The Handy Military History Answer Book. Samuel Willard Crompton

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      “We rebuilt from scratch,” Hans declares.

      “We were determined to remake Old England, and make her better,” Tommy declares.

      “Russia has been pounded many times, and she always comes back,” says Ivan.

      Joe—who once was called GI Joe by his coworkers—shuts his eyes in admiration. He remembers the America of 1945, the incredible enthusiasm that existed, and the belief that Americans were the best at almost everything, whether the making of automobiles, the election of leaders, or the creation of the new suburbs that sprang up after 1946.

      Deep down, Joe envies his three fellow veterans. The Second World War was a horrible experience for them and their societies, but they survived, endured, and—thanks in part to U.S. economic assistance—they eventually thrived. But it’s their incredible optimism about the future, their belief that their efforts will come to fruition—that a better world will be established—that’s what really compels Joe’s envy, as well as his admiration. It’s an odd thing for an American, a nation that was only established in 1776, but he feels strangely older, more mature than Hans, Tommy, and Ivan, and he’s not sure he really likes the feeling.

      Joe thinks a few moments, and remembers a book he saw recently that directly challenged its readers, asking them if there were not some good things that came out of war. Though he’s not inclined to switch places with Hans, Tommy, or Ivan, he thinks it quite possible that his grandchildren—of whom he’s very fond—just might be willing to exchange places with the grandchildren of these men.

      And then one of the best quotes he ever recalled comes back to Joe. He does not speak it aloud, but smiles gently, as he ponders Thomas Jefferson’s words, written in 1786: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed, now and again, with the blood of tyrants. It is their natural manure.” How odd that the Europeans, who’ve experienced so much tyranny over so many centuries, seem to know this better than his fellow Americans.

PREHISTORY

      Who cast the first stone (of human history)?

      How historians wish they knew! They could, then, cast all the blame and attribute all the subsequent mayhem to that person. But he remains anonymous to us.

      Are we quite sure that it was a “he” or “him”?

      Historians are not one hundred percent certain, but it seems very likely. Women are not inherently more moral or altruistic than men, but throughout human history they have shown much less propensity for settling matters by means of armed combat.

      This does not mean women have not figured in the history of war, however. Far from it. Our best surmise is that many ancient battles and skirmishes—those which took place before the development of writing—may have been fought over who possessed the land, animals, and not so incidentally, women.

      Can historians assign any sort of date to the beginning of armed combat?

      They really can’t. Archeologists examine Stone Age tools, such as the Acheulan Axe, for clues, but we cannot be certain whether they were used in human-on-human combat or for scraping the skin from animals. What we can say, with some confidence, is that nearly all the things—or aspects—that we today identify with being human had evolved around 50,000 years ago and that it is quite likely that there was some armed combat by that time.

      As to the age-old question of whether humans are naturally competitive or naturally cooperative, we cannot render any firm assessment. Both traits clearly exist within the great majority of humans, and it may be a matter of circumstance which trait is dominant at any place or time.

      Is there any truth to the belief that precivilized warfare was largely ritual in nature?

      Much of it probably was. Chiefs and shamans may well have organized the first battles of human history and done so in a way that minimized casualties. That does not lessen the impact of conflict in the lives of our ancestors, however. Some of them survived, and quite a few died in a time that has been accurately characterized as “red in tooth and claw” (the expression was coined by the nineteenth-century English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson).

      What tools, or weapons, did ancient peoples use?

      Between about 50,000 years ago and about 10,000 years ago, weapons were limited to the bone knife, the stone axe, and the throwing spear, known as the atlatal. By the time humans began settling into farming communities, however, roughly 10,000 years ago, their capacity for building larger, more effective weapons was apparent. At the same time, early farmers may have had fewer conflicts than nomadic peoples.

FIRST SETTLEMENTS

      Where did humans first settle on the land?

      There may have been some early human settlements in China and Meso-America, but the first truly successful settlements seem to have been in the Middle East. The area was cooler and drier than it is today, and a proliferation of plants and seeds made it an attractive place to settle. To the best of our knowledge, the area historians call the Fertile Crescent, ranging from southern Iraq to southern Turkey and northern Syria, was the first place where long-term human settlement succeeded.

      Is there any truth to the biblical stories of a Great Flood and the disappearance of most of the human race?

      That there was a Great Flood seems undeniable, because stories of the inundation appear in many tribal and national histories. It seems unlikely that it wiped out all the humans because if it did, we would not, today, possess the rich variety of DNA samples that geneticists use to trace human lineage. The idea that a God or gods would wipe out the “other” humans, leaving the more virtuous ones in control of the earth, is as old as civilization itself.

      On balance, it seems that many—if not most—human groups have asserted that “God is on my side,” and that he or she is against the enemy. The trouble with this thought, is, of course, that the enemy is saying and thinking the same thing. Given that one contestant usually prevails, God or gods cannot answer the prayers of both.

      Is there anything to the Homeric tales of Greece and Troy?

      For a very long time, scholars believed that Homer—a blind, Greek poet who composed poetry in the eighth century B.C.E.—had invented the Trojan War. In 1871, however, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) unearthed not one but seven levels of civilization on a Turkish hillside near the Aegean Sea. Although no single piece of evidence has ever emerged with the name “Troy” or “Trojan,” scholars generally believe that there is some truth to the Homeric tales.

      A seventeenth-century painting by Anton Mozart depicts what one of the battles of the Trojan War might have looked like.

      Where Homer lets us—his modern readers—down, time and again, is in his lack of detail concerning the average soldier; and civilian. To Homer, war was about the heroes, men like Achilles, Ajax, Hector, Paris, and even old King Priam. Homer tells us almost nothing about the struggles of the average soldier; historians do not even know what he looked like. Even so, most people who read Homer—whether in the original Greek or in translation—agree that he had a magnificent bird’s eye view of war, that he “saw” the battlefield better than any of his contemporaries.

      Does archaeology tell us anything about the Greeks from that time?

      It was, again, Heinrich Schliemann who did much of the work. Schliemann is often called the man that modern-day archaeologists love to hate, because his digs were so sloppy. He was in far too much of a hurry to get beneath the soil, and once there he dug so ferociously that thousands