The cost of war

In Nick Lloyd’s excellent How the West Was Won (March), he argues that the western front “ushered in a new age of warfare” and further states that “human flesh had been replaced by technology and industry”. How, then, can we explain that, in spite of even greater advances in technology and industry, the human cost of the Second World War remained just as high?

At the battle of Passchendaele (31 July– 10 November 1917), considered a disaster, British and Canadian losses were 244,897. But in Operation Overlord (6 June–25 August 1944), which is considered to be a success, there were Allied losses of 224,153 and thousands of French civilian losses, as well as collateral damage resulting in over 350,000 people being made homeless. This is hardly evidence that the lessons supposedly learned on the western front were carried forward to the Normandy campaign.

Anthony Lewis, Huntingdon