War didn’t end in 1918

Spare a minute to reflect on the grim statistics of World War 1, which ended exactly 100 years ago yesterday with the signing of the Armistice. The world’s greatest powers of that age were ranged against one another in that war that covered Europe, parts of Africa and Asia. It brought in millions of soldiers from North America, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, India and Africa. Believe it or not, it was a 19-year-old boy, Gavrilo Princip, who was given the credit, such as it is, for starting that war.

Princip was a Bosnian Serb nationalist who wanted to end AustroHungarian rule of his country. He shot and killed the Austro-Hungarian crown prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo streets. One thing led to another. Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, followed by a declaration of war. Due to a Europe-wide network of alliances worked over the previous decades, France, Britain, Russia [the Entente Powers] and much later the United States joined the war on Serbia’s side while Germany, Italy and the Ottoman Empire [the Central Powers] took sides with Austria-Hungary. We here, being at the time hapless subjects of the British Empire, were sucked into the war as well when we knew neither climbing nor descending, to paraphrase a local saying.

During four years of brutal conflict, dubbed at the time as “the war to end all wars,” the Allied Powers fielded 45 million soldiers, sailors and airmen including 12m Russians, 9m Brits, 9m Frenchmen and 5m Americans. The Central Powers fielded 25 million troops including 13m Germans, 8m Austro-Hungarians and 3m Ottoman Turks. Don’t forget, most of those big powers owned empires and colonies at the time, so their subjects were dragged into the mix. By the time it all ended in November 1918 5.5m soldiers on all sides were killed, 13m were wounded and 4m civilians were killed. Among the dead were 1.1m Brits, 1.4m Frenchmen, 1.8m Russians, 116,000 Americans, 650,000 Austro-Hungarians and 2m Germans.

One would have thought that after that collective folly fit for a kingdom of beasts, humans would have learnt their lesson and would have banished war forever. For where! Twenty years later, the great powers ignited another war in order to resolve the unresolved issues of World War 1. The principal driver of that second round of extreme folly was the German dictator Adolf Hitler, who found Fascist common cause with the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and the militaristic cabal led by Emperor Hirohito that ruled Japan at the time.

World War Two was far and away the costliest war in human history, from whatever angle you look at it. It was wider in territorial scope, longer in duration, deeper in intensity, greater in cruelty, involved more countries, deployed bigger armies, killed many more people and deployed much more destructive weapons, including atomic bombs than WW1 ever did. At the peak of their strength in World War Two the USSR deployed 12.5m troops. US deployed 12.3m, Germany had 10m, Japan had 6m, France had 5m, UK had 4.7m, Italy had 4.5m and there were 5m Chinese troops, divided between the Nationalists and the Communists.

An estimated 25 million soldiers, airmen and sailors and another 25 million civilians were killed in that war, including 5m prisoners of war and millions of victims of holocaust and pogroms. Another 20m people died from disease and famine that the war spawned. Overall, an estimated 3% of the world’s population at the time were killed in World War Two. USSR suffered the heaviest casualties with an estimated 27million killed. This probably explains why Vladimir Putin is highly proactive in European affairs today. Chinese losses were put at 20m. Germany lost 7.4m people in the war, of which 5.3m were soldiers. It even created a post-war shortage of men in German society. Poland suffered 5m dead; Japan estimated its losses at 3.1m while the US lost half a million troops.

World War II was also the most expensive war in human history. The major combatants were estimated to have spent 15 trillion US dollars [at today’s prices] to prosecute the war. That would be enough dollars to wipe out most illiteracy, disease and poverty in today’s world, if only that generation of leaders had the foresight. Even though they didn’t, one would have thought that World War Two would have been the war to end all wars, but it didn’t. In fact it quickly laid the foundation for many destructive small wars all over the world. Most of them were at the behest of the big powers that fought the Cold War. They trained and armed proxy armies while they themselves stayed on the sidelines, lest they recreate another big war involving thermonuclear weapons.

Among the most horrible wars the world has experienced since 1945, there was the Korean War of 1950-53, which cost 3million lives or 10% of Korea’s population at the time. There were 180,000 Chinese casualties because Chairman Mao sent volunteers to assist the Communist North Koreans. That war was quickly succeeded by the French war in Indo-China which, after France’s disastrous 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu, was taken over by Americans and it became the Vietnam War. Very far though we were from the theatre, this war was etched on our psyche because when we were growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, every BBC news bulletin opened with it. From it we got such Hausa terms as Yan yakin sunkuru [i.e. guerillas], Yan sari ka noke [commandos] and Yan bindiga dadi [trigger happy]. 1.1m North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers died in that war, plus 2m Vietnamese civilians. 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died while their principal backer, USA, lost 58,000 troops in Vietnam. For another two decades that war had a deep effect on American foreign policy, but they seem to have forgotten about it now.

Many more destructive wars have been fought since then in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge alone killed an estimated 2m people. There have been four rounds of Middle East wars since World War Two, in 1949, 1956, 1967 and 1973 together with many smaller skirmishes, guerilla hit and runs, airplane hijacks, invasions of Lebanon, bus bombings, three Intifadas and many rounds of merciless Israeli bombings of Gaza. All these due to the perfidious British solution of 1948 which rewarded Jewish victims of Nazi terror with territory occupied for centuries by Arab Palestinians. They should have given the Jews part of the British Isles instead, Canada’s uninhabited northern territories or even the Australian Outback.

The 1950s’ Algerian war of independence cost an estimated 1.5m lives, including tens of thousands of French settlers. This did not stop Algerians from fighting another war in the 1990s when FIS launched a bloody insurgency after its 1992 election victory was annulled. And to think that a year before that war broke out, I sat with FIS leader Mahmoud Mamdani and interviewed him at Bagauda Lake Hotel, near Kano.

Three rounds of war between India and Pakistan since 1947 cost many lives. In Africa here, the 1970s’ Angolan war of independence, followed by a threeway MPLA/FNLA/UNITA civil war cost thousands of lives, as did the wars in Congo, Ogaden region of Ethiopia and Somalia; liberation wars in Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa plus many more wars in Chad, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and South Sudan. We were not fools alone. The Sino-Soviet skirmish of 1969; the Chechnya war; Turkish-Greek conflict over Cyprus; Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s; IRA’s war in Northern Ireland and the mother of them all, the Balkan War of the 1990s all cost the world dearly in human lives lost.

As we speak, wars are going on in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, DR Congo and huge armies are ranged against each other in Korea and Kashmir, not to mention NATO missiles pointing East and Russian ballistic missiles pointing West. At the same time Donald Trump is talking about terminating the US/Russia nuclear arms limitation treaties. In short, humans learnt nothing from World War 1.