The purpose of the war is “extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people.”
- Letter from General Sherman to Mrs. Sherman, July 31, 1862
“[H]ad the Confederates somehow won . . . they would have found themselves justified . . . in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.”
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- Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians during Sherman’s Campaign, p. 286.
“Distinguished military historian B.H. Liddell Hart observed that the code of civilized warfare which had ruled Europe for over two hundred years was first broken by Lincoln’s policy of directing the destruction of civilian life in the South.”
- Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events, p. 116.
In When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession Charles Adams wrote of how the first Geneva Convention on War took place in 1863, followed by three more, with the last one being in 1949. The 1863 convention codified the laws of war as were understood at the time to say: 1) Attacking defenseless cities and towns was a war crime; 2) Plundering and wantonly destroying civilian property was a war crime; and 3) Only necessities could be taken from a civilian population, and they had to be paid for. Some historians, Adams wrote, claimed that these laws were the laws of war for four centuries and that they were all broken by the Lincoln regime. The lawlessness of the Lincoln regime, in other words, set the stage for the military atrocities of the twentieth century.
Most Americans have been taught to ignore the Lincoln regime’s war crimes by repeating Sherman’s CYA quip, “war is hell.” But there is a clear historical record of rape, murder, torture, arson, and the bombing of civilian occupied cities by the Union army. See for example War Crimes Against
Southern Civilians by Walter Brian Cisco; The Civil War by Shelby Foote; Union Terror by Jeffrey Addicott; and South Carolina Citizens in Sherman’s Path by Karen Stokes for starters.
There you will learn that there was so much murder, arson and theft in Missouri that vast sections of the entire state were uninhabited by the war’s end. Entire towns, including my former town of Bluffton, South Carolina, were burned to the ground with every private residence set ablaze by U.S. Army “soldiers.” The Union Army was an army of pyromaniacs, rapists, and thieves.
In August of 1863 Charleston, South Carolina was not defended by Confederate forces when a six-month bombardment of the city commenced, exploding more than 22,000 artillery shells in the city. Unexploded shells were still being found a century later.
Sherman ordered the four-day bombardment of Atlanta in the Fall of 1864 when it was only occupied by women, children, infants, and elderly men, with his artillerists targeting homes where they spotted human habitation. As many as 5,000 artillery shells rained down on Atlanta’s civilian population in a single day. Corpses littered the streets, something that Sherman called “a beautiful sight.” Thousands of surviving residents were homeless at the onset of winter.
Such war crimes were committed by Lincoln’s army, with his direction and full knowledge, for the duration of the war. It is said that when the Prussian military invited Sherman’s sidekick, General Phil Sheridan, to present a lecture on the American way of war the Prussians – no shrinking violets – were shocked and disgusted by how he described the murder, rape, plunder, and arson that occurred under his command in the Shenandoah Valley.
Just three months after Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia General Sherman was put in charge of the “Military District of the Missouri,” which was all land west of the Mississippi River. His orders were to essentially wage a campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians, which he did for the next twenty-five years, killing some 45,000 of them, women and children included, and placing the rest in concentration camps called “reservations.” In 1891, the year of his death, Sherman expressed his regrets that his army did not kill every last Indian. He is famously associated with the genocidal quip, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” He did all this, he once said, “to make way for the [government-subsidized] railroads,” of which he was a major stockholder.
During the Philippine Insurrection (1889) the U.S. Army killed some 200,000 Filipinos, with some estimates that a million civilians were killed. That was after the Spanish-American War also massacred thousands of civilians.
All of this was brought to mind when I recently ran across a 2010 book entitled Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947 by Thomas Goodrich. (There is also a YouTube video, “Hellstorm: The Genocide of Germany”). It is a hard book to read because it describes the results of the American way of war (imitated by the Russians, British, and Germans as well) combined with twentieth century military technology.
Goodrich starts by writing of how Hitler’s 1925 Mein Kampf promised to rid Germany of all “Jewish influence” if he were to ever obtain political power. This naturally “alarmed Jews worldwide . . .” Influential Jewish businessmen first organized an international boycott of the German economy and of course denounced the National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazis). That quickly turned into what the organizer of the boycott called a “holy war” against “cruel and savage beasts,” i.e., all Germans.
Goodrich quotes Hollywood script writer Ben Hecht as writing that a “cancer” flourishes in the world in the form of “Germany, Germanism, and Germans.” They are “murderers, foul and wanton,” said the Hollywood movie script writer. “Germany must perish,” added Theodore Kaufman in a book of that title. He argued that, after the war, “all German men and women should be sterilized” to eliminate the disease of “Germanism and its carriers.” The New York Times praised this as “A Sensational Idea” while the Washington Post labeled it “A provocative theory.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt made these calls for “extermination” and genocide official when he endorsed the so-called “Morgenthau Plan,” named after his Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. The plan called for the complete destruction of Germany after the war by the dismantling of all industry and the confiscation of massive amounts of land, among other things. The plan estimated that the result would be death by starvation of some 50 million Germans. Their hope was that “within two generations Germany would cease to exist.” When others expressed shock at such a barbaric proposal, Morgenthau snapped, “They asked for it. Why the hell should I worry about what happens to their people?” Morgenthau obviously wasn’t worried about what might happen to him in the afterlife.
Winston Churchill also endorsed the plan and, it goes without saying, so did Stalin. Goodrich claims that Hitler considered the war to be a war against “Jewish Bolshevism” since “Lenin, Trotsky, and many other Russian [communist] revolutionaries were Jewish.”
Hellscape vividly describes the carpet bombing of civilian-occupied Dresden, Germany, where tons and tons of bombs were dropped by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the U.S. Airforce on the defenseless city. Literally thousands of bombers dropped phosphorous bombs on the city, creating a hellish inferno that melted bodies almost instantly, literally broiling them alive. The entire city was described as “one huge glowing wave.” There were thousands of dead bodies everywhere and the stench of burnt, decaying flesh was nauseating, said survivors. The animals in the Dresden zoo were incinerated along with everyone else caught above ground.
Knowing that people would flee to a large public park outside of the city the RAF dropped tons of high explosive bombs there. American bombers followed up by strafing the civilians in the park with their machine guns. This whole scene was repeated day after day as though the objective was to murder every last human being in Dresden. Goodrich cites estimates of some 400,000 civilians killed in Dresden alone.
This mass murder of defenseless citizens was gleefully and fiendishly repeated in Hamburg and many other German cities near the end of the war when there was little or no military resistance. “What had taken the German nation over two millennia to build, had taken its enemies a mere six years to destroy,” Goodrich concludes.
Goodrich writes of how Stalin considered Russian prisoners of war to be traitors since his order was to fight to the death. The American authorities after the war helped Stalin enforce his rule with “operation keelhaul,” which returned thousands of Russian prisoners of war back to Stalin. “[T]he entire Cossack nation had been delivered to the Soviets. Within days, most were either dead or bolted into cattle cars for the one-way ride to Siberia” and slave labor. Over five million Soviet citizens were returned to Stalin and “delivered to torture and slavery.” General Eisenhower supervised all of this with a collection of concentration camps that held the prisoners before handing them over to Stalin. Thousands of them were intentionally starved to death in the camps, writes Goodrich.
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Stalin wasn’t the only newly-anointed slave owner. “When France requested slaves as part of its war booty, Eisenhower transferred over 600,000 Germans east.” And “like the Americans, the French starved their prisoners.” Several hundred thousand prisoners in Great Britain “were transformed into virtual slaves” as well. Eventually, “at least 800,000 German prisoners died in the American and French death camps” after the war.
One of the more sickening sections of Hellstorm is the description of the massive rape of German women and girls that occurred for several years. I will spare the reader of the gory stories and details. The Russians were the primary perpetrators, while American soldiers boasted that rape was not necessary; it was easy to bribe starving and destitute German women with a mere candy bar or a few slices of bread. “A bit of food, a bar of chocolate, or a bar of soap seems to make rape unnecessary,” an American soldier is quoted as saying very matter-of-factly. “By the summer of 1945, Germany had become the world’s greatest slave market where sex was the new medium of exchange.”
As I said, this is a hard book to stomach, but it is also a necessary book to read to understand the realities of the American way of war that was introduced the world in the 1860s and which, because of its “success,” was imitated by murderous tyrants – and their propaganda mouthpieces — the world over during the twentieth century. War crimes and their “ends-justify -the-means” rationales are so routine today that propagandists for the current Israeli war of genocide in Gaza have nonchalantly advocated the “Dresdenizing” of Gaza and the subsequent murder of thousands of women, children, and infants.
