Bare with him. There is a point at the end.
In May 1939 Adolf Hitler attended a demonstration of Waffen
SS battle tactics. The Führer was keen to see how the Waffen SS was using
assault groups of infantry together with field artillery and how effective this
was in a battlefield scenario.
For the demonstration the Waffen SS Regiment Deutschland was
to attack an enemy outpost and drive the defenders back to their main defensive
positions. Once this happened the supporting field artillery was to open up on
the enemy positions, at which point the assault troops would break through the
barbed wire defences with bangalore torpedoes to capture their objective.
Twenty minutes after the exercise was due to start Hitler
asked when it was going to begin. He was told that it had in fact been under
way for the previous twenty minutes. Hitler then became aware that he could see
brief glimpses of Waffen SS soldiers moving quickly from cover to cover.
Needless to say the exercise with the field guns went exactly according to plan
and was a complete success. As a result Hitler ordered artillery to be added to
the Waffen SS formations.
Eight months later, in January 1940, Winston Churchill
visited the 2nd Battalion, The Royal Norfolk Regiment, in its positions on the
Belgian frontier. Although not yet Prime Minister he was at that point First
Lord of the Admiralty and already heavily involved in developing wartime
strategy. The Royal Norfolks had been spending much of their time digging
trenches, an activity which would have been familiar to any old soldier from
World War I, as part of a defensive line called the Gort Line, after General
Lord Gort who commanded the British Expeditionary Force.
When Churchill arrived he was accompanied by three senior
generals and a clutch of staff officers. He was shown round A Company’s
positions by Captain Peter Barclay, the company commander. Barclay had acquired
a small dog which had come across from the other side of the Belgian border and
which he used to hunt rats and rabbits. As they were walking along inspecting
the positions the party came to a pile of wooden bundles. The dog immediately
started barking, having sensed a rabbit, and Churchill was interested. He asked
Barclay if they might have a little sport. Barclay replied that that he would
need three officers on top of the pile of wooden bundles to jump up and down to
get the rabbit out. Churchill promptly ordered the three generals on to the
pile where he directed their jumps to make sure they were all jumping at the
same time to get the rabbit to bolt. There was some embarrassment as the
generals bounced up and down while their aides-de-camp looked on. But they were
all delighted when the rabbit shot out and was chased by the dog, which duly
caught it.
The difference in approach between the German and British
Armies had started at the end of World War I. And what was interesting was the
way in which the German Army used its defeat to its advantage whereas the
British Army learned very little from its victory.
The victory of the Allied armies over the old German Army in
1918 was more than just a simple defeat for Germany because the German people
had believed sincerely that victory would be theirs. Because of their implicit
faith in their army it was all the more traumatic for them that it was their
army which had failed them. The Armistice had dealt another blow as the Treaty
of Versailles restricted the post-war German Army to 100,000 men, including no
more than 4,000 officers.
For General Hans von Seeckt, appointed Chief of the German
Army Command in 1921, the situation must have appeared a gloomy one. But,
crucially for the German Army, he was not infected with the trench warfare
mentality which afflicted the British Army for so long. Seeckt had served on
the Eastern Front in World War I and refused to believe that Der
Stellungskrieg, trench warfare, was the future. His experiences had taught him
that the use of fire and movement under the control of good leadership, was the
way forward. For Seeckt mobility meant machines, armour, artillery, infantry,
all mechanised and mobile and working together. In 1921, while the British Army
was fighting an uprising in Ireland, the German Army was conducting its first
exercises with motorised units.
Between the wars the German Army devoted much time to
exercises in the field. All units took part and used blank ammunition to fire
their weapons at the enemy. This is an important point because already the
German soldier was being conditioned for service on the battlefield in World
War II where, as we shall see, the type of training was to have a profound
effect on the course of battle.
With constant training and refinement the German Army was
ready in principle, if not in men and machines, for the Blitzkrieg by the time
Hitler came to power in 1933. And it was Hitler’s enthusiasm for the Panzer and
for the concept of Bewegungskrieg or mobile war which led to the creation of
the first Panzer divisions in 1935.5
Of course the British Army had not been idle during the
interwar period. But the British themselves were sick of war and by the 1930s
the general feeling was that another war was best avoided at all costs. And there
were other priorities. There were the colonies to police. There were social
obligations too – while the Germans were practising endlessly on exercise with
armour and infantry, British cavalry officers were busy on the polo field. The
notion that they should give this up in favour of more soldiering in tanks and
other armoured vehicles was, of course, quite out of the question.
Despite these limitations the British Army did make
progress. In 1926 and 1927, Lord Milne, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff,
allowed the Army to experiment with armour. And some regiments did make the
changeover in the inter-war period. One example of this was the Rifle Brigade.
This was a regiment which had started out as sharpshooters in the early 1800s
but whose riflemen had served in the trenches as ordinary infantry in World War
I and which moved to being a motorised regiment in the late 1930s. It was to
use Bren carriers with anti-tank guns in the desert to great effect.
All of this gives us clues as to why the Germans were better
prepared for World War II than the British. And it is the Allied generals who
take the blame for the early success of the German Army. Most historians will
point to bad leadership by the British and French generals and their staffs as
the reason why 1940 was such a disaster for the Allies. After all General Erich
von Manstein’s master strategy for the Blitzkrieg went exactly according to
plan and the French, British, Belgian and Dutch Armies were crushed by a
numerically inferior German force.
But there was something else which contributed to the
downfall of the British Expeditionary Force. And that something else has been
overlooked by modern historians just as it was by the British Army itself
before the war. Yet it was a key factor in the way the whole of World War II
was fought and it tells us why some British units were far more effective than
others.
The simple fact was that British soldiers were not very good
at killing.
In 1947 a United States Army general called S. L. A. ‘Slam’
Marshall surprised the military world by writing his classic book Men Against
Fire. The book detailed Marshall’s observations on the battles of World War II
which he had studied in his role as a US Army military historian – a task which
he had undertaken by travelling all over the battlefields of Europe and the Far
East where he talked to soldiers in the immediate aftermath of battle.
Marshall’s central theory was simple, ‘We found that on an
average not more than 15 per cent of the men had actually fired at the enemy
positions or personnel with rifles, carbines, grenades, bazookas, BARs, or
machine guns during the course of an entire engagement. Even allowing for the
dead and wounded and assuming that in their numbers there would be the same
proportion of active firers as among the living the figure did not rise above
20 to 25 per cent of the total for any action.’
The idea that in battle only a quarter of soldiers were
actually prepared to kill was a surprising one. However, Marshall was not
alone. During the Sicily campaign in 1943 Lieutenant-Colonel Lionel Wigram of
the British School of Infantry had observed that only a quarter of the men in a
typical British platoon could be relied upon in battle.
Therefore Marshall’s conclusions would seem to be solidly
based. But the new edition of Marshall’s book contains an introduction by
Russell Glenn in which he outlines problems with Marshall’s methodology. In the
late 1980s Dr Roger Spiller of the US Army Command and the General Staff
Command started to investigate Marshall’s work. He reviewed Marshall’s notes
and his letters and he talked to one of Marshall’s fellow combat historians,
John Westover, who could not remember Marshall asking soldiers if they had
fired or not. Spiller therefore came to the conclusion that Marshall’s theory
about the numbers of soldiers firing at the enemy was not based upon solid
evidence.
Marshall’s legacy received another blow from Marshall’s
grandson who quoted one of Marshall’s friends as saying that Marshall had
invented the 15–25 per cent proportion on the basis that these were what he
believed, rather than knew, were the accurate figures.
After this the academics weighed in with their own debunking
of the ‘Marshall myth’. In 1999 the Professor of History at Birkbeck College,
University of London, Joanna Bourke, wrote An Intimate History of Killing in
which she dismisses Marshall as someone who ‘did not interview as many men as
he said he did and not one of the men he interviewed remembered being asked
whether or not he fired his weapon.’ She goes on to suggest that documentary
evidence from soldiers themselves, mainly in the form of letters home from the
front in World War I which describe in gory detail the pleasures of killing,
meant that soldiers loved killing, ‘Warfare was as much about the business of
sacrificing others as it was about being sacrificed. For many men and women
this was what made it a “lovely war”.’
At the same time Niall Ferguson, Fellow and Tutor in Modern
History at Jesus College, Oxford, was writing The Pity of War18 in which he
takes a fresh look at World War I. He too makes the case that soldiers enjoyed
killing and quotes personal accounts from World War I to support this theory.
He concludes by saying that, ‘men fought because they did not mind fighting.’
However, at the same time as these two historians were
researching their books a former US paratrooper, Lieutenant Colonel Dave
Grossman, was writing a book called On Killing. Grossman is not only a former
soldier, he is also a psychologist and Professor of Military Science at
Arkansas State University and in this book he comes down firmly on the side of
Marshall.
Both Grossman and Spiller point to the fact that it is only
Marshall’s methods which have been discredited and that there is still merit in
considering whether his conclusions were right. Spiller notes also that
Marshall did indeed visit the battlefields immediately after the battles of
World War II and that he was a good observer of the human being under fire,
despite his lack of accuracy as a historian.
Grossman points to a large body of historical literature and
study which supports Marshall’s findings that, in any battle, most soldiers
will not be firing at the enemy, instead they will be running errands, loading
weapons and generally supporting the minority who are fighting. He goes on to
state,
There is ample indication of the existence of the resistance
to killing and that it appears to have existed at least since the black
gunpowder era. This lack of enthusiasm for killing the enemy causes many
soldiers to posture, submit or flee, rather than fight; it represents a
powerful psychological force on the battlefield; and it is a force that is
discernible throughout the history of man.
The question – are human beings natural killers? – is one
which has also preoccupied professions other than military historians.
According to evolutionary psychologists such as David Buss, Professor of
Psychology at the University of Texas, the answer to this question is a simple
yes. In his book The Murderer Next Door he states,
According to the theory I’ve developed, nearly all the many
kinds of murder – from crimes of passion to the methodically planned contract
kill – can be explained by the twists and turns of a harsh evolutionary logic.
Killing is surely ruthless but it is also most often not the result of either
psychosis or cultural conditioning. Murder is the product of the evolutionary
pressures our species confronted and adapted to.
This idea that evolution has forced humans into becoming
killers because of the benefits of killing other people in the great
competition of life is taken to its logical conclusion by Buss who suggests,
after reviewing hundreds of case files of murderers in the USA that, ‘Murderers
are waiting, they are watching, they are all around us.’
However Buss’s theories are flatly rejected by
anthropologists who are moving our understanding on by taking a fresh look at
the fossil record and the behaviour of other primates. Robert Sussman,
Professor of Physical Anthropology at Washington University (St Louis), states,
If murder statistics vary from place to place, one simple
evolutionary, biological, universal explanation cannot be correct, when so many
cultural ones are so much better. There is no evidence whatsoever from the
fossil record or from primate behaviour to support this type of adaptationists’
scenario.
Sussman’s book Man The Hunted, written with fellow
anthropologist Donna Hart from the University of Missouri – St Louis, shows
where the evolutionary psychologists are mistaken,
We humans are not slaughter-prone assassins by nature. We
often act badly, maliciously, cruelly but that is by choice and not by our
status as bipedal primates. We can state this because our closest relatives use
cooperation and friendship as the most expedient method for gaining what they
need and want. Yes, just like humans, chimpanzees occasionally act brutally
wacky – usually because of stress, resource shortages or unknown factors that
evict them from their comfort zone. Sound familiar? Isn’t that exactly why we
humans get crazed?
Whatever the arguments about Marshall’s methods, on looking
at Marshall’s work in some detail it quickly becomes apparent from his combat
notes30 that he was indeed interviewing combat soldiers in the aftermath of
battle, sometimes as part of a group and sometimes alone. Although his notes do
not record the issue of non-firers it does seem likely that Marshall could
easily have asked the question without recording it formally, although whether
the questioning was in any way scientific is another matter entirely.
This view is consistent with the recollections of First
Lieutenant Frank J. Brennan Jr who accompanied Marshall on similar post-combat
interviews during the Korean War. After this war Marshall stated that the ratio
of fire had improved so that more than half the infantrymen were now active
firers. In a recent interview with historian John Whiteclay Chambers, Brennan
recalled that Marshall asked a lot of open questions and that he did ask about firing
but without pushing the issue. Crucially, however, Brennan recalled Marshall
making only occasional notes during these interviews.
Having interviewed Brennan, Chambers concludes that
Marshall’s ratio of fire figure for World War II, ‘appears to have been based
at best on chance rather than scientific sampling, and at worst on sheer
speculation’. Chambers also concludes that Marshall was writing as a journalist
rather than as a historian when he came up with his 25 per cent because, ‘He
believed that he needed a dramatic statistic to give added weight to his
argument. The controversial figure was probably a guess.’ Chambers’s final
thought is that, even if more of Marshall’s field notebooks are found and they
contain more interviews like those with Brennan, They probably will not contain
the kind of data necessary to substantiate the controversial assertions of Men
Against Fire.’
Since Marshall is no longer alive the best people to ask
about his theory that only a minority of soldiers were firing at the enemy are
those who fought in World War II. The results are surprising. Many think that
there might have been something in what he said. Those who do not agree with
Marshall at all are the ones who would be best classified as being in Marshall’s
15–25 per cent of active firing soldiers. A typical response comes from Henry
Taylor, ex-7th Battalion, The Rifle Brigade,
If you ask me if any of our blokes had a problem with
shooting Ted [Tedeschi, Italian for German, used in soldiers’ slang], then I can
only say that everyone I knew would shoot to hit him. If you did not and that
Ted went on to kill a mate, you would have that on your mind.
Some of these ‘active firers’ asked how it was that so many
were killed if not many were firing but Marshall’s supporters point to the fact
that artillery accounted for large numbers of casualties in World War II and
that artillery battles are conducted at enough of a distance for the firers not
to be so obviously troubled by their consciences. This argument is helped by
the fact that the artillery is held to have been the most effective arm of the
British Army in World War II.
Some veterans also mentioned the power of emotion. A soldier
who might not be taking an active part in the battle might lose control if his
best mate were killed next to him and the enemy soldiers who shot him then
tried to surrender. The most dangerous time for any surrendering soldiers was
the period immediately after they showed themselves as surrendering. And of
course when soldiers knew about enemy atrocities, as was the case in the war in
the Far East in particular, there was an additional incentive to kill the
enemy.
What about the opposite viewpoint? – the idea championed by
Joanna Bourke in particular, that men enjoyed killing. The suggestion that most
men enjoyed battle met with universal rejection, even from those best classed
as the active firers. Certainly in talking to the veterans and reading their
accounts of World War II, it is very difficult to find stories about the joy of
killing. Of course many of them look back on the war as a time when they
enjoyed the comradeship and the shared danger, but killing, no.
Of course there were individual participants in World War II
for whom the term blood lust would not be inappropriate. Men such as Anders
Lassen VC of the Special Boat Service of whom it was said, ‘If he had the
opportunity he’d kill someone with a knife rather than shoot.’ So such men do
exist; it is simply that they appear to be either less common in World War II
than in World War I or that fewer of them wrote about it in World War II. So
why is there this body of literature, particularly from World War I and the
Vietnam War, in which soldiers talk of the joy of slaughter?
For Britain World War I was a different kind of war to World
War II. The country entered World War I in a burst of enthusiasm; men joined up
fired by a desire to see the Germans put firmly in their place. Perhaps some of
them, responding to the public mood, wrote of their experiences in terms which
they felt would be welcomed at home rather than to reflect the reality of what
they actually saw. Historians always need to be wary of personal accounts which
talk up the achievements of the author. The more medals a veteran has, the less
likely he is to blow his own trumpet. And if you read Lyn MacDonald’s books on
World War I or Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices of the Great War there is little
there to support the idea that men took pleasure in slaughter.
Peter Hart, the oral historian at the Imperial War Museum
for over twenty years, recalled that he had come across only one man he could
remember who took any real pleasure in remembering the men he had killed in all
his long experience of interviewing veterans. He went on to say that,
Most men regarded it as an unpleasant part of the job to be
carried out as dispassionately as possible. Many seem to have consciously or
unconsciously suppressed the details of the fighting. It was only in letters
home, diaries or in slightly vainglorious memoirs that men were occasionally to
be found boasting of their killing exploits. Here it appeared there was often
the intent of impressing the intended audience and indeed an element of fantasy
could creep in – a very real element of ‘giving them what they want’ – that
would provide fodder for the shallow thesis of the future. Such macho posturing
was not found in dispassionate oral history interviews where the soldiers’ real
feelings usually emerged.
Vietnam was a different war again. By using the methods
outlined later in this chapter the US Army had managed to make its soldiers far
more effective at killing than their fathers had been during World War II and
their grandfathers during World War I.
Logically too some of Marshall’s arguments make sense. After
all peacetime society, both before World War II and since, demands that its
citizens live peaceful lives. Killing someone in any civilised society usually
attracts severe punishment. It is perhaps therefore little wonder that men
found it hard to kill.
Given that there is probably some truth in Marshall’s
assertion that not all World War II soldiers were firing at the enemy the only
question which arises is the extent of this phenomenon. Was Marshall right in
suggesting that only 15–25 per cent were firing their weapons at the enemy? Was
it as simple as Marshall made out? Did soldiers either shoot to kill or not
shoot at all?
There is some evidence to suggest that there was another
group of soldiers between the firers and the non-firers, a group not recognised
by either Marshall or Bourke and a group whose size cannot be quantified. This
group of soldiers did fire their weapons but only in the general direction of
the enemy – in other words they fired but did not fire to kill, or they did not
know that they had killed. This theory is certainly consistent with British and
American fire policies whereby they fought with lots of fire to cover an
advance.
Consider this example:
Rifleman Joseph Belzar, 7th Rifle Brigade, Monte Malbe, Italy,
1944
I saw the long grass of the field below parting and I
followed the movement of the German observer as he moved towards our position
to lie motionless at the edge of the field. He was obviously observing our
positions less than 100 yards away; I don’t believe he realised how close we
were. I drew my rifle forward prior to taking aim but was too late as he
scuttled back to his mortar position. In retrospect I am glad I was too late in
firing. At that distance I would not have missed and now, looking back over
fifty years later, I should hate to have had the recollection of looking down
on a person for whose death I had been solely responsible. Generally in any
battle situation there is collective action and one could never be sure whose
bullet had found the target.
Given that the situation on the battlefield may not have
been quite as straightforward as Marshall made out it is also worth remembering
that, apart from the ordinary infantry there were also many Special Forces
units formed during World War II. Chief among these were the Commandos whose
special training regime produced soldiers second to none and who were close to
the 100 per cent of active firers.
But there was something else. Some of these Commandos also
said that Marshall might have had a point when it came to the ordinary infantry
units they belonged to prior to joining the Commandos but their training as
Commandos had been so effective that they became ‘proper’ soldiers. According
to David Cowie, who served with the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry in France in 1940
and who subsequently joined No. 4 Commando,
It [1940] was an absolute mess from start to finish, not
because of the men but bloody bad officers and a complete lack of knowledge
about the German Army … There was a complete lack of any training and I believe
Marshall was right … The Commandos trained me to be a real soldier.
So what was so special about the Commandos? The answer is
that they worked out what made soldiers kill long before today’s armies and
before even Marshall came up with his theory about ratios of fire. And to
understand the Commandos we need to understand what changed after World War II
and how it is that soldiers of both the US and British Armies are now
approaching a 100 per cent firing rate.
Colonel Grossman’s research is particularly valuable because
he has identified exactly what it is in modern training which produces soldiers
who can kill.
When we look back at the training of most World War II
soldiers it is clear that it fell into three categories. Firstly there was
drill, drill and more drill. The idea was that soldiers would respond
immediately to orders and that drill conditioned them to instant obedience.
Secondly there was weapons training which consisted of firing rifles on the
ranges against bullseye circular targets. Thirdly there was fieldcraft, the
necessary skills needed to move around the battlefield.
Compare this to the training given to the modern soldier as
identified by Grossman. Modern soldiers do learn drill, fieldcraft and they
obviously have weapons training. But now there are three additional factors:
desensitisation, conditioning and denial.
Desensitisation is all about getting soldiers used to the
idea of violence and killing through attitudes and language. Some old soldiers
from World War II have been upset they are when they see modern British Army or
Commando training on the television. Whereas these old soldiers were used to a
degree of respect and tolerance from their NCOs, today’s recruits face a
constant barrage of the language of violence including bawling out and
bullying.
Conditioning is arguably the most important single factor in
producing a soldier capable of killing. Instead of aiming at inanimate targets
on a range, today’s soldier fires at lifelike pop-up targets which fall over
when hit. They do this day in and day out until the whole process is automatic.
According to Grossman this is based, either by accident or by design, on what
is known as operant conditioning as identified by the famous psychologist B. F.
Skinner. The stimulus is the human-shaped target popping up, the response is to
fire the weapon, the reward is seeing the target go down. Do it often enough in
training and in battle it becomes automatic.
Not sure? Consider the following:
Private Dick Fiddament, 2nd Royal Norfolks, 1939
It’s one thing to fire at a target made of paper and wood
and it’s another thing to deliberately fire at something you know is like you –
flesh and blood and bone, who has a family, probably married with young
children, a mother and a father.
Private Michael Asher, 2nd Battalion, The Parachute
Regiment, 1972
It was our first day on the ranges and we were letting rip
at ‘figure elevens’: pictures of little yellow men who charged at you with
gigantic bayonets and menacing snarls. Whang! Whang! Whang! The targets went
down … we doubled forward to check the targets. Six bullets smack through the
target’s midriff. ‘You zapped him, soldier,’ the corporal said… We handled the
weapons for hours every day, repeating the rituals over and over again until
they became instinctive… Familiarity was what our training was about. Handling
your weapon had to become so instinctive that you could kill automatically.
One of the benefits of this type of conditioning for modern
armies is that, because not every response produces a result or reward, it is
hard to undo the conditioning. In other words, when a modern soldier misses a
target or the enemy soldier, instead of giving up he carries on until he hits
the next one and gains the reward. A similar idea is used by breakfast cereal
companies in getting us to eat more of their products – have you ever had a
bowl of muesli with a few elusive bits of strawberry in it? You keep eating to
find the next piece of strawberry.
Another part of conditioning is the battle drill. Although
criticised by some historians49 the World War II Commandos introduced their own
and found that it was a useful way for soldiers to react instinctively when a
set event occurred, for example the moment when a unit comes under fire. Modern
armies make extensive use of battle drills.
The third element identified by Grossman is denial. The idea
is that by continually rehearsing the act of killing the modern soldier is able
to believe that, when it comes to the real thing, he is not killing a human
being but simply another target. Modern armies do not talk about killing enemy
soldiers, they talk about engaging enemy targets.
Although the modern British and US Armies make much use of
these methods neither was the first to discover them. The Commandos and other
Special Forces already used some, if not all of these methods to produce
supremely effective killers in World War II.
Elsewhere other perceptive individuals also realised their
value. In 1944 Denis Edwards had already seen action at Pegasus Bridge and was
a very good sniper even though his training was entirely conventional.
Private Denis Edwards, Airborne Sniper, 2nd Battalion,
Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
15th July 1944 – my 20th birthday
At midday I went out on a lone sniping trip and the moment I
got into one of our ‘hides’ I realised why things had been so quiet yesterday.
The Jerries had been doing a change around and this was obviously a new lot who
were wandering around in the open and without a care in the world. It was a
reasonably clear day and they presented excellent targets. I contemplated
making a fast trip back to our lines and getting out a couple of other snipers
but just as the thought passed through my mind a big fat German stopped right
in the middle of a wide gap in the opposite hedgerow. The target was just too
good to miss and I let fly and the fat man leapt into the air and fell forwards,
flat upon his face and still out in the open.
19th July 1944
We [Edwards and a fellow (unnamed) sniper] went out to the
sniper hides before dawn. We both spotted a German standing in a gap and
yawning his head off. We let fly together and put him back to sleep. Then we
peppered away along the enemy hedgerow in the hope of making them think that we
were mounting a dawn attack. We may not have hit any more but I guess that we
must have caused a fair bit of panic.
We stayed for some while and had just decided to return to
our lines to get some breakfast when I spotted a German who must have had the
same idea in mind. He flitted past two gaps in his hedgerow and I selected the
widest gap in front of him and the moment he appeared I let fly. I think I hit
him, but how badly I could not be sure as he hit the ground almost immediately
and was lost from sight.
22nd July 1944
Went out sniping first thing and soon realised that a new
lot had moved in across the way. Having been ‘hit’ by us several times in the past
and well aware of the dangers, yesterday there was not a German to be seen.
Today they were strolling casually around in the open without a worry in the
world. It seemed odd to me that the outgoing lot did not advise their incoming
comrades of the danger from British snipers but it would seem they never did.
A big fat German ambled leisurely into one of the biggest
gaps in the hedgerow and casually raised a pair of binoculars to his face and
slowly scanned our hedgerow. Equally leisurely I raised my rifle, took careful
aim, gently squeezed the trigger and fired. Fat man crashed backwards and made
no further movement.
25th July 1944
Was issued with a brand new sniper rifle straight from
ordnance, wrapped in greaseproof paper and covered in a thick layer of grease.
I spent a lot of the day taking the rifle apart and cleaning it.
27th July 1944
Mid-morning I scrounged a couple of old biscuit tins, went into
a nearby field, propped the cans against a shell-scarred post, lay down about
150 yards away, fixed the telescopic sights to my new rifle and began firing
away. Unfortunately the tins kept jumping around so it was impossible to
correct the sights. What I really needed was a few obliging Jerries. My chance
came when at lunchtime I was allowed to go out to one of the sniper hedgerows
and a German kindly presented enough of himself in a small gap, just long
enough for me to take aim and fire. Judging by the way that he disappeared
backwards I was satisfied that the new rifle was correctly zeroed. Like a kid with
a new toy I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening wandering around in no
man’s land looking for likely targets but none appeared so I guess the first
hit must have been good and that the rest of them were keeping down.
Several friends and acquaintances – particularly amongst the
generation born after the war ended, who have read this manuscript, have asked
me the question, ‘What did it feel like when, as a sniper, you looked through
your telescopic sights, had a German in view and squeezed the trigger of your
rifle knowing that you were taking another human life?’ I have thought about
this since and the answer is that as a trained soldier fighting in a war where
you killed, or could just as easily be killed yourself, you did not regard the
enemy as human beings – they were simply targets to be hit and I had no
different feelings about hitting these targets as I did of hitting the targets
on the rifle range. The only difference was that the targets on the rifle range
could not fire back but the ones we met in action could. Thus there was more
satisfaction in hitting live targets since it meant one less enemy to fight in
the future. One less to kill or wound my comrades.
Denis Edwards also points out that the Commandos and other
Special Forces were full of volunteers whereas the rest of the Army was full of
conscripts, many of whom had little appetite for war. This is a very important
point, one overlooked by some historians. Joanna Bourke dismisses the Commandos
as units whose status she says was, ‘based largely on very effective
self-promotion’. She also refers to a 1941 report which found that, ‘A large
proportion of men arriving at training centres had not been aware they were
volunteering for the Special Service and promptly asked to be returned to their
unit.’ The fact is that the Commandos gained their deserved reputation from
their operations, and their ability to reject volunteers at any stage during
training was key to their success as highly effective soldiers.
Denis Edwards’s point about conscripts is also valid today.
The modern British and US Armies rely on volunteers, recruited at an age when
they are susceptible to the type of training outlined above. Any who are
unsuitable do not make it as soldiers and this helps ensure that all soldiers
are firers. A conscript army may not be entirely useless but many of its
soldiers are.
So what happens if you put an army trained in modern
techniques against one trained the World War II way? The answer is that a small
modern army can wreak havoc on a much larger force. Colonel Grossman points to
Richard Holmes’s research into the Falklands War as a prime example of this as
explaining how the British Army won a famous victory over the Argentines who
were trained in the traditional ways.
So far we have talked about the British soldier of World War
II. But what of the German soldier? As has already been mentioned German
soldiers spent more time on exercise and used blank ammunition on exercise. This
meant they were probably more conditioned and better prepared for battle than
the British. But the problem of inactive firers also troubled the German Army.
Günther K. Koschorrek fought on the Eastern Front and noted the following of
one of his comrades,
Grommel can’t aim and pull the trigger. Even when he is
forced to shoot, he closes his eyes as he pulls the trigger, so he can’t see
where he is shooting. Yet he was one of the best shots in the training camp.
But the Germans did have their conditioned killers, many of
them to be found in the Waffen SS, crucially an all-volunteer force. Waffen SS
training contained all the elements necessary to produce soldiers who were not
only ready but also willing to kill. For example members of the Waffen SS Division
Totenkopf spent 1330–1730 hours each day on battle training and weapons
practice and 1900–2000 hours each evening listening to lectures which included
Nazi politicising. Crucially the weapons training included shooting at various
targets which were either partial or full body shapes.
And, just to make sure they were thoroughly brainwashed, as
well as all of this the soldiers of the Totenkopf Division spent some time on
guard duty at the headquarters of the Totenkopf branch of the Algemeine SS at
Dachau concentration camp.
This is a book about the reality of fighting at close
quarters in World War II. However, we have already seen how it is possible for
academics to fall into the trap of painting a picture of the battlefield which
is somewhat at odds with the experience of those who were actually there.
Therefore this book will visit the battlefields of World War
II and tell the story of some of the actions which were fought in order to see
how they support the ideas outlined in this chapter. And in doing so the book
will also describe some of the weapons and tactics which were used and which
played a part in defeat or victory. Clearly the whole war would be outside the
scope of a single book. So for each theatre one or two individual actions have
been chosen to illustrate what it was like to fight there.
