Category: HISTORY

“What General Weygand has called The Battle of France is over. The battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization  Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour'”

                                        Winston Churchill  June 18, 1940

75 years ago this month, in a September 17th meeting with his military staff, Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Germany and the conqueror of continental Europe, heard the disparaging news that his air forces were not going to be able to sustain mounting losses and still hope to support a cross channel invasion of Great Britain.  Three days later, unbeknownst to the British, who had months of horrific losses ahead of them in nighttime bombing later referred to as the Blitz, Hitler effectively suspended the initiation of the cross channel invasion, Operation Sea Lion, and in doing so, changed the outcome of history.  The battle of which Churchill so eloquently spoke of  just three short months before, had turned back the greatest war machine ever known through the savvy, will, and courage of perhaps the fewest people one could imagine. 75 years later, it looks like no less a miracle, and ever more important, as we are currently called to summon our will again to combat a marauding evil.

When Churchill spoke to the House of Commons in June 1940, he saw a world where his Britain was the last remaining obstacle to securing Hitler’s stunning successful conquest of the European land mass and the subjugation of the cultures that had determined western civilization for the past five hundred years. The challenge looked immense, if not hopeless, to most, including members of his inner circle.  The United States, Churchill’s hoped for ally that might turn the tide, had no inclination to get involved in a trans ocean struggle and was nowhere near ready to do so, if it had so inclined.   The United States Ambassador Joseph Kennedy saw in the British a dying empire with no hope of  stopping Hitler, and recommended no American support.  The Germans as recently as May had gone through the French million man army in a mere six weeks, and the British had narrowly escaped with the remnants of their forces at Dunkirk in a hastily produced withdrawal that was a victory only in avoiding  disastrous capture or destruction of the entire British expeditionary army. The Soviet Union has earlier made its own pact with Hitler and swept into eastern Poland and Finland, to secure its own land grab, giving Hitler the ability to focus full attention on Britain.

Full attention meant the world’s largest war machine pointed at the nation that had just had it handed to it over the preceding 6 months in Norway, and then France. The only hope lay in the difficulties of achieving a cross channel invasion.  This had not been successfully achieved (without invitation) since 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings, and William had not had to worry about battleships or airplanes during the crossing.  The Germans initiated the preamble to Sea Lion in July, 1940 , with a massive daily air attack to destroy Britain’s capacity for defense, with the plan’s logic the destruction of the British Royal Air Force, and with it, the last chance to fend off a cross channel invasion fleet.  And so history was joined to the destinies of individual pilots, the German contingent looking to attack, the British looking to eliminate, in a deadly battle of attrition that bound one to exhaust the fighting capacity of the other.  Planes as machinery were difficult to replace, but pilots – able pilots were irreplaceable.  The destiny of a several hundred thousand man invasion force  therefore lay in the hands of several thousand trained pilots on each side, capable of the skills and experience required to marshall the  maneuvers of a modern aircraft.  Each day a massive bombing force from the continent looked to destroy British will, and each time a group of intrepid fighter pilots in Hurricanes and Spitfires looked to drive the Germans into the sea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The battle was every bit about individual courage, but it was also about revolutionary tactics.  The Germans were late to the understanding of the significance of radar and a sophisticated forward spotting network. The British airmen did not have the ability to be everywhere, but sophisticated tracking allowed the concept of force magnification by getting fighters from far afield to the appropriate intercept point with uncanny accuracy. The Germans had somewhat more powerful aircraft in straight line speed, but poor fuel capacity to the extent that for the escort fighters, only about ten minutes of dog fight capacity was present before the fighters had to turn to home across the channel, leaving the bombers exposed. The german bombers were instructed to destroy the airfields and planes initially, a task that proved difficult given the ferocity of the resistance and the accuracy of bombing at the time,  That left British industrial capacity for the most part untouched, allowing the capable replacement of the air machinery above loss rate.  Eventually, the German losses mounted and the raids turned to night bombing of civilian areas, bringing horrific casualties on the ground in the tens of thousands.

By mid-October, though the ferocity of the bombing was nowhere near done and the Blitz continued until May 1941, when Hitler re-directed his assets east toward Russia, The idea of a successful cross channel invasion was scrapped by the Germans.  The Battle of Britain had resulted in the loss of over 1600 German piloted aircraft, compared to 1400 RAF.  More importantly, it removed the word inevitable to describe the German war machine and proved a democratic people could develop the powerful martial instincts necessary to combat a remorseless leviathan.  As Churchill was to say in words that have become immortal regarding the Battle of Britain participants : “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”  In a war that may have resulted in as much as 25 million military deaths, the sacrifice of less than two thousand airmen may have changed the entire course of the war, and history itself.

75 years is such a time period, that the few that lived through the moment are in no position to teach the current generation of the necessity at times to defend one’s civilization.  No invasion took place of the British Isles, because a determined population believed their view of civilization was worth fighting for, no matter what the odds, and potentially at total cost. Surrender of a way of life and tradition of respect for others was thought less worthy than the loss of one’s life for the chance of preserving such principles.  Mr. Morley, the milkman in the photo above, saw the surrounding devastation as an obstacle to overcome in his call to preserve a civilized society, not a sign that self preservation was called for. Delivering milk to people who needed it, is what was done in a civilized society, and to stop, would to suggest the barbarians had won. And that, was unthinkable.  Civilization once again proved itself to be a bottom-up phenomena, barbarism top down.  The shadows of such distant history show us today that our civilization’s decline will occur only if we as individuals stop caring about our role in civility.  The island of Britain, all alone, against indescribable odds, showed what one could do, if civilization was your cause.  We again to look to Churchill whose words resonate for those of us who see the immensity of the task ahead of us in a time where surrender is all around us – ” You must just KBO!”

Keep Buggering On.

 

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.
                                                                                                                                                 Joan of Arc

As this Memorial Day descends upon us, the tendency to forget the core of the day, and celebrate instead its release from the weekly grind is strong.  In a democracy, however, in which the request to serve the nation and potentially give one’s limb or life for whatever dedicated purpose the nation’s leadership purports worth sacrificing for is a voluntary decision, the need to feel the day viscerally is critical to the nation’s existence.  Each individual sacrifice is unredeemable loss.  The important question is- is the national purpose worthy of the accumulated sacrifice?  Without the belief that the nation’s goals are purposeful and just, can anyone expect to continue to maintain the level of profound dedication and quality of those who have served at the ramparts of  this nation for over 200 years?

We live in dangerous times. But the determination by the nation’s leaders as to the need to confront dangers has been present since inception.  Some times requiring sacrifice have been heroically worthy, others in retrospect, less than heroic, but to the individual asked to sacrifice, the belief in and love for comrades, brought dignity to the sacrifice, no matter how difficult it was to recognize the logic of the action.  The military of the United States has been asked to sacrifice almost continuously from the nation’s birth to the present day:

• American revolutionary War                    1775-1783                           25,000
•  Northwest Indian War                               1785-1795                               1056
•  U.S. European Quasi-War                         798-1800                                 514
•  War of 1812                                                  1812-1815                           20,000
• 1st Seminole War                                        1817-1818                                   36
• Black Hawk War                                                   1832                                 305
•  2nd Seminole War                                     1835-1842                               1,535
• Mexican-American War                           1846-1848                             13,283
• 3rd Seminole War                                     1855-1858                                    26
• American Civil War                                  1861-1865                           625,000
•  Indian Wars                                               1865-1898                                  920
• Great Sioux War                                        1875-1877                                   314
• Spanish-American War                            1898                                          2,446
• Phillippine Insurrection                          1898 -1913                               4,196
• Boxer Rebellion                                        1900-1901                                    131
• Mexican Revolution                                1914-1919                                       35
• Haiti Occupation                                     1915-1934                                     148
• World War I                                             1917-1918                               116,516
• American Campaign/ Russia               1918-1920                                     752
• Nicaragua  Occupation                          1927-1933                                       48
• World War II                                           1941-1945                              405,399
• Korean War                                             1950-1953                                36,516
• Vietnam War                                           1955-1975                                58,209
• El Salvador Civil War                            1980-1982                                       37
• Lebanon/Beirut                                      1982-1984                                     266
• Grenada                                                              1983                                        19
• Panama                                                              1989                                        40
• Persian Gulf War Desert Storm          1990-1991                                      258
• Kurdish Defense                                    1991-1996                                        19
• Somalia Intervention                           1992-1995                                        43
• Bosnia                                                     1995-2004                                       12
• NATO Campaign Yugoslavia                        1999                                        20
• Afghanistan                                           2001-2015                                   2,356
• Iraq                                                         2003-2013                                  4,489
• Cold War                                               1948 – present                     Undocumented
• CIA Wars                                              1943- present                Undocumented                                      attrib./ militaryfactory.com

Over 1.2 million Americans have died in action since the nation’s inception.  Millions more have been injured and maimed, their lives changed forever.  To the individual serving his or her country, the purposeful sacrifice was no less heroic in the questionable principles or merits of the actions of the Great Sioux War or Philippine Insurrection as it would be in the visible threat and evil in World War II.  Ultimately a country is judged by both the priniciples underlying an action and in the ultimate success of that action.  To the families left behind, the loss is assuaged faintly ,but perceptively, if the loss was not “in vain” or “for a good cause.”  To note that the individual did their job to the ultimate, but the nation’s leadership failed theirs, adds only pain to the already tremendous burden accompanying sacrifice.  More and more, it seems the nation’s leaders are struggling to indicate the value principles of actions, and to see them through to the completion of the goals, assuring the sacrifices required might be worthy of their request.

A prime example of the detachment of leadership from the need to understand what the sacrifices have engendered are the brutal and now thrown away sacrifices of Fallujah.  The harrowing photo above captures one small but seminal event in the horrific Second Battle of Fallujah fought by US Marine and Army forces against Al Qaeda in November,2004.  The progressive crumbling and mismanagement of the supposed American “victory” over the Iraq army of Saddam Hussein in 2003 became clear in the Anbar Province city of Fallujah. The peace was ruptured and a challenge to the American assumptions regarding Iraq was placed,  with the Al Qaeda calling card of 4 burnt and hung American contractor corpses on a Fallujah bridge for all to see.  The First Battle of Fallujah in April, 2004, by the Marine Corps rousted out the initial Al Qaeda forces only to turn over the local policing of the city to a Sunni division of the ‘new’ Iraqi army, the Fallujah Brigade,  led by a former Baathist general Latif.  Ignorant of the long standing hostility of the Sunni locals to the now Shia overloads in Baghdad, the Fallujah Brigade ‘defended” the city by allowing thousands of Al Qaeda insurgents to nest and take over the city under the leadership of Musab Al Zarqawi, a vicious terrorist warlord whose goal was the expulsion of Americans and the slaughter of the Shia and Kurd Iraqi segments of Iraq.  The city became a place of horror to the subjugated, full of fascist Chechians, Somalis, and Syrians imposing their will and looking forward to Armageddon with the Americans.  The need to destroy the new fortress of the growing Al Qaeda threat led to the second battle of Fallujah.

The Second Battle of Fallujah is considered some of the most difficult and violent urban warfare American troops have faced.  The six months in between American intervention had been used by Al Qaeda to turn Fallujah into a deathtrap.  The narrow alleyways of the ancient city were full of explosive devices.  The stair wells of buildings were bricked to create dead ends were American troops could be slaughtered by hidden machine guns. The Al Qaeda troops were allowed drugs to stimulate aggression and super human strength to buttress their courage and sense of sacrifice. The battle was fought door to door, alley to alley, hand to hand in a gruesome dance to the death.  The brave forces that faced the killing machine in Fallujah, lost 107 dead and 613 wounded to take back in brutal combat what they had given away just six months before.  The two month action has been felt to rival the battle for Hue in Vietnam or the Pacific campaigns of World War II in ferocity.  The Second Battle of Fallujah is a story of sacrifice – the picture above relates the purest form, a soldier under direct fire risking all and coming back for his wounded comrade, only to fall himself under the same torrent of enemy fire.

And what is it all for, such sacrifice?  Fallujah, now stabilized in 2004 through such heroics, required more sacrifice in a Third Battle of Fallujah in 2007 with the Surge, before finally achieving with the rest of Iraq a measured and sustainable peace.  But peace did come, and the sacrifices by so many could at least be measured in victory – until it was thrown away by American political leadership in 2011. Eager to prove the politics of American presence in the Middle East wrong, the Obama administration was willing to withdraw Americans and the risk the hard won gains of Fallujah and so many other Iraqi conflict sites  for their own political satisfaction.  The result is almost complete nullification of the 4,489 Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq, and the tens of thousands more scarred forever by their efforts.

Memorial Day is for remembrance.  It is for taking a moment to demand that sacrifice not be asked of individuals when the national leadership is not up to securing those sacrifices for the long term.  Those mighty warriors of Fallujah and so many other battlefields around the world had some measure of confidence that the nation shared their beliefs and would stand by their sacrifice to the end.  As Joan of Ark said, to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief,  that is a fate worse than dying.  That’s true for nations as well as individuals.  A nation without the strength of its belief in its guiding principle, is already as dead as the brave people it asked to sacrifice for it.  The walking dead political class of Washington better take notice.

On this Memorial Day, a special thank you for all that have given so much  and selflessly served their country, in particular my own father, who served his country in both the army and navy, denying only the skies above  the contributions of his courage and patriotism.

 

 

At 300 pm, May 8th 1945,  the formal, unconditional surrender of the forces of Germany to the United Nations forces occurred, and the war state that had nearly destroyed Europe lapsed into a peace of sort.  The million man armies of the warring nations on the continent stopped their organized efforts to obliterate each other, and for the first time since September 1st, 1939, the outcome was officially assured.  For the 20 year old infantry man on the front lines on May 8th, the miserable sensation of potentially being the last man to die for his cause so close to the end of judgement mercifully came for a time to a close. As it did for the 24 year old captain, the 30 year old major, 34 year old colonel, and the 44 year old general.  Now 70 years later on the 70th anniversary occasion of VE Day – the day the official end of the war in Europe – the few captains of those men that can say they were there, are 94 years of age and the men they led 90, and all the rest are lost to the mists of time.

At the conclusion of the European portion of the conflict known as World War II, the military colossus astride the world was not one of the ones present at the start of it. The U.S Army in 1939, the year of the European war’s initiation with Germany’s Blitzkrieg into Poland, stood at 178,000 men, the 19th largest force in the world positioned meekly in size between those of Portugal and Bulgaria.  On VE Day, the United States had 12.8 million people in uniform and over 9 million of them in fighting forces across the globe.  By the end, it could project 100 fighting divisions, 60 aircraft carriers, thousands of fighters and bombers, and probably the most devastating submarine service  in the world.  This massive force was linked to the greatest economic production capacity the world had ever seen, supported by the most effective logistics, and capable if necessary of taking the war to any corner of the world with overwhelming weaponry.  With VE Day, those 8 million fighting men turned their martial attentions to defeating the last of the axis of evil, the Japanese Empire, with a horrific and staggering one million casualties estimated still to be necessary to subdue the fanatical mainland defenses of Japan, beyond the 600,000 casualties the Americans had sustained since entering the war three years before.

The picture above reminds us, seventy years later, that the outcome eventually achieved by  the combined titanic forces of the allied nations needed to defeat the Nazi war machine, paradoxically revolved around one man, Winston Churchill.  From the fall of France in May, 1940, until December 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Great Britain stood completely alone in the way of the incredible German military behemoth. One must remember that by May 10th, 1940, the entire continent of Europe was secure in the hands of the Nazi warlord, and the other totalitarian military power, the Soviet Union, was  six months into a nearly two year period cooperating with Germany as its ally in the domination of Europe through treaty.  The scrap remnants of British and Free French forces had escaped destruction of Dunkirk by the barest of margins, leaving Great Britain nearly defenseless to a determined German assault.  Great Britain, was alone and by most measures defeated, and everybody thought so.  Everybody except Winston Churchill, who gambled that the seas that had always provided the buffer for Great Britain. might just allow a certain technical difficulty sufficient to forestall any easy land invasion of the island, and that the ownership of the skies could assist in the delay until Great Britain could somehow convince the Untied States that the means for self preservation lay with fighting the Nazis on the continent of Europe, not the coasts of America.  When no one else believed, Churchill ringingly enunciated belief ,and his words served as power as significant as any division or battleship. He would not quit, and thereby Great Britain would not quit, no matter how overwhelming the odds.  The counterfactual of a world without Winston Churchill easily could be discerned, with a prostrate Great Britain seeking to avoid invasion through  a calamitous peace of enslavement with the Nazis, the Soviet Union soon to face its erstwhile ally now alone, with no counterforce nipping at its heels, and the United States, the buffers of oceans insufficient to successfully fight off the entire rest of the world.  Instead what proved to be Great Britain’s finest hour was ultimately because of the pugnacious leadership of the descendant of the Duke of Marlborough channeling his ancient ancestor.

May  8th, 1945, brought to the end the 2000 year history of Europe as the helmsmen of world history, initiated with Alexander’s conquest of the East in the 4th century BC, through the thousand year dominance of the Roman Empire, the linking of Christendom to the remnants of empire marshaling forth the enormous energies of the warrior kings of The Holy Roman Empire, Spain, and France, the spark of the birth of the individual genius in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the power of the Industrial Revolution and the reach of the citizen marine of Great Britain, that brought the efficient transfer of goods, administration, and connecting language across most of the globe.  On V-E Day a bankrupt and exhausted Great Britain was incapable of funding even a day of its own recovery, and the once formidable nation states of Europe forged from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 at the end of the previous devastating Thirty Years War , lay crushed under the combined weight of the sacrifice of multiple generations of youth and almost 80 million dead in the second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945.  The decisions as to the helmsmen of future civilization and power projection instead on that day 70 years ago stood in the grip of the colossus of the New World and the Slavic Empire of the Eurasian continent, and the basic status quo remains to this day, with Europe incapable of projection of influential power by any significant means.

May 8th, 1945 asked America to take on the mantle of helmsmen for those that had made civilization western, and in the seventy years since, when there were ramparts to be defended, America was there.  When the world needed an injection of technology, America provided it.  When the world was in crisis and needed food and assistance America marshaled the resources. At this seventieth anniversary, one has to ask if America has succumbed to the fatigue of sacrifice and endurance required to be the helmsman of so long a tradition, with the contraction of America’s willingness to lead over the last six years.  There does not appear to be any Churchill out there to focus our attentions on the task at hand.

May 8th, 1945, however, most especially brought that unique moment when there was almost universal acknowledgement that the forces of good had triumphed over a marauding evil.  An evil so malign, that the most advanced structure of civilized social structure, education, and culture had succumbed to its dark forces, and that had come to within an eye-blink of dominating the entire globe.  A world in which racial genetics, perverted science, and ruthless totalitarianism would have extinguished any whisper of the world’s diversity, creativity, and individual destiny.   But on May 8th, the most technologically advanced pervaders  of programmed death the world had ever seen, the Nazis, had Quit, and the world deservingly rejoiced.

To reach beyond the mists of time and bring immediacy to the events that gripped a nation one hundred fifty years ago is an extremely difficult proposition. The war that cleaved across the breath of the American land mass and struck into the life blood of nearly every American family is at best a distant recollection and for most has little emotional relevance.  The modern society struggles to understand the passion and commitment individual Americans brought to the concepts of union, liberty, individual rights, and the relationship of a governed people to its government that so stirred the nation to the cataclysmic conflict.  From Sharpsburg, Maryland to Glorieta Pass, New Mexico, the remnants of titanic battle scattered among fields, cemeteries, memorials and roads the strategic value of which are known to few and passed by millions without a glint of recognition of what lies beneath the traveled path.

It has not always been so.  The intense emotions that built over 30 years and exploded in the war that cost over 600,000 lives and immense destruction were for decades an acute sensation in the hearts of both north and south.  The events at Appomattox that culminated in the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia on April 9th, 1865 were documented in the previous Ramparts, but the final act of the tragedy that forever secured the sacristy of the conflict was the murder of the national leader five days later on April 14, 1865.  In a conflict that demanded the loss of so many, it was the almost Christ like death of Abraham Lincoln that seemed to stop the process of destruction forever in its tracks, as if a provision  for washing the sins away for a wayward people had been pre-ordained.  The stolen life of a single man seemed to bring a closure not possible through any other contemplated outcome.

On April 14th, 1865, the President of a United States that had fought an epic battle with itself for its very unity, was reported by many observers that day to be in an especially ebullient mood.  He participated in a productive cabinet meeting in which he laid out his determination to steer a magnanimous course for the nation’s reconstruction, and for the first time in many nights planned a strictly social outing that evening to attend a popular play currently playing at the Ford’s theater in Washington ,Our American Cousin.  He had invited his victorious general of the armies, U.S. Grant, to accompany the President and his wife, but due to a relative lack of comfort the two wives had for each other, Grant deferred.  The President looking forward to the life affirming experience of laughter after so many years of crushing responsibility and tragedy, determined to go anyway.

It was Lincoln’s fate that the leading actor of the playhouse, John Wilkes Booth, saw himself as an actor on a far greater stage than that of the local theater, and had for months determined to play a defining role in history.  The headmaster of a particularly bizarre gaggle of malcontents and miscreant Southern sympathizers,  Booth self-identified  as the avenger to reverse the fortunes of a conflict that the South had for months progressively pointed toward defeat.  With the South’s defeat assured with its army’s collapse at Appomattox, Booth somehow convinced himself that with an epic sacrifice, the tide would be reversed.  The cleansing act would be the decapitation of the Union leadership, with the violent deaths of the President, leading General, Vice President and Secretary of State to so shock the North that it would sue for peace and give the South the breathing room it needed.  The cockamamie plan required the simultaneous actions of multiple conspirators, but Booth gave himself the honor of removing the hated victorious President .

It was a sign of the innocence of the times that Booth and his fellow conspirators came as close as they did to accomplishing the calamitous plan.  As the President sat in the Presidential box at Ford’s to enjoy the play, Booth’s fellow conspirators fanned across Washington to remove the other stalwarts of government.  The conspirator Lewis Powell showed the most malevolent commitment, entering the house of the Secretary of State  William Seward, viciously attacking Seward’s son nearly killing him, then cascading up the stairs of the residence to enter the bedroom of the prostrate Seward, who had been severely injured in a recent carriage accident and was recovering.  Slashing with a knife, Powell nearly killed the Secretary of State before being incapacitated by the Secretary’s other sons and household servants.  The conspirator Atzerodt was positioned at the Willard Hotel, the residence of the Vice President of the United States, Andrew Johnson, but lost his nerve to attack and went off to get drunk, thus saving the Vice President for the honor of replacing the irreplaceable.

The penultimate act was left to Booth himself.  The President resided at the theater in a box accompanied by an army major, Henry Rathbone, Rathbone’s fiancé, and the President’s wife.  The President’s security detail was, stunningly given the emotions of the times, a single police officer, John Frederick Parker, who determined to be across the street at a tavern during the play’s intermission and never returned, leaving the President accessible to anyone who determined to enter the box.  Booth, as a celebrity, had no problem entering the Presidential box, and waited for an acknowledged line in the play that never failed to bring laughter across the house.  With the comedic line delivered, the President leaned back and with his last conscious act enjoyed a final moment of relaxed joy, as Booth positioned himself directly behind the president, placed a revolver against the President’s head – and fired.

A single bullet from close range entered President Lincoln’s brain from the left and lodged behind his right eye, and for all intent he joined the hundreds of thousands who passed in the war’s previous days and years, as the final sacrifice of a country’s death spasm.  The laughing crowd did not immediately interpret the muffled shot as apart from the play as the terminally wounded President slumped forward, then back, but the experienced Major Rathbone recognized the sound and scent of gunpowder and sprung into the assassin. Booth struck him with a knife and managed to free himself from Rathbone’s grasp, then leapt from the box only to catch his boot on the patriotic bunting and awkwardly fell the twelve feet to the stage , breaking his ankle.  The 1700 attendants to the nation’s first presidential assassination slowly grasped the reality, and turned their gaze to the box, then to Booth as he exclaimed an oath, eventually codified in legend as “sic semper tyrannis” – “thus always, to tyrants!”, though the actual words were heard differently be every shocked person close enough to hear them.  Booth ran off the stage and into history as devil incarnate, destroying any chance the nation had at a measured and wise reconciliation.

The unconscious President was brought across the street to the Peterson House, where military surgeons quickly determined the wound to be fatal.  So began the vigil of the President’s family, government leaders, and the nation, with President Lincoln drawing his last  breath at 7:22 am on April 15th, 1865.  As word spread of the events of the night and the President’s death, the stunned realization that the President who had somehow shepherded the country through four years of incalculable horror, had at the very moment of triumph and peace, been sacrificed at the altar of a sinful nation, progressively took hold.  Lincoln, in life, who had been viewed variably by the many touched by the conflict, began to assume in such a senseless death, a sanctification that seemed almost inevitable.  A man who had come from the simplest of roots, had grown to lead a people with an almost devine sense of the way forward when many around him felt lost.  The careful and gracefully beautiful language, the context of the words, the steady and careful hand of leadership, the bottomless well of humanity inherent in this man came to represent the whole of the goodness of those who endeavored to leave their homes and safety and risk all for the concept of a just cause.

The funereal journey seized the national consciousness, as did the furious manhunt for the conspirators.  The murderer Booth met his end 9 days later in a shootout at a Virginia barn; the other conspirators were hunted down and eventually met their fate at the end of a hangman’s noose. The vengeance though complete, seemed so unequal to the loss.

With the passing of the years, Lincoln’s stature has grown to where he is seen as the equal of the greatest of leaders in human history.  As Secretary Stanton preciently stated upon witnessing the moment of the great man’s death, “Now he belongs to the Ages..”  A man so much of his own time, Lincoln spoke of the potential of mankind as God’s vehicle for a better time, to be touched, as he so beautifully expressed, by the better angels of our nature. In our current day, where horrors once again abound, Lincoln’s profound humanity soars above his moment on earth, and truly belongs to our age every bit as all the others. In such ageless humanity, lies for us  the slightest glimmer of hope.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
William Tecumseh Sherman

 

April 2015 is the 150th anniversary of the denouement of the American Civil War, the calamity that defined the nation and whose tendrils still refine the consciousness of its people. As history recedes as an area of interest for the average American, the fundamental and inexorable causes leading to the war and the intensity and sacrifice of millions of people to the concept of a cause seems a trite and faded memory of a long ago time.  The America that saw ideals as concepts to be defended with life as necessary doesn’t seem real to the current generation, who see the nation as a means of dispensing resources, and not a standard to uphold.  To the American of 1861-1865, however, ideals were very real things and were equally real to the farmer from Wisconsin, the plantation owner from Mississippi, the news editor from New York, or the slave laborer in Alabama. For each the ideals were different, but the stakes in losing, total.How to persuade someone to whom losing is not an option, that they have indeed lost, is the centerpiece of any calamitous conflict, and the story of the last 14 days of the civil war are as eventful as any before.

Ramparts has addressed the unique circumstances of the final day of surrender of General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia before, but of equal historical interest is the final acts that led to the concluding day.  As we enter the story 150 years later, a cursory reminder of the tactics leading to the final chapter is appropriate for perspective.  Although the Civil War may on the surface seem archaic for its fixed set-piece battles and agonal use of men as expendable targets of attrition, the tactics by both sides following the elevation of General Grant to supreme commander of the Union forces following the victories of July , 1863 at Vicksburg and Gettysburg were extremely modern and innovative.  For the Union north, with superior resources and population, the plan outlined by Grant to President Lincoln was continental in scope and consistent with the modern concept that the morale and comfort of the population supporting the enemy army was the true target to weaken and destroy the army.  Grant’s comprehensive plan was for General Meade’s Army of the Potomac to find, pin down and decimate Lee’s Army of Virginia while the Army groups of Sherman, Braggs, and Butler were to wreak havoc in the South’s interior, destroying communications, railways, and supplies, bringing the war to the doorstep of the population of the South,  and carving up the residual Confederate armies into more and more isolated and digestible units.  General Lee’s plans were equally modern.  Lee sought to maintain superior ground, interior lines of communication, and bleed the opponent white to such an extent that the never ending war would be too expensive for the northern population to tolerate any longer.

The initial experiences of 1864 suggested Lee would be right as Grant was aggressively drawn in to bloodbath after blood bath in Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania to Cold Harbor and finally into a miserable trench warfare at Petersburg on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital.  In the first thirty days of the Overland campaign, Grant stunningly lost over 54,000 men and was perceived as a ‘butcher’ in the northern press. But the the Army of Northern Virginia was now pinned down, and the rest of Grant’s plan began to play out, with Sherman eventually laying devastation to the deep south through Atlanta, through Georgia to the coast at Savannah, then brutally through the Carolinas.  By the end of March, 1865, it was Lee who was reactive and  desperate for materials and men, and Grant who was reinforced and aggressive.

Yet, the conflict was fought by men to whom death was preferable to loss of ideal, and despite the staggering differences by this time in both men and material, the end was not one of timid collapse but rather one of a contest of inch by bitter inch.  It is often inconceivable to imagine the ability to fight tenaciously when all odds are against you and surrender would allow self preservation, but the sense of hopelessness seems to somehow instill tenacity beyond all sense.  A weakened southern army remained a bunch of badgers led by a lion, and Grant still sought the means to somehow crack the will of the committed.

After nine months of battles and siege at Petersburg, the Southern trench lines had finally been stretched to the point of cracking, and Grant determined that if a  crack were to be developed, a tsunami would follow.  Lee felt the pressure first and attempted a breakout on Grant’s right at Fort Steadman on March 25th,1865, with initial success in puncturing the edge of the northern line only to be crushed by a furious Union counterattack.  The southern forces retreated to their trenches but severe damage had been done to Southern infantry strength with over 4000 casualties and no means of reinforcing.  Grant seized

the opportunity and on March 29, a crack was finally developed in the impenetrable southern defenses and Grant’s VIth Corp lanced inward and forced the South to contract and support. General Sheridan’s Cavalry force, by this time as feared as any the South had developed swung around the union left to attempt the severing of Lee’s supply lifeline at Five Forks on April 1st, 1865, and the result was catastrophic for the South with envelopment of over 8000 troops of general Pickett and collapse of Lee’s right flank. On April 2nd, Grant found the final crack on the right and the crack became a deluge as two Union Army Corps poured through the decimated defenses.  Lee found himself now surrounded on three sides and had to evacuate the trenches of Petersburg and the Confederate capital city of Richmond.

The Army of Northern Virginia was now on the run, and unlike every other time in the war with similar circumstance, such as McClellan after Antietam and Meade after Gettysburg, Grant recognized the opportunity for a final kill and performed a perfect pursuit and destruction.  Lee had one chance remaining, to achieve supply support at Appomattox and attempt to rejoin the Southern Army of the Carolinas, now fighting off Sherman’s crushing attacks.

Grant assumed the role of anaconda and pursued, pinned, and cut off fragments of Lee’s support until the envelopment was total on April 9th, 1865 and Lee was forced to acknowledge he was the fox surrounded by hounds, and the end was inevitable.  To assume that such considerations led men to becoming self-preserving is to deny that the final 14 day struggle took over ten thousand lives, with neither army letting up an ounce.  For both sides, the end justified the sacrifice, and the overwhelming superiority of the Union capacities assured that inexorable force would win out over any desperate heroism.  This was a time of heroes however, who drew their own conclusions and inspiration from loyalty to their cause, and fought tooth and nail to the very end.

We are left with the famous stillness at Appomattox, where the overwhelming recognition of finality struck both sides simultaneously.  Lee, to whom losing was anathema, and Grant, who saw winning completely the only means to peace, found a way to achieve the peaceful stillness that allowed a reconciliation thought impossible only hours before.  One hundred and fifty years later, the victory stands tall as the means of preserving the original principles of the nation, that all men are created equal, and that individuals can have a full say in their destiny.  The price that both sides paid to achieve such laudable ideals is incalculable in the extent of the calamity or the effect on the families.  It was cruel, but it was necessary and it was purifying, though it took decades to fully wash out the stains.

On this 150th anniversary, we could use a reminder as to the closure we achieved as Americans, and what it required to achieve it.  In today’s superficial understanding by most as to the benefits of this great nation, a moment of stillness is in order.