Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
The Last Full Measure (37 page)
The great killing ground was Russia. It was here that Germany was bled to death. And in the bleeding, the Soviet Union sacrificed fighting men and women on a scale that would have been completely insupportable for their Western Allies. Although the numbers of Soviets and Germans killed on the eastern front are approximate, they are, even in a rough comparison with Western Allied deaths, astonishing. In combat deaths alone the Soviets lost about 6.5 million.
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In addition, more than 5.7 million Red Army soldiers were captured, of whom probably more than half were killed, primarily by being starved, worked to death, or, in the case of perhaps 600,000 of them, peremptorily shot either on capture or in captivity.
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During the first six months of the war alone, the Red Army lost two-thirds of its starting strength of just over 3 million men.
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David M. Glantz, an authority on the eastern front, calculates German casualties in all theaters over the course of the war at 13.5 million and of these 10.8 million became casualties or were captured on the eastern front.
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Even after the opening of the second front with D-Day, 65 percent of all German losses took place in the east. By January 1945 the Allies had inflicted about 620,000 “irreplaceable losses” (killed or so badly wounded that they could
not return to duty) in the European Theater of Operations, while in the east more than 1.2 million Germans fell during the same period.
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Germany would suffer about 3.5 million combat-related deaths in all theaters throughout the war.
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To put the scale of the Soviet and German losses in some perspective, a US Congressional Research Service report states that American ground forces (Army and Marines) had 291,557 killed or died of wounds in all theaters over the course of the war.
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Great Britain had about 260,000 servicemen and women killed, with perhaps another 100,000 from the British Empire (for example, Australia and India had each about 24,000 killed; New Zealand, 10,000; South Africa, approximately 7,000).
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In other words, the Soviets probably lost ten times as many killed as all the other Allies
combined
. In the Soviet view the Great Patriotic War—their war—
was
the war. The Western Allies were helpful, particularly in the supply of matériel, but when it came to the business of dying and killing, it was the Soviet Union that carried by far the bloodiest burden.
THE WAR AGAINST
Japan offers interesting contrasts as well as parallels to the eastern front. In contrast, compared with the massive human expenditure the Russians needed to defeat their enemy, the Americans (as the major partner in the Allied fight against Japan) were extraordinarily efficient. Taking into account only land forces, the Japanese had about 685,000 men killed fighting the Americans in the Pacific. The US Army and Marines sustained around 55,000 killed. So, roughly twelve times as many Japanese foot soldiers died as did Americans.
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In individual battles, though, that ratio could rise to more than fifteen Japanese killed for every American.
The Japanese were well established in a string of island
redoubts—Guadalcanal, Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Okinawa, to name a few—where one might have expected the old formula to work. In the past, assaulting fixed defenses was costly, and defenders enjoyed something like a three-to-one advantage over the attacker; that is, three attackers could expect to become casualties for every defender. However, attackers could usually be reinforced, while the bottled-up defenders were gradually eliminated through attrition. It did not always work that way (disease as well as casualties, for example, might erode attackers more quickly than defenders), but on the whole, if the attacker was willing to pay it, the price would secure the property. In the Pacific that formula was turned on its head.
The discrepancy between the relatively low American death toll in relation to the massive Japanese losses reflected a new way of doing this kind of warfare. A few representative examples make the point. At Guadalcanal (August 7, 1942–February 7, 1943), American dead totaled 1,600 while the Japanese defenders took 14,000 killed (plus 9,000 dead from disease).
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On Guam (July 21–August 10, 1944) the Japanese were wiped out (18,000–20,000 killed) for the loss of 1,023–1,400 US Army and Marine dead.
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On Peleliu (September 15–November 28, 1944), 13,600 Japanese were killed at a cost of 1,460 Americans. On the island of Tinian, 328 Marines died, but all of the 9,000 Japanese defenders were killed. And in the last great battle—Okinawa (April 1–June 22, 1945)—7,374 US soldiers and Marines died in the process of killing at least 107,500 Japanese (many others were entombed in the cave systems they had fortified).
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For a variety of reasons—strategic and logistic, tactical and cultural—the Japanese were annihilated in each of the island fortresses they chose to defend—a “fatality rate … rarely seen in the history of warfare.”
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One of the major factors that connected the eastern and Pacific fronts was the role racism played in driving up the numbers
of killed. The Germans in Russia and the Americans (including their allies) and the Japanese in the Pacific saw their enemies in racial terms that enabled and endorsed killing an opponent who had been stripped of any claim to humanity or nobility. Germans viewed the Russians as “Asiatic”
Untermenschen
: a reincarnation of those barbaric hordes that had swept out of the steppes to fall on medieval Christian Europe. On November 25, 1941, Colonel General Hermann Hoth, commander of the Seventeenth Army, told his troops:
It has become increasingly clear to us … that here in the East spiritually unbridgeable conceptions are fighting each other: German sense of honor and race, and a soldierly tradition of many centuries, against an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts, whipped up by a small number of mostly Jewish intellectuals: fear of the knout [a type of whip], disregard of moral values, levelling down, throwing away one’s worthless life.
More than ever we are filled with the thought of a new era, in which the strength of the German people’s racial superiority and achievements entrusts it with the leadership of Europe. We clearly recognize our mission to save European culture from the advancing Asiatic barbarism.
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The Allied fighting man usually viewed his Japanese counterpart with an equally ferocious contempt. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, at the conclusion of the conquest of Peleliu in October 1944, sent his congratulations to the infantry: “The sincere admiration of the entire Third Fleet for the hill-blasting, cave smashing extermination of 11,000 slant-eyed gophers.” He added gleefully that “we are drowning and burning [them] all over the Pacific, and it is just as much pleasure to burn them as to drown
them.”
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Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent most closely in touch with the ordinary fighting Joe, put it this way: “In Europe we felt our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive: the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.” On seeing captured Japanese, Pyle confessed that they “gave me the creeps, and I wanted to take a mental bath after looking at them.”
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E. B. Sledge, a Marine and the author of the classic memoir
With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa
(1981), notes:
The attitudes held toward the Japanese by noncombatants or even sailors or airmen often did not reflect the deep personal resentment felt by Marine infantrymen. Official histories and memoirs of Marine infantrymen written after the war rarely reflect that hatred. But at the time of battle, Marines felt it deeply, bitterly, and as certainly as danger itself. To deny this hatred or make light of it would be as much a lie as to deny or make light of the esprit de corps or the intense patriotism felt by the Marines with whom I served in the Pacific.
My experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa made me believe that the Japanese held mutual feelings for us. They were a fanatical enemy; that is to say, they believed in their cause with an intensity little understood by many postwar Americans—and possibly many Japanese, as well.
This collective attitude, Marine and Japanese, resulted in savage, ferocious fighting with no holds barred. This was not the dispassionate killing seen on other fronts or in other wars. This was a brutish, primitive hatred.
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George MacDonald Fraser, a noncommissioned officer in the British Army in Burma (who would go on to fame and fortune
with his
Flashman
novels), admitted to the racist basis of his war with a bluff, unapologetic vigor that probably reflected the views of the vast majority of his comrades and civilian countrymen:
There is much talk today of guilt as an aftermath of war—guilt over killing the enemy.… Much depends on the circumstances, but I doubt if many of [the] Fourteenth Army lose much sleep over dead Japanese. For one thing, they were a no-surrender enemy and if we hadn’t killed them they would surely have killed us. But there was more to it than that. It may appal a generation who have been dragooned into considering racism the ultimate crime, but I believe there was a feeling (there was in me) that the Jap was farther down the human scale than the European.…
… There is no question that he was viewed in an entirely different light from our European enemies.… The only good Jap was a dead one. And we were right, then.
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A research study during the Pacific war found that an average of 43 percent of American soldiers expressed an enthusiastic desire to kill Japanese. In contrast, only 10 percent of American GIs surveyed in Europe “really wanted to kill German soldiers.”
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Racism was also an important element of Japanese nationalism. It too created images of the “other” (“barbaric” Americans or “backward” Chinese) that made killing easier. The Japanese, like the Germans, had crafted out of their ancient past a mythological theater that was intoxicatingly inspirational—a collective fabrication rooted in heroic, chivalric militarism. This was a world in which war banners bravely streamed and the sun glinted on gorgeous armor. Its purpose was to energize and inspire a burgeoning nationalism or to revitalize the nation during periods of defeat and humiliation. Japan and Germany were both in thrall to a
deep nostalgia and profound sentimentality, an overproof concoction distilled from a mixture of legend and cynically manipulated quasi history that provided the high-octane ideological fuel for a very deadly style of warfare.
The racial element was almost entirely absent when the Allies and Axis fought in North Africa, Italy, and western Europe. Neil McCallum, a British infantry officer in North Africa, reflected on the place of hatred in combat:
One of us recently received a letter saying, “How you must hate those bastards.” We don’t … there is anger, but not at anyone in particular. The whole thing is too vast for so personal an emotion as hatred. In a sense, the more deeply you become involved in war, the more impersonally you regard it. That may be a sort of native caution: an excess of emotion such as hatred is very unbalancing. In any case, there are plenty of other things to hate—the flies, the heat, the cold, the grub, or not having enough sleep, and all that. But not the enemy, or very rarely.
Hatred belongs at home with the civilians.… The feelings of soldiers in action must be fairly standardized, unless they have been whipped up by such obscenities as concentration camps, or deliberate sadistic practices.… Such things exert no immediate influence on us, and there is little positive hatred to be drawn from the theoretical.… You cannot hate the bastard who is trying to kill you and who you are trying to kill. When war was brief and hand-to-hand hatred might have been possible.… We shoot at the enemy on the basic grounds of fear and self-preservation. If you don’t shoot first he will shoot you.
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When the fierce heat of combat burned off the ideological vapor, soldiers fell back on the sureties that have sustained soldiers
throughout the whole history of warfare: the interdependence of survival and comradeship. “After you have spent time at the front,” writes Günther Koschorrek, a Wehrmacht machine gunner in Russia, “you no longer fight for
Führer, Volk und Vaterland
. These ideals have long gone.… We fight … to stay alive and help our front-line comrades to do the same.”
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Sometimes soldiers did their killing fired up by lofty ideology, but more often they did it because they had to. “To get home,” writes historian Paul Fussell, then a young US Army officer in Europe, “you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it.”
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The political, civilian-sanctioned reasons for fighting were evaporated by the heat of combat, and the war became an internal world ruled and judged by its own laws, so immeasurably distant from the values of “home.” War becomes the point and purpose of war, and those at the sharp end watched the “other” world fade into the distant horizon. “If we killed,” says Jim Alcock, an American survivor of Anzio, “we could go on living. Whatever we were fighting for seemed irrelevant.”
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Alex Bowlby, a British rifleman in Italy, knew whom he was fighting for: “Mixed up in our counter-clowning was an intense pride. I had never felt so conscious of my regiment as I was then. This was the way to risk one’s life. There was no King or Country about it—it was the regiment. And I wouldn’t have changed places with anyone.”
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