The Strategy of Victory: How General
George Washington Won the American Revolution. By Thomas Fleming. Da Capo.
$28.
A Crime in the Family: A World
War II Secret Buried in Silence—and My Search for the Truth. By Sacha
Batthyány. Da Capo. $28.
It is customary to think of
war broadly, to regard it as, in Carl von Clausewitz’s famous words, “the
continuation of politics by other means,” and therefore as something
large-scale and momentous. And this is true but incomplete. If war occurs on a
large canvas, it is also the individual stories of the people who fight it, and
there are certainly interstices of war history that repay exploration even many
decades, or even centuries, after a particular conflict is over. The late
Thomas Fleming (1927-2017), in more than 40 books, returned again and again to
analyses of wars and the people who fought and were caught in them. He was
expert in thinking through strategies and tactics by looking closely at
specific occurrences during wartime and the decisions, good or bad, that were
made as a result. Fleming’s books are of scholarly interest for their
interpretative excellence, even when they are somewhat too rarefied to appeal
to a general readership. Books about George Washington, for example, can
reliably be expected to interest people beyond a hardcore group of military
historians; but The Strategy of Victory,
for all its fine arguments and careful consideration of the military
necessities underlying the formation of the United States, is primarily a book
for those already familiar with America’s war for independence and interested
in a new overview of the way that war was won. Fleming shows again and again
that Washington was an exemplary adjuster: he would create strategies and
tactics but would not hesitate to change them when conditions warranted, giving
the Continental Army flexibility that the more-regimented British forces could
not (and, in truth, did not wish to) match. Washington’s forces lost many
battles, Fleming points out, but did not balk at retreating so as to be able to
fight another day – the loss of posts and forts was seen as a necessary
component of eventual victory. Even more interestingly, Fleming shows that when
Washington and his field commanders won
battles, as at Trenton, Monmouth and Saratoga, they did not use their victories
to take on the British frontally in an attempt at decisive victory. Washington
essentially fought a war of attrition, not one of confrontation, except when he
had no choice; and he tried to make sure that he always had a choice. Fleming
does a fine job of showing how Washington made skillful use not only of the
perennially under-funded Continental Army (the “regulars”) but also of
“irregular” militias, whose help proved crucial again and again (and
undoubtedly led to the still-controversial phrasing of the Second Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution). With his penchant for focusing on little-known aspects
of war in addition to better-known ones, Fleming in The Strategy of Victory gives more time and attention to the last
northern battles of the war than other historians do – battles such as
Springfield and Connecticut Farms – before switching to discussions of the
final stages of the war in Virginia and the Carolinas. And Fleming makes clear
that the victory Washington sought was not fully won after the British
surrender at Yorktown in 1781, because the continued refusal by Congress to
appropriate adequate funds for the Continental Army led to simmering resentment
that came to a head in March 1783 in a
near-mutiny that Washington stopped through a personal gesture that
deserves to be far better known. “Washington fumbled in the inner pocket of his
coat and took out a copy of a letter he had recently received from Virginia
congressman Joseph Jones, describing some of the positive steps Congress was
planning to satisfy the officers. After reading the first few lines, he stopped
and peered at the page. Reaching into another pocket, he extracted a set of
eyeglasses he had recently received from Philadelphia. No one except a few
aides had seen him wearing them. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you will permit me to
put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the
service of my country.’” What an amazing, humanizing moment this is in The Strategy of Victory, and what a way
to show that a man usually thought of as distant, wooden, even cold and
calculating, had a deeply heartfelt side that he showed only rarely but that,
when he did so, had – as it had on this occasion – an overwhelming effect.
Fleming manages in this book to show that the grand matters of the American
Revolution were balanced in some ways by the small ones, such as reaching for a
pair of spectacles. He gives a more-humanizing portrait of Washington than many
other historians do, while not neglecting the battlefield detail that the
primary audience for this book will expect. The
Strategy of Victory may be mainly for those already deeply involved in
studies of the American Revolution, but it is also a worthy volume for readers
who may just happen to stumble upon it and start thumbing through it out of a
sense of curiosity.
A much more recent war, one
that ended “only” 75 years ago, is the impetus behind Sacha Batthyány’s memoir, A Crime in the Family. The word “only” belongs in quotation marks
in this context, because the whole point of the book is that for those deeply
involved in World War II, and their descendants and families, the war’s end
feels as if it happened only yesterday. Perhaps, the book argues, wars never
really end, their effects being felt through generation after generation and
affecting people born long after the wars’ official conclusions. Batthyány does not make this statement
directly, but it permeates his telling of the story, which is an ugly, sordid
and highly personal one. Batthyány,
a Swiss-born journalist with Hungarian parents, learns one day that a distant
relative, his great-aunt Margit – an heiress to the German Thyssen fortune –
gave a party in March 1945, near the war’s end, during which an atrocity was
committed: almost 180 Jews were shot dead by people attending the festivities,
stripped naked and forced to dig their own mass grave as Margit and her guests,
many of them prominent Nazis, drank and danced gaily. This is one horror among
many, many others from World War II – wars are nothing without atrocities – but
this one hits home for Batthyány
because someone in his family was involved, and he sets out to learn the truth
about what happened. It proves to be a seven-year search with the aid of the
diary of his paternal grandmother, Maritta, and a separate record kept by
Maritta’s onetime neighbor – Agnes Mandl, an Auschwitz survivor who is still
alive and living in Buenos Aires when Batthyány locates her. The main thing Batthyány finds out, and it is no surprise at all, is that after all
the years and all the deaths, all the records lost or changed or destroyed both
by the Nazis and by the Communists who succeeded them as rulers of Hungary, all
the people who still refuse to speak because they want only to put the memories
of that time behind them, it is simply impossible to know the truth. Batthyány
comes up with several truths, or
aspects of the truth, in a search whose outcome will surprise absolutely no
one. Batthyány’s methodical
research and his journey into his family’s past are nevertheless fascinating,
particularly in the way they stand for something beyond the personal – for the
eternal search for truth and the eternal inability to pin it down as time
passes, memories fade and people try to go on with their post-war lives. Batthyány is not very introspective about
any of this, despite the weekly visits with his psychoanalyst – which he
documents and reports carefully and which are repetitive and annoying, the
weakest part of the book. Batthyány
never finds out exactly what happened in March 1945; readers will realize early
on that he will not. So A Crime in the
Family is a journey of discovery rather than the unraveling of a mystery
(in fact, the massacre of the 180 Jews in the town of Rechnitz has been known
for a long time, so Batthyány
is looking for details about his family’s complicity rather than for new
information about the event itself). Inevitably, Batthyány tells readers that he learned much about himself during his
search and was forced to realize, eventually, that if he had been present at
the time the killings occurred, he would not have had the courage to hide and
protect Jews. That is a touch of honesty, and indeed there is honesty
throughout A Crime in the Family, to
the extent that Batthyány and
the others in it are capable of it in any objective sense after so many years.
The reality is that Batthyány
is just one of thousands upon thousands of people descended from people who
endured horrendous wartime experiences in World War II and other wars, and that
yes, some of those experiences were more intense and horrific than others, and
that yes, there can be something salutary in dredging up the desiccated
remnants of the past for those who choose to do so. But Batthyány, like others exploring long-gone
times that many people would rather forget than recall, thinks not at all of
the collateral damage caused by pushing people to remember in detail times and
events of unimaginable trauma. What Batthyány finds helpful for himself is scarcely that for all the people
he interviews and confronts. Self-focused selfishness in memory extraction is
yet another of the innumerable depredations and long-lasting consequences of
war.
No comments:
Post a Comment