On June 8, 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon and Republic of Vietnam (RVN) President Nguyen Van Thieu stood side-by-side at Midway Island and formally launched Vietnamization. The goal was to allow U.S. operational combat forces to depart South Vietnam as quickly as possible before the next U.S. presidential election, leaving South Vietnam able to defend itself. Seven months after this announcement, I arrived in Cam Ranh Bay as a replacement headed for the U.S. Army’s 1st Signal Brigade. I was about to have a front row seat on Vietnamization in practice as a quality assurance NCO. Communication technology is an essential combat support function, which Gen. Creighton Abrams, U.S. commander in South Vietnam, had identified from the beginning as critical if South Vietnam’s Armed Forces were to defend their country on their own.

The short time projected for Vietnamization was inadequate for the South to build an effective national defense force with sufficient training to wage modern warfare effectively. Such a project can require years—especially when the local government’s social, economic, and political foundations have been stunted by a century of colonialism and nearly two decades of violent internal turmoil. From my vantage point in South Vietnam throughout most of 1970, these obstacles to rapid Vietnamization appeared insurmountable.

Insurmountable Obstacles

I reported for induction on Oct. 14, 1968, went through basic training at Fort Bliss, Texas, and received orders for advanced training at the Electronic Warfare School at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. Completing the high frequency radio operator course (MOS 05B) in five weeks, I remained at Fort Huachuca as an instructor. With controversy over the war growing, the Army was having trouble getting junior NCOs to reenlist. Instructors were needed. On Nov. 14, 1969, after only 13 months in service, I was promoted to Sergeant E-5. Near the end of November, the training company’s first sergeant called me into the orderly room, looked across his desk, and said, “Congratulations, Sgt. Anderson, you’re going to Vietnam.”

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I landed at Cam Ranh Bay on Jan. 6, 1970, with orders to report to Company C, 43rd Signal Battalion at An Khe in the Central Highlands. The 1st Signal Brigade’s clerk at the 22nd Replacement Battalion, a buck sergeant like me, modified the original orders. I literally went up the hill from the replacement center to the 361st Signal Battalion. I could not believe my luck. Cam Ranh was a large and secure combat base. In the evenings off duty, we wore civilian clothes, and there were a lot of creature comforts with barracks, hot showers, mess halls, snack bars, clubs, a big PX, and a beach just over the hill.

There was a problem, however. My MOS was 05B4H: high frequency radio operator, NCO, instructor. My personnel folder also listed college graduate, high-speed code intercept operator, French linguist (based upon Army testing and six semesters of college French), and a secret-cryptology clearance from my work at Fort Huachuca. The 361st operated tropospheric scatter microwave facilities, and the Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE) of this high technology installation that could transmit almost 200 miles did not include any slots for high-frequency radio operators.

The operations sergeant was on his third straight tour in Vietnam, all at the same job. We called him “Grandpa” behind his back, which was a term of respect because it sure looked like he ran the whole battalion. I knew virtually nothing about tropospheric scatter communication, but Grandpa was pleased to have me, mainly because I was a college graduate who could type and compose a complete sentence. I soon discovered that everyone in the office except the sarge were college graduates. He immediately put me to work as the author of various monthly and quarterly reports but soon realized that I had a more valuable skill—French language ability.

Vietnamization had created an urgent need for a linguist. The operations officer was a signal corps major with an ARVN signal captain as a counterpart. The ARVN officer was in the battalion to learn to manage this integrated wideband communication site. The American officer had studied Portuguese at West Point and didn’t know any Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese captain spoke French but little English. With no training as an interpreter and only basic conversational French, it became my job to help the two officers communicate.

In the 361st Signal Battalion, Vietnamization in 1970 hinged on an American officer mentoring an ARVN officer to take command of a highly technical facility through the hand gestures and college French of a sergeant whose expertise was tactical, not long-range communication, and whose French was better suited to translating Molière than to conveying military technology. The mentoring process was slow and not, I am sure, what Washington envisioned Vietnamization to be. As bad as the situation was for efforts to Vietnamize the 361st Signal Battalion across a serious language divide, the ad hoc process received a further setback with my sudden transfer out with no apparent way to bridge the language gap. The commander of the 1st Signal Brigade later acknowledged in his lessons-learned study that the language barrier hampered training.

A Daunting Task

Brigade headquarters at Long Binh refused to issue permanent orders assigning me to the 361st because my MOS was not authorized for that type of unit. It transferred me to 12th Signal Group at Phu Bai for assignment somewhere in I Corps, the five northern provinces of the Republic of Vietnam. On Feb. 9, I got off a C-130 at Phu Bai airport. I waited in the transient hooch at Headquarters, Headquarters Detachment, 12th Signal Group with my duffle bag packed. I could be off to any of the radio telephone/teletype sites the brigade operated in support of the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile); 1st Brigade, 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized); III Marine Amphibious Force (MAF); 1st ARVN Division; 2nd ARVN Division; or Republic of Korea Marine Brigade. I could expect to spend the next seven months at a division or battalion headquarters, if I was lucky, or a small remote site if I was less fortunate.

As it turned out, I soon learned that I was going to be the group’s quality assurance NCO in charge of a small team of three or four currently being assembled. Col. D.W. Ogden Jr., the group commander, had created the team and its “communication evaluation” mission because, I was told, he was tired of complaints from the combat commanders (termed “customers”) about the quality of signal support from 1st Signal Brigade. The combat commands had their own signal assets, but depended on the 12th Signal Group to link their tactical networks to others in the corps tactical zone and from there to the Integrated Communication System [ICS], Southeast Asia and to worldwide networks operated by the Strategic Communications Command at Fort Huachuca. The technology of this vast system—sometimes referred to as the AT&T of Southeast Asia—was powerful. Through tropospheric scatter, line-of-sight microwave, cable, and other electronic assets, a commander could connect securely by voice, teletype, or data from a combat bunker to anywhere in the world as long as 1st Signal Brigade units in the field kept the complex system up and working.

It was a daunting task for well-educated and thoroughly trained signal soldiers with access to reliable equipment. Would the ARVN be able to manage this critical military infrastructure on its own, especially in the short time that Washington had allowed to accomplish Vietnamization? A new brigade regulation had created Buddies Together (Cung Than-Thien) to train Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces signalmen in highly technical communications skills. Units like ours were also expected to conduct surveys by special teams in each corps tactical zone to determine where American operators could turn over equipment and operations to the South Vietnamese.

My team consisted of an electric generator mechanic (another sergeant), a radio operator (one of my students at Fort Huachuca), and a draftsman. The latter two were SP4s and served as drivers or guards or were assigned other tasks. We usually traveled with the group’s engineering officer and the sergeant major from his office. The colonel had wanted a sergeant first class (E-7) to be the NCO, but senior NCOs were in short supply. He settled for me because of my education and instructor experience, and my rank was at least a hard stripe NCO. There were fewer than 10 E-5 and E-6 NCOs in the group headquarters. The team’s sergeant major (E-9) traveled with us primarily to back me up if the issues at the site turned out to be related to command or personnel problems.

Inexperienced Operations

The U.S. Army history of military communications in Vietnam describes the urgency of the task at hand. The recently completed Automatic Digital Network (AUTODIN) could transmit an average of 1,500 words per minute, but the tactical teletype circuits to which it was connected passed traffic at 60 to 100 words per minute. Signal operators experienced continuous maintenance problems with their overextended machines. In the summer of 1970, the Da Nang tape relay received 20 flash messages (highest precedence) in a 20-minute period from the AUTODIN. This signal company had to relay these messages to the tactical units on its circuits at 100 words per minute, which required about 20 minutes per message. This volume of traffic overheated the recipients’ equipment, requiring transmission to be slowed to 60 words per minute. As the official history records, “Besides such technical problems, tactical operators lacking special training on the operation of the new Automatic Digital Network were bewildered by its formats and procedures. The 1st Signal Brigade had to keep troubleshooting teams constantly on the road to help inexperienced operators.”

The group’s Operational Report-Lessons Learned (ORLL) for July and October 1970 recorded major emphasis on improved communications through quality assurance inspections. Working seven days a week, we were responsible for maintaining the efficient and effective performance of installations operated by 17 units in 5 provinces. The QA team conducted 57 site inspections in six months to improve equipment maintenance, operator efficiency, site operating procedures, and customer satisfaction. According to the ORLLs, “Partly due to the effort of the Quality Assurance team the high standards of customer service provided by units of the 12th Signal Group were maintained or bettered.”

The smallest detail could become significant when dealing with modern electronics. In northern I Corps the soil was red clay (red mud in the rainy season and red dust other times), which made it extremely difficult to establish a working electrical ground for the system. In some cases, poor signal quality or even interrupted transmission was owing to where and how deep the metal grounding rods were installed. Without this basic setup at a tactical location, all the immense technical power to connect the corps level and global system was of no use. It was a variation on the “for want of a nail” adage. In this case, for want of a ground, the message was lost; for want of a message, the battle was lost.

My job took me to signal sites from the DMZ southward to the Batangan Peninsula. Traveling usually by UH-1 Huey helicopters, we went to Camp Carroll (the 1st ARVN Division’s forward command post just south of the DMZ), Quang Tri, Dong Ha, Tan My, Hai Van Pass, Da Nang, Hoi An, Tam Ky, Chu Lai, Duc Pho, and Quang Ngai. Our work also included small fire bases and landing zones: Hawk Hill (5 miles northwest of Tam Ky), LZ Sharon (between Quang Tri and Dong Ha), and FB Birmingham (southwest of Camp Eagle, headquarters of the 101st Airborne, about 5 miles from Phu Bai). We went by road to sites in Phu Bai, Hue, and Camp Eagle.

We tried to get into and out of a site (especially remote ones) in one day without having to stay overnight. On one occasion, because helicopters were unavailable and a signal problem at III MAF needed urgent attention, I went from Phu Bai to Da Nang in an open jeep along Route 1 over Hai Van Pass with only one other soldier to ride shotgun. That we could make that drive at all indicated that by 1970 the level of enemy activity along this key road had declined significantly. My sense was that the enemy was not deterred by the growing size of the ARVN but was waiting for U.S. troop withdrawals to continue. Unknown to me was the CIA’s Special National Intelligence Estimate of Feb. 5 that “Hanoi may be waiting until more US units have departed, in the expectation that this will provide better opportunities with lesser risks, and that Communist forces will be better prepared to strike.”

Phu Bai was a large and relatively secure base. It was not Cam Ranh Bay, but there was a sign at the front gate proclaiming, “Phu Bai is Allright.” It received periodic mortar and rocket bombardment, especially aimed at runways, helipads, and signal towers. Signalmen are soldier-communicators who provide specialized skills and defend their installations against enemy attack. Our detachment had responsibility for about five perimeter bunkers and had a quick reaction team in the event of an assault on the base. With the shortage of junior NCOs in the detachment, I drew the duty as sergeant of the guard, reserve force NCO, or staff duty NCO at least one night a week.

Vietnamization

Most nights were uneventful, but occasionally I was NCOIC during probes of the perimeter or other imminent threats. One occurred during my last month in Vietnam. Perhaps Charlie knew I was short, because enemy bombardments and ground probes of Camp Eagle, nearby Camp Evans, and Phu Bai increased markedly in July and August 1970. Actually, the enemy was testing the progress of Vietnamization and not targeting me specifically.

There were ARVN troops at many of our bases, but most of them provided perimeter security, manned artillery pieces, or handled supplies—not operating signal equipment. Similar to what I had witnessed at the 361st Signal Battalion, there were a few ARVN officers and NCOs shadowing American counterparts, but I observed little interaction or hands-on communication activity by Vietnamese.

Aware of Vietnamization goals, I wrote to my parents: “The Vietnamization program is really going on in earnest over here.… Even 12th Sig. Gp. is getting in on the ARVN training program. We have about 20 ARVN at various sites in the Group receiving on-the-job training on a buddy system basis.” In retrospect, my estimate of 20 ARVN signalmen over a five-province area suggests that the number being trained was woefully small. With the exception of Camp Carroll, an ARVN command post, I seldom heard Vietnamese spoken at signal facilities.

An exception came when my team worked at a line-of-sight microwave installation near Chu Lai. A group of American military and civilian officials appeared. There were ARVN signal soldiers at the site. A high-ranking U.S. officer asked the American signal officer escorting them how long it would be before the Vietnamese would be ready to assume operation of this station on their own. After a long pause, he reasonably estimated about eight years. Enlisted ARVN signalmen had an approximately sixth-grade education. It required two years or more of hands-on experience for American soldiers with high school diplomas to develop the technical knowledge and problem-solving skills needed for this military occupation. The Nixon administration’s timetable for Vietnamization and turning over the defense of the RVN to its own military was measured in months—not years.

Lt. Gen. Walter Kerwin, a senior U.S. adviser, had estimated in 1969 that it would take five years for the ARVN to be self-sufficient. Washington’s goal was to have Vietnamization completed by January 1973. My former unit, the 361st Signal Battalion, had been designated as a test of 1st Signal Brigade’s buddy effort to turn over the fixed communication system to the South Vietnamese Signal Directorate. That initiative explains the presence of the ARVN captain in the battalion S-3 while I was there. That unit’s 1969 ORLLs assessed that South Vietnam’s armed forces lacked the “broad scientific and technical education base…to allow takeover of the ICS in [a] short time frame.” This study projected a minimum of four years for the South Vietnamese to take control and more realistically eight to 10 years.

 As my return to the United States neared, entire U.S. combat units were leaving the RVN. The 1st Signal Brigade’s primary mission of support for U.S. forces was narrowing. Gen. Abrams had wanted to keep a residual U.S. combat support element to bolster Vietnamization, but the Pentagon mandated sweeping reductions.

I left Vietnam on Sept. 8, after 1 year, 10 months, and 26 days active duty and 8 months and 5 days in Vietnam. The 12th Signal Group soon afterward relocated to Da Nang, as U.S. commanders consolidated their remaining strength and transferred their signal assets to the ARVN. American aid paid private contractors to operate the network as a stopgap to meet the South’s military communication requirements, but the days were almost gone when the U.S. Congress and public would pay the bill.

In my two assignments as an impromptu interpreter and as a quality assurance NCO, I experienced some of the problems with Vietnamization. Studies of combat support at the time and soon after the war frequently referenced what I personally witnessed—limitations on the effectiveness of Vietnamization because of language hurdles and lack of expertise on the part of the South Vietnamese to support modern combat operations. In an otherwise upbeat report on Vietnamization at the end of 1969, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird singled out the challenge posed by specialized training as a “serious concern.” “More English language instructors and more trained technicians to man military and civil communications systems are required,” he admitted. He added that there “were simply not enough qualified persons in the Vietnamese manpower pool to fill all the demands for technical skills.”

The bravery of the ARVN soldiers and their ability to shoot straight were necessary but not sufficient for battlefield success, as Gen. Abrams had perceived when first receiving his marching orders from Washington. As a nation-state, the Republic of Vietnam had major structural weaknesses to overcome before it could field a modern military establishment.

Anderson went directly from Vietnam in September 1970 to a classroom at the University of Virginia, where he later received a Ph.D. in history. After 45 years of teaching American foreign policy, he is now professor of history emeritus at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a former senior lecturer of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. His twelfth book was Vietnamization: Politics, Strategy, Legacy, published in 2019 by Rowman and Littlefield. 

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Donald Trump launched his third campaign for the White House amid a blizzard of legal investigations. In New York City, he was indicted for falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. He was also slapped with two civil lawsuits: one for fraudulently overvaluing his assets; a second for defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll when he denounced her belated claim that he had raped her in 1996.

In Georgia, a grand jury pondered whether he had violated state election laws by fielding a slate of bogus Trump electors after Joe Biden won the state en route to the presidency in 2020, or by pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” the votes he needed for him to win it. The FBI wanted to know why documents labeled “Top Secret” had been squirreled away at his Palm Beach home Mar-a-Lago, while Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith grilled a raft of witnesses to his alleged attempts (not just in Georgia) to overturn his 2020 loss. Smith’s bag included his veep Mike Pence.

Donald Trump likes to define himself in superlatives: biggest, richest, best. But he is not the first politician to seek office under a legal cloud. For example, James Michael Curley, four-time Boston mayor and all-time symbol of the big city Democratic pol, got an early boost from a jail sentence. Curley was the son of poor Irish Catholic immigrants. Throughout his long career, he pitched himself as the champion of his ethno-religious clan and class of origin, steering gifts, jobs and public works to friends and followers (and kickbacks to himself). He proclaimed his good intentions in a rich, rolling voice that one drama critic compared to actress Tallulah Bankhead’s.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Curley won elections to the lower houses of the Boston and Massachusetts legislatures. But in October 1902 he pushed the politics of generosity too far: he took a civil service exam for a would-be letter carrier who doubted he could pass it himself. In September 1903, the impersonator was convicted in federal district court of “conspiring…to defraud the United States,” and sentenced to two months in prison. Nothing daunted, Curley turned the verdict into a campaign slogan. He ran for the Board of Aldermen, the upper house of the Boston legislature, that November, boasting of his bogus test-taking: “[H]e did it for a friend.” Curley was elected and, after his appeals had been exhausted, re-elected in November 1904 while serving his time in the Charles Street jail. “I read…every book in the jail library,” he recalled, “and I made a lot of new friends among the authors.” His flesh and blood friends propelled him, over the following decade, to the U.S. House of Representatives, and his first term as mayor of Boston.

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Another jail house office seeker was Eugene V. Debs, whose fifth presidential race was run behind bars.

Debs’ parents, immigrants to Terre Haute, Ind., from Alsace, named him after French novelists Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo. But Debs’ political idols were all-American: Tom Paine, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln. As a teenager he worked as a fireman, or stoker, on train engines; as an adult he became a labor journalist, a union organizer, and the perennial presidential candidate of the fledgling Socialist Party. Debs ran four times from 1900 to 1912, barnstorming the country.

One listener described the effect of his oratory. “When Debs says ‘comrade’ it is all right. He means it. That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man….As long as he’s around I believe it myself.” In the 1912 free for all between Woodrow Wilson (D), Theodore Roosevelt (Bull Moose) and William Howard Taft (R), Debs polled 900,000 votes for a respectable six percent.

The overriding issue of the decade became the World War (it was not yet called I). True to socialism’s international spirit, Debs deplored America’s entry: “the master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” After a speech in Canton, Ohio, he was arrested for encouraging resistance to the draft and sentenced to ten years in prison. Debs’ concluding speech to the court was radical poetry. “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free.” Debs was imprisoned first in Moundville, West Virginia, then in Atlanta. So it was that he ran his last presidential race from the slammer. “It will be much less tiresome,” he joked, “and my managers and opponents can always locate me.”

Although Debs had the sympathy of non-socialists who thought him ill-treated, he polled barely more than he had in 1912, while his percentage of a popular vote broadened by women’s suffrage fell to 3 percent. Americans were tired of causes, foreign and domestic. New president Warren Harding commuted Debs’ sentence to time served on Christmas 1921.

James Michael Curley, after four decades in and out of office in Massachusetts, had a second stint in jail. This time the crime was mail fraud. During World War II, Curley fronted a firm that claimed to help small businessmen get defense contracts, while in fact it only helped itself to its clients’ retainers. Curley, indicted in September 1943, did not go to trial until November 1945. Late in the interim he was elected to his fourth term as mayor of Boston. “Curley gets things done!” was the winning slogan.

Twelve days after his inauguration in January 1946, a jury in federal district court in Washington, D.C. found him guilty. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but in June 1947 the septuagenarian mayor was taken to Danbury, Conn., to serve a six month sentence. He kept up a brave front. “The guests at this hotel,” he wrote of his fellow inmates, “give me cigars, oranges and razor blades….I am fortunate to have friends everywhere I go.” But the prisoner suffered from diabetes and a heart condition. President Harry Truman knocked a month off his time at Thanksgiving. The recidivist returned to City Hall.

Politicians in humiliating circumstances can retain the loyalty of their supporters, and even win elections, for a variety of reasons. Debs and Curley both spoke for the aggrieved—burdened workers, snubbed ethnics. Their personalities, however different, conferred an aura upon them: Debs the idealist, Curley (in biographer Jack Beatty’s epithet) the rascal king. They were stars. But they sought stardom—or seemed to seek it—in the service of others. The others rewarded them with their votes.

Debs ran no more races after he got out of jail. He died in 1926, age 70, appealing for the convicted anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Curley ran for a fifth term as mayor, unsuccessfully, but won something more important: a fictionalized, and sanitized, account of his life as Frank Skeffington in Edwin O’Connor’s best seller The Last Hurrah. His favorite part, he told the author, was “where I die.” He died in 1958, age 83.

At least one of Donald Trump’s legal cases will never land him in jail. In May the jury in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. If their verdict survives appeal, Trump will only be out monetary damages. Even hard time might not end his political career. You can be in the government and a guest of the government at the same time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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When the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945, the United States military had custody of a staggering number of enemy prisoners of war: 4.3 million total worldwide, with more than 400,000 held in prison camps inside the domestic United States. German personnel represented the single largest group of prisoners. However not every soldier in German uniform who fell into American hands—whether through capture, surrender, or exchange of custody with another ally—was actually a German citizen.

Between 1939 and 1945, tens of thousands of Frenchmen, Poles, Dutchmen, and Norwegians wound up in German uniform, either voluntarily or through coercion. Nearly a million Soviet citizens, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks had served in the German military for a myriad of reasons, plus many more millions of captured Soviet soldiers held as prisoners of the Germans were now in American or British hands; it was they who would represent one of the thorniest problems among the former allies in the war’s aftermath.

Forced Repatriation?

Prisoner of war issues during WWII were at least notionally governed by the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, but the conduct of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union demonstrated all too clearly the limitations of international conventions and laws of war. The Soviet Union was not a signatory to the 1929 Convention; Japan signed it but never ratified it; Germany was a full signatory. The legal distinction between them was largely irrelevant, because those three nations were categorically guilty of the worst treatment of prisoners of war of any belligerents during that conflict.

As many as 3 million Soviet soldiers died in German captivity. Japanese treatment of captured Allied soldiers was infamously brutal, with a death rate estimated at 27.1 percent among prisoners of Western armies (the mortality rate for American POWs in Japanese hands was more than 30 percent). Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners was even worse, with a nearly 100 percent death rate—only 56 Chinese prisoners were officially recorded as being released from Japanese custody at the end of the war, for the grim reason that Imperial Japanese forces killed most Chinese prisoners outright. The Soviets, at the end of the war, held as many as 3,060,000 German POWs. How many of those men died in captivity is debated, but of the 1.3 million German military personnel listed as missing in action, the vast majority of them are assumed to have died as Soviet prisoners. More than 50,000 Japanese POWs perished in Soviet prison work camps after the war was over.

The end of the conflict precipitated one of the most controversial episodes related to international conventions on prisoners of war: the question of forced repatriation. 

The 1929 Convention stipulated that “repatriation of prisoners shall be effected as soon as possible after the conclusion of peace.” What it did not account for, or at least did not anticipate, was how a nation should handle prisoners of war who did not want to return to their nation of origin. 

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviets insisted that all Soviet citizens held as prisoners of war by the Germans or liberated from German custody by the Western Allies were to be repatriated without exception. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Soviet government announced a policy that labeled all its soldiers who fell into enemy hands—whether by capture or surrender—as traitors. Order 270 issued August 16 that year, explicitly stated that Soviet soldiers’ only option was to fight to the last. To be taken prisoner, especially if one was a commander or political commissar, would be equated with desertion and defection to the Nazis. Stalin supposedly said, “There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors.” With that attitude in mind, Soviet insistence on repatriation of their captured soldiers did not sound particularly benevolent.

More than 800,000 Soviet soldiers had in fact changed sides once in German hands for a variety of reasons. After the grim years of the Great Terror of the 1930s and Stalin’s purge of the Red Army before the war, there was no shortage of Soviet citizens in the military who loved the Motherland but genuinely hated Stalin and the repressive USSR government. Stalin was especially unpopular among Ukrainians, Cossacks, and other ethnic groups who had suffered in the years following the Bolshevik victory in the 1917-1923 Russian Civil War.

Some senior Red Army officers, such as Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov, seem to have become turncoats for self-serving reasons, but led thousands of rank-and-file soldiers into peril. Other Soviet soldiers in German custody, faced with near-certain slow death by starvation and slave labor in prisoner of war camps, chose what seemed to be the lesser of two evils and signed on for what they were told would be labor battalions in German service, only to find out too late that they were deployed as frontline combat formations or as guards in Nazi death camps. 

A Promise at Yalta

The problem was that when the Soviets at Yalta extracted the promise from their British and American counterparts to repatriate all Soviet citizens, there was no consensus as to who fit that definition. The Soviets insisted that persons from the Baltic States and eastern Poland, annexed by the USSR in 1939-1940, were Soviet citizens, but neither the U.S. nor Great Britain recognized that claim. Nor had the Allies anticipated the problem of what to do with Soviet prisoners who did not want to return. The 1929 Convention made no provision for that situation, and it did not specifically allow a detaining power to grant asylum to prisoners in its control who asked to not be returned to their country of origin. 

As the war drew to its close, British and American officials, in both the civilian governments and military command structures, were confronted by this question: did the uniform a soldier wore determine the nation to which he should be repatriated? If a Soviet citizen fought in a German uniform and was captured as a German soldier, did the Geneva Convention say he was a member of the German armed forces and protected by that service as a prisoner of war, or was he a Soviet combatant who should be returned to his country of origin?

Legal specialists in the British Foreign Office argued “it was the uniform that determined a soldier’s allegiance and no government had the right to ‘look behind the uniform’ of any POW.” Part of the thinking behind that decision was a desire to avoid reprisals against British and American prisoners still in German control.

Unfortunately, they also had to worry about the risk their countrymen then in German POW camps faced from their own ally, the USSR. As Soviet forces advanced in the east and began overrunning German prison camps containing American and British prisoners, Britain and the U.S. wanted to do nothing that might cause the Soviets to delay the repatriation of those men. Previous Soviet behavior had repeatedly demonstrated this was no idle concern. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, told Churchill, “It is most important that they [British POWs] should be well cared for and returned as soon as possible. For this we must rely to a great extent upon Soviet goodwill and if we make difficulty over returning to them their own nationals I am sure it will reflect adversely upon their willingness to help in restoring to us our own prisoners.”

Even so, some of the language coming out of the Foreign Office in London was starkly coldhearted. As one Foreign Office official stated in an official memo, “This is purely a question for the Soviet authorities and does not concern His Majesty’s Government. In due course all those with whom the Soviet authorities desire to deal must be handed over to them, and we are not concerned with the fact that they may be shot or otherwise more harshly dealt with than they might be under English law.” This attitude did not sit well with many British military officers, but it became the policy of repatriations as the war ground to a halt.

“A Battle of Discourtesy”

The same debate caused problems between civilian and military leaders on the American side. In early 1945 Gen. Dwight Eisenhower grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of good faith cooperation from his Soviet counterparts on POW negotiations—the Soviets demanded much but conceded nothing. It eventually got so bad that Eisenhower suggested to the Chief of the U.S. Military Mission to the USSR in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Maj. Gen. John R. Deane, that he should simply stop cooperating with the Soviets until they proved more willing to collaborate as allies should. Deane said this would be pointless; there was absolutely no chance, he said, of “winning a battle of discourtesy with Soviet officials.” 

Statesmen in Washington also grumbled about the push to give into Soviet demands on the repatriation issue. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson vehemently opposed the idea of “turning over German prisoners of Russian origin to the Russians.” He put it bluntly: “First thing you know we will be responsible for a big killing by the Russians. … Let the Russians catch their own Russians.” The U.S. Attorney General agreed on grounds of legal precedent. “I gravely question the legal basis or authority for surrendering the objecting individuals to representatives of the Soviet Government….Even if these men should be technically traitors to their own government, I think the time-honored rule of asylum should be applied.”

But like the British, the Americans were most concerned about the fate of their own POWs who fell into Soviet control, which overrode all other issues. Edward Stettinius, the U.S. Secretary of State, expressed this clearly in a communique in February 1945 when he wrote, “The consensus here is that it would be unwise to include questions relative to the protection of the Geneva convention and to Soviet citizens in the U.S. in an agreement which deals primarily with the exchange of prisoners liberated by the Allied armies as they march into Germany… we believe there will be serious delays in the release of our prisoners of war unless we reach prompt agreement on this question.” By “agreement” he meant capitulating to Soviet demands, but there seemed no simple solution.

The Soviets knew very well their British and American allies were vulnerable on this point, and they kept the pressure on in a manner that was nothing less than outright coercion. That January, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle glumly told Stimson, “the Russians have already threatened to refuse to turn over to us American prisoners of war whom they may get possession of in German internment camps.” That threat was very much in plain view when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Repatriation Agreement with Stalin at Yalta the next month.

Asylum Would not be granted

By the end of February nearly 370,000 Soviet POWs were in the custody of British and U.S. forces in Western Europe, and a great many of those were taken while wearing the uniforms of the German military. In accordance with the Geneva Convention, Allied command had at first issued orders that forced repatriation would only apply to POWs and Displaced Persons (DPs) who identified themselves as Soviet citizens. That arrangement did not last long.

On May 23, representatives of the Soviet High Command and Supreme Headquarters Allied European Forces signed the Leipzig Agreement, which specified that, “All former prisoners of war and citizens of the USSR liberated by the Allied Forces and all former prisoners of war and citizens of Allied Nations liberated by the Red Army will be delivered through the Army lines to the corresponding Army Command of each side.” The operative word was “all.” Washington passed instructions on to its military commanders in Europe that they were to hand all Soviet citizens over to the custody of the Red Army “regardless of their individual wishes.”

Asylum would not be granted, not even for persons whose status all but guaranteed that they would be executed as traitors when they were returned to Soviet control. Mass repatriations followed, and by the end of September 1945, 2,034,000 former prisoners identified as Soviet citizens were given over to the Red Army, sometimes by use of military force.

Nothing in the 1929 Geneva Convention provided for the forced repatriation of prisoners who did not want to return to their government’s control, so the American and British decision to comply with Soviet insistence on the matter was not compelled by law or treaty obligation. It was, instead, an unpopular course of action driven by the need to protect their own soldiers from an ally whose brutality was in some cases nearly as bad as that of their common enemy. 

Refusal to Release Prisoners

By citing the 1929 Geneva Convention in its insistence that Britain and the U.S. had to repatriate all Soviet prisoners whether they wanted to return or not, the USSR’s position was duplicitous in the extreme. The Soviets had refused to join the Convention themselves, but that did not prevent them, during the Yalta negotiations, from pointing to Article 75 with its requirement that “repatriation of prisoners shall be effected with the least possible delay after the conclusion of peace.”

The diametric contrast between the wording of that article and what the Soviets themselves did in practice was absolutely appalling. The Soviet Union kept nearly 1.5 million German prisoners of war as forced labor for an entire decade after the war ended. The last of them were not repatriated until 1955. “Fragmented archival sources,” as historian Susan Grunewald says, “imply that the Soviets primarily held onto German POWs out of economic necessity caused by the war’s destruction.” As many as 560,000 Japanese prisoners were held by the Soviets until 1950 under the same excuse. The USSR used those men to rebuild a national infrastructure damaged by the war, but such practice was directly contrary to the spirit, if not the actual letter, of the very international convention that the Soviets cited when it suited their purposes.

Soviet refusal to release their prisoners after the end of WWII directly influenced the drafting of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 when it replaced the 1929 Convention. Article 118 (Release and Repatriation) begins with the sentence, “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.” At that time, there was still no end in sight to Soviet delaying tactics.

The 1960 Commentary on the Convention discusses Article 118 in refreshingly simple language: “This is one of the most important Articles in the Convention and is intended to remedy very unsatisfactory situations. As a result of the changed conditions of modern warfare, the belligerents have on two occasions, and without expressly violating the provisions of the existing Conventions [of 1929], been able to keep millions of prisoners of war in captivity for no good reason. In our opinion, it was contrary to the spirit of the Conventions to prolong war captivity in this way.” It then explains in detail that the Geneva Convention (III) is interpreted to mean that forced repatriation is unacceptable, and that a Detaining Power has the right to grant asylum to prisoners it holds in any situation “where the repatriation of a prisoner of war would be manifestly contrary to the general principles of international law for the protection of the human being.” 

Both interpretations exist today precisely because of the long shadow cast by Soviet policies on the repatriation of prisoners at the end of the Second World War.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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James Michael Curley’s first arrest came in 1903, when he was a 28-year-old Massachusetts state legislator. He was charged with conspiring to “defraud the United States” for taking the federal Civil Service exam while pretending to be one of his constituents, an Irish immigrant who hoped to become a mailman.

“He couldn’t spell Constantinople,” Curley explained, “but he had wonderful feet for a letter carrier.” Sentenced to two months in jail, Curley responded by running for Boston alderman on the slogan, “He did it for a friend.” He won easily.

Curley’s second arrest came in 1943, when he was a 68-year-old congressman charged with mail fraud in a scheme to extract bribes from companies seeking federal contracts. “I’m being persecuted,” he said, by “Communists and radical reformers.” Under indictment in 1944, he won re-election to Congress. Awaiting trial in 1945, he was elected mayor of Boston. Convicted in 1946, he served as mayor while serving time in a Connecticut prison.

In the 40 years between sojourns in the hoosegow, Curley was elected mayor of Boston four times, governor of Massachusetts once, and congressman four times. For half a century, he dominated the state’s politics with his pungent wit, his orotund oratory, his Machiavellian shrewdness—and the support of working-class Irish Americans who saw him as the embodiment of their hopes. And he lived to see himself portrayed as a lovable rogue in the best-selling novel The Last Hurrah, and played by Spencer Tracy in the 1958 movie version.

Son of Irish immigrants, James Michael Curley was born in Boston in 1874. His father, a laborer, died when James was 10. To help his mother, a scrubwoman, support the family, James began working at 11, selling newspapers. He quit school at 15 to work in a piano factory, then finished high school at night, while spending his days delivering groceries by horse and wagon.

Eager to enter politics, he volunteered to run social activities at a Catholic church and worked for the Ancient Order of Hibernians—thus building a political base among the Boston Irish. In 1899, he won a seat on the city’s Common Council, running as a Democrat, the party of Boston’s immigrants, and entertaining Irish voters by mocking the “Boston Brahmin” elite as old, weary has-beens with “dogs and no children.”

He created a political organization, “The Tammany Club,” named after New York’s Democratic machine, and organized picnics and Christmas parties for the poor. He did favors for constituents—providing a meal or a job and, as we’ve seen, taking a Civil Service exam “for a friend.” He recorded each favor in a notebook, expecting recipients to thank him with their votes. And they did, electing Curley state representative in 1902, alderman in 1904, and congressman in 1910.

Three years later, he was elected mayor, using a trick so outrageous it became legendary. Curley learned that the incumbent mayor, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald—the grandfather of President Kennedy—was having a fling with a barmaid nicknamed “Toodles.” A Curley crony informed the mayor’s wife of the affair in a letter, demanding that Fitzgerald withdraw from the race. But Fitzgerald refused, so Curley announced his plan to deliver a public lecture titled “Great Lovers in History: From Cleopatra to Toodles.” Fitzgerald quit and Curley won.

As mayor, Curley exhibited the political philosophy that would continue all his life—a proto-New Deal two decades before FDR’s election. Calling himself “the mayor of the poor,” he spent city money hiring workers to pave roads, expand the city hospital and build schools, sewers and playgrounds. He cut the pay of the highest-paid city workers, and raised the pay of the lowest. Recalling his mother’s years scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, he famously issued long-handled mops to City Hall’s scrubwomen, declaring that no woman should go down on her knees except to pray.

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“Government was not created to save money and to cut debt, but to take care of people,” he said. “That’s my theory of government.”

He did take care of people—but not nearly as lavishly as he took care of himself. Curley was as crooked as a pretzel. He forced city employees to fund his campaigns by purchasing tickets to Tammany Club dinners. He signed sweetheart deals giving city contractors huge profits, provided that they split the booty with him. He hardly bothered to hide his graft. Bostonians watched as construction companies with lucrative city contracts built Curley a 21-room, 10,000 square foot, neo-Georgian mansion with marble fireplaces—and charged him next to nothing.

“Even his core voters knew Curley was dishonest,” Jack Beatty wrote in his excellent Curley biography, The Rascal King. “For many Bostonians, his good works would ever stay their dudgeon at his bad deeds.”

In 1934, Curley was elected governor. As he had done in Boston, he hired the unemployed to build roads and schools. But he also purged the state Finance Commission, which was investigating corruption in Boston’s government, a subject Curley preferred to keep hidden. He fired one member, appointed another to a judgeship, and replaced both with toadies uninterested in investigating their boss.

For lesser jobs, Curley appointed cronies. His chauffeur got a state job; so did his gardener. A man who had served time for forgery was hired as an auditor. Curley also displayed unusual sympathy for prisoners, pardoning or paroling 254 on Christmas Day 1935—an act of mercy inspired by generous gifts to the governor from the prisoners’ attorneys.

Soon, newspapers and magazines began attacking Curley’s corrupt regime. “Governor Curley appears to be suffering now from delusions of grandeur,” a Springfield Union editorial charged, “and sees himself becoming dictator of this Commonwealth a la Huey Long.”

Realizing he couldn’t win re-election in 1936, Curley ran for the Senate instead, but he was trounced by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1937 and 1941, he ran for mayor of Boston but lost both races.

He seemed finished, an aging relic of a bygone era. But in 1942, Boston voters elected him to Congress, and in 1946 they elected him mayor. After spending five months of his term in federal prison, he ran for mayor three more times, though never winning again.

He was 82 and sickly in 1956, when Edwin O’Connor published The Last Hurrah, his novel about a very Curley-esque politician. Curley loved the book but sued to prevent release of the movie version, claiming it violated his privacy. The producers responded that they had already paid him $25,000 for his permission. Curley denied ever receiving their money or giving his permission. Anxious to avoid a lengthy court battle and eager to premier the movie in Boston, the studio paid Curley another $15,000.

That was his final scam, his last hurrah. When he died, two months later, 100,000 mourners filed past his coffin.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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John G. Nicolay, John Hay, and William O. Stoddard served as secretaries to Abraham Lincoln. Nicolay and Hay worked in close proximity to their chief throughout the war, while Stoddard spent significant time in the White House between July 1861 and July 1864. Loyal to “The Tycoon,” as they called the president, the three young men logged endless hours and experienced frustration and exhilaration in generous measure. They also created valuable testimony that Southern Illinois University Press published in a quartet of essential volumes: Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (1997); Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (2000); Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860-1865 (2000); and Harold Holzer, ed., Lincoln’s White House Secretary: The Adventurous Life of William O. Stoddard (2007).

Hay’s observations shed light on innumerable events and personalities. On November 11, 1864, the just re-elected Lincoln spoke to his Cabinet about the famous “Blind Memorandum.” He took the document, written on August 23, 1864, from his desk and said, “Gentlemen do you remember last summer I asked you all to sign your names to the back of a paper of which I did not show you the inside? This is it.” 

The president “had pasted it up in so singular style that it required some cutting to get it open” before he could recite the brief text: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”

Lincoln next explained that in late August he had believed George B. McClellan would receive the Democratic nomination and meant to urge “Little Mac” to “raise as many troops as you possibly can for this final trial, and I will devote all my energies to assisting and finishing the war.” Secretary of State William H. Seward remarked that McClellan would have said, “‘Yes—yes’ & so on forever and would have done nothing at all.’ ‘At least’ added Lincoln ‘I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience.’”      

Hay’s diary underscores Lincoln’s disappointment in the wake of Gettysburg. On July 11, though “rather impatient with Gen Meade’s slow movements,” the president believed his general “would yet show sufficient activity to inflict the Coup de grace upon the flying rebels.” Three days later “the Prest. seemed depressed by Meade’s dispatches of last night. They were so cautiously & almost timidly worded—talking about reconnoitering to find the enemy’s weak place and other such. He said he feared he would do nothing.”

On July 15, Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, “says the Tycoon President [Hay made the substitution] is grieved silently but deeply about the escape of Lee. He said ‘If I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself.’ I know he had that idea.”

A year earlier, Nicolay described reaction to George B. McClellan’s retreat after the Seven Days’ Battles. President Lincoln recently made a “flying visit” to the Army of the Potomac and seemed to have “returned in better spirits.” For the public, in contrast, it “has been a very blue week here among all classes of society….I don’t think I have ever heard more croaking since the war began than during the past ten days.” Many leaders exhibited “little real faith and courage under difficulties,” commented Nicolay, while the “average public mind is becoming alarmingly sensational. A single reverse or piece of accidental ill-luck is enough to throw them all into horrors of despair.” Although Nicolay played down the significance of McClellan’s failure at Richmond, his letter suggests the degree to which the Seven Days’ countered recent Union success in other military theaters.

On August 25, 1864, Nicolay vented to Hay about the volatile political situation that had prompted Lincoln’s solicitation, two days earlier, of signatures on his blind memorandum. “Hell is to play,” he began, “The N.Y. politicians have got a stampede on that is about to swamp everything.” Moreover, “Weak-kneed d—-d fools like Chas. Sumner are in a movement for a new candidate—to supplant the Tycoon.”

With everything in “darkness and doubt and discouragement,” Nicolay thought the nation had reached “a turning point in our crisis.” He lauded Lincoln’s “patience and pluck” and hoped other Republicans would emulate his example. “If our friends will only rub their eyes and shake themselves,” he concluded, “and become convinced that they themselves are not dead we shall win the fight overwhelmingly.”

William O. Stoddard’s recollections of Lincoln, notes editor Holzer, inspired dismissive comments from both Nicolay and Hay. Historians also have questioned some of Stoddard’s claims, as when he insisted the president asked him to manage the substitution of Andrew Johnson for Hannibal Hamlin as the Republican vice presidential candidate in 1864. Yet his autobiography contains ample material of interest. Charged with sorting the mass of unsolicited daily mail addressed to Lincoln, Stoddard had his pulse on the concerns and attitudes of the loyal citizenry and created excellent snapshots of key moments in the war.

One such moment conveys anticipation of public anger over news of Joseph Hooker’s ignominious defeat at Chancellorsville. Nicolay remembered that “[A] terrible, great, black cloud…came rolling across the Potomac and into the White House from the lost battlefield of Chancellorsville.”

John Hay told him that “Stanton says this is the darkest day of the war. It seems as if the bottom has dropped out.” Stoddard knew on that “awful day,” when it “almost seemed as if the White House itself had been transferred to the battlefield,” what the mail would soon bring. “[T]he wails and the mourning…would quickly come down from the North,” he foresaw, “and, mingled with these, would be the sounds of despair and the unsuppressed curses of the unreasoning people who would surely hold Mr. Lincoln and his administration responsible for this one more lost battle and its dead.”

Best read together, Lincoln’s secretaries afford readers an insider’s glimpse into an administration caught in the crucible of a great war. They also remind us of our debt to scholarly editors and university presses.

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Lt. Gen. Robert F. Foley has led a distinguished career in the U.S. Army. Graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he served as a company commander in Vietnam with the 27th Infantry Regiment, famed as the “Wolfhounds,” and received the Medal of Honor for his actions during Operation Attleboro in November 1966. Foley subsequently rose to become a battalion and brigade commander with the 3rd Infantry Division in Germany, served as West Point commandant of cadets, and was commanding general of the Fifth U.S. Army.

In his autobiographical book Standing Tall: Leadership Lessons in the Life of a Soldier, Foley offers us an in-depth view of his life and military career. The book contains a detailed account of Foley’s life, including his family background, career milestones, interactions with comrades, his marriage, faith, and experiences with mentors. It is a very personal book and there is a lot of material to sink into. Readers of Vietnam magazine will likely be most interested in Foley’s overall observations about the Vietnam War and the details of his experiences as an infantryman “in country,” especially during Operation Attleboro.

Views on Vietnam

Foley is a battle-tested Wolfhound and it is with justifiable pride that he frequently alludes to the prowess of his regiment, organized in 1901 and fighting under the motto, Nec aspera terrent, meaning “No fear on earth.” Fearless in combat, Foley also shows himself to be fearless in sharing his overall views about the Vietnam War itself. Some soldiers are leery of wading into politics, but Foley makes some controversial observations which merit further reflection.

Foley’s criticism of the war is not reactionary; he is well-read on the Vietnam War in addition to having experienced it himself, and he cites a variety of firsthand sources as a foundation for his criticisms. Foley alludes with regret to a failed opportunity for the United States to form a working alliance with North Vietnamese leaders, describing how Ho Chi Minh’s life was saved by U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officers in August 1945. “After the OSS dissolution on October 1, 1945, its solidarity with the Viet Minh vanished in the wake of the American and Allies’ pursuit of a new world order,” Foley writes. He also cites the words of Col. Harry Summers, founding editor of Vietnam magazine, from the latter’s work On Strategy: “Every military operation should be directed towards a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective.”

Foley is plainly skeptical of the Eisenhower administration’s policies based on an abstract “domino theory.” He argues that the Vietnam War “had no clearly defined objective” and that “conditions for declaring war against North Vietnam did not meet the criteria for a national security interest.”

The Wolfhounds

On Aug. 5, 1966, Foley became the commanding officer of Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry (Wolfhounds) while serving in Vietnam. His descriptions of the actions he took in the war zone demonstrate his competent leadership. For example, his “cure” for VD among his troops was depriving the stricken misbehavers of bed rest and ordering them instead to participate in all regular combat duties, regardless of their physical discomfort springing off helicopters and shuffling through leech-filled rice paddies. The rate of infections quickly dropped to zero.

“We lived with our soldiers 24 hours a day—we knew them and they knew us,” writes Foley. He allowed his subordinates leeway to devise deceptive methods to counteract communist forces attempting to infiltrate their base camp in night attacks. Foley also shares humorous anecdotes about his encounter with a bamboo viper and an occasion when he toppled into a well, only to be serenaded by his grinning men later with a new take on an old nursery rhyme: “Ding Dong Dell, there’s a captain in the well!”

“Angry As Hell”

Foley describes Nov. 5, 1966, as “the most difficult and devastating day” for his company in Vietnam. During Operation Attleboro, Foley was ordered to break into an enemy bunker system to create a corridor through which trapped comrades could escape back to friendly lines. He and his men were facing NVA regulars, and because the surrounded Americans were so close to enemy bunkers, his options were limited. “I couldn’t employ artillery, close air support or gunships,” according to Foley. As his group got stalled in dense underbrush and his men fell down shot all around him, Foley got “angry as hell” and took matters into his own hands. Accompanied by Pvt. First Class Charles Dean, who carried ammunition belts for him plus a grenade launcher, Foley swooped up an M-60 machine gun and led a charge against the NVA.

The NVA fled the battlefield taking heavy losses and Foley succeeded in rescuing the hemmed-in U.S. troops. He was wounded by shrapnel from a grenade. Foley was awarded the Silver Star and later received the Medal of Honor for his actions, but above all credits his fellow Wolfhounds who followed him into the fray, saying that their “indomitable spirit…made all the difference.”

Courage to Say No

True to its title, the book chronicles the evolution of a young soldier into an effective and capable military leader. Foley shares wise observations about leadership of soldiers that have withstood the test of time throughout military history, such as: “Good leaders make it a habit to get out of the command bunker, walk around the unit area, and be accessible—in the chow line, on the rifle range, in the mess hall, or in the barracks.”

Anyone familiar with the history of war will know that military science is not the science of agreement or passivity; the edifice of war history is etched with instances in which commanders have not agreed with each other—this friction is beneficial. Foley shares insights about military leadership in difficult moments.

“Leaders must also have the courage to say no when the mission has unacceptable risk, when essential resources are not provided, or when following orders is simply not an option,” writes Foley. “A solid background in moral-ethical reasoning is essential for leaders to feel confident in asserting their beliefs.… They can’t walk by the red flags of ethical turmoil and then maintain, during damage recovery, that there were no indicators.”

Standing Tall

Leadership Lessons in the Life of a Soldier
by Robert F. Foley, Casemate Publishers, 2022

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As a housekeeper for the German Embassy in Paris, Marie Bastian had two tasks. She was expected to gather the day’s paper trash twice a week…unless she recognized something worth pocketing to pass to her other employer, Maj. Hubert-Joseph Henry of the Section de Statistiques (“statistics section,” the innocuous-sounding title for French counterintelligence). Making her rounds on Sept. 26, 1894, she noticed a handwritten note in French lying torn up in the wastebasket of German military attaché Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen. She wasted no time in taking it to Henry, who passed it to his superior, Lt. Col. Jean Sandherr.

Pieced together, it proved to have only minor military secrets. Far more serious was the evidence of its origin. Someone in the French General Staff was passing secrets to the Germans. 

A Spy In Their Midst

It had been 23 years since the Franco-Prussian War, in which the Second Empire of Napoleon III collapsed and the collection of kingdoms and duchies that brought it down united into a single entity called Germany. Peace had reigned since then between the French Third Republic and the German Second Reich, but each power eyed the other suspiciously.

Behind a seeming high point in European civilization, spy games went on as secret agents from all the powers sought out any foreign secrets that might give them an edge, should another war ever break out. Although the French army had recovered from its humiliating defeat, it remained insecure to the brink of paranoia. This new revelation seemed to suggest that the paranoia was warranted.

Sandherr had been aware that someone was leaking information to Schwartzkoppen, but the note was the first solid evidence to fall into his hands. Matching the handwriting against documents among the General Staff, he found at least two specimens that seemed to match. Since the intelligence being passed was a list of new artillery components, including technical details for a hydraulic brake in a new 120mm howitzer and modifications to artillery formations, Sandherr narrowed the search down to an artillery captain on the staff: Alfred Dreyfus. 

Soldier and Patriot

A thorough examination of Dreyfus suggested dubious spy material. Born on Oct. 9, 1859 in Mulhouse, Alsace, he was the youngest of nine children whose father had risen from a street peddler to a textile manufacturer. When the Germans seized Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, the Dreyfus family moved to Basel, Switzerland, then to Paris. There Alfred chose to pursue a career in the army, enrolling in the Ecole Polytechnique to study military sciences.

In 1880 he was commissioned a sub-lieutenant and from then until 1882 studied artillery at Fontainebleau before being assigned to the 31st Artillery Regiment at Le Mans and then the 1st Mounted Artillery Battery of the First Cavalry Division in Paris. In 1885 he was promoted to full lieutenant and in 1889 served as adjutant to the director of the Etablissement de Bourges with the rank of captain.

Dreyfus married Lucie Eugènie Hadamard on April 18, 1891. Three days later he was admitted into the Ecole Superieure de Guerre (war college), from which he graduated ninth in his class in 1893. He was assigned to the headquarters of the Army General Staff—and ran into the first serious career obstacle stemming from his being the only Jewish officer on the staff.

One of his evaluators, Gen. Pierre de Bonnefond, gave him high marks for his technical acumen but lowered his overall score with a zero rating for “likeability” (what in modern U.S. Army jargon amounted to an “attitude problem”), adding that “Jews were not desired” on his staff. Although admitted to the staff, Dreyfus and some supporters protested Bonnefond’s blatant bias—an act that would be used against him when he came under investigation. 

Dreyfus Framed

Despite two of three examiners expressing doubts as to the similarity between Dreyfus’ writing samples and the handwriting on the note, Sandherr made it the cornerstone of his evidence against the captain. On Oct. 15, Dreyfus was ordered to appear at work in civilian clothes and was questioned by a self-styled handwriting expert, Maj. Armand du Paty de Clam, who, feigning an injured hand, asked Dreyfus to write a letter for him. Dreyfus did, giving no indication that he recognized the message he was transcribing as the same one to Schwartzkoppen. Upon his completing it, Du Paty fleetingly examined both documents and informed Dreyfus he was under arrest.

After four days of a secret court martial, Dreyfus was convicted of treason on Dec. 22 and sentenced to life imprisonment. At a public ceremony on Jan. 5, 1895, he was publicly stripped of every accoutrement on his uniform and had his sword broken before being sent to serve his life imprisonment at the penal colony on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. His last statement before being taken away was: “I swear that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the army. Vive la France! Vive l’Armée!”

As Dreyfus was led away, he faced a barrage of insults, not only from brother officers but crowds stirred up by army provocateurs to undermine any sympathy for the traitor. The emphasis was on his religion, the most common cry being “Death to the Jews!” One Hungarian correspondent covering the event for the Austrian Neue Freie Presse took special notice.

Although he then believed Dreyfus guilty, he commented on the nature of the aftermath in his diary in June 1895: “In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism…above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.” Despairing of his co-religionists ever finding acceptance anywhere in Europe, Theodor Herzl turned his thoughts toward the idea of their finding a homeland of their own.  

In Search of Justice

While Dreyfus endured heat, insects, malaria, dysentery and all the horrors that gave Devil’s Island its dreaded reputation, his older brother Mathieu spent all the time, energy and money at his disposal to have Alfred’s case reexamined, seemingly in vain. One appeal after another was rejected. The French army staff, obsessed with maintaining an image of infallibility, was not about to reconsider its rush to justice against the homegrown “foreigner” in its midst.

When Sandherr, promoted to colonel, left the Section de Statistiques to command the 20th Infantry Regiment at Montauban on July 1, 1895, his successor, Lt. Col. Marie-Georges Picquart, was instructed by Assistant Chief of the General Staff Charles-Arthur Gonse to find more incriminating evidence to ensure that Dreyfus stayed right where he was. 

Picquart, however, proved to be of different moral fiber. Investigating more on his own than his superiors authorized, the more he found the less the case against Dreyfus rang true to him—especially in March 1896, when he found a telegram from Schwartzkoppen, intercepted before it left the embassy, addressed to the actual author of the note.

That and other handwritten documents revealed a more precise handwriting match than Dreyfus’s. The handwriting was traced to Maj. Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, another staff officer who had served in intelligence from 1877 to 1880. In a scenario common in the world of espionage, Esterhazy had fallen deeply in debt and sought a way out by selling secrets to the Germans. Confronted by Picquart on April 6, he made a full confession. Picquart submitted his revised report, with a recommendation that the Dreyfus case be reexamined. 

A Military Cover-Up

The response was hardly what he expected. His demand ran into brick walls at every turn from senior officers like Chief of Staff Gen. Raoul le Mouton de Boisdeffre and Minister of War Gen. Auguste Mercier, who remained determined that army intelligence not be sullied with having to admit that a mistake led to a miscarriage of justice. In regard to letting the real traitor slip away, Gonse went so far as to say, “If you are silent, no one will know.” “What you say is abominable,” replied an outraged Picquart. “I refuse to carry this secret to my tomb.” 

Picquart’s strong sense of justice led to his undergoing a series of transfers “in the interest of the service,” first to a unit in the French Alps and ultimately to command the 4th Tirailleurs Regiment in Sousse, Tunisia. In a further attempt to discredit his findings, Boisdeffre and Gonse ordered Picquart’s deputy in the Section de Statistiques, Maj. Henry, to fortify Dreyfus’ file with more incriminating evidence. This Henry did on Nov. 1 by producing what he declared to be further correspondence between Dreyfus and the Germans. However, when Boisdeffre and Gonse brought the most incriminating letter to then-Minister of War Jean-Baptiste Billot, they realized that it was a forgery clumsily created by Henry himself. 

Dreyfus’ innocence was becoming too clear to deny. Yet Billot joined Boisdeffre and Gonse in agreeing that the verdict must stand—and to persecute Picquart, “who did not understand anything.” Henry conjured up an embezzlement charge against his former superior and sent him an accusatory letter. This only brought Picquart back to Paris, armed with a lawyer.

Far from being buried, by mid-1896 the Dreyfus case had grown into a cause célèbre attracting partisans on both sides. Most French journals upheld the guilty verdict and opposed a retrial, reinforcing their arguments with accusations that Jews could only be expected to betray any country they inhabited. 

Besides the army, the partisans who came to be called “anti-Dreyfusards” were mainly conservatives, nationalists and traditionalists. The tradition they conserved was hundreds of years of antisemitism that had supposedly ended with the Revolution and the Rights of Man, but which the General Staff tacitly encouraged in its ongoing campaign to keep the brand of traitor on Dreyfus. Among the foremost civilian mouthpieces was Edouard Drumont, whose publication La Libre Parole became an open forum for anyone with bile against Jews in general.

The Spy Escapes

In spite of all this, a growing cross-section of the French intelligentsia began taking up Dreyfus’ case. The first of these “Dreyfusards” was anarchist journalist Bernard Lazare, who after examining the existing evidence published an appeal from Brussels, Belgium. The conflict between of the Revolution’s ideals and the revival of old prejudices in “defense” of a Catholic France came to virtually split the entire country in two, breaking up lifelong friendships even in the world of impressionist art. Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Paul Signac and Camille Pisarro, for example, were Dreyfusards, while Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were anti-Dreyfusards.

With evidence of Esterhazy’s guilt and Dreyfus’ innocence leaking into public scrutiny, the General Staff took a new step to address the matter head-on. On Jan. 10, 1898, it tried Esterhazy before a closed military court, Mathieu and Lucie Dreyfus’ appeals for a civil trial having been denied. The three army-supplied “experts” testified that Esterhazy’s handwriting did not match that on the bordereau. The next day, after three minutes of deliberation, the court acquitted Esterhazy and all officers present cheered. Dreyfusards protested in the streets, to be beaten down by mobs of rioting anti-Dreyfusards and antisemites.

Dreyfus suffered on, but the trial’s real victim was Picquart, who was discredited, subsequently arrested for “violation of professional security” and imprisoned in Fort Mont Valérien.

Having been publicly exonerated, Esterhazy was discretely discharged from the army and exiled to Britain via Brussels. Settling in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, he lived out his life comfortably until 1923.

The Dreyfusards swiftly changed tactics, doubling down on Lazare’s use of the press with a vehement 4,500-word open letter to President Félix Faure by novelist and social critic Emile Zola in the Jan. 13, 1898 issue of the newspaper L’Aurore. It was aimed directly at the high command’s perfidy with a title suggested by fellow journalist Georges Clemenceau:“J’Accuse!”

Clemenceau himself was equally accusatory when he declared, “What irony is this, that men should have stormed the Bastille, guillotined the king and promoted a major revolution, only to discover in the end that it had become impossible to get a man tried in accordance with the law.” Others who took up Dreyfus’ cause included Léon Blum, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, Sarah Bernhardt and even Mark Twain.

A Forgery discovered

J’Accuse exposed all that was known of the army’s morally corrupt handling of both Dreyfus and Esterhazy and included the General Staff members involved by name. L’Aurore’s circulation was normally 30,000 but it sold 200,000 copies on Jan. 13. The anti-Dreyfusards’ reaction was so violently negative that Zola needed a police escort to walk to and from his home. On Jan. 15 Le Temps called for a new public review of Dreyfus’ case. Minister of War Billot struck back by filing a public complaint against Zola and Alexandre Perrenx, manager of l’Aurore, for defamation of a public authority, which was approved by the Chamber of Deputies by a vote of 312 to 22.

Held at the Assises du Seine between Feb. 7 to 23, the trial ended with Zola condemned to the maximum sentence, a year in prison and a 3,000-franc fine. Again, the verdict was accompanied by street riots against Zola and against Jews. After another trial on July 18, Zola took friends’ advice and exiled himself to England for the following year. In the process, so much of the Dreyfus Affair was exposed to public scrutiny that Zola’s two courtroom defeats ultimately amounted to a tide-turning victory. 

France got a new minister of war, Godefroy Cavaignac, who was eager to prove Dreyfus’ guilt but was completely in the dark about the high command’s obstruction of justice. He ordered the case files examined and was astonished to find out how much evidence had been withheld from Dreyfus’ defense. 

On Aug. 13, 1898 one of his staff, Louis Cuignet, holding a key document before a lamp, noticed that the head and foot were not the same paper as the body copy. The forgery was soon traced to Major—now promoted to lieutenant colonel—Henry.

A court of inquiry was called for Esterhazy, who admitted his treason and revealed the high command’s collusion in framing Dreyfus. On Aug. 30 the council questioned Henry in the presence of Generals Boisdeffre and Gonse. After an hour of interrogation from Cavaignac himself, Henry broke down and confessed to having falsified the evidence. He was promptly arrested and imprisoned in the Fort Mont Valérien. The next day he was found with his throat cut. Nobody found a straight razor on his person when he entered his cell. How it got there—and whether his death was suicide or murder—remains a mystery.

With the news reports of Henry’s act of deceit, the anti-Dreyfusards declared him a martyr. Lucie Dreyfus pressed for a retrial. Cavaignac still refused, but the president of the council, Henri Brisson, forced him to resign. Boisdeffre also resigned and Gonse was discredited. While the partisans continued to struggle, sometimes violently, new revelations were gradually shifting the political landscape. A growing number of French Republicans recognized the injustice that hid behind the military’s veneer of “patriotism.” 

Pardoned?

On June 3, 1899, the Supreme Court overturned Dreyfus’ verdict and sentence. Dreyfus himself had little or no access to news of the maelstrom brewing in the wake of his arrest. It was days later that he learned that he was being summoned back to France. 

On June 9 Dreyfus departed Devil’s Island—only to be arrested again on July 1 and imprisoned at Rennes, where he was to undergo his retrial. This began on Aug. 7, presided over by Gen. Mercier, who was still determined to maintain the guilty verdict, and attended by as much popular rancor as before. On Aug. 14 one of Dreyfus’ lawyers, Fernand Labori, was shot in the back by an assailant who was never identified. As the original case against him crumbled, the president of the council, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, sought a compromise. 

Although five of the seven court members upheld the original verdict, on Sept. 9 Waldeck-Rousseau declared Dreyfus guilty of treason “with extenuating circumstances” and reduced his life sentence to 10 years. The next day Dreyfus appealed for another retrial. Eager to put the “affair” behind France, Waldeck-Rousseau offered a pardon. Exhausted from his time on Devil’s Island, Dreyfus accepted those terms on Sept. 19 and was released on Sept. 21. Still, being pardoned implies guilt. Dreyfus’ supporters remained unsatisfied with anything short of exoneration. Beyond France, protest marches broke out in 20 foreign capitals.

Not Guilty

Among other literary responses, Zola added to his previous essays, L’Affaire and J’Accuse! with a third, Verité (truth).  On Sept. 29, 1902, however, Zola died, asphyxiated by chimney fumes from which his wife, Alexandrine, narrowly escaped. In 1953, the newspaper Liberation published the dying confession by a Paris roofer that he had blocked the chimney. Dreyfusards like socialist leader Jean Jaurès kept up the pressure for the next several years. 

On April 7, 1903 Dreyfus’ case was investigated once more—and eventually its conclusion was finally reversed. On July 13, 1906 he was declared innocent. He accepted reinstatement in the army with the rank of major, backdated to July 10, 1903, and was also made a chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. He commanded the artillery depot at Fort Neuf de Vincennes until June 1907, when he retired into the Reserve. Also exonerated was Georges Picquart, who rejoined the ranks, was promoted to brigadier general and served as Minister of War from 1906 to 1909. He died in a riding accident on Jan. 19, 1914.

On June 4, 1908 Dreyfus found himself literally the target of residual antisemitic hatred. As he attended the transfer of Emile Zola’s ashes to the Pantheon, journalist Louis Grégory fired two revolver shots, slightly wounding him in the arm. Although apprehended, Grégory was acquitted in court.

The question of Dreyfus’ loyalty to his country got a final test when World War I broke out. Returning from the reserves at age 55, he commanded an artillery depot and a supply column in Paris but as the French army suffered heavy attrition in the field, in 1917 he transferred to take up an artillery command on the Western Front, fighting at Chemin des Dames and Verdun. His son, Pierre, also served as an artillery officer, being awarded the Croix de Guerre. Two nephews also became artillery officers but were both killed in action. The only other major player in the Dreyfus Affair to see combat during the war was Armand du Paty de Clam.

In 1919 Dreyfus’ honors were upgraded to Officier de la Légion d’Honneur. He died on July 12, 1935, aged 75, and was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery. For all the French military’s efforts to make it go away, the Dreyfus Affair long outlived its namesake, leaving behind a number of political, legal and social aftereffects. In France it held up a mirror that showed two psyches—which would recur five years after Dreyfus’ death with new evocative names, such as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Laval. Sadly, it still hasn’t gone away.

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In 1858, Abraham Lincoln casually and unknowingly created a time capsule of his contemporary mindset on both slavery and race relations—not hidden in a cornerstone but taking the form of a 3.25- by 5.78-inch black campaign notebook shared with Capt. James N. Brown, a longtime friend and fellow campaigner.

It was the waning days of Lincoln’s senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and Brown was running for Illinois state legislature, partly at Lincoln’s encouragement. Brown, however, was assailed for his ties to Lincoln. Virulent opponents said that Lincoln—and therefore Brown, by association—supported and wanted to bring about social and political Negro equality.

Brown beseeched Lincoln for a clear statement on that Negro equality, what Brown referred to as the “paramount issue” of the day. Lincoln acceded, annotating what he called a “scrapbook” with news clips of his speeches on the subject, and a definitive 8-page letter, transcribed here.

Brown used the notebook from Lincoln during his campaign’s waning days. It didn’t help. He lost the election.

The scrapbook was cherished by Brown and, after his 1868 death, by his sons William and Benjamin. Eventually they sold it to New York rare-book dealer George D. Smith, who found a customer in Philadelphia Lincoln collector William H. Lambert, who believed Lincoln’s words warranted wider distribution and published a version of the notebook in 1901 as Abraham Lincoln: His Book: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original with an Explanatory Note by J. McCan Davis.

After Lambert’s death the ‘scrapbook’ was auctioned in 1914; and purchased for Henry E. Huntington’s San Marino, California library.

In his career Ross E. Heller, holder of a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, has been a journalist, U.S. Senatorial press secretary, lobbyist, association executive, entrepreneur, newspaper publisher and now, editor/author. Researching this book, he is also discoverer of new facts of America’s most-storied life; a life about which no one could imagine anything new could ever be found.

This article is an excerpt from By Abraham Lincoln: His 1858 Time Capsule, edited by Ross E. Heller and published by CustomNEWS, Seaside Books.

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This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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Daniel Ellsberg, whose leaked “Pentagon Papers” revealed to the world in 1971 the U.S. government’s closely guarded overview of the Vietnam War, died of pancreatic cancer on June 16 at his home in Kensington, Calif., at age 92.

Ellsberg, a Harvard-educated former Marine, was an analyst for the RAND Corporation before becoming an adviser to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1964. He spent two years in Vietnam for the DoD assessing the war and spent significant time accompany counterinsurgency sorties in the field.

It was there that his formerly pro-war stance began to change, as the brutality and likely futility of the fighting slowly turned him against American policy. In 1967, he joined three dozen others in compiling what would later be called the Pentagon Papers—a 7,000-page study commissioned by McNamara—detailing the history of the conflict in Southeast Asia and revealing that four successive presidents from Eisenhower to Johnson had expanded the war illegally, misleading Congress and the American public while doing so.

Ellsberg’s work on the document led him to believe the war was unwinnable. In 1971, he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, and later the Washington Post, who published them wholesale after court battles debating the limits of the First Amendment.

Ironically, it became the next president in the series, Richard M. Nixon, to take the fall. Nixon ordered a series of aggressive countermoves, including illegal wiretaps and a break-in of Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist’s office to dig up dirt, that ultimately led to the Watergate scandal and the subsequent resignation of the president.

Ellsberg was charged with espionage, conspiracy, and other crimes that could have seen him spend decades in prison, but his case was thrown out in 1974 when the level of the government’s misconduct came to light. Nixon’s domestic affairs adviser, John Ehrlichman, even offered the trial judge the directorship of the F.B.I. as the court case was proceeding. Ehrlichman later went to prison.

Ellsberg continued his antiwar activism and in later years became a vocal advocate for nuclear disarmament. In 2018 he was awarded Sweden’s Olof Palme Prize, which noted how his “moral courage” to leak the report led to an “untold number of saved lives.” He is survived by his second wife, children, and extended family.

There it was again. He was sure of it now. Muffled by the dense Amazonian undergrowth came the low rumbling of a vehicle moving at barely a crawl. Ecuadorian Corporal 1st Class José Maria Marasco froze stock-still in his outpost as he tried to determine the vehicle’s direction of movement. It seemed closer now, and he could hear the snapping of branches beneath the vehicle’s tires. Then he heard their muted voices—the hated Peruvians. An officer giving orders. A sergeant giving directions. And they were all coming toward him. The war he knew was coming had arrived in the Cenepa Valley.

Marasco whispered what he heard and saw into the mouthpiece of his landline and then silently made his way back to his unit.

Ecuadorian and Peruvian units had patrolled the disputed valley for years without incident, despite their mutual hatred. Sometimes their officers even got together for talks. Then, in 1995, Peruvian forces invaded the disputed area, seeking to evict the Ecuadorian troops dug in on the high ground overlooking the river basin.

The Cenepa War, a fierce little fight of 34 days, was the latest in a series of wars between the South American neighbors over their disputed boundary. The two had most recently come to blows in 1941 and 1981. Ecuador had not defeated Peru since the 1829 Battle of Tarqui.

Bolívar’s Role

Though Simón Bolívar is memorialized as the “Liberator” who freed what would become Peru and Ecuador from Spanish colonial rule, he ironically sowed the seeds of the Cenepa War via territorial claims when carving out his idealistic united state of Gran Colombia in 1819.

The dispute was a complex one, dating from Spain’s colonial rule, when Madrid oversaw most of Latin America through its Viceroyalties of Peru and New Granada and many smaller political units. Spain frequently changed the borders and responsibilities of the viceroyalties to ease the administration of its colonies and deal with Portuguese incursions along the Amazon River. One such change occurred in 1802 when a royal decree transferred much of what comprises present-day Ecuador to the jurisdiction of Peru. In 1803 another royal decree transferred jurisdiction of the province of Guayaquil to Peru. Based on these decrees, Peru claimed the disputed lands on the legal principle of uti possidetis (as you possess, so shall you possess). However, in 1819 the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, through the Congress of Angostura, claimed the province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) and parts of Jaén and Maynas provinces (in present-day Peru) for his Gran Colombia.

Ten years later an army under Marshal José de la Mar, president of a newly independent Peru, attempted to seize southern Ecuador. However, a Gran Colombian army under Grand Marshal Antonio José de Sucre beat back the Peruvians at the Battle of Tarqui and forced de la Mar to sign the Treaty of Girón, by which Peru recognized the boundary as it had existed in 1810. That treaty, however, did not resolve the dispute.

Over the next century Ecuador and Peru argued and sometimes battled one another for control of the disputed lands. At one point Peru seized the port of Guayaquil in retaliation for Ecuadorian incursions. Each sought to exploit the other’s internal political problems. On several occasions the parties asked the king of Spain to arbitrate. In 1936 the United States offered to arbitrate the dispute. Those efforts came to naught, and in 1938 Peruvian and Ecuadorian troops again engaged in border skirmishes.

In July 1941, taking advantage of the world situation and the United States’ distraction with events in Europe, Peru marched against Ecuadorian outposts in Casitas, Cero del Concho and elsewhere. The Peruvian commander, Brig. Gen. Eloy G. Ureta, was so insistent on an offensive operation that he’d threatened to march his troops against his own government were he not permitted to attack the Ecuadorians.

Peru greatly overmatched Ecuador in military might. It had modernized and reorganized its army, while Ecuador had not. Within weeks the Ecuadorian army was a fantasy. Although Peru suspended its operations to capture Guayaquil, abiding by the terms of a July 31 cease-fire between the belligerents, it nevertheless managed to seize the Ecuadorian province of El Oro.

In January 1942 the foreign ministers of Peru and Ecuador, together with representatives from the United States, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, hammered out the Rio de Janeiro Protocol, under the terms of which Peru evacuated El Oro province but retained control of Jaén, Maynas and Tumbes provinces.

That remained the status quo until Jan. 22, 1981, when Ecuadorian troops in the Cordillera del Cóndor of the Andes Mountains fired on a Peruvian reconnaissance helicopter. A day later they fired on another Peruvian reconnaissance chopper. Meanwhile, in the Cenepa Valley, Ecuadorian troops occupied three abandoned Peruvian outposts.

Ecuador justified its presence and actions, arguing that though the Rio Protocol had called for demarcation of their respective borders, that process remained incomplete, and unaccounted terrain features made what had been surveyed inaccurate. Thus, it argued, the 1942 agreement was invalid. Peru insisted the agreement did remain valid, and Ecuador had no legitimate complaint.

Peru, still militarily superior to Ecuador, resolved to retake its outposts and evict the Ecuadorians from the valley. Ever since its 1932–33 drubbing by Colombia over territory in the Amazon rainforest, Peru paid particular attention to its military: rebuilding it, retraining it, rearming it, and obtaining professional military advice from such European powers as France and Italy. In contrast, Ecuador used its military primarily to suppress internal unrest and failed to heed the threat posed by its historical enemy. In short, Peru prepared for war, Ecuador did not.

The results were painfully predictable and humiliating for Ecuador. At the outset of what became known as the Paquisha War, Peru twice attempted to assault the namesake Ecuadorian-held outpost before abandoning its efforts. On the third attempt, however, a Peruvian helicopter armed with rockets destroyed an Ecuadorian anti-aircraft battery, allowing helicopter-borne Peruvian soldiers to land and engage the Ecuadorians, driving them off after a short but intense firefight. A day later, on January 30, the Peruvians assaulted a second Ecuadorian outpost using attack helicopters and fighter-bombers. Landing air assault troops, the Peruvians quickly drove off the Ecuadorians. On February 1 the Peruvians recovered the third outpost.

The same scenario applied when the Peruvians attacked three more outposts occupied by Ecuadorian troops in the interim. Ecuador, lacking air support, was unable to respond and forced to abandon its positions and much of its equipment. Each side lost more than a dozen killed and two dozen wounded.

Ecuador had learned its lesson. When it instigated the next war, in 1995, it came prepared. In early January Ecuadorians seized the high ground in the Cenepa Valley and dug in. They had modern weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles and significant modern air assets, including French-built Dassault Mirage F1JA and F1JE fighters with air-to-air missiles and Israel Aircraft Industries Kfir C.2 and TC.2 fighters. They changed their tactics as well. Instead of directly confronting the Peruvians, as they had in the past, the Ecuadorians employed ambush and hit-and-run tactics, which one authority likened to tactics utilized by the Viet Cong in Vietnam. The Ecuadorian strategy was the same as in previous encounters in the disputed region: occupy positions Peru had abandoned in order to fight the Maoist Shining Path insurgency elsewhere. Ecuador would thus present a fait accompli to anyone interested, especially Peru. The challenge to Ecuador was to hold those positions.

The disputed area is roughly the size of the District of Columbia, less than 60 square miles, and lies approximately 50 miles east of the Ecuadorian city of Loja and 60 miles southeast of Cuenca. The Peruvian capital of Lima is about 600 miles to the south. The Cenepa River drains its watershed and ultimately sends its flow to the Amazon. The Cenepa basin is ringed by mountains, notably the Cordillera del Cóndor to the west. The very northern tip of the disputed area is a salient flanked by undisputed Ecuadorian territory. It is blanketed in dense jungle, some of which had never seen a human footprint other than those of the indigenous peoples. Indeed, many of those killed in the conflict weren’t found until years later, while others remain missing. Ecuador chose to begin offensive operations in this seemingly impenetrable salient.

Aided by Israeli advisers, Ecuadorian special forces units infiltrated and seized the Peruvian outposts at Tiwintza, Base Sur and Cueva de los Tayos, which were little more than clearings in the jungle large enough to accommodate a helicopter and a small garrison.

The Ecuadorians took position on high ground in the 6,500-foot Cóndor range. There they placed artillery that could effectively sweep the basin below and laid land mines to solidify their positions. They also made good use of the jungle canopy, which provided cover and concealment from Peruvian aircraft. The prevailing weather was also on their side. Cloud cover and rain often prevented effective use of the numerically superior Peruvian air assets. The Ecuadorians exploited their interior lines for good communication. They also used GPS to pinpoint targets and took a page from the U.S. Army’s AirLand Battle doctrine. Utilizing roads through the Cóndor mountains, the Ecuadorians made excellent use of their logistical support system. The Peruvians were limited to long-distance helicopter airlifts.

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Ecuador quickly established air superiority. Peru would lose a reported seven aircraft altogether: one medium bomber, two fighter-bombers, one light attack aircraft and at least three helicopters. The Ecuadorian air force suffered only damage to one light attack aircraft.

Peru’s military resources were numerically superior in almost every respect. But after more than 15 years of fighting Shining Path guerrillas, its army was worn down and dispirited. Once thought to be the most potent air force in Latin America, the Peruvian air force was a shell of its former self. It suffered from poor maintenance and a dearth of spare parts. Further, the Peruvian economy was in shambles, still reeling from long-term hyperinflation.

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was keenly aware his military was in poor shape to fight anyone. Indeed, he met with Ecuadorian President Sixto Durán-Ballén to advise him Peru would be withdrawing some of its forces in the Cenepa basin to commit them to the fight against the Shining Path. He expressed his hope Ecuador would understand and not take advantage of the situation but maintain the peace. Unfortunately for Fujimori, Ecuador did take advantage of the situation. It would suffer no further humiliation. As one regional expert put it, Ecuador’s 1941 loss of access to the Amazon “went against the Ecuadorian soul.”

Despite their setbacks, the Peruvians were able to muster a task force of 2,500 men to recapture the outposts. By late January, supported by Soviet-built T-55 tanks and artillery, they launched a counteroffensive against the Ecuadorian positions. Again the Ecuadorians avoided direct conflict by using ambush and hit-and-run tactics. By mid-February Peru had recaptured the outposts at Base Sur and Cueva de los Tayos, but they were unable to recapture Tiwintza. The Ecuadorians, aided by their artillery high in the Cóndor range, refused to yield.

Despite its maintenance issues and lack of spare parts, the Peruvian air force flew as many as 16 sorties per day against Ecuadorian positions, but at a price. Ecuadorians armed with ground-based weapons, including the British-made Blowpipe shoulder-fired missile, shot down several Peruvian helicopters and attack aircraft. On February 6 a Peruvian English Electric Canberra B.68 bomber was lost with all aboard when it flew into the side of a mountain, apparently due to poor weather conditions. In an air-to-air battle on February 10 two Ecuadorian Kfir C.2s intercepted several Peruvian U.S.-built Cessna A-37B Dragonfly light attack aircraft and downed one, while two Ecuadorian Mirage F1JAs shot down two Peruvian Sukhoi Su-22M attack aircraft, though Peru denied the latter two were combat losses.

A problem faced by ground-attack aircraft of both air forces was the asymmetrical nature of the battlefield. Peruvian pilots in particular had difficulty distinguishing between friendly and enemy positions. For the most part the war was fought by platoon-sized elements. There were no “front lines.” A Peruvian unit might have an Ecuadorian platoon to its rear or vice versa. When the combatants finally agreed on a cease-fire and their respective armies were to disengage, the effort took more than two months due to the battlefield asymmetry.

“Clearly, Ecuador holds the key terrain,” one military analyst noted. “I know they have sufficient firepower, so that if they really wanted to take out the Peruvians, they could do so.…Ecuador can hold out for a long time.”

It didn’t have to. By early March both sides had agreed to a U.N.-brokered cease-fire calling for the separation of the combatants, demobilization of their armies, substantive negotiations and a normalization of diplomatic relations.

The butcher’s bill for the conflict came to a reported 34 killed for Ecuador and 60 for Peru. The war was estimated to have cost $1 billion.

Though sporadic fighting broke out, generally the cease-fire held. Not until 1998 did the four original guarantors of the 1942 Rio de Janeiro Protocol—Chile, Brazil, Argentina and the United States—hammer out a permanent solution. Even then, the agreement was only possible because both Ecuador and Peru had significantly altered their long-held positions. Ecuador, in a massive sea change, agreed to work within the parameters of the Rio Protocol. Likewise, Peru reversed its long-held position there was no legitimate dispute.

The negotiations almost came to an abrupt halt when Ecuador buried its war dead in a cemetery it had created within the disputed zone. After months of negotiation on that issue alone, the guarantors devised a compromise by which the cemetery was deemed owned by Ecuador but under Peruvian sovereignty. Peru, in turn, agreed to give up any right to confiscate Ecuadorian property. The parties also agreed the area should be a demilitarized zone, and peacekeeping troops from the guarantor nations were to deploy in the zone as observers. Finally, Peru agreed to Ecuador’s unfettered access to the Amazon River. Both parties signed the Brasilia Presidential Act on Oct. 26, 1998, thus putting a definitive end to a more than 150 years of dispute.

Ecuador emerged the victor. Some commentators call it a stalemate, but the fact remains Ecuador was not, as the Peruvians had long intended, ejected from the Cenepa basin, but left of its own accord under the cease-fire protocol. It had prevailed by careful planning, improved logistics, shrewd choice of terrain and the use of modern technology, and after having revamped and rearmed its military. As Ecuadorian President Durán-Ballén stated, the victory was due to 14 years of military preparation since the 1981 debacle.

The Cenepa War has changed international thinking in several ways. First, it dispelled the long-held view that democracies don’t war with other democracies. Clearly, they can and do if the circumstances and national interests are right. Second, Ecuador’s successful use of modern technology proves a small state can fight a larger one on equal terms, thus presenting a real deterrent to its larger neighbor. Third, the war destroyed the notion Latin America has become a generally peaceful region not requiring close attention by third parties, such as the United States. U.S. foreign policy ignores Latin America at its peril.

Durán-Ballén emerged as one of Ecuador’s most popular presidents and elder statesmen, though scholars debate the legacy of his presidency. He died, much revered by the Ecuadorian public, at age 95 in 2016.

Although his administration defeated the Shining Path insurgency, significantly improved the economy and won re-election in April 1995 by a wide margin, President Fujimori became increasingly authoritarian. Facing charges of corruption and human rights abuses in 2000, he fled to Japan. Then, on a 2005 visit to Chile, he was arrested and later extradited to Peru. In 2007 Fujimori was convicted of illegal search and seizure, and two years later he was convicted of embezzlement, bribery and human rights violations, including the use or approval of death squads and torture. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence. Fujimori’s son, Kenji, served as a member of the Peruvian Congress from 2011 to 2018. His daughter, Keiko, ran for the presidency in 2011, 2016 and 2021, but was defeated each time.

Jerome Long is a former instructor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff Officers’ Course who taught classes on such topics as military intelligence, operational warfare and military history. For further reading he recommends Latin America’s Wars, Vol. II: The Age of the Professional Soldier, 1900–2001, by Robert L. Sheina, and Air Wars Between Ecuador and Peru, Vol. 3: Aerial Operations Over the Cenepa River Valley, by Amaru Tincopa.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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Poor Kamala Harris. The vice president took office in January 2021 trailing a cloud of firsts: first woman to hold the job, first African American (thanks to her Jamaican father), first Asian-American (thanks to her Indian mother). But the job itself has been a cavalcade of vexations. President Joe Biden saddled her with an unattractive assignment—managing and explaining the migrant mess at the southern border. She is reputed to be hard on her staff in private, and she is often tongue-tied in public. Even media outlets friendly to the administration have run hit pieces on her. According to The New York Times, “dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the nation” said (anonymously) that “she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.”

The office of vice president was devised in the home stretch of the Constitutional Convention as a flywheel in the machinery for picking an executive, and a successor in case the president died or was removed from office. Along the way, Elbridge Gerry worried that veeps would be too closely allied to the presidents alongside whom they served, which provoked a snort from Gouverneur Morris: “the vice president will then be the first heir apparent that ever loved his father.” Initially the vice presidency went to the runner-up in the Electoral College’s vote for president; the 12th amendment (1804) ensured that the veep would be the running mate of the winning presidential candidate.

The office got off to a rough start. John Adams, first vice president under George Washington, was the first (though not the last) to feel that he had nothing to do. Thomas Jefferson, second vice president under Adams, spent his term undermining his old friend and plotting to supplant him. Aaron Burr, third vice president under Jefferson, was shut out of all patronage, denied renomination when Jefferson ran again, and spent his post–vice presidential years plotting to break up the United States.

Most modern vice presidents, beginning with Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s number two, have been given substantive responsibilities, and have worked well with their number ones. Four of them—Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Joe Biden—have run for president themselves, two—Bush and Biden—successfully. But two vice presidents of an earlier era anticipated the problems bedeviling Harris today.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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Henry Wallace was the scion of an Iowa family of farmer/journalists (they published a magazine called Wallace’s Farmer). His father served as secretary of Agriculture under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge; Henry, crossing party lines, held the same job for FDR. In addition to his interests in crop cycles and new plant strains, Wallace had a passion for oddball religions. In the 1920s he came under the spell of Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré painter and seer who dressed in Tibetan robes and claimed to be the reincarnation of a Chinese emperor. Wallace and Roerich exchanged hundreds of letters, in which they referred to each other and to famous acquaintances in mystical code: Roerich was the Guru, Wallace was Parsifal or Galahad, FDR was the Flaming One, or the Wavering One, whenever Wallace felt disappointed in him.

In 1934 Wallace got Roerich attached to an Agriculture Department expedition to Mongolia seeking drought-resistant grasses. Roerich was also seeking the Holy Grail on the side. American diplomats reported that he was traveling the steppes with a bodyguard of White Russian Cossacks, trying to set up a Central Asian Buddhist kingdom. Wallace, embarrassed, cut ties with him.

The Flaming One, tired of his crusty Texan veep John Nance Garner, tapped Wallace to be his running mate when he sought a third term in 1940. FDR wanted a man of liberal views, and Wallace fit the bill. One potential landmine threatened the new ticket. The Republican National Committee had procured copies of 120 Guru letters. The GOP candidate Wendell Willkie nixed using them, however, afraid that the Democrats would expose his long-running extramarital affair with a prominent New York journalist. Roosevelt and Wallace cruised to victory.

Wallace found new soul mates post-Roerich—American Communists, whose designs he naively failed to penetrate. The Soviet Union was a wartime ally, and Communists were billing themselves as liberals in a hurry. Alarmed Democratic bosses told FDR in 1944 that he must dump Wallace, so the nod for his fourth run went to Missouri Senator Harry Truman, who became president when Roosevelt died three months into his last term. When Wallace ran for president himself in 1948 as candidate of the left-wing Progressive Party, the Guru letters finally hit the papers. Wallace won a meager 2.4 percent of the popular vote, and carried no states. Repenting of his pro-Soviet backers, he lived until 1965.

Richard Nixon was tied to Dwight Eisenhower politically and personally. He served as Eisenhower’s veep for two terms, 1953–1961. After Nixon won the White House himself in 1968, his daughter Julie married Ike’s grandson, David Eisenhower. Yet his relationship with Ike was always fraught.

Nixon had been put on the ticket in 1952 as a sop to the conservative wing of the GOP that Ike had defeated in winning the nomination. The two barely knew each other, however. There was a 23-year age gap between them. In September, the press revealed that Nixon had a campaign expense account, characterized in headlines as SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND. Ike’s advisers, fearful of any taint on the war-winning hero, pressured Nixon to resign from the ticket. Instead he made a half-hour television speech, defending his innocence (the account was legal), attacking Democrats (Ike’s rival, Adlai Stevenson, had his own campaign account), and pledging to keep Checkers, a cocker spaniel that a supporter had given Nixon’s daughters. The Republican National Committee got millions of letters, telegrams, and phone calls praising the put-upon Nixon. Ike embraced his feisty running mate.

But their relations never warmed. Nixon was intelligent and hard-working, but too political and ambitious for his old boss. In August 1960, at the end of Eisenhower’s second term and the start of Nixon’s first presidential run, against Sen. John F. Kennedy, the president was asked at a press conference what role Nixon had played in his administration. Had the vice president offered any “major idea” that Ike had subsequently adopted? “If you give me a week,” Eisenhower answered, “I might think of one. I don’t remember.” The Kennedy campaign gleefully used the line in an attack ad. Had Ike meant it as a flat-out diss? Probably not. But he hadn’t made a ringing endorsement either. The 1960 race was razor thin. Could a love-bombing Eisenhower have pulled Nixon over the line? Nixon would have to wait eight more years for a second shot.

The Vice President is a constitutional fixture and a political anomaly—a high official with hardly any defined role; a successor whom the president picks but cannot fire until and unless he runs again. Wallace was a deficient veep whom the president—and almost only the president—liked. Nixon was a work horse the president never truly admired. Kamala Harris seems to enjoy the worst of both worlds: low achievement, low esteem. With Biden determined to run again, will she be replaced a la Wallace, or retained a la Nixon? All the political termites of D.C. will be gnawing on that question.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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The Biden administration remains in a tense standoff with congressional Republicans over the national debt ceiling. On June 1, the U.S. will default on its obligations for the first time in history if the two parties are unable to come to an agreement on lifting the debt ceiling.

Indeed, there are perilous repercussions if the Treasury Department cannot avert an unprecedented U.S. default.

If the specific deadline, known as “X-date,” is missed, the “cascading impacts of default would probably compound — a pause in federal payments would hurt the economy, which would hurt the stock market, which would in turn hurt the economy even more, and so on. The interactions between collapsing home values, rising interest rates and a destabilized global financial system are hard to calculate. Some estimates suggest that more than 8 million jobs could be wiped out. Mortgage rates might soar by more than 20 percent, according to some projections, and the economy would contract by as much as it did during the 2008 Great Recession,” according to the Washington Post.

Such consequences are terrifyingly grim, yet this is not the first, nor — unfortunately — most likely the last time in U.S. history that the nation has come dangerously close to not raising the debt ceiling.

Since 1917, when lawmakers instituted the first debt ceiling, Congress has since raised that number 78 times — 49 times under Republican presidents, and 29 times under Democratic administrations, according to NPR.

Except for the year 1835, when President Andrew Jackson became the first and last president to pay off the entirety of the national debt, the U.S. Treasury has never experienced zero debt, with the need to accrue more debt beginning in earnest at the start of the U.S. entry into World War I.

As of today, the debt currently stands at $31.4 trillion.

Below is a brief history of the debt ceiling to provide some context to the current political battle waging in the capital city.

The Good News First: Has the U.S. ever defaulted before?

No, the U.S. has never defaulted on its debt over failure to raise the debt ceiling. Congress missed payments, but they were unrelated to the debt ceiling.

Why Was the Debt Ceiling Created?

According to Kathleen Day, aJohns Hopkins University financial history professor, the national debt ceiling was created in the 20th century due to the first World War. “Congress needs to approve every time the government had to borrow money,” Day told NPR. “But then with World War I, they had to do it so often, they just said, enough of this. Let’s just give you the authority to do — to borrow money up to a certain limit. And so ever after, we’ve had these debt limits. So Treasury can borrow up to a certain amount. And then when it hits that amount, it has to go back to Congress and get authorization.”

Since entering World War II, the U.S. has raised the debt limit every year, and, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, “By the end of the war, in June 1946, the debt limit [wa]s lowered to $275 billion as war costs dissipate[d] and the federal government beg[an] to run three years of surpluses. The federal debt limit remain[ed] unchanged at this level for eight consecutive years – the longest such period since its inception.”

With the decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tax cuts, emergency responses such as Katrina and expanded federal spending, the U.S. has added $25 trillion in debt, writes TIME.

How Did the Founding Fathers View Debt?

The topic of debt became a classic debate that contributed to the split between Jeffersonian and Hamilton followers. Jefferson understood the utility of debt but believed there were more downside to it. Hamilton recognized such downfalls but regarded debt as necessary to grow industry, and, in turn, the economy.

“There’s good debt and bad debt,” said Day. “Debt is just debt. It’s the people that either use it wisely or don’t.”

Andrew Jackson famously became the only U.S. president to get rid of the national debt, however,his actions, “zeroing out of the US debt contributed to the Panic of 1837, one of the worst recessions in American history,” writes NPR.

How Do Elections Play Into the Debt Crisis?

Oftentimes, debt-limit crises loom when an election produces a shift in who controls Congress. The debt ceiling crises of 1995 and 2011 are no exception.

During President Bill Clinton’s first midterms in 1994, the Republicans flipped both the Senate and House Chambers.

“GOP lawmakers pledged to pass a balanced budget as part of what they named their “Contract with America,” according to U.S. News and World Report. “House Republicans sent Clinton a budget that cut spending on domestic programs, which he vetoed. This in turn led to a five-day shutdown of the federal government.”

In response, House Speaker Newt Gingrich threatened to not increase the debt limit.

After a second Clinton veto of the GOP’s budget offer and a 21-day standoff, the Republicans passed a budget offered by Clinton and also lifted the debt ceiling.

Under President Barack Obama, the 2010 midterm elections saw Republicans gain seven Senate seats — although not a majority — and win a GOP majority in the House.

Following the election, the House refused to raise the debt limit without cuts to federal spending.

An 11th-hour agreement came on July 31, 2011, only two days before the U.S. government ran out of money. But creditors were spooked, with “the credit markets downgrad[ing] the nation’s credit ranking for the first time, upping the costs of future borrowing,” per the Associated Press.

What is the role of the 14th Amendment?         

The 14th Amendment states that “the validity of the public debt, authorized by law…shall not be questioned.”

According to TIME, “the controversial legal theory, which previous administrations had ruled out, builds on Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to argue that it would be unconstitutional for the U.S. to fail to make payments even if the debt limit isn’t raised, effectively challenging the debt limit on legal grounds.”

As talks between Democrats and Republicans stall, Biden stated that he was “considering” invoking the 14th Amendment on his own without an act of Congress but went on to say that he recognized the potential pitfalls in doing so. “The problem is it would have to be litigated, and without an extension it would end up in the same place.”

What Does This Mean Going Forward?

While invoking the 14th Amendment may be a constitutionally tenable option as the June 1st date looms, let’s hope for history’s sake — and the economy’s — that a deal is brokered long before that pinch point.

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This cable from April 19, 1975, was sent by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Graham Martin, U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam about the impending evacuation of Saigon. It also contains advice about interactions with President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam. This very candid document is one of many that have been made available to the public by the National Archives.

FM THE WHITE HOUSE

TO AMEMBASSY SAIGON

SENSITIVE EXCLUSIVELY EYES ONLY

DELIVER AT OPENING OF BUSINESS VIA MARTIN CHANNELS WH50728

April 19, 1975

TO: Graham Martin

FROM: Secretary Kissinger

1. Thanks for your 0715.

2. My ass isn’t covered. I can assure you I will be hanging several yards higher than you when this is all over.

3. Now that we are agreed that the number of Americans will be reduced by Tuesday to a size which can be evacuated by a single helicopter lift, the exact numbers are completely up to you. That having been decided, I will stop bugging you on numbers, except to say that you should ensure that the embassy remains able to function effectively.

4. You should go ahead with your discussion with Thieu. In your soundings relative to his possible resignation, however, the matter of timing is also of great significance. In any event any resignation should not take place precipitately but should be timed for maximum leverage in the political situation. You should know, although you should not intimate this to Thieu, that we this morning have made an approach to the Soviet Union. We should not be sanguine about any results but, if there are any, they could easily involve Thieu as one of the bargaining points.

5. You should also know that the French have approached us with the idea of reconvening the Paris Conference. We told them we were opposed and felt it would be counterproductive.

Warm regards.

On Oct. 1, 1949, Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China (PRC) the sole government of China. That December 7 Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the leadership of the Republic of China (ROC) fled to the island of Taiwan. They, too, soon claimed to be the sole legitimate government of China. Thus, the stage was set for a series of military confrontations in the Taiwan Strait.

The first crisis occurred in 1954–55 and centered on the PRC seizure of small island groups offshore from Zhejiang (Chiang’s home province) that were under ROC military control. It began when the PRC shelled the ROC-controlled island of Kinmen (aka Quemoy). In January 1955 PRC forces seized the Yijiangshan Islands. That action prompted the U.S. Congress to enact the Formosa Resolution, authorizing the use of American military force to defend Taiwan against further PRC military thrusts. In its wake the U.S. Navy facilitated the ROC evacuation of the Dachen Islands, while the Pentagon contemplated the use of nuclear-tipped missiles on behalf of the ROC.

The second crisis, in 1958, also involved islands just offshore from Zhejiang. This time the PRC established an artillery blockade of Kinmen, which forced seaborne and aerial drops of food and supplies to its defenders. The United States deployed significant air and naval forces into the Taiwan Strait and again considered the use of nuclear weapons.

The third crisis arose in 1995–96 when the PRC mobilized its armed forces in Fujian and conducted missile tests and live-fire naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait, disrupting commercial shipping near the Taiwanese ports of Keelung and Kaoshiung. Unlike the first crises, the PRC’s actions were in protest to then ROC President Lee Teng-hui’s moves toward a democratic and politically independent Taiwan—an idea wholly abhorrent in the minds of Beijing’s leaders. American warships, including two carrier battle groups, transited the Taiwan Strait, but the crisis eventually abated.

Just why the PRC risked a nuclear response from the United States in the 1950s over a handful of small island groups in the Taiwan Strait is instructive.

Essentially, Beijing exploited the first two military crises with Taiwan to convince the Soviet Union of the PRC’s immediate need for Russian nuclear weapons technology and advisers. This was followed up by a decision at the highest political ranks in Beijing to devote considerable financial resources and manpower into making the PRC a nuclear power as rapidly as possible. On Oct. 16, 1964, the PRC successfully detonated its first nuclear device, of approximately the same yield as the one the United States used against Nagasaki in 1945 and the one detonated by Russia in 1949 during its first nuclear weapon test. Thus, the PRC manipulated both the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve nuclear parity by engaging in relatively minor military actions in the Taiwan Straits.

Lessons:

Look through the bluff. Throughout the Cold War, even during the hot wars on the Korean Peninsula and in Vietnam, the PRC never attempted a full-scale invasion of Taiwan. The mere threat, however, contributed to another achievement—nuclear parity with the superpowers.

Tigers don’t change their stripes. Less than a decade after the PRC’s founding its leaders were politically savvy enough to use the Taiwan Strait Crises to wring all necessary technology from the Soviet Union to build their own nuclear bombs. Beijing still uses this manipulative approach to advance its international ambitions.

Remain vigilant. In the 74 years since its inception the PRC has not budged from its intentions with regard to Taiwan—unification. How it aims to accomplish that is an open question.

This story appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of Military History magazine.

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On May 4, 1980, 87-year-old Josip Broz died in Ljubljana, Slovenia, after a remarkable six-decade career as soldier, revolutionary and statesman. He also left behind a remarkable multicultural experiment in national unity. Yugoslavia (Slavic for “Land of South Slavs”) was, as its name implies, conceived as a Balkan state for the southern Slavs. In practice, however, it was an unsteady confederation of six ethnically similar but culturally, religiously and linguistically different republics—Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia. Tito had just the right combination of charisma and ruthlessness to force them to live together. His demise left a void no successor could fulfill, condemning the southern Slavic confederation to its own slow death.

Josip Broz was born on May 7, 1892, in Kumrovec (in present-day Croatia), the son of a Croat father and a Slovene mother who raised him in the Roman Catholic tradition. Conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1913, he entered World War I as a senior noncommissioned officer and distinguished himself in combat before being wounded and captured by the Russians in 1915. During his time in Russia, or shortly after returning to his homeland, he joined the outlawed Communist Party of Yugoslavia and became increasingly activist, adopting the pseudonym “Tito” in 1934 (“to reduce the chances of exposure,” he later explained).

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During World War II Tito commanded the multiethnic Yugoslav Partisans against the German and Italian occupation forces and their independent Croatian Ustase allies, also fighting alongside and sometimes against the Serbian royalist Chetnik resistance forces. In the fall of 1944 the arrival of the Soviet Red Army hastened the ouster of Axis forces from Yugoslavia. Following the liberation of Belgrade on October 20 Tito transformed the restored kingdom into the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. His was no Soviet puppet state, however, and in 1948 he broke away from Joseph Stalin and the Warsaw Pact to pursue an independent course.

Tito was the lynchpin that held together a diverse nation. Following his death in 1980 Yugoslavia was overseen by a collective presidency of the six republics, but Tito proved an impossible act to follow, as each of his successors found themselves threatened with civil unrest. The post-communist elections of 1990 heralded the rise of the Croatian Democratic Union under President Franjo Tudman and Bosnia and Herzegovina’s predominantly Muslim Party of Democratic Action under President Alija Izetbegovic. By year’s end Serbia had adopted a new constitution and declared itself a constituent republic of Yugoslavia with Slobodan Milosevic as its president. From then on Yugoslavia’s republics began falling away one by one like leaves from a rotting tree.

The first was Slovenia, which held a referendum in December 1990 in which the vast majority of Slovenes called for independence. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia formally seceded. Two days later tanks and armored vehicles of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) deployed to the region. They were opposed by lightly armed but well organized and determined troops of the Slovenian Territorial Defense. A series of clashes followed. The JNA, faced with combating erstwhile citizens, put up only a token resistance. Tanks and other military equipment soon fell into the Slovenians’ hands. Slovene conscripts deserted from the JNA, adding to a chaotic situation. It was all over within 10 days. Some 75 people had been killed, including a dozen or so foreign nationals caught up in the fighting. Many others had been wounded. Soon afterward, in accordance with the Brioni Agreement negotiated by the European Community (EC), which acknowledged Slovenia’s liberation from the control of Belgrade, the JNA withdrew.

Factions throughout Yugoslavia had been closely watching events, which were soon repeated in Croatia, but on a far greater scale than anybody could have imagined.

For the Slavs

Yugoslavia (literally “Land of South Slavs”) traces its origins to the post–World War I Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. King Aleksandar I Karadordevic gave it its more familiar name in 1929. After World War II Tito held it together as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

On July 25, 1990, the Serb Democratic Party issued a declaration proclaiming the sovereignty of Serbs in Croatia. This led to the creation of the Serbian Autonomous Oblast of Krajina. On March 16, 1991, its National Council declared Krajina’s independence from Croatia, raising political tensions and prompting ever increasing internecine incidents. In eastern Croatia’s disputed Slavonia region events came to a head in May when a dozen Croatian policemen were killed trying to rescue colleagues held by Serbs at Borovo Selo, on the Danube River.

Croatia formally declared independence on June 25, after which conditions in Slavonia deteriorated into daily firefights between Croats and Serbs, the latter supported by the predominantly Serb-led JNA. The newly formed Croatian National Guard (ZNG) laid siege to federal barracks, initiating a series of clashes known as the Battle of the Barracks, which ended late that year with Croats in possession of vast quantities of military hardware, including tanks and heavy weapons. Elsewhere, Serb militia, in conjunction with federal forces, engaged Croats in open warfare marked by mortar and artillery barrages, bombings, tank assaults and infantry attacks that devastated towns and villages and left thousands homeless. By autumn the front extended from Vukovar west to the Papuk mountains and southwest to Novska. It continued along the Sava River to Sisak and beyond and along the Kupa River to Karlovac. There was further fighting along the Adriatic coast, particularly around Zadar, Sibenik and Dubrovnik.

In Vukovar, in the disputed region of eastern Slavonia, a number of violent incidents had preceded the outset of the war. By July 1991 the situation had deteriorated as Croats and Serbs laid claim to surrounding districts. In August the federal army launched an offensive, with Vukovar as its main objective. For the Serbs, the city was key to achieving and consolidating their hold on eastern Slavonia. In taking the territory west of the Danube, the Serbs could extend their own borders and control the Privlaka and Srijemske Laze oil fields, south of Vukovar.

On August 24 the Serbs commenced a heavy bombardment of Croatian forces in and around Vukovar. Artillery, mortars and tanks, supported by the Serbian air force and gunboats on the Danube, concentrated a tremendous amount of firepower against the city. The strategy was simple: sever Vukovar’s energy, water and food supplies, disrupt communications and create a killing zone. In order to survive, the inhabitants, among them Serbs, took to living in cellars. Those daring to appear aboveground risked injury or death. Occasionally, the shelling would lessen as Serbian tanks and/or infantry advanced ever closer.

For 87 days a vastly outnumbered and outgunned ZNG, together with volunteers from other parts of Croatia, put up a desperate defense. Ultimately, however, on the afternoon of November 18 the last holdouts in central Vukovar surrendered. The battle had cost both sides dearly and would contribute to a temporary cease-fire some six weeks later.

On November 27 the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) agreed to send a peacekeeping force to Yugoslavia, subject to a prevailing cease-fire and on condition Croatian forces discontinued their siege of military establishments, thus enabling the JNA to withdraw. Two days later the federal army began to pull out of Zagreb. Elsewhere, the war continued. Not until Feb. 21, 1992, did the UNSC finally approve Resolution 743, authorizing deployment of a United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). Six weeks later the first UNPROFOR units arrived in Croatia. Although the situation was far from being under control, events were soon overshadowed by the war’s spread to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Late in 1991 Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina had made clear their support for a “Serbian Republic…within the framework of Yugoslavia.” However, in late February 1992, within weeks of EC recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, a referendum in Bosnia-Herzegovina also resulted in a majority vote in favor of autonomy. Bosnian Serbs, most of whom had boycotted the referendum, responded by erecting barricades in the capital, Sarajevo, ostensibly in protest against an incident during a wedding procession outside Sarajevo’s Serbian Orthodox church in which the groom’s father was killed and the officiating priest was wounded. The situation quickly deteriorated. In scenes reminiscent of those in Slovenia and Croatia, Sarajevo’s army barracks were besieged and looted. The first of countless mortar attacks struck the city on April 6. In May escalating hostilities prompted the U.N. to withdraw its headquarters from the city.

Muslims, Croats and Serbs battled for control in and around Sarajevo and throughout the region—at Bosanski Brod and Brcko in the northeast, around Bihac in the northwest, and at Bugojno, Mostar, Foca, Gorazde, Visegrad and Bratunac. Initially, the superior firepower of the Serbs enabled them to achieve significant gains, notwithstanding a united Muslim-Croat effort. After the latter alliance collapsed over territorial claims, the Bosnian Muslim army had to contend with both Bosnian Serbs and Croats, each reinforced by compatriots from the other side of the border.

With the onset of winter the situation in Sarajevo worsened. Water and electricity services were disrupted, and there was a shortage of food and medicine. From the high ground around the city Serbian gunners maintained a constant barrage. Snipers picked off whomever they saw on the city streets.

Elsewhere, all three sides fought to retain what each considered their rightful territory. In contested areas the inhabitants were killed or forced to flee, their property looted and homes destroyed. The place then became a sort of no-man’s-land, with vigilant troops quick to shoot at anyone who dared return.

During four and a half years of war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina there was one broken cease-fire after another amid a succession of internationally brokered peace talks. In January 1993 fighting again erupted in Croatia when Croats launched an offensive to recapture key positions around the coastal town of Zadar. In Bosnia-Herzegovina Serbs took Kamenica in February and Cerska the following month. In April continuing actions in the Drina valley resulted in the U.N. evacuating Muslim civilians from Srebrenica—a controversial move that, ironically, resulted in the U.N. being accused of so-called “ethnic cleansing,” a process that had begun in Croatia and would come to characterize the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Croats and Muslims clashed at Kiseljakm that month and at Jablanica and Konjic, on the route between Sarajevo and Mostar, into May. Fighting intensified in and around Mostar in May.

Under continuing international pressure, and faced with the worrying prospect of a military alliance between Bosnian Serbs and Croats, President Izetbegovic conditionally agreed on June 7 to establish six “safe areas” for Muslims in Bosnia. Simultaneously, renewed fighting round Travnik culminated in Croats fleeing their Muslim erstwhile allies to seek refuge among the Serbs.

Hostilities continued through the summer and fall of 1993. Northeast of Sarajevo, Zuc was subjected to a devastating artillery barrage. Southwest of the city Muslims and Serbs also battled for possession of Mounts Igman and Bjelasnica (from which the victorious Serbs would later be forced to withdraw in order to avoid the threat of North Atlantic Treaty Organization air strikes). Elsewhere, Muslims achieved considerable success, seizing control of several important towns, including Gornji Vakuf, Fojnica, Busovaca and Vares.

As Bosnia-Herzegovina entered its second winter of the war, the fighting showed little sign of abating. February 1994 brought further international outrage when 68 people were killed and many more wounded apparently by a single mortar shell that detonated in a crowded marketplace in Sarajevo. No one was able to ascertain who was responsible, but Serb forces were given 10 days to withdraw heavy weapons from around the city or face the consequences. Simultaneously, NATO called on Muslim forces to place their own heavy weapons under U.N. control. In another diplomatic move, presumably to dispel any accusations of prejudice, not least from Moscow, U.S. President Bill Clinton announced NATO would target anyone who continued to shell Sarajevo. The Serbs, knowing full well who would be held responsible for any such violation, prudently complied with the ultimatum. By late February, after having been under siege for 22 months, the Bosnian capital was at last able to enjoy some semblance of normality.

In April 1993 NATO had launched Operation Deny Flight to enforce a U.N. no-fly zone over Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nearly a year later, on Feb. 28, 1994, NATO carried out the first active combat action in its 45-year history when American F-16 fighters shot down four Serbian aircraft operating in defiance of the ban.

In March a tentative peace was negotiated between Bosnian Croats and Muslims subsequent to forging a joint federation. On the 19th Bosnian Serbs besieging Maglaj suddenly pulled back, a move that enabled the U.N. to send its first aid convoy in five months. A respite from the slaughter lasted until the end of the month, when “fierce fighting” was reported between Muslim and Serbian forces in central Bosnia. Farther east the so-called “safe area” of Gorazde also continued to come under attack by Serbs. On April 10 and 11 Serbian positions around the embattled Muslim pocket were bombed by NATO aircraft in the first of a number of ground attacks. Within days Serb fire brought down a British Sea Harrier (the pilot ejected to safety), and little more than week after that a British joint commission observer (a Special Air Service noncommissioned officer) was shot dead in Gorazde. The situation devolved further in late May when some 400 U.N. personnel were detained in a retaliatory move by Serbs.

Talks aimed at securing a cease-fire throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina commenced in Geneva on June 6, 1994. On the 8th the warring factions agreed to a one-month cease-fire. Within days, however, there was fighting in the northwest Bihac enclave and between Zenica and Tuzla, around Brcko and in the area of Vozuca in the Ozren mountains region.

In late May 1995 Serb forces again humiliated the U.N. by seizing personnel, this time for use as “human shields” in an effort to deter NATO air strikes. All were released in mid-June following the implementation of UNSC Resolution 998—the establishment of a rapid-reaction force within UNPROFOR.

The final battles played out during the summer and fall of 1995. On July 11 Serb forces overran the “safe area” of Srebrenica, then two weeks later that of Zepa. Later that month the Croatians announced their intention to provide military assistance to Bosnian government forces. A few days later, on the 28th, thousands of Croatian troops crossed the border and struck at Serb positions. On August 4 the Croatians moved against Krajina, retaking the region within days and precipitating a massive exodus of Serbian refugees, who sought sanctuary in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia.

Last One Out

Serbia cofounded the precursor kingdom that became Yugoslavia in 1929 and remained the dominant member of the subsequent socialist republic. After the breakup it and Montenegro formed a reduced federative state until the latter declared independence in 2006.

On August 30—two days after another mortaring of the marketplace in Sarajevo, in which more than 40 died—NATO aircraft launched a series of sustained attacks on Bosnian Serb positions. It was a clear indication of NATO support for the Bosnian government.

On September 8 U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke helped broker an agreement to stop the fighting in Bosnia. On October 5 the warring factions agreed to a cease-fire, which went into effect a week later. On December 14 the signing of the Dayton Agreement finally brought the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina to a conclusion. But hostilities continued unabated elsewhere in the Balkans.

In 1998 growing discontent among ethnic Albanians in the autonomous region of Kosovo erupted into violence, as the Albanian-backed Kosovo Liberation Army sought to rid the country of Serbian rule. When the Serbs retaliated, NATO intervened with a 78-day air campaign targeting Serbs, first in Kosovo and then in what remained of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. About half of Kosovo’s minority ethnic Serbs ultimately fled in fear of reprisals. On June 9, 1999, 11 weeks after the start of the air offensive, Serbian President Milosevic was forced to accept NATO’s terms for a peace plan that included the withdrawal from Kosovo of all Serbian armed forces, special police and paramilitaries. Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia on Feb. 17, 2008, though international recognition remains divided.

Of the remainder of the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia had declared independence in fall 1991 and, apart from a short period of internal strife in 2001, enjoyed a comparatively peaceful transition. A declaration of independence by the southern coastal region of Montenegro on June 3, 2006, was recognized by the Serbian parliament soon after.

No reliable figures exist, but during the years of conflict in the Balkans upward of 100,000 perished, countless people were injured, and millions were displaced. Of the former Yugoslavia, Serbia remains, together with the northern autonomous region of Vojvodina.

Anthony Rogers was a freelance photojournalist during the war in the former Yugoslavia. For further reading he recommends Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War, by Ed Vulliamy, and My War Gone By, I Miss It So, by Anthony Loyd.

Balkans’ Complex History

The decline of the Roman empire left it divided between Rome in the west and Byzantium in the east, with a corresponding split in the Christian Church—Roman Catholicism in the west, Orthodox Christianity in the east. In the Balkans the dividing line more or less followed the River Drina, which today marks much of Serbia’s border with Bosnia-Herzegovina and helps explain why the religion is mainly Orthodox Christian east and south of the Drina and largely Roman Catholic further north and along the coast. But how did Islam come to be the majority religion in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

The centuries following the collapse of the Roman empire saw the emergence of Balkan states from which would evolve Serbia, Croatia and Bulgaria. The Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bosnians and people of Herzegovina would develop their own regional and national identities. By the 13th century Bosnia was populated by Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians and the persecuted dualist Bogomilist sect. It began to merge with the southern region of Orthodox Christian Hum (later Herzegovina) in the early 14th century.

Muslim expansionism led to the crucial Battle of Kosovo in 1389, when Ottoman Turks defeated the Serbs, eventually driving them north to the Danube, while the Croats were pushed north toward Zagreb, Croatia’s present-day capital. It benefited the Bogomil heretics in Muslim-occupied regions to convert to Islam. In the 17th century, as the Ottomans were gradually forced to cede territory, many Muslims sought refuge in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The region was taken over by the Austro-Hungarian empire following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, which also led to the independence of most of Bulgaria. An emergence of nationalist fervor culminated in the early 20th century with Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece uniting in a brief and successful war with Turkey. Another conflict, between the victors this time, resulted in an expansion of Serbia’s borders. Relations between Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian government collapsed when, on June 28, 1914, Hapsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb terrorist Gavrilo Princip, precipitating the outbreak of World War I and the ultimate demise of the central and east European empires.

The postwar years saw the rise of the Serbian-dominated kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1929 Serbian King Aleksandar I Karadordevic declared direct rule by decree in an attempt to curb continuing dissent among the member states. Five years later Aleksandar was assassinated. Not until 1939 was home rule bestowed on Croatia by his cousin and successor, Prince Regent Paul.

The German invasion in April 1941 led to further discord, with some in favor of occupation and others opposed. Ustase (insurgents), composed of pro-fascist Croats and Muslims, proceeded to eliminate Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and others. The situation also gave rise to Dragoljub “Draza” Mihailovic and his Serbian royalist Chetniks (from ceta, or “company”) and Tito’s communist Partisans. In the civil strife that persisted after 1945, Tito prevailed, and Mihailovic was executed by a communist firing squad, laying the groundwork for a Yugoslavian federation. History, however, was far from through with the Balkans. —A.R.

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The United States came perilously close to civil war during the 1832 Nullification Crisis. After Congress passed a high protective tariff in May 1828, dramatically increasing taxes on many imported goods, protests erupted across the South—growing particularly violent in South Carolina. Hurt by a decade of economic decline and a series of slave panics, many South Carolinians considered the tariff a plot to impoverish the South and undermine slavery. Many championed nullification, insisting that states had the power to declare federal laws null and void. The most radical Nullifiers went even further, calling for outright disunion and armed resistance.

Nullifiers won control of the General Assembly in 1830, and just two years later held a commanding three-fourths majority. The state’s governor, senators, and most congressmen were also Nullifiers. In November 1832, a state convention issued the Ordinance of Nullification, declaring the tariff unconstitutional and threatening to secede if the federal government moved to enforce it. Nullifiers mobilized for war, with 25,000 men volunteered to defend their state against federal “tyranny.” As one volunteer proclaimed, “the fact is now probably obvious that we must fight.”

Yet South Carolina was starkly divided, with 40 percent of voters—generally older men, those owning fewer slaves—fiercely opposed to nullification. In their view, the Union was a bold but fragile democratic experiment, the “last hope of liberty” in a world ruled by kings and emperors—that nullification would prove humanity was incapable of self-government.

Among these “Union” men was William McWillie, a state legislator from Camden. Born in 1795, he had served in the War of 1812 and was admitted to the bar in 1818. A planter who owned nearly 200 enslaved laborers, he reportedly considered “the law more a pastime than a profession.” Elected to the General Assembly in 1829, he would spend several years, however, arguing against nullification. His oratory skills particularly shone during a December 1830 debate on whether a state convention should be called to nullify the tariff. The “hopes of mankind,” he argued, rested on survival of the Union.

Mr. Chairman—I agree to the fullest extent…as to the importance of the resolutions now submitted to the consideration of the committee; not only to this state, but to the United States; and perhaps to the world. The subject overwhelms me….

When we nullify, I am persuaded, it will be the beginning of violence, and this republic will be no more. Have we come to this? Are we prepared to say we will no longer be called the countrymen of Washington; and that the history of the revolution and [the War of 1812] shall no longer be our history? Are we prepared to say, that the eagle, the emblem of our national glory, shall no longer be our eagle? That our beautiful standard, the standard of stars and stripes, emblematical of the union of these states, shall no longer be our standard? Are we prepared to discard this standard, with which is associated all that we have of national character, and around which our fathers rallied when they drove the proud oppressors from our shores: that standard which has floated broad and high, triumphant and glorious in the rush of many a fight, where the strongest of our countrymen have striven, and the bravest have bled? Can we deface its honors? Will we trample it in the dust? Shall all that has been said of it in rhetoric, in poetry and in song, be heard no more? No. I at least for one, must answer no—of this my conscience will be clear….

We have been told [by Nullifiers] that the object of the north and west is to emancipate our slaves, to destroy our property. This is an argument I did not expect to hear in this house. It is a subject, although a slaveowner, on which I have no apprehensions…I have no fears in this matter from the general government; but I have sometimes feared the effect of our own madness and temerity. If any thing would be likely to destroy the value of this property, it would be disunion and civil war. We might then hear the shout of liberty, from quarters which would appal [sic] the stoutest hearts. We might realize the horrors of St. Domingo; where the labours of man, the monuments of art, where infancy and age; woman’s feebleness and man’s strength, were swept away in one vast, overwhelming tide of blood…

We have been told that our government is the most positive despotism on earth—and that our people are the most oppressed. Can this be true? Has my life been all one delusion? When in the midst of revelry and of songs, the joyous acclamations of freemen, and the thunder of artillery, I have celebrated her triumphs and her glory—was I deluded? Were manacles then upon my hands, and did I bow at the feet of despotic power? Was I a slave? No! I was then as I now am, a freeman; a citizen of this happy, vast and powerful republic; an American citizen….

I would ask this committee, if…our beautiful and happy institutions, on which rest not only our own national character and glory but the hopes of mankind, are to be permitted now to perish? Is man destined ever to be the slave of legal forms? Is liberty but an ignis fatuous gleam…ever to be pursued, but never to be grasped? I trust not—I believe that man is capable of self government—it is for us…to prove the fact—it is for us to assert the dignity of his nature, and shew his capacity for self control. God grant that the predictions of our enemies may not be fulfilled—but that our government, the world’s last hope, may continue forever in her onward course; and that her example may be to the enslaved nations of the earth, like the pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night; conducting them to happiness and freedom….

If the American people are true to themselves, this will be. Our fields shall ever brighten under their golden harvests; our commerce shall press the bosom of every sea; our armies shall hurl back the invaders strength; and our fleets, whitening the heavens with their canvass, shall sweep the ocean with the thunder of their cannon….

Oh God! Let my country live to see this… consummation, in which all the fond hopes of the patriot’s heart shall be lost in the fulness of fruition; and that we, as one people, may go forward, gloriously and forever with freedom’s soil beneath our feet, and…the broad and glorious banner of stars and of stripes, the banner of the union, proudly streaming o’er us.

Nevertheless, in 1832, state officials passed an Ordinance of Nullification to bring the nation closer to civil war. In reply, about 9,000 South Carolinians joined paramilitary Union Societies, vowing to fight even their own friends and neighbors. Congress defused the crisis in March 1833, agreeing to lower tariff rates over the next nine years. But even when the ordinance was voided, tensions remained high. “[T]he tariff was only their pretext,” Jackson wrote, “and disunion and a Southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery, question.”

Having moved to Mississippi, McWillie was elected to Congress in 1849. Amid another sectional crisis in 1850, he pledged enduring devotion to the Union, although he was quick to blame Northern abolitionists rather than Southern radicals for endangering the country. As governor of Mississippi in 1857-59, however, he pledged to dissolve the Union rather than surrender slavery. 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Fidel Castro’s Communist takeover of Cuba ushered in a period of conflict and tension with the United States that has lasted ever since the 1959 revolution. Tucked amid the saber-rattling was the Freedom Flight program of 1965-73, a rare example of cooperation between the two belligerent states. 

After coming to power in Cuba, Castro began aligning himself with the Soviet Union and its repressive version of Communism, prompting many well-off Cubans to leave the island. As Castro seized more private property, the middle class began leaving, too. At first, Castro welcomed ridding the island of those opposed to his political philosophy. In September 1965, he announced that Cubans wishing to join their families in the U.S. (except males of military age) could leave by boat, kicking off the massive Camarioca Boatlift and, along with it, a humanitarian crisis. That led to the Freedom Flight program, for which Pan American World Airways was commissioned to fly two flights a day, five days a week to bring eligible Cubans to the United States. The first flight lifted off from Varadero Airport, near Matanzas, on December 1, 1965. 

The program proved extremely popular in Cuba, with waitlists of up to two years—despite Castro’s pointed attempts to harass and shame those who wanted to leave. As it became apparent that Freedom Flights were exacerbating a Cuban brain drain, Castro grew wary. He suspended flights for six months in 1972 before halting the program altogether in 1973. By then nearly 300,000 Cubans had escaped the island for American shores. The last Freedom Flight touched down in Miami on April 6, 1973—50 years ago this spring.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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In spring 1942, Japan’s military was the virtual master of its area of operations. It had overrun most of Southeast Asia and a huge swathe of the western Pacific with startling speed after Dec. 7, 1941, and the campaigns in mainland China seemed well in hand. The Dutch and French colonial territories had fallen to the Japanese, as had the British territories of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and besieged United States forces in the Philippines were on the verge of defeat. The Empire of Japan was ascendant. The imperial government assured its people that Japan’s Home Islands were safe from retaliatory attacks by any of the Allied powers.

That assurance was shattered at noon on April 18, 1942 when 16 B-25B Mitchell bombers, launched from the US Navy aircraft carrier Hornet, roared in over the island of Honshu, vectoring in from different points of the compass. It was a hit-and-run attack. After dropping their bomb loads on Tokyo and five other cities, the American aircraft made for the Chinese mainland, where all but one ditched or crash-landed. 

The Enemy Airmen’s Act

In terms of battle damage assessment, the Doolittle Raid did not accomplish much physical damage to high-value military targets, but the psychological effects of the mission were tremendous. It provided a major boost to American morale, both in the military and on the home front, and it shocked the Japanese out of their illusions of invulnerability.

The attack also provoked two Japanese reactions of far-reaching consequences that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, most of whom had nothing to do with the raid. 

A month after Doolittle’s strike, the Japanese army launched the Zhejiang–Jiangxi Campaign, a reprisal operation against Chinese who had assisted Doolittle’s aircrews. The campaign also sought to deny Allied access to China’s eastern provinces, either as a launching point or escape route. Japanese forces killed more than 10,000 Chinese civilians in direct retaliation for the air raid on the home island. In the four months of the punitive operation (May–September 1942) as many as 250,000 civilians were slaughtered. 

While that death toll mounted, the Japanese government drafted official policies specifically aimed at Allied aircrews who carried out aerial attacks against Japanese targets—past, present, or future. In July 1942, the War Ministry issued Military Secret Order 2190, which stated: “An enemy warplane crew who did not violate wartime international law, shall be treated as prisoners of war, and one who acted against the said law shall be punished as a wartime capital crime.”

The wording of that directive seemed straightforward enough, citing international laws of war as the determiner of what was lawful conduct and what was criminal. However, it quickly became clear that the Japanese applied a questionable interpretation on what constituted “criminal” conduct by enemy aviators. 

Expediting executions

On Aug. 13, 1942, Gen. Shunroku Hata, the Supreme Commander of the Japanese Forces in China, issued Military Order No. 4, an edict that later became infamous as the Enemy Airmen’s Act. The four sections of the order specified that “bombing, strafing, and otherwise attacking” civilians, private properties, or non-military targets was a crime punishable by death. While the language of the order seemingly allowed for contingencies, allowing for cases where “such an act is unavoidable” (as extant international laws of war had already determined), the Japanese chose to interpret every attack against targets in their sphere as criminal instead of as acts of legitimate warfare.

The Enemy Airmen’s Act was also an ex post facto order since it stated, “This military law shall be applicable to all acts committed prior to the date of its approval.” That provision was specifically aimed at the American airmen who had flown in the Doolittle Raid.

Eight of Doolittle’s aviators fell into Japanese hands in China. They were tried by a Japanese military tribunal in a cursory trial where they were all sentenced to death, even before Military Secret Order 2190 was issued. When the Assistant Chief of Staff of Imperial Army Headquarters sent Order 2190 to Japanese forces in China, he amended a memorandum which stated, “concerning the disposition of the captured enemy airmen, request that action be deferred… pending proclamation of the military law and its official announcement, and the scheduling of the date of execution of the American airmen.”

The Doolittle Raiders

The condemned aviators were moved to Tokyo. The sentences of five were commuted to life imprisonment. The other three men—1st Lt. Dean Hallmark, 1st Lt. William Farrow, and Sgt. Harold Spatz—were executed on Oct. 15, 1942. The U.S. government knew about the executions during the war, but U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt suppressed the information. The Allies initiated a postwar investigation for a war crimes prosecution against the Japanese officers who conducted the trial of the Doolittle aviators. 

The Enemy Airmen’s Act was the template for subsequent edicts that the Japanese enacted against captured Allied aircrews, especially as American air raids against the Home Islands escalated in intensity and destructiveness. Between 1944 and the signing of Japan’s surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, as many as 132 Allied airmen were convicted by the Japanese in summary courts-martial, condemned to death as criminals and executed. At Fukuoka, 15 captured airmen were executed after Emperor Hirohito’s announcement of impending surrender.

This was the culmination of a practice repeated throughout the war, as the Japanese subjected captured Allied airmen to interrogations that used torture to extract confessions (usually written in Japanese without English translation), summary trials, and execution by firing squad or beheading. Yet even that perfunctory process was not enough for some senior Japanese officials.

Near the end of the war, the Commandant of the Military Police in Japan wrote an official memorandum to his subordinate commanders complaining that those field expedient trials, hasty as they were, unnecessarily delayed the executions of enemy airmen prisoners. As a direct result of that complaint, at least 90 American aviators were executed in the last weeks of the war. 

War Crimes Tribunals

After the war, Allied war crimes tribunals targeted Japanese personnel involved in the deaths of captured aviators. Senior military officers under whose authority the trials and executions of airmen were conducted were obvious targets for prosecution, but so too were rank-and-file Japanese soldiers personally implicated in the abuse and murder of prisoners of war.

Tsuchiya Tatsuo, a prison camp guard, was tried as a Class A war criminal and charged with eight specifications of torture and cruelty to prisoners. In particular Tsuchiya was accused of the prolonged torture of a prisoner named Robert Gorden Teas. Eight witnesses swore out affidavits detailing how Tsuchiya beat Teas to death over a period of five days. In December 1945, Tsuchiya was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor.

In July 1946 a US Military Commission tried Lt. Gen. Harukei Isayama, former commander of the Japanese Formosan Army, along with seven of his subordinates. The charge against Isayama was that he “did permit, authorize and direct an illegal, unfair, unwarranted and false trial” of American prisoners of war, and that he then ordered a Japanese Military Tribunal to sentence those prisoners to death and ordered the carrying out of the executions. The American court charged Isayama for war crimes involving 14 American aviators shot down and captured between Oct. 12, 1944, and Feb. 27, 1945.

The earlier date was critical, because that was when the Japanese had implemented the Formosa Military Law—an edict repeating the dictates of the Enemy Airmen’s Act but applying specifically to all airmen captured within the jurisdiction of the Japanese 10th Area Army.

The Formosa Military Law declared that “the severest punishment” would be applied to enemy airmen who bombed or strafed objectives of a non-military nature, who “disregarded human rights and carried out inhuman acts,” or who entered 10th Area Army’s jurisdiction with any intent of committing such acts. All 14 trials were completed in a single day. No defense was allowed. The defendants were not permitted to speak on their own behalf. Afterwards the 14 airmen were shot and buried in a ditch on the morning of June 19, 1945.

Bombings in China

Isayama’s defense counsel (an American jurist) argued that because senior officials in Tokyo had approved the use of death penalty in the summary trials of the 14 American POWs, Isayama’s tribunal had no choice but to sentence the airmen to death. Isayama himself, his attorney insisted, was required to order capital sentences to be carried out.

The American Military Commission found the argument unconvincing. Isayama and his co-defendants were all found guilty. The Chief of the Japanese Judicial Division and the military intelligence officer who oversaw the interrogations and torture of the POWs were both sentenced to death. Both sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment. Isayama and the others received prison sentences ranging from 20 years to life.

Aside from the fact that the Japanese treatment of enemy airmen was a clear violation of extant international military law, it was also a colossal hypocrisy. Beginning in 1937 with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese military had repeatedly targeted Chinese cities with the deliberate intent of terrorizing and murdering the Chinese population. From August to December 1937, Japanese bombing raids hammered Nanjing, targeting power plants, water works, and even the city’s Central Hospital. Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chongqing were bombed numerous times. In Chongqing alone, more than 10,000 Chinese civilians were killed in at least 268 separate Japanese air raids. In a direct connection to the Doolittle Raid, the Japanese flew 1,131 bombing attacks against Chuchow—Doolittle’s intended destination—killing 10,246 people in that city alone. 

In the Second World War, every major power conducted aerial attacks on its enemy’s civilian population. No nation could claim complete innocence of that. However, the Japanese implementation of the Enemy Airmen’s Act was war crime compounded upon war crime.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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The Geneva Accords, signed on July 20, 1954, ended the Indochina War. The Accords established a demarcation line along the 17th parallel, dividing Vietnam into two political entities: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam). Partition was intended as a temporary expedient pending elections in July 1956 to determine if both populations wanted unification.

Rebellion Starts Brewing

South Vietnam’s prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, a hardline Catholic, fervent nationalist, and committed anti-communist, was immediately faced with domestic turmoil caused by armed militias threatening the new government. However, the fledgling army had four battalions of well-trained, well-disciplined paratroopers who helped defeat the most dangerous private army, establishing Diem as the undisputed leader of South Vietnam.

Disregarding the mandate for joint elections, the prime minister organized a countrywide referendum where it appeared that the voters had overwhelmingly opted for their own nation, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), with Diem as president. His rule proved autocratic and nepotistic. His brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, was his chief adviser. Other family members held positions of authority.

By 1960, there was great dissatisfaction among prominent civilians and military officers over Diem’s failure to grant more individual freedoms and be more proactive combating the growing communist insurgency. On Nov. 11, 1960, the same paratroopers who contributed to the restoration of order at independence turned on the president and attempted a coup d’etat. This marked the first open rebellion in the country’s six-year history.

Diem’s Praetorian Guard

Developing a viable military was one of many challenges facing South Vietnam. The national army, a legacy of French colonial misrule, was a heterogeneous assortment of separate battalions and companies. Few leaders were groomed for high command because the French had dragged their feet putting Vietnamese officers into leadership positions.

Airborne battalions were the exception. During the Indochina War, the overextended French Far East Expeditionary Corps used indigenous troops to augment their forces. In 1951, the 1st Vietnamese Colonial Parachute Battalion was formed, becoming the first of five airborne battalions manned entirely by Vietnamese soldiers. French officers occupied key jobs while promising Vietnamese were given responsibilities as combat platoon leaders and company commanders.

After independence, four airborne battalions—the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 6th—were organized into the Airborne Group and moved to Tan Son Nhut Air Base on the northern outskirts of Saigon. All the paratroopers were volunteers. Many had served in combat against the Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh’s troops. The 5th Vietnamese Airborne Battalion, a former colonial parachute battalion, saw extensive action. Most notably, the unit parachuted into surrounded Dien Bien Phu and fought there until May 7, 1954, when the garrison fell.

Suppressing Gangsters

The Airborne Group’s combat experience was soon tested. The Binh Xuyen, a gangster organization controlling the police, gambling, and prostitution in Saigon, chafed under restrictions imposed by Diem. Its base was in Cholon, the Chinese quarter of the capital, and its heavily armed paramilitary forces numbered several thousand. On April 27, 1955, skirmishing broke out between Diem’s paratroopers and the Binh Xuyen.

The next day, hundreds of soldiers on both sides were killed in fighting that raged throughout Saigon. Cholon became a free-fire zone as mortars and artillery obliterated parts of the enclave, killing 500 civilians and leaving 20,000 homeless. This urban fighting became known as the Battle of Saigon. After a week of intense combat, the Airborne Group overran the Binh Xuyen’s main command post. Most militia troops were killed or captured while their leader, Le Van Vien, fled to Paris.

Diem was impressed with the Airborne Group. One paratrooper, Lt. Col. Nguyen Chanh Thi, especially distinguished himself. When the dust settled, Thi was promoted to colonel and given command of the Group. The prime minister, a bachelor, spoke affectionately of Col. Thi as his “son.” A CIA operative, George Carver, reported Thi was an excellent combat commander but a “blatant opportunist.” This assessment was remarkably prescient.

Warning signs to Washington

Diem’s victory over the Binh Xuyen did not go unnoticed in Washington. Heretofore, there were discussions as to whether Diem was the right man for the job.

Foremost among his critics was Gen. Joseph Lawton “Lightning Joe” Collins, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had appointed Collins as his emissary to South Vietnam in October 1954. Collins was adamant that Diem was not the leader the country needed. His reports to the State Department and Eisenhower castigated the prime minister as “a man in over his head.”

Yet Diem had American advocates. Sen. Mike Mansfield and Rep. John F. Kennedy countered Collins’ criticism. A turning point came when Diem defeated the Binh Xuyen; Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, concluded that Diem held Vietnam together when it was on the brink of civil war. The full weight of the U.S. administration now supported him.

Diem moved rapidly to strengthen his control and take advantage of American goodwill. In October 1955, a quickly organized referendum was held that established the Republic of Vietnam.

A Corrupt Election and business as usual

His brother Ngo Dinh Nhu rigged the election, giving Diem a stunning victory with a 98.2 percent plurality—when ballots were counted, the new president received 200,000 more votes in Saigon than there were registered voters!

Such heavy-handed actions were troubling for Eisenhower. However, he wanted to portray Diem in a good light due to the anti-communist Cold War aims of the U.S. Official pronouncements extolled Diem’s accomplishments. “President Diem stands for the highest qualities of heroism and statesmanship,” declared Eisenhower during Diem’s 1957 visit to the United States. Life, the most influential magazine of the era, followed that lead and called Diem the “Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam.”

The acclaim Diem received in Washington carried little weight back in South Vietnam. A communist insurgency grew. Assassinations, kidnappings, and attacks on army outposts became commonplace. Many officers sensed that Diem and Nhu had a “business-as-usual” attitude toward this menace. Attempts to push the powerful brothers to be more proactive fell on deaf ears.

Silencing All Critics

Communist activity was not the only problem facing Diem. Discord over restrictions on basic freedoms was on the rise. Nhu filled jails with political dissidents. His secret police shut down newspapers daring to criticize the government. Club-wielding thugs dealt with demonstrators brave enough to take to the streets.

Efforts by the U.S. ambassador, Elbridge Durbrow, to persuade Diem to be more liberal got nowhere. His authoritarian behavior and clampdowns rankled both influential citizens and military leaders. Governmental intransigence was the catalyst for plotting against the Ngo family.

However, money still flowed in from Washington. Much of it was used to expand the army and some earmarked for economic development was redirected to the military. The Airborne Group, a Diem favorite, received more than its share. Two more infantry battalions, the 7th and the 8th, and a 105mm artillery battalion were activated.

On Dec. 1, 1959, the last vestige of French influence disappeared when the “Airborne Group” designation was dropped and the unit was named the Airborne Brigade, now with six infantry battalions.

In April 1960, 18 anti-communists, former cabinet ministers, dissenting Catholics, and leaders of several political parties published a letter listing grievances over the loss of civil liberties and recommending modest reforms. U.S. reporters called the document the Caravelle Manifesto because its contents were announced at a press conference at the Caravelle Hotel in downtown Saigon. The letter to the president was respectful and did not call for him to leave office. Diem simply ignored it. Vietnamese journalists, thoroughly intimidated, did the same.

The Paratroopers Rebel

Col. Nguyen Chanh Thi, commander of the Airborne Brigade, and his former deputy, Lt. Col. Vuong Van Dong, were persuaded military action was needed to coerce Diem to implement changes. Neither wanted the president removed. Yet they were adamant that Nhu and his wife, Madame Nhu—Diem’s sharp-tongued sister-in-law often referred to as “The Dragon Lady”—needed to leave the government.

Their discontent came to a head on Nov. 11, 1960, three days after the U.S. presidential election when Sen. John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon. CIA analysts thought that the timing of the coup attempt was directly linked to the election and that the rebels wanted to give JFK a more liberal administration to deal with.

Shortly after 3 a.m., automatic weapons fire and mortar explosions shattered Saigon’s nighttime quiet. Earlier the previous evening, Thi and Dong led three paratroop battalions, the 5th, 6th, and 7th, and two companies of marines into the city. Detachments took control of the Joint General Staff headquarters, the central police station, and the main telephone exchange while the bulk of the troops headed for their main objective, the presidential residence at Independence Palace.

Diem narrowly escaped being killed when the paratroopers opened up suppressive fire with small arms and machine guns. Diem, Nhu, and Madame Nhu retreated to the safe room in the cellar equipped with communications gear, including radios and recently installed telephone lines not routed through the central exchange’s switchboard.

Storming the Palace

Around the palace, Diem’s outnumbered guards, about 30 men, stood their ground and inflicted casualties on the attackers. As the paratroopers launched their initial assault, the 5th Airborne Battalion commander was killed. A dozen airborne soldiers died and scores more were wounded.

The ferocity of the guards’ resistance surprised Thi and caused him to hesitate, although he possessed more than enough strength to destroy them. His hesitancy was a critical mistake. The initiative was lost and a time-consuming dialogue with the president began.

The pause allowed Maj. Gen. Nguyen Khanh, the acting head of the army, to slip into Independence Palace and serve as intermediary. Thi passed his demands through Khanh while Dong contacted Ambassador Durbrow, requesting American help. Although a frequent critic of the regime, Durbrow turned Dong down. In a call with Diem, the ambassador urged negotiations to avoid bloodshed. Diem was furious and viewed the response as tacit approval of Thi’s actions.

Rebuffed by the U.S. ambassador, Diem said he would listen to the insurgents. At the same time, he reached out to loyal commanders and requested their assistance. Being a talker, he could parlay extensively with his opponents and appear to accommodate them while his supporters organized efforts to aid him with force.

Diem Buys Time

Two nearby loyalists immediately responded to Diem’s request. Col. Tran Van Khiem, commander of the 7th ARVN Division in the Mekong Delta, was a friend of the president’s family. He assembled his tank battalion and two infantry regiments for a move to Saigon. Col. Nguyen Van Thieu mobilized the 5th ARVN Division, stationed northeast of Saigon in Bien Hoa, and gave orders to march on the capital. Thieu would later rise to prominence as the president of South Vietnam from 1967-1975.

Diem haggled with Thi throughout the afternoon and evening of the 11th. He agreed to some points, including dismissing his current cabinet and forming a more moderate government. He refused to sack his brother. The insurrectionists were delighted when Diem stated he would end press censorship, allow more free speech, and reduce economic restrictions. To buy additional time, the president promised to tape a speech highlighting the concessions. When it was completed at dawn, the insurgents rushed it to Radio Saigon.

Yet, as the president’s speech aired on the morning of the 12th, two infantry divisions, supported by tanks, converged on Independence Palace. They moved freely because Thi failed to block the routes leading into Saigon—a fatal error. The appearance of the 5th and 7th ARVN divisions caused senior officers, who stayed on the sidelines with a “wait-and-see” attitude, to declare their loyalty to Diem.

Fighting ensued as the newly arrived units attacked the paratroopers. Four hundred were killed in the melee. Many of the dead were innocent bystanders who came on the streets to see what was going on. By late afternoon, the remaining paratroopers surrendered and were herded back to their barracks.

As the situation crumbled, Thi, Dong, and their allies boarded a military aircraft and sought sanctuary in Cambodia. The abortive coup attempt was over and the Ngo family remained firmly in power.

Road to further destruction

Outsmarting the efforts of the paratroopers gave an extreme boost to Diem’s confidence. During the crisis he received advice from his brother and Madame Nhu that reinforced his perception of their indispensability and the preeminence of his family. Having triumphed over his adversaries, he promptly reneged on promises of reform and punished those who had sided with the paratroopers. The roundup included the signers of the Caravelle Manifesto.

Another lesson Diem promoted was that loyalty trumped all. Allegiance to the president, not the nation, became the primary attribute for army promotion and key assignments. He and his brother personally reviewed and approved every major military posting. Unfortunately, this policy prevailed after Diem was gone. 

Diem carefully selected the new Airborne Brigade commander. He wisely chose Col. Cao Van Vien, considered Vietnam’s most gifted leader who remained loyal to the president throughout his tenure in office. Vien was almost shot because he would not participate in the Nov. 1-2, 1963, coup d’etat that overthrew Diem and led to his and his brother Nhu’s assassinations. Vien ultimately became a four-star general and Chairman of the Joint General Staff from 1965-1975.

The airborne battalions involved in the coup attempt were assigned new leaders and banished from their comfortable billets at Tan Son Nhut Air Base (to more spartan sites outside the capital). The 5th and 7th Airborne Battalions were moved to Bien Hoa. The 6th Airborne Battalion, the unit at the forefront of the insurrection, was sent to the seaside town of Vung Tau, 65 miles from Saigon. Diem and his brother believed the distance would keep that battalion out of the capital’s political intrigues. U.S. advisers who later served with the 6th said “banishment” to a quiet, picturesque locale overlooking the South China Sea was hardly a punishment.

The Buddhist Crisis

Lost in the turbulence of the waning days of 1960 was the December 20 activation of the National Liberation Front (NLF). After six years trying to unify the two Vietnams by political means, the Communist Party in North Vietnam decided violence was required to depose Diem and expel the Americans. After the paratrooper incident, the Politburo knew it was time to act.

The NLF muted its communist ideology and ties to the north in order to recruit disillusioned southern nationalists. The new organization, collectively referred to as the Viet Cong by Americans, proved to be a serious problem for Diem, surpassing any rebellious activity stirred up by disgruntled paratroopers.

The rift between the United States and South Vietnam became palpable after Nov. 11, 1960. Diem remained angry with Ambassador Dur-brow for his “lack of support” and “meddling in local affairs.” Nhu even accused Durbrow and the CIA of collaborating with the rebels. The wound of distrust did not heal even after a new American ambassador arrived in Saigon.

Diem and Nhu fought any pressure for reforms from citizens as well as from the United States. Recriminations were the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface, the mishandled coup was a symptom of instability and unrest, overlooked in Washington as attention focused on the U.S. presidential transition.

Years later, the CIA’s George Carver reflected, “It [the paratrooper coup] was a fire bell warning which few noticed. Its not being heeded made probable, if not inevitable, much tragedy that was soon to follow.”

Losing Kennedy’s Support

The tragedy cited by Carver unfolded sooner than Diem or Kennedy anticipated. Notwithstanding dramatic increases in American economic and military aid, Diem was unable to make headway in combating the communists or generating more support for his government. The brothers’ obsession with ferreting out dissidents, real and imagined, became a growing malignancy that caused them to take more draconian measures.

Restrictions on religious freedoms led to the 1963 Buddhist crisis. Riots that began in May spread throughout South Vietnam, culminating in self-immolations by Buddhist monks. Photos of a burning bonze circulated worldwide and caused the Kennedy administration to finally lose patience with Diem.

It was the last straw for Americans. Vietnamese generals began plotting in earnest once they learned the United States would support a regime change.

Mistakes made by the paratroopers three years earlier were not repeated. On Nov. 1, 1963, troops commanded by Gen. Duong Van Minh stormed the president’s residence, now in the Gia Long Palace. Although the Airborne Brigade commander, Vien, refused to join the rebels, his subordinate leaders and their paratroop battalions actively participated in the coup. The commander of the 6th Airborne Battalion commandeered trucks in Vung Tau and moved the unit to Saigon where he led the attack on the barracks of the presidential guard.

To Minh’s frustration, Diem and his brother escaped before the assault on the palace. After hiding in nearby Cholon, the Ngos surrendered the next day, assuming they would be sent into exile. Denied a ceremonial transfer of power, an infuriated Minh directed their execution. At the time of the assassinations of her husband and brother-in-law, Madame Nhu was traveling in the United States with her daughter. She and her children were exiled to Europe. In the end, Diem’s ouster and assassination solved nothing, since Minh and the military junta proved to be as inept at governing as their deceased predecessors.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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The Mongol Subjugation of Novgorod (1238)

In 1238, a 40,000-man Mongol horde led by Genghiz Khan’s grandson, Batu Khan, embarked on a campaign of conquest against the Rus. By the end of 1238 they had taken 14 major cities and razed them for failing to heed Batu’s ultimatums. Only two major cities in the northern Rus territories were spared: Pskov and Novgorod, which pledged fealty to the Great Khan and agreed to annually pay a tax based on 10 percent of their produce. Novgorod, a vital fur-trading center, was surrounded by potential enemies, including not only the Mongols, but the Swedes and an order of German warrior-monks known as the Teutonic Knights.

Both western powers coveted the lands to the east, declaring their purpose to spread Catholicism while destroying the Eastern Orthodox Church. Appointed kniaz (prince) of Novgorod in 1236 at age 15, Alexsandr Yaroslavich was compelled to choose his friends and enemies carefully. He knew resisting the Mongols was suicide, but they tended to spare those who surrendered and left them to their own domestic affairs…whereas the Swedes would seize land and the Germans would kill nearly everybody.

As the Mongols marched on Novgorod in 1238, the spring thaws hampered their horses, halting the campaign 120 kilometers short of its objective. Seizing his opportunity, Alexsandr met the Mongols and accepted their terms. Pskov did the same. The Mongols moved on, establishing their western headquarters at Sarai under a yellow banner for which their force became known as the Golden Horde. Alexsandr made the right choice. He would later have to battle both his western enemies, defeating the Swedes on the Neva River on July 15, 1240 (for which he acquired the moniker Alexsandr Nevsky) and the Livonian Knights at Lake Peipus on April 5, 1242. Credited with preserving Russian civilization at a time of terrible duress, Alexsandr did so by knowing both when to fight and when not to.

The 335-Years War (1651-1986)

What if they gave a war and nobody came? Better still, what if they gave a war and nobody noticed? During the English Civil War, the United Provinces of the Netherlands sided with the English Parliament. As one consequence many Dutch ships were seized or sunk by the Royalist navy, which by 1651 was based in the Isles of Scilly, supporting the last diehards in Cornwall.

On March 30 Lt. Adm. Maarten Harpertsoon Tromp arrived at Scilly, demanding reparation for damages to Dutch ships. Receiving no satisfactory answer, Tromp declared war but then sailed away—and never returned. Critics of that so-called “war” have since noted that as an admiral, not a sovereign, Tromp was really in no position to formally declare war. The issue seemed moot in June 1651 when a Parliamentarian fleet under General at Sea Robert Blake arrived at Scilly to compel the last Royalists to surrender.

So things stood until 1986, when historian Roy Duncan chanced upon Tromp’s idle threat and in the course of investigation concluded that, the utter lack of hostilities notwithstanding, the Netherlands and Isles of Scilly had spent the past 335 years at war but had never gotten around to declaring peace. That oversight was finally remedied on April 17, 1986, when Dutch ambassador to Britain Jonkheer Rein Huydecoper formally declared one of history’s longest conflicts at an end—adding that it must have horrified the islands’ inhabitants “to know we could have attacked at any moment.” 

The Kettle War (1784)

Along with winning independence, in 1585 the Republic of the Netherlands closed off the Scheldt River to trade from the Spanish Netherlands to the south, adversely affecting Antwerp’s and Ghent’s access to the North Sea while serving to Amsterdam’s advantage. Spain accepted that arrangement again in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, but in 1714 Spain ceded the southern Netherlands to Habsburg Austria. Between 1780 and 1784 the Netherlands allied with the fledgling United States of America in hopes of gaining an advantage over Britain but was defeated. Seeking to take advantage of that situation, on Oct. 9, 1784, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II sent three ships, headed by the large merchantman Le Louis, into the Scheldt.

Calling his bluff, the Dutch sent the warship Dolfijn to intercept the Austrians, firing a shot through a soup kettle aboard Le Louis. At this point the Austrian flagship surrendered. On Oct. 30 Emperor Joseph declared war and the Netherlands began mobilizing its forces. Austrian troops invaded the Netherlands, razing a custom house and occupying Fort Lillo, whose withdrawing garrison broke the dikes and inundated the region, drowning many locals but halting the Austrian advance. France mediated a settlement signed on Feb. 8, 1785, as the Treaty of Fontainebleau, upholding the Netherlands’ control over the Scheldt but recompensing the Austrian Netherlands with 10 million florins.

The Anglo-Swedish War (1810–1812)

With the signing of the Treaty of Paris on Jan. 6, 1810, Emperor Napoleon imposed his Continental System throughout Europe and placing a trade embargo on one of his remaining enemies, Great Britain. That included Sweden, Britain’s longtime trading partner. A booming smuggling trade led Napoleon to issue an ultimatum on Nov.13, 1810, giving his reluctant ally five days to declare war and confiscate all British shipping and goods found on Swedish soil, or itself face war from France and all its allies. Sweden duly declared war on Nov. 17, but there were no direct hostilities over the next year and a half—in fact, Sweden looked the other way while the Royal Navy occupied and used its isle of Hanö as a base.

Ironically, this delicate standoff was upset by a Frenchman, Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who with the death of Sweden’s Crown Prince Charles August on May 28, 1810, was elected crown prince on Aug. 21. Although King Charles XIII was Sweden’s official ruler, his illness and disinterest in national affairs caused him to leave Crown Prince Bernadotte as the de facto ruler—who put Swedish interests above France’s. Relations with Napoleon deteriorated until France occupied Swedish Pomerania and the isle of Rügen in 1812. Bernadotte’s response included the Treaty of Örebro on July 18, 1812, formally ending the bloodless war against Britain and thus declaring a soon-to-be bloodier war against Napoleon’s France.

The Aroostook War (1838–1839)

Both the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 ended with unfinished business regarding the boundaries between the United States and British North America. On several occasions both countries came to the brink of further conflicts. One such was the “Aroostook War” regarding unresolved land claims between Lower Canada and Massachusetts, exacerbated in 1820 when a new state, Maine, broke away from Massachusetts. By 1839 the U.S. had raised 6,000 militia and local posses to patrol the disputed territory while British troop strength rose to as high as 15,000.

There were no direct confrontations.

Two British militiamen were injured by bears. The decisive action came in 1842 in the form of negotiations between British Master of the Mint Alexander Baring, 1st Baron Ashburton and U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster. As was often the case, the resultant Webster-Ashburton Treaty was a compromise. Most land went to Maine, leaving a vital area northeast for the Halifax Road to connect Lower Canada with the Maritime provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. In 1840 Maine created Aroostook County to administer civil authority in its expected territory, from which the incident got its name in the history books.  

The Pig War (1859)

Since at least the 1844 American presidential election that got James K. Polk elected on a slogan of “Fifty-four-Forty or Fight,” the United States set its sights on raising the northern border of the “Oregon Territory” (including what is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and British Columbia) to 54 degrees 40 minutes north latitude, rather than 49 degrees north as it had been in 1846. That border bisected San Juan Island, in the Straits of Juan de Fuca between Seattle and Vancouver, where on June 15, 1859, American resident Lyman Cutlar caught Charlie Griffin’s pig rooting in his garden and shot it dead.

Cutlar subsequently offered to compensate his British neighbor $10 for his loss. Griffin angrily demanded that local authorities arrest Cutlar. The U.S. authorities would not countenance Britain arresting an American citizen. Soon both sides were reinforcing the island with troops and offshore warships. Things came to a head when the governor of British Columbia ordered the commander of the British Pacific Fleet, Adm. Robert Baynes, to invade the island.

At that critical hour Baynes became the voice of reason when he disobeyed the order, declaring that he would “not involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig!”

News of the standoff spurred Washington and London to negotiate while reducing troop strength on San Juan to 100 each. Finally in 1872, an international commission headed by Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany settled the matter by ceding the entire island to the United States. Total casualties: one British pig.

The Pembina Raid (1871)

Following the American Civil War a committee of radical nationalists called the Irish Brotherhood, or Fenians, embarked on three attempts to capture large areas of British North America to ransom for an independent Irish republic. Although the participants were mostly hardened Civil War veterans—from both sides—their first attempt to seize the Niagara Falls peninsula in 1866 failed. A second attempt launched from New York and Vermont in 1870 was a greater failure—largely because the Fenians were facing better-prepared militiamen now defending their own sovereign state, the Dominion of Canada. Although the Irish Brotherhood itself had given up on the idea, Col. John O’Neill set out west for one more try, planning to invade Manitoba and form an alliance with the half-blood Métis, then rebelling against the Canadian authorities for land, ethnic and religious rights. By late 1871, however, Ottawa was acquiescing to Métis demands. Consequently the Métis had no intention of allying with the Fenians. 

Undeterred, at 7:30 a.m. on the morning of Oct. 5, 1871, O’Neill led 37 followers to seize the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post and the nearby East Lynne Customs House in Pembina. Of 20 people taken prisoner, a young boy escaped and ran to the U.S. Army base at Fort Pembina. While about a thousand Canadian militia marched south to deal with the threat, Capt. Loyd Wheaton led 30 soldiers of Company I, 20th U.S. Infantry Regiment to the settlement. O’Neill later said he was loath to fight bluecoats alongside whom he had served during the Civil War.

The Fenians fled north, but O’Neill and 10 others were quickly captured. By 3 p.m. the crisis was over. Canada had seen off its last invasion threat without firing a shot. Taken to St. Paul, Minnesota, O’Neill was tried twice for violating the Neutrality Acts and twice acquitted on the grounds that he had not really done so. Unknown to O’Neill, in May 1870 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had straightened out the disputed Canadian border, resulting in Pembina no longer being a quarter mile north of the border, but three-quarters of a mile south in Dakota Territory. O’Neill gave up his invasion ambitions under an avalanche of public ridicule over not only failing to conquer Canada but failing to even find Canada!

The Lobster War (1961–1963)

There have been numerous conflicts over territory and others over the natural resources they produce. One example began in 1961 when French fishermen seeking spiny lobsters off Mauretania tried their luck on the other side of the Atlantic and discovered crustacean gold on underwater shelves 250 to 650 feet deep. Soon, however, the French vessels were intercepted and driven off by Brazilian corvettes upholding a government claim that that part of the Continental Shelf was their territory, as was any sea life that walked on it. On Jan. 1, 1962 Brazilian warships apprehended the French Cassiopée, but the next time two Brazilian corvettes went after French lobstermen they were in turn intercepted by the French destroyer Tartu.

By April 1963 both sides were considering war. Fortunately, an international tribunal summarized the French claim as being that lobsters, like fish, were swimming in the sea, not walking on the shelf. This prompted Brazilian Admiral Paolo Moreira da Silva’s counterclaim that that argument was akin to saying that if a kangaroo hops through the air, that made it a bird.

The matter was finally settled by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on Dec. 10, 1964. By it, Brazilian coastal waters were extended to 200 nautical miles but permitted 26 French ships to catch lobsters for five years in “designated areas,” paying a small percentage of their catch to Brazil. Otherwise the two nations might have warred for a pretender to the throne of the true lobster—spiny lobsters, a.k.a. langustas, don’t have claws like their North Atlantic cousins and are thus not considered true lobsters. Although often used for “lobster tails,” some might not find them tasty enough “to die for.” 

The Sumdorong Chu Standoff (1986–1987)

While the United States and the Soviet Union were having a nuclear Cold War faceoff, in October 1962 border tensions in the Himalayas between India and the People’s Republic of China flared when Indian troops seized Thag La Ridge. The People’s Liberation Army reacted in force, inflicting a stinging defeat on the Indians at Namka Chu. Over the next 24 years both sides reformed and improved their military capabilities while still eying one another suspiciously. On Oct. 18-20, 1986, India staged Operation Falcon, an airlift that occupied Zemithang and several other high ground positions, including Hathung La ridge and Sumdorong Chu. The PLA responded by moving in reinforcements, calling on India for a flag meeting on Nov. 15. This was not forthcoming.

In the spring of 1987 the Indians conducted Operation Chequerboard, an aerial redeployment of troops involving 10 divisions and several warplane squadrons along the North East India border. China declared these activities a provocation, but India showed no intention of withdrawing from its positions. By May 1997 soldiers of both powers were staring down each other’s gun barrels while Western diplomats, recognizing similar language to that preceding the 1962 clash, braced for a major war.

Cooler heads seem to have prevailed, for on Aug. 5, 1987, Indian and Chinese officials held a flag meeting at Bum. Both sides agreed to discuss the situation and in 1988 Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Beijing, reciprocating for the first time Zhou Enlai’s April 1960 visit to India. The talks were accompanied by mutual reductions in forces from a Line of Actual Control that was agreed upon in 1993. With the crisis defused, there would be no major Sino-Indian border incidents again until 2020.

The Whisky War (1984–2022)

The disagreement over the exact national boundaries dividing little Hans Island involved two of the least likely adversaries, both members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: Canada and Denmark. Lying in the Kennedy Channel between Ellesmere and the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland, Hans was divided in half by a line that left a gap in its exact border descriptions. That gap went ignored until 1980, when the Canadian firm Dome Petroleum began four years of research on and around the island.

Matters took a more specific direction in 1984, however, when Canadian soldiers landed on Hans and left behind a Maple Leaf flag and a bottle of whisky. In that same year the Danish Minister for Greenland Affairs arrived to plant the Danish flag with a bottle of schnapps and a letter saying, “Welcome to the Danish Island.” These provocations heralded decades of escalating mutual visits and gestures that left all manner of souvenirs behind. Finally, on Aug. 8, 2005—following a particularly busy July—the Danish press announced that Canada wished to commence serious negotiations to settle the remaining boundary dispute once and for all.

Even so, it took the Russian “special military operation” against Ukraine to remind the world how serious war could be, resulting in the rivals unveiling a plan on June 14 for satisfactorily dividing the unresolved remnants of Hans Island between the Canadian territory of Nunavut and Danish Greenland.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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