The soldier’s mission, at its most primal, was to kill the enemy. The recruit was trained to use his weapons and told that destroying America’s enemies was necessary and justified. He was then immersed in an environment in which his main source of stress came from someone in a different uniform who was trying to kill him first. Under those circumstances, as one Vietnam veteran observed, and contrary to what a few students of soldier behavior claim, most men do not hesitate to shoot back: “People say, well, I could never kill a man. That’s bullshit. They can. Anybody can kill. It takes more to make one man kill than it does the next. The training helps a lot; it gets you there. But combat—you know, once they start shooting at you, if you don’t shoot back you’re a damned fool.”1
Though willing and able to accomplish his deadly mission, each soldier reacted differently to killing. Some killed impassively, a few eagerly. Some soldiers were plagued by guilt, but most accepted killing as a distasteful part of the job and did not dwell on the matter. The degree to which a soldier hated and dehumanized his enemy affected how reluctantly, or willingly, he killed. The leaders and the primary group set limits on what was acceptable behavior in accomplishing this deadly mission. But sometimes soldiers went beyond the acceptable bounds, killing prisoners of war or unarmed civilians.
PREPARING FOR THE KILL: SANCTIFICATION AND JUSTIFICATION
Preparing the soldier to carry out his mission began in earnest during initial training, when he was taught to use the basic tools of his trade, such as the rifle, bayonet, and grenade. Perhaps equally important, the trainee learned that killing America’s enemies was not only legally sanctioned but also his duty.2 For most soldiers, this license to kill did not automatically instill willingness; soldiers also wanted to believe that the enemy deserved to die. The reasons why the enemy had to be fought and defeated varied by foe and by war, but some themes were remarkably constant—what philosopher Sam Keen calls “archetypes of the enemy”: “Wars come and go, but—strangely, amid changing circumstances—the hostile imagination has a certain standard repertoire of images it uses to dehumanize the enemy.”3 America thus viewed its enemies as godless, evil, barbaric, greedy for conquest, even bestial.4
The effect of this imagery, as Keen notes, was to dehumanize the enemy, and since the ideal human was an American, the ideological, racial, and cultural differences, real or exaggerated, between America and its enemies made them easier to dehumanize.5 Much of this process occurred as part of an overall propaganda effort, especially during the world wars. Before and after donning their uniforms, men were repeatedly exposed to inflammatory comments in the media, in sermons, and in the speeches of opinion leaders about America’s actual or potential enemies. Anti-German propaganda was common in the years before America’s entry into World War I, and its impact was evident, writes Mark Meigs, in the doughboys’ speech and letters: “Soldiers themselves adopted the language of propaganda, often calling the German enemy ‘Huns,’ or sometimes, in reference to the often recounted stories of atrocities committed by Germans, ‘baby killers.’”6 Will Judy was aware of this propagandizing and deemed it essential if distasteful: “The leaders must preach patriotism to warm us to war, then must begin to grind hate out of the mills of publicity. . . . Patriotism is a beautiful thing and worthy of worship; but war prostitutes it of necessity.”7
Propagandizing in the form of lurid accounts of Japanese and Nazi brutalities prior to America’s entry into World War II similarly created hostile sentiments. Leon C. Standifer, a devout Baptist, explained that part of this propagandizing came from the pulpit: “‘Thou shalt not kill’ became less clear. We started learning about justified killing. It came on slowly until Pearl Harbor. After that, ‘Kill the dirty Japs’ was a popular sentiment.”8
The propaganda effort before and during the world wars undoubtedly helped to turn opinion against the “Huns,” “Krauts,” and “Japs.” What is less clear is the extent to which military training and indoctrination, beyond sanctioning the soldier’s mission of killing, contributed to this process. Formal indoctrination efforts started too late in World War I to have an impact. During World War II, indoctrination failed either to boost the soldiers’ commitment to the country’s war aims or to enhance their hatred of the enemy.9 Furthermore, soldiers who comment on their training during the world wars rarely mention a deliberate effort by their trainers to disparage the enemy or to instill blood lust.10
The process changed, however, by the Vietnam War era. The dehumanization of the Viet Cong, or the “gooks” as they were called, became integral to the training process. Jonathan Shay writes, “Vietnam-era military training reflexively imparted the image of a demonized adversary. The enemy soldier was pictured as evil and loathsome, deserving to be killed as the enemy of God and as God-hated vermin, so inhuman as not really to care if he lives or dies.”11 Shay overdramatizes the case, but this dehumanization process was nevertheless blatant enough to elicit comments from historians and soldiers alike.12 Private Reginald Edwards recalls what he learned about the Vietnamese enemy while in marine boot camp: “The only thing they told us about the Viet Cong was they were gooks. They were to be killed. Nobody sits around and gives you their historical and cultural background. They’re the enemy. Kill, kill, kill.”13 The message received by the army trainee was the same, as Specialist Haywood T. Kirkland remembers it: “Then they told us when you go over in Vietnam, you gonna be face to face with Charlie, the Viet Cong. They were animals, or something other than human. They ain’t have no regard for life. . . . [The trainers] wouldn’t allow you to talk about them [the Viet Cong] as if they were people. They told us they’re not to be treated with any type of mercy. . . . That’s what they engraved into you. That killer instinct.”14
Dave Grossman believes that this dehumanization of the enemy and the “deification of killing” was intentionally added to the Vietnam-era training process to heighten trainee aggressiveness.15 He may be correct, but there was a more basic reason for stirring up hatred of the “gooks.” The average Vietnam-era trainee entered service with little animosity toward and hence no particular urge to kill an enemy about whom he knew next to nothing. During the world wars, on the other hand, as a result of the steady stream of widely publicized German and Japanese aggressions and atrocities, those joining the military were already convinced that the enemy was evil, or at least fought for sinister causes, and had to be stopped. The Vietnam War draftee, however, was likely to ask, “Where is Vietnam and why should I care?”
After completing training, the soldier understood that he possessed the skills to kill and that doing so was sanctioned and even expected of him. Yet many soldiers echoed the sentiments of the World War II sergeant Charles Brown: “I think the biggest thing in war is to untrain you from the influences that say you don’t kill. . . . I feel the men I was with did not become untrained from the civilization in which they grew up. It takes time to make a killer out of a man.”16 For Standifer, even after completing his infantry training, being told that “killing the dirty Japs” was permissible did not mean that he was eager to get started: “What bothered me most was knowing that I now had the skill to kill quickly and easily, but still feeling deep revulsion at the possibility of having to do so.”17
Even the grunt heading off to Vietnam did not necessarily feel ready or eager to kill, despite the dehumanized image of his enemy that his training cadre had attempted to instill in him. Private David Parks recorded in his diary a question that his drill sergeant had asked him and his fellow trainees. Though intended to be rhetorical, it was not so for Parks: “The sergeant asked a tough question today. He wanted to know if we were ready to kill. I’ve thought about this for a long time now. I don’t know. I don’t think so.”18
THE CATALYST OF THE BATTLEFIELD
As Sergeant Brown observed, it took time to make a killer, and many green soldiers, like Parks and Standifer, were not at all sure that they were ready to become one. The environment of war, however, quickly turned most soldiers into capable if not enthusiastic killers, although the conversion process could be painful—a first killing was a traumatic experience for many. The first enemy soldier that William Manchester shot was at close range. Manchester, who had always had a “deep-seated” horror of violence, emptied his .45-caliber pistol into a Japanese sniper and watched him die, after which “a feeling of disgust and selfhatred clotted darkly in my throat, gagging me.” He vomited, wet himself, and began shaking uncontrollably.19
For Manchester, reluctance to kill was overcome by the need to shoot an armed enemy who, if not quickly dispatched, would have shot him instead. Jon Neely’s first encounter with the enemy in Vietnam was under similar circumstances. A Viet Cong soldier stepped from behind a tree and leveled his weapon at Neely’s squad leader. Instinctively, Neely pulled up his M-79 grenade launcher and fired: “I hit the guy dead center and there wasn’t much left of him.” Neely vomited from the shock: “To physically kill someone—it really got to me and it took me a few days to get over that.”20
In some cases, soldiers not in imminent danger hesitated to make their first kill. Whayland Greene, a fresh replacement in the Philippines in World War II, had a clear shot at an unsuspecting Japanese soldier but held his fire, hoping that one of his comrades would do the killing instead. A nearby sergeant obliged him.21
Some soldiers did not hesitate, however, even when making their first kill. Their understanding that killing the enemy was sanctioned and expected sufficed to allay any qualms. One of Mark Baker’s interviewees arrived in Vietnam at the height of the enemy’s Tet Offensive. During his first night in-country, he found himself defending a perimeter: “The VC were coming in the wire and I was shooting them. . . . I killed a couple myself. I thought in the back of my mind that I was going to break down and cry because I killed one, but to me it was nothing. . . . It didn’t bother me.”22
Audie Murphy’s first kill came during the invasion of Sicily, when he calmly dropped to one knee, sighted in on two Italian officers escaping on horseback, and shot them out of the saddle with a bullet apiece. Murphy’s green lieutenant hollered, “Now why did you do that?” A nonplussed Murphy responded, “That’s our job isn’t it? They would have killed us if they’d had the chance. That’s their job. Or have I been wrongly informed?’” Murphy learned with experience that some soldiers, like his lieutenant, adapted more slowly to battlefield realities than others: “In the training areas we talked toughly, thought toughly; and finally we believed we really were tough. But it is not easy to shed the idea that human life is sacred. The lieutenant has not yet accepted the fact that we have been put into the field to deal out death. I have.”23
Sooner or later, most soldiers accepted, as Murphy did, that they were indeed there to deal out death, and if they did not deal it out first, then the enemy would.24 In the environment of combat, most soldiers quickly overcame any reluctance, or queasiness, about killing. Several weeks after killing his first enemy—weeks of nearly continuous combat on Okinawa—Sergeant Manchester won a shootout with another Japanese sniper. As he approached his dead enemy, there was none of the shaking, vomiting, or remorse that had accompanied his first kill. Indeed, his only reaction was anger because this Japanese soldier had obviously been living in a warm, dry cave or bunker: “To my astonishment, and then to my rage, I saw that his uniform was dry. All these weeks I have been suffering in the rain, night and day, this bastard had been holed up in some waterproof cave. It was the only instant in the war when I felt hatred for a Jap. I swung back my right leg and kicked the bloody head.”25
The night before landing with his marine battalion in Vietnam, Private Richard E. Ogden had a “chilling thought”: “The thought of killing someone terrified the hell out of me.” Several months later, however, after killing a Viet Cong sapper with his bare hands, Ogden’s sense of self-preservation had clearly asserted itself: “I told myself that never again would I feel remorse or sadness for killing, because I was alive and it felt wonderful.”26
Most soldiers took little pleasure in killing, but once immersed in the environment of war, few remained overly troubled by it, either. Ernie Pyle observed how the GIs in World War II adjusted to their new profession: “The most vivid change was the casual and workshop manner in which they talked about killing. They had made the psychological transition from their normal belief that taking human life was sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing was a craft. No longer was there anything morally wrong about killing. In fact, it was an admirable thing.”27
Lieutenant Paul Boesch had made that transition by the time he killed his first German face-to-face in World War II. He had fired at the enemy many times before, but this time “there could be no doubt” that he had personally shot the man now dying at his feet. Yet he felt no remorse: “I could stand there and watch him die and feel absolutely no qualms of any kind. . . . It was as if I were a carpenter and had driven home a nail which secured one beam to another, the job I was assigned to do.”28
David Parks, who was not sure if he could answer in the affirmative his drill sergeant’s question about his readiness to kill, discovered in Vietnam that he was: “Charlie [the Viet Cong] isn’t easy to find, but when you do catch up with him he’ll fight like a cornered rat. They blast away and we blast away. Everyone has killing on their mind. I don’t have the fear about it that I thought I would. All I want to do is get it over with.”29 The soldier might not like killing, but as Lieutenant Philip Caputo notes, he did not hesitate if his life was at stake: “Selfpreservation, that most basic and tyrannical of all instincts, can turn a man into a coward or, as was more often the case in Vietnam, into a creature who destroys without hesitation or remorse whatever poses even a potential threat to his life. A sergeant in my platoon, ordinarily a pleasant young man, told me once, ‘Lieutenant, I’ve got a wife and two kids at home and I’m going to see ’em again and don’t care who I’ve got to kill or how many of ’em to do it.’”30
Though the killing was often necessary, it was not always done dispassionately. Soldiers sometimes killed in anger, especially if a close buddy had been killed or comrades lost to “cowardly” or “unfair” practices, such as sniping or booby trapping.31 Private Robert Stiles’s buddy was killed by a Japanese sniper hiding in a treetop. They had been close friends for two years. “I was stunned,” said Stiles, “but only for a minute.” He grabbed a Browning Automatic Rifle and went after the sniper: “I sprayed that fuckin’ tree with a whole clip and down came the Nip. As I look back on it, what the hell, he was only doing his job, same as me, but I’m still glad I was the one who got him.”32
Lieutenant Caputo’s platoon, while on a typical sweep operation in Vietnam, was caught in the blast of a command-detonated mine. Nine men were wounded, five seriously. As Caputo carried one of his wounded men to the medevac helicopter, “I felt my own anger, a very cold, very deep anger that had no specific object.” He soon found an object to hate, however—the wires used to detonate the mine were discovered and traced back to a nearby village. The Viet Cong who set off the explosion were by then undoubtedly mixed in with and indistinguishable from the villagers. Without hesitation, Caputo ordered the village set ablaze with white-phosphorous bazooka shells: “All right, I thought, tit for tat.”33
Such fits of rage were usually short-lived, as Elmar Dinter notes: “Feelings of hatred and revenge are the results of fleeting frustrations. If for instance a good friend has just been killed, these emotions increase, but as time passes, they diminish rapidly again. The average soldier does not maintain constant feelings of hatred and revenge.”34 Some soldiers did, however. For them, killing was no longer business; it was personal, as it was for Lieutenant Franklyn A. Johnson, beginning with the day his best friend was killed in Sicily in World War II: “For me, like others who lose a buddy, the day Dick is killed is when the war gets personal, and my hatred of our enemy becomes a continual, gnawing thing.”35
The anger, frustration, and inability to retaliate in kind generated by the enemy’s use of booby traps and mines in Vietnam produced a similar hatred in many grunts, as one of Mark Baker’s interviewees recalled: “We changed a lot. The change was individual. It was silence. It was reserve. The anger came from within, for seeing the guys blown up. The unspoken words behind the anger were, ‘You fucking bastards, you’re going to get it now. Let me find one of you and you’re going to die just like they died. I’m going to blow your fucking brains out.’ We went into the jungle angry and silent and very determined to do what we were trained to do—which was to kill.”36
Some soldiers thus burned with a steady hatred while for others anger and a desire for vengeance were passing emotions. Sometimes, when soldiers were engaged in heavy, close combat, the adrenalin flowed, noise and chaos abounded, and rational thought almost ceased. The terms “blood lust” and “in the heat of battle” appear in the memoirs to describe such moments.37 Soldiers often retained only disjointed recollections of what had happened during this sort of fighting. Bob Hoffman attempted to describe the bloody assault in which he won a Distinguished Service Cross and ended up in the hospital with multiple wounds, but his account is sketchy: “I don’t remember all the battle—didn’t when it was over.”38
In close combat, the killing became automatic, and no quarter was given. Lieutenant Joseph D. Lawrence and his men, during an assault in the Meuse-Argonne campaign, showed no mercy to a fleeing enemy who, just moments earlier, had been firing on them. His men opened up with aimed rifle fire, and “the execution was heavy.” Lawrence leveled his pistol at a German and fired, “the bullet striking just above the ear and tearing off the top of his head. . . . As I look back on the scene it is horrible, but then, while the heat of battle was upon us, it was thrilling.”39 Attacking doughboys who watched their comrades falling all around them were not in a charitable mood if they lived long enough to close with their tormentors. As Captain John W. Thomason recalled, “A man can stand just so much of that. Life presently ceases to be desirable; the only desirable thing is to kill that [machine] gunner, kill him with your hands!”40
After an intense fight, the adrenalin subsided and the survivors were physically exhausted. The loss of comrades began to register, and soldiers grieved, but they also realized, with a rush of relief and elation, that they were still alive. Lieutenant James Brady, returning unharmed from a failed attack during the Korean War in which thirty-two of sixty-four marines were killed or wounded, knew he would grieve for the dead, but that would come later: “I don’t know how anyone who hasn’t been shot at up close in a real firefight can possibly understand how good you feel afterward. Men have been killed and hurt, the fight has been won or lost, but there is only the one truly significant fact: that you are still alive, you have not been killed.”41
It was better still, according to the platoon leader James R. McDonough, if survival was accompanied by victory. The enemy dead were tangible evidence of that victory; hence their death was cause for neither remorse nor guilt but triumph:
Could it be—repugnant thought that it was—pleasure that one feels at the sight of an opponent’s body? How could a civilized man feel such a thing?
Perhaps the emotion was born of relief. Ground combat is personal. . . . It is a primordial struggle. . . . Emotions flow with an intensity unimaginable to the nonparticipant: fear, hate, passion, desperation. And then—triumph! The enemy falls, lies there lifeless, his gaping corpse a mockery of the valiant fight he made. Your own emotions withdraw, replaced by a flow of relief and exhilaration, because he is dead and not you.42
GERMAN FOES
The implication thus far has been that it did not matter who the enemy was, and up to a point that was true. The soldier went to war knowing that his job was to kill America’s evil, barbaric, grasping, or at least woefully misguided foes. Once on the battlefield, the realities of kill-or-be-killed sank in, and he fought to survive, to avenge his dead comrades, to save his buddies, and to accomplish the mission, regardless of who the enemy might be.
On the other hand, who the enemy was and how he fought mattered a great deal. The physical environment and the enemy’s combat methods ensured that the fighting in the Pacific and Asia, for example, was especially brutal. Racial hatred played a lesser role in generating this brutality than is commonly perceived, but the influence of race cannot be ruled out. Unlike the Asian foe, the German enemy was ethnically and culturally akin to white America, as an incident related by Lieutenant George William Sefton illustrates. One night during the fighting in World War II, a lost German soldier stumbled into American lines and was killed. Sefton remembers that “the dead German was very young. His pale face had a two-day stubble of wispy growth. His combat uniform pockets contained several apples and a harmonica. He reminded me of my brother who had turned 18 in January.”43 American soldiers rifling through the pockets of dead Asian foes did not feel the emotional tug of seeing a dead “Jap” or “gook” who reminded them of their kid brothers back home.
Not that the American soldier harbored any special love for Germans. He believed that the Prussian militarists of the first war and the Nazis of the second war were evil people intent on conquest and domination. The soldier tended to differentiate, however, between the average German soldier and his political masters. Hence, there were “good” Germans, who were deluded and perhaps coerced into supporting an evil system, and “bad” Germans, who were the Prussian nobility or the Nazis and their Schutzstaffel (SS) functionaries.44
Differentiating between average Germans and their racist, autocratic, greedyfor-conquest leaders allowed American soldiers to approach their German counterparts with an open mind or even with a measure of compassion. The doughboys and GIs had absorbed some of the dehumanizing propaganda about barbaric Huns and cruel, self-proclaimed Nazi supermen, but the realities of contact with the German Frontkämpfer belied these images.45 Lieutenant Robert G. Merrick’s first “view of the despised Boche” in World War I was a prisoner-of-war work party: “They paused slightly in their work and watched us file by. With their small round caps and pea-green uniforms inscribed with an enormous white ‘P.G.’ (Prisonier de Guerre), they did not appear like such ferocious characters to us.”46
The World War II GI also discovered that his German foe appeared human enough and certainly did not look the part of supermen. Private Roscoe C. Blunt recalled seeing his first Germans, a bedraggled group of freshly captured Volksgrenadiers: “These frightened, half-starved Kriegs Gefangener (war prisoners) didn’t look at all like the images of vicious German soldiers with cruel, distorted, snarling faces displayed on posters back in basic training lectures. Facing them close up brought the war into sharper focus for me. I was dealing with men just like ourselves, only in different uniforms, speaking a different language and fighting for a different cause.”47
For most doughboys and GIs, first encounter with the German enemy dispelled notions of a barbaric foe. German actions on the battlefield, with some notable exceptions, reinforced the impression of a human enemy. The German soldier generally acted “correctly,” that is, according to American expectations. He surrendered if his situation was hopeless and in turn accepted the surrender of Americans and usually treated them properly. He cared about his own casualties, honored the Red Cross emblem by not firing on medics or vehicles displaying it, and even agreed to occasional truces to allow recovery of the dead and wounded.48 Doughboys went to France expecting bestial behavior from the Germans, but to their surprise they witnessed few instances of cruelty. Bob Hoffman recalled the “usual atrocity stories,” but he “never saw any examples of such torture, killing and mutilation.”49 Nor could Father Francis P. Duffy, at war’s end, condemn German behavior: “We fought the Germans two long tricks in the trenches and in five pitched battles and they never did anything to us that we did not try to do to them. And we played the game as fairly as it can be played. We followed their retreat through three sectors, in two of which they had been for years, and we never witnessed at first hand any of the atrocities we read about.”50
The Germans, during their occupation and subsequent retreat from portions of Belgium and France, certainly exploited the local populace and often looted or destroyed private property, but Hoffman’s and Duffy’s assessments are consistent with other doughboy memoirs, which contain few references to German battlefield atrocities.51 German cruelty was more in evidence during World War II as GIs entered German-occupied territories. Some GIs who had been inclined toward a humane view of their German enemy even began to change their minds.52
This change of heart tended to come only late in the war, however, usually after GIs had witnessed the horrors of the concentration and displaced-persons camps. Even then, the “good German–bad German” rationale worked to limit the scope of American hatred. For example, the worst battlefield atrocities on the western front occurred during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, notably the slaughter of American prisoners of war by SS troops near the town of Malmédy. Word of this massacre spread like wildfire through the American forces, but the resulting hatred and retribution were generally restricted to the SS. Private Blunt’s attitude was typical: “There was a vast difference between Wehrmacht Soldaten and SS storm troopers. One took prisoners, the other executed them and perpetrated unspeakable atrocities against defenseless civilians.”53 Lieutenants Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, whose infantry company was one of many committed to stemming the German offensive of December 1944, asserted that fair play was out the window after Malmédy, but only against the SS: “If Company K’s reaction to the atrocity was typical, the Germans had committed their worst mistake of the war on the Western Front. We had fought by rules of a sort. In the heat of battle, prisoners were sometimes killed. We knew that. But this was mass murder, and the SS was going to have to pay and pay heavily.”54
After Malmédy, SS troops attempted surrender only at their own peril, but GIs continued to fight “by rules of a sort” when facing Wehrmacht troops. This distinction between Wehrmacht and SS troops was not entirely inappropriate. The battlefield atrocities of the SS were the shocking exceptions that validated the general rule that most Germans “fought fair.” They also fought well. Father Francis P. Duffy provides the doughboys’ opinion of their enemy: “They judge the German soldier by their own experience and by soldier standards. They do not fear him, they do not hate him, they do not despise him either. They respected him when he put up a good fight or made a clean getaway, and that was most of the time.”55 Hoffman was more grudging but also positive: “They were entirely worthy foes. I disliked them, but I was forced to admire them, too, for the way they fought.”56
The Germans again proved to be worthy foes in World War II. Like his doughboy predecessor, the GI respected his German counterparts as fighters. As Bill Mauldin observed, “Because our men soon learn to be more or less professional fighters at the front, they have a deep respect for the German’s ability to wage war. You may hear a doggie call a German a skunk, but he’ll never say he’s not good.”57 Klaus Huebner, after watching the Germans fight in Italy for over a year, conceded that “even though enemy, we must admit that they have been excellent soldiers.”58 According to Lee Kennett, this view of the German as a worthy adversary who normally conducted himself properly on the battlefield was critical in keeping the fighting, as harsh as it often was, within bounds. He adds that the European environment also helped to ameliorate the brutality. The European culture and countryside were similar to America. A GI might find a bottle of wine, a chicken to stew, and even a roof over his head. The soldier in the Pacific, however, “found himself in a strange and forbidding region inhabited by primitive people with a culture that had little or no attraction for him” and that provided few amenities.59
ASIAN FOES
Ground combat against the Germans, though invariably bloody, thus retained a measure of restraint, and most American soldiers did not deny the enemy his humanity. America’s Asian foes, on the other hand, were hated and dehumanized, and none more than the Japanese.60 Jesse Glenn Gray points out that restraint fell by the wayside once the Japanese were dehumanized to the point of being perceived by GIs as some sort of animal or vermin: “The enemy is sought out to be exterminated, not subdued. There is no satisfaction in capturing him. . . . There is also, of course, no safety in it [either], since he is held to be incapable of grasping civilized rules of warfare.”61 American racism undoubtedly played a role in this dehumanization process. John Hersey, in a reissue of Into the Valley, his 1943 story about marines on Guadalcanal, apologized for the racism evident in his book but elected to keep it in because it was an integral part of the war environment:
I have resisted the strong temptation to revise Into the Valley for this edition. The first passages to be cut would have been those that refer to the Japanese as animals. It was all very well—and “truthful” enough, for such things were indeed being said—for me to quote a Marine as wishing he were fighting against (white, blond?) Germans, who “react like men,” instead of against these Japanese animals, who “take to the jungle as if they were bred there.” But to my shame I am not quoting someone else when, after a mortar barrage begins, I write that I envisage “a swarm of intelligent little animals” fussing around the mortar tubes on the other side of the river.62
This demeaning racism was evident well before Pearl Harbor. Racial stereotyping had led Americans to believe that the Japanese could not possibly be their match, and thus Japan’s early successes in the war generated shock, alarm, and fear.63 The reaction of Gerald P. Averill and his fellow marines to the attack on Pearl Harbor was typically incredulous: “It was inconceivable. We stared at each other blankly, stunned. Like all other Americans growing up in the late thirties and early forties, we had been fed the national theme—the Japanese were stumpy, bowlegged, half-blind. They could not shoot; their ships were made from melted-down American beer cans; their aircraft, made of wood and cloth, without armor or armament, had no striking power. Yet in the span of those few hours . . . these same inferior people, with their substandard war machinery, had devastated major United States naval and air bases.”64
As the string of Japanese victories continued in the months after Pearl Harbor, American soldiers shifted from underestimating their opponent to endowing him with almost superhuman fighting capabilities, and dehumanizing racism again played a role in the process. The Japanese soldier was possessed, it seemed, of animal-like cunning, stealth, endurance, and night vision, making him a superior jungle and night fighter.65
With the Japanese defeat on Guadalcanal by the end of 1942, yet another shift in perception occurred. Japanese soldiers were inflexible and often committed tactical blunders and hence were not superhuman. After repulsing the disastrous Japanese charge across the Tenaru (Ilu) River on Guadalcanal, Captain William Hawkins commented, “Seeing all those [Japanese] corpses, and realizing how stupid the attack really was, knocked the aura of the Japanese superman into a cocked hat.”66 Racism again influenced the perception process, however. The enemy was still an animal, just no longer an exceptionally cunning and skillful one. He was now seen as some sort of especially nasty beast or vermin to be exterminated.67 Han Rants, fighting in the Philippines, expressed the GI’s common view that the Japanese were savage animals to be dispatched forthwith: “The great majority of enemy soldiers we faced were worse than uncivilized savages or wild beasts seeking to kill. . . . Each of us had to cope with their butchery in our own way but for me vengeance was the answer.”68
In Peter Bowman’s novel about an amphibious assault in the Pacific, published before war’s end, the protagonist reminds himself to be on the alert for the animalistic enemy, “stocky of build, with almost no perceptible waistline, that moves . . . with a shuffle rather than a stride . . . with yellow skin inclined toward hairiness, and buck teeth and a pair of squinting eyes slanted toward the nose and a characteristic odor like the smell of wild animals.”69
This racism, and the Japanese were equally guilty of it, helped ensure that the war in the Pacific would be fought with unparalleled brutality, as Eugene B. Sledge writes: “Official histories and memoirs of Marine infantrymen written after the war rarely reflect that hatred. But at the time of battle, Marines felt it deeply, bitterly, and as certainly as danger. . . . My experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa made me believe that the Japanese held mutual feelings for us. . . . This collective attitude . . . resulted in savage, ferocious fighting with no holds barred. This was not the dispassionate killing seen on other fronts or in other wars. This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands.”70
American soldiers also held racist opinions of their North Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese foes. As had occurred with the Japanese, racist attitudes sometimes caused the soldier initially to underestimate his opponents’ worthiness. Green units typically exhibited overconfidence prior to combat, but in the case of the first American units on the scene during the Korean War, that confidence was further boosted by the belief that no Asian foe could stand up to American troops. Captain Charles M. Bussey and his engineer company, part of the first American division to arrive in Korea, did not expect to be there long: “The word was that we would put up a show of force in the field in Korea, and when the enemy quaked and returned across the 38th Parallel—which was inevitable—we would return to home stations.”71
By the time that Lieutenant Uzal Ent arrived in Korea with the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, which followed on the heels of Bussey’s Twenty-fourth Division, the North Korean People’s Army had not only failed to scurry back across the Thirty-eighth Parallel but had also severely handled the first American troops to arrive. Ent noticed that racist assumptions about the enemy were not holding true: “What really bothered us was that the North Koreans hadn’t shown any awe, any respect if you will, for the American units that had been put in their way. There had been a definite feeling, not articulated maybe but very much in people’s minds, that the North Koreans would quit when they found out they were facing American troops. Of course they hadn’t quit.”72
A steady influx of American ground and air forces finally stopped the North Koreans and then drove them back across the Thirty-eighth Parallel. United Nations forces then continued attacking northward, intending to occupy North Korea and reunite the country, which triggered a massive intervention by the Chinese Communist Forces (CCF). The American leadership had discounted such an intervention, and the overextended UN forces were driven into headlong retreat in winter 1950–1951. Beyond numbers, this Chinese military success was attributed to the enemy’s animal-like cunning, stamina, and stealth, as Pat Frank described it in his novel: “This new enemy was not orthodox. This new enemy did not expose itself except on ground, and at a time, of its own choosing. Then it rose, as if birthed on the spot by the mud of Asia, in full strength and ferocity. . . . This new enemy slithered around your flanks, and stabbed your rear, and ate at your guts. You could not put your hands on him. It was like trying to strangle a jellyfish.”73
Endowing the enemy with superhuman, or, more accurately, nonhuman, attributes allowed Americans to explain away Chinese success without conceding that the enemy might possess such human qualities as military skill, bravery, or dedication. This dehumanized portrait, however, also inspired fear. How can such a fanatical, animalistic enemy be stopped? Samuel L. A. Marshall chastised the press for demoralizing UN forces in winter 1950–1951 by depicting the Chinese as unstoppable hordes: “Correspondents worked overtime portraying the new enemy in the most terrible aspect permitted by their imaginations; he was described as a fanatic horde breaking over our lines in irresistible waves, charging into the cannon’s mouth with maniacal fury, as if under the spell of some drug.”74
As with the Japanese and the North Koreans before them, the Chinese Communist Forces eventually proved to be beatable. Even their numerical superiority could not overcome American firepower. The discovery that the Chinese enemy was mortal, however, did not necessarily make him more human, just more killable. Lieutenant Ent did not feel any “personal animosity” toward his North Korean and Chinese enemies, but he believed that most GIs did, and he added that dehumanizing the enemy made it easier to kill them: “Many men fought with a visceral hatred of the enemy. Maybe the fact that they were Orientals had something to do with it. ‘Gooks’ was the standard term for them, and it was easier to think of them as not quite human, as something beneath us.”75
Underestimation of the enemy born of racism was not as evident in the first American units to deploy to Vietnam, perhaps because the Viet Minh had already proven themselves capable foes against the French. Grunts nevertheless expected the Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to be appropriately awed by American superiority; at least Robert Mason and his fellow helicopter pilots did: “The Cav [First Cavalry Division] is here now, and those gooks are going to shit when they see us in action.”76 Lieutenant Caputo and his marine battalion were equally optimistic about a quick victory over an inferior Asian foe: “We believed in our own publicity—Asian guerrillas did not stand a chance against U.S. Marines.”77
The VC and NVA were, in fact, disconcerted by the Americans and their helicopters and firepower, but they adjusted quickly and soon proved alarmingly adept at night fighting, concealment, and ambushes. As they had with earlier Asian foes, Americans attributed VC and NVA skills to animal-like qualities of endurance and stealth, as Lieutenant Alfred S. Bradford’s brigade staff did: “Staff adrenalin was flowing and so were staff jitters. For the first time I realized what a monster their imaginations had made out of the NVA. He could do anything. He could sneak up on an American and snip the buttons off his jungle fatigues. He could break through any barrier. He could mass any number of men. He never ran short of supplies. He could live on a handful of rice and a scoop of muddy water. He never got sick.”78 Headquarters staffs were not the only Americans to have jitters over the enemy’s animal-like instincts. The grunt on the perimeter at night also marveled at the VC’s seemingly supernatural stealth and cunning. The marines in Private Ogden’s company were amazed that the enemy could steal emplaced Claymore mines from under their noses and call out the names of unit members, threatening to come and get them: “The enemy was no longer warm flesh and blood; they were now an intangible, evil, macabre force.”79
Although Americans never did get the upper hand at night in Vietnam, they did discover that the enemy was not invincible. Grunts more often than not came out ahead in a firefight. As in earlier Asian wars, however, the enemy’s mortality did not equate to humanity. The enemy, and the Vietnamese people in general, were considered something less than human. The dehumanization process may have started back in training, but it continued and accelerated once the soldier arrived in-country.80 Americans did not understand Vietnamese culture and considered the natives poor and ignorant. Lieutenant Frederick Downs, newly arrived in Vietnam, learned from the soldier driving him to his unit that all Vietnamese, not just the enemy, were called “gooks.” The soldier explained why: “Friendly or not, they’re all called the same. Look at them. They don’t even know what good living is. They’re ignorant as owl shit, you know?”81 One of Mark Baker’s interviewees noted that this view was common: “Too many of us forgot that Vietnamese were people. We didn’t treat them like people after a while. . . . I really didn’t like to mistreat people over there. I tried as hard as I could . . . not that I didn’t from time to time.”82
As insidious as racism was in dehumanizing the enemy, thus making him easier to kill, the way America’s Asian foes fought was perhaps even more significant in generating hatred. Their methods and standards violated American concepts of fair play.83 In the South Pacific in World War II, Japanese battlefield brutality goes a long way toward explaining why the fighting became so vicious. American soldiers may have been initially reluctant to retaliate in kind, but as Ore Marion pointed out, they learned fast: “We learned about savagery from the Japanese. Those bastards had years of on-the-job training on how to be a savage on the Asian mainland. But those sixteen-to-nineteen-year-old kids we had on the Canal [Guadalcanal] were fast learners.”84
One of the first things GIs learned was that the Japanese did not seem to hold life dear. Enemy soldiers committed suicide or made hopeless banzai charges rather than surrendering. This “fanaticism,” more than American racism, the correspondent Dan Levin argues, explains why GIs came to loathe the Japanese: “I heard no crap about the ‘yellow peril’ among our young Marines. The mass suicides on Saipan—both the suicide banzais and the leaps off the cliffs at Marpi Point—had made many of our fellows believe they were facing a mysterious nation of fanatics; that’s something else.”85 American soldiers could never understand why the Japanese would commit suicide rather than surrender. The GI rationale simply became, if the Japanese do not care if they live or die, then why should we?
The next Asian foes to seem especially heedless of life were the Chinese during the Korean War. Although lurid accounts of human-wave attacks by screaming, fanatical Chinese have been overdone, the Chinese did often press their assaults with seemingly suicidal determination, according to the war correspondent Marguerite Higgins: “They frequently seemed to care very little for life and were willing to die unquestioningly. They would keep right on surging toward a target even though wave after wave of them were blown up in the process.”86 The machine gunner Ted White, fighting to hold off Chinese assaults during the enemy’s April 1951 offensive, agreed: “They kept coming in waves, and I kept firing. I fired my machine gun all night long. Everybody else was firing. And the artillery was dropping all around us. The artillery did a good job of keeping them off us. And all night long I’m thinking, These people are crazy. They’re dying in droves, and they just keep coming on.”87
This seemingly suicidal fanaticism mystified the GIs as much as Japanese banzai charges had in the previous war. Some GIs believed the rumor that the Chinese were “hopped up” on opium—how else to explain such behavior?88 The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese enemy did not usually expend lives as prodigiously as the Chinese and Japanese, nor did they normally commit suicide. Yet the grunts questioned the value that yet another Asian enemy placed on life because of the Viet Cong’s willingness to use women and children as combatants. The American belief that women and children should be spared the horrors of combat was thus violated, as Dave Grossman observes: “The standard methods of on-the-scene rationalization fail when the enemy’s child comes out to mourn over her father’s body or when the enemy is a child throwing a hand grenade. And the North Vietnamese and Vietcong understood this.”89
The low value that the Asian foe seemed to place on his own life was incomprehensible to Americans, but what really stirred up hatred was the enemy’s disregard for American lives. The American soldier expected his enemy to accept his surrender and treat him humanely, to respect the Red Cross emblem, to care for the wounded of both sides, and to spare noncombatants undue suffering and deprivations. The Asian foe often refused to play by these rules. In the case of the Japanese, asserts Dixon Wecter, this refusal incurred considerable American wrath: “Still greater hatred boils against the Japanese, with their studied Oriental sadism and refusal to pay even lip-service to the rules of the game. The deathmarch on Bataan, execution of flyers in Tokyo, beheading of prisoners, killing of medics trying to help the wounded, and machine-gunning of life rafts, add up to a rancor that generations are not likely to forget. ‘Kill the bastards’ is the war-cry of the Pacific.”90
Wecter writes with a vehemence typical of the war years, but postwar historians acknowledge that Japanese actions of the sort he describes started a downward slide into hatred and brutality early in the war.91 E. J. Kahn, in his brief memoir about his experiences in New Guinea, reveals the hatred generated by Japanese fighting methods: “Although Japanese exploits with knives have been well publicized, the New Guinea campaign . . . did not disclose any great proficiency on their part in this line, beyond bayoneting bound victims, raiding hospitals and stabbing the patients, and committing hara-kiri, at all of which they had already been known to be adept.”92 Japanese cruelties, actual and rumored, to prisoners, civilians, and wounded prompted GI hatred and responses in kind. As Peter Bowman put it in his novel, “Do unto Japs as Japs do unto you—but first.”93
The next Asian enemy, the North Koreans, seemed almost as brutal as the Japanese. Soldiers captured by the North Koreans were often tortured, killed, and their bodies mutilated. Mass executions of American prisoners occurred, and many more died from starvation and maltreatment.94 The Chinese exhibited less outright brutality and committed fewer atrocities than the North Koreans, but their treatment of prisoners was also far from humane, especially during the first winter of the war.95 Bill Mauldin, visiting the front in 1952, talked to a rifleman who said that the enemy in his sector were North Koreans, who “kill medics just for the fun of it” and were the ones, as opposed to the Chinese, who “have done most of the prisoner killing you hear about.”96 Lieutenant Beverly Scott summed up the GI’s opinion of North Korean fanaticism and brutality in terms reminiscent of those used to describe the Japanese, to whom the North Koreans were frequently compared: “They’d come right into your hole, try and shoot you or stab you or bite you if they didn’t have a weapon. Just fanatical as hell. Maybe thirty or forty of them would come straight at us in a kind of banzai attack, where they’d all get killed, but it was just to distract us while more of them were trying to sneak around us somewhere else. And they were vicious people. They mutilated bodies. They shot prisoners. Just, nasty, nasty people.”97
The GI learned that he could expect no quarter from such “nasty people” and was therefore disinclined to grant any. The American soldier in Vietnam similarly concluded that the Viet Cong were also nasty. Grunts were appalled at the Viet Cong terror campaign deliberately waged against their own people. Dominick Yezzo initially sympathized with the enemy, and the first enemy prisoners he met seemed like decent fellows. But after witnessing several Viet Cong atrocities, he changed his mind: “The Communist forces are continuing their wave of terrorism on the cities and civilian populated areas. . . . It’s awfully disgusting and churns my stomach. I can’t sympathize with North Vietnam any longer.”98
It was the Vietnamese enemy’s disregard for American life, however, that really provoked hatred. The discovery of slain Americans whose bodies showed signs of torture and execution, often followed by mutilation, generated a visceral urge for vengeance.99 Grunts quickly learned that the enemy, who had no logistical infrastructure for moving or caring for prisoners, often did not bother to take them, especially if wounded, nor did he leave them behind alive.100 Robert Sanders, after describing various mutilations of American corpses, explained the standard grunt reaction: “Here’s what guys felt: ‘If Charlie can do it, then we’re going to do the same thing to him if we kill him.’ All the mutilation did was just piss you off. Charlie turned you into an animal.”101 The marines in Caputo’s brigade absorbed the same lesson: “They learned rather quickly that Vietnam was not a place where a man could expect much mercy if, say, he was taken prisoner. And men who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it.”102
The Asian foe’s disregard for life violated American concepts of proper behavior in combat, and so too did his refusal to “fight fair.” Up to a point, ruses and deceptions were an acceptable part of the deadly game. If the enemy tricked or scared a unit into opening fire at night, for example, thus giving away its position and perhaps bringing down an artillery barrage as a consequence, then that was “score one” for the enemy. Some tricks, however, went too far. Even the German enemy occasionally attempted ruses that Americans considered foul play, such as using Red Cross vehicles or stretchers for moving weapons and ammunition, or the “Kamerad trap” of feigning surrender to draw doughboys into the open, then opening fire.103
It is indicative of the American soldiers’ desire to maintain a degree of restraint on the battlefield that these unsavory German tricks did not suffice to destroy the rules of fair play. The Asian foe, however, played relatively more, and more egregious, dirty tricks, providing one more reason for Americans to adopt a harsh, no-mercy policy. That the Japanese would commit suicide rather than surrender was unfathomable to the GI, but worse, some played dead or feigned surrender in an attempt to take a few Americans with them. Richard Tregaskis noted that even before the fighting on Guadalcanal was over, GIs had learned to be wary of Japanese playing dead: “Jap dead are dangerous, for there are usually some among them alive enough to wait until you pass, then stab or shoot you. Our marines had by this time learned to take no chances. The dead were shot again . . . to make sure.”104
Dan Levin described in one of his dispatches from Saipan how the Japanese used civilians as a ruse: “A group of Japanese civilians approached a group of Marines, as if to surrender. Suddenly they part and run aside, revealing the rifles of Japanese troops behind them. One Marine is slain, others wounded. The rest leave no enemy alive.”105 It did not take many instances of Japanese deviousness for GIs to adopt a no-prisoners policy. If a Japanese soldier, even a wounded one, could not be trusted to surrender in accordance with the rules, then he would not be given the opportunity.
The North Korean enemy also proved to be devious. Higgins reported that “an amazing number of Chinese and Koreans spoke a little English. These men would strip overcoats and parkas from our dead soldiers and try to make us believe they were friends. Others learned to yell ‘medic, medic’ and trick us into revealing our positions.”106 North Korean soldiers frequently slipped on civilian clothes and attempted to infiltrate in the guise of refugees or local inhabitants. The marine forward observer Charles S. Crawford was convinced that the Korean funeral procession he was observing with his binoculars was actually a disguised cart, full of ammunition. He called in mortar fire on the procession, killing the four people accompanying the ox-drawn cart. There was no secondary explosion, however, and Crawford was never able to verify if he had killed civilians or enemy soldiers.107
The dilemma of sorting out innocent civilians from enemy combatants was even more pronounced during the Vietnam War, and William D. Ehrhart pointed out that there was often little time to decide: “There’s Vietnamese around here, and there’s VC. And most of the time, you don’t know which is which until it’s too late.”108 Hiding behind civilian clothes was a violation of the American soldier’s concept of fighting fair, Jeff Yushta, a marine, asserted: “I could respect the NVA. . . . They put on the uniform and they came at you head on. . . . I never believed that there was honor between warriors on opposite sides of a battle, but I see that there is. But dealing with the Viet Cong was real hard because they didn’t stand up and fight like men.” The effect of facing an enemy who did not “fight like men,” Yushta added, was that “it was real easy for me to dehumanize the Viet Cong.”109 Against an Asian foe who refused to fight fair, Americans tended to shoot first and take prisoners, or ascertain civilian status, later.
Moreover, Asian combat techniques contributed to the brutal nature of the fighting. The Asian foe, unlike the German, was firepower poor compared to his American enemy and therefore resorted to night fighting or unconventional warfare. The cover of darkness, often coupled with rugged terrain or jungle, allowed the enemy to infiltrate American positions, set up ambushes, or launch sharp assaults with little warning. Even in daytime, given the dense jungle terrain of the Pacific and portions of Vietnam, the killing was often at close range.110 Hersey, covering the fighting on Guadalcanal, noted the enemy’s seemingly animal-like jungle senses but also understood that the jungle protected him from American weaponry: “On the ridges, the Americans could dominate the jungle with their firepower, and they could see what was going on. In the jungle, the Japs could hide themselves in ambush, and they could lead the Americans into easy traps.”111
Small wonder that Americans were loath to go into that jungle or down “into the valley,” as Hersey entitled his account. But go they did, and some brutish fighting resulted. Daytime jungle fighting involved brief, small-unit encounters generally limited to small-arms fire. Such firefights were actually less lethal than the firepower-intensive combat of Europe, but they were shockers, as Clifford Fox, fighting on Guadalcanal, recalled: “Sometimes you’d exchange fire with some Japanese along a ridgeline. That might be a little way off. But in the jungle, it was always close, very close. It was face-to-face sometimes. Lord, sometimes men fought with bayonets.”112
But the nastiest, most frightening combat occurred when the GIs dug in for the night and the Japanese infiltrators came calling. The infantryman Sam LaMagna describes the hellish nights on the Munda Trail on New Georgia Island: “At night it was an individual war with everyone fighting for his life. The screams pierced the jungle night and sent chills up my spine. . . . Every morning I’d hear who was killed or wounded. . . . Rumors went around that the Japs were yanking GIs out of their hole[s] by the helmets and to keep helmets unbuckled. At night I could hear teeth chattering.”113
In Korea, the Asian foe did not have the benefit of jungle concealment, but the North Korean and Chinese enemy learned to move, infiltrate, and attack at night. Captain Averill, a marine fighting his second Asian war, conceded that “all of the Orientals play the night games extremely well.”114 S. L. A. Marshall noted that close-in night fighting, much like jungle fighting, deprived Americans of their long-range firepower: “Recognition of the enemy, as he comes forward, is most likely to occur at some distance between 15 and 150 yards . . . too close and too late for practical and successful artillery intervention.”115 Furthermore, unless barbed wire and mines were thickly laid, the enemy was also too close to stop before reaching American foxholes. Hand-to-hand combat was common fare in the Korean War. Corporal Joe Scheuber’s description of a Chinese night assault captures how vicious this type of combat could be: “The fighting was heavy and confused. I turned to look back, hoping that some more of our people might be coming up to reinforce us. As I did, an enemy soldier shot my steel helmet off my head. I hit the ground and lost my rifle. I grabbed a grenade and threw it, never hearing it explode, though it must have. I saw the [South] Korean soldier who had been with me in the foxhole run his bayonet into a Chinese. There was a tremendous amount of noise and confusion, with bullets flying in every direction.”116
During such close combat, dehumanizing racial stereotypes aside, all soldiers fought like animals, and no quarter was granted. Close-in fighting also occurred during the Vietnam War, given the jungle terrain, the enemy’s tendency to move at night, and his preference for initiating ambushes at close range to preclude American use of artillery or air support. The grunt’s frustration and anger levels were raised not only by the close-in nature of this fighting but also by the enemy’s ability to run away after taking his toll. And when he ran away, he left behind his favorite calling cards, the booby trap and mine. The grunt was under the constant threat of danger from a populace containing enemies in civilian clothes who might snipe, throw a grenade, or plant a mine almost anywhere at any time. Private Ogden describes the demoralizing impact of this type of Viet Cong warfare: “Their spooklike hit-and-run tactics left gaping holes in our morale. The frustration of not being able to react in time creates a condition of tired, angry blood. . . . The Vietcong knew exactly what they were doing, and they were effective. Their continual harassment and evasion kept our anger, frustration, and jagged nerves at an optimum peak.”117
A common analogy in the memoirs refers to shadow-boxing; John Sack described how it could wear on grunts: “On many, most of the veterans in Vietnam, one will discern an uneasy flitting of the eyes or an irresolute twitch at the corner of the mouth, it testifies how they’ve been a year in the field boxing shadows, taking up arms against a sea of unseen essences.”118 The enemy in Vietnam, in sum, violated just about every American conception of fair and conventional fighting.
The American soldier hated and dehumanized his Asian foes to varying degrees. The Viet Cong, for example, were more despicable for hiding behind civilian clothes and resorting to guerrilla warfare than were the North Vietnamese army regulars who fought conventionally and in uniform. Korean War GIs rated the North Koreans as more brutal, and hence more hated, than the Chinese. The Japanese enemy was probably the most loathed. The more the hatred, the greater the tendency to grant no mercy. Such foes should be hunted down like animals or even exterminated like vermin.
But where is the honor in extermination? Dave Grossman explains that killing a gallant foe confers honor on the victor: “The soldier is able to . . . rationalize his kill by honoring his fallen foes, thereby gaining stature and peace by virtue of the nobility of those he has slain.”119 But what happens to the victor when the enemy has been so dehumanized that he is no longer a noble adversary but a rabid animal to be destroyed? Sam Keen believes the victor is equally demeaned as a consequence: “The use of bestial images seems initially to be one of the better ways of dehumanizing an enemy because it allows soldiers to kill without incurring guilt. But the problem is that it allows the warrior-become-exterminator little sense of dignity or pride in his skill in battle. There is little emotional purgation gained from the slaughter of such an enemy—no heroic sparring with a worthy opponent. . . . Only an escalating brutality and insensitivity to suffering and death.”120
That the American soldier often thought in terms of exterminating his lessthan-human Asian foes is true enough, and occasional comments like the one by a sergeant in Bowman’s novel imply that there was indeed little honor in such work: “Hell, . . . killing Japs isn’t war. It’s K.P.!” Yet in that same novel, which contains numerous virulent and demeaning comments about “Japs,” Bowman adds: “He’s an expert in counterpatrolling and skilled in preparing ambushes. He’s got an instinct for camouflage, and patience and trigger-discipline. . . . He’s counting on you to underestimate his toughness and spirit and the quality of his weapons and accuracy of fire, and he wants you to think he’s stupid as hell when all the time he’s a resourceful, wily little bastard who knows more about you than you know about him.”121
The enemy may have been subhuman, treacherous, and heedless of human life, but he was also tough, clever, and determined. Mixed statements about the Japanese enemy, simultaneously professing their bravery and their inhumanity, were therefore common. Robert Stiles credited the “Nips” with being “tough, brave guys,” but their practice of asking and giving “no quarter” could “become pretty crummy.”122 The army supply officer John Higgins admired “the fighting ability of the Japanese” but lost “respect for them as human beings” after witnessing the results of their massacres of Filipino civilians.123
Soldiers in later wars also acknowledged the skill and determination of their Asian foes. Captain Averill, who had fought in the Pacific in World War II, compared the North Koreans to the Japanese: “I was given the chance to do battalion operations against the Chinese and the North Koreans, the latter, in my estimation, coming very close to the Japanese in ferocity and tenacity.”124 Lieutenant Joseph R. Owen made a similar assessment of the North Koreans, who “were tough, skilled fighters, every bit as tenacious in battle as the Japanese had been in the bitter Pacific island fighting of the last war.”125
The North Vietnamese army and, to a lesser extent, the Viet Cong were similarly accorded a measure of respect, even if the grunt could not understand or condone many of the enemy’s methods. “Alice,” a grunt in Gustav Hasford’s The Short-timers, has mixed sentiments reminiscent of his predecessors’ in earlier Asian wars: “Alice really understands the shrewd race of men who fight for survival in this garden of darkness—hard soldiers, strange, diminutive phantoms with iron insides, brass balls, incredible courage, and no scruples at all. They look small, but they fight tall, and their bullets are the same size as ours.”126
Robert Sanders and his comrades “took care of business” when they met the enemy, confident that they could “get some scunnions out there on Charlie’s ass,” but they did not underestimate him: “He was good. ‘Sir Charlie,’ that was what we called him. We respected Charlie.”127
Thus the Asian enemy, who did not fight by American rules and was hated for it, was nevertheless a skilled, tough, and determined opponent. The American soldier, therefore, was more than Keen’s “warrior-become-exterminator,” devoid of dignity, but instead took pride in overcoming a capable if vicious enemy. Robert Leckie could not decide if his Japanese enemy was brave or just inhumanly fanatical, but then it really did not matter. He was tough to beat in either case: “I can only wonder about this fierce mysterious enemy—so cruel and yet so courageous—a foe who could make me, in his utmost futility, fanaticism, if you will, call upon the best of myself to defend against him.”128 William Manchester revealed the heart of the matter when he pointed out that dehumanizing the Japanese enemy in no way diminished the pride of effort in defeating him: “At the time it was impolitic to pay the slightest tribute to the enemy, and Nip determination, their refusal to say die, was commonly attributed to ‘fanaticism.’ In retrospect it is indistinguishable from heroism. To call it anything less cheapens the victory, for American valor was necessary to defeat it.”129
KILLING BEYOND THE REALM OF THE SANCTIFIED AND JUSTIFIED
The American soldier expected his enemy to fight by the same rules, or norms, that he did. To some extent these rules were formalized by various Hague and Geneva conventions, but in any case they reflected the American soldiers’ sense of what was fair and proper: noncombatants (to include medics and chaplains) should not be harmed, soldiers should be permitted to surrender, prisoners should be treated humanely, and enemy dead should be properly, if unceremoniously, buried. Beyond humanitarian concerns, these norms helped ensure the combat soldier’s survival if wounded or forced to surrender. Hence, if the enemy restricted himself to the justifiable killing of armed American combatants, then he would reciprocate.
Once the American soldier perceived that the enemy was regularly violating these norms by killing or torturing prisoners, mutilating corpses, or firing on medical personnel, however, he retaliated out of anger and a desire for revenge. A vicious downward spiral into brutality could then occur, with each side reacting to the other’s atrocities. James J. Weingartner points out that conditions in the Pacific were ripe for just such a degeneration: “The mixture of underlying racism exacerbated by wartime propaganda in combination with hatred generated by Japanese aggression and real and imagined atrocities was a potent brew.”130
On the battlefield, this potent brew could be powerful and fast acting. During his first campaign on Peleliu, Private Sledge saw the bodies of three dead marines that had been grotesquely mutilated by the Japanese. That was enough for him: “My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I had ever experienced. From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances.”131
The Vietnam War was nearly as brutal as the Pacific in World War II, and again a potent brew was at work: underlying racism, a harsh physical environment, atrocities, and an enemy whose unconventional fighting methods were alien to American conceptions of proper battlefield conduct. For Lieutenant Caputo, that meant a war without restraints:
Everything rotted and corroded quickly over there: bodies, boot leather, canvas, metal, morals. . . . We were fighting in the cruelest kind of conflict, a people’s war. It was no orderly campaign, as in Europe, but a war for survival waged in a wilderness without rules or laws; a war in which each soldier fought for his own life and the lives of the men beside him, not caring who he killed in that personal cause or how many or in what manner and feeling only contempt for those who sought to impose on his savage struggle the mincing distinctions of civilized warfare—that code of battlefield ethics that attempted to humanize an essentially inhuman war.132
The fighting in Vietnam was undeniably vicious, but Caputo overstates the case in claiming that there were no rules and that the grunt did not care whom he killed. Even during the Vietnam War, the group set boundaries on which actions were justified. Leaders at all levels also played a key role in setting the standards of acceptable behavior. If senior leaders talked about the enemy in racist, exterminationist terms, then their soldiers felt less constrained. As Gerald Astor points out in his oral history of the fighting in the Pacific, “The denigration of the enemy as ‘little yellow bastards’ from the top brass down just made the killing easier.”133
Even more influential in establishing group norms of behavior were the junior leaders. The men expected their leaders to tell them which actions were acceptable. Frederick Downs, in an article written years after his experience as a platoon leader in Vietnam, wrote that the leader made the difference between a disciplined unit and a murderous mob: “An officer’s first job is to keep his men under control. . . . If he condones an immoral act, then they will lose respect for him—and he will lose control. . . . His behavior determines whether his men conduct themselves with dignity or become a mob, operating with a mob mentality in which all common sense and decency are washed away.”134
Downs had learned this lesson the hard way in Vietnam. After a firefight in which several men were killed or wounded, a lightly wounded grunt began beating and kicking the lone NVA soldier whom they had captured. “It was obvious” that the grunt was “going to kill him,” but Downs and the rest of his men, enraged over their losses, simply “stood smoking and watching.” At that point the company commander intervened, rescuing the prisoner and chewing out Downs for failing in his responsibilities. After cooling off, Downs admitted, “I wanted the dink dead but the captain was right.”135 Downs had allowed his platoon to become a mob. In extreme cases, if the leadership did not restrain the men or, worse, if they condoned such actions, then a massacre on the scale of My Lai could occur.136
The killing of prisoners and other unacceptable acts, such as rape, pillaging, and the destruction of civilian property, occurred in varying degrees in all the wars of the draft era, and the junior leader’s role in condoning or preventing these acts was often decisive. Lieutenant Lawrence, hearing a commotion on the line, arrived just in time to prevent his doughboys from killing a wounded German soldier. He then escorted the prisoner to the nearest dressing station, where he was told by the harried, overworked doctors to “take him out and shoot him.”137 Lawrence eventually got medical aid for the German and saw him safely to the rear with other prisoners.
During the Korean War, local villagers came to Lieutenant Brady, then serving as the intelligence officer for his battalion, and told him that two marines had raped two women at gunpoint. Brady was sent to investigate by his battalion executive officer, who told him, “I don’t mind marines being a little wild. And I don’t much like gooks. But we’re not going to have rape. This battalion is going to have discipline.”138 Brady investigated diligently, and the guilty marines were identified and sent for court-martial.
The grunts in Matthew Brennan’s aerorifle platoon destroyed an NVA kitchen area one day and captured several prisoners, one of whom was an attractive young woman. Several of the grunts were well along in their plans to rape and then kill her when their platoon leader, Lieutenant Rosen, arrived and put a stop to it: “‘Forget it. I’ve already called in the prisoners [on the radio]. . . . The choppers are on their way in for extraction.’ That took courage to say, considering our mood.”139
Some junior leaders failed in their responsibilities to maintain discipline, however, often because they had grown as callous or vengeful as their men. During World War II, Captain Charles B. MacDonald’s company was ordered to disengage from a firefight and withdraw. After successfully completing this difficult maneuver, MacDonald discovered that three German prisoners held by his second platoon were no longer present. Bringing the prisoners back in the midst of a fighting withdrawal would have been difficult, and it was unlikely that his men had simply left the prisoners behind alive. But MacDonald asked no questions: “Company G today committed a war crime. They are going to win the war, however, so I don’t suppose it really matters.”140
Junior leaders thus played a central role in setting and enforcing, or failing to enforce, standards of acceptable behavior toward prisoners and the civilian populace. These standards were also strongly influenced, however, by the group’s desire to survive. A no-prisoners attitude was adopted in fighting the Japanese, for example, because of the widespread fear that a Japanese soldier, even a wounded one, would try to kill himself along with his would-be captors. Enough Japanese soldiers feigning surrender had grenades or explosives strapped to their bodies to add credence to that fear.141 Even bringing in the occasional Japanese prisoner for interrogation proved difficult, as Astor notes: “Although U.S. higher-ups in search of intelligence—not for reasons of mercy—constantly urged the taking of prisoners, they were foiled by the unwillingness of the soldiers. The foremost reason given was an inability to trust the surrender as genuine.”142 Lieutenant Emil Matula’s instructions to his platoon sums it up: “Shoot them first, and then question them later.”143
A no-prisoners attitude crops up in other wars as well, although it was usually motivated by vengeance, not survival, as was the case with German SS troops after the Malmédy massacre. The military cameraman Walter Rosenblum filmed GIs shooting SS prisoners in Munich, Germany. He was upset by this brutality, but shortly thereafter he witnessed the handiwork of the SS at the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. Thereafter he accepted the massacre of SS prisoners: “These SS troops were so brazen. They acted as though nothing could hurt them. And they sneered at you. They acted the superrace.”144 Lieutenant Christopher Sturkey’s tank-destroyer outfit “had no problem with regular German soldiers” who wanted to surrender, but the SS were another matter: “We had to kill SS men because they wouldn’t surrender and wanted to fight to the death; they wanted it the hard way and that’s just the way they got it.”145
A no-prisoners attitude was not as consistently evident toward other enemies, but the discovery of enemy atrocities did generate relatively brief but often intense periods of revenge. The frequent excesses of the North Koreans often triggered such a response. During his first weeks of fighting in the Pusan Perimeter, Private Arnold Winter did not recall “having an opportunity to take prisoners,” but after the discovery of mutilated marine bodies, he did not “think it was likely we would have taken any even given the chance.” Winter had “no sympathy for the North Koreans. I never saw any of their atrocities myself, but there were quite a few reports of American GI’s who were found shot in ditches with their hands tied behind their backs. Apparently they took no prisoners.”146
Sometimes a no-prisoners attitude applied to specific enemy soldiers in retaliation for not abiding by American concepts of fairness. During World War I, the doughboys’ nemesis was the machine gun, which the Germans made increasing use of in lieu of dwindling manpower. Carl Andrew Brannen noted that the operators of these death-dealing weapons received no quarter: “A machine gunner’s only chance was to be taken while he was away from the gun and his captors did not know he had any connection with it. The reason is obvious, for when a man sat behind a gun and mowed down a bunch of men, his life was automatically forfeited.”147
GIs felt the same way about snipers. Ernie Pyle understood why: “Sniping, as far as I know, is recognized as a legitimate means of warfare. And yet there is something sneaking about it that outrages the American sense of fairness.”148 During Private Blunt’s first stint in combat, a German sniper killed a GI and then attempted to surrender when Blunt’s squad closed in on his location: “A white flag started waving from a window and the sniper surrendered. We surrounded him and then, in a spontaneous outburst of hatred, every man in the squad fired at once. It was an eye for an eye. Many times later I learned that snipers were seldom taken alive.”149
At times, neither survival instincts nor revenge, but simple convenience, provided the impetus for a no-prisoners attitude. Exhausted, harried captors could not be bothered with escorting a few enemy prisoners rearward. During the successful but exhausting and bloody Allied Soissons counteroffensive in World War I, Elton Mackin’s friend Bill was escorting German prisoners, some of them wounded, to the rear. After four days of combat and continuous advancing, Bill “showed the effects of heavy cannon fire and nerve shock. He showed the strain of thirst and hunger; of weariness and—was it stifled fear?” After a brief halt, one of the wounded Germans could not go on: “The man sitting on the stump refused to move, or tried, then shook his head in helplessness.”150 Bill shot him and the rest of the prisoners moved on.
In the dead of winter on a frozen mountaintop in Korea, a lone North Korean soldier appeared before the American trench line. His feet were horribly frostbitten and he wanted to surrender. Taking him prisoner meant escorting him down the steep, ice-covered mountain, and as Corporal Crawford pointed out, “A man would have to go down the hill slow, really slow, and with a gook prisoner in front of him, his downward progress would be more severely curtailed . . . [and] the enemy looked for a target of opportunity.”151 The North Korean soldier shuffled up and down the trench line on his frozen feet, waving a surrender leaflet, but no one would accept his surrender. Finally, a marine killed him with a burst of machine-gun fire.
The considerable trouble and risk involved in escorting this enemy soldier off the mountain explains why he was shot instead. In some cases, however, killing for convenience made no sense at all except that some soldiers seemed to enjoy it, or at least did it without a second thought. During World War II, Sergeant Nat Frankel, perched in the commander’s hatch of his tank, chafed at his snail’s-pace progress as he herded four German prisoners in front of him. A sergeant from the infantry outfit that he was supporting pulled up in a jeep and asked if he could relieve Frankel of his burden. The tank sergeant readily agreed, and the infantryman loaded the prisoners into his jeep. The jeep then disappeared around an embankment, and Frankel drove off in his tank. Before going very far, Frankel heard gunfire from behind the embankment and a few seconds later the infantry sergeant drove his empty jeep past Frankel’s tank: “He smiled as he drove past, smiled and waved.”152
The group might condone the killing of surrendering enemies if survival or revenge were at stake, but this sort of blatant, cold-blooded killing did not meet with the average GI’s approval. Individual standards of behavior usually came into play at these times. Some soldiers, often the psychopathic ones, liked killing and did not especially care if it was within the bounds of what the group considered acceptable. Peter Watson, citing his own and other studies of Vietnam veterans who admitted to mutilating bodies or mistreating prisoners, concluded that “although the conditions of war may make anyone a potential mass murderer, some men are more prone to kill indiscriminately than others.”153 Or as William B. Gault put it, the atmosphere of war allows for “the natural dominance of the psychopath.”154
Lieutenant Caputo loved the marines in his platoon in Vietnam, but he also came to realize that they were not angels: “I had seen them as contemporary versions of Willie and Joe, tough guys who at heart were decent and good. I now realized that some of them were not so decent or good.”155 Matthew Brennan provides an illuminating rundown of the more “interesting fellows” in his aerorifle platoon: a squad leader named James who kept extending his tour “because I like to kill”; a medic named “Hippie Doc” who once bandaged a wounded NVA soldier and “then stabbed him to death as he thanked Doc for saving his life”; and a machine gunner, Hill, who “carried an enormous Bowie knife” for cutting off ears and even heads of enemy dead and who “once stomped an NVA to death” with his size-thirteen boots.156
The group did not approve of such excesses, and in some cases soldiers or junior leaders reported these atrocities to higher authorities. The group also did not condone, but understood and usually overlooked, the excesses of soldiers who temporarily “went crazy” out of grief and rage. In Leinbaugh’s and Campbell’s Company K in World War II, “One man whose best friend had just been killed took revenge on four prisoners. He said they had jumped him and tried to escape—maybe they had, but he got no more escort duty.”157
During the Vietnam War, Robert Mason’s helicopter was dispatched to pick up NVA prisoners. Arriving, he discovered to his horror that a sergeant was systematically executing the trussed-up prisoners with a bullet to the head. Mason began to protest, but a grunt explained to him that the previous night the enemy had tortured and killed six of the sergeant’s men. The sergeant could hear their screams all night. In the morning the bodies were discovered with their dismembered genitals shoved in their mouths: “This isn’t murder; it’s justice. . . . You’ll get ’em. They’ll just be dead, is all.”158
At the other extreme from those who loved the killing were the soldiers who, no matter how provoked, retained a measure of restraint. For most soldiers, situational ethics could excuse only so much. Peter Marin observes that although some grunts “participated mindlessly” in the Vietnam War, “countless others, even in the middle of battle, made anguishing moral choices.”159
Soldiers in all wars were confronted with tough moral choices. The doughboy William H. Houghton was captured during the Argonne fighting. He was escorted to the rear by a young, friendly, and obviously inexperienced German soldier who led, rather than followed, his prisoners and kept his rifle slung on his shoulder. Houghton had a large pocket knife—the Germans had failed to search him thoroughly—and he considered stabbing his lone guard and escaping. Such a move would have been acceptable behavior in almost any soldier’s estimation, but Houghton “just didn’t have the heart to kill a young boy in cold blood like that. I’d fired my rifle any number of times in combat, but that was different. All in all, I’m glad I didn’t do it.”160
During World War II, Roscoe Blunt witnessed the execution-style shooting of two German prisoners for no apparent reason. Blunt had killed many armed opponents and hated the SS, but he drew the line at murdering unarmed Wehrmacht prisoners: “I was torn, on the one hand, between my hatred for the Germans for their atrocities in Belgium and, on the other hand, what I considered the limits of human decency. What I had witnessed went beyond that limit. I was ambiguous about how I should feel about the episode, but I was certain about one thing: I never could have committed such a brutal murder.”161
During the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, the marines had difficulty evacuating their own equipment and personnel, let alone enemy prisoners, and a no-prisoners attitude was much in evidence. Private Ernest Gonzalez discovered the hard way, however, that this policy went beyond what he in good conscience could do: “Word was passed to kill all enemy wounded. I found one Chinese curled up, lying facedown. He had a head wound. . . . I fired into his midriff. He turned slowly and looked at me as if saying, ‘Why must you make me suffer more?’ Although it remained a common practice on both sides, I never again killed another wounded Chinese soldier.”162
While some soldiers refused to mistreat or kill enemy prisoners for moral and ethical reasons, others realized that abandoning restraint was foolish for pragmatic reasons. Lieutenant Hervey Allen rejected the recommendation of his unit’s British and French trainers in World War I to take no prisoners because, “aside from any other considerations, this was a stupid policy.”163 Surrenders must be accepted, “otherwise the enemy resisted to the last, which cost us many unnecessary casualties,” but a lenient policy “encouraged the Germans to surrender more easily.”164
During a conflict like Vietnam, with its elements of unconventional and civil war, mistreating prisoners or civilians would certainly not contribute to the critical goal of winning the hearts and minds of the people. A grunt in Private Parks’s outfit killed a VC suspect in front of his wife and three children, claiming the man had tried to escape. Parks understood that whatever the suspect’s guilt, this grunt had just made new enemies: “I can’t stop thinking about those kids. They’ll hate us the rest of their lives. And who can blame them?”165
Most soldiers thus refused, for a variety of practical and ethical reasons, to kill or destroy indiscriminately. Yet the environment of war greatly complicated the process of determining whether killing was justified or not. Were soldiers in the Pacific justified in killing all Japanese attempting to surrender because in some cases it was a ruse? Enough Japanese legitimately attempted to surrender to prove that not all were suicidally inclined. Was an enraged soldier justified, or to be forgiven, for killing a surrendering sniper who had moments before shot his best buddy? Were grunts to be faulted for destroying a village that undoubtedly harbored the Viet Cong who had just triggered a deadly command-detonated mine? The “critical issue,” as Tobey C. Herzog sees it, is “who or what is ultimately responsible for . . . [the] descent into this brutish state. . . . Does the burden of responsibility rest with individuals (the evil within), or is the war environment to blame (the evil without)?”166
Soldiers had to deal with this issue of responsibility. Some believed their actions were justified because the environment of war left them no choice. Sergeant Frankel freely admits that “there were times that we acted like butchers,” but so be it: “The longer you’re in a war, the more your moral attentiveness wears down. You become less scrupulous, or at least less assiduous. Well, all soldiers are expected to behave like butchers. Eventually you become one.”167
If the environment of war is to blame for turning soldiers into butchers, then the Vietnam War produced, according to Caputo, some real “brutes”: “It was the dawn of creation in the Indochina bush, an ethical as well as a geographical wilderness. Out there, lacking restraints, sanctioned to kill, confronted by a hostile country and a relentless enemy, we sank into a brutish state.”168 Lieutenant Downs agrees with Caputo, pointing out that “the philosophical arguments in favor of man’s ability to resist the slide into barbarism sound noble and rational in a classroom or at a cocktail party,” but in the kill-or-be-killed environment of war, “every day we spent in the jungle eroded a little more of our humanity away.”169
Given the number of veterans suffering some degree of guilt or remorse over what they did during their wars, however, it is clear that if a soldier went beyond what was justifiable and necessary in combat, then he was likely to pay an emotional price. Robert Jay Lifton points out that even though the soldier was immersed in a brutalizing environment that fostered atrocities, he was not absolved of “an irreducible element of individual responsibility.”170 “Joker,” the protagonist in The Short-timers, after killing an old farmer in a fit of rage, understood too late the implications—he could not leave his personal responsibility behind when he left Vietnam: “I was defining myself with bullets; blood had blemished my Yankee Doodle dream that everything would have a happy ending, and that I, when the war was over, would return to hometown America in a white silk uniform, a rainbow of campaign ribbons across my chest.”171 As a platoon leader, James McDonough considered it his responsibility to prevent grunts like “Joker” from crossing that line, because they would not then be able to erase what they had done: “War gives the appearance of condoning almost everything, but men must live with their actions for a long time afterward. A leader has to help them understand that there are lines they must not cross. He is their link to normalcy, to order, to humanity. If the leader loses his own sense of propriety, or shrinks from his duty anything will be allowed. And anything can happen.”172
Throughout the Vietnam War novel Fragments, Sergeant Bill Morgan grapples with the issue of responsibility in war. Blaming the environment for one’s own excesses seemed to have advantages: “There was something seductive about surrendering to forces outside your control, beyond choice or blame.” But like McDonough, he realizes that “if you surrendered” to those dark forces, then “how could you be sure you wouldn’t go too far? This was the knot: Either there was nothing you could do about it or else there wasn’t anything you might not do. . . . That was the personal problem.” Morgan eventually concludes that the soldier could not abdicate his responsibility, even, to borrow from Caputo, in the “wilderness” of Indochina: “I understood . . . now, understood it all. . . . The war was to blame, but we were the war. Facts and forces drove us, but we gave them their mortal shape. The final necessity was choice.”173
GUILT AND THE RATIO OF FIRE
If only for his own peace of mind, the average soldier would not kill or commit destructive acts beyond what he and the group considered justified or necessary. Soldiers who crossed the line and committed atrocities in a fit of rage or because they had lost their moral compass in the wilderness of combat often paid a heavy price in guilt. What the group considered justifiable killing varied by war and by foe, but in all cases the uniformed and still-resisting enemy was fair game. Killing him was what the soldier was there to do. Some historians and psychologists believe, however, that despite sanctification, justifications, and the catalyst of the battlefield, the American soldier retained an ingrained reluctance to kill that enemy.
The most famous proponent of this argument is Samuel L. A. Marshall. Based on his findings from four hundred company-level, postcombat interviews in the Pacific and European theaters in World War II, he claimed that at most 25 percent of the American infantry soldiers capable of bringing their weapons to bear during a battle did so. Marshall attributed the GI’s reluctance to fire in part to the “paralysis which comes of varying fears. The man afraid wants to do nothing; indeed, he does not care even to think of taking action.” But even more important, the “average, normal man who is fitted into the uniform of an American ground soldier” did not shoot because of his socialized aversion to killing:
He is what his home, his religion, his schooling, and the moral code and ideals of his society have made him. The army cannot unmake him. It must reckon with the fact that he comes from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable. . . . This is his great handicap when he enters combat. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him. Because it is an emotional and not an intellectual handicap, it is not removable by intellectual reasoning, such as: “Kill or be killed.”
Furthermore, the soldier’s junior leaders “pay little attention to the true nature of this mental block,” erroneously assuming that the soldier, based on his training, “loves to fire” and does so in combat.174
Students of soldier behavior, having no reason to doubt Marshall’s claim that his ratio of fire was based on exhaustive personal observation and research, accepted the fact that three out of four American soldiers did not fire in combat because they were too scared or put off by the thought of killing. Richard Gabriel states that “during World War II, no more than 15 percent of the soldiers in American frontline combat battalions ever fired their weapons at the enemy regardless of whether they were attacking or being attacked. Most soldiers were simply so afraid that they did nothing but stay in their holes.”175 The Canadian historian John A. English, after citing Marshall’s fire ratio, added that “it should not be surprising, then, that the most common cause of local defeat in minor tactics is usually attributed to ‘the shrinkage of fire,’ whereas the Germans had little problem maintaining their volume of fire.”176 The historian Russell F. Weigley cited Marshall’s ratio in his history of the campaign in Europe as evidence that the American infantry was “not particularly aggressive.” Weigley agreed with Marshall that this lack of aggressiveness was in part because “almost all American soldiers were conditioned from infancy not to kill.”177
Harold P. Leinbaugh came across Marshall’s ratio of fire while researching for his history of his rifle company, The Men of Company K. He arrived at a radically different conclusion from the historians, however. He decided that Marshall’s theory was “absurd, ridiculous, and totally nonsensical.” Canvassing his fellow K Company veterans, he found that “none of them recalled any experience of failure to fire. One old K Company sergeant asked, ‘Did the SOB [Marshall] think that we clubbed the Germans to death?’”178
Leinbaugh discussed his doubts about Marshall’s ratio of fire with the historian Roger J. Spiller, who then sifted through Marshall’s notes and journals and interviewed his contemporaries, only to find that Marshall had not surveyed the companies he had interviewed on the issue of refusing to fire. Nor had Marshall and his assistants conducted any number close to 400 company-level interviews. Spiller’s convincing findings were published in articles in 1988 and 1989 and concluded that “the systematic collection of data that made Marshall’s ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.”179
Spiller’s findings should have prompted anyone writing after 1989 to use Marshall’s theory only with serious reservations, yet some authors continued to cite his ratio without qualifications.180 In addition to Spiller’s research, which by itself raises serious doubts about Marshall’s fire ratio, the findings of other historians and psychiatrists and the further testimony of soldiers like Leinbaugh’s sergeant refute the idea that a significant number of infantrymen, let alone 75 percent, consistently failed to fire on the enemy in the midst of battle. Based solely on the evidence of American performance in combat in World War II, Marshall’s ratio of fire seems highly improbable. A 1994 study of American tactics in the European theater by the historian Michael D. Doubler provides a needed corrective to the image of the American infantryman as unaggressive and even cowardly by showing how versatile and effective he really was. Not surprisingly, Doubler has serious doubts about the validity of Marshall’s ratio: “An exhaustive review of anecdotal evidence, unit after-action reports, and training literature suggests that Marshall’s figures on the number of active firers are too conservative and that many more soldiers were pulling the trigger. Furthermore, it is hard to believe that an army attacking prepared defenses for the better part of an entire year could have accomplished much of anything with only one quarter of its soldiers firing their weapons.”181
The anecdotal evidence Doubler refers to comes from soldiers’ memoirs and interviews. Captain MacDonald described a desperate fight during the Battle of the Bulge in which, after a series of German assaults, his company was overrun. Succeeding waves of attacking German infantry were met with “volley after volley” from MacDonald’s defending platoons. “All three platoons and the 60mm mortars began to beg for more ammunition,” and MacDonald sent runners to find some. “Seven times the enemy infantry assaulted, and seven times they were greeted by a hail of small-arms fire and hand grenades that sent them reeling down the hill, leaving behind a growing pile of dead and wounded.” MacDonald’s company, possessing only one bazooka and three shells, was overrun only when German Tiger tanks attacked.182
Lieutenant Wilson’s platoon was caught in a surprise attack by about forty German soldiers just as his men were starting to dig in following an advance in the Huertgen Forest: “We instantly dropped our shovels, lay down in the shallow beginnings of our foxholes, and fired back with all we had.” The Germans, armed mostly with bolt-action rifles, “proved no match for the volleys of our Browning Automatic Rifles . . . and semiautomatic M-1 [rifles]. The Krauts were stopped about seventy-five yards in front of us.”183
As Wilson implies, the GIs discovered that volume of fire often made the difference.184 On the other hand, marksmanship was not obsolete, especially when defending positions. Sergeant Ross S. Carter and his fellow paratroopers stopped a German counterattack in Italy with aimed fire: “Since only a few of our machine guns and automatic rifles had reached us, it was up to the riflemen and tommy gunners to hold off the assault.” The troopers hunkered down in their holes and “calmly squeezed off their shots. . . . American riflemen were always the best in the world, and our . . . riflemen were among the best in the army. In about thirty minutes the attack was broken up.”185
These examples, provided by junior leaders, indicate not only that a majority of infantrymen engaged the enemy but also that the leaders themselves were well aware of the volume and effect of their units’ fires. Marshall’s contention that the junior leader in World War II was not even conscious of nonfiring is a dubious theory. Leaders and men alike were aware of, and did not condone, nonfirers—and there were a few, usually men too scared to take action. A nonfirer threatened the group’s survival and was not doing his share. Private Standifer was one of those soldiers who had genuine qualms about killing, but he decided that refusing to fire was not fair to the rest: “Some had shot to wound, but not to kill. All of that was considered reasonable; what was contemptible were the eight balls who simply wouldn’t fight. This wasn’t a matter of integrity, but of simple cowardice: when you fire your rifle, it attracts attention and you get shot at. The men who wouldn’t fire were a complete drag, without the courage to fight or to refuse. If you won’t fire your rifle, you are useless.”186
World War II psychiatrist Edwin A. Weinstein noticed that some of his psychiatric casualties were “passive, dependent” types who “developed anxiety rapidly” and often broke down early. One such broken soldier arrived in Weinstein’s hospital, complete with a note from his platoon leader: “I personally have never seen him fire his rifle at the enemy—when all the others were out of their holes and in firing position he would seem to be ‘froze’ in his hole with his head down. . . . All in all . . . he does not come up to par with the average infantryman and is decidedly a bad influence on the other men.”187
This lieutenant certainly noticed his nonfirer, and it is also evident that this soldier was the exception and that his inaction was unacceptable to the group. Lieutenant Wilson, now a company commander, was again caught by surprise, this time by a German patrol armed with machine pistols, not bolt-action rifles. The heavy enemy fire drove his men, many of whom were new replacements, under cover, and “very few of them even attempted to fire back.” The officers immediately returned fire and began “yelling at the men to start shooting.” Wilson rousted a dozen soldiers from their holes and led them on a flanking attack, killing several Germans and capturing one.188 This short, sharp, deadly action is informative. The officers were well aware of nonfiring, brought on by the understandable fact that the enemy had pinned the men down. Wilson and his leaders reacted quickly to correct the problem and to drive off the enemy with handheld infantry weapons.
If historians and veterans of the European theater in World War II put little credence in Marshall’s theory, then historians who have studied the vicious, nomercy fighting in the Pacific are especially dumbfounded that Marshall would claim that American soldiers were reluctant to kill. Craig M. Cameron, in his study of the First Marine Division, found Marshall’s theory a “specious argument to assuage moral sensibilities among civilians.” In reality, Americans put into uniform and given guns “proved as adept and ruthless in the exercise of violence as their totalitarian enemies.”189
Gerald Astor, who interviewed dozens of veterans of the Pacific fighting, found the notion ludicrous that three out of four infantrymen failed to engage the enemy: “The interviews with the sources for this book indicate that only a desire to avoid giving away a position kept fingers off the triggers.” For those green soldiers who did have reservations about killing, “the experience of enemy fire and the deaths of fellow GIs swiftly snuffed out regard for the Sixth Commandment.”190
Some students of soldier behavior, like Elmar Dinter, even hold to a theory diametrically opposed to Marshall’s: “The average person does not particularly worry about killing. Such ‘fear’ is an ancient myth and it can be removed from the list of possible anxieties. Deep down in his subconscious, man seems to enjoy killing.”191 Though some soldiers did enjoy killing, Dinter undoubtedly overstates his case. His observation, however, that soldiers do “not particularly worry about killing,” as long as that killing falls within the bounds of what is justified, contains much truth. Jules W. Coleman, a division psychiatrist in World War II, found that “there is little guilt associated with killing the enemy.” Furthermore, “The destruction of the enemy is an act of vengeance, and serves the purpose of adequately discharging emotions of hatred and impulses of aggression.”192
The main flaw in Marshall’s theory, or in Dinter’s for that matter, is the assumption of social homogeneity. Cameron takes Marshall to task for presenting a “monolithic image . . . both as related to how all American soldiers feel and regarding the cultural heritage used as a measure.”193 Soldiers’ attitudes toward killing were more diverse than Marshall’s theory allowed for. Some soldiers, although nothing close to three out of four, were indeed reluctant, for religious or ethical reasons, to kill even an armed opponent. Yet the consciences of most soldiers were assuaged by society’s sanctification and the combat group’s justifications for killing the enemy. And indeed a few amoral or pathological types found slaughter to their liking.
The memoirs reflect this range of attitudes toward killing and guilt. Corporal Crawford, after killing his first enemy soldier in Korea (there would be eighty-five confirmed kills—he kept count), found that it “did not make me happy, nor did it make me unhappy.” He decided to ask his buddies how they reacted to killing, and he received a variety of answers: “Some of the grunts said they felt guilty but couldn’t give me any reason for their guilt; it was, after all, their job to kill gooks. Other grunts said that, because of their religious beliefs, they were afraid after they knew for certain they had killed a gook, but they couldn’t explain their fear. Some grunts said they found it exciting, the knowledge they had just killed someone.”194
Lieutenant Downs provides a similar survey of how the soldiers in his platoon in Vietnam reacted to killing. Like Crawford, he found a wide range of attitudes, although he includes no category of soldiers who abstained totally from firing:195
It turned out that most of us liked to kill other men. Some of the guys would shoot at a dink much as they would at a target. Some of the men didn’t like to kill a dink up close. The closer the killing, the more personal it became.
Others in the platoon liked to kill close in. A few even liked to torture the dinks if they had a prisoner or cut the dead bodies with knives in a frenzy of aggression.
A few didn’t like to kill at all and wouldn’t fire their weapons except to protect their buddies.
Mostly, we all saw it as a job and rationalized it in our own way. Over it all ran the streak of anger or fear that for brief moments ruled us all.196
Downs raises another issue affecting the willingness to kill. Many soldiers did not like to kill up close, but at long range the killing was impersonal. Dave Grossman provides a good analysis of the effect of distance on attitudes toward killing. As the physical distance increases, the resistance to killing decreases, because, as Grossman notes, “from a distance, you don’t look anything like a friend.”197
Soldiers confirm the relative emotional ease of killing at long range. In World War I Elton Mackin and his fellow marines waited for the order to open fire on attacking Germans with unconcealed eagerness: “Men craned their necks to watch the officers, impatient for the word to open fire. Even our replacements felt the urge of it. Killing at long range is such an impersonal thing: a sporty test of the nerves, like practice on the training range. Here was fair game.” The marines, known for their marksmanship, stopped the attack solely with aimed rifle fire. Everyone fired and, Mackin believes, almost all shot to kill: “Do very many try to miss? Some fellows tell you things in confidence, but you seldom hear them mention that.”198
Mackin’s hunting and target-practice analogies are common in descriptions of long-range killing. Flushing a covey of quail is a frequently repeated analogy. MacDonald’s men opened fire on some Germans fleeing across a field: “The infantrymen sat calmly at the bases of trees and shot at them as if they might have been quail on the rise.”199 Lieutenant Sefton shot a fleeing German, remembering “to lead the angling runner like a rising quail.”200
Enemies killed up close, however, were not quail, but people. Lieutenant James Hamilton Dill was ambushed at close range by Chinese soldiers during the Korean War. Miraculously, he was not hit, and the GIs with him cut down the ambushers: “It was not my first close call, and I was sure it would not be the last, but I had looked directly into the face of a man trying to kill me. I then watched him die in agony. I had never before had an experience so personal.”201
Nothing was more personal, or more traumatic for some soldiers, than handto-hand combat. During a commando-style raid by Rangers in North Africa in World War II, Sergeant James Altieri found himself face-to-face with an Italian soldier in a narrow slit trench. Altieri reacted first, plunging his knife into the soldier’s stomach: “‘Mamma mia,’ he cried. ‘Mamma mia.’ I felt the hot blood spurt all over my right arm as I pulled the knife out, then rammed it home again and again. As the body sagged and slid to the ground, I reeled and vomited.”202
Close-up killing was common during the night fighting in Korea. Sergeant Warren Avery’s platoon, rushing forward to help a sister platoon caught in a Chinese ambush, overran some enemy positions almost before they realized it: “I jumped over an enemy foxhole; the Chinese soldier looked up at me and I down at him. I didn’t have the guts to blow him away with my carbine, but I did throw a grenade after I got beyond him. At least I didn’t have to look at him when he died.”203 Avery was not the only soldier who was squeamish over the thought of having to kill a man face-to-face.
Conversely, some soldiers discovered that they liked killing, at whatever distance, and this realization gave rise to guilt over not feeling guilty. For Private Blunt, “killing had become a challenge, even a need, and I found myself constantly seeking fulfillment.”204 He enjoyed killing, not in cold blood, but as part of the game of besting the enemy. He knew he was not supposed to feel this way and it bothered him:
I worried about the killing lust that I knew had built up inside me. I tried to convince myself that I was only impartially doing the job I had been trained to do, but still, I was experiencing troubled emotions. . . . I was well aware my moral conscience was constantly in conflict with my familial and religious upbringing, but I seemed powerless to resolve the differences. Circumstances had forced me into a life over which I had no control, but still I was concerned that I wasn’t even trying to control it, just going along with it—and even, distressingly, sometimes enjoying it.205
Lieutenant Caputo became disillusioned with the war in Vietnam by the end of his tour there, but for a long time, like Blunt, he reveled in the challenge of combat: “I knew . . . that something in me was drawn to war. It might have been an unholy attraction, but it was there and it could not be denied.”206 Also like Blunt, he knew that the average, God-fearing American should not feel this “unholy attraction.” After a fierce firefight culminating in the destruction of a village, Caputo was “disturbed” over “the dark, destructive emotions I had felt throughout the battle . . . urges to destroy that seemed to rise from the fear of being destroyed myself. I had enjoyed the killing of the Viet Cong who had run out of the tree line.”207
Dan Levin carried Caputo’s and Blunt’s thought process a step further: feeling guilty over enjoying killing was just a rationalization. After joining his comrades in gunning down a fleeing Japanese soldier “like furious animals after prey flushed from hiding,” Levin “suddenly realized” that this prey was human, but “even as I felt this horror at myself, I knew it was a device for taking the curse off my eager joy at being the hunter.”208 Private Sledge, after killing a Japanese soldier at close range, shared Levin’s initial horror: “That I had seen clearly the pain on his face when my bullets hit him came as a jolt. . . . The expression on that man’s face filled me with shame and then disgust for the war and all the misery it was causing.” Feelings of horror, however, were quickly displaced by feelings of foolishness: “My combat experience thus far made me realize that such sentiments for an enemy soldier were the maudlin meditations of a fool . . . feeling ashamed because I had shot a damned foe before he could throw a grenade at me! I felt like a fool and was thankful that my buddies couldn’t read my thoughts.”209
A few soldiers actually felt the way Marshall said they should. For religious and cultural reasons, they had an aversion to killing. Yet even these reluctant warriors did not fail to shoot to save their own or their comrades’ lives. Sergeant York killed twenty or more Germans during the famous fight for which he won a Congressional Medal of Honor because it was “them or me.” But the pious sergeant remained troubled by it: “Jes the same I have tried to forget. I have never talked about it much. I have never told the story even to my own mother.”210
Lieutenant Elliott Johnson, an artillery forward observer in World War II, was equally troubled by killing. He once called a destructive barrage of highexplosive and white-phosphorus shells on a massed target of German vehicles and soldiers. He could not put the resulting carnage out of his mind: “The devastation on that little piece of land . . . was incredible. It’s one of my bad memories, the suffering.” Johnson even killed a “German boy” face-to-face while clearing bunkers: “Again, an unpleasant memory.” He was a confirmed pacifist by VE-Day: “I was raised in a house that believed in God. . . . But it took something like this [war] to hammer it home to me: I am totally averse to killing and warfare.”211
Religious beliefs were often the main cause of a soldier’s anxiety over killing. Douglas Anderson encountered marines in his battalion in Vietnam who, having been brought up in religious Baptist families, “were having a lot of trouble killing people.” Though Anderson did not mention nonfirers, he believed that these reluctant killers sometimes hesitated an extra moment before shooting, and that could prove fatal: “This cost some of them their lives because the minute they would begin to think, they would move just a little less quickly . . . and pause just a little bit more before shooting at somebody.”212
If a soldier did suffer guilt over killing, his comrades would try to console him as long as they believed his actions were justified. A soldier in Brennan’s platoon captured a khaki-clad enemy who appeared to be unarmed, but the man suddenly reached into his pocket. The grunt, assuming he was reaching for a pistol or a grenade, killed him. The shot attracted the other grunts, who found their buddy standing over his victim with “big tears rolling down his cheeks.” The enemy soldier, it turned out, was a doctor; he had been reaching for bandages to prove his noncombatant status. The distraught grunt was justified in shooting, however, so his comrades tried to make him feel better. His platoon sergeant said, “Don’t take it so hard. This is war and people get killed.”213
People did indeed get killed in war, and the close-range, personal killing done by the infantry was the hardest. Few men enjoyed that sort of killing, but most did it willingly enough when their comrades’ and their own lives were on the line. Nor did most soldiers suffer guilt, especially in quantities sufficient to stay trigger fingers, over dispatching an armed enemy whose killing was sanctified and justified by country, cause, and comrades. Rather than a guilt-ridden GI frozen with fear, the picture that emerges from the literary evidence is that of an American soldier confident in his ability to defeat his enemies. One of the reasons for this confidence was the GI’s faith in his leaders. Soldier-memoirists comment frankly on their leaders, good and bad, thus providing valuable insights into the role of the junior combat leader and the qualities he needed to succeed.