The military history community lost one of the giants of the field with the passing of Craig Symonds on October 13th. Those who attended the 2023 Annual Meeting in San Diego may remember Professor Symonds’ thoughtful keynote address about the state of military history, and especially about the relationship between the “old military history” and the “new military history.” For those who missed that address, or who just want to revisit it, we offer it here for your reading pleasure.
Society for Military History 2023 Annual Meeting Keynote Address
Professor Craig Symonds, March 25, 2023
I want to thank the Society of Military History for hosting this wonderful conference and to congratulate Pete Mansoor and CC Felker—whom I have known since he was a plebe—for their service to our organization.
I won’t take up too much of your time. I know the reception is waiting, and I am as eager to get to it as you are.
I will start by telling you a story. I remember a meeting like this one that took place in 1990—some 33 years ago now. There were fewer of us then. At that meeting —mostly at Al Millet’s suggestion—we discussed changing the name of the organization from the American Military Institute, the name it had carried since 1939, to the Society of Military History. Al proposed this in order to professionalize and broaden the organization’s purpose and appeal.
We were having an open conversation about it, when Jim Bradford, who many of you know, proposed that the new name should be “the Society of Military, Air, and Sea History.” He did so, he told us, because that would make the acronym for it: SMASH. Those of you who know Jim know that he proposed this at least partly in jest, and we all laughed appreciatively, before approving the name the organization bears today.
But I tell that story because it leads to a more serious question, which is just how broadly those of us who study military history cast our net. Armies, Navies, Air forces, to be sure, but also much more than that.
Today, military history is often considered a niche field, one that has a broad appeal to the general reading public, but also one which is conspicuous mostly by its absence in the catalogs of liberal arts colleges and major universities. Many people, among them Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Mintz, have noted this with alarm. They note that fewer and fewer of our elected leaders have any personal experience with things military, and that fewer and fewer elite institutions offer more than a few courses—if any—in military history. True enough.
On the other hand, the new emphasis on race, class, and gender is a valuable and necessary—even essential—correction to the 19th assumption that history was the domain of be-whiskered white men who held political office. The sign that famously hung in the seminar room of the History Department at the University of Wisconsin read: “History is Past Politics, and Politics is Present History.” It is, of course, much more than that.
So, I have no objection to the new emphasis on race, class, and gender because they reveal important truths about humankind that have long been overlook in favor of accounts of elderly white men holding political office.
Let me quickly add here, parenthetically, that there’s nothing wrong with elderly white men holding political office!
But the argument I want to make tonight is that military history—in its full context, and done right—is, in fact, the most inclusive of all historical endeavors, one that includes race, class, and gender, as well as politics, economics, culture, society, industry, and geography, and probably any other subheading you can think of. That is because the application of a nation’s treasure, and its most valuable capital—its citizens—to violent confrontation reveals and illuminates the most deeply-held, and irresolvable of human issues. Given that, military history is arguably the most accurate and precise window into understanding history itself.
Winston Churchill, in the biography he wrote of his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough—which, in my opinion, is his best work—insisted, almost defensively, that “Battles are the principal milestones of secular history.”
Of course, Churchill was a kind of throwback, essentially a 19th century Victorian, in spite of the fact that he rose to great fame in the middle of the 20th century. He loved the trappings of empire, he loved grand heroic gestures . . . , and he loved military history. He wrote a lot of it himself, from the Malakand Field Force to the Second World War. There is a lot of politics and diplomacy in his works, as well as battles, but his work is generally categorized among the “old” military history which focuses on Battles and Leaders.
Sometime in the late 1960s, the term “New military history” was coined, and it has been bandied about ever since. It was meant to imply that the “old” military history of deconstructing the movement of armies on the field with X’s and O’s on a map, was passe. The NEW military history would include and embrace a much wider variety of elements including cultural, economic, and psychological elements.
In fact, of course, good military history has always done that. We have seen a particularly vivid demonstration of this over the past three days. Churchill would have been pleased by the sessions on Battles and Leaders, but I thorougjly enjoyed, and learned from, the sessions on Race, Class, and Gender as well as dissent, resistance and liberation movements, war crimes, POWs, the environment, and others. A rich strew.
All that is proof that historical events—and especially wars—have a deep back story. Hobbes notwithstanding, military violence does not emerge spontaneously from the combative nature of man. For Churchill, battles were the milestones of secular history, but perhaps it is more accurate to say that they are the punctuation marks of history—the exclamation points that reveal the fault lines of history. They are the events that tell us what issues can propel a nation—or a people, or a culture, a society, a religion, a belief system, or a tribe . . . , what leads them to risk human and material treasure for a valued object. What is the object? Why is it valued? Answering those questions reveals the essential characteristics of a society, and why military history offers not only an especially vivid snapshot of a past event, but also a particularly nuanced understanding of it.
To be sure, the battles themselves are interesting. Churchill found them fascinating, almost obsessively so. And they have drawn disproportionate attention from historians. How many books have been written on the Battle of Gettysburg, or for that matter, on just on one aspect of that battle, the assault that has been named Pickett’s Charge? It was a dramatic moment, so dramatic that it is tempting to focus on that punctuation mark, and perhaps to under-value the sentence, . . . the paragraph . . , even the entire essay that precedes it.
A battle, in effect, acts as a kind of shorthand to denote major turning points in history, including American history, which happens to be my personal interest.
A case in point: The first shot fired on Lexington Green in 1775, was but a moment in time—a mere instant. But to understand it, and explain it, requires the study of a whole array of issues that stretches back not just to the occupation of Boston by red-coated British soldiers, or to objections by English colonists to taxation, or even to Britain’s successful war against France that removed the French and Indian threat and triggered the effort to raise more revenue. To obtain a full perspective, we have to appreciate the British imperial system, which had its roots in the defeat of the Dutch in the 17th century, and even of the Spanish Armada in the 16th century.
Well, I don’t want to go back all the way back to Adam and Eve here, but the point is obvious: that battles, and the wars that birth them, have a long and complex back story.
Everyone here can all cite other such moments in history when decades, or even centuries, of circumstances brought an issue—or multiple issues—to a head until they generated an explosion of violence.
- the first shot at Fort Sumter;
- the sinking of the Lusitania;
- the Tonkin Gulf Incident
We say these are turning points in history, and that is certainly valid—history did turn on these moments—but history turned mainly due to long-percolating historical issues, revealed by the outbreak of violence, that expose the depth of feeling about those issues:
- slavery;
- American expansionism;
- the Cold War.
I wrote a book about the Battle of Midway—another turning-point milestone, or at least that’s what it says in the book. So, it must be true. Indeed, in that book I assert that history itself tipped during a five-minute period on the morning of June 4, 1942. But if we focus too intently on that five-minute period—the punctuation mark—or even on the days and weeks before or afterward, we miss a lot.
One reviewer of my Midway book criticized it for starting with the arrival of Chester Nimitz at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Day, 1941, a full six months before the actual battle. I thought I was being pretty focused. I could have started with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the event that began World War II, or the Versailles treaty in 1919 that gave the Japanese control of the Mandated Islands, or the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, or the American acquisition of the Philippine Islands in 1898, or even the Meiji restoration in 1868. If I really wanted to be thorough, I would have begun with the arrival of Matthew Perry in Edo Harbor in 1853. Again, NOT going back to Adam and Eve.
Still, all these threads came together, in one way or another, during a five-minute period on the morning of June 4, 1942 near Midway Atoll.
One way to think about how a military engagement illuminates broader issues is to think of the event itself as the center of a target. The bull’s eye is the tactical unfolding of the battle: what is attacked, when, and how. And of course, who won. And why? All that is pretty interesting stuff.
But in concentric circles extending out from that bull’s eye are other considerations: There is the Operational History—what brought the forces to that moment? There is the diplomatic maneuvering beforehand, and the political history that informed the diplomacy. There is the cultural background that determined the politics, and the economic and philosophical issues that drove the culture. Can we understand the history of the Pacific war at all without appreciating the tension between the Japanese Army and Navy, or the nuances of Japanese politics—or of American isolationism, itself a product of the perceived disappointments of World War I?
I am not suggesting that all military histories must include every event, or every aspect of a national culture, that led to the moment of conflict, but I am suggesting that those critics who dismiss the old military history as a niche field, fail to appreciate the extent to which a moment of intense conflict illuminates the full scope of history in all its aspects.
AND, SPEAKING OF ASPECTS. One that sometimes get less attention than it deserves, even among military historians, is the whole question of logistics.
My father was a Realtor. I remember him telling me when I was a mere lad, that the first three rules in determining the value of a home are: “Location, location, location.” You’ve no doubt heard that, too. In much the same way, the three most important aspects of a military campaign are “Logistics, logistics, logistics.”
I sought to make this point explicitly in my book on the naval aspects of D-Day, Operation NEPTUNE.
Logistics are less sexy than storming the beach—or searching for Private Ryan—but the Allies could never have crossed the Channel to the Normandy beaches, or for that matter crossed the Atlantic with the wherewithal to launch that invasion, without the ability to produce the tools of war needed to do so—produce them in previously unimaginable quantities—and then get them from the factory floor to the seaports, across the Atlantic to England, and eventually across the Channel. To do all that required shipping—shipping in unprecedented numbers. Those of you who study World War II are aware of the bottleneck caused by the shortage of one specific type of ship, the Landing Ship, Tank, or LST. The shortage of LSTs forced the Allies to adjust their timetable, not only for the invasion of Normandy but in the Pacific as well.
But even more broadly than that, the general cargo ships, like the Liberty ship, and the Victory ship, were also essential. Before the war was over, the United States built over a thousand LSTs, and more than 2,700 Liberty ships—all of them built during the war, and some built in a matter of weeks.
And once again, the call for so many ships so quickly had a cultural and social impact. The need for the workers to build them led to Rosy the Riveter and Wendy the Welder, with a permanent impact on subsequent American culture. It even led Andrew Jackson Higgins, designer of the famous Higgins boats, to consider employing Black workers in his shipyards in Louisiana, though that proved a hill too steep to climb despite the emergency. It is interesting, and revealing, that having white women on the factory floor, or in the shipyard, was less challenging to the dominant white male culture of 1943 than having black male workers in any capacity. White men were willing to work alongside white women, but not alongside Black men. Higgins toyed with the idea of setting up separate assembly lines—one for whites, one for Blacks—and then challenging them to see which line produced more ships faster. He never actually implemented the scheme, which might have worked—or led to a race riot.
Here’s another cultural, racial impact of war: Barring Black workers from shipyards in Louisiana, and the availability of mobilization jobs elsewhere in America led to what we call the Second Great Migration. Between 1940 and 1950, more than five million Black Americans moved from the South to the North and West to find those jobs. That dramatically changed the demographic picture of the United States. The percentage of Black Americans who lived in the States of the former Confederacy changed from 79% before the war, to barely over 50% afterward. This is also military history.
And, of course, the role of race in combat is also revealing. Blacks served in segregated units in the Union Army during the Civil War—with white officers. And not a lot had changed by Pearl Harbor Day. Blacks and other minorities were either barred from combat during World War II, or restricted to support roles, such as service as mess boys or stevedores. Scholars are digging deep into this issue now. I heard a great session this morning abut desegregation during the Korean War—one more example of the impact the impact that America’s war mobilization had on American racial culture.
The point here is that battles may be only the punctuation marks of history, but they accelerate change—social change, political change, economic change. They often mark dramatic shifts in what a culture decides is humane: Aerial bombing, unrestricted submarine warfare, atomic bombs. But this kind of acceleration also affects a nation’s culture. War is an accelerator of social change; when a nation or a society goes to war, it speeds up the rate of social change from normal, whatever that is, to fast-forward. Things that that were all but unimaginable at the outset of a war, came to be seen as inevitable by its end, not only the emergence of Wendy the Riveter, and the eventual, if grudging, acceptance of Black Americans in combat roles, but also to the new assertiveness of British women during the Blitz.
FINALLY, one powerful element of military history is military biography. Indeed, it is very nearly its own field. Studying the actions of military leaders in the cauldron of war is an almost unique laboratory for character analysis. What other aspect of human endeavor allows one person to exercise the power of life or death over another? So, military history allows us to study leadership, too. And not just by using the index of victory or defeat. George Washington won few battles. The same is true of Dwight Eisenhower. Yet we consider them to be great captains. Napoleon won many battles, though his legacy is more complicated.
And military biography also involves character analysis as well. It offers not only one individual’s role in, and view of, warfare, it is also an opportunity to investigate the role of personality and temperament in historical events, not only to figure out who he or she was, but also how character or personality affected, or didn’t, the great events of which they were a part.
I have written five biographies, two of generals, two of admirals, and one of a president—Lincoln. (Apparently, everyone who works in Civil War history is required to write a Lincoln book.) Each of these projects allowed me to explore not only who that person was, what role he played in the war, but also what his role told me about the war, about those who fought in it, and the society that prosecuted it.
My book on Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston highlighted the extent to which personal codes of honor infused the Confederate officer corps, and how that contributed not only to the way the war was fought, but arguably the outcome as well. My book on another Confederate general, Patrick Cleburne, allowed me—indeed, required me—to investigate the inescapable link between the slave system and the Confederate rationale for war. For those of you not steeped in Civil War minutiae, Cleburne was a Confederate general who was successful on the battlefield, but who also, being Irish born, never fully internalized the connection between the slave system and the war. His experience on the battlefield convinced him that the Confederacy was being overwhelmed by Union numerical superiority, including—to his great disappointment—a significant number of Irish immigrants like himself. So, in 1864, he proposed to overcome the North’s numerical advantage by freeing all the slaves in the South and giving them guns.
Well, as you can image, that was not universally popular among those who ran the Confederate government—and its army. To them, such a notion was not only heresy, it was absurd. The whole slave system in the South was based on the universal belief that Black men were incapable of the kind of behavior required of soldiers in the field. As Georgian Howell Cobb put it at the time, “if slaves make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Well, they did, and it was.
This example exposes the most elemental aspects of the Confederate rebellion, as well as the very human ability to convince ourselves that a thing that benefits us personally is, in fact, a virtue in and of itself. Cobb was convinced that what he considered military virtues—courage, discipline, steadfastness—were limited to the white race, because to believe otherwise wrecked his whole world view.
We humans are curious creatures, and one purpose of historical enquiry is to explore that. If war illuminates the deepest values of a culture or a society, it also exposes wide disparity of human values. On the one hand, it reveals the kind of heroism and self-sacrifice that can be found in the experiences of soldiers on the battlefield, but on the other hand it also exposes the depths of depravity to which we can descend when one culture demonizes another. How easy it becomes to justify the unjustifiable. The massacre of Black soldiers at Fort Pillow and the Crater during the Civil War? The U.S. Army commander during the Philippine Insurrection who ordered his men to kill every male over the age of twelve? Or the Holocaust, or kamikazes, or My Lai? . . . Or Ukraine? These events tell us not only about the culture we study, but about humanity itself.
My most recent military biography is about Admiral Chester Nimitz. He might not have fit Howell Cobb’s definition of a good soldier. He never fired a broadside, launched a plane, fired a torpedo, or took part in an amphibious landing. He never won a battle. And yet we say—or at least I say (you’d have to read the book!)—that he was the architect of victory in the Pacific Theater of World War II. So, what was it about Nimitz that allows me to make that claim?
There is a cottage industry devoted to the compilation of lists for how to improve yourself: How to become a better person, a more effective manager, a thinner person, a better lover. I am skeptical of such lists. I don’t think it is possible to write a book entitled, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Admirals”.
Even so, it is possible to study the behavior of individuals, in context, including Chester Nimitz. It probably goes without saying that he was intelligent, professional, and competent. So were most admirals. But what else beyond that? Well, there are a few things worth noting:
- He was soft spoken, not given to grandstanding, or giving speeches. When he did speak, he often did so with such reserve that people had to lean in to hear him. And he was likely to spend at least as much time listening as he did talking. That, in itself, is relatively rare among leaders in any venue.
- He had a puckish sense of humor which he deployed as necessary to defuse tense situations. He might be in the middle of a discussion of operational alternatives, or a particularly tricky personnel decision, and he was likely to interrupt the proceedings by saying, “That reminds me of a story.” This was something Lincoln did, too: Deploying humor to defuse awkward confrontation with being confrontational.
Nimitz liked to tell the story about a young doctor who arrived at the home of couple expecting their first baby. The doctor told the father not to worry, everything would be fine, and then he disappeared into the back room with the expectant mother. A few minutes later, as Nimitz told the story, the doctor stuck his head out the door to ask for a butter knife, which the nervous father provided. Then it was a screwdriver, then a stiff wire, like a coat hanger. Nimitz would go on in this fashion for several minutes, stretching out the story and pausing for dramatic effect, until finally the nervous father asked, “What is wrong? Is everything OK?”
Another pause here. Then Nimitz delivered the punch line: “Oh sure,” the doctor said, “I just can’t get my bag open.”
Nimitz used stories like these purposefully, to suppress growing frustration or bitterness, or simply to lighten the mood.
- Another characteristic was that Nimitz was always in control of himself, at least publicly. If he ever gave in to his frustrations or depression, no one ever saw it. That calm demeanor communicated itself to those around him. If the boss wasn’t worried, maybe there was nothing to be worried about. To use the words used to describe him in the Lucky Bag, the Naval Academy’s yearbook, he was “calm and steady going”;
- He was encouraging to others. He had a particular talent to instill confidence in other people that they could be successful. If he did not fire those broadsides, fly those planes, or storm that beach, he was particularly adept at convincing others that they could, and that they would be successful.
- And finally, Nimitz internalized a decision-making tool that he called “calculated risk,” which he relied on to assess strategic and operational alternatives dispassionately and thoughtfully.
Now, “Calculated risk” for Nimitz was not actually a calculation—there was no formula, no algorithm, that could produce an answer. Rather it was a process that depended on a commander’s subjective evaluation, analysis, and judgment—of weighing the likely value of the objective against the probable risk attached to securing it.
And the same can be said—more broadly—of doing military history. It, too, is subjective, analytical, and requires judgement. What happened is important; understanding the event itself is critical. But it is also critical to ask “So what?” How did what happened affect the expansive canvas of history writ large, including race, class, and gender?
So, hurrah for the “new military history” and for casting our net as broadly as possible. But hurrah, too, for the “old military history,” including the battles—those punctuation marks that reveal the fault lines in history, and the leaders, whose roles tell us so much about the culture in which they developed, and in which they played such a significant role.
I am proud to call myself a military historian.