Read The Scientist as Rebel Online
Authors: Freeman J. Dyson
The Scientist as Rebel (12 page)
We are fortunate to have a biography of Jodl written by his widow, Luise.
1
Luise Jodl was a career woman, working with the same dedication as her husband in the bureaucracy of the general staff of the German armed forces. She shared her husband’s code of honor and his professional pride. During the Nuremberg trial she helped the lawyers to prepare his defense. After he died, she wrote his biography while the events were still fresh in her mind. The book is valuable, not only for its authentic portrait of Alfred Jodl but also for its portrait of Luise. She, too, was a person of strong character and intelligence, driven to disaster by the ideal of
Soldatentum
. At the
beginning of her book she placed a quotation from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding”:
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when
it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment
.
For the title of her book she took Eliot’s words: “Beyond the End.” Eliot wrote these words in the quietness of wartime England, in the early years of the war, when no end was in sight. The passage continues with lines which Luise Jodl must have known but did not choose to quote:
There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at
the sea jaws
,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city.…
One of those other places was Nuremberg, where Luise found herself in October 1946, alone among the ruins, faced with the tasks of piecing together the fragments of her husband’s life and distilling some meaning from the dishonor of his death.
Perhaps the most brilliant field commander on either side in World War II was Hermann Balck. He commanded the motorized infantry regiment which led the decisive German breakthrough into France in 1940. Fighting later on the eastern front, he constantly surprised the Russians with unexpected moves and tactics. In the spring of 1945 he led the last German offensive of the war, holding off the Russian
armies in Hungary long enough so that he could retreat in good order into Austria and finally surrender his troops to the Americans. He was, unlike Jodl, a real Prussian. He fought as Jodl was not permitted to fight, in the front lines with his soldiers. He was accused of no war crimes. In 1979, at the age of eighty-five, he entertained an American interviewer with his reminiscences.
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On Prussia:
You need to see Prussia’s situation in Europe, first of all. Prussia was a small country surrounded by superior forces. Therefore, we had to be more skillful and more swift than our enemies. That started perhaps with Frederick the Great at the battle of Leuthen where he defeated, and defeated thoroughly, a force of Austrians about twice as big as his own. In addition to being more clever than our opponents, we Prussians also needed to be able to mobilize much more quickly than our enemies.
On the breakthrough across the Meuse River in 1940:
We knew in advance that we had to execute the crossing and I had already rehearsed it on the Moselle with my people. During this practice I had a couple of good ideas. First, every machine gun not occupied in the ground action was employed for air defense. Second, every man in the regiment was trained in the use of rubber boats. When we got to the Meuse, the engineers were supposed to be there, to put us across. They never arrived, but the rubber boats were there. So you see, if I hadn’t trained my people, the Meuse crossing would have never happened.
Which once again leads to the conclusion that the training of the infantryman can never be too many-sided.…
The operation lay under intense French artillery fire. I had thrust forward to the Meuse with one battalion after some brief fights with the French outposts, and I had set up my regimental command post up front there on the Meuse, along with the forward battalion. I went along with them to make sure that some ass wouldn’t suddenly decide to stop on the way. You know, the essence of the forward command idea is for the leader to be personally present at the critical place. Without that presence, it doesn’t work.
On a tank battle in Russia in 1942:
I was heavily engaged in an attack with the 11th Panzer Division. Corps Headquarters called up at 7 o’clock in the evening and said that there had been a serious breakthrough 20 kilometers to my left, and that I should hurry over and take care of the breakthrough. I said, “Well, let me clean up the situation here and then I’ll take care of the breakthrough.” They said, “No, the situation on your left is terrible, and you’ve got to cease your attack immediately and clean up the breakthrough as fast as possible.” I immediately gave the verbal order extricating us from the attack and directing the division to move and prepare for the new counterattack against the breakthrough 20 kilometers away. We launched our counterattack at 5 o’clock the next morning, and achieved such surprise that we bagged 75 Russian tanks without the loss of a single one of our own. Of course, one of the key reasons why we were able to achieve such quick movement was that I marched with the units. After all, the men were dead tired and nearly finished. I rode up and down the columns and asked the troops whether they preferred to march
or bleed. To compare our speed with the Russians, I would estimate that a Russian armored division would have required at least 24 hours longer to have achieved the same movement we achieved in 10 hours. I had much less experience against the Americans, so I can only guess that the Americans would have been slightly faster than the Russians.
On attack and defense:
It’s quite remarkable that most people believe that attack costs more casualties. Don’t even think about it; attack is the less costly operation.… The matter is, after all, mainly psychological. In attack, there are only 3 or 4 men in the division who carry the attack; all the others just follow behind. In defense, every man must hold his position alone. He doesn’t see his neighbors; he just sees whether something is advancing towards him. He’s often not equal to the task. That’s why he’s easily uprooted. Nothing incurs higher casualties than an unsuccessful defense. Therefore, attack wherever it is possible. Attack has one disadvantage; all troops and staffs are in movement and have to jump. That’s quite tiring. In defense you can pick a foxhole and catch some sleep.
On generalship:
There can be no fixed schemes. Every scheme, every pattern is wrong. No two situations are identical. That is why the study of military history can be extremely dangerous. Another principle that follows from this is: never do the same thing twice. Even if something works well for you once, by the second time the enemy will have adapted. So you have to think up something new. No one thinks of becoming a great painter simply by imitating Michelangelo. Similarly, you can’t become a great
military leader just by imitating so-and-so. It has to come from within. In the last analysis, military command is an art: one man can do it and most will never learn. After all, the world is not full of Raphaels either.
When Balck was a prisoner of war he resolutely refused to cooperate with American officers who asked him to contribute his reminiscences to an American historical project. Thirty years later, he had mellowed sufficiently to allow himself to be interviewed. The constant theme of his military career was learning to do more with less. He was always inventing new tricks to confound the enemy in front of him and the bureaucrats behind him. If I had to choose an epigraph for a biography of Balck, I would not take it from T. S. Eliot but from the old Anglo-Saxon poem commemorating the Battle of Maldon:
Thought shall be harder, heart the keener
,
Courage the greater, as our strength lessens
.
Balck, like the Saxons who fought the Danes at Maldon in the year 991, belonged to a tradition of soldiering older than
Soldatentum
, older than chivalry. Balck fought well because he enjoyed fighting well, and because he had a talent for it. As a professional soldier, he took his job seriously but not solemnly.
Jodl and Balck exemplify two styles of military professionalism, the heavy and the light, the tragic and the comic, the bureaucratic and the human. Jodl doggedly sat at his desk, translating Hitler’s dreams of conquest into daily balance sheets of men and equipment. Balck gaily jumped out of one tight squeeze into another, taking good care of his soldiers and never losing his sense of humor. For Jodl, Hitler was Germany’s fate, a superhuman force transcending right and wrong. Balck saw Hitler as he was, a powerful but not very competent politician. When Jodl disagreed with Hitler’s plan to extend the German advance
south of the Caucasus Mountains by dropping parachutists, the disagreement was for Jodl a soul-shattering experience. When Balck appealed directly to Hitler to straighten out a confusion in the supply of tanks and trucks, Hitler’s failure to deal with the situation came as no surprise to Balck. “As it turned out,” reports Balck, “Hitler never was able to gain control over the industry.” Jodl went on fighting to the bitter end because he had made Hitler’s will his highest law. Balck went on fighting because it never occurred to him to do anything else.
I chose my two examples of military professionalism from Germany because the German side of World War II displays the moral dilemmas of military professionalism with particular clarity. Both Jodl and Balck were good men working for a bad cause. Both of them used their professional skills to conquer and ravage half of Europe. Both of them continued to exercise their skills through the long years of retreat when the only result of their efforts was to prolong Europe’s agony. Both of them appeared to be indifferent to the sufferings of the villagers whose homes their tanks were smashing and burning. And yet the judgment of Nuremberg made a distinction between them. Whether or not the Nuremberg tribunal was properly constituted according to international law, its decisions expressed the consensus of mankind at that moment of history. Jodl was hanged; Balck was set free; and the majority of interested bystanders agreed that justice had been done.
Roughly speaking, the distinction which the tribunal established and the public approved was a distinction between strategy and tactics. Balck was forgiven for waging war aggressively at the tactical level. Jodl was condemned for waging war aggressively at the strategic level. In the view of the tribunal, it is a sin for a soldier to plan campaigns for the overthrow and destruction of peaceful neighbors, but it is no sin for a soldier serving in such a campaign to be master of his trade. Rightly or wrongly, the public still approves the old tradition of military professionalism, giving honor and respect to soldiers who fight bravely in a bad cause.
The distinction between strategy and tactics is not the only difference between Jodl and Balck. There is another difference, which is equally important, although it was not used by the Nuremberg judges to justify their condemnation of Jodl, namely the distinction between soldiering and
Soldatentum
, the distinction between soldiering as a trade and soldiering as a cult. Balck was a likable character because he did not take himself too seriously. He went on winning battles, just as Picasso went on painting pictures, without pretentiousness or pious talk. He won battles because the skill came to him naturally. He never said that battle-winning was a particularly noble or virtuous activity; it was simply his trade. Jodl was unlikable and in the end diabolical because he set soldiering above humanity. He made his soldier’s oath into a holy sacrament. He believed that he must be true to his ideal of
Soldatentum
even if it meant dragging Germany down to destruction. To be a good soldier was to him more important than to save what was left of Germany. He identified his duty as a soldier with loyalty to Hitler, and so he became infected with Hitler’s insanity. The ideal of
Soldatentum
became an obsession, detached from reason, from reality, and from common sense.
Germany was an extreme case of military professionalism run wild, and the judgment at Nuremberg was an exceptional nemesis. But every country which gives an exalted status to its military leaders runs a risk of catching the German madness. There, but for the grace of God, go we. Something of the German madness infected the American South at the time of the Civil War. Like Germany, the states of the Confederacy made a cult of soldiering. It was no accident that the most brilliant generals of the Civil War were all fighting on the Southern side. Long before the war began, the Southern states had established a cultural tradition which encouraged their best minds to become professional soldiers. The tradition of exaggerated respect for military prowess was doubly disastrous for the South. It led to the overconfident enthusiasm and the illusions of military superiority
with which the South went to war at the beginning. And it produced the spirit of sacrificial dedication in which the Southerners fought on to the bitter end, when the prolongation of the war was bringing to their country nothing but ruin and destruction. Robert Lee was a great general and a great gentleman, but all his tactical skill and strength of character only made the sufferings of his people heavier. The people of the Southern states, daily enduring death and destruction as a result of his activities, continued until the end to lavish upon him their unbounded love and admiration. When he returned to his home in Richmond after his surrender, he was greeted by an immense throng of cheering citizens. There was much in Lee that was noble and worthy of respect, but the hero-worship which surrounded him during and after the war was altogether disproportionate. The mystique of Lee distorted the Southerners’ view of the world for a long time. Robert Lee was a greater general than Hermann Balck and a finer human being than Alfred Jodl, but his role in history was the same as theirs, to lead his beloved people to disaster. Any society which idolizes soldiers is tainted with a collective insanity and is likely in the end to come to grief.
