Andrew Hagen

War Nerd Gary Brecher offers a correction to the commonly held belief that French military history lacks accomplishment. (*)

I was wandering around the bookstore, looking for something that would explain it all. Why is our culture killing itself with moral treason and intellectual suicide? Why do we stare evil in the eye and blink? Why are we losing this war? Why, despite our technology, despite our troops, despite our best intentions, the ordinary Westerner when confronted with a few difficult moments in Iraq suffers a failure of nerve? Why has the field of history become a proto-Marxist breeding ground? Why has social science been co-opted with a Gramscian revisionism that portrays everything in Western Civilization as vile and everything in other cultures and civilizations as unblemished and worthy of copying?

I picked up David Horowitz’s Left Illusions but the size seemed daunting, and a quick look through did not offer what I sought.

Then I found Robert Conquest’s book, Reflections on a Ravaged Century. (*) The book was published in 2000, and it focuses on fascism and communism, not terrorism. The 20th century was filled with murder and savagery in service to the Idea. To explain it all, you needed an Idea. Next to the Idea, human compassion and free thought meant nothing. People would be forced to fundamentally change so that they could live up to the Idea, and human nature was considered infinitely malleable. If the square pegs could be hammered just right, they could fit in round holes. As Conquest notes, you can’t make borscht without cutting up some beats. I believe the Politburo Diktat would appreciate that. (†) Millions were killed to make human beings what they are not, what they can never be.

Conquest does not address Islamist radicalism. Yet, I am drawn into the book. The more I read it, the more I see that the same things that happened in the long struggle against totalitarianism are happening now, except now they are worse. Now the enemies of our society are more insidious and far more committed. They don’t mind a few thousand dead on September 11. It serves their secret purpose of destroying liberal democracy. You can’t make bread without grinding some flour. It is worse now, however. Before they only wanted to convert us to an inhuman way of life. Now they want to destroy our way of life, transmitted from the past, simply for the sake of destroying it, and if Islamist radicals replace our hegemony with their own, a large number of Western intellectuals will proudly take responsibility. To them, that is honor.

In the end, Conquest is optimistic. Whatever the challenge is, our civilization can overcome it. We have the versatility and the flexibility. We need more Westerners to become strong and defend their heritage. We will find them, they will do their duty, and glory will attach to them.

We have a long, hard struggle ahead. It will not be easy, but we can triumph. We must. For otherwise we shall bequeath to our children a century worse than that which we ourselves were born to.

Patrick O’Brian tells the story of the Battle of the Nile, 1798. (*) In it the not-yet-famous Horatio Nelson crushed Napoleon’s fleet. (†)

The Battle of Lepanto was a turning point in the Mediterranean Sea in the 16th century, signaling the end of Ottoman naval power. (*) It is all too often unremembered. (†)

The historian Thomas F. Madden has argued that the Crusades were fought by Christians for primarily defensive reasons. (*)

The Crusades were initiated after Muslims had invaded Europe from the west into the Iberian peninsula and France; from the south into Italy; and from the east into eastern Europe. The Crusades began after the Muslims had violently conquered what had been the predominatly Christian areas of North Africa and the Middle East. The various abuses and excesses perpetrated by the Crusaders are regrettable. The Crusades were ultimately unsuccessful in taking and keeping key areas of the Middle East, including Jerusalem. Yet, they were largely successful in slowing the advance of the conquering Islamic armies, allowing Christian Europe to prosper long enough to reach the Renaissance.

Howard Owens has more. (†)

Update: 6 December 2003. Edited for phrasing.

Thomas F. Madden has more. (‡) (§)

Mike at Steven Den Beste’s site writes that the historical naval powers are lined up in support of war with Iraq, with others opposed. This is explained as the result of a fundamental national outlook. (*) Supporting the war are Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the US, naval powers past and present. Further supporters, tacit or otherwise, include former naval powers Japan and Bahrain (the latter being the ancestral home of the Muscat Arabs).

Nevertheless, the rule does not hold. Turkey is not a supporter of the war, but its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, was surely a great naval power. (†) It fought the famous Battle of Lepanto, 1571, for example. (‡) We might also mention the Phoenicians, as represented by either Lebanon or Libya today, and the Athenian Empire, as represented by Greece today. None support the war. The Scandinavian countries, from Norway to Sweden to Denmark, are tepid supporters at best (§), yet surely the Vikings have not been forgotten. Finally, I would find it difficult to not include either Germany, during World War I and II, or the USSR, during the Cold War, on the list of great naval powers. Their submarines may have been hidden beneath the waves, but they nevertheless represented projections of enormous power. If there is any pattern to this, it must be coincidence.

American naval experts have concluded that the mammoth German battleship Bismarck was not sunk by the British, as had been previously claimed, but was scuttled. British torpedos had penetrated the outer hull of the battleship, but the inner armor was unharmed, leaving her seaworthy. (*) The British-German engagement that ended with the sinking of the DKM Bismarck ultimately proved decisive in the battle for supremacy in the Atlantic in World War II. In early 1941, the Bismarck was the biggest battleship ever built, and was greatly feared as a threat to the British. When the Bismarck broke out and threatened to attack shipping, the British had to respond quickly.

In the fierce and bitter naval engagement that followed, the Bismarck fired a shell that hit the British battle cruiser Hood and penetrated to her magazine. The HMS Hood exploded with over one thousand sailors’ lives lost. A flotilla of British ships pursued the Bismarck, knocking out all but one of her guns, and jamming her rudder so she could only steam in circles. The Germans feared the capture of the battleship for it would mean that the British would learn the secrets of their prized ship-building technology. This technology provided the double layer of armor that had protected the Bismarck so well from British attack. Were the British to capture the Bismarck, they could soon build ships that were nearly unsinkable, too. German sailors set off explosives below the waterline to scuttle the battleship. Despite the deliberate scuttling, just over one hundred of over two thousand German sailors survived. Ignoring the law of the sea, and with the memory of the Hood still fresh, the British warships turned away from the scene and steamed off, abandoning most of the German sailors floating in the cold ocean. (†) (‡) (§) (**) War does terrible things to men.

Edited: 10 December 2002.

Update: 26 November 2003. A reader e-mails me and mentions that the British are said to have made a U-Boat sighting. That prompted them to quickly leave the scene of battle. Such a circumstance would mitigate the mistake of the British. The evidence is not striongly indicative of an actual sighting of a U-Boat, however. It may have been a false U-Boat sighting. (††) Trying to assign blame for a false U-Boat sighting, if it were false, would be difficult. It just doesn’t make sense to me that a U-Boat would peep its head out when German sailors were in the process of being rescued. On the other hand, the survivors who were rescued were treated humanely by the British.

If someone has knowledge of a definitive historical work on the subject, or of a primary document, I’d be much obliged for your contact. Thank you.