War Is Always Catastrophe

April 30, 2003

This remark is attributed to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations. The relatively low number of casualties in the war with Iraq experienced by the forces of the UK and USA without doubt is a smaller number than many predicted. The number of civilian casualties, children and adults who died or were maimed by the bombing and military actions may never be known. Lest we be cajoled into thinking that war is not so terrible, a few reminders may be sobering.

In a review of THE FIRST DAY ON THE SOMME, by Martin Middlebrook, we are reminded that July 1, 1916 is the bloodiest day in Britain’s history. World War I was largely trench warfare, and, often enough, the trenches of Allies and Germans were only hundreds of yards apart. The British soldiers attacked, advancing toward the German trentches. At the end of that day, the British had more than 57,000 casualties. 20,000 men were dead and three out of four officers had been killed or wounded. All for an attempt to reach German trenches, some less than 200 yards away. Can any words effectively describe such a day?

In HAMLET, Act IV, Sc. iv, the Norweigian captain says to Hamlet and others:

“We go to gain a little patch of ground
That has in it no profit but the name.”

That was the pattern of trench warfare in World War I. You will find that vividly documented in Barbara Tuchman’s THE GUNS OF AUGUST.

There was slaughter on the oceans, too. Most of us are familiar with the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania by a German U-boat; 1,200 persons [lost] their lives. Because many of them were Americans, this sinking was the event that brought the United States into World War I.

On January 1, 1945, there was another sinking that had a loss of more than 9,000 persons, the worst maritime disaster in history. The German cruise liner, Wilhelm Gustoff was torpedoed in the freezing waters of the Baltic Sea.

On board were 1,000 German U-boat sailors on their way to Kiel to serve aboard submarines. Also there were 370 women of the Naval Auxiliary. But most of the people who died were civilians trying to escape from the advancing Soviet forces. (I read this information in a book review in the “New Yorker” discussing the book CRAB WALK by Gunter Grass.)

In World War II, most killings were of civilians. One need only name cities to stimulate that recollection: London, Coventry, Dresden, Berlin, Leningrad, Hiroshima, Nagasaki – many others.

Unsuccessfully I have been trying to locate an article with a forecasting of the next World War. The essence of the article was that with the advance of science in devising and delivering new weapons there will be no need to send our uniformed men and women anywhere to engage in combat. The weapons will be “smart” missiles, unmanned “drone” bombers and other unmanned aircraft, all skillfully directed to their targets by their inboard computers, satellites and other devilish ways to destroy people.

If that scenario is a real possibility, then the only deaths will be civilians – millions of them. Other than similar retaliations by the “enemy”, our soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen will be safe at home. But is that much consolation? General William Sherman was more correct than he knew when he proclaimed, “War is Hell.”

Some person unknown to me made the observation that the certain proof that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe is that no one has bothered to make contact with us.