By Conrado D. Fontanilla

Scott’s anaconda

Anaconda is a giant snake that measures five meters long on the average; it may grow as long as ten meters. It kills its large prey by constriction (“anaconda (genus Eunectes) .” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition.  Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2009).

The constriction method could be the reason why the military strategy developed in the American Civil War was called Scott’s anaconda (Donald, D. H. 1996. Why the North Won the Civil War). It appears that Scott’s anaconda was jointly developed by Abraham Lincoln and Gen. Winfield Scott, then commander in chief of the United States of America when Lincoln was elected president in 1861.

I speculate that constriction strategy was conceived by Gen. Scott but the concept of destroying armies was embraced by Lincoln who probably took it from Karl von Clausewitz. Thus the Scott’s anaconda strategy has two parts: cordon and destroy armies.

At the start of the American Civil War in April 1861, Scott was already 75 years old, a product of the West Point Military Academy. Lincoln retired him. At West Point, a major textbook in military science was  authored by Antoine Henri Jomini, a brilliant Swiss officer under Napoleon Bonaparte, who assiduously documented Bonaparte’s strategies. A distinguishing feature of war strategy he preached was the capture of territory. There was no doubt that Gen. Scott picked this up as did all generals of the American Civil War on both Union side and the Confederate side. Gen. George McClellan, successor of Gen. Scott was a disciple, so was Gen. Henry Halleck, successor of Gen. McClellan. On the Confederate side, Gen. Robert Lee, Gen. Johnston and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard and others were disciples of “capture territory” strategy. All the generals in the Union army and Confederate army were graduates of West Point. President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy was a West Pointer; he was a colonel in the war with Mexico, a national hero for winning the Battle of Buena Vista; he was Secretary of War under Pres. Franklin Pierce in 1853 (Encyclopedia Britannica 2009). However, the generals of the South deemphasized capture of territory because their overall strategy was a cordon of defense meant to deny the North encroachment into their territory not to take territory from the North.

Able military director

Lincoln had a minor military record of taking an undistinguished position in the Black Hawk war. To the surprise of everyone, he developed into an able military director as the hostilities between the North and the South progressed. He exhorted his generals to destroy armies instead of capturing territory. He argued with Gen. McClellan to apply this part of the strategy but his commander of the army would not budge.

Destroy armies

The cordon part of the Scott’s anaconda strategy was adopted but the “destroy armies” part would not sink in with generals. Lincoln sacked many commanders of the Union army partly due to suffering defeats or incurring heavy losses in battle but mainly to look for a general who would adopt the concept. Then he found Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, or rather, Gen. Grant showed his worth. Gen. Grant served under Gen. Halleck. He contemplated resigning his post, perhaps over dissatisfaction on the conduct of war. But when he won a significant battle, he was promoted by Lincoln over the objection of Gen. Halleck who said that Gen. Grant drinks a lot too many. Some witnesses recalled Lincoln as saying “if his drink makes him win battles other generals should drink it, too” or something to that effect. Eventually Lincoln made Gen. Grant his commander of the army; Gen. Halleck became his subordinate. When Gen. Grant showed Lincoln his battle plan that presumably incorporated the Scott’s anaconda cum destroy armies, the President reportedly said: “Those not skinning can hold a leg” (Williams, T. Harry. 1996. The Military Leadership of North and South, in: Why the North Won the Civil War, page 57).

Sherman march

In Georgia, Gen. William Sherman’s March to the Sea spanned 50 miles. Having secured Georgia and Tennessee for the Federals, Gen. Sherman marched toward the Carolinas defended by Gen. Joseph Johnston. Gen. Sherman tied up Gen. Johnston that the latter could not move to support Gen. Lee who was engaged by Gen. Grant in Virgina.

“The blockade of about 3,500 miles (5,600 km) of Confederate coastline was a factor of incalculable value in the final defeat of the Davis government, although the blockade did not become truly effective before the end of 1863” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2009)..

Destruction of Gen. Lee’s army

The march of Gen. Sherman through the South destroying scattered lesser armies was like an anaconda wrapping around its prey, constricting it. The confrontation of Gen. Lee’s army and Gen. Grant’s army is a classic example of “destroy armies” doctrine. Gen. Grant erected a siege on Gen. Lee’s army for nine months in Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia. That siege cut off supplies of food and clothing for Gen. Lee’s army and when soldiers lay unable to fight and horses were dropping off, it was only a matter of time.

“An 88-mile (142-km) pursuit west-southwestward along the Appomattox River in Virginia ensued, with Grant and Meade straining every nerve to bring Lee to bay… When Lee’s final attempt to break out failed, he surrendered the remnants of his gallant Army of Northern Virginia….”(Encyclopedia Britannica 2009).

Gen. Lee surrendered to Gen. Grant without the approval of President Jefferson Davis on April 9,1865. Gen. Johnston surrendered to Gen. Sherman on April 26. The capitulation of Gen. Lee is considered the end of the American Civil War.

Gen. Grant allowed the soldiers of the South, now his prisoners, to keep their mules and horses; he shared with them rations of the North army.

My interest in American Civil War and WWII

My country was colonized by the Spaniards since 1529 to 1898. We drove out the Spaniards in a revolution in 1896-98. The Americans “bought” the Philippines from Spain when we had already won our freedom for use as a jumping board to the big marker, China. We resisted the Americans who lost more men in Philippine-American War than in the earlier Cuban War. We gained our independence from the United States in July 4,1946. I was born in 1947.

In high school we had a convocation that coincided with an event in American history which did not escape the memory of a teacher who was a graduate of Brent, an American school. He must have surmised that the convocation would be boring a one and he wanted to rev it up. Early in the morning, he cornered me saying he wanted me to memorize Abraham Lincoln’s eulogy to the soldiers who perished at Gettysburg where the North won a decisive battle. He knew I could memorize it and deliver a declamation during the convocation to be held in the afternoon of the same day.  This speech still holds me in awe.

Gen. MacArthur served as a military adviser to President Manuel A. Quezon of the Philippines when the general retired from the United States army in his early 50s. He was made to oversee the building up of a Philippine army in anticipation of Japanese expansion. He organized the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) that was unprepared for battle and it could only delay the schedule of the Japanese Imperial army in the south Pacific in 1941. Gen. MacArthur, slipping through the Japanese gauntlet escaped to Australia. He was reactivated as commander of the army of the allies, southern Pacific theater, to confront the Japanese.

Major players

The major players in WWII on the side of the United States were President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gen. George Marshall (chief of staff), Admiral Chester Nimitz, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy in 1913, before his election as 32nd president in 1933. There is no doubt that these men absorbed the lessons of the American Civil war, particularly Scott’s anaconda. It was not applicable wholesale in the southern Pacific theater because it comprised of islands where Japanese forces were deployed strategically. So a modification was made for the army and navy consisting of “island hopping” from Midway to, Coral Sea, Solomon Islands, Gilbert Island, Marianas, Palau, then Philippines. In the southern Pacific theater the army was under Gen. MacArthur; the navy was under Admiral Nimitz partly as a concession to the navy to redeem itself having been the victim of Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.

In WWI, Gen. Eisenhower was commander of a tank training center; before he could see action the war ended. In the 1920s he wrote a guidebook on WWI. In 1935 he assisted Gen. MacArthur   in organizing the USAFFE. Back to the U.S. he was made chief of staff of the 3rd army. He caught the attention of Gen. Marshall with planning of war games for 500,000 troops. He was appointed chief of war plans division of the U.S. army; promoted to Major General in 1942, leapfrogging 366 senior officers (Encyclopedia Britannica 2009). (Another reason for accelerating his promotion was for him to level up in rank with Field Marshall Montgomery who would soon become his subordinate.) Finally, he was appointed Supreme commander of the Allied forces, European theater.

Scott’s anaconda in the European theater

No doubt, the backbone of Eisenhower’s plan was Scott’s anaconda. In the battlefield, the Allied 48 divisions formed a cordon stretching from North Sea to Switzerland spanning 600 miles. On D-D day 156,000 soldiers landed in Normandy, France that swelled to 1,000,000 on an assault to bring the war to the heart of Germany. The objective was unconditional surrender of Germany.

Scott’s anaconda was not without opposition. The main planners were the British led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the Americans led by President Roosevelt. The British military, led by Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, were advocates of the subtle “underbelly” which consisted of weakening the enemy by attacking the periphery. This was shown in the battles in French North Africa led by Field Marshall Montgomery who drove out German Gen. Erwin Rommel from the desert theater, and the campaign to liberate Sicily and mainland Italy. Even when Operation Overlord, the codename of the invasion of France and drive to Germany, was already in progress Montgomery was able to get a concession from Gen. Eisenhower to apply his jackknife strategy consisting of a narrow column that penetrates into the enemy with speed. The jackknife failed because the column was too fast that the supplies could not catch up. It was also vulnerable to attacks on its sides. That strategy is the theme of an all-star movie, “A Bridge Too Far.”

In the battlefield, the Germans tried to breach the cordon in a counter assault called the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. It was the last stand of the Germans to stop constriction from Scott’s anaconda. In May 7,1945, the Germans surrendered. Hitler stole some teeth of the  anaconda, as it were, by committing suicide before the allies could get him.

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In the summer of 1932 at the height of the depression 25,000 former “doughboys” Word War 1 Infantry, many of them combat veterans walked, hitchhiked, or rode the rails to Washington D.C. Penniless and indigent, they squatted with their families in abandoned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue and pitched a shack and tent city along the Anacostia River. They came to ask the government to pay them bonuses promised to veterans in 1924 and scheduled to be paid in 1945. With starving families, no jobs, and no prospects of finding one they needed that bonus now to survive. Calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force. They became known as the “Bonus Army.”

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The fact was their mission was dead in the water. Hoover called out the troops. Commanded by General Douglas MacArthur with his aid Dwight D. Eisenhower. The assault was led by the Third Calvary, sabers ready, under the command of Major George Patton. The U.S. Army rolled out to defeat the rag tag bunch of men, women, and children with tear gas, tanks, and bayonets. The calvary charged then came the gas attack. The tanks leveled the camps and it was all burned. There were more than one hundred casualties and two babies died from the gas.

The Bonus Army joined the other two million people on the road. Some states posted guards at the state lines to turn back the poor. The violence in Washington D. C.was not the only protests by unemployed hungry people, some led by children. They were all put down by harsh police action.

At that time the presidential campaign was just beginning. A grim Herbert Hoover had been renominated again by the Republicans on a platform that promised to balance the budget, keep tariffs high, and repeal prohibition. The Democrats had no doubt they would recapture the White House after it being held by Republicans for 12 years. Their three top candidates were, Al Smith,John Nance Garner, and governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt won the nomination and many had doubts about the candidate. Newspapermen, H.L Mencken and Walter Lippmann called him the weakest candidate and an amiable boy scout who lacked any qualifications for the office.

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It made no matter, everybody was so sick and tired of Hoover and the Republican party the Democrats could have run a Boy Scout and won. Anything to get rid of Hoover. Roosevelt won the election with 57% of the popular vote, carrying 42 of 48 states.

The Second World War was over, but at what cost? Several hundred thousand civilians were killed instantly when those two steel cases fell from the sky, and thousands more died or suffered from radiation based illnesses for decades to come. The nuclear age was ushered in with the suffering of countless innocents and the total devastation of two beautiful Japanese cities. The threat of nuclear exchange was to loom large throughout the rest of the twentieth century, with the world coming perilously close to doom at least three times since 1945.

There has been much written over the years about the dropping of Fat Boy and Little Man on those August days, namely focussing on the need to unleash the atom on an already defeated enemy. The Australian journalist, John Pilger calls it a ‘criminal act on an epic scale’ and many modern  writers have discussed the savagery of dropping the bomb on Japan and argued that it was merely a way of demonstrating the United State’s mastery of the atom to the Soviet Union. Indeed, Pilger further argues that the bomb wasn’t intended to end the Pacific war at all, and was solely a ‘show of strength’ for the benefit of Stalin.

To claim this is fundamentally wrong, and a rash example of ‘shock and awe’ journalism that chooses to ignore key facts to achieve maximum impact over its readers. The dropping of the first A-bombs by the Enola Gay (Hiroshima) and Bock’s Car (Nagasaki) ultimately saved the allies potentially a million casualties and many more Japanese. The planners of Operation Olympic, the invasion of mainland Japan, anticipated almost 800,000 fatalities on the side of the allies. An invasion would have been protracted, bloody, and would have totally devastated the Japanese nation. The Japanese Imperial Air Force had ceased to be a fighting force in early July, but the Army and Navy were willing and prepared to fight on. The largely militarised Japanese population would have fought for every inch of their beloved homeland; honour and a way of life were at stake. However, after the two bombs, the peace faction within the Japanese government –including Emperor Hirohito- overruled the nationalists that were campaigning for continuation of the war, and began to sue for peace. On the 14^Th August 1945, the emperor informed his divided War Council that they must accept the surrender. Despite an attempted coup, the Emperor addressed his nation for the first time the next day and issued his ‘endure the unendurable’ speech. Thus, the loss of countless thousands of lives was prevented and the first true global and total war was over. Had the bombs not been used, the face of the world today would be hugely different, with almost an entire generation worldwide dying in a maelstrom of fanatical fighting on the Japanese mainland.

It is impossible in today’s climate to feel completely at ease with the dropping of those bombs by the allies on a struggling enemy. To feel no empathy for the survivors of the raids would display a lack of awareness and empathy towards the victims of attacks in recent years; innocents targeted as a means to defend or destroy a cause.

Yet is equally impossible to completely vilify the action, too.

To fully comprehend the decision made by Truman, we must understand the environment in which he made them. Harry Truman was thrust into a job he never truly wanted, and was ultimately responsible for ending the war as quickly as possible, and with minimal further U.S casualties. He was presented with an experimental weapon that could, theoretically, end the war with no more U.S loss of life and he used it. The pressure from both the Chiefs of Staff and the Manhattan Project directors would have been immense, and Truman gave the first –and hopefully only- ever order to use atomic weapons in theatre. In doing so, Harry S. Truman believed what he was doing was right, and in the best interests of his people and indeed the world.

However, Pilger may be right to highlight the ‘Soviet Question’ in his recent critique of Truman’s decision. It would be naive of any analyst or historian to rule out the fact that the western allies, the U.S included, had a very wary weather eye on the eastern horizon. In Europe, Stalin had finally shown is true colours to the world in the race to and subsequent occupation of Berlin. The Soviet Union had seized most of Eastern Europe and would not relinquish its’ grip for decades. Stalin was beginning his empire creep into Europe, and many in the west did indeed feel that the Soviet Union would pose a clear and present danger in the post war world. However, Stalin was aware of the Allies secret weapon, thanks to spies and sympathizers in the Manhattan Project, and was deliberately underwhelmed when he was officially informed about the project in Potsdam; whilst the weapons did give the west a temporary advantage over the USSR, it is important to remember that what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not an act of barbarism or an unholy science experiment, but a valid military operation that was intended to finish a war that had raged for six years, and had the potential to burn for at least another one.

Those two bombs dropped on Japan ultimately changed the world, and has seen the planet teeter close to Armageddon on several occasions, but such an early discharge of atomic weapons ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and kept the Cold War comparatively cool. During the Korean War, General MacArthur was a keen advocate of the use of tactical nuclear weapons to end the conflict, and only the direct invention (and ultimate resignation of the General) of president Eisenhower prevented it. Would the president have been as wary if the earth didn’t already bear the festering scars of a nuclear detonation?  I firmly believe that the spectre of a thousand Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s prevented further nuclear exchange for the forty years of the Cold War, irrespective of how close we came to the abyss.

War is a terrible thing, and terrible decisions have to be made so that good may triumph. I will leave the further philosophical debate on the morality of war to greater minds than mine, but it is fair to say that the world needs to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and be very thankful that it happened sooner, rather than later.

If you’re looking for the real story behind the surrender of Japan, start by researching the Japanese Emperor’s role. According to General Macarthur, the Japanese refused to surrender as long as the safety of their emperor was not guaranteed, but were willing to sign a treaty if he could remain untouched. The Americans refused to do this, and then dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. The Japanese did not respond diplomatically. Then the Americans dropped a bomb on Nagasaki. The Japanese, again, did not respond. Then the Americans guaranteed the survival of the emperor. At this point, and only at this point, the Japanese agreed to surrender.

Why did America drop the bombs on Japan, then, if it could have secured exactly the same peace terms without them? Granted, American policy makers were not simply sadistic and revenge-seeking (though the same might not be said of all aspects of the population at the time). The answer to this question might be found by looking at the bombs’ Cold War context. Historians and politicians alike have speculated that President Truman needed to show the Soviets that he was willing to use nuclear weapons against civilians in order to enhance his credibility and keep Soviet aggression contained. As George Kennan’s Long Telegram would later suggest, the American administration believed that the godless communists in Moscow could only be negotiated with using force. The Bomb was evidence of this force. It was the root of the Truman Doctrine.

In this way, the atomic bombs seem much less like the final shots of the Second World War, and, instead, much more like the opening shots of the Cold War.

When Supreme Commander A.E.F. Eisenhower wrote “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”, he meant to say that the Japanese would have surrendered – especially since the Russians had just entered the war against Japan – without any further American lives lost. He was not, at this time, worried about considering the bomb’s global context.

Whether Truman’s decision was moral or immoral, the incontrovertible fact remains that atomic bombs did not save any American lives during the Second World War. Whether they saved American lives by averting a direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union, however, is anyone’s guess.