For four years, mostly along a line that ran across Belgium, Luxemburg, and France from the Channel to the Swiss border, an incessant roar of artillery and staccato chatter of machine guns had filled the air. From any listening point along that line the din of war was rarely ever squelched.
Now, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month -- 11 A.M. on the 11th of November, 1918 -- the only sound along the front was a ragged cheer from men long at war finally at peace.
The Great War was over -- the fighting ceased by an armistice later codified by a treaty of peace. However, the pain and suffering, political disorder, and technological change wrought by the conflict would endure for, and impact, generations.
The war had literally bled white an entire generation of European men. Apocryphal, yet telling, is the belief that of the plaques honoring the war dead of each graduating class at the French military academy Saint Cyr, there is one that simply says "The Class of 1914." (In reality, only three quarters of the class died in the WWI; but, that is, in itself, emblematic.)
The horrors of this first "modern" war defy comprehension. The slaughter wrought by the mismatch of ploddingly antiquated battlefield doctrine and galloping technological advances boggles the mind. Nearly 11 million soldiers (and half that number of civilians) died. Life in the trenchworks was a horrid existence -- vermin and disease sat to a soldier's left, death by shrapnel or gas to his right. To leave the trenches and assault forward meant crossing ground churned by shell and swept by machine gun fire. Advances were often measured in mere yards. Casualties dwarfed any previous war's toll.
The killing fields of France, scarred still by the detritus and designs of war, were sown with seeds of monstrous destruction from which sprouted literal death and maiming for years to come. Mines, unexploded shells (many filled with poisonous gas), and barbed wire entanglements continued to claim victims for decades after the fighting ceased.
Even the 1919 Treaty of Versailles -- the treaty of peace forced on a politically, if not militarily, shattered Germany by the victorious Allies -- contained its own clutch of eggs in which poisonous offspring incubated in the heat of national humiliation, and from which slithered serpents of deception and destruction to wreak even greater pain and suffering on future generations.
The world of 1919 was a place much different than it had been in 1914. Empires, whose hereditary monarchs once ruled far-flung colonial possessions and commanded respect and admiration on the world stage, now lay headless and shrunken corpses in the back-alleys of history. In their place, upstart empires led by commoners stoking the flames of ideology (democracy, socialism, nationalist socialism, and militant religious nationalism) flexed their newly fledged wings and flew about picking over the abandoned territories like so many buzzards over carrion. From this witches' brew of humiliation and populism, new, more deadly, conflicts arose.
Many of the military strategists who fought in the Great War (Pershing and his Operations Chief -- Fox Conner; one of the Colonel's military heroes -- prominent among them) saw clearly the certain future world war. Pershing and Conner had argued in late 1918, as the German army retreated from the Allied offensive made possible by American reinforcements, and the German people recoiled in revolution at the great slaughter, that the "unconditional surrender" of the German army should be demanded; but, the Allied supreme command (French) considered unconditional surrender by the Germans unrealistic. The Allied offensive was reclaiming ground held by the German army since the beginning of the war, but the German army was still very much an effective fighting force. As the toll of the war mounted on the German people, revolution brewed. Kaiser Wilhem, support lost among both his people and the army, finally abdicated on 9 November. The new German regime immediately sued the Allies for an armistice. Half a year later, the civilian leaders of the victorious powers -- France, Great Britain, the United States, and Italy -- wrought (and forced on Germany) not just a treaty of peace, but a severe punishment that included devastating reparations, humiliating territorial concessions (Japan got Germany's colonies in China and the Pacific -- setting the stage for a future war in the Pacific), and unrealistic military limitations.
Pershing and Conner opposed the harsh punishments imposed on Germany by the Allies in the Treaty of Versaille. Conner saw clearly that the humiliation of who he considered "the strongest people" in Europe would blowback with another even larger war as a result. Over the next two decades, Conner made it a point to prepare his proteges (Marshall, Eisenhower, and Patton, among many others) for the coming second world war he was certain would spring from the stipulations of the treaty.
America -- never keen to enter the war in Europe -- quickly settled back into isolationism; and worse, unpreparedness. In Fox Conner's mid 1920's assignment in charge of the U.S. Army's logistics, he was appalled to find that the Army's entire budget for one year was less than what was spent to keep the AEF in the field for one week. Ammunition stocks were aging and dwindling at an alarming rate. The Army's manning dropped precipitously in the twenties and thirties -- to less than a third the number that Pershing and Conner considered the minimum to keep a nucleus of prepared forces to meet the next threat and train a rapidly swelling wartime force.
(Such unpreparedness was, unfortunately, an American habit. When the United States declared war on Spain in 1898, it had a relatively modern and effective navy; but the American army was miniscule. The Spanish army in Cuba dwarfed the standing American army -- Spain had nearly 200,000 men in Cuba, armed with modern weapons. In order to invade and "liberate" Cuba, a volunteer army was quickly raised. Fortunately, Spain quickly grew tired of the fight and sued for an armistice -- although its main force in Cuba was still effective. The Colonel believes that had Spain really wanted to hold on to Cuba, and its other Caribbean territory, Puerto Rico, it could have easily done so -- within a half dozen weeks of landing on Cuba, tropical diseases had swept the American invasion force and reduced its fighting efficiency by 75%.)
Clauswitz, one of history's most profound students of the nature of war, maintained that war was not a failure of politics and diplomacy, but was itself an extreme extension of those interstate activities. By logical extension, preparedness for war strengthens a nation's diplomatic hand. America's ability to exercise the influence in world affairs won by great sacrifice in 1918 was squandered by myopic populist politicians and nearly nonexistent a decade later.
Of the lessons of war Conner's mentorship imparted on the generation of military leaders that saw America and her allies through to victory in the next great war, the maxim that while weapons, doctrine, terrain, and weather change -- human nature does not, is perhaps the most salient. Conner taught this maxim to prepare Marshall and Eisenhower to expertly conduct the coalition-building required to make many allied nations fight as one. While that was indeed the competency that Marshall and Eisenhower needed most, there is a greater, big picture lesson for our Republic.
War is the one certain constant in the nature of man. Denial of this fact places a nation at existential risk. Peace is ephemeral -- out of humanity's grasp by God's design. But, freedom and relative security is attainable -- at cost.
Ninety-nine years ago the guns fell silent. The Colonel's maternal grandfather was one of a million American fighting men whose voices joined the chorus of cheers that swept the lines at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. The sacrifice those men -- and those like them in generations before and after -- laid on the altar of freedom must be remembered. It also must animate us to internalize and apply the lessons of war.
There is no more fitting tribute to an American veteran than to earn, through respect and preparedness, the freedom and security for which they fought.
No comments:
Post a Comment