Quote:
Originally Posted by Archaea
Nicely done.
I don't believe anything written after the 1st century C.E.
|
I don't think we're particularly good at war. We are better at mythologizing war. Consider this passage from a recent article by Max Hastings in the New York Review of Books:
Quote:
Even in the twenty-first century, almost seventy years after the outbreak of World War II, it is astonishing how much of its history is still written from nationalistic perspectives. Winston Churchill may be forgiven for telling the House of Commons in September 1944, at the height of the conflict, that the battle for Normandy had been "the greatest and most decisive single battle of the whole war." But modern historians of every nationality need to see matters more clearly.
Consider, for instance, the strategic situation in July 1943. The US had been in the war for twenty months, Russia for twenty-five, Britain for almost four years. On the Eastern Front, four million men and 13,000 armored vehicles eventually participated in the Battle of Kursk and associated actions in the Orel and Kharkov salients. Hitler suffered a disastrous defeat and half a million casualties. Soviet losses were far higher.
The attention of the British and Americans, meanwhile, was fixed upon what was then their only significant ground effort, the campaign in Sicily. They committed to Operation Husky just eight divisions, and lost less than six thousand men killed. In the whole of 1943, US and British fatal casualties in operations against the Germans were around 60,000. Even in 1944, the Western Allies' offensives in Normandy and Italy absorbed barely one third of Hitler's forces, while the remainder continued to be deployed in the East.
This is why Andrew Roberts writes, in his excellent new study of wartime Anglo-American strategy: "In considering the roles of Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Brooke"—the "four titans" of his title—"it is important to remember that the decisions of Hitler and Stalin far more profoundly influenced the outcome [of the war] than those of any Briton or American." Four out of every five Germans killed in action died on the Eastern Front.
Volume 56, Number 13 · August 13, 2009
A Very Chilly Victory
By Max Hastings
|
I don't mean this as a slight on America. On the contrary. It's our highly evolved state of civilization and huge regard for human life that makes us less than great at war. Stalin was so successful against the Nazis to a large extent because he didn't care how many Russians were killed in the process. He won beause he had several times more fighting men available to him. Meanwhile, Eisenhower and Roosevelt put off D-Day until our numbers and armament were so overwhelming that eventual victory was probably inevitable with the lowest possible number of casualties. Meanwhile, Stalin ground away at his ghastly war of attricion, and the chineys belched at Auschwitz. Students of the Roman Empire know that it "fell" because it was taken over from within by a brutal warrior cult. Less than 30,000 Goths sacked Rome, a city populated by several million souls.
Now we hear that politicians want to reduce forces in Afghanistan and fight the war to a greater extent with techno gadgets. This will only postpone the inevtiable. War is won with spending blood. The guerillas are winnning in Afghanistan with weapons that are primitive compared to our own. The complaint has been that America is relying too much on gadgets and spending too much time safely on bases. We're probably not cut out for real total war.