11/11/13 – Adam Hochschild – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
It's Armistice Day 2013, the day we celebrate the end of the First World War.
Veterans Day 95 years on is the title at TomDispatch.com, the war to begin all wars.
And it's the spotlight article today on AntiWar.com as well.
And you know how they do it with Tom Dispatch articles.
He always has kind of a mini introductory essay.
And then the other essay follows below with its own title.
In this case, it's The Enduring Folly of the Battle of the Somme by Adam Hochschild and with illustrations by Joe Sacco.
Welcome to the show, Adam.
How are you doing?
Good to be with you, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you on the show here.
And I guess, let me ask you, first of all, to tell us about the illustrations by Joe Sacco before we get into the story of the Battle of the Somme here.
Yeah, well, it was an honor for me to be asked to collaborate on this project with Joe Sacco.
Joe Sacco, as I'm sure some of your listeners know, is really one of America's great political cartoonists.
You're perhaps familiar with the books he's done on the war in the Balkans, on Palestine, on American inner cities.
A great, great political cartoonist.
And he, like me and many other people, has been long fascinated with the Battle of the Somme, which was one of the pivotal battles of World War I, and in many ways sort of epitomizes the folly of that entire war.
And in this new book that he's done, the artwork that he's done is a 24-foot-long accordion-style foldout where he tells, without words, in pictures, the story of that extraordinary battle.
One panel just easing into another with beautiful transitions, and you see the whole thing, the hopes, the buildup, the immense destructiveness.
And then to go with it, they took several thousand words of text that I wrote for a book of mine about the First World War, To End All Wars, which came out about two years ago.
And that's accompanying Joe's remarkable illustrations.
Great.
All right.
So, well, you know, World War I, that's the one nobody knows anything about, except that it caused World War II.
Even if they don't know how it caused World War II, it's kind of widely regarded as Chapter One.
So, you know, I don't know how far you want to get into all of that, but it seems like it probably makes sense to try to set up the alliance system a little bit here, and then take us, you know, so we can understand what were the Brits doing in the first place, massing this gigantic army to attempt?
What were they trying to do here?
What was the big deal?
Why were they at war with the Germans in the first place?
Well, you know, the strange and fascinating thing about World War I is that it doesn't have the same kind of direct and obvious causes that so many other wars do.
There was some tension among the major powers of Europe.
There was a military alliance between France, Britain, and Tsarist Russia.
On one side, there was a military alliance whose principal members were Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the other side.
But neither side was claiming overtly any piece of the other's territory.
They were all getting along rather well.
The members of the royal families of these countries were all cousins and used to go on holidays together.
Britain and Germany were each other's largest trading partners, so that a lot of the usual causes for war were absent.
But there were a couple of things that made Europe a dangerous tinderbox.
One was that there was this alliance system, as I said, the principles being Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side and Britain, France, and Russia on the other, which guaranteed that if one country got sucked into a war, the others in its alliance would also follow.
That was one dangerous thing.
The other thing had to do with the nature of war at that time, which is that these countries did not have huge standing armies.
They had a relatively small standing army and then a large number of reserves.
Men who had had military training, been in the army for two or three years, had to be mobilized and called up from their civilian occupations before you could really begin a war.
Now, in that kind of situation, where it takes several weeks to fully mobilize an army, and especially in a huge and creaky old empire like Russia, where it took really five or six weeks to do it, if you could start mobilizing before the other guy did, it gave you an enormous advantage.
That was also something that accelerated the movement to war.
Finally, the nature of warfare was such that in those days, if you could attack first, you had an advantage because it meant that the fighting would take place on the other country's soil and not your own.
These were all factors that accelerated the rush to war after the precipitating incident of the famous assassination of the Archduke at Sarajevo.
There's the great railway to Germany here.
I forgot if it was you or Tom that mentioned it in the essay, the Berlin-Bagdad railway that was going to...
I forget if it was supposed to go all the way to Basra, but I remember learning somewhere that the Battle of Basra was really the first battle of the First World War.
Is that right?
I'm not sure you could call it that, but it certainly is true that projects like the Berlin-Bagdad railroad really upset the British, who felt they were the ones who should own and control the Middle East.
They didn't want the Turks and the Germans muscling their way in there, because all of these countries were jealous of each other's colonial possessions.
In fact, as soon as the war began, they began planning which of the other side's colonies they would seize if they were victorious.
The Germans, who had colonies scattered around Africa but they were not contiguous with each other, wanted to create what they called Mittelafrika, which would be a band of German-owned territory that would stretch from the east to the west coast.
The British had their eyes on German colonies in Africa and actually set up a cabinet-level committee during the war called the Territorial Desiderata Committee, mapping out just which territories they would seize at the end and from whom.
This is what happened when the war was over.
The victors, who were mainly Britain and France, seized Germany's colonies.
Ostensibly, they were being administered under a mandate from the League of Nations, but in fact, they were, for all intents and purposes, becoming British and French territory.
Part of this, I guess, about the battles in Europe, especially between the British and French versus the Germans on the eastern front, would be the false confidence that all these different, I guess you could call them, first world armies had.
Since they'd been fighting all natives with sticks in Africa and in Asia and things like that lately, they hadn't really ever had to deal with mechanized armies like their own, which I guess it was just at the dawn of mechanization like that anyway.
So, they're trying to fight the last war with horses against modern machine guns and that kind of deal.
So, it was just a slaughter all the way around.
That's true.
I mean, they always say generals fight the last war, and to an amazing extent, that is true.
In this case, when you look at Europe in 1914, the last war for England, France, and Germany was a series of small colonial wars in Africa and in Asia.
And in these various colonial wars, long since forgotten now, British and French and German troops were victorious with very little trouble on their part because they had repeating rifles, machine guns, mobile artillery, important pieces of technology of transportation like the steamboat, and the Africans and Indians and Asians whom they were fighting had almost none of these things.
So, the machine gun, for example, had been around for decades, but the Brits and the French and the Germans all thought of it as a weapon to be used against Africans or rebellious tribesmen on the Indian frontier or whatever.
And none of their planning really took into account the fact that if a war began in Europe, it would not be just you, but also the other side that would have machine guns.
And, you know, in the opening battles especially, they fought them as if the other side didn't have machine guns.
And of course, this was an enormously destructive weapon where, you know, firing 500 bullets a minute can kill a lot of people.
Yeah, well, and it's amazing too, and I guess it's sort of, you could get all into public choice economics or whatever about the decisions that the officers make to continue on what they can tell at their very first try is a bad policy.
Like, jeez, you would think that any person, I guess, all things being equal without higher commanding officers and the things that they're insisting on, would say, well, jeez, I just tried to dump 10,000 men on a series of machine gun nests and it didn't work.
I should try something else.
Maybe go back to artillery for a little while, see if I can take the nest out and then try again.
But no, we'll just keep dumping them by the tens of thousands on the same machine gun nests that they cannot get to and cannot defeat.
It's incredible.
It is incredible.
And for much of the war, that's what happened.
You know, the standard method of attack, and this was used by the British and the French, and we're talking the first three years of the war here, the first three and a half years of the war used by the British and French, and on a smaller scale by the Germans, usually in counterattacks, was, you know, you pounded away at the other side with artillery for several days, or maybe even a week, or maybe two weeks, dropping hundreds of thousands of artillery shells.
And then men went over the top, as they said, climbed out of the trenches and marched forward across no man's land, under orders not to crawl, not to kneel, but to stand up, almost as if to make it easier for the enemy machine gunners to hit them.
Because the machine gun nests on the other side had usually not been knocked out.
These were very tough emplacements built out of concrete and stone and steel.
And unless there was a direct hit by an artillery shell, which was extremely rare when they were shooting these shells from, you know, three, four, five miles away, the machine gun nest was still there.
So, you know, month after month, year after year, the soldiers marched into this murderous fire.
The only change of tactics came in the very last year of the war when the Germans developed the stormtrooper method of attack.
So instead of doing this human waves, they infiltrated small groups of soldiers, you know, in places where they weren't expected, and that helped enable them to make a big breakthrough.
But by that point, the German army was was virtually exhausted.
How many people died in this thing?
Okay, in World War One, the best estimate is that the number of military deaths, soldiers killed in battle or dying of wounds was a little over 9 million.
Civilian casualties somewhat larger than that, perhaps 10 to 12 million.
Nobody has very precise figures on that, because some of the countries doing the tabulating, you know, Russia, for example, or Austria-Hungary have dissolved in complete chaos by the war's end.
But we forget that this was also the first war in Europe where the targets were civilian as well as military.
German submarines were trying to sink ships carrying food to Britain and France and Italy.
The British Navy was blockading Germany trying to prevent any food from reaching Germany and were quite effective in doing so.
The average German civilian lost 20% of his or her body weight during the war.
Yeah, actually, we just in context of Iran, but we we talked with Andrew Coburn on the show a little while ago about that.
And that's where his story starts is the blockade of Germany and how from the interests of the men who are in charge of implementing the blockade, they had just gotten the entire system perfected right at the end of the war.
And they that's what they call the perfect instrument.
And so they didn't want to give up their perfect little blockade bureaucracy that they had created.
And so they just kept it for another year.
Kept it well, I kept it going for another six or seven months, until the Germans signed the Treaty of Versailles.
So in a sense, the war continued to be waged against German and Austro-Hungarian civilians.
Even after the armistice brought the actual military fighting to an end.
Oh, I thought they had kept it even longer than that.
I don't think so.
I think they they lifted the blockade when the Germans signed the Treaty of Versailles.
Well, anyway, so the thing about the the civilian dead and the and the refusal of the officers to to change the strategy, even I guess you say the French and the British never did change their strategy at all.
Only the Germans did.
Not really.
The Germans finally did after nearly four years of fighting.
But as I say, the German army had been so worn down at that point, soldiers were, you know, their principal diet was horse meat and nettles.
And when the change of German strategy enabled the German army to advance quite far into France in early 1918, one of the things that slowed down the advance was that the German soldiers came across Allied supply depots filled with, you know, canned food and meat and all kinds of things that they hadn't seen for months or years.
And they, you know, stopped advancing and gorged themselves on this stuff.
But the British and French never really changed their their their tactics in a big way.
It's interesting what a human life is worth to an officer in circumstance like that.
Colonel Cathcart in Catch-22, right?
It's been many years since I've read it.
But the whole thing where, oh, yes, sir, can do says the lieutenant to his commanding officer, but can do means his men are happy to volunteer to raise their number of missions by another 10 or whatever it is.
Now, I'm perfectly happy to volunteer other people to go and die, risk themselves anyway.
That's true.
Although one of the things that endlessly fascinates me about the First World War, and that I spent quite a lot of time talking about in my book, To End All Wars, is that unlike most wars, where it's the poor who do the dying, the officer class and the aristocracy in this war, because being an officer in the armies of Europe at that time was was something for aristocrats and upper class people.
They suffered disproportionately, uh, you know, of the British soldiers who fought in the First World War, if I'm remembering the statistics correctly, something like 11% were killed of officers was 19% of men who graduated from Oxford in 1914, it was almost 30%.
You know, for peers and sons of peers, it was again, above average, because it was these officers, young captains and lieutenants, who led their men out of the trenches and into this, you know, hail of machine gunfire.
And just to make things a little easier for the German soldiers, officers wore special uniforms where they were distinguished by the fact that they carried a side guard sidearm instead of a rifle and had a different kind of belt and so forth.
So there was a kind of a self destructiveness by this officer class, as well as you know, the as well as destroying the lives of their men, and an extraordinary number of sons of the top generals and politicians of the war, you know, were killed in the war, Prime Minister Raskwith of Britain lost a son in the war, so did the Chancellor of Germany, the Chief General on the Western Front for Germany, General Ludendorff lost two stepsons, the British Army Chief of Staff on the Western Front lost two sons, his French counterpart lost three sons.
So these people were sending their own sons into this, this terrible destructiveness.
That's what I think gives the war this haunting.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I didn't know that.
But I guess it goes along sort of what you're saying, almost where there's just a denial about the way the war is being fought.
Everybody is still fighting the imaginary war that they think is going to happen all the honor and valor and horses on their hind legs and all of this kind of stuff, you know.
Now on the Battle of the Somme, this is in northern France.
And how many actually went into battle on either side?
And how many died in what time span here?
Because it's just amazing when you hear this.
Let's set the scene a bit.
And I think you can see why this battle has become sort of emblematic of the folly of the entire war.
It began July 1, 1916.
And it came after, you know, for nearly two years, the armies on the Western Front, German on one side, British and French primarily on the other, had been pretty much frozen in place in this system of trenches that made a line across northern France and a little corner of Belgium.
And in 1915, for example, the previous year, something like a million men had been killed or wounded, and the Allies had gained only eight square miles of ground.
So the armies were frozen in place, dug into these trench systems.
And the British decided, okay, we're really going to have a big breakthrough, we're going to hit the Germans on this one sector of the front with the largest artillery barrage ever seen.
So, you know, thousands of guns fired more than a million shells over the course of a week.
And then the plan was 120,000 soldiers would climb out of their trenches and charge through the German lines, which would, of course, be completely pulverized by all this artillery, charge through the lines, open a big gap, the cavalry would charge, you know, gloriously through the gap.
You know, you can't have a war without cavalry, of course, because they've been around for thousands of years.
And this would be the big breakthrough.
Well, what happened is they fired all these artillery shells.
And if you've ever seen documentary movies of World War One, you've seen these spectacular geysers of earth thrown into the air when an artillery shell lands.
Well, that's mostly what they do.
The shells landed, they threw geysers of earth into the air.
And it didn't accomplish much except that unless the shell was lucky enough to land directly on a German machine gun nest of which there were about 1000 in this stretch of front a dozen or so miles long.
And that's very hard to do when the guns are firing from several miles back of the line.
So very few of these 1000 German machine gun nests built, as I said, out of steel and concrete and stone were hit by shells.
The 120,000 British soldiers climbed out of their trenches marched forward and just got mowed down by the German machine guns.
By the end of the day, 57,000 nearly half of those 120,000 were killed or wounded, most of them in the first hour of the battle.
21,000 either were killed on the spot or died of their wounds.
The remainder were wounded, many of them really seriously.
And it was just a disaster.
It didn't stop the British general in charge General Haig from claiming that there was a big victory or from continuing the battle for another, you know, three or four months.
Finally, only the the intense rain of winter brought it to a stop and the army had gained maybe a dozen miles at that point.
You're saying that the general the British general in charge was declaring victory and and really just going on for his own sake?
Absolutely.
I mean, uh, one of the things about the about this war is that generals on both sides always claimed victory.
You know, the following year in 1918, the Kaiser proclaimed a national holiday celebrating the victory of the German troops as they got closer to Paris.
And it was only a couple months after that that they surrendered.
You could claim victory because you had no idea how many people on the other side had been killed.
And if British casualties were, you know, 20,000 or whatever you could say, you know, estimated German casualties were double that or triple that.
There was no way of telling.
And the generals really ran the war.
The civilian politicians, both in Britain and in Germany, had very little control over them.
Hmm.
And I guess, yeah, I mean, you could imagine some younger general, maybe even, you know, the right hand man of the general, even trying or wanting to say, but hey, you know, they do have machine guns.
So maybe we could rethink this.
But it's just all the personal pressure and the personal relationships among all these men in charge prevent that kind of rethinking.
It's true.
And then you have to ask the question, where would the rethinking lead if the rethinking was, you know, hey, wait a minute.
The Germans have all these machine guns pointed at us.
We can't knock them out with artillery shells.
Maybe the thing is not to attack after all.
The next step is to say, maybe we shouldn't be fighting this war after all.
Maybe we should sit down and make peace.
But that was far too subversive an idea for any general to risk his neck, you know, contemplating or voicing.
Hey, how about just wire clippers for every captain?
They're all hung up in the razor wire.
Well, they had wire clippers.
There was no shortage of them.
Oh, that's good, at least.
But, you know, the problem is once you start questioning the tactics, it takes you very quickly to questioning, you know, is this war winnable at all?
And no general dared raise that subject.
Although I think one of the things that I would like us to remember when we remember the First World War is that there were a lot of people who took that position.
And in my book, To End All Wars, I tried to retell the story of the war, not as a battle between two sides, but as a battle story of a battle between people who thought the war was a noble and necessary crusade, and people who thought it was absolute madness on all sides worth the risk of all these lives.
And there were such people on both sides, they were jailed for their opinions.
I focused in what I wrote on those in Britain, where the anti-war movement was strongest, it wasn't enough to prevail.
But 20,000 young men in Britain refused to allow themselves to be drafted.
And as a matter of principle, many of them also refused the alternative service that was offered for conscientious objectors, you know, driving an ambulance or working in a war factory.
And some 6,000 of them went to jail.
Well, that really is impressive.
But then again, they were faced with, you know, all the boys older than them from their same town are all dead now and never coming home.
So you can see why they'd be pretty motivated to push back.
You know, I think about the history, I mean, it's before my time, but I'm much more familiar with the Americans pushing back during Vietnam.
And you're talking about Vietnam level casualties, 56,000 guys, 58,000 guys dead in a day.
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
Put it put it in that perspective.
You know, all of America's side of the casualties of Vietnam war in a day.
Amazing.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time.
I sure appreciate it.
Good.
A pleasure being with you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is Adam Hochschild.
He's got this piece.
It's a spotlight today.
Antiwar dot com Veterans Day.
Ninety five years on.
It's under Tom Englehardt's name there.
And he's the author of To End All Wars, a story of loyalty and rebellion, 1914 through 18.
Hey, all Scott here, man.
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