Copyright © 2012 by Michael Stephenson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stephenson, Michael, 1946–
The last full measure : how soldiers die in battle / Michael Stephenson.—1st ed.
1. Battle casualties—History. 2. Military history. I. Title.
D25.5.S74 2011
305.9’06950973—dc22 2011005874
eISBN: 978-0-307-95277-6
Jacket design by Christopher Brand
Jacket photography by Getty Images
v3.1
For Kathryn, who makes everything possible
and for Gabriel Gray Henshaw, who runs so bravely
Dreading what I might see, yet needing to see it.
ALEX BOWLBY,
The Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby
We moved on, each of us inching along the brink of his own extinction.
WILLIAM MANCHESTER,
Goodbye, Darkness
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PREFACE
1. FIRST BLOOD
Death and the Heroic in Ancient Combat
2. TE DEUM AND NON NOBIS
Death on the Medieval Battlefield
3. A TERRIBLE THUNDER
Battlefield Lethality in the Black-Powder Era
4. ALL GLORY … ALL HELL
The American Civil War
5. AN INVESTMENT OF BLOOD
Killing and Honor in Colonial Warfare
6. “THIS HIGH PLACE OF SACRIFICE”
“Going West” in World War I
7. A CONFRATERNITY OF GHOSTS
How Soldiers Were Killed in World War II
8. DIAMONDS IN THE MIRE
Death and the Heroic in Modern Combat
APPENDIX
FOR PITY’S SAKE:
A Brief History of Battlefield Medicine
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PREFACE
But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.… From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.
—Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, November 19, 1863
THE IDEA THAT remembrance can conjure rescue from oblivion may be only a historian’s sleight of hand. But the act of remembering, of memorializing, also invokes a magic as old as humanity. There is an atavistic sense of propitiation: remembrance as a gift to the restless dead. It is an idea powerfully invoked by the First World War doctor and poet John McCrae (who was to die in Flanders in 1918). His line “If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep” was intended to rally the boys to the flag, but to me it makes a different, equally powerful appeal.
The Last Full Measure is about how soldiers have died in combat. This exploration of the central truth of battle involves a recognition of a debt and an attempt to honor an obligation. But it is important to be clear about this. To pay respect to these dead is not at all the same thing as promoting militarism. (The braying of the war lovers and the shrill call of the chicken hawks, will always ensure that their voices are heard loud and clear.) Nor is it to pretend that every slain soldier is a hero—a word hugely devalued by our huckster politicians and their media flacks (what the World War II poet-soldier Alun Lewis, killed in 1944, described as “the loud celebrities / Exhorting us to slaughter”). In fact, by trying to represent death in battle as honestly as possible and with as much regard to the complexities as my “poor power” would allow—in other words, to deal with the whole bloody business as humanely as I can—I hope to honor the slain by helping to rescue them from appropriation by the cynic and the jingoist.
Old wars were once real before they were preserved in the formaldehyde of history. They were chaotically bloody and shockingly immediate in a way that words have always struggled to convey. Reading about combat and death is radically different from experiencing combat and death. In time the blood dries, the agony fades, and battle takes on a pleasing shape, in the way a jagged rock is worn smooth by insistent surf. Looked at from afar, it becomes romantic, and the killed—rescued from the smashed and torn violence of their deaths by the magic powers of our nostalgia—are bathed in the golden aura of some version of the “greatest generation.” The stench and screams give way to rousing images. The death agonies settle into the encouraging heroic gestures of the war memorial and the movies. We are wrapped in the warmth and certitudes of History with a capital H.
Wehrmacht infantryman Guy Sajer, writing of the experience of combat on the eastern front in Russia in World War II, put it this way in his memoir, Forgotten Soldier (1967):
Too many people learn about war with no inconvenience to themselves. They read about Verdun or Stalingrad without comprehension, sitting in a comfortable armchair, with their feet beside the fire, preparing to go about their business the next day, as usual. One should really read such accounts under compulsion, in discomfort, considering oneself fortunate not to be describing the event in a letter home, writing from a hole in the mud. One should read about war in the worst circumstances, when everything is going badly, remembering that the torments of peace are trivial, and not worth any white hairs. Nothing is really serious in the tranquility of peace.… One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired, as I am writing about it now, at dawn …
Sajer draws his line in the sand, and only those who have experienced combat may cross it. All others are at best honest observers and at worst voyeurs—those who, as the poet-soldier Siegfried Sassoon accused, “Listen with delight / By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.” As I was keenly aware while writing this book, the fates had dealt me a pretty cushy hand as far as military hazard has been concerned. The date and place of my birth has, due to some benevolent turn of the roulette wheel, preserved my sorry ass. It is a fact of which I can be neither proud nor apologetic. Those, like Sajer, who have lived on one side of the line may be observed, but they may not be joined.
Many soldiers act heroically, but death in action is not itself an automatic anointment. The horrible truth is that most have had their lives wrenched from them, far from the embalming salve of the heroic. The last sound from the lips of the stricken is not so much the rousing rallying call “for the motherland” as the heartbreaking cry for mother. In the end, though, there is a kind of democracy among the killed: Heroic Themistocles is as dead as an anonymous soldier who has his life ripped from him in abject terror. And this book is interested equally in both—and seeks to honor both.
The roads that lead a soldier to the grave may be brutally short and straight, or they may be winding and complicated by many smaller byways and detours. But there is always a place where they come to their fatal intersection. What brings a warrior to his death is a convergence of many factors: the weapon that kills him; the tactics that brought him to the place and manner of his death; the strategy that marks the boundaries of the killing field; the decisions he makes or the decisions that others make on his behalf; the ability of medical services to save a life (or, throughout much of history, hasten the extinction). And last,
what might be called the cultural context that shapes each and every warrior: a complex amalgam of attitudes and ideas about such things as the heroic, the need for sacrifice, the justness of the cause, the embrace of the aggressive spirit, compassion toward the defeated (to name only a few ingredients in this rich soup), or, indeed, the rejection of all the foregoing. Much of this is quite specific to the historical period, and that is why I chose to organize this book chronologically—soldiers die in the style of their times. But also, much of it is a shared human experience, and that is why I have attempted to trace the great arcs of connection that leap across the centuries.
War is about many things, but at its core it is about killing or getting killed. It is not chess, or a computer game, or a movie, or a book about death. It is, implacably and nonnegotiably, the thing itself. Henri Barbusse, in Le feu (Under Fire, 1916), his great memoir of combat in World War I, puts it this way: “We leave by the trench at right angles … towards the moving, living and awful frontier of now.” In our “virtual” or ersatz culture we all too often confuse the pretend and the real. In a way unprecedented in history, most of us today are able to get by with acting out rather than acting. Warmed by the glow of the screen, we can choose to inhabit a simulacrum, while a few—comparatively very few—live and die in the searing light of a reality we would much rather read about or game-play than experience.
“Military history must never stray from the tragic story of killing,” says Victor Davis Hanson with characteristic forthrightness. “Wars are the sum of battles, battles the tally of individual human beings killing and dying.… To write of conflict is not to describe merely the superior rifles of imperial troops or the matchless edge of the Roman gladius, but ultimately the collision of a machine-gun bullet with the brow of an adolescent, or the carving and ripping of artery and organ in the belly of an anonymous Gaul. To speak of war in any other fashion brings with it a sort of immorality. Euphemism in battle narrative or the omission of graphic killing altogether is a near criminal offense of the military historian.”
In this regard I was acutely aware of the tightrope I had to walk in making this book. There is no way one can write about violent death without describing horrific scenes. Men do not always die with a decorous sigh and fall with composed grace. They often quit this world in a shit-storm of screams and blood, often literally blown to kingdom come. How does one do justice to that without pandering to Rambo-style porno-violence? Tightropes are demanding. I edged along mine as best I could.
The amazingly obvious but generally overlooked point is that we who write or comment, or indeed read, of this melancholy subject are—by the ministrations of the kindly Fates—alive! We have the good luck to be lolling on the sunny bank of the Styx, and although our journey is definitely booked and confirmed, we are still only looking, if humbly and sadly, at the legion upon legion of shades already gathered on the dark side.
THE LAST FULL MEASURE, through considerations of length and the stamina, not to say the sanity, of the author, limits itself to ground warfare. In no way are valiant sailors and airmen—among whom was an uncle, USAAF sergeant George Taylor, a left-waist gunner killed in his B-17G over Posen on April 11, 1944—denigrated by omission. What might be called the technological context of their deaths compared with that of soldiers makes the separation possible and, perhaps, logical. In addition, although recognizing that disease, cold, heat, and starvation have killed more soldiers than any weapon, and that death delivered by these Four Horsemen is a direct consequence of warfare, I decided to focus on the sharp end of battle—death caused directly by fighting rather than as a consequence of being in an army during wartime.
ONE
FIRST BLOOD
Death and the Heroic in Ancient Combat
The Greeks, as I have learned, are accustomed to wage wars in the most stupid fashion due to their silliness and folly. For once they have declared war against each other, they search out the finest and most level plain and there fight it out. The result is that even the victorious come away with great losses; and of the defeated, I say only that they are utterly annihilated.
—Herodotus, The Histories1
HERODOTUS: HISTORIAN OR LIAR? Researcher or fabricator? Famously denounced by Cicero as a fraudster, depicted by some modern historians as a fictionalizer, he can be seen as the precursor of some rather distinguished modern historians who have had, to put it delicately, a little difficulty with the all too often indistinct boundary between history and “imagined history.” But in looking back to the earliest evidence of warfare and the fates that befell warriors on those prehistoric and ancient killing grounds, the Herodotian dilemma—that confused swirl of myth and fact, of dispassionate observation and passionate “interpretation”—may serve us well, for the reality is that we walk on uncertain ground, and we would be well advised to tread it gingerly.
As the quote that heads this chapter suggests, Herodotus looked at the warfare of his age (fifth century BCE) and saw anything but a heroic clash of arms. Greek warriors could be almost lemminglike in their tunnel-visioned stampede to oblivion. His view echoes the modern debate—a hawks-versus-doves standoff—about our ancient and prehistoric ancestors.
Was it a clash between those who saw their interests best served by ruthless violence and those who saw their interests served by avoiding bloody conflict and reaching some kind of peaceful accommodation? The hawks see primitive man as truly primitive. This hawks-and-doves dichotomy is reflected in modern studies of early battlefield lethality. There are those who contend that early combat was merely ritualistic, full of sound and fury signifying nothing—a great deal of prancing and empty threats that were designed to minimize the body count. The argument is that in societies of low birthrate and high natural mortality, bloodletting, which could only harm both antagonists, would be avoided. Instead of real warfare they organized a mutually agreed-upon charade in which theatrical gesture replaced killing—an argument anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley dismisses as “the increasingly irrational meandering in a neo-Rousseauian, post-modernist ‘woo-woo land.’ ”2 However, the “flower-war” school gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps as a reaction to what was seen as the military brutalism of much of the twentieth century, which, despite its self-congratulatory “modernity” and humanism, set a new benchmark for savagery.
John Keegan in A History of Warfare (1993) promotes the idea of self-restraining warfare being a characteristic of “primitives” who “have recourse to all sorts of devices which spare both themselves and their enemies from the worst of what might be inflicted.… Most important of such devices is that of ritual, which defines the nature of combat itself and requires that, once defined rituals have been performed, the contestants shall recognise the fact of their satisfaction and have recourse to conciliation, arbitration and peacemaking.”3 But before we can rest in the comfortable assumption that primitive warriors were simply thwarted peacemakers, Keegan puts us right: “It is important … not to idealise primitive warfare. It may take a very violent turn.” Indeed, Keegan adds, a little euphemistically, it may “have material effects undesired by those who suffer them”—undesired as in being tortured before being eaten. Our primitive forebears could be unfussy diners.
Robert L. O’Connell in his influential 1989 survey of war and aggression also promotes a view of primitive battle as essentially one of low lethality:
Most probably fighting was, as it is now among contemporary hunting-and-gathering people, a sporadic, highly personalized affair, homicidal in intent and, occasionally, in effect, but lacking a sustained economic and political motivation beyond that of revenge and, sometimes, women. Under such conditions, ambush and raiding are the preferred modes of operation, and the target often is a single “enemy.” Pitched battles, when they occur, represent tactical failure. The object of the foray is rout, not prolonged combat. In such an environment the attacking party will close only if surprise is reasonably certain; otherwise the aim is to stay at long range and e
xchange missiles.4
The distinction O’Connell and Keegan make between “formal” battle and ambush or surprise attack is critical in understanding the risk primitive warriors ran. It has been posited that in formal battle the total casualty rate (wounded and killed) could be quite high—perhaps in the 30 to 40 percent range—compared with, say, an “average” American Civil War battle casualty rate of 12 to 15 percent (although casualties in certain battles, like Gettysburg, ran to almost 25 percent). But because these primitive battles were often standoffs employing relatively unsophisticated missile weaponry, the death rate was low compared with that of modern battle: one killed for about thirty wounded; whereas by comparison, one man was killed for about every five wounded at Gettysburg, and at the battle of the Somme in 1916 some British battalions took one killed for every two men wounded.5 However, some primitive pitched battles could be quite deadly if the protagonists closed with shock weapons such as clubs, axes, and lances (a pattern that would become characteristic of Greek and Roman warfare). For example, combat among the woodland tribes of eastern North America (before Europeans introduced firearms), in which up-close shock weapons such as clubs and axes predominated, could be highly lethal. However, if we look only at pitched battle the true picture of primitive-warrior fatality would be severely distorted because the favored mode of battle was what we might term “irregular”: ambushes and raids. The loss rate of each incident may have been quite low relative to modern warfare, but their frequency and ferocity elevated the cumulative kill to “catastrophic mortalities” so that “a member of a typical tribal society, especially a male, had a far higher probability of dying in combat than the citizen of an average modern state.”6
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