Gettysburg exposed the unvarnished truth

Pickett's Charge:  Confederate delusion reaps its just desserts

One hundred forty-nine years ago this week, General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of General George Meade and the Army of the Potomac near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  The three-day engagement was the culmination of Lee's second foray into Union territory and, like the previous episode, ended in defeat for the Confederacy.  Although Lee's reputation as an invincible commander had already been shaken at Antietam some 9 months previous, Gettysburg, as this battle would be named, forever dispelled the mystique.

The total number of casualties from the battle are some 46,000.  (Forty-six thousand casualties in three days.)  Although this number is divided nearly evenly between the two armies, it was a much greater loss, proportionally, to the smaller and less adequately supplied Army of Northern Virginia. 

Although it was not clear at the time, historians today point to the battle of Gettysburg as the high-water mark for the Confederacy.  It was all downhill thereafter.  When Lee abandoned the field, two days after Pickett's disastrous charge up Cemetery Ridge, his army was mortally wounded. 

The war lasted another two years, but after Gettysburg, any quaint, idiotic notions about honor and righteousness were cast aside in favor of the unvarnished truth.  "War is cruelty," as Union general William T. Sherman so famously said.  The Union generals, Meade, Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant, understood the new reality: attrition, economic destruction, total war.  Although Meade failed to press his advantage in the battle's immediate aftermath, once General Grant assumed command, they set about systematically crushing the Confederacy. 

Perhaps General Lee and his generals understood as well.  But, if so, how could they have imagined that there was any possibility of Confederate victory?  And why would they continue?  How much blood was owed to the antiquated and ridiculous notion of honor?  How much blood would sate the appetites of fanatics like Jefferson Davis?

Meade and Lee:  victor and vanquished

Were it not for the abolition of slavery, it is difficult to see how anything positive came out of the war.  The practical reality of the Civil War is that it was not so much a victory for Union and abolitionism as it was a triumph of industrialism over agrarianism. 

Put aside President Lincoln's beautiful words at the consecrated graveyard.  The Civil War was ruthless capitalism subjugating and destroying delusional aristocratism. Pick your poison.

Sixty-seven years since the Red Star rose over Berlin

Sixty-seven years ago today, Red Army soldiers hoisted their flag over the Reichstag, signalling an effective end to Hitler's Third Reich.  The city of Berlin lay in ruins; the Wehrmacht, the greatest military organization the world had ever seen, was no more.

While German soldiers to the west, in Bavaria and Westphalia, were surrendering en masse to advancing American, British, and Canadian armies, it was a different story in Prussia.   

"Munich gave up without a fight," a young German man told me in 1999.  He was my guide on a tour of Dachau, the notorious German prison camp where some 35,000 souls perished.  His short black curls, practical, round spectacles and black shirt and trousers gave him a severe appearance, but he was a pacifist and a liberal.  "In Berlin, for some strange reason," he continued, "they fought to the last man." 

The Soviets outnumbered their German adversaries three to one in the final assault on Berlin.  The Wehrmacht had been in full retreat ever since the Soviets had broken out from the Kursk pocket on the faraway Russian steppes nearly two years earlier.  Although to express doubt was an act of treason in dying Germany, it seems unlikely that even the most zealous Wehrmacht soldier could have harbored any illusions in those final days.  And yet, they fought on.  To the last man.

All told, nearly 200,000 persons lost their lives in the battle for Berlin.  In the last push from the Spree River to the Reichstag, a distance of less than a mile, the Red Army suffered 5,000 casualties.  German casualties are unknown, but estimated to be even higher.  When I visited at the end of the century, there were still scars from the savagery that had occurred over 50 years before.

It is impossible to express any judgment on the Battle of Berlin.  It was the result of the thoughts and actions of millions of people, defying any rational explanation.  In terms of scale and sheer savagery, it ranks as one of the most appalling battles in human history.  One could argue that it was the fulfillment of the nihilistic German worldview; the invocation of Ragnarok.

Mankind hasn't grown any more humane in these last 67 years.  We are what we are.  But it would not displease me if I spun out what time remains to me before the next Battle of Berlin occurs.