American History Revised (37 page)

Back to our original question: What war would you least like to be in? Answer: it depends which side you’re fighting on. God forbid you were fighting for the Confederacy. The fatality ratio for white Confederate soldiers was 25 percent.

1862
General George McClellan was unable to advance on Richmond in 1862 and end the Civil War quickly because 100,000 of his men had diarrhea.

Human waste played a significant role in the Civil War. Unlike earlier wars, where the number of troops in a skirmish was only in the hundreds, ensuring proper toilet facilities for huge battalions of men in the Civil War was a logistical and sanitary nightmare. No longer could a soldier take a pee or squat behind the bushes. Quartering thousands of men in a confined area resulted in dung smell, flies, and epidemics that “competed in horror with the battles of war.” Wrote a Confederate soldier from South Carolina, “These Big Battles is not as Bad as the fever.”

In an effort to combat disease among the troops, the North formed the U.S.

Sanitary Commission, which delivered a report urging proper construction of privies, urinals, and cesspools into which was poured chloride, lime sulphate, and sulphuric and muriatic acid gas to prevent the hatching of flies. To further ensure that soldiers wouldn’t catch diarrhea and dysentery, they were issued flannel underwear—even though it hindered their mobility and made them suffer in the sweltering summer heat.

The South had an additional problem besides disease: it was running out of chemicals to make gunpowder. With typical ingenuity, the Rebels resorted to collecting human urine to make nitrate. Confederate women rallied to the cause by saving their urine for pickup by collection wagons headed for munitions factories. (Northern snipers quickly caught on and focused their rifle shots on the urine wagons—not the food wagons.)

Military hygiene assumed particular importance in World War I, with its trench warfare. One thousand men generate six hundred pounds of dung and three hundred gallons of urine a day. Where to put all this stuff? In selecting a trench campsite, commanders looked for an area large enough to locate the kitchen far away from the waste-pit “bathroom.” Every two days the waste pit had to be burned with crude oil to kill the flies and larvae. When the campsite proved no longer habitable, the troops picked up and moved on. More often than not, they failed to move fast enough to avoid disease. Before entering battle, commanders ordered all their troops to relieve themselves, because being hit in the abdomen with a bullet was worse if excrement was present.

In his classic history of epidemics and infectious disease,
Rats, Lice and History
, written in 1934, Hans Zinsser wrote, “Soldiers have rarely won wars. They more often mop up after the barrage of epidemics. And typhus, with its brothers and sisters—plague, cholera, typhoid, dysentery—has decided more campaigns than Caesar, Hannibal, Napoleon, and all the inspector generals of history.”

The same could be said of American military history. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that a war was fought in which the U.S. lost more lives to actual battle wounds than to disease and lack of proper hygiene and food.

That war was World War II. In the Mexican War, for example, the U.S. lost 13,283 lives: 13 percent in battle, 87 percent to disease. In the Civil War, said Zinsser, the federal army lost 279,659 lives: 16 percent were killed in battle, 17 percent died of wounds and infection, and 67 percent died of disease. In the 1898 Spanish-American War (including the Philippines, not just Cuba), out of 5,660 deaths, 8 percent died in battle, 92 percent died from disease.

In World War I, 53,000 American troops died from combat, 63,000 from disease.

In World War II, the United States went
into overdrive in using the latest pharmaceutical products to save its troops from disease. The greatest problem at the time was malaria. Already in 1937 four million cases had been diagnosed in the United States, especially in the Southern states where most of the U.S. training bases were located. Even worse, all the war theaters—especially North Africa and the Pacific—were in high-malaria areas. When in early 1942 the island of Java fell to Japanese troops, the world supply of quinine was lost to America and her allies. This was an unmitigated disaster: Quinine is the drug of choice not only for malaria, but also for a whole range of other treatments: dysentery, herpes, influenza, meningitis, pneumonia, and typhoid fever.

In an emergency measure never taken before by an army, the U.S. military ordered 100,000 vials of tetanus antitoxin, 40 million quinine tablets, 35 million sulfathiazone tablets, and 10 million sulfapyradine tablets. Another drug, sulfanilamide, reduced the mortality rate from pneumonia from 75 percent to 11 percent and became quickly appreciated as having “dethroned the captain of the men of death.” In 1943 FDR signed into law the Pharmacy Corps of the United States Army, giving them power and authority to command desperately needed drugs such as penicillin, glycerin, sugar, and alcohol. Given that it took 65 gallons of alcohol to make smokeless gunpowder for a 16-inch artillery shell, getting hold of alcohol for medical reasons was not easy. The Pharmacy Corps persevered, and obtained sufficient alcohol and other antibiotics to save countless American soldiers on the battlefield. In 1944, a major American drug company ran an ad: “When the thunderous battles of this war have subsided to silent pages in a history book, the greatest news event of World War II may well be the discovery and development of … penicillin.”

Great generals have their place in history, but so too do the anonymous quartermasters and doctors who maintain the supply lines of vital health conditions and drugs. They know the major danger in war: not enemy bullets, but lack of hygiene.

1864
Said Napoleon, “An army of sheep led by a lion will always beat an army of lions led by a sheep.”

For more than one hundred years, Southerners have made the excuse that the Civil War was a gallant struggle for a lost cause, that they never had a chance against the powerful industrial North. Said William Faulkner, the South’s most renowned novelist, “Who else would have declared a war against a power ten times the area, and one hundred times the men and one hundred times the resources?”

Absolute nonsense. In fact, the two sides were quite evenly matched. The Union armies had a peak strength of
about 1 million men; the Southern armies about 600,000. This is a ratio less than 2:1—a far cry from the 3:1 or 4:1 ratio generally considered necessary for an attacking force. The North, as the invader aiming at permanent conquest, had to establish garrisons throughout the South to enforce the occupation. By the end of the war, according to General Grant, more than half the soldiers in the Union armies were involved in garrison or occupation duty as opposed to actual fighting. The South, as the defender, did not have this burden. In addition, 90 percent of the graduates of West Point elected to join the South. The South also had plenty of supplies; whatever it could not produce, it could always import from Europe; never were there any drastic shortages. The
Richmond Daily Examiner
in late 1864 complained of the “well known improvidence of our soldiers who throw away their overcoats and blankets in spring … expecting to take new ones from the Yankees before winter.” When the war ended, the newly installed Northern war governor of North Carolina was astounded to find ninety thousand Southern uniforms sitting in a warehouse—far better than his own troops had ever enjoyed.

When the war started, the betting money in England—especially that of the powerful British foreign secretary, Lord John Russell—was that the South would win. Even citizens in the nation’s capital feared the worst. For Abraham Lincoln to know he was in serious trouble, all he had to do was look out the White House window with a telescope and see the Confederate flag fluttering in the breeze on the other side of the Potomac.

Then why did the South, so close to victory, fail to win?

Wars, like all great endeavors, are essentially won on spirit, determination, will-power, and focus. The South, like America in Vietnam one hundred years later, lacked unity and clear objectives—the ferocity of the lion. When the majority of U.S. naval officers announced they would join the South, before departing for their home states they delivered their ships to their owner, the U.S. government! One admires these men for their sense of duty, but not for their will to win. War is a ruthless business, not a sport for gentlemen.

“The strange conduct of our people during this war!” bemoaned a member of the Confederate Congress in 1864. “They gave up their sons, husbands, brothers and friends, and often without murmuring, to the army; but let one of their negroes be taken and what a howl you will hear. The love of money has been the greatest difficulty on our way to independence—it is now our chiefest obstacle.” The plantation owners refused to let their slaves be conscripted, refused to buy Confederate bonds, and refused to pay export taxes on the substantial cotton they were smuggling through the Northern blockade.

Slavery was a dominant institution in the South, but it was not widespread, nor was it a great motivator of troop morale.
Seventy-five percent of all white families in the South owned no slaves. Certain states, less enthusiastic about the war than other states, granted ten times as many draft exemptions on a per capita basis. Besides exemptions, desertions were a major problem. Lee wrote to Jefferson Davis in 1862, “Our ranks are very much diminished—I fear from a third to one half of the original numbers.” The situation got so bad that Lee had to send out squads to track down and round up the deserters, many of whom were “wantonly destroying stock and property” and alienating the local population they were supposed to protect.

From day one, the South faced a paradox it could never resolve: it revolted against the North in the cause of states’ rights, yet the very autonomy of its members prevented it from forming a single, unified army to fight the North. It was like the Articles of Confederation all over again. President Jefferson Davis, who had been an outstanding U.S. secretary of war under Franklin Pierce during 1853–57, had to contend with his vice president, Alexander Stephens, and many of the Southern senators, who insisted on the primacy of states’ rights and that they have a say in how their state militias were used. Presiding over the Confederate Senate was Stephens, a frail ninety-pound weakling who “looked like a freak” and spent most of his time at home, bedridden. Says the historian David Eicher, Davis knew that “a strong, unified Confederacy under the control of a central government would be necessary if the war that most saw as inevitable were to come.” But when war came, there was constant bickering, failure to agree on which generals to appoint, failure to agree on whether they should be ranked by merit or by seniority, failure to agree on suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and failure to agree on financing. The more Davis meddled in states’ rights, the more violent the arguments got, and little got resolved—certainly no way to fight a war.