I promised to write more about development on this blog, and I’ll make that promise again now. But before I make good on that promise, I wanted to talk to about something completely unrelated.
A couple of friends of mine are leaving the DC area this summer and have been putting together a DC bucket list. They’ve been extra kind in inviting me along with them for some of the more interesting outings, and last weekend we went about 30 miles west of the city to Manassas, site of the first real battle of the American Civil War and another battle the next year. (Those of you up in arms yelling about Fort Sumter being the first battle — which is probably none of you, since I assume anyone reading what I have to say is a mindless troglodyte — should know that the Fort was surrendered with no casualties.)
It was fascinating to see the battlefield — I’ve read a number of books about battles in the Civil War, and I’ve seen maps, but I’m terrible at visualizing what those mean. Actually being in the field was a completely different experience; you could easily see how the troops were deployed and what the key strategic elements of the battle were. (The decisive fighting of First Manassas took place on a field no larger than about 300m x 300m, so it was particularly easy in this case.)
Also, completely unrelated to the main thrust of this post, I Learned A Thing! I had always assumed that when Stonewall Jackson got his nickname, it was during some great Confederate victory mid-way through the war, when his line held while the lines to his left and right were breaking. Not so! It turns out the famous, “There stands Jackson like a stone wall!” line was given at First Manassas, and not because his men were standing tall in the face of withering fire from an overwhelming enemy… but because they had just shown up at all while everyone else was fleeing in terror back toward Richmond.
Anyway, this trip was particularly topical, since the Civil War ended 150 years ago last month with Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865; Abraham Lincoln would get to see his nation at peace briefly before being shot on April 14, dying the following morning. Except…
While Lee was easily the best commander, and his army of Northern Virginia likely the best hope for the Confederacy in the field, his army was far from the last army in the field. In fact, the largest Confederate surrender didn’t occur until April 26, almost two weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, in Durham, NC; the Confederate government wouldn’t dissolve until May 5; the last battle would be fought on May 13; the last general wouldn’t surrender until June 23, and the new president wouldn’t declare the war’s end until August of 1866.
There’s a tricky thing about war; it turns out that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether you defeat the enemy’s army in the field or, say, accomplish your mission militarily, when your real goal is to completely change the way of life of your conquered foe. In hindsight, the end of the American Civil War was relatively straightforward; the most important army surrendered, the rest followed, and within a year or so, things were relatively peaceful. Of course, there’s the tricky bit of Reconstruction, and while the occupying Union troops had their work cut out for them (I recommend listening to the recent BackStory episode on the close of the war; (BackStory is one of my favorite podcasts)), there was not widespread guerrilla warfare after the war ended — which is what you might expect given the circumstances. (There are probably thousands of contributing reasons for this, not the least of which is the widespread failure of Reconstruction to actually change Southern society, curb institutionalized racism, etc., but that’s outside the realm of this post.)
What was particularly interesting to me about the end of the Civil War was the acknowledgement from the highest powers in the Union, implicit in the generous terms of surrender, that the situation could deteriorate into a guerrilla war at all. Maybe I’m just also a mindless troglodyte, but I was always taught that wars back in the day were fought in pitched battles in the field, at least until North Vietnam saw that their only hope of defeating the militarily superior United States was to engage them on their own terms. This technique has since been appropriated by insurgents in the Middle East, to our continuing dismay.
But if you look back on it historically, that’s obviously nonsense — the first case of a guerrilla pseudo-war against occupying forces was not in Vietnam. It wasn’t even in the 20th Century; the word dates back to the Peninsular War of the early 19th Century, but the tactics were used long before that. Many pre-Vietnam instances are even well-known; for instance, the French Resistance during World War II is not that different than modern insurgencies, Americans just view it differently because we (not the French) were still at war at the time.
So what do you do when you’ve won the “real” war, but the insurgency continues? Our strategy recently has been to train the (new) government’s troops to do the job while we disengage; it’s hard to say how successful this effort is or will be, but it’s definitely better than Vietnam, when we just cut and ran.
Except it’s exactly the same strategy we used in Vietnam. And Vietnam wasn’t the first place we used it, either — it turns out this is the same strategy we used in the Philippines after the Philippine-American War (who knew that was a thing?), when we set up a provisional government, then let their army and police take care of the lingering hostilities.
So now, here we are, doing the same thing to solve the same problem. I wonder what we could have learned from our Civil War forebears to avoid this in the first place.