Category Archives: military

by Joel | 27 June 2021 · 8:47 am

U.S. Army vs. Navy Codebreaker Recruitment

From Code Girls, by Liza Mundy (Hachette, 2017), Kindle pp. 26-27, 32-38:

The Navy was a service that cared about status. It wanted women who were well connected socially, and there also seems to have been interest in knowing what the women looked like. The application asked that the women submit passport photos, some of which excited a bit of commentary. “I might point out that the passport photos will scarcely do justice to a number of the members of the course,” enthused Harvard’s Donald Menzel, saying that the women’s “appearance is such that large-scale photographs would be a grace to any naval office.”

Around the same time, another meeting was taking place. Twenty women’s colleges sent representatives to the elegant Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Army was working to forge its own ties with institutions that schooled women. Already it was clear that educated women would be needed for the broader war effort. As the country coped with an acute labor shortage, the inspector general of the Department of Labor noted that adult civilians would not be sufficient to stock an economy bereft of its male workers. Students would be needed, and it made sense to start with the female ones. So the Army worked to tap its own network of women’s colleges before the Navy could reach them; indeed, the Navy suspended its own efforts to set up training at Connecticut College when it learned that the Army had gotten there first.

Disparate as their backgrounds were, the women who answered these summonses—that of the Navy and that of the Army—had a handful of qualities in common. They were smart and resourceful, and they had strived to acquire as much schooling as circumstances would permit, at a time when women received little encouragement or reward for doing so. They were adept at math or science or foreign languages, often all three. They were dutiful and patriotic. They were adventurous and willing. And they did not expect any public credit for the clandestine work they were entering into.

…

One of the best code-breaking assets is a good memory, and the only thing better than one person with a good memory is a lot of people with good memories. Every step of the process—the division of enemy traffic into separate systems; the noting of scattered coincidences; the building up of indexes and files; the managing of vast quantities of information; the ability to pick out the signal from the noise—enabled the great intuitive leaps. The precursor work during the war was almost always done by women, and many of those intuitive leaps were made by women as well.

Precisely because they did not expect to be celebrated or even promoted, the women tended to be collegial. This was in marked contrast to the Navy men—especially—who were fighting for recognition in a hotly careerist service. “The women who gathered together in our world worked very hard. None of us had an attitude of having to succeed or outdo one another, except in trivial ways,” recalled Ann Caracristi years later. “I mean, you wanted to be the first to solve a particular problem, or you wanted to be the first to get this recovery. But there was very little competition for, you know, for money, or anything of that nature, because everybody really assumed that when the war was over we would be leaving… The majority of the people considered it a temporary way of life.”

…

What is interesting about this generation of women is that they did understand that at some point they might have to work for pay. Forged by the Depression, they knew they might have to support themselves, even on a teacher’s salary, no matter how “good” a marriage they did or did not make. Some were sent to college with the idea that it would be ideal to meet a man, but their degree would permit them to “fall back” on teaching school. And some women went to college because they were, in fact, ambitious and planned to compete for the few spots in law or medical schools that were available to them.

Suddenly these women were wanted—for their minds. “Come at once; we could use you in Washington,” was the message conveyed to Jeuel Bannister, a high school band director who had taken an Army course on cryptanalysis at Winthrop College, in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

In the 1940s, the American labor force was strictly segregated by gender. There were newspaper want ads that read “Male Help Wanted” and others that read “Female Help Wanted.” For educated women, there was a tiny universe of jobs to be had, and these always paid less than men’s jobs did. But it turned out that the very jobs women had been relegated to were often the ones best suited to code-breaking work. Schoolteaching—with the learning it required—was chief among these. Knowledge of Latin and Greek; a close study of literature and ancient texts; facility with foreign languages; the ability to read closely, to think, to make sense of a large amount of data: These skills were perfect.

But there were other women’s jobs that turned out to be useful. Librarians were recruited to make sense of discarded tangles of coded messages. “Nothing had been filed. It was just a mess,” said Jaenn Coz, one of a number of code-breaking librarians who came to work for the Navy. “They sucked us out from all over the country.” Secretaries were good at filing and record keeping and at shorthand, which is itself a very real kind of code. Running office machines—tabulator, keypunch—was a woman’s occupation, and thousands were now needed to run the IBM machines that compared and overlapped multidigit code groups. Music majors were wanted; musical talent, which involves the ability to follow patterns, is an indicator of code-breaking prowess, so all that piano practicing that girls did paid off. Telephone switchboard operators were unintimidated by the most complex machines. In fact, the communications industry from its origins was one that had been considered suitable for women. Boys delivered telegrams, but women connected calls, in large part because women were considered more polite to callers.

Character also mattered. Here again, women’s colleges were ideal. All the schools had codes of comportment—curfews, housemothers, chaperones, rules about not smoking in your room and not having men visit you in private and not having sex and not wearing trousers or shorts in public. All of this enabled the women to sail through the military’s background checks. Bible colleges were even better; many of those graduates didn’t drink.

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by Joel | 26 June 2021 · 9:57 am

The 1941 Boom in U.S. Codebreaking Jobs

From Code Girls, by Liza Mundy (Hachette, 2017), Kindle pp. 22-25:

During World War II, code breaking would come into its own as one of the most fruitful forms of intelligence that exists. Listening in on enemy conversations provides a verbatim, real-time way to know what that enemy is thinking and doing and arguing about and worrying over and planning. It provides information on strategy, troop movements, shipping itineraries, political alliances, battlefield casualties, pending attacks, and supply needs. The code breakers of World War II advanced what is known as signals intelligence—reading the coded transmissions of enemies, as well as (sometimes) of allies. They laid the groundwork for the now burgeoning field of cybersecurity, which entails protecting one’s data, networks, and communications against enemy attack. They pioneered work that would lead to the modern computing industry. After the war, the U.S. Army and Navy code-breaking operations merged to become what is now the National Security Agency. It was women who helped found the field of clandestine eavesdropping—much bigger and more controversial now than it was then—and it was women in many cases who shaped the early culture of the NSA.

The women also played a central role in shortening the war. Code breaking was crucial to Allied success in defeating Japan, both at sea and during the bloody amphibious assaults on Pacific islands against a foe that was dug in, literally—the cave fighting toward the end of the war was terrible, as were kamikaze attacks and other suicide missions—and willing to fight to the death. And in the all-important Atlantic theater, U.S. and British penetration of the Nazi Enigma cipher that German admiral Karl Dönitz used to direct his U-boat commanders helped bring about the total elimination of the Nazi submarine threat.

The chain of events that led to the women’s recruitment was a long one, but a signal moment occurred in September 1941, when U.S. Navy rear admiral Leigh Noyes wrote a letter to Ada Comstock, the president of Radcliffe College, the women’s counterpart to Harvard. For more than a year the Navy had been quietly recruiting male intelligence officers from elite colleges and universities, and now it was embarking on the same experiment with women. Noyes wanted to know whether Comstock would identify a group of Radcliffe students to be trained in cryptanalysis. He confided that the Navy was looking for “bright, close-mouthed native students”—that is, high-achieving women who had the sense and ability to keep a secret and who had been born in the United States and were free of close ties with other nations.

“Evidence of a flair for languages or for mathematics could be advantageous,” Noyes said, adding that “any intense sociological quirks would, of course, be undesirable.” Without stating what such “quirks” might be, the admiral suggested that a handful of promising seniors could enroll in a training course the Navy had developed.

“In the event of total war,” Noyes told her, “women will be needed for this work, and they can do it probably better than men.”

Ada Comstock was happy to comply. “It interests me very much and I should like to take whatever steps would be thought serviceable,” she promptly wrote to her friend Donald Menzel, an astronomy professor at Harvard who was serving as a point person for the broader naval recruiting effort. Astronomy is a mathematical science and a naval one—for centuries, navigation was done using the position of the sun and the stars—and many of the instructors who taught the secret course would come from the field.

…

At the Navy’s request, Comstock also approached leaders of other women’s schools. These deans and presidents were devoted to the cause of educating women and eager to defend liberty and freedom of thought against fascism and totalitarian belief systems. They also were keen to develop career opportunities for their students. The leaders savvily perceived that war might open up fields—and spots in graduate schools—that up to now had been closed to women. Even before Comstock received the Navy’s letter, many of the leaders had been strategizing over how they could provide what Virginia Gildersleeve, dean of Barnard College, called “trained brains” to a war effort that would depend on advances in science and math.

The women’s college leaders met at Mount Holyoke on October 31 and November 1, 1941, with representatives from Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Wellesley, Radcliffe, Smith, and Mount Holyoke attending. Comstock told them about the Navy’s request and said Radcliffe would participate. She distributed some materials the Navy had developed: a “Guide for Instructors” and an “Introduction to Students.” The idea was that selected students would take the course during the remainder of their senior year, then go to work for the Navy, in Washington, as civilians. The “Guide for Instructors” assured them that no prior experience was necessary and that they would receive a “gouge,” or answers to the problems. The instructors would be given a few texts to jump-start their own education, including a work called Treatise on Cryptography, another titled Notes on Communications Security, and a pamphlet called The Contributions of the Cryptographic Bureaus in the World War—meaning World War I, the so-called war to end all wars.

The result was the wave of secret letters that appeared in college mailboxes in the fall of 1941, summoning surprised young women to secret meetings. Most were in the top 10 percent of their class, selected based on academic performance as well as character and loyalty and grit.

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by Joel | 31 May 2021 · 5:35 am

Long History of People Exiled

From Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, by R. M. Douglas (Yale U. Press, 2012), Kindle p. 67:

The driving out of unwanted peoples, to be sure, is a practice almost as old as recorded history. The Old Testament tells the story of numerous forced migrations carried out by the Israelites and their neighbors against each other, the Babylonian Captivity being the most celebrated. Philip II of Macedonia was renowned for the scale of his population transfers in the fourth century B.C., a precedent that his son, Alexander the Great, appears to have intended to follow on a far more massive scale. The colonial era witnessed many more forced displacements, often accompanied or initiated by massacre. Some of these bore a distinctly “modern” tinge. The Act of Resettlement that followed Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland, for example, ordered Irish property owners in three-quarters of the island to remove themselves to the impoverished western province of Connacht by May 1, 1654, to make room for incoming English and Scottish colonists; those remaining east of the River Shannon after that date were to be killed wherever found. “The human misery involved,” in the judgment of Marcus Tanner, “probably equaled anything inflicted on Russia or Poland in the 1940s by Nazi Germany.” On a smaller scale, but proportionately just as lethal, was the United States’ forced relocation of part of the Cherokee nation from Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama to eastern Oklahoma along the so-called “Trail of Tears” in 1838; perhaps a quarter of the fifteen thousand men, women, and children who were driven out perished, most of them while detained in assembly camps. Extensive forced migrations occurred in Africa and Asia also. In what is today Nigeria the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest independent state in nineteenth-century Africa, practiced slavery on a massive scale—by 1860 it possessed at least as many slaves as the United States—as an instrument of forced migration, the purpose being to increase the security of disputed border areas. “Enforced population displacement … was supposed to strengthen the Islamic state, which was achieved through demographic concentration.” On the western borderlands of China, the Qing Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “used deportations and mass kidnappings to build a human resource base.”

Contemporary scholars agree, though, that the twentieth century has been the heyday of forcible population transfers. The rise of the nation-state, in place of the dynastic multinational empires of the earlier period, was both cause and effect of the ideological claim that political and ethnographic boundaries ought to be identical.

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by Joel | 28 April 2021 · 6:24 am

Back at Yale, 1966

From Eat Your Heart Out, Ho Chi Minh: Or Things You Won’t Learn at Yale, by Tony Thompson (BookSurge, 2012), Kindle pp. 190-191:

The visual difference from the pre-war Yale of 1963 was more in the variety of clothing and in the variety of long hair-styles, and in how the beholder was supposed to respond, rather than in the amount of facial hair—especially in the desired response, these guys didn’t want to look interchangeable, like infantry soldiers or the Kingston Trio. They wanted to tell you something when you looked at them.

So you had the common “I love the workers” style or the basic Bob Dylan clone—the Pendleton-shirted, anorexic lumberjack look. And, to show identity with the people—but with the Russian people—you had the Fiddler on the Roof or Russian peasant type.

Many students were angry—really, really angry—so you had the never-smiling, stubble-faced, T-shirt, and torn jeans “yes, I sleep in my clothes; fuck you” appearance.

Some kids were sensitive—they felt the cruel pain of life and war so terribly intensely—so they wore tattered Sears work clothes and sported a stick-thin, crazy-eyed, greasy-filthy look that proclaimed: “I have suffered a nervous breakdown over this terrible world; I weep for the little people so much; please share the love.”

But the preppy, Shetland sweater and chinos look was still popular; I didn’t have to ditch my clothes….

What you didn’t have, beneath the surface, was much of a change in the social background of the students. A smaller percent came from private schools. There were more Jewish guys from public schools. But, public school or private school, Yale in 1966 was still overwhelmingly a place for white, middleclass, suburban boys.

Compared with the army, blacks were still almost invisible at Yale in 1966, despite the brand-new, fervid, vocal desire of so many at Yale to raise, liberate, or merely improve the lot of black Americans.

That the army was already doing these things for hundreds of thousands of typical young blacks was simply beyond the comprehension of these white suburban Yalies—who didn’t know any black Americans.

It would be many years before Yale had a sizable, representative cross-section of intelligent black American students, as opposed to a small, self-segregated cadre of handpicked, cosseted, and atypical blacks.

Whites and blacks also mingled far less at Yale than they had in the army. But at least they didn’t fight with each other.

In contrast with the army, I witnessed no overtly gay behavior back at Yale. Probably I didn’t know where to look.

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by Joel | 27 April 2021 · 6:44 am

Potage and Reportage in Vietnam, 1966

From Eat Your Heart Out, Ho Chi Minh: Or Things You Won’t Learn at Yale, by Tony Thompson (BookSurge, 2012), Kindle pp. 139-140:

Cubello took a bunk in a corner of the tent next to Bob Gaylord, a career soldier, former short order cook, and petty thief. Bob found or stole a one-burner kerosene stove and then began to filch food from the mess hall and cook it for us. So we all liked Gaylord despite personal hygiene deficiencies on his part, such as never changing his green army T-shirt.

Army food wasn’t bad as long as the army cooks had nothing to do with it. Gaylord mixed jars of stuffed green olives and anchovies—yes, from somewhere he got dozens of those small flat cans of anchovies—with a stolen gallon can of army beef stew and heated it to tepid on his stove. We craved salty food because of our constant sweating. With enough Tabasco, we thought the salty, fishy stew was delicious.

Time magazine claimed on several occasions that GIs in Vietnam had shrimp cocktail, steak, and ice cream on a regular basis. I suppose that you have to expect a certain level of bollocks from a mass audience magazine, as Time used to be. Time was printed on a useful quality of paper, though. In Vietnam, if you saw a soldier walking in a purposeful manner with a rolled-up copy of Time, you knew where he was going.

Time’s reporting of Vietnam had a more basic flaw. Time’s main local correspondent, Pham Xuan An, had remarkable sources of information. In The Making of a Quagmire, David Halberstam described An as the linchpin of his “small but first-rate intelligence network” of journalists. Halberstam thought that An “had the best military contacts in the country.”

In claiming this, Halberstam was certainly correct. An was a colonel, and later a general, in the North Vietnamese Army. An sent invaluable reports about American activities to North Vietnam via the Cu Chi tunnels.

A full description of An’s role is in The New Yorker of May 23, 2005.

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by Joel | 26 April 2021 · 5:30 am

U.S. Army Clerk in Germany, 1960s

From Eat Your Heart Out, Ho Chi Minh: Or Things You Won’t Learn at Yale, by Tony Thompson (BookSurge, 2012), Kindle pp. 94-95:

In the brief periods when we weren’t playing soldier or cleaning our military kit, we were completely free but only to go anywhere we wanted within Grafenwohr. Men wandered from shed to shed, checking on what kind of gambling was going on and on what was being traded. A vigorous commercial undercurrent existed everywhere in the army. Watching men shooting craps one afternoon, I ran into Specialist Fourth Class Chandos, who worked for our first sergeant. Chandos was a loan shark and was checking on the activities of his clients, most of whom were our senior sergeants. The craps shooters had pulled a blanket taut over a cot and were shooting dice on it. Though it was strictly forbidden for soldiers to lend money, and especially not to their non-commissioned officers, this was obviously a great business. The sergeants shooting craps were born losers and were soon cleaned out by a street-smart black soldier. Then they needed a further loan to go on shooting. Chandos himself only played poker and almost always won since he played exclusively with the battalion’s most stupid sergeants on payday. Chandos was a short, funny Greek from some northeastern American city. He boasted that his time in the army was going to buy him a Pontiac convertible. I hope Chandos succeeded in this; he was a friendly, amusing man and only charged 50 percent interest per month. In other companies, the rate was 100 percent. We immediately liked each other. Chandos was finding that his orderly room job got in the way of his loan business, especially when he needed to work on collections. He asked me if I could type. Could I type? After churning out all those midnight essays at Yale, I could type like gangbusters. He said that he would work on the first sergeant and get me transferred to the orderly room. I thought this was a terrific idea; the other occupants of the orderly room were the captain and the first sergeant. So it was no coincidence that every time I went there, the orderly room was warm as toast, even when we were out in the field and the orderly room was in a tent. Chandos was as good as his word. Within months, I made my first upward career move in the army, becoming the orderly room flunky. In the barracks or in the field, decisions were made in the orderly room. In our company, the captain merely signed off on decisions made by the first sergeant. This was not taught at West Point, but our first sergeant was infinitely more experienced than the captain—and infinitely wiser. I did whatever the first sergeant wanted done. Apart from making dozens of pots of coffee day and night, this work varied a lot. On a Monday morning, for example, I’d be writing letters for our linguistically and vertically challenged Puerto Rican company commander, when the first sergeant, who in practice ran everything, shouted for me to retrieve Blicksen, our toothless cook, from the custody of the MPs.

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by Joel | 25 April 2021 · 6:09 am

Impressions of Army Basic Training, 1963

From Eat Your Heart Out, Ho Chi Minh: Or Things You Won’t Learn at Yale, by Tony Thompson (BookSurge, 2012), Kindle pp. 68-70:

To my utter surprise, I found that my WASP background had prepared me well for basic training. I’d already lived in a tent at summer camp with boys I didn’t particularly like. I’d gone away to school years before; I didn’t miss anyone but our family dog. Army food was better than Yale’s and the army in-processing system no more impersonal than Yale’s. Most of my fellow trainees were friendly and much more interesting to me than the suburban types at Yale.

At Yale, I was a sub-mediocre athlete. But in the army I was a near star.

Most of my fellow trainees had never played any sport. Sports were mandatory at my school; they weren’t in the nation’s public schools. Most of these new soldiers had never run anywhere. At my school we ran all the time, just as we now did in basic training.

The result was that I played end and caught passes in football games. Wearing combat boots, I ran the fastest mile in our training company. Going on marches was no problem after hiking in the White Mountains as a ten year old.

Even better, I’d already learned how to shoot a .22 rifle at summer camp. Later, Phinney Works’s father, a World War II major in the army, had taught me how to shoot his World War II M-1 rifle, which the army was still using at Fort Leonard Wood in basic training.

Apart from hitting what you aimed at, the main objective in shooting the M-1 was to keep it from slamming you in the face when you did rapid fire. The trick was not to wrap your right thumb over the stock so that your thumb’s knuckle joint wasn’t subsequently slammed back into your cheek by the recoil. Sergeant Duty warned us of this feature of the M-1, but few paid attention. He was a font of hard-won military lore, but most trainees lacked the frame of reference needed to absorb his advice. There was no war going on so the advice seemed academic.

…

The randomness of the draft meant that I shared basic training with a wide cross-section of American men, somewhat tilted toward working-class men. We were nicely assorted as to size, shape, and color. The truly odd and quirky types were mostly found among my fellow volunteers.

The draftees were a bit older than the volunteers and more homogenized physically, with a couple of exceptions.

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by Joel | 24 April 2021 · 6:23 am

Impressions of Yale, Early 1960s

From Eat Your Heart Out, Ho Chi Minh: Or Things You Won’t Learn at Yale, by Tony Thompson (BookSurge, 2012), Kindle pp. 26-28:

The required academic work was dreary. Having to write twee little essays for English courses about John Donne’s imagery made me want to smash things. Or to puke. Raising the level of the world’s drivel barometer is demoralizing. Ruining a youthful love of poetry is worse. “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?”

Like my classmates, I wrote essays by the yard. Writing about great villains in novels or who won the Franco-Prussian War was less of a trial than writing about poetry. Also, learning to produce reams of more or less coherent written material about something totally boring and meaningless is good training for would-be lawyers or indeed for anyone who is lucky enough to land a writing job that bills by the column inch.

A few teachers inspired me. Like many ex-prep school students, I had been spoiled at Deerfield by excellent teaching and attentive teachers. At Yale, I quickly recognized that teaching undergraduates wasn’t the point of the institution and that my resentful attitude in the face of great learning and scholarship was childish. Still, I couldn’t help warming to the few professors who tried, however vaguely, to match undergraduate names to faces.

I adored Professor Gordon Haight who taught the Victorian English novel and was the world’s greatest expert on George Elliot. Professor Haight had been one of my father’s teachers, and I had known him as a small child. Academically, Professor Haight was a holdover from Yale’s former tradition of a broad historical approach to the study of literature. This appealed to me. I could never see the point of separating the life and times of John Milton from the poetry of John Milton. At least Milton’s life and times were interesting.

One escape hatch from the required courses in the embalmed world of English literature was accidentally discovering V. by Thomas Pynchon. I added Pynchon to the short list of fiction writers like Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse whose style and attitude speak loudly to me. I must have read V. five times during my first two years at Yale.

Obviously, there were courses that didn’t involve writing reams of drivel or sitting through interminable lectures. Being formally introduced to economics and philosophy was stimulating, regardless of the teaching. And the younger professors didn’t all use the droning, dismal lecture-hall approach. Some showed actual flashes of interest in teaching undergraduates.

I was fortunate to be taught introductory economics by Jan Tumlir, a Czech refugee from Communism. Doing hard labor in the Czech uranium mines after the postwar Communist takeover had wrecked the professor’s health. Without making any specific comments about his experience of Communism, he was a living argument against the collectivist policies believed in, or at least advocated, by so many of the Yale professoriate.

Instead, Professor Tumlir cherished nineteenth-century economic liberalism and ideals like free trade and free markets. He taught us about Ricardo, the great English economist who first stated the law of comparative advantage. Professor Tumlir later became head of economics at GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and predecessor to the current World Trade Organization, but died far too young.

Overall, though, Yale in the early 1960s offered the worst teaching I’ve ever experienced. The benighted, God-stuffed, over-long rambling sermons in the First Church of Deerfield were delivered better and with more conviction. Semi-literate army sergeants proved to be far better teachers, as did even the idlest Oxford dons. And Stanford Business School didn’t give tenure to anyone who received consistently poor student evaluations for teaching.

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by Joel | 17 April 2021 · 6:09 am

Siam Enters World War I

From 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution, by David Stevenson (OUP Oxford, 2017), Kindle pp. 285-286:

Siam declared war on Germany on 22 July 1917. The 1855 Bowring Treaty had limited its tariffs to 3 per cent and secured extraterritorial jurisdiction for British citizens, soon to be followed by those of other Powers. By 1914 Siam had ceded more than one-third of its territory to French Indochina and to the British Malay states. That its core remained independent owed something to it suiting Britain and France to keep Siam as a buffer, and something to King Rama V (reigned 1868–1910) and his advisors. Rama appointed Prince Dewrawangse as foreign minister, who served for thirty-eight years, and by 1914 was vastly experienced and temperamentally cautious. When Rama VI acceded to the throne in 1910, he kept Dewrawangse on. Siam was less developed than Greece or Brazil. Its population in 1910 was about 8 million, and Bangkok the one substantial city. Its principal export was rice and most of its foreign trade was managed by the British from Singapore and Hong Kong. Its government was an absolute monarchy, untrammelled by representative institutions, in which members of the royal family held key ministerial portfolios and several hundred foreign advisers worked in royal service. Insofar as public opinion existed, it might have been expected to be hostile to France and Britain; but Europe was distant and Germany and Austria-Hungary could not have aided the country. In fact such considerations were outweighed by the personal outlook of King Rama, who had attended Sandhurst and Oxford and undergone officer training with the Durham Light Infantry. In 1915–16 he made donations to widows and orphans of his former regiment, and he and George V exchanged the titles of ‘General’ in each other’s armies, despite German protests that such behaviour was un-neutral. Unrestricted submarine warfare and America’s appeal to other neutrals to break off relations with Germany started a similar debate in Siam to those in Brazil and China. The initial response to Wilson was that Siam was very remote from the war, and preferred to see how the situation developed. This holding position was primarily due to Dewrawangse, who worked closely with the British minister in Bangkok, Herbert Dering, who in turn advised London that it was best to apply no pressure but let the situation mature, and this recommendation the Foreign Office heeded. Although it might be advantageous to control the nine German steamers in Bangkok harbour and expel the 300 Germans working for the Siamese government, the country had already cooperated in, for example, deporting Indian seditionists, and the advantages from its belligerency were marginal. Dering also feared the Siamese might seek concessions over the unequal treaties. The situation remained unchanged until Rama returned from a visit to the provinces, during which time Dewrawangse (with reluctant acquiescence from an impatient ruler) sounded out Siam’s overseas emissaries. In a Cabinet meeting on 28 May Rama intervened decisively. Dewrawangse reported that the diplomats were divided: the representatives in France and Russia recommended breaking off relations (as did the French and Russian governments), but the London envoy considered it unnecessary. The king, however, said Siam should join the Allies. Previously the Central Powers had seemed to be winning, but American entry altered the equation and delaying meant Britain would end the war with greater leverage than it had now. Rama hoped the unequal treaties could be revised or even abrogated, although he forbade his ministers from saying so. Instead Dewrawangse, who was uneasy but went along, drafted a note that blamed Germany’s persistence in an illegal method of warfare despite Siam’s protests. The government took over the German vessels before their crews could damage them, rounded up the German nationals, and asked the Allies how Siam could help them. When the communications minister voiced concern about running the railways without German experts, Rama replaced him. The kingdom had an army of 12,000–15,000 men, and initially it was not intended to send troops, but in 1918 a contingent of 1,254 volunteers went to France, where nineteen were killed. Siam attended the peace conference and urged amendments to the unequal treaties and recovery of full sovereignty, which America conceded in 1920 and Britain and France in 1925. In relation to the objectives set for it, Siam’s was the most successful of the 1917 interventions, despite the war being followed by a financial crisis. The story underlines how the new conditions forged opportunities for dissatisfied nations to press claims.

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by Joel | 14 April 2021 · 6:51 am

Aftermath of Caporetto, 1918

From 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution, by David Stevenson (OUP Oxford, 2017), Kindle pp. 229-230, 232-233:

Caporetto transformed rather than terminated Italy’s war. The tensest period was late October, when sbandati [“disbanded” soldiers] and civilian refugees swarmed over the Tagliamento bridges. By the 31st the main Italian forces were over the river, but four days later the Central Powers crossed it and Cadorna ordered a retreat to the Piave. By 10 November the Italians held the new position and assaults immediately began against it, at the same time as Conrad, belatedly and with much weaker forces, attacked in the Trentino. A further month of fighting followed until the Central Powers, having failed to make significant gains in either sector, wound the campaign down.

The campaign failed, therefore, to knock Italy out, but it was even more successful than the attackers had anticipated. The Italians no longer menaced Trieste, and would launch no further major offensive until October 1918. They withdrew by up to 150 kilometres, and an area normally inhabited by 1.15 million people fell under occupation. The Italians lost 294,000 prisoners (thousands of whom perished), 12,000 battle dead, and 30,000 wounded, as well as half their artillery. Given that over 350,000 became ‘disbanded’, only half the field army remained operational. In comparison, German and Austrian killed, wounded, and missing totalled some 70,000, of whom about 15,000 were German. Even so, Hindenburg felt ‘a sense of dissatisfaction’: the triumph was incomplete.

…

The new team at the top in Rome would make a difference only gradually, and even the French and British divisions, though doubtless a morale booster, came too late to decide the battle of the Piave. The major part in halting the invasion came from Italian soldiers, whom opponents such as Rommel now found were fighting harder. Orlando told Diaz it was ‘absolutely vital for the national interest’ to hold the new front, which was 170 kilometres shorter than the old one, from which change the Italians benefited. In addition, the collapse had largely been confined to the Second Army, whereas the Third and Fourth held the Piave line, and the sbandati were reintegrated into new units. The government also called up the 1899 conscript cohort, so that before the year ended the army was almost back to pre-Caporetto numbers, while by the spring it would largely recoup its equipment losses. To be sure, British and French deliveries assisted, especially British gas masks, but Italian industry accomplished most of the task. Psychological recovery was harder, as over the winter food supplies remained critical and in several regions the civilian mood was fragile. The army sat out the cold in improvised positions and the military authorities, who continued monitoring troop morale, were nervous. The first two wartime prime ministers, Salandra and Boselli, were among many politicians who now doubted whether it had been right to enter the conflict. None the less, with the Germans gone the Austrians were again on their own, and from now on conditions on their home front and among their troops deteriorated while those of the Italians improved. 1918 would see less fighting than in 1917, much of the action being confined to the unsuccessful Austrian attack on the Piave line in June and the final Italian advance at the battle of Vittorio Veneto. This was a transformed front, and one that became the Austro-Hungarian army’s major commitment. Yet although Caporetto in the short term had spectacularly fulfilled the Central Powers’ objectives, in a curious way it weakened them in the longer, as Tenth and Eleventh Isonzo had weakened the Italians. Italy’s political unity and military morale improved in the aftermath and it received more Allied aid. But in the longer term still, among the consequences were the strengthening of ultra-nationalism and the PSI’s move towards extremism, paving the way for the rise of Fascism.