Deleted member 94680
Does it include Belgian rule of the Congo? I've seen figures as high as 16 million for numbers they killed (although mainly during the Leopold era).
I'm fascinated how the 11 million number is calculated, it seems very high.
Does it include Belgian rule of the Congo? I've seen figures as high as 16 million for numbers they killed (although mainly during the Leopold era).
I'm fascinated how the 11 million number is calculated, it seems very high.
Does it include Belgian rule of the Congo? I've seen figures as high as 16 million for numbers they killed (although mainly during the Leopold era).
In Strachan's estimate of 2001, British losses in the East African campaign were 3,443 killed in action, 6,558 died of disease and c. 90,000 deaths among African porters.[49] In 2007, Paice recorded c. 22,000 British casualties in the East African campaign, of whom 11,189 died, 9 percent of the 126,972 troops in the campaign. By 1917, the conscription of c. 1,000,000 Africans as carriers, depopulated many districts and c. 95,000 porters had died, among them 20 percent of the Carrier Corps in East Africa.[50] Of the porters who died, 45,000 were Kenyans, 13 percent of the male population. The campaign cost the British Empire £70 million, close to the British war budget in 1914.[51][52] A Colonial Office official wrote that the East African campaign had not become a scandal only "... because the people who suffered most were the carriers - and after all, who cares about native carriers?"[53] Belgian casualties of 5,000 were recorded, including 2,620 soldiers killed in action or died of disease. This does not count an additional 15,650 deaths of porters.[54] Portuguese casualties in Africa were 5,533 soldiers killed, 5,640 troops missing or captured and an unknown but significant number wounded.[55]
In the German colonies, no records of the number of people conscripted or casualties were kept but in Der Weltkrieg, the German official history, Ludwig Boell (1951) wrote "... of the loss of levies, carriers, and boys (sic) [we could] make no overall count due to the absence of detailed sickness records."[53] Paice wrote of a 1989 estimate of 350,000 casualties and a death rate of 1-in-7 people. Carriers were rarely paid and food and cattle were requisitioned from civilians; a famine caused by the subsequent food shortage and poor rains in 1917 led to another 300,000 civilian deaths in German East Africa.[56]
Except there were not that many whites in these countries. Often under a couple thousand per colony.
The main problem is capability, neither Britain nor France has large scale chemical industries producing chlorine or phosgene in the quantities that Germany could.
Also France was the first country during WW1 to violate section IV.2 of the Hague Convention by using grenades and projectiles "the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases".
True, but sadly it will be the white numbers that bring the outcry - maybe even along the lines of they were killed the same as the natives which is just insulting. There was already a line of argument that the natives should not be caught up in the white man's war - in case they decided that they would rather like their own land back & take advantage.
There would be saner minds who would condemn mass murder regardless of the race / creed / colour of the victims but they did not tend to have that loud a voice back then.
So to back up some of the claims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_African_Campaign_(World_War_I)
90K for English
350K for Germans
These give you the low end of the bands. But then you start looking at deaths to non porters from Disease, crops not planted, and other economic issues, and you will start getting much higher numbers. And this is part of the reason you get ranges in the genocide deaths to Hitler and Stalin. It is easier to figure totals deaths than to assign the deaths to "legal" war deaths versus genocide.
I doubt that I am going to have time to find the sources today for the Congo, but it was the same practice. Except the distance were longer. In a region with some of the toughest malaria in the world. It is not that the Belgians used holocaust type death squads or camps. It is that the Belgians used the local natives and did not care if they had enough food to eat. Or if crops were planted. Or cared about Malaria. A death of a black man in the WW1 era was less troubling than the death of a cow. And I mean that literally.
To make the Entente villains, you don't need them to do one thing more. You need the world, now or then to care. Just to acknowledge that the intentional mass killing of Africans or Indians is bad in the same way gassing 4.5 million Jews in death camps is bad. Or the 1.5 million executed by death squads.
I have grown callous reading British poetry about dead war horses. Then reading reports of how many cattle died. Then having the British not even bother to estimate, much less count black deaths. And this was not confined to Africa. I have read letters from Red Coats who had to "pacify" Delhi. There are complaints about how much work it is to bayonet to death 60+ women and children per house. Hour after hour. Day after day. But no remorse for the killing of civilians. Now the Nazi and to a lesser extent the colonial Germans did the same thing. Germany colonial record is probably better due mostly to having fewer colonies, and for fewer years.
A little ethnic cleansing wouldn't hurt.
I read/skimmed the entire NY Times articles about foreign affairs for the period of the war. I saw no indication that the events you indicate would lead to widespread condemnation of Entente.
To give an early example, Boer war contemporary sources. They will talk about dead whites and horses, but they ignore the blacks. Report on dead blacks is about as likely as reporting on dead chickens. Go read the original articles. The books and often newspapers are on google books for free. Read a few hundred pages of this stuff, and you will no longer believe it is possible to get a European of 1915 era to care about the death of blacks in more than some abstract way.
Imagine if the Belgians had killed 5 million white South Americans in the 1890's. What would have happened. A few books and articles condemning the Belgians followed by transfer of duties from one Belgian government official to another? or An invasion of Belgium to stop the crime with terms dictated to the government in Antwerp by the combined French, German, and French Armies? It would be the latter one.
We need white massacres in Europe proper by the Entente to have them viewed as evil.
I have read letters from Red Coats who had to "pacify" Delhi. There are complaints about how much work it is to bayonet to death 60+ women and children per house. Hour after hour. Day after day. But no remorse for the killing of civilians. Now the Nazi and to a lesser extent the colonial Germans did the same thing. Germany colonial record is probably better due mostly to having fewer colonies, and for fewer years.
For that matter, I've also seen claims that the British occupation of Persia during the war resulted in a famine that may have killed up to nine million people. That's Holodomor-levels of death, but there's not so much as an English Wikipedia page on the famine.
I thought your numbers were high.
As for the rest I think we are perilously close to Godwins Law here.
Was this in the aftermath of the Sepoy Mutiny? Do you have links to these accounts?
With a POD after the 1st of August 1914:
What could have been done to create such a situation? A cancellation of the Schlieffein Plan? France or Russia attacking Germany first? Or perhaps a ludicrously harsher Versailles treaty?
- Make the Entente win the Great War
- In the years after the war, have them considered as the "bad guys" of the conflict or at minimum the worse of the two alliances
- Optional: Have the Central Powers be viewed as sort of "tragic heroes" simply attempting to defend themselves from Entente aggression
Note: Extra minus points if it's because "Axis won WW2 and rewrote history"
This is not far from the "Revisionist" thesis put forward by Christopher (?) Clarke a few years ago in "The Sleepwalkers". Apologies if this has been mentioned before, haven't yet caught up with the whole threadAfter the breakup of Yugoslavia the actions of Serbia lead to a thorough reexamination of the lead up to The Great War and it is recognised that the Entente went to war in support of an act of state sponsored terrorisim.