What Could Have Been

I wrote a few posts ago how the 20th century could have been completely changed with vigorous leadership in the right place at the right time. Here's another example. Later I'll point out how this mistake repeated itself rather precisely in the past 20 years. Maybe you'll guess as you read.

This is entirely copied from an article about Black Jack Pershing in "Military History" magazine, Oct. 2007, page 52.

***Copy begins***
[ref. the defeat of the German Army at Argonne in France, fall, 1918]
In the end, though, the Germans broke - and it was the end. By the close of the battle, they were left without a single reserve division in the sector, and Hindenburg himself later wrote that the Meuse-Argonne was "our most sensitive point" and that "the American infantry in the Argonne won the war." It may have been more a coup de grace than the decisive blow, but the war was over within days, much to Pershing's chagrin. Alone among the Allied war councils, he had insisted throughout on winning an unconditional surrender from Germany, not merely an armistice.
"We shouldn't have done it," he commented at the time. "If they had given us another 10 days, we would have rounded up the entire German army, captured it, humiliated it ....The German troops today are marching back into Germany announcing they have never been defeated....What I dread is that Germany doesn't know that she was licked."
It was a prescient insight. In 1944, while living out the final years of his long, pleasant retirement at Walter Reed Army Hospital, Pershing received a birthday message from another President Roosevelt that read in part, "None of us will forget that in 1918 you wanted to go through to Berlin. How right you were!" Such was the vindication of a leader who had taken care to understand both his allies and his enemies."
***End of copy***

So had Pershing's advice been followed, one of the key motivating arguments of Naziism - the "stabbed in the back" propaganda, would not have existed. And perhaps the willingness of the German army to enter another war would have not existed, either. Perhaps no World War II.

How did was this mistake repeated? Bush the Elder gave Saddam Hussein an armistice in 1991, instead of letting Schwarzkopf bag the entire Iraqi army. So it survived to bolster Saddam's regime. And about 12 years later, we were fighting it again.

Never let an enemy recover - finish it off completely.