Hand Grenade of the Month May 2017 - The Hitler Problem

Handgrenade of the Month May 2017

The Hitler Problem

Just as I was wondering what I might write about next, especially since April’s hand grenade appears to have been a dud (as far as generating some dialog),  Mr. Sean Spicer of the Trump Administration brings military history and the fundamental a-historicism of American society into focus with a very public “gaffe.”

The facts first.  Here is what Mr. Spicer said, I tried as much as possible to avoid the “cherry picking” context error we see made so much in American discourse these days:

“I think a couple things. You, look—we didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II. Y’know, you had —someone who is despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to the, to the, to using chemical weapons. So, you have to, if you’re Russia, ask yourself, is this a country that you, and regime you want to align yourself with?” [1]

Directly underneath this quotation above a picture of press room journalists was this:  “PRESS ROOM (presumably thinking about Hitler’s many gas chambers)” [2]

Two things strike the military historian here, or just the average historian, especially those familiar with the facts about Hitler’s service in World War I and his non-use of chemical weapons for military objectives in the conduct of World War II against Allied Forces  (as opposed to his government’s use of chemicals for mass murder and genocide).

First, what was Spicer’s purpose, which has seemed to have been lost in the brou-ha-ha over his apparent gaffe?     My understanding based on the above is that he is saying Russia is supporting a Syrian regime that has committed a war crime that even the Germans did not stoop to, as led by Hitler, who established the policy on no use of chemical weapons, especially World War I style gas attacks on enemy combatants.

Or more simply, he was using a historical analogy to criticize Syrian and Russian actions, a position I think most of his audience that day agreed with.  What they seem to disagree with was his use of Hitler as a positive example of behavior.  This is forbidden.  This is the Hitler problem.

 He might have been better served to have said the German Army did not use chemical weapons, then his audience—poorly educated (if at all) in military history for the most part—would probably have let the comment pass, or tried to reinterpret it in some other tortured way as a stick to hit an administration they do not like  (for the most part, maybe one or two of them have empathy for current US federal administration led by President Trump, but this is supposition on my part).

Second, the no use of gas policy against combatants of other nations was Hitler’s policy.  He did not allow its use against combatants he considered sub-human-- the soldiers of the Red Army of the Soviet Union, whose captured soldiers Hitler’s legions murdered by the millions via conventional non-chemical means (mostly through starvation and neglect, but sometimes directly with guns and other weapons after their surrender).   [3]

So where did Hitler’s aversion to the use of gas (or other chemical weapons) against uniformed combatants come from?  Quite simply it came from his experience in World War I on the Western Front, where he endured gas attacks and developed an aversion to this horrible new weapon of warfare.  We often forget Hitler, the lowly enlisted veteran of an earlier war and his traumatization by these attacks. He almost certainly had comrades that were damaged or died from these attacks, never mind that it was his own nation, Germany, that let this particularly toxic genie of war out of the bottle. Albert Speer, Hitler’s Tsar for Armaments later wrote:

 “…Hitler [in 1944] , to be sure, had always rejected gas warfare; but he hinted in headquarters that the use of gas might stop the advance the Soviet troops.  We went on with vague speculations that the West would accept gas warfare against the East because at this stage of the war the British and American governments had an interest in stopping the Russian advance.  When no one at the situation conference spoke up in agreement, Hitler did not return to the subject.”  [4]

Speer also discusses in this section Western preparations and even plans for mass gas warfare and as we know, historians have documented US plans to use gas if the Germans initiated first use as well as American plans to use gas pre-emptively in the invasion of Japan (Japan had already used gas against the Chinese in their war in the far east, but not, significantly, against US soldiers except perhaps as guinea pigs while incarcerated.) [5]

Thus what we are seeing celebrated as an ignorant gaffe by President Trump’s press secretary is actually a celebration of a certain component of the polity’s own historical ignorance of military policy and events from 1939 to 1945 other than the Holocaust--of which they are adequately aware of [which is better than nothing].  But sometimes a little historical knowledge goes a long way—too long.   Colin Gray has decried this a-historicism as a feature of the American Way of War:

““A defense community led by the historically disrespectful and ill educated is all but condemned to find itself surprised by events for which some historical understanding could have prepared them.” 

 I daresay it is a feature of the American way of politics.

Final Caveat.  I did not vote for Donald Trump in the primaries or General Election. I completely disagree with his administration’s continuation of the foreign policy of liberal hegemony practiced, somewhat haphazardly in former President Obama’s case, by the previous three administrations  (Obama, Bush, W. Clinton).[7]  I feel somewhat perturbed that I even felt I had to add such a caveat.

Ka-boom.

John T. Kuehn, Fort Leavenworth, KS

[1] Transcript extract located at http://fusion.net/here-is-a-transcript-of-sean-spicers-comments-about-hit-1794224814 (accessed 4/14/2017).

[2] Ibid.

[3] For a quick account of this atrocity, which resulted in the murder of almost one third the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust, see Jonathan M. House and David Glantz, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, revised and expanded edition (Lawrence, KS:  University Press of Kansas, 2015), 67-68.  This authoritative source estimates 3.3 million Soviet prisoners died in German custody, most during the first year of the war.  This is actually half of the 6.6 million Jewish victims estimated to have been murdered during the Holocaust.

[4] Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (NY: Bonanza Books edition, 1970), 412-414.

[5]  Ibid. and see also D. M. Giangreco, Hell to Pay (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009), 112-113; see also Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson, wherein he discusses the famous accident when a German radio guided bomb hit a US ship in port containing gas munitions during the Italian campaign.  The US was not planning first use on that occasion, but was ready to respond in kind if the Germans did.

[6] Colin Gray, from “The American Way of War” in Rethinking the Principles of War, ed. Anthony D. McIvor (Annapolis, MD:  Naval Institute Press, 2005), 27-28.

[7]  This is a legitimate positon.  “Liberal hegemony” is best articulated and defined by Barry Posen in Restraint:  A New Foundation for the U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2014), 5-12.