For centuries men have tested themselves in war. War was the final test, the great experience, the privilege, the honor, the self-sacrifice or what have you, the absolutely ultimate determination of what kind of man you were. War was the great challenge and the great evaluator. It told you how much you were worth, but it is different today . . . War has always told men what they were capable of under stress.
Now it informs the machines. It’s the best test of a country’s technological skills . . . War brings out the best in technology.
(Don DeLillo, End Zone, 1972)
For centuries technology has redefined war and the warriors who fight it, but the pace of change is now accelerating at a dizzying rate and it has implications that many warriors should find disturbing.
Warriors have always been under threat from the development of weapons.
When, for example, the young hero of Stendhal’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma, the young idealistic Fabrizio, first encounters the Napoleonic battlefield, an old woman warns him: ‘your grip isn’t strong enough yet for the sabre fighting that will go on today. If you had a musket I wouldn’t say anything, because you could fire your bullet as well as anyone else.’ Even the old woman recognises that to fire a musket requires a minimum amount of training learned quickly. The action is largely mechanistic. The swordsman, by contrast, has to devote years of practice to master his art.1
This is what so shocked the samurai when they first encountered guns. It offended a class of warriors who devoted their whole lives to perfecting their art in order to discharge their duty. No one has to perfect firing a gun except through technique, which is precisely what the Japanese began to do when in the 1570s they developed a serial firing technique to speed the flow of bullets, increased the calibre of guns to increase each bullet’s effectiveness and developed a helical mainspring and an adjustable trigger pull. They appreciated that the skill of engagement had moved from the warrior to the manufacturer; they began to suspect that weapons had begun to overshadow the men who used them.2This is why in the end they chose to give up guns until they were forced to reintroduce them when challenged by the West two centuries later.
For good or ill, weapons have long determined the view we in the West have had of warriors – their skill at using weapons that kill anonymously, from a distance, and their ability to withstand for hours on end high attritional rates of firepower from a largely unseen enemy. Only in the course of the early twentieth century was there an attempt by the most militant country in Europe, Germany, to insist that heroic will-power could transcend the material realities that had begun to determine military life. Only in Germany (and a semi-Europeanised Japan) was the warrior code translated belatedly into an anti-materialist ethic.
The German high command and the ‘triumph of the will’
Let me go back to Patton’s article on the warrior soul. It is worth pointing out that Patton was mistaken about the Germans. In both world wars they tended to attach far more importance than their enemies to the existential dimension of war: the cult of the individual warrior. Indeed, in the breakthrough of 1918 they pinned everything not on the mechanical dimension but on a specific warrior type: the storm trooper, the real hero of Ernst Junger’s great work Storm of Steel.
Junger set out to glorify his fellow storm troopers as heroic figures, the latest metamorphosis of the warrior called into being by the demands of the industrialised battlefield. The storm of steel was for him not what it was for the Americans – a war of attrition in which the enemy was as much out-produced as outfought.
Instead he was reinforced in the conviction that while the majority of soldiers never thought about the war at all – they merely endured it – for the true warrior life at the front was ‘an incomparable schooling of the heart’. The German soldier, he added, had discovered within himself in that fateful last summer of the war an elemental power which made him distinctive. And Junger captured the Homeric qualities of the men beside whom he fought:
We hurled ourselves forward. Scarcely had a look glanced over the crumpled body of a foe who had played out his hand than a new duel began. The hand grenade exchange reminds you of foil fencing; you have to spring as in a ballet.
It’s the deadliest of contests for two, and it’s ended only when the opponent goes flying into the air.3
Homer could not have described the storm trooper better – the archetypal warrior in his private ‘contests’ with the enemy, crawling towards the trenches and springing across shell holes in a balletic, if grotesque, pas de deux.
In the spring of 1918 the storm troopers were given the task of infiltrating enemy lines under a barrage of artillery shells from their own side which landed often as little as a few yards from the first-wave attacks. Using light trench mortars, machine guns and flame-throwers they were tasked with clearing the way for attack by regular infantry companies. But the system failed to work. Not only were they expected to advance the line of combat, but they were also expected to become it, and in the brutal circumstances of a large-scale offensive their particular advantages – their autonomy and small arms – proved a distinct disadvantage. The German high command unwittingly sacrificed strategy to tactics, the end to the means.
Breaking through the enemy trench system proved so important that its desired effect, operational freedom, was soon lost sight of. The storm troopers could only fight on for three days before their own material and human resources were spent.
In the event they were squandered in the summer of 1918. Their casualty rates were horrendously high, often as high as 50 per cent.4
The Allies, by contrast, relied largely on material factors as much as if not more than the fighting spirit of their troops. The British army was the most wedded to firepower – a quarter of its men on the Western Front by the spring of 1918 (some 500,000 in all) were in the artillery. The coordination of infantry with all other weapons systems including artillery, tanks and aircraft provided the first ‘system’
to be seen in any war. The great technical achievement of the British was to integrate each component. ‘It was not that the British had developed a war-winning weapon. What they had produced was a weapons system: the melding of the various elements in the military arm into a mutually supporting whole.’5‘Systems management’ is what war has become. Since the First World War the integration of its different components – the managerial, scientific and logistical – has played an increasingly decisive role in helping the winning side to win.
And what of the Germans in the Second World War? The most mechanised branch of the military was not the army but the air force yet even a rudimentary comparison between the German and Allied forces will show how far the latter had reached the future first. In 1940 the Royal Air Force (RAF) was run by pro- fessionals who had spent years mastering their profession. The Luftwaffe high command was run by a swashbuckling adventurer (Goering) and a key commander (Kesselring) who had been trained as an artilleryman and who had spent only one-third of the time in the air that his principal opponent (Dowding) had. By 1940, the British had also carefully prepared a system which applied modern technology, including radar, to air war. The Germans, by contrast, largely impro- vised their attack and did not fully exploit the technology at their disposal, including radar. In addition, the British worked as teams and played down individual effort, whatever the public love affair with the idea of the lone Spitfire pilot.
Many Germans pilots, by comparison, thought of themselves principally as individuals, or knights of the air. One example was Lieutenant Hans-Otto Lessing, who wrote home to his parents in the summer of 1940 that the previous day he had registered his fifth kill. No one did he admire more than his commander, who had already registered twenty. And he also admired his enemy, the British, particu- larly one Hurricane pilot who had ‘played a game’ with thirty Messerschmitts without himself getting into danger. He was having the time of his life, he told his parents: ‘I would not swap places with a king. Peace is going to be very boring after this.’6He never had a chance to find out. The following day he was shot down over the Channel.
This letter – and there are many like it – provides a telling insight into the peculiar warrior ethos of the Luftwaffe. For many pilots war was indeed a game.
Many were interested in the ‘scores’ of individual units involved in aerial dog- fights. Indeed, the Luftwaffe went out of its way to promote individual heroes.
It encouraged score-chasing by pilots, and the rivalry between aces during the
Battle of Britain was particularly intense. By contrast, the RAF refused to officially recognise aces throughout the war and cooperated only reluctantly with press interest in the life story of the heroes like Douglas Bader which the public demanded, and in Britain’s case demand still.
The result of the battle, writes Stephen Bungay, confirmed ‘the bankruptcy of the warrior-hero’, which might seem an extreme evaluation until one recognises that what he means by the phrase is the single-minded belief that élan, or the prowess of the fighting serviceman, is enough. The ‘Few’ who were mythologised by Churchill may have become heroes in the minds of the public back home but Churchill’s rhetoric, stirring though it was (for the British it weaves its spell still), can be deeply misleading. The pilots who won the battle regarded what they did as a job, a collective effort, the work of a team. There was little talk at the time of glory; and those values that were extolled were not especially ‘martial’:
they were the values that make for a high level of achievement in every sphere including business.7
What made the Allied warrior ethos different from Junger’s or that of the young Luftwaffe pilots of the Third Reich is that it never degenerated into indulgent, aggressive or unhealthy emotionalism. It kept abreast of science or what we now call ‘the system’. The Allies had no illusions about modern war; they never believed that courage or will-power would be enough in the face of material factors such as firepower. In both world wars the Germans believed in technology, of course, but their commitment to modernity was arrested, or incomplete. For they also believed in the higher metaphysics of the will; they believed that war would be determined by the superior German spirit and that acts of self sacrifice, and even nihilism, were the measure of a nation’s spiritual well-being (or what the philosopher Hegel famously called its ‘ethical health’). War was reified, as too was sacrifice, with fatal results for their cause.
The warrior as ‘smart missile’
Some things, of course, cannot be translated. National character – if it exists – lies in practices and sentiments for which other nations have no words. When we wish to distance ourselves from behaviour we consider foreign we borrow foreign words. You can sense disapproval in the way these words are proudly mis- pronounced. In the West it is hard to be a kamikaze. One of the reasons why the Western warrior tradition is so difficult to export is that culture does not travel well. Instrumental rationality does: the Japanese imported the idea of a nation state from the West after the Meiji restoration in 1868 and with it military manuals, academies and even military organisation including universal conscription (which broke the old feudal link between social status and the military profession). But if hardware can be imported, software is very different. Culture can be transplanted on to a political body but the graft won’t always take. The body’s antibodies may reject it. More likely it will be adapted, not adopted, to fit the host.8
Thus in Japan the samurai tradition persisted until 1945. The bushido(‘the way of the samurai’) ethos continued to provide the foundations of notions of right and
wrong. So too did the concept of ‘face’, or reputation, the idea that each citizen should defend his own, his country’s and his emperor’s. Often the only way to redeem one’s reputation was suicide. When all else failed, only in death could one prove one’s sincerity, or worth, and defend face without dishonour. This later observation was made by the noted American anthropologist Ruth Benedict in a study commissioned by the US military towards the end of the war.
In fact, suicide is not an uncommon theme in several military cultures. Even in the West in the Jesuit order, which was founded by a soldier born on the Basque border, the son of a fighter, vows of absolute obedience to the order were predi- cated on the doctrine ‘perinde acsi cadaver essent’ – literally, to behave as if one were already dead.9Jesuitry in the English lexis carries no amiable connotations.
It means militancy, fanaticism, terrible self-belief. The Iniguistas, as the first followers of Ignatius Loyola were called, were seen as soldiers who were unusual for the time for their puritanical rigour. Loyola called his order a sword in the hand of the head of the church. Its initiates were taught not to embrace death but to defy it – to assert the triumph of the spirit which never perishes over the body which does.
The samurai ethos was very similar. The Hagakure(1716) – the gospel of the bushidocode – produced an idea of courage that required the warrior to accept that his life was already forfeit. ‘Concerning martial valour merit lies more in dying for one’s master than in striking down the enemy.’ In our eyes the Hagakureis the product of an alien culture; and so it is. If one reads the book one will find little of Western pragmatism; its appeal is entirely intuitive rather than rational. And one of its prime suppositions is that a warrior can achieve the impossible through an act of will (as we would call it), or act of celebration.
The samurai ethos was a truly demanding one for it required the warrior to accept that he would die in his master’s service; all that remained was consum- mation of the fact. By accepting that he was already dead before he entered battle he would not allow human doubt, or self-questioning, to get in the way of total obedience, even if he suspected his sacrifice might be in vain. The true warrior was expected to act in such a way that he did not bring dishonour upon himself, his family or his lord. In extreme circumstances seppuku(ritual suicide) was merely the acceptance of a death which had already been determined even if it had not yet occurred. To die instinctively without calculation, or thought of profit or loss, was not to die but to live more intensely.
Two centuries later the kamikaze shocked Western observers for that very reason. As one American admiral declared at the time, no one could depict with complete clarity their mixed emotions as he and his men watched a man determined to die so that he might destroy them in the process. ‘There was a hypnotic fascina- tion to a sight so alien to western philosophy. We watched each plunging kamikaze with the detached horror of one witnessing a terrible spectacle.’ But the fascination, he was quick to add, did not derive simply from the courage of the enemy:
One of the earliest lessons one learns in battle is that courage is a very common human quality . . . But there was a fundamental difference in the heroism of
the opposing warriors. The Japanese resolutely closed the last avenue of hope and escape, the Americans never did. To the Western mind there must be that slim chance of survival – the feeling that . . . you yourself are going to make it back.10
Even though the US Marine Corps has as its motto ‘Death before dishonor’, no Marine has ever been expected to interpret this literally. Indeed, he is instructed that there is no dishonour in surrendering to an enemy he respects or even an enemy he despises provided he has put up a good fight; he has given of himself and gone the extra distance. Characteristic was the view of the American Marine Chester Biggs, captured by the Japanese early in the war: ‘It is all right to die for a cause if the cause is a good one, but to die just for the sake of saying, “We fought to the last man and didn’t surrender” is not a very good cause.’11The whole point of being a US Marine is to know when to stop, and going a bit further. But suicide is not part of the deal.
Traditionally, Western militaries have only asked soldiers to sacrifice their lives when the sacrifice has some instrumental value. Even in the case of the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save the lives of his friends, his intention is not to die but to save the lives of others. The act should be seen as instrumental: saving others in the act of offering up his own life. And the fact that such acts of heroism are usually spontaneous and not rehearsed tells us much about the psychic economy of the Western serviceman.
It is ironic, therefore, that the Marines should have been the first Americans to learn that the Japanese military saw sacrifice in existential, not instrumental, terms. In the first offensive ground combat in Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands) the Marines came across their first banzaicharge (the cry Japanese soldiers raised to celebrate their commitment to die for the Emperor). In many instances, these charges were suicidal, and were seen as such by soldiers long before the much better-known kamikaze pilots appeared on the scene. The banzaibrigades sent out men with satchel charges and grenades so that they might get close enough to the opposing soldiers, trucks, tanks and jeeps and blow themselves up, taking dozens of Americans with them. A suicide bomber was a cheap and effective weapon. He was a kind of ‘smart’ shell, writes Victor Davis Hanson, who was able to use his senses and intelligence to zero in on a target with the added advantage of not being wed to a predetermined trajectory.12The kamikaze pilots can be brought into our age too if we see them as essentially cruise missiles with a human guidance system.
In one respect, they were very different from the Islamic militants of today.
Contrary to the caricature still fostered in the West these mostly student pilots were not volunteers in the classic sense of the word. Instead, new recruits to the air force were either assigned by their superiors or forced to sign up using pressure tactics.
No senior officer offered his life for this mission despite his ‘samurai’ heritage;
instead the Volunteer Corps comprised newly enlisted boy-soldiers barely of age and student conscripts from the nation’s top universities. They were not in that sense warriors at all: for them death was not freely chosen. They were not even