On killing Read online

  But to venture into the streets was to risk being swept by the wind into the very heart of the firestorm.

  Seventy thousand people died at Hamburg the night the air caught fire. They were mostly women, children, and the elderly, since those of soldiering age were generally at the front. They died horrible deaths, burning and suffocating. If bomber crew members had had to turn a flamethrower on each one of these seventy thousand women and children, or worse yet slit each of their throats, the awfulness and trauma inherent in the act would have D I S T A N C E : A QUALITATIVE D I S T I N C T I O N 101

  been of such a magnitude that it simply would not have happened.

  But when it is done from thousands of feet in the air, where the screams cannot be heard and the burning bodies cannot be seen, it is easy.

  It seemed as though the whole of Hamburg was on fire from one end to the other and a huge column of smoke was towering well above us — and we were at 20,000 feet! Set in the darkness was a turbulent dome of bright red fire, lighted and ignited like the glowing heart of a vast brazier. I saw no streets, no outlines of buildings, only brighter fires which flared like yellow torches against a background of bright red ash. Above the city was a misty red haze. I looked down, fascinated but aghast, satisfied yet horrified.

  — RAF aircrew over Hamburg, July 28, 1943

  quoted in Gwynne Dyer, War

  From twenty thousand feet the killer could feel fascinated and satisfied with his work, but this is what the people on the ground were experiencing:

  Mother wrapped me in wet sheets, kissed me, and said, "Run!"

  I hesitated at the door. In front of me I could see only fire — everything red, like the door to a furnace. An intense heat struck me.

  A burning beam fell in front of my feet. I shied back but then, when I was ready to jump over it, it was whirled away by a ghostly hand. The sheets around me acted as sails and I had the feeling that I was being carried away by the storm. I reached the front of a five-story building . . . which . . . had been bombed and burned out in a previous raid and there was not much in it for the fire to get hold of. Someone came out, grabbed me in their arms, and pulled me into the doorway.

  — Traute Koch, age fifteen in 1943

  quoted in Gwynne Dyer, War

  Seventy thousand died at Hamburg. Eighty thousand or so died in 1945 during a similar firebombing in Dresden. T w o hundred and twenty-five thousand died in firestorms over Tokyo as a result 102 KILLING AND PHYSICAL D I S T A N C E

  of only two firebomb raids. W h e n the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, seventy thousand died. Throughout World War II bomber crews on both sides killed millions of women, children, and elderly people, no different from their own wives, children, and parents. T h e pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and gunners in these aircraft were able to bring themselves to kill these civilians primarily through application of the mental leverage provided to them by the distance factor. Intellectually, they understood the horror of what they were doing. Emotionally, the distance involved permitted them to deny it. Despite what a recent popular song might tell us, from a distance you don't look anything like a friend.

  From a distance, I can deny your humanity; and from a distance, I cannot hear your screams.

  Babylon

  In 689 B.C. King Sennacherib of Assyria destroyed the city of Babylon:

  I leveled the city and its houses from the foundations to the top, I destroyed them and consumed them with fire. I tore down and removed the outer and inner walls, the temples and the ziggurats built of brick, and dumped the rubble in the Arahtu canal. And after I had destroyed Babylon, smashed its gods and massacred its population, I tore up its soil and threw it into the Euphrates so that it was carried by the river down to the sea.

  Gwynne Dyer uses this quote to point out that although more labor intensive than nuclear weapons, the physical effect on Babylon was litlle different from the effect of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima or firebombs at Dresden. Physically the effect is the same, but psychologically the difference is tremendous.

  No personal accounts of this horror have lasted through the ages, but we can see an echo of murder on such a scale in the accounts of survivors of Nazi atrocities. In This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski's memoir of his experiences in a Nazi death camp, he gives us a brief glimpse of the sheer horror of such mass killing:

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  We climb inside [a railroad car]. In the corners amid human ex-crement and abandoned wrist-watches lie squashed, trampled infants, naked little monsters with enormous heads and bloated bellies. We carry them out like chickens, holding several in each hand.

  . . . I see four . . . men lugging a corpse: a huge swollen female corpse. Cursing, dripping wet from the strain, they kick out of their way some stray children who have been running all over the ramp, howling like dogs. The men pick them up by the collars, heads, arms, and toss them inside the trucks, on top of the heaps.

  The four men have trouble lifting the fat corpse onto the car, they call others for help, and all together they hoist up the mound of meat. Big swollen, puffed-up corpses are being collected from all over the ramp; on top of them are piled the invalids, the smothered, the sick, the unconscious. The heap seethes, howls, groans.

  In Babylon someone had to personally hold down tens of thousands of men, women, and children, while someone else stabbed and hacked at these horrified Babylonians. O n e by one. Grandfathers struggled and wept as screaming grandchildren and daughters and sons were raped and slaughtered. Mothers and fathers writhed in their dying agony as they watched their children being raped and butchered. Again, Borowski captures a faint timeless echo of this mass murder of the innocent in a terse paragraph telling of the murder of a single lost, confused, frightened little Jewish girl: This time a little girl pushes herself halfway through the small window [of the cattle car] and, losing her balance, falls out on the gravel. Stunned, she lies still for a moment, then stands up and begins walking around in a circle, faster and faster, waving her rigid arms in the air, breathing loudly and spasmodically, whining in a faint voice. Her mind has given way . . . an S.S. man approaches calmly, his heavy boot strikes between her shoulders. She falls.

  Holding her down with his foot, he draws his revolver, fires once, then again. She remains face down, kicking the gravel with her feet, until she stiffens.

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  Exchange the revolver for a sword, and then multiply this scene by tens of thousands, and you have the horror that was the sack of Babylon and a thousand other forgotten cities and nations.

  Borowski knew that with these Jewish victims of a later-day Babylon "experienced professionals will probe into every recess of their flesh, will pull the gold from under the tongue and the diamonds from the uterus and the colon." History tells us that in Babylon and other such situations the victims were held down while their bodies were slit open to determine if they had swallowed or secreted valuables, and then they were often left to die slowly as they crawled off with their torn intestines and stomach dragging after them.

  Even the Nazis usually segregated sexes and families and could seldom bring themselves to individually bayonet their victims.

  They preferred machine guns upon occasion, and gas chamber showers for the really big work. T h e horror of Babylon staggers the imagination.1

  The Difference

  I could not visualize the horrible deaths my bombs. . . had caused here. I had no feeling of guilt. I had no feeling of accomplishment.

  — J . Douglas Harvey, World War II bomber pilot, visiting rebuilt Berlin in the 1960s

  quoted in Paul Fussell, Wartime

  What is the difference between what happened in Hamburg and in Babylon? There was no distinction in the results — in both, the innocent populations involved died horribly and their cities were destroyed. So what is the difference?

  T h e difference is the diffe
rence between what the Nazi executioners did to the Jews and what the Allied bombardiers did to Germany and Japan. The difference is the difference between what Lieutenant Calley did to a village full of Vietnamese, and what many pilots and artillerymen did to similar Vietnamese villages.

  The difference is that, emotionally, when we dwell on the butchers of Babylon or Auschwitz or My Lai, we feel revulsion at the psychotic and alien state that permitted these individuals to D I S T A N C E : A QUALITATIVE D I S T I N C T I O N

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  perform their awful deeds. We cannot understand h o w anyone could perform such inhuman atrocities on their fellow man. We call it murder, and we hunt down and prosecute the criminals responsible, be they Nazi war criminals or American war criminals.

  And by prosecuting these individuals we gain peace of mind by affirming to ourselves that this is an aberration that civilized societies do not tolerate.

  But when most people think of those who bombed Hamburg or Hiroshima, there is no feeling of disgust for the deed, certainly not the intensity of disgust felt for Nazi executioners. W h e n we mentally empathize with the bomber crews, when we put ourselves in their places, most cannot truly see themselves doing any different than they did. Therefore we do not judge them as criminals. We rationalize their actions and most of us have a gut feeling that we could have done what the bomber crews did, but could not ever have done what the executioners did.

  W h e n we reach out with empathy in these circumstances, we also empathize with the victims. Oddly enough, very few survivors of strategic bombing in Britain and Germany suffered from long-term emotional trauma resulting from their experiences, while most of the survivors of Nazi concentration camps — and many soldiers in battle — did and continue to do so. Incredibly, yet undeniably, there is a qualitative distinction in the eyes of those w h o suffered: the survivors of Auschwitz were personally traumatized by criminals and suffered lifelong psychological damage from their experiences, whereas the survivors of Hamburg were incidental victims of an act of war and were able to put it behind them.

  Glenn Gray, a trained philosopher, served in an intelligence unit in World War II that was responsible for dealing with civilians ranging from spies to Nazi collaborators to survivors of concentration camps. He understood this qualitative distinction in the manner of death:

  Not the frequency of death but the manner of dying makes a qualitative difference. Death in war is commonly caused by members of my own species actively seeking my end, despite the fact that they may never have seen me and have no personal reason for enmity. It is death brought about by hostile intent rather than KILLING AND PHYSICAL D I S T A N C E

  by accident or natural causes that separates war from peace so completely.

  Even our legal system is established around a determination of intent. Emotionally and intellectually we can readily grasp the difference between premeditated murder and manslaughter. The distinction based on intent represents an institutionalization of our emotional responses to these situations.

  The issue of relative trauma in killing situations (for both the victim and the killer) was addressed earlier. It is sufficient to say here that at some instinctive, empathic level both survivors and historical observers understand the qualitative distinction between dying in a bombing attack and dying in a concentration camp.

  Bombing deaths are buffered by the all-important factor of distance.

  They represent an impersonal act of war in which specific deaths are unintended and almost accidental in nature. ("Collateral damage" is the military euphemism for such killing of civilians while bombing military targets.) Execution of innocent civilians, a subject to be addressed later in this study, is on the other hand a highly personal act of psychotic irrationality that openly refutes the humanity of the victims.

  So what is the difference? Ultimately, the difference is distance.

  Chapter Two

  Killing at Maximum and Long Range:

  Never a Need for Repentance or Regret

  To fight from a distance is instinctive in man. From the first day he has worked to this end, and he continues to do so.

  — Ardant du Picq

  Battle Studies

  Maximum Range: "They Can Pretend They Are Not Killing Human Beings"

  Our examination of the killing process at different points along the distance spectrum begins at maximum range. For our purposes

  "maximum range" is defined as a range at which the killer is unable to perceive his individual victims without using some form of mechanical assistance — binoculars, radar, periscope, remote TV camera, and so on.

  Gray states the matter clearly: "Many a pilot or artilleryman who has destroyed untold numbers of terrified noncombatants has never felt any need for repentance or regret." And Dyer echoes and reinforces Gray when he notes that there has never been any difficulty in getting artillerymen, bomber crews, or naval personnel to kill:

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  Partly it is the same pressure that keeps machine gun crews firing — they are being observed by their fellows — but even more important is the intervention of distance and machinery between them and the enemy; they can pretend they are not killing human beings.

  On the whole, however, distance is a sufficient buffer: gunners fire at grid references they cannot see; submarine crews fire torpedoes at "ships" (and not, somehow, at the people in the ships); pilots launch their missiles at "targets."

  Dyer covers most of the maximum-range types of killing here.

  Artillery crews, bomber crews, naval gunners, and missile crews —

  at sea and on the ground — are all protected by the same powerful combination of group absolution, mechanical distance, and, most pertinent to our current discussion, physical distance.

  In years of research and reading on the subject of killing in combat I have not found one single instance of individuals w h o have refused to kill the enemy under these circumstances, nor have I found a single instance of psychiatric trauma associated with this type of killing. Even in the case of the individuals who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, contrary to popular myth, there are no indications of psychological problems. Historical accounts indicate that the pilot of the aircraft that made the weather reconnaissance for the Enola Gay had a series of disciplinary and criminal problems before the bombing, and it was his continued problems after leaving the service that formed the sole basis of the popular myth of suicide and mental problems among these crews.

  Long Range: " N o t Eyeball to Eyeball with the Sweat and the Emotions o f C o m b a t "

  "Long range" is defined here as the range at which the average soldier may be able to see the enemy, but is unable to kill him without some form of special weaponry — sniper weapons, anti-armor missiles, or tank fire.

  Holmes tells of a World War I Australian sniper recalling how, after shooting a German observer, "a queer thrill shot through me, it was a different feeling to that which I had when I shot my KILLING AT M A X I M U M AND L O N G R A N G E 109

  first kangaroo when I was a boy. For an instant I felt sick and faint; but the feeling soon passed."

  Here we begin to see some disturbance at the act of killing, but snipers doctrinally operate as teams, and like maximum-range killers they are protected by the same potent combination of group absolution, mechanical distance (the rifle scope), and physical distance. Their observations and the accounts of their kills are strangely depersonalized and different from those that we will see at closer ranges:

  At 2109 [on February 3, 1969] five Viet Cong moved from the woodline to the edge of the rice paddy and the first Viet Cong in the group was taken under fire . . . resulting in one Viet Cong killed. Immediately the other Viet Cong formed a huddle around the fallen body, apparently not quite sure of what had taken place.

  Sergeant Waldron continued engaging the Viet Cong one by one until a total of [all] five Viet Cong were killed.2

  Even given
the buffer of the tremendous distance at which snipers work, some snipers can rationalize their actions by killing only enemy leaders. O n e marine sniper told D. J. Truby "you don't like to hit ordinary troops, because they're usually scared draftees or worse. . . . T h e guys to shoot are big brass." And just as a remarkably small percentage of World War II fighter pilots were capable of doing the majority of the air-to-air killing, so too have a few carefully selected and trained snipers made a tremendous and disproportionate contribution to their nation's war effort by remorselessly and mercilessly killing large numbers of the enemy.

  From January 7 to July 24, 1969, U.S. Army snipers in Vietnam accounted for 1,245 confirmed kills, with an average of 1.39 bullets expended per kill. (Compare this with the average fifty thousand rounds of ammunition required for every enemy soldier killed in Vietnam.)3 In the course of calculating confirmed sniper kills, no enemy was counted as a kill unless an American soldier actually was able to physically "place his foot" on the body.

  Yet for all its effectiveness, there is a strange revulsion and resistance toward this very personal, one-on-one killing by snipers.

  Peter Staff, in his book on snipers, notes that after every war "the 110 KILLING AND PHYSICAL D I S T A N C E

  United States military rushes to distance itself from its snipers.

  The same men called upon to perform impossible missions during combat quickly find themselves to be peacetime pariahs. World War I, World War II, Korea. It was the same."

  World War II-era fighter pilots, firing their battery of heavy machine guns at the enemy, would probably fit into the long-range category, but they are hampered by lack of group absolution and their powerful identification with an enemy w h o is so remarkably similar to them. Colonel Barry Bridger of the U.S. Air Force described to Dyer the difference between air combat (long range) and ground battle (medium and close range):