The journalist Richard Rovere believed that Truman’s limited understanding of executive leadership was a serious problem for the new president and the country. But most of all, Rovere considered it “a cruel time to put inexperience in power.”

Truman’s difficulties over demobilization of America’s armed forces were a case in point. As the war came to an end in September 1945, Truman came under intense pressure to “bring the boys home.”

Where he saw a need to “adjust the rate of the demobilization of our forces so we would be able to meet our new obligations in the world,” the public, led by the twelve million men in the armed forces and their families, insisted on the fastest possible release from service.

Because of serious doubts about the country’s capability to establish effective occupations of Germany and Japan with diminished forces and its capacity to absorb so many men quickly into the economy, Truman was reluctant to give in to what he privately called the “disintegration of our armed forces.”

Truman encouraged Congress to “take the heat” from a public insisting on rapid demobilization, which he privately told congressional leaders could jeopardize global stability.

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President Harry Truman, Proclamation 2714--Cessation of Hostilities of World War II

December 31, 1946

With God's help this nation and our allies, through sacrifice and devotion, courage and perseverance, wrung final and unconditional surrender from our enemies. Thereafter, we, together with the other United Nations, set about building a world in which justice shall replace force. With spirit, through faith, with a determination that there shall be no more wars of aggression calculated to enslave the peoples of the world and destroy their civilization, and with the guidance of Almighty Providence great gains have been made in translating military victory into permanent peace.

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The British Special Air Service evolved just before the American entry into World War Two, when Britain and its Commonwealth allies had been fighting Axis forces alone for over two years.

Then some sixty years later the United States again enters the world stage to combat terrorism, which the British Forces, including the SAS, had been fighting world wide for many years.

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In agreeing with Manstein, Hitler overcame temporarily his personal distaste of an old-style Prussian general staff officer in favouring the brilliantly unconventional operational idea.

That Manstein’s plan to encircle the entire Allied northern wing along the Channel coast, which OKH (in reality, his rival Halder) had considered absurd and dangerous, now coincided with his own instinct to switch the main effort to the southern arm of attack merely confirmed the superior military judgement of the Fuhrer to his professional military advisors. Much as Hitler liked to live the myth that this brilliant idea was his (in a similar manner to Halder), there was an important distinction between Manstein’s farreaching operational level plan in pursuit of a strategic outcome and Hitler’s purely tactical inclinations towards Sedan.

There can be little doubt that the Fuhrer’s discussions with Jodl and Schmundt on 13 February had already primed his coincidental thinking about Sedan as the easiest place to cross the Meuse. In contrast, Manstein, as Frieser has rightly pointed out, was ‘thinking all the way to the Channel Coast’. Hence if Manstein shares with Halder and Hitler the credit for the adoption of Sichelschnitt in its final form, the original operational concept was very much his alone. As General Graf von Kielmansegg has made perfectly clear: ‘The idea was entirely and totally Manstein’s.’ Halder’s contribution thereafter from March to May 1940, whilst Manstein remained banished in Stettin, lay in defending the new plan against all objections.

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At 10 P.M. on December 29, after just two days of rest, Washington’s men again stood on the cold clay banks of the Delaware awaiting boats to shuttle them across the river. That night it wore a skim of ice too thin to support the weight of men but thick enough to impede the progress of boats. This crossing took two days. Washington’s troops weren’t fully assembled in Trenton until December 31, 1776—for many, their enlistments would expire the next day.

After the hard river crossing, in which half of his troops had camped a night in six inches of snow without blankets or tents, Washington rode to inspect a New England regiment of his veteran troops encamped in Trenton. These men had been with him throughout 1776—they had rejoiced at the evacuation of Boston, been driven from Long Island and White Plains, slogged for 80 miles across New Jersey; they looked less like soldiers than like ragged refugees.

Washington told them that they had done a good job and he was thankful. If they would extend the terms of their enlistment for just six weeks, he would top their regular pay with a bounty of $10.00. His regimental officers called for volunteers to step forward and a drummer beat a roll.

Not one man moved.

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For nearly five months the war had been fought with mounting severity. Suddenly, as darkness fell on Christmas Eve, there was, in sections of the front line, a moment of peaceable behaviour.

'We got into conversation with the Germans who were anxious to arrange an Armistice during Xmas,' a 25-year-old lieutenant with the Scots Guards, Sir Edward Hulse, wrote in his battalion's war diary. 'A scout named F. Murker went out and met a German Patrol and was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn't fire at them they would not fire at us.' That night, on a front where five days earlier there had been savage fighting, the guns were silent.

On the following morning, German soldiers walked across towards the British wire and British soldiers went out to meet them.

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For thousands of years, horses defined military land power, mobility, logistics and tactics. Yet, decades before motorized vehicles, including tanks, appeared on the battlefield, it was clear to almost all, except it seems cavalry officers, that the era of combat horse brigades, and charges, was over.

Accurate artillery and rapid-firing rifled small arms swept cavalry off the field at Balaclava during the ill-fated British "Charge of the Light Brigade" during the Crimean War against Russia in the mid-1850s. One hundred and thirteen men died in the charge that produced no decisive gains and resulted in unacceptably high cost, with a ratio of casualties to survivors of 1.5 to 1.

Over 330 horses were killed. That charge, immortalized by Alfred, Lord Tennyson's epic poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," prompted French Marshal Pierre Bosquet to state "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre" ("It is magnificent, but it is not war)" and "C'est de la folie" (It is madness"). Russian commanders were reported to have initially believed that the British cavalrymen must have been drunk to attempt it.

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CP Note: Robert Egan was a restaurant owner from a mobbed-up New Jersey town, who for thirteen years inserted himself into the high-stakes diplomatic battles between the United States and North Korea.

His life took an astonishing turn when his interest in the search for Vietnam-era POWs led to an introduction in the early nineties to North Korean officials desperate to improve relations with the United States. So Egan turned his restaurant, Cubby’s, into his own version of Camp David. Between ball games, fishing trips, and heaping plates of pork ribs, he advised deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Han Song Ryol, and other North Koreans during tumultuous years that saw the death of Kim Il-Sung and the rise of Kim Jong-Il, false starts toward peace during the Clinton administration, the Bush “Axis of Evil” era, and North Korea’s successful test of a nuclear weapon in 2006. All the while, Egan informed for the FBI, vexed the White House with his meddling, chaperoned the communist nation’s athletes on hilarious adventures, and nearly rescued a captured U.S. Navy vessel---all in the interest of promoting peace.

November 23, 1992. Washington politicos were trying to clear a path for normalized relations with the government of Vietnam, almost twenty years after the end of the war there. They needed a little help, and I jumped at the chance. How often does a guy from Hackensack have the ear of the U.S. Congress?

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December 22, 1864, two days after Savannah fell, General Sherman sent a telegram to President Lincoln (see copy of original):

I beg to present to you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition. Also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.

CP Note: 2011 marked the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks.

The surface parallels are easy to spot: both surprise attacks, both by air, both shocks to the world.

The article below breaks the surface and drills in, going back and forth between Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and Usama bin Laden,their reasons and motivations for planning and executing Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and the manhunts that followed.

Yamamoto

Much of what the admiral said went against the tide of popular opinion. Once the emperor agreed to make war against the United States, Yamamoto immediately ended his personal opposition, for he would never speak against the Chrysanthemum Throne. He set aside his feelings and accepted who he was—the sword of the emperor, and the one man in Japan who was capable of bringing the United States to its knees.

“What a strange position I find myself in now,” he wrote an old friend. “Having to make a decision diametrically opposed to my own personal opinion, with no choice but to push full-speed in pursuance of the decision.”

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On the day the war had ended in Europe, Patton had remarked to an aide: “The best end for an old campaigner is a bullet at the last minute of the last battle.”

Injured in a fender bender dreary months after that last battle, Patton succumbed to pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure December 21, 1945. He was 60 years old.

His wife chose the U.S. military cemetery at Hamm, Luxembourg, not far from Bastogne, site of the desperate battle of which her husband was proudest. Thus Patton was not only removed from life and all the controversies life engenders, even his mortal remains, the last vestige of his physical presence, were buried in a place remote from the people of his country. Dead heroes make the best heroes, because, for them, time has stopped, and there is no more of the messy business of life to interfere with the collective cultural projection that is myth.

Upon his death, Patton was enshrined in the American mythic imagination. Discussions of Patton still elicit controversy. Yet the name of Patton has never lost its magic. It would not be difficult to argue that Eisenhower, Bradley, and MacArthur were more central to the Allied victory than Patton, but it could not be argued that they were superior warriors, and none of them has entered the realm of mythic imagination.

And that is another aspect of the Patton problem. Figures of myth largely represent the meaning we endow them with. To the extent that he has entered into American mythology, this is true of Patton, and the mythic Patton all too readily overshadows the historical Patton, a soldier and a leader of soldiers, obscuring the important question that needs to be asked: What is Patton’s legacy to the army of today?

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