USE OF HISTORY

 “The things that are now before us,” said the Princess, “require attention, and deserve it. What have I to do with the heroes or the monuments of ancient times—with times which can never return, and heroes whose form of life was different from all that the present condition of mankind requires or allows?”

“To know anything,” returned the poet, “we must know its effects; to see men, we must see their works, that we may learn what reason has dictated or passion has excited, and find what are the most powerful motives of action. To judge rightly of the present, we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known. The truth is that no mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments. Our passions are joy and grief, love and hatred, hope and fear. Of joy and grief, the past is the object, and the future of hope and fear; even love and hatred respect the past, for the cause must have been before the effect.

“The present state of things is the consequence of the former; and it is natural to inquire what were the sources of the good that we enjoy, or the evils that we suffer. If we act only for ourselves, to neglect the study of history is not prudent. If we are entrusted with the care of others, it is not just. Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may properly be charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.

“There is no part of history so generally useful as that which relates to the progress of the human mind, the gradual improvement of reason, the successive advances of science, the vicissitudes of learning and ignorance (which are the light and darkness of thinking beings), the extinction and resuscitation of arts, and the revolutions of the intellectual world. If accounts of battles and invasions are peculiarly the business of princes, the useful or elegant arts are not to be neglected; those who have kingdoms to govern have understandings to cultivate.

“Example is always more efficacious than precept. A soldier is formed in war, and a painter must copy pictures. In this, contemplative life has the advantage. Great actions are seldom seen, but the labours of art are always at hand for those who desire to know what art has been able to perform.

“When the eye or the imagination is struck with any uncommon work, the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed. Here begins the true use of such contemplation. We enlarge our comprehension by new ideas, and perhaps recover some art lost to mankind, or learn what is less perfectly known in our own country. At least we compare our own with former times, and either rejoice at our improvements, or, what is the first motion towards good, discover our defects.”

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (42-43) [1759]. Kindle Edition.

DEKULAKIZATION

How many “kulaks” died in the course of “de-kulakization”? On 1 January 1932, the GPU carried out a general census of all deportees: it listed 1,317,022 people. We know, by the same police sources, that nearly 1.8 million “kulaks” were deported during the two main deportation waves in 1930 and 1931. Losses accordingly numbered close to half a million people, or nearly 30% of all deportees. Undoubtedly, a not insignificant proportion of those had escaped. In 1932, the GPU komandatury, which actually managed to keep accurate records of the deportees they were supposed to keep watch over, counted no less than 207,000 escapes (38,000 runaways were recaptured); in 1933, the number of escapes was 216,000 (54,000 recaptured). Considering a number of local GPU reports (for different periods in 1930 and 1931) on the flights of deported “kulaks”, we can extrapolate that around 200,000-250,000 deportees managed to escape in 1930-1931. This still leaves us with approximately 250,000-300,000 deaths. 

A number of local reports confirm the very high mortality rates among the deportees, especially among children and elderly people. In 1931, the mortality rate was 1.3% per month (16% per annum) among the deportees to Kazakhstan, and 0.8% per month (10% per annum) for those to western Siberia. Infant mortality oscillated between 8% and 12% per month, and peaked at 15% per month in Magnitogorsk. From June 1931 to June 1932, the mortality rate among deportees in the region of Narym, in Western Siberia, reached 11.7%. In 1932, the overall number of deaths among deportees was over 90,000 (annual death rate: 6.8%); in 1933, it was 151,600 (annual death rate: 13.3%). Altogether, more than half a million deportees died in 1930-1933, or 22% of the 2.3 million people deported during those years. Most of them died untimely deaths, of general exhaustion and hunger (Zemskov, 2003; Danilov & Krasilnikov, 1993, 1994, Viola, 2007).

Nicholas Werth, SciencesPo, 23 September 2011

BATTLE OF THE BULGE

But the greatest lesson was one learned from the enemy: to hate. Word of the Malmédy Massacre, of the massacres of civilians at Stavelot, Trois Points, and Bande, passed from man to man, and from unit to unit. Until the Ardennes the GI had fought a civilian’s war. Now he was learning to kill without remorse or pity.

John Toland, Battle: The Story of the Bulge
New York: Random House, 1959, pp. 329-331

    Reports from men drifting back from the front were alarming. Entire units, claimed many wild-eyed refugees, had been cut off and were being wiped out. Back at Division, General Grow had no clear idea of how great his casualties were. But he did know that it was the worst day in the history of his 6th Armored Division.

    The retreat of the 6th Armored wasn’t the only reverse on George Patton’s front. For the savage meeting engagement was at its climax. Violent German attacks had struck all along the Bastogne front. In particular the 17th Airborne Division, in their first real day of action a few miles west of town, had been dealt shocking casualties, some battalions losing 40 per cent of their men.

    Ordinarily the most optimistic of American generals, Patton was now in a despondent mood. Each man lost that day weighed heavily on him. He sat at a desk and wrote in his diary, “We can still lose this war.”

    But at the front, later that night, a strange thing began to take place where the day’s disaster had been greatest. Men stopped running, and were digging in. Terror was being replaced by anger.
 
    Not far behind the 6th Armored Division breakthrough area, Colonel John Hines was in a stone house where refugees from the front were thawing out their frozen rifles and frozen bodies.

    One man, his face covered with blood and dirt, his eyes two bitter holes, was saying, “I used to wonder what I was doing in the army. I didn’t have anything personal against the Krauts, even if they were making me live in a freezing, frigging foxhole. But I learned something today. Now I want to kill every goddam Kraut in the world. You know why? To save my own ass.”

    There was a new GI in the Ardennes.

    The good-natured, rather careless, supremely confident GI who had known one victory after another since landing in Normandy; who had assumed he would be well clothed, well fed, and well led; who accepted it as his heritage to outgun and outmachine the enemy, was gone. Since December 16 he’d had few days of the overpowering air support and air cover he’d taken for granted; his clothing didn’t keep out the cold; his boots were traps for trench foot, his tanks were outnumbered; often his machines were immobilized by cold, snow, and terrain.

    He was cold and hungry. He had just fought a humiliating series of retreats where terror roamed far behind the lines. He had tasted defeat.

    But he had learned bitter lessons that were beginning to pay off. In this first major winter battle ever fought by Americans he had learned that the wounded die fast in the zero cold. He had learned in a few weeks that cold is a living enemy and must be fought.

    Medics had learned to tuck frozen morphine Syrettes under their armpits; to put plasma under the hoods of trucks and jeeps. Infantrymen were saving their hands from frostbite by cutting four oversize mitten patterns from blankets and sewing them together. Trench foot, which was cutting down more Americans than bullets, was beaten with muffs made from blankets. At night the men learned to take off their soggy combat boots and socks, massage their feet, and then pull these blanket “Tootsie warmers” on, topped by overshoes. 

    They learned how to dry socks and shoes: heat pebbles in a can; dump the hot pebbles into the wet socks and the socks into the shoes.

    They learned that ordinary field jackets were little protection against the biting winds of the Ardennes. Inner linings were made of blankets sewed to the inside.

    They learned that two wool shirts were equal in warmth—and less bulky to fight in—than a shirt and overcoat. But the shirts had to be switched every night, the one next to the body, wet from perspiration even in the coldest day, taken off and hung up to dry.
 
    They learned what tramps and people of depression days had long known, that paper was a good insulator. A few sheets of newspaper wrapped around the chest between shirts was a buffer against the rawest wind.

    They also learned to wear shoes and overshoes that were a little too big, for tightness, cutting off circulation, brought on almost instant trench foot. They would stuff paper between shoes and arctics—a trick long used by hunters. The paper not only anchored their misfit footgear but retained body heat.

    They learned to heat food over a  “flambeau”—a wine bottle filled with gas with a wick of twisted rags.

    The facts of cold, long known to men of Minnesota and Maine, were passed on to men from Alabama and Texas. Frozen toes, ears, noses were rubbed gently to start circulation. The old wives’ remedy of rubbing snow on these frozen parts often brought on gangrene. Hands stiff from cold, unable to trigger a gun, were placed under armpits. To survive a night in a freezing foxhole many a man lived by covering his head with a blanket and trapping his own warm breath.

    The GIs learned not to eat snow except in very small doses or their stomachs would become chilled. Tankers learned that their great friend, Calvados, was their great enemy in the cold. For alcohol brought body heat to the surface, causing radiation and deadly chilling.

    They learned that cold metal would sweat when brought indoors, and then quickly freeze when taken outside. All weapons and ammunition were left outdoors, protected only from the falling snow.

    They learned the big lessons too. That their tanks should be whitewashed to blend with the snow; that they should wear sheets like Halloween ghosts.

    Mechanics, with Yankee ingenuity, soon learned how to make their machines work under sub-zero conditions. Where rubber tracks were unavailable for tanks, great metal cleats were welded on steel tracks to conquer ice and snow.
 
    But the greatest lesson was one learned from the enemy: to hate. Word of the Malmédy Massacre, of the massacres of civilians at Stavelot, Trois Points, and Bande, passed from man to man, and from unit to unit. Until the Ardennes the GI had fought a civilian’s war. Now he was learning to kill without remorse or pity.