Book review response - Ricochets and Replies - Brief Article - Letter to the Editor

Aerospace Power Journal, Summer, 2002 by Roger Beaumont

After reading reviews of two of my books in recent issues of Aerospace Power Journal, I feel the need to respond. In Dr. James S. Corum's review of The Nazis' March to Chaos: The Hitler Era through the Lenses of Chaos-Complexity Theory (Summer 2001), he asserts that "only Great Britain seemed relatively immune to the European tendency toward totalitarian government in the 1930s." That leaves out Switzerland, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, and discounts the Fascist movement as well as some appeasers' sentiments in Britain. No French government between the wars was "totalitarian," and the third of unoccupied France went under Fascistoid rule after military defeat. This book doesn't survey theories of European history, but, as the title indicates, it considers Nazism from a chaos/complexity perspective.

Exceptions to Dr. Corum's claim that resistance to mechanization at high levels in the Reichswehr and Wehrmacht is "unsupported outside of Guderian's self-serving memoirs include F. W. von Mellenthin's Panzer Battles, 1939-1945: A Study of the Employment of Armour in the Second World War; Wilhelm von Thoma's and Hasso Manteuffel's comments in B. H. Liddell Hart's The Other Side of the Hill: Germany's Generals, Their Rise and Fall, with Their Own Account of Military Events, 1939-1945; Siegfried Westphal's The German Army in the West; and The Rommel Papers, edited by Liddell Hart.

Additionally, although Dr. Corum faults me for not providing the reader with "clear conclusions," that would be apposite to the essence of chaos/complexity. Such dynamics are not bulletizable or reducible either to checklists or the "KISS" principle. As with turbulence in aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, air conditioning, and meteorology, the challenge lies in trying to discern patterns amid apparent pandemonium and to frame equations, coefficients, and/or algorithms that describe ranges of phenomena. The alternative is to develop a broad sensitivity to the irreducible turmoil of combat presented, for example, by Gen Erwin Rommel in Infantry Attacks, Ernest Swinton in The Defense of Duffer's Drift, or Cecil Lewis in Sagittarius Rising.

The review of Right Backed by Alight: The International Air Force Concept by Col Phillip S. Meilinger, USAF, retired (Winter 2001), also faults my not addressing subjects outside my stated focus. That having been well examined by others, I tried to steer close to the title.

The citing of factual errors is correct regarding the following: B-52s didn't fly from the Philippines in Linebacker II; and the Casablanca Conference was in January, not February, 1943. But while Dien Bien Phu in 1954 wasn't in Laos, it wasn't in North Vietnam then but in Tonkin, unless one accepts Ho Chi Minh's 1945 declaration rather than the Geneva Conference of 1954 as the point of North Vietnam's inception.

Further, views differ on Ike's nuclear threats in early 1953--for example, Maurice Matloff, in American Military History, who saw a general threat being offered to Moscow and Pyongyang, North Korea; Burton I. Kaufman, in The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command, who saw no direct threat being made to China; and Timothy J. Botti, in Ace in the Hole: Why the United States Did Not Use Nuclear Weapons in the Cold War; 1945 to 1965, who saw increased Chinese flexibility at Panmunjom, North Korea, as being "probably influenced by rumors that the administration had let circulate around the Far East that the U.S. was stationing more atomic bombers in Okinawa." Others saw the stately and visible progress of an atomic cannon across the Pacific as a crucial influence.

My comments on the relative intensity of the Gulf and Serbian air campaigns are those of an outsider, based on a broad impression of a tangle of apples and oranges in a matrix full of differential elements like volume of ordnance delivered, hits scored, numbers and types of targets, criteria and selection processes, density of infrastructure, propinquity of targets to elites and general publics, camouflage, target hardness, air defenses, and so forth. A worthy topic for Boydian--or post-Boydian--analysis? Or perhaps that has already been done.