The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (86 page)

This brings us to one of the most troubling aspects of the Second World War: the fact that Allied troops often regarded the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians – as
Untermenschen
. General Sir Thomas Blamey, who commanded the Australians in New Guinea, told his troops that their foes were ‘a cross between the human being and the ape’, ‘vermin’, ‘something primitive’ that had to be ‘exterminated’ to preserve ‘civilization’. ‘The Japs…had renounced the right to be regarded as human,’ recalled Major John Winstanley, who fought with the Royal West Kent Regiment at Kohima. ‘We thought of them as vermin to be exterminated.’ To Lieutenant Lintorn Highlett of the Dorsetshires, they were ‘formidable fighting insects’ – an echo of General Slim’s description of the Japanese soldiers as ‘part of an insect horde with all its power and horror’. Wartime cartoonists often portrayed the Japanese as monkeys or apes. ‘A searing hate arises in me whenever I see a Nip,’ wrote Edward Dunlop in his diary of the Death Railway. ‘Disgusting, deplorable, hateful troop of men – apes.’ Such sentiments were even more wide spread among Americans, where the popular reaction to Pearl Harbor (‘Why, the yellow bastards!’) built on preexisting racial prejudices. On May 22, 1944,
Life
magazine published a picture of a winsome blonde gazing at a humans kull. A
memento mori
perhaps, in the tradition of the Metaphysical poets? On the contrary:

When he said goodby [
sic
] two years ago to Natalie Nickerson, 20, a war worker of Phoenix, Ariz., a big, handsome Navy lieutenant promised her a Jap. Last week Natalie received a human skull, autographed by her lieutenant and 13 friends, and inscribed: ‘This is a good Jap – a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.’ Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo.

Boiling the flesh off enemy skulls to make souvenirs was a not uncommon practice. Ears, bones and teeth were also collected. In April
1943 the
Baltimore Sun
ran a story about a mother who petitioned the authorities to let her son post her a Japanese ear so that she could nail it to her front door – an unusual alternative to tying a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree. The United States had already all but embraced the command economy. Now the war against totalitarianism had forced Americans to adopt another of totalitarianism’s defining characteristics: they had dehumanized the enemy in order more easily to annihilate him. The Chairman of the War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, declared in April 1945 that he was in favour of ‘the extermination of the Japanese
in toto
’. Polls revealed that at least 13 per cent of Americans shared his view.

Thus, when American met German in the battle fields of Western Europe after the invasion of Italy, both had experience of lawless racial war, even if the scale of the German experience was vastly greater. Not surprisingly, prisoner killing was carried over into the new European theatres. Perhaps the most notorious example was the murder of seventy-seven American prisoners at Malmédy by the SS Battle Group Peiper on December 17, 1944. That taught Allied troops to fear Waffen-SS units more than regular Wehrmacht units. Yet such atrocities were committed by both sides. On July 14, 1943, for example, troops of the American 45th Infantry Division killed seventy Italian and German PoWs at Biscari in Sicily. Sergeant William C. Bradley recalled how one of his comrades killed a group of German prisoners captured in France. On June 7, 1944, an American officer admitted that US airborne forces did not take prisoners but ‘kill them as they hold up their hands coming out. They are apt in going along a road with prisoners and seeing one of their own men killed, to turn around and shoot a prisoner to make up for it. They are tough people.’ Stephen Ambrose’s study of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, suggests this was not wholly without foundation. As one British diplomat noted:

American troops are not showing any great disposition to take prisoners unless the enemy come over in batches of twenty or more. When smaller groups than this appear with their hands up, the American soldiers… are apt to interpret this as a menacing gesture… and to take liquidating action accordingly… There is quite a proportion of ‘tough guys’, who have
experienced the normal peace-time life of Chicago, and other great American cities, and who are applying the lessons they learned there.

As in the Pacific theatre, American troops often rationalized their conduct as retaliation. The tenacity of German troops, their reluctance to surrender and their ability to inflict casualties until their supplies of ammunition were exhausted were intensely frustrating to Americans certain of victory, who saw such resistance as futile. However, prisoner killing continued to be overtly encouraged by some American officers. General George Patton’s address to the 45th Infantry Division before the invasion of Sicily could not have been more explicit:

When we land against the enemy… we will show him no mercy… If you company officers in leading your men against the enemy find him shooting at you and, when you get within two hundred yards of him, and he wishes to surrender, oh no! That bastard will die! You must kill him. Stick him between the third and fourth ribs. You will tell your men that. They must have the killer instinct. Tell them to stick it in. He can do no good then. Stick them in the liver.

Major-General Raymond Hufft ordered his troops to ‘take no prisoners’ when he led them across the Rhine. And, as in the Pacific, American troops were encouraged to regard their foes as subhuman. One American interrogator described an eighteen-year-old parachutist captured after the Ardennes counter offensive as a ‘fanatical Hitler youth’, a ‘totally dehumanized Nazi’ and a ‘carefully formed killing machine’:

I wondered why the M[ilitary] P[olice] had not fulfilled his wish [to die in battle], particularly after he had killed one of their comrades. They had merely knocked him out cold. Hard-eyed and rigid of face, he was arrogant with an inner, unbending arrogance. He aroused in me an urge which I hope never to experience again, an urge to kill. I could have killed him in cold blood, without any doubt or second thought, as I would a cockroach. It was a terrible feeling to have, because it was without passion. I could not think of him as a human being.

Countless memoirs testify to the desperate but lethal quality of the German defence in the final months of the war. Since the Axis powers
appeared to fight more doggedly the more their strategic situation worsened, the question became: how on earth could they be defeated at a tolerable human cost? The obvious answer was simply to try to persuade German and Japanese soldiers that, contrary to their own expectation, it was safe to lay down their weapons. Accordingly, the many leaflets fired or dropped onto German positions, as well as radio broadcasts and loudspeaker addresses, emphasized not only the hopelessness of Germany’s military position but also the lack of risk involved in surrendering. Key themes of ‘Sykewar’ were the good treatment of PoWs – in particular, the fact that German PoWs were given the same rations as American GIs, including cigarettes – and Allied observance of the Geneva Convention. Typical was the leaflet which began simply:

ONE MINUTE
, which can save your life.
TWO WORDS,
which have saved 850,000 lives.
THREE WAYS
, to get home.
SIX WAYS
, to get yourself killed.

The words which had saved 850,000 lives were of course ‘I surrender’ – or rather ‘Ei Ssörender’, spelt out phonetically.

Though it is not easy to assess its effectiveness – PoW question naires revealed persistent trust in Hitler and belief in the possibility of victory until as late as January 1945 – it seems likely that ‘Sykewar’ did something to encourage already disaffected individuals to surrender. Once the crucial bonds of group solidarity began to break down in the Wehrmacht in the last months of the war, Allied propaganda began to be effective; indeed, it cannot be ruled out that the line of causation went the other way. Perhaps the best evidence of the effectiveness of such psychological warfare was the evident preference of German troops to surrender to American units. ‘God preserve us!’ one German soldier wrote in his diary on April 29, 1944. ‘If we have to go to prison, then let’s hope it’s with the Americans.’ That was a widespread sentiment. Until the third quarter of 1944 more than half of all German prisoners were held in the East. But there after the share captured by the Western powers rose rapidly, as Figure 15.2 shows. This was not just a function of the increased contact with British and American forces after D-Day. It is clear that many German units

Figure 15.2
German Prisoners of War, 1st quarter 1941–1st quarter 1945

sought to surrender to the Americans in preference to other Allied forces, and particularly the Red Army. With the benefit of hindsight, they might have done better to look for British captors, since the British treated German prisoners better than the Americans and were also less willing to hand them over to the Soviets. But psychological warfare led the Germans to expect the kindest treatment from US forces.

Similar efforts were made to encourage Japanese soldiers to capitulate. ‘Surrender passes’ and translations of the Geneva Convention were dropped on Japanese positions, and concerted efforts were made to stamp out the practice of taking no prisoners. On May 14, 1944, MacArthur sent a telegram to the commander of the Alamo Force demanding an ‘investigation… of numerous reports reaching this headquarters that Japanese carrying surrender passes and attempting to surrender in Hollandia area have been killed by our troops’. The Psychological Warfare Branch representative at 10th Corps, Captain William R. Beard, complained that his efforts were being negated ‘by
the front-line troops shooting [Japanese] when they made an attempt to surrender’. But gradually the message got through, especially to more experienced troops. ‘Don’t shoot the bastard!’ shouted one veteran when a Japanese soldier emerged from a foxhole waving a surrender leaflet. By the time the Americans took Luzon in the Philippines, 70 per cent of all prisoners made use of surrender passes or followed the instructions they contained. The Philippines had been deluged with over 55 million such leaflets, and it seems plausible to attribute to this propaganda effort the fall in the ratio of prisoners to Japanese dead from 1:100 in late 1944 to 1:7 by July 1945. Still, the Japanese soldier who emerged with six surrender leaflets – one in each hand, one in each ear, one in his mouth, and one tucked in a grass band tied around his waist – was wise to take no chances.

As on the Western Front in the First World War, then, the crucial determinant of an army’s willingness to fight on or surrender was soldiers’ expectations of how they would be treated if they did lay down their arms. In regard to prisoner killing in the heat of battle, information about enemy conduct was relatively easy to obtain; eyewitness accounts of prisoner killings tended to circulate rapidly and widely among front-line troops, often becoming exaggerated in the telling. By contrast, news of the way prisoners were treated away from the battlefield was slower to spread, depending as it did on testimony from escaped PoWs or the letters from PoWs to their families relayed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. (It should be borne in mind that both of the latter channels were effectively closed between Germany and the Soviet Union because of the geographical distances between enemy camps and safe territory, and the refusal of the Germans to acknowledge Stalin’s belated subscription to the Geneva Convention.) Such information mattered, because treatment of prisoners varied so enormously between theatres and armies, as we have seen. A British prisoner in German hands had a reasonably good chance of surviving the war, as only one in twenty-nine died in captivity; but a Russian prisoner of the Germans was more likely to die than survive. A substantial proportion of the large number of German troops taken prisoner at the end of the war also died in captivity, though the numbers remain controversial. Barely one in ten of those who surrendered at Stalingrad survived their time in Soviet hands –
indeed, half had died within a few months of laying down their arms – and perhaps as few as two-fifths of all those captured on the Eastern Front. The mortality rate for German PoWs in Soviet hands reached a peak of over 50 per cent in 1943. Germans who surrendered to the Western Allies were far luckier. Although it has been alleged that as many as 726,000 who fell into American hands died of starvation or disease, these calculations almost certainly exaggerate both the number of prisoners the Americans took and their mortality. The most that can be said is that those Germans who preferred to surrender to American rather than to British forces made a miscalculation, since the mortality rate for German PoWs in American hands was more than four times higher than the rate for Germans who surrendered to the British (0.15 per cent to 0.03 per cent).

Yet – and here is the twist in the tale – it was not always the paramount aim of Allied strategy to induce the Axis armies to surrender at the front line. As much if not more importance was attached, from an early stage in the war, to the idea that Germany and Japan could be bombed into submission. That, indeed, was the thrust of the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee’s assessment in 1943. It was not, however, the Axis armies that were to be bombed. It was their civilian populations. The Axis powers had treated the civilians of countries they occupied with an astonishing brutality. In the eyes of the Allied leaders, this was ample justification for ‘payback’.