This Day in Military History (Afghanistan War Ends in Chaotic U.S. Withdrawal)

Aug. 30, 2021—Less than two weeks removed from the anticipated complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Taliban forces forced that timetable to be radically revised.

Army Major General Chris Donahue represented not just just the last U.S. service member to leave at the end of a chaotic two-week period, but also the failure of America’s two-decade effort at nation-building in the country that harbored the 9/11 terrorists.

More than a few officials bore responsibility for this ignominious end to America’s longest war, but the one left holding the bag was President Joe Biden. Coming eight months into his administration, the images of civilians clinging to a military transport plane and a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members demoralized TV viewers who had never seen or had forgotten similar scenes of disarray in Saigon in April 1975.

Biden’s approval rating fell from 49 percent at the start of August 2021 to 43 percent a month later, according to Gallup polling, and never really recovered after that.

Periodically, American foreign-policy or military failures lead to the question, “Who lost it?”, as occurred in China and Vietnam. The Biden administration was certainly responsible for setting up a symbolic but arbitrary withdrawal date (the anniversary of 9/11) that left inadequate time for planning an orderly transfer to complete Afghan military self-reliance.

But multiple mistakes, as early as America’s initial airstrikes in October 2001, ensured that this would be a waste of American blood and treasure, including:

*Failing to catch Osama bin-Laden quickly: In an August 2021 Wall Street Journal analysis, Eliot Cohen thought that several brigades of light infantry were needed to finish off al Qaeda. Instead, bin-Laden eluded capture and remain the symbol (if not operational leader) of the terrorist network until he was killed a decade later in a raid into Pakistan.

*The Iraq War diverted needed men and equipment from Afghanistan. Five years ago, Jonah Blank, a former policy adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, observed in an article for The Atlantic, “the original sin of the war in Afghanistan was going to war in Iraq.” Bush advisers sought to convince the American public that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a destabilizing force in the region, but he did not have weapons of mass destruction, as they claimed. The result of the change in focus was detrimental to the U.S. long-range campaign in Afghanistan, according to Blank: “Too light a troop presence in Afghanistan meant that security was never truly established; too little money actually delivered meant that the fledgling government was never able to prove its credibility to its own people; too little focus from U.S. policy makers meant that a highly centralized governing structure, imposed on a never-before-centralized nation, could not be prevented from degenerating into nepotism, ineffectiveness, and rampant corruption. Failure to provide enough troops, money, and focus on the front end resulted in exponentially more troops, money, and focus down the line."

*Misguided drone use. Some military experts thought that, after instituting a troop surge following his inauguration in 2009, Barack Obama’s announced mass drawdown five years later occurred when Afghan security forces were still inadequately trained. But his authorization of more drone attacks was arguably worse, leading to civilian casualties that turned much of the population (along with then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai) against the continuing American presence.

*Corruption in the Afghan government: As early as August 2012, in a statement to the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institutions warned, “Afghans have become disconnected and alienated from the national government and the country’s other power arrangements,” resenting “the abuse of power, impunity, and lack of justice that have become entrenched over the past decade.”

*Lies and concealment among American political and military leaders about progress in the war: In December 2019, the Washington Post revealed that American officials, fearing the consequences of what might ensue once Americans left Afghanistan, misled the public by spinning casualty counts and other data. Behind the scenes, it was another story, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, throwing up his hands in a September 2003 memo: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

*Donald Trump left a skeletal American force in the country just as Biden was to be inaugurated. The administration announcement that only 2,500 troops would remainat that point came despite the lack of an agreement between Taliban and Afghan government negotiators—and a warning by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warns that too rapid a drawdown could expose the Afghan regime to collapse.

The public’s overwhelming feeling of futility at the Taliban’s resumption of control was palpable. But a few other aspects of the conflict got lost along the way:

*American concern about oil at least partly accounted for bin Laden’s murderous rage. George H.W. Bush ordered American troops placed in Saudi Arabia to counter a potential threat after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Those forces remained in the kingdom even after the successful conclusion of Operation Desert Storm to enforce no-fly zones protecting the Kurds. Bin Laden cited that presence as a primary reason for waging jihad against the U.S.

*Questions remain about the full extent of Saudi involvement with 9/11. Though the administration of George W. Bush never specifically claimed that Saddam Hussein collaborated with bin Laden on 9/11, officials mentioned the dictator and terrorist so often together that many Americans jumped to that conclusion. They were far more pointed in claiming there was no high-level Saudi government support for the attack. But most of the 9/11 hijackers (as well as bin Laden himself) came from the country. A lawsuit by 9/11 victim families turned up a growing body of circumstantial evidence that the Saudi government was being disingenuous about these connections.

*The overarching War on Terror distracted from countering the growing Chinese threat in Asia. The phrase “War on Terror” itself provided the Chinese regime with vocabulary to justify cracking down on the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. Moreover, military and intelligence resources that the Bush administration could have devoted to monitoring Chinese saber-rattling in the Far East were devoted instead to Afghanistan and Iraq.

(The image accompanying this post, of U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 10th Mountain Division standing security at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, was taken on Aug. 15, 2021, by Sgt. Isaiah Campbell.)

This Day in Military History (MacArthur Named UN Commander in Korea)

July 8, 1950— Having claimed that he knew “the Asiatic mind,” and acclaimed as the architect of Allied victory in the Pacific only five years before, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was named commander of the UN troops desperately trying to repel Communist forces from taking control of the entire Korean peninsula.

At the time, the appointment seemed logical, even inevitable, considering the general’s decades of experience, bravery, intellect, and a strategic skill manifested during WWII with an “island-hopping” campaign that minimized loss of life.

But, within a year, MacArthur’s overweening ego and hubris would imperil US troops, threaten a wider conflict, and precipitate a historic showdown concerning civilian authority over American armed forces with President Harry Truman.

Some signs, even within the first two weeks after Communist forces invaded South Korea, were already ominous for MacArthur’s leadership. Aides were initially reluctant to break the news of the attack to their boss, and even after learning of it, for the first 24 hours he downplayed its severity.

If he could get the 1st Cavalry Division into action, he told GOP foreign-policy maven (and future Secretary of State) John Foster Dulles, “Why, heavens, you’d see these fellows scuttle up to the Manchurian border so quick, you would see no more of them,” according to Bruce Cumings’ The Korean War: A History.

When he was prevailed upon at last to depart from Tokyo (where he was serving as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan) for the first of a series of one-day flyovers over Korea, he veered sharply towards alarm, telling Truman that South Korean forces were in no position to repel the invaders without American support.

One military observer—like MacArthur, often mentioned as a Presidential candidate—Dwight Eisenhower, was skeptical but not surprised that his fellow WWII hero was not at the top of his game. Privately, he wondered if MacArthur, now 70, might be too old for command.

Eisenhower, who had noted acidly that he had “studied theatrics” under MacArthur as his aide in the Philippines in the 1930s, would have had the personal knowledge and credibility to gain immediate public approval for a decision to relieve his old boss of command. But MacArthur’s superior at the moment was Truman, who lacked the stature of the commander of US forces in Europe in the last war.

Two and a half months after his appointment, MacArthur pulled off the kind of unexpected, daring move for which he had become known by ordering an amphibious assault on Inchon, the port city of Seoul that, because of its tides and lack of beaches, was deemed by MacArthur’s subordinate Gen. Edward Almond, “the worst possible place” for such an operation.

Inchon achieved the surprise MacArthur desired, and he predicted to Truman that US troops would be home for Christmas. But instead of stopping at the 38^th Parallel, the point at which America’s allies had agreed would restore the division between North and South Korea at the start of the conflict, the commander “went ahead to the Yalu frontier and set up an enormous disaster, which clouded his reputation,” according to historian David Fromkin.

“There’s a spot where the mountains go down on a north-south basis,” Fromkin explained to C-Span’s Brian Lamb in a September 1995 interview on “Booknotes,” “and if you’re a commander going there, you don’t want to get in that position because you have to split your troops. But he [MacArthur] did and he shouldn’t have; he went all the way up to the Chinese border, although there were signs that if he did so, they’d come in against us with their limitless manpower.”

The counterattack by the Chinese forces reversed all the gains by the US at Inchon. Communist momentum was only blunted when Matthew Ridgway took over command of the US Eighth Army in Korea and re-energized the demoralized troops.

By now, MacArthur was not only violating Truman’s directive to clear any statements with the White House first, but alarming the Joint Chiefs of Staff and allies with his urging that China lay down its arms or face “a decision by the United Nations to depart from its tolerant efforts to contain the war…[that] would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.”

He provided GOP leaders eager to score points against Truman over the military stalemate with a soundbite for taking the war to China: “There is no substitute for victory.”

Truman’s decision to relieve MacArthur of command led to a firestorm of controversy back home, but it was necessary to preserve the constitutional structure of ultimate Presidential authority over the military.

Just as important, by scotching the general’s proposal to drop up to 50 nuclear bombs at air bases, depots, and supply lines to create a radioactive barrier and halt Chinese and North Korean advances, Truman prevented the direct intervention of the Soviet Union in the conflict—and the possibility of World War III.

This Day in Military History (Western Democracies Pledge Mutual Security With North American Treaty)

April 4, 1949—The countries who put their signature to the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, DC, looked just like the Allied coalition that had recently won World War II in Europe—but with one notable exception: the Soviet Union, whose postwar threats to elected governments had alarmed its former partners.

Since the formation of this defensive pact, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has increased from its original 12 to 32 members. Its recent growth derives from the same factor that brought it into existence: a septuagenarian dictator who, in his quest to annex neighbors and subvert republics, inspires other nations to band together in mutual support.

Back in 1949, that authoritarian ruler was Joseph Stalin, who saw the chaos and devastation in the wake of WWII as an opportunity to expand Soviet influence, including through:

*reneging on its Yalta Conference promise of free elections in Poland;

*exploiting its continued military presence in Hungary to pressure non-Communist parties into submission;

*covertly backing an overthrow of the democratically elected government of Czechoslovakia by the nation’s Communist party;

*blockading Allied-controlled West Berlin in an unsuccessful attempt to incorporate the whole city into its orbit.

In 2024, the dictator is Vladimir Putin, whose revanchist nostalgia for the return of Russian influence has led him to invade Ukraine—a move that, in turn, led to a prompt application to join NATO by Finland and Sweden.

The West’s attempts to begin new eras of cooperation with Stalin and Putin quickly foundered as perceptions grew that these dictators were intent not just on cracking down on internal dissent but on posing a threat to Eastern Europe.

American, Britain, and French leaders had hoped to include the Soviets in a postwar Council of Foreign Ministers, according to a Truman Library oral history interview with John D. Hickerson, the Assistant Secretary of State generally credited with writing the text for what became the North Atlantic Treaty.

But, after 1947 conferences in Moscow and London that went nowhere because of Soviet intransigence, the three transatlantic partners determined to go their own way.

The genesis for the new system of cooperation came from British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, but the indispensable forces were the two American Secretaries of State when the treaty was hammered out in 1948 and early 1949, George Marshall and Dean Acheson.

The most important element of the North American Treaty may be Article 5, in which the signatories agreed that "an armed attack against one or more of them… shall be considered an attack against them all" and that following such an attack, each Ally would take "such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force" in response.

The first time that mutual-aid pledge would be invoked came not in response to a move by the USSR, but after 9/11—and it did not involve the US coming to the aid of the organization’s European members, but them supporting us in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center.

Hickerson’s oral history interview gives a strong sense of the improvisational nature of the discussions shaping the North Atlantic Treaty. 

The diplomats, he explained, were talking about “what we would do in the event of an attack, without considering anything beyond the political commitment to do that. And frankly in the back of our minds was the hope that that commitment itself would be enough to restrain any aggression.” 

It would not be until the following year, with the outbreak of the Korean War, before the “machinery” of NATO would be set up.

This brief history is worth keeping in mind in the present US. Presidential cycle, with one all-but-certain party nominee saying he would encourage Putin to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member that falls behind on its defense spending guidelines.

That Presidential candidate’s complaint about failing to meet these guidelines echoes the chief  American opponent of the pact back in 1949, Robert Taft, who saw it as “arming Western Europe at American expense.”

But the deeply conservative, anti-communist Republican Senator from Ohio was under no illusions about Stalin’s intentions and never praised his “strength.”

Moreover, the national defense spending percentages on which today’s isolationists fixate are, as mentioned earlier, guidelines, not ironclad commitments.

The Cold War between the US and USSR was often conducted without nuance and sometimes risked catastrophe. But NATO created a defensive alliance based on collective security—an arrangement missing before WWII that would have eased the task of countering Nazi aggression.

That alliance resulted in 75 years of peace, encouraging international commerce—the kind of minimal-cost arrangement that one might have hoped a once and future businessman might have better appreciated.

(The photo accompanying this post shows President Harry Truman with the diplomats from the countries signing the North Atlantic Treaty.)

This Day in Military History (Robert Rogers, Special Ops Pioneer, Dies)

May 18, 1795—Major Robert Rogers, a New Hampshire soldier whose tactics and leadership of an elite unit of unconventional warriors in the French and Indian War foreshadowed the modern “Special Forces,” died alone and impoverished at age 63 in London, far removed from the brilliant exploits in the North American wilderness that made him famous throughout the 13 American colonies.

If you are wondering what a picture of buckskin-clad Spencer Tracy is doing in a post about an 18^th-century military commander, it is because the great actor spurred my interest in this legendary but flawed soldier by playing him, with his usual intensity and conviction, in Northwest Passage, King Vidor’s 1940 adaptation of the bestselling novel by Kenneth Roberts. 

I can still remember being enthralled as a child by numerous scenes in this epic Technicolor tale of daring and survival—notably, a “human chain” that enables “Rogers’ Rangers” to cross a torrential river.

With America more than a year away from entering World War II, Rogers’ exploits showed how America, with little of the intense training that characterized Continental soldiers, could still revolutionize warfare by teaching a motley force unconventional new tactics. 

“Rogers’ Rangers” represented a sharp break with the English tradition of military service, where commissions were bought and common soldiers were drilled to march in strict formation. In contrast, the soldiers that Rogers molded were woodsmen, provincials, farmers, and Indian scouts, all ready to follow their charismatic leader in asymmetrical warfare where traditional methods could not find traction.

The film ended in triumph for Rogers and his soldiers. MGM had originally subtitled their feature “Book One: Rogers’ Rangers,” in the hope that its success would convince the studio’s most acclaimed male star that he should come back for the second half of the Roberts novel. 

But Tracy, exhausted by its arduous on-location filming, saw the downbeat second half of the book as a reason why it should not be filmed. “I’ll play him [Rogers] up to the point where he has achieved his objective, but I’ll be damned if I’ll play him when he becomes a drunkard. Audiences won’t want to see him in that stage of life.”

Offhand, I can think of only two epic films that challenged audiences with second halves that saw their real-life heroes suffer the kind of shattering disillusionment and death that Tracy saw as box-office poison: Lawrence of Arabia and Reds, about the American journalist who served as an eyewitness-participant in the Russian Revolution, John Reed. Northwest Passage, about an American further removed in time, would have been an even harder sell in tracing how its hero subsequently failed at politics, business, and marriage. 

The great 19^th-century historian of the colonial conflict between England and France, Francis Parkman, summed up Rogers’ opposing tendencies in Montcalm and Wolfe: 

“He had passed his boyhood in the rough surroundings of a frontier village. Growing to manhood, he engaged in some occupation which, he says, led him to frequent journeyings in the wilderness between the French and English settlements...He does not disclose the nature of this mysterious employment; but there can be little doubt that it was a smuggling trade with Canada. His character leaves much to be desired. He had been charged with forgery, or complicity in it, seems to have had no scruple in matters of business, and after the war was accused of treasonable dealings with the French and Spaniards in the west. He was ambitious and violent, yet able in more ways than one, by no means uneducated, and so skilled in woodcraft, so energetic and resolute, that his services were invaluable.”

A few of Rogers’ exploits were especially noteworthy, not only for the way he employed speed and surprise against the French and their Native American allies but also for the hardships endured by him and his men:

*The St. Francois Raid, the climax of a 150-mile march, much of it through marshy bog, that ended in the destruction of an Indian village that had served as the launching pad for several deadly raids into the northern colonies; 

*The Second Battle of the Snowshoes, in which, after attempting to ambush the French, Rogers’ men had the tables turned on them—surviving by the skin of their teeth (including, a possibly apocryphal tale claims, by sliding 400 feet down a sheer cliff to a frozen Lake George; and 

*The 1760 capture of Fort Detroit and other French outposts, secured after Rogers and the Rangers marched west—through enemy forests not even charted by the English.

Rogers’ career after the end of the French and Indian Wars marked a tragic fall from grace. He had made an enemy of General Thomas Gage, a rival of Rogers’ commander and mentor, British General Jeffrey Amherst. Gage, as Parkman indicated in the passage I quoted earlier, brought charges of treason against Rogers and had him hauled to Detroit in chains.

Rogers was acquitted following a trial. But, at the start of the American Revolution, he made a worse enemy in George Washington, who, because of the major’s extensive travels in the colonies as unrest spread against English rule, suspected that Rogers was a Loyalist spy. 

Forced to choose side, Rogers elected to fight against the New Englanders he grew up with, even playing a role in one of the earliest English intelligence coups of the war: the capture of Nathan Hale. But he was removed from a leadership role of “The Queen’s Rangers,” and his drinking and indebtedness mounted until he faded into obscurity far from home. 

Nevertheless, his contribution to American warfare remains. It not only was maintained through his aide John Stark, who would win the Battle of Bennington for the colonials in the American Revolution, but through his “Rules of Ranging,” a set of guidelines for guerrilla warfare that is still distributed by the U.S. Army Ranger School.

This Day in Military History (TR, Rough Riders Charge to Glory at San Juan Hill, With Press Help)

July 1, 1898—Victory at what came to be known as the Battle of San Juan Hill launched Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt on a political path that within three years landed him in the White House. But on a personal level, it lifted a burden oppressing him for nearly 30 years: the aching sense that his beloved father had not fully served his country when it counted in the Civil War.

Since the dawn of the American republic, military service had been the major means of gaining the Presidency for those without governmental experience, as in the cases of Zachary Taylor and Ulysses S. Grant. Battlefield triumphs had played an outsize role in the election of even those who did serve in the government, such as George Washington and Andrew Jackson.

T.R. fell into the second group. He was no soldier for a substantial part of his career as Grant had been (or as Eisenhower would be decades later). His ascent to the White House, while seemingly following the conventional path of military glory, remains unique, as attested to in an encyclopedia entry I came across in the second or third grade. 

The encyclopedia’s table listed the occupations of American Presidents before they reached the White House: “Farmer,” “Lawyer,” “Soldier,” and even, in the case of Herbert Hoover, “Engineer.” But I was puzzled by the entry for Roosevelt: “Publicist.”

The entry could have read “Politician,” befitting someone who had served in the New York State Assembly, on the U.S. Civil Service Commission, as New York City’s Police Commissioner, and as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. It could have read “Author,” as he had already written 16 books by the time he volunteered in the Spanish-American War—a conflict he had beaten the drums for at the Navy Department.

But “Publicist”—or, to be more correct, “Self-Publicist”—described exactly Roosevelt’s unusual trajectory to the White House at age 42, the youngest age of any individual who ever became President. He displayed a genius for putting his name before the public in a positive light. And nowhere was this better demonstrated than in how the public came to see him as a military hero of the unit formally called the 1st US Volunteer Cavalry but that nearly everyone called the Rough Riders.

Several aspects of how he attracted press attention stand out:

*Appearance. Though not handsome, Roosevelt was a dandy at heart. In the 1880s, he had posed several times in buckskin to signal his transition from Harvard swell to Western rancher. When President William McKinley finally asked Congress for a declaration of war against Spain for its alleged role in the sinking of the Maine, T.R. quickly had several khaki uniforms custom-tailored for him by Brooks Brothers. Later, as he prepared to lead his men into battle, he wrapped a bandanna around his neck. While this fashion choice was undoubtedly useful in protecting his neck against sunburn, it also lent him a dashing appearance when the bandanna flowed behind him when he charged on horseback.

*Cultivating an acquaintance.  According to Kathleen Dalton’s fine Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life, T.R. made the most of a 34-year-old editor, reporter and novelist who had been befriended by the colonel’s sister Bamie: Richard Harding Davis. Brimming with charismatic himself, Davis bonded quickly with the equally magnetic Roosevelt. The head of the regiment, Leonard Wood, might, under normal circumstances, have made an interesting story as a Medal of Honor winner, veteran of the war against Geronimo, and personal physician to President McKinley. Yet the coolly cerebral Wood paled in comparison with the voluble, energetic Roosevelt. Attaching himself to T.R.’s motley cadre of Southwestern cowpunchers, Oklahoma Indians, Ivy League football stars, and champion polo players, Harding was there to record their bravery when they came out blazing against a Spanish ambush in the jungle at Las Guasimas. Harding identified so strongly with the unit that the correspondent directed fire against the enemy himself—and, though he turned down Roosevelt’s offer of a commission, he accepted one of only three honorary memberships ever given by the Rough Riders. His colorful dispatches with the unit when it captured Kettle Hill and nearby San Juan Hill made him the best-known of the correspondents of the war with Spain.

*Accommodating the press as much as possible. Exhibiting little of the hostility that led Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to court-martial a reporter during the Civil War, Roosevelt made a concerted effort to win the media to his side. To a remarkable degree, he succeeded. (One notable exception: reporter-novelist Stephen Crane.) Even on the boats invading Cuba--often too crowded even for his own men--he managed to make room for reporters.

*Support in non-print media. Nearly 30 years before, New York’s notorious Boss Tweed had said he didn’t mind newspaper exposes of his corruption—but, with many of his supporters being illiterate, he couldn’t abide cartoons that anyone could understand. Roosevelt sensed this and used it to his own benefit through pictorial media, some in forms used first during wartime. One of these was the motion-picture camera, with the Edison and Biograph companies recording images of the troops on their way into action.  “Buffalo Bill” Cody incorporated reenactments of San Juan Hill into his enormously popular Wild West show, an entertainment that so burnished TR’s heroic exploits that the colonel did not go public with his strong disagreement with Cody about the role of the federal government. Frederic Remington’s Charge of the Rough Riders (accompanying this post), depicting the colonel on horseback leading his men up San Juan Hill, increased Roosevelt’s reputation for fearlessness under fire.

*Writing about the war himself. “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history," Winston Churchill once observed—a thought boiled down by posterity to “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Roosevelt exhibited a similar urge to shape perception of his actions when he wrote the  account of his military service, The Rough Riders. It was a hit both during serialization and when published in book form.

*Exhibiting a good sense of humor. A certain recent President—no names mentioned!—has displayed no small amount of…touchiness when mocked. This only has made critics even more determined to prick his vanity. The same could not be said for Roosevelt. Satirist Finley Peter Dunne, commenting on The Rough Riders through fictional mouthpiece Mr. Dooley, waggishly noted the author’s ego by saying the memoir should have been called instead Alone in Cuba. Was Roosevelt offended? If he was, he did a good job of concealing it. He wrote the humorist to say how much he chuckled over the piece—and ended up enjoying a cordial relationship with him.

*Being slow to correct accounts that worked in his favor. The Rough Riders were far more instrumental in seizing Kettle Hill than in taking San Juan Hill, where they played a more supporting role. But accounts in the press—including among Roosevelt’s admirers—jumbled the two together,  magnifying the importance of the Rough Riders and diminishing other units (for instance, the African-American “Buffalo Soldiers” whose deadly fire, T.R. admitted later, provided him cover as he led the charge uphill at Kettle Hill). While this boosted Roosevelt’s political career, it probably undercut his case for a Medal of Honor (not granted him until 2001, more than eight decades after his death).

Proving himself in battle was not simply a matter of winning fame for Roosevelt, however; it also involved redeeming the family honor. During the Civil War, his father, a staunch Unionist, felt compelled, because of his Georgia-born wife’s Southern sympathies, to sit out the war and hire a substitute at $300 a year to take his place. 

Even winning glory did not completely assuage Roosevelt’s feelings about honor. During WWI, he had pushed his sons to enlist. All served with honor, but one---the youngest, Quentin—was shot down in 1918 in an aerial battle with German pilots. The sense of grief and guilt over this loss was something that TR never really recovered from.

This Day in WWII History (Pearl Harbor Attacked, Followed by Blame)

Dec. 7, 1941—The surprise Japanese early-morning attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii left 2,400 dead, the American Pacific fleet in tatters, and an entire generation of young men now in danger of dying in a far-off land. The worst day in the history of the U.S. Navy also left an angry citizenry—and politicians looking to assign or deflect blame.

A blue-ribbon panel, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt and headed by Associate Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, concluded that the attack represented “a complete surprise to the commanders.” The Roberts Commission Report, delivered a month after the attack, was extremely critical of the on-the-ground commanders.

In the immediate aftermath of this, those commanders, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, were relieved of command and replaced. Though they never went through court-martials, they were charged with dereliction of duty, demoted and forced into retirement. Two generations of descendants have fought to clear their names, with mixed results.

But the Roberts investigation was only the first of nine into the attack. That number reflects a disbelief that this catastrophe could be the result of a perfect storm of circumstances, as well as a dark suspicion that a single person acted with either gross incompetence or gross malevolence.

Conspiracy theories are as American as apple pie. More than a thin thread runs between the Pearl Harbor conspiracy advocates and the 9/11 "truthers." The only difference between now and 75 years ago is that social media can propagate these theories more quickly and sustain them for far longer.

In the early 1940s, the isolationist movement was strong enough that suspicions lingered that FDR had known in advance that the attacks would occur, but that he allowed them to take place so that the United States would be drawn into the war. Among many Republicans, the hope existed that he would be weakened by investigations into the attack—enough so that the GOP would gain seats in the midterm elections in 1942, and, beyond to 1944, that the President would lose his reelection bid, should he decide to run again.

The Republicans were able to achieve only one of their achievements: gains in the midterm elections. But Senate Democrats managed to postpone the investigations a couple of times, then limited their scope so that sensitive intelligence information would not be disclosed while the country was still at war.

In 1999, a later Senate investigation, backed by Democrats such as Joe Biden, concluded that Himmel and Short were not guilty, after all, of dereliction of duty. Critics of the nine investigations also make a good point that General Douglas MacArthur, with more time to prepare than Kimmel, had not been relieved of command, despite his own heavy losses.

Even so, there seems little doubt that Kimmel and Short were guilty of errors in judgment and lack of imagination.

Consider this notable exception, for instance: Harold Stark, the chief of naval operations in Washington, sent a dispatch on November 27 to all U.S. Navy outposts in the Pacific that raised alarms among the military commanders in Hawaii but not enough questions:

This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan looking toward the stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days. The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organization of naval task forces indicates an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines Thai or Kra Peninsula or possibly Borneo. Execute an appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL46.

For most of the year, Kimmel had been receiving what future legend Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey would call “wolf” dispatches about possible Japanese aggression. Yet this was different. Kimmel had never, in his entire professional experience, seen the phrase “war warning,” and later admitted as much.

The problem was that neither Kimmel nor Short thought the message could apply to them. A Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor would have to cover an enormous distance. The far more likely targets were mentioned in the dispatch: the Philippines, or in Southeast Asia.

And so, on the morning of December 7, when Kimmel behold the Japanese planes appearing out of the sky, he appeared, as a friend later noted, as white as his uniform.