Iconic albums: The Wall by Pink Floyd will always be among them. The first time I listened to the album, it had a powerful impact on my middle-school-boy self, who keyed in on Roger Walter’s angst over his father’s death in WW2. The most memorable part of the album for me was hearing Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again.” The melancholic optimism was haunting.
Vera Lynn was a powerful influence for all “her boys;” the British soldiers fighting in WW2. Roger Waters wrote a tribute memorializing her importance and the scene in the movie is operatic:
Vera Lynn died June 18, 2020 aged 103. NPR coverage. The Economist summed her life and enduring impact:
Her biography is inspiring and emblematic of the grit shown by Britain when they alone stood against Hitler after Europe collapsed. [1]
Vera’s death coincides with my reading of Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (2017). (The New Yorker review of the book.)
Victor Davis Hanson’s work on classical warfare was pioneering and inspired in part by John Keegan’s The Face of Battle. Hanson has a clear vision of warfare as an unfortunate but unavoidable part of the human condition. His analysis of the human failures and frailties that lead to the outbreak of WW2 is a continuation of his earlier work. All worth reading and it starts with The Western Way of War.
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow of the Stanford Hoover Institution.
In all published material on Ueshiba’s biography, his participation in the Russo-Japanese war and later incursion into Mongolia (1924) is downplayed. Listen again to Hanson’s summary of the war being about targeting civilians and the effectiveness of Japanese killing Chinese (1931-1945).
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[1] Never forget: Britain was the only combatant to enter the war on principal (in response to the invasion of Poland), the only allied country that fought the entire duration of the war, and stood alone against Nazi Germany after the collapse of Europe. They were the last best hope until the United States entered as a combatant.
Tyler Cowen pointed to a recent publication Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime. His brief review had this excerpt:
In stark contrast to the Germans, in the French army there was “no large-scale examination of the lessons of the last war by a significant portion of the officers corps.” Partly as a result, the lessons that the French army drew from world War I led to a warfighting doctrine that was nearly the polar opposite of that developed by the Germans. The French army assumed that the next war in Europe would largely resemble the last. The staggering number of French casualties during World War I led French leaders to conclude that an offensive doctrine would prove both indecisive and prohibitively costly. They reasoned that a defensive doctrine would best preserve their fighting power and prevent the enemy from winning another major war through an offensive strike. As a result, nearly all French interwar thinking focused on leveraging defensive operations to prevail in any future war.
You cannot win by defending. And stream-of-consciousness leads me to that wonderfully disparaging characterization of the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” Thank you to The Simpsons (1995)!
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