By Jim Sack
During the Battle of Verdun in northern France during World War I nearly a million young men, Germans, French, English, Belgians, Scots and the sons of other nationalities, died. It was “schlacht” as the Germans refer to battle. At Cold Harbor in 1864, during our Civil War, nearly 7,000 Union Soldiers died in a useless thirty minute assault against strongly entrenched Confederate lines. The young Germans, Irish and Scots immigrants who were the bulk of the Union Army knew death was their’s the next day as the sewed their names into the collars to assist identification.
At Stalingrad hundreds of thousands died, civilian deaths in Warsaw in 1944, were half a million, when the Tatars invaded Russia villages and towns disappeared before their swords. At Borodino the Grand Army of Napoleon, mostly conscripted Germans, suffered 30,000 dead in two days, the Russians lost 40,000. Constantinople counted more than 30,000 dead after a few days of Ottoman assault. There was slaughter, schlacht, on the beaches of Iwo Jima as young Marines charged ashore. It goes on.
Over the centuries the norm has been hundreds of thousands dead in wars, tens of thousands killed on a given day. In my ancestral village in Germany the names of nearly every young man of a generation is carved into the obolisk in the town center. My kinsman, Ludwig Sack, died in France in 1914 and his name is solemnly inscribed there.
I think now about what we have suffered and lost so many bright young men and woman in Iraq and Afghanistan, or on the way there. My son was in Afghanistan, so I had something dear to lose as a basis of my thoughts. Others sit at home today and think about their kids who are there now.
We Americans have greatly advanced the philosophy of war from blunt attrition to a concern for “collateral damage.” We now have drones, cameras, computers, long range missiles, smart bombs and scores more equipment and ordinance to reduce the exposure of our troops to enemy fire, to minimize our casualties. This is another America tradition. At Agincourt, ten thousand French knights and attendants were mostly bludgeoned or hacked to death in the mud. Many drown in water held down only by the weight of their armor. In our revolution we picked of marching Red Coats from behind trees and stone walls.
Americas tend to avoid pitched combat in favor of overpowering the enemy at a distance. The Japanese oft complained in WWII that Americas would draw them into battle only to retreat and call in air or artillery. It frustrated the Nazis too. It was the same in Korea and Vietnam, the same now in Iraq and Afghanistan. He prefer drones to hand-to-hand combat, we prefer helicopter gunships to human wave assaults. Our goal has always been to minimize our casualties at the cost of enemy lives. That has been the case, with a few exceptions, since the days of Roger’s Rangers and Francis Marion.
So, I listen to the concerns that our people and government have about the loss of American lives in Afghanistan and I hope no American will be killed and that no “collateral damage’ will occur.
Our refinements in warfare, including to also reduce collateral damage, is correct and very American. We do not want to kill innocents, not like the Russians in Chechenya, not like the Nazis in Leningrad, not like the English or French or Ottomans or Tatars. We want to gain both Iraq and Afghanistan as trading partners and as allies in other world matters, the matter of Iran, for example.
To do that we need to limited the creation of two revenge-minded enemies for each one we kill. To do that we need to be precise in killing only our enemies and not killing innocents.
That makes it tougher and frequently exasperating. But, that’s why we have battle armor, armored vehicles and pay millions of dollars to buy the friendship of war lords and mullahs, to name a few. Smart war, not schlacht.
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Well put, Mr. Sack. I’m glad to see something like this, because it is true what they say about those who don’t learn history. If we’d think about Afghanistan in 1980-88 or thereabouts, we might never had entered that country. War changed forever in Autumn 1914, there is no such thing as sparing innocents in the type of war waged now. We can try our best, be an example, and I think we do a good job of that. But our people need to realize that its not that easy, and sometimes it puts our boys (and ourselves) in a worse line of fire than we’d be in other wise. If we were in the reverse situation, all of our power and the morality of our enemies, Afghanistan and Iran and North Korea would have been radioactive craters long ago.
Brings to mind this quote from Joseph Stalin: One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.
Stalin. Djugashvili. A Georgian. Perhaps those lingering memories of his repressions of the Russians prompted the excessive Russian force in the Summer War last year.
The Ukrainians remember Stalin, the Russians and their Ukrainian Communist allies starved 7 million or so Ukrainians to death in the 20s. The Russians confiscated food from the villages and closed them off to the outside, allowing neither coming nor going, food nor fuel to enter the villages. Nice guy, Joe, hope he and Hitler are chained to each other in hell.