War is a constant in human history; our generation is no different. In my lifetime there have been World War II, Korea, Vietnam, The Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan, just to name a few. I participated in one of them as soldier in the United States Army in Vietnam in 1968-69. My father was a soldier in the Italian Army in Africa in WW II. We tend to glamorize wars, especially those where we’ve succeeded. The movies have done their part to help. But war is hell on earth; it is the most grotesque example of man’s inhumanity to man. The heart of evil shines in war. Men in war tend to turn into monsters; they are forced to; kill or be killed. On arrival to my post in Nha Trang, South Vietnam, just after the Tet Offensive of February 1968, the first sign I saw shocked me a bit, though it was not a surprise. The sign read “Although I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the valley.” A purposeful distortion of Psalm 23. Welcome to a surreal world, I thought.
They called WW I the Great War. Don’t know exactly what was meant by this, but if it was in the sheer number of death and destruction of human life, it was on a grand scale. Barbara Tuchman’s book on WW I, “The Guns of August” is a classic. Most of what I report here comes from this book. Her book deals with the start of the war in August of 1914. Right off the bat there was death and destruction on such a scale that you would have to go back to Roman times for a comparison. the Battle of Cannae, August 2, 216 BC, between the Romans and the Carthaginians, led by the brilliant Carthaginian military leader, Hannibal, and the Roman General Gaius Varo, where 50,000 plus men were killed in one day could be comparable.
Germany was the main bad actor. Since their war with France in 1870 when they crushed France and took two of their territorial provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, Germany was puffing their chest constantly and pressing for another war, again, with France. Kaiser Wilhelm II was the main instigator. The Germans thought of themselves as the “anointed ones” of Europe. They thought they should rule Europe; they saw themselves as superior to other Europeans. They had a philosophy of expansion and conquest. From the early part of the 1900s the Germans were planning and preparing for war. They were chomping at the bit, sort of speaking, to crush France again so they could be the one uncontested leader of Europe. They took it as an insult that the French did not lie down completely and become subservient to them after their defeat in 1870. Their military leaders spent years in detailed plans for conquering France, to the minute detail. Their main planner was German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, (the “Schliffen Plan”). Plans included how many trains needed to be used, down to the time each train had to pass a certain point.
The German plan of attack was designed to go through Belgium to hit France. This despite the fact that they had signed a treaty to respect Belgium’s territorial integrity. Not a problem, they invaded Belgium in August of 1914. It is estimated that they had a force of 700,000 to two million troops. They believed the Belgians would just lie down and let them pass. When the Belgians resisted, the brutality started. Upon entering a town in Belgium, German troops would round up civilians and point blank shoot them. If they found any Belgian with any kind of weapon they would shoot and kill them on the spot. Any town offering any resistance was burned to the ground. When some of the Belgians cut telephone lines or blew up rail lines, the Germans were ruthless in slaughtering civilians and torching towns. On August 9 after German troops arrived in the small town of Aerschot, a town between Gette and Brussels and found that the Belgian Army had withdrawn, they took out their fury on the town civilians. 150 civilians were shot dead. At the town of Dinant, 664 civilians were shot dead. All innocent people going about their own business like tending their farm. On August 20, the Germans took Brussels. They took down the Belgian flag and raised their own. An indemnity of 50 million francs was demanded (about $10 million dollars). In the town of Nomeny on August 20, fifty civilians were bayoneted, and their houses burned to the ground. In some of the most climactic battles in Belgium, including the battles of Charleroi, Mons, Haelen and Turcos more than 1,250,000 soldiers took part in combat between French, English and German forces. French casualties, in just four days mounted to 140,000.
German brutality had no limits. German General von Bulow posted signs in the city of Liege announcing that the people of Andenne, a small town near Namur, having attacked his troops, commands the burning of the town and had 110 civilians shot dead. At the town of Tamines, 400 civilians were herded together in front of a church and a firing squad began systematically shooting them. Those still alive after the shooting were bayonetted.
On August 25 the burning of the town of Louvain began. The beautiful medieval Belgian city was renowned for its University and magnificent Library, founded in 1426, with incomparable historic books. All lost and destroyed. The burning and sack of Louvain lasted six days.
At the same time as the attack on Belgium, the Russians engaged them on the Russian-German front. In what became known as the Battle of Tannenberg, the Germans wiped out two Russian Army Corps, they took 92,000 prisoners and the dead were estimated to by around 30,000. All of this in the month of August 1914. The Russians, in the meantime inflicted a massive defeat on the Austria-Hungary Army. Between August 26 and September 6, they inflicted 250,000 casualties on the Austrians and took over 100,000 prisoners.
World War I lasted until 1918. The death and destruction was of biblical proportions. Over 68 million troops took part, ten million soldiers were killed, twenty million were wounded. Over seven million civilians were killed. In 1915 the Germans, for the first time in military history, used poison gas at the Belgian town of Ypres, devastating French troops. Click here for details. This is just a short list of casualties. The evil started again twenty years later in World War II. The Belgians were devasted for the second time by the Germans, on their way to Paris. The murder exploded exponentially with the killing of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Evil has no limits. The definition of war crimes can be found with the German killing machine of WW I and II. One common denominator was that the leader of Germany in both cases was a despot, Kaiser Wilhelm II in WW I and the insane lunatic tyrant, Adolf Hitler in WW II. Again, we must study and learn from history, otherwise we will repeat it. Yes, war is literally hell on earth.
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