Making of the A-Bomb :: essays research papers

The machine gun mechanized 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 cheek-anachronistically speaking, asoftware package. "The basic lever," the writer Gil Elliot comments, "was the conscription law, which made vast 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 production of resources, in particular guns andammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the intrench 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 rational to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to deviseguns of high technical capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in defensive 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 tyrannical 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 everyfront independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged on. In Russia it detonate in revolution. InGermany it motivated desertions and surrenders. Among the French it led to mutinies in the front lin es. Among the British it fosteredmalingering. Whatever its ostensible purpose, the end result of the complex organization that was the competent software of the Great War was themanufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation 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 atomic number 63 before 1914 and no one in authority expected it to evolve, despite the pioneering lessons of the AmericanCivil War. Once the trenches were in place, the long grave already remove (John Masefields bitterly ironic phrase), then the war stalemated