On killing Read online

  In the early morning hours of the third of June 1864, forty thousand Union soldiers under the command of Ulysses S. Grant 26 KILLING AND THE E X I S T E N C E OF R E S I S T A N C E

  attacked the Confederate army at Cold Harbor, Virginia. The Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee were in a carefully prepared system of trenches and artillery emplacements unlike anything that Grant's Army of the Potomac had ever encountered.

  A newspaper correspondent observed that these positions were

  "intricate, zig-zagged lines within lines . . . lines built to enfilade an opposing line, lines within which lies a battery [of artillery]."

  By the evening of the third of June more than seven thousand attacking Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured while inflicting negligible damage on the well-entrenched Confederates.

  Bruce Catton, in his superb and definitive multivolume account of the Civil War, states, "Offhand, it would seem both difficult and unnecessary to exaggerate the horrors of Cold Harbor, but for some reason — chiefly, perhaps, the desire to paint Grant as a callous and uninspired butcher — no other Civil War battle gets as warped a presentation as this one."

  Catton is referring largely to exaggerated accounts of Union casualties (usually claiming the thirteen thousand casualties of two weeks' fighting at Cold Harbor as the casualty rate for the one day's fighting), but he also debunks the very common misconception that seven thousand (or even thirteen thousand) casualties occurred in

  "Eight Minutes at Cold Harbor." This belief is not so much wrong as it is a gross oversimplification. It is quite correct that most of the isolated, disjointed Union charges launched at Cold Harbor were halted in the first ten to twenty minutes, but once the attackers' momentum was broken the attacking Union soldiers did not flee, and the killing did not end. Catton notes that "the most amazing thing of all in this fantastic battle is the fact that all along the front the beaten [Union soldiers] did not pull back to the rear."

  Instead they did exactly what Union and Confederate soldiers had done over and over again in that war: "They stayed where they were, anywhere from 40 to 200 yards from the confederate line, gouging out such shallow trenches as they could, and kept on firing." And the Confederates kept on firing at them, often with cannons firing from the flanks and rear at horrendously short range.

  "All day long," says Catton, "the terrible sound of battle continued.

  Only an experienced soldier could tell by the sound alone, that NONFIRERS THROUGHOUT HISTORY 27

  the pitch of ;he combat in midafternoon was any lower than it had been in the murky dawn when the charges were being repulsed."

  It took over eight hours, not eight minutes, to inflict those horrendous casualties on Grant's soldiers. And as in most wars from the tine of Napoleon on down to today, it was not the infantry but the artillery that inflicted most of these casualties.

  Only when artillery (with its close supervision and mutual surveillance processes among the crew) is brought into play can any significant change in this killing rate be observed. (The greater distance that artillery usually is from its targets, as we will see, also increases its effectiveness.) The simple fact appears to be that, like S. L. A. Marshall's riflemen of World War II, the vast majority of he rifle- and musket-armed soldiers of previous wars were consis-ent and persistent in their psychological inability to kill their fellow human beings. Their weapons were technologically capable, and hey were physically quite able to kill, but at the decisive moment each man became, in his heart, a conscientious objector who could not bring himself to kill the man standing before him.

  This all indicates that there is a force in play here. A previously undiscovered psychological force. A force stronger than drill, stronger than peer pressure, even stronger than the self-preservation instinct. The impact of this force is not limited to only the black-powder era or only to World War II: it can also be seen in World War I.

  Nonfirers of World War I

  Colonel Milton Mater served as an infantry company commander in World War II and relates several World War II experiences that strongly support Marshall's observations. Mater also provides us with several instances in which World War I veterans warned him to expect that there would be many nonfirers in combat.

  When he first joined the service in 1933, Mater asked his uncle, a veteran of World War I, about his combat experience. "I was amazed to find that the experience foremost in his mind was

  'draftees who wouldn't shoot.' He expressed it something like this:

  'They thought if they didn't shoot at the Germans, the Germans wouldn't shoot at them.'"

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  Another veteran of the trenches of World War I taught Mater in an R O T C class in 1937 that, based on his experiences, nonfirers would be a problem in any future war. " H e took pains to impress us with the difficulty of making some men fire their rifles to avoid becoming sitting ducks for the fire and movement of the enemy."

  There is ample indication of the existence of the resistance to killing and that it appears to have existed at least since the black-powder era. This lack of enthusiasm for killing the enemy causes many soldiers to posture, submit, or flee, rather than fight; it represents a powerful psychological force on the battlefield; and it is a force that is discernible throughout the history of man. T h e application and understanding of this force can lend new insight to military history, the nature of war, and the nature of man.

  Chapter Three

  Why Can't Johnny Kill?

  Why did individual soldiers over hundreds of years refuse to kill the enemy, even when they knew that doing so would endanger their own lives? And why, if this has been so throughout history, have we not been fully aware of it?

  Why Can't Johnny Kill?

  Many veteran hunters, upon hearing accounts of nonfirers, might say, "Aha, buck fever," and they would be quite right. But what is buck fever? And why do men experience during the hunt that inability to kill that we call buck fever? (The relationship between the failures to kill on the battlefield and failures to kill in the hunt are explored more completely in a later section.) We must turn back to S. L. A. Marshall for the answer.

  Marshall studied this issue during the entire period of World War II. He, more than any other individual prior to him, understood the thousands of soldiers who did not fire at the enemy, and he concluded that "the average and healthy individual . . . has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility. . . . At the vital point," says Marshall, the soldier "becomes a conscientious objector."

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  KILLING AND THE E X I S T E N C E OF R E S I S T A N C E

  Marshall understood the mechanics and emotions of combat.

  He was a combat veteran of World War I, asking the combat veterans of World War II about their responses to battle, and he understood, he had been there. "I well recall . . . ," said Marshall,

  "the great sense of relief that came to [World War I] troops when they were passed to a quiet sector." And he believed that this

  "was due not so much to the realization that things were safer there as to the blessed knowledge that for a time they were not under the compulsion to take life.'" In his experience that philosophy of the World War I soldier was "Let 'em go; we'll get 'em some other time."

  Dyer also studied the matter carefully, building his knowledge on those w h o knew, and he too understood that "men will kill under compulsion — men will do almost anything if they know it is expected of them and they are under strong social pressure to comply — but the vast majority of men are not born killers."

  T h e U.S. Army Air Corps (now the U.S. Air Force) ran head-on into this problem when it discovered that during World War II less than 1 percent of their fighter pilots accounted for 30 to 40 percent of all enemy aircraft destroyed in the air, and according to Gabriel, most fighter pilots "never sh
ot anyone down or even tried t o . " Some suggest that simple fear was the force that prevented these men from killing, but these pilots usually flew in small groups led by proven killers w h o took the nonkillers into dangerous situations, and these men bravely followed. But when it came time to kill, they looked into the cockpit at another man, a pilot, a flier, one of the "brotherhood of the air," a man frighteningly like themselves; and when faced with such a man it is possible that the vast majority simply could not kill him. T h e pilots of both fighter and bomber aircraft faced the terrible dilemma of air combat against others of their own kind, and this was a significant factor in making their task difficult. (The matter of the mechanics of killing in air battles and the U.S. Air Force's remarkable discoveries in attempting to preselect "killers" for pilot training are addressed later in this study.)

  That the average man will not kill even at the risk of all he holds dear has been largely ignored by those w h o attempt to WHY CAN'T JOHNNY KILL?

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  understand the psychological and sociological pressures of the battlefield. Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form the single most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrence of war. If we understand this, then we understand the magnitude of the horror of killing in combat.

  The Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit in his book The Psychology of Conflict and Combat, referring to Marshall's studies, says that it is "clear that many soldiers do not shoot directly at the enemy. Many reasons are given; one of them — which, oddly enough, is not often discussed — may be the reluctance of the individual to act in a direct aggressive way."

  Why is this not often discussed? If Johnny can't kill, if the average soldier will not kill unless coerced and conditioned and provided with mechanical and mental leverage, then why has it not been understood before?

  British field marshal Evelyn Wood has said that in war only cowards need lie. I believe that to call the men who did not fire in combat cowards is grossly inaccurate, but those who did not fire do, indeed, have something to hide. Or at the very least something that they would not be very proud of and would readily lie about in later years. The point is that (1) an intense, traumatic, guilt-laden situation will inevitably result in a web of forgetfulness, deception, and lies; (2) such situations that continue for thousands of years become institutions based on a tangled web of individual and cultural forgetfulness, deception, and lies tightly woven over thousands of years; and (3) for the most part there have been two such institutions about which the male ego has always justified selective memory, self-deception, and lying. These two institutions are sex and combat. After all, "All is fair in love and war."

  For thousands of years we did not understand human sexuality.

  We understood the big things about sex. We knew that it made babies, and it worked. But we had no idea how human sexuality affected the individual. Until the studies of human sexuality by Sigrnund Freud and researchers of this century we had not even 32 KILLING AND THE E X I S T E N C E OF R E S I S T A N C E

  begun to really understand the role that sex played in our lives.

  For thousands of years we did not truly study sex and therefore had no hope of ever understanding it. The very fact that in studying sex we were studying ourselves made impartial observation difficult. Sex was especially difficult to study because so much of the ego and self-esteem of each individual was invested in this area full of myths and misunderstanding.

  If someone was impotent or frigid, would he or she let that be common knowledge? If the majority of the marriages of two centuries ago suffered problems with impotence or frigidity, would we have known? An educated man of two hundred years ago would have probably said, "They manage to make plenty of babies, don't they? They must be doing something right!"

  And if one hundred years ago a researcher discovered that sexual abuse of children was rampant in society, h o w would such a discovery be treated? Freud made just such a discovery, and he was personally disgraced and professionally scorned by his peers and by society at large for even suggesting such a thing. It is only today, one hundred years later, that we have begun to accept and address the magnitude of sexual abuse of children in our society.

  Until someone with authority and credibility asked individuals in privacy and with dignity, we had no hope of ever realizing what was occurring sexually in our culture. And even under such circumstances, society as a whole has to be sufficiently prepared and enlightened in order to throw off the blinders that limit its ability to perceive itself.

  In the same way that we did not understand what was occurring in the bedroom, we have not understood what was occurring on the battlefield. O u r ignorance of the destructive act matched that of the procreative act. If a soldier would not kill in combat, when it was his duty and responsibility to do so, would he let that be common knowledge? And if the majority of soldiers two hundred years ago did not fulfill their duties on the battlefield, would we have known? A general of the era would probably have said, "They manage to kill plenty of people don't they? They w o n the war W H Y CAN'T JOHNNY KILL? 33

  for us didn't they? They must be doing something right!" Until S. L. A. Marshall asked the individuals involved, immediately after the fact, we had no hope of understanding what was occurring on the battlefield.

  Philosophers and psychologists have long been aware of man's basic inability to perceive that which is closest to him. Sir Norman Angell tells us that "it is quite in keeping with man's curious intellectual history, that the simplest and most important questions are those he asks least often." And the philosopher-soldier Glenn Gray speaks from personal experience in World War II when he observes that "few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the real truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling. This is especially true," observes Gray, "of men in war. The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink."

  If a professional soldier were to see through the fog of his own self-deception, and if he were to face the cold reality that he can't do what he has dedicated his life to, or that many of his soldiers would rather die than do their duty, it would make his life a lie.

  Such a man would be apt to deny his weakness with all the energy he could muster. No, the soldiers are not apt to write of their failures or the failures of their men; with few exceptions, it is only the heroes and the glory that make their way into print.

  Part of the reason for our lack of knowledge in this area is that combat is, like sex, laden with a baggage of expectations and myth.

  A belief that most soldiers will not kill the enemy in close combat is contrary to what we want to believe about ourselves, and it is contrary to what thousands of years of military history and culture have told us. But are the perceptions handed down to us by our culture and our historians accurate, unbiased, and reliable?

  In A History of Militarism, Alfred Vagts accuses military history, as an institution, of having played a large part in the process of militarizing minds. Vagts complains that military history is consistently written "with polemic purpose for the justification of individuals or armies and with small regard for socially relevant facts."

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  He states, "A very large part of military history is written, if not for the express purpose of supporting an army's authority, at least with the intention of not hurting it, not revealing its secrets, avoiding the betrayal of weakness, vacillation, or distemper."

  Vagts paints an image of military and historical institutions that for thousands of years have reinforced and supported each other in a process of mutual glorification and aggrandizement. To a certain extent, this is probably because those who are good at killing in war are quite often those who throughout history have hacked their way to power. The military and the politicians have
been the same people for all but the most recent part of human history, and we know that the victor writes the history books.

  As a historian, as a soldier, and as a psychologist, I believe that Vagts is quite correct. If for thousands of years the vast majority of soldiers secretly and privately were less than enthused about killing their fellow man on the battlefield, the professional soldiers and their chroniclers would be the last to let us know the inadequacies of their particular charges.

  The media in our modern information society have done much to perpetuate the myth of easy killing and have thereby become part of society's unspoken conspiracy of deception that glorifies killing and war. There are exceptions — such as Gene Hackman's Bat 21, in which an air force officer has to kill people up close and personal for a change and is horrified at what he has done — but for the most part we are given James Bond, Luke Skywalker, Rambo, and Indiana Jones blithely and remorselessly killing off men by the hundreds. The point here is that there is as much disinformation and as little insight concerning the nature of killing coming from the media as from any other aspect of our society.

  Even after Marshall's World War II revelations, the subject of nonfirers is an uncomfortable one for today's military. Writing in Army magazine — the U.S. Army's foremost military journal —

  Colonel Mater states that his experiences as an infantry company commander in World War II strongly supported Marshall's findings and noted several World War I anecdotes that suggest that the problem of nonfirers was just as serious in that war.

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  Mater then bitterly — and appropriately — complains that

  "thinking back over my many years of service, I cannot remember a single official lecture or class discussion of how to assure that your men will fire." This included "such formal schooling as the wartime Infantry Leadership and Battle School I attended in Italy and the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, that I attended in 1966. Nor do I remember any articles on the subject in Army magazine or other military publications."5