Uniqueness in historical violence

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot lately about the World Wars. When I say “lately,” I mean for the past year. I’ve read almost nothing else. Until you’ve spent some serious time studying them, you have no idea of their scale. They were bloody and destructive almost beyond imagining. The cursory surveys you get in high school and college tell you nothing.

One of the questions that continually comes to my mind is whether the carnage took place on such an appalling scale because of a particular rabidity of the belligerents or simply because of improvements in technology. Put another way, did millions (as opposed to hundreds of thousands in previous major wars) die because of mindsets unique to that period in time, or did millions die only because the artillery was better and airplanes could rain death from the sky?

It’s a difficult question to puzzle out. There’s no doubt the fighting was fierce. Over 700,000 became casualties at Verdun as France and Imperial Germany threw everything they had into the maelstrom. Over 1.2 million became casualties at Stalingrad 26 years later as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany did the same.

The proximate cause of all the death and dismemberment was the devastatingly effective weaponry produced by 20th-century industry. At Verdun, the soldiers defended themselves with machine guns, and hurled two-thousand-pound high-explosive shells at enemy positions. At Stalingrad, they had tanks, dive-bombers, self-propelled artillery, and truck-mounted rocket launchers. For the first time in history, soldiers had the means to level entire cities in short order.

But of course the weapons didn’t discharge themselves. They were fired by living, breathing men at the behest of the military leaders and politicians who gave the wars their shape. Were these leaders unique in how they saw the world and how they saw their mission in war? Were the circumstances unique? If 20th-century weapons had been available 100 years earlier during the Napoloenic Wars, would those have become as bloody? Could a conflict as bloody happen again?

In many ways, the causes of the wars and the attitudes of those fighting them now seem impossibly remote. The First War was basically a clash of empires. Germany had stolen Alsace from France, they were posing a threat to Britain’s naval supremacy, and they were joining Austria-Hungary in challenging the backward empire of Russia. Imperialism still lives in 2011, but the notions of national pride, honor, and glory that carried the great empires to war have basically died. At least, no one now articulates these notions as credulously they did.

The Second War followed as a consequence of the First’s ravages. The human and material losses, as well as the shame of defeat, gave birth to the peculiar ideologies of Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism. Observing these movements at the distance of 70 years—seeing their pageantry, their fanatical devotion, their constantly propagandizing stage management—they seem like historical anomalies. They were meteoric in both their rise and their fall. How could there ever be another man quite like Hitler, and how could he flourish in any circumstances other than those of a Germany ruined by war and humiliated by Versailles?

This would be the comforting conclusion to come to. It would be comforting to believe the unprecedented violence of these conflicts resulted from the storms of a special and never-to-be-repeated historical moment. But at heart, the architects of both wars were driven primarily by two things: desire and hate. These qualities certainly still exist. Circumstances can change at the drop of a hat, and there’s no telling who might be in power tomorrow.

The great war leaders of the 20th century fought with the means available to achieve their ends. Those means happened to be hellishly destructive. There’s little to suggest that great war-makers of the past fought with anything less than the full means available during their time, either. Nor is there much to suggest that current leaders would restrain themselves from using their every available means. The time since the World Wars has of course not been enough for the baser qualities that drove those conflicts to have been bred out of us. And if the destruction of those wars came from a logical progression from bows and arrows to rifles to aerial bombardment, it spells an uncertain future.