History never looks like history books when one is experiencing the uncertainty and the “fog of war” that envelops one’s choices.  What in hindsight has the whiff of inevitability appears uncertain and contingent while one is experiencing it.  While looking back we see certainties and events, while in the present looking forward we are dealing with possibilities and probabilities.

How does a historian deal with this tension between uncertain reacting and responding to events and the omniscient or at least hindsight-enabled historical perspective?  As it happens, by accident (in other words, not by my design) the combined libraries of my stepfather and I have together a case study that is rare, if not unique, in combining a classic fog of war account of an officer in a battle with a classic retrospective view of the same battle as a historian.

The historian in question is Charles B. McDonald.  During World War II he fought in the Normandy Campaign until V-E day as a company commander of frontline infantry in combat.  He was wounded in battle at the Battle of the Bulge and received a purple heart.  As it happens, shortly after the war he published his memoirs of his war experiences as a Company Commander, creating, in the process, a modern classic of the experience of military command as an officer in battle.  This short volume is full of dry humor and the fog of war.

Relevant to the subject of today’s entry, the book itself, as a memoir of his experiences, shows what military command is like for a relatively ordinary officer of the rank of captain.  In his account, his knowledge of military strategy is nearly nonexistent.  His main concerns are logistics (getting food and shelter for his men, and making sure they have enough ammo as well as artillery support) and the tactical orders he receives from battalion level command, which tends to be comical and slightly out of touch with the reality on the ground.  Knowledge of higher-level command or the strategic goals of his army, corps, or division, is nonexistent.  Since he knows little of the greater strategy, then he can convey nothing of that strategy to the men who serve under him.

And those men are an interesting lot.  Even though MacDonald was a very young officer (he was a captain at the age of 20, just after finishing his undergraduate studies and ROTC).  They value MacDonald, according to his own reporting of it, because he is willing to go out and see them and talk to them wherever they are, no matter how far from the command post, no matter how close to the enemy.  And it is that knowledge of their captain’s concern that translated into better fighting effectiveness.  War works in mysterious ways, and Company Commander shows the fog of war in a pristine form, where even officers at a relatively high rank have little to no idea of the bigger picture in which they work.

What makes MacDonald’s career more exciting is that he did not end it as a company commander, for many an officer never turns the major’s corner (it is, in fact, the decisive promotion in an officer’s career in most armies).  Instead of being promoted in command positions, though, MacDonald became a G-2 and went into military intelligence, becoming an army historian.  This gives his military historical work, in particular his epic A Time For Trumpets, about the Battle of the Bulge, a particular bite when it comes to the squabbling and fighting within militaries.  Indeed, a comparison of Company Commander and A Time For Trumpets shows the difference between a frontline officer and a historian in vivid (and intentional) relief.

A Time For Trumpets shows the whole span of the Battle of the Bulge, from Hitler’s orders and the deliberate deception of the Allied troops, to the effects of the Battle on the Bulge in giving Stalin a strong hand in demanding (and receiving) a paramount role in Eastern Europe in the postwar world, to a brief cameo of Captain MacDonald and his troops of Company G trying (briefly and unsuccessfully) to defend two villages against tanks (!).  One of the more bitterly ironic comments of the book is that the command and staff troops were often dismissive of the intelligence officers (and historians), and their insights were ignored in the period before the German attack.  This is bitterly ironic because Captain MacDonald was a talented army historian after World War II ended, just as he had been an able command officer of frontline infantry (a very small percentage of the American military in World War II) during conflict.

Company Commander played a major role in the work A Time For Trumpets, in ways that are truly intriguing.  For one, survivors of the Malmedy Massacre who had never spoken before about their harrowing experiences told Charles MacDonald the historian about their experiences because they figured that Charles MacDonald the commander of infantry soldiers would understand what it is like in the heat of battle and in deadly danger.  He was no armchair historian (unlike myself, for example), but someone who had lived the history he wrote.

This raises some very intriguing challenges.  For one, most people who write about their military experiences in the guise of history (generals who write self-serving memoirs for example) have a clear agenda to push.  In the case of Mr. MacDonald, though, he does not appear to have been high enough of a rank to have had an agenda, but neither was he low enough of a rank not to have any credibility within the army hierarchy.  As it happened, MacDonald was at the range where he could both participate in and write in an active role in history without his rank and prestige harming his professional integrity as a historian.  This is a very delicate act.

We might wonder why he wrote both works, though.  For one, it appears that MacDonald was among those people (as am I) who are simply compelled to make sense of their experiences and to place them in the context of the world around them.  Likewise, the fact that he believed he left part of himself in the Battle of the Bulge, and that it was the decisive event of his life as a soldier (at which he was a young man in his first position of grave responsibility in truly momentous times), meant that his own desire to understand the battle’s effect on him also led him to desire to understand the battle as a whole, and his skills as a historian and his excellent prose skills as an author then allowed him to convey that knowledge effectively to a wide reading audience.

And so we have in the historical career of Charles MacDonald, which consists of two classic book-length works, a dialectic between history-as-experienced and history-as-understood-with-hindsight on the same events.  In doing so, he provides an understanding of why history and memory are so different for human beings, because history can only be understood after the fact and with an understanding of the motives of the key actors on all sides, while memory is limited to one’s own particular mindset and one’s woefully incomplete understanding in the face of uncertainties and the workings of a wide variety of will’s apart from one’s own.

And so, it is worthwhile for a historian (or even just an ordinary reader interested in history) to read both Company Commander and A Time For Trumpets, and compare their accounts of the Battle of the Bulge.  The difference between the two provides a very clear understanding in the difference of “distance” and “perspective” in writing history versus living it.  And that goes a long way to explaining and making sense of the disconnect between the excitement of living history and the boredom most people have in reading or studying it.  The excitement comes when one is able to imagine the history as it happened, and the understanding comes from putting the puzzle pieces together and seeing it from afar.  To the extent that we can do both tasks, we can both enjoy as well as gain insights from history.  And that is something that we all should be capable of doing.