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The distribution of casualties by social class within the armed services
Ted Crawford
How far the upper classes among the fighting men suffer relative to those
beneath them in war depends on two factors; the differential casualty rates of
officers as opposed to other ranks and the degree to which such officers come
from the upper classes. Changes in either of these will have social and
political effects. This has some importance for Marxists as the degree to which
the upper classes have a higher chance of dying in conflicts as opposed to the
lower orders may effect their enthusiasm for war and whether they remain
enthusiastic for longer than the hoi-poloi. It is also important that the
bourgeoisie control the armed forces which have to act, if not in their name, in
their interests. This little essay is an attempt to throw some light on this
matter which has been obscured on the one hand by the belief of the left that
the poor always suffer most and the opinion of the British upper classes that
their losses were disproportionately high in two world wars. Furthermore
statistics are not collected to provide details of the class origin of
casualties and some rough guesswork has to be done.
There is no doubt that in the gunpowder age from about 1650 to 1900 the
casualties of the rank and file in land forces were always much greater
proportionately than among the officers. This was because the overwhelming
proportion of such casualties were `non-battle' ones, largely from disease, so
that the superior food and living conditions of the officers, particularly while
on campaign, meant that they fell ill less often and, if they did fall ill, they
were far more likely to be nursed back to health or sent home. In battle itself
infantry and cavalry officers tended to suffer rather more than their men and
medical aid, however costly, was often as deadly as neglect but even so their
losses were not too disproportionate
because, as weapon accuracy was poor, deaths were distributed fairly randomly
among those present on the `field of honour'. It was a matter of some comment
that battles in the American War of Independence and in the American war of
1812, against frontiersmen who were good marksmen with muzzle loading rifles,
led to heavier officer casualties in the British army.
Disastrous
A few statistics from the mid eighteenth century onwards are of interest here
always remembering that before then disease was even more deadly and armies
swiftly wasted away during European campaigns even when there was no fighting to
speak of. The most disastrous campaign ever recorded in terms of
casualties for the British army was that in the West Indies from 1793-1799 when
perhaps 75,000 men died of disease, comprising the vast majority who had been
sent out and including most of the officers. A more micro example of this is
shown in the regimental history of the 85th Foot which says that after a tour of
duty in Jamaica in (1803-1808) they came back numbering 9 officers, 30 NCOs & 31
privates. They recruited heavily and went to Shorncliffe to train as Light
Infantry 600 strong. At Walcheren in August 1809 the 85th went out nearly 700
strong & came back about 120 of all ranks though only one man had been killed in
action. Wellington, though a fearful reactionary, was very careful of the health
of his troops knowing that they were very difficult to replace by voluntary
enlistment but in the six year long
Peninsular War two-thirds of the 24,000 dead were from sickness not battle. In
the Crimean War about 25,000 British lives were lost but fewer than 4,000 were
killed or died of wounds. The hospital at Scutari over which Florence
Nightingale presided was full of sick - not wounded. The American Civil War,
involving vastly greater numbers, had similar proportions of battle to
non-battle dead as the British experienced in the Peninsular and the same was
true forty years later in the Boer War with 7,000 killed to about 13,000 dead of
disease. Indeed the first prolonged war in history in which the battle dead
outnumbered fatalities from sicknesses was as late as the present century in the
Russo-Japanese in 1904-5.
Naval service, which invariably involved far fewer people than land service,
was, before the middle of the nineteenth century, always characterised by very
high death rates among sailors and in the Great War with France (1793-1815)
eighty per cent of the deaths among British sailors were from sickness, fifteen
per cent from accident (including wrecks) and only five percent in battle.
Seamen had a far, far greater chance of dying from disease and falling out of
the rigging than did officers. In battles such as Trafalgar, senior officers,
including Captains, Admirals and captains of marines had very high casualty
rates but battles were few and far between. Earlier than Trafalgar non-battle
losses were an even larger proportion of the total at sea. In more modern times
death rates on board ship are generally very low unless the entire vessel
disintegrates in a horrible sort of industrial accident. There is not much
distinction therefore between the losses of officers and men on board ship in a
modern naval battle but, as in the eighteenth century, naval losses are a very
small proportion of the total deaths in war.
Deadliness
As the twentieth century opened the accuracy and deadliness of modern weapons on
land meant that when the fighting did occur officer casualties were getting
proportionately higher and the accuracy of the Chassepot rifle led to frightful
casualties among the Prussian Guard officers at Gravelotte and St Privat in
1870. It was very noticeable at the battle of Spion Kop in the Boer War that the
proportions of officers to other rank dead among the colonial troops, Australian
and South African, were similar for the Boers
could not distinguish between them and simply aimed at the tallest men in the
unit. Unlike the colonials who had been fed on a decent diet in their youth, the
stunted offspring of the slums among the British regulars were pygmies compared
with their officers so the officer losses were proportionately double. This
provided an excellent rationale for the upper classes to support health and
welfare reforms in the period 1902-1914.
Thus when WW1 opened there was a historically quite new situation. Because of
medical advances losses from sickness were very small in Western Europe in
1914-18 although much worse in `side-shows' like the East African campaign. The
socially prestigious corps were the infantry and the cavalry
which suffered far more in battle than the artillery and engineers, particularly
the infantry though cavalry frequently had to take a turn on foot in the
trenches too. Troops even further back than the gunners, the
non-combatant corps such as railway troops, had grown in the nineteenth century
but by the World War 1 the ratio was still about 9:1 in favour of the
front-line. As a result the many literary and historical accounts of this period
do accurately reflect the fact that the upper classes suffered even more than
the poor. In Britain it has been said that of those members of the aristocracy
who served in the military one out of five was killed as opposed to one out of
eight of the general population. A brief glance at the war memorials of the
great public schools tells the same story. Indeed not since the Wars of the
Roses
had there been such a kill-off of the English nobility.
The social, technical and tactical situation was similar in all European
countries and so the ancient aristocracies paid a terrible price - as too did
the aspiring middle classes who sought to emulate their style and coveted junior
commands in the `smart' regiments. If there was any group that suffered rather
less it was probably the skilled workers who were held back for essential war
work but in the First World War the importance of these for total mobilisation
had often not been realised and they were frequently called up to be duly mown
down with unfortunate effects on the production of munitions and therefore the
war effort as a whole. Sometimes industrial workers in Russia and Germany were
not called up because they were considered politically unreliable - the peasants
were preferred but this option was not open to the British as there were not
enough peasants here - though Scottish Highlanders served in relatively large
numbers. Proportionately fewer Irishmen served as they were never conscripted.
The Second World War was not very different for the British save that the period
of time when great armies were in combat was very much shorter and so casualties
as a whole were that much smaller even if the rate of casualties over any given
time was much the same. Once more the officers in the
infantry and this time the cavalry too, who were frequently burnt alive in their
tanks, suffered disproportionately but with this difference that the proportion
of rear echelon troops was growing and the more mechanised and therefore mobile
the armies became the bigger did the proportion supplying
them. But officers in such corps as the RAOC, RASC & REME were less socially
elevated members of the lower middle classes and once more the war memorials of
the public schools repay study. The losses among the general male population of
that age range were about a third of World War 1 but Eton had more ex-pupils
killed in the Second than the First War while my own rather less prestigious old
school had about 50% of the slaughter in the previous conflict, 278 as opposed
to 578. It is true that staffs, which were disproportionately of higher rank,
became relatively larger and amounted in total to a division or two on the main
fronts but to balance this there were huge losses in the RAF so that 40,000
air-crew of Bomber Command, mostly commissioned but generally of middle
class/lower middle class rather than upper class origin, died over Germany.
Future
But it was the American armed services which perhaps heralded the future. In
their drafting process skilled workers were funnelled into those sectors of the
services where their skills would be of use, the most striking example being the
engineering troops composed of construction workers who constructed airfields,
even if occasionally under fire, at the most amazing speed on Pacific islands.
In this respect at least the United States was far ahead of anywhere else in
military effectiveness. The technical arms, the
Navy and the Air Force ground staff got the first choice of the draftees
(aviators were all volunteers) while the infantry got the worst educated and
socially deprived recruits and often too the less well educated junior officers.
The more upper class Americans went into the Intelligence Services, the more
flash parts of the staff, perhaps the Navy which maintained its social prestige
and sometimes the air force or naval aviation though these last two did suffer
severely. Both in the United States and Britain war mobilisation was far more
efficiently run than in WW1 and, as a result, skilled workers, engineers,
electricians and so forth were as far as possible slotted into civilian or
military tasks where their abilities would be useful and which, coincidentally,
were either totally out of danger or were much further back than the fighting
arms. In both countries it is probable that unskilled workers lost a much higher
proportion than the skilled but in Britain as opposed to the United States the
upper classes suffered far more than the average too.
In the fifty or so years that have elapsed since 1945, a longer period than that
from the Boer War to the Hiroshima bomb, we have seen no all-out war. The
experience of the USA in Vietnam and on a more Lilliputian scale the New Zealand
and Australian contingent in the same conflict is however very
suggestive. In such colonial type wars against technically inferior opposition
the technical troops, the air force ground staff, the men on board ship and the
enormous planning and administrative staff suffered very little indeed save
boredom, fatigue, traffic accidents, the disruption of their lives from military
service and venereal disease. To a considerable extent this was true of the
artillery too but the overwhelming proportion of losses fell on the infantry and
even within battalions tended to fall on a tiny minority of the whole army in
the rifle companies. The wireless operators and those in the support companies
suffered a great deal less when the enemy lacked much artillery support. It was
for this reason that such a disproportionate number of American casualties were
black soldiers but, I suspect, no more than the
general percentage of the ill-educated and unskilled for both Mexican and
American Indians suffered disproportionately as well. White `blue collar'
workers lost a great deal too. Vietnam was truly a "Rich man's war and a poor
man's fight" and this broke the army which eventually disintegrated and forced a
withdrawal.
There was no land fighting to speak of in the Gulf War but those that did die
often did so as a result of accident - rather more than the official statistics
suggest. In the Korean War 33,000 Americans
died as a result of enemy action and 20,000 in accidents, I have not seen the
figures for Vietnam. In any case large numbers of often not very intelligent,
very young man who would not be able to get insurance in civilian life, driving
very heavy and dangerous vehicles, frequently extremely tired and often under
the influence of drugs or drink are a recipe for a massive accident rate. The
accident figures too would tend to be over-represented among the other ranks
rather than officers - a trend back to the 18th century pattern of non-battle
casualties.
Volunteers
In the British army today the infantrymen are also often quite lumpenised and
often barely literate though all are volunteers unlike the Americans in Vietnam
and it is almost certainly the same in every other country where there is a
volunteer army from a wealthy society. Such volunteer armed services are
becoming more general and will, I predict, continue to do so. The skilled arms
can be recruited by the bribe of training to those with aptitude but poorly
qualified while the infantry will get the merely poorly
qualified. Any prolonged war with heavy losses would mean conscription and this
will be difficult, if not impossible, for present day western societies. There
are far fewer pilots today in their expensive but highly effective machines but
increasingly the risky job of aerial fighting will be delegated to nerveless
machines, drones, cruise and stand-off missiles. Unlike the poor and fit young
infantryman, the educated and the manager will not be much at risk in such a
scenario. So the first fifty years of this century may be the exception that
proves the rule, a period of mass armies and mass production where class
differences in battle casualty rates as well as living standards tended to
narrow greatly in the areas of developed capitalism. This era seems to have come
to an end.
As far as the cost to the rank and file is concerned all this has analogies with
the widening class differentials as regards wages, security of employment,
conditions and general welfare in civilian society. In the past the difference
between the armed services and the productive labour force was that a section of
the managers, the officer class, had to put themselves into danger, many of them
into even more danger that those that they commanded and, since in the last
analysis such managers had control over the application of force and violence in
society, they had to be utterly loyal and committed to the existing ruling
class. To some extent this is still true. The question of how this has been
guaranteed in the past and how it is to be guaranteed in the future is however
an interesting one and perhaps one of considerable difficulty for present day
international capital.
© Ted Crawford
February 2005
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