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CORRESPONDENCE
Not Yet Obsolete
I enjoyed Professor Elting E. Morison’s article “Inventing a Modern Navy” (June/July issue), but a training manual on repelling boarders should not be used as an example of an idea that was outmoded by the late nineteenth century. During World War II the destroyer escort USS Buckley was boarded by the crewmen of a U-boat she had just rammed. Most of the Germans were driven back by small-arms fire, improvised missiles, and even bare fists before their sub sank. Likewise, the crew of the USS Pueblo might have benefited from the study of the art of repelling boarders.
Robert L. Lytch
Orangeburg, S. C.
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Military vs. Civilian
When Alain Enthoven and the other “Whiz Kids” first hit the Pentagon with their economists’ approach to cost efficiency, they had a majority of the military staff in favor of both their goals and their methods. It appeared we had some young tigers who, with the power of the Office of the Secretary of Defense behind them, might finally achieve some meaningful savings by eliminating duplication of facilities, matèriel, and people among the services. But after about a year they found the fight to win these goals from Congress too tough and chose instead to usurp the roles of generals and admirals.
In his interview “Why the Military Can’t Get the Figures Right” (February/March) and in his book, Mr. Enthoven said that the real generals and admirals are inherently unwilling to adapt to new technologies that might make a favored weapon obsolete, that they showed no serious interest in evaluating weapons and operations and stopping the ones that were ineffective and building on the ones that were effective, that the single greatest need was to create an independent force, outside the professional military, that could look at military decisions in relation to cost and other considerations.
Under Mr. McNamara’s tutelage, they did set up such an independent force. Some results:
1. Under the guise of savings through commonality, the Air Force was made to cancel its F-105 fighter-bomber program and to buy the Navy F-4 interceptor aircraft to be used as a fighter-bomber and for low-level reconnaissance—roles for which it was totally unfit.
At that time, the F-105 was the first and only aircraft designed as a fighter-bomber for the Air Force for its tactical mission. Its design incorporated ideas from “Think Tanks” and hundreds of experienced fighter pilots. It had the 20-mm “Catling” gun installed in the nose for best accuracy and could carry huge loads of ordnance and had a precise, automated aiming and weapon-release system. Contrast this with the Interceptor F-4, which had to be modified extensively even to attach a bomb; plus a makeshift aiming and gun system had to be added. The shape of the F-4 made it highly vulnerable to radar-directed guns and missiles. This “independent force” decision was made shortly before the buildup for Vietnam—a time when the Air Force needed a real fighter-bomber. The Air Force ended up spending more on the F-4 and its modifications than the continued production of the F-105 would have cost, and it still had an unfit weapon.
2. Then, during the war, these pseudo-generals formulated and imposed the incredibly stupid policy of “controlled response.” This was followed by dictating that the Air Force would bomb the same target for several consecutive days for evaluations to be made, for instance, as to how many F-4s would have to be sent with such and such a bomb load and fuzings to destroy, say, three spans of a bridge. The pattern of our operations was so fixed that as soon as the first target for that week had been attacked, the North Vietnamese moved every available defensive weapon from other locations to that target. The Air Force paid an unnecessarily heavy price in crew and aircraft losses using equipment inadequate for the task and flying suicidal missions for acquiring useless data for some future war.
Mr. McNamara and his Whiz Kids might have succeeded in giving us a unified military with little duplication of facilities, matèriel and people, and with enormous savings over the last twenty-five years. But they gave up their chance for greatness when they abandoned their assignment and assumed roles for which they had no experience or qualification.
James R. Carter, Col. USAF Ret.
LasCruces, N.M.
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Military vs. Civilian
Alain Enthoven replies: Colonel Carter got it wrong.
1. Experience showed the decision to cancel the F-105 and buy the F-4 was a very good one. The F-105 was designed primarily for nuclear-weapons delivery, because in the 1950s the Air Force leaders thought all wars would be nuclear. The F-4 was more powerful, rugged, and, with two engines, much safer for pilots. The official Air Force had to fight to save its F-105, but plenty of Air Force pilots privately confirmed the results of our analysis that the Navy/Marine Corps F-4 was a better all-around fighter for nonnuclear war.
2. “Controlled response” was a doctrine we developed for the conduct of nuclear war in opposition to the previous “uncontrolled spasm response” doctrine. Every President since Kennedy has supported some version of that basic idea.
“Controlled response” and McNamara’s Whiz Kids had absolutely nothing to do with Air Force or Navy targeting doctrine in the Vietnam War. Nor did anyone in my office prescribe choices of weapons, though our pre-war efforts did enable the United States to enter the war with much larger and better inventories of accurate guided weapons than otherwise would have been the case. At times, President Johnson did direct which targets would be struck and when, because he was using air strikes in conjunction with diplomatic efforts. Those orders were handled strictly by the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff without involvement of my office. I don’t doubt that at times the President’s orders seemed pretty incomprehensible from the military point of view of the officers who had to carry them out. But I am sure most Americans, including most military officers, would agree that the President is responsible for making such decisions.
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Song of Calumet
I first heard of the “event that killed a city” (“The Calumet Tragedy,” April/May) many years ago in a song entitled “1913 Massacre” and written by Woody Guthrie, composer of “This Land Is Your Land” and many other songs. Here are the lyrics:
Take a trip with me in 1913,
To Calumet, Michigan, in the copper country.
I’ll take you to the place called Italian Hall
And the miners are having their big Christmas ball.…
A little girl sits down by the Christmas tree lights
to play the piano, so you gotta be quiet.
To hear all this fun you would not realize
That the copper boss thugs are milling outside.
The copper boss thugs stuck their heads in the door.
One of them yelled and he screamed, “There’s a fire!”
A lady she hollered, “There’s no such a-thing!
“Keep on with your party. There’s no such a-thing!”
…A man grabbed his daughter and he carried her down,
But the thugs held the door and he could not get out.
And then others followed, a hundred or more.
But most everybody remained on the floor.
The gun thugs they laughed at their murderous joke
And the children were smothered on the stairs by the door.
Such a terrible sight I never did see.
We carried our children back up to their tree.
The scabs outside still laughed at their spree
And the children that died there were seventy-three.…
Guthrie, born in 1912, didn’t get all the facts straight (the inquest disproved that deputies held the doors of the Italian Hall shut, and the number of children killed was sixty-three), but his song is certainly an effective condemnation of the forces that may have caused this tragic event.
Tom Ewing
Columbus, Ohio
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Disastrous Test
In “Ordeal by Touch” (April/May), Lawrence B. Custer examined the seventeenth-century practice in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of finding a murderer by requiring a suspect to touch the victim’s corpse. It is historically significant that a comparable phenomenon occurred in the Plymouth Colony in 1675.
It is alleged that King Philip of the Wampanoags ordered the execution of one John Sassamon, an Indian traitor. This was done. The colony, which had found Sassamon useful, rounded up several promising suspects and noted that, although Sassamon’s corpse had been interred for several months, it bled when one of the three suspects approached it. In George F. Willison’s Saints and Strangers, Dr. Increase Mather is quoted as reporting that Sassamon’s corpse “fell a-bleeding as fresh as if it had been newly slain, albeit it was buried a considerable time before that.” Naturally, this proof justified the quick hanging of all three Indian suspects.
To the Wampanoags, this interference with Philip’s discipline was not to be tolerated. After years of humiliation, the Indians rebelled and fell upon the neighboring town of Swansea. Thus, the hangings, justified by the bleeding, ignited King Philip’s War.
John R. Hall
Arlington, Va.
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Ike Liker
I was thoroughly amused by the tirades of Messrs. Kasper and Stein in your June/July “Correspondence” column. I recall, vividly, being besieged by similar tirades when, as a young first-time voter in New York City, I bravely wore my four-inch “I Like Ike” button and actually felt I was at risk of bodily harm from the likes of Kasper and Stein. They were certain then, as now, that their view of events was the only, the absolute, truth. Fortunately, those of us who know we were right to like Ike are legion.
Brasilia M. Calilri
Oak Ridge, N. J.
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Holmes’s Obsession
Miller B. Zobel’s “Enlisted for Life” (June/July) recounts the famous anecdote of Oliver Wendell Holmes shouting at Abraham Lincoln on the parapet of Fort Stevens in 1864. Although Holmes himself was the source of this tale, having related it to several close friends in his declining years, its accuracy has always been questionable. Apparently the Justice said different things to different people: to Felix Frankfurter he implied that he had not recognized Lincoln, while to Harold Laski he evidently stated that he was the President’s escort. The dozen or so other eyewitness accounts of Lincoln under fire do not mention Holmes at all.
Whether accurate or not, this story further illustrates the remarkable affinity between Holmes and the Civil War that Judge Zobel has documented in his article.
Everard H. Smith
Chapel Hill, N. C.
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Wrong Railroad
In the interest of historical accuracy, I’d like to make a small correction to Clarence W. Johnson’s letter in the April/May issue. I believe the railroad involved, the N.C. & St. L., was the Nashville, Chattanooga, & St. Louis Railway, not the North Carolina and St. Louis. Known as The Dixie Line, it was absorbed into the Louisville & Nashville in 1957 and is now part of the Seaboard System.
Gordon Bassett
Colorado Springs, Colo.
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Semantic Confusion
I wonder how many of your readers were pulled up short as I was by Professor Wenhui Hou’s statement that “Americans are overly introverted (it is only on the surface that they pretend to be outgoing)” in “Getting to Know Us” (February/March). This is certainly the opposite criticism of the one commonly made of us by visitors from other cultures.
It becomes clear in the article that Professor Hou is using introverted as a synonym for self-centered. Whether or not she is aware that one of our extroverts can be just as self-centered as any introvert I have no way of knowing, but this hardly matters in view of her clarification on the first sentence of the following paragraph.
She says that “it can seem as though no one cares about anyone else,” a statement that expresses the crux of the difference between her culture and ours. In China, where people have lived at close quarters for so many generations, the concept of being “self-centered” (or individualistic) presents an almost insurmountable hurdle to the mind. Hence, apparently, her reason for settling upon the colorless neologism introverted. We would do well to realize that the self-centered individual entered upon the stage of history about the same time that America did, and that, as Professor Hou did not hesitate to tell us, “American history is very short.”
R. E. Steussy
Eugene, Ore.
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Nothing like Texas
While not a native Texan, I must reply to Phil Leslie’s letter in the April/May issue about Texas’s “big deal”—its 150th anniversary. First there is the important matter of being the only state (outside the original thirteen) to achieve independence by revolution. How can the mere admittance to statehood (shared by thirty-seven others beside Arkansas) compare to this? What does Arkansas have to compare to the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto? And assuming they do have something as impressive, what are they doing to celebrate it compared to the Texas wagon train, the recent spectacular at San Jacinto, not to mention a year-long variety of programs? If some Arkansas event occurs, I trust some writer from the land of opportunity will have taken the opportunity to submit a piece to you.
Paul V. Lutz
Houston, Tex.
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