William Manchester was a scared young American, flung down on the island of Okinawa during the Second World War and expected to act with bravado and bravery during the expected killing frenzy. His experiences of killing were shared by many other combatants. According to the way he told the story, a Japanese sniper was killing men in a neighbouring battalion. One day, he noticed an inconspicuous fisherman’s shack propped against a low hill and guessed the location of the killer-sniper. Fleeing was not an option: Manchester knew that he had to go on the offensive. When menaced, Manchester told himself, humans reacted like caged animals: there should be a sign around their necks, warning ‘this animal is vicious; when attacked it defends itself.’ Manchester recognized that he ‘could be quick’ or he ‘could be dead’. In terms of action, his options were limited. With wiry humour, Manchester quickly concluded that it would be impossible to turn his back on the shack and run through the battalion squealing ‘A Jap’s after me! A Jap’s after me!’. He also decided that it would discredit him in the eyes of his subordinates if he timidly ordered another soldier to kill the sniper. Worse: if he gave such an order, he feared that his subordinates might not even bother obeying. After all, he was a new NCO, a ‘gangling, long-boned youth, wholly lacking in what the Marine Corps called “command presence”.’ Finally, after procrastinating for a few minutes after discovering that no-one in his battalion possessed any grenades, Manchester ‘took a deep breath’ and, ‘sweating with the greatest fear [he] had known till then’, began dashing towards the shack, zigzagging and dropping every dozen steps, just like his filmic heroes did on the screen. It was not until he approached the door of the shack that he remembered that he had forgotten to don his steel helmet. His vulnerable skull rendered him ‘utterly terrified’. ‘I could feel a twitching in my jaw, coming and going like a winky light signaling [sic] some disorder’, he recalled, and ‘various valves were opening and closing in my stomach. My mouth was dry, my legs quaking, and my eyes out of focus.’ But there was no retreat so, taking a deep breath, Manchester kicked down the door and raced inside, only to find an empty room leading into a bedroom. He dashed forward, firing widely to his right. Luckily, the sniper’s rifle was tangled in its harness and, realising he was trapped, the Japanese sniper merely backed away into the corner (‘with a curious, crablike motion’). It was the first Japanese soldier Manchester had ever seen at close quarters, and the first man he had ever fired upon. His first shot missed, but
the second [shot] caught him dead-on in the femoral artery. His left thigh blossomed, swiftly turning to mush. A wave of blood gushed from the wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across his legs, pooling on the earthen floor….. he emitted a tremendous, raspy fart, slumped down, and died.
In panic, Manchester just kept firing, until disgust gagged him. ‘Then I began to tremble’, Manchester admitted, ‘and next to shake, all over. I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear: ‘I’m sorry’.’ He vomited and urinated in his skivvies, wondering ‘Is this what they mean by ‘conspicuous gallantry’?’
Manchester’s distressing encounter with war’s terror exposed the underlying glossolalia of combat – that hubble of sounds, screeches, and stutterings that were the language of emotion. Time and again, combatants stammered that they could not ‘take it’ anymore. Like Manchester, their bodies reverted to a more primitive state. Frightened soldiers frequently experienced epidemics of diarrhoea (as did American soldiers immediately prior to the landing on Iwo Jima), suffered chronic gastrointestinal problems, or escaped into ‘dyspeptic invalidism’. Three quarters of combatants during the Second World War complained of trembling hands, eighty-five per cent were troubled by sweating palms, and eighty-nine per cent tossed sleeplessly in their beds at night. It was not enough to merely repress the inward consciousness of fear because the body would betray itself through its respiration, circulation, digestion, and excretion. These were men whose starkly emotional sentences attested to how ‘the sights cannot cannot be explained in writing. Writing is not my line. No fighting either For them that wants to let them fight Because I will never like it no no never’ or, as another terrorized Private put it, ‘I admit I am a coward. A bloody, bleeding coward, and I want to be a live Coward than a dead blasted Hero.’ There were many such accounts of the physical effects of unrestrained terror, including more poignant descriptions like the one a Private sent to his mother after the Battle of the Somme, simply saying: ‘It makes my head jump to think about it’. The Second World War poet and combatant, Shawn O’Leary, summarized the aftermath of war’s panic in his poem of 1941:
And I –
I mow and gibber like an ape.
But what can I say, what do? –
There is no saying and no doing.
Cutting through the deafening silences that is the historian’s lot and suddenly fixing upon the authentic pulse of trauma brings the historian as close as possible to that no-man’s-land where the killing frenzy took place.
Yet historians have proved reluctant to analyse the emotions of their subjects in history. In part, this is due to a strong tendency within the social sciences to regard emotions as trivial by-products of rational, class-based responses to material interests. The disciplinarian separation of the social and biological sciences and the ‘privileged theoretical position given to concepts such as reason’ ensured that allegedly irrational and visceral forces in human history were sidelined. The emphasis on rationality followed the belief that arguments about change over time can be constructed only through the analysis on ideology or economic structures. Furthermore, focusing on human rationality seemed a more respectful way of interpreting people’s behaviour in the past. Even when historians were faced with clear examples of terror or panic, they were keen to impose a sober, dispassionate logic to human behaviour.
In combat, however, emotions such as fear, hatred, and exhilaration are explosive and impossible to sideline. Furthermore, in examining the language and narrative structures (such as genre, syntax, form, order, and vocabulary) used to discuss combat, historians can map changes over time in the emotional experience of combat. This approach enables us to study emotional reactions in combat by rendering the emotion visible in language and symbols.
To take an example, using narratives of killing: over and again, British and American servicemen prior to the Second World War accounts use the language of instincts to describe their emotions in war. This was the language that William Manchester used when he compared his actions in war to that of an animal under attack. This language was drawn from evolutionary notions about emotions arising out of universal instincts such as self-preservation, curiosity, pugnacity, self-assertion, self-abasement, parental love, and revulsion. As William James put it in Principles of Psychology (1905), ‘every stimulus that excites an instinct excites an emotion as well’. These instincts were inherited ‘from the brutes’ and could not be avoided. In popular accounts of fear in wartime, fear and panic in combat involved the feeling of being ‘taken over’ by ‘primitive blood-lust’, with the combatant only returning to his ‘real self’ afterwards. Thus, in a typical account from the First World War, Charles Stewart Alexander described his emotions in combat as a heady mixture of ‘fiendish joy’ and terror, arising out of being suddenly overwhelmed by ‘primitive instincts’. In the terror of combat, men reverted to their animalistic inheritance.
This language began changing after 1939 and was dramatically different by the 1960s when the fashionably self-conscious, psychoanalytical style of war memoirs encouraged a more detailed, more individual, and more confessional rendering of reminiscences and battle stories. Popular Freudianism resulted in an increase in sexual metaphors to describe the fear engendered by combat – most typically the description of fear in combat as inciting an ‘ache as profound as the ache of orgasm’. In other words, during the earlier period, the language of instincts was the language of fear. By the 1960s, the language employed was that of psychoanalysis, the language of anxiety.
The problem of causation cannot be avoided, nevertheless. Did the shift in the nature of war (factors such as distance between enemies and the increased killing of civilians) lead to increased anxiety, or did changes in the labels with which men could ‘make sense’ of what was going on around them change the way they ‘actually experienced’ combat? The answer is both, but historians have proved better at analysing the former than the latter. Of course, in historical time, many things actually do (or do not) ‘happen’, but the very act of narrating changes and formulates the experience. After all, from the moment of action (in this case, combat), the event that excited emotion entered into imagination and language, to be interpreted, elaborated, structured and re-structured. As the Vietnam story-teller Tim O'Brien, wrote in The Things They Carried (1990):
it's difficult to separate what happened to what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed.... And then afterwards, when you go to tell about it, there's always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
The act of narrating emotions – to oneself as much as to others – is dependent upon the ordering mechanisms of grammar, plot, and genre. To the extent that these mechanism are historical, the way emotions are experienced have a history.
In looking at narratives of martial killing more broadly, it is interesting to see the shift from narratives of fear to those of anxiety. The most basic indicator of this is the shift in the kinds of psychiatric breakdown occurring in war, from the hysterical fear-states of the First World War to the anxiety states typical of the Second World War and after. Admittedly, there was a class and racial dimension to psychiatric diagnoses. Throughout the century, officers were much less liable to be diagnosed as suffering from hysteria, compared with men in the Other Ranks. As a chapter in War Wounds and Air Raid Casualties noted in 1939, ‘rather naïve, simple, not very intelligent’ soldiers were prone to hysteria. A Private might not be overtly fearful in the firing line and he often obeyed orders with animal-like dumbness, but would break down suddenly in response to a particular stressful event. In contrast, an officer
with his training, his sense of responsibility, [and] his higher ego ideal [or ideas of courage instilled by training and example], could and did tolerate enormous amounts of anxiety before the final breakdown, but, because of his ego ideal, could not sanction the complete flight of conversion hysteria. The man in the ranks, with no ego ideal, no sense of responsibility to anyone but himself, had nothing to inhibit the mechanism of [psychological] conversion, whatever it is, which gave him so complete an escape.
In addition, Jews, Scottish Highlanders, Welshmen, and Irishmen were accused of being susceptible to hysteria. These groups were said to lack the ‘British’ tradition of conquering adversities, of bulldog endurance. In America, Black Americans were said to be capable of fighting ‘as courageously and recklessly as the most pugnacious white man,’ although anything ‘unusual or startling touches off his hair-trigger nerves. He has many traits which are childish.’ John Richards, who commanded a Black unit during the First World War, made a similar comment, claiming that black soldiers had
an extraordinary nervousness, does not like the dark, lacks will and initiative. This last appears most clearly in the case of non-commissioned officers. Many will handle their men very credibly behind the lines. In hard conditions, however, the best of them, though showing no apparent fear, seem to be struck dumb. They do what they are told, but move as if bewildered. I think they lack the free, independent spirit that stirs in the breast of the white; that rises within him when the shells are falling thick and says, ‘I am a better man than any – Boche, and I am coming through.’
Richards reminded his readers that ‘races develop slowly’ and since these men were slaves only a few years earlier and ‘a few years before that they were children in the jungles’, the military had to be patient. They were particularly susceptible to mass suggestion and thus hysteria.
But military rank and race were not the only factors distinguishing hysterics from anxious neurotics. There was a surprising gender element to hysteria. It was discovered that women in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force were reputedly less liable to suffer from hysterical conversion disorders than their male counterparts in the air force. An analysis of nearly one thousand air-force women suffering psychiatric problems found that emotionally traumatized women ‘tended to show an overt emotional upset rather than one masked by physical symptoms’. The explanation was clear. According to the researchers,
the socially acknowledged and permitted emotionalism of women allows for a more direct expression of adaptive and emotional difficulties, and that this renders prolonged and inconvenient physical symptoms superfluous. Men, on the other hand, submit to a sterner social and emotional code. They have, therefore, a greater need to preserve their self-esteem by the development of a more complex disguise or escape mechanism.
Women’s ability to talk about being scared prevented them from becoming hysterical.
Nevertheless, whether officer or private, white or black, man or woman, between the First and the Second World Wars, there was an overall shift in psychiatric terminology from hysterical states to anxiety states. This shift cannot be explained solely in terms of changes in War Office policy concerning the pension implications of different diagnoses nor in shifts in psychiatric nomenclature and classification (although both had some influence). Rather, as the wars of this century progressed, the emotions engendered by modern warfare were less liable to be linked to fear arising out of the multiple threats to survival and more liable to be linked to crippling anxiety arising out of the stripping away of individual agency in battle and the greater dissonance between the cultural languages and codes available and used to narrate war, and war-as-experienced by the combatants.
Of course, this is not to deny that fear and anxiety were prevalent in all conflicts. Anxiety states were already severe during the First World War. Trench fighting and artillery barrages created a battlefield in which the foe was invisible, the weapons of war impersonal. Expressed within the theoretical framework of the time, the fear response – honed through the centuries by ‘flight or fight’ instincts – was utterly frustrated causing, as the chief neurologist at Netley hospital explained, ‘The unexpended energy [to become] so extreme that the soldier is incapacitated by it’. If soldiers could not fight or otherwise engage in ‘manipulative activity’, and were not permitted to flee, they responded by becoming profoundly anxious – a crippling emotion. The modern soldier was pitted against unseen enemies and his own aggression was also incognito. Human emotions could not cope with that.
The inability to hit back against attackers was one of the main problems. Referring to combat on a tropic island, Colonel William Bleckwenn explained this phenomenon in terms of the fact that there was ‘no escape’. The men were forced to be passive. In his words:
The repeated mental insult of constant shelling finally dulls the normal sensorium, and men become automatons…. Many admit of retrograde amnesia as though there were a mild concussion, following the explosion of bombs and heavy shells. This was more common among the men who were unable to retaliate against the enemy attack. The men who manned the antiaircraft guns, the machine gunner, and even the rifle man, suffered less in these attacks. They could release and expend the pent-up emotions and burn up, through activity, the glycogen mobilized by excessive adrenal activity. They were less tense when it was over. By comparison, the unarmed inactive soldier who sought shelter in a foxhole or slit trench showed a greater pallor and less facial expression, a greater paucity of free associated movement, some tremor and all the signs of excessive adrenalization, and a thalamic syndrome. It took him longer to regain his normal poise.
Combatants were relieved on those occasions when they were able to act against the foe. Thus, typically, a fighter pilot who had seen active service in light bombers during the Battle of France described the devastating emotional effects of being unable to see his targets or witness the effects of his bombs. He was so frightened that he could not sleep and would burst into sweat even climbing into his aeroplane. All this changed during the Battle of Britain, however. As he explained it, ‘success in the game is the great incentive to subdue fear. Once you’ve shot down two or three the effect is terrific, and you’ll go on till you’re killed. It’s the love of the sport rather than sense of duty that makes you go on without minding how much you are shot up’. In other words, the affective response of excitement brought on by the ‘intimate contest’ inhibited exaggerated fear responses. In the words of the authors of the classic study Men Under Stress (1945) when explaining why airmen were terrified of flak yet found engaging with an enemy plane exhilarating:
Enemy planes are objects that can be fought against. They can be shot down or outmanoeuvred. Flak is impersonal, inexorable and… deadly accurate. It is nothing that can be dealt with – greasy black smudge in the sky until the burst is close. Then it is appreciated as the gaping holes in the fuselage, the fire in the engine, the blood flowing from a wound, or the lurch of the ship as it slips out of control.
Similarly, as a survey of psychiatric casualties during the Second World War concluded: ‘As long as the soldier feels that in some way he is able to control the dangers of the battle field by his own behavior, his sense of security is reasonably good.’ In the words of one modern observer of military operations: ‘passivity in the midst of threat induces distress.’
In other words, it was the emotional response of impotence (or the ‘blocking of the instinct of self-expression’, as the Chief of the Morale Branch during the Second World War euphemistically describing not being able to kill) that frightened combatants most of all. Thus, it was not uncommon for Anti-Aircraft Artillery personnel (men and women) as well as machine-gunners and riflemen to be allowed to continue firing rounds even after their target had long fled because this enabled their fear to dissipate. Further, the stressful aspects of being placed in a passive role in wartime helped explain the disjunction between risk and fear. Thus, crew in medium bombers (which were forced to keep to course irrespective of danger) consistently displayed much higher levels of fear than fighter pilots who at least could maintain the myth of control over their fate. This was despite the fact that it was well known that only one-quarter of all crew in medium bombers would be killed compared with one-half of all fighter pilots. If a combatant could not act, he was more susceptible to fear.
Furthermore, maintaining high morale meant ensuring that combatants retained at least the illusion that they were directing their aggressive emotions against a recognizable foe not some mysterious wraith. It was for this reason that even the War Office during the Second World War began downplaying the importance of dehumanizing the enemy.Dehumanization could increase levels of anxiety by transforming the enemy into mysterious and all-powerful ‘in-humans’: men yearned for the reassurance that their enemy were ‘flesh and blood’ even if this induced feelings of remorse when they killed them.
One additional factor that emerged during the Second World War and contributed to the increase in anxiety was the changing nature of the victims. No longer were ‘valiant warriors’ engaged in one-to-one battle with equals – the victims of choice from 1939 were women, children, and elderly men. Without question, killing the weak and the wounded made the most tender as well as the most grisly hearts tremble. When the perceived legality of any particular military action was breached men were particularly likely to feel overwhelming anxiety. This was particularly severe during the Korean War and the Vietnam Wear. Thus, Jerry Samuels had enlisted in the army in October 1968, determined to ‘make my wife and my mother proud of me’. Instead, he found himself raping women and killing unresisting civilians. On one occasion when women were killed after being gang-raped, Samuels was anxious to insist that although he had participated in the rape, he had taken no part in the murder (although he did nothing to prevent it). In his words:
I felt like a big bolt of lightning was supposed to come out of the sky with Uncle Sam's name attached to it and strike me dead. But it didn't.... I was hoping for some kind of reprimand, somebody to say, ‘You just murdered innocent people’. But nobody did.
It was not surprising that veterans who admitted to having participated in atrocities were more liable to be consumed with anxiety. In the words of ‘Fred’, who had frequently been ordered to massacre women and children when part of a SEAL team: ‘after each mission I would vomit for hours and beg God to forgive us for what we were doing.’ Anxiety was often present even when the breaching of a code was unintended, as in the case of the soldier, John Garcia, during the Second World War, who had inadvertently killed a woman and her infant. Forty years later, he confessed that the killing ‘still bothers me, that hounds me. I still feel I committed murder.... Oh, I still lose nights of sleep because of that woman I shot. I still lose lots of sleep.’ When the argument ‘it was only him or me’ could no longer be employed since the victims were patently unthreatening and innocent, combatants responded with profound anxiety and hid their faces, trembling.
Nevertheless, despite the emphasis on fear and anxiety during traumatic events, what is most striking when we read the letters and diaries of people who went through such events is that they testify not to breakdown but instead to the resilience of the human imagination – the ability of most people, even in the midst of the extremes of terror, to use language and memory (for memory is created not only after the conflict, but in each and every instant of enaction) to forge a mythical world that is desirous -- capable of conforming to recognisable aesthetics and embodying ‘meaning’.
One of the most powerful tools warding off psychological collapse is the ability to impose a sensible and coherent logic on chaotic events. This was the case in non-war disasters as much as in war. For survivors of traumatic events, emotional succour could only be achieved through the reinvention of myths, particularly those of family and community. A great deal has been written about ‘panic’ and ‘dysfunctional’ behaviour in combat, but what is actually striking is the high levels of adaptability. Let us not deceive ourselves, though: this process was frequently not benign. An evil ‘other’ was central to coping with disaster. Hatred dispelled terror.
The moral and emotional survival of combatants, however, depended on more than stimulating the urge to hatred. Fantasy and story-telling was central to the survival of combatants. The creativity of combatants took numerous forms – we are all familiar with bloodily heroic combat narratives and the giddy bragging typical of many oral histories. Combatants often constructed killing as an act of carnival. Combat gear, painted faces, and the endless refrain that men had to turn into ‘animals’ were the martial equivalent of the carnival mask: it enabled men to invert the moral order while still remaining innocent and committed to that order. There was also the more insidious (and equally carnavalesque) taking of souvenirs from corpses. This is often regarded as a phenomenon of the Vietnam War, but it was important during the First and Second World Wars as well, although the extent of such gruesome trophy-hunting varied according to the racial nature of the enemy (‘Japs’ more frequently than ‘Huns’), opportunity (small patrols during the Second World War in the Pacific theatre more than in the mass entrenched armies of the First World War), and national narrative traditions (American troops placed more emphasis on ‘scalping’ their enemies ‘like the Indians’).
Whatever its form, genre was important. The serviceman modelled himself according to the appearance of heroic warriors similar to those present in combat literature, games, and films. The military itself called it the ‘John Wayne syndrome’. In recent years, it has been augmented with the ‘G. I. Jane syndrome’. Many combatants took such tales to heart, blurring imagination and experience, as I documented in An Intimate History of Killing. By imagining oneself as participating in a filmatic or fictive fantasy, combatants could find a language that avoided facing the unspeakable terror not only of dying, but of meting-out death.
In these rituals and stories, death could be construed as a joke. The individual corpse came to represent a universal condition and the terror of death was diminished. At the same time, much of it was bitter creativity – the martial equivalent of what Charles Baudelaire called the ‘primordial law of laughter’ or the ‘perpetual explosion of... rage and... suffering’ – anger against the ‘big brass’ who issued the orders which caused Tommies such anguish. It was a narrative which ‘lacerates and scorches the lips of the laugher for whose sins there can be no remission’. Laughter not only enabled cruelty: it framed it. In the grotesque, men were able to confront (and survive) ‘the horror, the horror’.
At a political level, these ways of framing memory performed a crucial function in enabling men to cope with the problem of the transition from an identity based upon the Commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ to one in which killing was the measure of identity and self-worth. Carnavalesque rites of killing could be enjoyable: they helped create individual identity as a ‘warrior’ engaged in a life-and-death struggle, and they helped cement group bonds – comradeship between men, all of whom were ‘set apart’ from both their pre-war personas and civilian society ‘back home’, by acts of violence. This was why, in combat, cruel, and often carnavalesque rites constituted what Mikhail Bakhtin called ‘authorized transgression’: military authorities officially disapproved of gruesome photographs and ‘fooling around’ with enemy corpses, but ‘turned a blind eye’ to such antics, accepting them as necessary for ‘effective combat performance’. It was a sign of combat effectiveness.
Put another way, fantasies of fighting prowess, chivalrous warriors, and fearless combatants, as recited endlessly in diary entries and letters home, were one way of coming to terms with random, omnipresent death. It was a way of grasping something oppressive, crushing, and profoundly significant and for which men could find no adequate words. The philosopher, Julia Kristeva put this particularly well in her book Powers of Horror, when she referred to the state of ‘abjection’. Writing about the horrors of war can be seen as a way of coping with ‘a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me, [the] object and abjection are my safeguards’. This is clearly one of the functions of war-writing: it is part of the struggle to find a language – not in an attempt to ‘approximate’ ‘reality’, an impossible feat in the horror that is combat – but precisely to integrate it into some sequence that refers to the self.
But language fulfils another function – a more invidious one: not only does it enable the perpetrators to do what they do, it also enables them to reintegrate to ‘peacetime society’ afterwards. After all, although it may be important to engage people in war, at some stage, peace must break out again. In this latter shift, the act of narration or photographically ‘framing’ extremes of violence is integral to the process of enabling the perpetrator to assimilate his or her acts into a peacetime ‘self’. It is no wonder that so many war memoirs have been written.
In other words, evil is not ‘banal’. Quite the contrary: it has infused every subtle nuance of the society from which it was born. This is why mass killings can take place, with remarkably little psychological trauma for the perpetrators. Indeed, the striking thing about mass killing is that it involves almost unimaginable levels of complicity. As already mentioned, military groups might also encourage such brutal behaviour, recognising that even the extremes of aggressive behaviour of their troops encouraged the ‘offensive spirit’: punishing offenders reduced the likelihood of subsequent aggressive behaviour when it was ordered. In other words, brutal behaviour behind the lines was essential practice for future combat. In fact, people were more liable to be rewarded for mass killing than punished. Those individuals and groups with a high ‘kill ratio’ were given extra privileges, such as a longer stretch behind the lines or a larger share of the bounty looted from homes. But evidence of brutal behaviour in war begs the question of how so many academics, shopkeepers, and factory workers proved able to engage in exceptional acts of mass killing in wartime. Men like William Manchester, discussed at the beginning of this paper, were not ‘killers’, and they were not brutalised by their actions in combat. Emotions such as fear, rage, and exhilaration, as well as the belief in the need to ‘obey orders’ were some of the factors that enabled them to be converted into ‘effective military personnel’ after only perfunctory military training. In the killing frenzy of combat, the fact that the slaughter of fellow human beings could elicit feelings of satisfaction in addition to fear was the dirty secret that dared not be uttered after the war if combatants were to settle back to their calm civilian lives, un-brutalized.
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