Putting War Into Perspective

U.S. military deaths in the Global War on Terror have surpassed the total number of Americans who perished in the 9/11 terrorist attacks—over 4,500 Americans killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. But while this is a grim reminder of the horrific human costs of this conflict, it might help Americans and members of the media to temper talks of “quagmire” or hopelessness if they can regain their “historic memory” to better frame this war, and modern warfare in general, into proper perspective.

War is hell. Nobody can, or should, minimize that. And you don’t need to have experienced it firsthand to understand its brutality and misery. While some things never change, like the rough going of the footslogging infantry, advances in technology, medicine, and international law have mitigated some harsher aspects of battle when compared to the bloody meat grinders of World Wars I and II. While this idea may not be any comfort to a Marine under fire in Afghanistan, one can vicariously try to understand the vast differences between a “quagmire” of twentieth century war and what current politicians term a “quagmire” today. Trust this: few current military personnel or politicians have a thorough comprehension of what a real “quagmire” is.

Over 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq over a five-year period? That’s reprehensible. The loss of any U.S. soldier, sailor, or Marine is tragic. But in World War II, 4,000 Americans would have been killed in one battle, over several days! One thousand Marines were killed on the first day of Tarawa in 1943. In World War II, over 2,000 Americans were killed on Omaha and Utah Beaches in Normandy, France, on D-Day in a 24-hour period. In the month-long Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45, 16,000 Americans were killed in action. In the first day of the Battle of the Somme in France in World War I, the British Army lost over 50,000 men killed, wounded, and missing!

Unlike today, where newspapers print the death toll in Iraq almost daily, reminding us of the loss of our countrymen, in the two World Wars the media hardly bothered. Imagine reading The New York Times in 1945: “4,000 Americans were killed today…” Keeping our losses out of the media, which was easier in those decades due to a more limited communication system prevented Americans from being up in arms regarding the horrible toll of fighting for democracy.

One can only imagine how the world would be different if today’s media machine—faxes, Internet, cell phones, and all—had existed in World War II. Picture CNN covering the destruction of an entire American Army in the Philippines in 1942, as General MacArthur barely escaped with his life. Or imagine imbedded reporters with the green and ill-fated 106th Infantry Division in the first days of the Battle of the Bulge, a unit that was quickly destroyed by the Germans. Talk about quagmires! How would Anderson Cooper have covered General Mark Clark’s Italian Campaign of 1944-45, a bitter, hard-fought struggle in which Clark was all but told that he would never be given enough “boots on the ground” to “win,” but only enough to pin down as many German divisions as he could, so that Hitler would have them unavailable for use in Eastern Europe or France? Would Americans at home been able to stomach these disasters or the high casualties involved if they could see it on TV every night?

And what of the ancillary tragedies of war that shock the human consciousness: civilian casualties, friendly fire, and atrocities? We’ve seen isolated incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan—Haditha, Pat Tillman and Abu Ghraib come to mind—but keep in mind, that today’s military forces, for the most part, do as much as they can to keep civilians out of harm’s way. In World War II, targeting civilian centers was part of the “total war” package. Neither the Axis Powers nor the Allies had many qualms about destroying entire cities, many of which had little military value. And friendly fire incidents involving artillery or air strikes, as well as training accidents, sometimes killed over a hundred Americans at a time between 1942-45.

We get rightly shocked and outraged when we hear that an Iraqi mother and child are killed, inadvertently, when the car they are riding in fails to stop at a designated checkpoint and is fired upon. A Marine who is put on trial for possibly killing an unarmed and wounded Iraqi insurgent makes newspaper headlines, but few Americans remember the real atrocities from the European and Asian killing fields in the 20th century: the Rape of Nanking, Malmedy, or even the liberation of some of Nazi Germany’s worst death camps. In one instance, U.S. troops machine-gunned to death over a hundred lined-up and unarmed SS guards. Does the fact that they were SS butchers who had aided and abetted in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews and designated “undesirables” make it less of an atrocity?

Yes, war is hell, but it could be worse. We have seen world war, genocide, the Holocaust, and atomic obliteration. We have come close to nuclear Armageddon. Thankfully, whether we have meant to or not, we have progressed to the point that through collective international bodies and tribunals, modern technological advances, peace activists and movements, the media and the internet, and our own moral endeavors, we will never again (we hope) see the massive death and destruction that we witnessed in the early half of the 20th Century.

So let’s keep things in perspective (and keep our fingers crossed).