The Great War Exhibition – Wellington

Four of us, educators from the Holocaust Centre, visited the Great War Exhibition this week. A group of educators from the War Museum visited us recently, and they invited us come and see their displays. Peter Jackson and the Weta workshop were behind creating amazing replicas of war scenes. I came away with my head full of thoughts about warfare. Three cousins, all grandsons of Queen Victoria, King George V, Tsar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, fought among themselves and were responsible for the deaths of millions. Young New Zealanders signed up for a short overseas adventure and were sucked into a murderous campaign that lasted four years and changed their lives if they were lucky enough to survive. I came away with all sorts of other thoughts too. The war was fought to execute the strategic plan of Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, a plan of action should Germany face war on both its Eastern and Western borders. By the time the war broke out in 1914 von Schlieffen was dead. The strategy was obsolete. The British tried to fight the war in Europe with strategies learned in the Boer War and other colonial wars. Both sides had to improvise responses to unimagined circumstances, and invent equipment that would give them strategic advantage and resolve the deadlock of trench warfare without precedent on such a scale. One of the impressive exhibits at the War Museum is a full size replica of a British Mark 1 tank, its side door open, with seemingly sweltering figures inside its furnace like cabin. The tank is a huge monster. It was developed in 1916 and was first used in the Battle of the Somme, to go over trenches and demolish barbed wire fences and everything else in its way. After that tanks have been used extensively in some of the great decisive battles of the Second World War, at El Alamein, at Kursk on the Eastern front, in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, in the Iraq war in 1991, and Indo-Pakistani war of 1965. Today, however, in the age of drones and rockets precisely aimed form high-flying aircraft’s, tanks seem as obsolete as medieval armour. Wars in the past were so lethal, partly, because the generals, the strategists, were fighting wars in their time with strategies based on experience from past wars. The challenge now is to respond to wars fought by children with knives, young women with explosive belts, ideologically motivated fanatics with home made explosives. Perhaps it is not the battles of the Second World War, or or wars since then that military strategists should look to but to older successful ways of combating challenges like those of the present, the 11^th century war against the Assassins, the Nizari Ismaili sect of Persia.