Monthly Archives: June 2009

by | 12 June 2009 · 5:17 pm

Blitzkrieg: British Theory, German Practice

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 386-387:

Blitzkrieg is, of course, a German word meaning ‘lightning war’. The ironic thing is that it was in many ways a British invention, derived from the lessons of the Western Front in the First World War. Captain Basil Liddell Hart had drawn his own conclusions from the excessively high casualties suffered by both sides. As an infantry subaltern, he himself had been gassed, the long-term effects of which forced him to retire from the army in 1927, after which he turned to journalism, working as defence correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and then The Times and publishing numerous works of military history. In Liddell Hart’s view, the fatal mistake of most offensives on the Western Front had been their ponderous and predictable directness. A more ‘indirect approach’, he argued, would aim at surprising the enemy, throwing his commanders off balance, and then exploiting the ensuing confusion. The essence was to concentrate armour and air power in a lethal lightning strike. Liddell Hart defined the secret as lying

partly in the tactical combination of tanks and aircraft, partly in the unexpectedness of the stroke in direction and time, but above all in the ‘follow-through’ – the way that a break-through is exploited by a deep strategic penetration; carried out by armoured forces racing on ahead of the main army, and operating independently.

The good news for Liddell Hart was that his work was hugely influential. The bad news was that it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany, With the notable exception of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller,* senior British commanders like Field Marshal Earl Haig simply refused to accept that ‘the aeroplane, the tank [and] the motor car [would] supersede the horse in future wars’, dismissing motorized weapons as mere ‘accessories to the man and horse’. Haig’s brother concurred: the cavalry would ‘never be scrapped to make room for the tanks’. By contrast, younger German officers immediately grasped the significance of Liddell Hart’s work. Among his most avid fans was Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps in the invasion of Poland. As Guderian recalled, it was from Liddell Hart and other British pioneers of ‘a new type of warfare on the largest scale’ that he learned the importance of ‘the concentration of armour’. Moreover,

it was Liddell Hart who emphasized the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army’s communications, and [who] also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas, I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army … I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart.

Guderian – who was happy to describe himself as Liddell Hart’s disciple and pupil and even translated his works into German – had learned his lessons well. In September 1939 his panzers were unstoppable. The Poles did not, as legend has it, attempt cavalry charges against them, though mounted troops were deployed against German infantry, but they lacked adequate motor transport and their tanks were fewer and technically inferior to the Germans’. Moreover, like the Czechs before them, the Poles found Anglo-French guarantees to be militarily worthless. At the Battle of Bzura they mounted a desperate counteroffensive to hold up the German assault on Warsaw, but by September 16 their resistance was crumbling. By the 17th the Germans had reached the fortress at Bresc (Brest) on the River Bug. On September 28 Warsaw itself fell. Eight days later the last Polish troops laid down their arms. The entire campaign had lasted barely five weeks.

The Poles had fought courageously, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The most striking thing about the war in the West the following year was that the opposite was true. It was perhaps predictable that the Dutch and Belgians would succumb to superior German forces, but the fall of France within a matter of just six weeks was, as the historian Marc Bloch said, a ‘strange defeat’. Even without the support of the British Expeditionary Force, the French forces were superior on paper, an advantage that ought to have been magnified by their fighting a defensive campaign.

* Fuller had been the mastermind behind the British tank offensive at Cambrai in 1917. His frustration with the British Establishment led him to support Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

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Filed under Britain, France, Germany, military, Poland, war

by | 4 June 2009 · 11:04 am

Effects of Tang Imperialism on Its Eastern Neighbors

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 28-30:

In 631, [Tang Emperor] Taizong decided to resume the Sui policy of attacking the warlike state of Koguryŏ by sending an expedition to gather the bones of Chinese troops who had perished during earlier campaigns. Tang soldiers also pillaged Koguryŏ villages, throwing that kingdom into an uproar. The presence of massive Chinese armies on Koguryŏ soil also profoundly affected the political outlook in Paekche, Silla, and Yamato. When the Tang assaulted Koguryŏ again in 641, the elites in Paekche, Koguryo,Yamato, and Silla panicked. Between 641 and 647, militaristic, centralizing coups rocked each kingdom, as conspirators hoped to assemble the resources and troops necessary to fend off the coming Tang invasion.

In Japan, what is known as the Taika Reform took place in 645, concentrating leadership in the hands of a coterie of disenchanted royals (Princes Naka and Karu) and nobles (Nakatomi, later Fujiwara, no Kamatari). After killing off the Soga before the eyes of a startled monarch during a banquet, the rebels announced their intentions to take control of all the land and human resources of the islands, using institutions modeled after successful Chinese precedents. In other words, the best way to repel the Chinese was to copy their advanced political system and use it against them. Members of the cabal moved immediately to secure all weapons and arsenals, especially in the Kanto, home to the majority of mounted fighters. For the next fifteen years, the leaders of the Taika palace revolution struggled to play local leaders off against each other so as to concentrate power in their own hands.

The conflict in Korea, however, kept forcing its attention on the Taika leaders. After all, Paekche was a Yamato ally and a source of invaluable materials, ideas, and immigrants. Between 621 and 650, Yamato’s long-time enemy, Silla, sent envoys to the Tang court, and eventually the two cemented an alliance. Tang wanted the accord because its direct assaults on Koguryŏ were proving no more effective than those of the Sui, and the court needed an ally located at Koguryŏ’s rear. Finally, Tang and Silla decided that the best way to destroy Koguryŏ was to first conquer Paekche, a feat accomplished in 660 with an army of more than one hundred thousand. Most of the Paekche royal house fell into the hands of the alliance, but some escaped to Japan.

Beginning in 661, the Yamato court sent flotillas of small vessels to join Paekche guerillas fighting to revive their fortunes. By 663, more than twenty-five thousand Yamato troops were on erstwhile Paekche soil. At this time, a Yamato embassy was visiting the Tang court, but Taizong decreed that he had “determined … to take administrative measures in regard to the lands east of the sea, and you, visitors from Wa, may not return.” The envoys were locked in prison for months to prevent them from giving away Taizong’s plans. Later that year, the Tang navy and Silla army crushed the Yamato troops and Paekche partisans at the Battle of the Paekch’on River. It was one of the most decisive engagements in Japanese history.

Prince Naka and his supporters were now faced with a true emergency. Naka ascended the throne as the monarch Tenji and ordered beacons and Korean-style mountain fortifications erected from northern Kyushu, up the Inland Sea, to the Kinai. He withdrew his court to Otsu, guarded by mountains and safer from the looming threat. Meanwhile, the Tang-Silla alliance advanced from victory to victory, smashing Koguryŏ in 668. It is amazing that, although Tenji’s centralizing policies had met resistance from the beginning and he was now branded as a loser for the defeat in Korea, he managed to reform the bureaucracy and attempted to implement a census in 670.

When Tenji died in 671, he was unpopular with most local notables because they had lost men in Korea. He pressed his son Prince Otomo to succeed him, but Tenji’s brother, Prince Oama, secluded in the Yoshino Mountains to the south, had other ideas. In a brief civil war, Oama routed his nephew and took the title of Tenmu, “the Heavenly Warrior Emperor” (tenno). Born in 631, Tenmu had witnessed the Taika coup as a boy and the Battle of the Paekch’on River as a youth. He knew that to resist an invasion he had to have a strong, stable government capable of calling on the material and human resources of the entire archipelago. If Tenmu needed any further persuasion, Silla, which had implemented modified Chinese institutions, unified the peninsula, and then terminated its alliance with the Tang and chased the Chinese armies out of Korea. Fear of invasion consumed the Japanese court for several decades, and relations with Silla (668-935) were hostile for most of the 700s.

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Filed under China, Japan, Korea, war

by | 4 June 2009 · 7:52 am

Early Japan’s Peaceful Foragers, Violent Farmers

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 13-14:

Yayoi society was constantly at war, as historians have known from brief citations about the islands in Chinese annals. For example, of the five thousand skeletons surviving from the Jōmon era, practically none suggests a violent death, whereas among the one thousand skeletons preserved from Yayoi times, about one hundred betray signs of gruesome ends, including beheading and piercing with a dozen or more arrowheads. Iron and stone arrowheads are among the most common finds in Yayoi sites, and by the middle and late Yayoi, iron arrowheads were heavier and more deadly than ever.

Settlement location and structure also imply that Yayoi society was violent. Scattered throughout upland areas, highland settlements for just a few people probably served as lookouts for attackers. Some of these hamlets have pits containing ash, which suggests a system of smoke signals. On the flatlands, one and sometimes two moats with a V-shaped cross section encircle large settlements; as of 1998, about eighty moated villages have been found for the Yayoi period. At Ōtsuka in the Kanto, a trench measured twenty by one hundred thirty meters and was two meters deep. At Ōgidani near Kyoto, there were two ditches one kilometer in length; it is estimated that it would have taken one thousand ten-ton dump trucks to haul away the earth. Many moated settlements also used stakes, twisted branches, and earthen walls as barricades.

Why did the Yayoi resort to war so frequently? The reason is probably related to the importation of agriculture, which, even though it diffused slowly over the archipelago, soon produced classes of haves and have-nots. Villagers resorted to violence when their harvest was inadequate or when they wanted to take over a neighbor’s surplus grain and the lands that had produced them. The discovery of similar moated and walled settlements around the world from an analogous period, when agriculture was just underway, also supports such a view.

The invention of war went along with famine to comprise new ways for agrarian peoples to die. Malnutrition had been a problem under forager regimes, of course, but with the advent of agriculture and the consequent population growth, many more people were dependent on a new subsistence system and liable to starve to death. Known as the “spring hungers,” famine usually beset a family or village whose crop had failed or whose reserves of grain had been exhausted by the late winter. Along with the greater chance of extensive famine came war, which was really just theft organized on a village-wide scale. Every system of subsistence has its advantages and disadvantages.

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Filed under economics, food, Japan, war

by | 3 June 2009 · 5:23 pm

Peking Duck’s Interview with a 1989 Demonstrator

To mark the 20th anniversary of the PRC government crackdown on the democracy movement in 1989, Peking Duck has reposted an interview from 2003 with a former student who was caught up in the demonstrations in Shanghai, not Beijing. It’s quite a nuanced retrospective, mixing cynicism about government with (too much, IMHO) respect for Chinese leaders, lost idealism with rising optimism. Here are a few excerpts:

In the 1970s, if you said anything disrespectful of Mao, you’d be executed. In 1989, if you said something negative about Deng in public you could still be in serious trouble.

It was the students who were most sensitive to this. Our parents all worked for the state, and there was still little or no private enterprise. They were not as concerned about ideology and change. They only had to worry about feeding their families. But as students we were more liberal, more free-spirited and more engaged in ideologies. We weren’t concerned about raising a family. We were not necessarily practical; we were very idealistic….

I don’t have regrets and I don’t think what we did was in vain…. But I have to admit I am no longer interested in politics, especially now that China is undergoing a natural transition toward democracy, with the economy being the core and the catalyst for that change. And nothing can stop that change, no matter how much the Communists want to preserve their old values….

There was nothing like the martial law that took place in Beijing. The Mayor of Shanghai at the time was extremely competent, and he made an appeal to the city on TV and he calmed everyone down. I’ll never forget, he said something that was ambiguous and politically brilliant: “Down the road, truth will prevail.” That could have meant he was sympathetic to the students or totally with the government. But it was very calming to hear him say it.

The mayor organized factory workers to clear the roads, not the army. These workers were the parents and uncles and aunts of the students. Some members of the student body tried to stir up these factory workers, and I think that was a very dangerous thing to do. Students demonstrating was one thing, but if it was factory workers – that would need to be stopped, and there would have been a riot. That’s why Beijing was much more tense.

Bringing in the factory workers truly showed the leadership and tact and common sense of Shanghai’s mayor – Zhu Rongji. Beijing is the political center, but Shanghai is the financial center, and it could absolutely not fall into chaos, no matter what. That’s why you saw factory workers and not the army….

That was part of being 20 years old in China when you haven’t seen the world, no Hollywood movies, you’ve only read Stalin-style textbooks. I matured ten years overnight, and I also became a little cynical.

For so many years China had a stringently controlled educational system. From kindergarten to college, we all read the exact same books and took the exact same exams. We always believed everything that the government told us, and they told us it was an honor for ‘the people without property’ to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for the cause of communism, fighting against the two great enemies, the Nationalists [KMT] and the Capitalists. We were brainwashed….

You have to realize that Deng changed my life – everybody’s life. He opened new doors for all of us. In 1982, my mother was among the first batch of scholars who were sent abroad to study, and she went to Harvard. She returned to become the director of a major Shanghai hospital. So we are grateful. And soon so many other changes happened.

I feel a great respect for our leaders. There are some, like Li Peng, who I still have no respect for. But Deng – soon we felt as though he had torn down the Berlin Wall. I wondered, if Deng had not handled the demonstrations the way he did would China be the country it is today? The whole nation is changing and people are more affluent, and I feel proud of being Chinese. People once looked down at us, and now they have respect for us….

I believe that one day, China will have Taiwan-style democracy, but it has to be built on a strong economy.

via the Korea Blog Aggregator at The Marmot’s Hole

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Filed under China, democracy, economics, nationalism

by | 2 June 2009 · 8:06 pm

Ferguson vs. Krugman, Recession vs. Depression

In the Financial Times of 29 May, Niall Ferguson offers a History lesson for economists in thrall to Keynes.

I think perhaps Mr Krugman would benefit from a refresher course about [the] historical context [of Keynes’s (1937) General Theory]. Having reissued his book The Return of Depression Economics, he clearly has an interest in representing the current crisis as a repeat of the 1930s. But it is not. US real GDP is forecast by the International Monetary Fund to fall by 2.8 per cent this year and to stagnate next year. This is a far cry from the early 1930s, when real output collapsed by 30 per cent. So far this is a big recession, comparable in scale with 1973-1975. Nor has globalisation collapsed the way it did in the 1930s.

Credit for averting a second Great Depression should principally go to Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, whose knowledge of the early 1930s banking crisis is second to none, and whose double dose of near-zero short-term rates and quantitative easing – a doubling of the Fed’s balance sheet since September – has averted a pandemic of bank failures. No doubt, too, the $787bn stimulus package is also boosting US GDP this quarter.

But the stimulus package only accounts for a part of the massive deficit the US federal government is projected to run this year. Borrowing is forecast to be $1,840bn – equivalent to around half of all federal outlays and 13 per cent of GDP. A deficit this size has not been seen in the US since the second world war. A further $10,000bn will need to be borrowed in the decade ahead, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Even if the White House’s over-optimistic growth forecasts are correct, that will still take the gross federal debt above 100 per cent of GDP by 2017. And this ignores the vast off-balance-sheet liabilities of the Medicare and Social Security systems.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the bond market is quailing. For only on Planet Econ-101 (the standard macroeconomics course drummed into every US undergraduate) could such a tidal wave of debt issuance exert “no upward pressure on interest rates”….

The policy mistake has already been made – to adopt the fiscal policy of a world war to fight a recession. In the absence of credible commitments to end the chronic US structural deficit, there will be further upward pressure on interest rates, despite the glut of global savings. It was Keynes who noted that “even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist”. Today the long-dead economist is Keynes, and it is professors of economics, not practical men, who are in thrall to his ideas.

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Filed under economics, education, U.S.

by | 1 June 2009 · 8:20 pm

All-Indian Baseball in 1930s America

The Spring 2009 issue of NINE: A Journal of Baseball and Culture has an article by Royse Parr on Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club (Project MUSE subscriber link). Here are a few excerpts (footnotes omitted) from a fascinating glimpse at another era.

The story of Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club has never been told. A full-blood Creek, Harjo was born on October 8, 1898, in Indian Territory near the city of Holdenville, now within the state of Oklahoma. In his teenage years, Harjo attended Haskell Institute, an Indian boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas, where he was the captain and a pitcher on the school’s Creek baseball team. Known as the “New Carlisle of the West,” Haskell Institute was proud of its baseball stars that included major leaguers Ike Kahdot (Potawatomi), Lee Daney (Choctaw), and Ben Tincup (Cherokee). Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox, Potawatomi), a major league baseball player from Oklahoma, first attended Haskell. He then became athletically famous as an All-American football player and a track and field gold medal Olympian at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Prior to leaving for Carlisle, Thorpe’s father said to him, “Son, you are an Indian. I want you to show other races what an Indian can do.” In their warrior tradition, Indian athletes were inspired to beat the whites at their own games. From these beginnings emerged Ben Harjo’s dream of forming a barnstorming All-Indian baseball team.

According to the 1930 United States census, Harjo had ten laborers of Negro or Indian extraction who lived on the farm with his wife Susey and their five children. He was scrambling to make a living as a farmer during the lean years of the Great Depression and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. The local agent for the U.S. Indian Service regarded him as an exceptional young man whose farming methods were an example for other Indians.

Fortunately for Harjo and his baseball dreams, his full-blood Seminole Indian wife, Susey, was oil-rich from her land allotment in the Seminole oil fields. She had a trust fund controlled by the U.S. Indian Service that was in excess of three hundred thousand dollars. Susey was very generous with those less fortunate, especially for funeral bills, medical attention, and education, but she was only modestly educated. Susie paid for the building of a Presbyterian church, and she had a propensity for purchasing and discarding vehicles, which included a Ford sports coupe, two Dodge trucks, a Dodge sports coupe, a Pierce Arrow luxury sedan, and a Chevrolet team bus….

What is the historical significance of the Harjo club and its story? Earlier barnstorming Indian baseball teams were often subjected to racial taunts and harassment because of their skin color. No such incidents were reported in the press for the Harjos. Even when their teams were soundly defeated, local journalists were complimentary of the athletic talents of the barnstormers. The Harjo club’s play on the field, especially when they won the prestigious Denver Post Little World Series in 1932, proved that they were skilled professional athletes. In the New England states in 1933, it was heartwarming to read that the good-natured Thorpe was surrounded by hundreds of admiring youngsters.

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Filed under baseball, U.S.