CIAO DATE: 02/05/08
The National Interest
An Officer and a Professor
Jacob Heilbrunn
Full Text
Michael Howard, Captain Professor: The Memoirs of Sir Michael Howard (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 221 pp., $44.95.
IN RECENT decades, a British invasion has been taking place in American academia. One history department after another has welcomed scholars from across the pond to instruct and enlighten Americans about the past. Some of the prize catches include Paul Kennedy, Simon Schama, Linda Colley, Jonathan Spence and, most recently, Niall Ferguson. But perhaps no one has occupied a more prominent position than Sir Michael Howard.
In his memoir Captain Professor, Howard, who recently retired from teaching at Yale, where he was the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, recounts his illustrious career. Howard, who pioneered the study of war as an aspect of “total history”, was awarded Britain’s highest historical honor, the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford, before heading to Yale. He seems to have met or known everybody who was somebody, ranging from Winston Churchill to Henry Kissinger to Margaret Thatcher. Among his accomplishments were writing the definitive history of the Franco-Prussian War and helping establish the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He belongs to a long line of British military historians, such as John Wheeler-Bennett, who have drawn on their deep historical knowledge to expound upon contemporary politics in vivid and forceful prose that is almost impossible to read without mounting excitement.
In Captain Professor, Howard blends his personal history with world events to provide a delightfully informal and disarming account. He begins with his privileged childhood before turning to his years in British boarding schools. His descriptions of the combat he experienced during the Italian campaign in the Second World War are seldom less than gripping. Scarcely less robust than the real thing, his accounts of academic warfare are, more often than not, mordantly entertaining.
But it is Howard’s liberality of spirit and disdain during the Cold War for intellectual extremism of all kinds that emerges most sharply. As a half-Quaker and half-Jew who is also a homosexual—a topic he deals with in some detail—Howard says that from the outset he never felt as though he was traditional John Bull material. Rather, he took a far more inquiring and detached stance toward the issue of empire and the exercise of military power. Much of his life has been devoted to debunking pacifist sentiments in Britain and neoconservative nationalism in the United States. Today, Howard is aghast at the presidency of George W. Bush, which he believes has tried to claim a “hunter’s license to use force anywhere in the world” and to dispense with the restraints of international law that the United States had formerly helped to create. He at once offers a timely reminder of the unpredictable nature of warfare and the importance of distinguishing between real and imaginary threats.
Like the historian Fritz Stern, who memorably chronicles imperial Germany in his recent memoir Five Germanys I Have Known, Howard, who was born in 1922, evokes the vanished world of his ancestors. On his father’s side, Howard is descended from a long line of Quakers that was, as he puts it, “quite distinguished enough in its own quiet way without going scrabbling after strawberry leaves.” His father provoked some comment in the family when, in 1914, he married Edith Julia Emma Edinger, who was not a Quaker. She was Jewish. To make matters even worse, the Edingers were also German. In 1914 it was not exactly a good thing to be, especially if one had been presented, as Howard’s mother was, to the Kaiser on his yacht, the Hohenzollern. But whatever eyebrows may have been raised on the paternal side of the family, Howard’s mother did have the very considerable virtue of being quite wealthy. Michael grew up not in his father’s world, but his mother’s. He lived in a large house on Brompton Square, a fashionable area on the borders of South Kensington and Chelsea, amidst thick carpets, ticking clocks and heavy silk curtains. His family had an indoor staff of no less than seven, plus a full-time chauffeur and a man who came once a week to wind the clocks. A second estate at Ardmore provided a respite from the cares of the city.
Howard enjoyed a very traditional upbringing and surroundings. In the 1920s, says Howard, London seemed Edwardian—even Victorian—particularly in church: “Elderly gentlemen in the congregation still wore top hats and frockcoats. Elderly ladies still modeled themselves on the still-living Queen Victoria.” In the mornings, Howard would throw pennies to the organ grinder and his monkey, afternoons brought the muffin man with his tray and bell and in the evening, the lamp lighter arrived with a pole to combat the pea-soup fog. Faith in the Empire was a given. As a seven year-old at his day school, Howard was taught patriotic songs by a heavy-set old man with a walrus moustache. Maps of the British Empire hung on the wall. Kipling’s poems were memorized. Empire Day was celebrated on May 24. On Wednesday afternoons, Howard writes, “we were conducted, wearing the school uniform of cherry-red caps and grey shorts, to the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, to gape dutifully at replicas of South African gold ingots, sheaves of Canadian wheat and various artifacts made with Indian jute.”
This idyll could not last. In the 1930s, Howard’s mother’s relatives began to stream in from Nazi Germany—Fulds from Frankfurt, Eberstadts from Hamburg, Ehrenbergs from Prague. As a ten year-old, Howard took a keen interest in the German presidential elections of 1932 and events abroad. Apart from the plight of his relatives, he was also attuned to politics simply by attending school with the likes of fascist leader Oswald Mosley’s son, Nicholas, as well as Anthony Huxley. After World War II broke out, many of his schoolmates would perish. Indeed, from the outset, Howard had grown up in the shadow of death. The memory of the Great War was omnipresent. Much of the younger British aristocracy had been slaughtered in the trenches. Vera Brittain’s impassioned Testament of Youth about the destruction of her generation was a best seller in 1933—the very year Hitler came to power. Howard himself recalls that his nurse spoke of “the Front” to her friends with dread, and the phrase “killed in the war” often came up in adult conversations. Pacifist sentiments abounded in the interwar period—and would flare up again during the Cold War in the form of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was a favorite cause of radical historians such as E. P. Thompson. But Howard, whose family took a last trip through continental Europe in 1939, became increasingly aware that war was unavoidable, especially with the announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which carved up Poland and the Baltic states between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Howard joined the Officers’ Training Corps in 1937 and was called up for full-time duty in 1941. During that interval he won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he began to study history with an imposing array of scholars, including Keith Feiling, the historian of the Tory party, and A. J. P. Taylor. It was Feiling who prompted Howard to enter the Coldstream Guards for active service. Howard went to him, explaining that he had received an offer to join the Royal Air Force orchestra as an oboist. According to Howard, Feiling, puffing his pipe and looking like a wise owl, stammered: “Y-yes Howard. I-I can see that it doesn’t look a b-b-bad idea. But afterwards, when they ask you w-w-what you actually did during the war, and you said that you spent it p-p-playing the oboe. . . .” Howard got the message.
To his family’s delight—the social cachet was not insignificant—Howard joined the British Army’s oldest continuously serving regiment, the Coldstream Guards. The training was rigorous: In addition to drill, weapons training, minor tactics and military tactics, Howard and his fellow soldiers practiced night operations. But the Wehrmacht, as Howard reminds us, was a very formidable military organization: “We learned to be soldiers of a kind, but not yet fighters, let alone killers.” Before he was shipped out to North Africa and then Italy, Howard had the good fortune to be posted to a unit stationed at Winston Churchill’s country home, Chequers. He and his chums had the run of the place, playing the piano in the great hall. Churchill showed up one evening wearing his famous Turnbull & Asser siren suit to watch gangster movies, and Howard recalls that the prime minister lustily cheered on the good guys, shouting “Go on . . . hit him!”
Howard illuminates the mixture of heroism and ineptitude that characterizes warfare. Like Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s memorable World War II trilogy, he had a bird’s-eye view of the peculiarities of the British army. Howard notes that as he sailed to North Africa on a Dutch cruise liner called the Johann van Oldenbarneveldt, the quarters were ludicrously plush. Japanese stewards rang gongs to summon officers for their meals in elegant dining saloons. But actual fighting was a rather different matter. Battling in the desert was one thing, but in the European theater, problems abounded. For example, Howard observes that the
people we felt sorry for were the civilians. In all our training no one had ever suggested that there might be non-combatants around on the battlefield. . . .But here there were: families shelled or bombed out of their houses; farmers hanging on and trying to work their fields or milk their cows which were bellowing with pain. . . .How were these sad, bewildered peasants to be treated: as enemies, neutrals or friends?
Nor does Howard indulge in any chest-thumping about the glory of combat. His description of the agony of having no real choice but to abandon a badly wounded comrade under heavy fire is unflinching and mesmerizing. He also records his intense pride at being awarded a military cross for bravery during an attack near Salerno but observes that “it was my first action, and any fool can be brave in his first action. It was not to happen again.” Elsewhere, he recalls how he flinched in battle, briefly, almost unconsciously, trying to abandon his men, only to be brought up short by a query from one of them.
Still, Howard is very old school. He has a stiff-upper-lip view of it all, stating that nothing could have prepared troops for the pitched battles on cold, wet, bare mountains, where it would take eight men hours to carry a stretcher down slippery paths to dressing stations. “Today, of course”, Howard censoriously writes, “they would all need counseling, and would probably sue the army for neglecting its ‘duty of care.’ Then nothing mattered except defeating the Germans and getting home.” The desire to get home is one reason that Howard approved, and continues to approve, of the use of atomic bombs against Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Howard believes that they not only shortened the war, but also that the shock of their use served to deter the superpowers from using them during the next half-century.
With his military experience and interest in history, the young “Captain M.E. Howard, MC” was eager to return to Oxford. There he studied with, among others, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had earned fame with his 1947 best seller The Last Days of Hitler. But Howard did not shine immediately. He had to scramble for an assistant lectureship at King’s College. It rubbed away what he calls his Oxford superiority complex and forced him to work hard, long hours researching for what one mentor told him had to be “not just a few bloody articles”, but “a proper book.” Howard’s study of the Franco-Prussian War was it.
It’s a pity that Howard doesn’t describe much about the significance of the book itself. But it remains noteworthy for a number of reasons. For one thing, Howard didn’t simply focus on warfare in isolation but sought to show that the manner in which a nation fought was inextricably linked to its political culture. This was a clever and useful way to integrate the emerging vogue for social history with military studies. Howard also offered a reminder that the Franco-Prussian War prepared the ground for World War I, when France was determined to revenge itself for the German annexation of the province of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871. Perhaps it remains a touchy subject even today. According to Howard:
It has never been translated into French or German. Perhaps the France of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic did not want to be reminded by an Englishman of their humiliations, while the Germany of Konrad Adenauer’s Federal Republic was as unwilling to recall its military triumphs as were the French their military disasters.
The results of the Franco-Prussian War might make for painful reading in the United States as well. The willful and impetuous Kaiser, determined to outdo his cautious father, ignored the advice of his experienced foreign minister Otto von Bismarck about the need for allies, refused to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, surrounded himself with a nationalist claque of intellectuals and policymakers, and launched a disastrous preventive war.
Back in the days of the Cold War, however, one of the consuming topics wasn’t whether the United States would do too much, but whether it would do enough to protect its allies. The issue was called “extended deterrence”, that is, the credibility of the nuclear guarantee to Western Europe. Would the Soviets really believe that the United States was prepared to launch its missile force to protect Hamburg? A related subject was arms control, which offered another growth industry for academics. Howard says that he was very impressed by the energy that the United States displayed in tackling these questions. The Americans, he says, “took their responsibilities for world leadership with a seriousness that, coming from a post-Suez Britain sunk into ironic self-flagellation, I found awe-inspiring.” Given the bad odor into which the United States has fallen in the past decades, it comes as something of a shock to read these words.
Howard, though, does not overlook the streak of Manicheanism that emerged during the frostiest days of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation and that has lasted up to the present. The American penchant for demonizing its enemies left Howard cold. He recalls that by “all but a tiny number of experts, the Soviet Union was seen in the United States as a force of cosmic evil whose policy and intentions could be divined simply by multiplying Marxist dogma by military capacity.” Indeed, the manner in which some Soviet experts cited Lenin’s writings was akin to a foreigner viewing American foreign policy solely through the lens of George Washington’s Farewell Address. As Howard puts it, what he learned about Americans was the “sheer ferocity of their political system and the lengths to which political activists would go to silence and humiliate their political adversaries. In this respect at least, nothing seems to have changed in 40 years.” It was at the RAND Corporation that Howard found this spirit to be at its most virulent. He viewed RAND as a kind of secular monastery inhabited by the high priests of the nuclear era, who speculated endlessly about kill ratios and about how long it would take to rebuild Los Angeles following a nuclear war.
In particular, he singles out his good friend Albert Wohlstetter for criticism. Howard, whom the British historian A. L. Rowse has said “understood the complexities of the nuclear balance of power, and expounded them as no other writer”, got into protracted battles with Wohlstetter over Cold War policies. According to Howard, Wohlstetter relied on worst-case scenarios to argue that the United States was vulnerable to a Soviet Union intent on world conquest. Wohlstetter, who advised Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson as well as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the Ford Administration, had a number of protégés, including Richard Perle. Although Wohlstetter was a raconteur and gourmand, Howard points out that behind his bonhomie lay a ferocious debater—“a ferocity that, alas, his pupils have imitated. There was always, it was once said, a distinct odor of burning when Albert was around.”
But the zeal of the intellectuals for miring the United States in Vietnam or, more recently, in Iraq can hardly have come as a surprise to Howard, who has always been wary of intellectual crusades. In a wonderful collection of essays called War and the Liberal Conscience, Howard traced the ebullient 19th-century belief, voiced by Gladstone among others, that warfare could be a means of promoting liberalism and freedom, in the Balkans and elsewhere. Here Howard was following in the footsteps of A. J. P. Taylor, himself a man of the left, who had no patience with pieties about its righteousness and who liked to point out that the real danger comes not when statesmen fail to act on their principles, but when they do.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Howard concludes on a rather pensive note.
The world, he says, seems to be in little better shape at the beginning of the 21st century than it was in the aftermath of the First World War. The Middle East is aflame. The Balkan states enjoy an armed truce. Europe is terrified of the Muslim population in its midst. The United States has gone off the rails, acting much like Wilhelmine Germany in its conviction that might makes right. According to Howard, “one of the saddest experiences in my life was to see a nation for which my own gratitude, affection and admiration had been almost unbounded, become within a few months regarded with hatred by half the world and mistrust by most of the rest.” Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Howard warned against playing into the hands of terrorists by overreacting to them, likening the bombing of centers of terrorism to attempting to eradicate cancer cells with a blowtorch. Howard stated this publicly as well as privately in a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, but, of course, his minatory voice was not heeded.
For all his oratorical powers—and they are formidable—Howard has never occupied a government position, never wielded great power. Instead, Howard’s accomplishments rest elsewhere. It is noteworthy that in marked contrast to Niall Ferguson, Howard has never been captivated by illusions about the perils of combat or the beneficent ability of the United States to transform the Middle East overnight. Perhaps this is so because Howard has not only taught history, but also lived it. In recalling his own past, Howard offers important lessons for the present.
Jacob Heilbrunn writes regularly for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times and is the author of the forthcoming They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Doubleday Books, 2008).