The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

That was the moment at which World War I largely came to end in 1918. One of the most tragically senseless and destructive periods in all history came to a close in Western Europe with the Armistice –or end of hostilities between Germany and the Allied nations — that began at that moment. Some 20 million people had died in the fighting that raged for more than four years since August 1914. The complete end of the war came with the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.

The date of November 11th became a national holiday of remembrance in many of the victorious allied nations –a day to commemorate the loss of so many lives in the war. And in the United States, President Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day on November 11, 1919. A few years later, in 1926, Congress passed a resolution calling on the President to observe each November 11th as a day of remembrance:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

Of course, the hopes that “the war to end all wars” would bring peace were short-lived. By 1939, Europe was again at war and what was once called “the Great War” would become World War I.  With the end of World War II, there was a movement in America to rename Armistice Day and create a holiday that recognized the veterans of all of America’s conflicts. President Eisenhower signed that law in 1954. (In 1971, Veterans Day began to be marked as a Monday holiday on the third Monday in November,  but in 1978, the holiday was returned to the traditional November 11th date).

Today, Veterans Day honors the duty, sacrifice and service of America’s nearly 25 million veterans of all wars. We should remember and celebrate those men and women. But lost in that worthy goal is the forgotten meaning of this day in history –the meaning which Congress gave to Armistice Day in 1926:

to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations …

inviting the people of the United States to observe the day … with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

The Veterans Administration website offers more resources on teaching about Veterans Day.

You can read more about World War I history as well as all of America’s conflicts in Don’t Know Much About History

Don't Know Much About@ History (2011 Revised and Updated Edition)

Since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and Vietnam War might as well be the Punic Wars to some people, here is a quick refresher.

America was already twenty years into its Vietnam commitment when Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy’s “best and brightest” holdovers sought an incident to pull American firepower into the war with at least a glimmer of legitimacy. It came in August 1964 with two brief encounters in the Gulf of Tonkin, the waters off the coast of North Vietnam. On August 2, 1964 two American destroyers engaged three North Vietnamese torpedo boats, resulting in one of the torpedo boat’s sinking. American claims that the North Vietnamese fired first were later disputed. On August 4, 1964, the American destroyers reported a second engagement with North Vietnamese boats. There was never any confirmation that either ship had actually been attacked. (Weeks after this the late Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who died in 2009, expressed to Johnson doubts that the attack had occurred.) But these faulty reports would be exploited as a convenient excuse for the massive escalation of America’s involvement in Vietnam.

In the civil war that was raging between North and South since the French withdrawal from Indochina and the partition of Vietnam in 1954, the United States had committed money, material, advice, and, by the end of 1963, some 15,000 military advisers in support of the anti-Communist Saigon government. The American CIA was also in the thick of things, having helped foster the coup that toppled prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and then acting surprised when Diem was executed by the army officers who overthrew him.

Among the other “advice” the United States provided to its South Vietnamese allies was to teach them commando tactics. In 1964, CIA trained guerrillas from the South began to attack the North for months in covert acts of sabotage. Code named Plan 34-A, these commando raids failed to undermine North Vietnam’s military strength, so the mode of attack was shifted to hit-and-run operations by small torpedo boats. To support these assaults, the U.S. Navy posted warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, loaded with electronic eavesdropping equipment enabling them to monitor North Vietnamese military operations and provide intelligence to the South Vietnamese commandos.

According to Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History,

“Even Johnson privately expressed doubts only a few days after the second attack supposedly took place, confiding to an aide, ‘Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.’”

Without waiting for a review of the situation, he ordered an air strike against North Vietnam in “retaliation” for the “attacks” on the U.S. ships. One bitter result of these air raids was the capture of downed pilot Everett Alvarez, Jr., the first American POW of the Vietnam War. He would remain in Hanoi prisons for eight years.

President Johnson followed up the air strike by calling for passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This proposal gave the President the authority to “take all necessary measures” to repel attacks against U.S. forces and to “prevent further aggression.”

On August 7, 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the House unanimously after only forty minutes of debate. In the Senate, there were only two voices in opposition.

Congress, which alone possesses the constitutional authority to declare war, had handed that power over to a man who was not a bit reluctant to use it. One of the senators who voted against the Tonkin Resolution, Oregon’s Wayne Morse, later said,

“I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution.” After the vote, Walt Rostow, an adviser to Lyndon Johnson, remarked, “We don’t know what happened, but it had the desired result.”

The recent debate over Presidential powers to commit troops without Congressional approval, as in the NATO action against Libya, is a reminder of the ways in which Presidents have taken the nation to war. It is also a reminder that those monumental decisions are sometimes  base on lies or shadowy misinformation. In the case of Tonkin, the “official version” was elevated to an attack on Americans.

You can read more about the Tonkin incident and the Vietnam War in Don’t Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition, from which this post is adapted.

Don't Know Much About@ History: Anniversary Edition

Here is an older post with some suggested readings about the Vietnam War era.

These links are related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and recently declassified National Security Administration documents:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/index.htm
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/press20051201.htm

During the past 50 years, Communism rose and fell in Europe, relations with Red China were transformed, and Middle Eastern tyrants were embraced, tolerated or toppled. But the Cuba of Fidel Castro has remained a stubborn thorn for every American President since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Castro’s regime, which took over Cuba in a 1958 revolution, has survived coups, assassination plots, economic war and one attempted invasion.

What: For most of the 20th century, the Cuban economy –all the sugar, mining, cattle, and oil wealth– was in nearly total American control. American gangsters had a rich share of the casinos and hotels of Havana. The Spanish-American War had also given the United States the base it still controls at Guantanamo.  Then Castro and his rebels took over and turned the island into a Soviet-dominated Communist state. Almost since the time Castro came to power, the CIA began to plan his overthrow.

Who: In 1961, the CIA plotted to invade Cuba with a small army of anti-Castro refugees and exiles called La Brigada. Supported by CIA-planted insurgents in Cuba who would blow up bridges and knock out radio stations, the brigade would land on the beaches of Cuba and set off a popular revolt against Fidel Castro.

When: On April 17, 1961, some 1,400 Cubans, poorly trained, under-equipped, and uninformed of their destination, were set down on the beach at the Bay of Pigs.

By the end of the day on April 19, the invasion was over– a total disaster for the Cuban exile army. The toll was 114 Cuban invaders and many more defenders killed in the fighting; 1,189 other exiles were captured and held prisoner until they were later ransomed from Cuba by then- Attorney General Robert Kennedy for food and medical supplies. Four American fliers, members of the Alabama Air National Guard in CIA employ, also died as part of  the invasion, but the American government never acknowledged their existence or their connection to the operation.

Why: Poor planning, dated information about Cuba, and a complete lack of coordination doomed the ill-fated invasion force. Once the assault was underway, Castro poured thousands of troops into the area. Overwhelmed, the brigade fought bravely, but they lacked ammunition and, most important, the air support promised by the CIA. In Washington, Kennedy feared that any direct U.S. combat involvement might send the Russians into the non-Communist enclave of West Berlin, possibly setting off World War III.

The abject failure of the invasion was a total American humiliation. And it would bring Cold War America to its most dangerous flash point  when the Cuban Missile Crisis later unfolded in October 1962 as the emboldened Soviets, thinking Kennedy indecisive, tried to place missiles in Cuba.

In the view of many historians, the Bay of Pigs debacle also helped create the mind-set that sucked America into the mire of Vietnam. Having failed so completely in their attempt to rid Cuba of Communism, Kennedy and his advisers sought to counter the spread of Communism in Asia. And another fiasco began.

The Kennedy Library offers a page on the Bay of Pigs along with contemporary documents.

This post was adapted from Don’t Know Much About History where you can read more about the impact of the Bay of Pigs on American policy and the Cold War era.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/seymour_m_hersh/search?contributorName=Seymour%20M.%20Hersh

On March 16, 1968, in a small Vietnamese village, “something dark and bloody” took place.

On November 12, 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the massacre in My Lai during the Vietnam War. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize for the story. It was a story that changed history.

Dropped into the village by helicopter that March day in 1968, the men of Charlie Company found only the old men, women, and children of My Lai. There were no Vietcong, and nothing to suggest that My Lai was a staging base for guerrilla attacks. But under Lieutenant William Calley’s orders, the villagers were forced into the center of the hamlet, where Calley issued the order to shoot them. The defenseless villagers were mowed down by automatic weapons fire. Then the villagers’ huts were grenaded, some of them still occupied. Finally, small groups of survivors—some of them women and girls who had been raped by the Americans—were rounded up and herded into a drainage ditch, where they too were mercilessly machine-gunned. A few of the soldiers of Charlie Company refused to follow the order; one of them later called it “point-blank murder.”

During the massacre, Hugh C. Thompson, a 25-year-old helicopter pilot saw the bodies in the ditch and went down to investigate. Placing his helicopter between the GIs and a band of children, the pilot ordered his crew to shoot any American who tried to stop him. He managed to rescue a handful of children. But that was one of the day’s few heroic deeds. Another witness to the massacre was an army photographer who was ordered to turn over his official camera, but kept a second secret camera. With it, he had recorded the mayhem in which more than 560 Vietnamese, mostly women and children, were slaughtered. Those pictures, when they later surfaced, revealed the extent of the carnage at My Lai. The mission was reported as a success back at headquarters.

Then reporter Seymour Hersh also got wind of the story and broke it to an incredulous America in November 1969.

In the immediate aftermath of the investigation, several officers still on active duty were court-martialed for dereliction of duty for covering up the massacre, a word the Pentagon never used. At worst, they were reduced in rank or censured. Four officers –Calley, Medina, Captain Eugene Kotouc and Lieutenant Thomas Willingham– were court-martialed. Medina was acquitted, but later confessed that he had lied under oath to army investigators. The other two officers were also acquitted. Only Lieutenant Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder of 22 villagers at My Lai on March 29, 1971. Two days later, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But President Nixon then reduced his sentence to house arrest in response to an outpouring of public support for Calley, who was seen as a scapegoat. Calley was later paroled.

Hersh’s revelation of the My Lai Massacre transformed the way the war was viewed and reported in America. It went far in changing America’s views about the conflict. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and later wrote about the event in a book, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath. Hersh has continued his groundbreaking journalism with such stories as the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, subject of the book Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.