The Army War College has its new edition of PARAMETERS out. This is a compilation of articles looking primarily at past events and how the military handled them with an eye towards using these lessons for the future.If you go to the Small Wars Journal blog you can find a number of these articles )Ill figure out this linking thing eventually). There were a number of really good articles. If you haven’t read military history you may be surprised at how well written and self-critical they can become. This is a quote from one article that stood out for me.
When Premier Khrushchev announced that the USSR was withdrawing the missiles, as well as any other weapon systems the United States considered “offensive,” both John F. Kennedy and the United States gained enormous stature. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more satisfactory outcome. Yet General LeMay considered the result “the greatest defeat in our history,” and said so to the President. Admiral Anderson seconded that sentiment. Years later, even General Taylor thought the JCS’s advocacy of an air strike was the correct strategy.
Reading this stuff again it makes me realize things were worse than we knew. The generals were pushing for bombing Cuba even knowing it had at best a 90% chance of success by their own estimation. They totally ignored the possibility of a Russian response in Europe, especially Berlin. What is it about Americans that makes some of us think we can conduct foreign policy, especially fighting diplomacy, without having an effect in the rest of the world?
Steve
I grew up in an industrial Southern city that was in the “Top 10″ targeted for MIRVing. When I was in late elementary and junior high schools, I had a city map on my bedroom door demarked in concentric circles from Ground Zero by mortality: vapor; instant death; 100% third-degree burns/dead in 12-24 hours; dead in 48 hours; dead in 72 hours. I lived in dead in 72 hours.
That fall, in ‘62, the air was just fucking electric. A girl in our class got her first period unexpectedly, and just started screaming. One of the teachers managed to contain her and hustle her off to the school nurse where I suppose they sedated her.
I hear or read some of these young punks whining about the “toxic culture”, or how terrible things have become, and I think, really? Do tell. How terrible for you, of course, tender thing, but as for me, I think things have been looking a lot better for quite some time now.
I think the atomic clock ( the one counting down to nuclear war) was timed back a little recently if memory serves. I remember the nuclear drills we had, just like fire drills. We would all go into the coat room and sit, kneel or lie down. It was kind of scary, but eventually it just became another fire drill. I think it scared our parents more.
Steve
Right, I remember the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis too. I went to high school in a Miami convent school. Because we were only a few inches above sea level, nobody had basements in South Florida. The closest thing to an air raid shelter our school had was the chapel. It did give me a bit of the shudders to realize that “our shelter from the mighty blast” just might become “our eternal home.”
I was in college during the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the buildup to it, I was on assignment for a college magazine I wrote for, going around interviewing people about how they felt about the end of the world. Most of them had nothing remarkable to say, but William Alfred, may he rest in peace, one of the best teachers I ever had, took the time to point out to me that, after all, everybody’s world ends sometime, and thinking about that might be more to the point.
Anyway, I think one of the major differences between those born before 1975 or so and everybody else is that we oldsters do remember the Cold War and the prospect of Death by Massive Governmental Stupidity that permeated all of our waking moments for our most formative years. Long before Vietnam, that made skeptics if not cynics out of all of us.
These days, our apocalyptic fantasies are more diffuse. There are more ways for Life on Earth to be wiped out, but none of them are quite as likely as the Bomb was in its day. And many of them wouldn’t even be anybody’s fault, not that it would matter much afterward.
I have very distinct memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My father was in the Signal Corps in WWII, and my siblings and I have sometimes wondered if he actually continued to have contacts in the spy biz afterwards. He always seemed to know a bit more than was really obvious to the average man on the street.
We had a little sort of closet in our (unfinished) basement. It was called The Little Room. Because that’s what it was. Maybe six feet by six feet. It had shelves and served as an auxiliary pantry where my parents would keep extra jars of jam and bags of potatoes. During the crisis, my father bought a shortwave radio which he carried with him everywhere–odd behavior for a university professor. He bought two new garbage cans and filled them with chlorinated water and put them in the Little Room, along with numerous cans of beans, etc. He then collected newspapers and periodicals–fortunately the house was replete with a good supply of those–and stacked them around the perimeter to shield us from fallout. He informed us that if the Russians started bombing us, we would retreat to this impromptu shelter and stay there for three weeks or so to avoid the fallout.
The place where we lived was home to several important research facilities–probably a secondary target if not a primary one. I found this comforting because I hoped that, with any luck, we would be instantly incinerated. It seemed preferable to spending three weeks in a six by six space with my family and emerging to a world of mutants, zombies, and cannibals. It wasn’t that I feared death–if anything, I rather wished for it–but I did not want to die watching cannibals eat my little sisters as I vainly defended them with my Girl Scout jackknife.
“What’s the point?” I asked. “We’re all going to die anyway.” I did not get a good answer to this question, however. Once the crisis was over, my father vowed he would never vote Democratic again. He had been seduced by the hatless Catholic charm of JFK and had made what he came to see as a severe error. Sadly, he proceeded to compound it by voting, in the ensuing years, for Nixon, Reagan, etc. etc. Kennedy indeed has much to answer for.
What up dog
How Do you figure out all this stuff?