Henry Dunant: Catalyst for War Regulations

In the 1800s a Swiss man by the name of Henry Dunant saw the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino. Upon observation, Henry was distraught with what he saw. In fact, Henry was so perplexed by what he witnessed that he wrote a book about it and lobbied for a conference of nations in the hope of agreeing upon the improved handling of enemy soldiers in a time of war. His lobbying inevitably led to both The Hague and Geneva Conventions. Since their conceptions in the 1800s, these conventions have been persistent in setting broader and stricter “rules” for war over time in regards to everything from ammunition and hospitals, to the treatment of both civilians and militants (human rights). These authoritarian standards that are written in black and

Sledge recollects his experiences as a young man with the Japanese strategies of faking to be injured or deceased and then either throwing a grenade or stabbing the medic (Sledge p. 34). During one invasion, he sees a man that was incapacitated by a shell and stared at “the glistening viscera” that lay near the man’s hollowed out stomach (Sledge p. 64). The misery of war didn’t stop there for him, as during one night a Japanese soldier sneaked into a Marine’s position and let out “animalistic guttural noises, and grunts” due to being killed by the Marine ramming his “forefinger into the enemy’s eye socket” (p.

120). There were happenings where the Japanese fired upon Marines that were undertaking the endeavor of evacuating their wounded. In other occasions the Japanese mutilated the corpses of Marines “like a carcass torn by some predatory animal”(p. 148). These incidents triggered his fellow Marines to develop desensitization concerning human life. This desensitization culminated when a Marine held down a surviving Japanese soldier to pry out his gold teeth with a knife (p.120). With the Japanese soldier exasperatingly flailing about the Marine missed the teeth and “cut his cheeks open to each ear” (p.120). It was commonplace for Marines to wrench out gold teeth from deceased Japanese throughout the war. This is not taught in history lessons growing up as an adolescent studying the triumphs of a generation that has been famously dubbed as the greatest