It is sometimes said that the first casualty of war is the truth, but it is more often the language with which that truth might be expressed. The use of euphemisms to describe a ghastly reality is not new: the word casualty comes from the Latin casualitas, an ‘unfortunate accident’, and has been used to describe military losses since the 15th century. The casualties of a medieval battle were stabbed, hacked, and bludgeoned in a close-range mêlée aptly described as bloody murder. And while watching the pictures from cameras in the noses of precision-guided munitions as they hit buildings, it is often easy to forget that there are human beings in these buildings, being torn apart or burned to death. The use of terms like ‘surgical strike’ blurs the fact that now, as always, the aim of combat is the destruction of the enemy's will or ability to resist, and the infliction of casualties has generally formed part of this process. There is no significant difference whether the victim is disembowelled by the latest technology released from a nuclear submarine hundreds of miles away, or by a knife in close combat. There is nothing casual about it.
The term casualty refers to any unplanned subtraction from a force's fighting strength. Its major causes are disease, desertion, accident, and combat itself, which generates killed, wounded, captured, and missing. Of these, until recently disease was so greatly the grimmest reaper that many campaigns were decided by it outright. European micro-organisms conquered the Americas, the conquistadores, and other invaders simply mopping up the shattered Amerindian remnants. During the Walcheren expedition of 1809, the British lost over 23, 000 men to disease while suffering only a little over 200 casualties from combat. More people died in the 1918-19 influenza epidemic than in the four years of WW I, and the Allied campaign in Italy during WW II was the first in which combat casualties outnumbered those caused by disease, thanks to penicillin and other revolutionary advances in medicine. Large, static encampments with poor or non-existent sanitary provisions have been a perfect culture for epidemics, from the sieges of ancient times to modern concentration camps. During the American civil war, the proportion of fatalities caused by disease to those in combat was almost exactly two to one, falling particularly heavily on the country boys who lacked the acquired immunities of their comrades from the cities. The Roman army, one of the finest fighting forces in history, also paid the greatest attention to hygiene. Commanders who have not paid due attention to the health of their soldiers, like Frederick ‘Barbarossa’ during the Legnano campaign of 1176, have found their armies ravaged by disease before any battle was fought. If to this we add those who died of septicaemia from even light wounds, the casualty list for mankind's longest running war is billions to zero in favour of the microbes.
Next to disease, desertion has been the most common cause of casualties. Despite the draconian measures employed to discourage desertion, such is the misery of warfare that only armies enjoying the highest discipline and morale have ever been relatively free of it. Even invading armies campaigning in places where the likely fate of a deserter was a hideous death at the hands of vindictive inhabitants have not been spared it, as the French army found in Spain during the Peninsular war. Sometimes desertion is internal: besieged soldiers cease to defend themselves and await the end listlessly, having become, in effect, psychiatric casualties. Desertion is often a passive protest against a cumulatively intolerable state of affairs and can be precipitated by relatively minor grievances, the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. High on the list of complaints produced by French mutineers in the spring of 1917 were demands for better food and more regular leave. Some deserters have been so eager to prove that their action was not motivated by cowardice that they have fought for the other side. Another form of protest and a persistent if unquantifiable source of casualties has been the self-inflicted wound or the murder of one's fellows, today known as fragging.
Death and injury in combat has been the least significant source of casualties numerically, but it is the category that most captures our attention. Today we confront the paradox that weapons of mass destruction possess the potential to kill more people than even the Black Death, but a wounded soldier is far more likely to survive his injury than at any other time in history. Killing and healing science and technology have advanced in parallel. There have been some weapons intended to exploit this fact, such as the German S-mine designed to blow off a foot, because that not only disabled one soldier but tied up stretcher-bearers, medical staff, transport, and hospital resources. Yet although the variety of injuries and the range over which casualties may be inflicted have increased steadily since chemical replaced muscle power as the principal means of weapon delivery, there has never been a single day when more men were killed in battle than at Cannae, and it was well into the 19th century before the range, rate of fire, and lethality of the longbow was improved upon. For unmitigated horror at the point of contact, it is unlikely that the grinding crunch of the hoplite phalanxes could be exceeded. The military greatness of Shaka lay in the fact that he transformed normal tribal warfare, where spears might be thrown and insults exchanged, but where most of the warriors on both sides went home at the end of the day, into battles of annihilation. Successful double envelopment, every commander's beau idéal, can have no other outcome.
POWs are also casualties, and diminish an army's strength in two ways. The POWs themselves, of course, can no longer participate in the war. But more significantly the willingness to take prisoners and treat them humanely can diminish the enemy's will to resist. Taking prisoners can thus be a pragmatic, not a humanitarian consideration. In fortification and siegecraft, the rules were that if the garrison capitulated after a prudent time, it might march out with all the honours of war. If, on the other hand, resistance continued to the point where the besieger was obliged to assault the place, then it was understood that the defenders could expect no mercy. It is partly because irregular forces in general do not have the facilities to hold prisoners that they, in turn, are liable to summary execution if captured. A guerrilla leader who brilliantly turned this equation on its head was Fidel Castro, who would scrape together a sumptuous meal for any prisoners he took, make sure they saw only his best-equipped men, and then release them back to the conscript army of the dictator Batista. Since the latter tortured and killed the rebels who fell into his hands, the result was to harden the resolve of his enemies while the morale of his own army plummeted.
Soldiers missing in action (MIA) feature on casualty returns too. Soldiers were first reported missing on a large scale during WW I. Sometimes they had been captured, and news of this eventually filtered through. Sometimes, alas, they had been blown to tatters, mutilated beyond recognition, or simply lost in the moonscape of shell holes. Even soldiers initially accorded a known and honoured grave might be exhumed or obliterated by shellfire. Of the one and three-quarter million Commonwealth servicemen who died in two world wars, three-quarters of a million are commemorated on memorials to the missing like the soaring arch at Thiepval on the Somme with over 70, 000 British names or the panels behind the huge cemetery at Tyne Cot near Ypres with more than 34, 000. The families of soldiers reported missing in action often hope against hope that their loved one has somehow survived, or, even if they accept the worst, are denied a focus for their mourning. This explains the importance of commemorating both dead and missing, ensuring that the latter have their names engraved in stone whose endurance compensates for the transience of flesh and blood.
The calculation of casualties presents military historians with real problems. There is a general tendency for armies to understate their own and overstate the enemy's, and in ancient and medieval times casualty estimates were often wildly inaccurate. More recently, the basis on which casualty returns were made complicates matters. The German army of WW I did not include wounded who were not evacuated; the British army included even those wounded who were returned to duty after immediate treatment. Comparing casualties for, say, the Somme or third Ypres thus requires an addition to published German figures, and debating the size of this addition continues to generate as much heat as light. Although the desire to limit casualties has been a marked feature of wars fought by western democracies at the close of the 20th century, wounds and death remain the currency of war.
Bibliography
- Adams, G. W., Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (New York, 1952).
- Beebe, G. W., and DeBakey, M. E., Battle Casualties: Incidence, Mortality, and Logistic Considerations (Springfield, 1952).
- Gabriel, Richard, and Metz, Karen, A History of Military Medicine (London, 1992).
- McLaughlin, R., The Royal Army Medical Corps (London, 1972)
— Richard Holmes
