The Truth About Killing

Dr Martin Brookes

March 2004

Have you ever wondered how you would cope if you were asked to fight in a war? How you would behave if you were suddenly thrown into combat, against an enemy hell-bent on killing you. Would you have what it takes to kill? Perhaps you might if the enemy was miles away, on the receiving end of a long-range artillery barrage from your troop. But what if the conflict was up-close and personal? What if you were dug into your position with enemy soldiers bearing down on you? Could you line up a man in your sights, get a good view of his face, hear his voice, and then pull the trigger?

If your answer to this question is 'no' then you're in good company. Because even soldiers, it seems, are reluctant to end another's life. During the Second World War, for instance, it has been estimated that only 15-20% of front line American combat soldiers actually fired their weapons at the enemy. The rest either deliberately shot into the air or busied themselves with other tasks. Anything to avoid killing.

Can this be true? Is it really the case that only 15-20 men in every 100 shot to kill? It is a remarkable statistic that seems completely at odds with our understanding of the realities of combat. But let's step back a minute and ask where our impressions of the Second World War come from in the first place. We have testimonies from the individuals who were there, of course. We also have archive footage. But neither of these sources give us an holistic view about what really occurs on the front line during a battle. The only cameras that can take us to the heart of the action are those belonging to Hollywood, an industry with a woeful track record on authenticity. Blockbuster movies such as Saving Private Ryan rank highly on recreating the bloody nature of warfare, the gut-churning spectacle of exploding flesh. But in other areas, Hollywood, it seems, has been way off target.

Reluctant soldiers

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the American military historian and journalist Brigadier General S L A Marshall was given the task of collecting battlefield information on American operations throughout Europe and the Pacific. Marshall and his team conducted interviews with thousands of infantrymen who had been involved in close combat. The results of his labours appeared in his seminal 1947 book Men Against Fire. It was here that he made his startling assertion: when confronted by an exposed enemy soldier, only 15-20% of US riflemen chose to shoot at him.

Marshall noted that mitigating circumstances could drastically raise the figure. Machine guns manned by more than one man, for instance, were usually fired more readily. The presence of a commanding officer nearby was also a powerful incentive to kill. But given the freedom of choice, most men avoided pulling the trigger. At the level of the individual, there seemed to be an extreme reluctance to kill.

Since its publication, Marshall's research has come in for considerable criticism. His journalistic reputation led some to suggest that he was more interested in a good story than hard facts. Questions were asked about how he had obtained his information. Given their training, soldiers, surely, would be loath to confess a reluctance to kill. Some sceptics queried whether Marshall's interviews had even addressed the question at all. There were certainly good grounds for suspicion. In Men Against Fire, for instance, the raw data that would have helped to back up Marshall's assertion had gone AWOL.

Despite the doubters, Marshall's findings tally with circumstantial evidence taken from a variety of other conflicts and combat situations. In his recent book, On Killing, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman lists numerous instances where soldiers seem to have displayed a similar reluctance to kill. After the Battle of Gettysburg, for instance, 27,574 muskets were recovered from the battlefield. Of these, an astonishing 90% were still loaded, and 6000 contained from three to ten rounds. A few decades later, at the Battle of Rorkes Drift, a small band of British soldiers were confronted by a much larger Zulu army at nearly point blank range. Yet an average of 12 out of 13 thirteen British bullets still managed to miss their targets. And in the First World War, there are tales of commanding officers walking up and down a trench with their swords drawn, coercing their platoons to aim lower, and to stop firing above the heads of the enemy.

Animal instincts

Grossman, an ex-member of the US army's Ranger Corps, and now a professor of military science at Arkansas State University, is convinced that evidence like this reveals an elemental truth about human behaviour. We are not, he believes, natural born killers. As with other members of the animal kingdom, argues Grossman, we are far more predisposed towards aggressive posturing and display, rather than actual killing.

It is true that when it comes to the basic physiology of fear and aggression, we differ little from other animals. In neurological terms, our survival instinct is rooted in the amygdala, an ancient part of the brain that goes all the way back to the invertebrates. We may pride ourselves on our large frontal cortex, that part of our brain that gives us our unique human consciousness. But in the heat of battle, when the bullets start to fly, this evolutionarily advanced region of the brain is completely bypassed. Instead, our behaviour takes its cue from the amygdala, and the muscular and hormonal responses it precipitates.

Throughout the animal kingdom, conflicts between individuals almost always revolve around a limited resource, which usually means food, a territory or a mate. And whilst it's true that many species have evolved ritualised displays that are designed to avoid injury, fights to the death are not unknown. In fig wasps, for example, fights between males are routine and often deadly. Since mating takes place inside the actual fruits, individual figs can become the sites of fierce battles. The male wasps use their powerful jaws as weapons, and deaths through decapitation and disembowelment are common.

Relative behaviour

Perhaps we shouldn't read too much into the aggressive acts of a male fig wasp. Their lifestyles, after all, are some way removed from our own. But even when we get closer to home, to our nearest evolutionary relatives, there is little cause for comfort. Chimps and gorillas were long considered to be relatively docile and placid creatures, but today we know that they can be vicious killers. In gorillas, the killing is usually done by lone males, intent on displacing a male rival in order to gain access to a harem of females. And sometimes the loser is not the only one who gets killed. A victorious male may extend the slaughter to include the loser's infant offspring.

Chimps can take killing to a more sinister level. Acting in small, roving gangs, they have been seen making commando-style raids on neighbouring chimp groups, singling out individuals for slaughter. These kinds of attacks can go on, intermittently, for years, until all rivals are killed or evicted. In simple terms, it is nothing less than systematic genocide.

Animal 'wars' like these, are not exclusive to chimps. Many other social species, such as ants, lions, hyenas and wolves commit similar concerted acts of violence against their rivals. If nothing else, these examples illustrate that our own violent history is not unprecedented in animal terms. Weapons and technology have increased the scale of our slaughter. But perhaps the original motivation is deep-seated within the animal kingdom.

Whether animal aggression offers any genuine clues to our own behaviour in battle is debatable. Even so, it seems obvious that for humans, as for many other animal species, killing can sometimes make sense. Most people, when confronted by a man wielding an axe, would surely defend themselves, and if they had a gun they would probably use it. There seems to be no contradiction between this fact and Brigadier General Marshall's findings from the Second World War. Marshall's statistics came exclusively from the US army, an invading force in the ascendancy that was backed up by overwhelming air power. Perhaps many men on the front line chose not to kill simply because they didn't have to.

Learning to kill

A soldier's willingness to shoot must depend on many factors: the risk to his own life, the moral circumstances of the war, his psychological commitment to the cause, his training, morale, leadership, the current state of the battle, and so on. In this regard it would be interesting to compare Marshall's data with corresponding statistics from the German and Russian armies during the Second World War.

Whatever the truth behind Marshall's statistics, the US military was so alarmed by his findings that they instigated an entirely new approach to combat training in an effort to overcome this apparent resistance to killing. Out went the traditional rifle practice with bullseye-style targets, and in came battlefield simulations, with man-shaped pop-up targets that fell when hit. Such psychological conditioning seemed to produce remarkable results. In the Korean War, for example, the firing rate had risen from 20 to 55%. By the time of the Vietnam War, the figure had shot up to 95%. Which goes to show that however reluctant we may be as killers, we can always find novel ways to overcome our limitations.

It has been estimated that more than 55 million people died during the Second World War. Much of this killing may have been perpetrated by armies fighting at less than 20% killing capacity. We may never know the truth about killing. But it says something tragic about the human condition that we are still looking for ways to improve upon these figures.

Find out more

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Websites

The Battle of Rorke's Drift
www.militaryhistoryonline.com/
19thcentury/rorkesdrift/default.aspx
Excellent and comprehensive account of the legendary Battle of Rorke's Drift.

Biology does not make men more aggressive than women
www.culture-of-peace.info/biology/chapter4-5.html
Interesting article that looks at aggression in humans and in animals.

The Real Charlotte Grays
The Second World War is refreshingly explored from the point of view of four women, sent to work undercover in Nazi-occupied France.

Soldier Poets
Two poets who served and died in the Second World War are rescued from oblivion.

War Chronicle
www.warchronicle.com/us/
combat_historians_wwii/marshallfire.htm
This US site has historians' and soldiers' tales, official war records and a news and analysis section. There is also a scathing piece about Brigadier General S L A Marshall and his 'ratio of fire' argument.

World War Two Images Online
Five million aerial photographs depicting some of the key moments of the Second World War were taken by RAF reconnaissance pilots, providing vital intelligence. More than half a century on, these photographs offer a new perspective of the Second World War; a birds eye view of history.

Books

	Gorillas in the Mist by Diane Fossey (Phoenix, 2001) A remarkable story of the 13 years that Fossey spent living among the great apes. In 1967 she set up camp on the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes of Rwanda and studied four gorilla families there. Although it took them some time to accept her presence among them, she was immediately impressed by their peaceful nature and by their generous, guileless behaviour; so unlike the images found in popular culture. Get this book
	In The Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall (Phoenix, 1999) Classic account of primate research provides an impressively detailed and absorbing account of the early years of Goodall's field study of, and adventures with, chimpanzees in Tanzania, Africa. Get this book
	Men Against Fire: The problem of battle command in future war by S L A Marshall (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000) Brigadier General S L A Marshall served in the First World War, embarked in a career in journalism and in the Second World War was chief combat historian in the central Pacific, publishing this book in 1947. The US army were the beneficiaries of a training system based on his book, precisely designed to raise their rates of fire. The US army applied the lessons Marshall wrote down, and the result was exactly what Marshall predicted. Get this book
	On Killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society by Dave Grossman (Little Brown, 1996) Illuminating account of how soldiers learn to kill and how they live with the experience of having killed; Grossman lists numerous instances where soldiers seem to have displayed a reluctance to kill. An important book for anyone in the profession of arms and anyone concerned about violence. Get this book

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