[Repost] Nonsense holiday controversies, or keeping the Chi in "Χριστός"

I'm not sure how, but until this year, I managed to get through over four decades of life without learning that there was a controversy over the use of the word "Xmas" as an abbreviation for Christmas.  As is no surprise, this controversy is the creation of evangelical pastors who somehow got through seminary without even a smattering of the history of their faiths.  It seems that these angry, but well-meaning, fellows somehow think that the abbreviation "Xmas" was somehow popularized by the heathen to take the "Christ" out of "Christmas" as part of a plot to secularize the nation.  There are a whole slew of problems associated with how both Christians and non-Christians perceive this particular holiday, but today we'll stick with this Xmas thing.

The root of the problem is that the spelling of "Christ" is different in Latin-derived alphabets like English than is it is in Greek, the language of the New Testament.  In Greek, it is spelled "Χριστός", or "Christos".  The first letter is "Chi", or in Greek "Χ". In the ancient and medieval world, this was as obvious to educated folks as it was to Christians. Ancient Christians used the "X" (Chi) and the "P" (Rho) letters as a symbolic shorthand for Christ (the labarum) that still exists within the Catholic Church in its use on vestments and altar service.  The Chi-Rho symbol is also that which reportedly appeared to the Emperor Constantine in a dream before the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 A.D., where it was later claimed that he had his soldiers paint it upon their shields.

So, at least in the ancient world, the use of the "X" was a common abbreviation for Christ and Christians.  The use of the Chi as an abbreviation after that point is a bit more complicated, but historians generally agree that by the fifteenth century, the term Xmas was widely used.  Religious abbreviations were common due to the difficulty in reproducing manuscripts in scriptoria, ink was expensive, as was parchment and paper.  That meant that in Gregorian chants and other documents, the monks that made copies relied on abbreviations to reduce the time and cost to reproduce their works. Other examples include "Dne" for "domine" and "ala" for "alleluia".  We can definitively date various uses of the "X" in abbreviations for Christmas in England (as "Xp̄es mæsse") at least as far back as 1021 when it appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The expense of printing the entire word "Christmas" was such that even after the Gutenberg's development of the movable-type printing press in 1453, even the church was using Christmas in its documents. 

Of course, even the word "Christos" is a title, not the actual name for Jesus, in either historical or Biblical terms.  "Christos" is Greek for "the anointed one". I would be willing to wager that most Americans, even devout Christians, don't understand that distinction when they are arguing about keeping the "Christ" in "Christmas".  Of course, there's really a whole different argument about how, why, and when Christmas should be celebrated.

[Repost] Pagan Origins and Crīstesmæsse

A large part of the cultural conflict in the United States over the past decade has been the twin concepts of a "War on Christmas"and a need to "put the Christ back in Christmas".  As with the contentious issue over whether to abbreviate Christmas as "Xmas", the debate here stems from a rather profound ignorance of both the ancient and modern holidays celebrating the end of December and the start of a new year.  Not only did ancient Christians not celebrate Christmas, but the modern American and English celebrations of the holiday developed only with consumer culture and the mass media.  Indeed, we owe most of our conception of Christmas festivities to the esteemed Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Clement C. Moore's (or maybe, Major Henry Livingston's) 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. 

The celebration of Christmas as the day Jesus was born is a surprisingly contentious issue.  We don't know the day or month of Jesus' birth - modern estimates based on clues from the Gospels range from March to as late as October, but make it clear that he was almost certainly not born in December.  The major clues relate to weather, animal husbandry, and the lack of a winter census.  Winter weather in Judea was cold and rainy, unsuitable for both travel and tending flocks in fields.  Since the Gospels (Luke 2:8) tell us that the shepherds were keeping the flocks in the fields at night to feed at the time of Jesus' birth.  The same goes for travel to Bethlehem for a census.  Even the Romans probably wouldn't force people to travel in bad weather for annual bookkeeping. Since the winter rains end before Passover and start in October, the shepherds weren't in the fields with their flocks if Jesus was born in December.  In the Old Testament both the book of Ezra and the Song of Solomon indicate that December was cold and Rainy, so the evidence against Jesus being born in December is pretty good.

So the question then, is where these celebrations come from?  Although I'm loathe to use it as a source, and I don't let my students use it as a crutch, Wikipedia has a good discussion of some of the circumlocutions that some early Christian thinkers went through to justify a December birth for Christ.  Sextus Julius Africanus suggested in 221 that Jesus was conceived at the spring equinox, and in 386, John Chrysotom argued that Jesus was conceived in the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy with St. John the Baptist.  Other early christian theologians ridiculed the very idea of celebrating birthdays, so it is unclear why these two would try to find some justification for setting the date of Jesus' birth.

Christmas was celebrated by Christians only sporadically and locally in the ancient world, becoming important during the reign of the Emperor Constantine.  The reason for the emergence of Christmas under Constantine seems more like one of those conspiracy theories out of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code than the development of a profoundly religious event.  Constantine ruled over a multi-religious empire that had multiple conflicting December/January religious festivals.  The most important were the celebrations of Saturnalia, the birth of Mithras, and the rebirth of Sol Invictus.  It is hard to imagine that the early Church designated December 25th, also the date set aside for the birthday celebrations of Mithras and Sol Invictus, was a coincidence.  Romans exerted a lot of social pressure on Christians to take part in the Saturnalia activities that occurred from the solstice to the new year, and by designating December 25th a day to celebrate the coming of the messiah, the Church allowed Christians to enjoy feasts and exchange gifts. Christianizing the existing pagan traditions allowed the faith both survive and spread. Still, Christmas was not a major and widespread holiday until the 9th century.

If you were expecting the Christmas controversy to end there, you'd be sadly mistaken.  Although Christians merrily co-opted the winter festivals of the local traditions they came across, including the Christmas tree, those very pagan traditions that they adopted became a source of renewed debate by the 16th century.  Geneva seems to be the location of the first strenuous objections to Christmas and other "Romish festivals and fasts", banning them in 1550, along with all previously held religious holidays other than Sunday observances.  It seems that the good fathers of Geneva hand't figured out that the Sabbath had been moved to Sunday by Constantine to coincide with other Roman observances, but they were serious about avoiding Catholic and pagan "superstitions".  John Knox and the leaders of the Scottish Reformation similarly denounced Catholic innovations such as "Feasts (as they term them) of Apostles, Martyrs, Virgins, of Christmas, Circumcision, Epiphany, Purification, and other fond feasts of our Lady." 

English Puritans also developed objections to Christmas celebrations, providing these arguments against them: 

(1.) No time of worship is sanctified, unless God has ordained it; (2.) unscriptural holidays are a threat to the proper observance of the Lord's day because these holidays tend to eclipse the sanctity which belongs only to the Lord's day, (3.) the observance of unscriptural holidays tends toward the super stition and innovation in worship which are characteristic of Roman Catholicism.

Any non-Biblical celebrations were a superstitious distraction from the serious business of regular worship, and to be avoided by all right-thinking Christians.  Once the Puritans gained political power in England under Cromwell, they abolished Christmas celebrations, so from 1647, no official celebration of Christmas occurred. Things in Puritan dominated colonies in the New World were little different.  Christmas celebrations were banned in the Massachusetts Bay Colony starting in 1621.  From 1659-1681 people caught celebrating Christmas were fined five shillings, while those caught wassailing were arrested. Boston itself banned public Christmas displays for an extended period of time, scheduling classes in schools on December 25th until 1870.  Similarly, Congress regularly met on Christmas day until 1855.  Alabama was the first state to declare a Christmas holiday in 1836. The Puritan war on Christmas lasted through 1870 when it became a Federal holiday.

The major source of American Christmas celebrations was the former Dutch colony of New York, which produced festivities having little to do with the Christian tradition, but had a lot in common with German and Norse winter festivals.  Santa Claus, in the Dutch tradition, seems equal parts Saint Nicholas and Odin until civilized in the modern form by Moore/Livingston.  In England Christmas made a 19th century resurgence thanks to Charles Dickens and Prince Albert.  Queen Victoria's Prince Consort was German, and brought German Christmas traditions to his new English family.  His practice of giving Christmas gifts to their children sparked a fad of gift-giving in much the same way that people adopt the practices of modern celebrities.

Dickens both promoted Christmas celebrations and showed what Christmas day was like in Victorian England - it was normal to expect that merchants like butchers would be open for business.  How else was Ebeneezer Scrooge going to purchase a prize goose from the shop down the street, unless you assume that the butcher was living above the shop and interrupted his family's celebrations to make a sale?  The popularity of Dickens' and Moore's work combined with the advertising of the Coca-Cola Corporation and the development of leisure time and consumer culture to produce the modern Christmas holiday season.  When conservative Christians rail against consumerism and a "secular" assault on Christmas, they are fighting to preserve a tradition that doesn't really exist, or perhaps trying to establish a closer connection between the festivities and their modern interpretations of Christianity.

Billy Graham on My Lai

One of the great pleasures of doing research is finding unexpected treasures. My work revising my chapter on soldiers reporting atrocities in the media, most of whom cited My Lai coverage as a motivating factor provided something unexpected - A New York Times Op-Ed on My Lai and forgiveness by Rev. Billy Graham. I'm no fan of his, but I thought his tone in his Holy Week remarks also suitable for Thanksgiving Week and the coming Advent season. Graham argued that as objectivity returned to the country in turmoil over the controversial guilty verdict for Lt. William Calley, the nation might find the law too rigid, and that mercy should lessen the sentence. Beyond that, he hoped that the tragedy of My Lai might lead Americans to re-evaluate their lives, make an effort to live more peaceful compassionate lives, and seek forgiveness for their sins against others.

Revisions

Folks who follow me on Twitter already know that I'm in the process of radically revising the first four chapters of my dissertation before completing the fifth chapter. By radical, I mean that I'm essentially changing what I'm writing about in significant ways. The topic remains American atrocities during the Vietnam War, which I think were a significant, but not all-encompassing issue. That puts me at odds with both revisionists like Guenter Lewy, Mark Moyar, B. G. Burkett, and Lewis Sorley, and with the more traditional historians like Stanley Karnow, Nick Turse, and Christian Appy. The revisionists do far too much to minimize the importance, scope, and scale of American atrocities during the war, while Turse and Neil Sheehan lump too much under the heading of atrocities - I'm not comfortable putting random artillery and air strikes in the same category as rape, murder, and torture.

Originally, I wanted to examine cultural contributions to American atrocities in Vietnam - American conceptions of how to fight, religious interpretations of anti-Communism, racism, etc... Unfortunately, while writing my prospectus, I ran across Nick Turse's extraordinarily long and comprehensive dissertation on American atrocities in Vietnam, which he has since published as Kill Anything That Moves. That really took the wind from my sails. How many dissertations on that topic do you really need within a few years of each other? I couldn't see anything that Turse didn't cover, so I needed a different topic.

If you accept Turse's argument, atrocities were not only common in Vietnam, they were the norm when Americans came into contact with civilians in a combat environment. I decided on a different approach - instead of looking at soldiers who committed atrocities, I would write about those that didn't, focusing on how they justified their action or inaction. If atrocities were as common as Turse claimed, then why didn't these other guys commit them? With that goal in mind, I visited the Archives II to get the publicly accessible files of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, which Turse and journalist Deborah Nelson relied on in their work. I also reviewed a slew of Oral Histories from the Library of Congress, the Virtual Vietnam Archive, and a variety of other Oral History programs, and got writing. One case in particular fascinated me, so I also found the General Courts-Martial documents for it in St. Louis.

The problem, which wasn't really obvious until after I wrote the fourth chapter, was that the evidence I compiled didn't do a great job of addressing my questions, and I didn't have time to do yet more research. So my dissertation co-chairs suggested an alternate path that used the same evidence, which my organization of the data already suggested - looking at why the soldiers who were bothered enough about atrocities chose different venues to report them. At different times, soldiers reported atrocities through their chains of command, by contacting Congressional representatives, by contacting high-ranking officers in the Pentagon, by writing to the President, by talking to reporters, and ultimately by joining the antiwar movement to expose atrocities under the auspices of Vietnam Veterans Against the War or the Citizens Commissions of Inquiry. So the question becomes, why did these soldiers use these venues, did it change over time, and were there any events that played  a significant role in determining how the tiny minority of soldiers chose to do so?

Turns out that two things really stand out - the Army's handling of the My Lai Massacre, and Richard Nixon's policy of Vietnamization. My Lai dramatically changed how the media handled the issue of atrocities in Vietnam. Before My Lai, there had been a few reports that trickled through the media's self-censorship on the subject. Morley Safer's report from Cam Ne in 1965 stands out, as does the coverage of Col. Robert Rheault in 1969. After Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai story by selling it to Dispatch News Service, there was what Time magazine called an avalanche of atrocity reports by soldiers in the media.

So why did that happen? Many people have already addressed the media side of this: Kendrick Oliver, David Halberstam, Ralph Engelman, Ted Galen Carpenter, Robert Donovan, and Ray Scherer (among others) argue that after My Lai, atrocities suddenly became news. Americans had taken a much more negative view of the war after the Tet Offensive in early 1968. Until that time, television news followed the public's attitude and supported the war. Print media provided a more negative look, but for the most part, the media censored the most shocking violence and the plight of Vietnamese civilians. That was both economic and because even most of the journalists in the field supported the goals of the war. They might not think the United States would win, or they might question the strategies and tactics American forces used, but editors and journalists were on the government's side (right where LBJ wanted them). The New Yorker was an important outlier - as its editorial policy increasingly argued against the war, its revenues suffered because the demographics of its readership skewed younger, so advertisers wouldn't bay as much to run ads.

What is less explored is why more soldiers reported atrocities, and why the venues they chose changed. That's what I'm now writing about, and strangely enough, I do have evidence that helps answer those questions, especially for the men who contacted the media, Congress, DoD, or joined the antiwar movement. I won't go into great detail here because that's what my dissertation is for, but in general scapegoating Lt. William Calley and some junior enlisted men for doing what they argued was a logical result of the Army's training, tactics, and policies showed that the Army no longer had the men's backs. Because Calley was the only individual successfully court-martialed, it seemed clear that the Army could not provide justice, and that the senior officers would not be punished, soldiers who wanted to report atrocities changed their reporting venue. These are obviously generalizations, but how disgruntled they were determined which venue they chose. Soldiers who didn't want to hurt the Army or the war effort contacted Congressmen or the President, while those who had lost faith in the system chose either the media or antiwar groups. Some soldiers tried all of these venues - James D. Henry reported atrocities to a Staff Judge Advocate, to CID, and to Congressmen before finally writing an article for Scanlan's Magazine and joining VVAW. He remains the only soldier to testify at the Winter Soldier Investigation whose claims CID substantiated (because unlike the others he specific details, including names, dates, and locations, while the others didn't because they had a different goal in providing testimony).

My problem now is fighting to revise my four existing chapters around these issues. Unfortunately, the My Lai chapter is fighting back At forty-five pages, it was a beast in its original form. In my last iteration, I made the mistake of trying to mangle that document to fit into the new analytical framework. That didn't work well, so over the next two weekends, I'll be figuring out how to do that. For the remainder of the time before Thanksgiving, the chapter on reports in the media is getting revised and sent out. I will be ecstatic if the committee likes that one.

Eternal Father, Strong to Save (The Navy Hymn)

Eternal Father, Strong to Save

- William Whiting

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who biddest the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!

O Christ! Whose voice the waters heard
And hushed their raging at Thy Word,
Who walked on the foaming deep,
And calm amidst its rage didst sleep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!

Most Holy Spirit! Who didst brood
Upon the chaos dark and rude,
And bid its angry tumult cease,
And give, for wild confusion, peace;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!

O Trinity of love and power!
Our family shield in danger’s hour;
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect us wheresoever we go;
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.

Audio by the U.S Navy Sea Chanters

Five Reasons Why Alabama Football Matters to History

Another super event, coming up just in time to start the weekend when the Tide crushes LSU's dreams. Please join the Summersell Center on Thursday, November 7, at 6 pm in Gorgas Library Room 205, where Randy Roberts, Distinguished Professor History at Purdue University, will provide “Five Reasons Why Alabama Football Matters to History.” A historian of twentieth-century America best known for his work in the field of sports history, Professor Roberts is the author of, among other works, “Joe Louis: Hard Times Man,” “Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler,” and “The Rock, the Curse, and the Hub: A Random History of Boston Sports.” Professor Roberts’ latest book is “Rising Tide: Bear Bryant, Joe Namath, and Dixie’s Last Quarter.” 

This event is free and open to the public.

Howard Jones to Speak at the 2013 Vietnam Center and Archive Conference

Howard Jones to Speak at the 2013 Vietnam Center and Archive Conference

University of Alabama Research Professor Emeritus Howard Jones will speak at the 2013 Vietnam Center and Archive Conference. This year’s conference will explore the events of 1963, a year that has “long been viewed as a watershed in both the history of the Vietnam War and in the evolution of the United States’ intervention in that conflict. The Battle of Ap Bac, the ‘Buddhist crisis’ and the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, the abortive ‘Kennedy withdrawal’ of U.S. military advisors from South Vietnam, the overthrow and death of Ngo Dinh Diem in the Saigon coup of November, the Kennedy assassination that same month, the Ninth Plenum of the Vietnam Worker’s Party—all of these events and many others shaped the subsequent escalation of the Vietnam War and contributed to its transformation into a major international conflict.”

Jones’s presentation, entitled “JFK’s Plan For a Partial Withdrawal From Vietnam,” explores President Kennedy’s plan for gradual disengagement in Vietnam and challenges the popularly-held notion that the Kennedy Administration had no serious plans to withdraw from the Vietnam conflict.

Opening the (Graduate) Schoolhouse Door at UA: 21st Century National Leadership in African American Graduate Education

The University of Alabama is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" with a series of special events throughout 2013. The Graduate School’s contribution to this year of commemoration is the symposium “Opening the (Graduate) Schoolhouse Door at UA: 21st Century National Leadership in African American Graduate Education” on Thursday September 12, 2013, from 9:45 AM – 11:30 AM in the Ferguson Center Theater. The symposium will feature a panel comprised of African American pioneers in graduate education at UA, including Dr. Joffre Whisenton, the first African American PhD recipient at UA  in 1968, as well as current African American graduate faculty and graduate students. Together, our panelists will lead us on a journey outlining where UA has been, where we are now, and where we need to go as an institution to  continue to move forward as an inclusive and welcoming campus.

Dr. Daniel Riches to Deliver Keynote Lecture

  Dr. Daniel Riches to Deliver Keynote Lecture

University of Alabama Assistant Professor of History, Dr. Daniel Riches, will deliver the keynote lecture, entitled “Diplomacy and Cosmopolitanism,” at The Premodern Diplomats Network’s “Splendid Encounters: Diplomats and Diplomacy in Europe, 1500-1750” conference on September 20, at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History, in Warsaw.

The Premodern Diplomats Network is a organization for scholars studying the birth and early development of the diplomatic arts.

UA Professor Examines Cultural Impact of Barbecue on Alabama | University of Alabama News - The University of Alabama

UA Professor Examines Cultural Impact of Barbecue on Alabama | University of Alabama News - The University of Alabama

There are places that love barbecue and do it well. Then there’s the South, where barbecue could be considered a second religion (behind only college football). A University of Alabama professor is set to explore how barbecue became a cultural phenomenon within the borders of the state.

Dr. Joshua Rothman, UA professor of history and African American Studies, received an $18,000 grant from the Southern Foodways Alliance to study barbecue in the state of Alabama as well as the state’s foodways — meaning how the regional cuisine of Alabama developed over time.

“As a professor of Southern history and director of the Summersell Center for Study of the South, I try to take in as many aspects of the South and Southern culture as possible,” Rothman said. Then comes a wry smile. “Plus, I like to eat.”

And eating is a key part of Southern culture. However, barbecue is one of those things that brings people together from all walks of life. And, from a historical perspective, it’s a relatively new point along the foodways path.

“Smoking meat has been around for a long time,” Rothman said. “It was a key way to preserve meat before refrigeration became widespread. But barbecue as we know it in the modern day is something that didn’t really become so hugely popular outside the South until much later.”

Signing of the Korean War Armistice

Today is the 60th Anniversary of the Armistice that ended the fighting in Korea. Since there was no peace agreement, the war is technically not over. Watch the signing of the Armistice courtesy of the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center:

How Not to Impress Your Wife as a Soldier in Vietnam

I'm spending the morning organizing notes for the third chapter of my dissertation, which focuses on how soldiers reacted to atrocities that they witnessed or were part of that were reported by civilians (usually Vietnamese), and ran across a weird case in the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group files.  I only have the summary, not the whole file because this is one of the files still not screened for public viewing, so I don't have all the witness statements.  At first this looks like a generic war crimes case, but gets weird quickly.

A gentleman named Anthony Ciccarella, of Newport, Kentucky, took seven letters that SP4 Steve Snyder, formerly of Alpha Company, S&T Battalion, 25th Infantry Division had sent to his wife (Snyder's) to the military intelligence group at Ft. Knox.  The letters details several apparent war crimes during Snyder's service in Vietnam. 

1. His letter from 12 January 1970 claims that Snyder and his squad went into a village and were giving the local kids candy and cigarettes when they discovered that the children were booby-trapped.  One soldier died, and the rest lined up the kids and shot them execution-style.
2. On 16 January Snyder wrote that the squad looted $50 from the bodies of three Viet Cong.
3. Four of the letters (22 Jan, 5 Feb, 19 March, 11 Sept) included claims that rather than take wounded Viet Cong prisoners, Snyder just shot them.
4. When CID interviewed Snyder's wife, she told them she had destroyed a letter where he described "a black night when his unit killed everyone in an entire village."

I think it's weird that a soldier put these things in letters home, unless he was feeling really guilty about them, but there's more.  CID agents interviewed SGT Robert Leath and SP4 Max Akpik, who said that some of the incidents (no idea which ones) were based on reality, but grossly exaggerated, while others Snyder invented out of whole cloth.  Snyder finally gave his own statement to CID at his new post in Germany, where he told the agents that the atrocities he described in his letters were fake, and that he wrote them "only to impress his wife that he war a war hero".  He also confessed to taking about $5 in Vietnamese money from the body of a dead Viet Cong officer.

Here's what I don't get: why would this guy think that his wife would be anything other than horrified by these incidents?  The best outcome I can see would be her thinking that the war was horrible, and that he'd been changed by his service in it.  The worst?  Well, he came close when his letters got turned over to the authorities, but she also could have left him in abject horror at the type of person she'd married.

Book Review: Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China

Dikotter, Frank.  Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China. Hurst & Company, 2002.

Until the late Qing, the state of Chinese courts, jails, and punishments gave European powers an excuse to insist on the privilege of extra-territoriality in order to protect their citizens.  The arbitrary nature of Qing jurisprudence made it seem that this was in the best interest of various merchant communities.  Dikotter argues that extending this privilege to foreigners was not the major issue for the Qing that later reformers believed it was – it was part of normal concessions given to foreign trading partners I an effort to mollify them in their demands, and was not given exclusively to European imperial powers.

Defeat by Japan in the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese war led reformers to argue that China needed to reform its judicial and prison systems as part of the greater efforts at Self-Strengthening promoted by Kang Yuwei and others.  European powers roundly argued that Qing jails and punishments were barbaric due to the high incidence of corporal punishments and lack of effort at reforming prisoners.  Flogging, exile, and death by torment were used rather than confinement as the primary punishments.  Reformers agreed with Europeans that a change in penal regime was necessary.  They wanted a systematic and bureaucratized system aimed at reforming prisoners.  Activists had two primary motivations in pursuing this course – ending extraterritoriality, and strengthening China so that it could compete with other powers.

While there was an emphasis on scientific methods of reform, rules, regulations, and record keeping, European scientific rationality was not the basis for Chinese efforts.  Instead, Dikotter argues that reformers were using modern methodology to achieve a traditional Confucian goal.  Prison reformers wanted to use education and spiritual guidance to improve the mass of Chinese people, strengthening individuals for the collective good of the nation that needed to strive against others.  Reformers met with sporadic success and failure due to overcrowding and lack of funding, much like in prison systems elsewhere in the world.  Despite this, late Qing and Republican prison reform achieved much more than later Communist propagandists would admit.  Many prisons became orderly, safe, and clean, and sentences more humane in the effort to reform the nation.  These new prisons met with the same problems as those in the West – recidivism and systemic violence.  As such, they were firmly in line with modern developments in prison and prisoner management, despite being constituted to achieve traditional goals.

Book Review: Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s

Huang, Nicole.  Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s. Brill Academic Publishers, 2005.

Building on Chang-tai Hung’s War and Popular Culture, Nicole Huang examines the literary culture of Shanghai during World War II.  Her time frame is carefully chosen to examine only works published during what she considers the true duration of the war in the Pacific – from December 1941 through 1945.  The reason for this is that before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Shanghai existed as a virtual island surrounded by blockading Japanese forces, which allowed the literary culture to develop unchallenged themes of Chinese nationalism in support of the war against Japanese aggression.  Once Japan took the city after bombing Pearl Harbor, Shanghai’s writers had to contend with censorship and a competing Japanese use of popular culture.

Huang develops two primary themes.  First, she argues, the literary efforts of women in Shanghai were not focused primarily on promoting patriotism and national struggle against Japan in the same way that authors operating outside areas of Japanese control were.  Official censorship in Shanghai precluded such an effort.  Instead, Huang’s sample of female authors presents the reality of surviving in the city, methods of coping with scarcity and occupation in a subversive manner even in organs that belonged to Japan’s propaganda apparatus.  War is the backdrop of the themes of resistance to both the occupiers and their traditional roles n Chinese society.

Second, Huang asserts that the traditional theoretical models used to examine reaction to occupation are ineffective instruments for examining how real people react.  The prototypical construction found in French scholarship on World War II relies on a three-category framework, in which all civilians are collaborators, partisans, or passive onlookers prevents historians from examining the subtle details of how individuals act.  Similarly, Huang argues that events in Shanghai and elsewhere, like Vichy France, must be placed into historical context in order to understand them.  The efforts of women writing in occupied Shanghai are only understandable in the context of early Chinese reform movements, which focused on the role of women as a means of challenging the traditional social order.  In Vichy France, she argues that official efforts to restrict women should be seen in the context of conservative backlash against the liberal policies of 1930s France.  In effect, Huang is arguing for a more nuanced and contextual approach to history.

Lt. William Crandell on the Reality of Vietnam

Lieutenant William Crandell, who had served in the Americal Division in Vietnam, delivered the opening statement of the Winter Soldier Investigation on 31 January 1971.  The goals he said, were not to condemn individual soldiers, but to illustrate the effects of the policies and tactics used in Vietnam, and to show who was responsible for those policies.  There would only be direct testimony of what soldiers witnessed during their service, without any show trials, verdicts, or fake indictments of public figures.^*  He included this heartfelt summation of how he believed that his service in Vietnam had been a lie...  

We went to preserve the peace and our testimony will show that we have set all of Indochina aflame. We went to defend the Vietnamese people and our testimony will show that we are committing genocide against them. We went to fight for freedom and our testimony will show that we have turned Vietnam into a series of concentration camps.

We went to guarantee the right of self-determination to the people of South Vietnam and our testimony will show that we are forcing a corrupt and dictatorial government upon them. We went to work toward the brotherhood of man and our testimony will show that our strategy and tactics are permeated with racism. We went to protect America and our testimony will show why our country is being torn apart by what we are doing in Vietnam.

^* Later investigations by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division did find that some of the witnesses  related hearsay while testifying, but that few actually made anything up.  Many of the allegations made simply could not be substantiated because the participants refused to identify individuals or provide other details that would allow the Army to seek out and prosecute offenders.

Book Review: The Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military Under the Qing Dynasty

Waley-Cohen, Joanna.  The Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military Under the Qing Dynasty. I.B. Taurus, 2006.

The common view of China under the Qing is that the culture of the Empire was soft due to the lack of focus on martial arts and virtues, which the Manchu adopted after their conquest.  In this respect, the Manchu were little different from other invaders who were assimilated into a superior Chinese culture.  In The Culture of War in China Joanna Waley-Cohen offers an important corrective to this view.  She argues that the Qing imperial project consisted of two main efforts: military conquest and a modification of Chinese culture to the Qing’s advantage.

The Qing built on their image of military prowess and imperial expansion to add a martial element to Chinese culture designed to unite China’s disparate ethnic and religious groups based on the concepts of universality and pride in imperial expansion.  In order to achieve this goal, Qing officials elevated military prowess and accomplishments to the same level of social and political importance as traditional accomplishments within the confines of the existing Mandarin system.  A key part of this effort was the prominence given to military topics and efforts by those close to the emperor.  Still, the Qing were wise enough not to attempt to dismantle the existing culture of China in favor of their own creation.  The idea was to unify, not separate, the people of China.

    Waley-Cohen argues that the Qing deliberately injected martial elements into culture and the arts, including religion, landscape, ritual, and painting.  Scholars went to newly conquered provinces to document exotic areas in order to bring the imperial success home to the masses, inculcating both the idea of Qing arms and pride at their achievements.  In addition to these “soft” efforts, the Qing introduced the banner system of organization to maintain and display Manchu military vigor after the conquest of China.  The banner system also provided an alternate route to elite status for members – passing examinations based on Confucian texts were no longer the only route to prominence.  According to Waley-Cohen, after 1749, these changes to Chinese culture became a systematic effort designed to stabilize and extend both China and Qing control over China.  This resulted in a broad change in Chinese culture between 1636 and 1800.  As a result, it is necessary to look at changes and events in China through the Cultural Revolution through the lens of Qing militarization of Chinese culture.

Bart Osborn on His Decision to Testify at the National Veterans' Inquiry

Kenneth Barton Osborn gave this as his reason for testifying about the incidents of torture and murder he witnessed while serving as a military intelligence case officer near Danang.  His job was to run networks of Vietnamese agents to gather intelligence about Viet Cong activities. Although he served in the Army, much of his work included providing the Marines of the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force intelligence information during 1967-68, after which he worked with Project Phoenix.  At the National Veterans' Inquiry in Dec. 1970, he testified that he witnessed a Marine kill a Vietnamese detainee by pushing a small wooden dowel through the man's ear into his brain during questioning.

"I feel as if this standard operating procedure, which is authorized by the American military community, and by the CIA, is against the American value system. I don’t feel that I can come back with a clear conscience from Vietnam and consider myself a good Christian, or a don’t feel I can have a clear conscience, knowing that my government is working despicable methods of operation in other parts of the world and denying it; working against the Geneva Conference and blaming other nations for doing the same thing that we’re doing, it’s just that we classify it as they do – we catch them, they catch us, and it constitutes on heck of a hypocrisy. The reason I’ve said these things today is simply to document or add evidence to the fact that we are doing these things, and my suggestion would be that we don’t have to. We should not criticize others for doing the same things that we’re doing, or we ought to cut it out. One of the two. I simply want to add to what the others have said, and that’s why I’m here today.”

James Simon Kunen, Standard Operating Procedure: Notes of a Draft-Age American, Kindle edition, location 3395.

Book Review: War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945

Hung,Chang-tai, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945.University of California Press, 1994. 

While the Chinese struggle against Japan during World War II and the subsequent victory of the Communists over Jiang Jieshi’s Nationalists receives large amounts of scholarly attention, little attention is paid to propaganda and changes in popular culture during this period.Many studies assert that Communist forces successfully portrayed themselves as the primary forces opposing Japan, but few discuss how these claims disseminated through China’s large and dispersed population. Chang-tai Hung argues that both Nationalists and Communists relied on urban popular culture, which spread into rural areas to promote resistance to the invading Japanese, but that Communist propagandists were more adept at using popular media to promote their own agenda.

The new importance of popular culture is as important a change as the use made of it. Chinese elites looked down on popular culture as unsophisticated, and in their urban form as crass commercialism. However, popular culture became an important tool for spreading political messages simply because it was popular and entertaining. The urban popular culture that spread into rural areas after Japan’s invasion was less commercial, focusing on patriotic and reform messages. Although propagandists relied on media formats including song, cartoons, newspapers, and poetry, the first important export to the countryside was spoken drama, delivered by acting troupes that communicated rather than fought. The core of Hung’s argument is that the war with Japan was more than a military crisis – it created an environment when traditional values were questions, roles of intellectuals changed, and social order altered. These combined with the expansion of popular culture into rural areas to work to the Communists’ advantage in winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the people.

The result of these epochal changes was the development of a new political culture in China focused on rural areas rather than cities, providing Communists with an advantage in the Civil War against the Guomingdang. The war created a crisis for intellectuals, many of whom believed China at a dead end, and that the GMD’s leadership corrupt and ineffective. The result was a belief that a new era was dawning for China. The Communists successfully adapted these feelings to create a new “people’s culture” that minimized the rich and powerful and served their own ends.

Book Review: I Was a Prisoner of War in China

-->Bakshi, K.N. I was a Prisoner of War in China. Lancer International, 1989.
Serving as the commanding officer of a combat engineering unit during the short 1962 Sino-Indian War, Lieutenant Colonel K.N. Bakshi recalls his experiences as a prisoner of war and as a serving officer after his repatriation to India. His account begins with the poorly planned and executed retreat from prepared defensive positions that led to his wounding and capture, continues with his detainment by Chinese soldiers, and finally his humiliation at his treatment by the Indian military once he was repatriated.

Like other POW narratives, Bakshi portrays his sense of isolation, the harsh conditions, the privation of various camps, and conflicts with other soldiers. His case is particularly telling due to the serious injuries to his hip, both hands, and his wrist, which prevented him from caring for himself. The pain of enduring a finger amputation without anesthesia led to an outburst that alienated him from the soldiers who had to feed him. The resulting separation increased when Chinese soldiers carried him on a little to new quarters while the others walked up hill unassisted in a torrential downpour.

The final portion of Bakshi’s tale somewhat echoes Ha Jin’s depiction of Chinese treatment of prisoners returning after detention in Korea – defeated troops that failed in their duty are an embarrassment to the state when they initially return.Later returnees receive better treatment than those repatriated early in the process. Bakshi’s anger at his treatment is evident in his reaction to the events as they unfold, but also in his strong response to American coverage of hostages returning to the United States from Iran in 1981. His account argues for a commonality of prisoner experiences across cultures that deserves additional investigation.

Book Review: War Trash

Ha, Jin. War Trash. Pantheon Books, 2004.

Reading an account, even a fictionalized one, of Asian prisoners held by the United States provides a clear look at commonalities in the prison experience facing military and civilian prisoners.  Ha Jin describes Chinese prisoners of war experiencing the same feelings of loneliness, isolation, and fear that American prisoners during the Vietnam War report in their memoirs.  Issues of living conditions, food supplies, collaboration, and physical abuse are also a constant concern of both the Chinese soldiers Ha Jin portrays and other prisoner memoirs.  The difference with this text is that it addresses the specific problems faced by soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army during and after the Korean War.

Issues specific to this setting included, but were not limited to, conflict between soldiers with Nationalist and Communist sympathies, disparity in treatment between the two groups by their American and South Korean captors, and worries over treatment by either Communist or Nationalist governments after the end of the war.  The novel’s protagonist, Yu Yuan, fell into a grey area between the Nationalists and Communists.  While not a member of the Communist Party, Yu also did not completely support Chiang Kai-Shek.  His credentials as a graduate of the Nationalist-affiliated Huangpu Military Academy caused Communists to view him with suspicions, while Nationalists assumed he would side with them.  Both sides desired his skills as an interpreter and pressured him to join him – the Nationalists going so far to torture and murder those who opposed him.

Though he disliked the Communists’ desire to control the thoughts and minds of his fellows, Yu feels that he must fulfill his filial duty to his Mother and fiancé, and works to return to China at all costs.  As a result, he was one of the few Chinese prisoners to return.  Rather than receiving a hero’s welcome, the repatriated soldiers are condemned by the Communist Party, becoming pariahs in the homeland they fought to defend because they did not choose a glorious death.  By the time he returns, his mother is dead, and his fiancé shuns him due to the stain on his reputation.  In contrast, Yu sees the prosperity of those who chose to relocate to Tiawan, and the welcome they receive when they return to China thirty years after the war.

As much as War Trash shows the commonality of the prisoner of war experience of soldiers of different nations, it shines a bright light on the specific challenges Chinese soldiers faced during the Korean War, particularly the demands of ideological purity and sacrifice placed on them by the Chinese Communist Party.  While fiction, Ha Jin draws not only on a variety of primary and secondary sources.  Since the work is dedicated to his father, a member of the PLA serving in Korea, it is sure that some of the events described come from his recollections of the period.  This means that while War Trash cannot be relied on for research purposes, it plays an important role in setting the mood of the conflict.

Long Exposure Vietnam War Photos Released

Along with the other strange occurrences of the long war in Vietnam, we now have night photography of a base camp responding to a lone sniper with overwhelming firepower to no result other than a blood trail (and fled enemy).  This is what two M-60 machine guns, an M-2 .50 cal. machine gun, and the 40 mm anti-aircraft guns on an M-42 Duster will get you (at night).  The photos are stunning for what they show (and imply) about the conduct of the war.

Long Exposure Vietnam War Photos Released

Queen Victory Papers Available through 23 June

For anyone interested...

ProQuest is proud to make all the personal journals of Queen Victoria available to search and read online. This unique resource, developed in partnership by the Bodleian Libraries, the Royal Archives and ProQuest, is freely available for the public to access Queen Victoria's Journals until June 23, 2013. 

The journals, which span Victoria’s lifetime and consist of 141 volumes numbering over 43,000 pages, have never been published in their entirety and previously were only accessible by appointment at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. In addition to autograph diaries begun by the youthful Princess Victoria, there are edited versions from her later years, redacted and transcribed by the Queen’s daughter, Princess Beatrice. 

All the journals are now available via this easy-to-use website and can be browsed and read online.  Pages from the journals can be searched by date or place of writing, and transcriptions of each page–searchable by keyword–are provided. The site includes an interactive timeline and drawings by Queen Victoria, along with selections from her sketchbooks.  Importantly, the site includes a number of essays about aspects of Queen Victoria’s life, authored by Sir Roy Strong, Laurence Goldman and Peter Ward-Jones among others. 

Public access to Queen Victoria’s Journals is available until June 23, 2013. A specialized version for libraries is available from ProQuest. 

http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org

University of Alabama Commemorates Its First African-American Students

Fifty years after the first two African-American students enrolled at The University of Alabama following then-Gov. George Wallace’s unsuccessful “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door,” UA will commemorate that historic day and celebrate 50 years of progress with two public events – a program featuring speakers and musical performances on June 11, and an interfaith community prayer breakfast on June 7.

Tuesday, June 11, UA will host “Through the Doors: Courage. Change. Progress.” The program at Foster Auditorium is designed to recognize and honor the courage and dedication of Vivian Malone and James Hood, the two African-American students who enrolled at UA on June 11, 1963. It will include presentations by current UA students and alumni as well as musical performances. The event will begin with a reception in the Malone-Hood Plaza outside Foster Auditorium and will conclude by 7 p.m.

The public is also invited to an interfaith community prayer breakfast at 7:30 a.m., Friday, June 7 in the Bryant Conference Center. The program will celebrate the role of the faith community in the civil rights movement. Following commendations to Canterbury Episcopal Chapel and First African Baptist Church for their helpful roles in the events of 1963, the program will include performances by UA’s Afro-American Gospel Choir, a brief oral history of the local civil rights movement and prayers. While the breakfast is free, those planning to attend are asked to register at http://uaferguson.tix.com/Event.asp?Event=576940 by June 3.For more information about the events for June, click here.

Progress on My Lai

As anyone following my twitter feed noticed, this is My Lai week as I prepare to write my first two dissertation chapters.  I'll be trying to get the the first chapter on My Lai and the reactions of those present to the horrific events there on March 16, 1968, and part of my note-taking enterprise has been to tweet as I find interesting or important items in various books and documents.  Yesterday's reactions to Seymour Hersh's 1970 Harper's Magazine article were quite positive, as were those to Captain Jordan J. Praust's 1970 Military Law Review article.

Also important to my preparations to write have been Rives M. Duncan's dissertation, "What went Right at My Lai: An Analysis of the Roles of "Habitus" and Character in Lawful Disobedience".  Temple University seems to have been a veritable hotbed of My Lai scholarship during the 1990s, as one of yesterday's twitter responses from Pauline Kaurine revealed her dissertation "Agency and Character: A View of Action and Agency".  Neither History per se, but provide some good tools for examining how people at My Lai reacted, and even raise questions for how we judge their actions.  There's a definite conflict in interpretation between the two: Rives places the emphasis on individual, preexisting moral and professional mental frameworks, while Kaurine focuses on the nature of military character based on trust, honor, and oath-taking.  I'm not quite sure how to resolve the conflict, but both dissertations have important contributions to the discussion of why different people acted in the way that they did at My Lai.

The ideas in both intersect with the usual suspects, and I'm not talking about Calley or Medina.  Paul Meadlo seems to play a pivotal role in any discussion of what happened, as do Michael Bernhardt, Mike Terry, Gregory Olsen, Hugh Thompson, and Larry Colburn.  Rives Duncan argues that the social setting of Charlie company helps explain why some soldiers killed, raped, and pillaged at My Lai, while others didn't.  Duncan relies on Pierre Bourdieu's theories to explain why this happen, especially that of fields of power.  The military structure of power and rank form the social topology that determines which agents are influential in the social field.  The cultural capital of those agents also exerts influence on the social field - veteran combat soldiers, drill instructors, company commanders have more cultural capital to spend in influencing the social setting in which they operate, especially when dealing with inexperienced soldiers.

Duncan argues that social fields have their own mass and inertia, making them slow to change.  Change in an established social field can be so slow that it is virtually unnoticed when it occurs.  This is part of what happened in Vietnam - the values and norms of the soldiers changed as their experience of guerrilla war and untrustworthy leadership rubbed against the edges of the regular army's habitus.  Problems arose in Vietnam partially because the values and norms of the soldiers changed, but the written codification of how they were expected to behave did not - the laws of war did not change to match the environment that soldiers found themselves in.  Expected soldierly behavior in Vietnam changed from what the formal military culture indicated it should be.

The result was that the troops in Charlie Company who did not participate in atrocities at My Lai were the outliers, not the ones who engaged in rape and murder.  Duncan believes that nonparticipants didn't due to various forms of isolation from the rest of Ernest Medina's troops that day.  The isolation of nonparticipants was social, religious, geographic, and professional - these are the factors that Duncan argues led some soldiers not to participate in atrocities in My Lai.  Unfortunately, nonparticipation in atrocities further separated those soldiers from the group, and may have put their lives in further jeopardy because they lost the trust and loyalty of their comrades.  One example of this predates the massacre - according to his testimony before the Peers Commission, Dennis Bunning had used his large size to stop rapes several times before March 16, 1968, but other members of Charlie Company threatened to kill him if he continued.

Duncan identified several types of factors that lead soldiers to resist unlawful orders - personal factors, situational factors, and "other" factors.  Personal factors include strong religious faith that instills a moral code so ingrained that is seems normal or natural to the individual.  People act on these moral codes without conscious thought because they are practiced in real life, not just theories, to the point that they may be seen as just part of a society's values.  Situational factors include where the person is when the illegal order is given, and how far the order deviates from normal acceptable practices.  An order to kill unarmed women and children fits this category, as does being on the peripheries of the action (which might allow soldiers to resist an order without appearing to).  Other factors that Duncan identified as being part of soldiers' resistance to unlawful orders included education, maturity, age, and experience in the military.

Some soldiers were able to fully or partially resist orders to shoot civilians at My Lai due to their location in the village - Bunning, Olsen, Carter, Maples, Dursi, and Bernhardt all benefited from their relative distance from Lt. Calley and their comrades who were shooting civilians.  Chronological distance also helped some soldiers more easily avoid unlawful orders from Calley.  Bernhardt and Partsch were delayed while they examined an ammunition box while the rest of 1st Platoon assaulted the village.  When they did enter My Lai, Bernhardt did so with his rifle slung - he didn't actively resist orders to shoot, but was also not in a position to kill.  Similarly, the delayed entry of 3rd Platoon kept it from participating in atrocities as much as 1st and 2nd platoons.  Some members of 3rd Platoon were horrified by what they saw - Leonard Gonzalez notably vomited on encountering the bodies.

Other soldiers used tactics of avoidance, including leaving the group, shooting animals, or misunderstanding orders to resist at My Lai.  Duncan reports that LaCross, Lee, and Pendleton shot only at livestock, which gave the appearance that they were participating in the slaughter, but kept them from shooting innocent civilians.  Ronald Grzesik later claimed that he didn't understand what Calley meant when told to "finish off" a group of villagers that he was guarding.  Others' , like Sergeant Isaiah Cowen simply wandered off.  Gregory Olsen's M60 machine gun kept jamming, which allowed him to stop and move off to the flanks of his platoon to avoid killing.

James Dursi took a greater risk by refusing a direct order from Calley to open fire, saying that he was willing to go to jail over it.  He led his team away from the lieutenant to avoid getting caught up in the action.  Robert Maples similarly refused to use his M60 on a line of villagers that Calley wanted killed, ultimately dropping the weapon, which Calley seized and used anyway, and event corroborated by Mike Terry.  Bunning, who had earlier stopped rapes in progress, refused his squad leader's order to open fire, and found himself moved to guard the flank like Olsen.

These acts of resistance are primarily passive or negative in nature - the men involved did little to stop their fellows from murdering or raping the residents of My Lai.  Only Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson answered the call of duty to put a halt to the killing in My Lai.  After numerous attempts to contact the ground forces and complaints to other helicopters that were recorded in Duc Pho and Cu Chi, Thompson landed his scout helicopter and confronted Calley, ordering his door gunner and crew chief to open fire if American troops moved to kill more civilians.  Beyond this, Thompson entered a bunker to retrieve women and children hiding there to save them from grenades, and waded into a ditch with Larry Colburn to rescue a small child.  Thompson even cajoled the crews of the helicopter gunships over My Lai to land and evacuated some of the wounded.  Not satisfied with this, he filed a formal complaint with his superior officers, coming close to insubordination while doing so, and discussed the massacre with 11th Brigade chaplain Captain Carl Cresswell.

Duncan argues that individual habitus overrode any military training for the men that resisted participating in Charlie Company's acts in My Lai, saying that it took great courage for any soldier to disobey a direct order in combat.  Paul Meadlo, one of the more interesting figures of the massacre and its aftermath is an example of those whose character led them to follow authority above other considerations.  His initial response at My Lai was to gather and guard civilian prisoners and play with the children to keep them occupied - he believed that this seemingly normal procedure was what Calley had intended.  As a result, Meadlo was surprised when ordered to kill the villagers that he was guarding.  As the day progressed, he said he didn't want anything to do with the killing, but Calley pressed him to do it. Shooting civilians when ordered to by Calley until overwhelmed by the horror of it, Meadlo still had a distinct sense of morals, as evidenced in his candid television interviews, in which he was matter of fact and didn't shirk responsibility for his role in the massacre.  He testified that his understanding was that if he disobeyed orders in combat, he could be summarily executed, or jailed at hard labor.  Meadlo also contended that based on his interactions with veteran soldiers, his understanding of the war in Vietnam was that permissible behavior was different in guerrilla wars because everyone could be the enemy.

Gregory Olsen, Mike Terry, Hugh Thompson, and Michael Bernhardt also stand out as soldiers whose individual characters played a large role in their actions at My Lai.  Olsen and Terry were devout Mormons, and used to being seen as different as a result.  Duncan contends that religion was a determining factor in both Olsen's behavior and how people viewed him.  Mormons grew up living in a culture that was generally opposed to them, but adhered to their faith anyway.  That experience gave Olsen and Terry practice in taking a stand for their own values.  Olsen had previously expressed his concerns about the morals and disciplines of his comrades when they abused captives, and acted to avoid the carnage in My Lai.  He later testified that he saw no plausible way to report violations of the Geneva Conventions during the attack.

Terry was devout enough that he refused to use profanity even when quoting others under oath.  He was quite willing to be considered different, and other soldiers remember him as prone to questioning everything in order to understand the purpose of what he was told to do.  At My Lai, Terry made a gut-wrenching decision to kill severely wounded civilians who had no hope of receiving medical aid, and was tormented by that decision afterward.  In this case, a soldier technically violated the laws of war, but made what he believed was the most moral choice in a bad situation by acting to alleviate pain and suffering.

Religious motives are also frequently assigned to Hugh Thompson, who was a Baptist in the process of studying to become a confirmed Episcopalian.  Even before My Lai, Thompson was seen as a pilot who was willing to aggressively fly to fight the enemy, but would only fire if he saw a weapon and had a clear shot.  Coming from the deep South, Thompson was sometimes described as being racially prejudiced, but still acting like a professional.  These attributes were accompanied by an almost idealistic view of the American character - he reportedly said that he couldn't abide what happened at My Lai because Americans were supposed to be the "good guys", and didn't do those sorts of things.

Like Paul Meadlo, Michael Bernhardt represents another outlier.  He was alienated from Charlie Company from the beginning, joining the group after it had been together for awhile.  Bernhardt later testified that he just didn't understand the motivations of his comrades in the company, who were described as average soldiers, or grunts.  They were a group quite different from his own experience - he had attended LaSalle Military Academy, and attended summer training conducted by Green Berets, and received LRRP training before joining Charlie Company.  Bernhardt was a STRAC soldier - he did things by the book, and believed that the purpose of the war was not just to kill the enemy, but to induce them to stop fighting.  He saw My Lai as having no strategic purpose, and being counter-productive because it would push Vietnamese to support the communists.

Culpability and War Crimes

While review my My Lai materials for the first chapter of my dissertation, I came across Brigadier General Howard H. Cooksey's response to Tom Glen, who served in the 4/3rd Infantry, 11th Brigade, Americal Division.  Glen had written MACV Commander Creighton Abrams as he left Vietnam for home about abuses of Vietnamese by American soldiers.  Cooksey's comments get to the core of my dissertation since I'm writing more about witnesses to atrocities than the alleged perpetrators:

It is the duty of every American soldier to ensure that [the Geneva Conventions] are upheld, and the responsibility of violations rests in a certain measure upon those who do not report violations they have witnessed.  You imply that this goes on at other than the individual level; yet, there is always a higher headquarters to which violations can be referred and channels exist to which these reports can be made.  You ask: "Does his presence in a combat zone and his possession of a rifle absolve a soldier from moral responsibility?" The answer to that is, of course, No.  But neither is a person who keeps silent when he witnesses a war crimes absolved of responsibility for that crime because he did not actively participate in it.*

This is certainly the correct legal, moral, and ethical response, but when considered in relation to My Lai, seems a bit naive.  Hugh Thompson and Chaplain CPT Creswell both reported the massacre to higher authority, and radio intercepts of the conversations among the helicopter pilots were made, but the officers of Task Force Barker were successful in their cover-up of what happened at My Lai.  Only letters to Congress and media coverage brought any action.  The dozens of other men who witnessed the massacre, including those who refused to take part, did nothing to report the massacre to the authorities, and themselves took part in hushing things up when COL Oran K. Henderson and LTC Frank Barker conducted their sham of an investigation of their own units.  What I'm trying to get at is how those guys rationalized their noninvolvement and lack of intervention when they witnessed what were clearly war crimes.

Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai. New York: Viking, 1992.

Online Collection of Soviet War Posters at the University of Nottingham

Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham (in collaboration with Web Technologies and the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies), have created a website for the display of its collection of Soviet war posters, curated by Cynthia Marsh, Emeritus Professor of Russian Drama and Literature: http://windowsonwar.nottingham.ac.uk/


The online exhibition examines the creation, intentions and use of the posters in great detail. Each poster is placed within ‘stories’ to provide context and simple routes through the site in a horizontal layout echoing the experience when visiting a real exhibition. They are featured full screen with hotspots and side panels providing information on the war context, design, artists and writers involved in their creation, giving a broad historical commentary. Audio (readings of the verse featured on some of the posters) and video (interviews with various members of the team) are also being added.

Eleonora Nicchiarelli
Digital Development Officer
Manuscripts and Special Collections
University of Nottingham
King's Meadow Campus
Lenton Lane
Nottingham
NG7 2NR
Tel: 0115 84 68649

Email: eleonora.nicchiarelli@nottingham.ac.uk