Blithe, Band of Brothers

Aren’t we humans strange? I guess it’s like the book The Right Stuff describes it - “it can blow at any seam”. I think of Cobb having the motivation to volunteer & the toughness to endure Camp Toccoa, & then just losing it.

I recently watched The Conscientious Objector on Netflix. The captain who gave Desmond Doss the most grief was the first one to run when the fighting started.

Slightly off-topic, but speaking of factual representations in BoB:

I just finished re-watching the episode in which Easy Company leads the assault on Foy, and I realized that the song the nuns sing to them in the convent at the end, and which becomes the basis for the orchestral playout of the episode, is “Plaisir d’amour” (“Joys of Love”) – an 18th-century French secular song about an unfaithful woman and the fleeting pleasure of being in love. It pulled me completely out of the story because I spent the rest of the time wondering if a choir of catholic nuns would actually sing that…in church, no less?

I can’t say one way or another, but it struck me as odd.

I just finished watching the 35th and final episode in 1973 Thames Television documentary, “The World at War,” titled “From War to Peace,” which is an “interview” – actually a monologue – with Prof. Stephen Ambrose.

You won’t believe what Ambrose said.

“Manpower losses were almost insignificant; compared to the other combants, insignificant. Only slightly more than a quarter of a million Americans died during the war. America was the least mobilized of all the nations, of all the major combants in World War II. Altogether, we had an army and navy and air force of 12 million men out of a total population of 170 million. And of that 12 million, probably less than six million ever got overseas.”

I’m not a professional historian, but even I can spot at least one elementary error here. Can you?

  1. According to wikipedia.org, the U.S. had 416,800 military deaths, the most of any Allied country except the USSR.

  2. The population of the U.S. at the time was 131 million, according to wikipedia. The number cited by Ambrose was the population of the U.S. during the 1960s. That’s the elementary error I was referring to.

  3. The U.S. did not have an air force during WWII.

I have not been able to check the other numbers, perhaps someone else knows. But even so, nearly one in 10 of all Americans – men, women and children – served in the military during WWII. This Ambrose calls “the least mobilized.”

Wait, there’s more. Speaking of American treatment of Europe after the war, Ambrose said:

“The Lend Lease Act, which Churchilll, of course, called ‘the most unsordid act in all human history’ may very well have been that, but there was much about it that which was petty.”

Churchill, of course, was praising The Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after the war, not the Lend Lease Act. In his comments, Ambrose seems to be completely confusing the two programs. In the process, he unjustly maligns both President Harry Truman and General George Marshall, not to mention America.

Ambrose said the Soviet attack on Japanese forces in Manchuria lasting only two days was the decisive event in the Japanese decision to surrender. While I believe professional historians are generally entitled to their opinions, saying the Soviets deserve the credit for defeating Japan seems a bit outside the mainstream.

Some thoughts come to mind.

How did this guy every get a PhD. in history?

Did anyone at Thames Television actually watch Ambrose’s monologue, aside from the cameraman? (I can see why the British, from a nationalistic viewpoint, rather than an historical one, might have liked Ambrose’s remarks.)

Why did anyone take Ambrose seriously after this? Ambrose should have been demoted to teaching high school history, at best. Yet he was allowed to write books by publishers who seemed to have the attitude that you should not let facts get in the way of a good story.

To be fair to the documentary, episode 35 was part of the extras, so it may not have been broadcast at the time. But portions of his comments were used in the main documentary.

I don’t understand how a professional historian can get such basic, well-known facts wrong, and get away with it.

1)He’s referring to “battle deaths”. Per the same wikipedia cite, “Deaths in battle were 292,131.” At worst this is disingenuous, but I wouldn’t say it’s outright wrong.

  1. You’re being silly. No, the United States did not have an Air Force. It did have an air force. (The “Air Forces” existed during the entirety of the war, so if you want to argue that he was capitalizing in speech, maybe he just left off an s.)

I would agree that #2 is indeed an error, even though you appear to only be counting US Census statistics. Even if you include the Philippines and other areas that military forces were drawn from, I don’t think you’re going to get to 170 million.

Here is the webpage I was referring to:

All it says is “military deaths.”

What Ambrose said was “manpower deaths”:

“Only slightly more than a quarter of a million Americans died during the war.”

He does not distinguish military from civilian from battle deaths.

If you compare total American deaths, including civilians, then the U.S. did, indeed, get off relatively easy, compared to the horrors seen in other Allied countries, not to mention the Axis. But that’s not what he said.

I have not been able to check his 12 million and 6 million numbers; perhaps someone else can.

As to his listing the air force as a separate service, this is the kind of error you see from inexperienced journalists who are too lazy to check usage in the AP Style Manual. It is not the kind of error you expect from a military historian.

This, combined with the erroneous attribution of the Churchill quote, are the kinds of things that perpetuate historical inaccuracies in the public’s mind.

You can perhaps excuse isolated errors, but what you see here is a pattern of sloppy thinking and just plain not knowing the facts. And that’s without even getting into some of his bizarre opinions.

I don’t want to make it seem I think everything he said was idiotic. Some of the things were correct and insightful.

But you should watch this episode. He even lambasts Churchill for neglecting maintenance on Britain’s railroads and highways during the war, so that they were in bad shape afterwards!

I’m sorry, but Ambrose really doesn’t have much credibility in my mind. I wonder why it took so long for people to catch on.

There is a footnote on the Wikipedia article explaining the number in more detail. It is there that the battle deaths number is listed.

Anyway, it’s better to go to one of the actual sources used by Wikipedia, namely this congressional report (pdf). That also lists 15 million serving during the period of hostilities, so he was off on that number. It looks like the actual number who served in the military was ~ 11% of the population, going with 130 million for population. Ambrose’s inflated population marks it down to 7%. A definite error, but to my mind, 12 million is in the neighborhood if he was speaking off the top of his head (which he probably should not have been, but may well have been).
I can’t easily find any numbers about the percentage who were sent “overseas”, other than an unsubstantiated “74%” from this page. I think it’d take some work to find the answer, and it appears Ambrose was giving an estimate. Also this was 30 years ago when he did so.

On what do your base your belief that Churchill was talking about the Marshall Plan? This page, which unfortunately cites some dead links but appears to be reliable, makes a few statements. For one, Churchill apparently only ever called the Lend-Lease Act “unsordid”. For many years, however, it’s been said he referred to both Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan this way, but that page does’t provide a reference for the latter.

I don’t know why you would insist that Ambrose was listing a separate service. Having an air force is not the same as having The Air Force. Would you claim that Germany had no air force then because they had a Luftwaffe?

Ambrose has made a number of mistakes, but not so frequently as you suggest he did.

My source for the Churchill quote is President Harry S. Truman, in the source I cited in the Wikipedia entry, “Plain Speaking, An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman,” by Merle Miller.

Given that he knew General Marshall and Winston Churchill personally, and was the one who created the Marshall Plan, and that the source quotes Truman directly regarding the quote, it seems definitive to me.

Besides, it has always been my understanding that it referred to the Marshall Plan. I had never heard otherwise until I looked on the web following hearing Ambrose’s statement. It makes me wonder how much sloppy historians like Ambrose contribute to such misconceptions.

If errors get picked up by the press, this can perpetuate it. An interesting example is the falsehood that Marconi invented radio. Yet you can still see this today in the press.

And now with the internet, outright lies perpetrated by PR men a century ago can still circulate, such as the nonsense that aluminum cookware causes cancer. Pure PR BS concocted in the 1920s. I have heard this from both a cookware seller and a person from Russia just recently.

BUT, the internet can also be used to set the truth straight. With a little checking I was able to find the source of the aluminum rumor, the false attribution of cancer from using aluminum cookware to the death of Rudolph Valentino, if I remember correctly, by a PR man, about six months after aluminum cookware came on the market.

I don’t contest your interpretation of the air force remark, beyond what I have said previously.

My points are that it is part of a pattern of sloppiness and inaccuracy, which raises questions about his other statements that are more difficult to evaluate.

And, most important, this 1973 interview/monologue shows there were serious problems decades before the books by Ambrose that are being questioned now. Not once does whoever is conducting this “interview” actually ask Ambrose a question on camera, or challenge any of his remarks. Yet many of them are begging for clarification or contradiction. And then Ambrose gets listed as one of the primary sources on the documentary.

I suggest anyone interested in the history of WWII to watch this and judge for yourself. At first glance, it looks like here’s this very smart guy. But on closer examination, it starts to look pretty weird, some guy throwing around all sorts of off the wall judgments.

It should be noted that the Ambrose “interview” is the opposite of the Truman oral biography, which is a constant give and take between Truman and Miller. It is the real thing, unlike the Ambrose concoction with Eisenhower, based on hundreds of hours of recordings over several years.

Miller: Winston Churchill has called the Marshall Plan “the most unsordid act in history.”

Truman: Well, there wasn’t anything unselfish about it. We weren’t trying to put anything over on people. We were in a position to keep people from starving and help them preserve their freedom and build up their countries, and that’s what we did.

[Note that Truman doesn’t mention that this help was offered regardless of whether a country was a former friend or enemy, the key to the greatness of the plan.]

Miller: Mr. President, the plan called for expenditures of sixteen billion dollars. Didn’t that cause a lot of concern in Congress?

Truman: Yes, it did, but it had to be done, so I called in all the favors I was owed, and we got it through …

Sam Rayburn asks how much it will cost, and Truman tells him:

Truman: Well, his face got as white as a sheet, but I said to him, "Now, Sam, I figure I saved the people of the United States about fifteen, sixteen billion dollars with that committee of mine, and you know that better than anyone else.

" ‘Now we’re going to need that money, and we can save the world with it.’

“And he says to me, ‘Harry, I’ll do my damndest. It won’t be easy, but you can count on me to help all I can.’ And he did, too, and so did a lot of others in both parties. There wasn’t anything partisan about any part of this or anything else where foreign policy was concerned. Not when I was in the White House there wasn’t.”

I can’t recommend “Plain Speaking” too highly.

If the bit you quoted is your cite, then it’s worth noting that your source is Merle Miller, not Truman. Truman doesn’t say the phrase applies to the Marshall Plan, Miller does. Truman doesn’t challenge the attribution, but doesn’t necessarily prove anything.

I guess you don’t know Harry Truman.

Read the book.

Well, no, not personally. What’s your point?

I’m sorry, but it may be a wonder that it took you so long to catch on, but most of the rest of us knew to take Ambrose’s stuff with a boulder of salt, years and years ago.

If you want well-researched fiddly details, Ambrose is not your go-to guy. He’s good at conveying his information in an easy-to-read way. For the Band of Brothers (and other) stuff, he’s good for having a lot of primary sources to draw from – but he’s not good at verifying that those primary sources were necessarily accurate.

Which, of course, had already come up in this zombie thread from a year ago that you’ve randomly appended your OMGrant to.

If what Miller implies Truman agrees with what Churchill said is true, then he may well have said it twice. (One problem with the internet page I cited is that they never really disprove he said it about both). But he definitely said it about Lend-Lease, which is what Ambrose said he did.

Here’s the text of the speech. April 17, 1945 on the death of FDR.

And indeed, I agree with Lightray. I’m merely bothered that if your going to criticize someone you should maybe do a bit more research yourself. Back then, the internet didn’t have all these sources readily available. We are in a remarkable age now.

Now, I’m not a fancy History PhD, but even I know that ‘least’ is a comparative, and that there was more than one country involved in World War Two. So it’s kind of hard to say he’s wrong without knowing what percentage of Russians, British, Germans and Japanese served in the military.

Now I don’t have the numbers handy myself, but I’d be willing to bet good money that the US is going to come out with the lowest number.
At any rate, his general point – that the US came out of WWII in far better shape than any other combatant – is so obviously true that I find it hard to take seriously anyone who argues against it. Unless you can point to significant US civilian casualties (outside of the Merchant Marine), significant bombing or shelling damage to US cities, damage to US crops or farmland, or even above average amounts of hunger in the US during or immediately after the war.

So it was formally called the “U.S. Army Air Forces” from 1941 to 1947. But to the guys in it (including my father and his brother), they just called it the “Air Force”. Take a chill pill.

Ambrose was pretty will known for his numerous acts of plagiarism, so it doesn’t surprise me that he was also a sloppy fact checker.