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Michael F. Duggan

Woody Allen has announced his retirement from filmmaking.

I will not attempt to justify his private life, and I have not followed his legal troubles closely, but one of the tenets of popular wisdom to which I subscribe is: “to be great is to be abnormal.” And Woody Allen is a great director. With the possible exception of Francis Ford Coppola, he is the greatest living American director.

From his standup comedy in the 1960s, to his madcap early films like Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper, and Love and Death, to his great period with Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, and Crimes and Misdemeanors, to his later films like Husbands and Wives, The Mighty Aphrodite, Sweet and Lowdown, Match Point, Midnight in Paris, and Blue Jasmine, Allen has proved himself to be a world-class artist and commentator of the times.

He is a cross between a borscht-belt comedian, an East Village comic of the New Left, and an existentialist philosopher (“Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on a Sunday”). There is also something strikingly original about his work. He is unique and his films have a feel that cannot be duplicated. More than any other director, he captured the Zeitgeist (and angst) of the times in which he lived (or at least a New York version of them). Over 55 years, he directed, wrote, and/or acted in 65 films, about half of which are good and half of those are classics. Without him there would have been no Seinfeld or any number of lesser artists.

I admit that his private life has been a mess (although I’d wager that few people reading this have read all of the court transcripts and investigation interviews in the cases against him, which are apparently available).¹ But the art must be taken on its own merits, just like that of other morally-problematic artists, like Mozart, Beethoven, Byron, van Gogh, Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Jackson Pollock.

If you doubt his greatness as a director and storyteller, watch Annie Hall this week.

Notes
1. John Kendall Hawkins, “Woody’s Wicked and Wicked-er Gravity,” CounterPunch, April 15, 2020.

By Michael F. Duggan

It is one of the oldest maxims of war: hit ’em where they don’t expect it. First, hit ’em hard at a weak point, or a strong point for that matter. Then, when they are distracted and have committed resources elsewhere, attack the real objective in earnest.

Now Putin knows how Marshal Tallard felt at Blenheim, or how the Germans felt when the D-Day invasion forces showed up at Normandy instead of Calais (Operation Fortitude), or how the commander of any quiet sector felt when it suddenly became the focus of the entire war on the Western Front (feints were also used during the Great War to take pressure off of beleaguered portions of the line). Until February 1916, Verdun had been a quiet sector.

A few months ago, I conjectured that the Russian drive towards Kiyv was either an error or a feint to distract from their real objectives to the south and east. Now it seems that the much-reported Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south and east was itself a feint from the real objective in the Karkiv Oblast immediately to the east of Donesk and Luhansk. It has been a great success; The Ukrainian right-feint-and-left-hook strategy reintroduced shock and decisiveness to a war that had appeared to have settled into deadlock. The Ukrainians have shown themselves to be remarkable fighters, and, with roughly $1 billion per week in the latest Western weaponry and real-time intelligence, it seems that there is little they cannot do.

Of course a possible alternative is that the southeastern feint and the northern punch were both real attacks—a coordinate right-left, Mike Tyson-like combination, from which only the left hook drew blood. But let us assume that for a moment that the real Ukrainian focus was primarily on the north.

Does this mark a turning point in the war? It is hard to say. The West hopes that this victory will cause a general collapse in Russian morale and that the momentum of revitalized Ukrainian forces will allow them to roll up the line to the south and east. The success of the current offensive will no doubt encourage those supporting Ukraine to continue their support. But the degree to which Russia begins to lose the war will be proportional to the increased risk of an expanded and far more dangerous conflict. Forcing a nuclear-armed foe into a choice between losing face or lashing out with tactical nuclear weapons is no way to resolve a conflict. It is something like insanity.

Of course even if the counteroffensive is a turning point, it may not be decisive or final in a broader strategic sense. It may be just another round of escalation or a change in a shifting tide. As James McPherson observes in Crossroads of Freedom, the American Civil War was like a pendulum and had multiple “turning points.” This is certainly the case of many protracted conflicts, like the Second World War, and anything can happen. Momentum can swing back and forth numerous times in a long war. Along the rest of the line in Ukraine, both sides are dug in and it has hard to imagine Kiyv or Moscow suing for peace at this point. It seems that both sides are likely to redouble their efforts in the face of setbacks.

We know what the Kharkiv Oblast means to the Ukrainians. The question then is how much does it mean to the Russians? If they permanently lose this area, it will (from Russia’s point of view) remain a permanently hostile frontier and perhaps a Western bastion on the Russian border. This may be intolerable to them. If Russian strategy and pride dictate that this area must be retaken and included with Donetsk and Luhansk as a territorial war aim, then there will be a redoubled effort there, a counter punch, a counteroffensive to the present counteroffensive but with no chance of surprise. This would likely signal an even greater intensity of fighting, a magnitude of violence perhaps well beyond what we have seen to date. It will mark yet another escalation, an escalation in the viciousness in the prosecution of the war by both sides.

If the Russian leadership comes to regard Kharkiv as “a bridge too far” relative to their apparent territorial ambitions to the east and south, they might swallow their pride and abandon any ambitions of retaking it. The Kharkiv region is well beyond the prewar separatist areas, but has significant ethnically Russian and Russian-speaking populations.

Fasten your seat belts.

Postscript: December 13, 2022
The Ukrainian victory in Kharkiv three months ago was widely interpreted at the time to be the rolling up of the Russian right flank in the northeast. It now appears to be something like the American victory at St. Mihiel in September 1918. This attack, the first large-scale campaign by the American forces under Pershing, was intended to reduce the long-standing St. Mihiel salient. It was launched on September 12, just as the Germans were withdrawing from the sector. Although it would be an overstatement to say that the Americans only punched air at St. Mihiel (U.S. losses were 4,500 killed with another 2,500 wounded), the reduction of the salient was not the battle that was expected.

Like the Germans in September 1918, it now appears that the Russians were consolidating their positions both in Kharkiv and in Kherson during the late summer and fall of 2022, ceding territory not easily defended—a fighting withdrawal. Unlike the Germans during the final months of the Great War, the Russian forces now seem poised to launch a cold weather offensive that could be decisive.

By Michael F. Duggan

Yesterday is the anniversary of one of the most devastating attacks ever delivered by a foreign enemy on American soil. I refer of course to the defeat of the Continental Army at the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777.

The American forces under Washington were aligned along the east bank of Brandywine Creek at Chads Ford, Pennsylvania, attempting to block the British advance on Philadelphia. With him were Nathaniel Greene, Anthony Wayne, and the Marquis de Lafayette (it was his first battle and he would be wounded in the leg).

Sir William Howe, the British commander, saw the strong defensive position of the Americans. With the aid of local loyalists, he moved a portion of his forces under Charles Cornwallis north and crossed the Brandywine further upstream at Jefferis Ford. Moving south along the creek, they turned Washington’s right flank, and after a vicious fight, defeated the Americans. This opened the way for the capture of Philadelphia, the seat of the Continental Congress. The remaining American forces withdrew intact and would fight again.

Also present on the British side was a Scottish officer, Patrick Ferguson, who had invented, and was now armed with, the technically-sophisticated Ferguson Rifle, an early breechloader based on the La Chaumette design. He wrote in his diary that at one point in the battle, he had an American officer in his sights, but did not take the shot. He considered the targeting of an individual enemy officer to be dishonorable. The American officer may have been George Washington, who was on the part of the field described by Ferguson. Ferguson was wounded—shot through the elbow—at Brandywine.

Major Ferguson was killed on October 7, 1780 at the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina. A near-contemporary source alleges that his body was stripped and urinated on by undisciplined American militiamen before burial.

By Michael F. Duggan

And so the second Elizabethan Era draws to a close.

Not to get all weepy about an accident of birth—and in spite of my ambivalence about monarchy—I liked the Queen. All life is mostly accidental and just in being born each of us has won a trillion lotteries. In terms of social rank, the Queen just won one more lottery than the rest of us. Britain could have (and has) done worse in terms of the monarchy, and although it seems like an anachronism, there are certainly worse systems than constitutional monarchy. Although not a complete surprise, hearing of her death left a feeling that a decent, vaguely benevolent omnipresence had been taken. Approximately the same age as such long-gone people as Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, she seemed like a permanent part of the international landscape.

Okay, she wasn’t a hands-on executive like Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression or WWII, or John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but she was more than a figurehead. She was the moral leader of the British People from the Korean War until yesterday, an omnipresence of constancy and consistency. Both high-minded and tough-minded, she was the dignified Keeper of the Flame of national institutions, a relayer of national continuity.

Oh, sure, critics (Charles Krauthammer?) have long noted that the only political institution more absurd than the American vice presidency is the Royal family. But I think that this is only partially true. Marxians and some progressives deride these kinds of traditions, and yet this particular one is about 1,200-years-old (how old is the oldest Marxist government and to what degree has it lived up to the principles of Marxism?). It obviously resonates with a lot of people as a mostly harmless preoccupation and is the kind of historical and social detail that Marxians and Marxists tend to leave out of their moral-rationalist calculations.

Much of what one reads about the Royal Family and “The Firm” is calculated PR and the lingering pageantry of a dead empire. But as with the outpouring of emotions after Diana’s death, the feelings of ordinary people for the Queen both in Britain and abroad, their sense of loss appears to be a mixture of both false intimacy and real affection. Could it a coincidence that all of the county liquor shops were out of Dubonnet yesterday afternoon? Of course there is also PR that you cannot buy, and a double rainbow is said to have appeared over Buckingham Palace as the sun broke through the clouds yesterday afternoon. I was not there, but I assume that it really happened and was not just a wishful fictional device, like the Angles of Mons.

We all know the trivia: from the girl who could change tires and work on the engines of military vehicles during WWII, the the 25-year-old who inherited a moribund empire after her father’s untimely death, the most-traveled, longest-serving (15 prime ministers, 14 U.S. presidents) British monarch in history. She was not, as Prime Minister Truss (who has now served under two British monarchs) observed, “the rock on which modern Britain was build” (hardly a compliment), but rather the dignified means of relinquishing what Britain had been, both beneficial (the welfare state and social democracy), and problematic (the Empire itself). Above all, she embodied the devotion to duty to the institutions and traditions of Great Britain over a long period of great change and numerous crises.

She was not perfect. As one might expect of royalty, and in spite of the continuing displays of affection by the public, she was often remote from the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, and her grasp of contemporary issues and engagement in addressing them was uneven. Like Churchill and her father, she could be a guiding moral force in troubled times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Perfectly (if predictably) turned out in bright colors and a big hat, and perfectly well spoken, she embodied qualities so conspicuously missing from much of today’s world. She was regal.

But what about her successor to the Throne?

Except for his treatment of Diana—which was in part the tragic result of the absurd and brutal realities of being an heir to the throne—I have always liked Charles (I had the chance to meet him in my old job, but alas, was out sick on the day of his visit). A man of intelligence, ideas, and opinions, and grandnephew and protege of Lord Mountbatten, I think that we can expect a more hands-on monarch in important areas like the environment and perhaps geopolitics. If, like his mother, he is a force for benevolence in the world, let us recognize it and appreciate him.

Certainly no one can say that he has not paid his dues.

By Michael F. Duggan

There isn’t much in the world that give me hope these days, but I sometimes take solace in the beauty and power of ideas. Sometimes the ideas themselves give me hope as faint possibilities by which to address the world’s problems. Two people whose ideas have given me hope were Jane Jacobs and Peter Viereck. Besides being almost exact contemporaries—both were born in 1916 and died in 2006—they were brilliant thinkers of startling insight and originality with distinctive writing styles.

Jacobs is most famous for her landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but I think her most important work might be Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Here she makes the case that economies are naturalistic phenomena and that the best basis for an economy is the natural production region centered on an import-shifting city. Under such an arrangement, the world order would be based on a community of nations set up on such regions. To me, this idea makes much more sense than the prescriptions of Smith, Marx, or even Kenyes.

The initial problem is how to set up such a world order. Transforming the current world order into the model of Jacobs would be impossible. The powerful would never allow it. Even if it was possible, it would likely not last long; Jacobs might have been a natural-born genius with an intuitive understanding of how cities and their economies functioned, but she might not have understood how power functions in the world (although, to be fair, she stood up to Robert Moses and defeated him on his own ground—no small task). In reality, power aggregates, and even if her prescription could be implemented, it would likely not last as the most aggressive leaders of the world would consolidate their power and take over less aggressive neighbors.

Peter Viereck was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a political thinker of the first order. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he fought with William F. Buckley for the soul of American conservatism and lost. His model of true conservatism is nothing like the reactionary radicalism that we call “conservatism” today. For him it was was a moderate and high-minded form of realism. It was political gradualism toward progress and not the strident, rollback extremism of today’s far right who erroneously call themselves conservatives.

Like liberals of then and now, Viereck believed in progress, but held that it had to be gradual in order to keep what worked while changing that which did not. In Viereck’s analysis, quick change often resulted in instability and eventually violence (e.g. the Terror of the French Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, the Russian Revolution). People were imperfect in Viereck’s estimation—flawed by nature—and thus required strong cultural traditions, strong laws, and good, but strong, republican governance. He also believed in a liberal arts education for all citizens and that intellectually every person could be raise to the level of a cultural aristocrat. One could only study other cultures, but only after achieving a fluency in one’s own. Viereck also believed that when gradualism did not work or proved insufficient to meet a crisis, a system had to adopt more sweeping approaches. He was therefore a conservative that supported the New Deal.

As with Jacobs’ ideas, it is hard to imagine imagine the gradualism of Viereck working today outside of the judiciary (and even the U.S. judicial system at the highest level has become increasingly radicalized). Domestically the country is too deeply divided and too diverse for gradual solutions to work, and at this point, the crises of the environment now require the strongest and most sweeping non-utopian approaches. And so the wonderful model of conservatism as gradual progressivism looks like a dead letter.

The question then becomes: if the prescriptive models of two of the most insightful, most sensible thinkers of the 20th century have been rendered nonstarters, then what is the basis for any hope at all?

By Michael F. Duggan

I was never crazy about Senator Joe Biden. He seemed to embody so much of the mediocrity and cynicism of the Democratic Party of the post-New Deal paradigm. I also do not like his dangerous escalatory policies driving the Russo-Ukrainian War. That said, let’s look at what he and his administration have accomplished:

• American Rescue Plan ($1.9 trillion)
• 200 million vaccinations administered during his first 100 days, twice the number promised
• Infrastructure Bill ($2 trillion)
• The decisive withdrawal from the fruitless twenty-year U.S. War in Afghanistan
• Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (the gun safety bill; the first federal gun legislation passed in 28 years)
• CHIPS and Science Act
• PACT Act (Veterans’ Healthcare)
• The appointment of 75 federal judges to date (more than any president to this point in an administration since JFK)
• The appointment of Ketanji Jackson to the Supreme Court of the United States
• Student Loan Relief
• The killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri
• The Inflation Reduction Act (if it had not been for two obstructive members of the Democratic caucus, the far more robust Build Back Better Bill would have been enacted into law).
• Unemployment is at its lowest rate in 50 years

Work still remains to be done (the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill remains unpassed, illegal immigration remains high, and we must do much, much more to address the crises of the environment). But as far as domestic accomplishments go, this has been a significant first year-and-a-half, especially given how evenly divided the Senate is. It is reminiscent of the days of the great named domestic programs like the the Square Deal, the New Freedom, New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. It is reminiscent of the days when Americans still thought big for the public good. One can only wonder when the Democratic Party and the “liberal” media are going to start trumpeting these accomplishments.

By Michael F. Duggan

For several weeks the Western media has been reporting on an existing or impending Ukrainian counteroffensive in the southeastern part of the country in and around the Kherson between Crimea and the Donbas region. Now we are told that it has begun in earnest.

Two months ago, I wrote on this blog that one of the possible courses the conflict could take would be an open-ended war of position in Eastern Ukraine (see “Summer in Ukraine,” June 13, 2022). Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute recently wrote that technological advances have created a new paradigm-shifting defensive revolution in weaponry and therefore in war itself.¹ Is the age of Blitzkrieg in conventional warfare really over?

The first defensive revolution lasted from roughly the late 18th century to the final stages of the First World War. The defensive is the naturally stronger mode of war, and the initial phases of the Industrial Revolution—the “Age of Coal and Steam”—rendered it geometrically more powerful than the offensive mode (whose technological requirements tended to be more complex, and required the advances of the “Age of Petroleum and Electricity”). Thus the initial defensive revolution gave us smokeless gunpowder and flat-trajectory bullets, repeating rifles, heavy automatic weapons, barbed wire, and massed infantry attacks, while the Offensive Revolution (roughly 1915-1945) gave us tanks, attack aircraft, light automatic weapons, airborne infantry, modern small unit tactics, and combined forces offensives.

If Lieven is correct, then the days of the typical post-1939 armor-spearheaded combined forces attack might be numbered. Precision-guided munitions, light antitank missiles, and weaponized drones might be making the strategies that worked so well for Gudarian, Patton, Rommel, Zhukov, and Schwarzkopf things of the past (i.e. they might be neutralizing offensive shock, a frequently decisive element in war). Certainly the initial Russian invasion was blunted by Ukrainian defenders with the latest in Western weaponry, and in recent months deadlock has set in. At the very least, the two modes may be balancing-out, or they may be shifting back into tactical, operational, and strategic indecisiveness—a modern analog to the situation on the Western Front from the fall of 1914 until the summer of 1918. If this is true, then it is possible that, as was the case in First World War, offensives will become more and more costly while gaining less and less. It will be a case of diminishing returns in an already costly war.

What does this mean for the current offensive in eastern Ukraine? It could mean one of two things. First, if the dominant mode of modern conventional combat has shifted back in favor of the defense, Ukrainian forces could impale themselves on fixed Russian positions. During the period from the 1770s through World War One, many battles were won on the defensive. These include the Cowpens, Buscao, Sorauren, New Orleans, Waterloo, Balaklava, the decimation of the Light Brigade, Malvern Hill, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Chickasaw Bluffs, Cold Harbor, Kennesaw Mountain, and the Marne). Even if the Ukrainians are not defeated outright, they could take disproportional casualties with little or no gain.

The other possibility is that the death of the modern offensive has been greatly exaggerated and that the Ukrainians will be able to make substantial gains. This would be good for the anti-Russian forces in a tactical sense, but would be unacceptable to the Russians, causing them to push back even harder (i.e. a Ukrainian victory would trigger another round of escalation). John Mearsheimer has warned, there would be a dangerous irony —”a perverse paradox”—to a Ukrainian/Western victory in that the better they do, the greater the chances that the Russians will use tactical nuclear weapons.² Tactical victory for the West could therefore lead to a strategic catastrophe for everybody that might include a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. The Russians have already made it clear that they regard NATO expansion and its military support of Ukraine to be existential threats. As Mearsheimer also points out, the Russians will not give up hard-won territory—will defend it at any cost—and the Ukrainians will not tolerate Russian forces within its prewar borders. And so it goes.

The Southern Offensive has begun, and regardless of who wins, the result will be an increased danger of a broader, intensified war.

Notes
1. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/08/25/six-months-after-russian-invasion-a-bloody-stalemate-a-struggle-for-peace/
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qciVozNtCDM&fbclid=IwAR207AWrebrJ5u1iUP3J1bVZpfrU0mf2DK2wTcQaIEEmAXriSKJeQNfVua4 (See minutes 101.15-103,15).

By Michael F. Duggan

Biographer and Historian, David McCullough, is gone at 89. The author of at least 13 books (including interview volumes), he was sometimes written off by academic types as a popular historian and a writer of narrative history. But with two Francis Parkman Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, around 40 honorary degrees, and a wonderful prose style, I suspect that it didn’t bother him too much. I also suspect that they envied his book sales.

If he had a flaw, it was that he was too nice. He genuinely liked the people he wrote about and admitted as much. John Adams was probably not as likable as he made him out to be, and I am confident that Harry Truman was not that great of a president. When I was in graduate school, I wrote to McCullough and told him that, in the opinion of one history Ph.D. candidate, Truman was not a president of the front rank, that he did not rise to the level of a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Franklin Roosevelt. He wrote back and conceded the point, concluding “…but we were lucky to have him.”

I had the good fortune to meet McCullough a year or two later, about four or five months after I finished my doctorate. He was at my former place of employment, visiting one of the big shots there. A secretary tipped me off earlier in the week that he was coming and said that I could come down to meet him and get a book signed. He was exactly as I imagined him to be—almost too good to be true—a true gentleman. The guy you saw on TV was the real guy. He asked about my dissertation topic and had some impressive insights. With an abundance of generosity and in an impeccable hand, he signed my copy of Mornings on Horseback, his biography of of Theodore Roosevelt: “For Mike Duggan, fellow historian, with my best wishes, David McCullough. October 8, 2002.”

McCullough was far more optimistic about the American Experiment than I am, but I am glad that there are people like him in the world and in the calling. For me he will always be the warm, unmistakable voice of the early Ken Burns films, especially The Civil War. We were lucky to have him.

By Michael F. Duggan

Science has lost another giant. James Lovelock, the Gaia guy is gone at 103.

I have to admit that when I first heard of the Gaia hypothesis, I didn’t like it. It had been explained to me imperfectly and seemed too broad, too metaphysical. It did not strike me as a scientific theory at all, but rather, at best, was an untestable metatheory, an organon. But the more I read, the more impressed I became. Besides, taken as a natural historical description, evolution is also untestable (although both ideas have elements that can be tested; Lovelock, with Andrew Watson, devised the Daisy World model in 1983 to test the idea of self-regulating systems).

The idea is that the Earth’s biosphere is a living, self-regulating system. Analyzing data about the Martian atmosphere while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Carl Sagan in the 1950s, Lovelock noticed that “unlike Earth’s blanket of gases, Mars’s atmosphere was locked into the same kind of dead chemical equlibrium as as that of Venus.” (Frank 2018, 124). “It came to me suddenly, like a flash of enlightenment, that [for the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere] to persist and keep stable, something must be regulating it… It dawned on me that somehow life was regulating the climate as well as the atmosphere. Suddenly the image of the Earth as a living organism able to regulate its temperature and chemistry at a comfortable steady state emerged in my mind.” (Frank, 2018, 124). Far from being New Agey murk, this was the recognition that the biosphere regulates itself as a steady state rather than chemical equlibrium. The name Gaia was suggested to him by William Golding of The Lord of the Flies fame (Gaia is the Greek Earth goddess). (Frank 124-25). Sagan’s wife, Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) helped develop the idea and pushed for its acceptance.

As Adam Frank explains in his book, Light of the Stars, the implications of this idea are huge. Photosynthetic bacteria produce oxygen that keeps the Earth’s atmosphere at a steady state with around 21% oxygen. “But why did oxygen levels rise up to 21% and nor further? This is an important question, because if the concentration of oxygen in the air were to climb as high as 30 percent, the planet would become a tinderbox. Any lightning strike would create fires that wouldn’t stop.” (Frank 2018, 126). It all had to do with negative feedback from the living world. I now believe that the Gaia hypothesis was one of the greatest ideas of the 20th-century.

As I have written before, Lovelock’s and Margulis’s ideas of a self-regulating biosphere are highly suggestive and even more relevant in a time of pandemic. What if we have it all backward? What if the planet is the fevered patient, that we are the pathogen or imbalance, that COVID-19 is the planet’s immune response, and the vaccines and antivirals is the disease trying to outsmart the immune response?

By Michael F. Duggan

Eighty-five years ago this Tuesday, Gerda Taro (1910-1937), “The Girl with the Leica” (she also used a Rollei), was killed during the Loyalist retreat at the Battle of Brunete in the Spanish Civil War. She is believed to be the first female photojournalist killed in combat.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was a particularly vicious conflict; civil wars usually are. In terms of atrocities, modern armor, and strategic bombing—to include the bombing of civilians—it was a dry run for World War II. On one side were the Loyalists or Republicans who represented the legitimate government of the Second Spanish Republic. They were supported by an assortment of anarchists, democrats, socialists, and communists representing the Popular Front as well as the foreign volunteers of the International Brigades (e.g the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, whose last known surviving member, Delmer Berg, died in 2016). They were also supported by Mexico and the Soviet Union. On the other side were the Nationalists of General Francisco Franco, who launched a coup in July 1936. The Nationalists were supported by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The Nationalists won, and Franco governed Spain until his death in 1975.

The journalists who covered the war included Claude Cockburn, John Dos Passos, Floyd Gibbons, George Seldes, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, to name a few.

Taro’s real name was Gerta Pohorylle. She was born in Stuttgart on August 1, 1910 to Jewish parents. She fled Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and relocated to Paris where she met a young Hungarian photographer named Endre Friedmann. She would change her name to Taro (after a Japanese painter); Friedmann changed his name to Robert Capa. In 1936 the pair traveled to Barcelona to cover the war in Spain. Like all war photographers, Taro shot the war from the front, distancing herself from Capa (who had proposed to her) and working alone. It has been suggested that Taro actually took the “Falling Soldier” (“Loyalist Soldier at the Moment of Death”) photograph attributed to Capa, and one of the most famous war photographs of all time.

There are two different accounts of the accident that resulted in her death. The first states that on July 25, 1937, she was standing on the runningboard of a car carrying wounded when a tank crashed into it. The other account holds that a tank backed up without warning, running over her.¹ She died the following day. Six days later, on the day she would have turned 27, there was a parade in her honor in Paris. She is interred at the Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise.

Capa went on to cover WWII, taking some of the most well-known photographs of the D-Day landing and became a legend. After the war he reported from the USSR and Israel during its founding. He was killed by a landmine on March 25, 1954 near Thai Binh during the First Indochina War.

In 2010, a suitcase turned up with more than 4,000 previously unpublished negative images by Capa and Taro (126 rolls of film). They are the subject of the 2011 film, The Mexican Suitcase.

Note
Mark Kurlansky, The Importance of Not Being Ernest, (Coral Gables, FL: Books & Books Press, 2022), 119.