Making of the A-Bomb :: essays research papers

The machine gun motorize war. Artillery and gas mechanized war. They were the hardware of the war, the tools. But they wereonly proximately the mechanism of the slaughter. The ultimate mechanism was a method of organization-anachronistically speaking, asoftware package. "The basic lever," the writer Gil Elliot comments, "was the conscription law, which made massive numbers of menavailable for military service. The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turnednumbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The proceeds of resources, in particular guns andammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the bearing, and the trench system of defence,were military concerns." Each interlocking system was logical in itself and each system could be rationalized by those who worked itand moved through it. Thus Elliot demonstrates, "It is rea sonable to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to deviseguns of high practiced capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in valueive trenches." What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of smalldemocracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you. But the mencaught in the middle came to glimpse a darker truth. "The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman," Siegfried Sassonallows a fictional infantry officer to see. "What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims." Men on every face independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged on. In Russia it exploded in revolution. InGermany it motivated desertions and surrenders. Among the French it led to mutinies in the front lines. Among the British it fosteredmalingering. Whatever its ostensible purpose, the end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was themanufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial mental process was fantasized by the generals as a "strategy of attrition." The British triedto kill Germans, the Germans tried to kill British and French and so on, a "strategy" so familiar by now that it almost sounds normal. Itwas not normal in Europe before 1914 and no one in authority expected it to evolve, disdain the pioneering lessons of the AmericanCivil War. Once the trenches were in place, the long grave already dug (John Masefields bitterly ironic phrase), then the war stalemated