Honda Car Names and Trench Warfare

Honda makes great cars, we’ve owned several. But they missed the best possible marketing ploy for their popular small size SUV, the “CRV,” which to the Japanese executives in charge of nomenclature and branding of their products, means “Compact Recreational Vehicle.” Three members of the Alamo Rifles, my Civil War reenacting group, drive Honda CRV’s. I’ve driven mine for six years now, and the CRV has happily and efficiently hauled people, muskets, and reenacting gear all over Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.

I dare not write how many miles I’ve driven my CRV to Civil War reenactments, because my wife reads these blog posts and can do the math to turn mileage into gasoline costs. Once she did that, I fully expect I’d find some expensive bling around her neck when I get home from the next such trip.

If Honda would just give me a call, I’d give a sterling testimonial for my CRV—my Confederate Reenactor Vehicle. The Japanese having a long proud military history they could have tapped into when naming cars for the American market. They could have deemed the CRV the SRV, “Samuri Reenactor Vehicle.” But, at least in America, Honda has not taken to in-your-face brand names, like American car companies have. I mean the McBride’s have also owned Honda cars called Accord, Civic, Fit, Odyssey, and Passport.  How absent of testosterone can a name be? None of those Barricuda, Charger, Cougar, Sting Ray, or Mustang muscle car names for Honda. But surely there’s a middle ground for Honda car names that aren’t so darned polite. 

I mean, I wouldn’t expect a Japanese car company to name a car sold in America the “Banzai.” But “Mushroom Cloud” might work, or “You Yanks Won the War and We Will Never Get Over It (Y2W4NGOI).” Those names would NOT attract young urban hipsters. Although the last one, if it were the name of Honda’s pick-up truck, would likely sell well in the states of the old Confederacy. Enough of that.

Today’s blog post is not really about the inexpensive, efficient, and dependable imported cars that helped Japan get even after WWII by showing America that Detroit was making over-priced crappy cars. Today’s post is to remember WWI in Europe, where one hundred years ago danged near every nation in Europe and many beyond, crisscrossed the landscape with thousands of miles of trenches and wire and machine guns. 

The presence of the newly developed rapid-fire machine gun made trench warfare obsolete even as the Great War began. Four European nations each sacrificed over a million young men to the remedial classes the machine guns provided. The generals on both sides saw the slaughter, but were locked into tactics they knew, regardless of the price. The USA, late to enter the war, lost over 60,000 young soldiers in our own “Banzai” attacks on German trenches. All total, WWI caused over 11 million military deaths and 7 million civilian deaths from 1916 to 1920. It’s a mind-boggling number. The 600,000 military deaths in our American Civil War pales next to the 11 million dead soldiers who fell in Europe during WWI. We are a stubborn and violent species, no doubt about it.

My Civil War link is that on this 100th anniversary summer of the horrible WWI trench warfare battle near Verdun, France, I’m writing about the trench warfare battle that took place over the summer of 1864, just 52 years earlier, around Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia. Grant and Lee didn’t need Germans, machine guns or mustard gas to cause 70,000 American casualties that summer. They both ordered attacks and counter-attacks over the killing fields between the concentric rings of earthworks surrounding Richmond, until Lee’s army was bled dry. It was a terrible time in a terrible war.

The photo this week is just one young man, not dead, but a WWI English soldier who didn’t need words to tell of the horror of his war. His manic eyes and humorless grin said it all.

As I write this week in the Defiant Honor manuscript about the Yanks from New Jersey and the Rebs from Texas who met in bloody battle on the earthworks at New Market Heights just east of Richmond, that Brit soldier’s face will haunt me. I’ve promised him that I will keep my writer’s voice somber and the characters in blue and gray appropriately defiant in the penultimate fight of the Fifth Texas regiment.