The Italian infantry officer Giulio Douhet became the world’s first recognized airpower theoretician with the publication of his book
Prior to World War II, psychologists and military theoreticians such as Douhet predicted that mass bombing of cities would create the same degree of psychological trauma seen on the battlefield in World War I. During World War I the probability of a soldier becoming a psychiatric casualty was greater than that of his being killed by enemy fire. As a result of this, authorities envisioned vast numbers of “gibbering lunatics” being driven from their cities by a rain of bombs. Among civilians the impact was projected to be even worse than that seen in combat. When the horror of war touched women, children, and the elderly, rather than trained and carefully selected soldiers, the psychological impact was sure to be too great, and even more civilians than soldiers were expected to snap.
This body of theory, established by Douhet and later echoed by many other authorities, played a key role in establishing the theoretical foundation for the German attempt to bomb Britain into submission at the beginning of World War II and the subsequent Allied attempt to do the same to Germany. This strategic bombing of population centers was motivated by quite reasonable expectations of mass psychiatric casualties resulting from the strategic bombing of civilian populations.
But they were wrong.
The carnage and destruction, and the fear of death and injury caused by the months of continuous blitz in England during World War II were as bad as anything faced by any frontline soldier. Relatives and friends were mutilated and killed, but in a strange sort of way, that was not the worst of it. These civilians suffered one indignity that most soldiers need never face. In 1942, Lord Cherwell wrote: “Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even relatives killed.”
For the Germans it was worse. The might of the vast British Empire was brought to bear on the German population via Britain’s nighttime area bombing. At the same time, the United States devoted its efforts to “precision” daylight bombing. Day and night for months, even years, the German people suffered horribly.
During the months of firebombings and carpet bombings the German population experienced the distilled essence of the death and injury suffered in combat. They endured fear and horror on a magnitude such as few will ever live to see. This Reign of Fear and horror unleashed among civilians is exactly what most experts hold responsible for the tremendous percentages of psychiatric casualties suffered by soldiers in battle.
And yet, incredibly, the incidence of psychiatric casualties among these individuals was very similar to that of peacetime. There were no incidents of mass psychiatric casualties. The Rand Corporation study of the psychological impact of air raids, published in 1949, found that there was only a very slight increase in the “more or less long-term” psychological disorders as compared with peacetime rates. And those that did appear seemed to “occur primarily among already predisposed persons.” Indeed, bombing seemed to have served primarily to harden the hearts and empower the killing ability of those who endured it.
When faced with the failure of their predictions, postwar psychologists and psychiatrists scrambled to find a reason for the obstinate failure of the populations of Germany and England to become mass psychiatric casualties in response to strategic bombing. They finally used the theory of gain through illness as a model to explain what had occurred. This held that these individuals failed to become “ill” because they simply had nothing to gain by doing so.
The theory of gain through illness, however, fails for two reasons: soldiers in combat will become psychiatric casualties even when they have nothing to gain by doing so — such is the nature of insanity — and second, these individuals did have much to gain by “letting slip the bonds of reality” and escaping into the countryside, or better yet escaping to the psychiatric clinics that were usually located far from the targets of strategic bombing.
Gabriel notes that studies from both the First and Second World Wars show that prisoners of war did not suffer psychiatric reactions when they were subjected to artillery attack or aerial bombardment,
Soldiers who are surrounded and without cover will flee from battle, even when they have nothing to gain by doing so. An excellent example of this can be seen in one of Custer’s cavalry units, which was cut off and surrounded by the Indians for two days before being rescued. (Yes, some of Custer’s 7th Cavalry, at a different location under the command of Major Reno, did survive the Little Big Horn. Only the ones with Custer were all killed.) According to Gabriel many of these soldiers, pretending to be ill or wounded, left their defensive positions for the medical station,
Gabriel discards the gain-through-illness explanation in the case of prisoners of war (POWs) and guards receiving artillery fire or bombardment. He comes much closer to a more plausible explanation when he states that the prisoners “had shifted responsibility for their survival to the guards.” The prisoners had indeed relinquished responsibility to their guards: responsibility for survival
The prisoners were unarmed, impotent, and strangely at peace with their lot in life. They had no personal capacity or responsibility to kill, and they had no reason to believe that the incoming artillery or bombs were a personal matter. The guards, on the other hand, took the matter as a personal affront. They still had a capacity and a responsibility to fight, and they were faced with the irrefutable evidence that someone was intent on killing them and that they had a responsibility to do likewise. The psychiatric casualties among the guards — as among most other soldiers in the same circumstances — represented an accepted method of escape from the unbearable responsibility inherent in their roles as soldiers.
For thousands of years naval battles involved missile combat (bow and arrows, ballista, cannons, and so on) at extremely close range, followed by grappling, boarding, and vicious life-or-death, close-in battle with no way to escape. The history of such naval warfare — like that of ground combat — provides many examples of psychiatric casualties resulting from this kind of combat. In its emotional demands naval warfare was very much like its landbased equivalent.
But in the twentieth century, psychiatric casualties during naval warfare have been nearly nonexistent. The great military physician Lord Moran noted the remarkable absence of psychological illness among the men he ministered to aboard ships in World War II. Discussing his experience in two ships, he said, “One was sunk after surviving more than two hundred raids and the whole of the first Libyan campaign. The other was in four major actions in addition to many raids at sea and in harbour, and twice sustained actual damage.” Yet the incidence of psychiatric casualties was almost nonexistent. “There were more than five hundred men in the two ships and of
