AMERICAN WILL KILL AMERICAN
John Keegan on the deaths by
accident and 'friendly fire' which always occur in war
WHEN the history of the Gulf crisis comes to be written, historians may well seize upon Saddam's charge that 'America is not a society that can stand 10,000 casualties in one battle' as the most significant explana- tion of why he thought he could get away with his seizure of Kuwait. It was made to the American ambassador just before his army moved, in the interview now held to have 'signalled' America's readiness to acquiesce in Iraqi territorial ambitions.
Saddam is not a soldier but he has grasped what may prove to be the most crucial development in military affairs in the second half of the 20th century: that television, by confronting the populations of advanced societies with visual evidence of the human consequences of war, may unman them. Television shows not only ' the bodies coming home. It also shows the tears of the families that receive them at the airport, captures the sound of their grief and transmits the words in which they express their sense of loss.
During the world wars the grief of bereavement, though it touched millions, remained private. It was exposed only in the awful moment when the boy with the telegram came to the front door. The culture that prevailed, both among press and public, accepted suffering and the duty to keep it secret. In the dictatorships the duty was reinforced by censorship, but in the democracies self-censorship achieved the same effect. There were no anti-war rallies in Britain after the Somme or Passchendaele, none in the United States after Guadalcanal or the first Schweinfurt raid.
Vietnam brought anti-war protestors out onto the streets in thousands. Few of them may have been bereaved relatives. The emotions of loss do not fuel demonstra- tions. There is still a sense of dulce decorum about the death of a close relative in the service of his country and a fear of dishonouring his bravery by public protest. How, though, might relatives react if they were to learn that a loved one had died not at the hands of the enemy but by mundane accident? The first accidental deaths have already occurred in the Gulf, some 33 of them. What will not have been anticipated is that such accidental deaths are not only an unavoidable consequence of large milit- ary deployments, but that the toll will increase and that, should it come to shoot- ing, accidental deaths will eventually form a large proportion of the casualties.
The United States lost some 56,000 men in Vietnam. About 10,000 of those deaths were the result of accident, many of them in flying crashes but the largest number on the road. Armies have always been com- posed of young men, modern armies are mechanised, young men drive recklessly and the result is that many of them kill each other in collisions, ditchings, over- turnings and all the other mishaps associ- ated with motor vehicles. Armies do not choose to release the statistics that docu- ment such accidents. It is an index, howev- er, of how dangerous it is to serve in a mechanised force that the 2nd Household Cavalry Regiment fought as an armoured car regiment in Normandy and Belgium for six months in 1944 before its toll of battle deaths exceeded those it suffered in train- ing in England for D-Day. A second major cause of accidental death is what the British army calls 'accidental discharge'. Small arms are in- tended to kill the enemy but it is in the nature of things that those nearest to a soldier's personal weapon are his own comrades. Weapon training instructors de- vote more time to teaching soldiers safety precautions than any other procedure. Nevertheless, once weapons are loaded with live ammunition, accidents occur with statistical regularity and, because inflicted at very close range, inflict a high propor lion of fatal wounds.
Such woundings happen simply when soldiers have loaded weapons in their possession. As soon as shooting begins, 'friendly fire' sharply increases the accident toll. Statistics of the casualties 'friendly fire' causes are even more difficult to come by than those for road deaths and accidental discharges — entirely under- standably since such mishaps would not only deepen the grief of the bereaved but do cause terrible remorse to those re- sponsible. Nevertheless, we know that a significant proportion of British deaths in the Falklands, to draw on but one exam- ple, were caused by British weapons. A British helicopter was shot down by a British anti-aircraft missile, several Royal Marines were killed in an exchange of fire with an SAS patrol, each side believing the other was Argentinian, and there are reports of other 'friendly fire' deaths. The total number of British fatal casualties in the Falklands were 255; about 10 per cent of those were inflicted by the British themselves.
That percentage is, historically, on the low side. The Task Force was professional, highly-trained and select. Large, less well- trained, less select forces cause and suffer accidental deaths in greater proportion. In particular, when air and ground forces co-operate and when there is heavy artil- lery support for ground troops, infantry suffer a high number of casualties from what professionals call 'shorts'. The start of the American break-out from the Norman- dy bridgehead on 25 July, 1944, actually had to be postponed because the prepara- tory carpet bombing of the German posi- tions fell 'short' on the leading American infantry and killed several hundred of them.
A Gulf war, if it comes, will take a different form from the massed attacks of the first or second world wars. It is unlikely that 'shorts' will do the same damage, since modern tactics disperse soldiers more thin- ly than in the past. Nevertheless, it is an awful certainty that friendly forces will be responsible for a proportion of the casual- ties among themselves. Given the cultural change that has overtaken the media since 1945, it is equally certain that the wrong sort of newshound will be on the alert to sniff out that sort of story. He — or she — will get the story. The sadness is that it as old as warfare itself.
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