Sherman’s Ghosts

Civilians

The century between the end of the Civil War and the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 was marked by a striking paradox. On the one hand, more international laws, treaties, and conventions regulating the conduct of warfare were drawn up and signed by more countries than during any other period in human history. The Hague Conventions on Land War of 1899 and 1907, the International Law Association’s 1938 Amsterdam Draft, which declared that “the civilian population shall not form the object of war,” and the Fourth Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War were all part of a new international attempt to humanize or “refine” war, as Sherman disparagingly put it, which mandated armies to avoid unnecessary suffering and the deliberate targeting of civilians or other “protected persons.”

Yet these developments coincided with—and to some extent were a product of—a period of unprecedented global violence in which these rules and regulations were systematically violated or disregarded. At the beginning of the twentieth century, civilian deaths constituted between 10 and 15 percent of wartime deaths. By the end of the century, some 75 percent of wartime dead were civilians and noncombatants. In 1948 the Southern historian John Bennett Walters Jr. published an article, “General Sherman and Total War,” based on his PhD thesis, in the Journal of Southern History and subsequently expanded it into the book Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War (1973). In it Walters accused Sherman of having initiated his army into “the savage art of destruction and the disregard for human rights which the rules of war had sought to mitigate,” thereby establishing a “record for systematic torture, pillage, and vandalism unequalled in American history.”1

As the title suggests, Walters also linked Sherman to the conduct of war in the twentieth century. Various historians have challenged and rejected these claims, and Walters’s melodramatic and exaggerated depiction of Sherman’s campaigns makes them relatively easy to refute. These associations have nevertheless endured. In 1992 Sherman’s biographer Charles Edmund Vetter claimed that his “justification of economic, psychological and sociological warfare opened the door to its [total war’s] fullest development in the form of dropping atomic bombs on the noncombatant cities of Japan.”² Today American high school textbooks and the popular press still routinely refer to Sherman as the spiritual father of total war, and these claims are worth revisiting in order to understand the similarities—and the differences—between Sherman’s concept of war and some of the tributaries of violence that followed.

Total War

Total war means war waged without moral restraint. The term can also refer to the maximization and reorganization of the economic, social, and industrial resources of a society to achieve military objectives. For the historian David Bell, some of these tendencies were already evident in the French Revolutionary Wars, especially the war of extermination waged by the revolutionary armies against royalist rebels in the Vendée region between 1793 and 1796, which he described as “a kind of warfare whose scale had little or no precedent, whether in the mobilization of population and resources, the ambitious and ill-defined war aims, the demonization of enemy populations.”3 Other historians have found precedents in the horrendous destruction inflicted on Portugal by French and British armies during the Napoleonic Wars or, even further back, in the Thirty Years War.

The term total war was coined by Giulio Douhet in his exposition of airpower in 1921 to describe war waged against the civilian population and resources of the opposing state as well as its uniformed armies. In 1924, the German infantry and General Staff officer Joachim von Stülpnagel outlined a theory of Volkskrieg (people’s war), predicting that the coming wars would be waged without clearly defined theaters of operations or any distinctions between the front and the rear guard. In these wars, von Stülpnagel predicted, armies would no longer be bound by moral constraints in their treatment of civilians. “We can show no consideration for the population if the outcome of the war depends on it. In the war of the future, death behind the front has to be viewed like death at the front.”⁴ In his 1935 tract Der totale Krieg, the former German commander in World War I Erich Ludendorff likewise outlined a grim vision of “totalitarian warfare” based on the complete mobilization of the whole nation and its resources in wars “not only aimed against the armed forces, but also directly against the people.”⁵

At first glance, there is little connection between these ideas and Sherman’s philosophy of war. Sherman certainly shared the belief that modern wars were fought between societies as well as armies and that civilians could be legitimately intimidated in order to achieve political and military outcomes, but there were always limits to the violence that he was prepared to inflict in order to achieve them. Even though he talked of “exterminating” Southerners in his more irate moments, he did not attempt to put these ideas into practice. He was too suspicious of American society’s potential for “anarchy” to welcome the notion of the “complete mobilization of the whole nation,” and preferred a well-trained professional army to volunteers, whom he regarded with contempt at the beginning of the war.

Nevertheless, there are some peripheral historical connections between his campaigns in the South and some of the wars that followed. In 1865 Sherman’s aide-de-camp Major George Ward Nichols claimed, “History . . . will search in vain for a parallel to the scathing and destructive effects of the Invasion of the Carolinas. The immediate disasters to the Rebel cause, the cities captured, arsenals and munitions of war destroyed, the communications severed, will be appreciated by the military mind in Europe, as well as by our own army and people.” 6 Such appreciation was not nearly as general as Nichols predicted, but neither was it entirely absent.

One of the justifications for the Spanish-American War in 1898 was American outrage at the “reconcentration” policy enforced in Cuba by the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau (1838–1930). While serving in Cuba and Santo Domingo during the American Civil War, Weyler was sent to Washington as a military attaché, and he was a great admirer of Sherman, whom he met. Weyler was particularly impressed by his tactics in Georgia and the Carolinas. In February 1896, he was appointed captain-general of Spanish forces in Cuba, with the task of suppressing a powerful anti-Spanish rebellion in the countryside. In response Weyler introduced a series of draconian measures. Guerrilla prisoners were summarily shot, and villages and houses of known or suspected sympathizers were burned and their food supplies confiscated or destroyed.

Sent by President McKinley to investigate conditions in Cuba in 1897, former congressman William J. Calhoun described a journey from Havana to Matanzas by train: “The countryside outside of the military posts was practically depopulated. Every house had been burned, banana trees cut down, cane fields swept by fire, and everything in the shape of food destroyed. . . . I did not see a house, man, woman or child, a horse, mule, or cow, nor even a dog. . . . The country was wrapped in the stillness of death and the silence of desolation.”7

This devastation was not due only to the actions of Spanish troops or Weyler’s specially constituted battalion of Spaniards and pro-Spanish Cubans known as the Cazadores (Hunters) de Valmaseda, named after Weyler’s former commander the Conde de Valmaseda. The Cuban Liberation Army also burned farms and plantations and lynched landowners.

In 1897, however, Weyler introduced a new policy of forcibly evacuating civilians from the countryside and “reconcentrating” them in fortified stockades in order to break the links between the people and the guerrillas. Between 155,000 and 170,000 civilians died of hunger and disease in these camps, according to the more recent scholarly estimates. In the American press, these policies earned Weyler a nickname, the Butcher, and made his name a byword for Spanish cruelty in Cuba. Weyler consistently rejected allegations that his methods were uniquely barbaric, and he and his government excused them by saying that they were no different from those used by the American government during the Civil War. When the American consul in Cuba, Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee, asked Weyler about civilian suffering in the concentration camps, he received the very Sherman-like reply that “everything is fair in war.”⁸

In a self-justifying memoir, Weyler quotes a letter from the Spanish minister of state to his counterpart in Washington in 1897, which provides an exhaustive list of comparable actions carried out during the War of Secession, from the forced “reconcentration” of civilians and prohibitions on trade and commerce to “the burning of entire cities, the ruin and devastation of immense and most fertile regions, to the annihilation of all goods of the adversary.” The letter also cites Hunter’s and Sheridan’s campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley and the forced depopulation of Atlanta by the “illustrious and respected General Sherman” as precedents. The minister reminded the American government of the “supreme motivation for such actions by the victorious Sherman” in his memoirs and his letter to Mayor Calhoun in Atlanta, and praised his arguments as “upright and illustrious concepts that the Spanish government will not hesitate to make its own, applying them to Cuba.”9

Given the U.S. Army’s civilian concentration camps in the Philippines and Vietnam, there is some irony in the probability that “Butcher” Weyler was inspired by the U.S. Army. Sherman’s campaigns also had some influence on the British army, through the writings of Sir Garnet Wolseley, the field marshal and commander in chief of the British Armed Forces from 1895 to 1901. In 1861 Wolseley visited the disunited States as a Civil War observer. Though he was a strong Confederate sympathizer, like many British army officers, Wolseley was also a great admirer of Sherman, whom he wrote about in a number of articles in British military journals.

Wolseley also cited the methods used by the Union Army for destroying Southern railroads in his bestselling textbook, The Soldier’s Pocket-Book for Field Service (1869), which contained detailed instructions on how to destroy and reconstruct railroad lines, modeled on the techniques developed by Union engineers during “the American war.” Borrowing methods almost exactly from Sherman’s chief of engineers, Orlando Poe, and the head of the War Department’s railroad bureau, Herman Haupt, Wolseley recommended that track should be uprooted by squads of soldiers using U-shaped metal tools, after which the sleepers were to be burned in order to soften the rails until they could be “bent into the shape of a U, or round a tree or telegraph pole.”

In a section on protection of railways, Wolseley recommended that saboteurs should be dissuaded by proclamations warning that anyone caught damaging railways or telegraph lines would be “hanged without mercy,” just as Union generals had done in Missouri and parts of the South. Where these warnings failed to achieve their objectives, he suggested, “It may be possible to make the inhabitants living along it responsible for its preservation, and it may sometimes be necessary to make severe examples by burning the houses near the spot where any injury was done to it.”

Wolseley himself made some “severe examples” during the Third Anglo-Ashanti War in the Akan interior of the Gold Coast in modern-day Ghana of 1873–74, when he followed the British victory at the Battle of Amoaful on January 31, 1974, by marching on the Ashanti capital, Kumasi. After ordering his troops to carry reduced rations in order to increase their mobility, Wolseley entered the abandoned Ashanti capital four days later and summoned the Ashanti king to negotiate a peace agreement. When the king refused to appear, Wolseley’s troops blew up the royal palace, then burned the city and all the villages they passed through during their retreat because, he later wrote, “In my heart I believed that the absolute destruction of Koomassee, with its great palace, the wonder of West Africa, would be a much more striking and effective end to the war than any peace treaty.”10

Sherman also impressed one of Wolseley’s protégés, Colonel G.F.R. Henderson, the head of the Cadet School of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and the author of a number of studies of Civil War strategies and battles, including an important study of Stonewall Jackson. Henderson also praised Ulysses Grant as “the first to perceive that in a comparatively fertile country it was possible to subsist an army without magazines” during his Vicksburg campaign, and described both Sherman’s campaigns and James Harrison Wilson’s “mounted infantry” raids in the South as the most comprehensive realization of the Union raiding strategies, describing them as “extraordinary enterprises which did so much [damage] to the enemy’s communications.”11

The closest British parallel to Sherman’s campaigns took place during the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902, in South Africa, when the British commander General Frederick Roberts and his chief of staff, Major General Horatio Herbert Kitchener, put a scorched-earth policy into effect in western Orange Free State in June 1900 in response to successful guerrilla tactics of the Boer armies under General Christiaan de Wet. Ordered to “destroy or remove everything which may help the enemy or his horses or his oxen to move,” British troops destroyed some twenty thousand farms, leaving the families homeless and much of the veld littered with slaughtered animals, some of whose carcasses were thrown into wells and dams to poison the water supply.

Food denial was only one objective of these operations. Unable to locate and capture de Wet’s elusive guerrillas, Kitchener and Roberts adopted a strategy of indirect psychological pressure that was primarily directed against women, children, and the elderly—the easiest targets. These objectives were made explicit by General Thomas Kelly-Kenny, who told one detachment to “burn all farmhouses—explain reason (for so doing) as they have harboured enemy and not reported to British authorities as required. The question of how to treat women and children and what amount of food and transport will arise, as to the first part they have forfeited all right to consideration and must now suffer for their persistently ignoring warnings against harbouring and assisting our enemy.”

Not surprisingly, this “strategic” destruction frequently became merely a license for looting. Letters from British soldiers are filled with descriptions that recall Sherman’s campaigns in the South in the violent intrusions into female domestic space and the vindictive destruction of pianos, furniture, and other property of no military but great sentimental value.12 “I go into all the rooms and turn everything upside down, cut the mattresses of the beds open to look for rifles,” wrote one soldier. “If I am sent to a farm to see what is in it and to get the women out I never hesitate to burn the place before I leave, and only give the people five minutes to pack up and get into the wagon. I have no pity on them no matter how they weep.”¹³ Another soldier told his mother, “We were only there a few minutes but we did do a little damage in a short time. I put the butt of my rifle through a large looking glass over the mantelpiece and put my foot through a sideboard with glass doors. One of the others smashed up a piano and an organ. The women didn’t half scream.”¹⁴

Many British soldiers regarded Boer women in much the same way as Sherman’s soldiers had regarded the women of the South, as active and defiant participants in the war who deserved destitution and humiliation. Others were more ambivalent. Thomas Henderson Thomson, an Australian in the Bushmen’s Corps, described his participation in the operations: “We burnt hundreds of homes [in the] pouring rain & had to turn the women & children out in the wet with only a few clothes & very little food. It is a job I can’t stand & I hope we can get away from it soon. We came over to fight men, not women and children.”¹⁵

In December 1900, Kitchener adopted the policy of “concentrations” enacted by Weyler in Cuba and Bell in the Philippines, ordering the removal of Boers and black Africans into “camps of refuge” surrounded by barbed wire and guards to prevent any contact between the prisoners and the guerrillas. Isolated on the veld in overcrowded tent cities, without sufficient food, medical attention, or blankets, some 28,000 Afrikaners and 20,000 black Africans died in the course of the war, most of them women and children. These camps scandalized British and world opinion and were later cited by the Nazis to refute claims that their concentration-camp system was anomalous or especially cruel.

Civilian deaths during the British “burn and capture” campaign were often due to poor sanitary conditions and mismanagement rather than the result of deliberate policy, but they were often accepted by the British military establishment as a tragic but inevitable necessity in order to bring the war to an end. Many officers shared the outlook expressed in a December 1901 letter to The Times of London, whose author justified programs of slaughter by neglect in prison camps with a quotation from none other than Philip Sheridan: “The proper strategy consists in inflicting as telling blows as possible on the enemy’s army, and then in causing the inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force the government to demand it. The people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.”16

Sheridan reportedly made these recommendations during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which he witnessed as an observer with the Prussian General Staff after he was asked by the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, how his army should respond to attacks on German troops from Francs tireurs and other irregulars. At first glance, this encounter, between one of the most ruthless Union exponents of hard war and an army that was associated more than any other with the concept of total war, seems to bear out the thesis of a direct line of descent between the Civil War and its more destructive successors. But the German response to French resistance drew on a panoply of possible reprisals that were already well established among nineteenth-century European armies, even if it was magnified by Prussian outrage at continued resistance away from the battlefield, which Karl Marx mocked.¹⁷

From the Prussian army’s perspective, such resistance was a violation of the rules of war and a threat to the security of its troops. To suppress it, combatants without “distinguishing marks” were shot or hanged on the spot or sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude in Germany. The army also took French public officials as hostages to deter acts of sabotage, and in some cases placed them on the front of trains to deter attacks. In addition, towns that refused to provide food or requisitions to the German army were fined, bombed, and burned. French politicians and jurists denounced these acts of barbarism as particularly Prussian and a violation of the rules of war, but similar measures were adopted by many nineteenth-century armies in the same period.18

Severities

The behavior of the Prussian army in France pales beside the Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) issued by General Lothar von Trotha in response to the Herero and Nama Rebellions in German South West Africa, in which men, women, and children were driven out into the desert and denied food and water or imprisoned in forced-labor camps—a policy that reduced the Herero population from 80,000 to 15,000 and the Nama by half by 1911. In 1905 the German army waged an even more destructive campaign to suppress the Maji Maji Rebellion in German East Africa (later Tanganyika), when three columns under the command of the German governor Count Adolf von Gotzen burned villages and crops throughout the southern part of the country in a deliberate famine strategy that, according to the historian Thomas Pakenham, resulted in 250,000 to 300,000 deaths.¹⁹

At first glance, these colonial campaigns present far more compelling precedents for the barbarism of total war than the American Civil War—a conflict that the Prussian chief of staff Helmuth von Moltke was reported to have described as “two armed mobs . . . from which nothing can be learned.” But the Civil War did not go entirely unnoticed by the German army. In 1868 Major Ferdinand von Meerheimb presented a paper on Sherman’s campaign in Georgia to the Militärische Gesellschaft in Berlin, which compared the devastation of the state to that of the Thirty Years War while claiming that “Sherman used these harshest measures with a heavy heart” because “they alone would bring a quick and sure peace.”

The manual Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege (Usages of War on Land), issued by the German General Staff to its soldiers during World War I, expressed a philosophy very similar to the Lieber Code, asserting, “Certain severities are indispensable in war, nay more, the only true humanity very often lies in a ruthless application of them.”20 The German army resorted to numerous “severities” in Belgium and on the Eastern Front during World War I. In August 1914, invading German troops entered the ancient city of Louvain, near Brussels, and responded to sniper attacks by destroying more than a thousand homes and the university library with explosives and firebombs. There followed a looting spree in which soldiers took everything from musical instruments to food, wine, and lingerie. The procedure was repeated in other towns and cities as German troops responded to real or imagined incidents of Franktireurkrieg, “sharpshooter war,” with violent reprisals against Belgian civilians.²¹

Terrified of Francs tireurs and convinced—not without reason—that civilians were helping them, the German army frequently exacted the most extreme reprisals and countermeasures from the nineteenth-century military tradition, according to the principle that “the innocent must suffer with the guilty.” Some of these measures were justified by German commanders by an admittedly broad interpretation of “military necessity” and thus were excused as permissible under the Hague conventions.²²

But the German military administration also imposed crippling requisitions and financial contributions on Belgian cities that went well beyond what was allowed under the conventions, forcibly deporting 120,000 Belgian workers to Germany and France and draining the country’s resources to the point that much of the Belgian population was saved from starvation only by a special dispensation permitting food relief from the American-run Commission for Relief for Belgium. From the point of view of the German army and government, the subjugation of the Belgian people and economy to the war effort was a wartime expedient that was as militarily necessary as the “severities” adopted in response to Francs tireurs. Despite the widespread Allied condemnation of the Belgian occupation, Germany was by no means unique in its willingness to regard the civilian population as a military resource or an object of war.

As early as 1863, the Cambridge University political economist Henry Fawcett in his Manual of Political Economy criticized the “feeling of false humanity” that had “attempted to make the rights of private property respected in war.”23 Fawcett denounced what he regarded as a hypocritical form of war: “Life may be sacrificed with as much prodigality as ever. The foremost mechanical genius of this mechanical age is devoted to the production of weapons of death; but civilization, it is said, demands that there be no wanton destruction of property.” For Fawcett, any attempt to “palliate the material disaster of war” was counterproductive, because “war will be rendered less frequent, if a whole nation is made to feel its horrible consequences, instead of concentrating all the horrors in the sacrifice of thousands of helpless victims who may be marshaled at the caprice of a despot.” In 1914, the British navy imposed a blockade on food shipments to Germany and the Central Powers whose explicit purpose, according to the high lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was to “starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound, into submission.”²⁴ The success of these efforts was soon reflected in reports of famished women in Berlin breadlines, rising civilian mortality rates, and a dramatic increase in child malnutrition—all of which were intensified by American entry into the war in 1917, making the blockade all but impenetrable. By the end of the war, millions of people in Germany, Austria, and the Balkans were on the brink of starvation, and British soldiers in the Rhineland in 1919 were horrified by the sight of “hordes of skinny and bloated children pawing over the offal” from their camps.25

Estimates of German deaths caused by malnutrition and disease have ranged from 424,000 to 763,000. The Allied blockade was another indication of the changing parameters of modern warfare, in which civilians as well as armies could be seen even by democratic states as legitimate targets. Attacks on economic resources and morale appeared to be a solution to the problem of meat-grinder stalemates between powerful industrial states, just as they had once seemed to Sherman. Ideology, racism, and hypernationalist “othering” of the enemy have contributed to the extreme violence of twentieth-century warfare, but again and again armies and governments have invoked military necessity as a justification for actions that would normally be considered abhorrent and shameful. Though some armies have been more willing to do this than others, even democratic states that nominally accept moral and legal constraints in wartime have been prepared to dispense with or suspend such limits, just as Lincoln once did, in order to win.

In a memorandum to the British Cabinet in October 1917, Winston Churchill, munitions minister and former high lord of the Admiralty, rejected the idea of a bombing campaign against Germany in retaliation for the Gotha raids on London, arguing, “It is improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by air attack could compel the Government of a great nation to surrender.”²⁶ However, Churchill was not averse to bombing Iraqi rebels with poison gas in the immediate postwar period. Then as prime minister during World War II, he embraced the same strategy he had once rejected when he endorsed what he himself called the “terror” bombing of German cities. On August 25, 1940, the RAF carried out its first bombing raid on Berlin in retaliation for a German raid on London. On September 3, 1940, Churchill claimed that “the Bombers alone provide the means to victory. We must therefore develop the power to carry an ever-increasing volume of explosives to Germany, so as to pulverise the entire industry and scientific structure on which the war effort and the economic life of the enemy depends.”27

The British bombing campaign gained new momentum in 1942, when RAF Bomber Command began attacking residential neighborhoods and other built-up areas in order to target “the morale of enemy civil population, in particular industrial workers.” On May 30, the RAF conducted its first thousand-plane raid, on Cologne, using a combination of explosives and incendiaries designed to kill people in the largest possible numbers. For the next three years, the RAF pulverized German cities relentlessly and remorselessly. This strategy was partly a consequence of British strategic weakness. With their country isolated and vulnerable, and with little possibility of waging a conventional war in Nazi-occupied Europe, Britain’s leaders had clearly reached a very different understanding of what was militarily necessary—and morally acceptable—than their predecessors had during World War I. Other countries likewise embraced the terror bombing of civilians as a military necessity. The gassing of Ethiopian villages by the Italian air force; the Japanese bombing of Nanking and other Chinese cities; the Fascist and Nazi bombings of Guernica, Madrid, and Warsaw—all these events were a testament to the lowering of the moral threshold by twentieth-century armies that was made possible by the advent of airpower, enabling a few people to kill many thousands without ever having to observe the consequences of their actions firsthand.

Scorching the Earth

The barbarism of twentieth-century warfare and the blurring of the boundaries between armies and civilians were not limited to wars between states. By the mid-twentieth century, irregular and guerrilla conflicts had become a ubiquitous feature of modern warfare, from the resistance to German and Japanese occupations during World War II to the wars of decolonization that followed. On May 13, 1941, the Wehrmacht adopted a special dispensation for the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union known as the Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlass (War Jurisdiction Decree), which authorized its officers to carry out collective reprisals against civilians in response to any acts of partisan resistance. During the Nazi advance on Moscow, German infantry units burned villages, executed hostages, and destroyed property, crops, and livestock in “mopping up” operations behind the lines, and the reliance on destruction, devastation, and massacre became ever more pronounced as resistance continued to grow and the German advance was halted.

In the Ukraine, Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, adopted a policy of burning houses, confiscating food, and shooting or hanging hostages in operations against partisans, whom he regarded as “murderous animals.” On December 16, 1942, the German supreme commander of the armed forces, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, authorized German troops throughout Europe “to take any measures without restriction and even against women and children if these are necessary for success” in a struggle against “bandit warfare” and “communist-trained fighters,” which Keitel insisted “has nothing to do with a soldier’s chivalry nor with the decisions of the Geneva Conventions.”28

Antipartisan operations in the “Wild East” often overlapped with massacres of Jews and Slavic racial inferiors that had nothing to do with pacification or counterinsurgency. In other respects, however, the Nazi response to partisan warfare, or klein Kindergarten Krieg (“little kindergarten war”), echoed the atrocities in Cuba, the Transvaal, and the Philippines. Before the invasion, the Twelfth Infantry Division was issued “Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia,” which authorized soldiers to shoot or hang any member of a “Partisan-Battalion” not wearing a uniform or mark of identity. Other forms of “ruthless action” included the burning of houses suspected of harboring partisans (“The fire forces the partisans to jump and makes shooting easy”) and the destruction of “suspect” villages and the forced removal of their inhabitants.29 Antipartisan operations took the form of large-scale Kessel (“cauldron”) offensives in which suspected guerrilla areas were first surrounded and cordoned off before German troops turned inward, driving out or killing the inhabitants, burning their villages, destroying crops, and seizing animals in order to create “desert zones.”

Such operations contributed to a civilian death toll that reached well into the millions, and increased popular support for the partisans. Though some German commanders recognized that brutality was counterproductive and advocated more sophisticated and moderate methods, including the recruitment of local militias, extreme violence remained an essential component of Nazi antipartisan warfare as the war turned against Germany, and was often accompanied by the massive and indiscriminate destruction of crops, livestock, food, and industrial machinery. Retreating from a Soviet counteroffensive toward the Dnieper River in September 1943, one member of the Grossdeutschland Division wrote in his diary that “we were ordered to destroy all villages, as well as to take to the rear all the cattle. I cannot judge whether this measure was absolutely necessary, but it caused deprivation and misery to the population left behind.”³⁰

Nazi counterinsurgency tactics also influenced the Japanese Imperial Army in its response to Communist and Nationalist guerrillas in China and Southeast Asia. Between 1933 and 1937, the Japanese Kwantung Army successfully eliminated anti-Japanese resistance in Japan’s puppet state Manchukuo, using a range of methods that included the forcible relocation of some 5.5 million Chinese civilians into ten thousand “collective hamlets” on the same model used in Cuba, the Philippines, the Boer War—and later in Vietnam. As in these wars, towns and villages that lay outside these camps were destroyed to deny food to the guerrillas, and these campaigns had a devastating impact on the civilian population as well.

In May 1940 General Okamura Yasuji, commander of the North China Area Army, implemented a policy ordered by his superiors known as Sankō Sakusen, the Three Alls Strategy (kill all, burn all, loot all), also known as Jinmetsu Sakusen, the Burn to Ash Strategy, against Communist guerrillas in northern China. According to historian Chalmers Johnson, the method was “to surround a given area, to kill everyone in it, and to destroy everything possible so that the area would be uninhabitable in the future.”31 In one such operation, 800 people from the village of Peihuan died when poison gas was pumped into the tunnels where they were hiding. In a three-month operation in the Chin-Ch’a-Chi border region, 4,500 Chinese were killed, 17,500 deported, and 150,000 houses destroyed. As many as 2 million people may have died by violence or starvation, as the North China Area Army practiced what the historian Lincoln Li has called “a scorched earth policy in reverse.”32 Like Weyler’s cazadores in Cuba and the Union armies in the South, German and Japanese commanders regarded the distinction between civilians and armed combatants as either nonexistent or irrelevant and found that it was easier to target the fighters by attacking their supporters. Okamura’s ravaging troops in northern China moved without a supply line, taking their food from the local population, and used a body count metric of success like their counterparts in the Vietnam War.

German and Japanese commanders justified violence and terror on the grounds of military necessity, and these arguments were sometimes accepted by their victorious enemies. In October 1944, General Lothar von Rendulic, the German commander in Finland and Norway, ordered his troops to burn Finnish villages during a scorched-earth retreat from Lapland. At the Nuremberg trials, Rendulic was found not guilty of unlawfully destroying civilian property on the grounds that “urgent military necessity warranted the decision made.” He received a twenty-year sentence for other offenses; it was commuted to ten, and he was freed after three years. This successful defense became known as the Rendulic rule, and its general acceptance was such that it was still referred to in the U.S. Army’s rules of engagement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.³³

Following World War II, most Western armies adopted more “scientific” and “political” methods of counterinsurgency and antisubversive warfare that eschewed the kinds of massive destruction carried out by Nazi and Japanese armies. But armies continued to use military force as an instrument of punishment and/or political coercion against civilians and noncombatants, whether it was the French army dropping napalm on peasant villages during the Algerian war, the Israeli bombing of towns and villages in south Lebanon in response to Palestinian cross-border attacks, or the massive destruction inflicted on the anti-apartheid “frontline states” as a result of the “total strategy” waged by South Africa and its allies in the 1980s. In Afghanistan in the same period, the Red Army conducted a brutal war against the Afghan mujahideen in which rural villages were bombed, and their crops, wells, and water supply poisoned or destroyed as a policy of food denial to the guerrillas that was collective punishment of the entire population.

Guerrillas, terrorists, and other “non-state agents” have often adopted their own small-scale forms of total war that make no distinction between combatants and noncombatants or even deliberately target civilians. All these developments contributed to the lowered threshold of twentieth-century war and moved the notion of combat far beyond the battlefield.

To suggest, as John Bennett Walters and others have done, that Sherman was somehow responsible for these streams of twentieth-century barbarism fails to account for the relative restraint of his campaigns in comparison with their successors and ignores equally barbaric acts of military violence that preceded the Civil War and could be cited as precedents for his campaigns. Classical historians’ gleeful descriptions of Roman soldiers slaughtering “barbarian” women, children, and old people in the aftermath of battle; the massacres carried out by crusaders in the Holy Land; the razing of cities by the armies of Ghengis Khan; the destruction of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán by Cortés’s invading army—all these premodern episodes belong to a grim tradition of military violence against civilians that long precedes the modern concept of “total” warfare. Sherman’s decision to wage war on Southern civilians certainly belongs to this tradition, but the limited and calibrated destruction that his army visited on the South was also a departure from it, reflecting the modern drift toward rule-based warfare exemplified by the Lieber Code. The allegation made by Walters, J.F.C. Fuller, and others that his methods caused a “moral regression” in warfare tend to exaggerate both the destruction that he inflicted and the extent to which “civilized” warfare was really civilized in practice. Such accusations also tend to ignore the extent to which Sherman’s strategies, tactics, and philosophy of war were the products of a broader understanding of how wars could be fought and won that was shared by many of his contemporaries and then became more consensual and widespread as the wars of the twentieth century revealed the impossibility and irrelevance of Napoleonic notions of “the decisive battle” as the crucial ingredient of warfare.

Blitzkrieg

Something similar can be said of Sherman’s alleged influence on the more conventional military strategies and tactics that also fall under the rubric of total war. If Basil Liddell Hart is to be believed, Sherman’s campaigns had a decisive impact on twentieth-century warfare through adoption of his “indirect approach” by many armies and generals, including not only Patton’s Third Army, but also the German pioneer of tank warfare Heinz Guderian and the “desert fox” Erwin Rommel, both of whom were cited by Liddell Hart as his “disciples.” Liddell Hart’s inclusion of the British Eighth Army’s North African desert campaigns and the Israeli army during the Six-Day War as practitioners of his indirect method appears to extend Sherman’s influence even further.

In a discussion of the German blitzkrieg campaigns of World War II in his memoirs, Liddell Hart claimed, “The development of the theory owed much to the study I made, in reflection on the entrenched deadlock of 1914–18, of ways and means by which an earlier case of deadlock had been overcome in the American Civil War, particularly by Sherman in the western theatre.”34 Liddell Hart declared that his biography of Sherman led the War Office to carry out a “Sherman march” maneuver at its training camp in Aldershot, and that the Aga Khan arranged a meeting with General Werner von Blomberg, the head of the German military delegation at the disarmament conference in Geneva in 1932. According to Liddell Hart, von Blomberg “had been very impressed by the deductions I had drawn from Sherman’s campaigns for modern application, and had been applying them in the training of the troops for East Prussia” and told him that he and Chief of Staff von Reichenau were producing a special translation of Liddell Hart’s book for private circulation to their officers rather than wait for a German edition.35

These claims have been disputed by historians, who have accused Liddell Hart of deliberately exaggerating his influence.³⁶ In his study of the German military in the interwar years, James Corum maintains that “a careful examination of pre-war German books, documents, and articles yields no evidence that Liddell Hart was widely known in the German army or that he had any influence whatsoever upon German tactical thinking”—a claim that also seems to negate Sherman’s purported influence. Corum traces the origins of the blitzkrieg strategy not to Liddell Hart or Sherman but to the era of Hans von Seeckt, the general chief of staff from 1919 to 1920 and army commander from 1920 to 1926, whose analysis of German military failure in World War I concluded that “the universal levy in mass, this gigantic parade of armies” was no longer the essential instrument of war.

In a report to the army high command on February 8, 1919, von Seeckt argued, “The whole future of warfare appears to me to lie in the employment of mobile armies, relatively small but of high quality and rendered distinctly more effective by the addition of aircraft, and in simultaneous mobilization of the whole defense force, be it to feed the attack or for home defense.”³⁷

Other German generals reached similar conclusions. In his interwar bestseller Achtung-Panzer! Heinz Guderian briefly cites Liddell Hart, Fuller, and the British tank warfare campaigns of World War I as influences in outlining his strategic proposals for rapidly moving mechanized tank/infantry units. But his ideas also drew on the “deep battle” theories advanced by Soviet commanders of the same period, and the Nazi blitzkrieg strategy—a term Guderian didn’t use himself—that defeated France was one product of a common search for alternatives to the static battles of World War I in which all the great military powers were engaged.38

Patton and other American generals modeled their campaigns in Normandy and France on Guderian’s blitzkrieg strategy, but German officers also studied America’s early experiments with mechanized warfare during interwar visits to the First Cavalry base at Fort Knox and to Fort Leavenworth. These interactions suggest a common process of cross-fertilization rather than the influence of Liddell Hart or Sherman. However, they resulted in the tactics that were implemented to such devastating effect by the Wehrmacht in Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, and it is certainly possible to see Shermanlike features in these campaigns. In the summer of 1941, German infantrymen marched up to twenty-seven miles a day behind the advancing Panzer columns heading toward Moscow, sometimes sleeping only two hours a night or not at all. Like Sherman’s army, the advancing armies were ordered to live off the land. Three days before the invasion began, the Eighteenth Panzer Division was ordered to carry only essential supplies and rely on “full exploitation of the land.”

Despite the formation of “booty-registration units” to list economic assets in the conquered territories, these expeditions frequently descended into looting and pillaging a population regarded by many German soldiers as primitive, subhuman, and “Asiatic.” These “wild requisitions” overlapped with more systematic campaigns of scorched earth and devastation as the advancing Nazi armies destroyed and confiscated food and livestock. Such operations contributed to the deaths of millions of Russians from starvation, cold, and disease, and whatever their superficial similarities to Sherman’s campaigns in the South, these operations owed more to the ideological and racial fixations of Nazism and its absolute disregard for even the most elementary laws of war than they did to Liddell Hart and his biography of a Civil War general.39

America’s Army

It was against this background that the American way of war acquired its distinctive features by the end of the Vietnam War. In conventional warfare, the U.S. military relied heavily on its technological supremacy, particularly its fleets of bombers and fighters, to destroy its enemies’ armed forces and achieve rapid military decision. Though not averse to Grant-style campaigns of attrition, sieges, and assaults, the U.S. military and the American public favored slashing cavalry-style offensives, using mobility, speed, and maneuver to make deep territorial gains and target command-and-control structures and lines of communication. As the armed enforcer of the world’s premier industrial power and the essential guardian of the global capitalist economy, the U.S. military has always demonstrated a special aptitude for logistics that was already evident in the Civil War and was subsequently honed into a unique ability to organize and transport large numbers of men and materials across the most extended and attenuated international supply lines.

When Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany on April 16, 1917, the German military predicted that the war would be over before America was able to enter it. Instead the U.S. Army was able to mobilize 4,800,000 men in less than a year. By the time American troops first went into action at the Saint-Mihiel salient on September 12, 1918, the military had refitted French ports to receive its cargo ships, shipped 7.5 million tons of supplies to France, and built more than a thousand miles of railroad track in French territory. During World War II, these logistical skills overcame the extraordinary challenges of the Pacific and supplied Patton’s army for most of its headlong charge through France, and they have remained essential to the projection of American military power ever since.

America’s desire to obliterate its enemies at a distance with its technological superiority has been shaped by a public aversion to prolonged wars and a determination to preserve the lives of its soldiers. As a result, foreign civilians have sometimes been merely an expendable consequence of the reliance on overwhelming firepower and limitless ordnance that British journalist Reginald Thompson observed in Korea, but at other times deliberate targets. “The Yank style of fighting was to wait for the artillery and let the big guns blast the enemy positions as barren of all life as possible. It saved many American lives but it took longer,” recalled Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger, commander of the U.S. Eighth Army in the Pacific in 1944 and 1945.40 In the words of General Frederick C. Weyand, the last American field commander in Vietnam, “War is death and destruction. The American way of war is particularly violent, deadly and dreadful. We believe in using ‘things’—artillery, bombs, massive firepower—in order to conserve our soldiers’ lives.”⁴¹

American wars, unlike those fought by Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II, have been “democratic” wars in the sense that there has been a high degree of civilian participation at the strategic level. In theory these wars were subject to some degree of public scrutiny and generally conducted in accordance with the rules and conventions of war, at least at an official level. Unlike the Wehrmacht or the Imperial Japanese Army, the U.S. military did not generally sanction the deliberate killing of civilians, even when it carried out operations in which mass deaths of civilians were inevitable. “I never had an order, ‘Go out and kill civilians,’” declared a witness to the Dellums Committee Hearings on War Crimes in Vietnam. “Orders were ‘get a big body count, search and destroy; if you are in a free fire zone, you can shoot anything that moves.’ ”42

In all its wars, the U.S. military demonstrated a remarkable ability to transform men from an array of backgrounds very quickly into courageous, resilient, and skillful soldiers who were able to fight in the most difficult conditions, whether in the swamps of South Carolina, in tropical Pacific islands, in freezing foxholes in the Hürtgen Forest and the Ardennes, or in the jungles of Vietnam. As members of a democratic army that fought “moral” wars, America’s citizen soldiers were expected to adhere to the highest standards of military honor and the laws and conventions of war, but these expectations were not always realized, in either “good” or “bad” wars. “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? “asked Edgar L. Jones, a former ambulance driver and a war correspondent during World War II, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1946. “We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh of enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”⁴³

In the aftermath of the Normandy landings, the mayor of Le Havre was bombarded with letters from angry residents complaining of drunkenness, jeep accidents, and sexual assaults on French women by American and other Allied troops in what one of his respondents called “a regime of terror . . . imposed by bandits in uniform.” In Germany the U.S. Army’s judge advocate general (JAG) reported a “tremendous increase in the numbers of rapes . . . when our troops arrived on German soil.” The sexual assaults were “sometimes . . . accomplished through the application of direct force, at other times by submission resulting from the occupants’ fear of their lives.”44 American soldiers were often larcenous. In Normandy and Germany, American and other Allied troops broke into the houses of civilians to steal food, alcohol, and personal possessions as souvenirs or for profit. At Quedlinburg in Thuringia, American soldiers stole precious medieval Bible manuscripts and other objects, and a Captain Robinson stole five paintings from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Two officers from the Women’s Army Corps stole $1.5 million worth of jewelry from Princess Mary of Hesse.⁴⁵

Similar acts had taken place in the Philippines in 1898, where American soldiers looted the homes of Filipinos, their nominal allies. In Korea, Reginald Thompson watched GIs stealing from the South Korean peasants who were supposed to be their allies, as well as from North Korean civilians. Thompson attributed such behavior to the American dehumanization of all Koreans as “Gooks,” a tendency that he regarded as a psychological defense mechanism. Without it “these essentially kind and generous Americans would not have been able to kill them indiscriminately or smash up their homes and poor belongings. By calling them ‘Gooks’ they were robbed of humanity.”⁴⁶ The racial dehumanization of enemy fighters and the civilian population was also a feature of American wars in the Philippines, Vietnam, and, more recently, Iraq, but the racism seems to intensify when combined with gleeful celebrations of the military’s destructive power. In Korea, both soldiers and the American press reveled in the effects of napalm “hell bombs” on Communist troops—and towns and villages. In Vietnam off-duty soldiers and civilian advisers sang, “Bomb the schools and churches. / Bomb the rice fields, too. / Show the children in the courtyards / What napalm can do.”⁴⁷

The dehumanization of the enemy has also been matched by the dehumanization of the soldiers themselves, many of whom have returned from America’s wars brutalized and psychologically traumatized, incapable of readjusting to a society that has little comprehension of the wars they fought in. The impact of American warfare on civilians has been due to far more than the failings of its soldiers. In James Franklin Bell’s scorched-earth operations in the Philippines, in the bombing campaigns of World War II, in Korea and Vietnam, and in the export of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrines during the Cold War, America’s political and military leaders shared the belief held by many twentieth-century governments regardless of their political ideology that civilians were no longer to be considered neutral bystanders in war but rather part of the enemy nation’s warmaking capacity, and that it was therefore legitimate to use varying degrees of physical force against them. This recognition did not mean that unlimited violence against civilians was accepted as a general principle. The same U.S. Air Force that once firebombed Japanese, German, and Korean cities officially rejects the notion of military necessity as a license for unrestricted destruction: “Complementing the principle of necessity and implicitly contained within it is the principle of humanity which forbids the infliction of suffering, injury, or destruction not actually necessary for the accomplishment of legitimate purposes.”48

This principle has sometimes been disavowed in practice, but it has not been permanently abandoned. And the planners of even the most violent expressions of strategic terror and destruction against civilians in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam invariably exuded the special moral fervor that often accompanies American warfare. “Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some other country, it is always to liberate somebody,” observed Edmund Wilson in his literary study of the Civil War.⁴⁹

In The Soul of Battle (1999), Victor David Hanson placed Sherman and Patton in the same tradition as the Theban general Epaminondas, whose army invaded the Spartan region of Laconia in 370–69 B.C.E. and freed two hundred thousand helots. For Hanson, Sherman’s and Patton’s armies were a product of a liberating impulse that he regarded as the essence of “democratic warfare,” whether freeing Spartan helots, Georgian slaves, or the prisoners of German concentration camps. This impulse, he argued, gave all these wars the elevated “soul” that was intrinsic to moral crusades against tyranny and evil. That American armies have overthrown or played a part in the overthrow of some of the worst regimes in history is indisputable, but Hanson’s grand moral narrative too readily conflates the consequences of these wars with their intentions and ignores the frequent use of American military power to install or uphold an assortment of tyrants for geopolitical convenience.

Sherman did not regard either the Confederacy or slavery as evil and would certainly have accepted the latter were it not for the disobedience of the former. Patton was shocked at the sight of the survivors of the concentration camps liberated by his troops, but his government did not enter the war to save Jews. MacArthur “liberated” a South Korea created as an American anticommunist bulwark so as to hand it back to the Syngman Rhee dictatorship that was no less brutal and oppressive than its North Korean enemy. U.S. support for the South Vietnamese strongman Ngô Đình Dim, the shah of Iran, and (initially) Saddam Hussein was based on very similar calculations. This does not mean that the liberating impulse in American war making is entirely fictitious. But even the most fervently “moral” of America’s wars invariably involve more sordid economic and geopolitical objectives that are rarely made clear to the public or ordinary soldiers. Looking back on his thirty-three years of military service, the decorated former Marine Corps general Smedley D. Butler described himself as “a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”50

Yet even when America’s wars and military interventions have been driven by much the same economic and geostrategic self-interest that motivates other nations’ wars, these goals were generally pursued—when possible—through the installation or preservation of pro-American democratic governments that would secure open markets and guarantee essential resources. In situations where democracy has not produced governments compatible with American interests, U.S. leaders have had no compunctions about using American military power overtly or covertly to overthrow democratic governments and install or support dictatorships, whether in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Iran, or Indonesia. Yet even when American military power was used to suppress a popular movement for independence, as it was in the Philippines, it was presented as an altruistic act of liberation—“bringing civilization” or “spreading democracy.” The moralistic facade of America’s wars has often justified ruthless, indiscriminate violence, but, like Sherman, the U.S. military has also combined this capacity for destruction with a very American approach to military occupation, in which self-interest and pragmatism have sometimes produced surprisingly positive outcomes.

Waging Peace

In April 1914, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched a naval force with six thousand marines to the Gulf of Mexico to bring pressure to bear on the Mexican strongman General Victoriano Huerta. When Huerta refused an order from the U.S. Navy to apologize for the temporary detention of U.S. Marines who had gone ashore at Vera Cruz by firing a twenty-one-gun salute in honor of the U.S. flag, Wilson ordered marines to occupy the port facilities and seize the Customs House, which was one of the Mexican government’s main sources of income. Though Rear Admiral Frank F. Fletcher refused to carry out a “wholesale bombardment” of the city to avoid civilian casualties, this incursion turned into a full-fledged battle between the marines and Mexican soldiers and cadets from the Vera Cruz Naval Academy, supported by armed civilians. The conflict spread from the port into the city.

“Opposed by an enemy they could not see, in the streets of a strange city where every house was an ambush and every church tower had a fighting top,” in the words of war correspondent Richard Harding Davis, marines and navy “bluejackets” engaged in what was then the most intense urban combat in U.S. history, fighting house to house and sometimes floor by floor, killing several hundred Mexicans—both armed and unarmed—and losing 130 Americans.51 Having shot up a city in a country with which the United States was not at war—over a macho question of honor—Wilson placed Vera Cruz under military rule in the command of Major General Frederick Funston, an officer who had forcefully defended harsh methods against “unruly savages” in the Philippines.

In Mexico Funston adopted a very different policy and conducted a remarkably progressive—if puritanical—seven-month occupation that began to reform the city’s finances and local government, reopened its schools and recruited new teachers, built new roads and banned gambling, marijuana, cocaine, and cockfighting, and vaccinated much of the population against smallpox before it was abruptly brought to an end. This little-known episode embodied the same combination of “coercion and attraction” employed during the Philippine-American War that has become as much a part of the American way of war as blowing things up and killing people. In Military Government (1920), Colonel Harry A. Smith argued against “a military occupation marked by harshness, injustice, or oppression” because it would generate “lasting resentment against the occupying power in the hearts of the people of the occupied territory”; he described the ideal form of military government as one based on “just, considerate, and mild treatment of the governed by the occupying army” that would “convert enemies into friends.”⁵²

Raising the flag, Vera Cruz, April 27, 1914. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

This idea shaped subsequent American occupations in Latin America and the Caribbean in the interwar years and especially the occupation of Japan and Germany after World War II. In both their aims and their practices, American military occupations have generally been radically different from the predatory “belligerent occupations” conducted by Japan in Manchuria or Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union. At its best, U.S. occupation policy followed the prescription in the U.S. Army’s World War II–era Field Manual 27–5, that military government should be “just, humane, and as mild as practicable.”53

In Germany and Japan, U.S. occupying armies oversaw a complex and extraordinarily difficult process of postwar reconstruction and social and political transformation that was largely successful in both countries, even though some of the objectives were compromised or suspended in the interests of short-term stability and the priorities of the Cold War. In Japan, the U.S. military administration directed by Douglas MacArthur—an intelligence officer during Funston’s occupation of Vera Cruz—oversaw a remarkably progressive occupation in the country that he had so recently devastated; it destroyed the institutional foundations of Japanese militarism and paved the way for a parliamentary democracy that eventually embraced a pacifist foreign policy with such fervor that it resisted American attempts to rearm Japan during the Cold War.

American occupation regimes were not always so benign, however. In 1915 Woodrow Wilson dispatched 330 U.S. Marines to Haiti to restore order and protect American business interests following the assassination of the Haitian president. This expedition turned into a nineteen-year occupation in which marines and an American-created gendarmerie supported a series of weak and venal Haitian presidents. In 1919–20 the introduction of a corvée labor system by the new government prompted a peasant uprising known as the Cacos Revolt. In response, marines and gendarmes conducted a campaign of rural pacification in which at least three thousand Haitians were killed in operations that made little distinction between armed combatants and sympathetic or even neutral civilians.

In October 1919, the U.S. high commissioner for Haiti Colonel John S. Russell condemned the fact that “troops in the field have declared and carried on what is commonly known as an ‘open season’ where care is not taken to determine whether the natives are bandits or ‘good citizens’ and where houses have been ruthlessly burned merely because they were unoccupied and native property otherwise destroyed.”54 As in the Philippines, punitive antiguerrilla hunts were accompanied by the construction of new roads, built by unpaid peasant corvée labor largely to facilitate the penetration of the country by foreign corporations, but also by the construction of bridges, hospitals, irrigation channels, and telephone systems under marine supervision, before the occupation ended in 1934.

All these episodes provided the U.S. military with the common sense and expertise in the conduct of occupations that would later be so conspicuously absent in its disastrous management of the Iraq War. By the end of the Vietnam War, however, there was little indication that the U.S. military would draw upon this legacy in the future, as the army began a process of readjustment, reorganization, and retrenchment, beginning with the abolition of the draft in 1973 and the establishment of the All Volunteer Force (AVF) that Sherman had regarded as the military ideal. As a result of the huge rearmament programs of the Reagan era, the military began to reacquire some of the prestige it had lost in Vietnam and got a new generation of weapons and technologies intended to produce a smaller, leaner army for conventional and unconventional war. Apart from the “covert” wars and “rollback” campaigns of supplying anti-Soviet guerrillas such as the mujahideen, conventional military strategy in the Reagan years was still largely geared toward waging a deep-strike counteroffensive against a putative Soviet invasion of Western Europe on the Patton model. In war-gaming scenarios and training exercises, the military endlessly rehearsed a mechanized war of maneuver based on close air support, which would drive the Soviets out of Europe by penetrating deep behind their advancing formations. But in the last decade of the century, the age of superpower confrontation came to an abrupt and unexpected end, and the U.S. military entered a new period in its history, in which the old assumptions of “total” and “limited” war were no longer valid. The change called into question the very purpose of the military’s vast destructive powers.