and a whole bunch of scared, tired soldiers will surrender rather than die. In World War II an entire Soviet army corps defected to the Germans. The Germans were treating Soviet POWs like dogs, and yet a whole corps came over to their side. How would they behave if they faced a humane enemy?
“The last thing you ought to know is that if
I didn’t bother to include the possibility of organizing Soviet POWs and defectors into combat units and the very real importance of capturing POWs for intelligence purposes.
The Lesson and the Greater Problem
The most important point here is that nobody has ever pointed out to me the potential repercussions of improper POW handling. No leader of mine has ever stood up and clearly stated this position to me and defended it. In fact, the opposite has occurred. As a private and a sergeant, I have had enlisted superiors strongly defend the execution of POWs whenever it was inconvenient to take them alive, and at the time I accepted it as reasonable. But they never made me understand the vital importance and the deadly ramifications of POW handling (or mishandling) on the battlefield because I think they themselves did not understand.
On the next battlefield our soldiers may commit war crimes and thereby cause us to lose one of the basic combat multipliers that we have available to us: the tendency of an oppressed people to become disloyal to their nation.
One interviewer of World War II POWs told me that German soldiers repeatedly told him that relatives with World War I combat experience had advised, “Be brave, join the infantry, and surrender to the first American you see.” The American reputation for fair play and respect for human life had survived over generations, and the decent actions of American soldiers in World War I had saved the lives of many soldiers in World War II.
This is America’s position on the role of atrocity in combat, and this is the logic behind it. But there is another position that many nations have taken on the use of atrocity in warfare, and there is another logic to be considered. This other logic is the twisted logic of atrocity, which we must understand if we are to completely understand killing.
The Empowerment
War… has no power to transform, it merely exaggerates the good and evil that are in us.
The first time I saw a soldier plummet to his death in a parachute jump it took years to sort out my emotions. Part of me was horrified at this soldier’s death, but as I watched him fight his tangled reserve chute all the way down another part of me was filled with pride. His death validated and affirmed all that I believe about paratroopers, who stare death in the face daily. That brave, doomed soldier became a living sacrifice to the spirit of the airborne.
After talking to my fellow paratroopers and drinking a toast to the memory of our departed comrade, I began to understand that his death had magnified our own belief in the danger, nobility, and superiority inherent in our elite unit. Instead of being diminished by his loss, we were strangely magnified and empowered by it.[33] This phenomenon is not limited to, although it is always present in, elite fighting groups. Nations celebrate their costliest battles, even losing ones — the Alamo, Pickett’s Charge, Dunkerque, Wake Island, and Leningrad are examples — due to the bravery and nobility of the sacrifices involved.
As churlish as it might be to compare the death of a paratrooper in an airborne action with the sacrifice of the Jews in World War II, I believe that the same process that existed in me when I saw a soldier die exists in a greatly magnified form among those who commit atrocities.
The Holocaust is sometimes misunderstood as the senseless killing of Jews and innocent people. But this killing was not senseless. Vile and evil, but not senseless. Such murders have a very powerful but twisted logic of their own. A logic that we must understand if we are to confront it.
There are many benefits reaped by those who tap the dark power of atrocity. Those who engage in a policy of atrocity usually strike a bargain that exchanges their future for a brief gain in the present. Though brief, that gain is nonetheless real and powerful. In order to understand the attraction of atrocity, we must understand and clearly acknowledge those benefits that cause individuals, groups, and nations to turn to it.
One of the most obvious and blatant benefits of atrocity is that it quite simply scares the hell out of people. The raw horror and savagery of those who murder and abuse cause people to flee, hide, and defend themselves feebly, and often their victims respond with mute passivity. We see this in the newspapers daily when we read of victims who are faced with mass murderers and simply do nothing to protect themselves or others. Hannah Arendt noted this failure to resist the Nazis in her study
Jeff Cooper, writing from experience in criminology, comments on this tendency in civilian life:
Any study of the atrocity list of recent years — Starkweather, Speck, Manson, Richard Hickok and Cary Smith, et al — shows immediately that the victims, by their appalling ineptitude and timidity, virtually assisted in their own murders….
Any man who is a man may not, in honor, submit to threats of violence. But many men who are not cowards are simply unprepared for the fact of human savagery. They have not thought about it (incredible as this may appear to anyone who reads the papers or listens to the news) and they just don’t know what to do. When they look right into the face of depravity or violence they are astonished and confounded.
This process that empowers criminals and outcasts in society can work even better when institutionalized as policy by revolutionary organization, armies, and governments. North Vietnam and its Vietcong proxies represent one force that blatantly used atrocity as a policy and was triumphant because of it. In 1959, 250 South Vietnamese officials were assassinated by the Vietcong. The Vietcong found that assassination was easy, it was cheap, and it worked. A year later this toll of murder and horror went up to 1,400, and it continued for twelve more years.
Throughout these years the attrition warfare advocates in the United States visited impotent, futile bombings upon the North. The methodology and targets of these bombings made them very ineffectual compared with the strategic bombing conducted in World War II, yet our own post-World War II studies showed that in
