The common understanding of the term "conventional wisdom" seems to be that it is, as Dictionary.com puts it, "something that is generally believed; prudence."
However, John Kenneth Galbraith, generally credited with coining the term in his classic The Affluent Society (1958) had a much more precise, much richer definition, which gets into the matter of just what tends to be accepted as such, and why, and what the conventional wisdom of his moment actually was.1
The conventional wisdom is accepted because it is what is acceptable to its adherents (8), accommodated "to the audience's view of the world" rather than "the world that it is meant to interpret" (11). Implied there--more than implied--is that rather than being based on the most rigorous examination of all the known facts, it is a matter of what is convenient ("what most closely accords with self-interest . . . promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life" (7)), flattering, easy to understand (no one likes social or economic complexity), and after the passage of time, familiar to that audience--so much so that its very utterance is reassuring, comforting, ego-affirming, an intellectual life "raft" (7) on the stormy seas of life.
Indeed, repetition of the conventional wisdom is virtually a religious rite (10), while just like religious rites tend to be, it is a source of "inertia and resistance" (16) to the acknowledgment of inconvenient facts and truths, let alone serious grappling with them; outlives any usefulness it may have had as an alternative to the confusion and chaos of an utterly uncontrolled and unmanageable flow of ideas (16); and never surrenders, but only dies (12).
Galbraith makes clear that the conventional wisdom changes over time, that there may be more than one conventional wisdom operative at once (for example, a "liberal" conventional wisdom and a "conservative"), and that it may be "articulated at all levels of sophistication" (for example, in both intricately scholarly and crudely mass audience-oriented renditions of the same idea). Still, by and large the conventional wisdom for society at large--like the conventional wisdom he sought to challenge in that particular book--was that of the comfortable, mainstream, respectable, whose received, generally unexamined, commonplace views, defined above all by their congeniality to the maintenance of their immediate, selfish comfort, are the "mainstream, respectable" ideas.
Robust as Galbraith's discussion of the matter in The Affluent Society is, I still find it useful to refer also to his much later book The Culture of Contentment (1992), about the titular "contented" with the status quo in American life. As he observed, they were untroubled by problems not distressing them personally in the here and now, callous toward others' misfortunes, which they justify by blaming those others for their lot, insensitive to questions of justice, the well-being of the community or the public as a whole, or the long-term at any level; fearful and resentful of any suggestion that might even slightly diminish their comfort; and inclined to inaction over action in dealing with the larger problems of the world. ("Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow; better still, never do it at all.")
The "conventional wisdom," one might say, is how a George F. Babbitt or Archie Bunker sees the world.
Especially coming from the left-liberal Galbraith, the term was rather pejorative. But that is a far cry from saying that made it unuseful--rather more useful, in fact, than our bland, mildly approving use of the term today (i.e. as a synonym with prudence), arguably in itself a reflection of progress giving way to regression.
1. Chapter Two of The Affluent Society, which starts on page six, is actually devoted to explaining the concept in depth and detail because, to his credit, it was the conventional wisdom that he challenged in that book and its follow-ups (The New Industrial State, Economics and the Public Purpose).
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
On "Convenient Social Virtue"
John K. Galbraith first presented the concept of "convenient social virtue" in his book Economics and the Public Purpose--the work that capped off decades of study of the shortcomings of economic orthodoxy as descriptor of or source of solutions for mid-century American life with a social democratic vision for America. There he explained "convenient social virtue" as the presumed "meritoriousness" of "any pattern of behavior, however uncomfortable or unnatural for the individual involved," that is "advantageous . . . for . . . the more powerful members of the community."
One can describe this, as essentially, the demand of the powerful that others quietly defer to their superiors and offer no resistance to their exploitation and misuse because of the presumption that this is right, proper, moral conduct--such that, instead of asking for the material compensation properly due them, or even a measure of genuine respect, they can, at most, be fobbed off with a few words of pious praise for their "good service." Meanwhile, those who refuse to render the service, or demand more than such praise for that service, are subject to "righteous disapproval or sanction" for their "inconvenient" behavior.
Consider, for example, the difference between the way doctors are treated, as opposed to the way nurses are treated. That doctors expect very high compensation for their work is regarded as natural, and society generally does not think it is unseemly when they stand on such a demand. By contrast, nurses who demand better pay or conditions are condemned and even demonized in much media coverage (as in Governor Schwarzenegger's California).
Today where the term "conventional wisdom" remains in use, albeit quite a different use than Galbraith intended, "convenient social virtue" fell by the wayside. This is partly because of the way the book in which Galbraith presented the term has been marginalized--the work summing up his research, thought and proposals even more ignored than those that led up to it. However, it is also a reflection of what led to that work's being so ignored in the workplace. Where "conventional wisdom" was turned from a powerfully critical term into an innocuous or even flattering one, it is difficult to think of "convenient social virtue" being redefined as anything but a criticism of inequality and exploitation in need of redress--a thing with which the conventional wisdom already had little patience then, and rather less now.
Which is exactly why we need the term now more than ever.
One can describe this, as essentially, the demand of the powerful that others quietly defer to their superiors and offer no resistance to their exploitation and misuse because of the presumption that this is right, proper, moral conduct--such that, instead of asking for the material compensation properly due them, or even a measure of genuine respect, they can, at most, be fobbed off with a few words of pious praise for their "good service." Meanwhile, those who refuse to render the service, or demand more than such praise for that service, are subject to "righteous disapproval or sanction" for their "inconvenient" behavior.
Consider, for example, the difference between the way doctors are treated, as opposed to the way nurses are treated. That doctors expect very high compensation for their work is regarded as natural, and society generally does not think it is unseemly when they stand on such a demand. By contrast, nurses who demand better pay or conditions are condemned and even demonized in much media coverage (as in Governor Schwarzenegger's California).
Today where the term "conventional wisdom" remains in use, albeit quite a different use than Galbraith intended, "convenient social virtue" fell by the wayside. This is partly because of the way the book in which Galbraith presented the term has been marginalized--the work summing up his research, thought and proposals even more ignored than those that led up to it. However, it is also a reflection of what led to that work's being so ignored in the workplace. Where "conventional wisdom" was turned from a powerfully critical term into an innocuous or even flattering one, it is difficult to think of "convenient social virtue" being redefined as anything but a criticism of inequality and exploitation in need of redress--a thing with which the conventional wisdom already had little patience then, and rather less now.
Which is exactly why we need the term now more than ever.
Friday, October 26, 2018
Review: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, by Adam Tooze
New York: Viking, 2018, pp. 720.
In Adam Tooze's Crashed the crash of 2008 was not a mere subprime crisis from which America recovered, even as general disruption and downturn helped dip Europe into a sovereign debt crisis, in respects more severe but also largely resolved--a case resting in part on a very different understanding of just how the world economy works. As Tooze takes pains to make clear at the outset, it is not the national balance sheets that get so much attention but corporate balance sheets that are the scene of the "real action"--and in this case particularly the oligarchy of twenty or thirty globally significant banks. Moreover, this oligarchy was not national but thoroughly international. Rather than Wall Street and the City of London being separate nodes, they are complexly intertwined, with the City of London long shaped by American bankers in the London offices of Wall Street firms, while the policies they helped craft there influenced America's in turn (the repeal of Glass-Stegall in 1999 foisted on the American public in the name of retaining Wall Street's competitiveness with London). In its turn the City was a key point of interconnection between the American and European financial systems more generally, which can usefully be thought of as a single trans-Atlantic system.
Indeed, 2008 was at bottom a crisis of private banks rather than nations, and a trans-Atlantic crisis rather than an American one, as Europe's bankers equally generated a continental real estate bubble while putting their money into the toxic assets American firms generated.1 Moreover, after Europe's banks got caught up America's woes, they benefited substantially from the American bail-out, as much a bail-out of the European banks as the Americans (which extended as far as "swap lines" in which the Fed provided Europe with much needed dollars in exchange for Europe's currency). Subsequently the United States played a considerable part in the management of Europe's "own" crisis--underlining the continued predominance of the U.S. in a world where there is still no substitute for the American dollar or American Treasury bills as a safe asset to hold. Beyond establishing the thoroughly private, and thoroughly transnational, trans-Atlantic nature of the crisis, Tooze emphasizes that it did not end (as he had himself thought was the case when he started writing this book back in 2012), but that its effects continue to reverberate through the world economy and political life even a decade on, connecting it with the intensified internal stresses evident around the world, and the heightening of international tensions that has followed from it.
In approaching this material the main the book provides a chronicle of the conduct of government officials and central bankers in the United States and Western Europe as a whole, with occasional glances at the unfolding of smaller or related portions of it, like the crises of Ireland and Greece, and to a lesser extent, North Africa, Russia or China--more like The Deluge than The Wages of Destruction in its accent on diplomatic history rather than economic nuts and bolts, and it is in some ways a problematic approach.
Tooze's tracing of the players' machinations is lucid, and serves his purpose of demonstrating the trans-Atlantic and ongoing character of the current financial system and its crisis admirably. However, he is less successful in relating the smaller stories associated with it. (Just how, precisely, did Greece amass its sovereign debt? The matter is treated cursorily and conventionally, and alas the conventional answer is deeply unsatisfactory.) More significantly, Tooze provides only limited insight on the deeper roots of the crisis that he acknowledges lie back in the 1970s, let alone providing a real critical standpoint. Appalled as he may be by what was done to save the financial system, the sacrifice of Main Street to save Wall Street, so to speak; and the starkly undemocratic, anti-democratic character of policy and its justifications (exemplified by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble's brazen declaration that "elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy"--shades of Continuum, that); he implicitly accepts that "There Is No Alternative" to what was done. Consequently, while I do not think Tooze "misses the forest for the trees," describing the individual trees is mostly what he does, so that it is easy for a reader of this book to do so, and he may be due more credit for providing substantial raw material for the study of those issues than supplying such a study this time around. All the same, what the book does right is a considerable feat in itself, ample to justify yet another addition to the vast body of work already existing on the subject, and well worth attention from anyone seriously interested in a crisis that he is right to treat as still unfolding.
In Adam Tooze's Crashed the crash of 2008 was not a mere subprime crisis from which America recovered, even as general disruption and downturn helped dip Europe into a sovereign debt crisis, in respects more severe but also largely resolved--a case resting in part on a very different understanding of just how the world economy works. As Tooze takes pains to make clear at the outset, it is not the national balance sheets that get so much attention but corporate balance sheets that are the scene of the "real action"--and in this case particularly the oligarchy of twenty or thirty globally significant banks. Moreover, this oligarchy was not national but thoroughly international. Rather than Wall Street and the City of London being separate nodes, they are complexly intertwined, with the City of London long shaped by American bankers in the London offices of Wall Street firms, while the policies they helped craft there influenced America's in turn (the repeal of Glass-Stegall in 1999 foisted on the American public in the name of retaining Wall Street's competitiveness with London). In its turn the City was a key point of interconnection between the American and European financial systems more generally, which can usefully be thought of as a single trans-Atlantic system.
Indeed, 2008 was at bottom a crisis of private banks rather than nations, and a trans-Atlantic crisis rather than an American one, as Europe's bankers equally generated a continental real estate bubble while putting their money into the toxic assets American firms generated.1 Moreover, after Europe's banks got caught up America's woes, they benefited substantially from the American bail-out, as much a bail-out of the European banks as the Americans (which extended as far as "swap lines" in which the Fed provided Europe with much needed dollars in exchange for Europe's currency). Subsequently the United States played a considerable part in the management of Europe's "own" crisis--underlining the continued predominance of the U.S. in a world where there is still no substitute for the American dollar or American Treasury bills as a safe asset to hold. Beyond establishing the thoroughly private, and thoroughly transnational, trans-Atlantic nature of the crisis, Tooze emphasizes that it did not end (as he had himself thought was the case when he started writing this book back in 2012), but that its effects continue to reverberate through the world economy and political life even a decade on, connecting it with the intensified internal stresses evident around the world, and the heightening of international tensions that has followed from it.
In approaching this material the main the book provides a chronicle of the conduct of government officials and central bankers in the United States and Western Europe as a whole, with occasional glances at the unfolding of smaller or related portions of it, like the crises of Ireland and Greece, and to a lesser extent, North Africa, Russia or China--more like The Deluge than The Wages of Destruction in its accent on diplomatic history rather than economic nuts and bolts, and it is in some ways a problematic approach.
Tooze's tracing of the players' machinations is lucid, and serves his purpose of demonstrating the trans-Atlantic and ongoing character of the current financial system and its crisis admirably. However, he is less successful in relating the smaller stories associated with it. (Just how, precisely, did Greece amass its sovereign debt? The matter is treated cursorily and conventionally, and alas the conventional answer is deeply unsatisfactory.) More significantly, Tooze provides only limited insight on the deeper roots of the crisis that he acknowledges lie back in the 1970s, let alone providing a real critical standpoint. Appalled as he may be by what was done to save the financial system, the sacrifice of Main Street to save Wall Street, so to speak; and the starkly undemocratic, anti-democratic character of policy and its justifications (exemplified by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble's brazen declaration that "elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy"--shades of Continuum, that); he implicitly accepts that "There Is No Alternative" to what was done. Consequently, while I do not think Tooze "misses the forest for the trees," describing the individual trees is mostly what he does, so that it is easy for a reader of this book to do so, and he may be due more credit for providing substantial raw material for the study of those issues than supplying such a study this time around. All the same, what the book does right is a considerable feat in itself, ample to justify yet another addition to the vast body of work already existing on the subject, and well worth attention from anyone seriously interested in a crisis that he is right to treat as still unfolding.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Unemployment: The Perspective of a Decade
It has been almost a decade since the deepest economic crisis the world has seen the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The pain was not equally felt everywhere. For Greece, for example, the hardship in the form of economic contraction and spiking unemployment really did reach Great Depression levels.
It was not nearly so bad in the United States. Still, the modest U-3 measure of unemployment did hit 10 percent (in October 2009), stayed above 9 percent for two and a half years (30 months), above 8 percent for close to four years (43 months), above 7 percent for almost five years (59 months) and above 6 percent for six solid years (73 months).
More inclusive measures present an even worse picture, the U-6 (which counts those who want full-time work but are stuck working part-time, for example) at or even above 17 percent for five months, and at or above 10 percent for over seven years (88 months)--while it should be remembered that even the U-6 has been charged with undercounting unemployment in general and the post-2008 spike in unemployment specifically, entirely overlooking millions of "displaced workers."
Today the U-3 is at a near-record low of below 4 percent (3.9), the U-6 well under 8 percent (7.5) as of this past July, while major news outlets crow that job openings now outnumber the jobless. This implies boom times.
Still, the low unemployment numbers overlook the reality of lower work force participation pretty much across the board demographically speaking, as does one of the seemingly brighter reasons for it (more people in school--in school because they have to be in an age of credentialing crisis).
The movement of wages tells a similar story about the relationship between supply and demand in the labor market. In 2008 the median hourly wage was $15.57. Last year the median hourly wage was reported as $18.12. If one adjusts the figure for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, then wages have risen a mere 4 percent in the past decade. If one regards the CPI as understating inflation (do you really feel that prices went up just 12 percent in all that time?) then real earnings may well be below their pre-crisis levels. If one expects them to have some relationship to GDP growth (about 10 percent after inflation when calculated in the same way, roughly Great Depression-era rates, but there it is all the same) then by this measure workers have lost ground.1
Some recovery, that.
1. For the purposes of this calculation I used the Bureau of Economic Analysis' figures on U.S. GDP for 2008 and the second quarter of 2017 ($14.7 trillion and $19.4 trillion), and the commonly reported population figures of 304 and 325 million, for the two points.
The pain was not equally felt everywhere. For Greece, for example, the hardship in the form of economic contraction and spiking unemployment really did reach Great Depression levels.
It was not nearly so bad in the United States. Still, the modest U-3 measure of unemployment did hit 10 percent (in October 2009), stayed above 9 percent for two and a half years (30 months), above 8 percent for close to four years (43 months), above 7 percent for almost five years (59 months) and above 6 percent for six solid years (73 months).
More inclusive measures present an even worse picture, the U-6 (which counts those who want full-time work but are stuck working part-time, for example) at or even above 17 percent for five months, and at or above 10 percent for over seven years (88 months)--while it should be remembered that even the U-6 has been charged with undercounting unemployment in general and the post-2008 spike in unemployment specifically, entirely overlooking millions of "displaced workers."
Today the U-3 is at a near-record low of below 4 percent (3.9), the U-6 well under 8 percent (7.5) as of this past July, while major news outlets crow that job openings now outnumber the jobless. This implies boom times.
Still, the low unemployment numbers overlook the reality of lower work force participation pretty much across the board demographically speaking, as does one of the seemingly brighter reasons for it (more people in school--in school because they have to be in an age of credentialing crisis).
The movement of wages tells a similar story about the relationship between supply and demand in the labor market. In 2008 the median hourly wage was $15.57. Last year the median hourly wage was reported as $18.12. If one adjusts the figure for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, then wages have risen a mere 4 percent in the past decade. If one regards the CPI as understating inflation (do you really feel that prices went up just 12 percent in all that time?) then real earnings may well be below their pre-crisis levels. If one expects them to have some relationship to GDP growth (about 10 percent after inflation when calculated in the same way, roughly Great Depression-era rates, but there it is all the same) then by this measure workers have lost ground.1
Some recovery, that.
1. For the purposes of this calculation I used the Bureau of Economic Analysis' figures on U.S. GDP for 2008 and the second quarter of 2017 ($14.7 trillion and $19.4 trillion), and the commonly reported population figures of 304 and 325 million, for the two points.
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
"Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity": Thoughts
Having spent some years and some hundreds of pages on the question of Britain's economic rise and decline (you can check it out here), and gone through a good deal of the controversy about the process, I find myself with something to say not just about the subject, but about the debate.
On the whole, my explanation is that it was mostly a matter of the ways in which the changing technical state of the art interacted with the physical geography of Britain (size, location, natural resources) within the context of a complex international economic and political system to favor and disfavor it in various ways over the century.
However, a good many people prefer to simply say "culture." By which they mean that once upon a time the British people, or at any rate their elite, were practical and tough-minded, and then they stopped being that. After three decades and four volumes, this is what Correlli Barnett's celebrated study of the issue has to say. Apparently the public schools and the churches made Britain's rulers just too "gentlemanly" for their own good!
There is no point in denying that I, for one, am extremely suspicious of explaining large historical events in terms of nebulous cultural forces.
There is also no point in denying that such explanations are basically a matter of political axe-grinding, and especially where the Barnett version is concerned, right-wing axe-grinding.
It was those damned uppity workers and their labor unions! The lazy college kids who studied the humanities instead of engineering or business! Those nouveau riche businessmen who turned their backs on trade in favor of the country estate! The soft-headed aristocrats who went in for welfare states and socialism and all that paternalistic nonsense! The peaceniks who went in for appeasement and all the rest! Oh, would that we had a bit of Prussian iron in us! (And indeed, many a Thatcherite did read Barnett, or claim to have done so, like climate change denier Nigel Lawson.)
Still, at this point in working through the material (one can literally make a lifetime of this, and many have), I can say that it is also a matter of the simplicity of such explanations, compared with the sheer intricacy of the more material explanations that seem to me so much more persuasive.
After all, it wasn't simply that Britain had coal. It was that Britain had an abundance of easily exploitable coal--vast amounts of bituminous coal rather than, for example, lignite, and in surface deposits that were easy to mine, and the more attractive because Britain was so poor in wood, while the abundant water transport Britain's mix of rivers and coastline conferred on it made it, with a little work, feasible to move large amounts of bulk mineral around the island. And it wasn't just the value of coal as a fuel. It was also the fact that the need to transport all that fuel encouraged canal-building, and port development, and shipping, and ship-building, all of which had vast implications by integrating the British economy, while the ports and the ship-building and the rest also helped integrate its economy into the world economy. It was, too, the fact that, just as the flood control problem had factored into the Dutch development of inanimate power sources (windmills to power the pumps), digging deeper and coping with flooding gave Britain a greater incentive than any other country to refine the steam engine . . .
Meanwhile, coal and steam are bound up with the expansion of Britain's iron output in the critical period, which is hard to understand without some reference to metallurgy. Indeed, many histories do mention something called "puddling" and another thing called "rolling," and offer some description of them, along with the assertion that they made a difference, but the descriptions tend to be fragmentary, missing the key details, while in general they give little sense of why they made such a difference.
Getting a fuller description of the process takes some doing--in my experience, going to much more specialized books dealing with metallurgy and its history. (I certainly did--as the footnotes in the paper testify.) One has to concern themselves with the ways in which carbon and sulfur and phosphorous affect ironmaking; the differences between Baltic and British ores, and between charcoal and coal and coke in themselves and their uses as fuels. They also have to spend some time figuring out how prior methods of smelting and processing iron worked, and didn't work--get to the bottom of the differences between blast furnaces and puddling furnaces and finery forges and a whole host of other technologies no one uses today . . .
It helps to have some geology, some physics, some chemistry. (In fact, there were formulas to explain just what limestone is doing in the middle of all this.) Even as someone who is not a physical scientist, it seems to me that a high school education is enough to get a handle on the basics here.
But then, as Sinclair Lewis wrote, those things everyone is supposed to know, no one knows. And I get the impression that even a good many of the more talented and diligent historians can't cope with it, or can't be bothered to try, or if they do get a handle on it, feel they don't have such a firm handle on it as to be able to explain it concisely to a general reader.
Rather than dig into all that it is far, far easier to just say "culture," the more so because a substantial part of the population responds to such "Big Thinks" by grunting in admiration like Tim Taylor at the remarks of neighbor Wilson. Especially that part of the population which hates labor unions and college kids and all the rest.
On the whole, my explanation is that it was mostly a matter of the ways in which the changing technical state of the art interacted with the physical geography of Britain (size, location, natural resources) within the context of a complex international economic and political system to favor and disfavor it in various ways over the century.
However, a good many people prefer to simply say "culture." By which they mean that once upon a time the British people, or at any rate their elite, were practical and tough-minded, and then they stopped being that. After three decades and four volumes, this is what Correlli Barnett's celebrated study of the issue has to say. Apparently the public schools and the churches made Britain's rulers just too "gentlemanly" for their own good!
There is no point in denying that I, for one, am extremely suspicious of explaining large historical events in terms of nebulous cultural forces.
There is also no point in denying that such explanations are basically a matter of political axe-grinding, and especially where the Barnett version is concerned, right-wing axe-grinding.
It was those damned uppity workers and their labor unions! The lazy college kids who studied the humanities instead of engineering or business! Those nouveau riche businessmen who turned their backs on trade in favor of the country estate! The soft-headed aristocrats who went in for welfare states and socialism and all that paternalistic nonsense! The peaceniks who went in for appeasement and all the rest! Oh, would that we had a bit of Prussian iron in us! (And indeed, many a Thatcherite did read Barnett, or claim to have done so, like climate change denier Nigel Lawson.)
Still, at this point in working through the material (one can literally make a lifetime of this, and many have), I can say that it is also a matter of the simplicity of such explanations, compared with the sheer intricacy of the more material explanations that seem to me so much more persuasive.
After all, it wasn't simply that Britain had coal. It was that Britain had an abundance of easily exploitable coal--vast amounts of bituminous coal rather than, for example, lignite, and in surface deposits that were easy to mine, and the more attractive because Britain was so poor in wood, while the abundant water transport Britain's mix of rivers and coastline conferred on it made it, with a little work, feasible to move large amounts of bulk mineral around the island. And it wasn't just the value of coal as a fuel. It was also the fact that the need to transport all that fuel encouraged canal-building, and port development, and shipping, and ship-building, all of which had vast implications by integrating the British economy, while the ports and the ship-building and the rest also helped integrate its economy into the world economy. It was, too, the fact that, just as the flood control problem had factored into the Dutch development of inanimate power sources (windmills to power the pumps), digging deeper and coping with flooding gave Britain a greater incentive than any other country to refine the steam engine . . .
Meanwhile, coal and steam are bound up with the expansion of Britain's iron output in the critical period, which is hard to understand without some reference to metallurgy. Indeed, many histories do mention something called "puddling" and another thing called "rolling," and offer some description of them, along with the assertion that they made a difference, but the descriptions tend to be fragmentary, missing the key details, while in general they give little sense of why they made such a difference.
Getting a fuller description of the process takes some doing--in my experience, going to much more specialized books dealing with metallurgy and its history. (I certainly did--as the footnotes in the paper testify.) One has to concern themselves with the ways in which carbon and sulfur and phosphorous affect ironmaking; the differences between Baltic and British ores, and between charcoal and coal and coke in themselves and their uses as fuels. They also have to spend some time figuring out how prior methods of smelting and processing iron worked, and didn't work--get to the bottom of the differences between blast furnaces and puddling furnaces and finery forges and a whole host of other technologies no one uses today . . .
It helps to have some geology, some physics, some chemistry. (In fact, there were formulas to explain just what limestone is doing in the middle of all this.) Even as someone who is not a physical scientist, it seems to me that a high school education is enough to get a handle on the basics here.
But then, as Sinclair Lewis wrote, those things everyone is supposed to know, no one knows. And I get the impression that even a good many of the more talented and diligent historians can't cope with it, or can't be bothered to try, or if they do get a handle on it, feel they don't have such a firm handle on it as to be able to explain it concisely to a general reader.
Rather than dig into all that it is far, far easier to just say "culture," the more so because a substantial part of the population responds to such "Big Thinks" by grunting in admiration like Tim Taylor at the remarks of neighbor Wilson. Especially that part of the population which hates labor unions and college kids and all the rest.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
The War on the Eastern Front: Alternative Views
The conventional view of the Axis' invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 seems to go something like this:
What does it say about the comparative German and Soviet military performance? Obviously it cannot dispute the astonishing run of German military victories in 1941--the depth of their penetration into Soviet territory, the vast area they captured and the massive losses they inflicted. And indeed it does not.
However, it does stress that the Soviets were not up against Germany the interwar nation-state, but a Third Reich that had in the prior three years expanded its resources considerably beyond those bounds through annexations, occupations and other forms of control over most of the European continent--over a million Romanian, Finnish and other troops marching east along with their own forces.1 Another is that the Soviets could not use the whole of their forces in the western theater because there were threats from other directions--in the south from Turkey, in the east from Japan. The result was that the Axis assault substantially outnumbered Soviet troops in the key theater. Deborin's book stresses, too, that the Soviet army had been in the midst of a rapid expansion and reequipment (the world-beating T-34s just beginning to arrive while in the meantime Soviet troops made do with older gear, and were just beginning to learn the use of the new) that left it vulnerable at the decisive moment, in contrast with the Germans who had spent the '30s preparing to strike, as they did at the time of their choosing. And finally it acknowledges that the German army of June 1941 had a vastly greater fund of practical operational and battle experience.
In short, far from the image of German supermen fighting a more numerous Soviet foe, it was the Soviets who were outnumbered, outgunned and outmatched in the practical experience that knocks the kinks out of a system, and badly, all of which seems ample to explain losses and defeats. Deborin also emphasizes the relative speed with which the initial shock passed, the stiffening of Soviet resistance, and the first successful Soviet counter-attack at Yelnya (in late August and early September).
As it happens Western studies of the war do not deny any of this, especially when they get away from generalities to discussing hard facts. However, in their analysis they tend to give these factors (numbers of troops, the need to think of other fronts, reequipment, experience) comparatively short shrift and instead emphasize matters to which Deborin pays less attention, and sometimes none at all. They stress the damage done by the armed forces' leadership by the purges of the '30s (the liquidation of a fraction of the officer corps that included such dynamic elements as the remarkable theorist and reformer Mikhail Tukachevsky, and the intimidation of the rest), and the extent to which Stalin was taken by surprise when the attack came and allegedly paralyzed, while citing poor and often disastrously poor generalship generally.1 Western historiography also pays a great deal of attention to Soviet collaboration with the invading forces, while attributing much of the German failure to inclement weather. Deborin mentions the purges, but on the whole offers a glowing (if vague) appraisal of Soviet generalship instead (I must admit I got an impression of some strategic silences here--saying nothing about certain decisions of Stalin's rather than badmouthing him), while like-minded accounts claim collaboration with the invaders was solely the purview of "priests and criminals," and marginalize the weather as a factor in the slowing of the German advance. It is notable, too, that the Soviet accounts I have seen tend to be light on actual numbers, these surprisingly sparse in Deborin's book, where Western writers emphasize the numbers of Soviet troops who became casualties or were taken prisoner.
In short, when writers make reference to concrete specifics, they tend to be in agreement. (The only Soviet claim I didn't repeatedly find in entirely mainstream Western historiography is the one regarding Turkey's role, though Turkey did sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany mere days before the invasion; and there was a precedent in Napoleon combining forces with the Turks when he invaded Russia, a little known part of that well known story; making the tying down of some Soviet forces by fears of a Turkish attack in the south less implausible than it might appear.) It is the omission of some items from the analysis, the marginalization of others--the attribution of relevance and weight--that makes the difference, and this by and large seems predictable in light of the differing biases.
Interestingly, Christer Bergstrom recently endeavored to produce an account of Operation Barbarossa that would transcend the biases of both sides, reviewed here.
1. In contrast with Deborin, Georgy Zhukov in his autobiography has a good deal to say about the surprise the Axis achieved in June 1941, and explains Stalin's refusal to heed warnings that an attack was coming in terms of concern that the West was trying to entangle Germany and the Soviet Union in a war--make the Soviets do the brunt of the fighting to take Germany down, and damage the Soviet Union too in the process.
In June 1941 the German army and its allies struck against the Soviet Union. While vastly outnumbered in manpower and equipment by the forces arrayed against them, German troops inflicted six or eight or even more casualties on the enemy for every one they suffered, while even larger numbers of Soviet troops surrendered as the Germans went from victory to victory in a string of triumphs.If one accepts Ronald Smelser and Edward Davies argument in The Myth of the Eastern Front that the conventional view of the Axis-Soviet portion of World War II, and especially the contrasting images of German and Soviet capability, has been skewed by Nazi propaganda, then what would the alternative look like? One way is to look to the far opposite end of the spectrum of opinion for "the other side" of that portion of the war--not least, the Soviet version. There are not many books offering that version available in English, of course. By and large it seems to be just a matter of old translations of Soviet-era books (the kind of thing the Moscow-based Progress Publishers would put out). One of the better known seems to be Grigory Deborin's Thirty Years of Victory, which to go by my limited survey of such material, seems typical.
The exceptional German performance was due to several factors. One was the extraordinary military proficiency of the country's armed forces, in combination with the extraordinary weakness of their massive, but decrepit enemy. The Soviets suffered from a characteristically rigid command system and shoddy equipment, while many Soviets greeted the Germans as liberators from a wicked Communist rule. All of this was worsened by the madness and incompetence of Stalin--who destroyed his officer corps with a purge in 1937-1938; ignored the signs that an Axis attack was in the offing; and then collapsed for several days, doing nothing as the Wehrmacht rampaged in the west. However, in combination with Hitler's altering the plan mid-course, and exceptionally bad weather--a rainy and muddy fall, an early and harsh winter--Soviet numbers eventually told in the Battle of Moscow in December, finally breaking the six-month succession of victories.
What does it say about the comparative German and Soviet military performance? Obviously it cannot dispute the astonishing run of German military victories in 1941--the depth of their penetration into Soviet territory, the vast area they captured and the massive losses they inflicted. And indeed it does not.
However, it does stress that the Soviets were not up against Germany the interwar nation-state, but a Third Reich that had in the prior three years expanded its resources considerably beyond those bounds through annexations, occupations and other forms of control over most of the European continent--over a million Romanian, Finnish and other troops marching east along with their own forces.1 Another is that the Soviets could not use the whole of their forces in the western theater because there were threats from other directions--in the south from Turkey, in the east from Japan. The result was that the Axis assault substantially outnumbered Soviet troops in the key theater. Deborin's book stresses, too, that the Soviet army had been in the midst of a rapid expansion and reequipment (the world-beating T-34s just beginning to arrive while in the meantime Soviet troops made do with older gear, and were just beginning to learn the use of the new) that left it vulnerable at the decisive moment, in contrast with the Germans who had spent the '30s preparing to strike, as they did at the time of their choosing. And finally it acknowledges that the German army of June 1941 had a vastly greater fund of practical operational and battle experience.
In short, far from the image of German supermen fighting a more numerous Soviet foe, it was the Soviets who were outnumbered, outgunned and outmatched in the practical experience that knocks the kinks out of a system, and badly, all of which seems ample to explain losses and defeats. Deborin also emphasizes the relative speed with which the initial shock passed, the stiffening of Soviet resistance, and the first successful Soviet counter-attack at Yelnya (in late August and early September).
As it happens Western studies of the war do not deny any of this, especially when they get away from generalities to discussing hard facts. However, in their analysis they tend to give these factors (numbers of troops, the need to think of other fronts, reequipment, experience) comparatively short shrift and instead emphasize matters to which Deborin pays less attention, and sometimes none at all. They stress the damage done by the armed forces' leadership by the purges of the '30s (the liquidation of a fraction of the officer corps that included such dynamic elements as the remarkable theorist and reformer Mikhail Tukachevsky, and the intimidation of the rest), and the extent to which Stalin was taken by surprise when the attack came and allegedly paralyzed, while citing poor and often disastrously poor generalship generally.1 Western historiography also pays a great deal of attention to Soviet collaboration with the invading forces, while attributing much of the German failure to inclement weather. Deborin mentions the purges, but on the whole offers a glowing (if vague) appraisal of Soviet generalship instead (I must admit I got an impression of some strategic silences here--saying nothing about certain decisions of Stalin's rather than badmouthing him), while like-minded accounts claim collaboration with the invaders was solely the purview of "priests and criminals," and marginalize the weather as a factor in the slowing of the German advance. It is notable, too, that the Soviet accounts I have seen tend to be light on actual numbers, these surprisingly sparse in Deborin's book, where Western writers emphasize the numbers of Soviet troops who became casualties or were taken prisoner.
In short, when writers make reference to concrete specifics, they tend to be in agreement. (The only Soviet claim I didn't repeatedly find in entirely mainstream Western historiography is the one regarding Turkey's role, though Turkey did sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany mere days before the invasion; and there was a precedent in Napoleon combining forces with the Turks when he invaded Russia, a little known part of that well known story; making the tying down of some Soviet forces by fears of a Turkish attack in the south less implausible than it might appear.) It is the omission of some items from the analysis, the marginalization of others--the attribution of relevance and weight--that makes the difference, and this by and large seems predictable in light of the differing biases.
Interestingly, Christer Bergstrom recently endeavored to produce an account of Operation Barbarossa that would transcend the biases of both sides, reviewed here.
1. In contrast with Deborin, Georgy Zhukov in his autobiography has a good deal to say about the surprise the Axis achieved in June 1941, and explains Stalin's refusal to heed warnings that an attack was coming in terms of concern that the West was trying to entangle Germany and the Soviet Union in a war--make the Soviets do the brunt of the fighting to take Germany down, and damage the Soviet Union too in the process.
Review: Operation Barbarossa, by Christer Bergstrom
I have already remarked the common view of Operation Barbarossa, which some have criticized as badly flawed, among them Christer Bergstrom in his recent book by that name. Here he argues from the outset that the Axis attacked the Soviet Union with a 2-to-1 advantage in troops, and similar advantages in tanks and aircraft, especially at the outset and frequently through the rest of the period, as well as having a great edge in battle experience.1 It was also of consequence that Soviet forces were in the process of a hasty expansion, and at a particularly vulnerable point in a reequipment cycle--particularly where their air force was concerned. (Had the timing of the attack differed by as little as two weeks, the German air operations might not have been nearly so successful, and gone so far to winning air superiority for their side as a result.)
However, in spite of all these advantages (and sometimes disastrous military leadership by Stalin) the Germans inflicted fewer casualties and losses than they have sometimes been credited with (2-to-1 rather than 6-to-1).2 They also took fewer prisoners than is often claimed, due to their counting of the huge numbers of civilians they rounded up as prisoners-of-war; while those actual captures of prisoners of war were never in mass surrenders--as these simply did not occur.3 Indeed, as the initial surprise war off the Wehrmacht came to suffer high losses of equipment and manpower in stalling offensives that ended the hopes of quick victory, and only a real, though decreasing, advantage in air power enabled its further progress, while the Soviets won their first tactical victory in the Yelnya offensive in early September.4 Later that year, despite the Soviet defense still being outnumbered, it beat the invader back from Moscow in a victory that was the true turning point of the war, after which a German triumph over the Soviets, and with it an Axis triumph in Europe or anywhere else, was an increasingly remote prospect.5
In assessing the Soviet victory Bergstrom also pays ample tribute to the tenacity of a not merely patriotic but ideologically committed Soviet people in resisting them; Soviet skill in relocating industrial plant eastward before the Germans could capture it; and the Soviet armed forces' doctrinal innovations, both the "deep operations" doctrine, and the Soviet system for rapid regeneration of their fighting forces, that fortunately did not die with Mikhail Tukachevsky when he became a victim of the purges, but rather endured, and if the Soviet leadership implemented them less quickly than they might otherwise have done, still put them to use in time to stave off defeat.6
As Bergstrom promised, this is a very different account than the one we are accustomed to seeing in the West--one which goes beyond merely debunking the "superman" image of German forces to rating the Soviet defense much more highly than is usual. As Bergstrom points out, they did no worse than their Western counterparts in the Battle of France, with Soviet doctrinal and operational failings rather less appalling than those of the French in 1940, and as Bergstrom's statistics make clear, the losses of the Soviets less lopsided, even in the face of a more formidable offensive than the Western allies ever faced. (If the Germans made three or even five casualties or prisoners of the Soviets for every loss of their own, the vast number of French prisoners the Germans took made the proportion more like nineteen to one in their western campaign.) Indeed, given their disadvantages in numbers, equipment, and other areas, it is the Soviets who appear to have overcome the greater odds than the ostensible supermen.
Especially as Bergstrom's account is not only more than usually positive in its assessment of the Soviet performance, but reflects specific factors much more stressed in Soviet historiography than Western, some will be tempted to dismiss Bergstrom's book out of hand as merely substituting Soviet conventional wisdom for Western. However, the fact remains that Bergstrom does not minimize the technical and operational proficiency of the Germans, whom he argues could not have fought any more skillfully they did on this level (even if tactical success was mooted by a dismal strategic conception--Hitler's expectation the Soviets would simply collapse at the first blow).
Moreover, Bergstrom makes much of factors that the Soviet writing on the subject I have seen tend to slight--like the way the purges and the readiness of at least some elements within the Soviet Union to collaborate with the Axis helped its advance, or favorable weather aided the Soviet defense.7 (Indeed, just as Bergstrom argues that Western writers have made too much of the weather, he criticizes Soviet writers as having made too little of it.) Bergstrom is especially profuse and withering in his criticism of Stalin, of whom he takes the conventional Western view--whether discussing the purges, his failure to heed the signals that Hitler was about to attack, or his handling of the war, refusing to order timely retreats that might have extracted badly needed forces for later use, and scapegoating able and loyal generals for defeats.8 In fact, in Stalin's missing many an opportunity to defeat Hitler more quickly, Bergstrom assigns him equal responsibility with the Nazi dictator for the deaths of tens of millions.
Only someone completely unfamiliar with the conventional Soviet view could see all of that as simply a conveyance of it. One might more plausibly charge Bergstrom with deliberate striving for a compromise view, attempting to create a "balanced picture" at the expense of the truth (the way that the mainstream media does when it pretends there is a "debate" about whether or not anthropogenic global warming is a fact). However, this too strikes me as unfair, especially where the more fully military aspects of the discussion are concerned. The detailing of the operational history (some four-fifths of the text) is not only comprehensive, but backed up by ample statistics, lavishly sourced, and thoroughly contextualized. This does, admittedly, come at some cost to the book's readability--even those who can cope with such perhaps tempted to skim quite a few stretches--but it makes Bergstrom's case for his position a very formidable one indeed, sufficient to show, yet again, that a good deal of rethinking of the view of the Nazi-Soviet conflict taken for granted in the West is long overdue.
1. The count is 3.35 million Wehrmacht troops, backed by 1.1 million Finns and Romanians, versus 2.3 million Soviet troops in the key theater. The Soviets had 24,000 tanks--but over 21,000 of these were outdated light tanks (the largest portion of them 6-ton T-26s), so that in medium and heavy tanks the Soviets were outnumbered. Moreover, only a portion of the tank force was present in the relevant region (some 12,000 tanks of all types).
2. The Axis inflicted 2 million casualties on Soviet forces in the relevant phase--while suffering 1 million of their own, a 2-to-1 ratio. Even when prisoners taken are counted, this amounts to a 3-to-1 or at most 5-to-1 ratio. The Germans destroyed 7 Soviet tanks for every one they lost (20,500 to 2,800), but again, most of those were the aforementioned light tanks rather than the advanced T-34s and KVs then available only in small numbers. The situation was more favorable to the Germans in the air--a 9-to-1 exchange rate in aircraft (16,000 to 1,700), and 20-to-1 in aerial combat (7,000 to about 360)--but this reflected the massive destruction of Soviet planes on the ground and the shooting down of numerous unescorted bombers in the early period of the war rather than the norm over the course of 1941.
3. Of 3.3 million Soviet "prisoners" taken in this phase of the war, Bergstrom estimates 500,000 were actually civilians.
4. The first month alone saw 300,000 Axis casualties, as well as a quarter of its tanks out of action and half its aircraft destroyed or damaged.
5. The Soviet forces were outnumbered 2-to-1 in manpower and 3-to-1 in armor in the battle for Moscow, and only had an advantage in the air (important as that admittedly proved). By the end of the year the Axis armies' casualties were in the range of one million, while their tank and plane losses were equivalent to two-thirds of the Axis' initial stock.
6. Examples of these include the propensity of Soviet pilots for ramming their planes into attacking German aircraft to destroy them, and the voluntarism and self-organization manifest in the Military Soviet for the Defense of Leningrad in late 1941, which helped save that city. Bergstrom recounts numerous expressions of shock and even admiration on the part of the Germans in response to the resistance they encountered, down to Hitler's dismayed expression as the German offensive underperformed that the "rotten" and "subhuman" Soviet Union was in fact a "colossus and strong."
7. Bergstrom emphasizes that where the purges did not actually eliminate capable officers, they made many of them hesitant to take the initiative, and reversed earlier progress in doctrine with regard to the use of armor.
8. Soviet writers--like Marshall Zhukov in his memoirs--do not deny Stalin's missing the warning, but argue that the West had long been trying to push the Soviets into war with Germany, so as to make it bear the brunt of defeating the Nazis, making his overcaution plausible. Notably Bergstrom does not take this view.
However, in spite of all these advantages (and sometimes disastrous military leadership by Stalin) the Germans inflicted fewer casualties and losses than they have sometimes been credited with (2-to-1 rather than 6-to-1).2 They also took fewer prisoners than is often claimed, due to their counting of the huge numbers of civilians they rounded up as prisoners-of-war; while those actual captures of prisoners of war were never in mass surrenders--as these simply did not occur.3 Indeed, as the initial surprise war off the Wehrmacht came to suffer high losses of equipment and manpower in stalling offensives that ended the hopes of quick victory, and only a real, though decreasing, advantage in air power enabled its further progress, while the Soviets won their first tactical victory in the Yelnya offensive in early September.4 Later that year, despite the Soviet defense still being outnumbered, it beat the invader back from Moscow in a victory that was the true turning point of the war, after which a German triumph over the Soviets, and with it an Axis triumph in Europe or anywhere else, was an increasingly remote prospect.5
In assessing the Soviet victory Bergstrom also pays ample tribute to the tenacity of a not merely patriotic but ideologically committed Soviet people in resisting them; Soviet skill in relocating industrial plant eastward before the Germans could capture it; and the Soviet armed forces' doctrinal innovations, both the "deep operations" doctrine, and the Soviet system for rapid regeneration of their fighting forces, that fortunately did not die with Mikhail Tukachevsky when he became a victim of the purges, but rather endured, and if the Soviet leadership implemented them less quickly than they might otherwise have done, still put them to use in time to stave off defeat.6
As Bergstrom promised, this is a very different account than the one we are accustomed to seeing in the West--one which goes beyond merely debunking the "superman" image of German forces to rating the Soviet defense much more highly than is usual. As Bergstrom points out, they did no worse than their Western counterparts in the Battle of France, with Soviet doctrinal and operational failings rather less appalling than those of the French in 1940, and as Bergstrom's statistics make clear, the losses of the Soviets less lopsided, even in the face of a more formidable offensive than the Western allies ever faced. (If the Germans made three or even five casualties or prisoners of the Soviets for every loss of their own, the vast number of French prisoners the Germans took made the proportion more like nineteen to one in their western campaign.) Indeed, given their disadvantages in numbers, equipment, and other areas, it is the Soviets who appear to have overcome the greater odds than the ostensible supermen.
Especially as Bergstrom's account is not only more than usually positive in its assessment of the Soviet performance, but reflects specific factors much more stressed in Soviet historiography than Western, some will be tempted to dismiss Bergstrom's book out of hand as merely substituting Soviet conventional wisdom for Western. However, the fact remains that Bergstrom does not minimize the technical and operational proficiency of the Germans, whom he argues could not have fought any more skillfully they did on this level (even if tactical success was mooted by a dismal strategic conception--Hitler's expectation the Soviets would simply collapse at the first blow).
Moreover, Bergstrom makes much of factors that the Soviet writing on the subject I have seen tend to slight--like the way the purges and the readiness of at least some elements within the Soviet Union to collaborate with the Axis helped its advance, or favorable weather aided the Soviet defense.7 (Indeed, just as Bergstrom argues that Western writers have made too much of the weather, he criticizes Soviet writers as having made too little of it.) Bergstrom is especially profuse and withering in his criticism of Stalin, of whom he takes the conventional Western view--whether discussing the purges, his failure to heed the signals that Hitler was about to attack, or his handling of the war, refusing to order timely retreats that might have extracted badly needed forces for later use, and scapegoating able and loyal generals for defeats.8 In fact, in Stalin's missing many an opportunity to defeat Hitler more quickly, Bergstrom assigns him equal responsibility with the Nazi dictator for the deaths of tens of millions.
Only someone completely unfamiliar with the conventional Soviet view could see all of that as simply a conveyance of it. One might more plausibly charge Bergstrom with deliberate striving for a compromise view, attempting to create a "balanced picture" at the expense of the truth (the way that the mainstream media does when it pretends there is a "debate" about whether or not anthropogenic global warming is a fact). However, this too strikes me as unfair, especially where the more fully military aspects of the discussion are concerned. The detailing of the operational history (some four-fifths of the text) is not only comprehensive, but backed up by ample statistics, lavishly sourced, and thoroughly contextualized. This does, admittedly, come at some cost to the book's readability--even those who can cope with such perhaps tempted to skim quite a few stretches--but it makes Bergstrom's case for his position a very formidable one indeed, sufficient to show, yet again, that a good deal of rethinking of the view of the Nazi-Soviet conflict taken for granted in the West is long overdue.
1. The count is 3.35 million Wehrmacht troops, backed by 1.1 million Finns and Romanians, versus 2.3 million Soviet troops in the key theater. The Soviets had 24,000 tanks--but over 21,000 of these were outdated light tanks (the largest portion of them 6-ton T-26s), so that in medium and heavy tanks the Soviets were outnumbered. Moreover, only a portion of the tank force was present in the relevant region (some 12,000 tanks of all types).
2. The Axis inflicted 2 million casualties on Soviet forces in the relevant phase--while suffering 1 million of their own, a 2-to-1 ratio. Even when prisoners taken are counted, this amounts to a 3-to-1 or at most 5-to-1 ratio. The Germans destroyed 7 Soviet tanks for every one they lost (20,500 to 2,800), but again, most of those were the aforementioned light tanks rather than the advanced T-34s and KVs then available only in small numbers. The situation was more favorable to the Germans in the air--a 9-to-1 exchange rate in aircraft (16,000 to 1,700), and 20-to-1 in aerial combat (7,000 to about 360)--but this reflected the massive destruction of Soviet planes on the ground and the shooting down of numerous unescorted bombers in the early period of the war rather than the norm over the course of 1941.
3. Of 3.3 million Soviet "prisoners" taken in this phase of the war, Bergstrom estimates 500,000 were actually civilians.
4. The first month alone saw 300,000 Axis casualties, as well as a quarter of its tanks out of action and half its aircraft destroyed or damaged.
5. The Soviet forces were outnumbered 2-to-1 in manpower and 3-to-1 in armor in the battle for Moscow, and only had an advantage in the air (important as that admittedly proved). By the end of the year the Axis armies' casualties were in the range of one million, while their tank and plane losses were equivalent to two-thirds of the Axis' initial stock.
6. Examples of these include the propensity of Soviet pilots for ramming their planes into attacking German aircraft to destroy them, and the voluntarism and self-organization manifest in the Military Soviet for the Defense of Leningrad in late 1941, which helped save that city. Bergstrom recounts numerous expressions of shock and even admiration on the part of the Germans in response to the resistance they encountered, down to Hitler's dismayed expression as the German offensive underperformed that the "rotten" and "subhuman" Soviet Union was in fact a "colossus and strong."
7. Bergstrom emphasizes that where the purges did not actually eliminate capable officers, they made many of them hesitant to take the initiative, and reversed earlier progress in doctrine with regard to the use of armor.
8. Soviet writers--like Marshall Zhukov in his memoirs--do not deny Stalin's missing the warning, but argue that the West had long been trying to push the Soviets into war with Germany, so as to make it bear the brunt of defeating the Nazis, making his overcaution plausible. Notably Bergstrom does not take this view.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Considering Britain's Military Drawdown After 1945
Looking into the historians' debate on British decline I was struck by the coverage of the country's military drawdown between World War II and the 1970s, when it turned from dominant power and global military superpower into a regional military actor with some residual out-of-area commitments and capabilities, but in most ways, roughly on par with other industrialized states of the same size (of which there are several in its neighborhood alone). Some parts of the story are fairly well-covered in the literature, like the development of Britain's nuclear deterrent, and some of the other aspects of the story have at least been the subject of some solid books, like Eric Grove's study of the post-war British navy, From Vanguard to Trident (reviewed here). Still, there was little about the period compared with other phases of British military history, what there was of substance usually narrowly specialist stuff, and I sought in vain for really concise, really comprehensive pieces about the whole process, or even many portions of it. (Because of its connection with the nuclear deterrent there was a fair amount on, for example, the V-bomber force; but try finding anything comparable on the post-war Fighter Command, let alone Transport Command.)
While the comparative scanty and uneven nature of the coverage of a fairly important bit of history is unfortunate, it is unsurprising given the biases of military historians that Jeremy Black described so well in his book on the subject. Ultimately I wound up forming my picture of what went on from scattered bits. And as I had previously written about the country's economy I wound up consolidating them into new writing, which it seemed worthwhile to post up at SSRN given the scarcity of detailed material.
Apart from the more military-related bits in my long "Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity" (overall, more concerned with economics than defense) I have completed four pieces:
"The Evolution of Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1979."
"The Restructuring of the British Navy, 1945-1979."
"The Evolution of the British Carrier Force, 1945-1979."
"Foundations of Semi-Superpower Status: Financing Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1971."
The first paper, "Evolution," considers the country's overall posture as it developed phase by phase between 1945 and 1979. The following two consider the British navy (the funding and manning of the forces, their mission and distribution around the world, the key changes in their technology), "Restructuring" its overall development in the 1945-1979 period, while "Carrier Force" (naturally) focuses more tightly on its carrier force during the same years. The last, "Foundations," considers how Britain's posture was resourced.
Having gone through all that, I find myself less concerned with putting together a picture of British policy in that earlier period; and for that matter, the ways the issue echoed in British culture at the time; and more interested in relating it to what we are seeing now. A half century ago Britain decided to give up the global military aspirations, deeming carriers, "east of Suez" forces and the rest unaffordable and focusing on Europe. Now Britain is exiting the EU, commissioning supercarriers, and once again, getting a base "east of Suez" (in Bahrain, where it had a base until 1971). Any thoughts about all that?
NOTE: The four pieces discussed here have since been collected, with other pieces, in the collection The Long Drawdown: British Military Retrenchment, 1945-1979, now available at Amazon and other retailers.
While the comparative scanty and uneven nature of the coverage of a fairly important bit of history is unfortunate, it is unsurprising given the biases of military historians that Jeremy Black described so well in his book on the subject. Ultimately I wound up forming my picture of what went on from scattered bits. And as I had previously written about the country's economy I wound up consolidating them into new writing, which it seemed worthwhile to post up at SSRN given the scarcity of detailed material.
Apart from the more military-related bits in my long "Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity" (overall, more concerned with economics than defense) I have completed four pieces:
"The Evolution of Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1979."
"The Restructuring of the British Navy, 1945-1979."
"The Evolution of the British Carrier Force, 1945-1979."
"Foundations of Semi-Superpower Status: Financing Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1971."
The first paper, "Evolution," considers the country's overall posture as it developed phase by phase between 1945 and 1979. The following two consider the British navy (the funding and manning of the forces, their mission and distribution around the world, the key changes in their technology), "Restructuring" its overall development in the 1945-1979 period, while "Carrier Force" (naturally) focuses more tightly on its carrier force during the same years. The last, "Foundations," considers how Britain's posture was resourced.
Having gone through all that, I find myself less concerned with putting together a picture of British policy in that earlier period; and for that matter, the ways the issue echoed in British culture at the time; and more interested in relating it to what we are seeing now. A half century ago Britain decided to give up the global military aspirations, deeming carriers, "east of Suez" forces and the rest unaffordable and focusing on Europe. Now Britain is exiting the EU, commissioning supercarriers, and once again, getting a base "east of Suez" (in Bahrain, where it had a base until 1971). Any thoughts about all that?
NOTE: The four pieces discussed here have since been collected, with other pieces, in the collection The Long Drawdown: British Military Retrenchment, 1945-1979, now available at Amazon and other retailers.
"Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity"
Back when I wrote the first edition of The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I included in the appendix a brief essay discussing Britain's extraordinary industrial, imperial and military predominance at its nineteenth century peak, and its subsequent passing over the following hundred years. Basically what it came down to was the spread of industrialization as other nations increasingly consolidated. One result was larger-scale industrialized states, another was states which evolved a more sophisticated form of industrialization, and still another were states which combined both features, epitomized by the United States. The balance of economic power shifted in a hurry, the balance of military power with it. Meanwhile the declining acceptability of colonial rule, and the cost of two world wars, accelerated the unraveling of Britain's empire, but that economic change was first and foremost.
Given my historical and other interests I did much more reading and thinking about the issue, unavoidably rethinking what I wrote earlier (just why did others make a bigger success of the "Second" Industrial Revolution, for example?), and writing more. Initially I intended to produce a longer, better-grounded version of the piece in my appendix, later a few short pieces, but it eventually blew up into the paper I have just published through SSRN, "Geography, Technology and Opportunity: The Rise and Decline of British Economic Power" (the second revision of which is now up). About 74,000 words long it is less an appendix than a book in itself--which I suppose offers the same explanation in the end. With (I hope) more rigor, in detail and depth (unexpectedly I found myself coping with matters raging from the comparative phosphorous content of different iron ores to waterway-territory ratios in countries around the world to the finer points of the 1965 National Plan), but nonetheless, the same essential explanation.
If nothing else, I've done a fair job of convincing myself.
Given my historical and other interests I did much more reading and thinking about the issue, unavoidably rethinking what I wrote earlier (just why did others make a bigger success of the "Second" Industrial Revolution, for example?), and writing more. Initially I intended to produce a longer, better-grounded version of the piece in my appendix, later a few short pieces, but it eventually blew up into the paper I have just published through SSRN, "Geography, Technology and Opportunity: The Rise and Decline of British Economic Power" (the second revision of which is now up). About 74,000 words long it is less an appendix than a book in itself--which I suppose offers the same explanation in the end. With (I hope) more rigor, in detail and depth (unexpectedly I found myself coping with matters raging from the comparative phosphorous content of different iron ores to waterway-territory ratios in countries around the world to the finer points of the 1965 National Plan), but nonetheless, the same essential explanation.
If nothing else, I've done a fair job of convincing myself.
Monday, July 16, 2018
Empire, Spies and the Twentieth Century
Studying international relations certain subjects come up again and again and again. Even when one approaches such things as the rise and fall of great powers, hegemony and hegemonic cycles, systemic wars, industrialization and deindustrialization on a principally theoretical level, Britain, its rise and subsequent decline as an economic, military and imperial powers comes up again and again and again--and does so that much more when one takes an interest in concrete history, when one considers the situation of the recent or present or future United States in which so many have seen so many parallels.
Dealing with the spy fiction genre and its history, the same theme is almost inescapable. Much as we may think of spy fiction as a Cold War genre, the truth is that it was already well into middle age when the Cold War took center stage in international life, the thread that has really run through it from its beginning to the present the passing of the British Empire that already by 1900 saw its peak behind it. Anxiety that that empire would pass, bitterness that it seemed to be passing or actually was passing, denial about what was happening, and criticism of all these attitudes, are already there at the very beginning, in such founding works as Erskine Childers' celebrated The Riddle of the Sands and William Le Queux's contemporaneous but much less celebrated Secrets of the Foreign Office. ("The name is Drew, Duckworth Drew.")
As both of these have been major interests for me for decades, thinking about one matter naturally leads back to my thinking about the other, one reason why when writing about the James Bond films and books I spent a certain amount discussing the actual history of the period--more than most such writers, I think. When I published The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I actually included a thirteen page essay devoted to just such historical background in the appendix (and included it again when the second edition of the book came out back in 2015). You can check it out here, reposted on this blog.
Dealing with the spy fiction genre and its history, the same theme is almost inescapable. Much as we may think of spy fiction as a Cold War genre, the truth is that it was already well into middle age when the Cold War took center stage in international life, the thread that has really run through it from its beginning to the present the passing of the British Empire that already by 1900 saw its peak behind it. Anxiety that that empire would pass, bitterness that it seemed to be passing or actually was passing, denial about what was happening, and criticism of all these attitudes, are already there at the very beginning, in such founding works as Erskine Childers' celebrated The Riddle of the Sands and William Le Queux's contemporaneous but much less celebrated Secrets of the Foreign Office. ("The name is Drew, Duckworth Drew.")
As both of these have been major interests for me for decades, thinking about one matter naturally leads back to my thinking about the other, one reason why when writing about the James Bond films and books I spent a certain amount discussing the actual history of the period--more than most such writers, I think. When I published The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I actually included a thirteen page essay devoted to just such historical background in the appendix (and included it again when the second edition of the book came out back in 2015). You can check it out here, reposted on this blog.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
