Military Matters – Ted Crawford

I. The Distribution of Casualties by Social Class within the Armed Services

How far the upper classes among the fighting men suffer relative to those beneath them in war depends on two factors: the differential casualty rates of officers as opposed to other ranks, and the degree to which such officers come from the upper classes. Changes in either of these will have social and political effects. This has some importance for Marxists, as the degree to which the upper classes have a higher chance of dying in conflicts as opposed to the lower orders may effect their enthusiasm for war and whether they remain enthusiastic for longer than the hoi-poloi. It is also important that the bourgeoisie controls the armed forces which have to act, if not in their name, in their interests. This little essay is an attempt to throw some light on this matter which has been obscured, on the one hand, by the belief of the left that the poor always suffer most, and, on the other, the opinion of the British upper classes that their losses were disproportionately high in two world wars. Furthermore, statistics are not collected to provide details of the class origin of casualties, and some rough guesswork has to be done.¹

There is no doubt that in the gunpowder age from about 1650 to 1900, the casualties of the rank and file in land forces were always much greater proportionately than among the officers. This was because the overwhelming proportion of such casualties were ‘non-battle’ ones, largely from disease, so that the superior food and living conditions of the officers, particularly while on campaign, meant that they fell ill less often, and, if they did fall ill, they were far more likely to be nursed back to health or sent home. In battle itself infantry and cavalry officers tended to suffer rather more than their men, and medical aid, however costly, was often as deadly as neglect, but even so their losses were not too disproportionate, because, as weapon accuracy was poor, deaths were distributed fairly randomly among those present on the ‘field of honour’. It was a matter of some comment that battles in the American War of Independence and in the American war of 1812 against frontiersmen who were good marksmen with muzzle loading rifles, led to heavier officer casualties in the British army.²

A few statistics are of interest here, always remembering that before the middle of the eighteenth century disease was even more deadly, and armies swiftly wasted away during European campaigns, even when there was no fighting to speak of. The most disastrous campaign ever recorded in terms of casualties for the British army was that in the West Indies during 1793-99 when perhaps 75 000 men died of disease, comprising the vast majority who had been sent out, and including most of the officers.³ In the Crimean War about 25 000 British lives were lost, but fewer than 4000 were killed or died of wounds. The hospital at Scutari over which Florence Nightingale presided was full of sick — not wounded. Even in the six-year-long Peninsular War, two-thirds of the 24 000 dead were from sickness not battle, and Wellington, though a fearful reactionary, was very careful of the health of his troops, knowing that they were very difficult to replace by voluntary enlistment. The American Civil War, involving vastly greater numbers, had similar proportions of battle to non-battle dead as the British experienced in the Peninsular, and the same was true 40 years later in the Boer War, with 7000 killed to about 13 000 dead of disease.⁴ Indeed, the first prolonged war in history in which the battle dead outnumbered fatalities from sicknesses was as late as the present century, in the Russo-Japanese in 1904-05.

Naval service, which invariably involved far fewer people than land service, was, before the middle of the nineteenth century, always characterised by very high death rates among sailors, and in the Great War with France (1793-1815) 80 per cent of the deaths among British sailors were from sickness, 15 per cent from accident (including wrecks), and only five per cent in battle. Seamen had a far, far greater chance of dying from disease and falling from the rigging than officers. In battles such as Trafalgar, senior officers, including captains, admirals and captains of marines, had very high casualty rates,⁵ but battles were few and far between. Earlier than Trafalgar, non-battle losses were an even larger proportion of the total. In more modern times, death rates on board ship are generally very low unless the entire vessel disintegrates in a horrible sort of industrial accident. There is not much distinction, therefore, between the losses of officers and men on board ship in a modern naval battle, but, as in the eighteenth century, naval losses are a very small proportion of the total deaths in war.

As the twentieth century opened, the accuracy and deadliness of modern weapons on land meant that when the fighting did occur officer casualties were getting proportionately higher, and the accuracy of the Chassepot rifle led to frightful casualties among the Prussian Guard officers at Gravelotte and St Privat in 1870. It was very noticeable at the battle of Spion Kop in the Boer War that the proportions of officers to other rank dead among the colonial troops, Australian and South African, were similar for the Boers could not distinguish between them, and simply aimed at the tallest men in the unit. Unlike the colonials, who had been fed on a decent diet in their youth, the stunted offspring of the slums among the British regulars were pygmies compared with their officers, so the officer losses were proportionately double. This provided an excellent rationale for the upper classes to support health and welfare reforms in the period of 1902-14.

Thus when the First World War opened, there was an historically new situation. Because of medical advances, losses from sickness were very small in Western Europe in 1914-18, although they were much worse in ‘side-shows’ like the East African campaign.⁶ The socially prestigious corps were the infantry and the cavalry, which suffered far more in battle than the artillery and engineers, particularly the infantry, though cavalry frequently had to take a turn on foot in the trenches as well.⁷ Troops even further back than the gunners, the non-combatant corps such as railway troops, had grown in the nineteenth century, but by the First World War the ratio was still about 9:1 in favour of the front line. As a result, the many literary and historical accounts of this period do accurately reflect the fact that the upper classes suffered even more than the poor. In Britain it has been said that of those members of the aristocracy who served in the military, one out of five was killed, as opposed to one out of eight of the general population.⁸ A brief glance at the war memorials of the great public schools tells the same story. Indeed, not since the Wars of the Roses had there been such a kill-off of the English nobility.⁹ The social, technical and tactical situation was similar in all European countries, and so the ancient aristocracies paid a terrible price — as too did the aspiring middle classes who sought to emulate their style and coveted junior commands in the ‘smart’ regiments. If there was any group that suffered rather less, it was probably the skilled workers who were held back for essential war work, but in the First World War the importance of these for total mobilisation had often not been realised, and they were frequently called up to be duly mown down with unfortunate effects on the production of munitions and therefore the war effort as a whole. Sometimes industrial workers in Russia and Germany were not called up because they were considered politically unreliable, the peasants were preferred, but this option was not open to the British as there were not enough peasants here, though Irish and Scottish Highlanders served in relatively large numbers.

The Second World War was not very different for the British, save that the period of time when great armies were in combat was very much shorter, and so casualties as a whole were that much smaller, even if the rate of casualties over any given time was much the same.¹⁰ Once more the officers in the infantry and this time the cavalry too, who were frequently burnt alive in their tanks, suffered disproportionately, but with the difference that the proportion of rear echelon troops was growing, and the more mechanised and therefore mobile the armies became, the bigger did the proportion supplying them. But officers of such troops as the RAOC, RASC and REME were less socially elevated, and once more the war memorials of the public schools repay study. The losses among the general male population of that age range were about a third of First World War, but Eton had more ex-pupils killed in the Second than the First World War,¹¹ while my own rather less prestigious old school had about 50 per cent of the slaughter in the previous conflict, 278 as opposed to 578.¹² It is true that staffs,¹³ which were disproportionately of higher rank, became relatively larger and amounted in total to a division or two on the main fronts, but to balance this there were huge losses in the RAF so that 40 000 aircrew of Bomber Command, mostly commissioned but generally of middle class or lower middle class rather than upper class origin, died over Germany.

But it was the American armed services which perhaps heralded the future. In their drafting process, skilled workers were funnelled into those sectors of the services where their skills would be of use, the most striking example being the engineering troops composed of construction workers who built airfields, occasionally under fire, at the most amazing speed on Pacific islands. In this respect at least, the United States was far ahead of anywhere else in military effectiveness.¹⁴ The technical arms, the navy and the air force ground staff got the first choice of the draftees (aviators were all volunteers), while the infantry got the worst educated and socially deprived recruits, and often too the less-well-educated junior officers. The more upper class Americans went into the Secret Service, the more flash parts of the staff, perhaps the navy, which maintained its social prestige, and sometimes the air force, though this last did suffer severely.¹⁵ Both in the United States and Britain, war mobilisation was far more efficiently run than in the First World War, and skilled workers, engineers, electricians and so forth were as far as possible slotted into civilian or military tasks where their abilities would be useful, and which were either totally out of danger, or were much further back than the fighting arms. In both countries, it is probable that unskilled workers lost a much higher proportion than the skilled, but in Britain, as opposed to the United States, the upper classes too suffered far more than the average.¹⁶

In the 50 or so years that have elapsed since 1945, a longer period than that from the Boer War to the Hiroshima bomb, we have seen no all-out war. The experience of the USA in Vietnam, and on a more Lilliputian scale the New Zealand and Australian contingent in the same conflict, is, however, very suggestive. In such colonial-type wars against technically inferior opposition, the technical troops, the airforce ground staff, the men on board ship, and the enormous planning and administrative staff suffered very little indeed save boredom, fatigue, traffic accidents, the disruption of their lives from military service, and venereal disease. To a considerable extent this was true of the artillery too, but the overwhelming proportion of losses fell on the infantry, and even within battalions tended to fall on a tiny minority of the whole army in the rifle companies. The wireless operators and those in the support companies suffered a great deal less when the enemy lacked much artillery support. It was for this reason that such a disproportionate number of American casualties were black soldiers, but, I suspect, no more than the general percentage of the ill-educated and unskilled, as both Mexican and American Indians suffered disproportionately as well.¹⁷ White ‘blue collar’ workers lost a great deal too. Vietnam was truly a ‘rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight’, and this broke the army, which eventually disintegrated and forced a withdrawal. There was no land fighting to speak of in the Gulf War, but those that did die often did so as a result of accident — rather more than the official statistics suggest.¹⁸

In the British army today, the infantrymen are also often quite lumpenised and often barely literate, though all are volunteers, unlike the Americans in Vietnam, and it is almost certainly the same in every other country where there is a volunteer army from a wealthy society. Such volunteer armed services are becoming more general and will, I predict, continue to do so.¹⁹ The skilled arms can be recruited by the bribe of training to those with aptitude but who are poorly qualified, while the infantry will merely get the poorly qualified. Any prolonged war with heavy losses would mean conscription, and this will be difficult, if not impossible, for present-day Western societies. Increasingly, the risky job of aerial fighting will be delegated to nerveless machines, drones, cruise and stand-off missiles. In such a scenario, the educated and the manager will not be much at risk, unlike the poor and fit young infantryman. So the first 50 years of this century may be the exception that proves the rule, a period of mass armies and mass production where class differences in battle casualty rates as well as living standards tended to narrow greatly in the areas of developed capitalism. This era seems to have come to an end.

As far as the cost to the rank and file is concerned, all this has analogies with the widening class differentials as regards wages, security of employment, conditions and general welfare in civilian society. The difference between the armed services and the productive labour force is that a section of the managers, the officer class, have to put themselves into danger, many of them into even more danger that those that they command, and since in the last analysis such managers have control over the application of force and violence in society, they have to be utterly loyal and committed to the existing mode of production. The question of how this has been guaranteed in the past and how it is to be guaranteed in the future is, however, an interesting one, and perhaps one of considerable difficulty for present-day international capital.

II. The Creation of Armed Forces by Capitalist Societies in the Twenty-First Century

The classical Marxist writers and thinkers were very often deeply concerned with the sociology of the armed services and military technique. One need only think of Engels, Liebknecht, Jaurès and Trotsky. This was not because of their wish to play toy soldiers, but because they were aware that the armed forces embodied the state — and the state in its sharpest and most brutal form. What is more, on the continent of Europe, the universality of military service and its reserve obligations meant that from 1870 to 1918, a period of rising working class consciousness, the whole male population had experienced such service with its social pressures and its brutality. Even in the interwar period the Left Book Club produced a number of books by people like Tom Wintringham and Max Werner on military themes. Today this tradition seems almost dead, though, during period of the quarter of a century of anti-colonial guerrilla war of 1950-75, there was some interest by left wingers in some politico-military techniques. This period has now come to an end, and ‘guerrillaism’ was always an orientation to the Third World and socially backward states, rather than the most developed capitalist ones. To that extent, it was quite different in the pre-1914 period. Yet it remains true that the state is still ‘armed bodies of men’, and these armed bodies should repay study. The article which follows is a preliminary attempt to do this for the twenty-first century, and I hope that others will take it much further. I would welcome criticism.

As far as military technique itself is concerned, Marxists have no more to say than other intelligent observers, but the direction in which society may be pushed as a result of the changing forces of military production, if I can coin this Marxist term, and the ways in which technologies alter the ‘relations of military production’ can perhaps be illuminated by the Marxist method. More important still is the fact that as society changes so its armed forces will reflect this fact, and such changes will not always be in the direction of greater military effectiveness. But whether this is so or not, it is important to be aware of what is happening. As in so many other non-military respects, there seems to be some convergence internationally.

I will start by looking at the ideas of an anti-Marxist, but in my opinion a most fertile thinker, the economist Joseph Schumpeter. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he remarked in the chapter ‘The Destruction of the Protecting Strata’¹ on the fact that the processes of capitalism itself destroy the pre-bourgeois military classes, and that this meant that faced by a threat from outside its society (presumably the Soviet Union, or, as he thought, the anti-bourgeois Nazi Germany), or a non-bourgeois one within it (presumably the working class), capitalism was doomed. He thought that the old land-owning aristocratic classes provided the steel framework within which capitalist relations could flourish, and here he was obviously thinking of Hohenzollern Germany and his own Hapsburg Austria (but not only there). His metaphor is that bourgeois society destroys its own entrenchments, and is left defenceless. This has not happened, or not yet anyway, and to be fair does not look like happening in the near or medium term future, so it is interesting to see why. This essay, therefore, will concentrate on this theme. Weapons of mass destruction are of enormous importance here as they have meant that all-out warfare between nuclear armed states has ceased to be in any sense a rational policy, but I will not deal with this as much academic and political ink has been spilled on this question, and I have nothing to say that has not been said better.

But Schumpeter’s forecast that the values of bourgeois society were profoundly antipathetic to military virtue seems to me to be true. It does seem the case that the armed services of capitalist states are most effective when their tone is determined by pre-capitalist social formations. It is difficult to be an individual welfare maximiser and win the Victoria Cross. I do not think that it is a trivial point that Mark Thatcher, the epitome of self-seeking capitalist (rather than noble) youth, was not a Harrier pilot in the Falklands. The experience of this century has shown that the armies and populations of advanced capitalist states seem less and less willing to accept casualties as the pre-capitalist formations within them become less and less important. Consider the declension of the First and Second World Wars, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and finally the political fear of casualties in the Gulf. In each successive war the blood-tax became more and more unpopular. That itself cries out for an explanation which may arise in part from the smaller size of family so that the death of an only child or son is unendurable,² in part from a general mood when death is not expected among the young, and is all the more resented when, for whatever reason, it does occur.

There is no difficulty in recruiting poor and even lumpen elements for the rank and file as long as not too large an army is required. Capitalism creates these strata quite plentifully, in fact more plentifully than it would like in strictly functional terms. Falstaff’s cynical comment that ‘food for powder Hal, food for powder, they’ll fill a grave as well as any man’, must be the unspoken thought about the poor by many of our rulers — if not expressed openly in these mealy-mouthed and politically correct times. It is also perfectly possible to get officers for the support elements, the job has many civilian analogies (technical training can be offered as a bribe), and even in wartime the casualty rate here is relatively low. Any shortage arises from the demand for similar skills in civilian life. It is in the creation of officers for the front line units that there is a problem. There is an element of primitive blood sacrifice in this. For 600 years the Spartans never lost a battle without losing their commanders — the kings. Often when they won a battle, they also lost a commander or two. Unless the ruling class are there being slaughtered with the rest, there is an insufficient sense of solidarity and community, and the phalanx will not go forward. Capitalist development, of course, increasingly breaks down this sentiment, and this is most noticeable when the social system contains even fewer tribal or aristocratic elements as in the USA compared to Europe. Schumpeter would not disagree with any of this.

The bourgeois solution to this problem is that of a technical fix. An increasing proportion of both the personnel and material of the armed forces is devoted to air power where only a small minority of individuals are put at risk, unless there is a counter-bombardment of the air bases, while in land warfare there has been a move to put everyone into armoured vehicles which will move forward regardless of the wishes of those within the machine. This reaches its apogee in naval warfare where it has done so for a long time. Sea operations are now increasingly automated, and the most extreme example is the bombardment of Iraq by cruise missiles launched from nuclear submarines in deep waters many hundreds if not thousands of miles away. So to deal with the political problem of casualties in advanced capitalist countries, there arises the need for small, reliable regular armies if only because the military labour force is so capital intensive that few people can be afforded. But such forces also reflect their own changing social structures as well as their external needs, which seem, at the moment, to be post-colonial policing and the deterrence of other great powers by weapons of mass destruction.

I think that Schumpeter’s was a brilliant insight, even if the growing automation of war has prevented the military collapse of capitalism before a non-capitalist conqueror that he prophesied. But his insight does have implications for predictions as to how imperialism will behave. The Beast will, I envision, be far more fearful of war with anybody who could inflict a butcher’s bill. And this, as we can see in Bosnia and elsewhere, will enormously hamper any attempt to impose any valid political solution, since a few thousand dead citizens, and in the case of the United States mostly black citizens at that, cannot be endured in the messy task of conquering populations and creating a stable postwar political structure — not just massacring them from afar. The inability to impose solutions has important implications for socialists, though a purely military solution can still be imposed on an economically backward enemy. I say nothing one way or another of the justice of any solution imposed on Bosnia or anywhere else, I would simply emphasise that whether just or unjust, such a solution must be stable, and this will involve lots of people on the ground and therefore casualties.

So even if Schumpeter may have been wrong in thinking that capitalist societies were not driven to war, he was correct in thinking that their social tone and style was increasingly anti-warrior. There is a distinction. He did not predict that technical change would make this less important as mass armies became less affordable — as has occurred. (After huge expenditures over the past 40 years, Britain was only just able to rake up enough equipment in running order for one armoured division in the Gulf War — and to do that the rest of the army was gutted, believe you me.) France was unable to match even the British contribution, and as a result has decided to move to a smaller regular army, which is what De Gaulle called for in 1936. (It is interesting to note that De Gaulle’s book, Une Armée de Métier, was denounced at the time as a call by a right wing royalist to destroy the republican tradition of a ‘nation in arms’.) If France moves in this way, Spain, Italy and the whole of Latin America will not be far behind. This must have implications both for imperialist intervention in the Third World, and for an eventual socialist insurrection.

So it seems as if other countries are moving to the Anglo-Saxon model of smaller but highly equipped regular armies. What, then, is the nature of such a force as the British army, which appears to be a model for some other nations, and what problems does it face? At this point a word of warning is necessary. There is little standard sociology on the military officer class in the public domain, and this is particularly so in Britain.³ One suspects that the reality would be both difficult to face for many influential people, and even more difficult to justify in our ‘democratic’ state, and for this reason most of the data is almost certainly not even collected by the bureaucracy. Thus anecdotal evidence rather than the HMSO’s numbers must often be used to assess their society, but this does not make anecdotes any less valid. For a Marxist too, the special sources of his or her evidence, non-political friends, family or sexual partners must remain uncited for the most obvious of reasons. I will concentrate largely on the American and British services, the former because there is more published material about them, and the latter because they are rather peculiar compared with other capitalist states, and I know a little more about them.

In the British army, the officers in the line infantry regiments are often from the ranks, while in the navy and air force they are often A-level candidates or graduates from comprehensive schools. Nevertheless, from rough second-hand observation, the candidates at Army Regular Commission Boards do seem to be largely from independent public schools and grammar schools, though their academic qualifications average about three Cs or below. It may be that a high proportion are sons of NCOs,⁴ but to ask that question is to ask an Official Secret to be divulged. The Coldstreams, the Grenadiers and Household cavalry are still led by the nobility and gentry, while even the territorial Guards are more like the smart Light Infantry of yesteryear, ex-public school boys with a reasonable entry in the stud book, but with limited means. The gangster-like SAS units have a high proportion of these socially elevated hard men taking a turn among them. It is strange and incredibly archaic, but many of the cavalry regiments still need a small private income for junior officers because their mess bills are so high. As a result, observers of the cavalry mess have commented to me that there are many very ‘thick’ young men from top boarding schools and with ‘poor politics degrees from ex-Polys’, though many are very keen on polo. They are said to be ‘unbelievable — another world’.⁵ So there are still probably just enough young men going to Sandhurst to join such ‘smart’ regiments who think of their profession as a ‘calling’ similar to the Church, and, surprising though it may seem to readers of New Interventions, many still do. There will be enough to officer the Guards, Cavalry and Light Infantry in a very small regular army so that as yet the British ruling class can cope. But even the British would soon run out of both such types and the sons of NCOs in any prolonged clash. (Even then I note that three of the ‘tough guy’ SAS were taken prisoner unwounded by the Iraqis — hardly Japanese or Spartan behaviour.)

But what is extraordinary is the greater and greater contrast between the social mores and archaic attitudes expected within the regular army and society outside it. This must set up unbelievable tensions within it. The Officers’ Mess is a necessary institution, not an accidental one, because the ‘laddishness’ of the young men within it involves a bonding process which is needed for efficient operations on the battlefield. The greatest social difficulty arising from present day society is not gays,⁶ or the role of women (both comparatively trivial), but the problem of officers’ wives. In civilian life, young, able, educated, urban professionals increasingly marry women like themselves who also have careers, and because of their high joint incomes can afford the necessary child care. It is precisely from this stratum of young men that the army hopes to get its future generals and capable staff officers, but no woman can continue a professional career if she has to up sticks and move at the behest of the Service when her husband has a new posting. So the army loses just the high-flyers that it wants to keep, and continues to employ the dullards. That is a really serious problem for the army, which has arisen because of the emancipation of women and their growing integration into the labour force under modern capitalism. It is not so much a shortage of the ‘right chaps’, but of the ‘right sort of gels’, Air-Heads or Earth Mothers from the appropriate social stratum who are both attractive to clever young men, and who will breed another military dynasty without complaint. The Royal Family has similar difficulties in finding the right sort of female.

Normal American infantry officers, apart from a Samurai elite from West Point (about 15 per cent of the total corps) are Lieutenant Calleys — if not always the scum of the earth like him, then poor working class lads who got to a very minor US university thanks to army money, and did not have a family plumbing firm into which they could go. (With the economic development in the Southern United States, the role of the local gentry and small town middle class there has much diminished in the US Army.) The infantry officers who would take the overwhelming bulk of casualties in a stand-up conventional war are almost totally of respectable working class origin, and many are black as well. They would number about 20 000 men, and again in any real butchery the attraction of social mobility upwards for such types would pall very quickly, much faster than for young British infantry officers in 1914-18, or the bomber crews in 1941-45. I have heard it said that the US Army is very physically soft (and much less hard drinking than the British), while the bonding of the mess is non-existent — they are a much more nine to five and civilianised force. The other area which could have proportionately heavy combat losses and which needs brave (or as we now say ‘motivated’) people is the air force, and the US Air Force and Navy have a combined total of about 20 000 pilots, of whom perhaps as many as a quarter (but probably a good deal less) have to take themselves into danger. They can probably get enough aircrew as the attraction to young men is that of driving an immensely powerful but risky machine (a Porsche of Porsches that not even yuppies can afford), though whether all the US pilots would press home attacks with quite the zeal of the Israelis in 1973 can be doubted. In any case, the skills needed of the ground attack and fighter pilots are great, and in any prolonged clash the consequent losses will mean severe personnel shortages which can be less easily replaced than their machines.⁷ That is one reason, of course, for the increasing development of stand-off weapons and drones which will avoid a high rate of loss.

But I do not think American society can produce very many of this sort of individual, and not nearly enough for a massive clash with a developed power. Thus their desperate attempts to automate the process of war, which, in the Gulf, against a very inferior opponent, seems to have worked. To my vast amazement, I may add, though I did prophesy that most British casualties would be slain by the Yanks, only nine men were officially killed in that way.

I believe that the situation I have outlined above is sensed, if not stated, by the political leaderships of the great capitalist powers. They will therefore desperately avoid direct military confrontation, and against an enemy will increasingly use diplomatic pressure, bribery, blockade, even the mining of harbours, internal coups d’état, and, if a military clash is finally unavoidable they will, as in Bosnia and the Gulf, seek to use precise air attacks to destroy military and communication centres, and will rely for the messy part of the fighting on irregular auxiliaries whose mothers have no votes within the imperialist centres. Thus far that is what they have done against third world and economically weak opponents. If things get of hand and they have to bring in masses of their own troops, their political strength, though not their economic muscles, would prove very feeble. But out of such an unforeseen political crisis opportunities for the working class might arrive. Honesty makes me add that if the shape of such events is unforeseen by the intelligence, journalistic and academic agencies of the great powers, it is unlikely that I will be able to predict them except in the most general terms — the future is unknowable in detail.⁸ But the fragility can be noted, and is tending, I believe, to increase so that some optimism of the will can be engendered to counteract the deep pessimism that our intellect must feel today.

Notes (part I)

1.      John Ellis’ The Sharp End of War provides interesting data on living conditions at the front and casualties by arm in the Second World War.

2.      An Irish great-great grandfather of mine, a Major Maunsell of the 85th Foot, was badly wounded at New Orleans in 1814 just before the main assault, though another Irish great-great-great grandfather, Captain Spaight, survived Bunker Hill.

3.      Those of a literary turn of mind will remember that Cassandra Austen, the sister of the novelist Jane, lost her admirer in present-day Haiti, where whole regiments were wiped out by disease. See Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Sea-Power, Oxford, 1987.

4.      To be precise, officers lost 716 killed or died of wounds and 408 dead from disease, while the soldiers’ ratio was 7010 to 12 699 (Times History of the War in South Africa, Volume 7, p23). In the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand contingents, which were probably fitter to start with, the losses from disease and enemy action were equal. The relatively low battle loss was also due to the fact that the fighting was not very severe.

5.      Nearly 20 per cent at Trafalgar. See Keegan’s The Price of Admiralty, pp113-4.

6.      Rupert Brooke died of disease on a Greek island awaiting the Gallipoli campaign.

7.      The difficulty of the Woolwich exam for the gunners and sappers was always far greater than for the Sandhurst one, but such middle class officers could live on their income (their mess was cheaper), and had some small supplements to their pay.

8.      See Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, 1992, pp72-84

9.      In the Wars of the Roses fighting was almost invariably on foot. On the defeated side the archers easily ran away, while the gentlemen were slaughtered in their heavy armour. In a Civil Wars no ransoms were taken — only estates.

10.    Duncan Hallas told me that in the 10 months of fighting from the arrival of his infantry battalion in Normandy to the end of the war, there was almost a complete turnover of personnel. He went from private to a senior sergeant in the period. See Ellis, op cit.

11.    A high proportion of cavalry and Guards Officers might account for much of this.

12.    And 43 dead in the Boer War, in proportionate terms enormous.

13.    Typically this was where scum like the brothers Ian and Peter Fleming both served. My father told me that Peter, a great ‘explorer’ and tough guy, used to walk around Delhi festooned with Tommy guns, grenades and bowie knives several hundred miles away from dangerous Japanese, while of Ian (of James Bond fame) it is said that he always got his Wren (generally at the Ritz), while serving comfortably in London.

14.    In naval aviation matters they were also far ahead of the British.

15.    President Kennedy’s elder brother was killed as a pilot. President Bush was shot down, and Kennedy himself served in the navy and was shot up.

16.    In the Second World War US blacks were often used in more ‘menial’ rather than fighting roles, so their losses were proportionately lower than in Vietnam.

17.    About a third of the New Zealand dead were Maori from one tenth of the population.

18.    You will hear it said that an individual in a unit was killed by a ‘sniper’ or, more accurately, a ‘stray bullet’. Nobody is going to check and search out precisely where the shot came from. The man is dead, distress would be caused, and no purpose served.

19.    After their experience in Bosnia and the Gulf, the French are moving to a volunteer army, as are the Dutch and Belgians. If the French change so will the Italians, Portuguese and Spanish, while the Russians too are talking of abolishing conscription.

Notes (part II)

1.      J Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London, 1959, pp134-9.

2.      In some countries with conscription such as Spain or Latin America, the only son of a widow or even the eldest son was always exempted.

3.      Raoul Girardet, Société Militaire de la France Contemporaine, 1953, and Girardet’s other works have data which do not exist for the UK.

4.      Like officers, the senior NCOs get help from the army with boarding school fees (80 per cent), and if their sons can pass the entrance exam they can get into the smartest ones. Apart from Eton and Winchester, common entrance marks at the boarding schools are much lower than at the great day schools, and the pass mark is never divulged by the schools themselves.

5.      It is only fair to say that the Rifle Brigade officers are said to be very relaxed and genial people, though the Paras can be quite unpleasant. Traditionally, the Rifle Brigade was regarded as the ‘thinking men of the infantry’, if that is not a contradiction in terms.

6.      Male homosexuals are swiftly flung out if discovered, but although the rule is the same for women a blind eye is turned to practising lesbians if they are discreet. The Royal Logistic Corps, which has the highest proportion of women in it, is sometimes known as the Royal Lesbian Corps.

7.      It may take at least two years to build an aeroplane, and four to train a pilot. There is a greater prospect that technology will speed up the former process more quickly than the latter.

8.      If I had to hazard a wild guess, I would think a clash in East Asia between the USA and China would be the destabilising event most likely to occur.