From the dam in Ukraine to the “Cunctator”. The millennial strategy of disasters

Flooding one’s territory is a military tactic as old as the cuckoo. History offers many cases of tragedies committed in the name of self-interest, useful to review to better understand what happened in Kakhovka

The difficulty is not just repairing. Even just causing natural disasters in war is a lot of work. They had twice tried to break the levees of the Yellow River to slow the Japanese advance. But the river, although already swollen from the summer rains, didn’t want to overflow. The levees were huge embankments, raised and strengthened over centuries of “hydraulic despotism”. The explosives didn’t work, you had to dig by hand, forcibly recruiting thousands of peasants. They had tried twice, at the beginning of June, but without success. They finally succeeded in breaching it on June 9, 1938. But the water was still flowing too slowly. It took days for the river to open a gap sufficient to flood the entire territory, in search of a new outlet to the sea. It submerged 9 provinces, among the most populous and fertile in China, in three regions: Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu. Dotted on the maps, the flooded area strikingly resembles the shape of the one flooded by the Dnipro after the sabotage of the Kakhovka dam. Only it is much larger, ten times larger. The rivers are different from each other. But the imprint of their ferocity is similar.