Counting The Fallen

casualties in WWII

The size of the armies and the number of the casualties in a given war, or even individual battle, is always a difficult discussion for historians.

When dealing with pre-modern sources of any kind, historians are cautious about accepting contemporary estimates.* The assumption is that at best the writer of the source did not have access to accurate numbers and at worst he** diddled the numbers to make a victory more glorious or a defeat less humiliating.

Modern** record-keeping makes it easier to feel secure that the size of armies in the field is more or less accurate, but counting the fallen is still tricky. The conditions under which the counting occurs are inherently difficult, the temptation to make a victory more glorious or a defeat less humiliating remains constant, and the definitions of what is counted may vary from battle to battle. Casualties can include dead, wounded, fatally wounded but not yet dead, or missing (a category that is inherently fuzzy).

Accuracy aside, it is hard to visualize just what the body count actually looks like. Forty-eight thousand dead and wounded at the Battle of Waterloo*** is much less than 425,000 casualties in the Battle of Normandy. But what does either number mean, beyond the fact that enough men are dead to populate a small southern city, in the case of Waterloo, or a western state, in the case of Normandy?

Filmmaker and data-journalist Neil Halloran grapples with these questions, as well as the even slipperier issue of civilian casualties, in The Fallen of World War II--a web-based graphic documentary that looks at the human cost of the war. The graphics are as simple and painful as a fist to the gut. Halloran doesn't just look at how many people each country lost, but when and where they died. Most interesting of all, at least to this history buff/bugg, he compares WWII's numbers to those of other wars across historian and does not hesitate to draw conclusions about what it all means.

Check it out: http://www.fallen.io/ww2/

(There’s an interactive option, but I couldn’t get it to run. Possibly an operating system upgrade is needed for either my computer or my brain. If any of you get it to work, let me know what you think.)

*Not surprising given that the further back we go the looser our definition of contemporary. Primary sources means different things for different periods.

**I usually hesitate to use he for the generalized third person singular, but the case of pre-modern history almost all of the sources are in fact "he" due to historical realities related to access to education, etc. [rant over]

***Definitions may vary

****That's a LOT of teeth.

A Bit of (Really Gross) Waterloo Trivia

Let’s face it, there’s no reason for me to give you a quick synopsis of what happened at the Battle of Waterloo, what led to the Battle of Waterloo, why it mattered, or the battle’s social/political/artistic impact.  If you are reading this on or soon after June 18, 2015, blog posts and news articles related to the 200th anniversary of Waterloo* are everywhere, in both History Land and the mainstream media of your choice.  It will be harder for you to avoid reading about the battle than to read about it.

I had planned to give you a list of Waterloo books that you might have missed, or forgotten about.**   Instead I’d like to share with you one of the oddest bits of Waterloo trivia that I’ve read in recent weeks:  “Waterloo teeth”.

Rotten teeth were a significant problem in the long eighteenth century*** and false teeth were problematic.  They were expensive.  They were heavy.  Many of the materials used to make them--wood, ivory, and bone--were themselves prone to decay, which resulted in nasty breath and nastier infections.   The best material for making replacement teeth was actual teeth.  (Are you grimacing in disgust, yet?) Prior to the Napoleonic wars, real-teeth dentures were made with teeth from executed criminals, exhumed bodies, or animals.  Gumming your food may well have looked like a better choice.

The denture industry took an upward turn at the end of the eighteenth century when the Napoleonic wars produced a ready supply of young healthy tooth donors.  Teeth stolen from the from the bodies of fallen soldiers became the preferred material for dentures, which became known as “Waterloo teeth”. 

Makes you  want to floss right now, doesn’t it?

*   *   *

Here’s a little something to take the taste out of your mouth:

 

*It is worth pointing out that Waterloo is shorthand for three battles fought over a period of several days.  Napoleon’s army defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny  and forced the combined British-Dutch forces to withdraw from Quatre-Bras on June 16.

**Okay, just one, which I haven't yet read. The Sage of Waterloo, in which novelist Leona Francombe tells the story of the battle from the perspective of a bunny living on the modern site of the battlefield. Watership Down meets Vanity Fair?

***One of the side-effects of inexpensive sugar from the Caribbean islands.  The empire strikes back.

 

King John Was Not A Good Man…*

It’s a big week in History Land. History bloggers, history buffs, #twitterstorians** and re-enactors are all aflutter about the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo on Friday. But today we pause to recognize another historical anniversary, one that is less flashy and more ambiguous--the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymeade in 1215.

[If you want an even shorter explanation of the Magna Carta--with a level of snark that I have not allowed myself--watch this video from the British Library. (Who knew the British Library had attitude?) If you're reading this via e-mail, you may need to click through to your browser.]

Eight hundred years ago, forty English barons rebelled against what they perceived as excessive tax demands on the part of King John, baby brother of Richard the Lionhearted.*** Rebellion against Norman kings was nothing new. (They were often perceived to be milking England to pay for wars in France--and they often were.) The fact that the disgruntled barons were able to force King John to negotiate was. The Magna Carta was the result of those negotiations: sixty-nine clauses designed to protect the rights of a small elite group of men. Many of the clauses were very specific to the time and place: the removal of fish weirs from the Thames, for instance, had little impact on the larger course of history. Others had enormous, and probably unintended, consequences, most notably the idea that no man, whether king, baron, fishmonger or policeman, is above the law.

In the short run, the Magna Carta was a bust. King John immediately sent messengers to the Pope asking (or perhaps demanding) that the charter be annulled. The Pope, who did not like the charter’s terms and may well have been troubled by the precedent of subjects forcing legal changes on ruling monarchs, issued a papal bull describing the charter as “illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people” and declaring it “null and void of all validity for ever.”****  With the charter void, civil war quickly broke out between king and barons. King John raised an army of mercenaries, which suggests that his position was not a popular one. The barons renounced their allegiance to John and offered the crown to his cousin, Prince Louis of France. (A tactic that Parliament would emulate several centuries later in the Glorious Revolution.) The war, and the immediate legal value of the Magna Carta, ended when John died of dysentery on October 18, 1216.

From the barons’ point of view, John’s nine-year-old son Henry looked like a better choice than Louis for king. (Under-age kings provide so many opportunities for the nobility to grab power.) The young king issued three revised versions of the Magna Carta during his reign, the first as a condition of succeeding his father on the throne.

Over the long run, the historical importance of the Magna Carta depended on one clause, buried deep in the original document and seen as relatively insignificant by its framers:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of is rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, not will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.
To no one will we see, to no one deny or delay right or justice.*****

When this clause was first written it applied to only a few: “free men” were an elite in a society in which freedom as we know it was rare and the reference to men was literal. In the intervening eight centuries, it has become the foundation for the right to justice and a free trial for all within British Common Law, the American Bill of Rights, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights--an ideal that we value even though we do not always live up to it.

*To quote A.A. Milne, who was probably referring to an entirely different King John: “King John was not a good man. He had his little ways. And sometimes no one spoke to him for days and days and days.” "King John's Christmas". Now We Are Six

**Yes, you read that correctly. Historians on twitter are #twitterstorians.

***Who was not exactly the heroic king that popular history makes him out to be. But that’s another story.

****Not one of his infallible days.

*****“We” being King John and the mouse in his pocket.