xvi Introduction People who experience combat, “the heat of contrary passions” in Napoleon’s words, often vividly recall certain events that took place close to them. Such a recollection may be an insignificant detail that forever impressed itself upon that person’s memory. Or it may be a memory of what, in hind- sight, proved to be a pivotal event that turned the tide of battle. Regardless, memories are fallible. The stress of battle affects people differently. Consider a simple example, something that is funda- mental when trying to establish “historical fact”: the matter of time. As the eyewitness accounts contained in these volumes show, an individual’s sense of time can become distorted during a battle. Among many, Lieutenant Michael Schoenfeld speaks to this issue when describing his first combat during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He guesses that the fight lasted 20 or 30 minutes and then notes: “I still to this day can’t put times to the battles, how long or short they were. Talking with other guys, they’re kind of the same thing. Some people thought it was really long others thought it was five minutes.”3 Napoleon, while pondering the craft of history, acknowledged that human characteristics col- ored accounts of an event and then addressed another, broader issue: how and why individuals could purposefully distort their claims about what they saw and experienced: In all such things there are two very distinct essential elements—material fact and moral intent. Material facts, one should think, ought to be incontrovertible and yet, go and see if any two accounts agree . . . As for moral intent, how is one to find his way, supposing even that the nar- rators are in good faith? And what if they are promoted by bad faith, self-interest, and bias? Suppose I have given an order: who can read the bottom of my thought, my true intention? And yet everybody will take hold of that order, measure it by his own yardstick, make it bend to con- form to his plans . . . And everybody will be so confident of his own version! The lesser mortals will hear of it from privileged mouths, and they will be so confident in turn! Then the flood of memoirs, diaries, anecdotes, drawing room reminiscences! And yet, my friend, that is history!4 Ponder the issue of a narrator acting “in good faith.” Memoirs are sometimes written at a time when the writer feels unable to commit the whole truth to paper. Among countless examples, consider Crusade in Europe, the memoir of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the five-star general who com- manded the allied invasion of Europe in 1944. Published three years after the end of World War II, Crusade in Europe relates the story of the war as Eisenhower planned and lived it. Then and thereafter, Eisenhower was regarded as a man of great integrity. Nonetheless, his memoir delib- erately omits mention of a crucial element of allied strategy namely, how the allied ability to decode high-level German radio and teleprinter communications informed every important mili- tary decision. During the war, this ability was a closely guarded secret. Obviously, the British—who first masterminded the intelligence coup—did not want the Germans to know that they had cracked the German code. When the British began sharing intelligence with the Americans, Eisenhower quickly realized its value. He joined in the effort to guard carefully the secret. After the war, the great contest known as the Cold War pitted Communist Russia against the United States and its allies. To wage the Cold War, American and British intelligence officials and senior leaders judged that the secret still had to be preserved, since some of its components remained useful in the struggle against Russia. The ban finally lifted in 1974, the year that a key British participant in the wartime code-breaking effort received permission to publish an account of how that effort oper- ated. Among various revelations, the author wrote that Eisenhower, at war’s end, described the code-breaking effort as “decisive” to Allied victory. The “flood of memoirs” followed. It became clear that World War II historians writing before 1974, including those who had worked exclu- sively with primary sources and eyewitness accounts, could not, and did not, explain the war thoroughly. The revelation about allied code breaking compelled a reevaluation of the history of World War II. The preservation of important state secrets is only one of many reasons that primary sources may not reveal the entire truth about an historical occurrence.
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