Day of days

60 years ago, the largest single invasion force in human history was launched against the Normandy Coast. Operation Overlord, in the end, involved more than 5,000 ships, 12,000 aircraft and over a million soldiers. It was not just a matter of hurling as much as they could against the German fortifications - it was a matter of guile as well. The Germans knew that the invasion was coming - the only question was where, and when. The Allies' Operation Fortitude had, for months, cultivated the impression that a task force was going to land along the Calais coast, the narrowest part of the English Channel between England and France. The deception used faked plans to be dropped into enemy hands, decoy vehicles whose silhouettes could be seen from the French coast, and the word that General George S. Patton would be leading this military force. The brilliant but erratic Patton was himself in disgrace with the Allied Command. However, the Germans respected skill, and assumed that the Allies would as well. To the Germans, leaving Patton out of a leadership role in an European invasion was almost unthinkable. The Allies were all too happy to take advantage of that misconception, and the name of Patton being attached to this phantom force therefore lent the fiction that much more plausibility.

The invasion was actually launched in the late night of June 5 and early morning of June 6. This was to secure strategic points inland, so that the left and right flanks of the main invasion force would be secured when they finally hit the beaches. The British sent in their 6th Airborne Division, silently moving in using gliders, to capture a bridge that spanned the river Orne, near Caen. Code-named Pegasus, the glider troops carried out their orders - three words that soldiers really want to hear: "Hold until relieved." Reinforcements through the day helped to bolster their efforts, and eventually the strains of the 6th Commandos' bagpipes were a welcome sound.

Also in the early hours of June 6, the American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions were deployed by parachute around Vierville and Saint-Mère-Église. The transports carrying them in encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire - due to this and also the difficulty of navigating in the dark, the American paratroopers were scattered across a wide area. To their credit, the 101st and 82nd Airborne adjusted by forming ad hoc units of their own from whichever friendlies they could find, but many continued to fight for days behind enemy lines trying to make it back to their units.

When the main force hit the beaches, they encountered varying levels of enemy resistance. The Normandy Coast had been divided into different beachheads - Sword and Gold beaches were British responsibilities; Juno was given to the Canadians, and Omaha and Utah were handed to the Americans. As is well known by most people, the heaviest resistance was encountered at Omaha Beach, where the US 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions (V Corps) bore the brunt of the well-trained German 352nd Division, losing some 4,000 men before the day was out. In contrast, only 197 casualties out of 23,000 were reported at Utah, the smallest figures of any of the beachheads.

The beachheads were supposed to have been linked by the first day. This did not happen, but neither did they succumb to the inevitable German counterattacks. Working from the left flank to the right, by June 13, Utah was finally linked, forming a continuous Allied line that stretched nearly ten miles inland. Slowly and painfully, the infantry marched towards Cherbourg, through the bocages - hedgerows - that both hindered movement and provided ideal defensive positions for the Germans. However, air superiority and the destruction of the French railway lines were hindering the strength of the response, and Cherbourg surrendered on 26th June. At the same time, the British tank corps were moving in on the Caen peninsular, and by July 28th, Patton's US Third Army, now called in that the deception was no longer needed, bulldozed its way into the northwest of France. The liberation of Paris was at hand.

Operation Overlord did not go to plan - that was to be expected. As the old axiom goes, no plan ever survives contact with the enemy. The million men of Overlord were well-trained, well-drilled, and their officers able to improvise and learn as they went along, and that in the end was what told the day. Where Overlord was an unqualified success was as a symbol of international cooperation. It delivered a message to Nazi Germany that it now stood alone. With Italy gone, and the Japanese never having been able to assist with the European war; with the Russians pressing in from the East and the other countries moving in from the West, it became clear that it was only a matter of time. The Germans would continue to resist, of course, and that took its toll on the Allied armies, but as 1944 faded into 1945, the resistance became more desperate as the clock continued to mark the dying days of the Third Reich.

"So, you're a journalist."

Words fail me.

( British Journalist deported from LAX. )

I want a Jade Scorpion Ring and special moves

Alternate historical thoughts

logam and I had a brief discussion on Saturday before Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Akkakkakkakkak on Alternate History. While I used to read it, over the years, I have become less and less fond of alternate history fiction and lean towards the academic kind of alternate history, which some (trying to salvage some remnant of respectability to the genre) have called counterfactuals. For those not in the know, counterfactuals are alternate histories written not as fiction but as histories. They usually fall into one of two kinds - articles or books that acknowledge "real" history and then talk about how it would have changed if this or that happened, and the slightly more fun but more difficult to read kind, those that pretend to be from an alternative universe entirely and provide a historical account of those alternate events.

One of the things I've learned in my last year as a historian-in-training is that the idea that history has a progression, that certain things are inevitable has severely fallen out of favor with mainstream historiography. No historical event or string of events can really be reduced to something that would have happened no matter what. History is not a force that carries man helplessly along on its tides, but is dependent on hundreds, thousands of little decisions that are made along the way, and each shift, each alternate choice, could have sent history spinning off in many many different ways that nobody can honestly predict. History, in other words, is contingent. Nothing can be said to have had to happen, or will happen. Sorry, Marx.

Now, on first blush, this may seem to be exactly what AH is saying - that history could have gone wildly off kilter if this or that happened. But most AHs tend to rely on single, pivotal events. What if the Mongols had not turned back from Europe? What if Rome had not fallen? And, of course, perennial favorites like what if the South had won the American Civil War or what if the Nazis had won World War II? The difficulty in this kind of thinking is that it's usually far too simple.

Although history is contingent, historical events also have momentum. Even though they are based on evitable decisions, the impetus behind those decisions has been gathering steam for years, decades, and in some instances centuries. While nothing can be said to be truly inevitable and random events are able to change a great deal, it still is extraordinarily difficult sometimes to divert the course of history. Certainly, it is never as simple as the pivot boiling down to one event (no matter how crucial), like the Union Army not getting a hold of Lee's plans prior to and thus losing the Battle of Antietam, setting off a series of events that must culminate in victory for the South. Just one thing cannot change - many, many other things must change as well. Just because the South is bought some time doesn't mean that the British are going to recognize them politically, since they have their own problems with that peculiar institution of slavery. Victory at Antietam doesn't solve the problems of the South's lack of industrialization, or the changing face of the world economy away from mass labor.

From the professional historian's point of view, then, alternate history, or counterfactual speculation, is little more than a parlor game. It is an interesting diversion, a little exercise in imagination, uses the brain cells and tests your knowledge of the real history, but in the end, you learn little to nothing from it. Some historians go so far as to declare it a complete waste of time. My opinion is that it is not a complete waste of time, even though it is a time-waster (but then again, I never really consider using the imagination a complete waste of time). AH ultimately fails the test of significance - it cannot answer satisfactorily the question, "So what?" Trying to explain and illuminate the context and causes of real historical events are hard enough without pondering hypotheticals.

Some respected historians still do this: in the appendix of John Lewis Gaddis's We Now Know: Rethinking the Cold War (NYU Press, 1997), he speculates about what if the Cold War had gone this way or that, but ultimately one gets the feeling that it's self indulgent fluff, or mental masturbation. So what if Eisenhower could have done this, or so what if Reagan could have done that? Why does it matter, and what can you definitively say beyond, "It could have been different?" To go any further would really be the height of arrogance, and take a step back towards the rigid, inevitable models of historical thought. If AH teaches us anything, it is that history is contingent (albeit in a more complex way than most AHs envision), but once that lesson is learned, any further hypotheses do not serve to bolster the lesson further.

The overly simplistic nature of most AH work is why I can't read most alternate history fiction anymore, unless the nature of the change is very small, or simply cute, like Shakespeare being marooned in America and the natives thinking Hamlet is a comedy. Harry Harrison's Stars and Stripes trilogy, for example, had me wincing through it most of the way (even before I started at UGA) because of the way it so easy dismissed the enmity between North and South, not to mention the problem of slavery, which, in the book is magically solved by John Stuart Mill, or the easy way in which the British Army are defeated.

Even the granddaddy of AH, Turtledove, is no longer stirring. Aside from The Guns of the South, which was a fun read because it involved time travel, I have not really enjoyed a Turtledove book at all. His War Between The Provinces series is simply the Civil War transplanted into a fantastical universe with magic, and as such, bores the pants off me in way that even the white-man's-history narratives of Michael and Jeff Shaara never did. How Few Remain, that talked about the Second American Civil War - the first having ended in an armistice which amounted to a victory for the South, really - began interestingly enough, but soon settles into a confusing mass of characters which are barely distinguishable from one another. You may wonder what significance characterization has for an AH, but as the narrative gets further and further away from actual history, it becomes closer and closer to "pure" fiction, and in fiction, plot can only carry you so far if you cease to care at all for the characters. Once the central conceit disappears completely, then the narrative has to stand on its own. It really is a rock and a hard place, actually, since the closer the narrative hews to real history, then it becomes a rethread that is almost as boring; a string of insider jokes.

But then, why do counterfactuals like the Peter G. Tsouras edited series of "Victorious" books from Stackpole Books (Rising Sun Victorious, Third Reich Victorious, Dixie Victorious, et al.) don't bother me in quite the same way? Because being written as academic articles, they can provide a depth of analysis to the counterfactual events that AH fiction lacks and the dramatic structure of the narrative often precludes. Looking through these articles is less of an exercise in reading than in following the logic of the argument and seeing the interaction of causes and effects. You don't waste time on dialogue, or plot twists, or characters - you get down to brass tacks. If both are a waste of time, counterfactuals are less of a waste because it is the expression of the purest elements of the AH game.

However, when all is said and done, they are still games, and I don't understand why a minority of historians insist that counterfactuals be taken seriously. It is a crowd-pleaser, to be sure, but at its core it is just an empty confection. Fun while it lasts, but ultimately unsatisfying. Read them, chuckle, and put them aside. We can get so bogged down with might-have-beens that we forget to deal with what is and was, the things that do have impact on our present and future conditions.

Something for the iPod

University of Minnesota: Independent and Distance Learning
EngL 3020 Studies in Narrative: Science Fiction and Fantasy

20 lectures, in either RealMedia or MP3 format.

At last, Atlantis?

( Satellite images 'show Atlantis' along southern Spanish coast. )