Point of View

In the end, wars are all about mistakes

By Carl Heintze

It was April 1945 and we were attacking the Prussian city of Quedlinberg, advancing up a broad, shallow valley riding on the tanks of the Fourth Cavalry Group.

Quedlinberg was and is old, but not very large and certainly not a strategic city. It had no military value then and it has none now.

But in 1945 it did hold a small garrison whose commander felt it necessary to make at least a token gesture of defense before surrendering. The city's mayor, on the other hand, wanted to declare it an open city, to hang out white flags and welcome the conquerors without a shot.

After much discussion, they compromised with a brief demonstration of firepower after which the German troops withdrew, followed by a barrage of assault gunfire from the cavalry group. Then as dusk came we infantry reached the edge of town, searched the first few houses until we came to a small river and there set up roadblocks for the night.

Our roadblock--actually that of the cavalry--was two heavy machine guns mounted on jeeps sighted to fire at anything coming up the street.

And after dark something did: an Opel sedan bearing a man who had just suffered a heart attack; a nurse; the man's daughter and granddaughter; and a driver. They were on their way to the hospital on our side of the river.

Too late they saw the machine guns and turned on the car's headlights. Too late the machine gunners shouted "Halt!" and then fired simultaneously.

Too late, much too late.

The man with the heart attack died, the nurse and girl were badly wounded, the driver escaped unharmed.

It was all a mistake, but it has haunted me ever since. It also has made me mindful of the mistakes of warfare.

Wars are filled with mistakes. Indeed, wars are mistakes. They are the miscalculation, usually of both sides about what the other side will do, about how far they will go, about the effects of force on will.

The war in Kosovo is such a conflict and such a series of mistakes. It began as a mistake, a miscalculation by the Serbs that they could continue to push NATO around while they cleaned the countryside of Albanians. This miscalculation was compounded by the miscalculation of NATO that continuous air attacks would cause the Serbs to reverse this outdated policy, a reminder of the Holocaust, in short order.

Instead it only hastened the Serbs' so-called "ethnic cleansing," actually a kind of ethnic purging. And so the mistakes have continued.

For, as in all wars, big mistakes lead to little ones. Trains and hospitals got hit by mistake. Belgrade television got knocked off the air. The Chinese embassy was hit in a real stupid mistake. These mistakes ought not to have been unexpected, but they never are anticipated. They arrive as a surprise, usually an unpleasant surprise.

They shouldn't happen but they do.

Sometimes this is called the fog of war, but more often than not, it is simply failing to understand how the other side operates. For mistakes are made by men and women, not by machines of war.

Smart bombs are operated by dumb humans. Innocent people get killed by those with the highest of motives. That's the way war is and why war is always the unfortunate collision of what are supposed to be fortunate circumstances.

What is tragic is that the longer a war continues, the less regard there is for mischance, even as mischances multiply.

For the longer a conflict continues, the greater the desire for it to end; and the greater the desire for an end to conflict, the more likely are mistakes to be made.

Victory becomes the overriding goal of either side and compromise becomes less and less likely.

Vietnam, of course, looms largest on the American horizon where a whole series of miscalculations and misunderstandings produced a continuing series of disasters. But there are others.

Nor are Americans the only ones to make mistakes, of course. Germany's World War II history is a long and dismal record of miscalculations. The British never understood their American colonies; Napoleon badly underestimated the Russians.

As the novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse Five, a fictional recording of the bombing of Dresden (another huge mistake) "So it goes."

We might hope that it doesn't, that it doesn't go on, certainly that it doesn't go on much longer. To hope otherwise, it seems to me, is a big mistake.

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