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making of the abomb. The machine gun mechanized war. Artillery and gas
mechanized war. They were the hardware of the war, the tools. ...
... sustained nuclear fission chain reaction, which was critical to making the atomic ...
Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/abomb/mpmenu.html.
Submitted by oppapers on April 28, 2002
Category: American History
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The machine gun mechanized war. Artillery and gas mechanized war. They were the hardware of the war, the tools. But they were
only proximately the mechanism of the slaughter. The ultimate mechanism was a method of organization-anachronistically speaking, a
software package. "The basic lever," the writer Gil Elliot comments, "was the conscription law, which made vast numbers of men
available for military service. The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned
numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and
ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence,
were military concerns." Each interlocking system was logical in itself and each system could be rationalized by those who worked it
and moved through it. Thus Elliot demonstrates, "It is reasonable to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to devise
guns of high technical capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in protective trenches."
What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small
democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you. But the men
caught in the middle came to glimpse a darker truth. "The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman," Siegfried Sasson
allows a fictional infantry officer to see. "What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims." Men on every
front independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged on. In Russia it exploded in revolution. In
Germany it motivated...
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