Confronting War’s Horrors

Much of human history is written in blood.

During the First World War, a German soldier died every 45 seconds. French deaths were even greater. During the Battles of Verdun and the Somme, 277 soldiers died every minute. Some 20,000 British soldiers died every four days during the war’s four and a half years.

But for most Americans under the age of 90, war is an abstraction. Apart from the small and diminishing percentage of veterans, warfare’s death and destruction is mediated through various kinds of media: memoirs, movies, newscasts, novels and photographs.

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Today, when we use the word “trauma” expansively and apply the term to virtually any distressing event, it is more essential than ever to recall what wartime trauma actually involves and how people have dealt with war’s horrors, whether through fatalistic acceptance, dark humor, survivor guilt, shell shock and more.

But the horrors of war were not confined to combatants. Over the course of the last century, civilians comprised an ever-increasing percentage of wartime casualties. According to one estimate, civilian casualties outnumbered battlefield deaths during World War II. During the last decade of the 20th century, civilians accounted for nine out of 10 of the world’s four million war-related deaths.  

One reason: armed personnel increasingly targeted civilians. A study of 100 conflicts that occurred between 1989 and 2010 found “almost 50 percent of government forces and 60 percent of rebel groups deliberately attacked civilians.”

That appears to be precisely what Hamas did in its weekend attack on Israel, where we have authenticated cases of rape, abduction and civilians lined up and shot, their bodies then mutilated.

When I read some incredibly callous, pitiless, hard-hearted tweets about what happened this past weekend—like this from various Harvard student organizations issued just after the first attacks: “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame”—I want to cry out, Have you no decency or fellow feeling? How, the economist Noah Smith writes about the 250 concert goers who were murdered, “did slaughtering a music festival help the cause of Palestinian liberation?”

I am writing at a time when the near future seems utterly bleak: in addition to the events in Israel and Gaza, there are half a million wartime casualties in Ukraine. Some 150,000 Armenians are fleeing Azerbaijan. Serbia’s army is mobilized along the Kosovo border, and the People’s Republic of China appears to be practicing for a possible blockade of Taiwan, even as war and armed conflict rage in Yemen, Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Mali, the Central African Republic and elsewhere.

I fear that economist Smith is right: the global order—which had dramatically reduced the number of interstate wars and outside interventions in civil conflicts—is unraveling as multipolarity replaces what had been, earlier, the bipolarity of the Cold War, followed by Pax Americana.

At a time when the teaching of military history is in steep decline, let me mention several older books that you and your students would do well to read.

1. Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War. The book examines World War I through the personal diaries, journals and letters of 20 individuals, including a German schoolgirl, an Australian woman driving ambulances for the Serbian army, a Scottish aid worker, a Venezuelan cavalryman in service to the Ottoman Army, an English nurse in the Russian Army and an American field surgeon. It focuses on their “feelings, impressions, experiences and moods” as they witness hangings and the massacre of Armenians, tend to the wounded, watch babies starve to death.

Wrote Elfriede Kuhr, the German schoolgirl, in June 1917,

We learn about casual extramarital liaisons, some resulting in unintended pregnancies and illegal abortions. Lyrical yet extraordinarily sad, the book traces the descent of patriotic fervor into cynicism, horror, despair and emotional exhaustion.

Three broad themes run through the book. The first is that while historians strive to reduce complex events to a linear narrative, the participants often experience events as muddled, confused and chaotic. Only in retrospect is history’s logic revealed.

A second theme involves the ways that military and political leaders’ own agendas sacrifice ordinary people’s “modest ambitions of leading a happy, fulfilling life.” As a German prisoner of war, suffering shell shock, puts it, “The great lords have quarreled, and we must pay for it with our blood, our wives and our children.”

A third theme is how wartime experience altered people’s emotions. Initially, the war met certain emotional needs, including a desire for glory or wartime camaraderie, or self-sacrifice for a larger cause. As one Danish soldier put it,

Over time, however, those fantasies deflate as the war’s futility gradually sank in and its high costs become clear.

2. Michael Handel, Diplomacy of Surprise, and Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack. In the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel, a host of questions are being raised:

• Why then? Was it intentionally timed to mark the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War or to coincide with Jewish holidays? Or was the timing more coincidental?
• What was the objective? Was the intention to derail the possible normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia? Or were other motives at play, such as a desire to trigger involvement by other players, such as Hezbollah?
• How was surprise achieved? How could Israeli intelligence have been blindsided by such a large-scale, well-organized attack?
• How could one of the world’s most heavily defended borders be breached? In what ways were Israeli technology, fencing and troop deployments inadequate?
• Why was Israel’s initial response so slow? Why did the Israel Defense Forces fail to immediately send more troops into southern Israel?
• What will be the attack’s long-term consequences? Will this attack, like the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, provoke an overly emotional and ill-planned overreaction?

One of history’s values is to place current events into broader perspective. During the 20th century, there were many examples of diplomatic and military surprises.

In terms of diplomacy, as Michael Handel writes in his 1981 study, Diplomacy of Surprise, there are a number of striking examples of leaders confounding their rivals and supporters. These include Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 followed by the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement in 1939, the Nixon administration’s opening to China in 1971 and Anwar El-Sadat’s expulsion of Soviet military advisers in 1972 and his peace initiative and visit to Jerusalem in 1977. In many instances, an insulated leadership took these diplomatic steps despite opposition from intelligence and military authorities.

But it is the military surprises—Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s unexpected invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Pearl Harbor, the Tet Offensive, the 1967 and 1973 Middle East wars, the Argentine attack on the Falkland Islands, Iraq’s seizure of Kuwaiti oil fields, Sept. 11 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine—that elicit the most attention.

What do we know about such attacks? Some answers can be found in Richard K. Betts’s classic 1982 study, Surprise Attack:

1. The actors that stage surprise attacks tend to be led by authoritarians or military juntas insulated from public accountability. These actors are able to act independently of any bureaucracy or other outside pressure.
2. The attacks are not wholly unanticipated. What occurs is a lack of an adequate response to intelligence and other signals.
3. Surprise attacks tend to take place during periods of prolonged tensions. They often take place when leaders realize that war is on the horizon.
4. Intelligence is highly vulnerable to false alarms. Signals tend to be ambiguous, and intelligence and political leaders find it very difficult to distinguish true from false alarms. Fears of crying wolf sometimes lead intelligence officers to minimize genuine threats.
5. High levels of preparedness are very difficult to sustain. The military finds it difficult to maintain readiness. Political leaders are often concerned about taking steps that might provoke a crisis.
6. The vulnerabilities are usually as much political and financial constraints as strategic. Cost considerations—both financial and political—deter leaders from taking steps that would maximize their nation’s defenses.
7. Surprise attacks tend to paralyze leaders and damage morale—they truly come as a surprise, and military and political leaders are often ill prepared to deal with a surprise attack once it has occurred.

Surprise attacks can ultimately backfire. But in general, they often work well enough, at least in the short run, to encourage leaders, especially authoritarian leadership, to make extremely risky moves. In many instances, such moves do provoke indecision among their adversary’s leadership, they do incite hasty overreactions and they do erode morale and even prompt panic.

3. Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us. War is not an anomaly or an aberration: “War is woven into fabric of human civilization.” Organized violence is as old as our earliest records. Nor has it subsided. Not a single year since 1945 has passed without a war. The philosopher George Santayana had it right: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

A major historical theme is the success of central governments, since the 18th century, in suppressing “small-scale bloodshed—e.g., tribal conflicts, private armies, banditry, ordinary murder—in favor of efficient, large-scale warfare.” Those who live in failed states—think Libya or Haiti—are those who are most vulnerable to criminal or gang violence.

If we fail to study war, we won’t truly understand what it means to be human and will inevitably fail to see one of history’s driving forces and central themes. We won’t understand war’s central role in the development of centralized national governments, censuses, modern statistics, definitions of citizenship, taxation, the bond market, women’s suffrage, modern art and, yes, the computer and the internet. Or how the crescent-shaped croissant was an outgrowth of the defeat of the invading Ottoman Army outside Vienna in 1683. Or how the teeth from the victims of the Napoleonic Wars were reused as dentures and their bones ground up and turned into fertilizer. Or how Soviet soldiers raped some two million German women according to our most reliable estimates.

“One of the great tragedies of modern war was that the very strengths of societies—in organisation, industry, science or resources—could turn them into such effective killing machines,” one review of MacMillan’s book says about the deification of violence, which “persists in such modern guises as Maoism and jihadism, fueling ongoing conflicts from Peru to the Philippines.” But violence also takes other forms: as an expression of righteous anger when we or our allies are attacked and even so-called humanitarian interventions or the efforts at nation building and promoting democracy that have, at times, left the beneficiaries as badly off or even worse off than before.

It was well less than 200 years ago that diplomats began to regularize the laws of warfare. Out of the First and Second Hague Conferences (in 1899 and 1907) and the Geneva Conventions (of 1864, 1906, 1929 and 1949), five principles were codified to govern the legitimate use of force:

1. Distinction: Parties to a conflict must distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. Attacks can only be directed against legitimate military targets, not civilians or civilian objects unless they’re being used for military purposes.
2. Proportionality: The harm to civilians and civilian property is not excessive relative to the expected military objective.
3. Military necessity: Actions must be necessary to achieve a legitimate military advantage. Actions without military justification are not permissible.
4. Humanity: A prohibition against weapons or methods of warfare that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.
5. Honor: Parties to a conflict must conduct themselves with a sense of honor and fairness. It prohibits treachery, deception and misuse of certain symbols (like the red cross).

This strikes me as a moment when we as individuals and also as instructors need to reflect on war, the organized killing in the name of a political unit directed against another political unit.

Don’t shy away from discussing war with your students. They ought to delve into the questions of morality and ethics and humanitarianism that warfare raises, such as the justification for war, the treatment of prisoners and the moral implications of certain tactics or strategies. They need to understand the laws of war. They should also grasp the complexities of strategic planning and the consequences of decisions. Equally important, they should understand the psychological and emotional consequences of war: for combatants, including post-traumatic stress disorder, moral injury and, in some cases, depression, substance abuse and survivor guilt; for civilians, direct trauma and loss; for societies, collective and generational trauma and, at times, the normalization of violence and a quest for revenge.

I understand your hesitance to teach about war. Many fear that to even speak about war will be interpreted as taking sides—or victim blaming or demonizing one side or the other. But Leon Trotsky had it right: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”