The Battle of Omdurman (1898):

September 2, Anglo-Egyptian lines under General Kitchener were charged by 50,000 fanatical Dervishes and were mowed down by howitzers, machine guns and rifles. During the battle Lt. Winston Churchill led one of the last (and most unnecessary) cavalry charges in history. Kitchener claimed victory over the Mahdists and took Khartoum.

The Dervish Army, approximately 52,000 strong, suffered losses of 20,000 dead, 22,000 wounded, and some 5,000 taken prisoner--an unbelievable 90% casualty rate! By contrast, the Anglo-Egyptian Army, some 23,000 strong, suffered losses of 48 dead, and 382 wounded - an equally unbelievable 2% casualty rate.

Winston Churchill's description of the slaughter:

"The white flags [of the Mahdi's army] were nearly over the crest. In another minute they would become visible to the batteries. Did they realize what would come to meet them? They were in a dance mass, 2,800 yards from the 32nd Field Battery and the gunboats. The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery… About twenty shells struck them in the first minute. Some burst high in the air, others exactly in their faces. Others, again, plunged into the sand, and, exploding, dashed clouds of red dust, splinters, and bullets amid the ranks… It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply."

The damning evidence against Kitchener in this battle comes in the form of a letter written by Winston Churchill to his mother in which he states that "the victory was spoilt" by the execution of wounded prisoners, approved by Kitchener himself.


The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902):

Some 28,000 Boers perished in Kitchener's concentration camps -- nearly all of them women and children.

The war's non-human costs were similarly appalling. As part of Kitchener's "scorched-earth" campaign, British troops wrought terrible destruction throughout the rural Boer areas, especially in the Orange Free State. Outside of the largest towns, hardly a building was left intact. Perhaps a tenth of the pre-war horses, cows and other farm stock remained. In much of the Boer lands, no crops had been sown for two years.

Even by the standards of the time (and certainly by those of today), British political and military leaders committed frightful war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Boers of South Africa -- crimes for which no one was ever brought to account. General Kitchener, for one, was never punished for introducing measures that even a future prime minister called "methods of barbarism." To the contrary, after concluding his South African service he was named a viscount and a field marshal, and then, at the outbreak of the First World War, was appointed Secretary of War. Upon his death in 1916, he was remembered not as a criminal, but rather idolized as a personification of British virtue and rectitude.

A report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about 25% of the Boer inmates and 12% of the black Africans died (although recent research suggests that the black African deaths were underestimated and may have actually been around 20,000). However the precise number of deaths is unknown. Reports have stated that the number of Boers killed was 18,000-28,000 and no one bothered to keep records on the number of deaths of the 107,000 Black Africans who were interned in Concentration Camps.

The British system of waging war was summarized in a report made in January 1902 by Boer General J.C. Smuts, later Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa:

"Lord Kitchener has begun to carry out a policy in both (Boer) republic of unbelievable barbarism and gruesomeness which violates the most elementary principles of the international rules of war. Almost all farmsteads and villages in both republics have been burned down and destroyed. All crops have been destroyed. All livestock which had fallen into the hands of the enemy has been killed or slaughtered.

The basic principle behind Lord Kitchener's tactics had been to win, not so much through direct operations against fighting commandos, but rather indirectly by bringing the pressure of war against defenceless women and children."

"... This violation of every international law is really very characteristic of the nation which always plays the role of chosen judge over the customs and behaviour of all other nations."

Even in Britain, prominent voices began speaking out against the slaughter. Lloyd George, who later served as Prime Minister during the First World War, vehemently denounced the carnage. During a speech in Parliament on February 18, 1901, he quoted from a letter by a British officer: "We move from valley to valley, lifting cattle and sheep, burning and looting, and turning out women and children to weep in despair beside the ruin of their once beautiful homesteads."

Lloyd George commented: "It is a war not against men, but against women and children."

Another future Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, declared in Parliament on June 14, 1901: "When is a war not a war? When it is waged in South Africa by methods of barbarism."

In the end it took half a million men (the largest army Britain had ever sent overseas) and two and a half years for the mightiest power on earth, using everything it had, to "defeat" the Boer farmers, in a war that marked the transition from 19th to 20th Century warfare, that some called the "Last Gentleman's War", and others called the "First of the Modern Total Wars". But the Anglo-Boer War is now more often described as the "War that Never should have Happened".

It not only irreparably damaged the British Empire but directly led to the establishment of Apartheid in South Africa.