The Transportation of Troops in Great Wars

The announcement on June 15 that the United States had successfully carried over three-quarters of a million troops to France, a distance of more than 3,000 miles by sea, with the statement, made at the same time, that the Allies had successfully transported the enormous number of 17,000,000 to and from the various battle zones, both with absolutely negligible losses, serves to bring up the interesting question of the movements of vast bodies of men in earlier wars. Leaving out the primitive wars, in which troops were moved only by land, and almost wholly on foot, to begin with the great Persian invasion of Europe, in the fifth century before our era: Xerxes transported an enormous army, fabled to number five millions, and certainly reaching nearly half a million combatants, across the water-barrier of Europe by building a pontoon bridge over the Hellespont, between three and four miles wide; but the Persians had also, at Salamis, between 1,000 and 1,200 ships, which was a sufficiently great achievement in transportation. On the return invasion of Asia by the Greeks, Alexander the Great likewise crossed the Hellespont, at the site of the Gallipoli fighting, by a bridge of boats; the latest crossing of a great army on pontoons being that of the Russians at the Danube, when they invaded Turkey in 1877. A feat in transportation of another kind was that of Hannibal, who carried his mixed army of Africans, Spaniards, and Gauls across the Alps, probably at Mont Genevre, in the Summer of 218; an achievement later repeated by Napoleon and the Russian General Suvoroff. A more recent feat in transportation was the bringing of British and French troops to America, in the days of Washington. But the closest analogy to the present achievement of the American Army and Navy is probably that of the transportation of British troops to South Africa, twenty years ago, the distance being over 6,000 miles, or about twice the distance of our Atlantic port from the landing place of our troops in France. The total British losses in South Africa have more than once been equaled by one week's British casualties in the present struggle in France, the ratio of killed to wounded being about the same, namely, one to five.