Military history tells the story of human nature at its great heights and terrible lows.
In
the latter years of World War I, Winston Churchill met with the
novelist and poet Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was a winner of the
Military Cross––he single-handedly routed 60 Germans and captured a
trench on the Hindenburg Line––and a fierce pacifist. Sassoon’s
reminiscences of that meeting reveal how odd my title question would
have struck most people before our time. He recalled that during their
conversation, Churchill “gave me an emphatic vindication of militarism
as an instrument of policy and stimulator of glorious individual
achievements.”
After
Sassoon left, he wondered, “Had he been entirely serious . . . when he
said that ‘war is the normal occupation of man’? [I]t had been
unmistakable that for him war was the finest activity on earth.”
Churchill, remember, had served under fire in India, Sudan, Cuba, and
South Africa even before his service in the trenches, so his comments
were not the braggadocio of the armchair militarist unfamiliar with the
horrors of war.
Many
of us moderns, of course, find Sassoon’s beliefs, expressed in his
poems and novels, about the futility and misery of war more attractive
than Churchill’s idealization of it, and consider such enthusiasm
untoward, if not sinister. Such attitudes have made war a disreputable
topic of study. Once vigorous in the academy, military history programs
are rarely found at universities and colleges today, even as “peace
studies” programs have proliferated. Reasons for this change are not
hard to find. America’s historically unprecedented military power, its
enormous wealth, and since 1865 its freedom from battle on its own soil
and from foreign invasion have all insulated Americans from war, and
enabled the perception that rather than a foundational and ennobling
experience of humanity, war is an unnatural anomaly, a species of
barbarism from our benighted past, and hence an unsavory topic of formal
study, even as it remains a lucrative (and, to many people, low-brow)
subject for books, movies, cable television channels, and video games.
Unidentified Soldiers, World War I, 1914-1918 (Photo credit: State Library of South Australia)
In
contrast to the modern disdain for studying war, most people before the
twentieth century would have found Churchill’s comments unexceptional,
indeed banal, and they would have considered self-evident the answer to
the question raised in this essay’s title. The ancient Greeks were one
of the most civilized, artistic, and cultured peoples in history. But
they never questioned the eternal necessity of war. “War is the father
of all,” Heraclitus said of the original “creative destruction.” Plato
in the Laws has Cleinias say, “Peace is only a name; in reality
every city is in a natural state of war with every other.” The
arch-realist Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War has
an Athenian ambassador tell the Spartans that states fight one another
because of the constants of human nature such as fear, honor, and
self-interest, and invoke higher ideals such as “justice” only when they
cannot achieve their aims by force.
All
these Greeks agree with Churchill that war is a non-negotiable
necessity and a legitimate “instrument of policy,” given the realities
of human nature and its perennial passions and interests. In a harsh
world of limited resources and violent men, war is as critical for the
survival of civilization as agriculture, and as such, it would be as
great a folly not to study war, as it would be to ignore the craft and
skills of farming.
So
too with Churchill’s praise of war as the “stimulator of glorious
individual achievements.” From the beginnings of Western literature in
Homer’s Iliad, and of history in Herodotus’ Histories,
the glorious deeds of warriors, their bravery and self-sacrifice for
honor and community, have been celebrated and admired. Who can forget
the doomed valor of Hector, when despite knowing he is fated to die at
the hands of Achilles, says before his last charge, “But now my death is
upon me. Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious, but do
some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it”?
And
even today, in an age of historical amnesia, the last stand of the
vastly outnumbered Thespians and Spartans at Thermopylae is still
remembered, when, as Herodotus writes, the Greeks, their spears and
swords shattered, “defended themselves with knives, if they still had
them, and otherwise with their hands and teeth, while the Persians
buried them in a hail of missiles.”
Those
before us knew that for all its horrors and misery––which our ancestors
acknowledged as much as its glories––war is when the best that men are
capable of is manifested, and great deeds worthy of memory are achieved.
And they understood as well that the commemoration of these deeds by
men “who knew their duty and had the courage to do it,” as Pericles said
of his fellow Athenians, creates models of virtue and honor for
subsequent generations to study and emulate. Only in that way can a
civilization survive in a world of limited resources and ruthless
aggressors.
Churchill’s
comments, then, suggest two reasons for the study of war, one
practical, and the other philosophical. If war is an unavoidable and
necessary instrument of statecraft, then we should study the origins,
conduct, successes, and failures of wars in order to find, as the Roman
historian Livy describes the purpose of history, “what to imitate,” and
to “mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful
in the result.” This need is particularly pressing in a democracy, where
the military is subordinated to the civilian government, and the voters
have the responsibility to debate and deliberate policies, and to
choose leaders whose charge is to serve the security and interests of
the citizens both in the short and in the long term.
Two
historical examples, one ancient, one modern, illustrate the importance
of military history for teaching the lessons of the past. In 415 B.C.,
over ten years into the war against Sparta, the democratic Assembly of
Athens voted to send an expeditionary force 800 miles to attack the rich
and powerful city of Syracuse. In Thucydides’ telling, this decision
was based neither on short-term nor on long-term strategic national
interests and security, but on the promise of an expanded empire and the
greater revenues that would be available to the citizens through the
tribute of subject states.
The
charismatic and ambitious Alcibiades was a prime mover of the
expedition. He dangled the lure of greater empire, telling the Assembly,
“We shall either become masters, as we very easily may, of the whole of
Hellas [Greece], or in any case ruin the Syracusans, to the no small
advantage of ourselves and our allies.” As for the Assemblymen,
Thucydides writes, “The idea of the common people and the soldiery was
to earn wages at the moment [the treasury increased the pay for rowers,
and the commanders of the ships promised bonuses as well], and make
conquests that would supply a never-ending fund of pay for the future.”
The expedition sailed, and became one of the most famous military
disasters in history. The Athenians lost 6000 men and 200 ships, the
whole expeditionary force and a relief fleet as well.
This
disaster offers many lessons. First, dispassionate knowledge of the
enemy and the logistics of war are critical for success. According to
Thucydides, the Athenians were “ignorant of [Sicily’s] size and of the
number of its inhabitants, Hellenic and barbarian, and of the fact that
they were undertaking a war not much inferior to that against the
Peloponnesians.” Thus the Athenians woefully underestimated the power
and resources of the Syracusans and the dangers of resupply and relief
when 800 miles from home, both factors in the ultimate debacle. Next,
parochial self-interest, the selfish desire for personal wealth and
glory rather than the safety and well being of the state as a whole, are
dangerous motives for undertaking a war, as they obscure the limits and
obstacles a more sober consideration might reveal.
Finally,
politicians like an Alcibiades––who according to Thucydides was
“exceedingly ambitious of a command by which he hoped to reduce Sicily
and Carthage, and personally to gain in wealth and reputation by means
of his success”––will end up sacrificing the state as a whole in order
to further their own ambitions. These are all dangers that the citizens
should beware when contemplating the use of force to pursue policy, and
when deliberating and evaluating the aims which war will achieve.
The
modern lesson comes from the origins of World War II. As Winston
Churchill said in his famous “Sinews of Peace” speech in Fulton,
Missouri in 1946, “There never was a war in all history easier to
prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such
great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief
without the firing of a single shot.” Churchill was referring to the
period before 1935, when Germany’s serial violations of the Versailles
treaty, particularly its clandestine programs for rebuilding its army
and armaments industry, were met with indifference or appeasement. But
even later, timely military action could have stopped Nazi Germany at a
fraction of the 50 million dead World War II cost.
In
1936, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, the territory between the
French border and the Rhine River, in violation of the Versailles
treaty. His 36,000 policemen and green army recruits faced nearly 100
French and Belgian divisions, who did not fire a shot. Later Hitler
would admit that the Germans would have had to “withdraw with our tails
between our legs” had the French resisted. Two years later, England and
France abandoned their ally Czechoslovakia, and Germany absorbed this
strategically critical country. Yet if England and France had fought
back with force, an outnumbered Germany would have been defeated, as
Poland and the Soviet Union would likely have followed their ally
France’s lead. A French advance east from the Maginot Line would have
opened a second front and overwhelmed Germany’s manpower and materiel.
As historian Williamson Murray writes, “Germany would have faced
overwhelming Allied superiority . . . The results would have been
inevitable and would have led to the eventual collapse of the Nazi
regime at considerably less cost” than the butcher’s bill of World War
II.
Once
Hitler’s ambitions became obvious even to the appeasers after the
debacle of Munich, the French and British announced that they would
protect Poland’s territorial integrity should Germany invade. But this
was the wrong place and time to draw that particular red line. The
occupation of Czechoslovakia had strengthened Germany and put the
Wehrmacht on the southern border of Poland, beyond the state-of-the-art
fortifications the Czechs had built in their mountainous western region.
And Germany now possessed the military hardware of the Czechs and the
Skoda works, one of the largest arms manufacturers in Europe. In fact,
the Panzer 35(t) and 38(t) tanks used in the invasion of Poland were
actually Czech tanks produced by Skoda. Given Germany’s advantages,
there simply was not much England and France could do militarily to help
the Poles, which explains the 8 months of “phony war” marked by the
Allies’ inaction after Hitler invaded Poland.
The
lesson we should learn from this sorry history is that preemptive war
is a necessity when facing a determined aggressor, and that the time and
place of a potential conflict, and the capacity to wage war until its
successful conclusion, must be carefully considered and prepared for
when making treaty commitments and pledging the nation’s blood and
treasure. This means that often a nation cannot merely wait to react to
aggression, but must anticipate where the blow will fall.
To
use the simile of the great fourth-century Greek orator Demosthenes,
when he chastised the Athenians for serially failing to react to Philip
of Macedon’s aggression, a nation must not deal with an aggressor the
way a barbarian boxes: “The barbarian,” Demosthenes said, “when struck,
always clutches the place; hit him on the other side and there go his
hands. He neither knows nor cares how to parry a blow or how to watch
his adversary.” Given that Hitler had 13 years earlier laid out his plan
of conquest in Mein Kampf, the Allies should have anticipated
the sequence of aggression that would culminate in the attack on Poland,
and resisted the Germans in 1936 in the Rhineland, or in 1938 in
Austria or Czechoslovakia.
The
larger lesson, however, of this “low dishonest decade,” as W.H. Auden
called the thirties, is that success in war depends on morale, not
material superiority. Long before 1938, England and France had lost
their nerve, and simply did not have the will to fight. Instead they had
bought into the illusions of internationalism and collective security,
pacifism and disarmament, which had merely fed the alligator of Nazism,
to paraphrase Churchill, in the vain hope that they would be eaten last.
And this brings us to the philosophical lessons the study of war
teaches. Contrary to our modern therapeutic utopianism, the history of
war shows us the unchanging, tragic reality of human nature and its
irrational passions and interests that will spark state aggression and
violence.
The
modern world, in contrast, rejects the notion that human nature
comprises destructive passions and selfish interests that will start
wars only force can stop. On the contrary, to the modern optimist,
humans are universally rational and peace loving, if only the external,
warping constraints on these qualities––ignorance, poverty, parochial
ethnic and nationalist loyalties, the oppression of priestly and
aristocratic elites––can be removed. Then people will progress to the
realization that their true interests like peace, freedom, and
prosperity will be achieved not by force but by international trade,
economic development, democracy, and non-lethal transnational
institutions that can adjudicate conflict and eliminate the scourge of
war.
This
influential belief was famously expressed by Immanuel Kant in his 1795
essay “Perpetual Peace.” In it Kant imagined a “federation of free
states” that would create a “pacific alliance . . . different from a
treaty of peace . . . inasmuch as it would forever terminate all wars,
whereas the latter only finishes one.” In his conclusion, Kant expressed
the optimism that would become an article of faith in subsequent
centuries: “If it is a duty, if the hope can even be conceived, of
realizing, though by an endless progress, the reign of public
right––perpetual peace, which will succeed to the suspension of
hostilities, hitherto named treaties of peace, is not then a chimera,
but a problem, of which time, probably abridged by the uniformity of the
progress of the human mind, promises us the solution.”
Throughout
the nineteenth century international institutions were created to
realize this dream and lessen, if not eliminate, the savagery and
suffering of war. The First Geneva Convention in 1864 and the Second in
1906 sought to establish laws for the humane treatment of the sick and
wounded in war. The first Hague Convention in 1899 established an
international Court of Arbitration and codified restrictions on aerial
bombardment, poison gas, and exploding bullets. The preamble to the
first Hague Convention explicitly acknowledged its Kantian aims: “the
maintenance of the general peace” and the “friendly settlement of
international disputes” that both reflected the “solidarity which unites
the members of the society of civilized nations” and their shared
desire for “extending the empire of law, and of strengthening the
appreciation of international justice.” One wonders how such optimism
made sense of the Franco-Prussian War three decades earlier, when two of
the world’s most “civilized nations” suffered nearly a million
casualties, including 170,000 dead.
Even
after the industrialized carnage of World War I showed international
solidarity and universal progress to be a fantasy, the Versailles treaty
established the League of Nations, the transnational institution
intended to realize Kant’s dream of a “federation of free states” that
would keep the peace and promote global progress. But within a few years
the League had been exposed as ineffective, since the same sovereign
nations that had fought each other so brutally in the war continued to
pursue their zero-sum interests, frequently with force. No more
effective has been the United Nations, a “cockpit in the Tower of
Babel,” as Churchill feared it might become, that also has failed at its
foundational goal of maintaining peace, becoming instead an instrument
of the member-states’ nationalist interests, one that frequently
supplements and abets, rather than controls or limits state violence.
Familiarity
with the history of war should disabuse people of these Kantian
illusions. Studying the causes and nature of armed conflict reveals that
technological progress, better education and nutrition, global trade,
and increased prosperity has not eliminated or reduced wars, but often
made them more brutal and destructive. Military history teaches us that
war is not a distortion of a peace-loving human nature that not yet has
sufficiently progressed beyond such savage barbarism, but rather is a
reflection of a flawed human nature, and the necessary instrument for
states to protect their security and pursue their interests, whether
these are rational and good, or irrational and evil. The study of war,
in short, can remind us of the tragic wisdom evident on every page of
history: that humans are fallen creatures prone to destructive violence
that only righteous violence can check.
The
lessons we can learn from studying war, of course, are more numerous
than the few discussed here. Our judgment of any war, whether of its
origins or its conduct, must be based on the record of history rather
than the utopian fantasies of a world that will never exist. From the
standard of history, in any conflict we should always expect mistakes,
unforeseen consequences, civilian casualties, deaths from friendly fire,
barbarism, and cruelty. All of these contingencies can be found in
every war, including the so-called “good war,” World War II, from the
Market Garden disaster in September 1944 that cost the Allies 16,000
casualties, to the harvesting of gold teeth from the Japanese dead in
the South Pacific. These evils are the costs of using violence to defend
our security and interests, and should be expected, though never
condoned, the moment the decision to go to war has been made.
We
also should expect––particularly in constitutional states where
citizens are responsible for the decision to go to war––impatience,
second-guessing, and frustration with these unfortunately perennial
evils of armed conflict. And we should not be surprised when the
citizens want to punish the politicians and leaders who started and
managed the war. After news of the disaster in Sicily reached Athens,
Thucydides writes, the people “were angry with the orators who had
joined in promoting the expedition, just as if they had not themselves
voted it.” We recently experienced the same phenomenon during the Iraq
war in 2004, when many of the same Senators who had voted to invade Iraq
year earlier, a decision based on the same intelligence the Bush
administration had studied, responded to growing criticism of the war by
turning against it and attacking the president.
Leon
Trotsky allegedly said, “You may not believe in war, but war believes
in you.” Though likely a mistranslation, the sentiment is still
valuable. War and its horrors will always be with us, along with its
unavoidable suffering and cruelty, “such as have occurred and always
will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same,” as
Thucydides writes. And as long as we cherish our way of life, with its
freedom and human rights, its prosperity and its opportunity, we will at
times have to make the awful decision to send our citizens to fight,
kill, and die to defend those goods from those who want to destroy them.
The more we know about war, the better equipped we will be to make that
choice and see our efforts succeed.
by Bruce Thornton (Research
Fellow; W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow,
2009–10, 2010–11; and member, military history working group)
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