Memorial Day (3): Technology, stupidity and the Great War

John Kenneth Galbraith has written quite a bit about war.  In The Culture of Contentment (1992), he wrote of the Great War:

World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter.

In The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Galbraith surveyed various causes leading up to the slaughter we now know as the First World War.  Among them he included the following;

There was a final consideration, one that it is always thought a trifle pretentious to stress.  Rulers in Germany and Eastern Europe, generals in all countries, held their jobs by right of family and tradition.  If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.  Nor is its absence likely to be a disqualification.  On the contrary, intelligence is a threat to those who do not possess it, and there is a strong case, therefore, for excluding those who do possess it.  This was the tendency in 1914.  In consequence, both the rulers and the generals in World War I were singularly brainless men.

None was capable of thought on what war would mean for his class - for the social order that was so greatly in his favor.  There had always been war.  Rulers had been obliterated.  The ruling classes had always survived.  To the extent that there was thought on the social consequences of war, this was what was believed.

He observes further that this stupidity problem combined in a deadly way with the new technology of the machine gun:

Supporting this unlimited capacity to kill was the limited capacity for thought. Adaptation of tactics was far beyond the capacity of the contemporary military mind. The hereditary generals and their staffs could think of nothing better than to send increasing numbers of men, erect, under heavy burden, at a slow pace, in broad daylight, against the machine guns after increasingly heavy artillery bombardment. This bombardment the machine guns, enough of them, invariably survived. It did, however, eliminate all element of surprise. So the men who were sent were mowed down, and the mowing, it must be stressed, is no figure of speech. The political leaders, for their part, could think of nothing better than to trust the generals. Thus the continuing, unimaginable slaughter.

As an example of the horrors that war produced, he describes part of the Battle of the Somme:

On D-day in 1944, the great decisive day of that war in the West, 2491 American, British and Canadian soldiers were killed. On July 1, 1916, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme — but one day in one battle — 19,240 British soldiers were killed or died of wounds. To liberate France in 1944 cost all of the Allied armies around 40,000 dead. For a gain of under six miles on the Somme in 1916, British and French deaths were an estimated 145,000. The Battle of the Somme was partly to relieve pressure on Verdun — a disputed point. At Verdun, within that same year, 270,000 French and German soldiers were killed. ...

On the first day of the Somme, from trenches and over shell holes that you still can see, the First Newfoundland Regiment attacked, against the German machine guns and artillery and against barbed wire that was largely intact. The Germans beyond were admirably sheltered in a deep natural ravine served by a railroad. They had been amply warned by the preparations and the premature explosion of a large mine near their lines. (They promptly occupied the crater.) Because the attack had been programmed to succeed quickly, there was not only no surprise but this time no artillery support. Within forty minutes, 658 men and 26 officers were dead, wounded or missing. That was 91 percent of the entire attacking force. All the officers were casualties. The survivors were then calmly ordered to regroup and attack again. The order was rescinded only when the higher command discovered there were almost none. The signs on the battlefield say "Newfoundland Lines," "German Lines." The result was much as though the Crown Colony of Newfoundland had made war on the whole German Empire.

And what is left now of all the patriotic themes from that war, and the promises to spread freedom and to end all wars?  As Galbraith says, the "Great War" is now mostly remembered as "a mindless and pointless slaughter."  And, for the most part, that's exactly what it was.