Always Remember There Are Two Sides

This is Steven Petrick posting.

When I was much younger, I was eager to read about history, military history. I cared little about political or social history. I can remember being stunned when my second college history professor asked me "who was the King of England in World War II?" To which I more or less responded "King? England had a King?" I  had stopped caring about the Kings of England when they became figureheads rather than true military leaders in their own right.

Even so, my view on how I read history has changed very much.

I want both sides of the story.

It is not enough to read about how this or that combat unit or other military force overcame the enemy (or was defeated). I also want to know what the other side's view of the situation was.

At different times I have come across the other side's viewpoint of a specific incident that I knew of. A story where American forces triumphed and captured a pass from the enemy gets a different take when you read the enemy's viewpoint in which their orders were to hold the pass for a specified period of time, and then withdraw. While the enemy still retreated (and retreats seldom lead to ultimate victory, but there are exceptions, e.g., if the British Army had been lost at Dunkirk, World War II might have been very different), the Americans had not actually forced them to. But the Americans believed that they had defeated the enemy force.

And not all victories are truly as great as they seem. Custer may have been lost with almost half his command, but the Native American forces that won that victory never really won another. It was their high water mark, as Isandlwhana was the high water mark of the Zulu nation against the British Empire.

But what is going on on the other side of  the hill? Why did the enemy attack where he did and when he did? Why did he retreat? For the reasons we are told in our history books or for other reasons of his own?

When we play games, we can actually look across the table and ask our opponents those questions. Why did he commit to the low odds attack on Turn #X? What was he hoping to gain? How did he see the correlation of forces on the map that led him to the conclusion the attack was a good idea? Did he consider what the failure of the operation would cost him?

As players, we  almost always have a lot more information to hand than real soldiers will when they make their choices. Our enemy has a calculated (in the game system) combat value, and that combat value will usually be consistent whether the opposing player is well or happens to be a little sick that day, whether our opponent has eaten a good lunch or not, or missed a night's sleep will have no effect on the unit counter on the map. These factors may affect his game play, cause him to be inattentive at a critical moment and perhaps not get the best use out of a given counter, but the counter will still be what it is. Even in most "fog of war" games (where you do not necessarily know everything about the enemy's force) the enemy force capabilities are pretty much standard.

In real life, yesterday's heroes may be today's shirkers, and today's dispirited troops may be the ones whose elan allows them to advance under heavy enemy fire and take their objective. Depending on numerous variables, many of them beyond your immediate control, your troops might fight well on one day and poorly the next.

Books tell us stories of combat units brought to a halt in the middle of an assault because a key popular leader is killed. The case of a single sniper's bullet having more force than a machine gun. History may record that the defense triumphed and drove back the attack, but it may miss the point of the importance of one individual's death in the midst of the overall carnage as the key. By the same token, sometimes the death of one man can have the reverse effect. On Okinawa, a popular Marine officer died charging through a gap in an effort to inspire his men and, although he died, his death did inspire (or enrage) his men to charge through the gap and break the Japanese defense.

So, these days when I read a book about the landings on D-Day, I am always curious what was going on in the German Command Posts on the other side of beach. When I read an individual's personal account of how cool he and his unit were, I am always curious what his own men and  his superiors actually thought of him, and what the enemy's intelligence reports on his unit indicated. Whether the book is Anthony B. Herbert's "Soldier" or Otto Carius's "Tigers in the Mud" or Audie Murphy's "To Hell and Back," I am always curious what the opinion of others was.