Posted on 08/01/2016 5:21:21 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
I agree. If the Pacific War had gone into an invasion of the Japanese home islands, we might have lost a half million or a million men, killed 3 or 4 times that many Japanese ... and then made a negotiated peace. The United States has never fought a dig-down, to-the-limits war with a foreign power. We haven’t had to.
A case can be made that the Civil War wasn’t that kind of war, comparable with, say, the 30 Years War in Europe. Maybe we’ll get more insight on this as we go through the years and the literature. “How low can we go?” or how low did we go? I can’t say I really know, for all I’ve read over 40 years of history study.
So, what would you call US forces fighting in Italy, France, Iwo Jima or Okinawa?
Germans in Italy under "Smiling Jack" Albert Kesselring fought as good a delaying action as any troops anywhere, extracting huge costs in Allied blood & treasure, while Japanese always fought as fanatically as any human beings ever.
Tax-chick: " 'How low can we go?' or how low did we go?
I can’t say I really know..."
I have long argued that there's no comparison between the behavior of American soldiers, North or South, during the Civil War versus those of any other country or war.
They were genuinely Christian soldiers, and their good behavior was nearly always reinforced from the top.
So, despite frequent Lost Causer complaints about a "Beast" Butler or "insane" Sherman, the actual details of their alleged beastliness were quite mild when compared to other wars, from the 17th century 30 Years War to the Second World War.
Sure, you can google-up lists of Civil War massacres, and there were a few, but remarkably few and with civilian deaths in the range of a dozen or hundreds, not thousands or God-forbid, millions, as in other wars.
At least, that's what summaries of history imply.
Perhaps a closer look at the details will paint a somewhat different picture?
I can see that some of my comments weren’t clear. When I said we have not fought a “to the limits war,” I meant one with national survival on the line, one in which every resource was committed because the alternative was the non-existence of the United States, not just a far-less-favorable geopolitical situation. It was not a reference to the level of intensity of a particular campaign or to the troops involved, but a look a national level.
When I said, “How low can we go,” I did not mean in the sense of moral depravity. This was an expansion of the previous point, and had to do with going all the way to the bottom of our national resources. As in the case where a sports coach says, “Dig deep!” meaning that an athlete should reach the end of the competition in a total state of collapse ... that is what I was trying to say.
I agree with your thoughtful comments which were generated by my failure to get across what I was trying to say!
I'd think your description could apply to the American Revolutionary War and War of 1812, as well as the Confederacy after, say, Gettysburg in 1863.
The final death rate percentage (10%) among Confederate men exceeded that of any country, including Soviets, in the Second World War.
Estimates I've seen of civilian deaths, including slaves, in the hundreds of thousands seem utter nonsense when you ask: where are all the contemporary news stories of these deaths?
Where are the graves?
They are non-existent, because the alleged deaths are mythological, intended to support Lost Causer propaganda.
The reality was awful enough, no exaggerations needed.
Very interesting - I did not know that.
Estimates I've seen of civilian deaths, including slaves, in the hundreds of thousands seem utter nonsense when you ask: where are all the contemporary news stories of these deaths?
That hadn't crossed my mind. I was offering a viewpoint (open for discussion), not pushing a specific agenda.
August 14. Nothing new today but my own virtuous simplicity of manners. Yellow fever stock is falling like Nicaragua or Lucifer, son of the morning. None of it in town, and fewer cases at Quarantine. Per contra, the most astounding and terrific legends of its prevalence at Bath, New Utrecht, and Fort Hamilton; how everybody is running away, and no one lives there any more but people in the black vomit stage who are too much prostrated to run; how you can nose the poisoned air of those villages a mile before you reach them; how all the dogs and cats are saffron colored, and so forth. But men are very susceptible of panic when the word epidemic is whispered to them. On the Battery tonight, the sudden recollection that the cool sea-breeze I was enjoying came from somewhere near the Quarantine over nine miles of moonlit saltwater, quickened my walk for a moment.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, Abridged by Thomas J. Pressly
How far can a mosquito fly?
Mosquitoes can’t fly very far or very fast. Most mosquitoes can fly no more than about one to three miles, and often stay within several hundred feet of where they were hatched. However, a few salt marsh species can travel up to 40 miles. The top speed for a mosquito is about 1.5 miles per hour.
https://www.megacatch.com/mosquito-faqs/mosquito-facts/
Thank you. It sounds as if the author did not need to worry about yellow fever transmission in his particular situation, then.
Sorry, I rechecked those numbers and need to correct them...
Those numbers do not include civilians, of whom many millions died in WWII, but strictly military deaths in both Germany and the Soviet Union equaled or exceeded those of Confederates in the Civil War.
No other countries came even close.
I’ve seen the Russian and German numbers, although not in that exact format. I had not ever seen a comparison with the Confederacy.
In terms of national survival, I would say that the Soviet Union wasn’t going to be threatened. “Worst mistake of the millennium: invading Russia.” If other countries had wanted to, they might have broken down Germany back into some of its early fragmentation, resulting in a different configuration of Europe.
The Confederacy, of course, went away as a nation, such as it ever was, and the South as a region took a whopper hit to its long-term development prospects.
Was it known in 1856 how yellow fever was transmitted? I recall something about that being discovered when the Panama Canal was dug much later. (Found this at wikipedia)
"Carlos Finlay, a Cuban doctor and scientist, first proposed in 1881 that yellow fever might be transmitted by mosquitoes rather than direct human contact.[74][75] Since the losses from yellow fever in the Spanish–American War in the 1890s were extremely high, Army doctors began research experiments with a team led by Walter Reed, composed of doctors James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, and Jesse William Lazear. They successfully proved Finlay's ″mosquito hypothesis″. Yellow fever was the first virus shown to be transmitted by mosquitoes. The physician William Gorgas applied these insights and eradicated yellow fever from Havana. He also campaigned against yellow fever during the construction of the Panama Canal, after a previous effort on the part of the French failed (in part due to mortality from the high incidence of yellow fever and malaria, which killed many workers)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_fever#History
There was a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine that scientists are very close to being able to genetically modify individual mosquito species into sterility, and therefore extinction. I’m not a geneticist so I can’t explain how it works. But the justification was that mosquitoes kill far more humans than any other animal. While the article didn’t mention it to my recollection, mosquitoes kill far more humans than humans do. So why not exterminate them?
And the point of the article was that for the first time we can deliberately wipe out an entire species to extinction. Do we really want to do that?
I suppose if you had asked that of the American population of 1856, had they known mosquitoes were responsible for Yellow Fever and malaria, they would have answered “yes.”
I understand we were close to have exterminated the mosquitoes responsible for malaria before the DDT ban allowed them to return. Millions of lives have been lost as a result.
No, I think there was a "Miasma" theory, same as malaria.
On August 16, 1856, some fifty Free State men under Captain Samuel Walker attacked Ft. Titus. After a brief battle, Ft. Titus and its thirty-four defenders, including Colonel Henry Titus, surrendered. Also surrendered were 400 muskets, a large number of knives, 13 horses, several wagons, a large stock of household provisions, farm equipment and $10,000 in gold and bank drafts.
http://www.lecomptonkansas.com/fort-titus/
The fort was actually a cabin near the town of Lecompton, in Douglas County. There is more information at the link.
I have a post from “Bleeding Kansas” for tomorrow, which includes a paragraph on the attack on Titus’s “fort.” It includes a drawing of men fighting in front of a cabin, but doesn’t mention that the cabin is the fort.
Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era
Despite having spent many years in the K.C. area, I never heard of New Santa Fe until I saw it mentioned in this post. It was south of the original Kansas City townsite and the Santa Fe Trail went past it. I was able to locate all that is left, which is a cemetery and historical marker. The cemetery is tucked behind a church about a half block from State Line Road on Santa Fe Trail on the Missouri side. It's now an upscale suburban area.
Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era
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