Remembering and learning from the past: World War I and Iraq

Kitchener and his generals were vigorously criticised by the British public for their performance in the South African conflict. In the latest history (1979) of the Boer War, Thomas Packenham wrote the following, referring to the younger generation of Kitchener’s officers, Byng, Robertson, Birdwood, Allenby, French and Haig:

The central tactical lesson of the Boer War eluded them; the reasons for those humiliating reverses were not the marksmanship of the Boers, nor their better guns and rifles, nor the crass stupidity of the British generals - all myths which the British people found it convenient to believe. It was that the smokeless, long range, high velocity small bore magazine bullet from rifle or machine gun, plus the trench, had decisively tilted the balance against attack and in favour of defence.

The world learnt this lesson the hard way, in the bloody stalemates of the Dardanelles (Gallipoli) and Flanders (includes Passchendaele, where 38,000 Australians were killed and wounded).

Kitchener was in command of the British forces in World War I until 1916. His subordinate, General Haig, is most remembered as the Butcher of the Somme, after a battle fought in France. In that battle German Spandau machine guns, secure in pillbox protection, and riflemen in trenches with accurate Mauser magazine rifles, were used to deadly effect against massed infantry in close order formation. In one day, mostly in the first hour, the British forces suffered 57,470 casualties of which 19,240 were deaths. Such numbers were not especially unusual on both sides.

It is easy to be sanctimonious when making judgments of past events. Still it is difficult to understand how so many trained and experienced people, who had observed the new weapons in the previous 50 years, could then be so wrong. No one with influence appears to have remembered the recent past; they were, as Santayana says, condemned to repeat it. History has condemned Kitchener and his generals for doing so.

In the case of Iraq, history offers several examples of insurgencies in the last century that are relevant “past”:

• the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa, 1899-1902;
• the Malayan Emergency, 1948-1955;
• the Russian invasion of Hungary, 1956;
• the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968;
• the Vietnam wars of France, 1945-1954; and
• the Vietnam wars of the US, 1961-1975.

In the Boer War the British forces, much stronger numerically than the Boers, were in danger of losing until Lord Kitchener perceived the necessity of separating the combatants from their supporters who supplied them with food, intelligence and fresh horses. To accomplish this, he established secure “concentration camps” to contain the Boer non-combatant communities; he also initiated a “scorched earth” policy to minimise the food supply of the guerillas and their horses. This policy was effective and won the war. (Distressingly some 20,000 Boers, mostly women and children, died of disease in the camps, earning for Kitchener the intense hatred of succeeding generations of Boers and Afrikaners).

In the Malayan Emergency, ethnic Chinese communist insurgents on the Malay Peninsula who had fought against the Japanese, at the end of that war continued to fight against the restoration of British colonial government. Given the Cold War dynamics underway at the time, this insurgency was contested by the British with the support of many of the ethnic Malays, who were promised eventual independence. Under the strategy devised by Lieutenant General Briggs the insurgents were separated from their communities that supplied them with food and intelligence. These non-combatants were re-settled in secured “New Villages”. British planes and ships prevented re-supply of weapons and ammunition to the insurgents by sea routes, and troops secured the narrow mountainous access from southern Thailand. Even with these tactics, it was still necessary to have a large numerical advantage (up to 50 to 1) to finally defeat the insurgents sheltering in the rugged and jungle-covered terrain.

The anti-communist uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia were of a rather different nature, being spontaneous with apparently limited military preparation or planning. The Russians, with assistance from Warsaw Pact allies in the case of Czechoslovakia, quickly overwhelmed any resistance with little actual combat. About 2,500 Hungarians were killed and less than 100 Czechs. The Russians had an enormous strategic advantage, in that they could control all the borders. Both countries were 80 per cent bordered by other Warsaw Pact countries; the remaining sections were with Austria, which was no threat to the Russians. The number of invading troops (600,000 with 6,000 tanks) was proportionately much larger in Czechoslovakia, but the total number of people killed was much smaller; this result might be purely coincidental.

The French in Vietnam were not popular with an indigenous population restless after the defeat of the Japanese. It was not encouraged by any promises of independence. On the commencement of hostilities against nationalist/communist guerillas, the French were also not able to secure the rugged northern borders. This left the insurgents free to acquire arms and ammunition from ideological supporters China and Russia.

The Americans in Vietnam were determined to fight a conventional high-technology war and used air power extensively, often with little or no benefit. (If technology was effective against terrorism, Israel would have been at peace long ago.) Air power was unable to control the borders or the communist supply lines through nominally neutral Laos, where the Ho Chi Minh trail in that country continued to function effectively.

On the advice of British expert, Robert Thompson, a “strategic hamlet” program was introduced in 1963 which was intended to isolate the non-combatant community from the insurgents. It was unfortunately put under the control of South Vietnamese political appointees who followed their own separate agendas, not the least of which was corruption. The program failed. To compound the difficulties, the non-combatant population in South Vietnam was ethnically, religiously and politically divided, while the armies of the north were politically and nationalistically united and motivated.