Category Archives: war

by | 27 May 2005 · 10:52 am

Kitchener vs. Churchill in the Sudan, 1898-99

Sir Herbert (later Lord) Kitchener, sirdar of the Egyptian army, advancing http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/sierra/sudan1896.htm”>against the Dervishes in the Sudan to avenge the death of General Gordon, did his utmost to hamper correspondents in every way he could. He particularly disliked Winston Churchill, who had pulled every string available to him to see action in the Sudan and thus advance his army career. Churchill eventually managed to get there by persuading the War Office to allow him to go out as a supernumerary lieutenant at his own expense. Kitchener was much annoyed, and it is hard to believe that, as Churchill tells it, when Kitchener learned that Churchill proposed to finance his campaign by writing for the Morning Post “he simply shrugged his shoulders and passed on to what were after all matters of greater concern.” Kitchener’s tactics were to make the twenty-six correspondents with him run exactly the same risks as his soldiers, to limit their telegraphic facilities to 200 words a day, and to give them no help, no briefings, no guidance, and little courtesy. It was not surprising that they hated him, and his disdain for them was behind what was to happen over war news at the outbreak of the First World War.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 56-57

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Filed under Africa, publishing, war

by | 26 May 2005 · 4:57 am

Reporting from Mosul, 2005

Michael Yon, a journalist embedded with the U.S. military in Mosul, blogs his own take on war reporting as a business.

The media is an industry; but their business is not to report news. The industry needs a captive audience to beat the bottom line. The product is advertisement.

This is not a right or wrong. It’s just a business concept for moving merchandise, and every profession or industry has one. Doctors, soldiers, preachers, lawyers, journalists: everyone needs to earn a living. Only a reclusive holy man might argue otherwise, but most holy men also expect alms.

There are probably many reasons why violent acts get more attention than do acts of kindness. All of these reasons fit somewhere under the heading of human nature. Any person rummaging around in his or her own head while asking the simple question, “What do I find interesting?” is bound to find a few garish relics. Sex and someone else’s bad news will sell.

Finding or generating news can be costly. A good businessperson buys cheap, sells high. These points are obvious, but less conspicuous is how the media squeezes news cheaply from Iraq….

From a media executive’s perspective, where the CFO can occupy the same tier on the organizational chart as the managing editor, the math is easy: send a dozen journalists to Iraq, or hire one cheaply to live in Baghdad. The media gets a bargain rate on instant credibility from their “embedded journalist in the heart of the Sunni Triangle,” who spends a few minutes a day paraphrasing media releases, then heads downstairs for a beer at the hotel bar.

And now, for the rest of the story….

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by | 25 May 2005 · 12:46 pm

Reporting from the American Civil War

Like many other aspects of the Civil War, its war correspondents have been romanticised into legend….

The legend conveniently overlooks the fact that the majority of the Northern correspondents were ignorant, dishonest, and unethical; that the dispatches they wrote were frequently inaccurate, often invented, partisan, and inflammatory. Edwin Godkin [of the London Daily News] wrote of his American colleagues: “Their communications are what you might expect from men of this stamp–a series of wild ravings about the roaring of the guns and the whizzing of the shells and the superhuman valour of the men, interspersed with fulsome puffs of some captain or colonel with whom they happened to pass the night.” Henry Villard, one of the better American correspondents, said, “Men turned up in the army as correspondents more fit to drive cattle than to write for newspapers,” and Professor J. Cutler Andrews, in his mammoth work The North Reports the Civil War, wrote, “Sensationalism and exaggeration, outright lies, puffery, slander, faked eye-witness accounts, and conjectures built on pure imagination cheapened much that passed in the North for news.” Given that it was an age of declamatory journalism and that objectivity was a rare quality, it is still a little disconcerting to find that one correspondent saw his job in these terms: “It is not within the province of your correspondent to criticize what has been done by the army or navy; nor will he state occurrences which it may be unpleasant to read.” Like him, most correspondents on both sides saw as an integral part of their task the sustaining of both civilian and army morale. A skirmish became “a glorious overwhelming victory,” a rout was transformed into “a strategic withdrawal before a vastly superior enemy,” a dead Confederate soldier had been not merely killed in battle but “sacrificed to the devilish ambitions of his implacable masters, Davis and Lee”; Confederate women had necklaces made from Yankee eyes, while the “unholy Northerners” used heads of Confederate dead for footballs. In this sort of reporting, accuracy mattered little, and the Northerner Henry Adams wrote from London to complain that “people have become so accustomed to the idea of disbelieving everything that is stated in the American papers that all confidence in us is destroyed.”

The correspondents fared little better in recognising the historic incident, in realising that they were privileged to be present at moments millions would later want to study as part of their nation’s development. No correspondent attending the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg took any notice of President Lincoln beginning, “Four score and seven years ago …” At the best, they reported, as did the Cincinnati Commercial, “The President rises slowly, draws from his pocket a paper, and when the commotion subsides, in a sharp, unmusical treble voice, reads the brief and pithy remarks,” and, at the worst, ended their accounts of the event with the single sentence “The President also spoke.”

One would have expected that the war correspondents from Europe, more experienced, more mature, and less involved than their American colleagues, performed more ably in the Civil War. Unfortunately, the majority were as bad, if not worse. More subtle in their bias, more devious in their propaganda, and better assisted by the political intrigues of their editors, they completely misled their readers on what was really occurring in America. The Times of London was particularly bad.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 20-22

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by | 25 May 2005 · 10:19 am

British Reporting on the American Civil War

The American Civil War held considerable importance for Britain. In 1861 it was estimated that one-fifth of the entire British population was dependent directly or indirectly on the prosperity of the cotton-manufacturing areas, which in turn depended on the American South for 80 per cent of their supplies. This clear commercial relationship made for sympathy with the South, but after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation it also became an embarrassment, because then the commercial interest had to be reconciled with Britain’s long-preached sentiments of humanity. A country so experienced in moral accommodation would no doubt have had little difficulty in bringing about this reconciliation, but the issue was further complicated by a major political factor. The ruling class in Britain had nurtured a barely concealed hatred of America and her democratic institutions, and now clearly desired their downfall. If the American experiment in democracy could be shown to have failed, demands for greater democracy in Britain could be kept from becoming an issue. Britain’s interests in the war were, then, very strong, and at one stage it appeared highly likely that she would actually intervene–the American general Winfield Scott, in Paris on a propaganda mission for Lincoln, had to return to New York to prepare for its defence against a British invasion….

But The Times began with a heavy disadvantage. Its chief proprietor, its editor, and its foreign manager were all singularly ill-equipped to handle the news from America during this important period of history. The chief proprietor, John Walter III, was openly anti-Unionist. The editor, John Delane, was ignorant of American affairs and had little feeling for American institutions. The foreign manager, Mowbray Morris, had been born in the West Indies and was in sympathy with the South and slavery. Since these were the men who not only engaged the correspondents to cover the war but also presented the news the correspondents sent, it is not surprising that The Times’ coverage of the Civil War caused such a cleavage between the two nations that it required a generation to heal it….

The engagement of [biased] war correspondents like Mackay and [Francis] Lawley and the adoption of a pro-South attitude in its leading articles were bad enough, but The Times went even further to promote the Southern cause. When New Orleans fell it carried black mourning borders; it suppressed the fact that a Liverpool shipyard was building a warship, the famous Alabama, for the South and recorded her sailing to begin a career as a commerce raider in only five words in its “Ship News” column. And it commissioned Spence, the Confederate agent in Liverpool, to write a series of pro-South articles for The Times, under the signature “5,” for which it made him a gift of a specially bound edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The combination of poor and subjective war correspondents and the attitude at The Times’ office towards America produced a disastrous coverage of the war.

In July 1863, misled by Mackay (who was to be made to pay for it later), The Times confidently predicted that the Southern general Lee was about to capture Washington. In 1864 it reported Sherman’s march to the sea as a folly from which he would find it difficult to extricate himself. When Sherman reached Savannah, Delane was made physically ill by the set-back, but recovered rapidly and was able to write that The Times was doing its best “to attenuate the mischief.” This took the form of a piece in which Sherman was given credit for “one of the ablest, certainly one of the most singular military achievements of the war,” but which then went on to say that the South had little use for Savannah as a port anyway.

At the beginning of the war The Times referred to Lincoln as an uneducated rail-splitter. Half-way through the war he was “a sort of moral American Pope” or “Lincoln the Last.” When he was assassinated, he was suddenly recognised as having been “one of England’s best friends.” Naturally, this recognition that it had been wildly astray in its military and political estimates of the war was not accomplished by The Times without some unpleasant recriminations and extensive scapegoat-hunting. Although it was clear that at least some responsibility lay with the executives, who had allowed their prejudices to interfere with their selection of war correspondents and with the manner in which they were briefed, blame had to be placed farther down the editorial ladder. So Mackay was peremptorily sacked. Morris broke the news to him. “This has been brought about by your blind and unreasonable condemnation of all public men and measures on the Federal side,” he wrote. “You have presented the English public with a distorted view of the Federal cause … Every statement was one-sided and every remark spiteful.”

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 34-40

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by | 24 May 2005 · 12:13 pm

Reporting from the Crimean War

William Howard Russell [was], according to his epigraph in St. Paul’s Cathedral “the first and greatest” war correspondent. The greatest is open to dispute, and he was not the first …. But Russell’s coverage of the Crimean War [1854-1856] marked the beginning of an organised effort to report a war to the civilian population at home using the services of a civilian reporter. This was an immense leap in the history of journalism, so it is appropriate to begin with Russell, because, whether or not “the first and the greatest,” he was certainly, as he put it himself, “the miserable parent of a luckless tribe.”…

Russell returned to London and fame. The Times made the gesture every war correspondent dreams of: it put aside his IOUs for advance expenses and told him he could start again “with what tradesmen call a clean slate.” He was placed on the list of Times foreign correspondents at £600 a year, providing “you will render monthly accounts of your expenditure showing a clean balance so that we may both know how we stand.” He had breakfast with the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who, mistakenly believing that Russell’s criticisms of the conduct of the war must have been inspired by his having evolved constructive alternatives, disconcerted Russell by asking him what he would do if he were commander-in-chief of the army. After the war Russell’s dispatches were published in book form, and while awaiting new battles to cover he went on a lecture tour.

Clearly, it would have been hard for Russell not to have made a name for himself in the Crimea. This was the first time that a British army in the field had been subjected to any form of independent scrutiny, and it would have been difficult to miss its shortcomings. Russell certainly chronicled them, but he failed to understand and expose the causes. He concentrated his attacks on Raglan rather than on the system, not knowing that Raglan, a humane and sensitive man, had done his best to overcome the results of years of government neglect. Throughout the campaign, Raglan had made repeated requests for all manner of equipment and supplies to overcome deficiencies in the commissariat and the medical departments, but most of his requests had been ignored. When public clamour led to a demand for a scapegoat, Russell’s dispatches helped make Raglan a convenient choice.

Although Russell criticised the lot of the ordinary soldier in the Crimea, he was careful not to hammer too hard at a comparison with that of the officers, to whose social class he himself belonged. He did not write, as he could quite accurately have done: “While the troops, ill-clad to weather a Russian winter, try to ease their hunger with a watery stew made of doubtful horseflesh, tonight in the officers’ mess the menu consists of soup, fresh fish, liver and bacon, a shoulder of mutton, pancakes with quince preserve, cheese, stout, sherry and cigars.” Above all, Russell made the mistake, common to many a war correspondent, of considering himself part of the military establishment. The one thing he never doubted or criticised was the institution of war itself. He realised he had hit the right note in criticising the conduct of the war and that his dispatches suited The Times’ politics of the moment. (Russell tended to toe his paper’s editorial line despite his professional assessments.)…

It is clear that before the war ended the army realised that it had made a mistake in tolerating Russell and his colleagues, but by then it was too late. The war correspondent had arrived, and when the American Civil War broke out, five years later, 500 of them turned out to report the conflict on the Northern side alone.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 1-17

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Filed under Britain, publishing, Russia, war

by | 8 May 2005 · 10:11 am

Forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens after VE Day

Among the many controversial decisions they made at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed that all Soviet citizens, whatever their individual history, must be returned to the Soviet Union. Although the protocols signed at Yalta did not explicitly command the Allies to return Soviet citizens against their will, that, in effect, is what happened….

Some wanted to return home…. Others, frightened by what might await them, were nevertheless convinced to return by the NKVD officers who traveled to the POW and displaced persons camps scattered all over Europe. The officers trawled the camps, looking for Russians, offering them smiling visions of a bright future. All would be forgiven, they claimed: “You are now considered by us as true Soviet citizens, regardless of the fact that you were forced to join the German army … “

Some, particularly those who had fallen on the wrong side of Soviet justice before, naturally did not want to go back at all. “There is enough room in the Motherland for everyone,” the Soviet military attaché in Britain told a group of Soviet soldiers living in Yorkshire POW camps. “We know what sort of room there will be for us,” one prisoner replied. Allied officers were nevertheless under orders to send them–and so they did. In Fort Dix, New Jersey, 145 Soviet prisoners, captured wearing German uniforms, barricaded themselves inside their barracks to avoid being sent home. When American soldiers threw tear gas into the building, those who had not already committed suicide rushed out with kitchen knives and clubs, injuring some of the Americans. Afterward, they said they had wanted to incite the Americans to shoot them.

Worse were the incidents that involved women and children. In May 1945, British troops, under what they were told were direct orders from Churchill, undertook to repatriate more than 20,000 Cossacks, then living in Austria. These were former anti-Bolshevik partisans, some of whom had joined Hitler as a way of fighting Stalin, many of whom had left the USSR after the Revolution, and most of whom no longer held Soviet passports. After many days of promising them good treatment, the British tricked them. They invited the Cossack officers to a “conference,” handed them over to Soviet troops, and rounded up their families the following day. In one particularly ugly incident at a camp near Lienz, Austria, British soldiers used bayonets and rifle butts to force thousands of women and children onto trains which would take them to the USSR. Rather than go back, women threw their babies over bridges, and then jumped themselves. One man killed his wife and his children, laid their bodies neatly on the grass, and then killed himself. The Cossacks knew, of course, what would await them upon their return to the Soviet Union: firing squads–or the Gulag.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 436-437

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Filed under Europe, USSR, war

by | 7 May 2005 · 8:01 am

Edirne (Adrianople) after the Balkan Wars

Much has been published on the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) in general, and on the siege of Edirne (Adrianople) in particular, by journalists, diarists, historians, and others. The Balkan Wars, it will be recalled, had the distinction of being the first twentieth-century international conflict on European soil, complete with the use of aircraft. The siege of Edirne by the Bulgarian and Serb armies, which lasted more than five months, was one of the war’s most dramatic events, and it elicited much public interest in Europe and elsewhere….

By the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman Empire had been in a state of disintegration for some time. However, the Balkan Wars, which resulted in the Ottoman Empire’s loss of most of its European territories and the concomitant rise of victorious and strong Balkan national states that laid claim to the loyalties of the empire’s Christian minorities, delivered the final blow to the possibility of Ottoman plural coexistence and foreshadowed the empire’s complete demise. Indeed, within one decade from the end of the Balkan Wars, the remnants of the empire would be transformed into a national state in which the great majority of its population would follow one religion (Islam) and speak one language (Turkish). And these processes were fully reflected in the fate of Edirne.

According to Turkey’s official census of 1935, Edirne’s total population was 36,121, including 31,731 Muslims, or Turks (88 percent of the total), 4,020 Jews (11 percent), and 368 Christians (1 percent). What is striking about these figures is the almost total disappearance of the Christians (who were more than 30 percent of the population in 1912) due to migration and population exchange and the decline of the Jews (17-18 percent in 1912) in both absolute numbers and relative terms. But perhaps even more surprising is the numerical decline of the Muslims (55,000 in 1912). In fact, between 1912 and the post-World War I era, Edirne lost about two-thirds of its population and did not begin to recover until the 1960s.

The reason for Edirne’s decline is well known. The city that until the Balkan Wars had been a major administrative, military, economic, and commercial center had essentially become an isolated border town, but off from its commercial and economic hinterland. The Balkan Wars … also caused extensive destruction throughout eastern Thrace, further undermining Edirne’s economy. The outcome was a rapid flight of population and commercial and economic enterprises from Edirne.

SOURCE: “The Siege of Edirne (1912-1913) as Seen by a Jewish Eyewitness: Social, Political, and Cultural Perspectives,” by Avigdor Levy, in Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, ed. by Avigdor Levy (Syracuse U. Press, 2002), pp. 153, 191-192

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Filed under Eastern Europe, Turkey, war

by | 9 April 2005 · 2:43 pm

Surrender Negotiations, 7-9 April 1865

Today marks the 140th anniversary of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. My ancestors who fought for the Confederacy were already POWs by then–one was among the 1600 men left in Wharton’s two brigades who surrendered to Gen. Sheridan at Waynesborough on 2 March 1865 at the end of the Shenandoah Valley Campaign; the other was wounded and captured at of Five Forks on 1 April 1865, where Gen. Sheridan’s troops broke Confederate Gen. Lee’s supply line and forced him to flee toward the west, evacuating Richmond and Petersburg.

On 7 April 1865, Gen. Grant initiated a poignant exchange of letters with Gen. Lee.

“General R.E. Lee, Commanding C.S.A.:
5 P.M., April 7th, 1865.
The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the Confederate States army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.
U.S. Grant, Lieutenant-General”

“April 7th, 1865.
General: I have received your note of this date. Though not entertaining the opinion you express of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia, I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, and therefore, before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer on condition of its surrender.
R.E. Lee, General.”

“April 8th, 1865.
General R.E. Lee, Commanding C.S.A.:
Your note of last evening in reply to mine of the same date, asking the conditions on which I will accept the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, is just received. In reply I would say that, peace being my great desire, there is but one condition I would insist upon,–namely, that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged. I will meet you, or will designate officers to meet any officers you may name for the same purpose, at any point agreeable to you, for the purpose of arranging definitely the terms upon which the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia will be received.
U.S. Grant, Lieutenant-General”

“April 8th, 1865.
General: I received at a late hour your note of to-day. In mine of yesterday I did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, but to ask the terms of your proposition. To be frank, I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender of this army, but, as the restoration of peace should be the sole object of all, I desired to know whether your proposals would lead to that end. I cannot, therefore, meet you with a view to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia; but as far as your proposal may affect the Confederate States forces under my command, and tend to the restoration of peace, I should be pleased to meet you at 10 A.M. to-morrow on the old state road to Richmond, between the picket-lines of the two armies.
R.E. Lee, General.”

“April 9th, 1865.
General: Your note of yesterday is received. I have not authority to treat on the subject of peace. The meeting proposed for 10 A.M. to-day could lead to no good. I will state, however, that I am equally desirous for peace with yourself, and the whole North entertains the same feeling. The terms upon which peace can be had are well understood. By the South laying down their arms, they would hasten that most desirable event, save thousands of human lives, and hundreds of millions of property not yet destroyed. Seriously hoping that all our difficulties may be settled without the loss of another life, I subscribe myself, etc.,
U.S. Grant, Lieutenant-General”

“April 9th, 1865.
General: I received your note of this morning on the picket-line, whither I had come to meet you and ascertain definitely what terms were embraced in your proposal of yesterday with reference to the surrender of this army. I now ask an interview, in accordance with the offer contained in your letter of yesterday, for that purpose.
R.E. Lee, General.”

“April 9th, 1865.
General R. E. Lee Commanding C. S. Army:
Your note of this date is but this moment (11:50 A.M.) received, in consequence of my having passed from the Richmond and Lynchburg road to the Farmville and Lynchburg road. I am at this writing about four miles west of Walker’s Church, and will push forward to the front for the purpose of meeting you. Notice sent to me on this road where you wish the interview to take place will meet me.
U. S. Grant, Lieutenant-General.”

They finally met face-to-face at the home of Wilmer McLean.

General Grant began the conversation by saying ‘I met you once before, General Lee, while we were serving in Mexico, when you came over from General Scott’s headquarters to visit Garland’s brigade, to which I then belonged. I have always remembered your appearance, and I think I should have recognized you anywhere.’

‘Yes,’ replied General Lee, ‘I know I met you on that occasion, and I have often thought of it and tried to recollect how you looked, but I have never been able to recall a single feature.'”

… Within a month of Lee’s surrender, the remainder of the Confederate forces give up the fight.

SOURCE: “Surrender at Appomattox, 1865,” EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (1997).

And North-South reconciliation has continued–in fits, starts, and turnarounds–for 140 years.

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by | 10 March 2005 · 6:28 pm

Acts of War, 60 Years Ago

The Marmot reminds us that today marks the 60th anniversary of the fire-bombing of Tokyo, as a BBC report notes.

People in Tokyo have been marking the 60th anniversary of a massive US night-time bombing raid which destroyed much of the city in 1945.

Several memorial services have been held across the city to remember the more than 100,000 people who died.

The raid was part of an American strategy to try to wear down Japanese morale ahead of a possible invasion.

Last month, we commemorated the 60th anniversary of the fire-bombing of Dresden.

An aspect of the Dresden bombing that remains a question today is how many people died during the attacks of February 13/14, 1945. The city was crammed with uncounted refugees and many POWs in transit when the raids took place. The exact number of casualties will never be known. McKee believed that the official figures were understated, and that 35,000 to 45,000 died, though “the figure of 35,000 for one night’s massacre alone might easily be doubled to 70,000 without much fear of exaggeration, I feel.”

The battle of Iwo Jima began 60 years ago, shortly after the fire-bombing of Dresden, and didn’t end until after the fire-bombing of Tokyo.

The battle for Iwo Jima began Feb. 19, 1945, but didn’t end until March 15, with nearly 7,000 Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese killed. After years of retaking soil conquered by a Japanese military machine, America was knocking on the enemy’s door by taking Iwo Jima. It was the first invasion of Japanese soil since Pearl Harbor. Iwo Jima was heavily entrenched with a network of caves, tunnels and pillboxes. The brilliant Japanese commander defending the island, Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had been told to fight to the death — no Japanese survivors — hoping high American casualties would deter further attacks against Japanese territory.

And in April, we will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the battle of Okinawa.

Okinawa was the largest amphibious invasion of the Pacific campaign and the last major campaign of the Pacific War. More ships were used, more troops put ashore, more supplies transported, more bombs dropped, more naval guns fired against shore targets than any other operation in the Pacific. More people died during the Battle of Okinawa than all those killed during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Casualties totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle.

The battle of Okinawa proved to be the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. Thirty-four allied ships and craft of all types had been sunk, mostly by kamikazes, and 368 ships and craft damaged. The fleet had lost 763 aircraft. Total American casualties in the operation numbered over 12,000 killed [including nearly 5,000 Navy dead and almost 8,000 Marine and Army dead] and 36,000 wounded. Navy casualties were tremendous, with a ratio of one killed for one wounded as compared to a one to five ratio for the Marine Corps. Combat stress also caused large numbers of psychiatric casualties, a terrible hemorrhage of front-line strength. There were more than 26,000 non-battle casualties. In the battle of Okinawa, the rate of combat losses due to battle stress, expressed as a percentage of those caused by combat wounds, was 48% [in the Korean War the overall rate was about 20-25%, and in the Yom Kippur War it was about 30%]. American losses at Okinawa were so heavy as to [elicit] Congressional calls for an investigation into the conduct of the military commanders. Not surprisingly, the cost of this battle, in terms of lives, time, and material, weighed heavily in the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan just six weeks later.

Japanese human losses were enormous: 107,539 soldiers killed and 23,764 sealed in caves or buried by the Japanese themselves; 10,755 captured or surrendered. The Japanese lost 7,830 aircraft and 16 combat ships. Since many Okinawan residents fled to caves where they subsequently were entombed the precise number of civilian casualties will probably never be known, but the lowest estimate is 42,000 killed. Somewhere between one-tenth and one-fourth of the civilian population perished, though by some estimates the battle of Okinawa killed almost a third of the civilian population. According to US Army records during the planning phase of the operation, the assumption was that Okinawa was home to about 300,000 civilians. At the conclusion of hostilities around 196,000 civilians remained. However, US Army figures for the 82 day campaign showed a total figure of 142,058 civilian casualties, including those killed by artillery fire, air attacks and those who were pressed into service by the Japanese army.

The only TV news that I can sit through for more than 15 minutes without channel-surfing away (usually in response to commercials or “celebrity justice” stories) is The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, which ends each broadcast with a photographic listing of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq (no other individuals killed in Iraq or elsewhere). I view them all, with a mixture of sorrow and respect. Can you imagine how long The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer would have to be to list onscreen the names and photos of just the U.S. military personnel killed during World War II? It would have to be NewsWeek 24/7 with Jim Lehrer. I remind myself of that when I get too depressed about the state of the world 60 years later.

An imaginary Jim Lehrer Sr. in 1945: “And now, in silence, are 7,000 more …”

UPDATE: Tokyo-based White Peril has much more.

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Filed under Japan, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 8 March 2005 · 6:33 pm

An Afghan Woman Contemplates Exile, April 1980

The country’s conditions had become even worse. Several months had passed since I applied for a passport and I still didn’t know whether I would be able to make the planned trip to India, because the report from the secret police had not been made yet. With great sorrow I resolved to leave the country–for who knew how long?–the country to which I owed my entire life, the country my husband took such pride in serving [in the Afghan military], the land we cherished, treasuring its memories deeply, the one we always felt homesick for when we traveled.

This day, on my way home, I reviewed the situation carefully and these were my conclusions: It had been two years since my husband had gone missing, with no word about him or the reason for his disappearance. I didn’t know whether he was alive or not. I had a sick child and was not permitted to have her admitted to the only hospital that had proper facilities, even though I was willing to pay the entire cost up front. We had lost not only the benefits of health insurance but also Saleem’s social security and the retirement money he had paid into the fund directly out of his paycheck every month.

Many young students had disappeared lately without a trace. The schools were getting dangerous. I could not send my children to school without worrying about them all day long. I’d had them stay home several times during the past two weeks because of student demonstrations and the brutal efforts of the police to repress them. Omar and Ali both complied with my orders but didn’t understand my position. They thought I was paranoid.

I did not have security at my job. Any minute, I thought, they would come and arrest me. There were no guarantees of safety for any one of us anymore. In fact, circumstances were forcing me to leave as soon as possible–not for myself but for the safety of my family. It was the hardest decision I ever made in my life. To assuage my agony, I promised that I would return when conditions became right. Surely the Russians would not last very long.

The day I decided to leave, I cried all the way home from the office. A searing pain shot through my heart when I looked at the Aliabad Mountains behind the university. I remembered the times in college when we frolicked and played games among those steep rocks. We even tried one day to climb a large boulder but didn’t get very far before one of our classmates got stuck between two rocks. The rest of us tried to rescue her and the whole class missed a lecture. The dean didn’t let us make up the test we missed that day; he never understood the pleasure we derived from going up there.

All night long my head was full of unanswered questions. What was I going to do in a foreign country with no money, all by myself with three children? How would I be able to earn money for their food and education? Would I be able to provide the comforts they had here at home? What if my husband was released and I wasn’t home? Would he understand? Was I doing the right thing? What about the promise I’d made to him: “In bad times as well as good, in sickness and in health, I will stay by your side until death parts us”?

I had applied for a passport, but then my idea had been to return home after my daughter’s medical treatment. Now I must change the plan and I needed more money. I couldn’t sell our real estate because of the uncertainty concerning my husband; and even if he were no longer living, it could not be sold till all the children had passed their eighteenth birthday. I dare not sell the household goods because that would attract attention. Even if I did, they would realize only a small fraction of their original price. So I would have to give away everything we had accumulated and saved bit by bit over the years. My heart broke when I remembered that Saleem had sometimes saved money by canceling a movie or a trip in order to have enough to build our house.

Could I keep my plan secret? I certainly could not tell my husband’s family that I was leaving. The very few whom I trusted could not keep the news to themselves, especially my mother-in-law, who would begin to cry, and then others would know. Would our departure be too hard on her, especially at this time when my husband was missing too? What would happen to my mother and brothers and sisters? Would the government arrest them because I had left the country? Many close relatives were arrested and questioned if one family member left the country. Yet how could we all leave with our children, twenty-six of us, without being noticed? The more I thought, the more questions appeared in my head which called for answers–answers that I did not have. In fact, everything seemed impossible, out of reach.

Finally, early in the morning, I decided to put all the negative and all the positive points of my plan on the two sides of an imaginary balance. On the left side went all the negatives, such as lack of money, trouble finding a decent job, starting all over again from zero, leaving all my property behind; on the right side were the positive points, such as having a safer life for my sons and not being afraid of losing them, having proper health care and a good education for my children, not having to worry about spies and false reports. I still was not able to decide. In fact, it seemed I might lose a whole lot more than I gained in the deal. The future lay ahead of me as a somber blur.

At last I realized that what I would really gain from leaving would be freedom. The thought of freedom grew larger and larger in my mind until it completely weighed down the right side of that imaginary balance. It would be well worth fighting for. I thought, I can trade everything in the world, all the luxurious and elegant things in my life, in order to earn freedom for my family and for my mother, my brothers and sisters, and their families. The idea of achieving freedom for all of us gave me the peace of heaven.

SOURCE: An Afghan Woman’s Odyssey, by Farooka Gauhari (U. Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 171-174

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