Remembering D-Day

I was too backed up to post about the anniversary of D-Day, but wanted to jot a few thoughts down. In my post about visiting Fort McHenry, I mentioned how shipyards in Baltimore churned out the Liberty Ships that made D-Day (and the Allied victory) possible. As it happens, I am also in the middle of listening to John Keegan’s Six Armies at Normandy. Keegan, a masterful military historian adeptly blends his personal story with the history. As a young boy during World War II, he was living in a quiet corner of west England, where the war was very interesting to a boy – but not close at hand. Then quite suddenly, the Americans began appearing. They came in numbers that were simply unimaginable, bringing with them vehicles and machines never before seen in England like their bulldozers. The American khaki itself glowed compared to the uniforms of the superannuated garrison of the home guard. They were charming and wonderfully casual, and readily tossed friendly children mounds of candy equivalent to a month’s sugar rations. Keegan notes that as a boy he observed, “Something was going on in west England that Mr. Hitler should be extremely concerned about.”

And this was only the engineering units building quarters. Then the troops arrived and just as suddenly were gone – had disappeared. It was June 6, 1944. Keegan reports that men in town kept fiddling with their radios – to keep up with events (a predecessor perhaps to scanning news sites and blogs for some new tidbit of breaking news.)

The mass citizen armies, drawing on America’s bottomless wealth are part of our national narrative. And it is true that it took American generals and bureaucrats to envision and implement the massive landing at Normandy that was the only way to bring the war to its inexorable close.

But while Keegan writes deftly about grand strategy, his books always come down to the furious small unit actions and the individual soldiers that fight them that actually comprise a war. Keegan notes that while there is an American national myth, the U.S. Army has its own soul – he feels it is in Leavenworth, Kansas. Leavenworth was the staging ground for the Indian War of the 1870s and 1880s. In these conflicts small detachments, far from home, fought savage battles on unfamiliar terrain. Keegan writes that their successors in the American paratroop divisions did credit to this ethos in the landing areas inside France on D-Day.

This ethos lives on as the U.S. Army confronts challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere) in places where inherent American advantages in material are neutralized and the soldiers are forced to rely on their training, guts, and initiative.

About 2500 Allied troops died on D-Day (and several thousand more Germans). World War II was a war of 9/11s weekly, if not daily. Terrorism is terrible, but so is a full-scale of war of attrition between industrialized great powers. Hopefully, that era of human history has drawn to a close.

Memorial Day at Fort McHenry

On Memorial Day I visited Fort McHenry in nearby Baltimore, where almost 200 years ago, the Star-Spangled Banner was written after the Fort held out against a British bombardment and prevented a British fleet from entering Baltimore harbor and sacking the city. In studying the history of the fort, it encapsulates the history of what we now call homeland security.

Fort McHenry was the linchpin of a defense system built around the city of Baltimore and paid for primarily by the city, with some state and federal support. The federal government then was much weaker than now. Baltimore merchants had prospered as privateers attacking British shipping (the British were capturing American ships and pressing American sailors into their service). They knew they would be targeted and took matters into their own hands. The officers serving at Fort McHenry were also from these mercantile families. A certain parallel with the NYPD’s impressive counter-terrorism bureau suggests itself. Two hundred years ago, cities protected themselves with networks of fortifications – now they need intelligence networks. But just as Baltimore had to build the forts for themselves, according to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, “We’re still defending the city pretty much on our dime.”

Fort McHenry is most famous for its role in the War of 1812, but its role as a military installation continued. In the Civil War it was a fort, but perhaps more importantly for the war effort, it was used as a prison. Over 2200 people, including many of Maryland’s most prominent citizens (including state legislators) were held there under legally ambiguous circumstances. The fear was that if Maryland (a slave state) joined the Confederacy then Washington DC would be surrounded and the war would be lost.

In World War I, Fort McHenry served as an army hospital, serving the multitudes of wounded from “The War to End All Wars.” The Fort remained in service when the war ended and a deadly pandemic swept the globe killing tens of millions.

In World War II the Fort McHenry was a Coast Guard station. Every coast in the United States was considered vulnerable to German and Japanese attack, but Baltimore would have been an important target. Just a few miles from Fort McHenry was Sparrows Point, home to Bethlehem Steel’s giant steelworks (then the largest steelworks in the free world). Their steel was sent to the Fairfield Shipyard where Liberty Ships were built. Ugly and slow, American shipyards could churn out Liberty Ships faster then U-boats could sink them. Over 2700 were built in WWII, 385 at Fairfield.



Since WWII, Fort McHenry has not had a military function. It is a National Park, and in the best tradition of that service it preserves something essential to our common heritage as Americans. While there I watched the changing of the flag on Memorial Day and heard the Veterans speak - a ritual about binding ourselves together and to our common past. That is Fort McHenry’s new role in national security, as a reminder of our common history and that there is something special about this country and a reason we revere its symbols – and that it is worth fighting for…

Fort McHenry’s time as a physical defender is long past. It’s new mission, as a spiritual one is only just beginning.

Remembering the Beirut Embassy Bombing: April 18, 1983

Twenty-five years ago today a late model GMC truck packed with explosives slammed into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and crashing through the lobby door. In his memoir See No Evil former CIA operative Robert Baer, who devoted much of this career to identifying the perpetrators of the bombing, “Even by Beirut standards, it was an enormous blast…”

Often overshadowed by the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut only six months later (as well as the many suicide vehicle bombs since), the Embassy bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack against the United States up to that point, the first major suicide vehicle bombing, and Hezbollah’s opening move in its long war against the United States.

Beyond the symbolism of leveling a U.S. Embassy, the bombing was in fact a major strategic blow on American power. The Marine Barracks bombing appeared to have the more immediate impact, leading to the withdrawal of U.S. forces – and inspiring Bin Laden and others to believe the United States was a paper tiger. But of the seventeen Americans who died in the Embassy bombing (there were 63 total casualties) six were CIA officers – including the station chief, his deputy, and Robert Ames the national intelligence officer for the Near East (who was on a visit.)

The United States is an enormous country with tremendous resources. But experienced case officers are always in short supply. Losing so many in one blow was a severe loss of institutional memory and capacity. It is a loss that has been sorely felt in the quarter-century since as the U.S. has been blind-sided by one Middle East crisis after another. Baer notes:

Never before had the CIA lost so many officers in a single attack. It was a tragedy from which the agency would never recover.

Anniversary of the Marine Barracks Bombing

Almost a quarter-century ago today a multiple simultaneous suicide bombers struck the barracks of U.S. Marines and French paratroopers who (along with British and Italian soldiers) were attempting to stabilize the war-torn city of Beirut. International terrorism had long been on the world scene since the PLO sky-jackings that started in 1968 and continued throughout the 1970s. Suicide bombings had only just become a major tactic (most notably a deadly strike against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut only a few months earlier). But this bombing, in which nearly 300 lives (241 Marines and sailors and 58 French paratroopers) were snuffed out in moments, took this phenomenon to a new scale. Politically, the attack caused the peace-keeping operation to fold - sending terrorists the message that if you hit the Western powers hard enough they will retreat.

Lebanon was then left as prey to Syria, Hezbollah, and Iran.

In the mid-1990s Osama bin Laden met with the attack's mastermind, Hezbollah's top killer Imad Mughniyah (view his network graph here). Bin Laden expressed his admiration for Mughniyah's achievement. An alliance was cemented and Hezbollah tutored the nascent al-Qaeda in this tactical innovation, the multiple simultaneous suicide attack.

This attack has raised certain questions about the definition of terrorism. The victims were uniformed military and terrorism is generally defined as the targeting of civilians. There is the argument for modifying the definition of terrorism, or viewing the Barracks Bombing as an act of war rather than terrorism.

The debate is academic and to some extent trumped by the inscription on the monument to the victims of the attack at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina -