A Two-Edged Sword: Technological Change and the Burdens of the Soldier Since 1800

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of UNSW@ADFA University of New South Wales

In Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

by Darren Charles Moore 2011

UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Moore

First name: Darren Other name/s: Charles

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty: UNSW@ADFA

Title: A Two-Edged Sword: Technological Change and the Burdens of the Soldier Since 1800

Abstract 350 words maximum (PLEASE TYPE) This thesis will investigate whether the rapid rate of technological change over the last two hundred years had increased or decreased the burden of the soldier. It will concentrate principally on the application of peripheral technology whose primary purpose is not that of killing. It will examine the first and second order effects of such technology, many of which will be proven to be counter-intuitive. This thesis is principally concerned with how the soldiers themselves viewed the application of this technology. It will therefore draw upon hundreds of narrative accounts of warfare written by combatants from many nations and a range of conflicts to establish what the soldiers themselves believed were the principal burdens they must bear on behalf of their nations.

This thesis will determine that where technological advances have impacted upon the burden of the soldier, in a number of cases they have decreased one burden only to increase another. For example, recent advances in aeromedical capabilities and sophisticated treatment techniques mean that soldiers are now more likely to survive horrific injuries that even a generation earlier would most likely have been fatal. But those who survive often face a life of permanent disfigurement and disability, the possibility of which troubles many soldiers.

In some aspects, a more definitive answer will be given as to whether technological advances have increased or decreased the burden of the soldier. The contemporary soldier knows that his body will likely be recovered from the battlefield and if recovered will almost certainly be identified, thereby avoiding the abiding concern of his predecessors that his body might be left on the battlefield, buried in an unmarked grave. However, in other aspects, technological advances have clearly increased the burden of the soldier. For example, the growth of the modern media, fuelled by satellite communications and the Internet, can potentially reveal operational information and increase the risk of mission failure. A ubiquitous media presence also poses a very real risk that a soldier’s actions on the battlefield will be taken out of context and held up to be judged in the court of public opinion.

Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation

I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

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Abstract

This thesis will investigate whether the rapid rate of technological change over the last two hundred years had increased or decreased the burden of the soldier. It will concentrate principally on the application of peripheral technology whose primary purpose is not that of killing. It will examine the first and second order effects of such technology, many of which will be proven to be counter-intuitive. This thesis is principally concerned with how the soldiers themselves viewed the application of this technology. It will therefore draw upon hundreds of narrative accounts of warfare written by combatants from many nations and a range of conflicts to establish what the soldiers themselves believed were the principal burdens they must bear on behalf of their nations.

Originality Statement ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

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Statement Regarding Publication of Elements of Thesis Sections of this thesis have been published in Darren Moore, The Soldier: A History of Courage, Sacrifice and Brotherhood, Icon Books, London, 2009 (which was developed concurrently with this thesis). These sections were edited for publication by Duncan Heath of Icon Books.

Copyright Statement ‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

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Authenticity Statement ‘I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.’

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iii

Acknowledgements ...... v Introduction ...... 1 1 Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves ...... 22 2 Death and Disfigurement on the Battlefield ...... 49 3 Overcoming Resistance to Killing on the Battlefield ...... 74 4 The Anguish of Friendly Fire ...... 98 5 The Military and the Media ...... 134 6 Coming Home on a Jet Plane ...... 156 Conclusion ...... 175 Acronyms and Abbreviations ...... 187 Bibliography ...... 188

Acknowledgements

The approach taken for this thesis could best be des cribed as somewhat unconventional. I would therefore like to thank my supervisor, Dr David Blaazer, for encouraging this approach but also for making sure that I did not stray too far from the limits of acceptability. David, at crucial moments in the process, has given me gentle prompting on the need to limit the scope and focus the topic. I would also like to thank my co-supervisor, Dr Stephen Coleman, for the advice and guidance that he has given me during the development of this thesis. I also wish to thank Professor Jeffrey Grey, who reviewed an early draft of the thesis. More generally, I wish to acknowledge my debt to the remarkable cluster of historians that congregated in the military history department of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, specifically Sir John Keegan and Sir Richard Holmes. I am indebted to them for marking out the path that I have followed. However, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the influence upon this work by those on the other side of the Atlantic, such as S.L.A. Marshall, Morris Janowitz, J. Glenn Gray, Gwynne Dyer and Dave Grossman, who have delved into the nature of the relationship between soldiers that enables armies to function. B ut my greatest debt is to those who have fought in war and who had t he moral courage to bequeath their triumphs, their fears and their frustrations to print. Men such as Robert Graves, Eugene Sledge, William Manchester, Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, Hugh McManners, Anthony Swofford, Nathaniel Fick, Doug Beattie and many others. Without their efforts, this work would be little more than conjecture, lacking even the vestiges of authenticity. Lastly, I would like to thank my wife Theresa, who despite two major projects of her own (namely Benjamin (born 2009) and Sophie (born 2011), has been steadfast in her support for this project and has been understanding of the time pressures arising from working full-time and needing to find time to research as well.

A Two-Edged Sword

Introduction

In 1802 Benjamin Harris’1 ballot was drawn and he was drafted into the British Army’s 66th Regiment of Foot, later transferring to the 95th Regiment of Foot. Exactly two centuries later Joshua Key2 enlisted in the US Army and was assigned to the 43rd Combat Engineer Company of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment. Harris would fight Napoleon’s armies in Spain and Portugal; Key, insurgents in Iraq. Harris left Cork bound for Portugal aboard a sailing ship; Key flew into Kuwait from the United States on a jumbo jet. Harris’ personal weapon was the Baker Rifle, which was a single-shot flintlock rifle loaded via the muzzle. A skilled soldier could load and fire off three rounds in a minute. Key’s personal weapon was the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, a belt-fed, gas-operated automatic weapon that could fire up to a thousand rounds a minute. If Harris was seriously wounded the best he could hope for was to be carried off the battlefield by his comrades, operated upon without anesthesia and then, if he survived the operation, evacuation by bullock cart to a general hospital. If Key was seriously wounded he m ost likely would have been pl ucked from the battlefield by helicopter, stabilised in a f ield hospital and a f ew hours after being wounded would have been operated on by highly skilled surgeons at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany. O n the face of it, there would seem to be an unbr idgeable gulf between the wartime experiences of Harris and those of Key. B ut apart from the evident advances in military technology, is this really the case? Have the fundamental burdens of soldiering really changed? This thesis will address the following question: Has the rapid rate of technological change over the last two hundred years increased or decreased the burden of the soldier? Specifically, soldiers must face the possibility that their occupation may bring about their death or disfigurement. They suffer enforced separation from their loved ones. They are required to seek out and kill men whom they have never met. But not only will soldiers kill the enemy but they will also kill their comrades through tragic mistakes. And through it all, soldiers in recent times will have to bear these burdens under the harsh and unforgiving gaze of the media. The focus of previous studies in this area has largely been on developments of

1 Christopher Hibbert, (ed.), The Recollections of Rifleman Harris, as told to Henry Curling, The Windrush Press, Gloucestershire, 1998. 2 Joshua Key, The Deserter’s Tale: Why I Walked Away From the War in Iraq, Text Publishing, Melbourne, Australia, 2007. 1

Introduction

military-specific technologies, principally arms and armour.3 The increase in the destructive capacity of such technology is self-evident; for example, the ‘spherical case shot’ (later known as the Shrapnel shell)4 was introduced into service with the British Army in 1803 and could devastate a 30-foot circle beneath its point of detonation. This shot was the most lethal munition available to armies at the commencement of the period being studied. At the end of the period this mantle came to rest on the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, which was first exploded by the USA in 1952 and could devastate an entire city. The impact on the soldier of advances in military-specific technology will largely be excluded from this thesis, except for a section on fratricide, where advances in such technology are a k ey contributing factor to a quantifiable increase in this specific burden. Rather this thesis will principally examine the application of technology other than arms and armour, and determine its impact upon the burdens of the soldier. Although this technology may have in fact been developed by the military its primary purpose is not that of killing. This thesis will concentrate on the first and second order effects of such technology, many of which will be proven to be counter-intuitive. This thesis will also differ from previous studies as to where it draws its evidence base. Previous studies, given their focus on the technology, have rested on a foundation of quantifiable empirical data, and have been grounded in casualty statistics, the physical characteristics of weapon ranges and effect, and scientific reports. This study, however, is concerned less with the characteristics of the technology but rather how the servicemen and women themselves viewed the application of the technology; specifically whether they felt that this technology eased or magnified the burdens of the battlefield. There is often a temptation when writing military history, particularly traditional military history dealing with the conduct of battles and wars, to treat the soldier as an amorphous cipher. This approach provides a clarity that aids in understanding how large organisations composed of thousands and sometimes millions of individuals wage war. But such an approach is inimical when dealing with the human dimension of warfare, which seeks to understand how soldiers as individuals responded to the challenges and trials of the battlefield. As such, the thesis will draw upon hundreds of narrative accounts of warfare written by combatants from the UK, France, the USA,

3 Representative of this approach are works such as Kenneth Macksey, Technology in War: The Impact of Science on Weapon Development and Modern Battle, Guild Publishing London, 1986; Ian Hogg, The Weapons that Changed the World: The Key Weapons of Modern History from 1862 to the Present Day, Ebury Press, London, 1986. 4 The ‘spherical case shot’ was officially renamed the ‘Shrapnel shell’ in 1852 in memory of its inventor, Colonel Henry Shrapnel of the British Army. 2

A Two-Edged Sword

Canada, Japan, Italy, New Zealand, Russia, Australia, Israel and G ermany and i n conflicts as diverse as Vietnam and Napoleon’s march on Moscow to establish what the soldiers themselves believed were the principal burdens they must bear on behalf of their nations. Next, this thesis will determine the impact of technology on these burdens, noting that this period being studied has witnessed the greatest pace of technological change known to man. That some aspects of soldering have changed over the period is readily apparent. To go back only one century, it is obvious that the field rations of bully beef and biscuit eaten by the Australian troops at Gallipoli in the First World War bear little resemblance to the Meal, Ready-to-Eat (MRE) that currently sustain American soldiers in Afghanistan and I raq.5 The 24 menu MRE provides a s morgasbord of culinary delights ranging from beef ravioli in meat sauce to chicken breast fillet with corn bread stuffing, with each meal providing ‘1/3 of the Military Recommended Daily Allowance of vitamins and m inerals determined essential by the Surgeon General of the United States’.6 Another readily quantifiable change in the conditions of soldiering is the decreasing mortality of disease. During the American Civil War twice as many soldiers died of disease as were killed or mortally wounded in combat.7 Disease caused more than half the fatalities8 in the Australian contingents that fought in the Boer War but the Australians were evidently of more robust stock than their compatriots from throughout the British Empire, who had almost twice as many fatalities from disease as from enemy action.9 It was not until the Second World War that there were more battle than non-battle casualties in the American military.10

5 See Chapter 3 ‘Cannon Fodder’ of Sarah Murray’s, Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat, St Martin’s Press, New York, 2007 for a discussion of the development of combat rations. 6 Defense Logistics Agency Directorate of Subsistence webpage on Operational Rations, viewed 25 June 2008, < http://www.dscp.dla.mil/subs/rations/programs/mre/mreabt.asp>. 7 Union battle deaths (those killed in combat or mortally wounded) during the Civil War numbered 110,000. Union deaths attributed to disease numbered 224,580. The Confederate forces suffered approximately the same ratio of loss (authoritative statistics for the Confederate forces are not available). Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War, The Free Press, New York, 1987, p.115. 8 267 casualties due to disease compared to 251 battle casualties. Craig Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War: The War in South Africa 1899 –1902, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, p.175. 9 Total Empire casualties for the Boer War (excluding Australian casualties) were 7331 killed in action or died of wounds and 12,872 died of disease. Laurie Field, The Forgotten War: Australia and the Boer War, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p.199. 10 291,557 battle casualties compared to 113,842 non-battle casualties. Congressional Research Services RL32492 titled ‘American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and 3

Introduction

Moreover, advances in transportation, portable shelters, footwear, load-bearing equipment and so on over the last two centuries have made the contemporary soldier demonstrably more comfortable when in the field than Harris’s comrades in arms. In such aspects, the impact of technological innovation in reducing the burden of the soldier is largely self-evident and will not be examined any further in this thesis. Rather this thesis will concern itself more with the cognitive realm than the physical and to do this it will have to rely on the feelings and experiences of soldiers bequeathed to us in their memoirs. It therefore sits squarely within the genre of historical study commonly called the Human Dimension of Warfare. This historical field is differentiated from other fields of academic inquiry in the military sphere by its focus on t he individual rather than the organisation. In such matters, I will be guided by the philosophy of Sir Richard Holmes who wrote in Firing Line, his incisive study of the behaviour of the soldier in peace and war, that

Direct experience is, of necessity, limited, and the writer who extrapolates only from personal knowledge risks discovering a u niversality where none might exist. Indirect experience, culled from as wide a variety of sources as possible, is more likely to illuminate the real truth.11

But before delving into the antecedents for this particular area of historical study, it is necessary first to outline the broader context of this study. The defence of the realm is the foremost duty of any state. This factor in itself has provided an imperative for inquiry directed towards increasing the efficacy of military forces. Initially such endeavours were largely the preserve of military professionals and focused on conferring a tactical advantage on the battlefield. The founding of preparatory schools for military commissioning in the mid-seventeenth century, coupled with the growth of staff colleges in the eighteenth, the most prominent of which, the Kriegsakademie (War Academy) opened in Berlin in 1810, provided both the environment and the opportunity for broadening the scope of such studies. It is no coincidence that one of the first and still foremost attempts to understand the internal dynamics of warfare, On War (1832), was written by Carl Von Clausewitz whilst director of the Kriegsakademie.12 The study of military history, and ev en more so the study of the human

Statistics’, updated 14 May 2008, viewed 26 June 2008, .

11 Richard Holmes, Firing Line, Pimlico, London, 1985, p.9. 12Carl von Clausewitz, Carl. On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1989.

A Two-Edged Sword

dimension of warfare, has remained a specialty somewhat divorced from mainstream academia. Academic inquiry in this sphere is largely confined to institutions that have been contracted to provide tertiary education to members of the military, the University College of the University of New South Wales (UNSW@ADFA) being one ex ample, Cranfield University’s Defence College of Management and Technology being another. Even today, the most prominent historians active in this field, such as Sir John Keegan, Sir Richard Holmes and Dave Grossman are former faculty members of military academies; the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the case of Keegan and Holmes and the United States Military Academy, West Point for Grossman. Another avenue of related research is that undertaken under the auspices of the military with the aim of increasing the effectiveness of the soldier on the battlefield. The main sponsor of such studies has been the US military and in particular the US Army. Although a base level of research continues to this day, the volume of research conducted in this area reached its apogee during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, with the release of the landmark The American Soldier (1949). This four-volume study13 was the major output of a f our-year research project conducted by the Research Branch of the Information and Education Division, United States Army, drawing upon data gathered from more than half a million American servicemen concerning their attitudes and experiences arising from their war service. Another noted work of analysis of the attitudes and behaviour of the American soldier during the Second World War produced during this period was Men Against Fire (1947)14 by Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, the chief combat historian in the Central Pacific (1943) and c hief official historian (American) for the European Theatre of Operations (1945). Although elements of this work have always been controversial,15

13 The two key volumes for the purpose of this thesis are The American Soldier: Adjustment during Army Life and The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1949. The other two volumes dealt with peripheral issues (Experiments on Mass Communication (Volume III) and Measurement and Prediction (Volume IV)). 14 Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 2000. 15 Based on extensive post-combat mass interviews of US infantry in the Second World War, Marshall concluded that on average not more than fifteen per cent of men in combat actually fired their weapon at the enemy during any engagement. He stated that even among the most aggressive infantry companies not more than one man in four would engage the enemy with fire during any action. Although always controversial and disputed by many combat veterans, it was not until the 1980s that Marshall’s ratio-of-fire values began to be seriously questioned. An analysis of Marshall’s notes, combined with evidence from an officer who accompanied Marshall for many of his post-combat mass interviews, suggested that Marshall fabricated his ratio-of-fire values. It seems that Marshall’s aim in doing so was to draw attention to what he perceived to be a serious deficiency in the battlefield performance of American infantry soldiers. More information on this controversy can be found in Russell W. Glenn’s introduction to the 2000 Oklahoma Press edition of Men Against Fire. 5

Introduction

Marshall’s official role and the unique opportunity he was given to conduct immediate post-combat mass interviews with hundreds of men ensure there is still much of value to the discerning historian in this work. The focus on improving organisational effectiveness during the 1950s and early ‘60s did not bypass the military. B uilding upon t he sociological basis of the Second World War studies previously cited, are the works of Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State (1957), and Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (1960) and (as editor) The New Military (1964).16 These works sought to examine the military not as a monolithic organisation but rather one comprised of individuals, and attempted to identify the key determinants of the attitude of members of the military in the context of civil-military relations. The focus on the individual continued to dominate studies of the human dimension of warfare during the 1970s. Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976),17 which sought to elaborate upon the experiences of individuals at ‘the point of maximum danger’ by examining the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo and t he Somme, and B ill Gammage’s The Broken Years (1974),18 which similarly examined the experiences of Australian soldiers during the First World War, formed the vanguard of this movement. Later comparable works in this genre, such as Holmes’ Firing Line (1985) and Samuel Hynes’ The Soldiers’ Tale (1997),19 sought to expand the scope by examining human behaviour in battle over the past two centuries (Holmes) and the two world wars and Vietnam (Hynes). Hynes, unlike the majority of the authors previously cited, had ex perienced combat (he flew torpedo bombers with the United States Marine Corps during the Second World War) and this brings an authority to his work that is at times lacking from those totally reliant on the accounts of others. Other works by combat veterans that are perhaps deserving of wider recognition in this field are J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors (1959) and Hugh McManners’ The Scars of War (1993).20 But a limitation of these works is that although insightful, they have a restricted scope when compared to many of the works previously mentioned. Gray focuses on the American soldiers he served alongside during the Second World War, while McManners is principally

16 Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000; Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait, The Free Press of Glencoe, Illinois, 1960; Morris Janowitz (ed.), The New Military, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1967. 17 John Keegan, The Face of Battle, Penguin, London, 1978. 18 Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Penguin, Melbourne, 1982. 19 Samuel Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War, Pimlico, London, 1998. 20 J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, Bison Books, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1998; Hugh McManners, The Scars of War, HarperCollins, London, 1993. 6

A Two-Edged Sword

concerned with examining the experiences of his comrades from the Falklands campaign of 1982. The preceding paragraphs have provided a synopsis of the evolution of the analysis of the human dimension of warfare and t ouched upon s ome of the major published works in the genre. T he next section will detail knowledge gaps and describe how this thesis will build upon the accumulated knowledge base to examine topics that, in almost all comparable works, have either been i gnored or accorded cursory treatment. This thesis differs from comparable works in approach, scope and depth. It will examine the impact of technological change in relation to the burden borne by soldiers over the last two hundred years. No other work that I am aware of has adopted this approach. Furthermore, of all the works previously cited, none incorporate the experiences of soldiers from post September 11 conflicts (Afghanistan and Iraq); many concentrate on a single conflict, while others are almost exclusively based on accounts from United States and United Kingdom servicemen. N ot only will this thesis use sources from the wealth of material arising from the United States-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it will also draw upon narrative accounts of soldiers from an array of nations, including, but not limited to, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Canada, Japan, Italy, Russia, Australia, Israel, and Germany. In relation to depth, a few examples will best serve to differentiate this thesis from other comparable works. This thesis has a uni que approach to the study of the relationship between journalists and t he military. T he most wide-ranging book on this topic is Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty (first published in 1975, revised edition published in 2000),21 which provides an historical overview. Narrative accounts by war correspondents, such as Peter Arnett’s Live from the Battlefield (1995) and Max Hastings’ Going to the Wars (2000),22 provide insight into the conflicts described within their pages but lack the breadth and detached viewpoint of Knightley’s study. A number of recently published works, such as Oliver Poole’s Black Knights (2003), Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson’s Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq and Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (both 2004),23 recount the experiences of journalists

21 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2002 edition. 22 Peter Arnett, Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World’s War Zones, Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1995; Max Hastings, Going to the Wars, Pan, London, 2001. 23 Oliver Poole, Black Knights: On the Bloody Road to Baghdad, HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2003; Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson, Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2003; Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Living dangerously on 7

Introduction

embedded with the American forces that invaded Iraq in 2003 but are even more restricted in scope than the cited works by Arnett and Hastings. A commonality among these works is that they were all written by journalists and c onsequently dwell upon journalistic considerations, such as lack of access to the front line, and issues of overt and covert censorship. No comparable work examines in detail, as this thesis does, how advances in communication technology have increased the burden the media imposes on the soldier by placing him in peril by pre-warning the enemy of upcoming operations or by recording his actions on the battlefield and serving them up to be judged in the court of public opinion. This thesis will also pay close attention to the problem of friendly fire/fratricide; an aspect of the battlefield largely neglected by military historians. While friendly fire has been di scussed in monographs concerned with specific conflicts, such as Rick Atkinson’s Crusade (1993),24 dealing with the 1991 Gulf War, and McManners’ The Scars of War in relation to fratricide incidents of the Falklands campaign of 1982, no historical overview was published until 2002 (Geoffrey Regan’s Backfire).25 Previously the only in-depth examination of this topic was a paper prepared in 1982 by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Shrader for the Combat Studies Institute of the United States Army.26 As noted earlier, there is a dem onstrable correlation between advances in weapon technology and the increase of this specific burden for soldiers. Following the high incidence of friendly fire casualties in the 1991 Gulf War, where at least thirty-five of the 148 American deaths in combat were attributed to friendly fire, a rash of articles appeared bemoaning this loss and suggesting a range of technological and procedural solutions to reduce such losses in subsequent conflicts. Missing from these articles, and from earlier works, was an examination of the effects of friendly fire on unit morale and the psychological impact of friendly fire on the actual soldiers involved in such incidents. T his thesis will gather together the available material in order to examine these issues. Finally, this thesis will enrich the recent literature on the soldier’s experience of killing by examining the basis of soldiers’ decisions not to kill and the extent to which technological changes have impacted upon this decision. Dave Grossman’s On Killing

the road to Baghdad with the ultraviolent Marines of Bravo Company, Bantam Press, London, 2004. 24 Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Gulf War, HarperCollins, London, 1993. 25 Geoffrey Regan, Backfire: A History of Friendly Fire from Ancient Warfare to the Present Day, Robson Books, London, 2002, p.87. 26 Lieutenant Colonel Charles R. Shrader, Amicicide: The Problem of Friendly Fire in Modern War, Combat Studies Institute, Research Survey No.1, December 1982, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, p.2. 8

A Two-Edged Sword

(1995)27 was the first scholarly work to examine the psychological cost of killing in war. Grossman sought to determine the psychological factors that facilitated the action of killing. While On Killing provides a foundation for studies of this particular aspect of soldiering, its scope is largely restricted to the experiences of American soldiers. A later work on this topic is Joanna Bourke’s An Intimate History of Killing (1999).28 However, in common with On Killing, Bourke’s work tends to concentrate on the factors that enabled soldiers to kill on the battlefield at the expense of an in-depth examination of those factors that stayed the soldier’s finger on the trigger. Having detailed how this thesis will expand the knowledge base of the burdens borne by soldiers (and more specifically whether technological change has mitigated or increased these burdens), it is equally important to define its limits, as many other studies have examined at length the inherent discomforts and risks of soldiering. As noted earlier, the effects of technological change on reducing the physical discomfort of soldiers in the field are too obvious to warrant further study. That soldiers are exposed to the elements and suffer from inadequate food and rest is covered elsewhere in detail (see the chapter titled ‘The Painful Field’ in Holmes’ Firing Line for example). Likewise, a study of the psychological breakdowns arising from combat will also be excluded as there is a plethora of scholarly works in this area, including Richard A. Gabriel’s No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War (1987) and Ben Shephard’s A War of Nerves (2000).29 On this theme, discussions of shell shock are a feature of a number of works on the British military executions of the First World War (such as Cathryn Corns & John Hughes-Wilson’s Blindfold and Alone (2001) and Gerald Christopher Oram’s Military Executions During World War 1 (2003)30 to give but two examples). Furthermore, the correlation between post-traumatic stress disorders and service in the Vietnam War have been covered in a number of works, of which Achilles in Vietnam (1994),31 by the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, is one of the better known. The scope of this thesis is also defined by the limitations of its source material. The principal sources used are published, first person narrative accounts of combat.

27 Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Little Brown and Company, Boston, 1996. 28 See Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare, Basic Books, 1999. 29 Richard A. Gabriel, No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War, Hill & Wang, New York, 1987; Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914–1994, Pimlico, London, 2002. 30 Cathryn Corns and John Hughes-Wilson, Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War, Cassell, London, 2005; Gerald Oram, Military Executions during World War I, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, 2003. 31 Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995. 9

Introduction

Detailed accounts of military conflict date back to ancient Greece and Rome and include Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War and J ulius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War) and Commentarii de Bello Civile (Commentaries on t he Roman Civil War).32 These and s imilar accounts were usually written by high-ranking participants or by chroniclers in the employ of rulers or generals. But we have only literary fragments of the experiences of common soldiers prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century (specifically the Napoleonic wars). Indicative of this factor is that in the bibliography of Wellington’s Army (published 1912),33 Sir Charles Oman listed over a hundr ed printed diaries, memoirs and series of letters; only seventeen of which were authored by non-commissioned soldiers.34 This paucity of written accounts by the rank and file largely arose due to widespread illiteracy among soldiers, reflective of the absence of state-sponsored education before the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first compulsory attendance law for primary schooling was enacted in Massachusetts in 1853 followed by New York in 1854 (though it was not until 1918 that all American states had followed suit).35 In 1870 the passage of the Elementary Education Act made basic primary education compulsory in Britain. The Australian colonies were not far behind the British legislators, with each colony passing education acts in the period 1872 to 1895 providing for a free, secular and compulsory education.36 Furthermore, generally their respective societies did not place much value on the stories that soldiers had to tell. Illustrative of such factors is the lengthy path to publication of The Recollections of Rifleman Harris (1848).37 Benjamin Harris served as an enlisted soldier with the 95th Regiment of Foot during the Peninsular War. It was not until the mid-1830s that Harris, then employed as a cobbler in London, met up with a Captain Henry Curling, late 52nd Regiment of Foot and then working as a journalist, who persuaded him to dictate an account of his life in Wellington’s army. It was not until 1848 that Curling managed to obtain a publisher, thus preserving one of the few

32 Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars, translated by W. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn (1869 translation), Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2008; Julius Caesar, The Civil War, translation by John Carter (1997 translation), Oxford University Press, New York, 2008. 33 Sir Charles Oman, Wellington’s Army: 1809 – 1814, Greenhill Books, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, 2006. 34 Hibbert, (ed.), The Recollections of Rifleman Harris, p.v. 35 Encyclopaedia of Everyday Law entry on compulsory education, viewed 28 June 2008, . 36 The Victorian Government passed the Education Act in December 1872. Similar acts were passed in South Australia and Queensland in 1875, New South Wales in 1880, Tasmania in 1885, and Western Australia in 1895. 37 Hibbert (ed.), The Recollections of Rifleman Harris, p.v. 10

A Two-Edged Sword

surviving accounts of the life of a common soldier of the era. A lso indicative of the difficulties that soldiers of this era faced in getting their accounts published is the circumstances surrounding the publishing of The Letters of Private Wheeler 1809 – 1828 (1951).38 William Wheeler served with the 51st Light Infantry. In 1823/24, while stationed at Corfu during the Greek War of Independence, he wrote a short narrative of his experiences during the Napoleonic Wars and was persuaded by his comrades to set it in type and run off a few copies at the local Government Printing Office. Upon being invalided from the service, Wheeler, finding that his family had c arefully preserved his letters sent whilst on c ampaign, made a c opy of them into a s ingle volume. The earlier manuscript has now passed into obscurity. Rather it is the volume of letters, which was passed down within the family for over a hundred years, that was eventually published. William Howard Russell’s dispatches from the Crimea helped raise public awareness of the lot of the British soldier but this did not necessarily translate into a market for personal narratives of the Crimean War. Indeed, the relative plethora of accounts from Wellington’s Army when compared to that of Raglan’s can perhaps be seen as a reflection of society’s perceived value of the respective wars. One brought lasting peace to Europe after almost two decades of conflict (during which the British people believed that national survival was at stake), the other had an obscure genesis and its major campaign was fought to capture the fortress of Sebastopol, which was promptly returned to the Russians with the coming of peace. Indicative of the difficulty faced by Crimean veterans in finding a commercial publisher for their memoirs is the case of Sergeant Timothy Gowing of the Royal Fusiliers. Gowing’s A Voice from the Ranks (1895),39 which provided a narrative of the Crimean campaign, was privately published by a N ottingham firm. In his later years Gowing would supplement his service pension by sallying forth to the industrial areas of Lancashire with a bag filled with copies of his book to sell to office and factory workers. Less than a decade after the ending of the Crimean War, the United States of America was embroiled in a bloody civil war. In common with the other major wars of the nineteenth century, narrative accounts by famous commanders—Sherman (1875), Hood (1880), Grant (1885) and McClellan (1887)40—found receptive publishers but not

38 Captain B.H. Liddell Hart, (ed.), The Letters of Private Wheeler 1809–1828, Michael Joseph, London, 1951. 39 Timothy Gowing, Voice from the Ranks: A Personal Narrative of the Crimean War by a Sergeant of the Royal Fusiliers, William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1954. 40 William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman. By Himself (two volumes), D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1875; John Bell Hood, Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies, Beauregard, New Orleans, 1880; Ulysses 11

Introduction

so those of the common soldier, though a few accounts, such as Daniel Crotty’s Four Years Campaigning in the Army of the Potomac (1874) and George Eggleston’s A Rebel’s Recollections (1875),41 received limited print runs by second-tier publishers. It was not until the last decade of the nineteenth century that accounts by the rank and file began to be published in any great numbers, one of the better-known works to appear in this period being John O. Casler’s Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade (1893).42 This increase of published narrative works probably arose due t o the approaching sense of mortality experienced by the authors, coupled with a des ire to preserve a record of their experiences. Another contributing factor to the volume of narrative accounts produced by soldiers is the scale of the conflict. It is estimated that over three million men fought the American Civil War. T he number of men mobilised to fight the First World War numbered over 65 million; for the Second World War the figure topped 86 million.43 While the vast majority of participants in war will not have inclination or ability to commit their experiences to print a small percentage will. Therefore the greater the army, and the greater the literacy level of its soldiers, the more likely that manuscripts will be prepared for publication, although what actually gets published is a separate matter. It was only with the ascendency of total war in 1914 that the age of the soldier’s (as opposed to the general’s) narrative account truly arrived. This thesis will therefore have a preponderance of sources drawn from the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The number of published first person narrative accounts of combat in the First World War dwarfs those of all previous conflicts. A lthough few appeared during the war, as the conditions of life in the trenches were hardly conducive to finalising a work for publishing, the 1920s saw an upsurge in publication. W.H. Downing’s To the Last Ridge was published in 1920 al ong with Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel; Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War hit the bookshelves in 1928 along with the first volume of

S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (two volumes), Charles L. Webster & Company, New York, 1885–86; George Brinton McClellan and William Cowper Prime (ed.), McClellan's Own Story: The War for the Union, The Soldiers who Fought it, The Civilians who Directed it and his Relations to Them, Charles L. Webster & Company, New York, 1887. 41 D.G. Crotty, Four Years Campaigning in the Army of the Potomac, Dygert Brothers and Co, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1874; George Cary Eggleston, A Rebel’s Recollections, Hurd and Houghton, New York, 1875. 42 John O. Casler, Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina, 2005. 43 A table showing the number of troops mobilised per combatant nation for the First World War is produced on p.307 of H.P. Willmott’s, The First World War, Dorling Kindersley, London, 2003, and for the Second World War on p.303 of H.P. Willmott, Robin Cross and Charles Messenger’s World War II, Dorling Kindersley, London, 2004. 12

A Two-Edged Sword

Siegfried Sassoon’s autobiographical trilogy, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man.44 1930 saw the publication of Robert Graves’ Good-bye to all That and the second volume of Sassoon’s trilogy titled Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. With the exception of Downing,45 all the cited works were by junior officers, particularly officers who had enlisted for the duration. It was not until the 1930s that a number of works from the rank and file began to appear, for example, Frank Richard’s Old Soldiers Never Die (1933).46 Many such manuscripts were compiled by participants in the war then put aside and forgotten, only to see the light of day many years later, George Coppard’s With a Machine Gun to Cambrai (1968)47 being one such example. Even some ninety years after the war, after virtually every participant has died, new narrative accounts of the First World War by enlisted men continue to appear. Such was the case with Somme Mud (2006)48 by Edward Lynch, a pr ivate soldier with the First Australian Imperial Force. Ly nch wrote a nar rative of his experiences in the trenches in 1921. The manuscript eventually found its way into print when Lynch’s grandson passed it onto Will Davies, who was producing a battlefield guide of the First World War for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. In addition to soldiers’ memoirs, a number of memoirs by pilots, such as Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis (1936),49 were published, though accounts of this nature would not reach their apogee until after the Second World War. While volumes by British servicemen dominated the genre of combat narrative accounts of the First World War, by the Second World War the works of American servicemen were in the ascendency. U nlike the British accounts of the First World War, which predominantly dealt with a s ingle theatre (the Western Front), American accounts of the Second World War can be compartmentalised into those dealing with the war in Africa and Europe and those concerned with the Pacific campaigns. Accounts by senior commanders dominate the field for the African and European campaign, such as George S. Patton Jr.’s War as I Knew It (1947) and Omar Bradley’s

44 Walter Hubert Downing, To the Last Ridge: The WWI Experiences of W.H. Downing, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 1998; Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, translated by Michael Hofmann, Penguin Books, London, 2004; Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War, Penguin Books, London, 2000; Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man, The Folio Society, London, 1971. 45 Downing had received a more in-depth education than the average private soldier and by the time his account of the war was published he had completed the law studies that he had suspended to enlist. 46 It is perhaps indicative of the dearth of memoirs by private soldiers of the First World War published prior to the 1930s that Old Soldiers Never Die was only written due to the assistance and encouragement of Robert Graves (a former British officer). Private Frank Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die, The Naval and Military Press, Uckfield, East Sussex, 2001. 47 George Coppard, With a Machine Gun to Cambrai: A Story of the First World War, Cassell, London, 1999. 48 Edward Lynch and Will Davies, Somme Mud: The Experiences of an Infantryman in France, 1916 – 1919, Doubleday, London, 2008. 49 Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising, Penguin, London, 1977. 13

Introduction

A Soldier’s Story (1951).50 Conversely, it is the literary efforts of enlisted Marines that provided the best-known accounts of combat in the Pacific, such as Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow (1957), William Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness (1979) and E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed (1981).51 Likewise, it is the accounts of British servicemen in the eastern theatre that are foremost in the public consciousness (and periodically reprinted), such as John Masters’ The Road Past Mandalay (1961) and George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here (1993).52 Although a number of accounts by junior officers were published dealing with specific campaigns in the African/European theatre, including Sword of Bone (1942)53 by Anthony Rhodes about the initial campaigns in France leading up to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk and Brazen Chariots (1961)54 by Robert Crisp, concerned with the North African campaign of 1941, these did not attain the same level of popularity as those of the eastern campaigns and are now out of print. It is perhaps the industrial nature of the campaigns in Africa and particularly Europe, and the corresponding subjugation of the human scale, that has directed the public’s attention towards the smaller scale of combat in the east. It is also telling that the best-known accounts from British servicemen fighting in Europe are not from soldiers at all but rather from airmen, who fought as individuals or as part of a small team: Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy (1942), Enemy Coast Ahead (1946) by Guy Gibson and No Moon Tonight (1956)55 by D.E. Charlwood, an Australian serving with Bomber Command, being a few examples. Specifically excluded from this thesis is the sub-genre of Second World War narrative accounts dealing with the author’s experiences as a prisoner of war, as this has already been t he basis of much academic study. A lso excluded are those narrative accounts dealing with special or irregular forces, as the experiences of such soldiers are so far outside the norm of regular soldiers as to constitute an area of separate study. Although a few narrative accounts dealing with the conflict in Korea have been

50 General George S. Patton, Jr., War as I Knew It, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1995; Omar N. Bradley, A Soldier’s Story, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1951. 51 Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow, ibooks, New York, 2001; William Manchester, Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1980; Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, Oxford University Press, New York, 1990. 52 John Masters, The Road Past Mandalay, Cassell, London, 2002; George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe out Here, HarperCollins, London, 2000. 53 Anthony Rhodes, Sword of Bone, Buchan & Enright, London, 1986. 54 Major Robert Crisp, Brazen Chariots, Ballantine Books, New York, 1961. 55 Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy: The Memoir of a Spitfire Pilot, Burford Books, Short Hills, New Jersey, 1997; Guy Gibson, Enemy Coast Ahead – Uncensored, Crécy Publishing, Manchester, 2005; D.E. Charlwood, No Moon Tonight, Pacific Books, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956. 14

A Two-Edged Sword

published, Anthony Farr-Hockley’s The Edge of the Sword (1954)56 being one of the better-known works (though this deals mainly with the author’s capture by Chinese and subsequent escapes), it is for good reason that the Korean War is often described as ‘The Forgotten War’. Not so the next major conflict; the Vietnam War, which brought forth a flood of narrative accounts: Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973), Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977), The Killing Zone (1978) by Frederick Downs, Chickenhawk (1983) by Robert Mason, David Donovan’s Once a Warrior King (1985) and In Pharaoh’s Army (1994) by Tobias Wolff being among the better-known.57 The Vietnam War also gave rise to a form of narrative account largely missing from earlier conflicts, that of the struggle of the wounded soldier to come to terms with his reduced quality of life. The most prominent of these accounts is Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976), though Lewis B. Puller Jr.’s Fortunate Son (1991) is also well known (it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize).58 Given the short duration of the Falklands War, and its relatively brief but fierce battles, it is perhaps not surprising that a fair proportion of the published accounts of this conflict dealt with severely wounded soldiers, such as Robert Lawrence’s When the Fighting is Over (1988) and Simon Weston’s Walking Tall (1989).59 Perhaps publishers felt that the ongoing struggle of these men arising from their war service would have a g reater resonance with the public than accounts of a couple of weeks of combat. The technological overmatch of the coalition forces against their Iraqi opponents in the 1991 Gulf War, which brought about a s wift victory (the ground combat phase lasted just 100 hour s), limited the scope for narrative accounts of this war. Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead (1997)60 is the only published account of note concerning the ground combat phase to arise from this conflict,61 though Tornado

56 Captain Anthony Farrar-Hockley, The Edge of the Sword, Readers’ Book Club, 1955. 57 Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, HarperCollins, Flamingo Seventies Classic, London, 2003; Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1996; Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2007; Robert Mason, Chickenhawk, Corgi Books, London, 1987; David Donovan, Once a Warrior King, Corgi, London, 1988 (David Donovan is the nom de plume of a former captain in the United States Army); Tobias Wolff, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of a Lost War, Picador, London, 1994. 58 Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July, Corgi, London, 1990; Lewis B. Puller, Jr., Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr., Bantam Books, New York, 1993. 59 John Lawrence and Robert Lawrence MC, When the Fighting is Over: Tumbledown – A Personal Story, Bloomsbury, London, 1988; Simon Weston, Walking Tall, Bloomsbury, London, 1989. 60 Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War, Simon & Schuster UK, London, 2003. 61 A number of autobiographies of the principal military commanders during the 1991 Gulf War have been published, including General H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Peter Petre, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, Linda Grey, Bantam Books, New York, 1992; and Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, A Soldier’s Way: An Autobiography, Hutchinson, London, 1995; but only General Sir 15

Introduction

Down (1992),62 an account by John Peters and John Nichol of being shot down and their subsequent capture and mistreatment, has run into several editions. The ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and I raq have been r ecounted in a number of narrative accounts; the market for such works no doubt helped, as was the case for accounts of the Vietnam War, by the controversial nature of these conflicts. S ome of these accounts, such as Kayla Williams’ Love my Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army, Colby Buzzell’s My War (both 2005) and Joshua Key’s The Deserter’s Tale (2007),63 were published more because of the author’s particular circumstances rather than what they add to our understanding of how a soldier responds to combat. Williams was among the initial American female soldiers to serve in combat, Buzzell attained short-term notoriety in military circles due to a blog he maintained from Iraq, and the interest in Key’s story is implicit in the title. Other published accounts have focused on s ome of the defining characteristics of these conflicts, such as Chris Hunter’s Eight Lives Down (2007),64 which recounts his experiences in Iraq as a bomb disposal officer. Only Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away (2005) and Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officers’ Reading Club (2009), however, display the insight and breadth to stand alongside the so-called ‘classic’ narrative accounts from earlier conflicts.65 Having provided an ov erview of the primary source material used, I will now discuss some of the limitations and adv antages of relying on published narrative accounts and contrast these factors with other potential sources. A limitation of published narrative accounts is that usually the author must have survived the conflict of which they write, thereby precluding the recording of the thoughts and attitudes of the multitude of servicemen killed in war, though this is not always the case. The Last Enemy and Enemy Coast Ahead have a greater poignancy due to the reader’s knowledge that the author will not survive the war of which they write. Another limitation is the amount of time lapsed between the writing of the account and the events it describes. In the majority of cases, the accounts are written

Peter de la Billiere, Storm Command: A Personal Account of the Gulf War, HarperCollins, London, 1992 deals specifically with the Gulf War. 62 RAF Flight Lieutenants John Peters and John Nichol, Tornado Down: The Horrifying True Story of their Gulf War Ordeal, Signet, London, 1993. 63 Kayla Williams, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2006; Colby Buzzell, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2005; Key, op. cit. 64 Major Chris Hunter, Eight Lives Down, Corgi, London, 2008. 65 Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2005; Patrick Hennessey, The Junior Officers Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars, Allen Lane, London, 2009. 16

A Two-Edged Sword

some time after a c onflict has concluded, though since the Vietnam War the period between participation and publ ication has continued to shrink, with the interval for narrative accounts of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq now measured in months rather than years. The elapsed period provides opportunity for reflection but also for the memory of events to diminish. The length of the interval between the events described and publication provides a gauge as to the potential accuracy of the account, but this is at best a crude measure, as the manuscript may have been compiled and t hen filed away for a number of years as it was considered a personal account not suitable (or not of the necessary literary standard) for publication. In the preface to With the Old Breed, E.B. Sledge recounts, ‘I began writing this account immediately after Peleliu while we were in rest camp on Pavuvu Island. I outlined the entire story with detailed notes as soon as I returned to civilian life, and I have written down certain episodes during the years since then.’66 But Sledge’s account was not published until after some thirty-five years had elapsed since the events he describes. General Jack’s Diary (the reminisces of Brigadier-General James Lochhead Jack of his service throughout the First World War),67 which was compiled during and immediately after the war had an even longer gestation, not being published until 1964 (to say nothing of the eighty-five year gap between compilation and publication of Lynch’s work referred to earlier). An advantage of using published narrative accounts of conflict as a primary source is the level of scrutiny they are subjected to by being in the public domain. Invariably soldiers do not fight alone, and while the psychological state of the author, which provides a prism through which events are viewed, is unique, their participation in the events they describe is not. Although the truth is subjective and depends upon the viewpoint of the individual, it is a brave author indeed who ventures to stray too far from the accepted ‘truth’ and r isks bringing down upon t hemselves the wrath of the self-appointed custodians of their comrades’ memory. Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier (1967),68 detailing the author’s service with the German Gross Deutschland Division during the Second World War, is one such work that has been subjected to ongoing scrutiny.69 Some critics claim that it is in fact an historical novel disguised as a factual account because of discrepancies concerning such seemingly incidental matters such as unit titles, the names of individuals and t he positioning of uniform

66 Sledge, op. cit., p.xxi. 67 John Terraine, General Jack’s Diary 1914–18: The Trench Diary of Brigadier General J.L. Jack DSO, Cassell, London, 2000. 68 Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier, translated by Lily Emmet, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1971. 69 See http://members.shaw.ca/grossdeutschland/sajer.htm for a discussion of the differing views as to the book’s historical authenticity. 17

Introduction

embellishments. A lthough on bal ance the evidence as to the authenticity of Sajer’s work would seem to be i n his favor, the same cannot be s aid of a more recently published work, The Cage (2002) by Tom Abraham.70 Purporting to be the account of an Englishman who served with the United States Army in Vietnam, The Cage was marketed as an au tobiography. A braham had an English father and an American mother and did indeed serve as an officer with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam during 1967/68. Army records also uphold Abraham’s claims that he was awarded several decorations for gallantry, including the Silver Star. The central claim of Abraham’s narrative that he was captured and imprisoned by the Viet Cong (hence the book’s title), however, has been di smissed by several Vietnam War veterans associations, who point out that the official records do not list him as a prisoner of war71 and that the details of his supposed capture and subsequent escape are not entered on his service records. Although many of the other incidents written about by Abraham may indeed be true, demonstrable fabrications have made the whole work suspect and negate its value as an hi storical source. A judicious checking of an aut hor’s background and claims is therefore essential before using their account as an historical source. A related concern when relying on nar rative accounts as a p rimary source is that by their very nature they provide a selective account. The key determinant here is what the author was prepared to reveal about his own actions and feelings. A crucial factor to be determined, as much as possible, was the motivation of the author to put their experiences to print. Some may seek to present their actions in a favourable light as a means of generating a desired public profile. Some of the early autobiographical writings by Winston Churchill can be pl aced in this category. For example, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930)72 contains accounts of Churchill’s active service on the North-West Frontier against Afghan tribesmen and participation in the cavalry charge against the Dervishes at Omdurman. But many narrative accounts detail instances of personal cowardice, involuntary defecation and urination, and actions that do not present the author in a particularly laudatory light. Of course, the author may also keep something back. There is no statute of limitations on war crimes and this factor in itself provides an incentive for self-censorship. The historian Stephen Ambrose noted in Citizen Soldiers (1997) that although he had interviewed over a thousand American combat veterans, and t hat as many as a t hird stated they had

70 Tom Abraham, The Cage: A Year in ‘Nam, Bantam Press, London, 2002. 71 See http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/pmsea/pmsea_html_a.htm for the official Personnel Missing Southeast Asia (PMSEA) database maintained by the United States Department of Defense. 72 Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Thornton Butterworth, London, 1930. 18

A Two-Edged Sword

witnessed unarmed German prisoners being shot, only one soldier actually admitted to shooting a pr isoner.73 Although Ambrose was referring to oral testimony, the same reticence to admit to certain acts is also evident in written accounts. Although published works will undoubtedly contain omissions, and some material valuable to the historian will have been lost in the process, this is not an insurmountable weakness as any source will at best only tell part of the story. Having discussed some of the limitations, but also the advantages of relying on published first person narrative accounts of combat, the reasons for not focusing on other types of historical sources will now be elaborated upon. Archival sources can be divided into two broad categories: those which are officially generated; including reports, returns, recommendations for decorations, war diaries and s o on; and those produced for private purposes, such as diaries and letters. The first category is particularly valuable to a historian who seeks to determine what soldiers actually did, but of less value to one who is principally concerned about how they felt about doing it. While the former category provides the necessary context the latter provides much of the substance. Paradoxically, the key reason that diaries and letters are usually so valuable a r esource to the historian, their immediacy in relation to the events they describe, is why they are less valuable than published first person narrative accounts as a r esource for this thesis. Published first person narrative accounts, almost all of which are written some time after the conflict they describe, detail the feelings of soldiers arising from a period of reflection in relation to the events of which they detail. They therefore give a fuller picture of how a soldier felt about a particular event rather than an account that may have been jotted down whilst the soldier was suffering from fatigue or the shock of battle. Another key factor when considering the value of soldiers’ letters as a resource for this thesis is the intended audience of the correspondence. In many cases, letters were written to family members and the soldier would often seek in their writing to minimise their discomfort and the risks they faced to avoid causing undue distress to loved ones at home. Max Plowman recalled of the numerous soldiers’ letters he was required to censor during the First World War that ‘the formula is almost unvaried. The writer is in the pink, in spite of everything: a condition he hopes is mutual. He believes there’s a war on, so we must keep smiling.’74 Subsequent conflicts also saw self- censorship exercised by soldiers. Kevin Mervin, who served with the British Army in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, felt that ‘Writing letters back home was easier said than done

73 Stephen E. Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, Touchstone ed, New York, 1998, pp.352-3. 74 Max Plowman, A Subaltern on the Somme, E.P. Dutton & Company, New York, 1928, p.28. 19

Introduction

… We felt we had to tone things down a bit and make a joke of the weather, or write about how bored we were … What we didn’t do was write about the fire-fights, the Scud attacks, and the artillery and mortar bombardments.’75 As James Newton made his way to the Persian Gulf with the Royal Navy in 2003 he too felt the need to shield his family and friends from the reality of the war:

What’s the point in making a s tressful situation even worse? Naturally, family and friends back home often go into denial about their loved ones, trying not to imagine the worst that might happen to them. So, as a general rule, servicemen on the phone to those back home try and affect a bl asé attitude to what is happening, keeping them in the dark about the harsher realities and not letting on about anything that might be upsetting.76

David Bellavia, who served with the US Army in Iraq in 2004 wrote of one his men, Piotr Sucholas, who ‘to protect his mother, [he] has created a whole fantasy deployment for her. He’s written long letters to her about life as a rear-echelon type, living the life of Riley inside the base compound.’77 While the extent of Sucholas’ subterfuge is an extreme example, it does help to illustrate the risks of relying on letters without an in-depth understanding of the intent of the author when he wrote them. On the other hand, there is no need to reassure loved ones of the safety of the writer in published narrative accounts and so a more graphic and fuller picture of war emerges. Although an i ncreasing amount of archival resources (official records, diaries and letters) are now available online, most of this material can only be ac cessed by physically visiting the repository in which it is held. Due the breadth of this thesis, the military experience from the Napoleonic Wars to the present day, it was impractical from both cost and time considerations to rely on such materials, valuable as they are to an historian, though as noted, such sources also have some limitations. Rather, a less traditional approach was adopted, which has as it basis synthesis and analysis rather than discovery. This approach relied on published first person narrative accounts of combat drawn from a w ide range of conflicts and nationalities supplemented by the judicious use of secondary sources. This approach enabled the thesis to achieve the desired breadth of the examination of soldiers’ experiences over

75 Kevin J. Mervin, Weekend Warrior: A Territorial Soldier’s War in Iraq, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 2005, pp.191-2. 76 Lieutenant Commander James Newton, Armed Action: My War in the Skies with 847 Naval Air Squadron, Headline Review, London, 2007, pp.101-2. 77 David Bellavia with John Bruning, House to House: The Most Terrifying Battle of the Iraq War Through the Eyes of the Man who Fought it, Pocket Books, London, 2008, pp.52-3.

A Two-Edged Sword

the last two centuries but also enabled a consistent approach to be adopted for all conflicts studied. To elaborate on this point further, archival resources are limited for the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; specifically the majority of official records are classified and not available to the researcher. This is not the case in relation to published first person narrative accounts from these conflicts which, given the centrality of the application of modern technology to the research question, to not have examined these conflicts would have weakened the main premise of the thesis. Although the sources used in preparing this thesis were restricted to those available in English, recent developments in the publishing arena, specifically the market expansion that has arisen by selling books via the Internet, has facilitated the translation of foreign works that would have previously been considered uneconomical by publishers. Of particular relevance here is the number of accounts by non-English- speaking combatants that have recently been translated and publ ished, such as Johann Voss’s Black Edelweiss (2002), Gϋnter Koschorrek’s Blood Red Snow (2003) and Red Road from Stalingrad (2004) by Mansur Abdulin, all of which dealt with combat on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, the first two accounts being German, the third Soviet. 78 Previously, generally only the accounts of noted commanders of the German and Russian armies, such as Heinz Guderian’s (Panzer Leader (1952),79 were available in English. A historian can hope at best to present snapshots of the past, with some details more blurred than others. This thesis does not attempt to establish a universality; to state that all soldiers felt a certain way about a particular event is clearly unverifiable and almost certainty untrue. R ather, within the limitations of the source material, as outlined, it will seek to chart whether soldiers have felt that technology has increased or decreased the burdens inherent in their profession over the last two hundred years.

78 Johann Voss, Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS, The Aberjona Press, Bedford, Pennsylvania, 2002; Günter Koschorrek, Blood Red Snow: The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front, Greenhill Books, London, 2002; Mansur Abdulin, Red Road from Stalingrad: Recollections of a Soviet Infantryman, Pen and Sword Military, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, 2004. 79 General Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, Futura, London, 1974.

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

1 Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

That a s oldier’s occupation has an at tendant risk of them being wounded or killed is a priori and constitutes one of the principal burdens of the soldier. At its most fundamental level, this characteristic of war has been an historical constant. Technological advances over the last two hundred years have, however, fundamentally changed the manner in which soldiers may communicate their final wishes to loved ones as well as completely transforming the treatment of their bodies post mortem; historically an aspect of war that has been of great concern to soldiers. Death can seek out a soldier in many forms. It may be i nstantaneous and unexpected, delivered via a sniper's bullet or the detonation of an improvised explosive device (IED), or the soldier might have some warning of its arrival, such as the whine of an approaching artillery shell. B ut regardless of his level of skill and pr eparedness, even an adept soldier can be killed in battle. ‘In the coming year we would learn how little our decisions determined our futures. Destiny is not born of decision; it is born of uncontrollable circumstances,’ wrote James McDonough when reflecting upon his tour of duty in Vietnam. ‘Throughout the year to come, this point would be driven home time and time again. Rational decision making or technical and physical skills may save you once or twice. But a man in combat is exposed a thousand times.’1 David Bellavia confronted this stark reality during the battle of Fallujah in November 2004 when he was informed of the death of his battalion’s sergeant major.

If they can kill Sergeant Major Faulkenburg, how have I survived? He was so much more skilled than I, so much more experienced than almost every other soldier out here. Is this more about luck than skill? If it is, we’re all only one bullet away from Faulkenburg’s undeserved fate.2

Patrick Hennessey was struck by the randomness of death in combat when his British Army battlegroup sustained its first casualties (including a fellow officer) during its tour of Iraq in 2006. ‘It woke everyone up, how random it was’, wrote Hennessey, ‘how two nights before Tobin and I had patrolled the same stretch of road, how the next night it would have been Marlow’s turn and as it was there we all were in shorts, too shocked to read or even talk it through, all trying not to look in the direction of the thin

1 James R. McDonough, Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat, Ballantine Books, New York, 2003, p.18. 2 Bellavia, op. cit., p.189. 22

A Two-Edged Sword

canvas the other side of which was Tom’s empty bed’.3 Sebastian Junger, who over a period of fifteen months in 2007/08 was embedded with a US Army platoon deployed to the Korengal Valley, a r emote outpost in Eastern Afghanistan, and w ho was himself travelling in a vehicle blown up b y an improvised explosive device, also wrote of the capricious nature of death in combat.

The enemy now had a weapon [improvised explosive devices] that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck. Every time you drove down the road you were engaged in a t wisted existential exercise where each moment was the only proof you’d ever have that you hadn’t been blown up the moment before. And if you were blown up, you’d probably never know it and certainly wouldn’t be able to affect the outcome. G ood soldiers died just as easily as sloppy ones, which is pretty much how soldiers define unfair tactics in war.4

Doug Beattie, who served with the Royal Irish Regiment (British Army) in Afghanistan in 2008 (amongst other combat tours), concluded that:

It is the randomness of war that is truly frightening. Why do some people live and some die? More often than not it isn’t about skill or experience, but simply good and bad luck … It is about fate. And one’s fate can turn on the most insignificant of events. That is what is truly frightening. Knowing your destiny is out of your hands.5

It is because of the apparent randomness of death on t he battlefield that soldiers are generally more pragmatic in their attitude towards death than other elements of society. The day before he w as due t o take part in the opening air offensive against Iraq in 1991, John Peters of the Royal Air Force and his fellow aircrew went back to their rooms, ‘to put our affairs in order, which is to say, we prepared for the fact that we might die very soon. I t sounds melodramatic, but you have to think this way, it would be wrong to leave it to someone else.’6 A similar appreciation of the possibility of their death in combat would result in US soldiers deploying to Iraq a decade or so later having flag portraits (a picture of themselves in front of a American flag) taken. These photos would be used for memorial services,

3 Hennessey, op. cit., p.149. 4 Sebastian Junger, War, Fourth Estate, London, 2010, p.142. 5 Doug Beattie, Task Force Helmand: A Soldier’s Story of Life, Death and Combat on the Afghan Front Line, Simon and Schuster, London, 2009, p.75. 6 Peters and Nichol, op. cit., p.65. 23

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

placed on websites and released to the press if the soldier was killed. David Finkel, who was embedded with a unit of the US Army in Iraq in 2007/08, wrote that:

the process was always the same: someone would attach a flag to a wall for a backdrop, and one by one, soldiers would stand in front of it while another soldier snapped away with whatever digital camera was handy. None of them had any illusions about what the portrait was for. ‘I don’t plan on dying, so you don’t need a picture of me’, one soldier protested during one of the sessions. 7

A further example of this pragmatic approach to death is that before going into battle soldiers may write a ‘last letter’. The notion of a final communiqué to loved ones has been a constant factor in soldiers’ accounts over the last two centuries, although the manner in which this may be achieved has changed considerably due to advances in communication technologies. In many cases, the ‘last letter’ was exchanged with a fellow soldier on the understanding they would be posted only in the event of the author’s death. Conversely, the soldier may keep the letter on their body, or with their possessions, so that it would be found and posted postmortem. Before joining battle with the French in November 1813, Edmund Wheatley of the King’s German Legion (an element of the British Army) wrote in his diary, ‘An order to stand under arms at three tomorrow – a battle for certain. Must pack up. The last time perhaps. Schuck [the battalion adjutant] has promised to send my two letters in case of death. Farewell to all! God help me!!’8 Just prior to the storming of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, Timothy Gowing wrote in a letter to his parents:

I am determined to try and do my duty for my Queen and Country. I am glad in one sense that this hour has come; we have looked for it for months, and long before the sun sets that is now rising, Sevastopol must be in our hands. I will now say good-bye, dear and best of mothers; good-bye kind father; good-bye, affectionate brothers and sisters. This letter will not be sent unless I fall; I have given it open into the hands of one of our sergeants who is in hospital wounded, and if I fall he has kindly offered to put a postscript to it and forward it. May the God of all grace bless you, dear Parents, and help you to bear the pending blow.9

7 David Finkel, The Good Soldiers, Scribe, Melbourne, 2009, p.212. 8 Christopher Hibbert (ed.), The Wheatley Diary: A Journal and Sketchbook kept during the Peninsular War and the Waterloo Campaign, The Windrush Press, Gloucestershire, 1997, p.13. 9 Gowing, op. cit., p.113. 24

A Two-Edged Sword

Daniel Crotty, who served with the Third Michigan Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War, recalled:

We sit around the bivouac fires, and, as is usual before a great battle, each tells the others that in case he should fall what will be done in regard to letting the loved ones at home know what became of him, and what should be done with the little effects that a soldier carries about him.10

While a British soldier killed in the First World War wrote:

This is written on the eve of our going over the top in a big attack. It will only be seen in the event of my being killed in action. You I know, my dear Dad, will bear the shock as bravely as you have always borne the strain of my being out here. I believe I have told you before that I do not fear death itself. The beyond has no terrors for me. I am quite content to die for the cause for which I have given up nearly three years of my life and I can only hope that I will meet death with as brave a front as I have seen other men do before.11

In The Deadly Brotherhood, John McManus quoted a similar letter written to his parents by a US soldier killed in action in Italy in the Second World War:

I want to thank you for all those thousands and thousands of little things which really make up life … Though I would never be capable of full payment, I was hoping to do something for you some day. I had hoped to do it at home, but God has other plans. I want you to know that I’ll be praying and waiting for you. Please don’t have any regrets. God bless you and goodbye for now.12

Some soldiers will send a l etter home to help prepare their family for what appears to be their imminent demise. On 24 April 1915, the evening before the landing of the Australian forces at Gallipoli, Colonel (later General Sir) John Monash composed a heartfelt letter to his wife.

As this may be the last opportunity I have of talking to you, I want to say briefly that, in the event of my going out, you are to believe that I do so with only one

10 Crotty, op. cit., p.111. 11 Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War, Penguin, London, 1979, p.172. 12 Edward McCrystal letter to parents quoted in John C. McManus, The Deadly Brotherhood: The American Combat Soldier in World War II, Presidio Books, New York, 1998, p.155. 25

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

regret, which is, the grief that this will bring to you and B ert. and Mat. For myself, I am prepared to take my chance. While, on t he one hand, to win through safely would mean honour and achievement, on the other hand to fall would mean an honourable end. At best I have only a few years of vigour left, and then would come the decay and the chill of old age, and perhaps lingering illness. So with the full and active life I have had, I need not regard the prospect of a sudden end with dismay.13

A colleague of Monash, William Malone of the New Zealand Army, also felt the possibility of his death weighing heavily upon him as he prepared to lead his battalion in an attack against the Turkish position on C hunuk Bair at Gallipoli. In a letter to his wife he wrote:

I expect to go thro’ all right but, dear wife, if anything untoward happens to me, you must not grieve too much, there are our dear children to be brought up. You know how I love and have loved you, and we have had many years of great happiness together … I know that you will never forget me, or let the children do s o. I am prepared for death and ho pe that God will have forgiven me all my sins. My desire for life, so that I may see and be with you again, could not be greater, but I have only done what every man was bound to do in our country’s need.14

Three days after writing this letter, Malone was killed by friendly gunfire when an artillery shell fell short and burst above his trench. Some thirty years later, Karl Binder, a member of the trapped German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, wrote to his wife that:

Time is now so short that I must concern myself about the end of everything … I have always endeavored to be decent, a comrade, a soldier [sic]. I have also tried to be a good husband to you and a good father to the children … With us, Death is a daily guest. He has lost all his horrors for me … In case I fall, move to Schwäbisch Gmünd as soon as possible. Life is cheaper there … Throw away my uniforms. The rest is yours … I wish you and the children all the best for the future. Let us hope that we shall be reunited in the other world.15

13 Colonel John Monash, letter to his wife dated 24 April 1915, reproduced in Bill Gammage, op. cit., p.46. 14John Crawford (ed.), No Better Death: The Great War Diaries and Letters of William G. Malone, Reed Publishing, Auckland, New Zealand, 2005, pp. 297–8. 15 William Craig, Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad, Penguin, London, 2000, p.314. 26

A Two-Edged Sword

Matsuo Keiu, the commander of a Japanese midget submarine sent into Sydney Harbour on the evening of 31 May 1942 to attack Allied shipping, knowing that there was a hi gh probability that he w ould not return from this mission, wrote a l ast letter to his parents, which he left with a comrade.

I write this letter to you before I depart on the most important mission of my life. For twenty years, I have hoped and prepared for the honour of this task, and I am very happy, for I have achieved everything I wanted to in life. My resignation is set, and if I can do my duty steadfastly, then I will have nothing left to wish for.16

A Japanese soldier, awaiting the American invasion of Iwo Jima, expressed similar sentiments in a last letter to his parents.

As one who was given life in order to serve the emperor, I was always ready for my corpse to lie in the field of battle. It is my long-cherished desire as a soldier. I go to my death happily and with a feeling of calm … My honorable father and mother, for more than twenty years I have caused you great bother … and it is truly inexcusable that I am unable now to do anything for you in return. All I can do is express my warmest thanks.17

Robert Lawrence wrote his last letter home onboard the QE2 sailing towards the Falkland Islands. He reflected upon how this practice had almost become a cliché, ‘people going to war find themselves acting as they have seen people act in films about people going to war … writing in your letters what you have seen people in films writing in their last letters home’.18 Cliché or not, the practice has continued up to the present day. ‘… I love you so much and if anything has happened, know that I was always thinking of you and the kids’, wrote Jake Kovco in a last letter to his wife. Kovco was the first Australian soldier to die in Iraq following the 2003 i nvasion. The l etter had

16 A translation of the last letter of Lieutenant Matsuo Keiu is displayed in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. 17 Letter from Tatsuo (no surname provided) quoted in Kumiko Kakehashi, Letters from Iwo Jima, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2007, p.146. In addition to the practice of last letters, Japanese commanders fighting rearguard actions that they knew would most likely result in their own death, along with the deaths of the majority of the men under their command, would send official farewell telegrams to the Imperial General Headquarters. These telegrams would also be published in the newspapers so that they could be read by the public. These telegrams were highly stylized and would usually include a jisei (a death poem of three stanzas). See the prologue to Letters from Iwo Jima for an in-depth discussion of the farewell telegram written by Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the commander of the Japanese garrison on Iwo Jima. 18 Lawrence, op. cit., 1988, p.15. 27

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

been written following a suggestion made by his commanding officer prior to the unit’s deployment.19 ‘I never thought that I would be w riting a l etter like this. I really don't know where to start. I've been getting bad feelings, though and, well, if you are reading this …’ wrote Private First Class Jesse A. Givens in a letter to his family dated 22 April 2003. He continued, ‘Please keep my babies safe. Please find it in your heart to forgive me for leaving you alone’.20 Just over a week after this letter was written, on 1 May 2003, Givens was killed when his tank crashed into the Euphrates River in Iraq. Mark Hammond, serving with the Royal Marines in Afghanistan in 2006, noted the actions of some of his fellow crewmembers as they prepared to fly their Chinook helicopter back into an area where they had nar rowly missed being shot down mere hours before. ‘I looked up and D an and S am were sat on t heir racks [beds] writing goodbye letters to their families. I silently watched them as they placed them under their pillows’.21 Thus, as shown, the practice of writing ‘last letters’ has not been l imited to armies of a specific period or of a specific nation. What has fundamentally changed in the last decade or so, due to the arrival of the so-called ‘Information Age’, are the options available to achieve this final communiqué with loved ones. Although Kovco’s last letter was found in his private journal after his death and then sent to his wife, modern communication technology, specifically mobile phones and email, has increased the range of options and the immediacy available to soldiers to communicate such sentiments to their loved ones. For example, in May 2000, Phil Ashby, serving with the United Nations in Sierra Leone a nd surrounded in a w alled compound by members of the Revolutionary United Front, made some final phone calls home before he pr epared to break out of the rebel cordon with three companions. After going over his preferred funeral arrangements with a friend, he then spoke to his wife. ‘I felt relieved to have spoken to her,’ Ashby wrote in his memoirs. ‘I don’t know what it feels like to die but I’m sure that in the split second before oblivion you know what’s happening and, for me, it would have been unbear able not to have said farewell.’22 Staff Sergeant James W. Cawley of the US Marine Corps was killed in a firefight in Iraq on 29 March 2003. A few weeks earlier he had sent the following email to his sister:

19 Dan Box, ‘Kovco told his wife to remarry’, The Australian, 29 February 2008. 20 Private First Class Jesse A. Givens, US Army, letter to his family dated 22 April 2003, viewed 8 April 2010, < http://www.npr.org/programs/wesat/features/2004/may/givens/text.html>. 21 Major Mark Hammond with Clare Macnaughton, Immediate Response, Michael Joseph, London, 2009, p.144. 22 Major Phil Ashby, Unscathed: Escape from Sierra Leone, Pan Books, London, 2003, p.237. 28

A Two-Edged Sword

From: James To: Randy and Julie Hanson Subject: Just a few notes Date: Tuesday, 18 February 2003

… I am sure I’ll be fine and I don’t plan on getting killed but you never know so just in case I don’t come back I have just a few things I need to pass on so here goes. First make sure Miyuki [his wife] is assisted with anything she needs … I wish to be buried in the Roy cemetery near Mom and Dad. T he military will help defray a lot of the cost of burial except the plot I believe. I would like full military honours, which the Marine Corps should provide [the email goes on to specify music to be played and poems to be read at the service] … And maybe you could find someone to say a kind word or two about me.23

This ability to reach out and c ommunicate directly with loved ones from the battle zone would have been very unusual only a decade earlier (although many static HQ organisations, due to their supporting signal (communications) infrastructure, have had this ability since the Vietnam War). To further reinforce this point, Patrick Cordingley, the commander of the British 7th Armoured Brigade during the 1991 Gulf War, tells us that in the lead-up to the conflict, ‘the greatest morale booster was the “bluey”, the forces aerogramme. These were free and we all made the most of them. Each day the brigade would send out thousands of letters, and would in turn receive just as many.’24 A decade or so later, when the British soldiers returned to the Gulf for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Tim Collins, the commander of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, noted that in addition to surface mail (which he described as ‘terribly slow’), each soldier was issued with a twenty-minute phonecard per week to be used for the satellite phones.25 The British soldiers taking part in the invasion also received ‘e-blueys’. An e-bluey was essentially an email sent to a computer server in theatre that was printed out, enveloped and s ent forwards to the troops, thereby avoiding the delays inherent with surface mail. Moreover, the progression from combat to stabilisation operations in Iraq and the consequent move into semi-permanent garrisons increased the Internet access of the troops, with most major bases having an Internet kiosk for use by the soldiers to keep in contact with family and friends. A US

23 Staff Sergeant James W. Cawley, email to Randy and Julie Hanson dated 18 February 2003 reproduced in ‘Last Letters home (Correspondence of American soldiers who died in Iraq’, Esquire, February 2004, viewed 9 April 2010, . 24 Major General Patrick Cordingley, In the Eye of the Storm: Commanding the Desert Rats in the Gulf War, Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1997, p.180. 25 Tim Collins, Rules of Engagement: A Life in Conflict, Headline, London, 2005, p.119. 29

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

soldier serving in Iraq in 2006 commented that access to the Internet ‘has enriched the lives of the soldiers here at Camp Bucca [southern Iraq] in ways no other morale welfare and r ecreation function can. I t keeps us in constant contact with our loves ones back home.’26 Of course this ability to communicate directly with loved ones can be used to pass tragic as well as good news. For this reason, the US and UK military forces cut off access to the Internet and phones when a casualty occurs to ensure that news of the death/wounding is not passed onto the next of kin except through official channels. Patrick Hennessey noted that:

In any operational theatre, as soon as a s oldier is seriously injured or killed there is a blackout of all communications back home. The welfare telephones and Internet are shut down, and in the few bits of Iraq and Afghanistan where people have working mobiles they are expected not to use them. This ensures that the family hear the bad news first through the correct channels and not, as had previously been occurring, from friends back on t he patch [married quarters] who had already got word from their own husbands that they were fine but that poor old Mitch had died, or in one shocking case from the first reporters who made it to the door.27

This was a new challenge for the military, who had previously relied on the dispatch of the traditional telegram, commencing with the ominous words ‘The Secretary of the Army regrets …’ to inform the next of kin of the death of their loved one. D uring the Vietnam War the US Army established casualty-notification teams who would personally deliver the telegram and would then stay to comfort the widow or parents until friends and relatives could arrive.28 For casualties occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan the US military would dispatch a casualty notification officer, who would be accompanied by a chaplain (if available), to the next of kin’s address. Information on the casualty would be withheld from the media until the next of kin was advised. The benchmark used by the US military was for the next of kin to be notified within twenty- four hours of the death of the Service member, and i t was for this period that the Internet and phone c onnections would normally be c ut off for the operational base

26 Sergeant Scott Langley, US Army, quoted in Kathryn Balint, ‘Access anytime, anywhere’, The San Diego Union-Tribune, 7 July 2006, viewed on 8 April 2010, . 27 Hennessey, op. cit., p.135. 28 See Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once … And Young, HarperCollins, New York, 2002, p.414. 30

A Two-Edged Sword

where the deceased’s unit was based.29 The proliferation of social networking sites in the first decade of the twenty-first century has greatly increased the means (if not the medium, which is generally restricted to the Internet) for instant communications with family and friends. For example, Patrick Hennessey, who served with the British Army in Afghanistan in 2007, observed that upon r eturning from operations ‘exhausted, filthy, hungry soldiers drop their kit on their beds and head straight past the kitchen to queue for a desperate fix of Facebook’.30 The latest development in enabling soldiers to maintain contact with loved ones back home is the widespread use of web-cameras (webcam). In June 2009, an American soldier based in Iraq was even able to be ‘virtually’ present for the birth of his first child (a daughter) in Pennsylvania via a webcam set up in the operating theatre.31 However, the technical capacity to communicate directly with loved ones, which less than a g eneration earlier was virtually unknown, can be a two-edged sword. By frequently reminding a soldier of his life beyond the military, such contacts can weaken the bonds that bind soldiers together. S.L.A. Marshall, who conducted extensive studies into the behaviour of men in combat during the Second World War, noted that fear pervades the battlefield. But if a soldier was serving among men whom he had known for some time, then he w ould seek to hide his fear from his comrades to preserve his reputation. Marshall claimed that because of this social pressure, ‘The majority are unwilling to take extraordinary risks and do not aspire to a hero’s role, but they are equally unwilling that they should be considered the least worthy among those present’.32 These sentiments were echoed by an A merican soldier of the Second World War who remarked: ‘The thing that keeps a soldier going in the face of horrendous violence and unbelievable living conditions is simply self-respect and the psychological need for the respect of your fellow soldiers.’33 Lord Moran observed that the need to maintain their reputation kept soldiers in the front line during the First World War and that few sought to avoid battle by reporting sick. ‘The few sick that I saw in the trenches were old friends,’ he wrote, ‘they came without hope, they had no r eputation to lose, in the Company they were

29 US Department of Defense, ‘Briefing on Casualty Notification’, 26 March 2003, viewed 10 April 2010, < http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2149>. 30 Hennessey, op. cit., p.24. 31 ‘Soldier Watches Wife Give Birth From Iraq’, 18 June 2009, MSNBC, viewed 30 June 2009, . 32 Marshall, op. cit., p.149. 33 Lawrence Nickell, 5th Infantry Division, quoted in McManus, op. cit., p. 275. 31

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

well known. These apart the men would not come near me until they were hit.’34 Small-group solidarity fulfils a vital role in preventing psychological breakdowns among soldiers. American military psychiatrists during the Second World War concluded that the psychological breakdown of most soldiers was precipitated more by a disruption to their immediate small group than exposure to a particular threat: ‘The soldier lost his group relationship and … forfeited all the strengths and comforts with which it had sustained him. As a member of the team he would have been able to take it, alone he was overwhelmed and became disorganised.’35 This opinion was shared by the senior psychiatrist for the British 2nd Army, who in July 1944 stated that ‘The emotional ties among the men, and between the men and their officers … is the single most potent factor in preventing breakdown’.36 An introspective soldier is a hesitant soldier, so militaries emphasise the deeds of those who have gone before to encourage soldiers to submerse their own hopes and desires and em brace the collective spirit of the unit. An officer of the Scots Guards who served in the Falklands War maintained that ‘we were confident that we would uphold the traditions of the regiment. That sounds rather pompous, but for a regiment like ours with such a long history, it is an important part of our motivation.’37 Units with high esprit de corps so successfully inculcate regimental pride that individuals develop an ingrained sense of personal responsibility not to ‘let the unit down’. Alex Bowlby, reflecting upon why some men could not handle the pressure of combat and deserted, concluded that they ‘had been “closed” men, shut off from the tribal spirit that kept the rest of us going. They had fallen because of this. My own immediate source of courage – fear of disgrace – would soon have dried up without it.’38 The knowledge that their forebears in the unit were able to withstand the strain of battle gives comfort to those about to face their own baptism of fire. An officer of the 2nd Battalion of the British Parachute Regiment, who fought in the Falklands War, reflecting upon the ties that bind a unit together, commented:

we are a body of people welded together by our traditions, by our regiment, by a feeling of togetherness. We’re a family of people and you have to remember that. We all know each other, we know each other’s families. This is a body of people

34 Lord C.E. Moran, The Anatomy of Courage, Constable, London, 1966, p.184. 35 L.H. Bartemeier et al., ‘Combat Exhaustion’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, Vol. 104, 1946, p. 370, quoted in John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1980, p.306. 36 Ellis, op. cit., p.307. 37 Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, quoted in McManners, The Scars of War, p.109. 38 Alex Bowlby, The Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby, Corgi, London, 1971, p.168. 32

A Two-Edged Sword

who would die for each other. If you run away, you’re running away from all that. It’s like withdrawing the love of your mother, it’s that kind of commitment.39

The elements that bind soldiers together on the battlefield, such as small-group solidarity and esprit de corps, have been a hi storical constant for the period studied. But the key issue here is to what extent technological developments have countered these forces. Militaries tend to define in abstract terms the reason for soldiers to continue fighting: such as duty, honour, and country. This abstraction is particularly useful when the soldier’s family, friends and/or home are not directly threatened by enemy action. The ever-present danger for the military is that a soldier may begin to dwell upon what he is being asked to risk – his life – and seek to determine for whose benefit is he risking it. Soldiers are more likely to become introspective when their focus shifts from maintaining their reputation with their comrades to that of their life beyond the military. A British soldier, recalling his initial reaction when the IRA ambushed his patrol in 1975, stated: ‘I started thinking about my wife, family, mother, kids … What the fucking hell am I doing here.’40 When a soldier ceases to think of society in abstract terms but rather focuses on individuals, he may come to feel that these individuals, safe and comfortable at home, and i n the soldier’s mind almost certainly oblivious to his privations and suffering, have no right to ask this task of him. Militaries would prefer that soldiers concentrate on the slight matters that they can actually influence, such as the specifics of their assigned task, rather than dwell upon the larger issues of why they are risking their lives in combat and whether this risk is justified. This sentiment is evident in the comments of a parachute officer who served in the Falklands War and was interviewed by Richard Holmes for his book Firing Line:

he dreaded the arrival of mail because it reminded him that he had another persona: in addition to being merely a c og in a military machine and of little individual value, he was also a h usband and a father whose death would have devastating consequences. Remembering his role as a family man made him feel uneasy when the situation demanded that his military role should be dominant.41

Sergeant Mike Goodale, serving with the US Army in Somalia in 1993,

39 Major Chris Keeble, 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, in Michael Bilton and Peter Kosminsky, Speaking Out: Untold Stories from the Falklands War, André Deutsch, London, 1989, p.148. 40 WO2 McCullum, quoted in McManners, The Scars of War, p.102. 41 Holmes, Firing Line, p.90. 33

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

succinctly captured the dichotomous nature of the ability to communicate directly with loved ones in a letter he wrote to his fiancée just prior to setting out into the maelstrom of Mogadishu: ‘Kira, I love you so very much it hurts. I’m reluctant to call again because I know it will just make me miss you that much more.’42 Hennessey wrote at length about the bittersweet nature of the phone calls he made, using a satellite phone, from Afghanistan to his girlfriend in London:

I’m not sure how a phone conversation can go so quickly from sexy whisperings and longing for clean sheets and s turdy double beds to tearful recriminations and complete lack of understanding, but somehow that’s the trajectory of my call to Jen, and I’m cursing the waste of precious sat-phone time … We have to keep a maddening separation, don’t want in the space of a quick phone call to remember who we were at home, because we hope that’s not the person pushing out on patrol tomorrow to kill or be killed.43

Craig Mullaney, an of ficer in the US Army, whose company base in Gardez, Afghanistan was equipped with Internet access along with satellite phones, also came to rue the bittersweet nature of being able to communicate directly with loved ones from the battlefield. He wrote in his memoirs of a phone call he had with his girlfriend following the death of one of his men in a Taliban ambush.

‘I love you,’ Meena said as we closed our conversation. ‘Stay Safe.’ ‘I love you, too.’ I couldn’t stay safe though … More and more I worried about Meena. It was as if I had another platoon to protect. The risks I faced extended to her as well. I couldn’t protect my platoon and Meena simultaneously. Staying safe meant staying home. F or now I had to focus on m y mission even though doing so kept me anything but safe.44

The historian Martin Crotty has noted that instant communications detract from the contemporary soldier’s ability to disassociate themselves from their civilian existence whilst on operations. He commented:

42 Sergeant Mike Goodale quoted in Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, Corgi, London, 2003, p.70. 43 Hennessey, op. cit., pp.288-9. 44 Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education, Penguin, New York, 2010, pp.305-6. 34

A Two-Edged Sword

I mean if you're at Gallipoli, you're at Gallipoli, but if you're in Afghanistan with instant communications back home, the phone c alls, that kind of thing, the differentiation between where you're serving and where you've come from is much less clear … in World War I of course, if you got letters from home they arrived (if they arrived at all) months later. But the stress of worrying how your wife's getting on a t work, or so-and-so's getting on at school; those close communications with home might make people feel loved and connected to their loved ones and al l that kind of thing, but they do provide a whole lot of additional pressures.45

For the armies fighting the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq such reminders of their family can come with an immediacy and via means (such as web- cameras) unknown in previous conflicts, thereby making a difficult job just that little bit more difficult. Another aspect of the soldier’s relationship with death is the enduring fear that their bodies will remain unidentified on t he battlefield. For the wars of the late nineteenth and t wentieth centuries the identity of slain soldiers could usually be established. But for much of the history of human conflict there were no pr actical measures to identify bodies that had been so disfigured by injury, or became so decomposed, as to preclude visual identification. I f a s oldier’s body remained unidentified then his family might endure the emotional agony of being informed that their loved one was ‘missing in action’; not knowing if he was dead or alive. Before going into battle during the American Civil War, some soldiers would write their name, regiment, and home address on a slip of paper that would be stuffed into a pocket or pinned to the back of their coat. They hoped that in the event of their death this information would prevent them from being buried in an unm arked grave. This was a r ealistic concern as forty-two per cent of the Civil War dead remain unidentified,46 though a major contributing factor here was which side held the field at the end o f the battle. Hamlin Alexander Coe, who served with the 19th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment, wrote of visiting the site of the battle of Chickamauga and being appalled by the manner in which the Confederate troops had treated the bodies of his Union comrades.

45 Transcript of an interview between Peter Mares, Dr Martin Crotty and Colonel Peter Murphy (Australian Army), ‘National Interest’, ABC Radio National, 23 April 2010, viewed 6 May 2010, < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/nationalinterest/stories/2010/2881575.htm>. 46 William C. David, Rebels and Yankees: The Fighting Men of the American Civil War, Salamander Books, London, 2001, p.227. 35

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

They buried their own men decently, putting a board and inscription at the head of each, but the Union forces they covered so slightly that their hands, feet, and their skulls are now uncovered and exposed to the open air. T hey burned a great many and their bones are now lying with the ashes above the ground. 47

Other methods of facilitating postmortem identification during the Civil War included soldiers stenciling their name and regiment onto their clothing and equipment, or the men might be identified by the notebooks, letters and diaries they carried in their pockets. The more affluent soldiers could purchase commercially manufactured silver and gold pins inscribed with their details that they attached to their coats. A less expensive option was provided by the sutlers who followed the campaigning armies and who would hand-stamp a soldier’s personal information onto a solid brass or lead tag. These tags, like the ‘dog tags’ of the twentieth century that would succeed them, had a hole in the top for attaching a string or chain and were worn around the neck. There were several variations, but most featured an eagle, shield and the inscription ‘War of 1861’ on one side and the soldier's name, company and regiment on the other. There was no official policy on battlefield identification. It was left to the individual soldier to decide what form of identification he would use, if any.48 Official recognition of the need f or standardised battlefield identification of soldiers’ bodies would not occur until some forty years after the end of the Civil War. Although a metal identification disk was first officially recommended for issue to US soldiers in 1899 dur ing the Philippines Insurrection, it was not introduced until December 1906, and not made mandatory for US Army personnel until 1913. Initially a single circular tag, a second tag was added i n July 1916. The second tag hung beneath the first on a separate small chain so that one tag could be interred with the body while the other was turned over to the Graves Registration personnel to record the death.49 During the Second World War the circular ID disc was replaced by the oblong shape that is still in use today and the information stamped on them was standardised. This information consisted of the soldier's name, their army serial number (replaced by their Social Security Number from July 1969), their blood type, the name and address of a person to be contacted in the case of an emergency (generally their next of kin),

47 Hamlin Alexander Coe, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Combat Diaries of Union Sergeant Hamlin Alexander Coe, Associated University Presses, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1975, p.120. 48 Captain Richard W. Wooley, 'A Short History of Identification Tags', Quartermaster Professional Bulletin, December 1988, viewed 6 August 2010, . 49 British soldiers of the First World War carried two identity discs. The burial party collected the red disc while the green disc was left on the body for identification. 36

A Two-Edged Sword

and the soldier's religion (if applicable). The information required on these tags remained virtually unchanged for the next sixty or so years, although a r ecord of tetanus immunization came and went, and from March 1944 the next of kin details were removed because it was felt that this information might aid the enemy. One dog tag was to be tied into the laces of the left boot while the other was to be worn around the neck to increase the probability of at least one tag surviving the mortal injury. In Vietnam the practice was for members of the mortuary affairs unit to collect one tag and clamp the other tag in the dead man’s jaw. The German Army first used identity discs (erkennungsmarke) during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The German disc was oval in shape and had two holes through which a cord was threaded, allowing the disc to be worn around the soldier’s neck. During the First World War the German soldiers wore a single identity disc, which was divided in two by a perforated line. The front of the disc contained the name and residence of the soldier, followed by the details of the depot unit they had joined. T he back of the disc detailed the soldier’s regiment, company and roster number (equivalent to a serial number). The information was repeated on each section of the disc, enabling the bottom half to be snapped off if the soldier was killed. The bottom half was sent back to the depot (who would notify the family), while the top half was buried with the remains. The Wehrmacht also used a tag that could be snapped in two, but the information was restricted to the details of the soldier’s depot unit and roster number, along with the soldier’s blood group. The details were stamped on both halves of the disc.50 Not all nations have required their soldiers to carry identity discs, the absence of which doomed the fallen to unmarked graves. Addison Terry, a US artillery officer attached to the famous ‘Wolfhounds’ (27th Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division) during the fierce fighting of the initial months of the Korean War, tells us that, ‘Because the Reds wore no dog tags and had no i dentification there was no point in separate graves and it had become SOP [Standard Operating Procedure] to bury them in groups of thirty-five to fifty’.51 The usefulness of a dog tag is predicated on the hope that it will survive, reasonably intact, the infliction of the mortal wound. While this may be true for deaths caused by small calibre weapons, it may not be the case when bodies are fragmented beyond recognition by blast weapons, such as artillery shells, aerial delivered

50 Fredrick Clemens and Jason Pipes, ‘German Military Identification Documents and Tags’, viewed 6 August 2010, . 51 Addison Terry, The Battle for Pusan: A Korean War Memoir, Presidio, Novato, California, 2000, p.106. 37

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

munitions or, as often occurred in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, an IED. Colby Buzzell, who served with the US Army in Iraq in 2003/04, observed that a number of his fellow soldiers were getting ‘meat tags’ prior to deployment, ostensibly to aid postmortem identification of their bodies. Buzzell explained that:

A meat tag is basically your dog-tag information (name, Social Security number, blood type, and religion) tattooed on your side, usually under your armpit. Soldiers get the meat-tag tattoo so that when an IED blows them into a million fucking pieces, there’s a better chance for their carcass to be identified.52

Since the beginning of the twentieth century forensic identification of human remains has principally relied on fingerprint53 and later dental records. But such methods have limitations; not enough remains may be pr esent to identify by conventional means or records may be incomplete or missing. The US Department of Defense, anticipating a large number of US casualties during the 1991 Gulf War, investigated using DNA for battlefield identification. B y the beginning of Operation Desert Storm in January 1991, a system for the collection and storage of DNA samples was in place and DNA was used to establish the identity of two American soldiers killed during the war.54 The validation of battlefield identification using DNA prompted the US Department of Defense to embark upon an ambitious project to collect and store a DNA sample of all members of the US armed forces (both active and reserve). These samples, consisting of a card containing two drops of blood, are held in a deep-freeze warehouse at the Armed Forces Repository of Specimen Samples for the Identification of Remains, operated by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, at Gaithersburg, Maryland. Collection commenced in June 1992, and by October 1992, all personnel entering the US Army through its six basic training centres had a D NA sample collected. A DNA sample was collected from those members already serving in 1992 when they sought care at a m ilitary medical facility or during pre-deployment preparation. The US Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps enacted similar collection methods for their respective personnel. By 2007, this DNA Registry contained over 5 million samples, providing a DNA record of all current US military personnel (active and

52 Buzzell, op. cit., p.71. See also Rick Reilly, ‘Where Have All the Young Men Gone?’, Time, 17 February 2003, p.104. 53 The first fingerprint bureau in the United Kingdom was established at Scotland Yard in 1901. In 1906 fingerprint identification was adopted by the New York City Police Department. 54 Douglas J. Gillert, ‘Who Are You? DNA Registry Knows’, American Forces Information Service, 13 July 1998, viewed 6 August 2010, . 38

A Two-Edged Sword

reserve), as well as Department of Defense civilians and contractors deployed to certain operational areas. These DNA records were used to identify military victims of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the Pentagon in Washington D.C., as well as US casualties suffered during combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.55 The intention behind the establishment of the DNA Registry was to ensure that in the future there would never be another US military casualty buried under the inscription, ‘Here Rests in Honored Glory An American Soldier Known But To God’. A case in point is that concerning the identification of the remains previously interred in the tomb for the Vietnam Unknown in the Tomb of the Unknowns at the Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington D.C. In the early 1980s the Reagan Administration began a search to find a s et of remains that could be i nterred in the Vietnam tomb at the Tomb of the Unknowns. O n 13 A pril 1984, the Department of Defense selected the remains and t hey were interred on V eterans’ Day (28 May) in 1984. But advances in forensic identification, coupled with fact that in July 1995 the Defense Science Board approved the use of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) for forensic identification, raised the possibility that the remains in the tomb of the Vietnam Unknown could now be identified. MtDNA is inherited from your mother. It is shared by all maternal relatives, unlike the better-known Nuclear DNA, which is a r andom blend of millions of genes inherited from both parents and which constitutes a unique genetic fingerprint. MtDNA testing requires the DNA of a maternal relative for comparison. T he remains were disinterred in May 1998 and t he required tests completed. On 30 June 1998, a Defense spokesperson announced that the remains were identified as belonging to United States Air Force 1st Lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie. The remains were returned to his family on 10 July 199856 and were buried in his hometown of St Louis, Missouri.57 The circumstances surrounding the eventual identification of Blassie’s remains are illustrative of how modern advances in forensic identification have largely negated the enduring fear of soldiers that their body will be buried in an unmarked grave on the

55 ibid.; Gary Turbak, ‘Unknown No Longer’, Veterans of Foreign War Magazine, September 2002, pp.12-16; Donna Miles, ‘DNA Registry Unlocks Key to Fallen Servicemembers’ Identities’, American Forces Press Service, 24 January 2007, viewed 21 February 2009, . 56 On 17 September 1999, during POW/MIA Day ceremonies, the empty crypt of the Vietnam Unknown at the Tomb of the Unknowns was rededicated with the inscription, ‘Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen: 1958–1975’. Blassie’s gravestone at St Louis includes the following inscription, ‘Unknown Soldier May 28 1984–May 14 1998’. 57 Background Paper on the Activities of the Department of Defense Senior Working Group on the Vietnam Unknown in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers, dated 27 April 1998, Arlington National Cemetery Website, viewed 6 August 2010, < http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/unk- vn45.htm>; Turbak, op. cit., pp.12-6. 39

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

battlefield. On 11 M ay 1972, Blassie’s A-37B aircraft was shot down by ground fire near the village of An Loc (100 kilometres to the north of Saigon), South Vietnam. On 31 October 1972, an Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN) long-range reconnaissance patrol near An Loc recovered a par tial set of remains and s ome personal effects in the vicinity of an ejection seat. The remains consisted of four ribs, part of a pelvis and a right humerus (approximately three per cent of a skeleton). The remains were officially listed as ‘believed to be’ Blassie but there were no forensic tests then available that could provide conclusive proof. In 1978, officials at the US Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii determined that they were unlikely to ever be able to conclusively identify the remains, which were subsequently reclassified as ‘unknown’. Y et, only twenty years later the remains were successfully identified. In mid-June 1999, the Department of Defense announced that remains would not be placed in the crypt of the Vietnam Unknown unless it could be pr oven that they will never be identified. Because of continuing advances in forensic medicine, it is highly likely that the crypt of the Vietnam Unknown will remain empty.58 However, even with the rapid advances in forensic identification over the last few decades, the process still has its limitations: the main one being that investigators need to narrow down the list of potential identities of the body to allow DNA testing to occur. I n most cases, some identifying feature will remain, perhaps a dog tag or a scrap of uniform, and DNA testing will be used to confirm the identity of the remains. For example, in September 2006 Belgian gas workers, while laying a pipe, discovered the bodies of five Australian soldiers killed during the battle of Passchendaele. The bodies were reburied in a Commonwealth War Cemetery in October 2007. The lengthy delay between discovery and reburial was to allow for extensive research, followed by DNA testing, in an attempt to identify the bodies (two were identified). A similar process was followed to identify the remains of Australian soldiers among the 249 bodies discovered in a mass grave (consisting of six pits) near the First World War battlefield of Fromelles (northern France) in mid-2008. The soldiers had been killed on 19 June 1916, and were numbered among the 1900 Australian soldiers killed and 3100 wounded or missing in what was the bloodiest single day in Australian military history. Over the next few days, to avoid the spread of disease as the bodies festered in the high summer, the Germans dragged hundreds of bodies into mass graves. Most of these graves were uncovered during or shortly after the war but one remained undiscovered for almost ninety years.

58 ibid.; ‘Vietnam Unknown Crypt at Arlington to Remain Empty’, American Forces Press Service, dated 17 June 1999, viewed 6 August 2010, < http://www.defense.gov/news/Jun1999/articles.html>. 40

A Two-Edged Sword

The process of identifying the remains commenced with a combined team of British and A ustralian historians and r esearchers analyzing the available archival material to compile a list of the soldiers who might have been buried in the mass grave. Arising from their efforts, out of the 1,294 Australian soldiers officially listed as missing after the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916, a list of 190 was compiled. Next forensic archaeologists, anthropologists and s cientists exhumed the bodies and sought out identifying features. Concurrently attempts were made to extract viable DNA from the bones, which if successful, were then screened against samples provided from the soldier’s descendants.59 In mid-March 2010, it was announced that the scientists had c onfirmed the identity of 75 of the 249 bodies. Indicative of the process was the identification of the remains of Private Harry Willis of the 31st Battalion, 1st Australian Imperial Force. A medallion was uncovered by a metal detector during initial excavations of the site and later identified as a keepsake given by the Alberton Shire Council (Victoria) and Private Willis was the only soldier on the list from that area. A DNA sample was taken from his ninety-three-year-old niece and matched to DNA taken from the remains. In February 2010, all 249 m en were interred in individual unmarked graves in the newly created Commonwealth War Graves cemetery at Pheasant Wood, near where the bodies were discovered. The 75 soldiers whose remains have been identified will have their details recorded on their headstone when erected; the remaining headstones will display the traditional inscription of ‘A Soldier of the Great War – Known unto God’. H owever, viable DNA was obtained from all but six sets of remains, with testing on samples to continue until 2014, which is likely to uncover the identities of a num ber of the ‘unknown’ soldiers.60 Until relatively recently (in a hi storical sense), most men killed in battle were buried where they fell—more often than not in a mass grave at the site of the battle (as had occurred at Fromelles). The bodies of the slain were generally not returned to their family for burial unless the campaign occurred close to their village or town. The decomposition of the body, coupled with primitive means of transportation, usually precluded the movement of bodies over great distances.

59 Belinda Tasker, ‘Race on to identify diggers at Fromelles’, Brisbane Times, 24 March 2009, viewed 29 June 2009, < http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/race-on-to-identify- diggers-at-fromelles/2009/03/24/1237656897998.html>. 60 Paola Totaro, Bridie Smith and Adrian Lowe, ‘Private Willis identified, not forgotten, The Age, 17 March 2010, viewed 10 April 2010, < http://www.theage.com.au/national/private-willis- identified-not-forgotten-20100316-qcl1.html>; Paola Totaro, ‘Scientists identify lost Diggers of Fromelles’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 March 2010, viewed 16 March 2010, . 41

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

Naval forces have a longstanding tradition of burial at sea, particularly if the ship’s mission made it impractical to return the remains to shore. The deceased were sewn up in their hammock or a piece of canvas (traditionally the last stitch was inserted through the nose of the corpse to ensure that the sailor was not cataleptic), some cannonballs were added for additional weight, and the body was tipped over the side. Both the US Navy and the Royal Navy conducted wartime burials at sea up t o and during the Second World War (the US Navy currently provides burial at sea during peacetime for active duty members and veterans upon request) with the Royal Australian Navy conducting at least one61 burial at sea during the Korean War. The contemporary naval practice is to refrigerate the remains until return to port or to airlift them ashore. For the majority of the period studied, the return of a warrior’s body to their home for burial was generally because of socio-political considerations based upon the appointment held by the deceased. Three examples of this practice are the funerals of Vice Admiral Viscount Nelson, Field Marshal Lord Raglan and Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges. Vice Admiral Viscount Horatio Nelson was the Commander-in-Chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet that defeated the Franco-Spanish fleet off Spain’s Cape Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. A French sharpshooter shot Nelson in the closing stages of the battle. His body was placed inside a cask of Spanish brandy to preserve it for the journey back to England. N elson was laid to rest in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral on 9 January 1806 (some two-and-a-half months after his death). The other British casualties from the Battle of Trafalgar were buried at sea; the practice in the Royal Navy at the time was to throw the bodies overboard so that they did not clutter up the decks during the battle.62 Field Marshal Lord Raglan, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces during the Crimean War, died from dysentery on 28 June 1855. His was the only body to be shipped back to England from the twenty-one thousand British soldiers and sailors who died on this campaign. Raglan was buried at the family seat in Badminton on 26 July 1855. Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges was the commander of the Australian Imperial Force that landed on Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula on 25 A pril 1915. He died on 18 May 1915 after being shot by a T urkish sniper. Bridges was buried in a military cemetery in Alexandria, Egypt a few days later. A few

61 Sub-Lieutenant Richard Sinclair was killed in action when his plane was shot down in Korea on 7 December 1951. His body was recovered and buried at sea off the flight deck of HMAS Sydney. 62 Two British casualties from the battle of Trafalgar are buried in Gibraltar’s Trafalgar Cemetery; however, these men died of their wounds after being brought ashore following the battle, rather than being killed in the battle proper. 42

A Two-Edged Sword

months later, following a s uggestion raised in the Australian parliament, Bridges’ remains were exhumed and returned to Australia for a state funeral and reburial at a site overlooking Australia’s Royal Military College at Canberra (Bridges was the founding commandant of the college). Of the sixty thousand Australian soldiers who died overseas in the First World War, Bridges’ were the only remains returned to Australia for reburial for some eighty years. I t was not until 11 November 1993 t hat another of the fallen would return home, when an Australian soldier killed in France was reburied in the tomb of the ‘Unknown Soldier’ in the Australian War Memorial’s Hall of Memory.63 Technological developments in the twentieth century, in particular advances in transportation such as powered flight, largely negated some of the practical considerations that had previously restricted the movement of dead bodies. Although it was now possible to return home the bodies of all slain soldiers, the official policy on the repatriation of war dead varied from country to country. The families of Americans killed during the First and Second World Wars were given the option of having the bodies of their kin returned to the United States for reburial (bodies were not repatriated until after the end of hostilities). If they chose to forgo this option, the body was removed from its temporary burial site, normally located on the periphery of the former battlefields, and re-buried in one of the official American war cemeteries scattered throughout Europe, North Africa and the Pacific. Approximately a quarter of all American servicemen killed during the First and S econd World wars are buried overseas. The remainder were returned to the United States for re-burial, less those listed as ‘missing in action’ or buried/lost at sea. The recovered bodies of all American servicemen killed during the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003 ongoing) and the current conflict in Afghanistan were returned to the United States for burial. Conversely, it was the policy of the countries of the British Commonwealth to bury their war dead in the operational theatre in which they died. Up until the Vietnam War, for example, the vast majority of Australian war dead were buried overseas.64 It is only since Vietnam that the bodies of slain Australian soldiers were repatriated as a matter of official policy.65 This policy initially reflected the impracticality of returning the

63 Darren Moore, Duntroon - The Royal Military College of Australia: 1911-2001, Royal Military College of Australia, Canberra, 2001, pp.185-6. 64 Of the 520 Australians killed during the Vietnam War, forty-five are buried at the Terendak Military Cemetery in Malaysia, while one is buried in Singapore’s Kranji War Cemetery. The remainder were returned to Australia for burial. 65 Geographical distribution of the United States war dead provided by the American Battle Monuments Commission (www.abmc.gov). Burial policy for Australian war dead provided by the Office of Australian War Graves, viewed 6 October 2010, . 43

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

bodies of soldiers slain in far-flung imperial campaigns to their home country for burial, though this was less of an impediment for the soldiers killed in France and Flanders during the First World War. Initially, despite a ban on exhuming remains during the war, some wealthy and/or influential British families successfully repatriated the bodies of fallen soldiers (usually officers) back to the United Kingdom. Major General Sir Fabian Ware, then head o f the Graves Registration Commission, vehemently opposed this practice, emphasizing that: ‘The one point of view that seems to me to be often overlooked in this matter is that of the officers themselves, who in ninety-nine cases out of a hund red will tell you that if they are killed [they] would wish to be among their men.’66 Ware, by now the vice chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission (renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1960), reinforced this view in a press statement released following the Armistice:

to allow removal by a few individuals (of necessity only those who could afford the cost) would be contrary to the principle of equality of treatment … The Commission felt that a higher ideal than that of private burial at home is embodied in these war cemeteries in foreign lands, where those who fought and fell together, officers and men, lie together in their last resting place, facing the line they gave their lives to maintain.67

The principal reason for returning the body of a slain soldier to their family is that the presence of the body at the funeral provides a focus for the family’s grief. Furthermore, the body will most likely be buried locally and thereby allow regular visits from family members, unlike the bodies of soldiers interred in a distant official war cemetery that are rarely, if ever, visited by their loved ones.68 Yet many a soldier has expressed a preference to be buried among the men with whom they fought and died. William Manchester wrote that his section was unanimously of the view that if killed in combat their bodies should be buried on the Pacific island on which they fell.69 In July 1943, General George S. Patton Jr. indicated in a letter to his nephew that, ‘If I should

66 Major General Sir Fabian Ware, quoted in Philip Longworth, The Unending Vigil: A History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Leo Cooper, London, 1985, p. 14, reproduced in Julie Summers, Remembered: The History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Merrell, London, 2007, p.15. 67 Major General Sir Fabian Ware, press statement for the Imperial War Graves Commission dated 20 November 1918, quoted in Summers, op. cit., p.25. 68 In recognition of the difficulties that faced Australian families who wished to visit the graves of their fallen loved ones buried in Europe and the Middle East, shortly after the end of the First World War the Australian government arranged for photographs to be taken of individual gravesites and sent to the soldier’s next of kin. 69 Manchester, op. cit., p.276. 44

A Two-Edged Sword

conk, I do not wish to be disintered [sic] after the war. It would be far more pleasant to my ghostly future to lie among my soldiers than to rest in the sanctimonious precincts of a civilian cemetery.’70 The journalist Peter Arnett recalled being told that the dead soldiers of the French Groupement Mobile (Mobile Group) 100, ambushed at Mang Yang Pass by the Viet Minh in June 1954, as per their prior request, were buried upright where they fell, facing France.71 The relatives of the British dead of the Falklands campaign were given the option of having the bodies repatriated to the UK or reburied in the official Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at San Carlos on t he Falkland Islands.72 The officer in charge of establishing the cemetery would later comment that when he chose the site he felt that:

no one should be shipped back to the UK. It seemed ridiculous, to be dug up and reburied in Aldershot military cemetery where you’d be forgotten in ten years’ time. Better to stay here where nobody would ever forget you, with your mates in this beautiful spot, with the War Graves Commission taking care of everything.73

From a psychological perspective, the presence of a body helps bring about a ‘sense of closure’ in the grieving process. To help ease the grief borne by the families of fallen servicemen, governments will now go to great lengths to recover the remains of those killed overseas. Since the early 1990s, improved political relations between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has facilitated joint expeditions aimed at recovering the remains of US servicemen killed during the Vietnam War. The US Department of Defense has stated that, ‘Achieving the fullest possible accounting for these Americans is of the highest national priority’. B y mid-2003, the remains of nearly seven hundred Americans had been l ocated, identified and r eturned to their families for burial since the end of the Vietnam War, though approximately 1800 American servicemen are still listed as ‘missing in action’ from this war. The US Defense Force’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command is currently attempting to locate

70 Letter from General George S. Patton to Frederick Ayer, dated 9 June 1943, quoted in Carlo D′Este, A Genius For War: A Life of General George S. Patton, HarperCollins Publishers, London, 1996, p.798. 71 Arnett, op. cit., pp.151-2. 72 Thirty-three of the 255 British servicemen killed in the Falklands campaign were buried at San Carlos, noting that a number of bodies were unrecoverable and buried at sea (for example, the twenty men killed on HMS Sheffield). 73 Major Bob Leitch quoted in McManners, The Scars of War, p.345. 45

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

and identify the eighty-eight thousand74 American servicemen still unaccounted for from the Second World War, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the 1991 Gulf War.75 The US government is not alone in its desire to recover the bodies of the nation’s war dead. Already noted were the efforts to identify the remains of Australian soldiers killed during the First World War. Furthermore, in 2007 t he Australian government, aided by the volunteer organisation Operation Aussies Home76 (founded by three Vietnam veterans), whose efforts led to the discovery of the remains, repatriated the bodies of three Australian soldiers killed during the Vietnam War.77 In August 2008, the remains of the last Australian solider listed as missing in action in Vietnam, Private David Fisher of the Special Air Service Regiment, were discovered (complete with identification tags). The identification of Fisher’s remains left just two Royal Australian Air Force officers (Flying Officer Michael Herbert and Pilot Officer Robert Carver) still unaccounted for from Vietnam. In April 2009 the wreckage of their Canberra Bomber was discovered near the border with Laos and their bodies were identified three months later.78 The locating and identifying of the remains of Herbert and Carver is illustrative of the impact that modern technology has had on the ability of governments to recover the remains of their servicemen and women missing in action. Although traditional means of identifying the location of remains were utilised, such as the examination of historical records and the interviewing of witnesses, these were supplemented by highly technical computer modeling undertaken by the Air Operations Division of the Australian Department of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation.

74 The breakdown of unaccounted for US servicemen is: 78,000 Second World War, 8,100 Korean War, 1,800 Vietnam War, 120 Cold War (generally arising from the loss of aircraft on surveillance operations or individuals on classified missions) and 1 from the 1991 Gulf War. The Joint POW/MIA Account Command does not actively seek out cases from any war or conflict earlier than the Second World War, but they do undertake identification of remains from the First World War (and earlier conflicts) as cases present themselves. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, viewed 9 July 2008, . 75 U.S. Department of Defense, News Release No. 417-03, ‘Top U.S. POW/MIA Official Visits Vietnam’, American Forces Press Service, 13 June 2003, viewed 6 August 2010, . 76 ‘Operation Aussies Home’ is now (2010) focusing their efforts on attempting to find the bodies of two Australian commandos executed by the Japanese on Kairiru Island in April 1945. See Max Blenkin, ‘Search for remains of WWII commandos’, The Canberra Times, 27 February 2010. 77 David McLennan, ‘Veterans help to bring home Vietnam dead’, The Canberra Times, 28 April 2007. 78 Media Release 130/08 by Warren Snowdon, Minister for Defence Science and Personnel, titled ‘Private David Fisher to Return Home’, 11 September 2008, viewed 6 August 2010, . 46

A Two-Edged Sword

This modeling helped refine the search area and prioritise the efforts of searchers on the ground.79 The search team included forensic odontologists, a forensic anthropologist and a forensic pathologist, and used modern techniques and equipment to conclusively identify the remains. The expectation that the body of their loved one will be repatriated provides some measure of comfort to the families of contemporary soldiers. This factor influences government policy in regards to the repatriation of war dead. In early 2003, Pentagon officials were considering the on-site cremation of American battlefield casualties arising from an Iraqi chemical or biological attack, in order to protect the health and s afety of other military personnel, particularly those tasked with handling contaminated remains. This option was eventually discounted because of religious objections to cremation and the envisaged emotional effect that such an act would have on the deceased’s family. A Pentagon spokesperson stated that returning soldiers’ remains to families continued to be ‘ a top priority’. A ccordingly, specially designed ‘contaminated remains’ body bags were trialed. Regular body bags typically were not equipped with airtight seals. This lack of airtight seals helped to dissipate the gases produced by the body when it began to decompose. However, the contaminated remains body bags were equipped with airtight seals, were constructed out of a specially treated polyvinyl and were equipped with chem-bio filters comparable to those contained in gas masks.80 The need for contaminated remains body bags is a modern manifestation of the enduring pragmatism of soldiers towards death, for soldiers always have and always will be k illed in war. The r ealisation that either they or some of their comrades are likely to be killed in battle has resulted in soldiers adopting a pragmatic outlook on death. One unchanging manifestation of this pragmatism is the desire to make a final communication with home. The impact of technological advances over the period studied, specifically in the field of communications, have increased the options and indeed the immediacy with which soldiers are able to make this final communiqué with loved ones. A lthough the ‘last letter’ still exists in the traditional form, soldiers now have the option of communicating directly with family and friends via email, phone calls and web-cameras. But the immediacy of communication with loved ones available to modern soldiers can actually increase the burden of the soldier by constantly reminding

79 Media Release 51/09 by Greg Combet, Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science, titled ‘Flying Officer Michael Herbert and Pilot Officer Robert Carver Return to Australia’, viewed 3 January 2009, . 80 Vince Crawley and Karen Jowers, ‘Pentagon rejects mass-cremation option’, Army Times, 3 March 2003.

Facing Death: Last Letters, Dog Tags and Graves

them of what is waiting for them back home and how their death in combat would have far-reaching implications for their loved ones left behind. The postmortem treatment of their remains is also an endur ing concern of soldiers. In this aspect, technological advances in forensic identification and transportation have fundamentally changed the manner in which soldiers' remains have been treated and have largely negated the concerns of previous generations of servicemen and w omen. The first concern is that their body will be i dentified, as soldiers particularly fear anonymity in death. The use of identification discs, pioneered during the American Civil War, would eventually lead to the use of sophisticated DNA testing procedures that have largely ensured that there will be no m ore ‘unknown soldiers’. Another change over the last hundred or so years has been in relation to the repatriation of soldiers’ bodies. Previously only high-ranking officers were returned to their home country for burial. R epatriation policies vary from country to country and from conflict to conflict, though contemporary fatalities are more likely to be r eturned home than buried in the operational theatre due to the development of refrigeration and advances in transportation making this possible. Conversely, this capability to return the body home, may actually be ag ainst the wishes of the soldiers themselves, with many soldiers expressing a wish that they should be buried among their comrades where they fell rather than returned home for burial.

A Two-Edged Sword

2 Death and Disfigurement on the Battlefield

The previous chapter discussed how technological advances have impacted upon the manner in which soldiers prepare for the possibility of their death in combat and the practical aspects of the postmortem treatment of their bodies. This chapter continues the examination of how soldiers cope with the ever-present possibility that their occupation may bring about their death or disfigurement. Specifically, it focuses on the decreasing lethality rate of wounds over the period studied, largely due t o advances in medical treatment and surgery, and how soldiers respond to the increasingly likely possibility of their surviving their evacuation from the battlefield but then having to a face a diminished quality of life due to crippling and/or disfiguring wounds. Although repatriation policies may assure contemporary soldiers of the return of their body to their loved ones—particularly noting the technological advances that have now made this a r eality for virtually all soldiers regardless of their rank or appointment—the postmortem condition of their body has been an enduring concern of soldiers across the period under study. The use of edged weapons could produce disfiguring and often fatal wounds but would largely leave the body intact. Although such weapons were used throughout the period studied (modern soldiers still carry and have used bayonets in the wars of the twenty-first century), increasingly soldiers have relied on the second-order effects of the chemical reaction of gunpowder and high explosives to kill their enemies on the battlefield. A t the commencement of the period the main killing agents on the battlefield were lead shot fired by muskets and cannon balls. A musket ball would produce a localised wound at the point of impact, with death arising if it hit a vital organ or a major blood vessel (or more likely from the onset of infection) but otherwise such wounds were survivable. For example, Edward Costello wrote of his ‘sixth confinement through gun-shot wounds’,1 the latest wounding arising from being struck by two musket balls, one grazing the skin of his left thigh, the other entering beneath the right knee and exiting out the calf. Being struck by a cannonball was another matter entirely, the ballistic effects of the weapon being magnified by the close-rank formations of the period. Jean-Baptiste Barres recounted the effects of the Russian cannonballs during the battle of Eylau in February 1807: ‘Once the file touching me on the right was struck full in the chest; once the file to the left had their right thighs torn

1 Edward Costello, Rifleman Costello: The Adventures of a Soldier of the 95th (Rifles) in the Peninsular & Waterloo Campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars, Leonaur, 2005, p.278. 49

Death and Disfigurement on the Battlefield

off’.2 Benjamin Harris tells us in his memoirs of his service with Wellington’s Army in Portugal and Spain of a cannonball killing three members of his company at the same moment.3 The cannonballs would tear off limbs and on occasion even heads. Costello tells us of the death of one of his comrades, a soldier by the name of Brooks. He recounted that, ‘The shot [cannon-ball] had smashed and carried away the whole of his head, bespattering my jacket with the brains, while Tracey was materially injured by having a splinter of the skull driven deep through the skin behind his ear’.4 While such wounds were horrific, the development of high explosive artillery shells and a corresponding move away from solid shot in the latter half of the nineteenth century produced a whole new set of fears for soldiers. In particular, the mutilation arising from the explosion of artillery shells caused a great and abiding fear. Lord Moran commented:

There were men in France who were prepared for [death] if it came swiftly and decently. But that shattering, crude, bloody end by a big shell was too much for them. It was something more than death, all their plans for meeting it with decency and credit were suddenly battered down.5

This sentiment was shared by the French soldier Paul Dubrulle, who recorded in his journal the horror of the prolonged German bombardment of Verdun: ‘To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is a f ear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the bombardment’.6 Frank Crozier provided a vivid, first-hand account of the dismemberment arising from the impact of artillery shells. H e recalled that while showing a fellow officer around the trenches during the First World War they encountered a soldier carrying a sandbag filled with something. Crozier, suspecting the theft of rations, challenged the soldier to reveal what he was carrying in the bag, ‘ “Rifleman Grundy”, comes the unexpected answer. He is carrying down the only mortal remains of Grundy for a decent burial in a bag which measures a few feet by inches.’ C rozier continued his inspection of the front line and encountered a soldier carrying a human arm:

2 Jean-Baptiste Barres, Chasseur Barres, Leonaur, London, 2006, p.88. 3 Hibbert (ed.), The Recollections of Rifleman Harris, p.36. 4 Costello, op. cit., p.124. 5 Moran, op. cit., p.128. 6 Paul Dubrulle, Mon Regiment, Paris, 1917 quoted in Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, Penguin, London, 1993, p.177. 50

A Two-Edged Sword

‘Whose is that?’ I ask. ‘ Rifleman Broderick’s, Sir,’ is the reply. ‘Where’s Broderick?’ is my next question. ‘Up there, Sir,’ says my informant, pointing to a tree top above our heads. There sure enough is the torn trunk of a man fixed securely in the branches of a s hell-stripped oak. A high explosive shell has recently shot him up t o the sky and landed him in mid air above and out of reach of his comrades.7

A generation later on the plains surrounding Stalingrad, Alexei Petrov looked out into a maelstrom of exploding German shells and was amazed to see a tiny figure, no more than three feet high, waving his arms. When he looked closer Petrov saw that it was the upper torso of a Russian soldier, whose legs and hips lay beside him on the ground, having been sheared off by a shell burst. The man looked at Petrov and tried to communicate but Petrov heard only the sucking in of air. The arms grew still and the man’s eyes glazed over. The torso remained upright next to the rest of the soldier’s body.8 On the other side of the world in the Pacific theatre, William Manchester witnessed the evisceration caused by the artillery bombardments on Iwo Jima. He graphically recounted that, ‘There seemed to be no c lean wounds; just fragments of corpses … You tripped over strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist. Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos.’9 The impact of rounds fired by tanks had a similar effect on the human body. ‘Those who lie here are not just dead bodies, with one wound in them or possibly with one part missing’, wrote Günter Koschorrek, describing the aftermath of a round fired by a Soviet T-34 tank hitting the crew of a German 88mm gun. ‘Here are individual lumps of flesh from arms, legs and buttocks, and in one instance from a head, on to which part of a damaged helmet still clings.’10 In later conflicts, the mutilating effects of mines and high explosive booby-traps would generate the same dread among soldiers as did artillery fire for those who served in the First and S econd World wars. I n the Vietnam War, the percentage of casualties killed or wounded by mines and booby traps was almost four times greater than that of the Second World War.11 Gary McKay wrote in his memoir of the Vietnam War that ‘I think what frightened me more than anything was the danger from mines. I had known two platoon commanders in 2 RAR [Royal Australian Regiment], Bill Rolfe

7 Brigadier F.P. Crozier, A Brass Hat in No-Man’s Land, Jonathan Cape, London, 1930, pp.94-5. 8 Craig, op. cit., p.241. 9 Manchester, op. cit., p.340. 10 Koschorrek, op. cit., p.97. 11 Michael Clodfelter, Vietnam in Military Statistics: A History of the Indochina Wars, 1772-1991, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1995, p.241. 51

Death and Disfigurement on the Battlefield

and Pat Cameron; Pat had lost a leg and Bill had lost both. Mines were a real bastard and you could never tell where or when you would hit them.’12 Tim O’Brien, who served as a private with the US Army in Vietnam, recalled:

You look ahead, a few paces and wonder what your legs will resemble if there is more to the earth in that spot than silicates and nitrogen. Will the pain be unbearable? Will you scream or fall silent? Will you be afraid to look at your own body, afraid of the sight of your own red flesh and white bone?13

O’Brien decided to be ultra-careful, trying to second-guess where the Viet Cong may have laid a mine, weighing up carefully where to put each foot down. He tried to step in the footprints of the soldier in front of him until this soldier turned around and cursed him for following too closely. One of O’Brien’s comrades commented: ‘It’s an absurd combination of certainty and uncertainty: the certainty that you’re walking in minefields, walking past the things day after day; the uncertainty of your every movement, of which way to shift your weight, of where to sit down’.14 Philip Caputo, who served as an officer with the US Marine Corps in South Vietnam in 1965–66, expressed a similar sentiment. Caputo pointed out that, ‘The infantryman knows that any moment the ground he is walking on can erupt and kill him; kill him if he’s lucky. If he’s unlucky, he will be turned into a blind, deaf, emasculated, legless shell.’15 He noted that the Viet Cong preferred to use command-detonated mines and booby-trapped high explosive shells. The mines consisted of hundreds of steel pellets packed around a f ew pounds of C-4 explosive and of ten resulted in the amputation of arms, legs and heads. But even more dismembering were the booby- trapped shells. Caputo graphically recounted that, ‘Lieutenant Colonel Meyers, one of the regiment’s battalion commanders stepped on a booby-trapped 155-mm shell. They did not find enough of him to fill a willy-peter bag, a waterproof sack a little larger than a shopping bag. I n effect, Colonel Meyers had b een disintegrated.’16 Robert Mason, who served as a helicopter pilot with the US Army in Vietnam in 1965, graphically described in his memoir of the war an i ncident where he was sent to pick up t he casualties from a jeep destroyed by a booby-trapped howitzer round. The round had been buried in the road and was remotely triggered when the jeep passed by. When

12 Gary McKay, In Good Company: One Man’s War in Vietnam, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1987, p.54. 13 O’Brien, op. cit., p.126. 14 ibid., p.127. 15 Caputo, op. cit., p.288. 16 ibid., p.167. 52

A Two-Edged Sword

Mason arrived there were two survivors out of the six men travelling in the jeep. After the wounded (both of whom died on the flight back to base) were loaded onboard the helicopter, the remains of the dead men were collected:

The man that had lost his leg had also lost his balls. He lay naked on his back with the ragged stump of his leg pointing out the side door … Only the torn skin from his scrotum remained … The scurrying grunts tossed a f oot-filled boot onto the cargo deck. Blood seeped through the torn wool sock at the top of the boot. T he medic pushed it under the sling seat. I turned around and saw a confused-looking private walking through the swirling smoke with the head of someone he knew held by the hair.17

The overwhelming battlefield technological superiority of the American military at the beginning of the twenty-first century, coupled with the unlikelihood of opponents choosing to fight the US Army on a c onventional battlefield, means that the greatest source of casualties for US soldiers on operations will continue to be command- detonated or booby-trapped explosive devices, rather than indirect or direct fire. I n mid-2007, a report to Congress noted that improvised explosive devices (which includes roadside bombs and suicide car bombs) were responsible for over sixty per cent of all American combat casualties (both killed and wounded) in Iraq and half of all combat casualties in Afghanistan.18 These insidious devices were concealed under the surface of roads, hidden amongst rubbish or even placed inside dead animals left by the roadside. In 2003 there were 81 recorded IED incidents in Afghanistan. In 2009 there were 8159. The journalist David Finkel noted that among the US soldiers he travelled with in Iraq in 2007/08, ‘The gunner tried to stand in a particular way, with one foot in front of the other, so that if an EFP [explosively formed penetrator] slug came roaring in, he might only lose one f oot instead of two, and for similar reasons Kauzlarich sometimes tucked his hands inside of his body armour …’.19 A 2010 article on the efforts by the US military to detect and survive IEDs noted that, ‘In Helmand [Afghanistan] it is common to see soldiers vomit [due to fear] before they go out on patrol because the chances of being hit are so high’.20 ‘It scared the shit out of everyone’, commented Michael Bailey, a US soldier following the death of a comrade in

17 Mason, op. cit., p.155. 18 Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, ‘Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan: Effects and Countermeasures’, Order Code RS22330, updated 28 August 2007, viewed 6 August 2010, . 19 Finkel, op. cit., p.35. 20 Christina Lamb, ‘Deadly Simple’, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 13-14 March 2010. 53

Death and Disfigurement on the Battlefield

an IED explosion. ‘Me, every time I go out on patrol, I feel sick. It’s like, I’m gonna get hit, I’m gonna get hit, I’m gonna get hit …’21 The general in charge of the counter-IED efforts of the US military, General Michael Oates, having personally survived an I ED attack, described the psychological impact of this weapon as: ‘After you’ve survived one but clearly felt the effect, you know the feeling next time you go out, when you’re looking around all the time so much your neck hurts, waiting for the next’.22 This sentiment was confirmed by Doug Beattie, who served with the British Army in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2008.

With every footstep, every rotation of the wheels, you are watching for signs of disturbed ground, culverts running under the road, trip wire or pressure pads, bags or tins or junk lying beside the route, material that might just be rubbish, or might just be a di sguised weapon designed to blow you to kingdom come. It takes bucketloads of nerve and a huge helping of willpower just to put one foot in front of another. And then do it again. And again.23

Mark Ormrod, who was blown up by an IED in Afghanistan in 2007, wrote that, ‘Sometimes on patrol you could see poorly hidden or exposed command wires used to trigger a device and you could do something about it. But if devices were well hidden there wasn’t a lot you could do but try to step into the footprints of the man in front.’24 A key point here is the similarity between the comments of Ormond concerning how soldiers sought to cope with the IED threat and those expressed by O’Brien when talking about how he coped with the threat posed by mines during the Vietnam War, almost forty years earlier. The detonation of an IED could produce similar devastation to that of the incident involving the explosion of the booby-trapped howitzer round during the Vietnam War, described above by Mason. Illustrative of the effect of the detonation of an IED is an attack on an American Humvee that occurred on 4 S eptember 2007 in Baghdad. The IED ripped apart the Humvee, engulfing it in flames. Of the five men travelling in the vehicle, three were killed in the blast or died shortly thereafter. One of the men who initially survived, Private First Class Duncan Crookston, suffered burns to fifty per cent of his body, lost both legs, his right arm, his left hand, his ears, his nose and eyelids. Five months after being wounded he succumbed to a raging fever brought about from secondary infections from his wounds. The last survivor of the attack, Private First Class Joseph

21 Finkel, op. cit., p.116. 22 General Michael Oates, US Army, quoted in Lamb, op. cit. 23 Beattie, Task Force Helmand, pp.134-5. 24 Mark Ormrod, Royal Marine, Man Down, Bantam Press, London, 2009, p.75. 54

A Two-Edged Sword

Mixson, lost both lower legs in the blast.25 ‘By the law of averages, whichever road you choose, there’s eventually going to be a bo mb waiting for you at some point’, wrote Chris Hunter when reflecting on hi s service with the British Army in Basra. H e continued:

What makes it so damn hard is that there’s so little you can do t o defend yourself against the bastard things. You could be the most highly trained soldier on the planet, but no amount of training, skill or judgement can protect you from the random and indiscriminate effect of a bomb. It’s nearly all down to luck.26

What these accounts reveal is that although the characteristics of the munitions may have changed over the last two centuries, what has remained historically constant is the soldier’s fear of dismemberment. A related aspect is that a range of narrative accounts drawn from across the period studied reveal that many soldiers became accustomed to the sight (and smell) of bodies on t he battlefield. B enjamin Harris recounted an i ncident where he c ame upon the bodies of three Frenchmen killed during the Peninsular War.

War is a sad blunter of the feelings I have often thought since those days. The contemplation of three ghastly bodies in this lonely spot failed then in making the slightest impression upon me. T he sight had become, even in the short time I had been engaged in the trade, but too familiar. The biscuits, however, which lay in my path, I thought a bl essed windfall, and, stooping, I gathered them up, scraped off the blood with which they were sprinkled with my bayonet, and ate them ravenously.27

Colin Campbell, taking part in the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, confessed in a letter home that, ‘The vast amount of fatigue, misery and death which is always before me here only begets a c allousness which, I suppose, will disappear when one returns to a proper mode of life. The sight of a dead body at present excites no more emotion in me than the sight of a dead beetle …’28 John Casler wrote in his memoirs of the American Civil War that the soldier ‘becomes familiar with scenes of

25 Kirk Mitchell, ‘Fallen buddy followed his calling’, Denver Post, 3 February 2008, viewed 10 April 2010, < http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_8152523>. 26 Hunter, op. cit., pp.309-10. 27 Hibbert (ed.), The Recollections of Rifleman Harris, p.41. 28 Colin Frederick Campbell, Letters from Camp to his Relatives During the Siege of Sebastopol, Richard Bentley and Son, London, 1894, pp.100-1. 55

Death and Disfigurement on the Battlefield

death and carnage, and what at first shocks him greatly he afterwards comes to look upon as a matter of course’. 29 An Australian soldier, following the battle of Lone Pine at Gallipoli, wrote in a letter to his family, ‘The dead were 4 & 5 deep & we had to walk over them: it was just like walking on a cushion’. Anticipating the reaction of his family he added, ‘I daresay you will be s urprised how callous a m an becomes’.30 Gottlob Bidermann, although initially shocked when he first encountered the bodies of enemy soldiers as the German Army advanced across Russia, ruefully recalled that:

in the months and years to come I would become benumbed to death on the battlefield and that such scenes would be commonplace to us all. In the months to come our reaction to the deaths we had witnessed would become callous and accepting. We would have searched the corpses for documents, collected weapons, and gathered equipment for our own use.31

But the narrative accounts of soldiers reveal that it is somewhat less common for soldiers to become oblivious to wounded men. P erhaps it is easier for them to develop an emotional detachment to corpses; after all, they can always look away and it is clearly the case that the dead are no longer suffering any pain, while the cries of the wounded reach out to them and beg to be comforted. As Doug Beattie noted in his account of serving with the British Army in Afghanistan in 2006, ‘It’s difficult to have your breakfast when a man is moaning in agony nearby’.32 Bidermann confessed that ‘throughout the long years of the Russian campaign, helplessly witnessing the badly wounded soldiers in their agony always profoundly affected me far more than when a comrade met an immediate and painless death’.33 The cries of the wounded remind soldiers of their own vulnerability. ‘In the few days we’ve been here we’ve heard the awful screams of the wounded—how terrible it must be t o die lying on t he frozen ground’, recounted Günter Koschorrek, one of Bidermann’s comrades on the Eastern Front. He continued: ‘The thought fills us with horror—we might lie there, with nobody to help us’.34 A manifestation of this particular fear is that some soldiers may enter into a ‘buddy pact’, whereby if one is wounded in specific horrible ways, the other will kill

29 Casler, op. cit., p.89. 30 Lieutenant J.H. Sandoe, 45th Battalion, letter dated 19 September 1915 quoted in Gammage, op. cit., p.106. 31 Gottlob Herbert Bidermann, In Deadly Combat: A German Soldier’s Memoir of the Eastern Front, translated and edited by Derek S. Zumbro, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 2000, p.30. 32 Doug Beattie, An Ordinary Soldier, Simon & Schuster, London, 2008, p.173. 33 ibid., p.52. 34 Koschorrek, op. cit., p.84. 56

A Two-Edged Sword

him rather than leave him to live as “half a man”’.35 J. Glenn Gray postulated that the reason why soldiers have a greater aversion to wounded rather than dead comrades is that soldiers have a benchmark for pain, as pain is ‘very real in the memories of everyone’. P ersonal experience of death, however, is abstract for all. Gray argues that:

most combat soldiers have witnessed enough gaping wounds and listened to the agonised cries of the wounded often enough so that they cannot consciously endure the thought of the same thing happening to them. Though the dread of death may be at the bottom of conscious processes at such moments, the fear of being painfully injured is much in the foreground. 36

Philip Williams, who fought with the Scots Guards during the Falklands War, echoed this enduring feeling: ‘As the injured were carried in on s tretchers nobody looked at them. I didn’t either. I suppose we were all scared we might see images of ourselves lying there all maimed and bloody. Not that I was afraid of dying’, Williams wrote in his memoir of the war. ‘When you’re my age you don’t even think that it’s possible, not even when people are shooting at you. But I didn’t want to be injured. That was the thing all of us dreaded, I think. Injury was far worse than death in our minds.’37 Though for many soldiers, it was not a generalised concept of being injured (or more technically correct: being wounded) that played on their mind, rather they had a much more specific fear. T he US Army’s Textbook of Military Medicine: War Psychiatry states that: ‘Wounds of the external genitalia38 are the most feared combat injuries.’39 David Hackworth pointed out that soldiers being deployed by helicopter into an operational area in Vietnam would sit on t heir steel helmets, as ‘few trusted the Huey’s thin underbelly to keep them in full possession of their most vital organs’.40 Dan Schilling recalled that when he was travelling through the streets of Mogadishu in October 1993 crammed into the back of a Humvee:

35 Shay, op. cit., p.217. 36 Gray, op. cit., p.105. 37 Philip Williams with M.S. Power, Summer Soldier: The True Story of the Missing Falklands Guardsman, Bloomsbury, London, 1990, pp.33-4. 38 While wounds of the external genitalia were the most feared by the soldiers of the Second World War, they occurred relatively infrequently. John Ellis noted that in the Second World War on average only 0.6 percent of wounds were to the genital area. John Ellis, op. cit., p.175. 39 Edwin A. Weinstein, ‘Chapter 14 – Disabling and Disfiguring Injuries’, Textbook of Military Medicine: War Psychiatry, Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army, 1995, p. 372. 40 Colonel David H. Hackworth and Julie Sherman, About Face, Pan Books, Sydney, 1989, p.496. 57

Death and Disfigurement on the Battlefield

It wasn’t my head and torso that I was worried about, it was my groin. The way I was situated, with my back towards the front of the vehicle and my crotch facing the tailgate, I was scared to death that I would get shot there … in the back, man, there was nothing between your future family and high velocity rounds but a tin tailgate.41

So Schilling took off his pack, which contained two metal radios, and placed it between his legs. Stephen Ambrose wrote of an incident where the primary concern of a soldier pierced by shell fragments during a mortar attack in Normandy was not the large hole in his left buttock, nor the wound to his right wrist, but rather the blood seeping into his right trouser leg at the crotch. Fearing the worst, he asked a fellow soldier to take a look. H e was OK. The soldier was greatly relieved. The two shell fragments had lodged in the top of his leg and, according to the wounded man, had ‘missed everything important’.42 Frank Hunt, who was severely wounded by the explosion of a mine while serving with the Australian Army in Vietnam in July 1969, said:

I can still remember lying there and feeling the blood running down my knee on to my thigh. I immediately thought, ‘Oh no,’ and stuck my hand down my trousers and felt the old fellow: it was all full of blood. I thought to myself, oh fuck. I might as well be dead. I was more worried about my balls than I was about my legs or whether I was going to die or not, because if they got me in the balls I wanted to be dead. 43

A similar incident involved Simon Weston, a soldier with the Welsh Guards, who was aboard the Sir Galahad, a landing ship belonging to the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, when it was hit by Argentine bombs during the Falklands War. Despite sustaining horrific burns to almost half his body and seeing the skin of his hands come off in layers, his greatest concern was for another part of his anatomy. Weston turned to a medic:

‘For God’s sake, man,’ I blurted, ‘give us a situation report on the wedding tackle, will you?’

41 Dan Schilling, ‘On Friendship and Firefights’, The Battle of Mogadishu: Firsthand Accounts from the Men of Task Force Ranger, edited by Matt Eversmann and Dan Schilling, Ballantine Books, New York, 2004, pp.195-6. 42 Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001, p.97. 43 Frank Hunt, quoted in Stuart Rintoul, Ashes of Vietnam: Australian Voices, William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1987, p.75. 58

A Two-Edged Sword

He lifted the waistband of my underpants and had a good e yeball. ‘All present and correct,’ he said. ‘Looks in perfect working order.’ ‘Thank God for that.’ At least one per cent was left. If the family jewels had been missing I don’t think I’d have bothered coming back.44

A member of David Bellavia’s company was wounded in the genitals during the US Army’s assault on t he Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004. The force of an improvised explosive device had embedded a dead-bolt lock from an exterior gate in the man’s penis and some shrapnel had torn his scrotum. Reflecting on the incident, Bellavia wrote: ‘Getting hit in the crotch is every soldier’s worst nightmare. We can either dwell on it and drive ourselves crazy, of make fun of it. Laughter is our only defense.’45 The pervasive fear among soldiers of genital mutilation meant that some of the most feared weapons were the anti-personnel mines designed to explode at waist height. The German ‘S-mine’ (Schrapnellmine 35) of the Second World War, colloquially known as a ‘Bouncing Betty’, was usually buried with just its igniters (three prongs) protruding above the ground. When triggered, usually by a foot depressing the igniters, a propelling charge would fling the projectile about a metre into the air, where it would detonate. Contained within the mine were 350 small steel balls that accelerated outwards at high speed and became the main wounding agent. The mine was designed to eviscerate and/or, as Stephen Ambrose comments in Citizen Soldiers, to inflict ‘the wound that above all others terrified the soldiers’. Ambrose quotes a Lieutenant George Wilson (US Army), who claimed to have seen every weapon used by the Wehrmacht and who declared that the ‘S-mine’ was ‘the most frightening weapon of the war, the one that made us sick with fear’.46 In recognition of this fear of genital wounds, the latest-generation body armour (the Interceptor body armour system) worn by American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq has a detachable groin protector. The groin protector is clipped on to the front of the flak vest and contains a ballistic insert (a ceramic plate designed to provide protection from small arms fire and fragmentation). Witnessing men being wounded and killed on the battlefield changes the nature of the fear felt by soldiers. The abiding fear among soldiers untested in combat is that they will turn out to be a coward and will let their comrades down, as this accords with

44 Weston, op. cit., p.154. 45 Bellavia, op. cit., p.175. 46 Stephen E. Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The US Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, Touchstone, New York, 1998, pp.143-4. 59

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their limited frame of reference. Mansur Abdulin, a Soviet soldier, spent a sleepless night following his arrival at the front during the Second World War. A comrade noticed that Abdulin was awake: ‘ “Well, Mansur afraid?” I feel like someone has hit me in the stomach, “come on, don’t be as hamed,” he winked, “everyone’s afraid”’.47 Alex Bowlby, who served with the British Eighth Army during the Second World War was also apprehensive before his baptism of fire and discussed his fears with a comrade.

‘The first time you were in action, Paddy, were you afraid of running away?’ I asked him. O’Conner chuckled. ‘Yerrah, I’d say!’ ‘Did you feel afraid of being afraid?’ ‘Now don’t start worrying, Alec. I’ll look after you.” ‘It’s funny, you know. I feel excited and afraid at the same time.’48

The evening before his first combat patrol in Vietnam, Philip Caputo had l ain awake all night:

With my brain alternating between feverish dreams of glory and the coldly practical problems involved in securing a landing zone, my feelings had become confused. I hoped we would meet resistance so I could fulfill those dreams, or at least learn how I would behave under fire. A t the same time, worried that I might behave badly, I hoped nothing would happen. I wanted action and I did not want it.49

But once soldiers have experienced their first battle, realised that they can cope with its dangers and are not a coward, the fear of social disgrace is largely supplanted by the fear of being permanently crippled or disfigured. For such men, having seen at first hand their fellow soldiers dismembered and maimed, the possibility that the same may happen t o them is all too real. ‘ I was not especially afraid of fire from infantry weapons, because in my experience, if one i s hit, chances are that one will either recover or will die quickly’, wrote Georg Grossjohann, a German veteran of the Second World War. ‘ My Achilles heel was artillery fire, because I had seen the effects of shrapnel often enough to know that it could tear off a limb. I could only imagine how

47 Abdulin, op. cit., p.9. 48 Bowlby, op. cit., p.13. 49 Caputo, op. cit., p.78. 60

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awful it would be to live without arms, legs, or with other cruel mutilations.’50 Evgeni Bessonov, a Soviet veteran of the Second World War, expressed the same sentiment more succinctly, ‘The worst thing is to become a cripple, it is better to die right away’.51 Mark Ormrod deployed with the Royal Marines to Afghanistan in 2007. On Christmas Eve he was patrolling in the Sangin Valley when he trod on a pressure-plate detonator attached to a 107 mm rocket. The resulting explosion tore off both legs and shredded his right arm. A s he aw aited medical assistance the extent of his wounds made Ormrod question, ‘Do I want to go back and live like this? T he thought stopped me dead. A massive feeling of guilt welled up inside me. How would it be for my daughter when I turned up to pick her up from school? Would she get picked on by the other kids because her daddy was a freak?52 As one of his comrades reached him Ormrod looked him in the eye and shouted at him: ‘Shoot me. All the anger I was feeling came tearing out of me. I couldn’t face the life on offer if I survived this and wanted it over with now.’53 Doug Beattie encapsulates these themes in a reflective passage from his account of his service in Afghanistan in 2006.

If there is no dignity in death, there is certainly none in serious injury. For many soldiers the possibility of being maimed brings even greater fear than dying. With death comes finality. Nothing more to worry about. It’s all over. There is hope too that in time your family will get over their grief. Mourn and move on.

But with the loss of a l imb or your sexual ability, maybe paralysis or a br ain injury, perhaps incontinence, the effects last for ever. There is no escape from your past; a physical reminder of the horrors of war remains for the rest of your days, plain for all to see. And not just to see, but also to live with. Life changes for everyone.54

In Beattie’s case, having seen firsthand the mutilation and evisceration of the battlefield, his fears took on a specific form. ‘For me it was anything but my face’, he wrote. ‘I was scared stiff of going home with my looks twisted and scarred by battle,

50 Georg Grossjohann, Five Years, Four Fronts, translated by Ulrich Abele, The Aberjona Press, Bedford, Pennsylvania, 1999, p.54. 51 Evgeni Bessonov, translated by Bair Irincheev, Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army, Greenhill Books, London, 2003, p.115. 52 Ormrod, op. cit., p.4. 53 ibid., pp.186-7. 54 Beattie, An Ordinary Soldier, p.199. 61

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perhaps burnt, maybe rearranged by bullets and shrapnel. Teeth missing, jaw shot off, eyes blinded.’55 The likelihood of soldiers receiving crippling or disfiguring wounds on t he battlefield has never been well publicised. War memorials invariably depict physically complete men standing resolute. Seldom do memorials portray a corpse and rarely, if at all, do they depict a crippled or severely wounded soldier.56 Soldiers killed in action are commemorated on ‘rolls of honour’ but the crippled, the infirm and the maimed are discharged from the service and pensioned off. Wounded soldiers hanging around barracks are considered bad for morale – as was discovered by Lieutenant Robert Lawrence of the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards. Lawrence was severely wounded during the Falklands War (he was shot in the head). When he was discharged from the army after an extensive period of medical treatment he went back to his former barracks to bid farewell to his old platoon. Before he could do so, a new company commander asked him why was he visiting the barracks. When Lawrence told him that he had come to say goodbye to his men, the officer looked up briefly from his paperwork and remarked: ‘You know, I don’t think it’s very good for morale for the boys to see you limping around the barracks like this. So if I were you, Robert, I’d hurry up and g et out of camp.’ Fr om a m ilitary effectiveness perspective, it is preferable to have soldiers worrying about whether they will be a coward in battle rather than dwelling upon how they would cope if they lost a limb. This psychological diminution of the inherent risks of combat helps make possible the necessary short-term perspective vital for the efficient functioning of armies. But it seems that the military is not alone in this desire to avoid highlighting the struggle of wounded soldiers to cope with a reduced quality of life. Although war films are one of the staples of mainstream cinema, rarely is the public exposed (and by extension potential recruits) through film to the physical aftermath of life for a severely wounded soldier. One of the first films to broach this subject was the 1946 melodrama The Best Years of Our Lives. The film focused on a trio of Second World War veterans and their readjustment to civilian life. Harold Russell, a r eal-life double amputee, portrayed one of the trio, Homer Parish, a young seaman who had lost both hands in a torpedo explosion. Russell, a S econd World War veteran, was a former demolitions

55 ibid., p.199. 56 One of the few war memorials that portrays a corpse is the Artillery Memorial in Hyde Park, London that commemorates the fifty thousand members of the Royal Regiment of Artillery who were killed during the First World War. Among the bronze figures on the memorial is that of a dead soldier covered by a greatcoat, so that only his boots protrude. Below the figure of the corpse is the inscription ‘Here was a Royal fellowship of Death’, taken from Shakespeare’s Henry V. 62

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instructor who had been s everely wounded when a d efective blasting cap exploded. He subsequently appeared in an army documentary that depicted the rehabilitation of an amputee. The documentary was seen by the director of The Best Years of Our Lives and resulted in Russell being cast. In the movie, Parish, whose hands have been replaced by prosthetic, articulated hooks, worries that his sweetheart since adolescence will feel only pity for him now rather than love. Although the movie concludes with Parish’s wedding, the ongoing emotional and physical burden of his wartime service is still apparent. He is reduced to living off his monthly disability cheques and al though he displays considerable dexterity with his hooks, one of the movie’s most poignant scenes reveals how helpless he has become when he removes them at night. After he has been tucked into bed by his fiancée, she departs, leaving the door slightly ajar in case he needs to go to the bathroom during the night. The scene ends with a shaft of light revealing Parish crying in the darkness – with no hands to wipe away his tears.57 Later films, notably Oliver Stone’s biopic of Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (1989), have also portrayed the struggle faced by severely wounded veterans as they are reintegrated into society. In January 1968, Kovic, a sergeant in the US Marine Corps, was paralysed from the chest down after being shot during his second tour of duty in Vietnam. One of the film’s secondary themes is Kovic’s feeling of emasculation arising from his physical disability. He bitterly wrote in his autobiography that ‘I have given my numb young dick for democracy … Oh God Oh God I want it back! … Nobody ever told me I was going to come back from this war without a penis. But I am back and my head is screaming now and I don’t know what to do.’58 The following section will provide an historical overview of the extent of crippled or maimed soldiers arising from several of the major conflicts of the period studied and examine how advances in medical technology have meant that more and more soldiers survive being wounded to be crippled or maimed, thereby giving even more substance to one of the greatest fears of soldiers. Although the number of casualties for the conflicts of the first half of the nineteenth century are known (for example, the British had 22,500 soldiers killed during the Crimean War, only 4,000 of whom were killed in action or died from wounds, the remainder succumbing to disease59) the number of crippled and m aimed veterans

57 Francis Davis, ‘Storming The Home Front’, The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 291, No. 2, March 2003, p.129. 58 Kovic, op. cit., p.86. 59 Julian Spilsbury, The Thin Red Line: An Eyewitness History of the Crimean War, Cassell, London, 2006, p.322. 63

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arising from these conflicts is not known. More detailed statistics were maintained, however, for the American Civil War. Of the three million soldiers who fought this war, approximately 622,000 were killed. This figure represents the loss of two per cent of the US population at that time. Y et even this enormous figure does not capture the true extent of the lives destroyed by the war. Another five hundred thousand men survived the war but were left permanently disabled. D uring the war, approximately eighty thousand amputations were performed on soldiers. Such was the extent of lost limbs, that one-fifth of the revenue for the state of Mississippi in 1866 ( the Civil War ended in 1865) was spent on artificial limbs.60 Three-quarters of all operations performed by military doctors during the Civil War were amputations. This is a reflection of the nature of the wounds (approximately seventy per cent of wounds were to the limbs) and that surgical intervention was rarely attempted when the wound was to the abdomen or the head ( approximately 90 per cent of such wounds were fatal). ‘ They [the surgeons] found many that required amputation’, noted Rice Bull of the 123rd New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the aftermath of the battle of Chancellorsville (April/May 1863); ‘the only treatment they had for [the] others was to give them a cerate [ointment] with which to rub their wounds’.61 Bull observed that as each amputation was completed the removed limb was thrown onto an ever-increasing pile in full view of the wounded awaiting the surgeon’s attention. Because of the absence of antiseptics and antibiotics, the primary concern of the Civil War surgeon was to remove the destroyed tissue before the onset of gangrene. Therefore all limbs with open f ractures were amputated, usually within twenty-four to forty-eight hours of wounding.62 The number of casualties suffered by the British Expeditionary Force of the First World War exceeded the losses of the American Civil War. Approximately six million British soldiers served in this force during the war, of which 750,000 (representing twelve-and-a-half per cent) had died on active service by the time of the armistice in November 1918. I n March 1930, twelve years after the end of hostilities, 1.6 million veterans were still receiving a pension to compensate them for a disability arising from or aggravated by their war service.63 The extent of the ongoing suffering wrought by the war is evident from the fact that approximately forty-two thousand of these former

60 Julius Bonello, ‘Civil War Medicine’, The Surgical Technologist, Vol. 32, No. 1, January 2000, pp.14-16. 61 K. Jack Bauer (ed.), Soldiering: The Civil War Diary of Rice C. Bull, Berkley Books, New York, 1988, p.74. 62 Bonello, op. cit., pp.14-6. 63 Nearly 272,000 Australian servicemen survived the First World War. In 1938, twenty years after the end of the war, 77,000 incapacitated veterans were in receipt of a government pension. 64

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servicemen had under gone an am putation. Of those who served, almost 2.5 million (approximately forty per cent) were either killed in action, died of illness/wounds, or suffered some form of disability for which State compensation was awarded.64 The economies of the other major combatants also had t o bear the ongoing financial burden of rehabilitating and pr oviding for the enormous number of men wounded during the First World War. For example, of the thirteen million men who served in the German Army, approximately 2.7 million were permanently disabled by their wounds, eight hundred thousand of whom were awarded invalidity pensions; while France had at least 1.1 million war wounded, of whom over a hundred thousand were assessed to be totally incapacitated.65 The United States military suffered almost sixty thousand deaths in Vietnam. In addition, over three hundred thousand American soldiers were wounded, approximately half of whom needed hos pitalisation. Of those hospitalised, approximately half (seventy-five thousand) were classified as severely disabled upon their release, of whom twenty-three thousand were classified as a hundr ed per cent disabled. A mong the American servicemen wounded in Vietnam, five thousand lost limbs and over a thousand underwent multiple amputations.66 Since the Second World War, the lethality rate of wounds has been s teadily decreasing. The ratio of the number of deaths to the number wounded was one i n three for the Second World War, falling to one in four for the Korean, Vietnam and 1991 Persian Gulf Wars. For the Iraq War, one i n eight wounded soldiers died from their wounds.67 In relation to soldiers wounded on the battlefield, a certain percentage will die within the first ten to fifteen minutes, generally because of exsanguination (i.e. bleeding out). The next peak is around the hour mark (known as the ‘Golden Hour’), with a third around the two-to-three day mark due t o complications from surgery.68 The widespread availability of aeromedical evacuation by helicopter direct from the battlefield sought to get wounded soldiers back to the sophisticated treatment facilities

64 Major T.J. Mitchell and Miss G.M. Smith, History of the Great War Based on Official Documents: Medical Services – Casualties and Medical Statistics of the Great War, Battery Press, Nashville, 1997, pp.315. 65 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War 1, Basic Books, New York, 1999, p.437. 66 Anonymous, ‘Vietnam Warriors: A Statistical Profile’, Veterans of Foreign Wars, January 2003, p.18. 67 Atul Gawande, ‘Casualties of War: Military Care for the Wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan’, New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 135, No. 24, pp. 2471–5; Nancy Gibbs, ‘The Lucky Ones’, Time, 21 March 2005, pp. 24-5. 68 Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Parkhouse, 16 Medical Regiment, British Army quoted in Andy McNab (ed.), Spoken from the Front: Real Heroes from the Battlefields of Afghanistan, Bantam Press, London, 2009, p.34. 65

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established in Vietnam by the US military within the Golden Hour. This system meant that many wounds that would have almost certainly been fatal in earlier wars could now be treated and t he patient stabilised. An example of a s oldier who survived horrific wounds received in the Vietnam War was Max Cleland. I n April 1968 Cleland was severely wounded by the explosion of a grenade that had been accidentally dropped by one of his comrades in the US Army. The explosion caused the traumatic amputation of his right arm and leg. Within an hour of being wounded, Cleland was medevaced by helicopter some sixty kilometres to a field hospital. Upon arrival he was operated upon by a team of five doctors, who amputated his left leg and tended to his other wounds in a marathon five-hour operation. S hortly after the operation, Cleland was transferred from the field hospital to a s eries of more advanced surgical hospitals in Vietnam before, a l ittle over a w eek after being wounded, he w as medevaced by Hercules aircraft to a general hospital in Yokohama, Japan. After another week he was medevaced by a U S Air Force C-141 (Starlifter) to the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington D.C., where he received treatment for eight months before being shipped to Veterans Administration hospital in Washington (state), and finally released from hospital in December 1969.69 Since the Vietnam War, ongoing improvements in the battlefield treatment and evacuation of casualties70 has continued to reduce the percentage of soldiers who succumb to their wounds. R elatively recent advances such as the deployment of mobile surgical teams with combat forces, faster medical evacuation from the battlefield and continuing improvements in treatment, including quick-clotting

69 See Max Cleland interview in Tom Weiner (ed.), Voices of War: Stories of Service from the Home Front and the Front Lines, Library of Congress Veterans History Project, National Geographic, Washington, D.C., 2004, pp.273-4. 70 Although many modern battlefields are serviced by helicopters providing rapid evacuation of casualities back to medical facilities to be stabilised or undergo surgery (the aim being that the casualty is stabilised within the so-called ‘Golden Hour’ of wounding) not all modern soldiers have been so fortunate. The dearth of helicopter support during the Falklands War meant that many of the British casualities from Goose Green had a ten-hour wait for evacuation, with one officer not being evacuated back to the medical facility at Ajax Bay until twenty hours had elapsed from his being wounded. John Geddes, Spearhead Assault: Blood, Guts and Glory on the Falklands Frontlines, Century, London, 2007, p.26.

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(haemostatic) agents applied at point of wounding to control haemorrhaging,71 mean that soldiers routinely survive horrific wounds. Indicative of the cumulative lifesaving effects of these improvements in treatment and ev acuation is the case of Mark Ormrod. On Christmas Eve 2007, Ormrod was caught in the detonation of an improvised explosive device whilst patrolling in Afghanistan’s Sangin Valley. The explosion tore off both legs, peppered his back with shrapnel, shredded his right arm and left a deep gas h in his left palm. First aid was rendered by the patrol medic who applied a tourniquet to Ormrod’s legs and right arm. He was evacuated first by stretcher to even ground and then by a six- wheeled all-terrain vehicle to a landing zone awaiting the arrival of a Chinook helicopter that had been dispatched from Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand Province. Onboard the Chinook was an Emergency Response Team (ERT), consisting of a doctor and three support medics. Sixty minutes after the explosion Ormrod was being treated onboard the Chinook. T he ERT applied a bandag e called a H emCon (which contained a haemostatic agent), pumped fluids into his bone marrow via an insertion made straight into his hip using a battery operated drill and hooked him up to a portable oxygen cylinder. Arriving back at Camp Bastion, Ormrod was transferred to a waiting ambulance that took him the few hundred metres to the Joint Medical Treatment Facility. Ormrod noted that this facility ‘had room for twenty-five wounded with eight intensive care beds, two operating theatres, a C T scanner and two X-ray machines. More importantly for me, some of the best military surgeons in the world worked there.’72 Soon after arrival, Ormrod was wheeled into the operating theatre where the surgeons amputated his right leg through the knee and his right arm above the elbow, closed the major blood vessels and removed the major debris (shrapnel and gravel) that was lodged in the wounds. At Camp Bastion Ormrod was worked on by three consultants (doctors), a neur osurgeon, an orthopedic surgeon and a g eneral surgeon. Once out of the operating theatre he was placed in an i ntensive care bed while awaiting the next stage of the medical evacuation. Ormrod was transferred by Hercules aircraft to Kandahar airfield (about an hour’s flying time) onto a Royal Air

71 A range of hemostatic dressings have recently been developed to control acute haemorrhaging on the battlefield. Examples include the HemCon Bandage made out of Chitosan, which is derived from the exoskeletons of shellfish. Another such product is QuikClot, whose active ingredient is granular zeolite derived from lava rocks. When QuikClot is placed onto a bleeding wound it absorbs the water molecules in the blood and creates a high platelet concentration. The basis of these and similar products is to speed up the rate at which blood clots. Dr Lawrence E. Heiskell, Dr Bohdan T. Olesnicky and Dr Sydney J, Vail, ‘Blood Clotters: SWAT medics report their findings on high-tech hemostatic dressings used to stop bleeding when seconds count’, policemag.com, August 2004, viewed 8 June 2010, < http://www.tacticalmedicine.com/files/policeaugust04.pdf>. 72 Ormrod, op. cit., p.15. 67

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Force (RAF) Tristar jet for transfer back to the United Kingdom. On board the Tristar, Ormrod was in the care of the RAF’s Critical Care Support Team and was placed in an aeromedical bed, equipped with oxygen bottles and vital signs monitors. A little more than twenty-four hours after the explosion Ormrod was receiving treatment in the intensive care unit of the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine (Selly Oak Hospital) at Birmingham in the United Kingdom. In addition to technological advances applied to the transportation and treatment of wounded, a c ontributing factor to decreasing lethality rates on t he battlefield is the recent technological advances in body armour. The Kevlar vest worn by US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq was equipped with ceramic plates that slipped into pockets in the front and rear of the vest and was capable of stopping high-velocity rifle rounds and ensured the torso was well protected. T he head w as also partially covered by a Kevlar helmet. A consequence of these improvements in body armour is an increase in the percentage of wounded soldiers who suffer crippling or disfiguring wounds, with the majority of wounds (over two/thirds) suffered by US soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq being to the unprotected arms and legs. By January 2007, over five hundred American soldiers had had limbs amputated after being wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan.73 The amputation rate for US soldiers wounded in Iraq was six per cent (as at November 2004), compared with an average rate of three per cent for previous wars.74 Additionally, about one-fifth of the soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq and then evacuated to military hospitals in Europe, suffered injuries to the face or neck that occurred below the protection of the helmet. Many of these soldiers required lifelong medical care. Injuries of this nature often involved irreversible brain damage, breathing and eating impairments, blindness and severe disfiguration. In the first eight months of 2004, the US Army’s Walter Reed Hospital in Washington D.C. treated 355 soldiers for traumatic brain injury.75 The number of American soldiers wounded in Iraq is greater than the cumulative total of American soldiers wounded in all other US conflicts since Vietnam. On 1 May 2003, President George W. Bush declared that ‘major combat operations in Iraq have ended’ and that ‘in the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have

73 Michael Weisskopf, ‘A Grim Milestone: 500 Amputees’, Time, 18 January 2007, viewed 6 August 2010, . 74 Raja Mishra, ‘Amputation rate for US troops twice that of past wars’, Boston Globe, 9 December 2004, viewed 6 August 2010, . 75 Nancy Shute, ‘Cheating Grim Death’, U.S. News & World Report, 29 November 2004, pp.40- 3; Angie Cannon, ‘Trying to Make a Life’, U.S. News & World Report, 29 November 2004, pp.44–51. 68

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prevailed’. The US forces then migrated from a combat to a stabilisation role. This new role required greater interaction with the Iraqi populace and nec essitated American soldiers moving through Iraqi towns and cities in thin-skinned vehicles or on foot, rather than in armoured vehicles. This increased the vulnerability of soldiers to ambushes by Iraqi irregular forces. By late summer 2003, there were about twenty separate attacks on US forces daily, resulting in an average of ten American soldiers being wounded, many of them grievously. In addition to this background rate of wounding, spikes occurred during major US offensives. For example, the battle of Fallujah began on 8 November 2004 and that week 455 wounded US servicemen were evacuated to Europe for treatment.76 By January 2009, over 31,000 American service personnel had been wounded in Iraq since the start of the war. Approximately half of the wounded men and women were unable to return to duty. A related issue is the support that the state will provide to its disfigured and maimed veterans. Some consolation for disabled and disfigured veterans is that the medical advances that have made their survival more likely have largely coincided with more generous state provision of support. For the British veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, disability pensions were determined by the Commissioners of the Royal Hospital Chelsea. E dward Costello, wounded during the Peninsular Campaign and at the battle of Waterloo, was invalided out of the Service on account of his wounds and w ent before the Chelsea Board to determine his pension. He was awarded a pension of 6d a day, which he described as a ‘pittance’.77 Costello appealed directly to the Governor of Chelsea for an increase in his pension but to no avail. ‘ Day after day we struggled with our necessities, and I confess I saw nothing but starvation staring me in the face’,78 wrote Costello. But for the support of some his comrades in arms, Costello may have ended up begging on the streets, as did many of Wellington’s veterans. The historian Bill Gammage wrote in The Broken Years, that the sight of invalid soldiers begging on the street after the war was distressing for those who did not serve. He surmises that ‘stay-at-home Australians, weary of war, recoiling from its horror, and sickened by the number of its victims tried to forget those tragic years as quickly as possible … they wanted a return to normalcy’.79 Rather than honouring these men for the sacrifices they made, the good citizens wished they would just go away. In England, George Coppard, who had noted

76 Lawrence F. Kaplan, ‘Survivor: Iraq – America’s near-invisible wounded’, The New Republic, 13 & 20 October 2003, p. 20; Shute, op. cit. 77 Costello, op. cit., p.228. 78 ibid., p.299. 79 Gammage, op. cit., p.270. 69

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the extraordinary support given to soldiers during the First World War by the home front, bitterly condemned the abandonment of the soldiers once victory was secured.

Lloyd George and company had been full of big talk about making the country fit for heroes to live in, but it was just so much hot air. No practical steps were taken to rehabilitate the broad mass of demobbed men, and I joined the queues for jobs as messengers, window cleaners and scullions. It was a complete let-down for thousands like me, and f or some young officers too. It was a c ommon sight in London to see ex-officers with barrel organs, endeavouring to earn a living as beggars.80

The implementation of the Beveridge Plan by Clement Attlee’s Labour government after the Second World War laid the foundations for the so-called Welfare State. The provisions made under the Beveridge Plan were instrumental in sparing the demobbed British veterans of the Second World War many of the hardships experienced by their predecessors from the First World War. Their comrades from the Soviet Union were less fortunate. In mid-1946, Soviet authorities estimated that there were some 2.75 million surviving invalids from the war. These men (and women) were all provided with a pension and many were also entitled to supplementary food packages. This subsistence support kept the veterans alive, but for those unable to work, future prospects were limited. Although in theory entitled to the best medical support the Soviet Union could offer, the reality was a shortage of hospitals, doctors and prosthetic limbs. Maimed veterans begging on t he streets became a common sight in Soviet towns and cities, particularly in Moscow. In 1947 Stalin ordered the streets of Soviet cities to be c leared of beggars. The invalid former soldiers were forced onto trains heading north, many ending up on the island of Valaam on Lake Ladoga near the border with Finland.81 Valaam was the site of a former monastery and f itted the requirement of keeping the crippled veterans out of sight and out of mind in a country that was desperately trying to put the destruction of the war behind it. Contemporary wounded US veterans are treated somewhat better than their Soviet counterparts from the Second World War. Those US veterans who are deemed medically unable to continue their service with the military may either be di scharged and receive a lump sum payment, or be medically retired and receive monthly

80 Coppard, op. cit., pp.134-5. 81 Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2006, pp.363-4. 70

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retirement pay. The monthly retirement pay is derived from the soldier’s percentage of disability as determined by an Army Medical Board. For example, a soldier retired at fifty percent disability will receive fifty percent of his base pay.82 US soldiers injured on active duty can also apply to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for disability compensation. The VA determines a v eteran’s disability rating, which is expressed as a percentage, by considering the extent to which the member’s injury/condition has affected their earning capacity. Monthly tax-free payments are then made to the member based upon their disability rating, the amount to be paid being set by Congress. For example, mild mental symptoms resulting in decreased work efficiency was assigned a disability rating of ten percent, for which the veteran would receive a monthly payment of $106 or $1272 pe r year. 83 An amputated foot was assigned a disability rating of forty percent and attracted a monthly payment of $454 ($5448 per year). A leg amputated at the middle or lower thigh was assigned a sixty percent disability rating for a monthly payment of $817 ($9804), amputation of five fingers of the dominant hand was assessed as a seventy percent disability rating ($1029 per month, $12,348 per year), while amputation of a leg with the loss of the pelvic girdle muscles was assigned a ninety percent disability rating ($1344 per month, $16,128 per year). A soldier who was assessed as having total work and social impairment due to mental disorders was assessed at the hundred percent disability rating and was paid $2239 per month ($26,868 per annum). The most seriously disabled veterans were eligible for additional payments of up to $6404 a month ($76,848) plus the provision of extra help from medical attendants.84 Soldiers must choose between the army’s monthly retirement pay or the VA disability compensation. Most choose the VA compensation because the money is tax- free and the monthly amount is often more generous than that awarded by the medical board.85 For many soldiers, however, the money is a small consolation. An American

82 A soldier’s pay consists of base pay, being the set salary for his rank and grade, and allowances. Allowances are paid for a variety of reasons, including to reward a soldier for attaining a specific skill, such as being a qualified parachutist, or to offset a cost, such as housing allowance. 83 All figures are in US dollars and are correct as at November 2004. 84 Figures provided by the US Department of Veteran Affairs and quoted in Cannon, op. cit. 85 One of the main reasons that the US has two compensation systems for wounded veterans (retirement pay and VA disability compensation) is that army retirement pay commences immediately upon discharge while the processing period for VA disability compensation is from six to nine months. 71

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soldier who lost two-and-a-half fingers on his left hand after being wounded in Iraq commented, ‘I’d rather have my fingers and hand back than the money’.86 In February 2010 t he British Government announced changes to the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces Compensation Scheme. A review had been commissioned as a r esult of growing public pressure to increase the payouts given to wounded veterans, particularly given the large number of British soldiers being permanently disabled by the effects of IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although the maximum amount that could be claimed would remain at £570,000, some one-off payouts rose by fifty per cent. Previously an injured member would be compensated for just the worst three injuries from any one incident. The revised scheme took into accounts all injuries suffered. The maximum payment of £570,000 was awarded for total deafness and the loss of both eyes (or blindness in both eyes); loss of both legs and both arms; loss of both eyes/total deafness and loss of either both legs or both arms; spinal cord injury at or above vertebra C3; brain injury with persistent vegetative state; and brain injury such that the claimant has little or no meaningful response to the environment, no language, double incontinence and requires full-time skilled nursing care. S evere facial lacerations resulting in the loss or severe damage to chin, ear, lip or nose and which produces a ‘poor cosmetic result despite camouflage’ attracted a payment of £63,825. The loss of both legs at or above the knee and both arms at or above the elbow was awarded the same payment as the loss of a single arm above the elbow or a single leg above the knee (£230,000). The minimum payment of £1,155 was made for the loss of one toe, other than great toe, from one foot.87 Another substantial change announced at the same time was to the guaranteed income payment system (essentially a disability pension) that was paid to veterans whose wounds were so severe that they were no longer able to work. Henceforth, the amount paid would reflect any likely promotions the soldier would have received if they had continued to serve. T he UK Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, stated when announcing the changes that, ‘Our armed forces must have the confidence that if they are injured, they will receive the help that they need … we [now] have a scheme that fully recognises the severity of their injuries and helps to provide for the future’. Between October 2001 and October 2009, a total of 522 U K service personnel had been seriously wounded whilst on operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.88 What is

86 Cannon, op. cit. 87 Armed Forces Compensation Scheme Tariff Effective from 11 January 2010, viewed 15 April 2010, . 88 ‘More money for wounded soldiers’, BBC News, 10 February 2010, viewed 11 February 2010, . 72

A Two-Edged Sword

doubtful, however, is whether changes to ongoing medical care or the amount of compensation paid/disability pension awarded would mitigate the enduring fear of soldiers of being disfigured or maimed. A historically constant burden of soldiers has been their fear of dismemberment arising from their exposure to various forms of munitions, in particular soldiers wanted their body to remain whole and not be mutilated. Thus explosive weapons, due to their ability to disintegrate the body, were among the most feared. The most feared weapon has changed from war to war. For the First and S econd World wars it was high explosive shells, in Vietnam it was mines and booby traps and for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq it was IEDs. This is not to argue the case that a correlation can be drawn between technological advances in weapons and their potential to mutilate. Leaving aside matters of scale (noting that the explosive power of weapons has greatly increased over the period studied) and focusing on the effect of an individual exposed to such weapons, it would be difficult to determine whether the body of a contemporary soldier who suffered the impact of an IED detonation was any more or any less dismembered than a soldier blown apart by the explosion of an artillery shell of the First World War (or for that matter a soldier on the receiving end of a cannonball fired during the Napoleonic Wars). What this chapter has proven, however, is that the mutilating effect of such explosions was one of the greatest burdens borne by the soldier, and it is the fear of disfigurement and disability that troubles experienced soldiers more than the fear of dying. Recent technological advances in aeromedical capabilities and sophisticated treatment techniques mean that soldiers are now more likely to survive horrific injuries that even a generation earlier would most likely have been fatal. This is not to claim that, upon reflection, the soldiers who survive horrific wounds would have preferred to have been killed, but rather that the possibility of one of the greatest fears of soldiers, that they will be per manently disfigured or disabled, is more likely to be realized due to these technological advances.

Overcoming Resistance to Killing on the Battlefield

3 Overcoming Resistance to Killing on the Battlefield

A historical constant is that soldiers are required to kill other soldiers during the prosecution of a war. Because of their military specialty or circumstance, not all soldiers will be placed in a position where they have the opportunity, if not indeed the duty, to kill a fellow soldier. For all soldiers, however, they must contend with the fact that Western culture emphasizes the sanctity of human life and this instills in many a deep-seated aversion to killing another human being. The strength of this aversion will vary from person to person but will be present for virtually all soldiers. Over the period studied, military forces have employed a range of psychological mechanisms to overcome this reluctance to kill. These mechanisms do not act in isolation but rather it is their combined effect (though at times one aspect may predominate) that have eased this aversion to killing on the battlefield. This chapter examines these mechanisms and considers the impact of technological changes in relation to weapons, training and mass communication. Soldiers must overcome their reluctance to kill if they are to operate effectively on the battlefield. Not all will be able to do so, and for others, the act of killing will incur an ongoing psychological cost. For many soldiers, one of principal burdens of war is the expectation that they will be r equired to kill in combat. This sentiment was expressed in a letter written to his family by a British soldier of the First World War.

And there is one thing I am most thankful for—and I think you will be t oo. I have never knowingly killed or injured a man. I don’t think if it had come to the point I could have done it, and most mercifully, although I have been in action many times and ‘over the top’ twice, God has prevented me from being brought to the test.1

The inherent resistance towards killing a fellow man is so strong it can even overcome the instinct for self-protection. A British chaplain of the First World War recounted one such incident:

I saw a sergeant this afternoon. He had let a German off. His pistol was at the man’s head but he had not the heart to pull the trigger. The result was that he

1 Guardsman F.E. Noakes, 3rd Battalion, Coldstream Guards, quoted in Malcolm Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book Of The Western Front, Pan Books, London, 2001, p.333. 74

A Two-Edged Sword

was badly wounded by a bomb, others of the enemy party having time to come up unobserved. The dear man was wounds all over but, in spite of that, said he was very glad he had not killed the German.2

Günter Koschorrek, who fought with the German Army on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, noticed that one of his comrades kept missing the enemy when he was firing, despite being one of the best shots during training. The soldier showed a distinct reluctance to engage the enemy and when forced to do so he closed his eyes so that he did not have to see whom he was firing upon.3 The soldier in question was not lacking in courage and bravely saved his comrades by jumping out of his trench and striking a Soviet soldier in the chest with his rifle butt. Tragically, as the Russian fell his Kalashnikov discharged and the German soldier fell dead. A few hours before, he had confessed to a fellow member of his unit that ‘his religion forbade him to shoot people. In front of God we are all brothers.’4 The conflict of conscience that arises from placing soldiers in situations where the taking of life is expected can result in severe emotional distress. Studies of combat fatigue by US Army psychiatrists in the Second World War found that the fear of killing, rather than being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure, closely followed by the fear of letting their comrades down in combat.5 A Soviet sniper of the Second World War recalled, ‘When I first got the rifle, I couldn’t bring myself to kill a living being: one German was standing there for about four minutes talking, and I let him go … When I first killed, I was shaking all over … I felt scared: I’d killed a person.’6 The Department of Military Psychiatry of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research conducted extensive interviews (over 800) with the American soldiers who had taken part in Operation Just Cause (the December 1989 invasion of Panama). They found that the greatest cause of emotional stress in the veterans they interviewed arose from the killing of enemy soldiers. A company commander who had taken part in the invasion commented that, ‘Shooting people has been harder for most soldiers to come to grips with than the death of a friend’. A squad leader said of one of his men, ‘He killed two. That night he was punching the wall and crying’. Moreover, a platoon sergeant interviewed by the team from Walter Reed confessed, ‘Then there’s the

2 Chaplain Montague Bere, quoted in Brown, op. cit., p.334. 3 Koschorrek, op. cit., p.84. 4 ibid., p.128. 5 Marshall, op. cit., p.78. 6 Anatoly Chekhov, 13th Guards Rifle Division quoted in Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945, edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, Pantheon Books, New York, 2005, p.157. 75

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burden of killing people. I can’t reconcile it, I just carry it’.7 Most members of the military are spared the responsibility required of the infantry, who must seek out and close with the enemy and either kill or capture him. ‘Remember, we are an infantry battalion. Our task and purpose is to close with and destroy the enemy’, commented Major Brett Cummings of the US Army to the journalist David Finkel, who was embedded with the Second Battalion of the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment for its tour of Iraq in 2007/08. He continued, ‘We are the only force designed for this. Armour stands off and they kill from a distance. Aviation kills from a distance. The infantryman goes in and kills with his hands, if necessary.’8 As military forces have become increasingly reliant on technologically advanced weapon systems, there has been a c orresponding increase in the ratio of support to combat personnel: the so-called ‘tooth to tail’ ratio. This factor is most evident over the last fifty or so years. R iflemen comprised 68.5 per cent of the men of an American infantry division of the Second World War.9 Over the period of the Cold War the tooth to tail ratio was generally assessed to be 1 :1, and since then the ratio has become even more pronounced in favour of the tail, now generally assessed to be 7:3.10 Doug Beattie bemoaned this increase in the ratio of support personnel to frontline soldiers as he awaited reinforcements during desperate fighting in Afghanistan in 2006. ‘Perhaps only 1,500 out of the 5,000 total [number of British Service personnel deployed to Afghanistan] were fighting men. The rest offered logistical support. Engineers, cooks, quartermasters, signalers, clerks and so on and so forth. All necessary roles, but why no more infantry to do the job at the sharp end?’11 Similarly, Craig Mullaney, an officer in the US Army, was also struck by the proliferation of support personnel when he returned to Kandahar Airfield from his company base in a remote area of Afghanistan.

Kandahar Airfield—or ‘Kaf,’ as everyone here called it—housed thousands of soldiers, the majority of whom had never left the base; their only contact with Afghanistan was a weekly bazaar in a wired enclosure near the perimeter. This was the Army of the twenty-first century: For every ‘trigger puller’ in the field,

7 Faris R. Kirkland, ‘Chapter 12 – Postcombat Reentry, Textbook of Military Medicine: War Psychiatry, Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army, 1995, pp.298-9. 8 Major Brett Cummings, US Army, quoted in Finkel, op. cit., p.27. 9 Arthur Hadley, The Straw Giant – America’s Armed Forces: Triumphs and Failures, Avon Books, New York, 1987, p.52. 10 See comments made by General Merrill McPeak (US Air Force) at ‘Reshaping the Military’, Public Broadcasting Service, viewed on 2 July 2009, . 11 Beattie, An Ordinary Soldier, p.223. 76

A Two-Edged Sword

there were at least five soldiers supporting him with food, ammo, and intelligence. 12

Indeed, one of the current strategic thrusts of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (the central research and development office for the US Department of Defense) is to increase the tooth to tail ratio.13 Even within the ‘tooth’ component, the infantry is but one el ement. Gwynne Dyer wrote that gunners, bomber crews and s ailors usually displayed less reticence than the infantry in firing their weapons. H e concluded that this was partly because there was intense peer pressure to carry out their role, arising from the fact that they were under the direct observation of their comrades and that, in the case of crew- served weapons, if any man did not carry out his assigned role then the weapon would not fire. The technical requirements of their respective weapon systems were also a contributing factor, allowing the soldiers/sailors/airmen to concentrate on the mechanics of getting their weapon to fire rather than contemplating its effect. ‘We’ve got to get the bombs on target. We’ve got 10 minutes to do it. We’ve got to make a lot of things happen to make that happen. So you just fall totally into execute mode and kill the target’, recounted Fred Swam, the pilot of a US Air Force B-1 bomber, when asked about a mission during the 2003 Iraq War.14 Ade Orchard, who served as a R oyal Navy pilot in Afghanistan in 2006/07, provided in his memoir of this conflict a descriptive account of ‘the lot of things’ referred to by Swam. First the aircraft needed to be heading in the right direction to start the attack run. Then each of the two pilots (attacking aircraft and wingman) would read through a brief checklist of actions on their knee-board beginning with confirming the weapon selected. Then they would cross-reference the target location to ensure they were both confident that they had selected the right location. One aircraft would then ‘lase’ the target (indicate the target with a laser) while the other aircraft accelerated into their attack run (the aircraft needed to be flying above 300 knots for the bomb to arm as it came off the aircraft). The attacking aircraft would then acquire the laser spot and begin tracking it. With the target acquired and the aircraft tracking started, the plane’s systems automatically updated the tracking solution. The pilot would then press the weapon-release button. T his did not actually drop the weapon but authorized the

12 Mullaney, op. cit., p.339. 13 Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency website, viewed in 1 July 2009, . 14 Lieutenant Colonel Fred Swan quoted in Julian Borger and Stuart Millar, ‘2pm: Saddam is spotted. 2.48pm: pilots get their orders. 3pm: 60ft crater at target’, The Guardian, 9 April 2003, viewed 26 October 2008, . 77

Overcoming Resistance to Killing on the Battlefield

computer to do so at the optimum moment. The pilot was now concentrating on flying the track that represented the ideal approach to the target by following the azimuth steering line displayed on his head-up display. The onboard computer calculated the bomb’s ballistic release point. The bomb released, the pilot then took evasive action to ensure the resulting explosion did not damage the plane.15 Orchard, reflecting upon the manner in which he was required to kill the enemy, wrote:

It’s too easy to remain quite detached from the reality. There’s a big difference between stabbing someone with a bayonet—when you can see their face and their body and you’re close enough to touch them, see their pain and see their blood—and dropping a bomb on them. When you deliver a weapon you are so focused on the process of delivering it that you don’t think for a moment about what effect it will have. You are totally concentrating on g etting the job done …16

But the most important factor in facilitating the firing of their weapons, as alluded to by Orchard, is the intervention of distance and machinery between them and their enemy – usually they cannot see the enemy and so can convince themselves that they are not killing fellow humans. Dyer commented, ‘gunners fire at grid references they cannot see; submarine crews fire torpedoes at “ships” (and not, somehow, at the people in the ships); pilots launch their missiles at “targets”’.17 This sentiment was confirmed by Samuel Hynes, who flew dive-bombers for the US Marine Corps in the Pacific campaign of the Second World War. Hynes recalled, ‘in an air war you are not very conscious of your enemies as human beings. We attacked targets – a gun emplacement, a supply dump, a radar station – not men.’18 Dave Grossman concluded that there is a correlation between the physical and empathetic distance between opponents and t he difficulty and as sociated trauma of killing a fellow man. Physical distance can be measured along a spectrum ranging from long-range killing (bombing and artillery) to physical contact (bayoneting and hand-to-hand combat). As the physical distance lessens, the empathetic distance must

15 Commander Abe Orchard with James Barrington, Joint Force Harrier: The Inside Story of a Royal Navy Fighter Squadron at War, Michael Joseph, 2008, London, pp.70-2. 16 ibid., p.277. 17 Gwynne Dyer, War, The Bodley Head, London, 1986, p.119. 18 Samuel Hynes, Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator, Bloomsbury, London, 1989, p.216. 78

A Two-Edged Sword

correspondingly increase to overcome man’s innate resistance to killing.19 During the Second World War, Allied aircrew, drawing upon what is sometimes called the ‘morality of altitude’, firebombed Hamburg (seventy thousand deaths), Dresden (eighty thousand deaths) and Tokyo (225,000 deaths). At bombing height the aircrew could not hear the screams nor could they see the burning bodies of their victims, most of whom were the elderly and women and children, since the men of soldiering age were typically at the front. ‘This was remote control. A ll we did was push buttons’, recalled John Ciardi, who served as a B -29 gunner on firebombing missions over Japan with the US Twentieth Air Force during the Second World War. ‘I didn’t see anybody we killed. I saw the fires we set.’20 From an intellectual perspective the aircrew understood the destruction they were unleashing, but the physical distance separating them from their victims permitted them to deny it emotionally. The aircrew therefore consoled themselves with the belief that they were destroying a legitimate military target rather than condemning thousands of people to horrific deaths. At the mid-range of physical distance, the weight of rifle fire directed at the enemy may enable a soldier to deny that he was personally responsible for the death of any particular enemy soldier, as he is able to rationalise that someone else fired the fatal shot. Paul Steppe, who served with the US Marine Corps in the Korean War, fired upon a North Korean soldier at the same time as at least another four Marines. The Korean was struck by the bullets and fell dead. Steppe recounted that, ‘I didn’t feel any remorse for that soldier, perhaps because I was not the only one that shot him’.21 But such cognitive dissonance does not provide a salve for all soldiers. Alexander Aitken, a member of the New Zealand Army, fired on a Turkish soldier at Gallipoli at exactly the same time as a comrade. Recalling the incident, he wrote that:

It seemed that the two shots could raise nine possibilities, in three of which at any rate I might have killed or had a part in killing a fellow human being. This, of course, was what I was there for, but it seemed no light matter, and kept me awake for some time. I could come to no conclusion except that individual guilt in an act of this kind is not absolved by collective duty nor lessened when pooled in collective responsibility.22

19 Grossman, On Killing, pp.97-8. 20 John Ciardi quoted in Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1985, p.200. 21 Paul Steppe, US Marine Corps, quoted in Weiner (ed.), op. cit., p.152. 22 Alexander Aitken, Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman, Oxford University Press, London, 1963, pp.33-4. 79

Overcoming Resistance to Killing on the Battlefield

At close-range, the soldier is confronted with the physical effects of his actions and the undeniable certainty that he i s directly responsible for someone’s death.23 Doug Beattie recalled such feelings when he wrote of killing a Taliban fighter.

For the first time in all my years of soldiering I had killed someone. There was no doubt about it. I had taken a l ife. P erhaps during what had gone before during that day I’d already taken others … But this was definite — no question. And personal. I was face to face with the enemy. C lose enough to identify features, distinguish some blemishes, certainly recognise bravery and determination. It set off a whole train of thoughts. Was he married, like me? Did he have children, like me? Were members of his family counting the days till he came home, like mine were?24

The historian Ken Hechler noted the aversion of American troops to close-range killing: ‘This was the part of war that the men hated most. They had almost grown used to killing the enemy at long range, especially when they had seen their own comrades die. But there was something terrible about shooting a man whose facial expression they could watch close up.’25 Returning to the two soldiers mentioned in the introduction, the effective range of Benjamin Harris’s Baker Rifle was around 200 metres when firing into the mass formations of men that characterised Napoleonic era warfare, while the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon carried by Joshua Key had an effective range of around 1 km when used against an area target (which approximates the battlefield conditions faced by Harris). At first glance, it would appear that improvements in weapon technology have helped increase the physical distance at which infantry soldiers kill each other, and therefore eased the psychological burden of killing. But this assumption largely ignores the characteristics of the battlefield. Weapons are rarely employed at their maximum effective range, as the modern soldier is distinctly unwilling to stand in massed ranks and engage the enemy across open fields as occurred in the Napoleonic era. Rather, the modern infantry soldier, particularly in an urban warfare environment, will seek to exploit the cover provided by buildings to protect himself from enemy fire, therefore increasing the probability of his death at the hands of a fellow infantry soldier arising from a close-range killing. Indicative of this characteristic of modern warfare is the title

23 Lt. Col. Dave Grossman with Loren W. Christensen, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, Warrior Science Publications, 2007, pp.101/2,111,115. 24 Beattie, An Ordinary Soldier, p.99. 25 Ken Hechler, The Bridge at Remagen, Ballantine Books, New York, 1957, p.102. 80

A Two-Edged Sword

of a recent memoir of combat: House to House by David Bellavia. Bellavia, a member of the 2nd Battalion of the US Army’s 2nd Infantry Regiment, took part in the battle of Fallujah (Iraq) in November 2004. ‘ I pounce on him. My body splays over his and I drive the knife right under his collarbone’, recounts Bellavia of an insurgent he killed in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle. ‘My first thrust hits solid meat. The blade stops, and my hand slips off the handle and slides down the blade, slicing my pinkie finger. I grab the handle again and squeeze it hard. The blade sinks into him, and he wails with terror and pain’.26 Doug Beattie also experienced this form of close range killing while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan in 2008. H e wrote of a contact of ‘opposing soldiers coming face to face at a range of ten to fifteen metres – point blank range – in a situation where success was measured in terms of blood spilled and blood saved. A ll the 105s, GMLRS [Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System], mortars and fast jets in the world weren’t of any relevance in this type of personal battle.’27 Some soldiers experienced a brief feeling of elation immediately after a close- range kill on the battlefield. ‘Ground combat is personal, not like dropping bombs from thirty thousand feet on impersonal targets. It is a primordial struggle, you and the other guy exchanging rounds at a few-metres distance. Emotions flow with an i ntensity unimaginable to the nonparticipant: fear, hate, passion, desperation,’ wrote James McDonough in his memoir of his service as an i nfantry platoon commander in the Vietnam War. ‘And then – triumph! The enemy falls, lies there lifeless, his gaping corpse a mockery of the valiant fight he made. Your own emotions withdraw, replaced by a flow of relief and ex hilaration, because he i s dead and not you.’28 This elation (survivor euphoria) principally arises from the fact that it is their enemy, and no t themselves, who has been killed. But elation may be rapidly overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt and revulsion so strong that the soldier may become physically sick.29 A German infantryman recalled experiencing such a sensation after he k illed a French soldier during the First World War. The German was taking part in an attack on the enemy’s trenches when he was suddenly confronted by a French corporal with his bayonet at the ready:

I felt the fear of death in that fraction of a second when I realised that he was after my life, exactly as I was after his. But I was quicker than he was, I pushed his rifle away and ran my bayonet through his chest. He fell, putting his hand

26 Bellavia, op. cit., p.266. 27 Beattie, Task Force Helmand, pp.297-8. 28 McDonough, op. cit., p.199. 29 Dave Grossman, On Killing, p.167. 81

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on the place where I had hit him, and then I thrust again. Blood came out of his mouth and he died. I nearly vomited. My knees were shaking.30

Private Simpson served with the Australian 13th Battalion during the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War. He too killed an enemy soldier so close that he could feel his final breath. ‘I got [a Turk] in the neck’, Simpson related in a letter home, ‘ … made me feel sick and squeamish, being the first man I have ever killed … I often wake up and seem to feel my bayonet going into his neck’.31 A generation later, Guy Sajer wrote of the emotional torment he felt when he killed a Russian partisan at close range.

I felt as if my skull enclosed a black void, and that a nightmare enclosed me, like a fever ... I stared at the corpse lying face down on the ground in front of me. I couldn’t really believe that I had k illed him, and waited for the tide of blood which would soon begin to seep from beneath his body. N othing else mattered to me. The weight of the drama which had just occurred was so overwhelming that I could only stare at the motionless body.32

William Manchester was also sickened by his first battlefield kill; a J apanese sniper. The sniper had just shot two Marines in the adjoining company and Manchester realised that the sniper’s fire would soon be di rected towards his own section. He ran towards the sniper’s position and fired. His first shot missed but the second smashed into the man’s femoral artery. He continued to fire as the Japanese soldier’s life ebbed away. As the threat was now removed, the realisation of the finality of his actions enveloped Manchester:

A feeling of disgust and self-hatred clotted darkly in my throat, gagging me … Then I began to tremble, and next to shake, all over. I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear: ‘I’m sorry.’ Then I threw up all over myself. … At the same time I noticed another odor; I had urinated in my skivvies [underwear].33

Not all soldiers have been affected in this way after they have killed a man. Some, such as snipers, are seemingly able to kill men without compunction, men who posed no direct threat to the firer. James Sims, a paratrooper who took part in

30 Sergeant Stefan Westmann, 29th Division, German Army quoted in Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Ebury Press, London, 2003, pp.70-1. 31 Private A. M. Simpson, 13th Battalion, letter dated May 1915 quoted in Gammage, op. cit., pp.104-5. 32 Sajer, op. cit., p.300. 33 Manchester, op. cit., p.7. 82

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Operation Market Garden during the Second World War, noted that, ‘Snipers were altogether different and s eemed to enjoy killing their enemies, and w ere disliked as much by their own side as their enemies’.34 Sims recounted an incident where a badly wounded German soldier, who had managed to drag himself across a road towards his own lines, was shot through the back of the head by a sniper moments before he would have reached safety. ‘ That upset me — not only me, it upset quite a few of us. Nobody likes snipers — and I said, “What the hell did you do that for? He was out of the battle.” The Welshman [sniper] said, “Well, he was the enemy, he was a German wasn’t he?”‘35 Jack Coughlin, who served as a sniper with the US Marine Corps during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was coldly professional in relation to killing men, focusing on the technical aspects of the shot, such as the distance to target and the effect of wind on the bullet’s flight, rather than his shared humanity with the enemy. ‘I did not think for a moment about him being another human being with a family, and in fact didn’t really think about him as a person at all’, recalled Coughlin of how he felt as he lined up an Iraqi soldier in the crosshairs of his rifle’s scope. ‘He was a threat who had stepped into my world, and those would be the last steps he ever took.’36 Dan Mills, a sniper with the 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, which deployed to Iraq in April 2004, explained that:

The difference with being a sniper is you can see the man’s face when you kill him. You can see everything about him, because you’ve probably been studying him for minutes, or even hours. So when you pull the trigger you have to be a ble to separate yourself from the knowledge that you’re taking a life. There’s no p oint in putting someone through eight weeks of highly physically and mentally demanding training if when the moment comes, all he’s going to do is think about the wife and kids the target might have at home. He may well be a f ather of eight, and have four grandparents to feed too. But he’s the enemy and that’s that. Tough shit.37

Evan Wright, a journalist who was embedded with a US Marine Corps unit during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, noticed that some Marines experienced a visceral thrill

34 Private James Sims, 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, quoted in Sean Longden, To the Victor the Spoils - D-Day to VE Day: The Reality Behind the Heroism, Arris Books, Gloucestshire, 2005, p.31. 35 Private James Sims, 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment quoted in Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Second World War, Ebury Press, London, 2004, p.357. 36 Gunnery SGT. Jack Coughlin, USMC and CAPT. Casey Kuhlman, USMCR, with Donald A. Davis, Shooter, St Martin’s Press, New York, 2006, p.250. 37 Sergeant Dan Mills, Sniper One: The Blistering True Story of a British Battle Group Under Siege, Penguin, London, 2008, pp.5-6. 83

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when killing and br agged about it later. Wright commented, ‘It’s not just bragging. When Marines talk about the violence they wreak, there’s an almost giddy shame, an uneasy exultation in having committed society’s ultimate taboo and having done it with state sanction.’38 But the apparent ease with which the young Marines killed belied a hidden psychological cost. One of them later confided to Wright, ‘I felt cold-blooded as a motherfucker shooting those guys that popped out of the truck. Dog, whatever last shred of humanity I had before I came here, it’s gone.’39 The Soviet sniper quoted earlier made a similar comment: ‘I’ve become a beast of a man: I kill, I hate them as if it is a normal thing in my life. I’ve killed forty men.’40 The British soldiers of the 1st Battalion The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment displayed little hesitation when firing upon insurgents in the heat of battle while deployed to Iraq in 2004. ‘You identify the enemy, place the sight on to him, pull the trigger and he i s gone, but you don’t think about it because you are still taking incoming fire’,41 recalled Dave Falconer. But when ordered to collect the bodies of the insurgents and bring them back to camp for identification the soldiers were struck by the finality of their actions. ‘Killing someone, then looking at them afterwards as you place them in your Warrior, is something I could have done without, personally’, wrote Chris Broome. ‘Even though this is our job, it still does not stop you replaying the dead faces in your mind time and t ime again and as king the questions why, and w hat if? The next time I hear a comment like “I want to get stuck in and kill somebody”, I will remind him of what you may have to live with for the rest of your life.’42 Of interest is that all the comments in the preceding section are drawn from members of the infantry, which as a percentage of the total force has decreased over the period studied. Tooth to tail ratios have already been di scussed, but within the ‘tooth’, there is a greater variety of combat arms in modern armies than there was even a generation before. Obviously, the development and widespread use of combat aircraft and armoured vehicles have increased the number of troops who perform their killing at long to medium range. Even artillery, which was present in the armies of the Napoleonic period, has evolved from being largely a line of sight weapon to one that can be fired from up to 30 km distant from the intended target. The consequence of these technological developments in weapons, in particular increased weapon range, is

38 Wright, op. cit., p.109. 39 Sergeant Antonio Espera quoted in Wright, op. cit., pp.217-8. 40 Anatoly Chekhov, 13th Guards Rifle Division quoted in Vasily Grossman, op. cit., p.158. 41 Warrant Officer Class Two Dave Falconer, 1st Battalion The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, quoted in Richard Holmes, Dusty Warriors, Harper Perennial, London, 2007, p.317. 42 Sergeant Chris Broome, 1st Battalion The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, quoted in Holmes, Dusty Warriors, p.239. 84

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that, when viewed as a whole, the percentage of combat soldiers (therefore excluding support personnel) who are required to bear the psychological cost of close range killing has decreased. The psychological cost of killing another man may not become apparent until some time after the event, and is a k ey factor in the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder. ‘When we kill another human being, there’s a price to pay,’ recounted a helicopter pilot who served with the US Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. ‘We try to put a barrier around our heart and our emotions, but there is a price to pay … we talk about how much we want to kill the enemy, but it’s still going to come back and haunt you, because it’s an unnatural act.’43 Combat training techniques are based on operant conditioning, the central tenet of which is that all human behaviour is influenced by past rewards and punishments. The soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars were ceaselessly drilled to ensure their competency in loading and firing as part of a formed body of men. Any deviation, or slowness, in the carrying out of these drills would result in the rebuke of the non- commissioned officer with the likelihood of punishment if the matter was not rectified. The intent was to inculcate a collective form of muscle memory, whereby the actions of the men to their left and right provided visual and auditory cues to guide a s oldier’s action. Thus the action of firing became largely automated with the soldier having little time to contemplate the finality of his actions, noting that, at best, his aim was directed at the approaching body of men rather than specific individuals. During the First World War, marksmanship training for soldiers involved them lying prone in a grassy field and calmly firing at a bulls-eye target. After a series of shots were fired, the target would be checked and the firer’s score calculated. However, the chief limitation of training in this manner was its artificiality. Max Plowman recounted how ‘having thoroughly enjoyed practice upon a t arget, I begin to feel squeamish on being told that firing low is a mistake because the head is the most vulnerable part of a man. Bull’s-eyes on a target are a pleasure; but when the power to make them becomes applied … then a gruesome sense of mean inhumanity begins to assert itself …’44 Modern marksmanship training seeks to simulate, in a s afe environment, the actual conditions of combat. A soldier will stand in a weapon pit wearing full combat

43 Dave Pelkey, quoted in Gerald Wright, ‘Picking up the pieces’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 March 2007, viewed 6 August 2010, . 44 Plowman, op. cit., p.179. 85

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equipment and ol ive-drab man-shaped targets will pop-up briefly in front of him at varying ranges (the conditioned stimulus). The soldier must instantly aim and fire (the target behaviour). If he hits the target it will immediately fall backwards—just as a living target would—providing immediate positive reinforcement of the target behaviour. The effectiveness of such techniques is evident in the account by Doug Beattie of his first battlefield kill: ‘His sharp outline became blurred as I refocused on the small foresight at the end of my weapon and squeezed the trigger. It was almost an innocent act, a drill, a bit like being on the firing range, shooting at a target made of metal’.45 The latest refinement of marksmanship training replaces the man-shaped targets with video images of actual humans. These images are controlled by an interactive computer program that responds to the actions of the soldier. If the soldier accurately engages the target within a defined timeframe the target will drop. Praising high-scoring firers and awarding them marksmanship badges, to differentiate them from their less capable peers, confers additional positive reinforcement.46 Shooting is considered a basic but essential skill required of every soldier. Those who do not achieve the required standard of firing accuracy will suffer mild punishment in the form of retraining, as well as loss of face among their peers. These factors further reinforce the desired target behaviour. The key point here is that the base aversion to killing has not changed between the soldiers trained in the First World and those trained using modern marksmanship training but rather that technological advances have enabled more effective operant conditioning to largely overcome this aversion As noted, military training has sought to enable soldiers to kill on the battlefield without hesitation. ‘You’re taught by the army to conceive of them as the faceless enemy, not a real person (in psychological terms this is known as pseudospeciation which can help neutralize the inhibitions to killing conspecifics (fellow men)). In training you spend time shouting “Kill, kill, kill!” to help make it a nor mal thing to do’,47 First Lieutenant John Yaros explained to Oliver Poole, a journalist embedded with the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division for the push towards Baghdad. Another officer commented to Poole, ‘The simulation of battle training is so realistic that it resembles almost exactly what occurs in the field. They have lifesize tanks that resemble precisely the ones we’ve been s hooting out here. There are dummies of soldiers popping out of doors that resemble the scenario in house-to-house searches.’48 Indeed, so successful was the battlefield inoculation training provided to the American soldiers that the officer

45 Beattie, An Ordinary Soldier, pp.98-9. 46 Dave Grossman, On Killing, p.253-4. 47 First Lieutenant John Yaros, 3rd Infantry Division, quoted in Poole, op. cit., p.154. 48 Captain Robert Ross, 3rd Infantry Division, quoted in Poole, op. cit., p.255. 86

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concluded, ‘Half these soldiers feel they’re been on a field exercise. The problems are going to come when it sinks in that this time it was people they’re been shooting at.’49 Earlier Poole had spoken to two American soldiers who were still so hyped-up after a skirmish with some Iraqi soldiers that ‘they were literally bouncing on the spot, unable to stand still’.50

‘Did you see us? We took those two out. The captain spotted them on a ridge and we turned, I saw them and badabadabada,’ one said, mimicking the sound of machine-gun fire, his hand imitating grasping a gun. ‘I shot right across the first one, and it caught the grenades strapped to his front and he exploded. This other guy was scrabbling in the ground for an AK-47. Badabadabada. His head was shot straight off’.51

But a few days later, when Poole encountered the men again, the soldier who had shot the Iraqis confided to him that, ‘I didn’t feel any remorse then. I wanted to kill them. But yesterday I was sitting up on the tank thinking, “Damn, I did kill guys”.’52 At close-range it becomes very difficult for a soldier to deny the humanity of his enemy. Dave Grossman stated that, ‘looking in a man’s face, seeing his eyes and his fear eliminate denial … Instead of shooting at a uni form and killing a generalised enemy, now the killer must shoot at a person and kill a specific individual.’53 Al Slater served as a company commander with the US Marine Corps in Vietnam in 1967. While patrolling in the demilitarised zone, Slater’s company was fired upon by a North Vietnamese soldier. Taking advantage of the pause when the enemy soldier stopped firing to reload, Slater ran forward and shot him in the face at close range. Slater later recalled the ‘look in his face and I can see the fear in his eyes’. He would replay the incident over and over in his mind. ‘It’s easier to fight from afar. It’s hard to realise that our enemy, who we hate so bad, is human. We look at them as an object. They look at us the same way. It didn’t keep me from wanting to kill them. I would just rather kill them from afar.’54 To overcome man’s innate resistance to close-range killing throughout the period studied (which, as discussed, is now largely the responsibility of the infantry), armies have sought to develop an em pathetic distance between their soldiers and

49 ibid., p.255. 50 ibid., p.145. 51 ibid., p.145. 52 ibid., p.153. 53 Dave Grossman, On Killing, p.119. 54 Al Slater quoted in Wright, op. cit. 87

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those of the enemy. An empathetic distance is cultivated by emphasising differences. This action diminishes the feeling of shared humanity with those deemed the enemy. ‘Somehow everything German gave one t he creeps’, felt Harvey Allen, a member of the US 111th Infantry Regiment, 28th Division as he sifted through the refuse left in a dugout by withdrawing German soldiers in the closing stages of the First World War. ‘It was connected so intimately with all that was unpleasant, and associated so inevitably with organised fear, that one scarce regarded its owners as men. It seemed then as if we were fighting some strange, ruthless, insect-beings from another planet …’55 The effectiveness of establishing an em pathic distance to enable soldiers to kill on t he battlefield is revealed in the following account from Roland Winter, who served as a helicopter gunner with the US Marine Corps during the Vietnam War.

There was one time when one of the guys I shot was bought on board, and that was a l ittle difficult because he was much younger than I thought. And of course, when your people are trying to prepare you to fight and go kill someone else, they’re trying to give you as mean and horrible an image of that person as they can, and that’s the only way you’re mentally prepared to do what you have to do. This guy had a pack, and there were personal effects in it, and there were picture of his home and his girlfriend and him, and I said, ‘Boy, that was human being”. T hat was different. A nd then you get an idea, like, What on earth?56

Racial and ethnic differences are accentuated to establish a cultural distance. This process is materially assisted when soldiers already have a deeply ingrained belief in their own country’s cultural superiority. A common method of developing a cultural distance between soldiers and their foe has been to refer to enemy soldiers in derogatory terms. Paul Fussell, who served with the US Army during the Second World War, pointed out, ‘We always called the Germans “Krauts”, doubtless to bolster our sense that we were killing creatures very odd and sinister and thus appropriate targets of contempt’.57 Japanese soldiers during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) were told that they ‘must not consider the Chinese as a human being, but only as something of rather less value than a dog or

55 Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A War Diary, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968, p.115. 56 Ronald Winter, US Marine Corps, quoted in Weiner (ed.), op. cit., pp.163-4. 57 Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, Little Brown and Company, Boston, 1996, p.108. 88

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cat’.58 Ed Moranick, who served with the United States Marine Corps during the Second World War, confessed during a reunion visit to Iwo Jima that, ‘Forty years ago I came to this island to kill “Japs”; I didn’t even think of them as “people”’.59 Establishing empathetic distance not only frees soldiers from hesitation but also from guilt after killing an enemy. David Hackworth recounted that the first time he killed enemy soldiers (North Koreans):

I dropped four guys point-blank with my M-1, each dead with a six-o’clock-sight picture in the chest, just like the good book said. I felt no guilt—few of us did; I’d been trained too well, and besides, the enemy had been utterly dehumanised throughout my training. They aren’t men, they’re just gooks.60

Frederick Downs, who fought with the US Army during the Vietnam War and personally killed a number of ‘dinks’, wrote:

In order to kill, the soldier is taught to dehumanize the enemy, to kill targets. Any hesitation, any thought that he is killing someone’s father, son, or brother, and the soldier may be slow to pull the trigger. S oldiers kill French Frogs, German Krauts, slanty-eyed Japs, Rebs, Yanks, Pepper Bellies, Dinks, Onion Eaters, Chinks, Ragheads, and s o it continues: an endless list throughout time.61

Bernard Szapiel served with the Australian infantry in Vietnam in 1967. He later spoke of an incident where he was required to bury some dead Vietnamese soldiers.

We were in a hurry, so we dug very shallow graves but they wouldn’t fit so we started jumping on the arms and b odies to get them to go i n. But that didn’t work so we thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll make an easy job of it,’ so we just cut the arms off with machetes and threw them in and piled the dirt over the top. It was like cutting up a sheep. Our training was so good that you never saw them as people, they were just an animal, really, nothing else but an animal.62

In Vietnam the process of dehumanization was assisted by the ‘body count’

58 Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, Penguin Books, New York, 1998, p.56. 59 Ed Moranick, United States Marine Corps, quoted in Kakehashi, op. cit., p.130. 60 Hackworth and Sherman, op. cit., p.49. 61 Downs, op. cit., p.263. 62 Bernard Szapiel quoted in Rintoul, op. cit., p.48. 89

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mentality, under which American soldiers were encouraged to think of the dead Vietnamese in terms of a gross number, rather than as fellow humans who had families and friends who would mourn their death. The dehumanisation of the Vietnamese was furthered by the practice employed by some American units of awarding in-country R&R to the soldier/Marine credited with killing an enemy combatant.63 The practice of dehumanizing the enemy continues to the present day. Joshua Key recalled that when he underwent basic training in 2002, he and h is fellow recruits were lined up on the bayonet range facing a life-sized dummy and told to imagine that it was a Muslim man. As they repeatedly thrust their bayonets into the dummies one of their commanders shouted through a microphone, ‘Kill!, Kill! Kill the sand niggers’. 64 ‘The hajjis, Habibs, rag heads and sand niggers were the enemy, and they were not to be thought of with a shred of humanity’, wrote Key.65 Racial differences are more readily accentuated and internalised than cultural differences. The psychologist Samuel Stouffer found that among the American troops he interviewed in the Second World War, around forty-four per cent ‘would really like to kill a Japanese soldier’, but only around seven per cent felt the same way about killing a German.66 This is a direct reflection of the shared ethnicity of many American and German people. Additionally, most Germans and Americans are of the same race (Caucasian). Stephen Ambrose concluded ‘there was little racial hatred between the Americans and the Germans. How could there be when cousins were fighting cousins? About one-third of the U.S. Army in ETO [European Theatre of Operations] were German-American in origin.’67 No such common cultural heritage existed with the Japanese. Additionally, the Japanese were Asians and thus different in appearance to the majority of Americans. The greater publicity given to the wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese forces, coupled with the anger over the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, were also contributing factors to the level of hatred American soldiers felt towards their Japanese counterparts. The racial and c ultural differences between American and J apanese soldiers even resulted in some US servicemen considering the Japanese as somewhat less than human. T his lack of empathy for the Japanese soldiers resulted in the desecration of their bodies. Gold teeth were commonly extracted with a K-bar knife but

63 Puller, Jr., op. cit., p.104. 64 Key, op. cit., pp.46-7. 65 ibid., p.49. 66 Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine and Marion Harper Lumsdaine, ‘Chapter 1 – Attitudes Before Combat and Behavior in Combat’, The American Soldier: Combat and its Aftermath, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1949, p.34. 67 Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers, p.228. 90

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perhaps the most notorious practice involved American soldiers stripping the flesh from the decapitated heads of Japanese soldiers and sending the bleached skulls home as macabre souvenirs. The situation got so out of hand that in September 1942 t he Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet felt it necessary to issue an order stating, ‘No part of the enemy’s body may be us ed as a s ouvenir’.68 A similar lack of empathic recognition of their enemy’s common humanity resulted in American soldiers during the Vietnam War cutting off the ears of slain Vietnamese and wearing them as a necklace, just as primitive hunters would wear the tusks of slain boars.69 In modern society, it is generally more politically acceptable, and less likely to facilitate wartime atrocities, to emphasize the moral rather than cultural distance between armies/nations. Developing a moral distance entails establishing the enemy’s guilt in conjunction with asserting the legality and legitimacy of one’s own cause. Hence killing the enemy becomes an act of justice: he is being punished for his crimes.70 Of course, each side will seek to claim the moral high ground. The Union forces of the American Civil War convinced themselves that the killing of their southern brethren was necessary to end the secession of the Confederate states and preserve the Union, while the Confederate soldiers spoke of Northern aggression and unjustified interference in the internal matters of the southern states. ‘So, figuring as a whole, the responsible parties for the great flow of blood should not be l aid at the Southerner’s door’, wrote William Fletcher in his memoir of his service with the Confederate Army. ‘(f)or the matter of property rights, as granted by the Constitution, should, at least be proof enough to exonerate; and the cloak of defense of preserving the union was not the kernel in the nut …’71 Conversely, the Union soldier Hamlin Alexander Coe wrote of Confederate deserters in morally unambiguous terms: ‘They are really disheartened and have given up the idea of establishing a southern confederacy. It is only surprising to see how willing they are to confess their guilt, and I believe they mean to do better in the future.’72 Moreover, Rice Bull commented about the destruction wrought upon the property of the plantation class of South Carolina (the first state to secede from the Union) as Sherman’s army made its way north through the Carolinas in early 1865:

68 Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989, pp.116-7. 69 See Bourke, op. cit., pp.28-30. 70 Dave Grossman, On Killing, p.164. 71 William A. Fletcher, Rebel Private: Front and Rear – Memoirs of a Confederate Soldier, Meridian, New York, 1997, p.154. 72 Coe, op. cit., p.92. 91

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The grudge held against South Carolina and her people by many soldiers was very intense; many times they ruthlessly destroyed property when they heard it belonged to an active secessionist. They excused their actions by saying that they wished such people to suffer for their responsibility in bringing upon our country the Civil War.73

When establishing the moral high ground the basis of the enemy’s guilt may be atrocities committed against a third party or simply aggression, that is, they started the war. Such was the case in mid-1914, when the propaganda efforts aimed at the British public in general, and potential soldiers in particular, focused on two German crimes: the violation of Belgian neutrality and the atrocities committed by the Germans in their efforts to crush Belgian civil resistance. In December 1914, the British Government asked Viscount Bryce to chair an independent committee to investigate the alleged German brutality towards civilians in occupied Belgium. The resulting ‘Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages’ was released in May 1915 and t ranslated into thirty languages. The report was based upon m ore than 1,200 depositions, mostly from Belgian refugees, though some British troops were interviewed as well. A number of captured German diaries were also used as sources. The report detailed the systematic execution of civilians and the looting and burning of Belgian villages by German soldiers, many of whom were apparently drunk when these acts were committed. Specific atrocities included: killing a woman and then cutting off her breasts, cutting off limbs and hands, using civilians as screens when firing upon Belgian troops, murdering priests, raping and then bayoneting women, and murdering a child by nailing it by its hands and feet to the door of a farmhouse. The report provided two graphic accounts of German soldiers bayoneting infants and then leaving the dying child attached to the bayonet while the rifle was hoisted into the air. The report also claimed that German soldiers had bayoneted and cut the throats of wounded British soldiers and had feigned surrender and then opened fire. T he report concluded by stating: ‘Murder, lust, and pillage prevailed over many parts of Belgium on a s cale unparalleled in any war between civilised nations during the last three centuries’.74 There is little doubt that the Germans burnt numerous villages and executed a large number of civilians (about 5,500 in total) during their occupation of Belgium.

73 Bauer (ed.), op. cit., p.207. 74 The Bryce Report: Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, 12 May 1915, copy of report provided at http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/brycereport.htm 92

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McKinley McClure, serving with the US Army’s 12th Field Artillery Regiment, tells us of an incident where an old Belgian lady pointed out to him a bullet-pocked wall where her husband and brother, along with some other men from the village, had been executed by the Germans in 1914.75 But some of the more gruesome atrocities of which the German soldiers were accused—such as the bayoneting of babies—were most likely the invention of propagandists. Furthermore, from the German perspective, many of these actions were militarily justifiable because of the tactics of the Belgian partisans, which included stringing wire across streets to decapitate German soldiers travelling in staff cars. A German officer recounted in his memoirs that:

Warfare in Belgium soon became a hideous experience because the population took part in the fight. Whenever they had the chance they shot down German soldiers … There was little defence against that sort of warfare because the streets were full of civilians and s o were the houses. U nless they shot first, nobody knew where the enemy was. It was nerve-wracking in the extreme and resulted in savage and merciless slaughter at the slightest provocation.76

Phillip Knightley noted that the depositions given to the Bryce inquiry vanished after the war and t hat a Belgian commission of inquiry in 1922 ‘ failed markedly to corroborate a single major allegation in the Bryce report’.77 But such issues were now largely irrelevant. T he war was over. The Bryce report had achieved its aims: the German crimes justified British participation in what was essentially a continental European war and t he report helped turn American public opinion against the Germans. Another salient example from the First World War of the process of cultivating moral distance is the propaganda arising from the death of the British nurse Edith Cavell. Ca vell had moved to Belgium in 1907 and was appointed matron of the Berkendael Medical Institute (a training school for nurses) in Brussels. When Germany invaded, Cavell, then holidaying in Britain, returned to Belgium and harboured fugitive Allied soldiers in the institute. In conjunction with some Belgian civilians, she also actively assisted the soldiers to escape to neutral Holland. She was arrested by the German authorities on 5 August 1915 and c harged with having aided the escape of some two hundred British, French and Belgian soldiers. She confessed and was found

75 M. McKinley McClure, Hey! Major, Look Who’s Here, Dorrance & Company, Philadelphia, 1972, p.79. 76 Fritz Nagel, Fritz: The World War 1 Memoirs of a German Lieutenant, Der Angriff Publications, Huntington, West Virginia, 1981, p.21. 77 Knightley, op. cit., p.88. 93

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guilty by a military court. Four Belgians who had assisted Cavell were also sentenced to death. She was executed by firing squad at dawn on 12 O ctober 1915. H er execution became a cause célèbre, notwithstanding the fact that under the accepted rules of war the Germans were justified in executing her as a spy. Newspaper reports condemned German barbarism and Cavell became a martyr. Avenging her execution became a recurring theme in recruiting campaigns. Numerous propaganda posters were produced, generally showing Cavell’s body, still dressed in her nurse’s uniform, prostrate at the feet of a German soldier, or a photograph of Cavell with the caption ‘murdered by the Huns’.78 A more contemporary example of establishing a moral distance arose after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. It was widely reported in the Western press that Iraqi soldiers had removed hundreds of premature Kuwaiti babies from incubators. The soldiers allegedly left the infants to die on the hospital floors and sent the incubators back to Iraq. The story originated with a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti, identified only as ‘Nayirah’, who tearfully testified to witnessing this atrocity before the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus on 10 October 1990. P resident George Bush referred to the incident six times in the next five weeks as a prominent example of the evil nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Furthermore, during the US Senate debate on whether or not to approve military force to evict the Iraqis out of Kuwait, seven senators specifically mentioned the death of the ‘incubator babies’.79 Chris Hedges, a journalist who reported on the US-led liberation, discovered when he arrived in Kuwait and checked with the Kuwaiti doctors that the allegations were a fabrication.

But by then the tale had served its purpose … Nayirah turned out later to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasir al-Sabah. She did not grant interviews after the war and it was never established whether she was actually in the country when the invasion took place.80

Throughout the twentieth century, the aggressor nation in a conflict has usually attracted international condemnation. Thus the Allied nations could claim moral justification when responding to German aggression in the Second World War, General Dwight Eisenhower even categorising the June 1944 l andings in occupied France in the morally unambiguous terms of a ‘Great Crusade’. Li kewise, the North Koreans,

78 Peter Clowes, ‘A Fanatical Sense of Duty Drove Nurse Edith Cavell to Harbor Allied Soldiers Behind German Lines, Military History, pp.18-21. 79 Knightley, op. cit., p.487. 80 Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Anchor Books, New York, 2002, p.145. 94

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Argentines and Iraqis (among others) were all condemned through the mechanism of a United Nations Security Council Resolution for invading a neighbouring country. A major aim of emphasising the moral distance between combatants is for this moral distance to be internalised by soldiers. O nce internalised, soldiers will usually seek out confirmatory evidence and disregard contradictory facts, that is, although they may be exposed to a wide range of viewpoints they will only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe.81 Thus reports of enemy atrocities, even those based on the flimsiest of evidence, will be readily believed and will serve to reinforce the underlying moral justification for military action. This factor helps explain an apparent paradox. E stablishing a c ultural or moral distance usually relies on a simplification of the facts and general ignorance of the enemy so that they can be reduced to a stereotype. For the soldiers of the First and Second World Wars, their information generally came from three sources: newspapers, the radio and rumour, the former two of which were willing mouthpieces of government propaganda. Yet the modern soldier exists in an age of information proliferation, where via the Internet he has access to countless viewpoints. But, as noted above, due to cognitive dissonance, soldiers will usually seek out views that reinforce the need for military action, thus justifying the cause in their minds and facilitating the killing action. Moreover, the modern proliferation of cable news stations allows greater market segmentation so that soldiers seeking reinforcement of the justification of a military response can generally find an accommodating channel. For example, the extreme position taken by the American Fox News in relation to the justification for invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq attracted it a loyal following among the members of the US military. A year-long study by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes determined that viewers who relied on the Fox News Channel for their coverage of the Iraq War were most likely to believe misinformation about the war, whatever their political affiliation may be. The study found that these mistaken facts increased viewers’ support for the war.82 As discussed in the previous paragraphs, the establishment of a c ultural or moral distance has been utilised time and time again over a range of conflicts to enable soldiers to kill on the battlefield. A factor that has changed over the period examined

81 The tendency for people to adopt a position and then rationalise facts to support this position is examined in Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, ‘It Feels Like We’re Thinking: The Rationalizing Voter and Electoral Democracy, working paper dated 28 August 2006, viewed 19 January 2010, . 82 The findings of this research are summarised in Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay and Evan Lewis, ‘Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War’, Political Science Quarterly, Volume 118, Number 4, Winter 2003-2004, New York, pp.569-98. 95

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largely due t o technological advances is the impact of mechanical distance between soldiers and their foe. Mechanical distance is established when technology masks the humanity of combatants.83 For example, a soldier equipped with a thermal sight on his rifle can momentarily convince himself that he is firing at a green blob rather than another human.84 ‘On the thermal imaging screen on my TOGS [Thermal Observation and Gunnery Sight] I could see Iraqi infantry advancing towards us. I felt curiously removed from the actual blood and guts of warfare although men were being cut down and dying,’85 recalled James Hewitt as his Challenger tank engaged Iraqi troops during the opening stages of the ground offensive of the 1991 Gulf War. In Napoleonic warfare, even artillery pieces, which had the longest range of weapons then available, were fired at what were unmistakably people. And although it can be argued that sailors have generally fired upon ships rather than the crews that manned them (with the exception of sharpshooters who fired at individual targets whilst in close order battle), it was not until the wars of the twentieth century that the humanity of soldiers began to be masked by being encased in a metal shell, such as an aeroplane or a t ank. ‘Air fighting is a very detached sort of warfare’, recalled Frank Carey, a pilot with the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, ‘being fought, as it were, between machines with the human factor very much submerged in a “tin box”. Once in awhile, for a few fleeting seconds when someone bales out, one can suddenly be aware that humans are actually involved but, as the parachute descends, machines quickly regain the centre of the stage once more.’86 A similar mindset enabled Ray Holmes, another pilot with the Royal Air Force, to state, ‘I wanted to shoot an aeroplane down, but I didn’t want to shoot a German down’;87 as if the two events were not inextricably connected. Some sixty years later, as James Newton lined up an Iraqi T55 tank in the sight of his TOW missile launcher he felt that, ‘I wasn’t thinking in human terms: it was helicopter versus tank. The training had kicked in and it was as if I had been pre-programmed to delete any thoughts about fellow souls. All I could see was 60 t ons of Russian armour.’88 The need to develop this mechanical distance is encapsulated in the following comment from a British Army officer who fought in the Falklands War: ‘It’s all very well shooting a target, but when the target is speaking and

83 Dave Grossman, On Killing, p.169. 84 ibid., p.169. 85 James Hewitt, Love and War, Blake Publishing, London, 1999, p.128. 86 Flight Lieutenant Frank Carey, 43rd Squadron, Royal Air Force quoted in Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Second World War, p.88. 87 Sergeant Ray Holmes, 504th Squadron, Royal Air Force quoted in Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Second World War, p.92. 88 Newton, op. cit., p.8. 96

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you realise it’s a human being, things are actually rather different’.89 One of the key tenets of Western society is the sanctity of human life. Yet soldiers are expected to disregard their upbringing and kill in combat someone they most likely have never met and with whom they have no personal conflict. This burden of killing falls heaviest on the infantry, who must seek out and close with the enemy. Advances in the effective range of weapons over the last two centuries have been largely counterbalanced by the changing dynamics of the battlefield, with the modern infantrymen likely to be fighting in urban terrain and thus still having to engage in close- range killing. Yet the percentage of an army who are infantry has considerably decreased with a proliferation of support personnel along with other combat arms (such as armour and artillery), who are generally spared the close-range killing required of the infantry. To overcome man’s innate resistance to killing, militaries have resorted time and t ime again to emphasising the cultural and moral differences between opposing sides. This is a characteristic of war that is unlikely to change, and remains effective despite the proliferation of counter viewpoints to the official position available to soldiers via media such as the Internet and cable news stations. What has changed over the period examined is that by increasing the realism of combat training, the killing of enemy soldiers becomes more mechanistic and this factor is increased by the tendency of modern soldiers to be encased in a metal shell, such as a tank or plane, further allowing the soldier to put out of his mind that he is killing a fellow man.

89 Lieutenant Alastair Mitchell, 2nd Battalion, the Scots Guards, in Bilton, op. cit., p.204.

The Anguish of Friendly Fire

4 The Anguish of Friendly Fire

Although deaths in war due to friendly fire have been a historical constant over the period studied, technological developments in weaponry appear to have increased the frequency of fratricide in addition to altering its form. This chapter will provide a chronological overview of how evolving weapon technology has changed the nature of the threat of friendly fire over the last two hundred years, as well as examine how technological panaceas to decrease this danger have proved elusive and have lagged behind improvements in the destructive capabilities of weapons. Particular emphasis will be paid to the high proportion of friendly fire deaths among the coalition forces during the 1991 G ulf War and on going conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as these conflicts best illustrate the convergence of the key themes of this chapter. It will conclude by examining the psychological impact upon bot h those who fired the fatal shot and the immediate comrades of the killed and wounded, thereby establishing the burden friendly fire imposes on the soldier. Casualties arising from friendly fire were a constant feature of the battlefields of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The close-order formations of the Napoleonic period were particularly susceptible to fratricide. M arshal Saint-Cyr estimated that one quarter of all French infantry casualties during this period were due to the men in the forward ranks being accidentally shot by those arrayed in the ranks behind them.1 John Keegan suggested that the obsession with drill among the soldiers of this period principally arose from their desire to avoid friendly fire, ‘For among close- packed groups of men equipped with firearms, one’s neighbour’s weapon offers one a much more immediate threat to life than any wielded by an enemy’.2 The armies of the Napoleonic period, like those of the American Civil War, fought in constrained areas with limited visibility, due to the plumes of smoke generated by the firing of thousands of cannons and muskets (smokeless cartridges did not come into widespread military use until the 1890s). B enjamin Harris wrote of the battle of Vimeiro in August 1808:

The battle began on a fine bright day, and the sun played on the arms of the enemy’s battalions, as they came on, as if they had been tipped with gold. The battle soon became general; the smoke thickened around, and often I was obliged to stop firing, and dash it aside from my face, and try in vain to get a

1 Holmes, Firing Line, p.173. 2 Keegan, The Face of Battle, p.195. 98

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sight of what was going on, whilst groans and shouts and noise of cannon and musketry appeared almost to shake the very ground. 3

In such an env ironment, even the best-drilled and m ost disciplined troops would inevitably engage their comrades in musket fire when the battle broke down into desperate localised struggles. N arrative accounts of this period abound with references to friendly fire incidents of this nature. Edward Costello recalled an incident that occurred during the attack on San Sebastian (August 1813) in the Peninsular War when his company mistakenly engaged their comrades; ‘fire they did, and di d some mischief too, for the Major bringing up their left shoulders more than he should have done, they fired a volley into the 6th Scotch, who were some distance on our right front, and badly wounded fifteen or sixteen of their men’.4 In addition to being shot by the muskets of their comrades, the soldiers of this period also had t o contend with the misdirected shells of their own artillery. Deaths from friendly artillery would result either from the shells falling short or because of misidentification of the target by the friendly gunners. A typical account of such an incident is provided in the diary of Edmund Wheatley: ‘On ascending [higher up the hill] a 9lb. shot from [our own] artillery [across the river] fell short and nearly cut off half of us’.5 William Fletcher had a similar experience during the battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War.

I had s lept but a f ew minutes when our batteries behind opened fire on t he enemy’s supposed line, to confuse, and then we would be ordered to charge. The guns were not elevated enough and were doing fine work on our position. The bursting and flying pieces of shell and rock put us in a panic condition—we could not drop to the front and protect ourselves, for we would be exposed to the enemy.6

The limited concentration of artillery fire on these battlefields, however, restricted the number of deaths due to friendly artillery fire—not so during the massive artillery barrages of the First World War. The greatest agent of fratricide during the First World War was indirect fire weapons. Rudimentary communication systems meant that headquarters often lost contact with their subordinate elements advancing on the battlefield. T his loss of

3 Harris, op. cit., p.27. 4 Costello, op. cit., p.275. 5 Hibbert (ed.), The Wheatley Diary, p.4. 6 Fletcher, op. cit., p.82. 99

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communications meant that the headquarters no longer knew the exact location of their forces when giving fire control orders to the artillery. When this factor was coupled with the sheer volume of artillery fire that characterised warfare on t he Western Front, casualties from friendly artillery fire became so commonplace as to be unremarkable. Charles Shrader recorded in his study of fratricide that when estimating the probable casualties from an offensive during the war, ‘the thorough staff planner usually included an allowance for casualties due to a friendly barrage’.7 The French general Alexandre Percin wrote that friendly artillery fire caused an es timated seventy-five thousand French casualties during the First World War.8 Among the many friendly fire episodes detailed in his book,9 Percin recounted an incident on 22 August 1914 when the 1st Regiment of Colonial Infantry encountered three regiments of German soldiers in a dens e forest near Rossignol, Belgium. An accompanying French battery set up their guns several hundred yards from the forest and, although they were not given any orders to do so, fired blindly into the trees— supposedly in support of the French infantry. Several hours later when the battle had ended, of the 3200 French soldiers who entered the forest, approximately two thousand were dead with a further thousand or so wounded or taken prisoner. Percin estimated that the French artillery fire had caused a third of the French casualties, including nearly seven hundred deaths.10 Another tragic friendly fire incident was to occur in the early hours of 24 February 1916 during the battle of Verdun. A battalion of the French 72nd Division was ordered to hold the village of Samogneux. The battalion repeatedly fought off determined German attacks but a number of panic-stricken soldiers fled to the rear claiming that the village had fallen. A breakdown in communications strengthened the belief of the French commanders that the Germans had indeed captured the village and the inevitable counter attack was ordered. A preparatory artillery barrage was arranged and for over two hours French shells rained down on Samogneux, in the process killing a number of Germans but also decimating the remnants of the French battalion still holding the village. In vain the defenders fired off the green ‘cease fire’ rockets but these were either not seen or ignored. Once the barrage finished the Germans moved in and occupied the position and the remnants of the French battalion were taken prisoner.11

7 Shrader, op. cit., p.2. 8 Regan, op. cit., p.87. 9 Alexandre Percin, Le Massacre de notre Infanterie 1914–1918, Albin Michel, Paris 1921. 10 Regan, op. cit., pp.88-9. 11 Horne, op. cit., pp.98-9. 100

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The British troops of the First World War also suffered casualties from their own artillery. A typical fratricide incident befell the British Army’s 66th Division during the Passchendaele campaign of mid-1917. At dawn on 9 October 1917, after a gruelling eleven-and-a-half hour trek in darkness and rain through an al most impassable landscape pocked with shell holes filled with water and mud, the division’s lead elements reached the start line for the assault. The exhausted soldiers plunged straight into the attack, only to fall victim to German machine guns and British artillery fire. B ecause of the slow progress of the exhausted men, the lead elements of the 66th Division arrived at the start line twenty minutes late and had fallen far behind their supporting creeping artillery barrage. Their divisional commander, aware of the slow progress of the infantry, ordered the British gunners to bring the barrage back. Tragically the gunners did not establish the location of the forward elements of their troops before opening fire. Consequently, the artillery fire caused heavy casualties among the British soldiers as they struggled across no man’s land.12 Indirect fire weapons were also a major cause of friendly fire casualties during the Second World War. T he mobility of the armies that fought that war produced irregular frontages as units pushed forward or withdrew. This mobility made it difficult to keep track of the exact location of friendly units and complicated the delivery of accurate supporting fire. As a r esult, positions were often shelled by their own comrades. Even if the precise location of friendly troops was known, human error could still result in troops falling victim to friendly indirect fire. The incorrect charge bag could be used or there might be an error in the shell trajectory calculations. Friendly fire casualties also happened because of faulty ammunition, which could result in rounds falling short. On 7 August 1944, elements of the US 124th Infantry Regiment had one man killed and three wounded by the Japanese in a battle near the Driniumor River in New Guinea. But in that same battle, eight American soldiers were killed and fourteen wounded by faulty mortar ammunition that dropped short.13 Yet by the latter stages of the Second World War, the greater destructive power of air-delivered ordnance (a form of weapon which was in its infancy during the First World War) and the concentration in which it was dropped on the battlefield resulted in aerial bombing overtaking artillery as the greatest cause of friendly fire casualties. Mansur Abdulin recounted in his memoir of his service with the Red Army a

12 Regan, op. cit., pp.114-7; Charles Edwin Woodward Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918: Volume IV, The A.I.F. in France: 1917, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1935, pp.886-7. 13 Shrader, op. cit., p.11. 101

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friendly fire attack by Soviet fighters as his regiment advanced towards the Ukraine following the battle of Kursk. The Soviet planes overflew the marching column and then wheeled about and dived towards the troops.

Are they crazy? N ow I can see only the wings and the noses of the aircraft, pointing straight at me. Unwilling to believe that our planes are about to attack us, I — just in case — plunge through the basement floor window of the nearest house. I mmediately, I hear the sound of explosions in the street above my head. E arth, broken glass, plaster and bitter lime dust fall on my head. I thought that the thunder [and] smoke would never cease. A nd the planes, having fired all their missiles, started shooting us with their guns. They tore our regiment to pieces and then safely returned to their airfield … The street was like a trench turned into a communal grave, into which someone had dropped a mass of dead men and horses … 14

The soldiers of the Western democracies also had cause to fear their air forces. In early 1944 fierce German resistance at Cassino was holding up the Allied advance on Rome. Two previous assaults on t he main German position atop Monte Cassino had been repulsed by the defenders. On the morning of 15 March 1944, in preparation for a renewed assault by the troops of 2nd New Zealand and 4th Indian divisions, 435 Allied bombers dropped over 1,000 tons of high explosive bombs on the Cassino area. Regrettably, some of the bombs fell on friendly troops, resulting in twenty-eight Allied soldiers killed and 114 wounded. A subsequent investigation determined that a malfunction in a bomb rack on one of the lead aircraft resulted in forty bombs being dropped on friendly positions. Obscuration of the target by smoke and dust, and the resulting lack of specific aiming points, also contributed to some of the bombs going astray.15 The fratricide at Cassino was to prove a prelude for the much higher number of friendly fire casualties arising from the close air support for the breakouts from the Normandy beachheads. Operation Cobra was the code name given to the breakout of General Omar Bradley’s US First Army from the Normandy beachhead near St Lô in July 1944. The breakout was to be preceded by an immense aerial carpet-bombing of the surrounding area by the planes of the Eighth and N inth US Air Forces. The bombing would be conducted in three waves. Initially fighter-bombers would bomb the forward German positions. These would be followed by the less accurate heavy bombers, who would

14 Abdulin, op. cit., p.101. 15 John Keegan, The Second World War, Penguin Books, London, 1989, p.358; Shrader, op. cit., p.35. 102

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bomb the German defences for sixty minutes. Medium bombers would follow, and would attack the German rear areas for thirty minutes. The air effort represented the largest close air support operation yet attempted.16 General Bradley and the air planners reached an impasse during the planning for the breakout. The air planners wanted the American ground forces withdrawn 3,000 yards from the edge of the target area to minimise friendly fire casualties. Bradley wanted his ground troops to remain as close as possible to the German positions so they could advance upon t he Germans before they had t ime to recover from the bombing. Bradley stated that 800 yards was the maximum he would ask his men to fall back. Eventually a compromise was reached; the ground troops would pull back 1200 yards. But another problem had arisen.17 Bradley was concerned about the potential for friendly casualties due to the planes dropping their bombs short of the target and wanted the bombers to fly parallel to the St Lô t o Périers road, so that they did not overfly his ground troops. T he air planners disagreed. To achieve the required concentration of heavy bombers within the sixty minutes allocated they insisted that the bombers would need to approach at right angles to the target area. Thi s approach would minimise the effect of German counter-air fire and speed-up the passage of the aircraft over the target but it meant the bombing run-in would be over friendly positions. The risk to friendly ground troops would be i ncreased because the bombing method used by the air force was for formations of 12 to 14 aircraft to follow the flight path of the lead aircraft and conform to the bomb drop of the lead bombardier. If the lead bombardier of a formation dropped his bombs short invariably the remainder of the formation would bomb short as well. In the end the air force got its way—the bombers would approach perpendicular to the target area.18 After several postponements due to unsuitable weather, the attack was scheduled for the afternoon of 24 J uly. H owever, heavy cloud over the target area resulted in the bombers being recalled mid-flight. Many of the aircrews did not receive the abort message and most of the fighter-bombers and several hundred of the heavy and medium bombers continued on to the target. Because of poor visibility over the target area coupled with aircrew errors, a large number of bombs were dropped short, killing twenty-five American soldiers and w ounding 131, mainly from the US 30th Division. The attack was rescheduled for the following day.19

16 Shrader, op. cit., p.40. 17 Regan, op. cit., pp.202-3. 18 Shrader, op. cit., p.41; Regan, op. cit., pp.203-4. 19 Shrader, op. cit., p.42; Regan, op. cit., pp.205-6. 103

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Clearer weather enabled the full aerial attack to go in on the 25th, yet inaccurate bombing again resulted in US casualties. Visibility over the target area was reduced by a huge column of dust and s moke from the damage caused by the preceding fighter-bomber attack blown into the flight path of the heavy bombers by a wind coming from the south. R eference points were obscured, so the bombardiers assumed the dust clouds from the previous attack marked the target.20 Tragically for the friendly troops on t he ground, the wind was blowing the dust clouds towards the American positions. The war correspondent Ernie Pyle, located in the forward area with the American assault troops, provided a graphic account of the gripping fear felt by the ground troops, helpless to do anything about the approaching cataclysm.

As we watched, there crept into our consciousness a realisation that the windrows of exploding bombs were easing back towards us, flight by flight, instead of gradually easing forward, as the plan called for. T hen we were horrified by the suspicion that those machines, high in the sky and completely detached from us, were aiming their bombs at the smoke line on the ground— and a gentle breeze was driving the smoke line back over us! An indescribable kind of panic comes over us. We stood tensed in muscle and frozen in intellect, watching each flight approach and pass over, feeling trapped and completely helpless. And then all of an instant the universe became filled with a gigantic rattling as of huge ripe seeds in a mammoth dry gourd. I doubt that any of us had ever heard that sound before, but instinct told us what it was. It was bombs by the hundred, hurtling down through the air above us.21

In addition to the misidentification of the target area, other aircrew errors also endangered the friendly troops on the ground. In one instance the lead bombardier of a flight failed to synchronise his bombsight and so dropped his bombs short, with the other eleven bombers in his flight following suit. Because of this act of carelessness, twelve B-24s dropped almost five hundred high explosive bombs on f riendly troops. Overall, the short bombing resulted in the American 9th and 30th divisions suffering 111 killed and 490 wounded.22 A few weeks after Operation Cobra, on 8 August during Operation Totalise, it was the turn of the Canadian and Polish troops to be bombed by Allied aircraft. Sixty- five soldiers of the 1st Polish Armoured Division were killed and 250 wounded by the

20 ‘Who Goes There: Friend or Foe?’, Office of Technology Assessment, US Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., June 1993, p.14. 21 Ernie Pyle, Brave Men, Bison Books, 2001, p.462. 22 Shrader, op. cit., pp.40-1; Regan, op. cit., p.208. 104

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Allied air attack, while the Canadian North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment suffered around a hundr ed casualties.23 A week or so later, on 14 A ugust during Operation Tractable, the follow-up operation to Totalise, the Canadians again fell victim to inaccurate Allied bombing. On this occasion the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command attempted to provide close air support to a ground attack by Canadian and P olish troops on German positions near Falaise, resulting in 150 deaths due to friendly fire.24 What made aerial bombing so dangerous to friendly troops during the Second World War was the nature of the bombs used and the tactics employed to maximize their effectiveness. Once the bombs were dropped from the plane they fell according to their ballistic properties. They were very much ‘dumb’ bombs, in contrast to the ‘smart’ bombs that will be discussed later in the chapter and which brought a whole different range of threats to friendly troops on the ground. Because the aerial-delivered munitions of the Second World War were unguided and therefore inaccurate they were essentially an ar ea weapon and w ere used much in the same way as an ar tillery barrage during the First World War. That is, military planners would compensate for a lack of accuracy by increasing the volume of destructiveness unleashed. T his translated into the tactic of carpet-bombing (as had occurred at St Lo), whereby wave after wave of bombers would release their bomb loads over the target area. Over the next few decades, the accuracy of conventional aerial-delivered munitions would improve but so too would their individual destructive power. The ground troops that fought the Korean War also had cause to fear the approach of friendly aircraft. On the morning of 23 September 1950, two companies from the 1st Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders captured Hill 282 from the North Koreans. The North Koreans, however, held the adjacent Hill 388, which overlooked the Argyll’s position. The North Koreans began to shell the British positions and mounted a fierce counterattack. The British called for UN artillery support but none was available. However, the Argylls were able to identify the forming-up points from which the enemy were launching their attacks and requested a UN air strike. The British troops ensured their own positions were clearly marked from the air by laying out crimson and gold air recognition panels. S hortly after noon, three US Air Force (USAF) P-51 Mustangs responded to the request for air support. The pilots ignored the air recognition panels and, after circling Hill 282 t hree times, began their attack run, strafing with 20 m m cannons and t hen dropping napalm onto the helpless British

23 Terry Copp, ‘Reassessing Operation Totalize’, Legion Magazine (Canada), September/October 1999, viewed 6 August 2010, . 24 Fussell, Wartime, pp.18-9. 105

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soldiers. The air strike killed seventeen British soldiers and wounded a further seventy- six, most of whom received extensive burns.25 Fifteen years later, in November 1965, Hal Moore was facing a similar situation to the Argylls, with soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) threatening to overrun his battalion during the battle of Ia Drang in the Vietnam War. Moore and his troops also experienced the inherent danger of close air support when a USAF F-100 Super Sabre jet fighter released two napalm canisters over the battalion command post. ‘When the flames died down we all ran out into the burning grass’, recounted Joe Galloway, a reporter covering the battle. ‘Somebody yelled at me to grab the feet of one of the charred soldiers. When I got them, the boots crumbled and the flesh came off and I could feel the bare bones of his ankles in the palms of my hands. We carried him to the aid station. I can still hear their screams.’26 The burnt soldier died two days later. The key point from the preceding two accounts of friendly fire is that the main killing agent was napalm. Napalm incendiary bombs (M69) were first used by the US Army Air Force against German targets in France in July 1944. The development of napalm continued throughout the remainder of the Second World War, though it tended to be used more to attack area targets, such as the firebombing of cities, than attacking tactical targets on the battlefield. After the Second World War, particularly during the Korean and Vietnam wars, more effective means of aerial delivery meant that napalm could now be used against point targets, such as defended localities, as the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and H al Moore’s men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment could attest. The deadliest air fratricide incident of the Vietnam War was to occur on 19 November 1967 and involved the 2nd Battalion of the American 503rd Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade who were assaulting Hill 875 near Dak To, South Vietnam. The NVA had turned Hill 875 into a formidable fortress, complete with deep bunkers connected by tunnels. The attacking American paratroopers were subjected to withering rifle and machine gun fire from the NVA positions. Fu rthermore, the NVA counterattacked towards the battalion’s reserve company, the remnants of which were driven up the hill towards the two assaulting companies. The besieged Americans formed a defensive perimeter and attempted to hold off the attacking NVA with the assistance of indirect fire and close air support. Tragically, around 8 pm, a USAF jet dropped a 500-pound bomb inside the US perimeter, killing forty-two American soldiers and wounding forty-

25 ‘Friendly Fire on Hill 282’, viewed 6 August 2010, . 26 Moore and Galloway, op. cit., p.211. 106

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five. This single friendly fire incident caused almost half of the total fatalities suffered by the 2nd Battalion during the battle of Dak To.27 The bomb dropped on the American paratroopers at Dak To was a MK-80 series free-fall, nonguided, general-purpose bomb that was developed in the 1950s. This incident illustrated the tragic consequences for friendly forces posed by the increased explosive yield of a single bomb. Although these incidents were horrific, relatively few deaths (exact figures are not available) among the 58,000 Americans killed in the Vietnam War were officially attributed to friendly fire. Fratricide would briefly flare-up as an issue before being lost in the general clutter of doleful stories flowing out of the war. Shrader, whose study of fratricide was completed in 1982 and therefore did not incorporate the friendly fire incidents of the 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 Iraq War and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, noted the technological advances in air-ground communications and accuracy of ordnance since the Second World War were, ‘offset in part by the higher speed of attacking jet aircraft, which demanded of the pilot extremely quick reactions susceptible to error’. He concluded, ‘Since 1945 the capabilities of aircraft have seemingly outstripped the ability of pilots to control them accurately enough to avoid the occasional destruction of friendly ground troops’.28 An analysis of subsequent aerial fratricide involving the USAF, particularly those that occurred during the Gulf and Iraq wars, supports this assertion. The proportionally high number of fratricide casualties during the 1991 Gulf War thrust the issue of friendly fire into the public spotlight. One of the iconic images of this war was the grief-stricken face of a young American sergeant (Ken Kozakiewicz) taken at the moment he l earns the body bag next to him contains the remains of his best friend, Andy Alaniz. Kozakiewicz and Alaniz’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle, part of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, had been mistaken for an Iraqi vehicle and was fired upon by an American M1A1 Abrams tank. What made this loss to friendly fire an even greater tragedy was that it occurred on the last day of the war. The Pentagon, in its final report to Congress, identified twenty-eight incidents of American-on-American fratricide during the 1991 Gulf War, most of which were attributed to human error. However, as will be shown, a m ajor contributing factor to these incidents was the employment of technologically advanced weapon systems, none of which had been used during the Vietnam War. At least thirty-five of the 148 Americans deaths in combat during this war (out of a deployed force of approximately

27 Atkinson, op. cit., p.315. 28 Shrader, op. cit., p.62. 107

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540,000) were due to friendly fire—approximately one-quarter of the total combat deaths. Additionally, 72 out of 467 A mericans (15%) wounded in combat were attributed to friendly fire. The next section will examine in detail a num ber of friendly fire incidents that occurred during the 1991 Gulf War to determine whether a correlation can be dr awn between the increasingly sophisticated weapon systems used in this war and the high proportion of friendly fire casualties. The American forces suffered their first fratricide casualties two weeks before the start of the ground offensive. The evening of 29 January 1991 saw the first engagement between the US and I raqi forces. Tragically, the opening salvo of the Americans would kill their own comrades rather than the enemy. The Marines of Task Force Shepherd, positioned just west of the Saudi Arabian border with Kuwait, had established a series of observation posts (OP) along the border. Just after dusk on the 29th, one of these posts reported Iraqi armour moving about on the Kuwaiti side of the border. Around 8 pm, approximately fifty Iraqi armoured vehicles were detected closing in on OP 4, which was manned by only a lightly armed Marine reconnaissance team. The Marines managed to hit an Iraqi tank with a l ight anti-tank weapon, temporarily stalling the Iraqi attack. The Marines then sent up a s tar cluster flare; the signal for requesting immediate assistance. The Task Force’s Delta Company, consisting of twenty Light Armoured Vehicles (LAV), responded.29 Four LAVs moved forward and positioned themselves approximately 2 miles west of the sand berm that marked the border. The LAVs were equipped with thermal sights and TOW (anti-tank) missiles. The vehicles were positioned line abreast, approximately three-quarters of a m ile apart. T he leftmost vehicle of the four (designated Green 1) reported that its gunner had detected what appeared to be a tank at a range of two miles to their right front. The commander of the four LAVs was skeptical of this report, as this target indication would have placed the Iraqi tank on the west side of the berm and meant that the enemy had already moved into Saudi Arabia. At that time, the four LAVs had not received any Iraqi fire. The commander asked the gunner to confirm the target. The gunner insisted that through his thermal sights he could see a tank at a range of 1.5 to 2 miles. Two of the other LAVs also reported that they had Iraqi armour within range. The LAV commander radioed the Delta Company commander and informed him that they were about to engage. The three LAVs opened fire. T wo of the TOW missiles flew due east and em bedded themselves harmlessly into the sand berm, falling well short of the Iraqi tanks, which at that time

29 Atkinson, op. cit., pp.198-200. 108

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were still in Kuwait. The third TOW missile, fired by the leftmost LAV (Green 1), flew south by southeast and struck the LAV to its right (Green 2). The missile sliced through the rear troop hatch of Green 2, detonating the fourteen TOW missiles stacked in its storage rack. Green 2 ex ploded in a m assive fireball, instantly killing the four Marines inside. Regrettably, these were not to be the only deaths from friendly fire that Delta Company suffered that night.30 As the main element of the Iraqi force advanced into Saudi Arabia, heading for the town of Khafji, Delta Company was fighting a desperate rearguard action in the vicinity of OP 4, with close air support being provided by the A-10s of the USAF 355th Tactical Fighter Squadron. One of the A-10s acquired an Iraqi tank with its targeting system and released a Maverick anti-tank missile. However, instead of locking automatically onto the tank, the missile malfunctioned and dived straight down, striking one of Delta Company’s LAVs. The warhead punched through the thin armour of the LAV’s roof and detonated inside the troop bay. Miraculously, the force of the explosion flung the driver clear of the vehicle and although badly burnt, he survived. Seven of his comrades were not so fortunate. Delta Company had been in combat for four hours and eleven Marines had been killed—all by friendly fire.31 The next American fratricide incident occurred two weeks later. On 16 Feb ruary 1991, the Coalition forces were manoeuvring into position in the northern deserts of Saudi Arabia in preparation for the launch of the ground offensive. Task Force Iron, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James L. Hillman, had pushed 3 miles into Iraq to establish a protective screen for the 1st Infantry Division. Positioned on the Task Force’s right flank were some reconnaissance vehicles, including a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and a M113 armoured personnel carrier (APC). At 11.30 pm on the night of 16th, the American forces reported hitting an Iraqi vehicle with a TOW missile. Hillman’s troops were spread out over a 20-mile front and he became concerned that the Iraqi forces might outflank him during the night. He therefore requested some close air support from the Apache helicopter gunships of the division’s aviation brigade. The divisional commander, Major General Thomas G. Rhame, had earlier ordered his subordinate commanders to avoid direct participation in the fighting so that they could more readily exercise command and control over their troops. Despite this order, the commander of the Apache battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Hayles, chose to lead the mission. Hayles later told Army investigators he made this decision because it was his battalion’s first night mission flown in support of US troops

30 ibid., p.200. 31 ibid., pp.206-7. 109

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in combat, flying conditions were poor and he felt that he was the battalion’s most qualified pilot.32 Just after midnight, Hayles’ wingman noticed two vehicles that appeared to be located a mile north of Hillman’s screen. However, the Apaches had drifted northeast instead of flying due n orth as they had i ntended. C onsequently, they were flying virtually parallel to the American screen rather than perpendicular, as they had assumed. Hayles had also misread the Apache’s navigational data on his fire control computer, which would have informed him that the targets below were at a di fferent grid reference to that where the American troops had earlier engaged the Iraqi forces with the TOW missile. Hayles saw several figures moving between the vehicles and concluded that they were Iraqi soldiers shifting equipment from one vehicle to another. He assumed that one of the vehicles was probably the vehicle hit earlier by the TOW. He conferred with Hillman who stated, ‘Yeah, those are enemy. Go ahead and take them out’. H ayles’ wingman, however, noticed the discrepancy in the grid reference given by Hayles and that shown on his own fire control computer. He suggested that the two Apaches move in closer so that they could verify the target. When the Apaches were around 2 miles from the target, Hillman came back up on the radio and asked, ‘Can you still engage those two vehicles?’. Hayles replied, ‘Roger. I could shoot those easy’. But Hayles still had doubts about the identity of the target and commented, ‘Boy, I’m going to tell you, it’s hard to pull this trigger’.33 Hayles attempted to engage the targets with the Apache’s 30 mm cannon, but it jammed after firing three rounds. He then fired off a Hellfire missile at the larger of the two vehicles. As the missile was released, Hayles revealed that he still harboured some doubts about whether they were friendly or enemy vehicles, commenting, ‘I hope they’re enemy because here it comes’. Hayles then fired another Hellfire into the second vehicle, which was attempting to withdraw. The other Apache supported Hayles’ attack with cannon fire. Moments later a voice came up on the radio and stated that friendly vehicles may have been hit. Hayles responded, ‘Roger. I was afraid of that, I was really afraid of that’. T he Apaches ceased fire and t hen Hayles commented, ‘I hope it’s not friendlies I just blew up because they’re all dead’. T hey were ‘friendlies’ but fortunately some survived the attack. T he missile that hit the Bradley killed two soldiers and wounded three, while the missile that struck the APC wounded three soldiers. The next day Hayles was relieved of command for violating

32 ibid., pp.317-8. 33 ibid., pp.317-9. 110

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Rhame’s order by choosing to lead the mission.34 Of the three fratricide incidents discussed in the preceding section, the common elements were that all involved high-tech weaponry (TOW, Maverick and Hellfire anti- tank guided missiles) delivered by advanced weapon platforms (LAV, A-10 and Apache). Two of the attacks were initiated at a c onsiderable range (the A-10 and Apache attack), which made positive identification problematic (though this was clearly not the primary cause of the A-10 attack), while the third was initiated on the basis of a target identification of approximately two miles away. All casualties arose from the detonation of a single weapon. In relation to friendly fire incidents overall, of the twenty-eight US fratricide incidents, ground-to-ground incidents were the most prevalent, the sixteen ground-to- ground incidents accounting for twenty-four American deaths and fifty-seven American wounded. The majority of the ground-to-ground incidents concerned crews of armoured vehicles being struck by advanced high-velocity non-explosive rounds that relied on kinetic energy to destroy their target. The Pentagon report noted the number of casualties arising from these incidents would have been much higher if not for the built-in survivability features of the M1A1 Abrams tank, such as fire suppression systems, blow-out panels, hardened armour and protective liners. S ignificantly, only one M1A1 crewman was killed by friendly fire, while fifteen of the twenty-one army personnel killed by friendly fire were crewmen of the lightly armoured Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV). Seven tank crewmen were wounded in friendly fire incidents compared to forty-nine BFV crewmen.35 Air-to-ground friendly fire accounted for the remainder of the fratricide deaths and injuries (eleven killed and fifteen wounded). There were nine air-to-ground incidents: four involving USAF aircraft, one a Marine aircraft, one an Army Apache attack helicopter (AH-64), and three High Speed Anti-Irradiation Missiles (HARM) fired from undetermined sources. These missiles acquired as their target US radars mounted on ships and trucks, killing one Marine and wounding three. There was also one ship-to-ship, one shore-to-ship and one ground-to-air friendly fire engagement, but these incidents did not result in any casualties. In relation to American matériel losses, friendly fire accounted for twenty-seven of the thirty-five Abrams tanks and BFVs destroyed during the war.36 Of the twenty-eight fratricide incidents, approximately forty per cent were attributed to target misidentification (as had occurred with the attack by

34 ibid., pp.319-20. 35 Final Report to Congress, ‘Conduct of the Persian Gulf War’, April 1992, p.591 (can be viewed at ). 36 ibid. 111

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Hayles’ Apache helicopter on t he vehicles of Task Force Iron), while coordination problems accounted for around thirty per cent (these were closely aligned to target misidentification, an ex ample of which was the TOW attack on the LAV discussed earlier). Of the remaining nine incidents, six were because of technical and/or ordnance malfunctions, such as the malfunctioning Maverick anti-tank missile that killed the Marines of Task Force Shepherd, while three did not have sufficient evidence to assign a specific cause.37 Despite the high percentage of American casualties due t o friendly fire, the odds of being killed by the Americans were even greater if you were a member of the British contingent sent to the Gulf. Over a t hird of the British fatalities during the ground combat phase resulted from friendly fire (nine of twenty-four). All nine fatalities came from a s ingle fratricide incident on 26 February 1991, when two USAF A-10 Thunderbolts shot up a column of thirty-seven Warrior Infantry Fighting Vehicles from Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers Battle Group. I n addition to the nine deaths, eleven British soldiers were seriously wounded in the American attack.38 The attack by the USAF A-10s on the British vehicles occurred mid-afternoon in clear weather with good visibility. The British vehicles were all displaying the standard Coalition identifying markers: fluorescent panels on t he upper surface to facilitate identification from the air and an inverted black ‘V’ marked on the sides of the vehicles in infra-red paint to facilitate identification from the ground (as well as from the air). The British contingent had halted to conduct a reorganisation on the edge of their next objective and the British soldiers had dismounted from their vehicles. The contingent had stopped in the vicinity of some former Iraqi defensive positions, which were littered with abandoned Iraqi vehicles and equipment. During the halt, some Royal Engineers prepared some nearby abandoned Iraqi artillery pieces for demolition. When the charges had been s et, the Charlie Company Commander ordered his men to re-enter their vehicles, close the vehicle’s hatches and move away from the gun emplacements. 8 Platoon had j ust started to comply with this order when suddenly one Warrior (callsign 22) exploded into flames. A second Warrior (callsign 23) immediately moved to the aid of callsign 22. Some of callsign 23’s crewmembers had just begun to move the casualties to the first aid post when callsign 23 also exploded. As the explosions were so violent and unexpected, it was initially thought that the vehicles had detonated some mines. However, the British formation’s Assistant Divisional Air Liaison Officer

37 ibid., p.588. 38 Atkinson, op. cit., p.464. 112

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(DALO) swiftly realised that the location of the explosions corresponded with an attack position reported by the two A-10s.39 The virtually flat, featureless terrain of the Iraqi desert was criss-crossed by dozens of tracks leading in all directions and i t was therefore difficult for pilots to confirm their bearings. Shortly before the attack on the British Warriors, the USAF had conducted two air strikes with A-10 and F-16 aircraft against Iraqi armoured vehicles located 12.5 miles to the east of the British position. The Assistant DALO requested a follow-up attack on the Iraqi armoured vehicles by the two A-10s. He later insisted that he had radioed to the A-10 pilots the same target coordinates used for the previous air strike, which should have placed the A-10 strike some distance to the east of the British Warriors. Both pilots denied receiving any instructions from the Assistant DALO other than the assurance that there were no C oalition troops within six miles of the designated target. The A-10 pilots identified what they assumed was the target area, based on a phy sical description given to them by a depar ting F-16 aircraft from the previous air strike. They detected what they thought were about fifty Iraqi T54/55 tanks and support vehicles moving north. Significantly, these vehicles were within six miles of the point that the pilots had i dentified as their target. The lead aircraft made two passes, at 15,000 and 10,000 feet, and observed the vehicles through binoculars. As the pilot did not identify any friendly vehicle markings, the A-10s commenced their attack. B oth aircraft fired a M averick missile and consequently two vehicles were destroyed.40 The British 4th Brigade, to which the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers belonged, was in contact with the enemy for fifty-four of the hundred hours of ground combat in the 1991 Gulf War. The brigade advanced three hundred and fifty kilometers, destroyed sixty Iraqi tanks, ninety Iraqi armoured personnel carriers and thirty-seven Iraqi artillery pieces. The brigade suffered no losses to enemy action. All of its fatalities arose from the USAF attack on the Warriors.41 A subsequent British Board of Inquiry determined that no blame or responsibility for the incident could be at tributed to the Fusiliers or the Assistant DALO, who requested the attack. The A-10 pilots stated that they had attacked on the basis of the information passed to them by a previous flight and bec ause of their positive identification of the target as enemy vehicles. The board concluded the Warriors were

39 General Sir Peter de la Billiere, op. cit., pp.292-293; Written statement by the Minister for Armed Forces, Archie Hamilton, 24 July 1991, Hansard (House of Commons Debates: Written Answers to Questions), Column 705. 40 Hamilton statement, op. cit.; Atkinson, op. cit., p.464. 41 de la Billiere, op. cit., pp.299-300. 113

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displaying the correct inverted ‘V’ recognition symbol and the required fluorescent panels but that open hatches or equipment carried outside the vehicles could have obscured some of these panels. Fur thermore, the board noted that although a reconnaissance flight had observed the panels at 6000 feet, this was below the operating height of the A-10s. The board did not firmly establish whether the A-10 pilots were at fault. However, its report concluded:

On the basis of the evidence before it, the Board was unable to establish why the attacked Warrior vehicles were misidentified by the A-10 pilots as enemy T54/55 tanks, particularly in view of the previous identification runs at 8,000 and 15,000 feet … The Board remarked that it was clear all UK and USAF personnel involved were striving to achieve their individual tasks to the best of their abilities in a f ast-moving battle. T he Board thought it inevitable that, at some stage, difficulties may arise when individuals are under such pressure.42

When examining the attack on the British warriors, common elements with the other fratricide incidents from the 1991 Gulf War already discussed can be seen. Both of the attacks on the British Warriors and the LAV of Delta Company were by A-10 aircraft with the friendly fire deaths arising from the strike of a single Maverick anti-tank missile (the actual weapon was likely the AGM-65G, which entered operational service in 1989).43 That is, the deaths resulted from a single high-destructive yield, highly sophisticated modern weapon. Moreover, the attacks were prosecuted from a distance that made positive identification of the vehicles as friend or foe problematic. It is important, however, to keep the number of friendly fire incidents, particularly air-to-ground incidents, in perspective. The Coalition ground forces were provided with an unprecedented level of close air support (CAS) during the 1991 Gulf War. An analysis of all CAS missions conducted during the war credits CAS aircraft (generally A-10s and F-16s) with the destruction of 3500 Iraqi tanks, 2400 armoured vehicles (other than tanks) and 2600 artillery pieces.44 During the brief ground combat phase, approximately 4500 CAS sorties were flown, only a f ew of which resulted in fratricide.45 The military power of the Coalition, particularly air power, overwhelmed the Iraqi forces and brought about their rapid collapse. The lack of sustained enemy resistance,

42 Written statement by the Minister for Armed Forces, Archie Hamilton, 24 July 1991, Hansard (House of Commons Debates: Written Answers to Questions), Column 706. 43 Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles entry on AGM-65, viewed 5 April 2010, . 44 Stewart M. Powell, ‘Friendly Fire’, Airforce, Vol.74, No.12, December 1991, p.58. 45 ibid., p.60. 114

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and consequently the short duration of the ground conflict phase, helped minimise Coalition casualties. Studies published by the Pentagon contend that the brief period of ground combat and the low number of casualties to enemy fire meant that the proportion of fratricide casualties was much higher in the 1991 Gulf War than in previous wars; the Pentagon’s supposition being that if the ground combat phase had lasted longer, the experience level of the troops would have increased and t herefore the fear and i nexperience that facilitates fratricide would have correspondingly decreased.46 While this hypothesis was, and will remain speculative, what can be quantified is the thoroughness of the investigation of each suspected fratricide incident. B attle damage assessment teams were greatly assisted in determining which equipment losses were due t o friendly fire by the fact that only the American Abrams tank fired depleted uranium anti-armour rounds. These rounds left trace elements of uranium in destroyed vehicles, clearly identifying the vehicle had been destroyed by friendly fire. This radiological evidence was complemented by interviews of witnesses and the scrutinizing of the radio transmissions of aircrew and ground controllers, along with studying the target video footage taken by US attack helicopters and fighter aircraft.47 Troop inexperience was undoubtedly a contributing factor for a number of the fratricide incidents that occurred during the 1991 Gulf War. But the principal reason for the high number of friendly fire deaths in this conflict was the nature of the combat. The speed and manoeuvrability of modern, technologically advanced armoured forces resulted in a much more fragmented battlefield than the linear battle lines of the past. Consequently, Coalition units would unexpectedly come upon other Coalition units, or they would become intermingled with Iraqi forces. When this factor is combined with decreased visibility because of dust, darkness or smoke, and a tendency to shoot first and verify identity later, it is little wonder that there were fratricide incidents. Technological advances in weaponry were a major factor in the high number of such incidents during the 1991 G ulf War. Coalition armoured vehicles and at tack aircraft were able to engage at ranges that often precluded precise identification of friend or foe. A s one U S Army report into the fratricide incidents put it, the basic problem was that: ‘We can shoot farther than we can see’.48 For example, Abrams tanks using thermal sights were able to engage targets up to 3 kilometres away. A t

46 Final Report to Congress, ‘Conduct of the Persian Gulf War’, April 1992, p.589; Major Bradford G. Washabaugh, ‘Friendly Fire: Time For Action’, viewed 6 August 2010, . 47 ibid. 48 Colonel David H. Hackworth, ‘Friendly Fire Casualties’, Marine Corps Gazette, Vol 76, No.3, March 1992, p.46. 115

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such a range, while state-of-the-art sights can identify general targets, they often lack the resolution to determine vehicle type. Indeed, positive identification beyond seven hundred metres is difficult using thermal sights.49 Additionally, standoff weaponry, when coupled with the fear that pervades the battlefield, can bring about a tendency to shoot before positive identification has been made but, more importantly, before the enemy can fire at you. The Pentagon’s final report to Congress on the 1991 Gulf War noted that tank crews were routinely held to a standard of achieving a round on target in less than ten seconds after the target was detected, with a well-trained crew having the initial round downrange in about six seconds. The report commented that the history of tank-on-tank combat demonstrates, ‘when opponents have equally sophisticated fire control and equally lethal munitions, success usually belongs to the crew that fire first’.50 In such an env ironment, with extreme pressure to fire quickly, ambiguous targets are likely to be assumed to be hostile until proven friendly. A report to Congress on the fratricide incidents noted that target misidentification was responsible for more of these incidents than any other factor in the war.51 A further contributing factor, as noted, was the increased lethality of individual weapons. Lieutenant General Charles A. Horner, the air commander during the 1991 Gulf War, noted the effect of a single modern weapon going astray was much greater than in previous wars. H e commented, ‘If an i ncident happened i n World War II or Korea, you had a guy with a shrapnel wound. Now you have large numbers of KIA and WIA.’52 In addition to the standard battlefield coordination measures, such as phase lines and r estricted fire areas, various temporary fixes were implemented during the 1991 Gulf War in an attempt to mitigate fratricide incidents, though these fixes all had potentially fatal flaws. For example, the standard fluorescent orange air recognition marker panels (VS-17) were to be attached to the upper surfaces of Coalition vehicles. However, these panels were not visible from 10,000 feet, where most of the fixed-wing aircraft flew (the use of these panels did not prevent the British Warriors from being attacked by the American A-10s). Additionally, when peering through the thermal sight of a main battle tank, at ranges exceeding 1.2 miles all the crewman would see is a small hot spot. The tank gunner would therefore have great difficulty identifying the inverted ‘V’ marked on the sides of Coalition vehicles with infrared reflective tape or

49 Atkinson, op. cit., p.316. 50 Final Report to Congress, ‘Conduct of the Persian Gulf War’, April 1992, p.590. 51 Who Goes There: Friend or Foe?’, Office of Technology Assessment, op. cit., p.38. 52 Powell, op. cit. 116

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paint to identify them.53 A more promising development arose out of an intense government/industry effort directed to occur by the Joint Chiefs of Staff following the first air-to-ground fratricide incidents. Within twenty days of the request from the Joint Chiefs, the Anti- Fratricide Identification Device (AFID), also known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) light, was made available in theatre in limited numbers. The AFID was a battery-powered directional infrared beacon that was principally designed to identify friendly vehicles from the air. The beacon was visible through standard night vision goggles from up to 5 miles away. The AFID had a protective collar to shield its flashing infrared light from disclosing the vehicle’s position to hostile ground forces. Unfortunately, by the time these devices arrived in theatre (26 February), the war had almost ended. Similarly, fifteen thousand ‘Budd Lights’ (a small battery powered blinking infrared light intended to be c arried by dismounted infantry for identification purposes)54 were bought off–the-shelf and shipped to the Gulf, only to arrive on the day the war concluded.55 A device that did help to reduce fratricide incidents during the 1991 Gulf War was the Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. The GPS receiver provided units with the exact coordinates of their location. This information, when coupled with the exact location of adjacent units, helped headquarters control manoeuvre forces and increased the situational awareness of the friendly forces, to say nothing of allowing units to accurately navigate long distances over virtually featureless deserts. Additionally, greater situational awareness of both the location of artillery units, as well as the location of the units they were supporting, mitigated friendly losses due t o misdirected artillery fire. S ome five thousand GPS receivers were use in the field during the 1991 G ulf War. Wider distribution of GPS receivers would probably have reduced the number of fratricide incidents by increasing the overall situational awareness of the Coalition force.56 Although briefly a high priority issue following the publication of the high number of fratricide incidents during the 1991 Gulf War, the focus of the Pentagon soon shifted elsewhere, with high-tech anti-fratricide programs becoming a casualty of shifting Pentagon funding priorities. One key program involved attempting to create an

53 Hackworth, Marine Corps Gazette, p.47. 54 Refer to Chapter 11 of Dexter Filkins, The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror, Vintage Books, London, 2009, for an example of how the use of an infrared strobe beacon undoubtedly saved a number of American soldiers from becoming friendly fire casualities during the battle of Fallujah, Iraq in November 2004. 55 Tom Clancy with General Fred Franks, Jr., Into the Storm: A Study in Command, Berkley Books, New York, 1998, p.390; Hackworth, Marine Corps Gazette, p.47. 56 Final Report to Congress, ‘Conduct of the Persian Gulf War’, April 1992, p.592. 117

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electronic combat identification system, known as the Battlefield Combat Identification System (BCIS). The army’s intent was to equip all combat vehicles with a microwave device that utilised call-and-response technology similar to the Caller ID devices on cellphones. A receiver on t he combat vehicle would seek out a coded ‘friend-or-foe’ signal from the target before firing. Approximately US$180 million was spent on research for the BCIS before the Pentagon cancelled the program in 2002. The Pentagon claimed the system was ineffective, that there were concerns about its interoperability with coalition forces, and at US$50,000 a unit, it was cost prohibitive.57 Following the cancellation of the BCIS program, development continued on various situational awareness systems (such as Force XXI Battle Command Brigade- and-Below and Blue Force Tracker) as a component of the so-called ‘digital battlefield’. These systems relied on signals sent from friendly equipment being relayed by either radio or satellite to a c entral computer. The central computer plotted the location of friendly vehicles on a m ap and transmitted this information back to the vehicles in the field. The location of their own and adjacent friendly vehicles were displayed as blue icons on a c omputer screen inside the vehicle (and at the various HQs), thereby increasing the situational awareness of the ground forces and reducing the potential for fratricide. But the only formation fully equipped with this system, the US Army’s ‘digitized’ 4th Infantry Division, which in the original campaign plan was tasked to open a northern front into Iraq from Turkey, mostly remained out of combat in the 2003 Iraq War. The Blue Force Tracker system was made available to some other units in Iraq but this was on a l imited basis. H owever, in contrast to the 1991 Gulf War, all US military vehicles were equipped with a GPS receiver, greatly facilitating their ability to accurately navigate and t o determine their position when advancing across the desert.58 Although the high-tech identification devices fell victim to budget cuts, a number of low-tech devices were developed in the decade or so between the two Gulf Wars. The US Army developed Combat Identification Panels (CIPS). CIPS were the primary means of ground-to-ground identification for US Army and M arine Corps vehicles during the 2003 Iraq War. These thermal recognition panels were designed to fit specific vehicles types. They were either fastened with Velcro against the vehicle’s exterior or placed inside a bracket mounted on the vehicle’s exterior. The 24-inch x 30- inch panels were covered with a low emissivity thermal tape and appeared as a

57 Peter Pae, ‘Friendly Fire Still a Problem’, Los Angeles Times, 16 May 2003, viewed 6 August 2010, ; Mark Mazzetti, ‘Friendly Fire, U.S. News & Weekly Report, 17 March 2003, pp.17-20. 58 Mazzetti, op. cit., pp.17-20. 118

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contrasting cold spot on a hot image when viewed through thermal imagining targeting sights. Each CIPS set consisted of three to five panels depending on the vehicle type, which were installed so that they were visible from the front, the rear and the sides. However, terrain features, the adoption of defilade firing positions and obstacles will break up the thermal image of the vehicle and therefore decrease the effectiveness of the CIPS.59 Air-to-ground vehicle identification was facilitated using Thermal Identification Panels (TIP). E ach TIP was a 4 -foot square panel made out of soft cloth that was attached to the upper surface of the vehicle. The TIP worked on the same principle as the CIP, that is, to provide a c ontrasting cool spot on a hot surface when viewed through thermal sights. Vehicles were also equipped with an infrared beacon known as a Phoenix Junior Light. These superseded the Budd Lights used during the 1991 Gulf War. The beacons flashed every two seconds and were designed to be visible through night-vision goggles. They were mounted on vehicles or carried by foot-borne infantry. Individual soldiers also wore 1-inch Glo Tape squares, which appeared as glowing spots when viewed through night vision goggles, to facilitate identification by friendly forces.60 Another complicating factor in the efforts to decrease the number of fratricide incidents was the growing preference for coalition operations. The various national contingents of a coalition may have different equipment, and some elements may even have similar equipment to that used by the enemy. The presence of so many equipment types greatly complicates the process of battlefield identification. What remains to be seen, however, was whether the high proportion of friendly fire incidents during the 1991 G ulf War was an hi storical anomaly that largely arose from the defining characteristics of this war, principally the force overmatch between the Coalition and the Iraqi military that brought the ground combat phase to a speedy conclusion. Conversely, the 1991 Gulf War might be found to have been indicative of the expected proportion of friendly fire casualties from similar conflicts in the future. Notwithstanding the lessons supposedly learned during the 1991 Gulf War, and the subsequent funding directed towards developing technological solutions to minimise casualties from friendly fire, fratricide incidents, again largely arising from the use of technologically advanced weapon systems, beset the forces engaged in the

59 Michael Peck, ‘Desert Setting Tough on Combat ID Systems’, National Defense, August 2003, viewed 6 August 2010 . 60 ibid. 119

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Global War on Terror. Examination of a few fratricide incidents from this conflict will help illustrate the similarities between these incidents and the friendly fire incidents of the 1991 Gulf War already discussed in this chapter. Just before 2 am on 18 April 2002, four Canadian soldiers were killed and eight wounded when a USAF F-16 dropped a 500 -pound bomb on a ni ghttime live-fire military exercise. T he incident occurred at a firing range about 9 miles south of the Kandahar airfield in southeastern Afghanistan. The soldiers belonged to the paratroop company of the 3rd Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group.61 The deaths triggered a national outpouring of grief and anger in Canada, particularly because these were the first Canadian deaths in combat since the Korean War some fifty years earlier. Separate Canadian and American boards of inquiry were convened to investigate the incident. In a statement to the press, Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Ray Henault, commented, ‘My understanding is that there was no hostile activity in the area that would have created this incident. How this sort of thing could happen is a mystery to us.’62 The inquiries determined that the two American F-16 pilots were solely at fault for the death of the Canadians and found that the pilots had violated the rules of engagement and engaged in an inappropriate use of lethal force.63 The death of the four Canadians on 18 A pril 2002 was not the first fratricide incident to involve the USAF during the Afghan campaign, nor was it the deadliest. The first such incident occurred on 26 November 2001, when five US Special Forces soldiers were wounded and six allied Afghan fighters killed by an F/A-18 air strike near Mazar-e-Sharif. The aircraft responded to a request for close air support from a Forward Air Controller on the ground and dropped a pr ecision-guided bomb that exploded near the friendly troops. The Pentagon concluded that the incident was the result of ‘procedural errors in the transmission and application of friendly and enem y coordinates’.64 The deadliest fratricide incident occurred on 5 December 2001; when a USAF

61 ‘Canada mourns “friendly fire” deaths’, BBC News, 18 April 2002, viewed 6 August 2010, ; ‘US: Friendly fire pilot reported being fired upon. Initial permission to drop bomb was denied, officials say’, CNN.com, 18 April 2002, viewed 6 August 2010, . 62 Dave Moniz, ‘Pentagon probes bombing that killed 4 Canadians’, USA Today, 19 April 2002. 63 ‘Indepth: Friendly Fire’, CBC News, 6 June 2005, viewed 6 August 2010, . 64 Sergeant 1st Class Kathleen T. Rhem, ‘Two U.S. Troops Die in 2nd “Friendly Fire” Accident’, DefenseLINK News, 5 December 2001, viewed 6 August 2010, . 120

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B-52 bomber dropped a 2,000-pound precision-guided bomb about 100 metres from a position manned by members of the 3rd Battalion, US 5th Special Forces Group. At the time, the US soldiers were directing air strikes against Taliban forces to the north of Kandahar. Three Special Forces soldiers were killed and nineteen wounded by the blast. T he US soldiers were fighting alongside members of the Afghan opposition forces, five of whom were killed and eighteen wounded, including the Afghan Interim Authority Leader, Hamid Karzai (elected President of Afghanistan in October 2004). The bomb had a s atellite-based guidance system, therefore US Defense officials theorised that either the weapon system malfunctioned or the wrong coordinates were sent by the ground force or entered by the B-52 crew.65 The US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in a comment that probably did not provide much solace to the relatives of the dead and wounded, rationalised that, ‘A very smart weapon, a g ood weapon might work 85 to 90 per cent of the time. The rest of the time it doesn’t work right. Now that’s a very good percentage. But it means that there is one out of 10 that is not going to do what it was intended to do.’66 The dangers of malfunctioning munitions were brought home to Ade Orchard of the Royal Navy by an i ncident that occurred when his squadron of Harriers took part in a range practice in Oman prior to deploying to Afghanistan in 2006. He noted that all bombs landed where they were meant to, except one.

The odd one out was a Paveway 2,000lb laser-guided bomb that failed in flight and ceased responding to directional guidance. Far from impacting the target, it drifted well off course, ending up almost on the edge of the range boundary, and the outcome could have been disastrous. It was a s harp reminder to us that smart munitions are only smart munitions when they work as advertised. We all knew very well that if a bi g 2,000lb high-explosive bomb went awry in Afghanistan it could be catastrophic.67

There were a number of similarities between the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War. The enemy had not changed, nor had the major partners in the coalition. Tragically, another similarity was that during the combat phase several British soldiers

65 ‘Bomb kills 3 U.S. soldiers, 5 Afghan fighters, CNN.com, 5 December 2001, viewed 6 August 2010, . 66 ‘Bodies of two Green Berets arrive in Germany’, CNN.com, 6 December 2001, viewed 6 August 2010, . 67 Orchard, op. cit., pp.35-6. 121

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were killed by the Americans—their allies. Mid-afternoon on 28 M arch 2003, a USAF A-10 aircraft (part of a t wo aircraft patrol) attacked two Scimitar armoured reconnaissance vehicles belonging to Delta Squadron of the Blues and Royals, Household Cavalry Regiment. The Scimitars were part of a five-vehicle patrol conducting a recce along the Shatt al-Arab river, about 25 miles to the north of the Iraqi city of Basra. T he patrol had paused when, without warning, the two lead vehicles were attacked by an A-10. Both vehicles were hit by 30 mm rounds and caught fire. One British soldier was killed and four wounded in the attack. A sixth soldier escaped the burning vehicles without injury.68 The attack generated an irate public response. A number of reports in the British press stated that some of the wounded soldiers were calling for the A-10 pilot to be prosecuted for manslaughter. The commander of one o f the Scimitars, Lance Corporal Steven Gerrard, speaking from his hospital bed, angrily remarked:

I can command my vehicle. I can keep it from being attacked. What I have not been trained to do is look over my shoulder to see whether an A merican is shooting at me … He [the pilot] had absolutely no regard for human life. I believe he was a cowboy. There were four or five that I noticed earlier and this one had broken off and was on his own when he attacked us. He’d just gone out on a jolly.69

The A-10 was flying at low altitude and should have been able to differentiate between Iraqi and C oalition armoured vehicles, Gerrard noting the aircraft was only about fifty metres off the ground when the pilot commenced a second attack run. One of the pilots misidentified the British vehicles as Zil157s—Russian made trucks used by the Iraqi Army, which, incidentally, are wheeled vehicles while the Scimitars are tracked. The Scimitars were all marked with an inverted ‘V’ (the Coalition symbol for a friendly vehicle), had the standard NATO fluorescent orange signal panels tied across their turrets to assist identification from the air and flying from the back of one of the vehicles was a Union Jack flag measuring eighteen inches by twelve inches. Additionally, one of the wounded soldiers exited his vehicle and waved frantically at the A-10 pilot in an at tempt to halt the second attack run. S ignificantly, the disabled

68 George Cross citation for Trooper Christopher Finney (can be viewed at ; Patrick Barkham, ‘Troops’ anger over US “friendly fire” ’, BBC News, 31 March 2003, viewed 6 August 2010, . 69 ‘Wounded British soldiers condemn US ‘cowboy’ pilot’, The Guardian, 31 March 2003, viewed 6 August 2010, . 122

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vehicles did not pose any threat to the A-10.70 No disciplinary action was taken against the two pilots involved in the attack, an official US military investigation concluding that their actions were not reckless and that they reasonably believed they were engaging the enemy.71 A transcript of the cockpit video for the attack revealed that the pilots were repeatedly informed by a US Marine Corps Forward Air Controller attached to a British unit on the ground that there were no friendly vehicles in the target area. A lthough the pilot of the attacking A-10 initially identified the orange panels, when informed there were no friendly vehicles in the area he convinced himself the panels were in fact rocket launchers.72 The attack on the Scimitars was unfortunately not the only fratricide incident the British forces suffered during the 2003 Iraq War. Five days earlier, on 23 March, a US Patriot missile battery near the Kuwaiti border shot down a British Tornado aircraft from 9 Squadron, Royal Air Force, killing the two crew. T he Tornado had c ompleted its mission and w as returning to base when the Patriot battery targeted it. A US Army spokesperson later stated a s oftware error in the Patriot system has caused it to misidentify the Tornado as an incoming missile. Additionally, a British soldier from the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment was accidentally shot dead by a comrade on 24 March while trying to quell a riot in Al Zubayr (near Basra) and two British soldiers from the Queen’s Royal Lancers were killed on 25 March when their Challenger II tank was engaged by another British Challenger to the west of Basra. The US forces in Iraq also suffered casualties from friendly fire, with some US pilots also falling victim to malfunctioning Patriot batteries. O n 25 March, two days after the British Tornado was shot down, a USAF F-16 pilot received a signal that his aircraft was being targeted by radar that he assumed belonged to an enemy missile system. He fired a missile in self-defence, destroying a Patriot battery near Najaf that had been tracking him. Nine days later, on 2 April, a US Navy pilot, Lieutenant Nathan White, took off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk in a F/A-18 Hornet to undertake a bombing run near Karbala, 50 miles to the south of Baghdad. He had completed his mission and was returning to the Kitty Hawk when a Patriot battery misidentified his plane as an enem y missile and f ired two missiles at him. White radioed in that he had seen the missiles and tried to manoeuvre away from

70 Audrey Gillan and Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Trooper who saved friend in face of friendly fire awarded George Cross’, The Guardian, 31 October 2003; viewed 6 August 2010, ; ‘Wounded British soldiers condemn US ‘cowboy’ pilot’, The Guardian, op. cit; Barkham, op. cit. 71 ‘US to release cockpit footage’, BBC News, 6 February 2007, viewed 6 August 2010, . 72 Tom Newton Dunn, ‘The tape they wanted to hide’, The Sun, 6 February 2007, viewed 6 August 2010, . 123

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them, but the missiles had acquired their target and struck White’s plane a few seconds later, scoring a direct hit and killing the pilot.73 The Patriot system was originally designed to shoot down aircraft but, just before the 1991 Gulf War, it was modified to shoot down tactical ballistic missiles. In its current configuration, the Patriot missile system is almost completely automatic. Its radar tracks airborne objects, which its computer then identifies and displays as symbols on a s creen. I f the Patriot determines that an i ncoming object is a ballistic missile, its operator has just seconds to decide whether to override the machine or to let it fire. A 60 Minutes investigation in February 2004 found that the US military had known since the early 1990s that in field tests the Patriot missile system often tried to shoot down friendly planes—yet the system was still widely deployed in Kuwait and Iraq during the 2003 Gulf War.74 An investigator, tasked by Congress to lead an investigation into the Patriot’s performance in the 1991 Gulf War, commented:

What’s so disheartening about this is the very things we warned about came to pass in this war [2003 invasion of Iraq]. I t’s clear that the failure to correct some of the problems that we’ve known about for 10, 12 years led to soldiers dying needlessly. To flyers, dying needlessly.75

The deadliest fratricide incident involving US troops occurred at Nasiriyah on 23 March 2003, when USAF A-10 aircraft fired on Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment. The 1st Battalion had been tasked with securing two bridges on Highway 8, which linked the southern Iraqi cities with Baghdad. One bridge rose over the Euphrates River on t he south-eastern edge of Nasiriyah, the other over the Saddam Canal, located 4.5 kilometres to the north of the first bridge. As the Marines were involved in heavy fighting against Iraqi irregulars at the time of the A-10 attack, US military investigators found it difficult to determine who was killed by enemy fire and who by friendly fire. Of the eighteen Marines killed in this action, up to ten may have been killed by the A-10, nine of whom died when a Maverick missile slammed into the rear of a M arine amphibious assault vehicle. Of the seventeen Marines wounded, thirteen were verified as being wounded solely by enemy fire, the others by a combination of enemy and friendly fire. A subsequent military investigation cleared the

73 Derek Rose, ‘Patriot downed jet’, New York Daily News, 15 April 2003, viewed 6 August 2010, < http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2003/04/15/2003-04- 15_patriot_downed_jet_friendly_.html>. 74 ‘The Patriot Flawed’, Sixty Minutes (CBSNews.Com), 27 June 2004, viewed 6 August 2010, . 75 Joseph Cirincione quoted in ‘The Patriot Flawed’, CBSNews.Com, op. cit. 124

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pilots of any blame, attributing the incident to a loss of situational awareness because of ‘deviations from the planned scheme of manoeuvre, the urban environment, and problematic communication links’.76 Some of the surviving Marines later expressed their frustration that the USAF A-10 pilots did not recognise the distinctive Marine armoured assault vehicles. One Marine commented, ‘This was my second time being strafed by an A-10. First Gulf War I was strafed. If I can’t work with Marine air, I don’t want to work with anything.’77 This comment exemplifies one o f the key effects of friendly fire that extends beyond the immediate loss of life and matériel, that being the loss of confidence of the ground combat troops in their supporting arms (artillery, armour and close air support). This distrust has often been magnified if the supporting arm is drawn from another Service, such as the air force, or from another country (hence the response from the Canadian and British soldiers attacked by the USAF). The common perception among soldiers is that forces from another Service or those of another nation are somewhat less concerned for the safety of the troops on the ground than members of their own Service/nation. Therefore friendly fire can have a detrimental effect on a force out of all proportion to its immediate loss of combat power, particularly in relation to modern conflicts, which will likely involve elements of more than one Service and, often by political necessity, are fought by military forces contributed from more than one nation. The similarities between the friendly fire incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan and those of the 1991 Gulf War are apparent. In many cases the same weapon systems were involved (the A-10 and Maverick anti-tank missiles being a repeat offender) with the characteristics of the conflict (coalition operations and a non-linear battlefield) exacerbating the potential for friendly fire incidents in Iraq in 2003 as they did in Iraq/Kuwait a decade or so earlier. Another similarity was the high proportion of friendly fire incidents involving high-tech weaponry. I n 1991 they were TOW and HARM missiles, in 2001 the culprits were Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), which converted ‘dumb’ bombs into ‘smart’ bombs’ by the use of an integrated inertial guidance system coupled with a GPS receiver), or almost fully automated Patriot batteries. In relation to the ratio of friendly fire to total battlefield casualties, the period of

76 United States Central Command, ‘Investigation of Suspected Friendly Fire Incident Near An Nasiriyah, Iraq, 23 March 2003, dated 6 March 2004 (can be viewed at ; ‘Marine captain faulted in “friendly fire” incident’, CNN.Com, 30 March 2004, viewed 6 August 2010, . 77 1st Lieutenant Michael Seeley quoted in ‘Marine captain faulted in “friendly fire” incident’, CNN.Com, op. cit. 125

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the Iraq War of greatest combat similarity to the 1991 Gulf War was the period of major combat operations (as what followed could best be categorized as stabilization/peace keeping rather than combat in the traditional sense). The period of major combat operations was determined from the start of the invasion on 19 March until 1 May 2004. Over this period, twenty-seven British soldiers were killed in action, of which six (twenty-two per cent) were victims of friendly fire. Over the same period, the American military had 109 personnel killed in action. Of these at least 17 (15.5 per cent) were victims of friendly fire (including Lance Corporal Jose Gutierrez, the first American service member to die in combat in Iraq).78 The final section of this chapter will move beyond discussing the numbers of friendly fire casualties and the details of the incidents that brought about their deaths to concentrate upon the impact of friendly fire on the soldiers themselves. While the weapons principally responsible for friendly fire casualties have changed over the period surveyed, what has not changed is the anguish felt by soldiers when they realise they have killed their comrades. On 28 March 2003, a USAF A-10 pilot (call sign POPOV36) fired on a patrol of British armoured reconnaissance vehicles believing them to be Iraqi. The transcript of the cockpit video clearly reveals the pilot’s distress when told he had killed and wounded friendly troops:

Dammit. Fucking dammit. (POPOV36) God dammit. Fuck me dead (weeping). (POPOV 36) You with me. (POPOV 35 – the attacking pilot’s wingman) Yeah. (POPOV36) They did say there were no friendlies. (POPOV35)79

Adrien Bourgogne of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard tells of an incident that occurred on t he retreat from Moscow in 1812. A mounted grenadier mistook one of Napoleon’s orderly officers for a Cossack and ran him through with his sword. According to Bourgogne, ‘The unhappy Grenadier, on seeing his mistake, endeavoured to get killed. He flung himself amongst the enemy, striking to right and left, but

78 The calculation of friendly fire casualties was made using the database provided at the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count () using the following search criteria for cause: ‘hostile – friendly fire’, ‘hostile – friendly fire – cluster bomblet’ and ‘hostile – friendly fire – jet crash’. To this figure was added the 9 Marines whose deaths at Nasiriyah on 23 March 2003 were most likely caused by friendly fire (these deaths were classified as ‘hostile – hostile fire’ in the database’). Deaths classified as non-hostile (such as vehicle accident, natural causes etc.) were excluded from the casualty count. 79 Dunn, op. cit. 126

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everyone fled before him.’80 The Soviet soldier Mansur Abdulin recalled that following a clash between Soviet armies encircling the Germans at Stalingrad, ‘We also cried: for there were dead and wounded on both sides, and each person blamed himself. Later, when clearing the battlefield of bodies, we avoided each other’s eyes.’81 Robert Crisp, who served with the British Royal Tank Regiment during the North African campaign of the Second World War, mistook a British tank for a German Panzer and fired four rounds into it. Another British tank suddenly appeared waving a red flag (the signal to cease fire). ‘I looked again, my heart coming into my mouth in sheer horror … I knew immediately what I had done’, Crisp wrote in his memoirs of the campaign. H e ran over to the shattered tank, hoping that no one had been killed, where he w as confronted by a young officer: ‘You bloody fool. You’ve killed my gunner.’ The surviving crew members placed a rope around the figure slumped in the turret.

I had neither the strength nor the will to help. Perhaps he wasn’t dead. Perhaps he was just unconscious. T he officer might have made a m istake. There was still a little hope.

Out of the turret-top they hauled a lad’s body—red hair, fair skin, freckled face. As they pulled him out, the head rolled sideways and two, wide-open, empty eyes looked straight into mine. I n that moment I touched the rock-bottom of experience.82

The emotional anguish of killing a comrade is evident in these accounts, as well as in Ron Kovic’s memoir of his service in Vietnam and its aftermath. In October 1967 Kovic shot and k illed a ni neteen-year-old fellow Marine during a firefight near the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) with North Vietnam. It was dark and the Marines were withdrawing when a figure suddenly appeared before Kovic and he fired three shots, hitting the man in the throat. Kovic was driven back to base with the body of the dead Marine sprawled at his feet. After reporting the incident to his superiors Kovic retired to his tent and s at down on hi s bed. He went over the scene repeatedly in his head. Consumed by guilt, he poi nted the barrel of his rifle at his head. ‘ Oh Jesus God almighty, he thought. Why? Why? Why? He began to cry slowly at first. Why? I’m going to kill myself, he thought. I’m going to pull this trigger.’83 But he did not pull the

80 Adrien Jean Baptiste François Bourgogne, Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne 1812–1813, Constable, London, 1997, p.60. 81 Abdulin, op. cit., p.31. 82 Crisp, op. cit., p.148. 83 Kovic, op. cit., p.144. 127

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trigger and fell into a troubled sleep. The next morning he tried to convince himself it was an accident or that maybe someone else had fired the fatal shot, but in the end he knew that was not the case. E ven confessing his actions to the battalion executive officer did not provide Kovic with the absolution he sought. He began to feel alienated from his fellow Marines, who he believed blamed him for the man’s death and who he felt talked about the incident behind his back. Kovic lamented that

The next few weeks passed in a slow way, much slower than any time in his whole life. Each day dragged by until the night, the soft soothing night, when he could close himself off from the pain, when he could forget the terrible thing for a few hours. Each night before he slept he prayed to his god, begging for some understanding of why the thing had happened, why he had been made into a murderer with one shot … What kind of god would give him these terrible feelings and nightmares for what seemed to be the rest of his life?84

The anguish caused by friendly fire incidents is not confined to those who fired the fatal shot. Guy Chapman served for most of the First World War as an officer in a battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. I n his memoir of the war, Chapman wrote of an incident where a mortar shell fell short and exploded a few yards away from a British raiding party, killing a young officer and wounding ten soldiers.

The catastrophe wrenched many of us as no previous death had been able to do. Those we had seen before had possessed an inevitable quality, had been taken as an unavoidable manifestation of war, as in nature we take the ills of the body. But this death, at the hands of our own people, through a vagary of the wind, appeared some sinister and malignant stroke, an out rage involving not only the torn body of the dead boy but the whole battalion.85

A German officer, Walter Bloem, similarly recalled the devastating effect on the morale of his men when mistakenly shelled by their own artillery as they advanced across France in the opening campaign of the First World War. He stated that, ‘Death coming from the enemy’s shells is expected, part of the bargain of war, but coming from the mistaken fire of one’s own artillery it is beyond the pale—utterly devilish’. 86 Eugene Sledge, who served with the US Marine Corps in the Second World War, felt very much the same when a US tank mistook his mortar party for Japanese soldiers

84 ibid., p.149. 85 Guy Chapman, A Passionate Prodigality, Fawcett Crest, New York, 1967, p.68. 86 Captain Walter Bloem, The Advance from Mons, Tandem Books, London, 1967, p.102. 128

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and opened fire.

A surge of panic rose within me. In a brief moment our tank had reduced me from a well-trained, determined assistant mortar gunner to a quivering mass of terror. It was not just that I was being fired at by a machine gun that unnerved me so terribly, but that it was one of ours. To be killed by the enemy was bad enough; that was a real possibility I had prepared myself for. But to be killed by mistakes by my own comrades was something I found hard to accept. It was just too much.87

Evgeni Bessonov, who served with the Soviet 4th Tank Army, wrote in his memoirs of the Second World War of an i ncident where the misdirected fire of a regiment of Katyusha rocket launchers fell on some units of his brigade, killing thirty to thirty-five soldiers. ‘In one month of fighting we did not have such high casualties, as from one Katyusha salvo! It was painful to see the dead soldiers — young, healthy and needed for further battles.’88 Joseph Owen was more explicit when recounting an incident where a friendly artillery barrage fell among the Marines trying to break out of the encirclement by Chinese troops near the frozen Chosin Reservoir in North Korea. ‘Friendly fire. The worst thing that can happen in combat’, wrote Owen. ‘Our dismal day turned to horror. Cries and moans and agonised screams pierced the black smoke that drifted over the broken ground.’89 When the smoke dissipated four Marines were dead and three wounded. Hal Moore tells us of a friendly fire incident in his account of the Vietnam War where a 105 m m artillery round dropped short and ex ploded among one o f his platoons. The round killed nineteen-year-old Private First Class Richard C. Clark. Clark was part of a platoon that had been cut off for twenty-six hours and had survived several determined attacks by the NVA during the battle at Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley of South Vietnam in November 1965. One of Clark’s comrades plaintively remarked: ‘I just couldn’t believe this. He was right next to me in Ia Drang when we were trapped. We made it through that, we got out of there, and then he gets killed by our own artillery. Why did Richard Clark have to die that way?90 As his company prepared to assault their final objective on Wireless Ridge in the closing stages of the Falklands War, Philip Neame told his Forward Observation

87 Sledge, op. cit., p.69. 88 Bessonov, op. cit., p.59. 89 Joseph Owen, Colder than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 1996, p.160. 90 Specialist 4 Galen Bungum quoted in Moore and Galloway, op. cit., p.399. 129

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Officer to put down some artillery fire on the Argentine position. Tragically the wrong target number was called up and the artillery fire fell on Neame’s soldiers, wounding one and killing another. ‘This lad had already been injured and casevac’d; he’d recovered, returned to us and now, of all things, he’d been killed by our own artillery. It seemed a complete waste’, Neame bitterly recounted. ‘These things do happen in war, far worse has happened in the past and far worse will probably happen in the future, but it made me really mad’.91 Anthony Swofford wrote of an incident during the 1991 Gulf War where American tanks attacked his unit’s supply convoy. Four vehicles were destroyed during the attack, resulting in two soldiers killed and six wounded. Swofford felt that the rounds fired by the US tanks were:

more mysterious and thrilling and terrifying than taking the fire from the enemy, because the enemy fire made sense but the friendly fire makes no sense—no matter the numbers and statistics that the professors at the military college will put up on transparency, friendly fire is fucked fire and it makes no sense and cannot be told in numbers.92

The senselessness of friendly fire casualties weakens morale among soldiers, not because these deaths are unexpected—as shown, fratricide has always been a feature of war during the period studied—but because they seem so tragically avoidable. The soldiers lament that if only their comrades had been better trained or the weapons better designed then these casualties would not have been incurred. But the unmistakable fact is that if soldiers are sent off to war some of them will most likely be killed by their comrades. Reducing the number of fratricide incidents is an abi ding goal for all modern armies. B ut a technical panacea remains elusive. D evelopments in the areas of enhanced optics and more sophisticated Identification Friend or Foe d evices, while promising, will probably always lag behind advances in weapon ranges and standoff capability. A nother complicating factor is the growing preference for coalition operations. As noted, the various national elements of a coalition may have different equipment, and some elements may even have similar equipment to that used by the enemy, thereby complicating the process of battlefield identification. Realistic training should help reduce the number of friendly fire casualties but the inescapable fact is that

91 Major Philip Neame in Max Arthur’s, Above All, Courage - The Falklands Front Line: First- Hand Accounts, Guild Publishing, London, 1985, p.198. 92 Swofford, op. cit., p.219. 130

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the ‘fog of war’ will always remain and consequently fratricide incidents will continue to occur. The key question is how many casualties should be expected? The oft-quoted figure of friendly fire accounting for less than two per cent of all battlefield casualties is based on a study completed in 1982 by Lieutenant Colonel Charles R. Shrader of the US Army. However, he admitted that the figure of two per cent was his best guess, acknowledging the paucity of accurate data on h istorical friendly fire casualties. In his study, Shrader examined 269 incidents of fratricide, the nature of the sample determined almost entirely by what was recorded in official records or from what authors deemed noteworthy enough to include in autobiographical and gener al accounts of combat. The sample was also heavily weighted toward the experiences of the US Army in the Second World War. While Shrader’s monograph remains probably the most in-depth study of modern friendly fire incidents to date, it must be examined in view of the limitations of his sample. Furthermore, he concluded:

commanders at various levels may be reluctant to report instances of casualties due to friendly fire either because they are afraid of damaging unit or personal reputations, because they have a misplaced concern for the morale of surviving troops or the benefits and honours due the dead and wounded, or simply because of a des ire to avoid unprofitable conflicts with the personnel of supporting or adjacent units.93

The difficulty in apportioning deaths to friendly or enemy fire is illustrated by the 23 March 2003 i ncident at Nasiriyah, Iraq—and this incident was investigated using modern forensic techniques! I t therefore stands to reason that the number of casualties arising from friendly fire may indeed be greater than two per cent. Colonel David Hackworth, who conducted an internal Pentagon study into fratricide during the Vietnam War, concluded that fifteen to twenty per cent of all US casualties in Vietnam were caused by friendly fire.94 Furthermore, a s tudy conducted by the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in 1993, which drew upon casualty surveys from the Second World War and the Vietnam War, suggested these conflicts had fratricide rates of fifteen to twenty per cent.95 However, neither of these should be considered authoritative studies because of the incomplete nature of the data upon which they were based. But as we have seen, the number of friendly fire casualties

93 Shrader, op. cit., p.x. 94 Hackworth and Sherman, op. cit., p.594. 95 ‘Who Goes There: Friend or Foe?’, Office of Technology Assessment, op. cit., p.1. 131

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during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 also fits within this bracket. So the twenty-four per cent figure for friendly fire victims during the 1991 Gulf War may be less of an anomaly and closer to the norm than most modern militaries would care to acknowledge. Deaths from friendly fire have been a c onstant feature of warfare over the period studied though the principal agent has changed, largely reflecting the technological evolution of weaponry. The soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars up t o the First World War mainly had cause to fear the musket/rifle fire of their comrades, though an occasional errant artillery shell could produce at most a few casualties. The greatest cause of fratricide during the First World War was indirect fire, particularly artillery fire, and while the destructive power of a single artillery shell had not increased greatly from say those in use during the Franco-Prussian War of some forty years previously, the concentration in which they were delivered on t he battlefield greatly increased the possibility of friendly casualties. Massive aerial bombardments were the great fratricide killer of the Second World War. Since 1945, the speed of aircraft and the destructive power of the weapons they carry have substantially increased, and for the foreseeable future it will be these weapon platforms that continue to extract a heavy price from their own comrades. Incomplete data for conflicts prior to the 1991 Gulf War have precluded the determination of long-term historical trends in relation to the percentage of combat casualties due to friendly fire. But what this chapter has revealed is that in recent high- level conflicts, such as the 1991 G ulf War and t he major combat phase of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, friendly fire casualties have constituted what would seem to be an excessive percentage of total casualties. An examination of several fratricide incidents from these conflicts revealed several contributing factors, a nu mber of which are directly attributable to recent technological advances. Developments in armoured vehicles have increased the mobility of ground forces and this coupled with advances in communication capabilities has enabled the manoeuvreist approach of modern warfare, which has largely done away with the linear battle lines of the past. This factor has increased the confusion of the battlefield, though recent technological advances, such as GPS and B lue Force Tracking are increasing the situational awareness of ground forces. The prevailing confusion of the battlefield is exacerbated by the growing preference for coalition operations; noting that there is no greater threat to coalition unity than friendly fire casualties caused by a coalition partner. Moreover, due to continued technological advances in the field of explosives, the destructive power of a single misdirected shell or bomb is constantly increasing. The final factor is incidental to the actual fratricide event, though it does impact on the reported number

132

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of friendly fire casualties (and thus on their impact) and that is that due to the employment of advanced forensic techniques militaries have become better at identifying the cause of casualties on the battlefield. The indications are that fratricide will continue to be a major issue of concern for modern armies. What has not changed, however, is the extreme angst that friendly fire produces among those who fired the fatal shot and the immediate comrades of the victims. It is likely that a higher percentage of soldiers will have to bear this specific burden in future conflicts as weapons technology and forensic techniques continue to evolve.

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The Military and the Media

5 The Military and the Media

This chapter will examine the relationship between the military and the media and how the growth of the media presence on the battlefield over the last hundred and fifty years has impacted upon t he soldier. The growth of this media presence is inseparable from technological developments in the field of communications, as it these developments that have created both the demand for the news and t he means of supplying it. T he telegraph led to wireless communications and finally to satellite communications utilising mobile phones, while cameras became gradually more sophisticated, leading to film and then to digital images that can be dispatched instantaneously from virtually anywhere in the world. T hese technological developments have not only created the ability to transmit information instantaneously but the incentive to do so, so as to satisfy the media’s insatiable demands for news. It is these factors that have put soldiers’ lives at risk by revealing operationally sensitive information. Lastly, this chapter will examine the added burden that a ubiquitous media presence, supported by highly advanced communication systems, places upon contemporary soldiers who not only have to perform a difficult and dangerous job but also have to worry about how their actions might play out on the evening news. Detailed accounts of military conflict date back to ancient Greece and Rome and include Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War and J ulius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War) and Commentarii de Bello Civile (Commentaries on t he Civil War (Roman)). These and s imilar accounts were usually written by participants or by chroniclers in the employ of rulers or generals. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the first war correspondent, that is, a civilian specifically employed by a media organisation to submit reports on a conflict for public consumption, appeared on the battlefield. It is also no coincidence that this period also saw the introduction and rapid expansion across the globe of the electrical telegraph, which enabled for the first time ‘live’ reporting but also the expectation among the public (and a c orresponding demand by the newspapers) for live reports from the battlefields. The first photographs of war were taken in 18481 during the American-Mexican War when a street photographer in Texas made ten daguerreotypes of General John E. Wool’s column of cavalry advancing into the Mexican town of Saltillo. O ther

1 The first photograph of soldiers, however, was taken in 1844 by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. The subject was some men from the Gordon Highlanders who posed with an artillery piece on a castle wall at Leith. 134

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photographic pioneers soon followed. S . Lecchi captured images of the destruction wrought by French forces as they besieged Rome in 1849 seeking to reinstate the deposed Pope Pius IX. John McCosh, a medical officer who served with the regiments of the British East India Company was also an amateur photographer and shot images of the Second Sikh War (1848–49) and the Second Burma War (1852–53).2 However, these photographic pioneers captured these images for private rather than public consumption and they soon passed into obscurity (though their photographs survived). Not so Roger Fenton, who is widely acknowledged as the first official war photographer. Fenton was a founding member of the Photographic Society of London (which later became the Royal Photographic Society) and was one of the first court photographers for Queen Victoria. I n 1855, Fenton was sent on as signment to the Crimean War (1854–56) by a Manchester publisher, Thomas Agnew, to capture images of the troops. Fent on also had a r oyal sponsor, the Prince Consort, Prince Albert, who provided him with a l etter of introduction. There had bee n two earlier unsuccessful attempts to capture a photographic record of the conflict. The first photographer and all his equipment were lost when his vessel sank in Balaclava harbour during a severe storm. The second attempt used semi-trained photographers who consequently produced negatives of such poor quality that they could not be used. Agnew was unofficially encouraged by the British Government to procure pictures that might improve the public’s perception of the war. Fenton arrived at Balaclava in March 1855 and travelled around the Crimean theatre for four months with his mobile photographic laboratory. He left in June and returned to London, where he staged an exhibition of his photographs (360 in total). Again, the application of new technology (in this case wet plate cameras), enabled the first official documenting of a military conflict but also created an ex pectation among the public that subsequent conflicts would also be captured photographically. Also present in the Crimea, and indeed photographed by Fenton, was William Howard Russell, one of the first official war correspondents,3 acting as a ‘special correspondent’ for The Times (London). The first acknowledged war correspondent was Henry Crabb Robinson, who reported for The Times on Napoleon’s campaign along the River Elbe in 1807. Robinson did not actually witness the battles he reported on but rather relied on the accounts of others. Charles Lewis Guneison of the Morning

2 Rainer Fabian and Hans Christian Adam, translated by Fred Taylor, Images of War: 130 Years of War Photography, New English Library, London, 1985, p.77. 3 See Trevor Royle, War Report: The War Correspondent’s View of Battle from the Crimea to the Falklands, Mainstream Publishing, Worchester, 1987, pp.16-18. 135

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Post was the first war correspondent to provide front-line accounts, reporting on t he Spanish Civil War of 1835–37. However, Russell was the first war correspondent to gain widespread recognition. Previously the London newspapers had largely relied on letters sent to them by junior officers for their coverage of campaigns.4 The nature of the media business was such that any newspaper that could publish the news before its competitors would gain a commercial advantage. T he Crimean War was the first conflict where reporters used the electric telegraph to provide virtually ‘live news’, with a consequential increase of interest in the conduct of the campaign by both the public and the politicians and the resulting temptation, and means to do so, for politicians to react to and influence events whilst they were actually underway. As noted, the effect of the application of this new technology to report upon and capture images of military conflicts created a growing demand for these media products, with the subsequent growth of the media presence on the battlefield. Russell had few competitors in his coverage of the Crimean War, the major London papers sending a total of three correspondents. Less than a decade later, at least five hundred correspondents and war artists covered the American Civil War for the Union (the Confederacy mainly relied on serving officers to provide its newspapers with updates on battles and campaigns). At the peak of the Boer War there were almost three hundred correspondents providing accounts for British, European and American newspapers. Ninety correspondents were accredited to accompany the American Expeditionary Force of the First World War and 558 journalists accompanied the Allied forces undertaking the Normandy landings during the Second World War. The largest number of accredited reporters during the Korean War was 270, with a peak in accredited journalists during the Vietnam War of 637.5 The exponential growth in the number of news organisations, including the emergence of twenty-four-hour news networks such as CNN, resulted in an estimated 1600 journalists and support personnel being based in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War, with hundreds more covering the conflict from neighbouring countries—some even reporting directly from Baghdad. Of this multitude, 192 w ere permitted by the Americans to accompany combat units.6 When NATO troops entered Kosovo in June 1999 they were accompanied by an e stimated 2750 journalists and s upport staff. T he war correspondent Martin Bell, who was part of this throng, noted that, ‘Satellite vans

4 Knightley, op. cit., p.2. 5 Figures are drawn from Knightley, op. cit. 6 Captain Jon Mordan, ‘Press Pools, Prior Restraint and the Persian Gulf War’, Air & Space Power Chronicles – Chronicles Online Journal, 6 June 1999, viewed 6 August 2010, . 136

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clogged the highway, and patrols of the Parachute Regiment in Pristina would go out with more photographers than soldiers’.7 During Operation Iraqi Freedom in early 2003, over 600 r eporters and phot ographers, from 220 media organisations, were embedded by the US Department of Defense with its Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps units. Eighty-three of those journalists and photographers were embedded into a single formation: the 3rd Infantry Division.8 Major media companies tend to package news as entertainment, with a resulting emphasis on conflict, dramatic footage and melodrama. This factor, coupled with an increase in the number of twenty-four-hour cable news stations and the growth of Internet news services, has fundamentally changed the dynamics of the media business. The widespread use of the telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century meant that editors could publish information from their correspondents in the field the day after an event; and this led to the media preoccupation with the ‘scoop’. At the time, papers were usually printed daily and had s et deadlines. B y the time of the Second World War, the number of media outlets and the demand for product from journalists at the front line had greatly multiplied. Fo r example, articles written by correspondents concerning the battle of Iwo Jima would appear in newspapers the following day, though there was a t wo-day delay for photos to be f lown back from Iwo Jima to the continental United States. I mmediate coverage of events was provided by radio reporters, who transmitted live reports from the ships of the invasion fleet or from the beaches with the forward elements of the American troops. 9 The Vietnam conflict added to the above mix the demand for combat footage for television news, noting that television was still relatively in its infancy during the Korean War. (There were 10 million television sets in the United States during the Korean War compared to a 100 million at the peak of the Vietnam War.) There would be a delay of at least two days, though it could be as many as five, before the footage could be shown on American television, as the film had to be flown to the United States for processing.10 The next major technological development was the use of satellites to beam instantaneous footage from virtually anywhere in the world (the 1991 Gulf War was the first major war to be reported on using this technology). There are now several real-time, 24-hour news stations along with a plethora of Internet news sites, all

7 Martin Bell, Through the Gates of Fire: A Journey into World Disorder, Phoenix, London, 2004, p.170. 8 Poole, op. cit., p.26. 9 Kakehashi, op. cit., p.48. 10 Knightley, op. cit., p.451 and ‘Vietnam on Television’, webpage from the Museum of Broadcast Communications, viewed 10 May 2010, . 137

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wanting new material from journalists in the field. This current cut-throat nature of media competition has given rise to an incessant demand for ‘breaking news’, encouraged sensationalism, and resulted in less reflection and verification by reporters. Ever-looming deadlines encourage reporters to ‘go with what you have got’ rather than investigate further and risk being pre-empted by a c ompetitor. Andrew Hoskins recounted that a CNN producer in an off-the-record seminar acknowledged that during the 2003 I raq War ‘a key quandary for the network was, whether to run with a story without verification and risk having to later withdraw it, or hold back and watch a competitor break the news first’.11 Moreover, a veteran reporter commented in 2001: ‘Not only has this proliferation increased the likelihood that leaked information could compromise operational security, but the increased media competition detracts from careful fact checking’.12 The growth of the media presence on the battlefield, along with the technological developments that provided the means of capturing and disseminating information, challenged the military’s efforts to control the flow of information, so as to maintain operational security and not endanger soldiers’ lives by the premature revelation of battle plans. During the First and Second World wars, the sense of a common purpose resulted in a largely compliant media acting as a propaganda arm of the government. The nadir of the relationship between the military and the media was reached during the Vietnam War. Vietnam was the first American conflict in which there was virtually no censorship of the press, though reporters agreed to abide by a set of fifteen ground rules, which were principally concerned with maintaining operational security. The American military commander in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, General William C. Westmoreland, had initially considered some form of censorship of the media but rejected the idea as it would have been unenforceable because of the large number of foreign correspondents in-country, along with the difficulties of coordinating such a measure with the Vietnamese authorities. ‘The situation was ripe for dispute and misunderstanding and resentment’, wrote Peter Arnett, ‘creating a climate of discord that would permanently tarnish our relations with the military and designate the press a handy whipping boy for the disasters that were to come.’13 The need to maintain operational security has always been f oremost in the military’s dealings with (and tolerance of) the media. During the Peninsular War, the then Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the 1st Duke of Wellington), commander of the British

11 Andrew Hoskins, Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq, Continuum, London, 2005, p.69. 12 James Kitfield, ‘Lessons from Kosovo’, Media Studies Journal: Front Lines and Deadlines – Perspectives on War Reporting, Vol.15, No.1, Summer 2001, p.34. 13 Arnett, op. cit., p.140. 138

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Army in Spain and Portugal, wrote to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Lord Liverpool, to protest against the release of operational information by the press.

I beg to draw your Lordship’s attention to the frequent paragraphs in the English Newspapers, describing the position, the numbers, the objects, the means of attaining them possessed by the armies in Spain and Portugal. In some instances the English Newspapers have accurately stated, not only the regiments occupying a position, but the number of men fit for duty of which each regiment was composed; and this intelligence must have reached the enemy at the same time as it did me, at a moment at which it was most important that he should not receive it. 14

The opposing French forces also bemoaned the release of operational information by the press. ‘The liberty of the press is certainly an excellent thing; but more patriotism ought to prevail in the use that is daily made of it’, admonished Elzéar Blaze, an officer in Napoleon’s Army, in his account of his campaigns. He continued, ‘we ought not to tell our neighbours what is so important to them to know. The enemy formerly kept spies among us; he now obtains his intelligence at a much cheaper rate – he subscribes to our journals.’15 A similar complaint was made by Field Marshal Lord Raglan, the commander- in-chief of the British Army forces in the Crimea, who felt that Russell’s dispatches had breached operational security (noting that these dispatches were sent to London b y electric telegraph) and thereby afforded assistance to the enemy. Indeed, in an article published in The Times on 23 October 1854, that paper’s ‘special correspondent’ (Russell) revealed the number and type of artillery pieces the British had dispatched to the Crimea, the location of the main powder magazine, the shortage of roundshot, the site of Lord Raglan’s HQ and the disposition of the forces on the ground.16 Raglan wrote to the Secretary of War, the Duke of Newcastle, pointing out the details contained in The Times’ article of 23 October, noting that the main powder magazine was shortly afterwards the object of a heavy cannonade, and requesting that something ‘be done to check so pernicious a system at once’.17 In a subsequent letter to Newcastle Raglan bemoaned that, ‘The enemy at least need spend nothing under

14 Sir Arthur Wellesley to Lord Liverpool quoted in Royle, op. cit., p.17. 15 Elzéar Blaze, Captain Blaze: Life in Napoleon’s Army, Leonaur, 2007, p.176. 16 ‘The War: The British Expedition’, The Times, 23 October 1854. 17 Lord Raglan to the Duke of Newcastle dated 13 November 1854 quoted in Christopher Hibbert, The Destruction of Lord Raglan: A Tragedy of the Crimean War 1854–55, Penguin, London, 1985, p.158. 139

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the head of Secret Service’.18 Christopher Hibbert noted in his biography of Raglan that the enemy shared Raglan’s view of the damage done by the premature release of operational information by the newspapers, the Tsar reportedly stating, ‘We have no need of spies, we have The Times’.19 On 25 February 1856, in the closing stages of the Crimean War, the newly appointed commander-in-chief, Lieutenant General Sir William John Codrington, issued a general order pertaining to war correspondents. The order forbade the publication of details that could prove of value to the enemy, authorised the expulsion from the theatre of war of any correspondent who, it was alleged, had published such details (no doubt Codrington had Russell in mind when including this clause), and threatened future transgressors with the same punishment.20 This order represented the opening salvo in the military’s ongoing campaign to control the press during war. The next battlefield of this campaign was the American Civil War. General William Tecumseh Sherman displayed considerable animosity towards the press throughout the American Civil War, on one occasion having a reporter for the New York Herald court martialled on charges of giving intelligence to the enemy. The reporter in question, Thomas W. Knox, had drawn Sherman’s ire by reporting on the failed attempt by the Union Army to seize the Chickasaw Bluffs, to the north of the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg. Although it was a fact that the Union forces had been rebuffed, suffering some 1700 casualties in the process, Knox’s implication that the Union defeat was a direct consequence of Sherman’s insanity and inefficiency was unlikely to place him in the general’s good graces. Incidentally, the court martial, while finding Knox not guilty of the more serious charges, found him guilty of willfully disobeying Sherman’s prohibition on accompanying the army on this campaign and of causing a dispatch to be printed without the sanction of the general in command. The court ordered Knox ‘to be sent without the lines of the army, and not to return under penalty of imprisonment’.21 Sherman’s intolerance of the press was not merely in response to the personal attacks they frequently made upon him. Rather he believed that the press directly endangered the lives of his men by revealing the direction of Union attacks and the components of the attacking force. For example, on 17 July 1861, the New York Times reported, ‘The army in Virginia today took up the line of march for Richmond, via

18 Letter Raglan to Newcastle quoted in Hibbert, The Destruction of Lord Raglan, p.160. 19 Hibbert, The Destruction of Lord Raglan, p.160. 20 Knightley, op. cit., p.15. 21 Joseph H. Ewing, ‘The New Sherman Letters’, American Heritage Magazine, Vol.38, No.5, July-August 1987, viewed 6 August 2010, . 140

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Fairfax and Manassas. The force starting today was fully fifty thousand strong … about three thousand Regular Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery, and fifty thousand volunteers.’22 Four days later the Union and Confederate forces fought the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), resulting in a resounding defeat of the Union Army. In a l etter to Senator Thomas Ewing, Sherman’s foster father (as well as his father-in-law), Sherman wrote:

I regard newspaper correspondents as spies … They publish without stint positive information of movements past and prospective, organisations, names of commanders, and ac curate information which reaches the enemy with as much regularity as it does our People … Being in our very midst, catching expressions dropped by officers, clerks, and or derlies, and be ing keen expert men they detect movements and give notice of them. So that no matter how rapidly we move, our enemy has notice in advance. To them more than to any other cause do I trace the many failures that attend our army. While they cry about blood and slaughter they are the direct cause of more bloodshed than fifty times their number of armed Rebels. Never had an enemy a better corps of spies than our army carries along, paid, transported, and fed by the United States.23

A different army, a different continent and a different century would provide the best known manifestation of Sherman’s concerns about the press endangering the lives of soldiers by revealing operationally sensitive information. The relationship between the press and the British Ministry of Defence during the Falklands War of 1982 was combative, with the press accusing the Ministry of excessive censorship and the Ministry responding by pointing out the dangers to the troops that arose from the media’s apparent inability to exercise self-censorship. The British media openly speculated about potential dates for the landing of British forces on the Falkland Islands as well as possible tasks of SAS and SBS patrols. The media also reported that Argentine bombs had f ailed to detonate because the munition technicians were setting the safety fuses too long (these fuses arm after a predetermined interval to stop the bombs detonating too close to attacking aircraft). The members of the Task Force were urged not to mention this information in their letters home because once alerted it would be a simple matter for the enemy to reset the safety fuses. ‘The night after the commander of the Intrepid had asked us not to

22 New York Times, 17 July 1861 quoted in Ewing, op. cit. 23 General William Tecumseh Sherman letter to Senator Thomas Ewing dated 6 February 1863 quoted in Ewing, op. cit. 141

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mention the fuses in letters home, the World Service of the BBC announced it for us’, bitterly recalled Hugh McManners in his memoir of the war. ‘The freedom to print the truth is obviously a cornerstone of democracy, but it would seem that editorial common sense practised by professionals is concerned with selling copy rather than any other implications the broadcast story might have. Suffice it to say that we were not impressed.’24 Another serious breach of operational security was to occur in relation to the attack by the 2nd B attalion of the Parachute Regiment (2 Para) on the Argentine positions near the settlements of Darwin and Goose Green. At 10 am local time on 27 May 1982, the soldiers of 2 P ara were sheltering in the abandoned C amilla Creek House and outbuildings preparing for an attack on the Argentine positions at Darwin that evening. S ome of the men were listening to the BBC World Service and w ere shocked to hear the BBC’s defence correspondent state ‘there is something quite big going on. They’re saying for example that the 2nd P arachute Regiment has moved South towards Darwin area.’ The British official history of the Falklands campaign records that the Argentine commander had de cided to reinforce the Darwin/Goose Green position on the 26th, the day prior to the BBC announcement. A hundred men were taken from Port Stanley to Goose Green by helicopter, arriving during the initial stages of the battle on the 28th. Another 140 reinforcements and some artillery pieces from the Argentine positions on Mount Kent arrived on the afternoon of the 28th, too late to influence the outcome of the battle, which was then coming to an end. Although the position of the official history is that the BBC announcement did not precipitate the movement of the Argentine reinforcements, nevertheless, the announcement represented a s erious breach of operational security. The commander of the land forces in the Falklands, Brigadier Julian Thompson, immediately expressed his dismay about the leak to Fleet Headquarters in the UK. A dmiral John Fieldhouse replied, ‘Equal horror expressed here. Have made representations at highest level.’25 At Camilla Creek House the BBC announcement was greeted with shock and then anger, as 2 P ara felt the vital element of surprise was now lost. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones, ordered his men to leave the shelter of the buildings, disperse and dig-in, in case the Argentines acted upon this information by launching an air or artillery attack. John Geddes, a member of 2 Para, recalled that the majority of the men were cooking breakfast when ‘suddenly there was a melee of officers and sergeants appearing among the various companies and platoons in a right

24 Captain Hugh McManners, Falklands Commando, William Kimber, London, 1984, p.119. 25 Sir Lawrence Freedman, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, Volume II: War and Diplomacy, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, London, 2005, pp.560, 563-4. 142

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fucking flap. “Move out! Move Out! Away from these buildings on t he double! Grab your kit and fucking get out of here!” our sergeant major Baz Greenhalgh yelled at us.’26 This dispersal interrupted the preparation for battle and complicated the required coordination measures, specifically the holding of a final orders group by Jones prior to the attack.27 Any remaining doubt that the Argentines may have held about Goose Green being the target of a British attack was soon dispelled when, shortly after the BBC announcement, two British forwards patrols were spotted and disengaged under fire.28 The media’s announcement of the impending attack on G oose Green was as much due t o political impatience as it was to the media’s inability to exercise self- censorship. The British politicians were anxious for some positive news from the Falklands to offset the negative press arising from the loss of ships among the Task Force (by 25 May five ships had been sunk). At the War Cabinet meeting on the 26th, the breakout of the land elements from the beachhead at San Carlos was discussed. The Secretary of State (John Nott) told the House of Commons that afternoon, ‘our forces on the ground are now poised to begin their thrust on Port Stanley’. There were only two possible directions for this advance: north towards Teal Inlet and the main Argentine positions, or south towards the less well-defended positions on the Goose Green isthmus. Journalists openly speculated that Goose Green seemed the most likely target. On the 27th, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, refused to go into details of the impending attack during Parliamentary questions, merely stating, ‘our ground forces are now moving from the beachhead’. The news of the breakout was duly broadcast on t he 1 pm news and w as picked up and rebroadcast on t he BBC World Service an hour later. A lthough the direction of the breakout had not been officially announced, the media were speculating that it would be towards Goose Green and that is what the press in London broadcast.29 Although no Fal klands-based journalist played any part in the BBC’s announcement, ‘at San Carlos rage towards the media was unbounded’, recalled Max Hastings. ‘The reporters, it was felt, had shown that they simply could not be trusted with operational information. For the rest of the war, some units would have nothing to

26 Geddes, op. cit., p.118. 27 Lieutenant Colonel Jones was incensed by the actions of the BBC, which he likely felt endangered the lives of his men. Major General John Frost recounts in 2 Para Falklands: The Battalion at War that ‘H fulminated to all and sundry that he would sue the Corporation when the war was over’. Maj-Gen John Frost, 2 Para Falklands: The Battalion at War, Sphere Books, London, 1984, p.49. 28 ibid., p.51. 29 Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1983, pp.255-6. 143

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do with any of us.’30 Later in the campaign, the already strained relationship between the military and the media was frayed even further when two journalists conversed with some colleagues at another settlement on the civilian landline about the forthcoming British attacks towards Port Stanley and were overheard by a R oyal Marines officer, who reported the matter to Brigadier Thompson. A lthough the initial fear that this conversation could have been monitored by the Argentines proved unfounded, as the line was cut well short of Stanley, the damage was done. Hastings was barred from attending Thompson’s briefing on the forthcoming battle: ‘journalists as a group were at that moment regarded with deep s uspicion, even animosity, in some military circles’, Hastings noted.31 While the BBC’s premature announcement of the attack on Goose Green by 2 Para is one of the best-known and most cited examples of an instance where the press have compromised operational security, it is by no means the only example. In April 1999, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Kenneth Bacon, commented:

we live in an incredibly competitive media age. We now have three, twenty- four-hour-a-day cable networks all competing for scoops, all competing to get on the air as soon as possible with new details. And I think … that the press is much less restrained in the use of operational information today than they used to be.32

By way of example, Bacon stated that in 1995 a television network reported that the US military was about to launch a c ruise missile against a S erbian surface-to-air missile site at Banja Luka, Bosnia. Because of this disclosure the missile launcher was moved and could have potentially been us ed to shoot at American planes. Bacon also mentioned that in late March 1999, during the Kosovo conflict, the Washington Post announced on i ts front page that the Allied forces were going to target the Serbian Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Defence in Belgrade. The targets were struck the following week. Bacon claimed that the forewarning by the media allowed the Serbians to take ‘various actions to reduce the impact of those strikes’.33 There was also a notable breach of operational security by a m ember of the press during the 2003 i nvasion of Iraq that showed the inherent risk of the military’s

30 Hastings, op. cit., p.354. 31 ibid., p.353. 32 Kenneth Bacon, ‘The Pentagon & The Press’, PBS Online NewsHour, 6 April 1999, viewed 6 August 2010, . 33 ibid. 144

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practice of retrospective censorship34 in the age of instant communication from anywhere in the world. On 1 April 2003, Geraldo Rivera, a journalist representing the Fox News Channel, who was embedded with the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division, voluntarily left Iraq—on a US Army helicopter—after Coalition officials threatened to expel him. Rivera was allowed to leave voluntarily only because a compromise had been reached between Fox News and the Pentagon. During a live television broadcast Rivera had sketched a map of Iraq in the sand and indicated the current and planned future locations of the 101st as they prepared to assault Baghdad. A military official commented that Rivera ‘gave away the big picture stuff. He went down in the sand and drew where the forces are going.’35 Although the vast majority of correspondents observe the military guidelines that seek to maintain operational security and would never intentionally put their own soldiers in danger, there is nevertheless an attendant risk that breaches of operational security will occur if the media is permitted into the combat zone. This risk is increased by technology that enables instant connectivity from virtually anywhere and t he proliferation of media outlets, particularly those of opposing or neutral nations. Such outlets will usually be l ess inclined than domestic media organisations to observe military guidelines on press coverage. The military was now faced with the difficulty of trying to control the flow of information generated by a ubiquitous media presence equipped with satellite communications. In such an environment, the only viable means of control was a self- censorship code. The basis of self-censorship was that journalists were provided access to an operational area and ongoing support from the military in return for agreeing to follow a set of defined ground rules on what can and what can not be reported. While the media has the technological means of releasing a story violating the ground rules agreement, the likely outcome would be the expulsion of the offending journalist from the operational area. In this way, the military makes it clear that the media’s presence in operational areas depends entirely on the military’s highly conditional goodwill. By this process the military has found a way to somewhat negate the technological advances that facilitate instant communication and, in a way, while the means of control differ, this situation is not dissimilar to the restrictions imposed by the military on j ournalists during the period from the Second World War up t o and

34 Retrospective censorship is based on the notion that it is too late to censor what has already been broadcast but that the consequence of broadcasting something that contravenes military guidelines will be borne by the offending journalist in the form of loss of access to an operational theatre. 35 Chris Plante, ‘Fox News, military reach deal on Rivera’, Cnn.com, 1 April 2003, viewed 6 August 2010, . 145

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including the Falklands War. In these earlier conflicts the military controlled the means of communicating back from the war zone. In the Iraq and A fghanistan conflicts, largely unable to physically prevent journalists from broadcasting from the actual battlefield (without seizing their equipment, which would have likely generated claims of military censorship), they instead sought to control access to the war zone. A defining element of the relationship between the military and the media is the interplay between two conflicting objectives. The media espouses the public’s ‘right to know’ about the actions of state-sponsored military forces. But this factor should be somewhat counterbalanced by the soldier’s right to undertake a difficult and hazardous duty without having to unduly concern himself with whether or not his actions will be subjected to ‘trial by media’. The soldier should not have to worry that his conduct on the battlefield may be sensationalised, presented out of context and served up t o be judged by those whose understanding of the conditions of war is limited and whose interest in the welfare of the soldier is minimal. Nathaniel Fick wrote that:

As a c itizen, I supported the Pentagon’s much touted embedded media campaign as a way to give Americans an uncensored look at the war and the warriors. As an officer, I dreaded dealing with information leaks, distraction to my Marines, and constant moral oversight of people who knew little about our culture and the demands of combat decision making.36

Soldiers function in an environment characterised by great stress and confusion, where life or death decisions have to be made instantaneously. When the commanding general of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General James Conway, addressed the officers of the First Marine Division about the rules of engagement prior to them moving into Iraq in 2003, he r eassured them that, ‘a commander would be held responsible not for the facts as they emerged from an investigation, but for the facts as they appeared to him in good faith at the time—at night, in a sandstorm, with bullets in the air’.37 Yet despite the best intentions of the military to ensure that apparent breaches of the laws of armed conflict by soldiers are examined in context, the ubiquitous media presence, facilitated by advanced communication equipment that allows virtually instant transmission from anywhere in the world, may sensationalise such incidents and hold them up to be judged in the court of public opinion. At the same time, this media presence may uncover or even prevent wartime atrocities: as Dave Grossman

36 Fick, op. cit., p.184. 37 ibid., p.182. 146

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noted, ‘the modern soldier is likely to have his every act videotaped and reported on national TV, and there is no tolerance for any deviation from the rules of War. Today our soldiers are held to the highest standards, and that is a good thing’.38 But the media has a tendency to judge the actions of soldiers against a benchmark of normal codes of behaviour, rather than the kill-or-be-killed nature of the battlefield. In this manner, the ever-increasing media presence on the battlefield imposes an additional burden on the soldier: that his every action may be judged by members of the public, safe at home and spared the terror and confusion of the battlefield. A notable (because filmed) case of an al leged breach of the rules of engagement occurred on 13 N ovember 2004, during the US-led offensive targeting insurgent strongholds in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. The incident began when an unidentified corporal, belonging to the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, entered a mosque with his section. The day before, the mosque and an adjacent building were the scene of a fierce firefight between insurgents and Marines. The Marines secured the mosque, killing ten insurgents and wounding five who, after being treated by Navy corpsmen (medics), were left in the mosque to be r ecovered by another American element when time and circumstances allowed as fighting was ongoing and there were American casualties that needed to be moved first. Intelligence reports indicated that insurgents had reoccupied the mosque during the night, resulting in the dispatch of a force of Marines to reclear the building. The insurgents inside were engaged by machine-guns mounted on the Marines’ tanks. After the tanks ceased fire, gunshots were heard coming from inside the mosque. A squad of Marines then approached the mosque through a breach in the outer wall and encountered other Marines already in the complex. One of the Marines already present in the mosque informed the soldier commanding the newly arrived squad that there were five insurgents in the building and he had shot them. Both parties of Marines then moved inside.39 When the Marines entered the main building of the mosque they found the body bags containing the dead from the previous day’s attack, as well as the five wounded and apparently unarmed insurgents who had been left behind in the mosque. It appeared one of these men was now dead and that three others were bleeding from new gunshot wounds. The fifth insurgent was partially covered by a blanket and was

38 Dave Grossman, On Combat, p.361. 39 United States Marine Corps Press Release No.0505-05-0611, ‘Marine involved in mosque shooting will not face court martial’, 4 May 2005 (can be viewed at ); Kevin Sites, ‘Open Letter to the Devil Dogs of the 3.1’, The Digital Journalist, 21 November 2004, viewed 6 August 2010, . 147

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lying where he had been left the previous day. H e had not been s hot again. The Marine corporal noticed the apparently dead Iraqi and realised he was breathing. The corporal shouted out, ‘He’s fucking faking he’s dead—he’s faking he’s fucking dead’. He then shot the apparently unarmed and critically wounded man in the head at close range. Another Marine commented, ‘Well he’s dead now’. The Marines then continued with their clearance of the building.40 The Hague Convention of October 1907 codified the Laws and Customs of War on Land. Article 23 states that it is ‘especially’ forbidden, ‘To kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion; and to declare that no quarter will be given’.41 Yet despite this prohibition of the killing of prisoners of war there is ample evidence that it occurs in combat. Guy Chapman wrote of a conversation he had during the First World War with a fellow British officer who had come to him for advice about how he should discipline one of his soldiers who had calmly shot a surrendering (and unarmed) German officer in the head. Chapman commented, ‘I don’t see that S___’s really to blame. He must have been hal f mad with excitement by the time he got into that trench. I don’t suppose he ever thought what he was doing. If you start a man killing, you can’t turn him off again like an engine.’42 The officer revealed to Chapman that another of his soldiers had al so executed a pr isoner of war. They agreed it was too late to do anything about these incidents and that the best course of action was to overlook them.43 The killing of the unarmed German officer was by no means an isolated incident during the First World War. ‘Prisoners we are not troubled with now for we kill every bosche at sight’,44 an Australian officer on the Western Front blithely recounted in a letter home. Robert Graves noted nearly all of the officers he served with at Le Havre during the First World War knew of specific cases where prisoners of war had been murdered.

The commonest motives were, it seems, revenge for the death of friends or relations, jealously of the prisoner’s pleasant trip to a comfortable prison camp in England, military enthusiasm, fear of suddenly being overpowered by the

40 Sites, ‘Open Letter’. 41 Hague Convention on Laws and Customs of War on Land signed 18 October 1907, Annex to the Convention: Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, Section II: Hostilities, Article 23. 42 Chapman, op. cit., pp.80-1. 43 ibid., p.81. 44 Captain D.V. Mulholland, 1st Machine Gun Battalion, letter dated 17 March 1917 quoted in Gammage, op. cit., p.258. 148

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prisoners or, more simply, not wanting to be bothered with the escorting job. In any of these cases the conductors would report on arrival at headquarters that a German shell had killed the prisoners; no questions would be asked.45

The practice of executing prisoners of war was not restricted to the First World War. Stephen Ambrose commented that of the thousand plus combat veterans of the Second World War he had i nterviewed, only one admitted to having personally shot a prisoner of war; the man adding that while he had felt some remorse for this act he would do it again. But as many as a third of the veterans Ambrose interviewed had witnessed incidents of other GIs shooting surrendered German soldiers.46 Harold Leinbaugh and John Campbell wrote of an incident that occurred near the German village of Kogenbroich. Their men had captured a dozen Germans and were escorting them to the rear when, ‘One man whose best friend had just been killed took revenge on four prisoners. He said they had jumped him and tried to escape—maybe they had, but he got no more escort duty.’47 Moreover, General George S. Patton Jr. suggested in his memoirs that, ‘Prisoner of war guard companies … should be as far forward as possible in action to take over prisoners of war, because troops heated with battle are not safe custodians’.48 A related issue to the killing of surrendering soldiers is the considerable personal risk entailed in providing medical assistance to a w ounded enemy soldier because he may be s eeking to get his foe to come closer before striking. Timothy Gowing recalled that in the Crimean War some of the wounded Russian soldiers ‘[shot] down our men just after they had done all they could for them. Our comrades at once paid them for it either by shooting or bayoneting them on the spot.’49 A British report (the Bryce Report) on the atrocities committed by the Germans when they occupied Belgium in 1914 commented:

In dealing with the treatment of the wounded and of prisoners and the cases in which the former appear to have been killed when helpless, and the latter at, or after, the moment of capture, we are met by some peculiar difficulties, because such acts may not in all cases be deliberate and cold blooded violations of the usages of war. Soldiers who are advancing over a spot where the wounded have fallen may conceivably think that some of those lying prostrate are

45 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, Blue Ribbon Books, New York, 1930, p.224. 46 Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers, pp.352-3. 47 Leinbaugh, op. cit., p.54. 48 Patton, Jr., op. cit., p.351. 49 Gowing, op. cit., p.21. 149

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shamming dead, or, at any rate, are so slightly wounded as to be able to attack, or to fire from behind when the advancing force has passed, and thus they may be led into killing those whom they would otherwise have spared.50

An example of the inherent danger of accepting the surrender of an e nemy soldier on the battlefield is provided by Denis Winter who quotes a soldier from the First World War.

Lying on his stomach, he turned his head and asked for mercy but his eyes said murder. I plunged my bayonet into the back of his heart and he slumped with a grunt. I turned him over. There was a revolver in his right hand under his left armpit. He had been trying to get a shot at me under his body. As I withdrew the bayonet, I pressed the trigger and shot him to make sure.51

Günter Koschorrek described how one of the NCOs in his unit was killed when a Soviet officer, who was lying wounded on the ground and whom the NCO had just finished bandaging, pulled out a pistol and shot him in the back. The Soviet officer was immediately killed by a bur st from a German sub-machine gun.52 David Hackworth recalled an incident during the Korean War when his unit was conducting a sweep of the battlefield following the repulse of a C hinese attack. ‘Many [Chinese soldiers] played possum, lying motionless on the ground, pretending they were dead; when this was discovered, every single “corpse” got a slug in the head—if blood pumped out you knew you’d gotten a live one.’53 Yet no s oldier was ever court martialled for any of the incidents described above, nor was the morality of these actions debated in editorials or analysed on talk shows across the globe. But tellingly, the Marines who entered the mosque in Fallujah were accompanied by an embedded journalist, who captured the shooting incident on film and, as part of a media pool, was obligated to share this footage with other networks. Footage of the incident was soon being shown across the world, particularly on al-Jazeera, which repeatedly aired the unedited footage (the actual killing was edited out when it was shown on the American news networks).54 Once the footage had been aired, the Marine corporal who had killed the insurgent in the mosque was removed from his unit and questioned by the US Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service.

50 The Bryce Report: Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, 12 May 1915 (can be viewed at ). 51 Winter, op. cit., p.214. 52 Koschorrek, op. cit., p.152. 53 Hackworth and Sherman, op. cit., p.106. 54 Amanda Ripley, ‘A Shot Seen Round the World’, Time, 29 November 2004, pp.26-7. 150

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Significantly, in view of the justification posited by the Marine corporal for his actions in the mosque, CNN reported that on the same day, and a mere block away a Marine was killed and five others wounded by a boob y-trapped body they had f ound in a hous e following a shootout with insurgents.55 The report of the Criminal Investigative Service was reviewed by the Commanding General of the 1st Marine Division, Major General Richard F. Natonski. Prior to the assault on Fallujah the Marines were informed that the rules of engagement (ROE) allowed the use of deadly force against men of military age deemed to be displaying hostile intent, even if these men had not fired upon the Marines.56 Natonski determined that ‘the actions of the Marine in question were consistent with the established rules of engagement, the law of armed conflict and the Marine’s inherent right of self-defense’.57 A Marine Corps’ press release stated that careful consideration was given to the impact of the enemy’s known tactic of feigning death or surrender and then attacking. The press release revealed the Marine corporal had in fact shot and killed three insurgents, not one, while clearing the mosque. Autopsy reports revealed the three insurgents had died from multiple gunshot wounds and that all three men had been hit by bullets fired from the corporal’s M-16. (Although it is not clear in the press release, presumably some of the insurgent’s wounds were inflicted during the battle of the previous day.) I n a s worn statement provided to investigators, the corporal admitted he had shot the three men in self-defence, as he believed they posed a threat to himself and hi s colleagues. I t was noted in the investigators’ report that the videotape showed the wounded insurgent was concealing his left arm behind his head.58 The press release concluded with the statement that:

it was reasonable to believe that the corporal fired on t he [insurgent] after reasonably believing that the individual was committing a hos tile act by exhibiting a known enemy [tactic] (feigning death and subsequently moving his concealed arm). B ased on all the evidence in the case, and the rules of engagement that were in effect at the time, it is clear that the corporal could have reasonably believed that the [insurgent] shown in the videotape posed a hostile threat justifying his use of deadly force.59

55 ‘Military investigates shooting of wounded insurgent’, CNN.com, 16 November 2004, viewed 6 August 2010, . 56 David Hancock, ‘A Marine Who Shot An Unarmed, Wounded Iraqi Won't Face Charges’, CBSNews, 4 May 2005, viewed 6 August 2010, . 57 USMC, ‘Marine involved in mosque shooting will not face court martial’. 58 ibid. 59 ibid. 151

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Tellingly, the press release did not provide any details about the two other insurgents killed by the Marine corporal in the mosque. Nor was any information provided on the circumstances of the death of a fourth wounded Iraqi insurgent, who was killed in the mosque by another Marine during the same patrol. Apparently justification was required only for the killing captured on video, which is indicative of the role played by the media in this incident. This is a c rucial point, because military authorities can no longer decide on the basis of their own values/ROE which infractions to investigate or punish. The filmed incidents are investigated while the others are kept hidden. T his situation has arisen as an out come of the collision of technology and military culture underpinned by operational imperatives. It should be noted that the key issue here is not one of morality or justification for the actions of the Marine in question. That is a separate debate. As noted, similar incidents involving the killing of unarmed prisoners of war have occurred with an al arming frequency in previous conflicts. B ut what made this particular case so different to the others was the presence of the media, which transformed a l ocalised incident into one played out across the world’s television screens. Another contemporary example of the media’s tendency to sensationalise incidents, and the resulting impact on soldiers, arose out of the intense media coverage of Israeli soldiers tasked with containing the Second Palestinian Intifada (September 2000 to November 2006). These soldiers were subjected to severe criticism from their superiors as they responded with progressively more violent tactics to Palestinian provocation. Martin Van Creveld commented in his history of the Israeli Defence Force that:

the chariggim (excesses) were the result of stress as the troops panicked and used ‘excessive force’ in situations they considered life-threatening—but that their superiors, prompted by the growing presence of reporters and T V cameras, thought should have been handled with greater care … The upshot is that those who use ‘excessive’ force and ‘unnecessarily’ kill or wound Palestinian demonstrators find themselves at risk of being treated as criminals; those who did not use enough force and lost lives, as fools.60

The propensity of the media to sensationalise incidents will result in the actions of soldiers in combat being subjected to greater scrutiny and will potentially make a

60 Martin Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive: A Critical History of the Israeli Defence Force, Public Affairs, New York, 2002, pp.347-8. 152

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challenging and dangerous job more difficult. Shortly after the shooting of the wounded insurgent at the mosque in Fallujah, the Marines were informed by the journalist present that these were the same men that had been wounded, disarmed and given medical treatment from the previous day’s attack. ‘At that point the Marine who fired the shot became aware that I was in the room’, the journalist recalled. ‘He came up to me and said, “I didn’t know sir—I didn’t know”. The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread.’61 What produced this ‘fear and dread’ in the Marine? Was it the realisation that he had just shot and killed an unarmed and helpless man, or was it the knowledge that his actions would now be broadcast across the world’s television screens, potentially taken out of context and subjected to intense scrutiny? In early 2002, Andrew Exum’s platoon of US soldiers were accompanied by two reporters whilst they conducted a patrol in the Shak-e-Kot Valley of Afghanistan. During the patrol Exum and hi s men shot and killed an al -Qaeda fighter. R eflecting soldiers’ concerns about the media’s tendency to distort and present out of context actions on the battlefield, Exum noted that:

After we returned from that mission, the higher-ranking officers and sergeants major fretted over what the reporters might write in their stories. They worried that the reporters might not understand what we had done, why we had fired so many bullets, and what my soldiers had d one after the man was dead, when Corporal Littrell cut the clothes off the body with a knife to search him.62

Later, Exum and his men were required to make sworn statements to an officer investigating the incident. They were told that this action was just a precaution. ‘One of the reporters worked for a national magazine, and the officers weren’t sure how he would interpret our actions. In case the reporter’s story branded us as anything less than heroic, the officers just wanted to have our statements on record for use in a rebuttal.’63 Exum bitterly recalled:

It was complete bullshit. If the reporter’s story was negative, the officers could use our statements as proof that the army had already taken action and was on its way toward prosecuting the offenders. With our sworn statements, they

61 Sites, ‘Open Letter’. 62 Andrew Exum, This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story from the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism, Gotham Books, New York, 2005, p.198. 63 ibid., p,198. 153

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could put together an investigation to find us guilty of ‘excessive violence’ or something equally ridiculous.64

The need to counter media sensationalism, particularly when combating an insurgency where allegations of the abuse of prisoners/civilian casualties/disrespecting holy sites and so on could inflame the local populace, has been incorporated into the contemporary military’s preparation for battle. During the November 2004 assault on Fallujah, Major General Jim Molan, an Australian army officer serving as the Chief of Operations for the US-led Multi-National Force-Iraq, was directed to ensure that within one hour of an allegation appearing in the media a response was ‘fired back’. Molan noted that: ‘We were not to deny anything immediately, nor investigate everything in such detail that we could only reply five days later, far too late for the media cycle’.65 Despite the efforts of Molan and his staff he surmised: ‘Yet for the millions in the world who gained their knowledge of the war from the media, the courageous and moral actions of thousands of these troops [members of the Multi-National Force-Iraq] were overlooked. A video of one US Marine shooting a wounded enemy gave the battle its enduring image.’66 Moreover, it does not take long before the lessons learnt on op erations are incorporated into training. I n 2004 P atrick Hennessey entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. H e vividly remembered one par ticular exercise that sought to simulate the pressure exerted by the media on soldiers in operational areas. Hennessy wrote that:

press conferences and daily newspaper reports about how bad/good you are almost made us yearn for the bad old days. After relentless days we were exhausted and f elt nothing but admiration for the guys out in Iraq. T he odds might have been worse back in the day, but at least you wouldn’t get misquoted or indicted for taking a trench.67

Since the Crimean War the military and t he media have had an uneasy coexistence. At the heart of the often turbulent relationship between the military and the media is the dichotomy between the military’s need for operational security and the media’s right to inform the public of the nature and purpose of the military operations

64 ibid., p.198. 65 Major General Jim Molan, Running the War in Iraq, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2008, p.226. 66 ibid., p.251. 67 Hennessey, op. cit., p.82.

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conducted by the nation’s armed forces. Technological developments over this period in the field of communications are inseparable from the increase of the risk that the media may compromise operational security. In the wars of the mid-nineteenth century, the first war correspondents would need to be within easy access of a telegraph station to file their dispatches and news would travel across the world in hours rather than a day or weeks, as had been the case prior to the linking of major cities via the telegraph. Contemporary journalists can file instantly from almost anywhere in the world, thereby increasing the risk of releasing real-time operational information that will benefit the enemy. But the media is also a business, and like any business it will not survive if it does not fulfill a need . The current intense competition among media outlets (facilitated by the ability to transmit from virtually anywhere in the world instantaneously), and in particular the insatiable demands for new material driven by the twenty-four-hour cable news channels and Internet news sites, tends to compel journalists to ‘go with what they have got’, which often represents a t riumph of sensationalism over accuracy. T his factor, when coupled with a ubi quitous media presence on the battlefield means that the contemporary soldier, more so than soldiers of the past, needs to consider the possibility that his actions will be recorded, taken out of context, and served up by the media to be judged in the court of public opinion. In this respect, perhaps more clearly than any other aspect examined in this thesis, the soldier’s burden has unquestionably increased as a r esult of the collision of modern technology and the battlefield.

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6 Coming Home on a Jet Plane

This chapter will examine a burden that is borne not only by the soldier but also by his family, that being the lengthy separation brought about by his war service. Prior to the era of mass commercial aviation, which commenced in the 1960s and was facilitated by technological developments in aircraft design (principally the development of jet engines), the opportunities for soldiers serving in far-flung campaigns to undertake reunion travel were limited. A t the commencement of the period being studied, limited numbers of wives were granted permission to accompany their husbands on c ampaign but the opportunity to do so ceased after the Crimean War. From then on until the late 1960s and the coming of the Vietnam War, when their husbands sailed off to war they were generally away for the duration. The focus of this chapter will then shift to examine the effects that this lengthy separation has had on divorce rates. From 1685 a British soldier needed the permission of his commanding officer to marry,1 though the financial hardship of not obtaining permission was usually more persuasive than any disciplinary action that might be taken. If permission was granted the wife would be bought onto the Married Roll of the regiment and would be entitled to quarters, rations (wives generally received a half ration, a child above seven years a third of a ration and one under seven years a quarter ration)2 and transportation when the regiment was sent abroad. Because of the financial liability incurred, the number of wives brought ‘on the strength’ were strictly limited. A lthough junior officers were discouraged from marrying,3 there were no restrictions on the number who could do so, as long as they received permission. Likewise most staff-sergeants and sergeants would be g ranted permission to marry if so sought. O nly around six per cent of the rank and file (corporal and below), however, were permitted to marry. The conditions that needed to be fulfilled prior to permission being sought changed over time and from regiment to regiment, though John Baynes noted that in the pre-1914 British Army a

1 Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket, HarperCollins, London, 2002, p.293. 2 James Anton, Royal Highlander: A soldier of H.M 42nd (Royal) Highlanders during the Peninsular, South of France & Waterloo Campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars, Leonaur, 2007, p.153. 3 The practice of discouraging junior officers from marrying has been maintained by some regiments of the contemporary British Army. Major James Hewitt, a former member of The Life Guards, wrote in 1999 that the regiment ‘preferred bachelor officers who would get out and do sports and not have family ties when it came to postings abroad or war. It was still frowned upon to get married below the rank of captain, and you still had to ask the commanding officer’s permission.’ Hewitt, op. cit., p.15. 156

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member of the rank and file generally needed to have completed seven years’ service, been awarded at least two good conduct badges and have at least £5 in savings before he could apply for permission to marry. Many more soldiers were married unofficially, that is, without the permission of their commanding officer. Consequently, their wives and children were considered ‘off the strength’ and were barred from the barracks. Being granted permission to marry did not automatically bestow a right for the wives of soldiers to accompany their husbands on campaign. In 1799 the War Office issued an or der that, ‘The lawful wives of soldiers are permitted to embark in the proportion of Six to One Hundred Men [the nominal strength of a company], including Non-Commissioned Officers’.4 Some regiments interpreted the order as only applying to regiments proceeding on active service as opposed to garrison duty, and permitted more wives to accompany troops embarked for the latter. In 1813 Army Regulations clarified the matter by stating, ‘when a regiment embarks for Garrison Duty on Foreign Service, the lawful Wives of Soldiers shall be permitted to embark, in the proportion of Twelve per Company, including the Wives of Non-Commissioned Officers … for active Field Service, the number of Soldier’s Wives … must be limited to six per company’.5 No restrictions were placed on the number of officers’ wives who could accompany the regiment abroad, though the officers were generally expected to pay for their family’s own food and keep.6 The drawing of lots among the married women as to whom would accompany the troops usually took place the day before or even on t he day of embarkation and great was the suffering incurred by the women who drew the ‘Not to go’ ticket. Benjamin Harris recounted the scene when the 95th Regiment of Foot set sail from the port of Deal for the Walcheren campaign of 1809.

a terrible outcry there was amongst the women upon the beach on the embarkation; for the ill consequences of having too many women amongst us had been so apparent in our former campaign and retreat that the allowances of wives was considerably curtailed on this occasion, and the distraction of the poor creatures at parting with their husbands was quite heart-rending; some of them clinging to the men so resolutely, that the officers were obliged to give orders to have them separated by force. I n fact, even after we were in the

4 Robert Henderson, ‘A Soldier’s Family in the British Army during the War of 1812’., The War of 1812 Website, viewed 14 July 2008, . 5 ibid. 6 Annabel Venning, Following the Drum: The Lives of Army Wives and Daughters, Past and Present, Headline, London, 2005, p.27. 157

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boats and fairly pushed off, the screaming and howling of their farewells rang in our ears far out to sea.7

Joseph Donaldson of the 94th Regiment of Foot described another such scene that occurred at the pay-sergeant’s office just prior to the regiment embarking for Portugal.

The next in turn was the wife of a young man, who was much respected in the company for his steadiness and good behaviour. She was remarkable for her affection for her husband and bel oved by the whole company for her modest and obliging disposition. She advanced with a palpitating heart and trembling hand, to decide on (what was to her, I believe) her future happiness or misery. Trembling between fear and hope she drew out one of the tickets, and attempted to open it; but her hand shook so that she could not do it. She handed it to one of the men to open—when he opened it, his countenance fell and he hesitated to say what it was. She cried out to him, in a tone of agony, ‘Tell me, for God’s sake, what it is’. ‘Not to go’, said he, in a c ompassionate tone of voice. ‘Oh, God help me! O Sandy!’, she exclaimed and sunk lifeless in the arms of her husband, who had s prung forward to her assistance, and i n whose face was now depicted every variety of wretchedness.8

Donaldson recounted that Sandy’s wife followed him the six miles to the port of embarkation, where she begged the commanding officer to allow her to accompany her husband, but to no avail. As the boat pulled away Donaldson recalled, ‘she uttered a shriek, the knell of a broken heart, which rings in my ears at this moment’.9 Sandy was killed in Spain and nothing more was heard of his wife. A number of women did accompany Wellington’s Army during the Peninsular War, some arriving by official transport, others by their own means. I n the field the wives acted as laundresses and nurses and bore the privations of this campaign alongside the men. James Anton wrote of sharing a tent with his wife and seventeen other men, prompting him to build a t emporary hut, ‘resolving, if possible, not to mix blankets with so many bedfellows again. This I was the more anxious to do, because at that time the whole of the men were affected with an eruption on their skin similar to

7 Hibbert (ed.), The Recollections of Rifleman Harris, p.114. 8 Joseph Donaldson, Donaldson of the 94th Scots Brigade: The Recollections of a Soldier During the Peninsula & South of France Campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars, Leonaur, 2008, p.57. 9 ibid., p.60. 158

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the itch, and their clothing was in a very filthy state …’10 Harris told of the retreat to Coruna (December 1808–January 1809), ‘the scenes of distress and misery I witnessed were dreadful to contemplate, particularly amongst the women and children, who were lagging and falling behind, their husbands and fathers being in the main body in our front’.11 Edward Costello wrote of an incident following the retreat from Burgos (October 1812) where the French captured several children. ‘In a few days, however, the French, desiring to be as little encumbered as ourselves with children, sent them back with a flag of truce. This was followed by a m ost interesting scene, as the different mothers rushed forward to clasp their darlings in their arms.’12 The French Army of the period did not extend the same rights for women to accompany their husbands on campaign as did the British, with the exception of the Cantinières. The Cantinières, of which there could be up t o four per regiment, were required to be married to a soldier of the regiment and were given a commission to sell food and dr ink to the unit’s soldiers to supplement their rations. If her husband was killed in action she would usually marry one of his comrades (in short order) to maintain her position. Although not required to expose themselves to enemy fire, these women shared the hardships of the campaign alongside the men. Adrien Bourgogne tells us that during the retreat of the Grand Armée from Moscow, their Cantinière, the wife of the regimental barber, gave birth to a baby boy in a flimsy shelter while the temperature plunged to ten below zero. The infant died a few days later.13 Bourgogne admired the endurance and tenacity of these women, noting that, ‘The women bore their sufferings and privations with an astonishing courage, enough to reflect shame on certain men, who had no courage and resignation to endure their trials’.14 The number of women permitted to accompany the troops on campaign varied from conflict to conflict; only four women per hundred men were allowed to accompany the British expeditionary force sent to the Crimea in 1854.15 This was the last campaign of the British Army where wives were permitted to accompany their husbands on active duty.16 The regiments that fought the American Civil War did not make any provisions for the wives of soldiers to accompany their husbands in the field, though a few women joined the camp followers trudging behind the campaigning forces. Some women even

10 Anton, op. cit., p.58. 11 Hibbert (ed.), The Recollections of Rifleman Harris, p.81. 12 Costello, op. cit., p.159. 13 Bourgogne, op. cit., pp.66,72. 14 ibid., p.199. 15 Trevor Grove, ‘The wives who went to war’, The Daily Mail, 14 April 2007, viewed 11 July 2008, . 16 Richard Holmes, Sahib: The British Soldier in India, HarperCollins, London, 2005, p.493. 159

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took the extreme step of enlisting to serve alongside their husbands. Both the Union and Confederate armies forbade the enlistment of women. The women therefore assumed masculine names and disguised themselves as men by deepening their voices, binding their breasts and wearing men’s clothing to pass what is best described as the cursory medical examination upon enl isting. S arah Blalock enlisted in the Confederate 26th North Carolina Infantry to be with her husband William. She disguised herself as a young male named Samuel Blalock, supposedly the twenty- year-old brother of William. The official Compiled Military Service Record by the US Army’s Adjutant General’s Office for Blalock states:

This lady dressed in men’s clothes, volunteered, received bounty and for two weeks did all the duties of a soldier before she was found out, but her husband being discharged, she disclosed the fact, returned the bounty, and was immediately discharged April 20, 1862.17

Florina Budwin and her husband enlisted together in the Union forces, were captured at the same time by the Confederate Army and sent to the infamous Andersonville prison in Georgia, where Mr Budwin died. M rs Budwin survived Andersonville only to succumb to disease when transferred to a pr ison in Florence, South Carolina.18 Women such as Blalock and Budwin were very much the exception rather than the rule and for most wives the Civil War represented a period of enforced separation, punctuated by infrequent letters and even more infrequent periods of leave. During the major wars of the twentieth century, few if any armies made provisions for wives to accompany their husbands on ac tive service. On the rare occasions that this did occur it was most likely due to a senior officer manipulating the system to their advantage (as will be seen in the case of Field Marshal Blamey described below). However, the lack of official assistance did not stop those with the means to do so (generally the wives of officers) from making their own way overseas. Norman Carlyon noted that in the first few months of the Second World War there were no restrictions placed on civilians travelling to Palestine, so those wives who could afford the fares and accommodation made their way independently into theatre. Some of the wives were thus in the Middle East to meet the troopships of the Australian 6th Division upon arrival. Shortly afterwards, however, the Australian Government

17 DeAnne Blanton, ‘Women Soldiers of the Civil War’, Prologue, The U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, Spring 1993, Vol. 25, No.1, viewed 6 August 2010, . 18 ibid. 160

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imposed a ban on any further civilian (non-war related) travel to the Middle East.19 In October 1940, Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey, then a Lieutenant General and General Officer Commanding (GOC) the Australian Imperial Force, wrote to the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, petitioning for his wife, along with the wife of Major General Iven Mackay (GOC 6th Division), to have their passports endorsed to allow them to travel to Palestine and Egypt to undertake voluntary welfare work. No reply being forthcoming, Blamey wrote to the incoming Army Minister, Percy Spender, and again put his case. O n 12 D ecember the War Cabinet granted Olga Blamey a passport to travel to the Middle East. She arrived the following month. The special treatment accorded Blamey’s wife caused adverse public comment and she had barely arrived in the Middle East when Cabinet requested she return to Australia. She declined to do so.20 Carlyon, who at the time was serving on Blamey’s personal staff and noted Blamey’s strenuous efforts to bring his wife overseas concluded, ‘In my experience of him, Blamey never felt bound to set an example in cheerfully accepting the restrictions that active service imposed on others. He assumed the right to do as he pleased when he pleased, regardless of what others thought.’21 A somewhat different position on the matter of providing female companionship for soldiers on campaign was adopted by the Soviet forces of the Second World War. A large number of women served with the Soviet military in the field, usually as signalers and clerks on headquarters staff and as doctors, medics and cooks with frontline units, though others served as pilots, snipers and d rivers. The ready availability of women enabled senior officers to take ‘campaign wives’. Senior officers would arrange for their mistress to be posted to their headquarters staff, even to the extent of creating a po sition whereby they would accompany them throughout the campaign. This practice was widespread throughout the Red Army during the Second World War.22 Some British soldiers may have had wives/girlfriends among the nurses, ambulance drivers or members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps serving in France during the First World War, but for most, contact with their wives/girlfriends was limited to leave periods or while convalescing at home after being wounded. From mid-1915, British soldiers could expect to get home leave once a year, generally of either four or ten days.23 But for many of the soldiers of the British Empire, particularly those from

19 Norman D. Carlyon, I Remember Blamey, Macmillan, Sydney, 1980, pp.11-2. 20 David Horner, Blamey: The Commander-in-Chief, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998, p.159. 21Carlyon, op. cit., p.14. 22 Merridale, op. cit., p.239. 23 Winter, op. cit., p.165. 161

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the far-flung dominions of New Zealand and A ustralia, home leave would only come with the end of the war. This largely arose because the only option for transportation, by ship, would require several weeks to complete the journey and i t was therefore impractical for such troops to be granted home leave. Conversely, due to the relative closeness of their homes to the battlefield, German soldiers of the First World War received regular home leave, as did the French. In addition to scheduled leave, German soldiers were also awarded furlough for bravery in action. Ernst Jϋnger wrote of receiving two weeks furlough following a patrol in September 1917 of which fourteen men set out and only four returned.24 The opportunity to take home leave during the Second World War was very much dependent on the theatre in which the soldier fought. S ome aircrew from Bomber Command, who were based in England throughout the war, were able to see their families regularly, some even had their wives serve alongside them in the same unit. Guy Gibson wrote of the wife of one of his pilots who served as a plotter in the squadron operations room. As the bombers returned to base her job was to record the time landed against each plane. On one occasion, the whole board was filled in except for the space alongside the name of her husband’s plane. ‘I sat there smoking cigarette after cigarette, until it became light and an or derly came in and drew the blackout curtains’, Gibson recalled. ‘It was hard to say anything. I wanted to go up to the crew room and talk to the boys, but I didn’t like to leave her. She just sat there, staring at that space, a funny look—an incredible look.’25 The Soviet Union mobilised women to a greater extent than the other combatants during the Second World War. It was not unheard of for husbands and wives to serve in the same unit. Evgeni Bessonov, who served with the 4th Tank Army, recalled that his battalion’s doctor was married to the deputy battalion commander. In January 1945, during the Polish campaign, her husband was badly injured when struck by a tree whilst standing on the step of a truck. He later died from his injuries with his wife in attendance.26 In contrast to the soldiers, sailors and ai rmen serving in the United Kingdom were those dispatched to North Africa or Burma. The official history of the British Army during the Second World War concluded that the psychological strain of a prolonged absence from home became apparent in most men after being away for two years. The policy then in force was that the longest period men should be kept overseas, in all

24 Jünger, op. cit., p.190; Sergeant Jack Dorgan, 7th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers quoted in Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Great War, p.91. 25 Gibson, op. cit., p.163. 26 Bessonov, op. cit., pp.165-6. 162

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but exceptional cases, was three years. T his policy was a di rect reflection of the difficulties encountered in transporting the men back to the United Kingdom, which if it did occur would almost invariably be by ship, with priority being given to the wounded.27 In November 1944, the American army in Europe introduced a rotation plan whereby troops who had been wounded at least twice, or decorated twice for bravery, or had spent at least six months at the front, would be eligible for rotation back to the United States for four months. The initial quota was 2,200 men per month (later increased to 5,500), though passage back to the States was dependent on be rths being available on ships. The impact that this rotation had on the manning of the divisions in combat was negligible, but the plan had the desired effect of providing the combat troops with some hope, albeit remote, that there was another way to be released from combat other than death, wounds or peace. Ernie Pyle commented that only the most optimistic of soldiers considered that he w ould personally be r otated home and be reunited with family and friends. One soldier he spoke to had calculated that under this plan he would be returned to America in seventeen years’ time!28 Australian servicemen undertaking a year-long tour of duty in the Korean War were given five day’s leave in Japan after four months’ service in Korea and a further three weeks’ leave (two weeks for officers), also to be taken in Japan, after they had passed their eighth month in-country.29 Former members of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan who had m arried a Japanese national would have the opportunity to reunite with their wives during the designated leave periods, but for most servicemen this was not a possibility. American servicemen undertaking the standard twelve-month tour of duty in Vietnam were given seven days of R&R (rest and recreation) out-of-country. Initially travel was restricted to several Asian cities, such as Bangkok and H ong Kong, and Hawaii, though from July 1967, following a request from the US Government, Sydney was added to the list of cities open to American servicemen on R&R from Vietnam.30 Hawaii was generally reserved for married soldiers so that they could meet up w ith their wives and families. Australian servicemen were also given a week’s leave during their tour of duty in Vietnam. Morgan Quinn served with the Royal Australian Air Force

27 Lieutenant Colonel J.H.A. Sparrow, The Second World War 1939-1945, Army: Morale, The War Office, London, 1949, p.9. 28 Pyle, op. cit., p.124. 29 Colin H. Brown, Stalemate in Korea: And How we Coped 1952–1953, Australian Military History Publications, Sydney, 1997, p.63. 30 Department of Veteran Affairs (Australia), ‘Australia and the Vietnam War: Rest and Recreation in Sydney’, viewed 18 July 2008, . 163

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in Vietnam in 1968/69. He took R&R after six months in Vietnam and recalled that, ‘It was like meeting my wife again for the first time. I was afraid to have sex with her.’31 The distance from Vietnam to Hawaii is less than the distance from North Africa or Burma to the United Kingdom, however key point here is that the development of mass commercial air travel in the period since the Second World War gave the soldiers serving in Vietnam the opportunity to undertake reunion travel during their combat tour, an opportunity that was denied to many of their predecessors. From a military effectiveness perspective, any absence of a soldier from a unit required either supplementary manning to cover the absence or, which was more likely, the unit would carry the vacancy until the member returned from leave. From the First World War onwards, soldiers were traditionally given leave periods of around one t o two weeks, as any longer would have entailed too great an impost upon the manning needed to conduct operations. It is not the case that in wars prior to Vietnam the military authorities actively sought to deny soldiers the opportunity to reunite with their wives and families, but rather that the distance to be covered for such reunions to occur and the time taken to do so would extend the leave period beyond that able to be sustained by armies on campaign. And while the combatant nations of the Second World possessed considerable air transport capability, this was needed to move about high priority military stores, with little surplus capacity available for non-operational travel. Thus it was only the convergence of the ability of aircraft to transit great distances quickly and the additional capacity for passenger travel made available to the military by the development of mass commercial air travel in the late 1950s/early 1960s that long-distance reunion travel for soldiers deployed on far-flung operations became practical. This factor fundamentally changed the expectation of soldiers in relation to the maximum duration of their separation from their family and friends. As noted, unless the conflict was fought in close proximity to the home country, many troops would say goodbye to their family and friends for the duration of the conflict. Now the decision facing soldiers was when would be the optimum time to take their home leave: at the mid-point of the tour, or in their final few months so that when they returned they would have only a short stretch to complete. Australian troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan for periods of six months or greater were entitled to ‘Relief out of country travel fare assistance’, which was essentially reunion travel. Entitlement for this travel accrued according to the length of the overseas deployment. A deployment of six months but less than nine months

31 Morgan Quinn quoted in Rintoul, op. cit., p.114. 164

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attracted one funded trip, nine months but less than 12 months attracted two, with up to five funded trips for deployments of 18 months or more. The Australian Defence Force lengthened the duration of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan from six to eight months in 2007, though this did not impact upon the standard entitlement of one reunion travel trip per deployment. The required minimum period to be outside the operational area was seven consecutive days, although it could be longer if additional leave had been accrued. Members were able to use this travel assistance to return to their family in Australia. Conversely, for members who did not wish to return to Australia, the approved destination for members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan was Rome, with many servicemen and women arranging for their husband/wife/partner to meet them in Europe (at their own cost) for a European holiday.32 American troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan on a standard twelve-month deployment were able to take a mid-tour break of fifteen days (excluding travel time). The increase in the length of deployments to fifteen months in 2007 s aw a corresponding increase in the mid-tour break to eighteen days. No more than ten per cent of a unit was able to be on leave at any time during the deployment.33 However, there was another unrelated factor that was decreasing the separation of husbands and wives on operations and that was the increasing proportion of females in the US military. For example, in 2008 there were an estimated 10,000 married couples serving in the US Army. The practical effect of this increase of married couples serving in the military is that a number are now being deployed together, usually at their own request, to operational theatres. In recognition of the difficulties of keeping them apart, in May 2006 the Army policy was changed to allow married soldiers in Iraq to share sleeping quarters.34 But although the availability of commercial air travel facilitated the return of the soldier home, the rapid transformation from the combat zone to the ‘home front’ could impose a psychological burden on the soldier. T he US Army’s Textbook of Military Medicine: War Psychiatry noted that, ‘The veteran of Vietnam went from the battle zone to the United States in 48 hours. He did not have time to think and talk through what he had seen and done, and i n any event he went back with strangers, not the

32 Australian Defence Force Signal PERS DSC 041/07 titled ‘ADF Conditions of Service – Operation Slipper [Iraq]’, dated 30 August 2007. 33 ALARACT Message 163/2007 dated 20 July 2007 titled ‘Announcement of Policy Changes to USCENTCOM Theater Rest and Recuperation (R&R) Leave Program’, viewed 6 August 2010, . 34 Bradley Brooks and Russ Bynum, ‘In historic change, Army lets husband-and-wife soldiers live together in Iraq’, Army Times, 2 April 2008, viewed 20 July 2008, . 165

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men he had served with.’35 Michael Scrase, who served with the Australian Army in Vietnam in 1968 as a dispatch driver, recalled, ‘One minute I was in Vietnam and the next minute I was home and I was totally lost … There was no debriefing, no time to melt back in’. 36 Similar feelings were expressed by Bob Hobbs, who served as an infantry soldier with the Australian Army in Vietnam in 1969.

When I left Vietnam all our blokes were dug in around the village of Thai Thien and the VC were trying to get to the rice caches. We’d crawled around until we found their tracks down around our perimeter and we were armed to the teeth because we were expected VC to come in and take the rice. So here I am, twenty-four hours out of the jungle, thousands of miles away surrounded by people who didn’t want to know about it and who couldn’t have cared if we lived or died … They weren’t aware and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t belong here, I belong with the guys in the platoon’.37

One of his fellow Chinook crewmembers commented to Mark Hammond concerning their return from operations in Afghanistan in 2006, ‘One night I am in a cab [Chinook helicopter] watching a soldier having his heart massaged by the MERT [Medical Emergency Response Team], with his chest cracked open, and twenty-four hours later I am sat on my own in my living room watching Eastenders and David Beckham’s new haircut is front-page news’.38 The above comments are particularly illustrative of one of the factors that causes soldiers to have troubling reintegrating into society, particularly if only home for a short period on l eave, which is their overall sense of disillusionment due to an unrealistic expectation of public interest in the war and sympathy for the soldiers’ plight. The military, to a certain extent, is a self-contained society. This factor, when combined with the intense emotional investment that naturally arises when soldiers are asked to risk their life and limb for a cause, somewhat blinds them to the fact that, quite simply, for civil society ‘life goes on’. A British soldier of the First World War recalled that when he returned home on leave:

One thing I found when I eventually got home was that my father and mother didn’t seem in the least interested in what had happened. They hadn’t any

35 Faris R. Kirkland, ‘Chapter 12 –Postcombat Reentry, Textbook of Military Medicine: War Psychiatry, Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army, 1995, p. 296. 36 Michael Scrase quoted in Rintoul, op. cit., p.181. 37 Bob Hobbs quoted in Rintoul, op. cit., p.134. 38 Hammond, op. cit., p.293. 166

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conception of what it was like … they had no idea of what kind of danger we were in.39

Joshua Key, returning home on a mid-tour break from Iraq in 2003, was struck by the incongruity between his day-to-day existence in Iraq and the attitude to the war by the people back home:

America felt like a dreamland. It seemed that not a soul in the country had the faintest clue about what I had been living every day in Iraq. My buddies were in danger, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. But outside the military base, people in Colorado Springs carried on as usual – going to work, sporting events, malls and m ovies. Walking about the city, a per son visiting from another country would have had no idea that the United States was at war.40

Andrew Exum had similar feelings when he r eturned to America after serving with the US Army in Afghanistan in 2002.

As I walked the mall, I felt like a stranger in my own country … I felt that I also should have been wearing some sort of cardboard sign that read ‘War Veteran’, or ‘Be nice to me. I have just returned from Afghanistan.’ … Americans—like citizens in most democracies—don’t regard their soldiers or veterans with too much awe. We occasionally hold patriotic rallies and send cards and cookies to troops overseas, but soldiers largely live outside the mainstream culture and are outsiders, even though they often look just like everyone else … For my part, I began to fall victim to the most common sin among soldiers, the sin of self-righteousness. I genuinely felt that society—those people in the mall, those people at the bar—ought to treat me with deference.41

Patrick Hennessey eagerly anticipated his R&R period while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan in 2007, ‘Two weeks of R&R had t aken on a m ythical importance out on tour: the agonizingly closer we’d got to them, even as the intensity seemed to ramp up on purpose with their approach, the more we’d wanted them’.42 But when he returned home to London he was surprised by his feelings.

39 Private Norman Demuth, 1/5th Battalion, London Regiment quoted in Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Great War, p.169 40 Key, op. cit., p.179. 41 Exum, op. cit., p.207. 42 Hennessey, op. cit., p.253. 167

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I bolted from the bars. We’d been lonely and isolated out on the line but we were just as lonely and isolated surrounded by our nearest and dearest, stiff to the welcome-home hugs and honest wide-eyed questions, the shoulder-patting teasing of the guys, distant from those I’d missed being close to … you couldn’t have relaxed anyway because you knew as soon as you did you’d be back in Brize [Brize Norton, the airport of departure to return to Afghanistan] and the flight which would drop you back into the alternative universe which was somehow where you felt you belonged.43

Doug Beattie, who had returned home to the United Kingdom from Afghanistan in 2008 on R&R to attend his daughter’s wedding, was also struck by his inability to reintegrate back into civilian society.

Yet over the next few days increasingly I shrank back into my shell, sitting silently on the couch, watching whatever was on the box, remembering Afghanistan … Around me frantic last-minute plans were being made for Leigh’s wedding due to take place in just a few days. I wanted to share in the excitement, have it sweep me up, yet instead it just swirled around me. I was like an interloper. I was the head of the family and yet I didn’t belong. I was marking time, waiting to return to the world I knew best. One of war. Fighting. Death.44

When considered collectively, the above statements from soldiers returning home from a range of modern conflicts (Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan) encapsulate the key aspects of the psychological burden that home leave can impose on soldiers. First there is the shock of the rapid transformation from a combat environment to that of home, next there is the disillusionment that arises from the realization that civil society is virtually oblivious to the suffering of their soldiers on their behalf. These feelings may also be coupled with a sense of guilt about leaving comrades behind in the war zone and the knowledge that all too soon you would be back in the fight. The key point here is that although soldiers will inevitably experience many of these feelings when their deployment is over (though obviously they will not be concerned about the impending return to operations), the availability of mid-tour leave now means that they have to experience the difficulties of reintegration back into civilian society on at least two occasions. To an extent, providing the opportunity for this rapid transformation out of the

43 ibid., pp.251,253. 44 Beattie, Task Force Helmand, p.196. 168

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war zone has ignored the lessons of the First and Second World wars, whereby the lengthy passage on the troopship home allowed the soldiers who had been i n combat the opportunity to de-stress and m entally process their experiences by talking them through with their comrades. Lou Armour of the Royal Marines recalled of the long journey home on the Canberra after the Falklands War:

It was great coming home while you were still part of the group. It’s the getting home and t he splitting up: that was the time that I started getting problems emotionally. While you’re with all the lads, because you’ve all been in it together, you know each other’s feelings. O nly people who’ve been in that situation really understand.45

Likewise, Julian Thompson, who commanded the 3 Commando Brigade during the Falklands War, also felt hesitant leaving his comrades upon his return to the United Kingdom.

There was a feeling that we didn’t want to leave the familiar surroundings of our friends, comrades and men we knew, to go bac k to what was going to be unfamiliar. We were going among people who did not totally understand what we had done; into a world full of people who didn’t know what we had gone through, who were perhaps putting the wrong connotation on what had happened … I actually in some ways felt reluctant to walk off that ship among it all.46

Lengthy overseas deployments and infrequent or non-existent opportunities for home leave often resulted in widespread separation anxiety among soldiers, particularly in relation to the suspected infidelity of their wives and f iancées. This concern has been exploited by enemy propaganda, which suggested to the front line troops that, while they were enduring the squalor and danger of combat, their wives or girlfriends were living it up with other men. Normally the men cuckolding the combat soldiers were identified as civilians who had avoided the draft and were getting rich at home or the soldiers of their allies, who were enjoying the delights of the home country while others fought abroad. This particular form of propaganda reached its zenith during the Second World War and was mainly used by the Axis Powers. A German propaganda leaflet produced in 1944 showed an illustration of an English girl and an

45 Sergeant Lou Armour, Royal Marines quoted in Bilton, op. cit., p.239. 46 Brigadier Julian Thompson, British Army quoted in Bilton, op. cit., p.230. 169

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American serviceman re-dressing next to a r umpled bed with the caption ‘While you are away’. The reverse of the card stated:

The Yanks are ‘lease-lending’ your women. Their pockets full of cash and no work to do, the boys from overseas are having the times of their lives in Merry Old England. And what young woman, single or married, could resist such ‘handsome brute from the wide open spaces’ to have dinner with, a cocktail at some night-club, and afterwards …… Anyway, so numerous have become the scandals that all England is talking about them now.47

Likewise, the Japanese produced a pr opaganda card with an illustration of an Australian soldier standing in New Guinea above which is the caption, ‘Australia Screams. The Aussie: What was that scream. Something up?’ The rest of the illustration portrays an American officer holding a s truggling young lady. A bove the American officer is the caption, ‘The Yank: Sh..Sh.. Quiet. girlie. Calm yourself. He’ll be on the next casualty list. No worry.’48 Soldiers’ concerns about their wives' fidelity were not unfounded. When the 32nd Regiment of Foot reached Lahore, India in April 1848 it found the lonely wives of their comrades. Robert Waterfield, a soldier in the regiment, wrote:

The regiments to which their husbands belonged was up t he country with Sir Walter Gilbert, and not having any one to watch over them, or to keep them within bounds, they came out in their true colors, and pr oved false to their plighted vows. There were some few exceptions, and I am afraid but few, and the scenes enacted by the false ones was, in some cases, disgusting to the extreme.49

A hundred years later, the wives of the British soldiers stationed in India were sent to Quetta for the duration of the Second World War. J ohn Masters blissfully recalled that whilst there, ‘Good girls grew lonely, naughty girls grew naughtier’.50 Paul Fussell tells us the concept of the Dear John letter—whereby a soldier was informed by

47 Propaganda card A10-046-8-44, National Archives, reproduced in John Costello, Love, Sex and War: Changing Values 1939–45, Collins, London, 1985, illustration No.32. 48 Herbert A. Friedman, ‘Sex and Psychological Operations’, viewed 19 July 2008, . 49 Private Robert Waterfield, papers located in the Oriental and India Office Collection of the British Library, quoted in Holmes, Sahib, p.494. 50 Masters, op. cit., p.85. 170

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his wife or girlfriend that henceforth they would be w ith someone else—originated among the American soldiers of the Second World War.51 So it is perhaps not surprising that one of the most popular songs of the war years was the subtle plea for fidelity titled Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone but Me.52 Likewise, one of the most popular Russian poems of the Second World War, which was soon set to music, was the similarly themed Wait for Me. The official history of the British Army during the Second World War noted that a woman’s fidelity usually broke down after two- to three-years of separation, commenting, ‘The number of wives and fiancées who were unfaithful to soldiers serving overseas almost defies belief’. The official history goes on to state, ‘Nothing did more to lower the morale of troops serving overseas than news of female infidelity, or the suspicion of it’.53 These suspicions were often well founded. David Hackworth and his classmates encountered ‘the lonely Army wife, whose husband was on an unaccompanied tour’, when they attended an officers’ training course at Fort Benning, Georgia during the Korean War. Hackworth fondly reminisced: ‘These were temporary widows looking for company; if the magic was there, you had an odds -on first-night score, and guaranteed good meals and hi gh times for the rest of your Benning experience, with no strings attached.’54 Indeed, Hackworth, then a first lieutenant, had an affair with the wife of a major serving in Korea. The suspected infidelity of their wives/girlfriends was also a source of angst for the American soldiers deployed to Saudi Arabia in preparation for the 1991 Gulf War. Anthony Swofford recounted how his Marine regiment had a ‘Wall of Shame’, where photographs of wives or girlfriends suspected of having affairs were affixed with duct tape. He noted that forty or more photographs were attached to the Wall (actually a six-foot-tall post), many of which had nar ratives of the men’s cuckoldry emblazoned across the duct tape.55 Later, when reinforcements arrived in Saudi Arabia from the United States and joined Swofford’s platoon, one of them revealed the extent of the adultery being committed by the wives of the deployed men. He commented that he had noticed cars pulling into the driveways of the ‘war wives’ late at night and leaving early in the morning. The Marines called the men cuckolding them ‘ghostpeckers’, which Swofford explained was ‘a pecker that’s fucked your old lady, but you’ll never

51 Fussell, Wartime, p.253. 52 Lew Brown, Charles Tobias and Sam H. Stept, Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else But Me, Alfred Music Publishing, Van Nuys, California, 1942. 53 Sparrow, op. cit., p.9. 54 Hackworth and Sherman, op. cit., p.213. 55 Swofford, op. cit., pp. 91-2. 171

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know’.56 A decade or so later, Joshua Key was taunted by one of his sergeants the day before he deployed to Iraq: ‘It’s a known fact that your wife is gonna start fucking some other guy, the moment you’re out of the country. You wait. You’ll see. It happens to them all.’57 While Key’s wife did remain faithful, one of the fellow soldiers in his company was not so fortunate. Key recalled overhearing a conversation as he waited in line for his turn on the phone. ‘I could hear her saying that she was leaving him, and then I could hear a man bark into the line: “Your little bitch wife is my princess now.” And then the line went dead.’58 James Pritchard, a US Army chaplain based in Baghdad, recounted that in the first five months of 2008 he had thirty-eight soldiers come to him to discuss marital problems, over a quarter of whom had found out that their wife was leaving them or having an affair. ‘It’s a big issue, especially with younger soldiers who’ve married somebody they haven’t known very long,’ commented Pritchard. ‘They suddenly have extra money coming in and the lifestyle of a spouse at home lends itself to extra-marital affairs. We’ve had s oldiers go home and f ind the house empty, the wife and kids gone.’59 Sebastian Junger tells us that among the US soldiers he was embedded with in Afghanistan in 2007/08 that they would joke about almost anything. ‘Only wives and girlfriends are off-limits because the men are already so riddled with anxiety over what’s going on back home that almost nothing you could say would be funny’.60 As noted in Chapter One, and as evidenced by Key’s account, the ability to communicate directly with a girlfriend/wife is two-edged. On one hand it enables the instant reaffirmation of the bond between partners but it can also undermine, or even terminate, relationships that were in trouble. David Finkel observed that:

a soldier who was one of the snipers was storming around in a rage because he had telephoned his wife at one o’clock in the morning her time and no one had answered and where the hell was his wife at one o’clock in the morning? So he called her again at two o’clock in the morning and she didn’t answer and where the hell was she at two in the morning?61

56 ibid., p.110. 57 Key, op. cit, pp.72-3. 58 ibid., p.124. 59 Chaplain James Pritchard, quoted in David Smith, ‘Divorces inflict home front damage on US troops as Iraq war drags on’, The Observer, 1 June 2008, viewed 6 August 2010, . 60 Junger, op. cit., p.176. 61 Finkel, op. cit., pp.178-9. 172

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Another soldier in the same unit revealed to Finkel that, ‘She wanted me to, like, call her more, and this was when we just got here. Things were crazy. I was calling her once a week, but she wanted more. She’d be all sobby. “You don’t call me enough. I’m the only one talking. You don’t care about me. You don’t love me.”’62 The marriage was annulled after four months. For much of the period studied, noting that divorces were quite rare in the nineteenth century due t o prevailing social norms and forbidding legal obstacles, wartime separation had caused the divorce rate to spike. The number of divorces granted in Britain in 1918—a thousand—was unprecedented. During the Second World War, Compassionate Posting Boards were established by the British military in all major overseas theatres to cope with the incessant flow of applications for home postings because of actual or impending marriage breakups. Furthermore, ninety per cent of the work of the Legal Aid stations throughout the war was generated by soldiers petitioning for divorce.63 In 1947, shortly after the end o f the Second World War, another unprecedented total of sixty thousand divorces was reached in Britain. In America, between 1940 and 1946 t he divorce rate doubled and reached a million divorces per year by the end of the decade. In the majority of cases, the grounds for divorce were men citing their wives for adultery.64 Although divorce rates among service members during period of conflicts are still higher than in peacetime (for example, in 2004, the number of married US Army officers getting divorced was three times as high as 2002, the year prior to the invasion of Iraq) the dynamics of the separation between husband and wife are more favourable for maintaining a marriage than was the case during the Second World War.65 The nature of the contract between the soldier and the state is that the needs of the military will always be paramount. Although up to the Crimean War a small proportion of soldiers were accompanied by their wives on campaign, henceforth the wives would remain at home. The only physical contact between husband and w ife would be i f the soldier was returned home to convalesce after being wounded or on leave. T he ability to take home leave depended v ery much on the conflict and the theatre in which the soldier fought. Many men fighting the First and Second World wars were absent from home for years at a time (particularly so the Australian and New

62 Specialist Charles White, US Army, quoted in ibid., p.227. 63 Sparrow, op. cit., p.10. 64 Tom Hickman, The Sexual Century, Carlton Books Limited, London, 1999, p.82. 65 ‘War swells US army divorce rate’, BBC News, 8 June 2005, viewed 20 July 2008, . The high divorce rate in the US Army has been maintained. In 2007 there were 8,700 divorces involving American soldiers, compared to an estimated 5,500 in 2001. Smith, op. cit.

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Zealand troops fighting in Europe or Africa). S ince the Vietnam War, however, technological developments in air travel that heralded in the era of mass commercial aviation has meant that soldiers will receive at least one period of out-of-country leave per tour of duty. The lengthy separation of couples brought about by war has usually caused the divorce rate to spike, and although divorce rates among soldiers are still higher during periods of conflict than in peacetime, the knowledge that generally the most that a hus band and wife will be s eparated will be m easured in months give marriages a better chance of surviving than those of the Second World War when the duration of the separation might be measured in years. In this respect, technological change would seen to have eased the psychological burden imposed by their war service on s oldiers and their families, though the difficulties of soldiers reintegrating back into civil society should not be under estimated, particularly now that with the widespread availability of mid-tour leave this is a t ransition that they may have to undergo multiple times.

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Conclusion

Benjamin Harris first saw active service with the 95th Rifles in the Danish campaign of 1807 and then took part in the opening campaigns of the Peninsular War, where he was amongst the last to be evacuated from the beach at Vigo following the retreat from Corunna. His final campaign was the ill-fated expedition to Walcheren in the Netherlands in 1809, where Harris, along with the majority of his comrades, contracted malaria. Four thousand of his comrades died from the disease but Harris survived, although he w as no l onger fit for campaigning and w as invalided from the army in 1814 after a period of home service. Joshua Key deployed to Iraq in April 2003 with the 43rd Combat Engineer Company. After six-and-a-half months of active service he returned to the United States in November 2003 on a m id-tour leave where, traumatized by what he had s een in Iraq, he deserted, eventually fleeing to Canada. Two centuries separated the military careers of Harris and K ey, two centuries that witnessed unparalleled technological advances in arms and ar mour but also in a multitude of other technologies (communications, medicine and forensic identification to name but a few) that have demonstrably changed, though not always for the better, life on the battlefield. Literally tens of millions of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen served in the armed forces in these two centuries. To undertake a quantitative assessment in an attempt to make a definitive statement regarding certain aspects of soldiering is clearly impossible. H owever, a wide-ranging survey, drawing upon hundr eds of first-person narrative accounts of combat from the Napoleonic Wars to the Global War on Terror, can state, based on inductive reasoning, that it is probable that many, but certainly not all, soldiers felt a particular way about a specific aspect of soldiering. The basis of this approach is to allow the soldiers themselves, through their written accounts, to identify what they believe to be the principal burdens they must bear on behal f of their respective societies. Drawing upon t hese narrative accounts as its principal source, this thesis addressed the question whether the rapid rate of technological change over the last two hundred years has increased or decreased the burdens of soldiers, as viewed by the soldiers themselves. Technological advances are generally assumed to constitute an improvement over what came before. But the so-called ‘law of unintended consequences’ is particularly relevant when it comes to examining the impact of technological advances on t he burdens of the soldier. I t is these second-order effects—so often counter-intuitive—that have often been t he major determinant as to 175

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whether a burden faced by soldiers has actually been mitigated or has merely changed its form. The first chapter examined a num ber of aspects concerning what is probably the most evident burden of the soldier; that he m ight be w ounded or killed whilst serving his nation. Soldiers tend to adopt a pragmatic approach to their potential death in combat. One unchanging manifestation of this pragmatism is the desire to make a final communication home; only the form has changed, with those soldiers fighting the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq now having the option to use emails or phone calls instead of the traditional letter (though many soldiers still prefer for a letter to be found postmortem among their personal effects, or have handed the letter to a trusted comrade). The key point here is not whether the majority of soldiers tend to satisfy this desire for a final communiqué with loved ones via virtually immediate means, such as email or a phone call, but rather that those who choose to do so now have the option. A closely related issue is that the widespread availability of email, web-cameras and m obile phones has provided contemporary soldiers a c ontinuing intimacy with their loved ones unknown in previous conflicts except by a fortunate few. The opportunity to have virtually instantaneous communications with loved ones from the combat zone is a r elatively recent change but, like many of the technological advances examined in this thesis, can be considered a two-edged sword. By regularly exposing a soldier to his life beyond the military such contacts can weaken the bonds that bind soldiers together by reminding them of what is waiting for them back home and reinforcing the impact that their potential death or wounding in combat will have on their loved ones. This chapter also examined how the post-mortem treatment of their remains was also an enduring concern of soldiers. A key concern is that their body may not be identified and that their family might have to endure the emotional agony of being informed that their loved one w as missing in action; not knowing whether they were dead or alive. The use of identification discs (dog tags) was pioneered during the American Civil War and the current use of sophisticated DNA identification processes means that in technologically advanced societies there will be no more ‘unknown soldiers’ (the identification of the ‘Vietnam Unknown’ being a case in point). The application of this technology to identify the bodies of soldiers killed as far back as the First World War was also discussed. Another change over the period studied was in relation to the repatriation of their bodies. Previously only high-ranking officers were returned to their home country for burial. R epatriation policies have varied from country to country and from conflict to conflict, though contemporary fatalities are far

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more likely to be r eturned home than buried in the operational theatre due t o technological advances in transportation. The key point discussed in this section, and indeed an underlying theme of the entire chapter, was the enduring desire of soldiers to minimise the impact of their death upon their loved ones. In relation to changes to the repatriation of bodies the impact was twofold, the presence of the body helps bring about a sense of closure in the grieving process and it also facilitates the body being buried locally. B eing buried locally enables regular visits to the grave from family members, unlike the bodies of soldiers interred in distant official war cemeteries that are rarely, if ever, visited by loved ones. A counter viewpoint was also discussed, this being that although existing repatriation policies are largely currently for the benefit of those loved ones left behind, returning the body home may actually be against the wishes of the soldiers themselves. This chapter quoted a number of soldiers who have expressed a desire that they should be buried amongst their comrades where they fell rather than (to use the words of General Patton) ‘rest in the sanctimonious precincts of a civilian cemetery’. The post-mortem condition of their bodies was also an endur ing concern of soldiers, in particular they wanted their body to remain whole. ‘To be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is a fear that flesh cannot support’, wrote Paul Dubrulle in his journal during the First World War. The theme of the second chapter was death and di sfigurement on the battlefield. This chapter discussed how technological changes in weapon design and ef fect, in particular the development of high explosive shells, have increased the possibility of soldiers’ bodies being disintegrated and thus also increased the probability of the fear expressed by Dubrulle being realised. This chapter discussed how although the basic nature of this fear has been enduring, the type of weapon that has generated this fear has changed from war to war. For the First and Second World wars it was the explosion of artillery shells, in Vietnam it was the detonation of mines and bo oby traps and for the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq it was the initiation of IEDs. This chapter went on to discuss how the fear of the mutilating effect of such explosions on the body has been one of the greatest burdens that must be borne by the soldier, as it is this fear of disfigurement and disability that affects experienced soldiers to a greater extent than the fear of dying - as illogical as this may first seem. A related aspect is that soldiers generally become accustomed to the sight of bodies on the battlefield, but it is somewhat less common for soldiers to become oblivious to wounded men. Evidence was presented that the reason that soldiers have a greater aversion to wounded rather than dead comrades is that soldiers have a benchmark for

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pain, as they have all experienced pain before. P ersonal experience of death, however, is abstract for all. Likewise soldiers are able to conceptualize how they themselves would feel if disfigured or disabled (a specific fear being emasculation), while none can similarly conceptualize what it would be like to be dead. A related discussion was how the likelihood of soldiers receiving crippling or disfiguring wounds on the battlefield has never been well publicized, and an historical overview was provided of the extent of crippled or maimed soldiers arising from the American Civil War onwards. From a military effectiveness perspective, the psychological diminution of the inherent risks of combat helps make possible the necessary short-term perspective vital for the efficient functioning of armies. That is, militaries would prefer soldiers concern themselves with how they will achieve their mission rather than dwell upon their future quality of life if they were to crippled or disfigured in combat. Chapter two concluded by discussing how recent advances in aeromedical capabilities and sophisticated treatment techniques, along with improvements in body armour, have brought about a decreasing lethality rate of wounds and this means that soldiers are now more likely to survive horrific injuries that even a generation earlier would most likely have been fatal. This is not to suggest that upon reflection those soldiers who survived horrific wounds feel that they would be better off dead but rather that, as discussed, one of the greatest fears of soldiers is that they will be permanently disfigured or disabled and correspondingly the risk of this fear being realised has demonstrably increased over the period studied. One of the enduring tenets of western society is the sanctity of human life. The third chapter examined the psychological impact of soldiers being expected to disregard their upbringing and kill in combat someone they most likely have never met and with whom they have no personal conflict. This chapter detailed how one of the greatest—if not indeed the greatest—causes of emotional stress among veterans arose from the killing of enemy soldiers. There are a range of psychological enablers that enable soldiers to kill on t he battlefield, not all of which have a technological dimension, and it is their collective effect that facilitates the killing action. Therefore the predominance of one of these factors lessens the need for others. A key concept discussed in this chapter was that of physical distance, in that the greater the distance between servicemen and those it is their duty to kill, the easier it is (from a ps ychological perspective) for them to do s o. T hus aircrew of bombers during the Second World War were able to draw upon t he ‘morality of altitude’ and convince themselves that they were destroying a legitimate military target rather than condemning their fellow men (and women and children) to horrific deaths. At the other

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end of the spectrum was close-range killing, where the soldier was confronted with the physical effects of his actions and the undeniable certainty (and arising anguish) that he was directly responsible for someone’s death. T his specific burden of killing falls heaviest on the infantry, who must seek out and close with the enemy. Advances in the effective range of weapons over the last two centuries have been l argely counterbalanced by the changing dynamics of the battlefield, with the modern infantrymen likely to be fighting in urban terrain and thus still having to engage in close- range killing (which entails the greatest psychological cost). Yet the percentage of an army comprised by the infantry has considerably decreased over the period studied, with a proliferation of support personnel along with other combat arms (such as armour and artillery), who are generally spared the close-range killing required of the infantry. As noted earlier, the cognitive preparedness to take another soldier’s life in combat is the product of the interplay between a range of influences. These influences do not act in isolation but rather it is their combined effect (though at times and for specific soldiers one aspect may predominate) that have eased this aversion to killing on the battlefield. Fo r example, this chapter examined how there is a correlation between the physical and empathetic distance between opponents and t he difficulty and associated psychological trauma of killing a fellow man. As the physical distance lessens, the empathetic distance must correspondingly increase to overcome man’s innate resistance to killing. E mpathic distance arose from emphasising the cultural/racial and moral differences between opposing sides. This is a characteristic of war that is unlikely to change, with examples of how a m oral distance is established being provided from a range of conflicts from the American Civil War to the 1991 Gulf War. The establishment of this moral distance remains effective despite the proliferation of counter viewpoints to the official position available to soldiers via mediums such as the Internet. Due to cognitive dissonance, soldiers are likely to seek out views that reinforce the need for the military action, thus justifying the cause in their minds and facilitating the killing action. However, what has fundamentally changed over the period examined is that by increasing the realism of training by utilising advanced combat simulators the killing of enemy soldiers becomes more mechanistic. From a psychological perspective this is known as operant conditioning, the central tenet of which is that all human behaviour is influenced by past rewards and punishments. The key point here is that while the base aversion to killing may not have changed, technological advances have enabled more effective operant conditioning to largely overcome this aversion (in conjunction with the other influences/enablers discussed earlier). This factor is increased by the tendency of

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modern soldiers to be encased in a metal shell, such as a tank or plane (which largely arose from technical developments in weapon design), further allowing the soldier to cognitively deny that he is killing a fellow man (at least for the second or so he needs to take the shot). In these ways, technological changes have facilitated the killing action on the battlefield and reduced the psychological burden on those required to kill. Deaths from friendly fire (the thematic burden examined in the fourth chapter) have been an enduring feature of warfare over the period studied, though the principal agent has changed, reflecting the technical evolutions of weapons and munitions. The soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars up to the First World War mainly had cause to fear the musket/rifle fire of their comrades, though an occasional errant artillery shell could produce at most a few casualties. The greatest cause of fratricide during the First World War was indirect fire, particularly artillery fire, and the concentration in which it was delivered onto the battlefields of the First World War exacerbated the risk of friendly casualties. Massive aerial bombardments were the great fratricide killer of the Second World War, with aircraft-delivered munitions remaining the greatest agent of fratricide in subsequent conflicts. The most authoritative study of friendly fire to date (conducted prior to the 1991 Gulf War) concluded that friendly fire accounted for less than two per cent of all battlefield casualties. More recent studies and the documented number of friendly fire casualties from the 1991 Gulf War and the major combat phase of the 2003 invasion of Iraq would seem to indicate that, at least as far as modern high-level conflicts are concerned, this figure is too low and t hat it could be as high as twenty per cent. A detailed study of several fratricide incidents from recent conflicts revealed several contributing factors, a number of which are directly attributable to recent technological advances. Although it cannot be conclusively stated that the percentage of friendly fire casualties to total battlefield casualties is increasing, due to the incomplete data from conflicts prior to the 1991 Gulf War, what is apparent is that a number of factors now make friendly fire casualties more likely to occur in modern conflicts. The development of armoured vehicles has increased the mobility of ground forces. Concurrent development of communication systems has enabled the adoption of the manoeuvreist approach of modern warfare, which has largely done away with the linear battle lines of the past. This factor has increased the confusion of the battlefield with there often being no clear front line and troops coming upon the enemy and friendly troops unexpectedly. The need to get a shot away within seconds, or risk being hit yourself, has brought about a tendency often to fire first and ascertain the identity of the target later. To help decrease the confusion of the battlefield modern

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military forces have invested considerable resources in increasing the situational awareness of ground forces through technologies such as GPS and B lue Force Tracking, though such systems have their limitations (not the least of which is that not all vehicles are equipped with such systems). This prevailing confusion of the battlefield is exacerbated by the growing preference for coalition operations; noting that, from an e mpirical perspective, there is no greater threat to coalition unity than friendly fire casualties caused by a coalition partner. Another key technological factor contributing to making friendly fire casualties more likely in modern warfare is that the destructive power of single misdirected shell or bomb is constantly increasing. Thus, for example, a s ingle malfunctioning bomb dropped by a pl ane now has the potential to cause a g reater number of friendly fire casualties than a bomb of even a generation before. The final key technological factor discussed in this chapter that has contributed to the apparent growth in the percentage of friendly fire casualties is that due to advanced forensic techniques military forces have become better at identifying the cause of casualties on the battlefield. Thus, fratricide casualties that may have been assigned to enemy action in the past are now recognised for what they are. The chapter concluded that fratricide will continue to be a m ajor concern for modern military forces as a technological panacea to decrease the risk of friendly fire continues to lag behind ongoing improvements in weapon technology and supporting systems. What has not changed over the period studied is the extreme angst that friendly fire produces among those who fired the fatal shot and the immediate comrades of the victim(s). A burden borne by the soldier that has demonstrably increased over the period studied is the impact of the media upon operational security and a soldier’s freedom of action. This aspect of soldiering was examined in the fifth chapter of this thesis. Since the first war correspondent pulled out his notepad in the Crimean War the military and the media have had an uneasy coexistence. At the heart of the often turbulent relationship between the military and the media is the dichotomy between the military’s need for operational security and t he media’s right to inform the public of the nature and purpose of the military operations conducted by the nation’s armed forces. This is an aspect of the relationship between the military and t he media that has remained relatively unchanged over the period studied. What has changed is that developments in communications technology have fundamentally changed the risk posed by the media to soldiers on combat operations. In the wars of the mid-nineteenth century, the first war correspondents needed to be within easy access of a telegraph station to file

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their dispatches and avoid being scooped by their competitors. The lapse between transmission and publication was likely a day or so. Contemporary journalists can file instantly from almost anywhere in the world, thereby increasing the risk of releasing real-time operational information that will benefit the enemy. C oncurrent with these technological developments, and l ikely enabled by it, due to the intense demand among competing media outlets (including twenty-four hour cable news channels and Internet news sites) for new material, is the growth of the media presence on the battlefield. This produces an insatiable demand for a scoop and tends to compel journalists to ‘go with what they have got’, rather than check with the military in relation to possible breaches of operational security. This factor, when coupled with the ubiquitous media presence on t he battlefield, means that the contemporary soldier, more so than soldiers of the past, needs to consider whether his actions will be recorded and played out in living rooms and computer screens across the world, often without reference to the context in which the soldier acted. Several recent examples from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were provided to illustrate this point. The sixth and final chapter examined a burden borne by soldiers that was also borne by their loved ones; that being the often lengthy separation of the soldier from family and friends brought about by his war service. The British regiments departing for the Napoleonic Wars were accompanied by a small number of soldiers’ wives (and officers’ wives as well). This practice ceased with the Crimean War and henceforth the wives would remain at home. The reuniting of husband and wife would generally occur only if the soldier was wounded, and returned home to convalesce, or during an infrequent period of leave. E ven then the soldier generally had t o be s erving in a theatre close to the home country (or be wounded to such an extent that they would not be able to return to active service) to be provided with even this opportunity to see his wife. By way of example, this chapter noted how many men fighting the First and Second World wars were absent from home for years at a t ime (particularly the Australian troops fighting in Europe or Africa). However, technological development in aircraft design in the 1950s, which heralded the era of mass commercial aviation, has meant that henceforth soldiers will usually receive at least one period of out-of-country leave per tour of duty. Most noticeably this factor gave the soldiers serving in Vietnam the opportunity to undertake reunion travel during their combat tour, an opportunity that was denied to the vast majority of their predecessors in prior conflicts. The lengthy separation of couples brought about by war has usually generated separation anxiety (a factor often exploited by enemy propaganda) with a consequential spike in the divorce rate. Although divorce rates among soldiers are still

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higher during periods of conflict than in peacetime, the knowledge that generally the most that a hus band and wife will be s eparated will be m easured in months give marriages a better chance of surviving than those of the Second World War, for example, when the duration of the separation might be measured in years. In this matter technological change would seem to have eased the psychological burden imposed by war service on contemporary soldiers and their families; they can certainly have more physical contact with each other during a c ombat tour than their predecessors from past conflicts. But the ability to travel across the world in a day or so means that troops, particularly for mid-tour breaks, will leave their comrades in action and a short time later may find themselves sitting back in their living rooms with their families. In such circumstances, these soldiers will have had little opportunity to de-stress and are also faced with the knowledge that in a few days they will be going back into harm’s way. Many soldiers will find this rapid change in their circumstances to be psychological disconcerting. This brings us back to the central question of this thesis: on the balance of the various burdens of military service examined (as revealed to us from the soldiers’ own words contained in their narrative accounts), has the rapid rate of technological change over the last two hundred years increased or decreased the burden of the soldier? But before addressing this question, it needs to be acknowledged that this thesis has concentrated on s pecific burdens of the soldier for which a t echnological factor was discernable. This approach, while necessary to achieve the focus of inquiry required of a thesis, has meant that a number of key burdens revealed by soldiers in their narrative accounts have been excluded from the discussion. A case in point is that while the anguish arising from killing your comrades accidently by fratricide was examined, the anguish arising from killing your comrades deliberately through the application of the death penalty was excluded. The use of the death penalty for military offences is a burden of the soldier that has fundamentally changed over the period studied (from being widespread to now being virtually non-existent) but the reasons for this change were social and pol itical rather than technological, and s o an examination of the psychological impact of the use of the death penalty upon soldiers was excluded from the discussion. Likewise, the prevailing attitude towards homosexuals serving in the armed forces has fundamentally changed over the period studied, but again a discussion of the impact of this particular burden on hom osexual soldiers has been excluded from the discussion due to the absence of a technological factor. This approach therefore precludes a discussion of the changing burden of the soldier over the last two hundred years from a collective perspective, that is the sum of individual

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identifiable burdens. R ather it is only possible to discuss how specific burdens of soldiers have changed over the last two hundred years. Returning to whether the rapid rate of technological change over the last two hundred years has increased or decreased the burden of the soldier, the answer, as detailed in this thesis, is ambiguous. C ertainly, improvements in military equipment have made the contemporary soldier more comfortable in the field than his predecessors. Advanced logistics systems and scientifically designed meals mean that the modern soldier does not have to concern himself with foraging to fill his belly. Nor does the modern soldier have to worry too much about the greatest scourge of the armies of the nineteenth and ear ly twentieth century: disease. In such aspects, the impact of technological innovation over the last two hundred years in reducing the burden of the soldier is largely self-evident and w as not examined in detail in this thesis. Moreover, certain burdens of the soldier are almost entirely psychological, such as the inability to control their fate and the arising fatalism, and thus largely resistant to advances in technology and therefore were also excluded from this thesis. But what is of greater interest is that where technological advances have impacted upon the burden of the soldier, in a number of cases, they have decreased one burden only to increase another. Two such examples discussed in this thesis are the availability of instantaneous communications with loved ones from the battlefield and improvements in the evacuation of casualties and medical treatment. While email, mobile phones and web-cameras provide an immediacy of communications with loved ones for contemporary soldiers that was unknown less than a decade ago, they can make a soldier’s job more difficult by constantly reminding him of what is waiting for him back home and the effect his death or wounding will have on h is loved ones. Likewise, recent advances in aeromedical capabilities and s ophisticated treatment techniques mean that soldiers are now more likely to survive horrific injuries that even a generation earlier would most likely have been fatal. B ut those who survive often face a life of permanent disfigurement and disability, the possibility of which troubles many soldiers. In some aspects, however, a more definitive answer can be given as to whether technological advances have increased or decreased the burden of the soldier. The contemporary soldier knows that his body will likely be r ecovered from the battlefield and if recovered will almost certainly be identified. Moreover, if his family wishes, the soldier’s body will most probably be repatriated for burial, largely doing away with the concerns of his predecessors in relation to the post-mortem treatment of their bodies. The use of advanced combat simulators has enabled more effective operant

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conditioning and eas ed the psychological aversion to killing on t he battlefield. Furthermore, increased weapons ranges have enabled many soldiers, but generally not the infantry, to avoid the psychological trauma of close-range killing. M oreover, advances in air travel over the last few decades provide opportunities for reunion travel for soldiers fighting in far flung campaigns that mean that the maximum absence they can expect from family and friends will be measured in months rather than the years experienced by some of their predecessors, though the arising psychological difficulty of the rapid transformation from combat to the outside world should not be underestimated. But technological advances in the maneuverability of armed forces, the ability to shoot further than you can see and the increasing destructive power of modern weaponry mean that the contemporary soldier faces a substantial risk of falling victim to friendly fire. This is a bur den of the soldier that is likely to remain an ongoi ng concern for military forces as a technological panacea remains elusive and the development of weapons technology continues unabated. Moreover, ongoing efforts to facilitate soldiers killing on the battlefield can also increase the likelihood of fratricide as soldiers whose resistance to killing the enemy has been broken down are less likely to hold their fire if in doubt about the identity of a target. Finally, the growth of the modern media, fuelled by satellite communications and the Internet, has unquestionably increased the burden of the soldier. Not only can the media potentially reveal operational information and i ncrease the risk of mission failure, but a ubiquitous media presence, particularly the recent practice of embedding journalists and cameramen in military units, poses a v ery real risk that a s oldier’s actions on the battlefield will be held up to be judged in the court of public opinion. This factor also impacts upon the military’s ability to regulate the behaviour of its soldiers on the battlefield as it is the alleged war crime held up for condemnation on the evening news and the resulting demands from politicians for a ‘thorough investigation’ that will direct the efforts of military investigators, and i n the process invariably tarnish the careers of soldiers who were often just trying to complete a di fficult job and k eep themselves and their comrades alive. In an e ra of smaller professional armies, where the military is but one of a number of employment options open to potential recruits, it is in the military’s (as well as the respective government’s) best interests to reduce the burdens faced by soldiers on the battlefield so as to make military service more attractive. The application of technological developments to martial matters may seem an obvious way of making a soldier’s life less arduous and of mitigating their fears. B ut, as shown in this thesis,

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introducing technological developments to the battlefield may prove to be a two-edged sword.

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Acronyms and Abbreviations

AFID Anti-Fratricide Identification Device APC Armoured Personnel Carrier BBC British Broadcasting Corporation BCIS Battlefield Combat Identification System BFV Bradley Fighting Vehicle CAS Close Air Support CIP Combat Identification Panel CNN Cables News Network CT Computerised Tomography DALO Divisional Air Liaison Officer DARPA Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency DMZ Demilitarised Zone DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid ERT Emergency Response Team ETO European Theatre of Operations GOC General Officer Commanding GPS Global Positioning System HARM High Speed Anti-Irradiation Missile HQ Headquarters IED Improvised Explosive Device JDAM Joint Direct Attack Munition KIA Killed in Action LAV Light Armoured Vehicle MERT Medical Emergency Response Team MIA Missing in Action MRE Meal, Ready-to-Eat mtDNA Mitochondrial Deoxyribonucleic acid NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NCO Non-commissioned Officer NVA North Vietnamese Army OP Observation Post Para Parachute POW Prisoner of War RAF Royal Air Force RAR Royal Australian Regiment R&R Rest and Recreation ROE Rules of Engagement SAS Special Air Service SBS Special Boat Service SOP Standard Operating Procedure TOGS Thermal Observation and Gunnery Sight TOW Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided UK United Kingdom UN United Nations US United States of America USAF United States Air Force VA Veterans Affairs WIA Wounded in Action

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