Unless you are a U.S. history buff you probably missed a remarkable date last week: the 150th anniversary of the burning of Atlanta during the Civil War. Although the destruction of the city was neither as organized, nor extensive, as myth has made it out to be, the atrocity became an important part of our history by becoming the opening act in the denouement of both the war and the Old South’s pretensions to independence. In the campaign that followed, the Union armies, led by Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, tore out the guts of Southern resistance by practicing a form of total war that had only before been visited upon the continent’s native inhabitants.
Farms, railroads, factories — anything along Sherman’s line of advance from Atlanta to the Atlantic coast port of Savannah and then up from there into to the Carolinas was effectively destroyed and put to the torch. It was terrible and by all accounts the assorted inhumanities carried out along the way were war crimes as we now define them: the more or less deliberate targeting of non-combatants by military forces that showed little in the way of mercy for the South’s civilians. Indeed, when Atlanta’s city fathers begged Sherman to spare them the full wrath of his armies, he replied that, “War is cruelty,” and the crueler it is, the sooner it ends.
Sherman was probably right. Although the South was on its last legs by then, the potential for sustained conflict passed the point at which the rebels’ final surrender was very conceivable. If, for instance, Sherman had not acted as brutally as he did by marching through the heart of Georgia and then up through the Carolinas toward the deadlocked Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in Virginia, then it is possible the war could have dragged on through most of another year or more as Sherman slowly took and held territory in a conventional advance that ate up time and resources he could ill afford to lose. Southern defeat was inevitable, true, but the final butcher’s bill would have been much greater the longer the war persisted.
“War is hell”
This cold logic is an unfortunate one. In today’s era of televised war in which surgical strikes, collateral damage and “boots on the ground” are comfortable euphemisms for things we would rather not know more about, the idea that winning wars takes massive amounts of bloodshed, liberally applied, is not something we are proud of or would like to acknowledge. In World War II, for instance, few acknowledge that it was the stated policy of the U.S. government to burn down Japanese and German cities from the air via firebombing. In one night in early 1945, for instance, the U.S. killed 100,000 Japanese men, women and children when we firebombed Tokyo — an event constituting one of the greatest atrocities of that entire war.
Fast forward a few years to the Korean War, when the U.S. actually used more ordinances on North Korean population centers than it did during the war against Japan just a few years earlier. By all accounts the bombing of North Korea leveled or put to the torch nearly every building north of the 38th parallel and south of the Yalu River. U.S. POWs held in the north who saw the bombing reported that most every population center they ever saw was reduced to rubble. Curtis LeMay, the man in charge of bombing both Japan and North Korea, essentially confirmed these reports, saying, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”
These aerial atrocities were then multiplied even further during the Vietnam War, when it became more or less official policy in many areas of the country to, as historian Nick Turse puts it, “kill anything that moves.” This entailed not only the wholesale and fruitless bombing of North Vietnam by godlike and remorseless U.S. airpower, but the systematic use of free-fire zones in areas of South Vietnam where civilians were routinely shot down and blown apart as if they were enemy combatants. Although the movie “Full Metal Jacket” may have taken some liberties in depicting the war, the famous scene of a crazed helicopter door gunner mowing down defenseless peasant farmers is far more close to the truth than many in this country would like to admit. Massacre, officially sanctioned or otherwise, was what the war was.
The point of this litany of horrors is not to condemn the U.S. as an inherently insidious great power, but to point out that war — to once again quote Sherman — is hell. Violence and atrocity is part and parcel of it, and no matter how hard we try to deny its reality, it sneaks up on us to remind us just what it is. War is by its nature a crime — an abrogation of normal law and moral concern in a battle for survival in which literally no holds are barred. It’s a cliché, yes, but like most clichés it has an element of uncomfortable truth to it we would rather not admit. War is about making the other guy die for his country, not dying in adherence to principles for your country. War is terrible precisely because of its totality in determining the fates of its winners and losers. When everything is at stake, it is assured that innocents will be nailed to some.
This is why as America moves closer to committing more troops to Iraq and Syria we should think very carefully about just what we are getting into.
“It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization!”
The recent war in Afghanistan and the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 turned into such colossal failures precisely because we didn’t understand our enemy or think out what we wanted to achieve. Even a recently published testimonial by a U.S. general who was there admits as much, saying in an interview that “success” — itself a problematic term — would have required an imperial mindset which envisioned America staying, in force, for 100 years. Instead, what we got was obfuscation and incompetence as the Pentagon and official Washington forced a division’s worth of advisors to do what a corps could not or would not.
This is ultimately where the true immorality of what we are doing now in the Middle East becomes apparent. The immorality of a given war or military action is not purely defined by how many people die or in what way. Sherman burned Atlanta, after all, but by all accounts should be reckoned a hero because the South, which was fighting for slavery, surrendered more quickly because of his calculated cruelty. Likewise, when the Allies turned Dresden into a charnel house during World War II, one should remember that they were fighting a regime that packed people into gas chambers and planned to enslave all of Europe. No, what matters is not that one decides to engage in crime and atrocity, since war by definition is both, but that their employment can actually achieve results.
Even Sherman, the great originator of the American way of total war, understood this. In a letter to a Southern friend as secession fever was running high after Lincoln’s election, he wrote:
“You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.”
Of all the Civil War generals, Sherman knew precisely what war was and what it took to win. The South and its people were engaging in something that, by his reckoning, they could not hope to win. Their error was thus not war, per se, but war in a situation that was for the most part hopeless. They did not understand, as he did, the sheer amount of death and horror it would take to win if one was determined to do so. Indeed, Sherman was perfectly willing to go to almost any lengths to ensure victory for the North. In one chilling letter dispatched to a subordinate in January 1864, he declared that if the people of the South wanted “eternal war,” he would gladly give it to them:
“We accept the issue, and will dispossess them and put our friends in their place. I know thousands and millions of good people who at simple notice would come to North Alabama and accept the elegant houses and plantations there. If the people of Huntsville think different, let them persist in war three years longer, and then they will not be consulted. Three years ago by a little reflection and patience they could have had a hundred years of peace and prosperity, but they preferred war; very well. Last year they could have saved their slaves, but now it is too late.
All the powers of earth cannot restore to them their slaves, any more than their dead grandfathers. Next year their lands will be taken, for in war we can take them, and rightfully, too, and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives. A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.”
Fortunately, Sherman never had to carry out this threat to physically eradicate America’s rebellious white Southerners, but his cold declaration that he was prepared to do so, if necessary, should give us pause.
“War is cruelty”
What would Sherman, burner of cities and a would-be génocidaire, say about our adventures in the Middle East today? Is our cause worthy enough to justify committing ourselves even further to this region? Is our strategy and the resources we are willing to commit to it likely to lead to success? And if not, just what are we prepared to do in order to ensure that success?
How much suffering, how much death, are we prepared to impose in order to “win?” Shall we kill 20,000 people? 100,000? 1,000,000?
The lesson of Sherman and Atlanta for us today is that war is cruelty, but what is worse cruelty is applying the horrors of war incompetently and half-heartedly for a cause that is never likely to succeed in the first place. Indeed, in Sherman’s view that is the worst possible thing, something far worse than the mere immorality of war. It is a mistake. Having made so many mistakes in the Middle East of late, perhaps we should avoid the next one while we still can or accept, with eyes wide open, what we will need to do in order to “win.”