Cataclysm: Victor Davis Hanson’s 'The Second World Wars'

Hanson’s background as a classicist and historian of the ancient world enables him to place World War II in a broader historical context.

By Mackubin Thomas Owens

http://www.nationalreview.com/

November 11, 2017

I have always found Victor Davis Hanson to be one of the most insightful historians of warfare, whether he was specifically discussing ancient wars, as he did in The Western Way of War (1989) and A War Like No Other (2005), or addressing the broader question of Western civilization and war, as he did in Carnage and Culture (2001). In addition, he is a master of clear prose. His books are a pleasure to read.

Nonetheless, I was a little apprehensive when asked to review The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (Basic, 720 pp., $40). I wondered whether perhaps this was a bridge too far, the case of a gifted historian’s addressing a topic beyond his acknowledged area of expertise (the Greeks and Romans). I had seen this before. Some years ago, I was invited to review a book on the American Civil War by the marvelous military historian John Keegan. To my great sorrow, this book by a man I greatly admired was dreadful. It pained me to write a negative review. In addition, I thought that the organization of the book — chapters focused on large issues rather than presenting a chronological narrative — might result in a disjointed account of the great struggle.

I needn’t have worried. The Second World Wars is an outstanding work of historical interpretation. It is not an operational history of the war: Hanson does not provide extended accounts of military campaigns. It focuses instead on the decisions about why, how, and where to fight the war, the diverse methods of warfare employed by the belligerents, and how the investments and strategies of each side led to victory or defeat.

Hanson observes that this great cataclysm of the 20th century began as a traditional series of border conflicts among European powers, the manifestations of an old story: better-prepared aggressive states’ launching surprise attacks against weaker neighbors. He writes that by the end of 1940, this familiar form of European fighting had achieved a “Caesarian or Napoleonic” scale, but within a year, these smaller conflicts had unexpectedly coalesced into a cataclysm for which the aggressors — the “Axis” of Germany, Italy, and Japan — were strategically and materially unprepared. “Advances in Western technology and industrialization, when married with both totalitarian zealotry and fully mobilized democratic states, also ensured that the expanded war would become lethal in a way never before seen.”

The title of the book reflects Hanson’s observations that this war was fought to an unprecedented degree in diverse geographic locales (Europe, Africa, South Asia, China, and the expanses of the Pacific Ocean) based on premises that seemed unrelated, and that it was fought in so many diverse and unfamiliar ways — not only on land and at sea but in the air and below the surface — while mobilizing the manpower and industrial might of modern states.

Hanson points to three events — Axis blunders all — that transformed the traditional European border wars of 1939–40 into the global conflict that we now call World War II or the Second World War: Germany’s invasion of its erstwhile partner, the Soviet Union, in June 1941; Japan’s attack on the United States in December 1941; and the subsequent decision of both Germany and Italy to declare war on the United States.

These unforeseen developments added the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan to the lethal mix, transforming heretofore regional conflicts into “a continuous and now interconnected global war.” Hanson notes that when it invaded Poland in 1939, Germany had no plan for defeating potential enemies beyond Poland’s borders, the very ones that would crush it six years later. Germany lacked the population, the industrial capacity, and the military means — especially sea power and long-range air power — to strike its enemies.

Hanson notes that not even Napoleon “declared war in succession on so many great powers without any idea how to destroy their ability to make war, or, worse yet, in delusion that tactical victories would depress stronger enemies into submission.” In rolling what the German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg once called the “iron dice,” Germany ignored Clausewitz’s warning that “no one starts a war — or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so — without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”

Hanson’s background as a classicist and historian of the ancient world enables him to place World War II in a broader historical context, one stressing war’s “eternal elements.” These include such factors as the balance of power, deterrence, surprise, and preemption; victory achieved by defeating, humiliating, and occupying one’s enemy; the ability of one side or the other to learn rapidly from its mistakes; and the importance of geography.

The organization of The Second World Wars, which I originally believed might be problematic, proved to be effective. Hanson examines in turn the causes of the war; the evolution of alliances; industrial power and economic resources; air power, sea power, land power; political and military leadership; and the outcome of the war.

Hanson attributes the Allied victory to a number of factors. First, the Allies were superior in terms of men and matériel. The United States in particular produced aircraft, ships, and other weapons of war in quantities that the Axis powers could never hope to match. Long-range air power enabled the Allies to strike at the industrial heart of Germany almost from the beginning and to subject Japan to nearly continuous bombardment beginning in 1944. The leverage of the Allies’ sea power enabled them to execute expeditionary operations that, in Europe, forced the Germans to commit manpower to peripheral theaters and, in the Pacific, mounted a relentless drive toward the Japanese home islands. The air and sea power of the United States and Great Britain operated in conjunction with the Soviet Red Army, which inflicted massive casualties on the Wehrmacht.

Of course, despite their material advantage, the Allies were not preordained to win. To do so, they had to marshal the necessary resources and employ them according to an executable strategy. This required statesmen and generals of high caliber. For the most part, the Allies found such men. They also learned from their mistakes.

On the other hand, the Axis powers made multiple errors, many of them fatal. Hanson argues that the greatest of these was Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union, exposing Germany to a two-front war. This error was exacerbated by his decision to reduce the size of the army in order to deal with manpower shortages in German industry, and by a shift in resource priority from the army to the navy and air force.

The decision also represented an intelligence failure of the highest order. Hitler severely underestimated the strength and resiliency of the Red Army. In addition, both Hitler and the Wehrmacht made the mistake of confusing an operational concept — blitzkrieg — with a strategic concept. Blitzkrieg worked against unprepared enemies — the Poles, the French, and the Red Army at the beginning — but failed in the long run in Russia, as the Soviets adapted and as Hitler’s bad strategic decisions trumped the Wehrmacht’s skill in operations.

Another factor favoring the Allies was that although the countries that fought the Axis were at odds ideologically — the Soviet Union on one hand and the United States and Great Britain on the other — they operated in concert, albeit not perfectly. The Axis, although composed of countries with similar ideologies, failed to cooperate or coordinate their efforts. Thus the Allies were free to deal with the three Axis powers separately.

The Axis powers believed that their martial excellence and will would prevail over the material strength of their decadent enemies. There is no question that the operational excellence of the Wehrmacht was unmatched and that the Japanese military code made the Japanese soldier a fearsome opponent. But Hanson notes that while, by 1943, a U.S. Marine was as skilled a killer as his Japanese counterpart, the Axis powers could never match the productive output of the Allies. The overwhelming nature of this output can be illustrated by the example of the war in the Pacific.

War Plan Orange, the U.S. outline of how to fight the Japanese, proposed two general plans that would culminate in the eventual assault on the Japanese home islands: either an advance originating in the South Pacific and progressing via the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and the Philippines, or a drive through the Central Pacific from the Gilberts, the Marshalls, and the Marianas. Although the United States supported the Allied strategy of “Europe First,” it was still able to allocate sufficient resources to advance on both of these axes — advancing against Japan, while conducting military operations in the Mediterranean and preparing for the invasion of Europe as well as supporting both Great Britain and the Soviet Union with matériel.

It is sometimes difficult to fathom the magnitude of World War II. It killed over 60 million people, meaning that about 27,000 people on average died each day. The victors suffered five to seven times more dead than did the defeated, mostly as a result of death inflicted on the Russians and Chinese. It was the first major war in which more civilians than soldiers died.

Hanson makes it clear that what Winston Churchill said of the First World War was even more true of the Second: “The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. . . . When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.” In World War II, torture was added to the list. The title of Hanson’s fine book on the Peloponnesian War, A War Like No Other, is appropriate for World War II.

It is impossible to do justice to such a magnificent book in a short review. Given the vast quantities of ink expended on accounts of this great conflict, one would think that there was not much more left to say. Hanson proves that this belief is wrong. His fresh examination of World War II cements his reputation as a military historian of the first order.

READ MORE:

A Classic War of Modern Violence

What We Can Learn from World War II

Why the Great War was Avoidable

– Mackubin Thomas Owens, the dean of academics at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., and the editor of Orbis, is the author of U.S. Civil–Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil–Military Bargain. This essay originally appeared in the November 13, 2017, issue of National Review.

Manifest McKinley

By Paul Starobin

https://www.city-journal.org/

November 10, 2017

President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, by Robert W. Merry (Simon & Schuster, 624 pp., $35)

How is history made—by great figures, mastering the currents of the era, or in a more organic and haphazard fashion, by the currents themselves? In his engrossing new biography, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, Robert W. Merry tenders an answer to that eternal question, at least with respect to McKinley’s place and time, the America of the late Gilded Age. McKinley’s hand “was on the tiller of the national destiny,” Merry writes of the country’s 25th president, who formulated and executed a vision of “American ascendency” in global affairs—the proof supplied in the expulsion of the aging Spanish empire from Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean, the annexation of Hawaii, the laying of plans for what became the Panama Canal and, not least, in the bloody vanquishing of a determined guerilla force to make the Philippines a U.S. possession. “Noncolonial imperialism,” as Merry labels McKinley’s approach, a rejection of the traditional European tack of acquiring colonies outright as a means of amassing economic and military power, emerged as the nation’s “geopolitical philosophy.”

In staking this claim, Merry goes against many historians’ longstanding view of McKinley as the last in a string of second-rate presidents, at best the fortunate beneficiary of the unstoppable tides propelling America to the front rank of nations in the late nineteenth century. An Ohio Republican, McKinley won the presidency in 1896 and was reelected in 1900, but his life was abruptly ended in September 1901 by the bullets of an assassin—an obscure anarchist stalking him at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt took over, serving for nearly eight action-packed years. Ever since, TR, larger than life, identifiable not only by his initials but also by the children’s stuffed animal named after him, has been lauded as one of America’s great leaders, his predecessor and onetime boss all but effaced from memory. In the withering judgment of liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, only in the person of Grover Cleveland was there a “reasonable facsimile of a major President between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.”

President McKinley then, is, in part, a work of revision, a corrective, and on these terms, Merry, author of a 2012 book, Where They Stand, on how voters and historians see American presidents, is successful. This comprehensive treatment, focused most intensively on McKinley’s years in the White House, convincingly shows Hofstadter’s verdict to be false and in so doing, fills a gap in the literature on this undeservedly unheralded president.  William McKinley Jr., born in Niles, Ohio in 1843, was by no stretch a mediocrity. At 18, he volunteered to fight for the Union in the Civil War. Assigned to a quartermaster corps, he was fearless under fire and, possessed of what his superiors saw as “rare managerial skills,” promoted along a path from private to major. Bland on the surface, seemingly guileless, a cigar ever in his mouth, “the major,” as he was affectionately known in his circle, nursed a steadfast ambition that drove his rise in politics from congressman to governor to president. “His short, bulky frame cut an imposing figure,” Merry writes, “ and people responded avidly to his personal traits—a broad, handsome face featuring candescent gray eyes . . . a deep, resonating voice; a ready smile and hearty laugh that betokened warmth and confidence; moral rectitude devoid of sanctimony.” Merry demolishes the myth that McKinley was a tool of Mark Hanna, the Ohio business magnate and political fixer turned U.S. senator. McKinley was his own man, with a keen sense of political judgment and timing. Hanna vigorously fought to keep TR from being chosen as McKinley’s running mate in the 1900 presidential election, but he stood down when McKinley issued a statement directing “close friends,” meaning Hanna, to desist.

McKinley in some ways stands as a contrast to the notable personalities of his era—a period dominated, not by mild-mannered managerial types, but by aspiring oligarchs of a roguish bent, trafficking in political influence and tending to view the law as a trifling obstacle to be overcome on the road to piling up fortunes in railroads, steel, mining, and the like. McKinley’s life has poignant aspects, in particular, his tender devotion to his wife, Ida, virtually an invalid. Still, the telling of his story can’t possibly be as juicy as the rendering of the exploits of a man like Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Commodore, who set the tone for the Gilded Age with his famous cornering of the stock of the Harlem Railroad in the 1860s.  They may have been Robber Barons, as critics came to call these figures, but they presided over the boom in industry that made America a global economic behemoth.

Was McKinley really a builder of anything, much less of the American Century? Here was a man of “stolid intellect,” after all. “Dynamic thinking wasn’t his forte,” Merry concedes, and he “wasn’t the type to blaze new trails in pursuit of success.” And yet, Merry marshals a case for McKinley as “architect” based on decisions, especially in foreign affairs, that might have gone differently in another president’s hands. The most persuasive example concerns the Philippines. After Commodore George Dewey’s rousing naval triumph, devastating the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in the spring of 1898, McKinley faced the fateful question of whether to proceed with the conquest of the entire archipelago, thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland and, as a senior army officer pointed out, “inhabited by people, the majority of whom will regard us with the intense hatred born of race and religion.” In Congress, most Democrats, and some Republicans, opposed an expansive military venture as inimical to America’s anti-imperial character. McKinley weighed that opposition but wound up embracing what proved to be a protracted campaign, bloodier and longer-lasting than expected, though ultimately successful, to subdue the islands. One rationale, cited by a McKinley advisor, was the opportunity to extract gold, coal, oil, and other treasures from the Philippines, and to use the islands as a hub for an “enormous extension” of American commerce in Asia. Another, less tangible reason was the obligation that McKinley felt to, in his words, “uplift and civilize” the Filipinos.

This vow of duty was not, as a Marxist materialist (or a cynic) might have it, mere cover for the profit motive. An abiding Christian faith, Merry shows, lay at McKinley’s core, along with that run-of-the-mill intellect. Indeed, his religious conviction, nurtured by his mother, a passionate Methodist, was inseparable from his missionary sense of patriotism. As his first experience of battle loomed in the Civil War, he confided to his diary, “This record I want to be left behind, that I not only fell as a soldier for my Country, but also as a Soldier of Jesus.” He subscribed to what was earnestly called Manifest Destiny, as God’s plan for the global greatness of America, and in the grip of this conviction, he felt real anguish, as he told a Boston audience, that the “misguided Filipino” was bent on frustrating “the liberator,” America, in battle.

McKinley, then, stamped his ideals on America’s momentous transformation from continental to overseas empire. Yet he was well aware that he had public opinion behind him, despite critics in Congress and, in the chattering classes, sneering types like Mark Twain. With the United States becoming an economic titan on par with Britain and Germany, Americans supported the projection of the nation’s power abroad. Before McKinley confronted the Philippines, powerful voices in the press, like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journaland Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, clamored for the White House to take on the Spanish in Cuba, a war that McKinley tried to avoid. He was far from being in the forefront of the pugilistic spirit of the times, easily outstripped in that dimension by TR, a proud, self-identified “jingo” who considered his president’s backbone to be “as soft as a chocolate éclair.” The idea of the nation as a global titan, bestride the oceans, breech-loading cannon on deck, but without a phalanx of European-style colonies, could be found roughly in the political center during the late Gilded Age. Born in revolt against its overlord in London, America lacked the genetic makeup to assemble a global network of dependencies on which the sun never set. Its power would be exercised after its own character.

The question returns to whether McKinley truly directed the churning currents of his times. Probably the best answer is that while McKinley can be seen as an architect of the American Century, he was not the architect. In fact, there was no single builder: the makers stretch over the decades. Their ranks include not only presidents, from McKinley and TR to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, but also military leaders, from George Dewey to Douglas MacArthur, and ideologists, from Hearst to Henry Luce—who proclaimed, in his 1941 Life editorial, “The American Century,” that America was “the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world.” Any narrative that can run this long, with so much resonance, and with support from so many quarters, must be firmly rooted in a national culture. In that sense, the American people themselves stand collectively, over generations, as the architects of the country’s global ascendancy. It is our doing. But McKinley’s hand shows.

Paul Starobin is the author of Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War (PublicAffairs, 2017) and After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age (Viking, 2009). Robert W. Merry was his editor atCongressional Quarterly in the late 1980s.

Climate Song and Dance

By Oren Cass

https://www.city-journal.org/

November 10, 2017

Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), at podium, addressing the opening ceremony of the Bonn Climate Conference. Photo: UNFCCC

Good news is hard to find at this year’s United Nations climate conference in Bonn, Germany. Diplomats from nearly 200 countries have gathered to review progress made on the “historic” Paris climate accords, signed two years ago. But as the champagne-fueled self-congratulation of Paris recedes into memory, the agreement’s underlying fraud is becoming obvious.

In theory, international discussions, negotiations, and agreements on climate change aim to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions and thus lessen the expected warming of the climate. In fact, the Paris accord does not even attempt to achieve this goal, except nominally. Instead, countries can pledge as much or as little climate action as they see fit, and no enforcement mechanism ensures that they deliver on their commitments. A country unhappy with its pledge can simply change it.

Operating in this framework, countries have pledged very little. Back in 2000, before all the clean-energy investments and cap-and-trade programs and carbon taxes and landmark international deals, the UN’s projection for emissions this century pointed toward a planetary warming of 3.4°C by 2100. On the eve of the Bonn summit, the UN acknowledged that, with all pledges, projected warming by 2100 still comes out to 3.2°C—and even that miniscule reduction in warming assumes compliance, which is in short supply. None of the major powers are on track to meet their pledges, and developing countries are failing to even get started. Angela Merkel, “climate chancellor” and host of this year’s conference, has been an outspoken critic of President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord, but her own nation’s emissions are rising. Germany’s environmental ministry believes that the country will miss its targets badly and warns of “a disaster for Germany’s international reputation as a climate leader.”

None of this should be surprising, given what the Paris agreement actually contains, as opposed to how it was advertised. “This agreement is ambitious, with every nation setting and committing to their own specific targets,” President Obama said in 2015. That was then. Now, the New York Timesexplains, “many of the Paris pledges remain fairly opaque, and most nations have been vague on what specific policies they will take to meet them. There is no official mechanism for quantifying progress.”

In 2015, leaders signing the agreement felt confident that the momentum and good feeling of Paris would surmount the gaps between rhetoric and reality. The agreement, Obama said, “sends a powerful signal that the world is firmly committed to a low-carbon future,” which would help “unleash investment and innovation in clean energy at a scale we have never seen before.” But investors could read the agreement, too. Global clean-energy investment fell by 18 percent in 2016, the worst performance on record; in developing countries, the decline was 27 percent. And First World investment in Third World countries, considered critical to global progress, fell 26 percent.

Apparently, the plan is to continue with the aimless plodding. One goal for Bonn is to finalize the “rulebook” under which countries voluntarily comply (or not) with their voluntary pledges. Another is to “tee up a ‘facilitative dialogue’ scheduled to take place in 2018,” reports the Washington Post. “The facilitative dialogue will be a preliminary assessment . . . So, expect the Bonn negotiations to produce a consensus on the structure of this first critical step.” Should next year’s facilitative dialogue fail to achieve its goals—whatever those are—a “global stocktake” is already calendared for 2020.

But all is not lost: Syria is finally on board. The war-torn failed state, the only nation yet to sign the Paris agreement, announced this week that it would do so. “With Syria’s decision, the relentless commitment of the global community to deliver on Paris is more evident than ever,” crowed the World Resources Institute’s Paula Caballero. “The U.S.’s stark isolation should give Trump reason to reconsider.” ThinkProgress, a website affiliated with the Center for American Progress, declared that “a country in the midst of civil war is doing better on climate change than the United States.”

Syria made no pledge, but pledges don’t matter anyway. Bashar al-Assad obviously has no interest in tackling climate change or reducing Syria’s carbon footprint—unless cutting his citizens’ energy supply or decimating the population counts for credit. But he signed; he’s playing the game. And he provided an opportunity to criticize Donald Trump. Isn’t that, after all, what action on climate change is all about?

The UN exhibited the self-restraint not to tout its Syrian success, but it had to promote something. As meetings got underway this week, the top headline on its website read “Bonn Kids Sing and Act for the Planet.” Most of the conference participants aren’t children, but otherwise this sounds about right.

Remembering Stalingrad 75 Years Later

It is now fashionable to demonize Russia, but most Americans have forgotten key aspects of 20th-century history, including the Russians’ fight to stop the march of Nazi Germany.

By Victor Davis Hanson — November 9, 2017

http://www.nationalreview.com/

A Russian soldier waves a flag while standing on a balcony overlooking a square, where military trucks gather, during the Battle of Stalingrad, World War Two, Stalingrad (now Volgograd), USSR (now Russia). The soldier has a rifle strapped to his back. 

Seventy-five years ago this month, the Soviet Red Army surrounded — and would soon destroy — a huge invading German army at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Nearly 300,000 of Germany’s best soldiers would never return home. The epic 1942–43 battle for the city saw the complete annihilation of the attacking German 6th Army. It marked the turning point of World War II.

Before Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler regularly boasted on German radio as his victorious forces pressed their offensives worldwide. After Stalingrad, Hitler went quiet, brooding in his various bunkers for the rest of the war.

During the horrific Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted more than five months, Russian, American, and British forces also went on the offensive against the Axis powers in the Caucasus, in Morocco and Algeria, and on the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific.

Yet just weeks before the Battle of Stalingrad began, the Allies had been near defeat. They had lost most of European Russia. Much of Western Europe was under Nazi control. Axis armies occupied large swaths of North Africa. The Japanese controlled most of the Pacific and Asia, from Manchuria to Wake Island.

Stalingrad was part of a renewed German effort in 1942 to drive southward toward the Caucasus Mountains, to capture the huge Soviet oil fields. The Germans might have pulled it off had Hitler not divided his forces and sent his best army northward to Stalingrad to cut the Volga River traffic and take Stalin’s eponymous frontier city.

By the time two Red Army pincers trapped the Germans at Stalingrad in November, Russia had already suffered some 6 million combat casualties during the first 16 months of Germany’s invasion. By German calculations, Russia should have already submitted, just like all of the Third Reich’s prior European enemies except Britain.

Instead, the Red Army drew the Germans deeper into the traditional quagmire of Russia until the 6th Army was low on supplies, freezing in the winter cold, and trapped more than 1,500 miles from Berlin. How did the Red Army not only survive but go on the offensive against the deadly invaders?

In part, it had no choice. Germany was intent on not just absorbing Russia, but wiping it out or enslaving millions of its citizens. In part, Britain and the United States under the Lend-Lease policy began sending huge amounts of material aid, providing everything from boots to locomotives. In part, Red Army soldiers were terrified of their own communist strongman, Josef Stalin.

Prior to the German invasion, Stalin was responsible for some 20 million Russian deaths through forced farm collectivization, planned famine, show trials and purges, and the murders of his own Red Army troops. More than 10,000 soldiers were likely executed at Stalingrad by their own officers.

But most important, no European invader — neither Sweden under Charles XII in the early 1700s nor France under Napoleon in the early 1800s — had ever successfully invaded and defeated Russia.

The country was too large, both geographically and demographically. Good weather was too brief between the spring floods and the bitter Russian winter. And Russians always fought heroically as defenders of their own soil, even if this wasn’t always the case when they were fighting abroad as invaders.

Despite the horrors of Soviet Communism, the Allied winners of World War II owed a great deal to the Russian people. Russia’s male and female soldiers were most responsible for destroying Hitler’s vast ground forces, having killed more than two-thirds of the German soldiers lost in the war.

The Soviet Union lost about 27 million soldiers and civilians — about 60 times more than America lost in the war.

Due to memories of the Soviet Union’s Cold War ruthlessness, and because of Vladimir Putin’s autocratic government, it is now fashionable to demonize Russia. Moscow sent troops into eastern Ukraine, absorbed Crimea, and has sought to tamper with a U.S. presidential election.

But most Americans have forgotten key aspects of Russia’s 20th-century history, a tragedy of unspeakable human losses. Outside Kiev in late summer of 1941, more than 700,000 Russian soldiers were killed or captured by Germans in a single battle.

In one of the costliest sieges in history, at Sevastopol in July 1942, 100,000 Russians were killed or captured in a failed effort to save the port on the Black Sea.

We rightly see Putin as an aggressive autocrat. But millions of Russians view Ukraine and the Crimea as sacred, blood-soaked Russian ground.

After the collapse of the nightmarish Soviet Union, Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd “city on the Volga.” Today, few in the West know exactly what happened there 75 years ago this month.

This Veterans Day, we should also remember those heroic Russian soldiers. In bitter cold, and after losing hundreds of thousands of lives, they finally did the unbelievable: They halted the march of Nazi Germany.

READ MORE:
One Hundred Years of Hell
The Enduring Allure of the Russian Revolution 
Reckoning with Communism

– Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com. © 2017 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Never Ending Bob Dylan

By Howard Fishman

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/

November 3, 2017

When I was seventeen, I became a Bob Dylan zealot. This was 1988. I’d gotten hooked by “Blood on the Tracks,” one of the twelve CDs that I’d received for a penny from Columbia House. (Did we really send in the penny with the coupon? I think maybe we did.) After wearing that album out, I undertook a meticulous survey of Dylan’s discography.

Eager to share my passion, and frustrated by attempts to interest my peers (many of whom were busy worshipping the Grateful Dead and who considered Dylan a has-been), I turned to the one person whom I could rely upon to take me seriously: my brother Adam. Three years my junior, Adam had long since become accustomed to having an obsessive for a sibling. When we were a bit younger, I had forced him and his friends to enroll in what I called the West Hartford School of Comic Books, administering written quizzes and tests that covered such vital topics as who inked Jack Kirby’s pencils on early issues of “The Fantastic Four” (Joe Sinnott), or what color was the original Hulk (gray). I had since moved on from comic books, to “m*a*s*h” reruns, to Cat Stevens. It was now time to indoctrinate Adam in the world of Bob Dylan.

I turned on my stereo. “Listen to this,” I told my brother, and put on “Maggie’s Farm” from “Bringing It All Back Home.” A “greatest hit,” the song is not really that great—not by Dylan standards, anyhow. Over a fairly pedestrian backbeat, a series of verses catalogues the various people, and their eccentricities, on a farm where the narrator has been employed. He announces that he won’t work for Maggie’s mother any longer, nor her father, nor her brother. The reason, we ultimately learn, is that he’s bored. (Maggie herself appears only briefly, forcing him to scrub the floor; this, he judges, is “a shame.”)

My brother seemed receptive, if not overly impressed; Dylan’s music sounded pretty good. He didn’t know that he was being set up for a series of punchlines. I then put on the version of “Maggie’s Farm” from 1978’s “At Budokan” album. Built around a nasty electric-guitar riff, the glammy arrangement has a big, theatrical sound. Where the original had projected an attitude of hip, wry nonchalance, this version felt frenetic, frenzied, even nightmarish. Strings, horns, and full-throated backup singers were all featured, as was a repeated key modulation that kept tilting the song on its ear. Halfway through the track, my brother looked at me quizzically. “Wait a minute,” he said, “is this the same song? Is this Bob Dylan?” Sagely, I nodded.

“Maggie’s Farm” from Dylan’s tight, tough 1974 tour with the Band*, was next, the singer’s vocals here a holler, all machismo and swagger. Allowing the music to speak for itself, without introduction, I then cued up the coup de grâce: the first track of “Hard Rain,” from 1976, a proto-punk version of “Maggie’s Farm” that can only be called perverse. If Dylan and the Band, buoyed by Levon Helm’s strutting, deep-in-the-pocket Southern groove, had sounded like American comfort food, a triumphant homecoming football team on a crisp Thanksgiving afternoon, the singer and his band on “Hard Rain” sound like a surly crew of mercenaries adrift at sea; exhausted, strung out, and hungry, they are so bored out of their wits that they’ve taken to drinking the ship’s supply of whale oil and throwing one another overboard for fun. (The entire album has this feeling; it may be one of the greatest and least appreciated live rock albums of all time.)

Now my brother was sold. “Everyone will tell you that Dylan is nothing more than a great lyricist,” I told him, but Dylan the performer, the constantly changing interpreter of his own work, was the thing no one seemed to pay attention to, worthy of study and exploration. I’d read that Dylan was about to embark on a new tour that summer, with a new, unknown band, and I told Adam that my plan was to borrow the family station wagon and follow the tour. My brother looked at me with a mixture of admiration and solemnity; he knew this wouldn’t be easy, and he also knew I would find a way to make it happen.

Somehow, I did. My parents granted me the use of the car for two weeks. I laid down the backseat, threw a sleeping bag in there, packed a bag and my guitar, and away I went to follow Bob Dylan. It was impossible to know then that I was about to witness the rollout of what has since come to be known as Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour,” a run of shows that has now included close to three thousand concerts over five continents, and is about to celebrate its third consecutive decade.

My high-school peers weren’t alone in their hatred of Dylan. It may be fair to say that, in 1988, Bob Dylan had reached the nadir of his commercial and artistic relevance. His religious conversion (now exhaustively documented in “Trouble No More: 1979-1981,” released today); a series of overproduced, stale-sounding albums; his disastrous set at the finale of “Live Aid;” and bloated stadium tours with big rock acts that seemed to find Dylan struggling to connect with audiences and with himself, all contributed to the sense that he was simply washed up—that he might not have anything left. That wasn’t what I saw in the summer of 1988. When I caught up with the Never Ending Tour on its first Northeast dates that July, at small outdoor stages, at state fairs, and amusement parks from Virginia to Maine, I saw a man go out every night who seemed to be fighting for his life. He was barking out lyrics with startling, almost volatile conviction, and revisiting and reworking material from across the entirety of his already mammoth back catalogue. I saw urgency, I saw humor, I saw risk and passion; I saw beauty achieved in a way that was ugly, alternative, outside. I saw a hero.

There was nothing polished about these shows. Most were general admission, in open fields, which meant that I could get there early to insure a spot right up against the stage (I was often the first, and sometimes only, person in line when the gates opened). Through the course of each show (which changed radically from night to night), I was privy to the interplay between Dylan and his trio of sidemen. It often veered into high drama, as Dylan confounded his band with spontaneous new arrangements and musical flights of fancy. Any song might begin with lurching imbalance, like a plane taking off in high wind. Turbulence was common; Dylan would strike a guitar chord that had no place in the song being performed. I would see terror flash in the band’s eyes, their mouths slightly agape as they tried to guess where the music was headed next. Often, it seemed as though Dylan himself didn’t know, and he seemed to draw energy from this. He was playing without a net, and they were expected to follow. Changes in tempo might occur mid-song, complete stylistic shifts were de rigueur. If Dylan wasn’t satisfied with how things were going, he might end a song abruptly, driving it straight into the ground.

There were moments of great beauty, usually during the short set of acoustic duets that served as the centerpiece of each concert. Dylan had left his trademark harmonica behind for this tour, and had seemingly found new, boundless inspiration in the two-guitar format. It allowed him to explore long, instrumental interludes between verses, building and weaving ecstatic washes of sound on his big Gibson. By abandoning the chord progression of any given song, he could open it up to a kind of free-form exploration of inversions and reharmonizations of the melody. In addition to his own songs, these acoustic sets often included one-offs of traditional songs—ancient folk ballads that Dylan appeared to be teaching his guitarist on the spot: “Barbara Allen,” “The Waggoner’s Lad,” “When First Unto This Country,” always invested with a surfeit of emotion.

All of this was thrilling. Dylan’s commitment to spontaneity, his courting of musical danger, was authentic and audacious. It didn’t seem to bother him a bit that the stage could sometimes be plummeted into total darkness in the middle of a song, the lighting technicians not knowing when it was starting or ending. Each night, I watched as Dylan fell on his sword. It was a nightly lesson in bravery, in risk, in what it meant to be a performing artist. It wasn’t really from show to show that the quality of the music varied but tune to tune. Dylan was gloriously untethered to anything but the imperative to find something true in the moment of each song. And if he didn’t succeed, he would destroy it before our very eyes.

An early highlight of the new eight-disk set, “Trouble No More: 1979-1981,” is the January 6, 1980, live version of “Man Gave Names to All the Animals.” Those with only a passing familiarity with Dylan as a live artist might ask incredulously, as my brother did thirty years ago, “Is this Bob Dylan?” The track sounds like an invitation to a private ritual in some hidden, dark wood. Under a midnight sky with no moon or stars, a group circles a visionary prophet—maybe he is Asa Hawks, from Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood.” They dance by candlelight, whispering a strangely childish ditty, telling secrets to one another. It’s like the soundtrack to a horror movie, tension grinding toward some twisted denouement.

Also included on “Trouble No More” are two starkly different versions of “Caribbean Wind,” the lyrics like some lost Spalding Gray monologue, all mania and neurosis, the narrator searching for his Perfect Moment. On the rehearsal version, from September 23, 1980, backed (and countrified) by Ben Keith’s pedal-steel guitar, Dylan is the anonymous singer at a bamboo rum shack on a sultry, tropical night; he’s there with his band to play for the margarita-and-daiquiri crowd. You’re not really paying any attention until you realize that you are, that there’s something peculiar going on with this guy, something significant—something that could have a profound impact on your life. Or it could just be the booze. You come back the next night, hoping to hear him again, only to be told by the manager that he’d only been passing through, a last-minute fill-in for their Jimmy Buffett tribute band. No one there can even remember the guy’s name.

I’ve seen Dylan at least once a year since 1988. I’m forty-seven now, the same age he was when he began this tour. He seemed old to me then; it’s astonishing to see him now, still at it, his star long since risen again. The tour itself has undergone stylistic changes and shifts in personnel. It’s a quintet these days, not a trio, accompanying him, and Dylan hasn’t played much guitar in years—he either stands at a microphone, downstage center, or else sits at a baby-grand piano, pounding out crazy rhythms and melodic motifs. His Never Ending Tour will end, eventually (unless the world ends first, another matter), but there are no outward signs that this will happen anytime soon. He’s currently on a twenty-eight-date swing across the country that will culminate right here, in New York City, with five nights at the Beacon Theatre.

Imagine Ernest Hemingway giving a reading of “A Farewell to Arms” in a thick Cajun accent, or in the manner of a speed-talking auctioneer. What if Eugene O’Neill had gone on tour performing a one-man version of his five-hour opus, “Strange Interlude”? (The actor David Greenspan is actually doing this right now in New York; I haven’t seen it yet.) Think of attending an Alice Munro reading, and having her devote half the program to her renderings of the stories of Shirley Jackson. Watching Dylan perform is a weird experience. It’s just weird. No other performer does or has done what Dylan continues to do night after night. There is no context to put him in. He is his own category.

Dylan’s is the art of possibility. The scope of his imagination and his brazen willingness to experiment is as enthralling as any results he achieves. Over the course of more than a half century, and over thirty years (and counting) of constant touring, he has exercised his right to publicly tweak, improve, develop, deconstruct, and—when deemed necessary—utterly raze his own creations. He brandishes this license with complete authority. Dylan can do anything he wants with his songs, and he knows it. They belong to him, they are his to do with what he will. He’s always been outside of our comfort zone, and he shows no signs of changing.

I last saw Dylan in concert in June. My brother was with me. Having read that Dylan had recently been devoting half his show to covering standards from the American Songbook (as featured on his most recent studio album, “Triplicate”), we brought, for the first time, our mom, who never could quite figure out why I felt it was necessary to see him in concert more than two dozen times during the first eighteen months of the Never Ending Tour. As the lights dimmed, I wondered, as I always do, who will he be this time? And then, as he ambled onstage in the shadows, there came the requisite shock of recognition—that wild visage coming into view, feral, unwilling (or unable) to be tamed—and along with it, the only possible answer to my question: that’s Bob Dylan.

Today's Tune: Bob Dylan - When You Gonna Wake Up (Oslo, Norway - July 9, 1981) [Audio]

Bob Dylan's 'Trouble No More' examines the gospel years, 1979-81

Randy Lewis
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/

November 1, 2017

Bob Dylan, Warfield Theater, San Francisco, November 1979

On one hand, it’s no great mystery that when Bob Dylan seemed to find new faith around 1979, a lot of fans and Dylanologists lost theirs — in him.

On the other, Dylan’s track record for musical revelation was so firmly established by that time that he could have put out an album of songs about his stamp collection and they would have been worthy at least of honest consideration.

But Dylan’s apparent conversion to what sounded a lot like fundamentalist Christianity struck many as a stark turnaround from tenets we had come to expect from him, and from rock music itself — first and foremost being a healthy skepticism toward institutional conventions of any kind.

Dylan, after all, was the man who (contrary to his own wishes) was widely considered “the spokesman of a generation,” the musician who made it a virtual prerequisite of young adulthood to challenge authority and dogma.

So what were audiences to think when, with the release of 1979’s “Slow Train Coming” album, he sang that he was “Gonna change my way of thinking / Make myself a different set of rules” and preached that “there’s only one authority / And that’s the authority on high”?

All this figures into the latest edition of his record company’s ongoing series of archival releases, “Bob Dylan — Trouble No More — The Bootleg Series Vol. 13/ 1979-1981.” This one spans the so-called “Christian period” of his trio of albums: “Slow Train Coming,” “Saved” (from 1980) and “Shot of Love” (1981).

The deluxe set from Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings encompasses eight CDs and one DVD with director Jennifer Lebeau’s new documentary, “Trouble No More: A Musical Film.” An abridged two-CD set and a four-LP vinyl version are also available.

The deluxe set comprises 100 tracks: alternate studio versions, rehearsal takes and live performances. Only one has been previously released: “Ye Shall Be Changed,” which appeared on the first installment from 1991, “The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3.”

Until now, this has been a relatively under-investigated and certainly misunderstood chapter in the long history of Dylan’s music, one in which many accused him of abandoning his artistry in favor of demagoguery. In fact, he was challenging listeners’ preconceived notions as he often had.

Surveying the set brings up a realization that hadn’t crystallized back when I first heard the studio albums: Then, or today, I never doubted Dylan’s sincerity in the expressions of faith he wrote at that time.

Now, however, it seems clearer that another major impetus for him in heading down the path of spirituality had to be the opportunity to tap into the higher power of a great rock-gospel band.

The talent he assembled, both for the studio sessions and the concert tours were respected then, revered now: guitarists including Mark Knopfler, Steve Soles and Fred Tackett; keyboardists such as veteran Muscle Shoals session player Spooner Oldham, Benmont Tench from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers and Dylan’s old Chicago-blues circuit pal, Al Kooper; bassists Tim Drummond and Jerry Scheff; drummers Jim Keltner and Ian Wallace and drenched-in-the-spirit singers Clydie King, Regina McCrary, Carolyn Dennis and Regina Peebles among others.

Roots music aficionado that he’s always been, Dylan has long understood the power gospel music has to move and inspire listeners.

In turn, Dylan served up some of his most impassioned, electrifying performances with these gospel-steeped songs.

The first two discs of the “Trouble No More” set are drawn from various tour stops from 1979-81, while discs 3 and 4 collect rare versions of songs from the studio albums along with several that didn’t wind up on any of those releases.

The fifth and sixth discs contain his full show from April 18, 1980 in Toronto, while CDs 7 and 8 offer up another full concert from June 27, 1981 at Earl’s Court in London. (For Dylan completists, the singer-songwriter’s website is offering two additional discs with yet another complete performance, this one from his Nov. 28, 1979 tour stop in San Diego.)

Discs 1 through 4 are framed smartly, each of the four opening with markedly different renditions of the same song: “Slow Train Coming,” displaying how Dylan’s restless artistry was always in search of the right feel, tempo and attitude for a given song.

An alternate studio take of one of the “Slow Train Coming” album’s higher profile songs, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” features a livelier bounce in the rhythm section of Drummond and drummer Pick Withers, while keyboardist Barry Beckett pushes the song forward with beat-anticipating piano interlaced with funky clavinet parts. The backing gospel singers on the released version are absent.

The fidelity of the live versions varies noticeably in places, which makes for some compromises. The performance of “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” on the first disc, recorded in 1980 in Portland, Ore., benefits from a more fluid reggae-ized lilt by the band, and is buoyed further by a break where the gospel singers are featured.

But Dylan’s vocal is low in the mix, rendering certain lines difficult to discern, especially to anyone not already intimately familiar with his clever roster of creation stories he cooked up for so many critters.

With the distance of nearly four decades, it’s possible now to look back at this period and recognize that yet again, the Bard from Hibbing, Minn., was doing what he’s done so consistently through all phases of his career: challenging orthodoxy.

What made this manifestation of the impulse to prod and provoke so intriguing is that it was an unexpected orthodoxy Dylan chose to put under his microscope: the orthodoxy of rock ’n’ roll.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-bob-dylan-trouble-20171101-story.html