In civil life, people with a penchant for fighting
are deemed at best an embarrassment, at worst a menace. Warriors are
unfashionable people in democratic societies during times of peace.
Major-General John Pope of the Army of Tennessee asserted: ‘The well-being of
the people equally with the well-being of the Army requires a common sympathy
and a common interest between them.’ Yet this proposition is far more honored
in the breach than in the observance. ‘Much more could be done if the women in
America would praise their heroes,’ said George Patton. Nelson liked to quote
Thomas Jordan’s epigram:
Our God and sailor we adore,
In time of danger, not before;
The danger past, both are alike acquitted,
God
is forgotten, and the sailor slighted.
Yet all nations need warriors to pursue their interests in conflict, to create disciplined violence
within the harness of uniform. In times of war, fighting men are suddenly
cherished and become celebrities – or at least did so until very recently. Few
of those who experience battle emerge as heroes. Most, even if they have
volunteered for military service, discover amid mortal peril that they prefer to
act in a fashion likely to enable them to see home again, rather than to perform
the sorts of feats which win medals. This does not mean they are cowards. The
majority do their duty conscientiously. They are reluctant, however, to take
those strides beyond duty which mark out the men who win battles for their
countries . . . Stan Hollis’s[1] colonel said: ‘I think Hollis was the only man
I met between 1939 and 1945 who felt winning the war was his personal
responsibility. Everybody else, when they heard there was a bloody awful job on,
used to to mutter: ‘Please God some other poor soul can be found to do it.’’
Every army, in order to prevail on the battlefield, needs a certain number of
people capable of courage, initiative of leadership beyond the norm,. What is
the norm? It has changed through the course of history, dramatically so since
the mid-twentieth century, with the advance of what passes for civilization. Western
democracies have not become more merciful towards enemies, Indeed they use ever
more terrible weapons to encompass their destruction. Western warriors,
however, have become progressively more sensitive to risk and hardship, in a
fashion which reflects sentiment in the societies from which they are drawn. A
Greek or Roman soldier was required to engage in hours of close-quarter combat
with edged weapons which hacked through flesh, muscle, bone and entrails.
Modern firearms inflict terrible wounds, but by a much less intimate process.
“Was this fighting? mused World War I fighter pilot V. M. Yeates. ‘There is no
anger, no red lust, no struggle, no straining muscles and sobbing breath; only slight
movement of levers and the rattle of machine-guns.’
In the past . . .the acceptance of possible death – of a multitude of deaths on
one’s own side, win or lose – was part of the contract, in a fashion that has
vanished today. Low-intensity engagement with guerillas continues to inflict
painful losses on Western armies, conspicuously in Iraq after 2003. If matters
go according to plan in such set piece operations as the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq, or the bombing of Kosovo, however, military objectives are achieved
are negligible cost to the technological master–power . . .
The American civil war required from combatants the same submission to mass
fire as Bonaparte’s and Wellington’s soldiers experienced, the ordeals of
Gettysburg and the Wilderness being rendered more terrible by improvements in
weapon technology. Although the clash of the states was much shorter in
duration than the the great European wars
earlier in the nineteenth century, it exacted by far the highest
casualties of any conflict in the history of the United States, albeit many of
them by disease…A relatively small number of people enjoyed the conflicts of
the twentieth century as much as Churchill had revelled in his adventurers with
the Malakand Field Force in 1900. … .Few 1939-45 citizen soldiers wrote home
from North Africa or the Pacific with Churchill’s enthusiastic delight.
The most dramatic foreshortening of Western democratic man’s assumed quotient
of courage, his expected tolerance of the circumstances of conflict, took place
between the two world wars. . . .However ghastly were some individual Western
Allied experiences of World War II, only in the Japanese, Russian and German
armies were demands routinely made compared to earlier centuries. It might be observe that ‘fanatical’ enemy
behavior which roused the dismay, even revulsion, of 1939-45 American and
British soldiers was no more than had been asked as commonplace of their own
forebears: a willingness to carry out orders likely to precipitate their own
deaths. After 1918, the soldiers of the Western democracies in World WAR II
were deemed to have grown more ‘civilized,’ a cause of lamentation among their
commanders, Senior officers such as Patton, Brooke and Alexander, not to
mention Churchill, bewailed the fact that the men whom they led possessed less
capacity for suffering than their fathers who bore arms in the Kaiser’s war.
Norms have changed.. .
Yet in every society one earth, the most durable convention, from ancient times
until very recently, has held physical courage to be the highest human
attribute. For thousands of years, in nations dominated by the warrior ethic,
this quality was valued more highly than intellectual achievement and moral
worth. . . . One consequence of
mankind’s exaggerated regard for courage is that some remarkably stupid men, their
only virtue a willingness to expose their own persons to risk, have been
granted positions of responsibility on the battlefield, where their follies
cost lives. Bonaparte often over-promoted officers of high courage and small intelligence,
whose headlong assaults upon the enemy cost the imperial army gratuitous
slaughter. General Sir Harold Alexander’s bravery, patrician manners and
dashing appearance made him Churchill’s favorite general. ‘Alex’ looked the
ideal warrior. The prime minister was
content to overlook the hero’s notorious laziness and lack of intellect.
A less-exalted officer who showed himself ‘brave as a lion’, to quote a
comrade, leading a battalion in northwest Europe in 1944-45 had to be relieved
of brigade command in Korea in 1951. His subordinates formally protested to the
divisional commander when this committed warrior proposed to launch his men in
a frontal assault upon the Chinese. He failed to comprehend the new terms of
limited war.
Ambrose Bierce advised the ambitious American professional soldier: “Always try
to get yourself killed.” Many of those who display the willingness to pursue
this objective are, however, fools by the normal yards tricks of humanity.
‘Valor without wisdom is insufficient,’ said Frederick the Great. Cavalry and
its senior officers were flawed through most of their history, up to and
including World War II, by an instinctive compulsion to charge. No warrior
should be promoted to higher command merely because he is brave. Two thousand
five hundred years ago, the Chinese warrior Wu Ch’i noted: ‘When people discuss
a general they always pay attention to his courage. As far as a general is
concerned, courage is but one quality. A valiant general will be certain to
enter an engagement recklessly.’ A skilled and eager fighter is best rewarded
with decorations rather than promotion. He should be retained in a role in
which he can make himself useful in personal combat, rather than advanced
beyond the merits of that rather limited gift – even for a soldier –of being
good at killing people. . .
In the tranquil times in which we are fortunate enough to live- with or without
Al Q’aeda - our ancestors would consider
our era uniquely privileged – there is a public yearning to make life safe. A corollary
of this is a diminution of enthusiasm for those who embrace risk. Most of the people
whose stories feature in this book would find our society’s quest for existence
without peril incomprehensible, unmanly, absurd. They would be amazed by the childlike
and increasingly widespread belief that if governments do their business properly,
a soldier in war can be protected from harm.
It is welcome that popular perceptions of courage no longer embrace only, or
even chiefly, achievement in battle. But it seems dismaying that the public
today blurs the distinction between a victim, who suffers terrible experiences,
and a hero. A true hero must consciously consent to risk his or her life for a
higher purpose. The media for instance, will describe a pilot who safely lands
a crippled plan full of passengers as ‘a hero’. A party trapped for hours on a
cable car which returns to terra firma without betraying visible moral collapse may well be dubbed
heroic. In truth, of course, these people are merely prisoners of misfortune.
If they behave well, they are doing so to save their own skins, and only
incidentally those of other people. Anyone who has served in a theater of war,
even in a non-combatant capacity and even in as a perfunctory affair- from the
Allied point of view- as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, may be described in any
subsequent media report of a divorce, car crash or fatality as a ‘war hero’. This
is a travesty. Such a word as ‘hero’ deserves to be cherished as carefully as
any other endangered species.
Physical bravery is found more often than the spiritual variety. Moral courage
is rare. A willingness to defy peril comes remarkably easily to some people but
the warrior deserving highest praise is he who demonstrates fortitude alone,
without the stimulus of comradeship. . .
The highest form of courage is that of a
man, or woman, who surrenders his or her life without hope of recognition. There
have been innumerable such instances throughout history, which by their nature
are unknown to us. By contrast many acts of heroism, some recorded in this book,
have been committed in the active hope of advancement or glory. Eager warriors,
aspiring heroes, ‘gong chasers,’ are generally disliked and mistrusted by those
of more commonplace disposition who are obliged to serve with them. Many soldiers
display a baleful attitude towards officers who are perceived to be excessively
aggressive. ‘It’s all right for him
if he wants to win a Congressional Medal,’ they mutter, ‘but what about us?’ Audie Murphy, that hero of heroes
of whom I write about in this book, was not well like by his comrades. General
Ian Hamilton wrote ‘If a British officer wishes to make his men shy
of taking the lead from him, let him stand up under fire whilst they lie in
their trenches . . .Our fellows are not in the least impressed by such bravado.
All they say is: ‘This fellow is a fool.
If he are so little for his own life, how much less will he care about ours.’’
‘How can man die better than facing fearful
odds,
For the ashes of his fathers and the temple of his gods?’
From a Western commander’s perspective, however, a distressingly small number
of men share [Macaulay’s] Horatio’s sanguine
point of view. There is an element of hypocrisy about the manner in which democracies
deplore ‘fanatical’ or ‘suicidal’ behavior in battles by foes such as the wartime
Japanese and Germans, even the modern terrorist. Western armies have awarded
their highest decorations, often posthumously, in recognition of behavior in
action which was more likely that not to result on the death of the warrior concerned.
It is because it is so difficult to persuade sensible Western soldiers to perform
acts likely to cause their own deaths that democratic societies become alarmed when
they perceive hostile races capable of more aggressive behavior than their own.
This observation is not intended to applaud fanaticism ,but merely to recognized
our double standard. A modern Islamic suicide bomber might assert that his
actions would have won Western applause, if it had been performed sixty years
ago against the Nazi oppressors of Europe. A host of Allied medal citations in
two world wars including the approving words; ‘Without regards for his own safety.’[2]
The tales recounted in this book are designed to reflect a variety of manifestations
of leadership, courage, heroic folly and the warrior ethic. Some are romantic,
others painfully melancholy .Some of those portrayed were notably successful in
their undertakings. Others were not. I am fascinated by warriors, but try to
perceive their triumphs and tragedies without illusion. A touch of skepticism
does these remarkable men – and two women- no disservice, nor does the
acknowledgement that few were people with who one would care to share a desert island,
My subjects represent a range of nationalities, but are chiefly Anglo-Saxon,
for this is my own culture. Three rose to lead large forces, most did not. This
is a study of fighters, not commanders.
[1] On D-Day and in the battles that followed
he attacked German positions which were holding up his battalion’s
advance three times with a Sten gun and grenades, killing or taking the
defenders prisoner. Miraculously, he lived to receive a Victoria Cross and keep
a pub in his old age.
Chapter 10 , ‘The Dam Buster’ covers the question of civilian casualties vs sound strategy. The busting of the Ruhr dams caused 13,000 civilian drownings, a majority of whom were Nazi slave laborers but ultimately did not deny the Nazis an adequate supply of water. He also discusses the bombing of German Cities in a similar frame, ‘Heroes’ and our desire to honor them in disregard of the practical efficacy of their actions.
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