Bastogne!

[thedrifter]

December 21, 2006, 0:00 a.m.
Bastogne!
Saving Western Civilization on Christmas.

By Joseph Morrison Skelly

“Welcome to the ‘Alamo!’” With this greeting from a seasoned warrior of the 1st Infantry Division who had been in the city for six months, several of my fellow soldiers and I settled down to our first meal in the chow hall at the Civil-Military Operations Center, a one-acre installation in the center of Baquba, in Diyala Province, Iraq. It was September, 2004.

I gulped as I heard the salutation. Having the utmost respect for the absolute courage of the men who valiantly defended that Texas redoubt in 1836 (and about which more below), I was, nevertheless, somewhat uneasy given the outcome of that famous battle in San Antonio. I was in no hurry for history to repeat itself in Baquba.

Still, the same theme cropped up a few days later as several of us tucked into another meal. “So, what do you think of the ‘Alamo?’” one of the 1st Infantry Division soldiers asked me.

“It’s a decent place,” I replied. “Glad to be with serving with you guys. But is there any chance we can change the name of this post?”

“Got any suggestions?”

Situated on the Eastern edge of the Sunni Triangle, located near the Iranian border, subjected to frequent attacks from insurgents, determined to hold our ground at all costs, I offered an alternative historical parallel. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s call this place ‘Bastogne!’”

I received a few puzzled looks from some of the younger troops, but the older ones at the table smiled upon hearing the name of that famed Belgian town. They were well schooled in the feats of the American soldiers who put up a ferocious fight there during the Christmas season of 1944. Perhaps the grim determination of those GIs is worth reflecting upon as we prepare to celebrate another Christmas in 2006.

THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE
In mid-December, 1944, after several months of heavy fighting since D-Day, Allied armies were poised along the German border, preparing to strike into the heart of the Fatherland. At 5:30 A.M. on December 16 Adolf Hitler caught those forces off-guard when he launched an armored blitzkrieg through the Ardennes forest into Belgium, seeking to replicate the success of his surprise attack through the very same woods in May, 1940, which had knocked France out of World War II. Hitler’s war aims four years later were to capture the port city of Antwerp, split the Allies by forcing the United States and Britain to sue for peace and thus abandon the Soviet Union, and wheel his army to the Eastern front, where it would halt the advancing Russians. In a fit of delusion several weeks earlier he had told his generals that he envisioned a repeat of the victories of Frederick the Great during the Seven Years’ War, especially against France and the Holy Roman Empire at Rossbach and the Austrians at Leuthen in late 1757, which subsequently broke up the alliance arrayed against Prussia.

Speed was essential to Hitler’s divisions, and as the Panzers advanced over the first three days the shape of the German salient gave rise to the popular name for the campaign, the Battle of the Bulge. In the Southern sector of the offensive the Nazis set their sights on Bastogne, a town on the edge of the Ardennes in Eastern Belgium, near the border with Luxembourg. It was the central node of a network of roads leading to Marche, St. Hubert, Rochefort and Dinant, a town on the Meuse River, which was the Wermacht’s first strategic objective. If they crossed the Meuse they could encircle several American divisions on the other side of the river, make a dash for the coast and quickly undermine Allied confidence.

The Germans were about to run into as roadblock, however. Holding Bastogne was the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army. General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, had personally ordered the division to the town on December 17, and it arrived from Camp Mourmelon, near the French city of Rheims, two days later. Hitler’s troops would have to dislodge the 101st or face a counterattack and a likely defeat. Still, the early prospects were daunting for the Americans. Bearing down on Bastogne were General Hasso von Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army, General Heinrich von Luttwitz’s 47th Panzerkorps, General Fritz Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr Division, the 26th Volksgrenadier Division, and Major Rolf Kunkel’s Kampfgruppe. Complicating matters were some of the worst winter conditions in recent memory. The roads were clogged with ice, snow drifts were several feet deep in places, rifles jammed in the frozen air, a biting wind sliced through the soldiers’ wet uniforms while many of them suffered from frostbite, a heavy fog hung over much of the region, and elsewhere tanks moved at a crawl and half-tracks ground to a halt in the thick mud. In 1944 American soldiers did not have to dream of a white Christmas; they got the real thing without wishing for it.

On December 20 American prospects worsened when the Nazis closed a ring of steel around Bastogne, completely cutting off the town. Over the next several days they threw everything they could at the American pocket, hoping to puncture it. On December 21 Kampfgruppe Kunkel launched a fierce assault against a U.S. outpost in the hamlet of Senonchamps, on the Western edge of Bastogne, but was repulsed. It tried again four times on the following day, to no avail. Withstanding similar attacks from the South and West, the 101st Division, under the leadership of its acting commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, held its position. Supporting it inside Bastogne were tanks from the 9th and 10th Armored Divisions, guns from the 73rd, 109th, and 969th Field Artillery Battalions, soldiers from the 105th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and troops from the 110th Infantry Regiment. Even so, conditions inside the town slowly deteriorated, as ammunition dwindled, gasoline ran low and medical supplies ran out. But morale was high, and the perimeter did not crack.

“NUTS!”
The enemy underestimated American resolve. On December 22 two German officers and two enlisted men walked up a snow-covered road under a white flag of truce to an Army check point. The subsequent story is retold in many fine histories of the Battle of the Bulge, including those by Charles MacDonald, George Koskimaki, Stephen Ambrose, and Donald Goldstein, Katherine Dillon and Michael Wenger. The Germans carried an ultimatum from their commander in the sector, General von Luttwitz. It insisted that there “was only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation: that is, the honorable surrender of the encircled town.” It gave the American commander two hours to consent or German guns would “annihilate” the U.S. forces and level Bastogne.
An American officer delivered the note to General McAuliffe and his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Ned Moore, who read it out loud. McAuliffe’s first reaction was to utter, in sheer disgust, “Aw, nuts.” After discussing the situation with his staff, everyone agreed that McAuliffe’s initial outburst was the ideal response to the German demand, and the general wrote out a formal reply. In words that have since become legendary, it exclaimed: “To the German Commander: NUTS! From the American Commander.” Colonel Joe Harper, the officer in charge of the 327TH Glider Infantry Regiment, trenchantly translated the colloquialism for the Germans: in plain English McAuliffe’s words meant, “Go to Hell!” He added that if they continued their attack, the Americans would “kill every *******ed German” in the vicinity. He meant it, too.

CHRISTMAS, 1944
Over the next several days the Americans held on in the face of unrelenting German assaults, often by their frostbitten finger tips. Air drops of ammunition, food and medical equipment provided a lifeline. Christmas arrived a day early on December 24 when more than 150 American cargo planes flew drop missions over Bastogne, dipping and diving to evade anti-aircraft fire from the German batteries, with several crash-landing inside the American zone. General McAuliffe’s message to his troops on Christmas Eve is recorded in many accounts of the battle: “What’s merry about all this, you ask? Just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us from the North, East, South and West. We have identifications from four German Panzer divisions and one German parachute division. The Germans surround us, their radios blare our doom. Their commander demanded our surrender, and received the following reply…‘NUTS!’ We are giving our country and our loved ones at home a worthy Christmas present, and, being privileged to take part in this gallant feat of arms, are truly making for ourselves a Merry Christmas.”

In his own narrative Stephen Ambrose adds: “The men at the front were not as upbeat as General McAuliffe. They had cold white beans for their Christmas Eve dinner.” For Captain Richard Winters, who is well known from the “Band of Brothers” television series, “dinner that night consisted of five white beans and a cup of cold broth.” Out on icy line, Sergeant Robert Rader and Private Don Hoobler, both from the same town in the Midwest, sat in their frigid foxholes. Rader said, “As the night wore on we talked of our homes, our families, and how they were spending their Christmas Eve. Don felt sure all of them were in church praying for us.” They probably were, and that was a good thing: the Luftwaffe bombed Bastogne that night, causing extensive damage and killing numerous civilians and American soldiers.

There was no let up on Christmas Day. Hitler had demanded that the town be taken immediately. The Germans let loose several armored attacks against the Bastogne pocket. Once again they were driven back, with heavy losses. Inside the town some soldiers attended religious services. Others tended to the wounded, or buried the dead. Most were outside, holding the perimeter. Meanwhile, at home the American people were learning about Bastogne. In their book Rendezvous with Destiny, Leonard Rapport and Arthur Norwood record how during the battle men and women would look at maps printed in newspapers that showed “one spot holding out…for days it was the one encouraging sight that met their eyes each morning. And the War Department, earlier than was its practice, identified the division inside the town, so even before their bloody month in the town was up, to the world the 101st became the Battered Bastards of the Bastion of Bastogne.”

Christmas did arrive one day later, on December 26, when an armored column from General George Patton’s Third Army, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, pierced the German cordon. The next day it rolled up into the center of Bastogne. It had traversed over 150 miles in six days, fighting pitched battles and tank engagements along the way. The siege was over. On December 29 troops of the 101st Airborne Division unleashed a counterattack against the Germans on the edge of town. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, according to Ambrose, “to celebrate the coming of the year of victory and to demonstrate how much things had changed in Bastogne in the past few days, every gun in Bastogne and every mortar piece joined in a serenade of high explosives hurled at the Germans.”

On January 18, as the 101st Airborne Division prepared to move out of Bastogne and chase the Nazis back to Germany, its commander, General Maxwell Taylor, officially handed over control of the town to Major General Troy Midddleton of VIII Corps. Bastogne had transformed Hitler’s delirious dream of a quick victory into a nightmare. As the weather cleared, the Americans launched a major counteroffensive against the Wermacht and the S.S. divisions that had led the assault into Belgium. By the end of January, 1945 the “bulge” ceased to exist. Hitler had lost his last throw of the dice

HOLD YOUR GROUND
What had happened? Quite simply, at Bastogne the Americans had held their ground. This effort was repeated throughout the Ardennes at towns and villages named Lanzerath, Noville, St. Vith and La Glieze, if sometimes only just long enough to slow the German advance and gain time for nearby units to consolidate their positions. On the first day of the fighting Major General Walter Lauer, the commander of the 99th Infantry Division, which was positioned North of Bastogne and absorbed successive body blows from the advancing Panzers, had issued a “hold at all costs” order, which delayed the German spearhead. After the war, according to the author Alex Kershaw, General Lauer said that without that command “there would have been no Bastogne.” He may be correct. Holding one’s ground is among the first principles of combat. Sometimes in the fog of war a unit in action — whether it be a platoon, company, battalion, brigade or division — may not be able to discern the larger picture of what is taking place around it, yet by maintaining its position it is, in all likelihood, contributing to tactical and strategic advantage.

History reveals endless examples of American soldiers holding the line under intense fire: Little Round Top, Mount Surabachi, Khe Sanh, and today in Ramadi, Tal Afar, Bagram, and Kandahar. The same thing, in essence, transpired at the Alamo. The men who stood their ground there in 1836 were part of an American military tradition that was reinforced just over 100 years later by those who stood and fought in Bastogne. After World War II the people of Belgium erected a memorial near the town in memory of all of the American soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action during the Battle of the Bulge. The Texans in San Antonio would have appreciated its design: It is a 40-foot-high lonestar made of granite and marble. Inscribed on it are the words “The Belgian people remember their American liberators.”

Many of the fallen from the Battle of the Bulge are interred in the American Military Cemetery in the city of Neuville-en-Condroz, in the Ardennes forest. In dignified silence they will forever hold that sacred ground. Their last stand offers eloquent testimony to how their sacrifice, and the valor of their brothers who survived that day, helped to save Western civilization one Christmas in 1944.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

December 21, 2006, 0:00 a.m.
Christmas on the Frontlines
Back at the Bulge.

An NRO Q&A

He’s covered the 1914 Christmas Truce and Washington’s Christmas Farewell, among other books. This year historian Stanley Weintraub travels back to 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944. He recently talked to NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez about his latest and Christmas at war.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What was Christmas like for General Patton in 1944?

Stanley Weintraub: Ordered to turn his tanks and troops of the Third Army around and race north to rescue the besieged crossroads town of Bastogne in southern Belgium, Patton faced the twin enemies of the Wehrmacht and the weather. Slow and sleet slowed down his movements and kept covering aircraft from the skies. A traditionally religious Episcopalian, Patton believed that an occasional personal appeal to the Almighty was useful. Just before Christmas, he went to a Roman Catholic chapel near his headquarters in Luxembourg, fell to his knees before the altar, and as if the Deity were a general senior to him, prayed, “Sir, This is Patton talking. . . . Who’s side are you on anyway?” He asked for four days of clearing weather, “to kill Germans.” His chaplain protested the abuse of prayer, but, Patton later wrote to his wife, Beatrice, “My prayer seems to be working still as we have had three days of good weather and our air [force] has been very active.” Bastogne was reached the day after Christmas. Patton prayed again, reporting that the “awful weather which I cursed so much” actually hindered the Germans more than the Americans. “That, Sir, was a brilliant military move, and I bow humbly to a supreme military genius.” Others thought that Patton was often off-the-wall, but as a fighting general he had no peer.


Lopez: You have Patton asking God which side the Almighty was on. Did he really feel the need to ask, though?

Weintraub: The war was going badly. Patton never lacked confidence, but he questioned everything.


Lopez: What about Christmas for Hitler?

Weintraub: Born in Austria a Roman Catholic, Hitler eschewed all vestiges of faith and religious observance, decreeing instead Nazi substitutes for traditional ritual. But a holiday dinner of roast goose was a German tradition beyond religion, and if few could manage that in the straitened circumstances of the war’s last Christmas, Hitler’s headquarters could — and did. While his staff masked defeatism with feigned festivity on Christmas Eve, Hitler had his usual vegetarian meal, and with a hand that still trembled from injuries after a failed assassination attempt in July, he even accepted a rare glass of wine as everyone toasted him — and the victory they all knew was now an illusion. The next day he returned to Berlin.


Lopez: I imagine it would have been relatively easy to ignore the German point of view. Why didn’t you?

Weintraub: There are always two sides in a war. German troops had been propagandized that they were the Master Race, and sure to win whatever the odds. Early and easy victories had validated that assurance. One SS grenadier painted in block letters on a farmhouse wall, “Fuehrer befiehl, wir folger dir!” (Our leader commands; we follow!) Discipline remained firm. Their tenacity was fierce. The Germans knew they were now battling to keep Allied forces from the Homeland — which strengthened their resolve to fight on. This was their last chance to do that.


Lopez: Is the question the Germans blared across the lines via loudspeaker, “How would you like to die for Christmas?” a good motivator?

Weintraub: The Germans knew the Americans were not fighting to defend a threatened Homeland, but for such lesser matters as values — Mom, apple pie, faith, etc. Who wants to be killed for values? The aim was to demoralize the enemy. The opposite happened. The challenge evoked anger, determination, aggressiveness.


Lopez: You have some remarkable novel-like details in your book. Where do you get them from?

Weintraub: Interviews with survivors, letters, diaries, memoirs privately published for family members, histories of the Bulge gathered by and for individual units (the source of “How would you like to die for Christmas?”), past chronicles of the Bulge. Sometimes what seems to be a trivial memory encapsulates the experiences of many veterans — as with the miniature doll christened “Purple Heart Mary” (it had arrived in the mail, damaged), or the flowers wired home in advance for Christmas which led the family to think that the sender was dead. Or prisoners of war singing carols, to keep spirits up, in a sealed, dark, railway boxcar attacked by one’s own planes. Fact is often far stranger than fiction.


Lopez: How does Ernest Hemingway irreverently fit in 11 Days in December?

Weintraub: Hemingway as an ambulance driver had been wounded in World War I, and covered the Spanish civil war as a highly paid reporter. Two of his novels deal with those wars. He wanted to experience another world war as a correspondent, for the excitement and possible material for more fiction. When he pulled strings with brass hats he knew to cover the Bulge, he had been ill with flu in a hotel in Paris. In the snow and cold, he jeeped out, ill, and largely covered the war, bedridden, from inside a house near the front abandoned by a priest. In it he found a hoard of sacramental wine. I leave it to my readers to find out what happened, most irreverently and unexpectedly, next! Call it comic relief.


Lopez: What is your fascination with Christmas at war?

Weintraub: I have written three books in which wartime Christmases occur. Each of them emerged from research on another book. In the mid-1980s I worked on a book about the end of World War I, beginning with the “False Armistice” of November 7, 1918, to the real thing on the 11th. It was published as A Stillness Heard Round the World. The End of the Great War. While researching it, I learned of an abortive end to the war nearly four years earlier, when the opposing sides on Christmas Eve refused to fire on each other, lay down their arms, and fraternized — even singing carols, exchanging token gifts, and playing soccer together — in chewed-up No Man’s Land. Most histories said it was a minor episode, largely myth. Curious, I spent years tracking down what really happened — even the “football” scores. The book became Silent Night (2001). When I was working on a book about how the American Revolution appeared from the losing side (losers seldom write the histories!), I found that when the British, long after their defeat at Yorktown, finally evacuated their last bastion in the American colonies, New York City, or December 4, 1783, George Washington, on retrieving the city, determined to get home to Mount Vernon for Christmas with his family. He had only been home once in seven years. Did he make it? I found that he got to Mount Vernon, after a long celebratory journey, on Christmas Eve. I put aside Iron Tears (it would be published later, in 2005) and wrote General Washington’s Christmas Farewell. A Mount Vernon Homecoming (2003).

Working on a new book, 15 Stars, to be published June 12, 2007, I found that the chapter on the Battle of the Bulge was getting greatly oversized although it dealt largely with only eleven days in a narrative that covered seventy years. It threw the story out of balance. And the crucial episode ended the day after Christmas, 1944. I pulled out the chapter and rewrote it as 11 Days in December. Christmas at the Bulge.

Christmas, although crucial to these books, is obviously more than that. Aside from its religious aspects, it is a home-and-family festival. Service personnel away from home at that time sorely miss the warmth and togetherness of the season. I recall that from personal experience during the Korean War, spending two bleak Christmases 8,000 miles from home, and seeing its impact on others. Wartime Christmases far away, and under the strained atmosphere of war and foreign parts, sticks in the memory no matter how many years pass. And “peace on earth, good will toward men” is especially ironic during a wartime Christmas.


Lopez: Are there some constants you find when you’re researching soldiers at war at Christmastime?

Weintraub: As a biographer more than as a military historian, I look for the human face of war. Conflicts may occur for all kinds of political, economic, geographical, or religious reasons over history, but they are fought by people, and people — farmers, mechanics, clerks, whatever — pay the price for the losses or gains. As a song about the Christmas Truce of 1914 observes, on both ends of the rifle we’re the same.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

December 21, 2006, 0:00 a.m.
A Lincolnian Christmas
1863, 2006.

By Michael Novak

A while back, I wrote a short column asserting that no matter whether you agree with President Bush or not, or admire him in other respects or not, it is incontestable that he is one of the bravest presidents ever to occupy the White House. All around him, pundits say that his presidency is “a failure,” that he is “the worst president ever,” and that his “war to emancipate the Middle East is a fiasco” or a “total disaster.” I have seen some write, or say on television, that Bush is too much of a simpleton and country boy even to understand how bad things have gotten in Iraq; that he is lost in a fog of religious unreality; and that his visible good humor and love of little jokes are further signs of how essentially unserious he is.

Another way to look at the same evidence, of course, is to note that the president consciously and willfully gambled his entire presidency on the war in Iraq, and on the very daring (foolhardy?) strategy of getting democratic currents started in the Middle East. To the point of boredom, and despite relentless criticism, he has been unswerving. It is not reasonable to believe that he is insensitive to the insults constantly hurled at him, nor oblivious to the course his “betters” insist that he should take.

So let us for a moment suspend judgment on whether Bush is truly brave, visionary, and far ahead of his time. Those encomiums are what we usually heap on Abraham Lincoln. . . . but only after the fact of victory in 1865. Such praise was not sent Lincoln’s way during the long, dark year from autumn 1863 until September 1864. Quite the opposite.

Many in that dark time wrote, spoke, and thought of Lincoln in much the same way people nowadays speak of George W. Bush.

“Well!” I can hear you remonstrate haughtily, “Bush deserves it. Lincoln did not.”

That is easy to say now; it was not so easy late in 1863, and under the gathering clouds of 1864, when it seemed certain that a bumbling Lincoln could not possibly win a second term, and that all he had fought for would come to naught.

Thus, even if we suspend judgment on Bush’s bravery this year, his predicament this December should remind us of Lincoln’s at Christmas in 1863. Looking ahead to an election year in 1864, Lincoln early shared the cold fear that he could not possibly win. The great Union victory at Gettysburg in July had petered out in the failure of General Meade to pursue Lee’s battered and discouraged forces retreating in some disorder southward.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was received by many as a sign of Puritan moral arrogance and clumsy overreach — bound to make the South fight harder, while not really inspiring the Union forces. On all sides, journalists regarded Lincoln as a failure, a country bumpkin, an unsophisticated jokester, a homespun weaver of fantasies, outside his depth. What had his experience been, after all? A four-term member of the Illinois Assembly, then a one-term congressman from Illinois, a man of no education, save what little he gleaned by firelight sitting on a log (all this said in derision). The handsome, blue-eyed General McClellan with his reddish-brown hair, a rousing favorite to his troops, seemed to Lincoln ready to vault into the race from the outside, to steal away the spot of front-runner, and to stampede Lincoln ingloriously out of town. Not often in human history had any army taken as many dead and wounded, suffered so many bitter defeats, failed so notably to capitalize on the few victories its hapless generals had managed to win. During some 48 months of war, both sides together lost 620,000 dead — some 13,000 every month. To grasp the scale, compare that to an average of about 85 dead per month in Iraq.

Lincoln’s native pessimism was weighted down even lower by new evidence of political rebellion in state after state (even Indiana), disappointments on battlefield after battlefield — First and Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, the Peninsula Campaign — and the immense stream of blood from the wounded and the dead, at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and countless battles and skirmishes in between.

No end to the bloodshed flickered in sight. There seemed to be no plan for winning the war, and no general capable even of conceiving how to lead an army to victory. Many Union generals lived in fear of losing a face-to-face battle, and again and again employed tactics that guaranteed humiliating losses, wasting the lives of innumerable brave men. Lincoln’s War Cabinet mocked him, his generals sometimes disobeyed him, but more often failed to share his serious purpose and determination to win.

Many great newspapers mocked Lincoln, and hoped soon to be rid of him. Even publishers who supported the Union had come to believe that Lincoln was a simpleton who could not win the war. Key political leaders were talking withdrawal from the fight, and urging negotiations with the South, in the hope that the unrealistic dream of Union might be traded away for peace. Compared to Lincoln, they thought themselves realists.

Meanwhile, at Christmas 1863, and in the months thereafter, Lincoln was silently deciding — there was almost no one he could talk to about such things — to take more and more direct control of his army. He began to fire failing generals, and to cast around for real fighters. He prayed for even one or two generals who shared his fire, and his determination to secure nothing less than victory. Lincoln wanted the total surrender of the South, the abolition of slavery, but most of all the preservation of the Union. His dream was shared by few and derided by very many, dismissed as outside reasonable possibility. God, it is said, takes care of children, drunkards, and the United States of America. And there were, in fact, a couple of Union Generals quite capable of getting themselves so drunk they could go two or three days unable to function. Grant was one. General William T. Sherman, although not a heavy drinker, had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1861. And somehow in the late summer of 1864, somehow pulling himself together, and racing his army through the South to Atlanta, cutting Lee’s army off from its “breadbasket,” and dramatically exposing Lee’s Southern flank, General Sherman brought total victory in sight. That suddenly, that quickly. In a way almost totally unpredicted.

Lincoln faced a dark nine months from Christmas 1863, until the next September. Was it not thus, also, for George Washington from Christmas 1776 and through much of 1777? Was it not thus during Christmas of 1941 just after Pearl Harbor, and even during the awful Battle of the Bulge just before Christmas of 1944? My father’s best friend Mickie Yuhas took a bullet in the head at that battle, and I remember how sorrowful it was in our household that bitter, cold Christmas day.

Lincoln is regularly, these days, rated as the greatest of all U.S. presidents. Historians may well know how swiftly everything turned around for Lincoln, how narrow the thread by which he hung on, how improbable the final victory. But most Americans, less detailed in their knowledge of history, have merely taken Lincoln’s late-arriving reputation for granted. At the same time, historians have often forgotten how suddenly reputations change, as when they early and wrongly predicted much lower reputations for Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan than later evaluations warranted.

Wars are often darkest just before the light. In our day, we must pray for military leadership committed to making Baghdad secure, and Iran and Syria quite afraid. Even conceived of in these limited terms, we need top generals committed, as in 1864, to victory. Many Americans will not believe it can be done. That’s the way it was in 1777, when historians estimate that as many as two-thirds of all Americans in New York and New Jersey had come to support the British. During the meandering carnage of 1863 and 1864, many Americans also gave up hope. Americans ought never to forget Abraham Lincoln’s dark year, just before the sun of victory surprisingly broke through. Contemplating the sacrifices that so many hundreds of thousands had made to keep the Union whole, Lincoln did not believe that the God who gave us liberty when he gave us life, could in the end disregard the sacrifices of so many. That is how Lincoln held on in 1864. As did Washington (and even Tom Paine) before him in the darkest days of winter 1777. Those prayers of Washington and Lincoln would not be bad for Christmas 2006, either.

Ellie