Andrew Kostanecki
The Future of War
By Andrew Kostanecki
Introduction
In 1898 my Great Grandfather, Jan de Bloch, who every visitor to the Bloch Foundation website knows, wrote his famous six-volume work on the future of war and became the inspiration for the First Peace Conference at the Hague and a nominee for the First Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
My Grandfather, Kazimierz Kostanecki, married Janina Bloch, one of Jan de Bloch’s four daughters. As Rektor of the Jagielonian University in Krakow, he was considered a martyr for the Polish cause after being seized by the Nazis along with thirty other Polish intellectual leaders in 1940. He was held in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp where he died in 1941.
My Mother, Dorothy Adams, a distant relative of the second President of the United States, John Adams, was something of a political free spirit when she graduated from Goucher College in 1921. As soon as she could, she jumped on a boat to Europe, took a train to Geneva, talked her way into a job working in the Secretariat of the League of Nations, went on a mission to Poland, met a young Polish diplomat, my father, Jan Kostanecki, fell in love and married. She lived in Poland for fourteen years. During that time, she became a passionate champion of Poland and things Polish.
In 1938, my Father was killed in an airplane accident. In August 1939 Mother and I returned to the United States, just in time to escape the German invasion. I was four years old. Had Father not died, we never would have left. In 1946 she wrote a best selling book, We Stood Alone, about her time in Poland, the indifference of the West to Germany’s ambitions, the rise of Nazism and the onset of World War II. Mother’s book was a perfect epilogue to the works of Jan de Bloch. In 1947, Mother and Helen Keller, the extraordinary woman who overcame deafness and blindness from birth, were named Catholic Women-of-the-Year.
The experience of being born Polish, growing up American and listening to Mother gave me a slightly different perspective on the War than that of my friends. It also left me with an urge to write about World War II, to try to express what it was that distinguished that war from all others and, like my Great Grandfather, to speculate about the future of war.
What follows is material from the Foreword and Epilogue of My book, Whatever Happened to War? It is, admittedly, my point of view as an American, but it is not an apology or justification for American foreign policy or military strategy. Little, if anything that I tell about Jan de Bloch will be new to visitors to this website, but the conclusions I draw concerning the future of war and warfare may be.
Foreword
Any American too young to fight in the Second World War, but old enough to remember it, thinks of it as a magical period in their lives. It was a time when everyone understood the reasons for being at war. The enemies were villains, heroes were bigger than life and patriotism was a part of day-to-day life. If you were a boy, you probably played in your school’s Bugle and Drum Corps and knocked on doors selling $18.75 “Victory” bonds that paid back $25 ten years later. If you were a girl, you probably knitted six-inch squares that turned into blankets for our soldiers. When the paper shortage became critical, you rolled cigarettes for your parents using raw tobacco and pre gummed tissue that you wrapped around pencils to shape them. For this and for carrying out the ashes from the furnace you earned your twenty-five cent weekly allowance.
You collected paper, tin foil and tin cans for the “War Effort” and made butter out of the cream sitting on top of the hourglass shaped milk bottles that the milkman delivered every other day. Your parents saved their ration cards so that you could have the sugar and butter needed to make the real frosting on your birthday cake. The chances were that your father walked to the train station every day so that you and your family had enough gas to drive twenty miles inland to visit your cousins over the weekend.
Your father might have been an “Air Raid Warden” wearing his olive drab gas mask while he walked up and down the street every night making sure no telltale light peeked out from any of your neighbor’s windows. The headlights on the prewar family car were painted black from top to midpoint so that they could not be spotted from above.
When there was snow, you could safely sled down the local streets. You walked to school. You walked to the movies. In spring you would roller skate down the middle of the road. No cars were likely to interfere. If you were going a long distance, you would ride your bike. The idea of being driven or “dropped off” was unthinkable.
In Assembly, you learned “Over There,” “Wild Blue Yonder,” “Anchors Away,” the anthems of the armed forces and you sang oldies like “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Your heroes were the older brothers of your schoolmates who had enlisted and from time to time came home on leave. They never considered changing out of their uniforms. They were proud to be wearing them and you were proud to be near them.
There were parades on Memorial Day and July 4. As a Cub Scout, you would march wearing your uniform as if in the Army, yourself. You followed the news of the campaigns in Europe and the Pacific and you learned the names of exotic sounding places as the Marines slowly burned the “Nips” out of their bunkers in one Pacific atoll after another. It was a great war.
Perhaps most important, nobody ever dropped a bomb on your house. You never went hungry and you never felt endangered. These were not things you really considered. You were asked to “Do Your Part,” and no matter how old, everyone did. It may have been the last time in the history of the United States that virtually all Americans pulled together.
Then one day, a bomb was dropped on a Japanese city that was so powerful that it destroyed the entire city and killed almost everyone in it. A couple of days later another one was dropped on another city. Within a week, the War was over.
It took months before the cheering subsided and our soldiers returned home full of the flush of victory. A year passed before reports and photographs from the Red Cross and others emerged telling the world about the Holocaust, the German extermination camps and the after effects of radiation poisoning from the atomic bombs. As we learned more about the real price that both the winners and the losers had paid and the horrible things that had happened to millions of people, the greatness of the War began to wear off.
In less than five years, the last remaining feelings of security wore off in the face of hysteria about the spread of communism and a series of conflicts involving our former Allies, the Soviet Union and China. The Blockade of Berlin and the Korean War destroyed any ideas that World War II was going to be the last war, great or small.
More than fifty years have passed since the end of World War II and war has certainly not disappeared from the face of the earth. But as anyone alive is painfully aware, there is a character to war today that has a different cast to it, not only in the way it is being fought, but also between whom.
World War II had its share of villains and more than its share of heroes. It might have been that the nature of the 1940’s technology of radio, the movies and the press led to stories with a sweep that left us feeling better about “our boys” than do today’s TV images with their grizzly immediacy.
More than anything, World War II was about people, its leaders and its followers. It was about those characteristics we admire, courage, kindness, forgiveness and loyalty. It was about those characteristics that reflect man’s incredible ingenuity, inventiveness and perseverance. Sadly, it was also about the evil that man can commit.
All of these attributes of human behavior, singly or as a group, good and bad, existed during the Second World War and keynote the stories in this book. Were they unique to World War II? The answer is for posterity to gauge, but one measure at this moment in 2007 is that after five years of fighting in Iraq only two Congressional Medals of Honor have been awarded to our soldiers. During the same period of time during World War II, there were two hundred and forty-two. It almost surely has nothing to do with any defect in the character of our soldiers today, but rather with the character of the war they are fighting.
World War II was tragic enough in the way it caused destruction, cost lives and changed the culture of the world. As much as people hoped and prayed that it would, World War II did not signal the end of War. The real tragedy was that despite the sacrifices that people made so that there never would be another war like it, the seeds of the kind of warfare that surrounds us today were sown in World War II. Weapons of mass destruction (the atomic bomb), suicide bombing (kamikaze raids), ethnic cleansing (the Holocaust) and weapons launched miles away from the victims led to changes in warfare that threaten the very foundations of civilization today.
Epilogue – The Future of War
In the sixth century BC during the era of Confucius, Sun Tzu, a brilliant Chinese General and philosopher wrote “The Art of War”, a work that affected the way wars have been fought for over two thousand years. The principles outlined by Sun Tzu influenced a mix of military leaders as diverse as Napoleon Bonaparte, the German General Staff, Generals Carl von Clausewitz, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur and Mao Tse-Tung.
“The Art of War” has probably been the most widely read book on Warfare, yet it comes to an apparently contradictory conclusion considering that it is a book on how to wage war. It was Sun Tzu’s feeling that the best war was no war, a sentiment he repeated time and again in his work.
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
Better than anyone, Sun Tzu understood that in war no matter how good one’s plans and no matter what the reasons for going to war in the first place, wars never turned out the way one expected.
Wars have always been the worst of all possible ways to resolve disputes. Wars have been fought for every conceivable reason: acquisition of land, lust for power, ethnic hatred, governmental politics, religious beliefs and independence from occupation. There even were times when wars were considered entertainment, when Kings went to war with other Kings and the courts of both camps watched from the sidelines. For thousands of years wars were fought face to face, one man against another doing his best to beat his opponent into the ground using lances, swords, cudgels, daggers and his own fists.
Each of the “Ages” brought changes in the way wars were fought. During the Roman Empire, the tactics and strategy of twentieth century war were already in place. Modern ideas about transport, logistics, mobility, artillery, organization and training had been set. Moreover, no one understood better than the Greeks and Romans that the most important part of warfare was not the size of the army and its destructive power. It was the endurance of the State and its willingness to commit its entire social, economic, and political resources to the support of military operations.
Greece, for example, lost almost every battle against Persia for two hundred years with little consequence. Greece survived and prospered. Rome prevailed over Carthage through the endurance and will of its people. In 255 B.C. a Roman fleet of 248 ships was sunk in a storm with a loss of over 100,000 men, a number equal to fifteen percent of all men of military age in Rome. Rome's response was to build another fleet. Considering the percentage of people lost on both sides, the Carthaginian War may have been the bloodiest and costliest in history. Roman losses alone approached 400,000 men, and still Rome fought on. In all of its years of fighting with Carthage, like the Greeks before them, Rome lost every battle and yet, in the end, survived.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, the tools of war began to evolve rapidly. The canon and more powerful gunpowder began to change the rules of combat and during the ensuing two hundred years war went through a profound change.
The muskets and canons of the Napoleonic wars and the American Revolution fired round cannonballs and bullets without the likelihood of actually hitting a specific target. The original purpose of the musket was to keep an enemy’s head down until he could be attacked by bayonet. By the time of the American Civil war in the 1850’s, however, improved metallurgy and machine tools that put rifling grooves in the barrels of canons and rifles and opened the door to bullets and shells with increased range and deadly accuracy.
The American Civil War, the bloodiest in American history, provided a hint of what war might look like in the future. Sherman’s March to the Sea, burning crops and towns in his army’s wake suggested that future wars would involve everyone, civilian as well as soldier. It was a precursor to the wholesale destruction of cities in World War II. Nobody studied the lessons of the American Civil War with greater interest than the German General Staff.
Thirty years after the Civil War, the machine gun made its appearance in the Boer War between the British and the two Boer Republics, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic. The machine gun, advances in the range of the canon, smokeless gunpowder and the accuracy of the rifle made the trench warfare of World War I inevitable.
The Gatling machine gun, first used in the Boer War – 1880’s