Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (12 page)

Taken together, all these elements correspond to the demands placed upon a
fighter pilot. (Indeed, the German for fighter pilot,
Jagdflieger,
contains the word for hunt
Jagd
.) This is why German fighter pilots understood what they did in the context of hunting. It was considered dishonorable, for instance, to fire upon enemy pilots who had ejected from their planes and were
parachuting back to ground, even though these men were technically still enemies.
¹¹⁶
Luftwaffe General
Adolf Galland supposedly once deemed it “unworthy of a huntsman” to bombard groups of
American bombers. The hunt is the source of the “fun” of which Luftwaffe POWs constantly spoke. The only other military men who talked about battle in such sporting terms were U-boat
crews.

A good example of this trope is a metaphor used by German navy Lieutenant
Wolf-Doetrich Danckworth, the only survivor from the German submarine
U-224:

For soldiers, it made no difference whether the prey consisted of military or
civilian
targets. In his diary, an enthusiastic
Ernst Jünger described how he finally, after two and a half years of war, succeeded in “felling” his first Englishman with a “precise” shot.
¹¹⁸
Soldiers’ anecdotes were less concerned with who was killed and why than with the more spectacular results one had achieved. This, too, is an instance of how soldiers saw battle in terms of sports.

The more prominent or important the target, the greater the triumph, and the more interesting the stories that could be told about the kill:

Dock’s anecdote about shooting down the Douglas DC-3 transport airplane carrying the actor
Leslie Howard particularly underscores the sporting aspect of the
frame of reference of
war. His victims are big game. Dock clearly expresses his admiration for the pilot of the Douglas, who tried to avoid being shot down with a spectacular evasive maneuver. But the pilot had no chance against a fighter plane. All Dock and his comrades had to do, as he puts it, was “to press the button, quietly and calmly.”
¹²⁰

Such anecdotes once again show that most soldiers did not distinguish between military and civilian targets. The point was to sink ships, shoot down planes, and destroy targets—who was killed was simply not very important. Occasionally, POWs even emphasized that their targets were
not
military ones. For example, in January 1945,
First Lieutenant
Hans Harting from the
Luftwaffe’s Fighter Wing 26 related:

A conversation between
bomber pilot Wille* and submarine corporal
Solm provides an especially drastic example of what conscious attacks on nonmilitary targets meant:

Solm was likely referring to the
sinking of the British passenger ship
City of Benares
on September 18, 1940, in which seventy-seven children died.

It is irrelevant in this context that Solm’s account deviates from the historic record in a number of respects: German U-boat commanders, for instance, did not know that there were children aboard the
Benares
. What is important is that Solm thinks he can impress his interlocutor with a story about how he sank a ship transporting children.

Otherwise, the stories told by German
navy men and army soldiers starkly differed from those related by
Luftwaffe members. For starters, hunting tropes played far less of a role. For purely technical reasons, ships’ crews had few opportunities to act individually. Unlike
fighter pilots, navy men could not brag about how perfectly they could handle their equipment, since in general they were more dependent on whole crews working as one. The word “fun” hardly occurs in their conversations.

Astonishingly,
German infantry soldiers, too, rarely tell of killing others in battle.
Franz Kneipp, an SS Untersturmführer in the
“Hitler Youth” Division who was captured in Normandy, is one of the few who did. On July 9, 1944, he recalled:

German soldiers were most likely to talk about killing when the enemies were defined as partisans or “
terrorists” (this trope will be treated in detail in the next section). But both army and navy men were generally reluctant to discuss the topic.

What navy men did enjoy talking about in great detail was the
tonnage of the ships they sank. It was irrelevant in terms of
medals whether those ships were
passenger,
merchant, or fishing boats. All sorts of vessels were “knocked over,” “shot down,” “cracked,” or simply “sunk.” Navy POWs rarely mention any victims. One exception was this narrative told by an
E-boat sailor about an experience in the
Baltic Sea:

If the rescue
attempt had gone off without incident, the navy man probably wouldn’t have mentioned it. What made the story worth telling
was the unusual detail that the Russian women didn’t want to be saved, and that they, too, had been killed.

The battles surrounding convoys
HX 229 and
SC 143 seem to have made a particular impression. Forty-three German submarines attacked the ships, which were on their way from
Canada to
Great Britain, in March 1943. Over the course of a few days twenty-one Allied merchantmen were drowned.

Evidence that sailors felt pity for the
crews of
ships they sank were very rare, as were reports about successful rescues. Apparently, the POWs talked very little about whether submarines occasionally rescued and cared for enemies fleeing destroyed vessels. One exception was First Mate
Hermann Fox from the submarine
U-110:

By contrast, most narratives are simply concerned with how many gross registered tons had been sent to the bottom of the ocean. Victims mainly appear in the anonymous form of masses of killed or dying enemies.

Lieutenant Captain
Heinz Scheringer, for instance, told two of his comrades of the final mission of the
U-26:

Stories concerning
ships that were sunk were omnipresent not only among submarine crews, but navy men in general. The strategy of German naval command against Great Britain was one of
tonnage: the German navy aimed to sink more ships than Allied dockyards could replace. So the criterion for success was size.
¹²⁸
That was true as well for the crews of armed German merchant marine vessels. Evidence of this is a dialogue between crew members of the raider
MS
Penguin
and its supply ship
MS
Atlantis
: