the deed, certainly not the intensity of disgust felt for Nazi executioners. When we mentally empathize with the bomber crews, when we put ourselves in their places, most cannot truly see themselves doing any different than they did. Therefore we do not judge them as criminals. We rationalize their actions and most of us have a gut feeling that we could have done what the bomber crews did, but could not ever have done what the executioners did.
When we reach out with empathy in these circumstances, we also empathize with the victims. Oddly enough, very few survivors of strategic bombing in Britain and Germany suffered from longterm emotional trauma resulting from their experiences, while most of the survivors of Nazi concentration camps — and many soldiers in battle — did and continue to do so. Incredibly, yet undeniably, there is a qualitative distinction in the eyes of those who suffered: the survivors of Auschwitz were personally traumatized by criminals and suffered lifelong psychological damage from their experiences, whereas the survivors of Hamburg were incidental victims of an act of war and were able to put it behind them.
Glenn Gray, a trained philosopher, served in an intelligence unit in World War II that was responsible for dealing with civilians ranging from spies to Nazi collaborators to survivors of concentration camps. He understood this qualitative distinction in the manner of death:
Not the frequency of death but the manner of dying makes a qualitative difference. Death in war is commonly caused by members of my own species actively seeking my end, despite the fact that they may never have seen me and have no personal reason for enmity. It is death brought about by hostile intent rather than by accident or natural causes that separates war from peace so completely.
Even our legal system is established around a determination of intent. Emotionally and intellectually we can readily grasp the difference between premeditated murder and manslaughter. The distinction based on intent represents an institutionalization of our emotional responses to these situations.
The issue of relative trauma in killing situations (for both the victim and the killer) was addressed earlier. It is sufficient to say here that at some instinctive, empathic level both survivors and historical observers understand the qualitative distinction between dying in a bombing attack and dying in a concentration camp. Bombing deaths are buffered by the all-important factor of distance. They represent an impersonal act of war in which specific deaths are unintended and almost accidental in nature. (“Collateral damage” is the military euphemism for such killing of civilians while bombing military targets.) Execution of innocent civilians, a subject to be addressed later in this study, is on the other hand a highly personal act of psychotic irrationality that openly refutes the humanity of the victims.
So what is the difference? Ultimately, the difference is distance.
CHAPTER TWO
To fight from a distance is instinctive in man. From the first day he has worked to this end, and he continues to do so.
Maximum Range: “They Can Pretend They Are Not Killing Human Beings”
Our examination of the killing process at different points along the distance spectrum begins at maximum range. For our purposes “maximum range” is defined as a range at which the killer is unable to perceive his individual victims without using some form of mechanical assistance — binoculars, radar, periscope, remote TV camera, and so on.
Gray states the matter clearly: “Many a pilot or artilleryman who has destroyed untold numbers of terrified noncombatants has never felt any need for repentance or regret.” And Dyer echoes and reinforces Gray when he notes that there has never been any difficulty in getting artillerymen, bomber crews, or naval personnel to kill:
Partly it is the same pressure that keeps machine gun crews firing — they are being observed by their fellows — but even more important is the intervention of distance and machinery between them and the enemy; they can pretend they are not killing human beings.
On the whole, however, distance is a sufficient buffer: gunners fire at grid references they cannot see; submarine crews fire torpedoes at “ships” (and not, somehow, at the people in the ships); pilots launch their missiles at “targets.”
Dyer covers most of the maximum-range types of killing here. Artillery crews, bomber crews, naval gunners, and missile crews — at sea and on the ground — are all protected by the same powerful combination of group absolution, mechanical distance, and, most pertinent to our current discussion, physical distance.
In years of research and reading on the subject of killing in combat I have not found one single instance of individuals who have refused to kill the enemy under these circumstances, nor have I found a single instance of psychiatric trauma associated with this type of killing. Even in the case of the individuals who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, contrary to popular myth, there are no indications of psychological problems. Historical accounts indicate that the pilot of the aircraft that made the weather reconnaissance for the
Long Range: “Not Eyeball to Eyeball with the Sweat and the Emotions of Combat”
“Long range” is defined here as the range at which the average soldier may be able to see the enemy, but is unable to kill him without some form of special weaponry — sniper weapons, anti-armor missiles, or tank fire.
Holmes tells of a World War I Australian sniper recalling how, after shooting a German observer, “a queer thrill shot through me, it was a different feeling to that which I had when I shot my first kangaroo when I was a boy. For an instant I felt sick and faint; but the feeling soon passed.”
Here we begin to see some disturbance at the act of killing, but snipers doctrinally operate as teams, and like maximum-range killers they are protected by the same potent combination of group absolution, mechanical distance (the rifle scope), and physical distance. Their observations and the accounts of their kills are strangely depersonalized and different from those that we will see at closer ranges:
At 2109 [on February 3, 1969] five Viet Cong moved from the woodline to the edge of the rice paddy and the first Viet Cong in the group was taken under fire… resulting in one Viet Cong killed. Immediately the other Viet Cong formed a huddle around the fallen body, apparently not quite sure of what had taken place. Sergeant Waldron continued engaging the Viet Cong one by one until a total of [all] five Viet Cong were killed.[15]
