Over two million troops served the Union in the Civil War, five million US troops were in uniform during World War I, over sixteen million served during WW II, six million during the Korean conflict and over nine million during the Vietnam era. I was never in a foxhole. I never looked down the barrel of a gun in wartime. I was never the target of a wartime bayonet, bullet, or bomb. But I gave four years (five percent) of my life to serve my country during my formative years and I am proud to be among the more than 40 million men and women who have served and have the honor of being a US Military veteran.

I don't wear an American flag pin. I don't belong to the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I have never attended a military reunion. I seldom attend a Memorial Day or Veteran's Day parade or observance. But I am inwardly proud to have served. It is a personal and private sense of pride. Sixty years after being discharged, I retain an organized file of military awards, ribbons, documents, photos and souvenirs from my Air Force years, realizing that they are of value to no one but me and may eventually be tossed when my memorabilia and possessions are sorted one day.

My wife and two oldest daughters sacrificed during my military service by my frequent absences in Europe, South America and the Vietnam war zone while I served as a geodetic survey officer and while I served a 13-month tour in Korea as a fuels management officer. I am proud to have served, but I also benefitted greatly for having served. I was 10 years into my civilian career when I assumed as much management responsibility, liability and risk potential as I was given as a young Air Force lieutenant and captain in my mid-twenties. A substantial reward for having served honorably for four years was the opportunity to utilize a generous GI Bill of Rights support to pursue three years of post-graduate education at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. That led to my attaining a PhD in my chosen field of geochemistry. The advance degree allowed me to have a rewarding career as a science researcher and the owner of a successful science-based business. Thank you, Uncle Sam.

Cliff Westlund was an unusual high school teacher. He encouraged you to think for yourself. As a sophomore in Mr. Westland's English class at Wausau (Wisconsin) Senior High in 1953/1954 this was a new experience for me. For example, when Mr. Westland asked each of us to select a favorite poem and recite it to music for the class each student had to make decisions.

Similarly, when he assigned class members to write a story of their lives 10 years into the future each of us had to think for ourselves. This exercise brought me face-to-face with the reality that over the next 10 years I would certainly be subject to the draft. I had an obligation to serve my county in the military. How would I do this? I hardly knew anyone who had served in the military. My father, an immigrant from Norway, where he performed his sixmonth long Norwegian service obligation in a chemistry lab, knew absolutely nothing about the US military. So he could not provide an example or even offer valuable advice. I would have to think for myself.

I had heard of Wausau high schoolers receiving congressional appointments to a military academy. One of my best friends, taking lessons to earn a pilot's license, told me that his father was already working on getting him an appointment to the newly founded Air Force Academy (which he subsequently received). But the military academies held little attraction for me.

The University of Wisconsin in Madison is where I wanted to study. I wanted to be a Badger. At college I would be deferred from the draft for the duration of my studies. Then, as a college graduate, perhaps I would be qualified to become an officer. This appeared to me to be a more attractive alternative than being drafted for two-year's active duty or enlisting in the reserves with a six-month active duty and a very long commitment in the reserves.

So, I started to research in the school library how one could become a military officer without graduating from one of the academies. This is where I learned about the ROTC. Little did I know then at age 16 that this knowledge would provide the pathway for my entire life.

With a 1945 birthdate, it became apparent when I was in law school, or before, that I would likely have to perform military service. This was not something that I had given a great deal of thought to beforehand as military service had not loomed large in my family since my forebears came to the country from Russia and Russian Poland in the late nineteenth century. It is fascinating (to me, at least) to see how things unfolded.

It is a complicated story. On the one hand, my great-grandfather, Aaron Greenberg served in the Tsar's army. Oral tradition among my cousins has it that he was an Army barber. On other sides of the family tree, my paternal great-grandfather was said to have served in the brief Russo-Turkish War of 1878–79, while my maternal grandfather elected in the 1890s not to answer the Tsar's call. One of the few pieces of family memorabilia I possess is his draft notice. He fled, made it to New York, learned English in a hurry, and within a few years of immigrating graduated high enough in his class at the former Brooklyn College of Pharmacy to win a microscope as a prize. It's in my closet. Nicholas II also figures in my stepfamily; one of my stepsisters’ proudest possessions is a photo of their dashing young grandfather in his Russian Army white tunic.

My father was born in 1909 and served briefly in the New York National Guard, including marching in Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt's inaugural parade. Regrettably, he never gave me any other details, and I imagine he was too old to be drafted in World War II. My maternal uncle, who trained as a dentist, served briefly in the Army in the 1940s, but again, details are few. He never discussed it. I never had the opportunity to meet my wife's father, but he was an Army doctor.

In my own generation, military service became a reality thanks to the draft. This was simply a fact of life for young men of my generation. Nevertheless, it was a new experience when my brother, also a lawyer, was commissioned in the Coast Guard, going on to serve for six years, that is, beyond his obligated service.

Our personal accounts describe the range of experiences that our military service provided. We eight were not a “band of brothers” who shared military experiences in a single command at the same time. Rather, we were a group of civilian friends either before or after active military service. In recent years, we have shared our thoughts on that service and its relevance to the present day American armed forces.

We served in the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines and Air Force. Our services were in the United States and overseas, combat and non-combat. Yet, they provided experiences that we shared and that we agree on half a century after our service ended. We identify a dozen of those common features.

• 1. Pride in our military service: Whether our service was in front line combat or stateside desk duty, we look back on our years in uniform respectfully, even if not always fondly. Our service gave us a strong sense of what it meant to be an American.

• 2. Service as a maturing experience: Unlike most first civilian jobs, our military service was often far from home and parents, mentors, classmates and friends. Often it involved doing initially unfamiliar work. It did not allow the abandonment of that work without criminal consequences.

• 3. The lifelong value of physical conditioning and/or competitive athletics: Regular exercise or competitive sports remained, for most of us, an attractive part of our life in our post-service careers.

• 4. Early opportunities for leadership: Military service, particularly at the officer level, typically required service in leadership positions. This often involved working with multi-million dollar equipment under challenging conditions. We did this work in our early twenties often far sooner than we would have in our first post-graduation civilian employment.

• 5. An unease with the way military service is praised today: We performed our military service during the latter part of the Vietnam War and Cold War eras when a substantial portion of privileged young men avoided military service of any kind. A significant and visible minority of them sharply criticized the military. Often the criticism was directed at the uniformed military members themselves rather than at their civilian leadership. Those of us who did serve found much to admire about military leadership, but also things that did not impress us.

Roughly 1.8 million French soldiers were taken prisoner in May–June 1940, which certainly spoke to a severe morale crisis in the French army. The large number of POWs brought generational shame on France. POWs also became a way for Berlin to control Vichy’s behavior, by dangling the prospect of release in return for French collaboration in Germany’s war aims. Although they viewed themselves as “victims of the debacle,” POWs were expelled from French wartime memory because they failed to qualify for the heroic Resistance motif of the Liberation. On the contrary, they symbolized France’s greatest defeat and hence personified France’s crisis of national and masculine identity. They had proven “inadequate in some way” because they had allowed themselves be captured, while 95 percent had failed to escape. Collaboration and solidarity of the camps discouraged escape attempts, while the Germans freed French POWs only when it was in their interest to do so.But also, they were shunned because they became “Vichy’s adored children” and so discredited along with collaboration. Nevertheless, the Germans were shocked in 1945 by the bitterness of the French for the alleged poor treatment of French POWs and laborers in Germany, because in their view the French in many instances had settled comfortably into local life, often substituting for absent German men, to the point that, in German eyes at least, French POWs came to be seen as the war’s “spoiled children.” The humiliation of POW status transferred to the French nation, as a national disgrace to be redeemed by the myth of the Resistance.

By November 1940, les forces françaises libres had swelled to 19,679 soldiers. Arguably the setback at Dakar became a benefit, because it hardened and focused the French exile movement, forced it to adjust to a long-war strategy, and obliged de Gaulle to initiate the transition from a military organization with a political agenda into a political movement with an, albeit constricted, armed wing. With the creation on 27 October 1940 of a Conseil de la défense de l’Empire, the external resistance was now a legitimate territorial power. In the BCRA, la France libre had an organization with the potential to structure and operationalize an as yet diminutive but inevitable internal resistance. On the debit side, la France libre remained an insecure movement with a narrow and underdeveloped African base, factionalized between soldiers and civilians, between the various branches of the movement, torn between its civil war with Vichy and the compulsion to fight the Germans. The BCRA was inexperienced in clandestine mobilization, without a strategy, and dependent on the British for resources. While de Gaulle exhibited many noble qualities, even elements of true greatness, and had stamped his personality on his organization, his attributes were offset by an autocratic temperament and imperious behavior that exasperated allies and alienated potential supporters. Furthermore, Vichy still commanded its High Seas Fleet and controlled the strategically important Levant, Dakar, and AFN. Pétain also enjoyed patriotic prestige and credibility with a French population disoriented by defeat, eager to secure the release of French POWs, and convinced that he was plotting “la revanche” against Germany. British policy continued to recognize Vichy while supporting de Gaulle. With the United States poised to enter the conflict, relations among the three allies would grow more complex.

Despite a frequent tendency in the writing of the history of war to focus on a legend of a victorious general, or to view a decisive battle as a validation of national exceptionalism, Carl von Clausewitz posited the idea that in war, no result is ever final. In the event, the record of soldiers (and civilians, in this case, to be sure) in their variety who constitute the character of an army in a state and society or within the international system of alliances and coalitions becomes obscured or risks being condemned to caricature. In this regard, the story of any army in war and that of its soldiers comprises vastly more than simply the account of a single battle, for armies often pass through a cycle of victory, defeat, and regeneration, and new purpose.

The armistice logic combined a short war, Britain’s rapid capitulation, and the quick conclusion of a Franco-Axis peace to liberate French POWs. “L’homme providentiel,” Pétain, was embraced as “a substitute for politics and a barrier to revolution.” The Armistice transferred responsibility for defeat to the Republic and its combat-shy “citizen soldiers,” liberated the professional army from the tyranny of the levée, and transformed surrender into a collective rather than individual act. Vichy wagered that collaboration would place France in a position to play a major role in Hitler’s New Europe. The three departments that comprised Alsace-Moselle were incorporated into the Reich. But it also sealed the status of France as a second-tier power. Despite the armistice and the fact that many French soldiers remained incarcerated in Germany, France retained considerable latent military power, that included a 100,000-man Armistice Army, roughly the same number in French North Africa, a considerable air force sans avions, and a significant navy. However, rather than prepare clandestinely for la revanche as many of its supporters believed, Vichy’s energies were directed into collaboration. A paramilitary Chantiers de la Jeunesse, designed to build the character so lacking in French youth, was stood up, as well as various organizations like the LVF that provided a vehicle for recruiting Frenchmen to serve in German forces. The armistice, not the British attack at Mers-el-Kébir, took Vichy and its navy down the path of collaboration.

French North Africa (AFN), a complex constellation of tribes, cultures, and religions, was viewed as the Hexagon’s strategic hinterland. However, from 1942, the war’s momentum would thrust it into the front lines. Roosevelt’s policy had been to entice Vichy back into the war on the Allied side. When that collapsed, Washington’s target became Maxime Weygand, whose reputation as anti-German did not, alas, make him pro-Allied. When Weygand was recalled, both the Americans and the British looked for a French leader whom they could champion as a replacement for both Vichy and de Gaulle. Henri Giraud seemed to be the man who could bring together a conspiracy of Vichy dissidents in AFN orchestrated by American Consul in Algiers Robert Murphy, whose “actionable intelligence” that AFN stood ready to welcome the Allies with open arms helped to convince Roosevelt to launch Torch – the Allied invasion of AFN. Vichy counted on l’armée d’Afrique to defend AFN against an Allied invasion. However, that force had been undermined by defeat, honeycombed with Gaullist dissidence, and riven by racial and professional animosity. Darlan was utterly clueless about the looming Anglo-American invasion. More presciently, Juin believed that an Axis invasion of Tunisia was more likely. But Darlan forbade him to defend it, evoking the protection of the 1940 armistice. Vichy continued to view the war as deadlocked. As a result, Torch caught Vichy and AFN completely by surprise. Furthermore, their chain of command in AFN was reorganizing, which further confused the response.

From 1938, French policy suddenly pivoted from a policy of appeasement to one of confrontation with Nazi Germany. But once war was declared on 3 September 1939, Anglo-French governments seemed unable to articulate a strategy to win it. Gamelin’s strategy was to build up an impregnable defense of the Hexagon, mount an economic blockade of Germany, and fight a war on the periphery – la guerre ailleurs – until the enemy was enfeebled and the Allies had amassed enough military power take the offensive. But without a Soviet alliance, this strategy failed to pressure Germany and was vulnerable to preemption. The frenzy of mobilization followed by the serenity of Sitzkrieg hollowed out civil resolve and basically neutered the “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity” of the population which Clausewitz argued was essential to the successful waging of war. The drôle de guerre seemed to offer evidence of the drift of Allied policy that portended a lack of national resolve. Daladier stood as a bulwark against military reform and the removal of Gamelin, and encouraged wishful thinking about the ability of Poland to defend itself and the unpopularity in Germany of Hitler’s aggressive policies, which would restrain German aggression. While it appeared on the surface that France had recovered its nerve, the spirit of appeasement in the guise of “victory without combat” hovered over the French declaration of war and lingered in the form of an absence of urgency that affected morale in the long winter of 1939–1940. It also encouraged a flirtation with peripheral operations that culminated in the Narvik fiasco in May 1940, which offered a curtain raiser for the Fall of France.

The debate over the Fall of France has pivoted on whether its causes were rooted in a structural dysfunction of the French Republic and a defeatism that infected its citizens and soldiers, or were merely contingent – that is, a combination of the surprise and speed of the German advance, and Gamelin’s Dyle–Breda plan miscalculation, that allowed the Germans to concentrate their best troops on the French hinge at Sedan, which gave way when French soldiers panicked at Bulson.Using the documents on the secret post-war “Committee for the Investigation of Suspicious Withdrawals,” this chapter sequences the French collapse at Sedan and Bulson. Because soldier panics are not an exceptional event in warfare, Bulson does not by itself offer evidence of a lack of French will to fight. What made Bulson critical was its strategic consequences. The chapter also examines the three armored counterattacks conducted by de Gaulle. Although they became part of his legend as a man of tactical and operation prescience, in fact, they were improvized and totally ineffective.

For the purposes of a counter-offensive in the secondary phase of the war in Europe, Operation Torch in late 1942 marked a significant advance for the Allies, at crossed purposes whether to strike at Hitler’s New Order from the periphery, versus a direct continental assault as favored by the US Army. Torch reinforced alliance cohesion, held the potential to bring France back into the war, and preserved maritime flexibility characteristic of the indirect approach. The success of Torch also assuaged Roosevelt’s fear that Gibraltar and “the great shoulder of Africa” with its European imperial realm might be infiltrated and occupied by Axis forces. As abstruse as this idea seems in the twenty-first century, that might have preempted a mortal threat to the American hemisphere where an Axis fifth column lurked in the southern cone.

By 1942, the Soviet Union and the United States had joined the conflict, further isolating Vichy. Resistance in France was growing, acknowledged by a change of name from la France libre to la France combattante to acknowledge a growing resistance movement inside France. Jean Moulin had been dispatched to organize and harness it to la France combattante’s political agenda, and to define its missions. While de Gaulle’s movement remained small, the FFL had demonstrated fighting resolve at Bir Hakeim, a small but symbolic step toward wiping away the stain of 1940. Vichy’s deepening collaboration with Hitler helped to put la France combattante on firmer political footing, and strengthened de Gaulle’s political standing. Nevertheless, as de Gaulle realized, the Americans in particular posed a more immediate threat to the achievement of his goal of reasserting French grandeur and global influence than did either the Germans or Vichy. It would require all of de Gaulle’s determination and political savvy to keep la France combattante from being relegated to one of the Second World War’s obscure footnotes in the wake of Operation Torch – the November 1942 Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa.