Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [35]
With regard to sources for the military aspect, I met only two problems: For the period of World War II there is too much, a problem I will return to later. The second was minor: What happened during the maneuvers of 1940–1? This was when Stilwell earned the great reputation as tactician and field commander that led to his being rated number-one corps commander in the U.S. Army and to his being selected after Pearl Harbor for the first overseas command of the war. Maneuvers do not seem to be a very well-documented subject; in fact, for public affairs of the time they have the unique distinction of being under-documented. Yet as Stilwell’s biographer I obviously had to find out what the maneuvers demonstrated. It is not enough to know the result; one wants to show it happening.
This is a frequent problem in military history: One always knows the result of a battle; the difficulty is in reconstructing the course of events during it. It is only when the time comes to write the narrative that you discover that you really don’t know what went on. I had that problem with the loss of Alsace in August 1914. In that case I never did find out enough to make it clear in my own mind. I faked it, but nobody noticed.
This time I spent endless hours searching. I read all the critiques in the Infantry Journal. OCMH (Office of the Chief of Military History) came up with a history of the Third Army, in which Stilwell commanded a division during the first maneuvers, but it didn’t tell me anything. The best source, oddly enough, proved to be the press, which can hardly be said of it later on when the war was for real in China and Burma.
At that stage the American public was reading fairy tales, largely based on Chinese communiqués—which could teach Munchausen a thing or two. For a while, presumably on the theory that you would come nearer to the truth if you got out of Asia altogether, the New York Times covered the Burma campaign from London! The whole fairy tale of the Chinese war effort became in itself a factor of history because the attitudes and myths it created influenced our policy—but that is another story.
It has led me, however, to the proposition that the press might do well never to publish anything its reporters have not personally witnessed. It would eschew all communiqués, press releases, canned speeches. Just imagine! The news without press releases! We would be reading what happened, not what someone wants us to think happened—it might even be, on some delightful day, nothing at all. I proposed this once to Turner Catledge when the Times published a report about an alleged Iraeli air raid which Cairo said killed fifty civilians while Tel Aviv said no planes had left the ground. Why not send a reporter to the spot, I asked Mr. Catledge; why bother to print the communiqué and the denial at all? He said something about being a paper of record, but I don’t see much point in putting into the record something that may never have taken place, just because some propaganda office has put it into a communiqué. That is simply being a sucker. Communiqués have about as much relation to what actually happens as astrology has to the real science of the stars.
To get back to the maneuvers, the best account of all I found in a press-clipping book kept by the Stilwell family, which was a mine of wonderful things you never would find in a paper of record, but suffered from the disability that neither date nor name of newspaper was supplied for any of the clippings. Needless to say, the scrapbook was, to put it gently, a nightmare to the researcher.
From the point of view of World War II historians, my research was characterized by two unorthodoxies: no clearance and no tape-recorder. As regards the first, I