Autumn XX. Wine and war

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn XIX. Italy

Truly, I grow aged. I have no longer much delight in wine.

... I would not speak unkindly of anything in cask or bottle which bears the great name of wine, But for me  it is a thing of days gone by. Never again shall I know the mellow hour cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli. Yet how it lives in memory!

“What call you this wine?” I asked of the temple-gardian at Paestum, when he ministered to my thirst. “ Vino di Calabria,” he answered, and what a glow in the name! There I drank it, seated against the column of Poseidon's temple. There I drank it, my feet resting on acanthus, my eyes wandering from sea to mountain... The autumn day declined;  a breeze of evening whispered about the forsaken shore; on the far summit lay a long, still cloud, and its hue was that of my Calabrian wine.

How many such moments come back to me as my thoughts wander!  Dim little trattorie in city byways, inns smelling of the sun in forgotten valleys, on the mountain side, or by the tideless shore, where the grape has given me of its blood, and made life a rapture. Who but the veriest fanatic of teetotalism would grudge me those hours so gloriously redeemed?  No draught of wine amid the old tombs under the violet sky but made me for the time a better man, larger of brain, more courageous, more gentle....

Alpha.

He seems to get more pleasure from wine than I do, but then again I’ve never been to Italy or drunk the wine he describes. But I do agree about wine’s ability, at least on occasion, to make you “larger of brain.”

One evening I was enjoying a glass or two -- perhaps three -- of wine when I started thinking about something I had previously read about the war on the Western Front during WW2. Following the famous Allied breakout from Normandy (Operation Cobra) as the various Allied armies raced east and north, their commanders, in particular Montgomery and Patton, fought for logistical support as they were each convinced that they alone possessed the correct strategy for slipping by the Germans and racing to Berlin where the war would quickly (and relatively bloodlessly) be brought to an end.

Eisenhower, in overall command, held other views. He recognized that the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS forces they faced were too experienced, well lead, and well trained to permit any brilliant outflanking maneuver on the part of the Allies. The Allies would have to wear the Germans down in a battle of attrition. They would need to methodically destroy the German army as a fighting force, division by division. This was not something anyone really wanted to hear, but it was reality.

The book where I picked up this idea about Eisenhower, was about the little known (but very bloody) battles that took place during the autumn and early winter of 1944 when Allied forces hit the German West Wall (or Siegfried Line) prior to the Battle of the Bulge. But as I drank and reflected on this truth -- that the most vital thing in 1944 was not capturing land but destroying the German army as a fighting force -- I suddenly saw that Patton’s race across France, when he famously drove past his assigned stopping points and pushed his tanks forward until they ran out of gas, was a terrible mistake.

Most of the time it is a good thing to capture land from the enemy, especially if you can do it quickly and without heavy losses, but this is not always the case. In some cases, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 being a famous example, moving quickly just makes your logistical situation worse, as it improves the logistical situation of your foe. In 1944, when the Allies lacked a single port on the European coast, and had to bring in all their supplies over a beach, fighting as close to those beaches as possible made things easier. Conversely, the further into France the Germans had to fight, the more their lines of communication were subject to Allied air attack and Resistance sabotage. Racing to the French-German border made everything easier for the Germans and harder for the Allies.

And then, I thought of another instance of the same phenomenon in another American war. Just as most people think Patton was bold and smart in racing east in 1944, most people think General Butler, commander of the Union Army of the James, blew a once in a lifetime opportunity when he failed to quickly take Petersburg in 1864 during the American Civil War. The bloody Siege of Petersburg and Richmond, which was the consequence of Butler’s failure to take Petersburg when it was all but undefended, is one of the nastier chapters of this already quite nasty war.

But looking at this campaign from, let’s call it, the Eisenhower perspective, we see that had Butler been as bold and dynamic as Patton, General Lee, and the still powerful Army of Northern Virginia, would have been driven out of the cities and away from tidewater Virginia toward the hill country to the west. They would have had the advantage of withdrawing along their railroad line of communications while the Union armies would have been parted from the support of the U.S. Navy, which had been moving troops and supplying logistical support wherever it was needed. Navy ships could not navigate the river above Richmond.

As it worked out, the armies settled down into a prolonged siege in which battle and disease severely weakened both forces. But at the same time, the Union made use of the time to build up its logistical situation around Petersburg -- even building a railroad to aid the movement of troops and material. And in the spring, the Army of Northern Virginia was a sad remnant of itself, while the Union could bring in a fresh army under Sheridan (the Patton of that war) to force Lee out of Richmond and Petersburg and then chase him down and bring the war to an end.

The Siege of Petersburg turned out to also be a preview of trench warfare during The Great War -- though technology would make the early 20th century battles even more gruesome than the late 19th century siege had been.

The lesson here, it seems to me, is that the most important thing in war is to know what victory looks like. From the opening days of the American Civil War, Union generals and politicians had been focused on capturing the Confederate capital, Richmond. But, as important as Richmond was, it was the Confederate Army, and in particular the Army of Northern Virginia, that was the strength of the Confederacy.

In WW2, once the German armies had been methodically destroyed in late 1944 and early 1945, the Allies could pour into Germany almost unopposed as there were no strong divisions (and almost no tanks) left to face them.

More recent American wars, like Vietnam and the even more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffer from a similar failure to know what victory might look like. Capturing land, in itself, achieves very little.

Would all of this have ever occurred to me without the benefit of wine? Who knows. I only know how it in fact happened.

Next: Autumn XXI. Young writers.