Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (56 page)

Situational conditions in war often establish rules that violate those of the
Geneva Convention. Soldiers may consider it inadvisable or superfluous to burden themselves with POWs, opting simply to eradicate them. This phenomenon occurred in all theaters of World War II, although with varying frequency. In those areas where fighting was particularly fierce, the numbers of POWs executed rose. Because of the prevailing cult of toughness, elite units were more likely to kill enemies who tried to surrender. The
U.S. 82nd Airborne Division in
Normandy, for example, did not behave all that differently in this regard than the SS division
“Götz von Berlichingen.”
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The greatest eruptions of violence in World War II occurred in the
Soviet Union and the Pacific. But extreme violence was also part of everyday life in the relatively “normal” European theaters of war in
France and
Italy,
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and it was perpetrated by both sides: “ ‘Even in hopeless situations,’ reported American
Joseph Shomon, who saw many
bodies as the commander of a
graves registration unit, ‘the Germans would usually fight to the last, refusing to surrender. [Then] when their
ammunition was gone, they were ready to give up and ask for mercy [but because] many American lives had been lost in this delay, our troops often killed the Germans.’ ”
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According to historian
Gerald Linderman, the most frequent reason for American GIs to shoot German POWs was to avenge their own lost comrades. But Linderman also cites intentional and not just situational factors. Sometimes soldiers were ordered not to take any prisoners,
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and they were more likely to execute captured soldiers who conformed to Nazi
stereotypes, yelled “Heil Hitler,” or belonged to the
Waffen SS.
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For instance, four years after the fact,
Ernest Hemingway still told with pride how he had boldly shot a captive member of the Waffen SS.
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To briefly summarize: A lot of what appears horrible, lawless, and barbaric about
war crimes is actually part of the usual
frame of reference in wartime. For that reason, stories about cruelty don’t attract any more attention in the World War II German surveillance protocols than they do in reports and commentaries by U.S. soldiers who served
in Vietnam. Such instances of cruelty rarely seem like anything spectacular to the majority of soldiers as long as they are not called to answer for themselves before a court of law. Such violence is instrumental in nature. It’s hardly any surprise, then, that it occurs in war.

Work is a crucial social activity in all modern societies. What we do is embedded within a veritable universe of desired end results, defined largely by people other than ourselves, be they bosses or those who set the rules for institutions, businesses, or military units. In the context of work, individuals per se only bear particular responsibility for that precise part of the total process to which they contribute. Ironically, division-of-labor arrangements are precisely what relieve individuals of accountability for what they do or are prepared to do.
Commercial airplane pilots or reserve policemen can become murderers who kill civilians. Likewise, aviation companies, oven producers, or academic departments covering pathology can become instruments of
genocide. Matrixes of social functions and institutions store up human potential like batteries.
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Never is this more apparent than in wartime. When societies are mobilized to fight a total war, institutions, businesses, and organizations that normally work harmlessly toward their respective peacetime goals become “essential to the war effort.” That’s because they can easily redirect their potential.

Seen from the historical perspective, cases in which swords have been beaten into plowshares are far less common than vice versa. Modern
division of labor, with its focus on instrumental reason, can serve almost any purpose imaginable. In their analysis of
letters German soldiers sent home from the Eastern Front, historians
Ute Daniel and
Jürgen Reulecke cited
Jens Ebert’s thesis that war is accepted as long as it can be articulated in terms of peacetime, workplace values such as diligence, endurance, persistence, duty, obedience, and
voluntary subordination: “The only thing that changes on the frontline or as part of a special commando is the content of one’s work, not one’s attitudes toward work itself or the way it is organized. In this sense, the soldier is a ‘worker of war.’ ”
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This sort of work-oriented understanding of war is also clearly expressed in a letter sent home by a U.S. Marine captain to his mother during the Vietnam War. In it, he tries to justify his decision to extend
his tour of duty and explain why killing enemies is an appealing job, carrying a lot of
responsibility. “Here there is a job to be done. There are moral decisions made every day. My experience is invaluable. This job requires a man of conscience. The group of men that do this
must
have a leader with a conscience. In the last three weeks we killed more than 1,500 men on a single operation. That reflects a lot of responsibility. I am needed here, Mom.”
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When war arises, the participants don’t have to reconfigure their psyches, overcome themselves, or be specially
socialized in order to be able to kill. The context in which they do the things they do only needs to be altered. For soldiers who only do the sorts of things they were trained for anyway, nothing at all changes except the fact that the context becomes deadly serious. Thus, as a number of examples have shown, the transitional phase from training and practice to actual war not only surprised and frightened soldiers. It also excited and fascinated them. In no case, however, did the definition of what they were supposed to do, what they were there for, change.

Pride in the fruits of one’s labor and descriptions of what one has achieved are not the only way in which people express that war is work, and that they see it as such. The idea is also articulated in acknowledgment that the enemy, too, has done a “good job.” In the surveillance protocols, one vivid example of this was the appreciation
German POWs had, all Nazi propaganda about
Bolshevik inferiors notwithstanding, for the skill of Red
Army soldiers. The same was true for German soldiers viewed from the perspective of the enemy.
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Nonetheless, soldiers’
perceptions of one another were also formatted by cultural
stereotypes. For Germans, Red Army soldiers were courageous warriors and masters of improvisation. But those positive images were clouded by stereotypical beliefs in inherent Russian
brutality and lack of self-preservation instincts.
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Since Japanese soldiers treated POWs with extreme brutality, American GIs also came to view “Japs” as inhuman enemies. Other aspects of Japanese behavior were equally incomprehensible to U.S. soldiers: the practice of killing their own wounded or POWs who had been released, or of refusing to be saved by GIs when their ships were sunk. This radicalized the way American soldiers perceived their enemies, expanding upon already existing cultural stereotypes. For that reason, the word “Jap” had extremely nasty, and occasionally
racist, connotations that were absent from the relatively harmless term “kraut.”
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Cultural differences prevent soldiers of all nationalities from perceiving war universally. In soldiers’ own eyes, not all soldiers are created equal. Differentiations people make in peacetime persist during war. What distinguishes war from peace, and remains constant from war to war, is camaraderie. The group plays an extraordinarily important role. Without it, individual soldiers’ behavior in wartime would be incomprehensible. Soldiers never act on their own. Even sharpshooters or
fighter plane aces, who have only themselves to rely upon, are still parts of a group that remains together before and after battle. Samuel
Stouffer’s previously discussed study from 1948 thus concludes that the group has far more influence over individual soldiers’ behavior than ideological convictions, political views, and personal motivations.
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This conclusion does not just apply to the military. Edward
Shils and
Morris Janowitz, for instance, emphasize that the
Wehrmacht’s ability to do battle was based not on National Socialist fervor, but on the need to satisfy personal needs within the context of group relationships.
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Moreover, this aspect of the Wehrmacht’s organization was supported by modern management and personnel techniques.
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A soldier’s immediate social environment decides how he perceives and interprets war, and the parameters by which he targets and evaluates his own actions. Every member of a group sees himself as he believes others see him. That, as
Erving Goffman has shown in his “stigma” study, provides the most powerful motivation for people to conform to the norms of the group.
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In war, for an indeterminate length of time and under the most extreme conditions, the soldier is part of a group he can neither leave nor seek out according to his own personal preference. That is completely different from civilian life, in which people select their own
groups. The lack of alternatives to the group a soldier is part of and helps comprise makes it an all-decisive normative and practical entity, especially as battle is a life-or-death situation. To paraphrase a sentiment often expressed in American combat briefings in Vietnam: I don’t know why I’m here, and you don’t know why you’re here, but let’s try our best to do a good job and stay alive.
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Such sentiments underscore the importance of one’s comrades for everything that happens and is thought or decided during war. This far outweighs the significance of any worldviews, convictions, or historical
inevitabilities, which might have provided the external conditions leading to the war itself. The internal reality of war, as it presents itself to soldiers, is the group. That is how war appeared to Vietnam veteran
Michael Bernhardt, who refused to participate in the
My Lai
massacre and was subsequently ostracized. The only thing that counted, Bernhardt later recalled, was how people thought of you in the here and now, how people in your immediate surroundings regarded you. Bernhardt’s unit was his entire world. What they thought was right,
was
right; what they thought was wrong,
was
wrong.
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The German soldier
Willy Peter Reese would have agreed with Bernhardt:

Willy Peter Reese was killed shortly after he wrote these words. His words resonate with another universal truth of war:
reasons don’t matter
.
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One of the major themes of literary and cinematic meditations on war—from Erich Maria Remarque and Ernst Jünger to Francis Ford
Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now
—is that ideology and all other larger reasons behind
war are irrelevant. Indeed, apart from a small percentage of ideological warriors, one central characteristic of soldiers is their distance from and disinterest in the causes that led to their present situation. This is true not only when everything is falling apart, as in
Reese’s description. It also applies to situations of victory. Soldiers’ attention is primarily focused on things at hand, the plane just shot down or the village just taken—and not abstractions like “the conquest of living space in Eastern Europe,” “the defense of Bolshevism,” or the “yellow peril.” Things like that form the backdrop of war and the arenas of battle connected with it. But they rarely provide the concrete motivation for soldiers’ interpretations and actions in any given situation.
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That fact runs all the way through the twentieth century. The signature psychosocial experience of World War I was
disillusionment at the fact that there was nothing heroic or ideological about the hail of shrapnel soldiers endured as part of trench warfare. Fundamental senselessness was a feeling shared by American troops in Korea,
Vietnam, and
Iraq, and by all the nations involved in Afghanistan. Indeed, it was augmented as the rationale behind those wars became increasingly abstract. Why should you fight far away from home for the freedom of people who despise you? Why defend populations and stretches of territory that have nothing to do with you personally?

With reference to the
Vietnam War, one U.S. sergeant wrote to a friend: “Of course Americans are dying, and I would not belittle anyone who served ‘with proud devotion’ and faith in this enterprise. It may not have been a terribly wrong theoretical idea at one time. But the foreign introduced offensive, the consequent corruption and then the contempt that developed between people and groups—it makes a mockery of the ‘noble’ words used to justify war. It belies the phony enthusiasm with which those words may be delivered. It’s now a war of survival.”
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