in Asia and avoiding a war with that nation. It is a long voyage around Europe and underneath Africa to cross the Indian Ocean. Along the way, Laurence and Temeraire endure a French ambush, Temeraire's first encounter with the common cold, and a typhoon amongst other adventures.

As in the first book, the relationship between the two, Temeraire and Laurence, defines "Throne of Jade." Both prove that they would be willing to suffer to the point of death to spare the other harm. They make an outstanding team. Their mutual respect and their love for one another protect more than their own relationship. Each one allows the other to find within themselves new and greater truths, they make each other better than they would be alone.

The book is peppered with wonderfully crafted battle scenes: naval engagements, aerial combat, a desperate defense of a besieged fort, and even a dragon duel. Novik's knowledge of maritime terms and practices is impressive, and her attention to detail and creativity in imagining how a team of people could man a dragon in flight as they would a ship at sea make the stories she tells immersive.
Along the African coast, Temeraire sees his first slaves being sold and prepared for shipment across the sea. He witnesses a small scale revolt when a handful of the slaves fight back against their captors instead of meekly submitting to their imprisonment. The slave rebellion is quickly and brutally put down in full view of the scandalized dragon. Later, as the massive dragon transport ship called Valiance, enters the Indian Ocean, she is attacked by a massive sea serpent. Temeraire is reluctantly forced to kill the 250 foot long beast. This encounter and Laurence's insistence that the serpent was merely a mindless animal, along with the memories of the slaving outpost, set the dragon to asking questions about his own freedom.

If Temeraire is as smart as Laurence, and he is probably even smarter, why should he be forced into military service? Dragons in England are not allowed to roam freely. Human fear prevents this possibility. It is understood to be the natural order of things. Dragons are either harnessed for service in the aerial corps, or kept captive in breeding pens to help grow the ranks of beasts to be used as weapons. Laurence has a hard time answering his friend's questions, and his love of Temeraire helps him see the dragon's argument from a completely new perspective.

Their arrival in China does nothing to help Laurence's argument that the British way is the only way to deal with dragons. The Chinese, a society thousands of years older than Europeans, have a completely different way of thinking about and treating the mythological creatures. Even in our reality, China harbors a special reverence for dragons, but Novik takes this to the next level that her fictional world requires. Instead of shying away from the subject, Novik revels in a culture that respects the creature she inserted into our history. How would the Chinese have evolved to treat dragons? Novik draws from their customs, their mythology, and their art and decides that they would have evolved their entire civilization around the coexistence between humans and dragons.

In Novik's world, Chinese cities are designed to allow easy passage of dragons through their streets. Entire markets develop to provide food for dragons as well as to supply the treasures they naturally desire. Chinese chefs pride themselves on the perfect preparation of food for dragon consumption. Choice meats are heavily seasoned with spices and peppers, nothing like the English way of simply providing raw, or even still living, fodder. Dragons in China must earn their own wages, other than the rare and highly revered Celestial breeds. Therefore, dragons are woven throughout Chinese society. They are employed as messengers, taxis, and guards as well as soldiers for the government.

It's shocking at first for Laurence to learn that all Chinese dragons aren't serving the emperor's armed forces as English dragons are expected to do for their king. And to Laurence's surprise, with his Victorian-era sensibilities, the dragons who do end up serving in the Chinese military are captained exclusively by women. This is all due to an ancient legend of a girl who disguised herself as her father to save him from military service. In the legend, the girl (obviously, but never explicitly named Mulan) had been a companion to a warrior dragon and had saved the Chinese empire during a crucial battle. Women had been serving in the Chinese aerial corps ever since. It is a closely guarded secret in England that certain dragon breeds will only allow female captains, but for the entire Chinese aerial corps to have women at the helm is something entirely new for Laurence. It's also a nice way for Novik to get in a jab at naive Western ideas that they are the only enlightened societies on Earth, her reminder that gender roles, rather than being set in stone, are as varied as the many cultures that dot the globe.

Temeraire has always had a bit of a rebellious streak in him, Laurence has joked about it several times throughout both books. But this realization, that there are places in the world where his kin are treated as equals, where dragons are educated and respected, proves too much for Temeraire. His eyes are opened to possibilities he had never entertained before, and Laurence sees the passion growing within the closest friend he's ever known and he realizes that it's not wise to fight against it. In the end he knows that he never really wanted to fight it in the first place. Temeraire vows to return to England once the situation with the Chinese emperor is solved (quite cleverly, as a matter of fact) and begin a campaign to spread the word that dragons and humans can indeed live in much closer harmony than the English allow. Laurence knows that Temeraire is right. There is now no reason to continue catering to English fears or to pretend that segregation is the natural state of the world.

Temeraire, like many other non-human fictional characters, helps you to further define what it means to be human. We all have the potential to give in to our fears, to use the status quo as a refuge for our own laziness and self-protection, or as an excuse to turn a blind eye. Temeraire reminded you that you want to be the kind of person who fights against that inherent human weakness and he reminded you that you want to raise children who do the same thing. Sometimes the very people who seem like the enemy, who are treated as monsters by the rest of the world, are the ones who would make the greatest allies. Sometimes, there are far more terrible things in the world than dragons. The world needs more people who see injustice and inequality for what they are, who refuse to sit by and let them continue.






On to the next book!

"Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

Your Father In Law told you that you needed to read this book. When he was in town helping you out with your newly born daughter he went ahead and bought it for you. You recognized the name Louis Zamperini when you read the cover and realized that the main character had only died a few weeks before, you'd heard about it on NPR. If George Nite and NPR agree that this guy was a big deal, you figured you had better check him out.

Laura Hillenbrand is famous for having written the book "Seabiscuit." While researching that book, she found a few news stories about an underdog runner who shocked the world by qualifying for the 5,000 meter race in the 1936 Olympics, even though he'd only competed in that distance three times before. Intrigued, Hillenbrand began looking into the life of this runner, Louis Zamperini, and she found a remarkable story there. She knew that she had found her next book.

Even as a small child, Louie was a hellion. If it was edible, he stole it. If there was a rule, he broke it. If there was an authority figure, he challenged it. He was an incurable prankster. Denis the Mennace had nothing on Louie Zamperini. He was one of those people who is just born rebellious by nature, utterly fearless and hopelessly optimistic in his iconoclasm. In an attempt to keep him out of trouble, Louie's older brother got him involved in track. Louie was a natural.

Attending USC, Louie made a name for himself as a blindingly fast runner who could overcome all sorts of adversity on the field. People from his hometown of Torrance, California, the same people who once cursed his "one-boy insurgency" on them, now cheered Louie on, calling him the Torrence Tornado. After he won a 2 mile race by more than a quarter of a mile, the Torrence police department sent him flowers proclaiming that they were glad that other people were chasing Louie now. Louie tried out for a spot in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was so hot in the stadium during the qualifying race that the metal cleats in his shoes had burned a pattern on the soles of his feet. He lost three pounds during the grueling 5,000 meter run. Despite all this, he blew past several far more famous favorites to secure his spot on the Olympic team.

As a member of the '36 US Olympic track team, Louie Zamperini became friends with Jesse Owens himself. In his final run in Berlin, Louie turned in the fastest final lap time in the mile run in Olympic history, though he did not medal. Adolf Hilter, the host of the games that year, was so impressed that he shook his hand and praised him to his face as "The boy with the fast finish." (The kid who had made his reputation stealing everything he could find in his hometown even swiped a Nazi Swastika flag while two guards had their backs turned.) Louie knew that he would keep getting better and set his sight on the 1940 Olympics, to be held in Tokyo, Japan. Instead he, and most of the rest of the planet, went to war.

Louie enlisted in the Army Air Corps and became a bombardier. After the Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Louie was assigned to a B-24 in the Pacific theater. You knew that those big bombers, B-17's and B-24's, were put to use in the Pacific war, but it was interesting to be reminded of how extensively they were employed in that theater before the conflict could evolve into the carrier-based campaign you are used to imagining. B-24's were nicknamed "Flying Coffins." They were ugly, hard to fly, prone to developing glitches, and, with their odd bomb bay doors and high set wings, tended to break apart during attempted water landings. Also, and ominously for a war fought almost entirely over the largest ocean on Earth, B-24's sank almost immediately on meeting with water.

Louie took part in several bombing missions, including the destruction of the Japanese garrison that had taken Wake island from the US Marines. Louie's plane, Super Man, was almost completely destroyed on another mission bombing the island of Nauru. The mission was a success but one of Louie's crew was killed and several more were permanently taken out of the war by the wounds they received that day. Super Man limped back home with 594 holes blown in it by the Japanese defenders. The plane never flew again.

Louie and his pilot and friend, whom he simply called Phil, were moved to another B-24, the Green Hornet. The Hornet was plagued by technical problems and had been repeatedly cannibalized by resourceful American ground crews scrounging for parts. On May 27, 1943, Phil and his bombardier Louie, were ordered to take part in a search and rescue operation. Another B-24 had been lost somewhere over the Pacific and the Army Air Corps was determined to find the crew.

Before he flew in the Green Hornet for the first time, Louie wanted to check his speed at running the mile. He had a friend clock him. In 1954, eleven years later, on a track at Oxford, Roger Bannister would become famous for breaking the four minute mile. On that day, May 26, 1943, in the middle of World War II, Louie Zamperini ran a mile in four minutes and 12 second. And he did it in deep sand. He was on the shores of some nameless Pacific island, not in an Olympic stadium.

The next day, his plane crashed into the ocean and he was lost at sea. The Green Hornet had suffered from engine trouble and was too plagued with malfunctions for Phil, piloting the bomber for the first time, to save it. Only three men survived the crash, Louie, Phil, and the tailgunner named Mac. They had gone down too fast for anyone to have had time to send out a distress call. No one knew where they were when they crashed and they were hundreds of miles from any land.

The three men drifted on two inflatable life rafts longer than any other people have ever been recorded surviving. Over the course of 47 days they drifted 2,000 miles. They starved, burned in the sun, and suffered terribly from dehydration and exhaustion. They were strafed by Japanese planes and they battled ever-present sharks. No really; they battled the sharks. The demons from the deep leaped at them, tried to get into the raft, rubbed their backs along the bottom of the rafts while the men lay in them, and one monstrous great white pummeled the rafts from underneath to try and eject them into his waiting jaws. The exhausted men had to beat the beasts off with oars like they were sword fighting. Like "In Harm's Way" before, "Unbroken" didn't exactly cure you of your phobia of sharks.

The three men stayed sane by talking about cooking, describing food in exquisite detail. They quizzed one another and gave educational lectures. Their minds were sharpened by the lack of food and any visible distractions. The privations of the flesh and the beauty of the endless expanse of the ocean actually inspired awe and even gratitude in Louie at times. Louie saw visions too, choirs in the sky singing to him. He prayed to a god he never believed in before to help him out. He promised a life of service if that god saved his life.

Mac, the tailgunner died before they sighted land. Phil and Louie, however, survived just long enough to be captured by a Japanese warship before they could reach the island they'd seen. They were moved from prison to prison over the course of the next few months. They were not treated very well. Guards beat them, they were served pitiful meals. Visiting Japanese submariners and sailors would often swing by the prisoners' cells to heap physical and verbal abuse on them. Louie was questioned about his knowledge of the top-secret Norden bomb sight and soon it was discovered that he was a famous man, an Olympian.

By September of '43 Louie found himself in a place called Ofuna. This place was no POW camp. Ofuna was a secret interrogation center and therefore was not registered with the Red Cross. The men held there were given the nebulous status of "unarmed combatant" and the Japanese government maintained that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. Dostoevsky said that you can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners. If that's true, then the Empire of Japan was to be found lacking in everything that a society should stand for. Places like Ofuna are what make the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay so offensive to students of history. History teaches us that people held in secret prisons and given special status exempting them from the rule of international law are not usually treated very well. Harsh judgements have been rendered against nations that do this and it has usually been the United States rendering those judgements. For an American outpost to even be included in the same sentence as camps like Ofuna is beneath the honor of the men and women who have served in this nation's military for over 200 years.

The conditions at Ofuna were more than deplorable, but not all of it was the fault of the Japanese government. Food was sent to the camp by officials but the guards and, most egregiously, the head cook sold the prisoners' food on the black market for obscene profits. For the men held at Ofuna and other POW camps, starvation and exposure to the extreme cold were bad enough but worse than that, worse than being lost at sea, worse than battling sharks, was the loss of dignity. The men would do anything in their power to gain back even the smallest slice of the dignity that the Japanese worked daily to rob from them. In every camp Louie ended up in, he and the men around him stole information, hid valuables, sabotaged the equipment they were forced to help build or transport, and even poisoned guards; anything to feel like they had some shred of dignity left.

Eventually, Louie was moved to yet another POW camp, called Omori, nestled on a small artificial island in Tokyo Bay. This place was something altogether different from the other camps he had been in. This one was run by a psychopathic sadist.

A corporal named Mitsuhiro Watanabe, but referred to most often as "the bird" by the prisoners, was a guard at Omori. He was the son of a wealthy Japanese family and had received a top-tier education in French literature and philosophy. He longed to rise through the ranks of the military but his application to be accepted as an officer had been rejected. Japan was at war and he felt that honor demanded that he serve with distinction, but this denial disgraced Watanabe. It snapped something in his psyche. His dissolution, his powerlessness, and his hate (and possibly his insanity) got him transferred to a dead end post for NCO's, a POW camp. At Ofuna, Watanabe was allowed to let his mental illness run rampant upon the prisoners. The bird ran the place, giving orders to officers and even countermanding orders that had been issued by men who far outranked him.

The bird regularly beat the prisoners. He screamed and raged. He demanded utmost respect and would lose his mind over the slightest provocation. Often he would give the POW's contradicting commands in order to give himself a reason to dole out harsh punishments. He would confusingly flash from calm and caring in one second to murderous and cruel in the next. He was unstable and unpredictable and he focused all of this madness on Louie Zamperini from the minute he laid eyes on the captured American Olympian. His celebrity status and his latent sense of defiance and rebellion made Louie an irresistible target for the bird's rage. Watanabe tortured him constantly.

The men of Omori had a front row seat to the defeat of the Japanese Empire. They were sitting in the middle of Tokyo Bay and watched as the American war machine began sending the newest, most sophisticated and futuristic technological weapons into the skies above Japan to ensure her destruction. Gleaming silver metal B-29s, long range, pressurized, high altitude, heavy bombers began appearing over the heads of the POWs in 1944. The terrified Omori guards could not keep the news from the prisoners that huge portions of many Japanese cities had been destroyed by B-29 firebombing raids. For you, was an odd feeling to read about the war from both the perspective of the people of Japan and the American POWs who were witnessing both the brutality of their tormentors as well as the inhumanity of the American bombing campaigns. Eventually the men on Omori were ringside witnesses to the calamity that befell Tokyo itself in the Spring of '45. Most of the city was incinerated overnight. Since Omori was in Tokyo Bay, some of the desperate and terrified citizens of the nation's capital tried to seek shelter from the maelstrom on the POW's island. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in a firestorm that raged hundreds of feet into the night sky, burned and suffocated under the rain of ruin the 20th century had brought on their heads.

By then, Louie had been saved from the wrath of the bird. Watanabe had been reassigned to somewhere unknown. For the first time since meeting the bird, Louie felt that he might be able to survive his imprisonment. Before long Louie was transferred as well, only to be met at the new camp by none other than Watanabe himself. This was the thing that almost broke Louie, the man whose biography is named "Unbreakable." The bird had requested Louie's transfer specifically. He missed his favorite victim. Louie was subjected to the kind of mental and physical suffering that scars humans for the rest of their lives.

Unbeknownst to most of Japan's POWs (but suspected by some) the Empire had a standing "Kill All" order. If the advancing American forces approached too close to any POW camps, the Japanese guards were under orders to use any and all means necessary to kill every single prisoner before they could be freed. Any means at all. The Japanese hierarchy was well aware that they had been breaking all kinds of international laws in their deplorable treatment of Allied prisoners and they were determined to protect themselves from any punishment if/when the war was lost. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese but may have saved thousands of Allied prisoners of war. The emperor agreed to surrender before the "Kill All" order could be carried out across the Japanese home islands.

Fat Man and Little Boy abruptly ended the war and they also ended Louie's torture. Within days, he was feasting on supplies air dropped to his camp by B-29's. His guards, including the bird, had disappeared, and word had spread that Louie was alive and heading home soon. But, as with many veterans, the war followed him home.

Before long, it became clear that Louie Zamperini was a poster case for PTSD. He woke every night with terrible nightmares, he descended into alcoholism, and became obsessed with visions of returning to Japan to murder Watanabe, the man who continued to torture Louie even long after they parted ways. He suffered from intense flashbacks and extreme mental trauma. Louie met a girl and got married, but his emotional scars worked under the surface to eat away at his marriage. He was pulled in to several "get rich quick" schemes that appealed to his desire to get back to Japan to find and murder the bird.

Watanabe had taken Louie's sense of self. He had created a puppet in Louie, a man who could not see the reality of his life. Ironically, the former celebrity and Olympian, the man who made himself a success in the world, a man who had survived the unendurable, was now comparing himself to someone far less of an enviable man than he. Watanabe was a pitiable man, a failure. He only ever achieved any meaning in his life through enforcing suffering on others. After the war, he was a man on the run, a fugitive from justice. He was not anyone to be revered or to be respected. Watanabe was a sad pathetic figure, while Louie was an inspiration to all. Yet Watanabe held power over Louie's life and influenced him in way that were evident every day. But such is the nature of torture and psychological abuse.

Eventually, Louie's wife, Cynthia convinced him to attend a speech being given by a charismatic and passionate young man named Billy Graham. In a parking lot in Los Angeles, under a massive circus tent, Louie heard a message that resonated with him. He remembered the prayers he had thrown out in desperation on his raft adrift on the Pacific. He remembered the rain that repeatedly answered those prayers. He remembered that God had indeed kept him alive. It was his final flashback. All at once, Louie realized that he had a promise to fulfill. He had told God while on that raft, surrounded by sharks and dying of starvation and thirst, that "If you will save me, I will serve you forever." That night was the first in half a decade that the bird did not show up in Louie's dreams.

Louie dedicated his life to God and to helping young people find their way in the world. He became a Christian motivational speaker and started a camp for troubled boys. He traveled back to Japan shortly after his conversion but not to seek revenge. He met with those of his captors who agreed to see him and he embraced them one by one, forgiving them for their abuse of him and preaching the gospel to each in turn. Watanabe was not there.

Decades later, when the Olympics came to Nagano, Japan and Louie was carrying the Olympic torch for a fifth time, he reached out to try to meet with Watanabe. Against all odds the bird had evaded capture and survived until a blanket pardon was given to all war criminal suspects. He still refused to meet Louie, his favorite former prisoner and victim, face to face. So Louie wrote a letter to the man who once haunted his dreams. He told Watanabe he forgave him and that he hoped his former captor found the love and grace of God through Jesus.

Whether or not there is a god, whether or not your own Christian faith is founded on any reality, this story is an example of how it is all worth it. If Louie's faith could inspire this kind of healing, your own can do things just as powerful. Louie realized that in order to move past the most traumatic thing he (or almost anyone) had ever endured, he needed to do what did not come naturally to him, he needed to turn the other cheek. He needed to heed to words of a 2,000 year dead carpenter and learn to forgive and then pray for his enemies. He wasn't content to let God sort out his enemies. He knew that his faith called him to do what he could to try to save the very men who had almost driven him mad. He needed to make a choice to not only forgive his former tormentors, but to come to a place where he cared about them enough to tell them that he was concerned about the destinations of their eternal souls. He had to abandon hate and vengeance. He chose to love them.

And, in the end, that's what made him unbreakable.





On to the next book!

"Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley (1818)

"Frankenstein" is one of the most well known works of fiction there is. Everyone has heard of Frankenstein. He the guy who sings 'Puttin' On The Ritz' with Gene Wilder right? The guy with bolts in his neck. "Fire Bad!" That guy. Frankenstein.... Or is it pronounced Frahnkensteeen?

You'd never read "Frankenstein" before, but you are totally the kind of guy who always complains when other people have only ever seen the movie or the TV show but have never read the book. You figured it was time to practice what you preach and read up on the old familiar story of the mindless monster and his mad scientist master. Everyone knows the story so well already that you figured reading the book would just be a reminder of where it all got started. Surely there would be no surprises. You were wrong.

You've always loved the story of how Shelley wrote this classic novel. She was touring central Europe with her lover the famous poet Percy Shelley (they would later marry), the flamboyant and aristocratic poet Lord Byron, and physicist and poet John Polidori (who would go on to write the first published vampire story). They all decided to have a contest to see who could write the scariest horror story. Shelley thought about it for days and had a dream about a scientist who created life on his own. She turned the dream into her story. Shelley undoubtedly won the competition. She also created in one stroke both the horror and science fiction genres in modern literature.

The novel opens with letters written from an Englishman to his sister as he sails out of Archangel, Russia. He recounts to her how he has given up on his lifelong dream of being a poet (remember who Shelley was writing for?) and he has decided to be the first human to reach the North Pole.

What? That's not how the story is supposed to start! Where are the spooky mountains and the tower with the mad scientist? Where is Igor? From the opening page of the book, it became clear that this story is nothing like you were expecting.

After four months, the poet turned explorer, named Captain Walton finds his ship surrounded by sea ice. He and his crew are stuck fast and hoping for a break in the ice to allow the to sail to safety. Through the fog and the snow, he and his crew see something they never expected. A team of dogs is pulling a sled over the ice not far from the ship. In the sled is no normal driver, but a gigantic man. He and his dogs leave Walton's crew slack-jawed and shocked as they disappear into the distance, there is not supposed to be anyone this far north. That night, the ice breaks up, releasing the ship. In the morning Walton finds another sled, a different sled, floating on an ice floe with a man clinging to life inside. Walton orders his crew to rescue the stranger, but the man asks in a foreign accent where the ship is headed, north or south. Only when the crew answers that they are headed northwards does the strangers say that he will allow them to rescue him.

Captain Walton, still writing to his sister, sees the stranger is near death and nurses him back to health. The stranger reveals to Walton that he is on the hunt, chasing after the giant the crew had seen before. He calls his quarry "the demon." He says he has been chasing him for many months but he is sparing with details. Walton recognizes a kindred spirit in the stranger and soon comes to see him as a close friend. Both men share a passion for knowledge and agree that human beings cannot be complete unless they share deep friendships and also personal success. The stranger becomes distraught at this and decides to tell Walton his story. He intends it to be a warning for the Englishman to beware of chasing knowledge without considering all of the ramifications of his actions. Captain Walton dictates the stranger's tale word for word.

The stranger is, of course, none other than Victor Frankenstein. The story he tells Captain Walton bears little resemblance to the tropes you have grown up thinking constituted the story of "Frankenstein." Victor grew up in Switzerland and Italy and attended college in Ingolstadt, Germany. As a young man, Victor became fascinated by ancient sciences like alchemy. In school, his professors introduced him instead to the modern practice of science and physical philosophy. Victor is hooked immediately.

Deeply affected by the death of his mother just before his leaving for college, young Frankenstein develops a fascination with the origin of life in individuals, the spark that sets inanimate matter into motion. He claims that, after much study, he discovered how to impart life to the lifeless. Frankenstein tells Captain Walton that he will never reveal this powerful knowledge because of the ruin it brought to his own life. He does not wish his fate on any man. He reminds the captain that he is not insane, merely a genius, and his discovery will remain a secret. 

Energized by his new-found knowledge, Frankenstein relates how consumed he became with the prospect of creating a new being. He worked himself to the bone, nearly suffering a psychotic break finding the raw materials needed to stitch together a vessel into which he could ignite the fires of life itself. For two years he worked in an upstairs lab on the campus, obsessing over the perfection of his dream. Shelley describes his toils in macabre and disturbing language, maintaining enough morbid vagueness to let the reader's imagination run wild.

One night (neither a cold nor stormy one) he succeeded in his greatest ambition. There was no harnessed lightning, no dutiful Igor, no screaming of "It's alive!" Frankenstein simply performed whatever secret procedure it was that he had discovered. He created life from what was previously dead. But on looking at his creation for the first time, instead of triumph he felt utter revulsion. The monster that stirs at his feet is so hideous, so disgustingly inhuman, that Frankenstein spends the rest of the night hiding from his own creation. When the dawn arrives the next morning, Victor wanders the streets of Ingolstadt, terrified at every turn that he will run into his creation.


It is two full years until Frankenstein sees his creation again. His brother had been murdered back home in Geneva and Frankenstein returned there to comfort his family and confirm his suspicions of who the murderer might be. Victor sets off into the heart of the Alps and finds the monster he created hiding on a high glacier.


Frankenstein's creation, his demon, is not a staggering mindless ghoul. He is eloquent and articulate, a man possessed of reason and logic. He is no mindless monster. He is persuasive and passionate. He shows an appreciation for beauty and a thirst for knowledge. Victor sees this and realizes his duty to his creation, telling Captain Walton that he had an obligation to make sure the creature was happy before he condemned it's wickedness. He stays with his monster to hear his story.

The creature ran into the mountains after he first woke to life, after he witnessed his own creator fleeing from the sight of him. His every attempt to introduce himself to civilization are met with fear, anger, torches, stones, and pitchforks. In the mountains he finds a small poor family to secretly observe from a camouflaged vantage point. The De Laceys live in a modest cottage and the monster learns to speak and read through his observations of their lives. His surreptitious education leads him to become self aware. Frankenstein's demon starts asking himself the questions that eventually occur to all of us. "Who am I? What am I? Where am I going?" Like most of us, the monster proves unable to answer these metaphysical questions. But he has an idea for how he can assuage his loneliness.

The monster demands that Victor create a companion for him, a woman to keep him company and furnish him with the sense of love and belonging that humans have proven incapable of providing. The monster then becomes sinister for the first time in the story. He reveals that he did indeed murder Victor's brother in order to lure him to the mountains to make this very demand from him. The creature swears that he will hound Victor, no matter where he goes, until his request is met. He promises to make Frankenstein's life one of unimaginable misery if he refuses the request.

Frankenstein tells Walton that he acquiesced to the monster's demand out of a sense of compassion rather than of fear for his safety. But soon, the fear sets in. Victor takes his best friend to England to create a bride for his demon. Filled with worry and paranoia, he retires to a remote island north of Scotland, one of the Orkneys, to perform his gruesome task, the creation of another monster. But at the last second, he stops himself. Victor realizes that he cannot be responsible for unleashing another monster in the world and destroys what progress he has made. As soon as he does this he looks up to the window and sees the enraged face of his monster. The creature disappears into the night, hell bent on fulfilling his promise to ruin Frankestein's life.

The monster then enacts his vengeance, murdering Victor's best friend, his new wife, and causing so much heartache to Victor's father that he too dies of a broken heart. With nothing left to live for, Victor Frankenstein makes killing the monster the sole goal of his life. He chases him all across Europe and even almost all the way to the North Pole.

The former scientific genius becomes consumed with worry and anguish and fear. He is afraid that everyone he loves is doomed and he his right. But it is not the inhumanity of his creation that proves Frankestein's undoing, it is his own. He has no sympathy, no compassion. He sees only what his fear tells him to see. He sees a monster so he creates one, not when he breathes life into a corpse, but when he believed his creation to be unworthy of love. And, ultimately, love is all the monster wants.

Like any good horror story, the genre it created, "Frankenstein" is a warning. It is Shelley's warning to be careful to not put too much stock in the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. As wonderful and inspiring as technology is, as important as it is for humans to constantly push the boundaries of what is possible, it is even more important for us to be guided by principles, to remember that just because we can do something doesn't always mean that we should. It is a warning to never obsess over work and professional pursuits at the expense of other, more valuable things. Shelly's novel also serves as a reminder that often, much of the hardships we find ourselves the victims of are the results of evil we ourselves put into the world. Violence only begets violence and vengeance is ultimately an empty pursuit.

Most importantly, most poignantly, "Frankenstein" is a warning to never surrender our capacity for empathy, our compassion to fear of the unknown. Just because something is not beautiful it is no less worthy of our love. You can find inspiration even in the most unlikely of places. Men like John Rabe and Claus Von Stauffenberg remind you that even amongst Hitler's Nazis, there were men who were worthy of respect and admiration. And men like Hal Halvorsen remind you that even the smallest acts of mercy and compassion can affect the course of world history. This is a common theme you have noticed arising throughout all of the books you find yourself reading lately, both fiction and nonfiction... maybe it is a common theme amongst all story tellers. The greatest evil humanity can commit is always a result of our refusing to recognize the humanity in others. The greatest good we can perform is always a result of embracing that quality in others. Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein" was a reminder that sometimes you have to embrace that humanity even in the most monstrous and hideous among us.





On to the next book!