Flood!

This is coolbert:

Make war by flood!

Here two recent instance of floods, man-made during wartime the purpose of which was to deny an advancing adversary avenues of approach, resources,  cause casualties to the enemy if possible.

Floods as caused by the breaching of dikes or the demolition of dams the result of which were awesome, on a scale apocalyptic and almost biblical in nature.

Casualties regrettably immense as well, FRIENDLY CIVILIANS MORE THAN LIKELY THE VICTIMS.

1. Yellow River Flood.

"The 1938 Yellow River flood . . . flood created by the Nationalist Government in central China during the early stage of the Second Sino-Japanese War in an attempt to halt the rapid advance of the Japanese forces. It has been called the 'largest act of environmental warfare in history.'"
. . . .

"To stop further Japanese advances into the western and southern part China, Chiang Kai-shek, at the suggestion of Chen Guofu, determined to open up the dikes on the Yellow River near Zhengzhou. . . . floods covered and destroyed thousands of square kilometers of farmland and shifted the mouth of the Yellow River hundreds of miles to the south. Thousands of villages were inundated or destroyed and several million villagers driven from their homes and made refugees. An official Nationalist post-war commission estimated that 800,000 were drowned, which may be an underestimate."

We need to be clear here. The flood man-made having the proper result from the military standpoint, but that loss of friendly civilian life just enormous, prodigious in the extreme.

Understood within the context that the Chinese Yellow River [Hwang Ho] referred to for thousands of years as "China's Sorrow". That river for a length of 500 miles [800 kilometers] the course of which kept in check by dikes, the river for that entire distance about thirty feet [10 meters] above the surrounding countryside, only those dikes at any given moment preventing flood on a massive and uncontrollable scale.

2.  "Ukrainian Activists Draw Attention To Little-Known WWII Tragedy"

That great dam on the Dneiper river demolished as part of the Soviet scorched earth policy, a showcase monument to Soviet engineering expertise and communist can-do spirit destroyed, that release of water enormous and killing many tens of thousands, again, friendly civilians.

"In case of a forced retreat... all rolling stock must be evacuated, the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, not a single pound of grain or gallon of fuel. The collective farmers must drive off all their cattle and turn over their grain to the safe keeping of the state authorities for transportation to the rear. All valuable property, including non-ferrous metals, grain and fuel that cannot be withdrawn must be destroyed without fail. In areas occupied by the enemy, guerrilla units....must set fire to forests, stores and transports." - - J. Stalin.

 "The tidal surge killed thousands of unsuspecting civilians, as well as Red Army officers who were crossing over the river."

"Since no official death toll was released at the time, the estimated number of victims varies widely. Most historians put it at between 20,000 and 100,000, based on the number of people then living in the flooded areas."

Dnieprostrov the destruction of which more than anything else an evidence of Soviet resolve.

"The Russians have proved now by their destruction of the great dam at Dniepropetrovsk that they mean truly to scorch the earth before Hitler even if it means the destruction of their most precious possessions ... Dnieprostroy was an object almost of worship to the Soviet people. Its destruction demonstrates a will to resist which surpasses anything we had imagined. I know what that dam meant to the Bolsheviks ... It was the largest, most spectacular, and most popular of all the immense projects of the First Five-Year Plan ... The Dnieper dam when it was built was the biggest on earth and so it occupied a place in the imagination and affection of the Soviet people difficult for us to realize ... Stalin's order to destroy it meant more to the Russians emotionally than it would mean to us for Roosevelt to order the destruction of the Panama Canal." - - Knickerbocker, American journalist.

This too an instance from ancient times, flood as a weapon of war:

3. Siege of Baghdad (1258).

That Mongol, while on the OFFENSIVE [Yellow River and Dnieprostrov defensive measures] using flood as a weapon of war, breaching dikes, causing a release of water that landscape to the rear of the Islamic cavalry the Caliph and his men faced with a barrier to their rear impassable, room for maneuver negated, defeat inevitable

"The cavalry were decisively defeated by the Mongols, whose engineers broke dikes along the Tigris River and flooded the ground behind the Abbasid forces, trapping them"

Indeed, that breaching and destruction of those dikes vicinity of Baghdad vital to agriculture as well, the population of the area not recovering for a subsequent seven hundred years hence!!

Well, at least the United States Army did resort to such measures.

coolbert.