Woodrow Wilson Learns to Love War

Woodrow Wilson was elected in November 1912, and began his first term as president in March 1913, having earned 41.8% of the popular vote. Europe’s diplomatic tensions didn’t seem, at that time, to merit much attention from America, and also seemed unlikely to provoke a major war. Wilson’s first years in office were occupied with his legislative agenda - he persuaded Congress to approve bills limiting the number of hours per day that people might work and creating newly-permitted income taxes. Initially, Wilson seems to have desired to keep America out of the First World War. Historian Jonah Goldberg writes:

The outbreak of war in Europe distracted Wilson and the country from domestic concerns. It also proved a boon to the American economy, cutting off the flow of cheap immigrant labor and increasing the demand for American exports.

By 1916, as he ran for reelection, he saw that it would be advantageous to involve America in the war, but for the sake of the election, he continued to campaign on the anti-war platform. America’s decision to declare was hotly debated then, and is still debated today. At the war’s outset, among the Americans who wanted the United States to enter the war, there was a split regarding which side America would support; there were significant numbers of voters on both sides. Reasons for U.S. involvement in the war, especially before the Lusitania sinking and before the Zimmermann Telegram, were also murky.

Nations normally enter war if their interests are at stake - if the war will help to protect the lives, freedoms, and properties of the nation’s citizens. Nations will also enter a war if a grave injustice can be prevented by doing so. Neither was the case in early 1915; America had no direct interest in the war, and neither side of the European conflict could claim honorable intent. Yet Wilson began to see other reasons for bringing the United States into World War One.

Despite Wilson’s promise to keep us out of it, American entered the war in 1917. In hindsight, this was probably a misguided, albeit foregone, intervention. But the complaint that the war wasn’t in America’s interests misses the point. Wilson boasted as much time and again.

Wilson’s political views - he was a leader of the “progressive” movement - indicated that the government should involve itself in all aspects of people’s lives, regulating and taxing. There were limits to how much government interference the citizens would tolerate in peacetime. During war, however, citizens may tolerate greater government intrusion into their private matters if they believe that such infringement is necessary for the safety of the nation. While the European conflict had no direct impact on American interests, involvement in that conflict could give power, and excuses, for managing the details of American life. Wilson’s fellow progressives saw war as an opportunity to reshape American society and American government.

They were desperate to get their hands on the levers of power and use the war to reshape society. The capital was so thick with would-be social engineers during the war that, as one writer observed, “the Cosmos Club was little better than a faculty meeting of all the universities.”

War brings with it urgency, and awakens passions like self-sacrifice, obedience, and patriotic fervor. Instead of being directed toward the protection of freedom, these were subverted to enable the government’s intervention in the lives of ordinary citizens. The Wilson administration’s slogan was that the war was to “make the world safe for democracy,” but in fact the war effort was motivated by Wilson’s desire to make America safe for Wilson’s control of society.

When America entered the war in 1917, progressive intellectuals, versed in the same doctrines and philosophies popular on the European continent, leaped at the opportunity to remake society through the discipline of the sword.

Wilson’s fellow progressives knew that there was no direct national interest in the war. The Zimmermann Telegram - a German diplomatic communique encouraging Mexico to declare war on the United States, and promising German assistance to Mexico in any such war - was clearly a hollow threat; it was clear that Germany could not offer any meaningful help to Mexico. The sinking of the Lusitania was already a year-and-a-half past by the date of Wilson’s reelection, and almost two years gone by the time of his second inauguration. The two keys pieces of evidence for U.S. entry into the war were specious. While the progressives found the war distasteful, it was a price they were willing to pay to increase their control in American society.

It is true that some progressives thought that World War I was not well-advised on the merits.

Yet they pushed America into the war anyway. There were no “merits” to the case for war, and the war by itself was “ill-advised,”

but most supported the war enthusiastically, even fanatically (the same goes for a great many American Socialists). And even those who were ambivalent about the war in Europe were giddy about what John Dewey called the “social possibilities of war.”

John Dewey, a leading progressive thinker, saw the war effort as a chance to restructure society. What was important to the progressives was not the war, but the war effort. Galvanizing the public will, and being able to demand obedience to nearly any directive, is the desire of any utopian social schemer. Utopians inevitably pine for that chance to get everyone in society to go along with their plans.

He ridiculed self-described pacifists who couldn’t recognize the “immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war.”

Progressives didn’t want the war, but they wanted the war effort, and were willing to override even principled pacifists to get a chance at unprecedented social engineering. Each detail of the war effort was seen in this way. The draft - the conscription of young men into the armed services - was desired by the progressives, not because it would further the nation’s military objectives, but because it would place people into organized and regimented structures, allowing them to be moved and directed en masse.

Richard Ely, a fervent believer in “industrial armies,” was a zealous believer in the draft: “The moral effect of taking boys off street corners and out of saloons and drilling them is excellent, and the economic effects are likewise beneficial.” Wilson clearly saw things along the same lines. “I am an advocate of peace,” he began one typical declaration, “but there are some splendid things that come to a nation through the discipline of war.”

Already during Wilson’s administration, political leaders developed a term for this seizure of power - “war socialism.” Tax rates went up, federal spending went up, the national debt went up. Details of the nations economy were micromanaged, from railroad schedules to the factory production of consumer goods. Importantly, these actions were done with the excuse that they were for the war effort, but they were often unrelated to military needs. Regulations were sometimes enacted to carry out the plans of some social engineer, hoping to optimize human behavior through laws. Other regulations seemed to be in place merely to prevent free market activity.

We should not forget how the demands of war fed the arguments for socialism. Dewey was giddy that the war might force Americans “to give up much of our economic freedom … We shall have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step.” If the war went well, it would constrain “the individualistic tradition” and convince Americans of “the supremacy of public need over private possessions.” Another progressive put it more succinctly: “Laissez-faire is dead. Long live social control.”

Progressivism incarnated itself in a maze of bureaucracies. Although FDR’s ‘New Deal’ would become famous as an ‘alphabet soup’ of various committees and agencies, Wilson beat him to it by almost two decades. These offices served not only to control the actions of individuals, but also to mystify a citizen who might hope to understand how, why, and by whom he was being manipulated.

Wilson the great centralizer and would-be leader of men moved overnight to empower these would-be social engineers, creating a vast array of wartime boards, commissions, and committees. Overseeing it all was the War Industries Board, or WIB, chaired by Bernard Baruch, which whipped, cajoled, and seduced American industry into the loving embrace of the state.

Shockingly, members of the Wilson administration used the word ‘dictatorship’ to describe their committees - a word loaded with socialist connections:

The progressives running the WIB had no illusions about what they were up to. “It was an industrial dictatorship without parallel - a dictatorship by force of necessity and common consent which step by step at last encompassed the Nation and united it into a coordinated and mobile whole,” declared Grosvenor Clarkson, a member and subsequent historian of the WIB.

Wilson’s war efforts went well beyond the direction of resources and material to the military - i.e., well beyond what was actually necessary or even relevant to the military effort. The Wilson administration intervened with wage and price controls (an experiment repeated with equal failure by Richard Nixon fifty-five years later). Predictably, whatever shortages were unavoidable due to the military needs were worsened, not alleviated, when the government dictated prices for various commodities.

The rationing and price-fixing of the “economic dictatorship” required Americans to make great sacrifices, including the various “meatless” and “wheatless” days common to all of the industrialized war economies in the first half of the twentieth century.

Members of the Wilson administration, of the War Industries Board, and of the progressive movement in general, like Grosvenor Clarkson, clearly stated their goals. Their objective was not the war, not the winning of the war, and not the war effort: their goal was the restructuring of society. War had merely given them the excuse to do it. Jonah Goldberg writes:

Grosvenor Clarkson saw things similarly. The war effort “is a story of the conversion of a hundred million combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrificed to the good of the whole.” The regimentation of society, the social worker Felix Adler believed, was bring us closer to creating the “perfect man … a fairer and more beautiful and more righteous type than any … that has yet existed.” The Washington Post was more modest. “In spite of excesses such as lynching,” it editorialized, “it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”

Although Wilson’s administration began with his self-glorification as a “trust-buster,” urging Congress to pass legislation which would allegedly protect the public from the alleged dangers of alleged monopolies - the monopolies didn’t exist as monopolies, but rather faced real competition; the trusts didn’t pose a danger to the consumer and didn’t cause the price-based hardships for which they were blamed; the legislation didn’t and couldn’t protect consumers from the problems they faced - Wilson in fact encouraged and created monopolies through the WIB. In the name of the war effort, price collusion and cartels were sanctioned and organized by the Wilson administration. Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano writes:

During World War I, under Woodrow Wilson, much of the economy was regulated by the federal government, creating state-run monopolies that the government said were justified by the war.

The classic policy choice is between “free market capitalism” and “crony capitalism” - whether to allow a fair opportunity to each individual in the economy, allowing each to try his hand at whatever endeavor he may choose, and face either success or failure based on the choices of consumers; or whether to regulate the markets, grant special privileges to some individuals or companies, and so designate some as the eventual victors in the rigged marketplace. Wilson, whose excuse and propaganda claimed that he brought America into the war for the cause of freedom, actually chose against freedom, and for regulation.

The decision to enter the war prompted an unhealthy relationship between business and government. From the time the war effort began, plans were quickly set into motion.

Instead of created a “level playing field” for fair competition - instead of giving equal chances to various companies - the Wilson administration either chose some as winners and others as losers, or it urged them to form cartels and so function as monopolies: the very monopolies from which it claimed to protect the public.

An early effort to fuse business and government was the Council of National Defense, which included the influential Advisory Commission that consisted of private industrialists. This commission designed the system of purchasing war supplies, regulating food, and maintaining control and censorship.

“Although this commission was intended to be a nonpartisan link between business and government, in reality it put the power to regulate the wartime economy into the hands of” the monopolies which Wilson’s economists had created. Ordinary businessmen simply wanted a fair chance to compete. Instead, unethical business leaders - those who were willing to collaborate with the government - were rewarded for their corruption by obtaining the power to manipulate the economy.

Bernard Baruch, who had made a fortune for himself in the commodities market - mainly in sugar - , understood well the dynamics of the economy. His skills made him well-suited to manipulate the national market in raw materials. He shared with President Wilson an affection for the South, endowing an organization known as the “United Daughters of the Confederacy” with cash. Like Wilson, Baruch worked to keep African-Americans far away from financial opportunities.

The Wilson administration soon established the War Industries Board, which gained control over all purchasing, pricing, and allocating of resources. The War Industries Board was led by the notorious Progressive Bernard Baruch, who was clearly eager for the opportunity to regulate the economy, as he had presented an idea for war mobilization to President Wilson almost three years before America’s entry into the war.

In his role at the WIB, Baruch set about distorting the marketplace. An article in the New York Times on May 17, 1917, tells readers that

executives representing the large steel concerns will meet Bernard M. Baruch, chairman of the War Industries Board, here tomorrow to determine the most effective way to control and distribute the steel output of the nation to help win the war. All phases of the situation, including possible curtailment of less essential industries, coal production and transportation, will be considered. Government departments engaged in war work will be asked to submit estimates and the steel producers will be called upon for figures of plant capacity.

The meeting described is a clear intervention by the government into the marketplace in the form of a government-organized cartel. The only outcome of such discussions would be higher prices to the consumers. To anyone who wants a centrally-planned economy, such a meeting would be a joyful dream. But to those who value freedom, it is a nightmare. Justice Napolitano writes:

The corruption to which this fusion between governmental and business interests led could not be more apparent, and yet there was no check on these policies. As is typical of American governments, war can be, has been, and here was used to justify almost any inappropriate seizure of power.

When government intervenes into the work of business, or when business interferes with the work of government, a breach has occurred which is arguably much more damaging to the cause of freedom than a breach is the so-called “wall of separation” between church and state. Given that Baruch had made his fortune in the sugar market, it should be no surprise that

The U.S. government purchased the entire supply of U.S. and Cuban sugar crops. In order to create and sustain federal regulation of food through the Food Act of 1917, prices of sugar and wheat were then set at one price that was arrived at through a series of calculations. This type of market manipulation ensured that while the prices would not go up, they also could not go down. Amidst heavy regulation of the economy, wartime industry was standardized by the Conservation Division of the War Industries Board. This meant that only certain styles, varieties, colors, sizes, or models of certain products could be produced.

In the May 1917 meeting with steel producers, Baruch considered dictating to the auto industry that it reduce its output by 25%.

Railroads were seized and operated directly by the government under the Railroad War Board, which ordered them to coordinate all railroad operations. This coordination would undoubtedly have been perceived as an illegal combination under any of the nation’s anti-trust legislation. Thus the federal government not only selectively prosecuted, selectively enforced, and routinely broke its own laws; it ordered private businesses to break them as well. The government also took over the telephone, telegraph, shipbuilding, and wheat-trading industries.

Great harm was being done to consumers and to those business owners who were too ethical to collude with the government. This damage was being done in the name of the war effort, but it was a war which Wilson stated was not in the nation’s interest, nor was it a war in which the nation was supporting some grander moral cause. The war was a nationalistic and imperialistic competition between European nations, and in the name of that war, citizens of the United States were being asked to surrender their civil rights and human rights, and to see harm done to the prosperity created by a free marketplace.

Government regulation of industry during this time was harmful to small-business owners and independent contractors. The government was regulating prices and markets, and big-business owners, in conjunction with federal agencies, were given the job of awarding contracts. Unlike a privately run business or monopoly, the government could use its power to control propaganda to embarrass or shame any private industrials that were not benefitting from the wartime economy and dared to protest. Consumers were also harmed by price-fixing, as in the sugar and wheat industries, where too much regulation led to high prices and shortages.

Government-sponsored price collusion did not help American businesses in general. It helped only those corporations which violated ethical standards by forming close relationships with the government for the purposes of manipulating markets.

Governmental economic relations during this time may have benefitted certain businesses, but they were more harmful to consumers than most of the monopolies that had been attacked by Wilson and Roosevelt during their trust-busting sprees. Progressives hoped that the ideas of cooperation instead of competition that characterized the wartime economy would transfer into peacetime as well.

While honest and intelligent people will disagree about whether or not the United States should have entered into World War One, there can be no doubt that when America did actually enter the war, it was did so under Wilson’s leadership; it is clear that Wilson, originally opposed to the war, suddenly decided to bring America into the war, not because the war was protecting the nation’s interests, nor because the war had a clear moral dimension, but rather because the war offered him an excuse to implement a managed and centrally-planned economy.

Catch and Release: Spies or Fish

During the 1930's, the Soviet Union worked to place a number of agents in the United States. The lines were clearly drawn: the Soviets stood opposed to the American understanding of freedom. The FBI worked to uncover such spies; they were usually sent back to Moscow when they were found. That was an especially obvious move during those years in which the Soviet Union was allied with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. When American diplomats began to sense that the Soviet Union might become Hitler's enemy instead of Hitler's friend, and when the Soviet Union appeared as America's ally against the Nazis, our treatment of Soviet spies became ambiguous.

On the one hand, the FBI continued to uncover agents who were accessing and exporting classified and sensitive information and who were undermining America's national strength. On the other hand, the State Department wanted to maintain good working relations with the Soviets who were bound with us in opposition to Hitler.

Two incidents exemplify this trend. One happened shortly before the official split between the Soviets and the Nazis. Historian Medford Stanton Evans writes:

One such case arose in 1938, involving the Soviet agent Mikhail Gorin, surveilled obtaining confidential data from a civilian staffer of the U.S. Navy. The FBI nabbed both suspects, who were charged with espionage violations and convicted. The naval employee would serve four years in prison, but the Soviet agent would walk free, thanks to State Department intervention. According to the FBI's account, the judge in the case, "on recommendation of the Department of State, and through the authorization of the Attorney General, suspended the execution of Gorin's original sentence and placed him on probation."

Over the decades, there has been a tension between the State Department - home of diplomats - and the intelligence community, charged with gathering information and keeping information from the foreign governments. By 1941, Hitler was ready to attack the Soviet Union, which he did in June of that year, largely surprising the Soviets. At that point, the Soviet Union became the explicit ally of the United States, and the pressure from the State Department to downplay anti-American espionage by the Communist Soviet government became greater.

Even more troubling to the Bureau was the 1941 case of the Soviet superspy Gaik Ovakimian. Having tracked his endeavors in behalf of Moscow, the FBI arrested him for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and thought it had him dead to rights. Again, however, the State Department stepped in to change things. The FBI memo about this says "arrangements were made by the Soviets with the United States State Department for the release of Gaik Ovakimain and his departure for the Soviet Union." The somewhat doubtful reason given for this lenient treatment was that the Soviets would reciprocate by releasing six Americans held by Red officials.

The excuse for releasing a known Communist spy was 'doubtful' because of the six hoped-for releases, only three would make it back to the United States, and of those, two turned out to be Soviet agents.

Catch and release is an activity enjoyed by some fishermen, but when it comes to Communist spies, it's probably not the best way to deal with them.

The U.S. Gets into WWI

During the late 1800's, and even after the turn of the century, the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan influenced the military and naval thinking of the United States. Mahan stressed the importance of a strong navy. The United States was becoming a global power instead of a regional power, and naval strength would, according to Mahan, be the key to ensuring that the U.S. would not be overshadowed or manipulated by other nations. Mahan's books had a significant impact, not only on America's strategic thinkers, but on military leaders in numerous other countries as well. Historians have mixed views of Mahan: on the one hand, he was accurate to emphasize the importance of controlling the seas not only for military dominance, but also for economic dominance by means of controlling international commerce; on the other hand, in his admiration for naval power, he underestimated the importance of armies moving across, conquering, and controlling areas of land.

The influence of Mahan led to expectations - some accurate, some to be disappointed - about America's next major military involvement. Mahan's ideas seemed to work in the Spanish-American War, but by 1917, technology had changed, and the war in question had a different geographic configuration. Historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski note that

during the green April of 1917, as America entered "The Great War," a United States senator cornered a General Staff officer and asked the critical strategic question of the intervention: "Good Lord! You're not going to send soldiers over there, are you?" Some eighteen months later, the answer was clear as the American Expeditionary Force of over 2 million men, cooperating with the armies of France and the British Empire, bludgeoned Imperial Germany into an armistice. Supporting the AEF stood a Navy and Marine Corps of over 600,000. In the United States and in places as far separated as northern Italy, polar Russia, and Siberia, another 2 million American soldiers served the war effort and diplomacy of the Wilson administration. World War I was the debut of the United States as an international military power. Like most debuts, the war brought its share of high anticipation, major disappointment, dogged accomplishment, and exaggerated exhilaration.

Admiral William Sowden Sims was building his career as a naval officer in the years before WWI, in the same years during which Mahan's views were influential. Mahan had not foreseen the importance of the submarine, and the importance of convoys and the other defensive measures which would become important in an era in which the submarine gained much significance. Mahan's hypotheses about naval warfare were centered around the concept of decisive battles. In WWI, convoy duty and submarine hunting would be important as well. Given the international prevalence of Mahan's ideas, a defensive tactic taken by some navies was simply to refuse to be engaged in a 'decisive battle.'

Admiral Sims, commanding U.S. naval forces from his station in England during WWI, had to create new concepts about naval warfare to fit the new circumstances. Working with his English counterparts, he was able to develop effective anti-submarine tactics. This can be interpreted variously as moving past Mahan's views, or as simply updating Mahan's hypotheses. Historian Russell Weigley writes:

By the time the United States entered the World War in April, 1917, the intermediate objective of command of the sea had in a conventional sense been achieved. The Royal Navy had the German High Seas Fleet securely bottled up in German coastal waters. Unfortunately, when the United States entered the war the German submarine campaign was making conventional command of the sea appear a very bad joke. William S. Sims, now a rear admiral, arrived in London soon after the American declaration of war to learn from the Admiralty's statistics that Great Britain was within measurable distance of strangulation. The submarines were sinking one ship of every four that left England, and the British were able to replace only one ship in ten. With the submarine and the self-propelled torpedo employed against a vulnerable maritime nation, the guerre de course, the commerce-raiding war, was becoming an immense German success, Mahan to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, one of the principal mistakes the Germans had made was to have paid too much heed to Mahan and to have built too many battleships and not enough submarines before the war.

In any case, WWI did not occur as Mahan thought it might, first because armed conflict on land was more than significant and did not leave the matter to be settled at sea, and second because the naval fighting did not center around one or more decisive battles, but rather around convoy duty and submarine warfare. Mahan died in 1914 and did not live to see WWI. Admiral Sims commanded those U.S. naval forces which operated from England during the entire American involvement in WWI. He is considered to be an excellent naval officer, and he authored a book about the naval aspects of WWI; his work is still honored by the U.S. Navy.

The Pacific War That Wasn't

Of the U.S. ships sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, what would have happened if the majority of them had survived the attack and gone on to meet the Japanese – or some other – fleet in a traditional naval battle? We’ll never know, of course, and good historians routinely caution against speculation of this nature. Yet with exactly this hypothetical question historian Trent Hone begins his article on “The Evolution of Fleet Tactical Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1922 – 1941” in The Journal of Military History.

Of course, it is merely a rhetorical device, meant to grab the reader’s attention; it succeeds. Having gotten our attention, Trent Hone wishes to explore the a question more appropriate to a serious historian: what did Navy officers envision as a naval battle during the pre-war years? By war’s end, submarines and aircraft carriers would assume a much greater role. But the Navy, which began its glory years with Teddy Roosevelt’s “great white fleet,” had three or four decades of battle planning prior to Pearl Harbor’s destruction. What were they planning?

One main feature of their tactics and strategies involved fleet formations. A fleet is composed of various types of ships: battleships, cruisers, destroyers, tenders, and other types of ships. Naval vocabulary is a world unto itself, and worth exploring: a battleship is the largest and heaviest of the traditional naval vessels, heavy with arms and heavy with armor, introduced after the end of sailing ships and with the advent of the steam, coal, and oil era; a cruiser is small and light, lightly armed, and lightly armored, and therefore very fast; a destroyer is even faster, smaller, and lighter; the battlecruiser has light armor but heavy arms, allowing it to be faster than a battleship; a tender supports or supplies other vessels. There are many other classes of boat, including: armored cruiser, aircraft carrier, gunboat, heavy cruiser, monitor, pocket battleship, submarine, and torpedo boat – to name but a few. Within these categories, one can distinguish, e.g., between pre-dreadnought and post-dreadnought battleships, or between light cruisers and heavy cruisers.

The formation of a fleet, consisting of some combination of the above-named categories, is crucial to its success. In years between WWI and WWII, the Navy designed formations for three situations: cruising, approach, and battle. A ‘cruising’ formation is mainly for transporting the fleet from one place to another, in conditions when “the chances of contact were slight.” An ‘approach’ formation was for exactly that: approaching the enemy. Likewise, a ‘battle’ formation was for actually engaging the enemy.

Designing a formation was one thing. Carrying it out was another. Two key variables were necessary to executing a formation: a steady course, and the ability to turn. A steady course was dependent on technology: accurate maneuvering, and the ability to maintain a consistent speed; the slowest vessel in the formation determined the maximum speed of the formation; wheelhouse and rudder skills determined how consistent and how tight the formation could be. Turning was a complex activity: to turn one ship is easy; to keep a specific formation while turning an entire fleet is an exercise in vector physics. The answer to the question of turning was circular, or semi-circular, formations based on a series of arcs.

A steady course was important, not only for keeping formation, but for calculating precision firing from the heavy guns. For the most accurate firing, a ship had to keep constant speed and direction, with a minimum of pitch, yaw, and roll. Even so, the skills required for accurate fire included algebra, trigonometry, and calculus.

The U.S. Navy enjoyed a set of advantages, relative to the navies of other nations, in the 1920’s – the technological construction of their ships incorporated the best designs of guns and armor; aerial spotting increased the range of effective fire by many thousands of yards; fire had been organized by ‘director control’ in which all the guns of battle ship fired on the orders of one officers, and by ‘massed fire’ in which all the guns of a number of ships fired on the orders of one officer; the development of a computer – analogue, to be sure – which sped up the calculations; and an emphasis on arming ships with the most powerful sixteen-inch guns.

In this same decade – the 1920’s – the Navy dealt with two disadvantages: first, the elevation of its big guns was limited, keeping them from longer ranges; second, the speed of the fleet was slow.

In the next decade – the 1930’s – the Navy dealt with these disadvantages. The elevation of guns could be improved on existing ships, and new ships could be built so that their guns reached higher angles. Dealing with a slow average fleet speed was a thornier problem. Although newer ships could be constructed with faster capabilities, any group of ships was still limited by its slowest, and usually oldest, ship. This difficulty was resolved by new plans for formations and maneuvers. One innovation was the ‘reverse action’ in which the Navy’s ships would steam past the enemy’s ships, moving in the opposite direction – i.e., if the enemy boats were moving southward, the Navy boats would move northward. This increased the relative speed of the ships, making up for the Navy’s slower speed. This tactic was never put to any conclusive test, so it remains an innovation in theory.

Surveying the years from 1922 to 1941, Trent Hone generates a description of the Navy’s tactical doctrine: first, its goal was to have a definite plan for various situations – no improvising. Second, tactics were structured around known American advantages – powerful guns and strong armor – and known enemy disadvantages – possible opponents might lack the long range of American guns. Third, despite the goal of having plans for various types of situations, there was also an element of flexibility and decentralization; a battle plan was a ‘framework’ within which officers could apply ‘their own initiative.’ Fourth, the Navy wanted to seize the tactical initiative, not by means of the speed which it lacked, but by means of complex and unexpected maneuvers – e.g., the ‘reverse action.’ Fifth, long-range fire supported by aerial spotting became a clear preference of naval officers; the addition of airplanes made the guns much more effective. Sixth, aggressive offensive action concentrated on the enemy battle line, not only with powerful guns, but with airplanes bombing, dive-bombing, and launching torpedos was given primary effort in battle scenarios, as opposed to more cautious and conservative battle plans which devoted more resources to defensive maneuvers.

Trent Hone continues his article by describing how new ships – the North Carolina and the South Dakota – were built with the Navy’s tactical doctrine in mind, featuring big guns with high elevation angles, high-tech armor, and higher speeds.

The Navy’s doctrines from the pre-1941 era were never really tested in combat. Hone closes his article by reviewing some battle plans and war game notes from mid-1941. How such battles – presumably against the Japanese – would have ended remains forever unknown.

Heroes, Not Icons

From the time at which both elementary schools and high schools began requiring classes which included “the civil rights movement” and “African-American History,” the famous ‘Tuskegee Airmen’ have become familiar icons alongside Rosa Parks, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglas, and a host of other famous Black Americans. But aside from the vague notion that these airmen were pilots in WWII, the typical student has no detailed understanding of what they actually did, despite the fact that both documentary films and a Hollywood movie have portrayed their exploits.

Historian William Percy provides insight into who the Tuskegee airmen were, and what they did; this knowledge can transform them from one-dimensional characters in a rehearsed civil rights narrative into the three- or four-dimensional historical individuals they actually were.

The “airmen” actually included commissioned officers, an important step for African-Americans in the Army (no separate Air Force existed until after WII). Their exemplary work in a ‘semi-integrated’ setting, as Percy calls it, gave the Air Corps a head start over the other branches of the military in achieving further integration. The Army itself had operated in a highly segregated manner since the administration of Woodrow Wilson; soldiers recruited from the South, who had already lived under ‘Jim Crow’ laws, were familiar with the system, but soldiers from the North – both white and black – were sometimes surprised by the system, having attended, e.g., the integrated high schools in many Northern cities. Having served and fought in ‘semi-integrated’ settings, returning to segregated Army bases in the U.S. was a rude awakening for some of the airmen.

Higher officers in the Army Air Force, the AAF, acknowledged the accomplishments of the Tuskegee units – the 99th Fighter Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group – but saw the integration of African-Americans into AAF as a wartime necessity or a political statement, and seemed willing to return to the segregated status quo antebellum.

One reason for the success of the 332nd was their leader, Colonel B.O. Davis, Jr.; he was a West Point graduate and was praised by his superiors, General Eaker and General Dean Strother. The airmen compiled an impressive record; measured by nearly any statistic – number of missions, number of enemy craft shot down, number of medals earned, etc. – they performed as well as, or better than, other units. The only criticism made of them was that they might have more aggressively pursued enemy fighter planes; but this criticism fails to consider the fact that, to make such pursuit, they would have had to leave the bombers which they were escorting, and giving escort was their assigned task at that moment. Thus it was that no bomber escorted by the Tuskegee pilots was ever shot down by enemy fire: this unique statistic is one of their main claims to fame.

Various specific anecdotes serve to illustrate the heroism for which these men became known. On a sixteen-hundred-mile raid to Berlin, bombers were to be accompanied by three different fighter groups: one group for the first third of the mission, another group for the second third, and a final group for the remainder of the flight. The Tuskegee pilots were assigned to the middle third, but when the final group of fighters failed to appear at the rendezvous point to takeover escort duty and relieve the Tuskegee pilots, the Tuskegee fighters continued to protect the bombers for the remainder of the mission, including shooting down at least three ME-262 jet fighters, a feat which earned them a Distinguished Unit Citation.

Among the white officers and white airmen of AAF, there were certainly some whose racists attitudes emoted a strong distaste for working with the ‘Negroes’ – the majority of white fliers, however, respected and appreciated the work of Black airmen and officers. High-ranking AAF officers, including even General “Hap” Arnold, visited the bases and praised the ‘Negro airmen.’ Aside from friendliness and praising the skill of the Black pilots, the crews of the American bombers realized that the Tuskegee airmen had saved their lives in many situations. When a bomber suffered either mechanical difficulties, or damage from enemy fire, and had to separate from the formation and return to its base alone, it was especially vulnerable to German fighters, and especially thankful for the protective escort of the Tuskegee fliers.

The 332nd Fighter Group was formed in January 1942 and arrived in Europe in January 1944. Initially, the 332nd was equipped with P-39 fighter which had inferior technical features, and the missions given to the 332nd were “boring, routine patrols.” Bombers needed protection, however, and the 332nd was re-tasked to escort them, was re-equipped with technically superior P-47 aircraft, and earned its fame protecting the vulnerable B-17 and B-24 bombers.

The 99th Fighter Squadron was older than the 332nd, having been founded in July 1941. The 99th trained at Tuskegee on a variety of non-combat ‘trainer’ aircraft – the BT-13 and the AT-6 – and was then equipped with P-40 fighters. The 99th arrived in Africa in April 1943. (The reader may recall a TV series from the 1960’s called “Rat Patrol” which captured the flavor of the North African Theater of combat.) After training briefly with the 27th Fighter Group, the 99th was assigned to the 33rd Fighter Group; the 99th was with the 33rd for only May and June of 1943. The officers of the 33rd alternated between ignoring the 99th and belittling it; while individual officers, and most of the airmen, of the 33rd were supportive of the 99th, the commander set a hostile tone. The 99th was reassigned to the 324th Fighter Group in June 1943. The 324th was somewhat better to the 99th; the intelligence officers of the 324th “fully credited the black squadron for its escort and ground-support missions over Sicily,” but the 324th seemed more puzzled than anything else at the African-American airmen, and largely ignored them, keeping them segregated and sending them on their own missions apart from the white squadrons. It was during this time, over Sicily, that the 99th got its first confirmed kill, and the highest officers visited the 99th to congratulate: General Eisenhower, General Doolittle, Air Vice Marshal Coningham of the RAF, and other superstars of air power. This demonstrated that the Tuskegee fliers were being supported and watched by the top-level officers, even if the mid-level officers seemed oblivious or antagonistic. (“Ike” Eisenhower also integrated ground troops during the Battle of the Bulge, long before President Truman’s postwar executive order to integrate the armed services.)

In July 1943, the 99th was reassigned back to the 33rd Fighter Group. This time, the 33rd was less hostile to the 99th; instead, the 33rd merely ignored the 99th. In October 1943, the 99th squadron was reassigned to join the 79th Fighter Group. Of the groups to which the 99th had belonged so far, the 79th was by far the best. The 99th was one of four squadrons in the group, and duties were assigned equally. In January 1994, the 99th had twelve confirmed kills in two days, establishing a level of performance comparable to any other unit. While with the 79th, the men of the 99th enjoyed a collegial and professional relationship with the white fighter pilots of the 79th’s other three squadrons; this marks a high point in race relations. Also while with the 79th, the 99th began upgrading to P-47’s to replace their P-40’s, a signal that highly-placed officers had confidence in the 99th and were investing in its future. In April 1944, the 99th was reassigned back to the 324th, were they were largely ignored by the white officers but continued to perform excellently, particularly in support of U.S. Army ground forces in Italy. In June 1944, the 99th was reassigned to the 86th Fighter Group. After June 1944, the 99th was assigned to the 332nd, where it would remain for the duration. With the 332nd, the 99th would have new duties as bomber escorts.

This dizzying summary of the 99th’s history and 332nd’s history suffices to demonstrate two points: first, that the Black pilots performed well; second, that some white officers were hostile and some were friendly. In any event, the Tuskegee fighter pilots certainly earned their places in the history books.

The value of William Percy’s article is this: it transforms vague icons into concrete data. References to “The Tuskegee Airmen” appear in every standard presentation about “the civil rights movement” and about “African-American History,” but remain merely imprecise allusions. It is a disservice to these warriors to allow them to remain icons; such symbols are instruments, carrying little meaning in themselves, and used for whatever goals various rhetoricians may choose. The Tuskegee Airmen were not merely symbols or metaphors, but rather real men, servicemen who saw combat. They are not merely tokens to be used in a game of civil-rights discourse; they protected their loved ones and their nation. Only a presentation of quantifiable and observable data, such as William Percy gives us, confirms that the Tuskegee pilots were honorable and brave, and not merely figments in the imagination of some political leader who creates exhibitions and lectures for schoolchildren. The Tuskegee airmen were flesh-and-blood heroes.

The Second Amendment's Complex Details

The political debates surrounding the Second Amendment lead the reader into many obscure niches of legal history. As a part of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment was intended to do more than guarantee to the individual citizen "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." It is the prepositional phrase "of the people" which tells us that this right is for the individual private citizen. However, the same text also preserves for each of the states the right to maintain its own "well-ordered militia," separate from the army of the federal government.

America's military systems were once structured so that the bulk of the nation's military forces was maintained by the states in their own militias. The national government had sometimes a small army, but had also the ability to call the state militias into action. The nation's army consisted then primarily of the combination of state militias, and only secondarily of a standing federal army.

For this reason, then, the Second Amendment guards not only each citizen's right to "keep and bear," but also the right of each state to maintain its militia. Indeed, the federal government depended on each state not only having that right, but exercising it. As Adam Winkler writes in The Atlantic magazine,

For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the "individual mandate" that has proved so controversial in President Obama's health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters — where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.

A few years prior to the Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson wrote, while drafting the constitution for the state of Virginia,

No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.

Jefferson worked through three drafts of the state's constitution, and each draft contained this line (with slight variations in wording). It was apparently important to him.

Although the immediate context of the Second Amendment was the struggle against England for independence, the text came into play at the close of the Civil War. At that time, two things were clear: blacks had gained their freedom, and blacks would not have an easy time keeping that freedom. Adam Winkler continues:

Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

The history of gun-control legislation, i.e., the history of attempts to undermine the freedoms given by the Second Amendment, is rooted in post-Civil War racism. Recall that the war ended in 1865 - Lee surrender to Grant on April 9, and President Johnson declared the war ended on May 9. Between the war's end and Congress's vigorous reconstruction - often titled "Radical Reconstruction" in history books - in 1867, there was little protection for the civil rights of the newly-freed African Americans. Ex-slaves were at the mercy of the same local government who had opposed Lincoln, declared secession, and maintained the war effort.

During this time, Democratic Party officials in the South developed "Black Codes" - laws aimed at reducing the civil rights of blacks. This injustice would not be rectified until the Republican Party enacted three constitutional amendments - the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth - and sent federal observers into the South to verify compliance. This "Radical Reconstruction" beginning in 1867 was the Republican Party's effort to continue Abraham Lincoln's vision.

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn't do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had "seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen" in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

Attempting to address these injustices, before Congress organized the full-blown Radical Reconstruction, northern military officers occasionally intervened during the milder "presidential reconstructions" under Lincoln and during the first months of Johnson's presidency.

In response to the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen's constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that "the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed." When South Carolinians ignored Sickles's order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the "full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms."

It became clear to Congress that Second Amendment rights among blacks in the South needed to be protected. Between the KKK's illegal activities and the blind eye which local Democratic Party officials in the South turned toward the Klan's activities, the African-Americans needed "the right to keep and bear" in order to defend their civil rights.

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an "equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense." President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.

In December 1865, Republican Congressman John Bingham of Ohio proposed the text that would become the Fourteenth Amendment. His co-sponsor, Republican Senator Jacob Howard from Michigan, presented the text in the Senate by reminding his colleagues that in preserving for blacks the "privileges or immunities of citizens," the text of the amendment kept "the right to keep and bear arms" for the ex-slaves:

the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment — America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law — clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, "Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman."

As the amendment progressed through the ratification process, and Congress's more assertive vision of reconstruction began to replace President Johnson's milder version,

The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights.

A century of civil rights progress - from the 1860's to the 1950's - was marred by setbacks during the Progressive Era, when Woodrow Wilson re-segregated federal departments, like the Post Office, which had been already integrated. Wilson also took steps to reduce black enrollments in the nation's universities. Recovering from these blows, African-Americans benefitted from the return to "normlacy" and by 1921, Presidents Harding and Coolidge supported blacks by introducing anti-lynching legislation in Congress, aimed at the state of affairs in the South.

As partial desegregation in the military during WWII continued the positive momentum, the stage was set for the emergence of a vigorous civil rights movement in the 1950's.

Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as "an arsenal." William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recalls that, as a child, she saw her father organize local black men to patrol the streets of their Birmingham neighborhood. The men were armed as they patrolled. They protected their families this way. Rice recalls:

The way I come out of my own personal experience, in which in Birmingham, Ala., my father and his friends defended our community in 1962 and 1963 against White Knight Riders by going to the head of the community, the head of the cul-de-sac, and sitting there, armed. And so I'm very concerned about any abridgement of the Second Amendment.

Rice continues:

I also don't think we get to pick and choose from the Constitution. The Second Amendment is as important as the First Amendment.

The New York Times confirms:

Ms. Rice's fondness for the Second Amendment began while watching her father sit on the porch with a gun, ready to defend his family against the Klan’s night riders.

For Martin Luther King, for Condoleezza Rice, and for the black civil rights movement as a whole, Second Amendment rights were seen as vital. Carrying that notion forward by several decades,

in 2008, in a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual's right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District's unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.'s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

The court's ruling in this case muddies the water somewhat, inasmuch as there is a distinction to be made between firearms for self-defense against criminals, and for defense against violation of one's civil rights. The history of the Second Amendment shows that the latter is the stronger current in the narrative of American history.

German Guns - American Freedom

America's war for independence including innovations in both technique and technology. Virtue, noble character, and leadership also played important roles - George Washington and Paul Revere exemplify this, as do the thousands of nameless Minutemen and militiamen.

The technology incorporated into rifles enabled snipers to shoot with accuracy from long distances. Rifles offered an advantage over an opponent armed with a musket or a blunderbuss, both of which were smoothbore weapons. Historian Thomas Sowell writes:

The Pennsylvania Dutch also developed a hunting rifle that was to play a very different role from that intended by these German pacifists. Unlike most European muskets of the time, German weapons had spiral grooves (called rifling) inside the barrel to produce greater accuracy. Some of these rifled muskets were brought to Pennsylvania by German immigrants. Here they developed a new rifle, with a very elongated barrel for even greater accuracy. This product of German craftsmen in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was originally known as the Pennsylvania rifle. But it acquired fame in the hands of frontier sharpshooters like Daniel Boone and then became known as the "Kentucky Rifle." It later proved very effective in the guerrilla warfare used by Americans against the British during the Revolutionary War.

As the bullet spun, the axis of its spinning was also its flight-path, and the gyroscopic effect keeps the lead ball flying in something very close to a straight line. Projectiles from smoothbore weapons deviate more to the right or left. Historian Geoffrey Norman writes:

The rifled musket was, indeed, a game-changer in the American Revolution, even if it was not quite as decisive as some have made it out to be. American gunsmiths were not the first to cut grooves into the barrel of a musket, thus putting spin to the lead ball it shot. The spin imparted stability to the ball in flight and improved accuracy over the smoothbore by orders of magnitude. German gunsmiths were the first to employ the technique. German immigrants brought it with them to the New World and made the refinements and improvements that became the Pennsylvania (or Kentucky) long rifle and so famously knocked General Simon Fraser out of the saddle at Saratoga and, a few years later, dropped rank after rank of British troops carrying smoothbores that left them outranged and vulnerable to Andrew Jackson’s men at New Orleans. As usual, the British were brave but slow to learn.

The Americans seemed to incorporate rifles into some of their units quicker than the English, and combined with guerrilla tactics, allowed a small number of Americans to effectively harass larger British armies. (The word 'guerrilla' wouldn't be used until later - when Napoleon invaded Spain - but the Americans had effectively conceptualized the technique.) The British army would eventually shift to large-scale use of the rifle, but only after the United States had won independence.