Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 30. August 2012 / Timeline August 30, 2012
Version 3.530. August 2012, September 2012
08/31/2012
World War: Nobody Had The Slightest Idea What It Would Be
Like
By John Scales Avery
None of the people who started the First World War had the
slightest idea what it would be like. The armies of Europe were
dominated by the old feudal landowning class, whose warlike
traditions were rooted in the Middle Ages. The counts and barons
who still ruled Europe’s diplomatic and military
establishments knew how to drink champagne, dance elegantly, ride
horses, and seduce women. They pranced off to war in high spirits,
the gold on their colorful uniforms glittering in the sunshine,
full of expectations of romantic cavalry charges, kisses stolen
from pretty girls in captured villages, decorations, glory and
promotion, like characters in “The Chocolate Soldier”
or “Die Fledermaus”. The romantic dreams of glory of
every small boy who ever played with toy soldiers were about to
become a thrilling reality!
But the war, when it came, was not like that. Technology had taken
over. The railroads, the telegraph, high explosives and the machine
gun had changed everything. The opposing armies, called up by means
of the telegraph and massed by means of the railroads, were the
largest ever assembled up to that time in the history of the world.
In France alone, between August 2 and August 18, 1914, the railway
system transported 3,781,000 people under military orders. Across
Europe, the railways hurled more than six million highly armed men
into collision with each other. Nothing on that scale had ever
happened before, and no one had any idea of what it would be
like.
At first the Schlieffen Plan, conceived decades earlier, seemed to
be working perfectly. When Kaiser Wilhelm had sent his troops into
battle, he had told them: “You will be home before the leaves
are off the trees,” and at first it seemed that his
prediction would be fulfilled. However, the machine gun had changed
the character of war. Attacking infantry could be cut down in heaps
by defending machine gunners. The war came to a stalemate, since
defense had an advantage over attack.
On the western front, the opposing armies dug lines of trenches
stretching from the Atlantic to the Swiss border. The two lines of
trenches were separated by a tangled mass of barbed wire.
Periodically the generals on one side or the other would order
their armies to break through the opposing line. They would bring
forward several thousand artillery pieces, fire a million or so
high explosive shells to cut the barbed wire and to kill as many as
possible of the defenders, and then order their men to attack.
The soldiers had to climb out of the trenches and struggle forward
into the smoke. There was nothing else for them to do. If they
disobeyed orders, they would be court- marshaled and shot as
deserters. They were driven forward and slaughtered in futile
attacks, none of which gained anything. Their leaders had failed
them. Civilization had failed them. There was nothing for them to
do but to die, to be driven forward into the poison gas and barbed
wire and to be scythed down by machine gun fire, for nothing, for
the ambition, vanity and stupidity of their rulers.
At the battle of Verdun, 700,000 young men were butchered in this
way, and at the battle of Somme, 1,100,000 young lives were wasted.
For millions of Europe’s young men, the trail lead only to
death in the mud and smoke; and for millions of mothers and
sweethearts waiting at home, dreams of the future were shattered by
a telegram announcing the death of the boy for whom they were
waiting.
When the war ended four years later, ten million young men had been
killed and twenty million wounded, of whom six million were
crippled for life. The war had cost 350,000,000,000 1919 dollars.
This was a calculable cost; but the cost in human suffering and
brutalization of values was incalculable. It hardly mattered whose
fault the catastrophe had been. Perhaps the Austrian government had
been more to blame than any other. But blame for the war certainly
did not rest with the Austrian people nor with the young Austrians
who had been forced to fight. However, the tragedy of the First
World War was that it created long-lasting hatred between the
nations involved, and in this way it lead, only twenty years later,
to an even more catastrophic global war.
In the Second World War, the number of soldiers killed was roughly
the same as in World War I, but the numbers of civilian deaths was
much larger. In the USSR alone, about 20 million people are thought
to have been killed, directly or indirectly, by World War II, and
of these only 7.5 million were battle deaths. Many of the
USSR’s civilian deaths were caused by starvation, disease or
exposure. Civilian populations also suffered greatly in the
devastating bombings of cities such as London, Coventry, Rotterdam,
Warsaw, Dresden, Cologne, Berlin, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In
World War II, the total number of deaths, civilian and military, is
estimated to have been between 62 and 78 million.
Do Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, who are contemplating
starting what might develop into World War III, have any
imaginative concept of what it would be like? Netanyahu has told
the Israeli people that only 500 of their citizens would be killed,
and that the conflict would be over in a month. One is reminded of
the Austrian leaders in 1914, who started a what they thought would
be a small action to punish the Serbian nationalists for their
Pan-Slavic ambitions. When the result was a world-destroying war,
they said “That is not what we intended.” Of course it
is not what they intended, but nobody can control the escalation of
conflicts. The astonishing unrealism of the Netanyahu-Barak
statements also reminds one of Kaiser Wilhelm's monumentally
unrealistic words to his departing troops: “You will be home
before the leaves are off the trees.”
The planned attack on Iran would not only violate international
law, but would also violate common sense and the wishes of the
people of Israel. The probable result would be a massive Iranian
missile attack on Tel Aviv, and Iran would probably also close the
Straits of Hormuz. If the United States responded by bombing
Iranian targets, Iran would probably use missiles to sink one or
more of the US ships in the Persian Gulf. One can easily imagine
other steps in the escalation of the conflict: a revolution in
Pakistan; the entry of nuclear-armed Pakistan into the war on the
side of Iran; a preemptive nuclear strike by Israel against
Pakistan's nuclear weapons; and Chinese-Russian support of Iran. In
the tense atmosphere of such a war, the danger of a major nuclear
exchange, due to accident or miscalculation, would be very
great.
Today, because the technology of killing has continued to develop,
the danger of a catastrophic war with hydrogen bombs hangs like a
dark cloud over the future of human civilization. The total
explosive power of today's weapons is equivalent to roughly half a
million Hiroshima bombs. To multiply the tragedy of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki by a factor of half a million changes the danger
qualitatively. What is threatened today is the complete breakdown
of human society.
There are 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, about 4,000 of
them on hair-trigger alert. The phrase “hair trigger
alert” means that the person in charge has only 15 minutes to
decide whether the warning from the radar system was true of false,
and to decide whether or not to launch a counterattack. The danger
of accidental nuclear war continues to be high. Technical failures
and human failures have many times brought the world close to a
catastrophic nuclear war. Those who know the system of
“deterrence” best describe it as “an accident
waiting to happen”.
No one can win a nuclear war, just as no one can win a natural
catastrophe like an earthquake or a tsunami. The effects of a
nuclear war would be global, and all the nations of the world would
suffer - also neutral nations.
Recent studies by atmospheric scientists have shown that the smoke
from burning cities produced by even a limited nuclear war would
have a devastating effect on global agriculture. The studies show
that the smoke would rise to the stratosphere, where it would
spread globally and remain for a decade, blocking sunlight,
blocking the hydrological cycle and destroying the ozone layer.
Because of the devastating effect on global agriculture, darkness
from even a small nuclear war could result in an estimated billion
deaths from famine. This number corresponds to the fact that today,
a billion people are chronically undernourished. If global
agriculture were sufficiently damaged by a nuclear war, these
vulnerable people might not survive. A large-scale nuclear war
would be an even greater global catastrophe, completely destroying
all agriculture for a period of ten years.
The tragedies of Chernobyl and Fukushima remind us that a nuclear
war would make large areas of the world permanently uninhabitable
because of long-lasting radioactive contamination.
The First World War was a colossal mistake. Today, the world stands
on the threshold of an equally enormous disaster. Must we again be
lead into a world-destroying war by a few blind individuals who do
not have the slightest idea of what such a war would be like?
 |
 |