I served in the Army and was stationed at several forts in southern states (where most forts are now located). In the south, their civil war veterans are still revered and honored.

Griereson was from Jacksonville, Ill., when the war started. When he retired from the Army, he returned to Jacksonville, where he died. He is buried on the east side of town, in what is probably the least prestigious cemetery in town. His grave is docorated with a newer government tombstone for the rank of general. Someone, I don’t have a clue, had seen to it that his old, damaged stone was replaced. Unfortunately, on Memorial Day, his gravesite was not decorated with the flag. (This was back in 1999.) I am proud to say that I went to the local Walgreens and purchased one and put it on his grave. My way to honor such a man. Again, thanks for your article, it did much more to honor him than I did.

Hard to believe this sort of drivel comes from the pen of the same guy who wrote “Please Don’t Eat the Pygmies”, a classic exposure of what the negro really is.

How about an article on the Lord’s Resistance Army Gary? Can’t bring yourself to write about the little pickaninnies in Joseph Kony’s child army gobbling up the flesh off their nappy-headed relatives’ bones? That’s something that doesn’t fit the usual Brecher template of swooning adoration for anything with black skin.

it is to my utmost support and sympathy that you have decided, either consciously or through a growing sense of unease, to abandon The eXiled.

This publication has become the embodiment of unstructured intellectual venom, of a perpetual adolescent rebellion that is unable to integrate into the adult world and which therefore is of no use to human civilization other than being an antithesis to what is worthy.
A writer, thinker, and personality of your caliber has nothing whatsoever in common with the founders and hosts of this website, or what they have turned into.

I hope you will get through the grief soon – other great men and women have been there before you when we mourned the loss of our bright youth as we saw them degrade into the mind-numbing self-hatred of the non-accomplisher.

You shall rise again, and find yourself a worthy place in this virtual universe. No doubt it will be a nice, conservative website defending the traditional American values that are the pure essence of what you yourself honor.

Let us know when you have found them, or when they have found you.

Your faithful reader and supporter,
Oksana

PS: Where shall I email a jpeg of my conservative snapper?

Oh, we’re still around. I think you’re thinking of Shakers.

If you haven’t delved too deeply into ww1, I highly recommend The Myth of a Great War by Mosier, it’s right up your alley in subject mater, style, cynicism, etc. It also shows why the standard take on that war is so *$#%ing boring – cause it’s not what happened! (and the British wrote it…)

A tired man I am. Today I fucked my h-u-u-u-g-e chunky lovely lady only twice. If she tells you I fucked her three times, I’d call her a liar.

She’s lovely.

Still no proper answer to my question.

I’ll take the caps off, perhaps it’ll do the trick: a civil war hero? What a strange concept. Is my question more sensible this way now? Nooo…

Yup.

OK. I don’t know much about history, but it seems to me that civil war heroes aren’t that much celebrated around the world, because of a real

good old fucking civil war terror factor that makes one’s cranium explode out of of cheer joy if thinking any of it.

Civil wars were quite often quite bloody ones. A brother against brother, a sister against sister – sometimes even within the family. All in the

family against the family and perhaps your neighborhood against your family too. Nice. Basically, the working class against the ruling class.

If there wasn’t enough blood spilled in the battlefield for your blood hungry appetite, then perhaps prision concentration camp mass

executions without trials and starvation and etc. would satisfied your elegance – all the good stuff a human being can come up with

when thinking about the best of his/her fellow brother’s and sister’s wellbeing.

In many countries these civil war issues are very sensitive indeed, thus: no civil war heroes. Why? No need no further extra polarizarion –

trying to heel the wounds of the Civil War and shit.

So, my extended question is: is the Civil War (note the caps) hero an American concept?

Perhaps a romanticized one?

Although Speer’s relocation & dispersal of German industry was sheer genius, and negated SOME of the impact of USAF “pin-point” bombing – for example, German industry wasn’t ground down to zero by bombing of ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt as US commanders hoped – the loss of ECONOMIES OF SCALE couldn’t help the Germans – and it was those DEEP PENETRATION raids which ground the Luftwaffe down.

Imagine if the Luftwaffe had been able to assemble 2,000 (dispersed) fighter-bombers to repulse D-Day: against sitting-duck ships & especially troop-ships, it would have been a bloody massacre, to make Omaha beach look like a picnic in comparison.

History is also pretty clear that close air support is extremely effective. The Easter Offensive and the Ardennes Offensive completely ground to a halt as soon as the weather cleared.

As far as strategic bombing of enemy war production goes its a mixed bag. Certainly bombing German oil production was effective but those resources may have been better applied elsewhere. I would argue that since there the western allies had the advantage of the English channel for protection spending resources on strategic bombing was a good idea. Bombers could be used right away to apply pressure. Other war material like tanks had to be accumulated until there was enough for a cross channel invasion. Russia on the other hand didn’t have that luxury and had to devote all her resources to stopping the ground advance.

Strategic bombing also has diminishing returns. The 100th bomber off the assembly line is much more cost effective than the 1000th. I was under the impression the decision to bomb Dresden was because we had produced too many bombs and were running out of targets. The war planners figured bombing civilians was better than letting the ordinance sit in a warehouse.

Here is a good resource on the effectiveness of bombing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Bombing_Survey_%28Europe%29

The evidence indicates that while strategic bombing was useful, it was overemphasized in WW2. Its effectiveness depends on what is being bombed and how accurate it is.

There’s probably a lot of truth to the argument that we forced the Luftwaffe to defend factories instead of the thing it was really good at, tactical ground support. But did we really understand that at the time, or did we just get lucky?

Here’s an example of how important the luck of good timing is. In 1940, anticipating that he’d beat Britain with the weapons he had on hand, Hitler shut down a lot of warplane research. By the time this was reversed, a big time lag had been introduced into the Luftwaffe’s ability to respond to Allied technology. Germany was stuck in 1943 with a lot of planes that were a little too primitive to get into a tangle with the P-51s and P-47s and later Spitfires that finally began escorting bombers. But those planes would likely have done fine in anti-infantry operations, while the ME-262 that should have handled the bomber escorts suffered from the delay and an attempt to divert it to ground support.

However, consider a more obscure story. The USAAF was utterly committed to the B-17 because at some point the War Department had to commit to which weapons it would order every damn factory in America to produce. I think this edict came in ’41. Ironically, the P-51 was not part of that edict but it was so easy to mass produce ($50,000 each) that it got shoehorned in and saved the B-17s over Germany. But unlike Germany, US plane development was never suspended, and Douglas was privately working on a radical new bomber called the B-42 Mixmaster that would have changed everything over Germany. While the B-17 had become encrusted with extra turrets that slowed it down, the B-42 was a smaller torpedo-shaped plane with two counter-rotating props in the tail and two side-by-side bubble cockpits, aerodynamic and capable of 410 mph with an 8000 lb bomb load (the average B-17 load was only 5000). But the USAAF had already committed, so it only bought a few prototypes, the first of which flew in ’44, too late to matter.

Since none of the B-42′s parts were new (a pair of P-38 engines instead of the B-17′s four thirsty radials), this plane could have been designed and put into production years earlier. No German prop plane could overtake it in ’44. If one was lost, that only meant three dead instead of thirteen. We could have built more, and run them on less fuel. Schweinfurt would have gotten bombed every week for the rest of the war.

In fact, the B-42 was the ancestor of modern bombers, along with the Arado Blitz and the Mosquito. It was a sound concept, and it could have saved a lot of airmen from a horrible fate if it had gotten the priority of, say, the Manhattan Project.

Failing that, I think we could have accomplished almost as much just by building thousands of F-82 Twin Mustangs, which could carry 4000 lbs of bombs 1280 miles. Imagine the nightmare those would be for the Luftwaffe. But the idea for the F-82 came too late, though the parts were already available.

On strategic bombing -

There were Americans who understood daylight bombing was inefficient. A Strategic Survey was formed to try to calculate the weak points in the German economic system, the one factory that could be destroyed over and over again because everything else depended on what it produced. That is why USAAF carried out suicidal attacks on the Schweinfurt ball bearing factory. But the McClellans in the high command apparently couldn’t stomach the horrible losses from hitting a target with a fully aware enemy.

The strategic bombing cult consisted of guys who read Douhet, who really wanted to terror-bomb civilians into submission. Like Nobel before him, he thought the newest toy would make war too horrible to contemplate, but this proved to be one toy too early.

In later wars the USAF cult ran up against economies so primitive that there was no Schweinfurt, no one factory that really mattered to the agrarian system. I’ve heard it suggested that the bombing went on anyway because the commanders (in chief?) decided if they couldn’t beat Vietnam, they could at least wreck it so badly that no other nation would ever dare defy US demands again. Well, that wears off after a while…

Thank you, Korman, for recommending “The Graveyard of the Fireflies” (US title), a film that I can barely watch because it’s so depressing, but probably as accurate as any account of what modern war is really about – the destruction of an opposing society at its very roots.

Civil War photos -

General Ben Butler looks as worthless as Burnside, and was. Once I saw a photo in the Ken Burns series of a New York officer named “Capt. Dafoe”, and damned if he didn’t look just like actor Willem Dafoe. So keep him on the casting list for the next Civil War movie.

Generals versus businessmen –

Miss Dolan, it’s more like the US Army treats war as an industry, not a business. It’s inherent to a democracy that properly fears a professional military class, and avoids a large standing army. An army of conscript citizen-soldiers is a broadsword, not a rapier, and it can only be used to smash skulls. McClellan really was a businessman, from the then-sexy railroad industry, and he did a fine job of building the Army of the Potomac into a timetable-meeting machine. But then he tried to use it as a rapier for a clean kill. Grant, as any photo will show, was meant to wield a broadsword, and it was he who cast the United States Army into a mold that it cannot escape. Our army won its great struggles with logistics and artillery. Math and scheduling. Since the Great Powers fighting wars before 1945 were all industrialized societies, they increasingly fought the way we were good at fighting. If the war doesn’t fit that model, God help us. Naturally, the world of peoples who might potentially come into conflict with us (many for good reasons) increasingly refuses to give us a war that will fit our model.

1. They became more effective once they figured out which targets to hit & how to hit them

2. But far more important, it was a strategic offense/tactical defense – like Longstreet wanted to do & that the Germans did so well in WW1. Heavy bombers compelled Germans to oppose them with their fighters, which were opposed by the US long range fighters.

That ground down German fighter strength, sapping away fighter cover from the eastern front but more importantly ensuring air superiority in the West so Allied tactical bombing could go on unopposed. That was a big deal. Germans with lots of experience in the East were shocked, stunned. They said it was worse than the eastern front. Modern combat operations were rendered essentially imposible on the German side.

Due to the fighter-bombers hitting bridges and harrassing therail & roads, it took longer for reinforcements to get from the border of France to the fighting than it did to get from the Eastern front to the border of France. The fighter bombers had total freedom because of the heavy bomber campaign. Had the Germans declined the engagements and hid/dispersed their fighters, maybe they could have made a real difference around d-day.