Chartbook 291 Anglo-Thanatocene, or D-Day as liberal militarism (Thanatocene mini-series #2)
The D-Day landings that began on 6th June 1944 were the most material-intensive and technologically complex form of war ever attempted up to that point. An armada of 6000 ships, covered by an air fleet of more than a thousand aircraft landed over 130,000 men and equipment in the space of only 24 hours. Over 20,000 were dropped from the air. And the build-up continued, day after day, week after week, month after month.
For this reason, I’ve made the 80th anniversary into an occasion to thematize the connection between World War II and what environmental historians call “the great acceleration”.
D-day exemplifies what French historians Bonneuil and Fressoz aptly call the Thanatocene – the distinctively modern mobilization of energy and resources towards the project of destruction, killing and death.
This does not mean that we have to take a jaundiced unpolitical distance from the history of this moment. D-Day commemoration is not for nothing a moment of Western rallying. The giant mobilization of material forces was in the service of a distinct project i.e. the projection of Western power onto the continent for the purposes of liberating Europe from Nazi occupation. The aim of this mini-series is not to debunk that narrative, but to highlight the material force that liberation was carried by.
It was carried by energy. Above all, in the British and American case, it was carried by oil.
It was, therefore, also, and at the same time, the quintessential example of what Bonneuil and Fressoz call the Anglocene – i.e. the epochal role played by the British Empire and then American hegemony in shaping a global system of power based first on coal and then on hydrocarbons.
Fossil fuels do not just remove the constraints on democratic choices, as is commonly remarked. Fossil fuels historically super-charged Western hegemony. In 1950, five years after the vast expenditure of Allied firepower and resources on D-Day, the Anglo-American share of cumulative planetary CO2 emissions stood at roughly 60 percent.
Do Thanatocene (energy-death) and Anglocene (energy-western hegemony) go together? Is there such a thing as the Anglo-Thanatocene?
Yes there is. Clearly there is.
There is a specific energy-intensive form of “Western” power projection, violence and killing, a specific mode of war-making my friend David Edgerton once called “liberal militarism”.
The basic elements of this mode of war-making are as follows:
Western power is rich and capital intensive, so it seeks military overmatch in key areas of advanced technology.
Specifically, western power mobilizes fossil fuel empires that others can only dream of and is, therefore, led to focus its military efforts first on modern naval power (coal and then oil) and air power (kerosene).
On the battlefield, these specific strengths of the Western powers predispose their soldiers and their commanders to rely on massive firepower advantage rather than exceptional military skill, courage or endurance to win.
They do so also because, except in extreme circumstances of existential survival, the democratic war bargain sets limits to the sacrifices that can reasonably be expected of citizens soldiers.
The bias to the brute force destruction of the enemy is reinforced by the tendency of western liberal regimes, like other modern political formations, to delegitimize their opponents. Why engage in restraint when the opponent lacks all legitimacy and needs to be erased?
Furthermore, liberal regimes fighting with the odds so heavily in their favor in material terms and with the sense of “history being on their side” have an impatient expectation of victory - call this the pressure of the philosophy of history. If you are truly convinced that your victory is inevitable, resistance is, as the saying goes, “futile”. Opponents that engage in futile resistance, exacting a price from you, long after their defeat is inevitable, are rightly treated as “mad dogs” that demand their own destruction. Not just their defeat but their erasure and total destruction. Rather than encouraging liberal agents of history to raise themselves to great personal efforts and sacrifice, this philosophy of history, this sense of historical inevitability counsels the opposite. If your barbaric, criminal enemy does not understand that they must lose, if they want to go down in a meaningless suicidal blaze, there is no reason why anyone on your side should needlessly expose themselves to risk. After all that would deprive those citizen soldiers of the victorious future that is rightfully theirs. Instead, minimize your own losses and let massive firepower do the work. Collateral damage, especially if it occurs on the enemy side, is barely worth a mention.
The relevance of this paradigm to America’s “wars of choice” and to the Israeli campaign in Gaza, is obvious.
There clearly were precursors to this kind of annihilatory, firepower-based war-fighting in the colonies, but I would argue that its logic was perhaps first fully on display in the Normandy campaign.
D-day commemoration in the West focuses, for obvious and powerful reasons, on the heroics of the troops that went ashore on June 6th. But once the foothold in Normandy was gained, the battle changed and became an attritional fight for a breakthrough. It was here that the liberal script really began to take hold with all its paradoxes and perplexities. The allies laid waste to the German positions in front of them with massive firepower and to a large part of Northern France into the bargain.
This history and its historiography is explored at length in an essay I first finished in 2017 and published in shortened form 2 years ago on Chartbook. Back then substack did not yet support PDF, but the whole file, complete with footnotes is here.
Placing the essay as part of this mini-series I want to highlight three key points that are relevant to the connection between World War II and the “great acceleration”.
(1)
The first is that talking about the material conditions that enabled D-Day exposes a profound ambiguity about modern civilization and politics in the era of the great acceleration. On the one hand fossil-fuel, material-intensive way of life clearly empowers us in a literal sense and thus enhances our freedom to make choices. It is a common place to say that modern democracy would be unthinkable without energy. The idea is deeply embedded in the American way of life as a privileged and exceptional form of existence with universal appeal.
But once we acknowledge the significance of this connection between energy and liberty it has an ambiguous effect. It both brings clarity and humility. After all it places our political ideals in relation to a mundane, prosaic material base. It diminishes the purely human elements of values that are held to be universal. What does it mean to acknowledge that for all its vainglorious talk, democracy and democratic triumph in history, at a moment like D-Day, was only possible because of overwhelmingly superior access to? Does this delegitimize the claims of those political forms?
This question is brought out particularly by thinking about military history because the questions of courage and skill are so starkly posed on the battlefield. Even talking about allied material preponderance at D-day, as I am doing here, can seem diminishing of the heroism and the values that the men carried ashore in the landing. This may be uncomfortable. But if you dig into the historiography of D-day, you find those questions posed with at times shocking openness.
Indeed, because we are talking about 1944, the moment at which both the British and the Americans were debating dramatic postwar expansions of their public services, the question of combat in Normandy is directly coupled to the history of the welfare state, the most advanced and sophisticated model of modern citizenship. If men are acknowledged not just as citizens, but as citizens of a rich, fossil-fuel powered welfare state, how much can be expected of them in battle? D-day was the place where that question was first put to the test.
If this sounds far-fetched, I really do recommend checking out the full historiographical essays on the twist and turns of British D-Day scholarship in the era of Thatcherism and beyond. “Tea breaks” and trade unionism are key themes in that historical literature.
(2)
Secondly, if the significance of material power in modern war poses questions of political representation, we also face the challenge of how actually to represent this kind of violence. How do we represent a battlefield dominated by multi-dimensional modern firepower? In infantry combat and even in tank battles there is an obvious human dimension. This meshes with narrative forms centered on what John Keegan called “the face of battle”, the existential, visceral human dimension of war, of killing and being killed. But how does this relate to the kind of distanced killing enabled by modern long-range, electronically enabled firepower. To put a point on it, what is the narrative form adequate to the liberay way of war – the Anglo-Thanatocene?
The question was not new at D-Day. It arose with the industrial revolution, with the shock of the speed of railway travel, with the dislocations of 19th century modernity and then in the meat-grinder, blood mills of World War I. But at D-day, as the battlefield expanded fully to three dimensions and into the invisible electronic sphere, the problem – the gap between modes of war-fighting and modes of war-representation - took on a new intensity, an intensity which, rereading the essay from seven years ago, is eerily reminiscent of reportage from the Ukraine battlefield today.
In the omnipresence of airpower, German soldiers in Normandy in 1944, including veterans of the savagery of the Eastern front, experienced a new kind of threat. This was a menace that defies simple description in the form of heroic struggle. And this has consequences both for how we describe the human condition and for how we understand technological development.
In the case of the Normandy campaign, I argue in the essay that the Allied struggles on the battlefield are misunderstood when they are judged against the standard set by German “Blitzkrieg” earlier in the war. To a remarkable extent given their overall industrial advantage, the Allies struggled to assemble the key components for tank warfare on the model attributed to the Germans earlier in the war. Indeed, they even struggled with the basics of modern infantry combat, which far from rudimentary was, in fact, a constantly evolving and increasingly technological business in its own right, where German light machine guns and their withering fire ruled supreme (as illustrated in the traumatic opening sequence of “Saving Private Ryan”). It was those struggles with tank and infantry combined arms that made the breakout battles at D-Day such a slog and often left Allied troops outgunned by German forces that were, seen in the large, hopelessly inferior to them in material strength. The Allied answer was firepower in the form of artillery “fires” or airpower. Often they even called on huge naval guns floating offshore.
But this did not mean that they were regressing to World War I-style “trench warfare”, as was sometimes alleged by self-declared military modernists (a trope that continues to this day in Ukraine reportage). To think in these terms about the development of military technology is to adopt a far too linear, “stagist” vision of military development. War-fighting does not progress by stages from infantry and horse, to artillery, to tanks, to airpower, atomic bombs and “Space Force” etc. To imagine such a sequence is to indulge in a profoundly misleading image of modern technological development, whether in the specialized field of military history or more generally with regard to the technologies and energies deployed in modern society.
(3)
What modern war illustrates is the basic point, one that is increasingly dominating our understanding of the “great acceleration” more generally, which is that technological and energy epochs do not succeed each other in a neat sequence, but are folded together, layered on top of each and combined in hugely complex and relational way. This process is not directionless. It increases in scale over time as does economic output and the scale of the means of destruction. But that process of accumulation, as the Normandy battlefield demonstrated, is not a matter of neat transitions, but agglomeration, addition and combination.
And if that goes for any particular battlefield, it applies to the whole war. It was not some single unitary, simple totality that can be summarized by D-day or Stalingrad. It was instead governed by the heterogeneous logic of uneven and combined development that compressed together and interrelated three modes of warfare that defined the 20th century and beyond: classic land warfare increasingly dynamized by tactical airpower and armour, agrarian guerrilla struggle powered by modern ideologies and “appropriate” cheap technologies and hyper-modern air and naval war as exemplified in the skys above D-day and on the beaches. In this mini-series we will explore all three.
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