Tuesday, July 27, 2004
This is the seventh installment of What Tax Profs Are Reading. The goal is to share with the broader tax community reviews of both tax-related and nontax-related books recently read by tax professors. We invite tax professors to submit book reviews for publication on TaxProf Blog.
Jim Maule (Villanova) shares with us his thoughts on Thomas Carmichael’s The Ninety Days: Five Battles That Changed the World (2002):
The book has me wondering if the people alive in October 1942 through January 1943 knew that the five major battles fought during those three months made the difference that they made. Even with the limited and delayed reporting of that war, in such contrast to news flashes about late twentieth and early twenty-first century conflicts, our parents and grandparents surely learned the outcomes if not some of the operational details, perhaps not immediately but within weeks or months.
When the Second World War gets into the spotlight it’s usually the battle of Midway, the landings at Normandy, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Battle of the Bulge, the escape at Dunkirk, and a few other encounters that take most of center stage. Other campaigns, successful and catastrophic from either or both sides’ perspective, have had their movies and their anniversary celebrations. The five battles in Carmichael’s book include the famous and the not-so-well-known. During this period that began 10 months after America’s formal entry into the war, conflict reached critical pace at Guadalcanal, El Alamein, Northwest Africa, Stalingrad, and in the Barents Sea. Surely Guadalcanal and Stalingrad have often been on center stage, and El Alamein occasionally. The campaign in Northwest Africa hasn’t had the attention it deserves as the precursor to the more publicized landings in Sicily and southern Italy. And I must admit, even though I’ve read dozens if not hundreds of accounts relating to the Second World War, this particular battle of the Barents Sea was one of which I had known nothing.
Carmichael’s accounts of these battles, avoiding overly detailed and technical analyses of troop and ship movements and tossing in bits of human interest information, are set against the larger picture of the war that is clearer from the present than it was at the time. There is a disadvantage in reading any World War Two history, and that is the reader’s knowledge of the basic outcome and of the basic outline of events. Carmichael does a good job of taking the reader back in time, to days when the outcomes were not known, when Allied defeat in any one of the five battles would have changed the course of the war, and when those making decisions, fighting the battles, or hearing about them did not know that their outcomes would weave together into an ultimate Axis defeat that wasn’t apparent to either side.
These were not battles with simultaneously broadcasting embedded reporters. But what if the reporters who were present (which was not the case at Stalingrad or the Barents Sea) had the ability to send their news in real time? Would the citizens of the Allied nations have been sufficiently patient to endure the distress of bad news? Or would they have given up on the first indication of things going badly? It’s easy to guess at the answer. Every one of these five battles began badly for the Allies, and in all five instances predictions by some or most military planners were stronger than the hopes for success. The battering and devastation is still difficult to fathom, even in an age of weapons of mass destruction. Tens, no, hundreds of thousands died. Twenty German divisions were annihilated at Stalingrad. These were not the quick and relatively bloodless first-round knockouts to which some in the late twentieth century have become accustomed and that have become an unrealistic standard of war battle for others. These were typical long, drawn-out, see-saw, slugging matches in which victory came on the thinnest of margins with a lot of good timing and seemingly minor, but event-shaping, miscalculations sprinkled in. Any one easily could have turned out the other way, and just one difference of that sort could have turned the war in a very different direction. The “what ifs” are waiting in yet another book sitting in the “to read” pile and that I plan to pick up later in the summer.
As a student and a teacher of federal tax, I’ve long been aware that the Second World War reshaped the income tax from an impost on the wealthy to the pervasive “touch everyone” monstrosity that it is today. The financing needs of the war are apparent in the sheer size of worldwide war. Stalingrad alone dwarfed current military efforts. And Stalingrad was one of not five but hundreds of skirmishes and battles underway during those ninety days. Collectively, tens of thousands of warplanes, thousands of warships, tens of millions of troops, and supplies measurable in trillions of cubic yards require enormous amounts of money. The Second World War has left all sorts of legacies, some just now becoming evident. The federal income tax, in its present-day form, is just one.
For prior TaxProf Blog book reviews, see here.
