Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (48 page)

The German navy was equally prone to willful credulity when it came to kill reports by submarine commanders. Some officers were notorious for exaggerated tonnages sunk and still received medals. Part of common navy parlance was the expression
“Schepke tonnage”—a reference to the fact that commander
Joachim Schepke routinely overestimated the
tonnage of the ships he had sunk.
Rolf Thomsen was another commander whose reports were absurdly optimistic, and he received the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves for his efforts. On two patrols, for example, he claimed to have sunk a destroyer, two corvettes, six freighters, and an escort carrier. There was only proof of one of these vessels having been truly sunk. Late in the war, when there were few triumphs to cheer, the navy leadership was eager to believe positive reports from their commanding officers.
⁷²³
Although
no one could reconstruct whether or not Thomsen was intentionally lying, many people believed he was an empty boaster—a reputation that dogged him even as a navy officer after World War II for the
Federal Republic of Germany.

Inflated reports by German navy men, however, paled in comparison to those of
Enzo Grossi, an
Italian submarine commander, who claimed to have sunk two American battleships in the southern
Atlantic in 1942 and who was awarded the Gold Medal for Bravery by
Mussolini and the Knight’s Cross by Hitler. Nazi newsreels repeatedly featured the courageous commander peering bare-chested through his periscope.
⁷²⁴
After the war, it emerged that Grossi hadn’t sunk any ships at all. Right-wing circles in Italy refused to accept this, spreading a conspiracy theory that the Americans had constructed replicas of the two battleships Grossi had destroyed in an attempt to cover up their losses. Grossi’s medal for bravery was revoked posthumously.
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All in all, Wehrmacht soldiers accepted the system of incentives created by the political and military leadership with very little criticism and integrated it into their personal frames of reference. The surveillance protocols show that the lure of
medals and other decorations was an excellent motivational tool. The only griping centered around whether specific accolades had indeed been awarded fairly and whether superior officers were applying award criteria consistently. Bearers of the Knight’s Cross who put on too many airs were jokingly referred to as “tin collars,”
⁷²⁶
and there was minor criticism about the design of certain medals. “The Knight’s Cross set with diamonds is a frightful thing,” complained one Luftwaffe lieutenant. “You give diamonds to a woman but not to a fighter pilot.”
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The preponderance of decorations also came in for sarcasm. “It’s only the Captains of the
B
ERLIN
river steamers who have no special decoration,” scoffed one submarine officer in November 1940.
⁷²⁸
Jokes about
Göring were particularly popular, especially after he became the sole recipient of the special “Grand Cross of the Iron Cross” in July 1940. On February 1, 1945, First Lieutenant
Hartigs of
Luftwaffe Fighter Wing 26 asked ironically: “Don’t you know the ‘mammoth cross’? At the end of this war, in which we shall be victorious, G
ÖRING
is going to get the Mammoth Cross of the Grand Cross with Diamonds on an S.P. mounting.”
⁷²⁹

Wehrmacht soldiers may have differed from one another in a number of respects, but their basic
frame of reference remained quite consistent. It is only when we begin to make international comparisons that we discover major differences in this regard. The central point of reference for Italian soldiers, for instance, was neither the nation nor the state nor indeed the military itself. Italian fascism pushed corruption and nepotism to the extreme. Italian historian
Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi writes: “Other countries—for example
England or
Germany, closed ranks in an hour of great peril and rallied around institutions, performing a feat of utmost resistance on behalf of a cause they saw as crucial to the welfare of the entire collective. By contrast, in Italy, the social network completely collapsed, as in times of extreme crisis, the attitude became ‘every man for himself.’ ”
⁷³⁰

Italian soldiers never succeeded in finding any great sense of purpose in doing battle. They lacked not only a positive self-image, but also military triumphs and an officer corps that could communicate values such as bravery, devotion to duty, and steely resilience. The officer corps was seen as an incompetent, cowardly clique, whose members had attained their posts through nepotism, not merit. Italian officers were only enthusiastic about war, the prevailing view held, as long as they themselves didn’t have to fight. Their main
motivation, if we believe a conversation between two
Italian POWs in the British camp Wilton Park, was personal enrichment:

Appeals to the bravery of common
Italian soldiers were cheap and likely fell on deaf ears. Italian POWs recorded in the surveillance protocols repeatedly state that the officers were the first to flee when the going got rough.
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Admiral
Priamo Leonardi, the commander of the fortifications at Augusta, opined: “If people see that the whole H.Q. staff pushes off somewhere else they say: ‘Why should we stay here? Are we really such fools? Let’s all push off.’ ”
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Leonardi himself doesn’t seem to have been particularly concerned about defending Augusta, admitting that he had considered slinking away disguised as a civilian. “In the end,” he reasoned, “if everyone else marches off, there’s no reason the admiral shouldn’t flee as well.”
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Some German generals may have thought and behaved in similar fashion. Major General
Sattler, for instance, had tried to flee the fortifications at Cherbourg in a speedboat in 1944, and when his escape failed, he immediately capitulated. Still, it would have been unimaginable for him to confess his lack of heroism to his fellow POWs. Members of the Wehrmacht and in particular high-ranking officers always tried to depict themselves as professional, upstanding soldiers. No one would have dared raise questions, as Leonardi voluntarily did, about the core of every true soldier’s self-image, his own bravery.

The conversations of lower-ranking Italian POWs, too, show how much their perception of the war differed from that of their German allies. Planes shot down, ships sunk, and decorations won play no significant role in their discussions, and the same is true for concepts like honor, bravery, and the “fatherland.”
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Italian POWs focused on the hair-raising deficiencies that became apparent with every major military engagement. For instance, in March 1943, a lieutenant colonel captured in
Tunisia related: “Our army has become a mere gang of adventurers. They should all be brought to trial, at least from a military stand-point. And I should be in with [Italian supreme commander in North
Africa] General
B
ATISTICO
himself. I wish an inquiry could be opened into all their doings in A
FRICA
: how they behaved in various circumstances; it was disgraceful! Nearly everybody in the army
will tell the same sad story of corruption and disorganization. It would almost be better if we had the English or the Russians in I
TALY
.”
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The
Italian
military leadership and the Italian state were perceived as being so corrupt and incompetent that they, and not the Allies, were sometimes considered the true enemies. From the point of view of ordinary Italian soldiers, only a “fesso” (idiot) would sacrifice himself for a system that did not represent one’s own interests in the slightest.
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The only Italian soldiers who told stories of a type comparable to those of Wehrmacht soldiers were members of the special forces.
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Paratroopers, fighter pilots, and submarine crewmen did tend to talk about their own achievements, their weaponry, and the challenges they had to overcome to fulfill their missions. It was important for them to be seen as good soldiers, corruption and incompetence notwithstanding, and they often spoke of ideals such as bravery and devotion to duty. In this vein, a U-boat officer of the watch remarked in 1941: “One must win the war, and do one’s part even if one is anti-fascist.”
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In April 1942, in a conversation between two Italian pilots, one did invoke instances of heroism in battle: “We scored a direct hit and when we came back on the scene there was no more cruiser to be seen. So many of our people wanted to change their jobs because torpedo-carrying aircraft are so dangerous. This last time we were to be in the air for six hours. We were to do B
EYROUTH
, P
ORT
S
AID
, A
LEXANDRIA
. C
AIRO
. Our pilots are very young, but amazingly brave. They throw themselves on their targets. We did four
torpedoes at R
HODES
. Do you know Captain
B
USSATI
? He was a torpedo aircraft ace.”
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Members of these units often made the impression of being the most committed fascists. On August 31, 1943, after running through the list of their own achievements, two submarine captains discussed the general situation: “Had we had four or five divisions of young Fascists like those who fought in
A
FRICA
, those English Gentlemen could never have landed! Just look—in A
FRICA
fourteen tanks with crews of young Fascists went out to fight a hundred and forty English tanks, and I can well believe it!”
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Bravery seems to have been an important point of reference for committed fascists. Nonetheless, in contrast to their
German counterparts, they refused to fight to the bitter end when all seemed lost. For them, World War II was effectively decided when the Allies captured
Sicily. The only choice was to sue for peace. The vast majority echoed the sentiments of
Italian commander and short-lived prime minister of fascist Italy
Pietro Badoglio: “ ‘We must end the war with honour.’ He is an old soldier, and he will never accept unconditional surrender.”
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In fact, Italy never capitulated unconditionally, but negotiated an armistice with the Allies. The two submarine captains were probably not all that proud of the chaotic end to Italy’s participation in World War II, which saw the Italian king and Badoglio fleeing. What’s important, however, is that
Italian POWs had no stake in any apocalyptic scenarios about fighting down to the last bullet or drop of blood.

Yet despite all the differences, we should not overlook a certain amount of common ground in the values of German and Italian soldiers. Italian soldiers were noticeably impressed by the superior fighting ability of their German allies, who were otherwise not very well liked.
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With reference to the conquest of
Crete, one Italian navy man remarked: “It’s phenomenal! The Germans are the only ones who fight through to the end; even if they are cut to pieces they go on until they have smashed through. Neither we Italians, nor the Japanese, and still less the English, can do it.”
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The soldier quoted here could only arrive at this sort of conclusion if he valued bravery and persistence in battle as well as military
success. Moreover, conversations about the shameful conditions in their own army, including
cowardice among their commanders and corruption, suggest that many Italian soldiers regarded such deficiencies as deviations from what should have been the military norm.
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When Italian soldiers were well equipped and competently led, they also showed signs of being willing to fight bravely.

Nonetheless, men like Field Marshal
Giovanni Messe had no desire for
camaraderie with German detainees in his
British POW camp. On the contrary, he maintained that Italians were completely incompatible with their German allies. In so doing, he arrived at a flattering explanation for Italian military failings: “They [the Germans] haven’t got [a soul]. We are generous, and in reality we are incapable of hatred. Our mentality is like that, that is why I have always maintained that we are not a warlike people. A warlike people knows how to hate.”
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By any standards, the Japanese were more soldierly and oriented toward traditional military virtues than the Italians. The most important Japanese military codes of behavior—the Gunjin Chokuyu, Senjinkun, and Bushido—formed a unique frame of reference that
required soldiers to demonstrate loyalty, bravery, daring, and, above all, absolute
obedience. Retreat was forbidden, and soldiers were never supposed to surrender. These values were also effective in practice because they were based on the deeply rooted conviction in
Japanese society that any sort of imprisonment was dishonorable. Being taken captive brought shame not only on oneself, but one’s family as well. For this reason, countless Japanese soldiers preferred to commit
suicide rather than fall into enemy hands. As an American GI wrote from New Guinea in 1944, the Japanese ethos was to achieve victory or die trying, so that Japanese troops were incapable of giving up or allowing themselves to be taken prisoner.
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In the years up until March 1945, American troops succeeded in capturing only around 12,000
Japanese POWs—a tiny number compared to the millions of soldiers in European internment camps.
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