From Wired:
Paula Broadwell, a West Point graduate and Petraeus biographer, described the destruction of Tarok Kolache in a guest post for Tom Ricks’ Foreign Policy blog. Or, at least, she described its aftermath: Nothing remains of Tarok Kolache after Lt. Col. David Flynn, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, made a fateful decision in October.
His men had come under relentless assault from homemade bombs emanating from the village, where a Taliban “intimidation campaign [chased] the villagers out” to create a staging ground for attacking the task force. With multiple U.S. amputations the result of the Taliban hold over Tarok Kolache, Flynn’s men were “terrified to go back into the pomegranate orchards to continue clearing [the area]; it seemed like certain death.”
After two failed attempts at clearing the village resulted in U.S and Afghan casualties, Flynn’s response was to take the village out. He ordered a mine-clearing line charge, using rocket-propelled explosives to create a path into the center of Tarok Kolache.
And that was for starters, Broadwell writes. Airstrikes from A-10s and B-1s combined with powerful ground-launched rockets on Oct. 6 to batter the village with “49,200 lbs. of ordnance” — which she writes, resulted in “NO CIVCAS,” meaning no civilians dead.
It seems difficult to understand how Broadwell or the 1-320th can be so confident they didn’t accidentally kill civilians after subjecting Tarok Kolache to nearly 25 tons worth of bombs and rockets. The rockets alone have a blast radius of about 50 meters [164 feet], so the potential for hitting bystanders is high with every strike.
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Sherman’s tactics were brutal. But they worked.
Why did he consider it necessary to inflict hardship on civilians as well as enemy soldiers?
Early in the war, Union commanders, including Sherman, had required Union soldiers to respect the property, lives and even the freedom of Southern civilians in areas occupied by the Union forces. But this worked out badly for the Union army. Armed Southern “civilians” frequently murdered Union soldiers who traveled in small groups or who became separated from their units. Confederate guerrillas sabotaged Union communications behind Union lines.
Commenting on this situation, Sherman wrote,
“We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and we must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”
The Union forces needed
“to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us…
“We cannot change the hearts and minds of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible … [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”
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