The Love of War

 In my last post I wrote about the rape of Belgium by the German war machine in World War I.  I'm now reading another book about the Siege of Leningrad in World War II, again, by the German war machine, no more than 20 years after their colossal defeat in WW I.  The Germans were just as brutal and inhumane as they were in WW I.  The book is called "Leningrad: State of Siege" by Michael Jones, 2008.  You may have heard of what the Germans did to Poland and especially to the Jews in WW II.  A testament to man's inhumanity to man.  Just as they did in Belgium in WW I, when the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, they had a multi-pronged strategy.  Click here for a map. The northern drive took them through the Baltic States which had recently been annexed by the Soviets.  Not having any love for the Russians, the Baltic countries welcomed them reluctantly.  What they did not welcome was the sheer brutality that they brought.  Not wanting to do it themselves, the Germans got the Lithuanians, for example, to round up a thousand Jews and bludgeon them to death in public solely for their religion, while German troops looked on. This was not the worst. Upon encircling Leningrad, they proceeded to starve the city to death.  

Mass murder, cruelty and sheer evil was their calling card. They delighted in targeting helpless civilians.  In one case they targeted a tram full of people and killed all in the tram. After months of not being able to get food, many died of starvation; approximately 20,000 per day died.  In the brutally cold winter, when temperatures got to -30 Celsius, people died where they stopped in the street, unable to take another step.  The Russians military tried to break the siege with troops they had marched on foot to Leningrad until exhaustion.  They ordered these exhausted troops to attack heavily fortified German formations without ammunition, in some cases.  When two Russian commanders, seeing the madness of the strategy, refused the order to attack, they were arrested and shot.  When Stalin was informed, he was happy.  He asked if they were shot in public.

I've often been puzzled by the public fascination with war.  The movies certainly popularized, and in some cases, idealized war.  Nothing could be further from the truth in reality.  Many people have not seen war up close.  I did in Vietnam in 1968-69.  Although I was not an infantry soldier, I saw enough misery of what war brings.  I got my first look at war immediately upon landing at the American Bien Hoa Air Base, not far from Saigon.  As we were landing, you could see the flash of artillery in the distance.  After getting on an Army bus and driving to Saigon right after landing, we were billeted temporarily at the St. George Hotel in the Cholon District of Saigon.  The hotel was full of bullet holes and scarred by war.  Combat was happening all around us.  My first duty was to guard the perimeter of the hotel during the night along with some South Vietnamese soldiers.  The next day we headed to Tan Son Nhat Airport, which had been overrun during the Tet Offensive a few months earlier.  While there we looked at pictures of the death and devastation that had just happened there and in and around Saigon itself.

As ugly and deadly as war is, there is a strange fascination with war by many in the general public.  The bad guys are looked upon as "macho" or "heroic,"John Wayne types, while those who oppose war are looked upon as cowardly.  As an Italian immigrant I have been the butt of some very stupid, idiotic banter related to this.  Example, I'm in a work elevator in Long Beach, California and someone who knows I'm an Italian immigrant says to me: "do you know what the smallest book in the world is?  A list of Italian war heroes."  So, let's see, the people who resisted the war madness of Hitler and Mussolini and did not drink the kool-aid are cowards but those who followed Hitler's murderous evil plan and drank the kool-aid are heroic?  

First of all, I would venture that a person who makes a stupid comment like that has no clue about the history of war in general or Italian history in particular. Do they know that an Italian Army of 250,000 fought in Russia alongside the Germans with half of them perishing? Did they  know that these soldiers were sent to Russia without proper clothing or weapons or fuel? Did they know that the brutal Russian winters killed those who were not killed in action?  Have they ever participated in a war on the Russian steppe in -40 degree weather? Do they know that Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia in 1812 with 500,000 troops but only 5,000 survived to return home?  Was he a war hero? Do they know what the Roman Empire was, how long it lasted?  Do they know what happened in WW I and who the participants were?  Do they know the madness of the Germans, starting with the Prussian Empire and what led them to be so war hungry?  They have no idea.  All they know is what they heard some else say.  They're simple parrots.  The madness of war and the ignorance of people can be deadly.  Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it, as the Spanish philosopher Santayana said.