The Civil Wargasm

The Civil Wargasm

The reading of Confederates in the Attic this week started with a visit with Shelby Foote in his home in Tennessee.  Foote is a well respected expert on the Civil War, who appeared and became famous in Ken Burn's documentary, The Civil War.  He speaks of the war much as Southerners must have in the 1860's.  He uses similies and metaphors, "If you look at American history as the life span of a man, the Civil War represents the great trauma of our adolescence."  As Horwitz puts it every answer Foote gave was, "a perfect sound bite."  Foote is a true Southerner; he is drawn to the land, the people, the culture, and that it's not the North.  Shelby Foote's favorite aspect of the Civil War was the Battle of Shiloh.  Shiloh was a major battle in the War's western theater and marked the begging of Ulysses S. Grant's rise to fame; this not being why Foote was so enamored with the battle.  Foote's great-grandfather fought in the battle and Shelby had visited the site over 20 times; when asked what drew him to the battle he replied, "If you've drawn or written about a particular historical incident in a particular place, the placebelongs to you in a sense.  I feel that way about Shiloh....I swear I can see and hear soldiers coming through the trees."  Shelby Foote has a very romantic view of the Civil War and his passion is evident in his musings with Horwitz.

Civil War enthusiast Shelby Foote.  Courtesy of Tumblr.

In Horwitz's visit to Shiloh, he encounters an anomaly.  Wolfgang Hochbruck, an ex-German military man wearing a blue Federal uniform.  If that's not weird enough, he was doing the exact thing Horwitz was and guessed his name.  Both were researching to write books on the memory of the Civil War and Wolfgang had emailed Tony months before to compare notes, but Tony never received the message.  Wolfgang was a professor of history who taught the Civil War in Germany.  The two a lot in common, so Horwitz joined Wolfgang on his tour of Shiloh.  The two chatted and hiked for awhile and had dinner that night.  As they parted Wolfgang told Tony, "I'm glad you didn't before [answer the email], it was much better that we met on the field of battle."  What a crazy coincidence.

Horwitz's trip into Mississippi was filled with drinking and racists.  Vicksburg was filled with casinos and had lost touch with some of it's past.  One thing is worth talking about and that's the Minie Ball Pregnancy story.  During the Civil War recruits were taught to aim low to improve their hit ratio.  The guns and bullets weren't terribly accurate.  Even with the invention of the rifled barrel and Minie Ball.  A smooth barrel is like throwing a knuckle ball in baseball, while a rifled barrel puts spin on the bullet like throwing a fast ball.  Unfortunately, curveballs, sliders, etc also require spin so you still didn't quite know where the bullet was going to go still.  Anyway, aiming low led to a lot of soldiers being wouned in the lower abdomen and groin.  Legend has it that one soldier was shot straight through the groin and the bullet hit a woman in the groin standing in the distance.  9 months later she had a baby.  The couple found each other after the war, married and had two more children conventionally.

Minie Ball Pregnancy exhibit in Vicksburg.  Courtesy of Greetings from Mississippi.

The highlight of our reading this week was the really long chapter on the Civil Wargasm with Robert Lee Hodge.  This sounds like it would be one helluva trip to take over the summer.  Not with Rob though, I want a change of clothes, a shower, and not to be crammed in a car in the Southern heat with a man wearing a thick wool uniform.  If anyone who enjoys shorts, showers, and beds wants to join in just let me know.  Rob and Tony took Tony's car and started driving the South for a weeks time, following the path of the war; starting at Manassass (Bull Run) and ending at Appomattox with Lee's surrender to Grant.  I'm not going to go into much detail about the Wargasm experiences because i don't have the time, they went to so many places and Rob had so many opinions.  Although I did think hiking in to Bloody Lane at Burnside's Bridge was pretty cool.  My favorite part of the Wargasm didn't occur in that week of driving though.  It occurred five days later when Rob called to get Tony to reenact Pickett's Charge of Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg.  I think this would have been so fun and exhilarating to do, not just because it's historical importance but also because of the crowd that formed to cheer them on while they stormed the hill.  It was probably just an adrenaline rush but Horwitz finally has his "period rush" (the high reenactors feel when traveling back in time) making Pickett's Charge.  I'd definitely have to "farb out" (Rob's phrase for not being fully authentic) but I think an experience like this would be a once in a lifetime and unique experience.

Artist rendition of Pickett's Charge.  Courtesy of Britannica.

"A University is just a bunch of buildings gathered around a library" - Shelby Foote

Kategoriler:

Tarih Notları, Atatürk Dönemi İç Politika Gelişmeleri, II.TBMM Dönemi,  Nasturi İsyanı, İsyanlar,  Atatürk Dönemi İsyanları,

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Hirsch's "Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg" at WHS

The next meeting of the Washington History Seminar will be devoted to Francine Hirsch, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her book, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II.  It will be held on Thursday, November 12 at 4:00 pm ET.  Click here to register.

Organized in the wake of World War Two by the victorious Allies, the Nuremberg Trials were intended to hold the Nazis to account for their crimes and to restore a sense of justice to a world devastated by violence. As Francine Hirsch reveals in her groundbreaking new book, a major piece of the Nuremberg story has routinely been left out: the critical role of the Soviet Union. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers a startlingly new view of the International Military Tribunal and a fresh perspective on the movement for international human rights that it helped launch.

--Dan Ernst

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Gerstle & Isaac, eds., "States of Exception in American History"

New from the University of Chicago Press: States of Exception in American History, edited by Gary Gerstle (University of Cambridge) and Joel Isaac (University of Chicago). A description from the Press:

States of Exception in American History brings to light the remarkable number of instances since the Founding in which the protections of the Constitution have been overridden, held in abeyance, or deliberately weakened for certain members of the polity. In the United States, derogations from the rule of law seem to have been a feature of—not a bug in—the constitutional system.

The first comprehensive account of the politics of exceptions and emergencies in the history of the United States, this book weaves together historical studies of moments and spaces of exception with conceptual analyses of emergency, the state of exception, sovereignty, and dictatorship. The Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Cold War figure prominently in the essays; so do Francis Lieber, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, Clinton Rossiter, and others who explored whether it was possible for the United States to survive states of emergency without losing its democratic way. States of Exception combines political theory and the history of political thought with histories of race and political institutions. It is both inspired by and illuminating of the American experience with constitutional rule in the age of terror and Trump.

Some chapters that are especially likely to interest our readership:

2 Negotiating the Rule of Law: Dilemmas of Security and Liberty Revisited

Ewa Atanassow and Ira Katznelson

4 The American Law of Overruling Necessity: The Exceptional Origins of State Police Power

William J. Novak

5 To Save the Country: Reason and Necessity in Constitutional Emergencies

John Fabian Witt

6 Powers of War in Times of Peace: Emergency Powers in the United States after the End of the Civil War

Gregory P. Downs

9 Constitutional Dictatorship in Twentieth-Century American Political Thought

Joel Isaac

10 Frederick Douglass and Constitutional Emergency: An Homage to the Political Creativity of Abolitionist Activism

Mariah Zeisberg

 

More information is available here.

 

-- Karen Tani

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Losano on War Prohibitions in Postwar Constitutions of Japan, Italy and Germany

The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History announces a new publication, Three constitutions against war: Japan, Italy, Germany, by Mario G. Losano.  It is Volume 14 of the Open Access series Global Perspectives on Legal History:

The three defeated powers from the Second World War incorporated provisions prohibiting wars of aggression into their post-war constitutions, which are still in force. The first part of the book covers the difficult years for Japan, Italy and Germany between the end of the war and the start of peace (with the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, denazification, reparations and the renewal of the school system), analysing the birth of the three constitutions between 1947-49.

The consequences of defeat were different in each of the three countries, and hence each followed its own path in formulating the prohibition on war. However, the division of the world into two hostile blocs required the three countries to rearm, thus launching a process that resulted in the watering down of the original prohibition on war. In fact, the three countries’ involvement in international bodies requires each of them to participate in new wars, which are now branded as “peacekeeping” missions. There have thus been increasingly frequent calls to modify or even revoke these pacifist articles, above all in Japan (due to its geopolitical position).

The second part looks at three extensive annexes of documents that detail a specific aspect of each of the three states’ constitutional pathways. Japanese pacifism is examined with reference to the Allied documents that laid the groundwork for the post-war constitution. This leads to a consideration of current political debates concerning the amendment of the pacifist article, under pressure from Russian and Chinese interests coupled with the threat of North Korean aggression. With regard to Italy, its interest in Japan through the figure of the soldier-poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and his “samurai brother” is considered, alongside the now-forgotten “Partisans for Peace” movement, drawing on two unpublished documents. Germany, on the other hand, was divided into two countries after the World War II, with West Germany adopting a “Basic Law”, which has now been extended to the reunified Germany. The book considers excerpts from the reports of the constituent assembly concerning the adoption of the pacifist article. The equivalent East German legislation is documented in more summary terms, as that legal system is now little more than a historical footnote.

This threefold historical-constitutional inquiry provides an account of the birth and development of the pacifist article imposed by the victorious Allies, thus allowing for a better understanding of current debates concerning its impending modification.

--Dan Ernst

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The Polish Exodus To Iran in World War 2

In light of the horrific deaths of refugees & migrants crossing into Europe and the alarming xenophobic sentiments that are being spouted on the radio waves, I have decided to bring attention to an almost forgotten footnote in history; the Polish refugees of Iran.

A Polish woman decorates her tent, in an American Red Cross camp in Tehran, Iran. 1942

Why were the Polish in Iran?
Time for some backstory. It's September 1939 - Germany and the Soviet Union have invaded Poland and partitioned the country between the two. To say life was miserable for the Polish at this time would be an understatement. The Soviet Union interned over 320,000 Polish citizens and deported them to Siberia for work in the infamous Gulags. Another 150,000 Poles died, in gruesome massacres such as the Katyn massacre. Stalin began emptying Poland of anyone who could resist the occupation. First went military officers and their families, then the intelligentsia, and last anyone with wealth, influence or education.

Fast forward to 1941 and Nazi Germany launched a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa, the largest military campaign in history). Officially on the side of the Allied powers in July 1941, Joseph Stalin signed a Polish-Russian agreement that led to the foundation of a Soviet-backed Polish army that was to be made up of Polish prisoners of war who were 'pardoned' from the Gulags. The formation of such an army would take place in British-occupied Iran.

With news of their mass release, Poles began to slowly make their way towards Iran. With the Polish government in exile unable to assist their compatriots, and the Soviets refusing to allow access to trains to facilitate their exodus, fatalities due to hunger, the Siberian cold, violence, disease and simple exhaustion were high. By August 1942, a conservative estimate suggests more than 115,000 Poles (included 40,000 civilians) fled to Iran. At most, it is thought 300,000 Poles fled.

Camp Polonia:

The soldiers who enlisted in Anders' Army (named after its commander Władysław Anders) regrouped in Bandar Pahlavi, Mashhad and eventually Ahvaz, before being transferred to British command in Mandatory Palestine.

Young Polish refugee at a camp operated by the Red Cross in Tehran, Iran. Nick Parrino, 1943

The civilians were left in the refugee camps that sprawled up around the country. Having first arrived in the port of Bandar Pahlavi (now Bander Anzali) on the northern Iranian coast, a makeshift city comprising over 2000 tents (provided by the Iranian army) was hastily erected along the shoreline of Pahlavi to accommodate the refugees. It stretched for several miles on either side of the lagoon: a vast complex of bathhouses, latrines, disinfection booths, laundries, sleeping quarters, bakeries and a hospital. Every unoccupied house in the city was requisitioned, every chair appropriated from local cinemas. Nevertheless, the facilities were still inadequate.

The Iranian and British officials who first watched the Soviet oil tankers and coal ships list into the harbour at Pahlavi on the 25th March 1942 had little idea how many people to expect or what physical state they might be in. Only a few days earlier, they had been alarmed to hear that civilians, women and children, were to be included among the evacuees, something for which they were totally unprepared.[4] The ships from Krasnovodsk were grossly overcrowded. Every available space on board was filled with passengers. Some of them were little more than walking skeletons covered in rags and lice. Holding fiercely to their precious bundles of possessions, they disembarked in their thousands at Pahlavi and kissed the soil of Persia. Many reportedly sat down on the shoreline and prayed, or wept for joy.

They had not quite escaped, however. Weakened by two years of starvation, hard labour and disease, they were suffering from a variety of conditions including exhaustion, dysentery, malaria, typhus, skin infections, chicken blindness and itching scabs. The spread of typhus in particular was deadly to such an extent that 40% were hospitalised and a large proportion later died.

Overcrowded ship crossing the Caspian Sea to Pahlavi

Gholam Abdol-Rahimi, a struggling photographer in Pahlavi, emerged from bed to witness ships disgorging disheveled refugees. Abdol-Rahimi's photographs are perhaps the most complete account of the catastrophe. But his work was never recognized or published.

Pahlavi was only a temporary shelter. Refugees were later dispersed to more prepared camps in Isfahan (Isfahan in particular being dubbed as the 'City of Polish Children'), Tehran and Ahvaz.

More than 13,000 of the arrivals in Iran were children, many orphans whose parents had died on the way. In Russia, starving mothers had pushed their children onto passing trains to Iran in hopes of saving them.

As the war dragged on, most refugees continued their journey away from the Soviet Union, reaching Pakistan, Palestine and British East Africa & South Africa, eventually to the United Kingdom and the United States.

The Polish cemetery in Bander Anzali (Pahlavi)

In all, 2,806 refugees died within a few months of arriving and were buried in cemeteries around Iran. Their alien names and the dates on their tombstones chronicle a calamity, even to a visitor without knowledge of their history. Etched on row after row of identical tombstones is a single year of death: 1942.

Polish military cemetery, Tehran.

Further reading:
Forgotten Polish Exodus to Persia - Washington Post
The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939-1956. Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann. page 26-27 
The Polish Deportees of World War II: Recollections of Removal to the Soviet Union and Dispersal Throughout the World. Tadeusz Piotrowski. page 10-12.

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Does History Repeat Itself?

Not exactly.

First of all, let's get the fine print out of the way; every moment in time itself is unique and forever lost. You never obtain the exact same conditions (unless you happen to own a rather expensive real life Sim game). So technically history cannot literally repeat itself, unless you're a fervent believe in radical physics theories.

And now to the actual discussion. Does history in fact repeat itself? There are common themes throughout the history of human civilisations. Let's take the example of religion. All cultures, from the huts of the Mongolian steppes to the rainforests of Central America have a religion of sorts; Animism, Shamanism, Christianity, Islam and so on. The absence of a so-called 'Atheist civilisation' may be a simple coincidence. It could be a by-product of human curiosity; What is the warm life-giving Sun? Why does the Sun set and so on... It has to be a superior being (which is probably why religions from Germanic paganism to Roman mythology feature it so prominently). But I'll leave you to ponder on that.

But I digress with all this philosophy. Time for actual history. You'd be forgiven if you looked at certain events in the past and thought "huh, this is familiar? Didn't this happen before?", especially as the current media scramble over the Iran deal in the US Congress. Advocating for the invasion of a country which is allegedly constructing a nuclear stockpile without sufficient evidence (and whose aftermath would trigger a power vacuum that would cause the region to spiral into a chaotic darkness of perpetuity) sounds incredibly familiar, you may be thinking. 

History has a habit of striking similarities. Invasions of Russia in the winter (or ever) have never succeeded (see Napoleon's invasion in 1812 and Hitler's invasion in 1941)  unless you discount the Mongols who wisely invaded from the other side. The same could be said to Afghanistan, earning the title of Graveyard of Empires due to the exceptional difficulty of pacifying the region throughout history (Alexander the Great, the Mughal Khans, the British, the Soviets and currently, the American coalition).

A nation under financial turmoil breeds the rise of radical xenophobic nationalists of the far right; the rise of Hitler & the Nazi Party in a 1930s depression-hit Germany is the most noted of examples. Not too long ago in 2012 did the Greek far right party Golden Dawn win 21 seats (its first ever representation in Greek parliament). The good news is that in subsequent elections, that figure is now down to 17 and with even more elections around the corner, we can be hopeful that number slides down.

Allow me to bring the 5th century Byzantine historian Zosimus into the framework. Zosimus highlighted that great empires fell due to internal conflicts and disunity. Citing the fallen empires of the Greeks and Alexander's Macedon, he brought attention to the need for an external enemy. The rapid growth of the Roman Republic in 53 years, he credited, was due to the devastating Punic Wars fought against Rome's bitter rival, Carthage. Roman themes were embraced and thus championed in the the face of Carthaginian foes. The defeat of Carthage (and the Gauls) set the scene for internal quarrels and civil war, culminating in the replacement of Roman aristocracy with monarchy, which eventually decayed into tyranny.

The eventual fall of all empires was a notion brought up earlier by Dionysius of Halicarnassus who had anticipated Rome's eventual collapse after the defeat of her rivals  (Assyria, Macedonia, Persia). The iconic Italian historian Machiavelli commented on the recurrent themes between "order" and "disorder" within contemporary Italian states between 1434-1494:

..when states have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend, and thus from good they gradually decline to evil and from evil mount up to good.

Machiavelli accounts for this oscillation by arguing that virtù (valor and political effectiveness) produces peace, peace brings idleness (ozio), idleness disorder, and disorder rovina (ruin). In turn, from rovina springs order, from order virtù, and from this, glory and good fortune.

This post can go on forever. To paraphrase Mark Twain; history does not repeat itself. Not exactly, anyways. But it does rhyme. I'll conclude by sharing one of my favourite cartoons on the topic. Let me know what you think in the comment section below!

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Yang Kyoungjong - A Conscript's Story

It was 6 June 1944 and the D-Day landings were in full swing. The largest seaborne invasion in history saw almost 160,000 troops cross the English Channel in a single day and pour into German-occupied Normandy. Amongst the several thousands of German prisoner of wars (POW), American paratroopers captured what they believed was a Japanese soldier in German uniform. Eventually, it turns out he was Korean, why only puzzled the Americans more. What was a Korean doing in the middle of Normandy, thousands of miles away from home?

His name was Yang Kyoungjong and this is the story of how he was an unwilling veteran of the Japanese, Soviet and German army during the most devastating conflict of all times. 

Yang Kyongjong (left) in Wehrmacht attire following capture by American paratroopers in June 1944 after D-Day

Let’s turn the clock back to 1938 to a Japanese-ruled Korea. Japan was at war with China, the Soviet Union threateningly loomed above Japanese Manchuria, border clashes, and skirmishes were common. Yang Kyoungjong, a native from Northwest Korea, was amongst thousands of Koreans conscripted into the Kwantung Army of the Imperial Japanese Army, in response to Soviet border hostilities. In 1939, the unofficial conflict climaxed at the Battles of the Khalkhin Gol in Mongolia that saw the defeat of the Japanese Sixth Army and the capture of 3,000 Japanese soldiers, including Yang Kyoungjong. All were shipped to labour camps across the country. 

Fast forward to 1942 & Operation Barbarossa, the largest land invasion in history (with over four million Axis soldiers deployed along a 2,900km Soviet front) was in full gear . The Soviets, having lost enormous portions of land and manpower, began drafting thousands of prisoners (our friend Yang included) to fill in the ranks. 

In early 1943, at the Third Battle of Kharkov which saw the destruction of 52 Soviet divisions, Yang was captured and conscripted into the newly-formed Ostlegionen (German for “Eastern Legions”). Now why would the German Wehrmacht (Army) conscript an “inferior race” into its ranks when it has gone so far in spouting its racial supremacy rhetoric? Simple; manpower, manpower, manpower. Thousands of German soldiers were stuck in German-occupied France and the Balkans, to deal with partisan activity. The general idea was that the Ostlegionen would free up troops to be sent to the Eastern Front. 

Yang, now in German uniform, was sent to the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy in occupied France, later that year. When the events of D-Day occurred, Yang was captured and sent to a POW camp in the United Kingdom, before being transferred to another camp in the United States. At the end of the war, this war veteran became a US citizen and settled in Illinois, where he lived a quiet life. He died in 1992, age 72.

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