Warriors and Scholars: A Modern War Reader (review)

This readable and well-edited book is neither a text nor a comprehensive history of war, nor does it have much to do with the Cold War as covered by this journal. Rather, it is a combination of diverse elements, including some truly harrowing accounts of combat experience at the most human and bewildering level and as prisoners of war; some rather potted but interesting capsule histories of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War; two essays on the Cold War; and two brief discussions of terrorism and insurgency, past and present. The book thus offers a potpourri of reflections on war, mostly hot wars and mostly by retired U.S. military officers. In a way, it amounts to a set of Cliff's Notes on the U.S. experience in war (except for David Glantz's chapter about the Soviet role in World War II), though it is an incomplete set.

The chapters by Roy Appleton, John Luckadoo, David Braden, Edwin Simmons, Henry Gole, and David Winn provide the views of those who have come under hostile fire. Appleton and Gole were grunts in the U.S. Army in World War II and Korea, respectively. Luckadoo and Braden dropped bombs on Germany and Japan, respectively. Simmons fought on the ground in Korea but provides a broader history of that war. Winn, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, conveys all the desperation and hope displayed by those unfortunate soldiers. On the ground and from the air, the human slaughter was immense, both of soldiers and of civilians. The enormous attrition of bombers in World War II, both to enemy fire and to malfunction, is astounding. The message that comes across in all these chapters is the mindlessness of it all—at least to the participants in day-to-day conflict, whether on the ground, in the air, or in prison. None of them knew the political leaders who sent them to war or the goals they were supposedly pursuing when making their sacrifices.

The histories written from a more detached perspective are mere capsules, with useful footnotes added by the editors. Glantz covers the immense battles between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, recounting the terrible slaughter of that war. Simmons provides a short history of the Korean War. Russell Dougherty's chapter on the early Cold War is mostly a paean to General Curtis LeMay. Charles Hamm recalls his tour as U.S. defense attaché in Moscow during the late Cold War, when, it seems, nothing happened unless the KGB state security forces (he does not mention Soviet military intelligence or the Internal Affairs Ministry) let it happen. What Dougherty does not say is that LeMay, the commander of bombing campaigns against Japan who later was eager to bomb the Soviet Union, was gradually marginalized as the concept of deterrence acquired greater sophistication. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was left grumbling in the back row.

The historian Robert Divine provides a compact description of the wartime context in which President Harry Truman decided to drop two nuclear bombs on Japan. He wryly notes that one of the benefits of Truman's decision is that the bombings provided true-life evidence about the unprecedented horror that nuclear weapons could cause, a horror that eclipses even the gruesome experiences recounted by the former infantrymen and bomber pilots earlier in the book. The historian George Herring provides a good, concise account of the agony that Lyndon Johnson suffered over Vietnam—with Johnson acknowledging that it was his war. We can ponder this admission as the Bush administration's war in Iraq stretches as long as Johnson's war in Vietnam. In the latter case, the grunts and pilots, including the one prisoner, who contributed to this book hardly knew what the politicians on high were thinking about.

Finally, unconventional forms of warfare are covered by Norman Itzkowitz on terrorism and Brian Linn on...