Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (12 page)
Taken together, all these elements correspond to the demands placed upon a
fighter pilot. (Indeed, the German for fighter pilot,
Jagdflieger,
contains the word for hunt
Jagd
.) This is why German fighter pilots understood what they did in the context of hunting. It was considered dishonorable, for instance, to fire upon enemy pilots who had ejected from their planes and were
parachuting back to ground, even though these men were technically still enemies.
116
Luftwaffe General
Adolf Galland supposedly once deemed it “unworthy of a huntsman” to bombard groups of
American bombers. The hunt is the source of the “fun” of which Luftwaffe POWs constantly spoke. The only other military men who talked about battle in such sporting terms were U-boat
crews.
A good example of this trope is a metaphor used by German navy Lieutenant
Wolf-Doetrich Danckworth, the only survivor from the German submarine
U-224:
It’s still good fun today. When we were after a convoy it was always like a wolf after a flock of sheep, strongly guarded by dogs. Dogs are the corvettes and the sheep are the ships and we were lurking round like wolves until we found a way of slipping in, then we attacked, fired our
torpedoes and got out again. The best fun is to hunt.
117
For soldiers, it made no difference whether the prey consisted of military or
civilian
targets. In his diary, an enthusiastic
Ernst Jünger described how he finally, after two and a half years of war, succeeded in “felling” his first Englishman with a “precise” shot.
118
Soldiers’ anecdotes were less concerned with who was killed and why than with the more spectacular results one had achieved. This, too, is an instance of how soldiers saw battle in terms of sports.
The more prominent or important the target, the greater the triumph, and the more interesting the stories that could be told about the kill:
D
OCK
: I usually took two photos of the same object; the ops. people always kept one. My best pictures were of a
Whitley, the first enemy aircraft shot down by the Staffel. How we celebrated our first
victory! Until half-past five the next morning; and we had a sortie at seven. We all got into the aircraft as tight as lords! The Whitley was the first our Staffel shot down, then
came nothing but four-engined aircraft, Liberators, Hellfires, Stirlings, Sunderlands. Then came Lockheed-Hudsons and so on. We shot down four civil aircraft.
H
EIL
: Were they armed?
D
OCK
: No.
H
EIL
: Why did you shoot them down?
D
OCK
: Whatever crossed our path was shot down. Once we shot down—there were all sorts of bigwigs in it: seventeen people, a crew of four and fourteen passengers; they came from L
ONDON
. There was a famous English film-star in it too, H
OWARD
. The English
radio announced it in the evening. Those civil aircraft pilots know something about flying! We stood the aircraft on its head, with the fourteen passengers. They must all have hung on the ceiling! (Laughs.) It flew at about 3200 m. Such a silly dog, instead of flying straight ahead when he saw us, he started to take evasive action. Then we got him. Then we let him have it all right! He wanted to get away from us by putting on speed. Then he started to bank. Then first one of us was after him, and then another. All we had to do was to press the button, quietly and calmly. (Laughs.)
H
EIL
: Did it crash?
D
OCK
: Of course it did.
H
EIL
: And did any of them get out?
D
OCK
: No. They were all dead. Those fools don’t try to make a forced landing, even if they can see that it’s all up with them.
119
Dock’s anecdote about shooting down the Douglas DC-3 transport airplane carrying the actor
Leslie Howard particularly underscores the sporting aspect of the
frame of reference of
war. His victims are big game. Dock clearly expresses his admiration for the pilot of the Douglas, who tried to avoid being shot down with a spectacular evasive maneuver. But the pilot had no chance against a fighter plane. All Dock and his comrades had to do, as he puts it, was “to press the button, quietly and calmly.”
120
Such anecdotes once again show that most soldiers did not distinguish between military and civilian targets. The point was to sink ships, shoot down planes, and destroy targets—who was killed was simply not very important. Occasionally, POWs even emphasized that their targets were
not
military ones. For example, in January 1945,
First Lieutenant
Hans Harting from the
Luftwaffe’s Fighter Wing 26 related:
H
ARTING
: I myself flew to Southern E
NGLAND
. In 1943 we flew over hourly in “Schwarm” formation, and we were ordered to fire at
everything,
except
military targets. We killed children and women with prams.
121
The film actor
Leslie Howard (1893–1943) played Ashley Wilkes in
Gone With the Wind
. He was killed on June 1, 1943, while on board KLM Flight 777 from Lisbon to Bristol, which was shot down over the Bay of Biscay by a Junkers 88 fighter plane. (Photographer unknown; Ullstein Bilderdienst)
A conversation between
bomber pilot Wille* and submarine corporal
Solm provides an especially drastic example of what conscious attacks on nonmilitary targets meant:
S
OLM
: We sank a children’s transport.
W
ILLE
: You or P
RIEN
?
S
OLM
: We did it.
W
ILLE
: Were they drowned?
S
OLM
: Yes, all are dead.
W
ILLE
: How big was she?
S
OLM
: 6,000 (??) tons.
W
ILLE
: How did you know that?
S
OLM
: Through W/T; the B.D.U. (U-Boat
commander) sent through “there is a convoy at such and such a place, so and so many
ships with supplies, so and so many ships with this or that cargo, a children’s transport, etc., etc. The children’s transport is so big, and the other is so big.” Whereupon we attacked it. Then came the question “Did you attack the convoy?” We replied “Yes.”
W
ILLE
: How did you know that just this ship out of the 50 had the children on board?
S
OLM
: Because we have a big book. This book contains all the
ships of the English and Canadian steamship lines. We look them up in that.
W
ILLE
: That doesn’t have the name of the ship, does it?
S
OLM
: We have that.
W
ILLE
: Are the names of the ships in it?
S
OLM
: It has them all in by name.
S
OLM
: Children’s transport … which gave us great pleasure.
122
Solm was likely referring to the
sinking of the British passenger ship
City of Benares
on September 18, 1940, in which seventy-seven children died.
It is irrelevant in this context that Solm’s account deviates from the historic record in a number of respects: German U-boat commanders, for instance, did not know that there were children aboard the
Benares
. What is important is that Solm thinks he can impress his interlocutor with a story about how he sank a ship transporting children.
INKING
S
HIPS
Otherwise, the stories told by German
navy men and army soldiers starkly differed from those related by
Luftwaffe members. For starters, hunting tropes played far less of a role. For purely technical reasons, ships’ crews had few opportunities to act individually. Unlike
fighter pilots, navy men could not brag about how perfectly they could handle their equipment, since in general they were more dependent on whole crews working as one. The word “fun” hardly occurs in their conversations.
Astonishingly,
German infantry soldiers, too, rarely tell of killing others in battle.
Franz Kneipp, an SS Untersturmführer in the
“Hitler Youth” Division who was captured in Normandy, is one of the few who did. On July 9, 1944, he recalled:
K
NEIPP
: One of the radiomen in front of me sprang in the trench. All at once he was hit. Then a dispatch rider came and he also jumped in with me and he took a wound as well. I dressed both of them. Then an American jumped out of the brush with two packs of ammunition in his hand. I took careful aim, and bang, he was gone. Then I shot at windows. I took my scope and saw someone. I took the MG, aimed it at the window and slap, bang, it was over.
123
German soldiers were most likely to talk about killing when the enemies were defined as partisans or “
terrorists” (this trope will be treated in detail in the next section). But both army and navy men were generally reluctant to discuss the topic.
What navy men did enjoy talking about in great detail was the
tonnage of the ships they sank. It was irrelevant in terms of
medals whether those ships were
passenger,
merchant, or fishing boats. All sorts of vessels were “knocked over,” “shot down,” “cracked,” or simply “sunk.” Navy POWs rarely mention any victims. One exception was this narrative told by an
E-boat sailor about an experience in the
Baltic Sea:
We once sank a
Russian E-boat, a kind of small anti-aircraft boat with a crew of ten. They are quite small things and run on petrol. We shot one of them into flames. The crew went overboard. Our captain said: “Watch out, we can take those few men on board.” We went up to them, there were Russian women among them. The nearest ones started to shoot from the water with pistols. They simply didn’t want to be picked up, they were so stupid. Our captain said “We meant to treat them decently. They don’t want it so we’ll just do the fellows in.” We … let them have it, they were … gone.
124
If the rescue
attempt had gone off without incident, the navy man probably wouldn’t have mentioned it. What made the story worth telling
was the unusual detail that the Russian women didn’t want to be saved, and that they, too, had been killed.
The battles surrounding convoys
HX 229 and
SC 143 seem to have made a particular impression. Forty-three German submarines attacked the ships, which were on their way from
Canada to
Great Britain, in March 1943. Over the course of a few days twenty-one Allied merchantmen were drowned.
People who mutually participated in this witch’s cauldron said that not one of the English who had lived through this bombardment would ever sail again. It was such a hell of fire, flames, noise and explosions, dead bodies and screams, that none of all the ships’ crews will ever go to sea again. That is definitely one up to us, a clear moral victory, if the enemy’s morale should deteriorate to such an extent that he should have no further desire to go to sea. But if they really get short, they will force the crews to sail, exactly as we do.
125
Evidence that sailors felt pity for the
crews of
ships they sank were very rare, as were reports about successful rescues. Apparently, the POWs talked very little about whether submarines occasionally rescued and cared for enemies fleeing destroyed vessels. One exception was First Mate
Hermann Fox from the submarine
U-110:
F
OX
: We
torpedoed a ship which was bound from S
OUTH
A
MERICA
, at night, 200 sea-miles off the English coast. We were unable to save the people on board. We found three of them in a boat and gave them food and cigarettes, the poor devils!
126
By contrast, most narratives are simply concerned with how many gross registered tons had been sent to the bottom of the ocean. Victims mainly appear in the anonymous form of masses of killed or dying enemies.
Lieutenant Captain
Heinz Scheringer, for instance, told two of his comrades of the final mission of the
U-26:
S
CHERINGER
: That would have paid; that would have been a further 20,000 [tons], that would have made 40,000; yes, we should have got something more. It was grand fun when we made the
attack on the whole convoy; everybody picked out their own victim: we’ll take this one; no, we’d better take that one, she is bigger still, and then we decided to take the tanker, first. Then, after that, immediately, the one on the left.… officers on board, they were “Steuermannsmaate,” then we fetched up (mentions a name) again and asked “Which would you take now?” (Laughter.)
127
Stories concerning
ships that were sunk were omnipresent not only among submarine crews, but navy men in general. The strategy of German naval command against Great Britain was one of
tonnage: the German navy aimed to sink more ships than Allied dockyards could replace. So the criterion for success was size.
128
That was true as well for the crews of armed German merchant marine vessels. Evidence of this is a dialogue between crew members of the raider
MS
Penguin
and its supply ship
MS
Atlantis
:
