Air War Research Articles

Institutionalizing supreme command: explaining political–military integration in the Vietnam War, 1964–1968

Under what conditions can leaders achieve wartime political–military integration? In the Vietnam War, political–military integration exhibited dramatic variation: in the air war, the US was able to tightly integrate its political objectives and military conduct, but in the ground war, the American military prosecuted a strategy that was both divorced from broader political objectives and was immune from Washington's influence. I argue that the nature of information management between the military and civilian leadership explains the pattern of political–military integration in the Vietnam War more completely than do explanations that focus on the organizational cultures of professional militaries.

Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (review)

Reviewed by: Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars Robert Wohl Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars. Roxanne Panchasi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 203. $39.95 (cloth). Given the recent fascination of historians of modern France with sites of memory, it must have seemed like a clever idea to focus on visions of the future in the 1920s and 1930s, and in many respects such a study offered promising possibilities. But as every tennis player knows, there is often many a slip between the idea and its execution, and that turns out to be the case in Roxanne Panchasi’s brief but dense study. After informing us, a bit misleadingly, that her book is an “experiment in the history of ‘the future,’” Panchasi goes on in her introduction to argue that Future Tense “rests on the premise that the future anticipated at a particular historical moment can tell us a great deal about the cultural preoccupations and political perspectives of the present doing the anticipating, in this case the interwar years in France” (4). More interesting than this claim, to which I think no one would object, is her observation that the visions of the future she explores all expressed “a nostalgic longing for French values and cultural phenomena that had not yet disappeared (5). I should add that the heavy and at times surprising use of italics is one of the characteristics of Panchasi’s writing. The five chapters that follow examine five themes: the human body; the rebuilding of Paris; the French border with Germany; the threat represented to French civilisation by the United States; and the threat represented to the French language by English and Esperanto. Throughout the book, Panchasi tells us, she plans to use the concept of “cultural prosthesis,” which we encounter in the first chapter in the form of the prosthetic rehabilitation of soldiers returning from the First World War. I confess that having read the book very carefully, I have only the vaguest notion what Panchasi means by “cultural prosthesis.” In any case, it permits her to construct an initial chapter in which she connects the prosthetic rehabilitation of mutilated soldiers returning from the First World War, the introduction to French households of mechanized appliances, and the design of furniture by Le Corbusier and other lesser know figures. By any standard, this is something of a conceptual leap. Returning to the notion of “cultural prosthesis,” Panchasi ends the chapter by asserting that by taking this idea as the model for the relationship between humans and the machine, the people she had discussed “suggested the eventual disappearance of the very humanity they purported to reinforce and improve” (42). The second chapter takes up a topic that appears quite promising: the city of the future. Most of us know that Le Corbusier had ambitious plans for the rebuilding of Paris. Why he thought that Paris, which was considered by many to be the most beautiful city in Europe and was largely untouched by the war, was in need of massive rebuilding is another issue; but it is useful to remember that he wanted to replace a city that had been built horizontally with skyscrapers. One can only sigh with relief that he failed. Most curiously of all, Le Corbusier, for reasons Panchasi never explains, thought that skyscrapers would protect Paris from destruction in the coming air war, which was a common topic of discussion in the 1930s. [End Page 667] Concerns about air attack lead quite naturally to Panchasi’s next topic: how to respond to anticipated threats to the security of France, primarily if not exclusively from a resurgent Germany. The response, was the decision in 1929 to build the Maginot Line. This, of course, is well trodden historical ground. Relating the decision to build the Maginot Line along the eastern frontier and the debate that it inspired to her concept of “cultural prosthesis,” Panchasi claims that in wartime propaganda “the physical suffering of the nation’s bodies and the physical invasion and occupation of the national body were inextricably linked from 1914 to 1918” (82). I confess that despite having...

Air War and Dream: Photographing the London Blitz

This paper treats Lee Miller's photographs of the London Blitz as a species of dream, which is to say, the Surrealist's images are regarded as a special form of thinking in which the conflicts and horrors of the times are represented in an effort to discharge their destructive force. This treatment calls upon Freud's discussion of dream-work, but also upon Didier Anzieu and Wilfred Bion's later writings, which consider the defensive and protective qualities of oneiric life. Miller's photography, like dream, provides a glimpse into the interior dimension of human existence. The essay argues that this interior dimension provides protection not only from inner psychological and biological traumas, but also from social and political aggression. In the era of air war, photography provides a powerful tool of civil defense.

'Once upon a time there was a lovely town ... ': The Allied Air War, Urban Reconstruction and Nostalgia in Kassel (1943-2000)

'Once upon a time there was a lovely town ... ': The Allied Air War, Urban Reconstruction and Nostalgia in Kassel (1943-2000)

The Citizens United Election? Or Same As It Ever Was?

In January 2010, the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC overturned long-standing regulations governing the role of unions and corporations in sponsoring pro-candidate advocacy. Many predicted a deleterious effect on the electoral process. In the aftermath of the midterm elections, a number of questions deserve consideration. Was the observed level of outside spending abnormally high in 2010? What can we say about the potential effect of outside spending on the outcomes of House and Senate races? Moreover, what has the decision done to the power of parties and, most especially, their ability to compete with special interests in backing federal candidates? This paper investigates these questions using data from the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracked political ads in 2010. The initial evidence suggests that while interest groups were aggressive players in the air war, their impact may not have been as negative or as large as initially predicted.

Comments on the <i>Mass Atrocity Response Operations (MARO) Handbook</i>

Comments on the <i>Mass Atrocity Response Operations (MARO) Handbook</i>

<i>Tonite Let's All Make Love in London</i> Review, <i>Films and Filming</i>, 1968

Tonite Let's All Make Love in LondonReview, Films and Filming, 1968 Raymond Durgnat Tonite Let's All Make Love in London Review, Films and Filming, 1968. Raymond Durgnat Directed, produced, photographed and edited by Peter Whitehead. A Lorrimer Film production. British. Colour. Cert A. 78 mins. With Julie Christie; Michael Caine; Lee Marvin; The Rolling Stones; The Animals; Edna O'brien; Alan Aldridge and David Hockney. Marx denounced religion as the opium of the people. But more and more it's less the pulpit than the mass media that stupefy us with myths which we don't really believe but which colour our thinking and dim our sense of our own reality. In every myth there's a grain of truth—the bigger the better; exaggeration is always more plausible than invention. If the old myths stressed eternity, austerity, duty, pain and gloom, the new ones stress ephemerality, indulgence, liberty, plea sure and optimism. Swinging London, by now, is such a myth—a welcome, disturbing minority way of life falsified into a city's brand-image by journalists, advertisers and everyone's daydreams. The economic trampoline beneath it is probably that for the first time working-class adolescents had money and freedom; the upper classes had no empire to be sent out to; the middle classes had lost their dynamism and their self-confidence. But such shifts have left most people, and institutions, untouched, so far. As Michael Caine tells his interviewer here, a capital city whose pubs shut at eleven is about as swinging as Highgate Cemetery, and, as David Hockney observes, London is to New York as Bradford is to London. Near the beginning of Peter Whitehead's reportage his characteristically nimble camera roams over magazine covers and headlines—as if to stress [End Page 315]that "Swinging London" is as much an image as a reality. (A friend of mine always calls it "Swingling London," to suggest "swindling.") The camera catches Donyale Luna off guard, and, as she nervously laughs, "looking like a rag" (but a fascinating rag) in the Portobello Road—the myth comes to earth, and there's still no contact. 1At a light show a girl dances with her own shadow; beatnik buskers avert their faces. Lee Marvin, in his Dirty Dozenoutfit, represents the typical, amiable American tourist, obliging with a few vapid remarks about mini-skirts. The inevitable Playboysmoothie is, sickeningly, there (it's surely the Playboy club that David Hockney describes as "a sort of rhythm-and-blues Angus Steak House, where the seats are so small it's like a children's tea-party"). The camera watches, as smooth, as critical, as a cat, waiting for the people to give themselves away, to come alive. The criticism is carried out on a moral plane also. Eric Burdon records "When I Was Young," whose words are cut in with stockshots of the 1939-45 air war, and the gruelling purpose dominating the older generation's youth. 2A dollygirl, on a Big Wheel, talks about her freedom, and the camera zooms back to show her, high, alone and perilous, in her lofty cage, while the soundtrack twice repeats the last two words of her last sentence: "You can do what ever you like and no-one cares." David Hockney emerges from behind his "Zoom" spectacles to discuss the way we live now with a blend of Bradford accents, Oxford high table mannerisms, and flip thoughts which in itself is a splendid commentary on our new social mobility. Some of the other interviewers are less enlightening (Andrew Oldham, Mick Jagger, Julie Christie) not because their thought isn't sensible, but because the easy English use of words is rooted in social and moral outlooks which no longer apply. Thus Alan Aldridge, shown painting flower and butterfly patterns on a girl's nude body, is asked if he doesn't think it's "psychic masturbation," and can respond only with a sceptical shrug. 3The best accounts of themselves are given by the artists. David Hockney is almost the star of the film—apart, of course, from the camera—and Edna O'Brien is quite interesting—though not more...

"For their own good": civilian evacuations in Germany and France, 1939-1945

List of Figures List of Tables List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. Preparing for Air War Chapter 2. Order or Chaos? Chapter 3. Organizing Evacuations Chapter 4. Our Stay Gives Us No Pleasure Chapter 5. If Only Family Unity Can Be Maintained Chapter 6. On the Basis of Selection Chapter 7. Responding to Chaos Chapter 8. Evacuation's Aftermath Note on sources Bibliography Index

Bombing to Bargain? The Air War for Kosovo

Given the prominence of air power as a foreign policy tool, we attempt to clearly link the military process of dropping munitions on the target state to the accompanying diplomatic process between the attacker and the adversary. To explore the connection between the two processes, we look at the 1999 NATO bombing campaign over Kosovo, which allows us to isolate the influence of air power. Why were 78 days of NATO bombing needed to convince Milosevic to make concessions? Comparing expectations from both bargaining models and traditional coercive models, we find that the intensity of bombing, the duration of bombing, and mediation were important predictors of the Serbian government's behavior during the Kosovo crisis.

The Bombing of Germany. Dir. and prod. by Zvi Dor-Ner. wgbh for the American Experience, 2010. 90 mins. (pbs Home Video, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/bombing/)

The eminent historian Richard Overy once observed: “The most striking moral paradox of the war years was the willingness of ostensibly liberal states to engage in the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians from the air” (Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, 1995, p. 296). The Bombing of Germany represents another entry in a field of works on this “moral paradox,” ranging from such recognized classics as Overy's book The Air War, 1939–1945 (1980) to the recent volume Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany (2008) by Randall Hansen. The film begins by highlighting President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plea on September 1, 1939, for all belligerents to eschew bombing civilians. It then vaults to August 1942 when the U.S. Eighth Air Force, destined to be the premier American strategic bombing command in Europe, commenced operations from England. The leaders of the force proclaimed that they...

War of the Machines

The article reports on an increase which has been seen in the number of unmanned robotic ground and air systems that are being used by the U.S. military in military conflicts cross the globe including the Middle East in 2010. The effectiveness of the systems in urban streets and remote villages is examined. A discussion of ethical and legal issues which have been raised by the increased use of unmanned robotic systems is presented. Opposition which the U.S. military showed in previous years towards the use of the systems is discussed. INSETS: ANATOMY OF A NEXT-GENERATION ROBOT;A MENAGERIE OF ROBOTS;AMERICA'S REMOTE-CONTROLLED AIR WAR.

Burying Culpability: The Killing Fields (1984), Us Foreign Policy, and the Political Limits of Film-Making in Reagan-Era America

Burying Culpability: The Killing Fields (1984), Us Foreign Policy, and the Political Limits of Film-Making in Reagan-Era America

Escaping the New Wilderness of Mirrors

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsG. Murphy DonovanG. Murphy Donovan, a retired United States Air Force intelligence officer, was also Senior Air Force Research Fellow at the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, and Director of Research and Russian Studies, ACS Intelligence, HQ USAF. He has served at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency, where his overseas assignments included Korea and Vietnam. He is a graduate of Iona College, New Rochelle, New York, the University of Southern California, the Defense Intelligence College, and the Air War College.

Bombed and Silenced: Foreign Witnesses of the Air War in Germany

ABSTRACTNon‐German accounts of the air war from inside Germany, 1939–1945, offer perspectives and evidence that are very distinct from what most German authors have been able to contribute. Yet they have not been registered in the recent debates about representations of German suffering in testimonies and literature (initiated by W. G. Sebald ten years ago). By looking at five issues specific to non‐German writing, the present article proposes to open up the debate to these new voices: (1) Foreign experiences are distinctively sudden, open, ambivalent, dynamic and, by contrast, sharper in perception. (2) International reports are historical documents that have a particular value for understanding contemporary expectations, relative information and shifting judgments on the Allied bombing campaign. (3) Writers like Curzio Malaparte, Louis‐Ferdinand Céline, Kurt Vonnegut or Marie Vassiltchikov developed rhetorical and poetical means for representing the destruction without succumbing to the faults that Sebald diagnosed in most German writers, who repressed, stylised or banalised it. (4) Unlike many of their contemporary German counterparts, most international authors dealt with the uncanny aesthetics of an air raid without aestheticising it. (5) Finally, the article attempts an explanation for why international witnesses have not been heard in the politicised German debates. Their tendency to overemphasise introspection and moralism over comparative philology and historiography may have made many Germans deaf to the voices of foreigners.

Germans as victims in the literary fiction of the Berlin Republic

In recent years it has become much more accepted in Germany to consider aspects of the Second World War in which were not perpetrators, but victims: the Allied bombing campaign, the expulsions of ethnic from the east, the mass rapes inflicted on German women, and the postwar internment and persecution of Germans. An explosion of literary fiction on these topics has accompanied this trend. Two key texts are W. G. Sebald's The Air War and Literature (1999) and Gunter Grass's Crabwalk (2002), but there are many others. The vast majority of these texts seek not to revise German responsibility for the Holocaust but to depict the fate of Germans in an empathetic manner, seeking a balance German victimhood and German perpetration. This book of essays by leading scholars from the UK, the US, and Germany is the first in English to examine in detail the variety of these recent texts. An opening section on the 1950s - a decade of intense literary engagement with as victims before the focus shifted in the 1960s to German perpetration - provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The longer second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s advent of the Berlin Republic and the coinciding shifts in perspective on the Nazi past, on questions of perpetration and victimhood, on the fates of ordinary Germans, and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation. Many of the works considered are among the best of contemporary German literature and are widely read in English translation. This volume will therefore interest not only the specialist but also the general reader (titles of texts and quotations are translated). Cultural historians, historians of the Holocaust, and comparative literature specialists will also find this book an invaluable resource and guide. ~~ STUART TABERNER is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society, and KARINA BERGER, B.A., M.St., is a Ph.D. candidate, both at the University of Leeds, UK.

The Air War over Germany: Claims and Counter-claims

The Air War over Germany: Claims and Counter-claims

German postwar films: life and love in the ruins

Introduction: Looking Again at the Rubble W.Rasch 'When Everything Falls to Pieces'- Rubble in German Films Before the Rubble Films E.Schutz Rubble Without a Cause: The Air War in Postwar Film W.Wilms A Time for Ruins D.Barnouw Rubble Film as Archive of Trauma and Grief: Wolfgang Lamprecht's Somewhere in Berlin A.Pinkert The Stones Begin to Speak: The Laboring Subject in Early DEFA Documentaries B.Prager What's New? Allegorical Representations of Renewal in DEFA's Youth Films, 1946-1949 M.Silberman In the Ruins of Berlin: A Foreign Affair G.Gemunden Rubble Noir J.Fay When Liebe was Just a Five-Letter Word: Wolfgang Liebeneiner's Love 47 R.G.Moeller 'Kampf dem Kampf': Aesthetic Experimentation and Social Satire in The Ballad of Berlin C.Bregerb Planes, Trains, and the Occasional Car: The Rubble Film as De-Mobilization Film J.Fisher The Sound of Ruins L.Koepnick

Film and memory in East Germany

Introduction: Cinematic Specters of History as MemoryPart I Vanishing Returnees: War Trauma, Antifascism, and Crisis of Masculinity (1940s)1. Flashbacks and Psyche - The Murderers Are among Us 2. Grieving Dead Soldiers - Somewhere in Berlin 3. Psychotic Breaks and Conjugal Rubble - Wozzeck 4. Suicidal Males and Reconstruction - Our Daily BreadPart II Fantasmatic Fullness: Strained Female Subjectivity and Socialist Dreams (1950s)5. Silent Mothers: Air War as Intimate Memory - Rotations 6. Ghostly Returns - Story of a Young Couple and Destinies of Women 7. Stalin's Daughters on the Verge - Story of a Young Couple and Destinies of Women 8. Missing Smile: Psychic Paralysis and Production - Sun SeekersPart III. Germany, Year Zero: Recasting the Past in the Present (1960s) 9. Postmelancholic Memory Projections - I was Nineteen 10. Modern Loss and Mourning Plays - Born in '45Epilogue: Vacant History, Empty Screens - Postcommunist Films of the 1990s

Rostow's War: Vietnam, 1961-1969

Rostow's War:Vietnam, 1961-1969 John M. Carland (bio) America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War. By David Milne. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. ISBN 978-0-374-10386. Notes. Index. Bibliography. Pp. xi, 268. $26.00. The narrative arc of this morality tale—for that is what David Milne has written—begins in hope and ends in tragedy. More prosaically, it is the author's take on Walt Whitman Rostow's role in the formation and implementation of Vietnam War policy, especially concerning the air war against North Vietnam. In his Introduction the author lays out the details of his argument. His fundamental assumption, from which all else flows, is that despite the good intentions of the United States, the Vietnam War was an avoidable disaster essentially brought about by American actions, and that Walt Rostow, as assistant to the president for national security affairs, played a critical role in causing and shaping that disaster. Also in the Introduction Milne explains his attention-grabbing title. Calling Rostow "Rasputin" (a nickname coined by Averell Harriman, who despised Rostow) is "emotive," he admits, because the characterization "leads one to visualize a conniving sinister character in possession of preternatural powers of persuasion." Milne [End Page 615] believes the description fits Rostow because "when it came to the Vietnam War, Rostow was not averse to deploying questionable tactics to achieve his aims" (p. 8). (Page numbers without an accompanying citation represent pages in Milne's book.) But was that Rostow? Having been so certain at first, Milne retreats briefly, but only briefly, into uncertainty, observing that even Rostow's adversaries believed him to be a "human being" and "a considerate, gregarious individual" and perhaps not quite so bad. (I wonder if Milne knows that in American popular culture, the name Rasputin also conjures up a character difficult, almost impossible, to kill—remember the alleged attempts by assassins to poison, knife, and shoot, not to mention drown, the Russian priest.) I suspect that we could have done without this particular title—though perhaps the publisher liked it. Chapters 1 and 2 tell Rostow's story from his birth in 1916 until Kennedy appointed him deputy national security advisor in January 1961. Without exaggeration it is an amazing story of intellectual achievement and career success. A few highpoints make this clear: B.A., Yale, 1936; Rhodes Scholar, 1936-38; Ph.D. in economics, Yale, 1940; instructor at Columbia, 1940-41; U.S. Army, 1941-45 (detailed to the Office of Strategic Services to develop targets for allied bombing); State Department as Assistant Chief, German-Austrian Economic Division, 1945-46; accepted and rejected a full professorship at Harvard, 1946; instructor at Oxford, 1946-47; member of the Economic Commission for Europe, 1947-49; instructor at Cambridge, 1949-50; and professor of economic history, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1950-61. Despite this record, Milne sees Rostow's success in negative terms: "Having never confronted failure, his capacity for self-criticism was significantly impaired" (p. 340). Chapters 3 through 8 form the heart of the book—they narrate and analyze Rostow's years as a senior policy advisor on Vietnam (1961-1969), especially when he was national security advisor from April 1966 until the end of Lyndon Johnson's presidency. An Epilogue takes Rostow's life from that time until his death in 2003. Although Milne discusses many aspects of Rostow's work on Vietnam in these chapters, the coverage of key issues—e.g., the incremental nature of the American intervention, the ground war, the air war in the south, pacification, negotiations—with one exception tends to receive short shrift. The exception is the air war against the North and Rostow's role in that policy. These chapters become an extended critique of Rostow, the "Rostow Thesis," and its implementation through the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign. Milne uses his own definition of the thesis rather than Rostow's and so creates a straw man easier to demolish than the real thing: "The so-called Rostow Thesis," he writes "held that the United States must deal with externally supported insurgencies through bombing their source…" (p. 134). While Milne's words are true as far...

Geen familiegeheim - De herinnering aan de geallieerde bombardementen in recent onderzoek: een besprekingsartikel

Since a broad public debate on German suffering was initiated in the late 1990’s, the German experience of the allied bombings has often been portrayed as a taboo, or, in W.G. Sebalds words, a ‘family secret’. Recent research, however, has disproved this taboo thesis. In this article the recent volumes edited by Helmut Schnatz, Bill Niven, Dietmar Süß, and Jörg Echternkamp, and the dissertation projects of Jörg Arnold and Malte Thiessen are reviewed. While many of the articles in these edited volumes give interesting case studies and insights, their conclusions on the workings of German memory of the air war remain somewhat fragmented. The works of Arnold on the local memory cultures of Magdeburg and Kassel, and Thiessen’s analysis of Hamburg, which are discussed in this article, provide a more detailed perspective. Arnold and Thiessen offer excellent and thoroughly empirical studies on the importance of the air war for local memory. Moreover, these works make clear the ease with which memory of the allied bombings could be linked to political issues in the present. With this Arnold and Thiessen have deepened our insights into the importance of the bombings for local memory and post-war identity. What remains unclear, however, is to what extent their conclusions can be applied to the national memory discourse of the Federal Republic and the GDR. Arnold’s and Thiessen’s studies do not show whether the allied bombings became as important for national memory as they obviously were for the local communities of Kassel, Magdebrurg, and Hamburg.