Are you comfortable in your own head?

Good Read

Can you unplug from your iPad, iPhone, and iPod, sit alone, and just think? I do, quite often. Indeed, When I turn to other stimuli, I prefer any form of entertainment that will inspire me to seek a quiet corner and reflect on what I have learned. It matters not whether it comes in fiction or nonfiction stories. Truth is simply true, and it belongs to anyone willing to embrace it. The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front by Peter Hart is one of those books, full of true incidents, and it gives people like me something to think about.

Infantrymen advance into no man's land

Hart's book illuminates the battle of World War I in which nearly 1 million men were either killed or wounded in during the brief period of July1 to 18, 1916 on the banks of the River Somme in France.

The Somme chronicles the events leading up to the battle as well as the carnage that ensued. It is this early part of the book that caused me to reflect on my war, the one in which I participated, Vietnam. It dwells not only on the engagement of forces, but also on the steps and missteps that led to it. We become familiar with the heads of state, mostly royal cousins, trading notes in familiar language, and their respective statesmen giving the appearance that they want to avoid the unavoidable, and yet secretly rushing to war. We learn how the armies came to meet on the bucolic plains of rural France where they had to improvise an infrastructure to support the men and machines of war. I paused to remember Vietnam after reading this part inasmuch as America's military victory in Vietnam, a place where so many others had failed, was largely based on logistics.

Ah, I can see that you are thinking. What does he mean, “...America's military victory...”?

The Chinese, the French, and the Japanese, all coveted the rich plantations and rice paddies of that part of Southeast Asia in turn, especially the lush Mekong Delta. They all fought brutal wars to possess it and lost to the stubborn Viet tribesmen. Unlike these other nations that sought to build empires, America fought there to prevent another empire from annexing Vietnam, the communist empire. Only America succeeded in bringing the invaders to the peace conference to make concessions. Those concessions might of held if the United States had left a military presence on the DMZ between North and South Vietnam as they did in Korea. Unfortunately, it didn't. Even more egregiously, the United States not only withdrew all its forces, but also withdrew its support of the South Vietnamese government, and communism devoured them.

One of the keys to the American victory was the highly mobile systems of logistics developed under the direction of General William C. Westmoreland. Although Westmoreland is honestly criticized for his overly optimistic views of the conduct of war, he was a very competent military strategist and tactician. He well-recognized the need for an army that could fight at any point in the theater of war and then quickly move to any other point at a moment's notice. Such mobility had to extend to the artillery and logistics as well as the infantry. 

The battle of the Somme was quite a different matter. Unlike Vietnam, World War I was fought by armies facing each other along immobile fronts, lines of trenches that moved by inches and yards after months of careful preparation. The Somme describes these preparations better than any other book of war that I have ever read. 

No, it's not dry reading. The author infuses the story with eyewitness accounts that breathe life into the story. We can share their discomforts and feel their fear as they crawl into no man's land to provide cover for the ditch diggers who worked at night to avoid annihilation. We marvel at their ingenuity and perseverance as they fabricate railroads, roads, water supplies, sanitation and living facilities to support massive armies in a land that never accommodated more than a few hundred peasants in any previous time.

The battle of the Somme, when hot lead and cold steel is traded, becomes almost an afterthought in this story, albeit a bloody one. The rewards of battle never fully compensate for its carnage, and this is never truer than in this battle. This is why this book is a must read for those who don't just want to be entertained or informed. It is a book for people who like to think for themselves. It provides them with fodder for their thoughts.