HISTORY, FROM AN ACTUAL HISTORIAN - AT 7:23 A.M. ET:  The Wall Street Journal reprints a piece by distinguished British historian Andrew Roberts, spraying a dose of reality on our current, and artificial debate over rough interrogation techniques.  Nobody likes this stuff, but there are realities we should understand:

When troops need information about enemy capabilities and intentions -- and they usually need it fast -- moral and ethical conventions (especially the one signed in Geneva in 1929) have repeatedly been ignored in the bid to save lives...

...The very success of the D-Day landings themselves can largely be put down to the enhanced interrogation techniques that were visited upon several of the 19 Nazi agents who were infiltrated into Great Britain and "turned" by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) between 1939 and 1945.

It seems the Allies wanted the Germans to believe that the landings would take place somewhere other than Normandy, where they did occur.  The plot to convince the Germans of this was called Operation Fortitude, and it succeeded.

If anyone believes that SIS persuaded each of these 19 hard-bitten Nazi spies to fall in with Operation Fortitude by merely offering them tea, biscuits, and lectures in democracy, they're being profoundly naïve.

COMMENT:  So true.  It goes to the horror of war, and what war is about.  We fail to understand the nature of war at our peril.

May 14, 2009