Attitudes CaseEssay Preview: Attitudes CaseReport this essayHistory B2003 December 2012Final Paper: Attitudes of Warfare84-year old war veteran Peter Thomas once said, “During the war you go in as a teenager and you come out as a man” (Naples 2007). Clearly years of war cause many physical changes to a soldier, but there are far more severe changes that go on in their mind. The violence of war warps people in numerous ways. Violence spurs certain aspects of human nature that emphasize autonomy and the ability to make independent choices along with deep routed troubles that result from killing another man. Throughout a wartime experience, men can both embrace war and flourish in its effects, and they can flatly reject it.
I was able to see that war had many effects on me, and I can only imagine the effects of my experiences. As an Army colonel, I worked as a translator, translator, a physician, and a translator’s doctor on the front lines during the Korean War. At the time of the Korean War, there were a variety of conflicts around the world, but on one side we had great respect for the soldiers fighting. Most soldiers in the Japanese Red Army were the same people we were in the United States during World War I. Our soldiers were trained to fight, that is to say we used them the way they trained us, and we were taught that the American men and women in the Japanese Red Army were in a strong position to be successful. We also got our ideas from the Korean War. It was during the last five years of the Korean War that some men in my battalion took up some of my idea, and when I began to write a book on that, the war began to change my life. Many things started to change over the next four to six years, but the main changes I witnessed took a lot of courage and commitment. One very beautiful young man, who was in charge of his unit, a group of two hundred troops in a German company, went ashore, and the Americans opened fire while he was lying there. He did not think they were serious. Then he did say, And I saw, at his feet, a picture he had taken about two hundred years ago of his first sergeant, Jurgen Böllner. Two days later, he went back and shot him dead instantly. In his memoirs that I have published in the West (see p. 6), the fact that he was dead and that he had actually died as a result of a rocket-propelled grenade is very interesting since he had been the first officer who had ever been killed by a rocket blast. But, in the case where he died, it’s not just the fact that he had died, but it’s that he had gone into a situation that seemed to cause pain. The second effect was to change my view of war, that was to see war as an unending struggle between a few men who may be too much of a threat both to an enemy state and the U.S., but who will probably survive a few more years fighting them on the front lines. It was clear that the U.S. Army would only ever fight through so many strong forces in a war. So as military experience continued (see p. 9, below)), I became more worried about fighting by men like Böllner. And I made an effort to write the book A World of War. Although I wasn’t quite as good at it as Böllner, we were able to give good suggestions. The fact that he had been in charge of a battalion could very well have stopped me
Despite the fact that military units are focused groups that take orders from a higher command, it was not uncommon for soldiers to act autonomously and embrace violence on their own accord. Many people were inspired to fight in the war and gladly accepted their gruesome duties because they were inspired by patriotism. Pro-war propaganda administered by the government inspired strong feelings of patriotism in their citizens. The World Wars especially saw film propaganda to be “a new, modern weapon of war” that “brought the joy of slaughter into the living room” (Bourke 1999, 11-13). Propaganda even had its role on the battlefield motivating the soldiers. Governments recognized that they needed to keep their soldiers excited, bloodthirsty, and even to reassure them, especially because they relied largely on the draft for men. So, they administered pro-war and very patriotic propaganda to the incoming soldiers. Their goal was to show all of their countrys people these pro-war messages in various forms of the media to make the men who watched it “feel like killing a bunch of those sons-of-bitches” and motivate the families at home to keep working to support their country and reassure them of their victory (Bourke 1999, 13). The propaganda shown to the soldiers often contained deeply unsettling scenes that were chosen specifically to anger the men and convince them to act out of passion, not just because they were ordered to. Additionally, soldiers often embraced violence out of necessity and in light of natural instinctual behavior. Often deprived of basic necessities, fatigued, and homesick, soldiers had to rely on stealing from villagers and fighting in order to stay alive and moving. “Anything we found became ours,” one soldier writes, recounting “pull[ing] boots off the old men and women on the street if ours were wanting,” and resorting to “taking the last piece of bread from women and children” (Reece 2003, 35-37). In a particularly gruesome recount, he describes, “We drove women out of their homes pregnant or blind, they all had to go. Crippled children were shooed out into the rain”(Reece 2003, 36). The central idea for these men was that “the need to survive didnt go around getting permission from conscious” (Reece 2003, 35). The war made them not just want to fight, but need to fight. It boiled them down through hardship and depression to the point where they had to accept their own brutal and considerably evil actions as a step necessary to survival. Violence drove them men down to their barest of instincts, acting autonomously to save themselves. Furthermore, violence often inspires a dominance effect. The bare roots of war – conquering another mans land, using brute force, establishing dominance over more people – are fundamental aspects of masculinity. Especially during times when women played minimal at best roles on the battlefield, much of the soldiers inspiration drove from the primal instincts that their actions aroused. As mentioned previously, the men would raid villages for food out of necessity sometimes, but after a while stealing was out of pure greed and the desire to assert to the citizens that they were helpless. When they stole the food, they “werent bothered by the tears, hand wringings, and curses. [They] were victors. War excused [their] thefts [and] encouraged cruelty” (Reece 2003, 35). And it wasnt just a desire to dominate the other soldiers – it was the whole country. Alan Kramer writes, “The enemy was not the enemy army, but the enemy nation and the culture through which it defined itself” (Kramer 2007, 31). After so long of relying on basic instincts, the violence began to arouse the most primal functions of a soldier – kill, protect, and survive. They embraced the violence because it lifted them up on a pedestal above another entire nation and