Oppenheimer was certainly right in his basic perception, that history changed its course in 1945. Never again can a major war be fought in the style of World War II. And yet, international politics are being conducted on all sides as if the lessons of World War II still applied. History proceeds at its old slow pace, even if the course is changed. The transition from virulent nationalism to a world united must be stretched out over centuries. Meanwhile, we have to live in a precarious balance, between the apocalyptic warnings of Stonier on the one side and a possibly false sense of human history on the other. In spite of all uncertainties, it remains true that the catastrophes envisaged by Stonier may happen. It is well that we should be reminded of these dangers, and we must be grateful to Stonier for having reminded us of them, with his sober, thoughtful and eloquent book.2
1. Meridian Books, 1963.
2. This is the oldest piece in the collection, written in 1964. I have included it because the dilemma that it describes is still as real today as it was in 1964.
8
GENERALS
AT 2:30 PM ON August 31, 1946, the former chief of the Operations Staff of the German armed forces, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, made his final statement to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal:
Mr. President and Justices of the court. It is my unshakable belief that history will later pronounce an objective and fair judgment on the senior military commanders and their subordinates. They, and with them the German armed forces as a whole, faced an insoluble problem, namely, to wage a war which they had not wanted, under a supreme commander who did not trust them and whom they only partially trusted, with methods which often contradicted their doctrines and their traditional beliefs, with troops and police forces not fully subject to their command, and with an intelligence service which was partly working for the enemy. And all this with the clear knowledge that the war would decide the existence or nonexistence of the beloved fatherland. They were not servants of Hell or of a criminal. They served their people and their fatherland.
For myself, I believe that no man can do better than to struggle for the highest goal which he is in a position to achieve. That and nothing else was the guiding principle of my actions all along. And that is why, no matter what verdict you may pass on me, I shall leave this court with my head held as high as when I entered it many months ago. If anyone calls me a traitor to the honorable tradition of the German army, or if anyone says that I stayed at my post for reasons of personal ambition, I say he is a traitor to the truth.
In this war, hundreds of thousands of women and children were destroyed by carpet-bombing, and partisans used without scruple whatever methods they found effective. In such a war, severe measures, even if they are questionable according to international law, are not crimes against morality and conscience. For I believe and profess: duty toward people and fatherland stands above every other. To do that duty was my honor and highest law. I am proud to have done it. May that duty be replaced in a happier future by an even higher one: duty toward humanity.
On October 10 he wrote a final letter to his friends in the German army:
Dear friends and comrades. In the months of the Nuremberg trial I have borne witness for Germany, for her soldiers, and for history. The dead and the living crowded around me, giving me strength and courage. The verdict of the court went against me. That came as no surprise. The words which I heard from you were for me the true verdict. I was never proud in my life until now. Today I can and I will be proud. I thank you, and one day Germany will thank you, because you did not run away from one of her truest sons in his hour of need and death. Your future lives must not be filled with sadness and hate. Think of me only with respect and pride, just as you think of all the soldiers who died on the battlefields of this cruel war as they were required to do by law. Their lives were sacrificed to make Germany more powerful, but you should believe that they died to make Germany better. Hold fast to this belief and work for it all your lives.
On October 15 he wrote his last letter to his wife:
And so I tell you at the end, you must live and overcome your grief. You must spread love around you and give help to those who need it. You must not make more of me than I was, or than I wanted to be. You must believe and make it known that I worked and fought for Germany and not for her politicians. Oh, I could go on writing like this forever, but now in my ears I hear the bugles playing taps, and the old familiar song—do you hear it, my love?—Soldiers must go home.
At 2 AM the next morning he was hanged.
Alfred Jodl was a Bavarian, not a Prussian. Probably that was one of the reasons Hitler chose him as chief of staff and kept him at his side throughout the war. Jodl nevertheless embodied the old Prussian tradition of military professionalism, with all its virtues and vices. Albert Speer, who sat with him in the dock at Nuremberg, wrote of him afterward: “Jodl’s precise and sober defense was rather imposing. He seemed to be one of the few men who stood above the situation.” For six years Jodl had worked, day after day and night after night, planning and organizing the campaigns in which millions died. He begged Hitler many times to relieve him of this responsibility, to give him a subordinate command at one of the fighting fronts. Hitler refused, and Jodl obeyed, steadfast up to the end. Jodl had sworn an oath, on his honor as a soldier, to obey Hitler as supreme commander. This oath of soldierly loyalty was for Jodl the unbreakable bond, holier than the Catholic faith in which he had been raised, stronger than his obligation to the welfare of the German people which he believed himself to be serving. On the day that he came to Berlin to take up his duties as chief of staff, a week before the German armies marched into Poland, he said to his wife: “This time I am afraid it looks like the real thing. I don’t yet know for sure. But thank God, that is a problem for the politicians and not for us soldiers. I know only one thing; if we once get on board this boat there won’t be any climbing out of it.”
Jodl’s personal religion and code of ethics were summed up in one word, Soldatentum, a German word which fortunately cannot be translated into English. The literal equivalent in English is “soldierliness,” but the English word altogether misses the tone of solemnity which belongs to the German, and thereby misses the greater part of the meaning. The English word “militarism” means something else entirely. An accurate translation of Soldatentum would have to be a paraphrase: the profession of soldiering considered as a quasi-religious vocation. The emotional flavor of it is well conveyed in the writings of Jodl which I have quoted. In English, the word “chivalry” had once a similar aroma, but it became archaic and metaphorical after knights ceased to fight on horseback.
We are fortunate to have a biography of Jodl written by his widow, Luise.1 Luise Jodl was a career woman, working with the same dedication as her husband in the bureaucracy of the general staff of the German armed forces. She shared her husband’s code of honor and his professional pride. During the Nuremberg trial she helped the lawyers to prepare his defense. After he died, she wrote his biography while the events were still fresh in her mind. The book is valuable, not only for its authentic portrait of Alfred Jodl but also for its portrait of Luise. She, too, was a person of strong character and intelligence, driven to disaster by the ideal of Soldatentum. At the beginning of her book she placed a quotation from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding”:
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.
For the title of her book she took Eliot’s words: “Beyond the End.” Eliot wrote these words in the quietness of wartime England, in the early years of the war, when no end was in sight. The passage continues with lines which Luise Jodl must have known but did not choose to quote:
There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at
the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city.…
One of those other places was Nuremberg, where Luise found herself in October 1946, alone among the ruins, faced with the tasks of piecing together the fragments of her husband’s life and distilling some meaning from the dishonor of his death.
Perhaps the most brilliant field commander on either side in World War II was Hermann Balck. He commanded the motorized infantry regiment which led the decisive German breakthrough into France in 1940. Fighting later on the eastern front, he constantly surprised the Russians with unexpected moves and tactics. In the spring of 1945 he led the last German offensive of the war, holding off the Russian armies in Hungary long enough so that he could retreat in good order into Austria and finally surrender his troops to the Americans. He was, unlike Jodl, a real Prussian. He fought as Jodl was not permitted to fight, in the front lines with his soldiers. He was accused of no war crimes. In 1979, at the age of eighty-five, he entertained an American interviewer with his reminiscences.2
On Prussia:
You need to see Prussia’s situation in Europe, first of all. Prussia was a small country surrounded by superior forces. Therefore, we had to be more skillful and more swift than our enemies. That started perhaps with Frederick the Great at the battle of Leuthen where he defeated, and defeated thoroughly, a force of Austrians about twice as big as his own. In addition to being more clever than our opponents, we Prussians also needed to be able to mobilize much more quickly than our enemies.
On the breakthrough across the Meuse River in 1940:
We knew in advance that we had to execute the crossing and I had already rehearsed it on the Moselle with my people. During this practice I had a couple of good ideas. First, every machine gun not occupied in the ground action was employed for air defense. Second, every man in the regiment was trained in the use of rubber boats. When we got to the Meuse, the engineers were supposed to be there, to put us across. They never arrived, but the rubber boats were there. So you see, if I hadn’t trained my people, the Meuse crossing would have never happened. Which once again leads to the conclusion that the training of the infantryman can never be too many-sided.…
The operation lay under intense French artillery fire. I had thrust forward to the Meuse with one battalion after some brief fights with the French outposts, and I had set up my regimental command post up front there on the Meuse, along with the forward battalion. I went along with them to make sure that some ass wouldn’t suddenly decide to stop on the way. You know, the essence of the forward command idea is for the leader to be personally present at the critical place. Without that presence, it doesn’t work.
On a tank battle in Russia in 1942:
I was heavily engaged in an attack with the 11th Panzer Division. Corps Headquarters called up at 7 o’clock in the evening and said that there had been a serious breakthrough 20 kilometers to my left, and that I should hurry over and take care of the breakthrough. I said, “Well, let me clean up the situation here and then I’ll take care of the breakthrough.” They said, “No, the situation on your left is terrible, and you’ve got to cease your attack immediately and clean up the breakthrough as fast as possible.” I immediately gave the verbal order extricating us from the attack and directing the division to move and prepare for the new counterattack against the breakthrough 20 kilometers away. We launched our counterattack at 5 o’clock the next morning, and achieved such surprise that we bagged 75 Russian tanks without the loss of a single one of our own. Of course, one of the key reasons why we were able to achieve such quick movement was that I marched with the units. After all, the men were dead tired and nearly finished. I rode up and down the columns and asked the troops whether they preferred to march or bleed. To compare our speed with the Russians, I would estimate that a Russian armored division would have required at least 24 hours longer to have achieved the same movement we achieved in 10 hours. I had much less experience against the Americans, so I can only guess that the Americans would have been slightly faster than the Russians.
On attack and defense:
It’s quite remarkable that most people believe that attack costs more casualties. Don’t even think about it; attack is the less costly operation.… The matter is, after all, mainly psychological. In attack, there are only 3 or 4 men in the division who carry the attack; all the others just follow behind. In defense, every man must hold his position alone. He doesn’t see his neighbors; he just sees whether something is advancing towards him. He’s often not equal to the task. That’s why he’s easily uprooted. Nothing incurs higher casualties than an unsuccessful defense. Therefore, attack wherever it is possible. Attack has one disadvantage; all troops and staffs are in movement and have to jump. That’s quite tiring. In defense you can pick a foxhole and catch some sleep.
On generalship:
There can be no fixed schemes. Every scheme, every pattern is wrong. No two situations are identical. That is why the study of military history can be extremely dangerous. Another principle that follows from this is: never do the same thing twice. Even if something works well for you once, by the second time the enemy will have adapted. So you have to think up something new. No one thinks of becoming a great painter simply by imitating Michelangelo. Similarly, you can’t become a great military leader just by imitating so-and-so. It has to come from within. In the last analysis, military command is an art: one man can do it and most will never learn. After all, the world is not full of Raphaels either.
When Balck was a prisoner of war he resolutely refused to cooperate with American officers who asked him to contribute his reminiscences to an American historical project. Thirty years later, he had mellowed sufficiently to allow himself to be interviewed. The constant theme of his military career was learning to do more with less. He was always inventing new tricks to confound the enemy in front of him and the bureaucrats behind him. If I had to choose an epigraph for a biography of Balck, I would not take it from T. S. Eliot but from the old Anglo-Saxon poem commemorating the Battle of Maldon:
Thought shall be harder, heart the keener,
Courage the greater, as our strength lessens.
Balck, like the Saxons who fought the Danes at Maldon in the year 991, belonged to a tradition of soldiering older than Soldatentum, older than chivalry. Balck fought well because he enjoyed fighting well, and because he had a talent for it. As a professional soldier, he took his job seriously but not solemnly.
Jodl and Balck exemplify two styles of military professionalism, the heavy and the light, the tragic and the comic, the bureaucratic and the human. Jodl doggedly sat at his desk, translating Hitler’s dreams of conquest into daily balance sheets of men and equipment. Balck gaily jumped out of one tight squeeze into another, taking good care of his soldiers and never losing his sense of humor. For Jodl, Hitler was Germany’s fate, a superhuman force transcending right and wrong. Balck saw Hitler as he was, a powerful but not very competent politician. When Jodl disagreed with Hitler’s plan to extend the German advance south of the Caucasus Mountains by dropping parachutists, the disagreement was for Jodl a soul-shattering experience. When Balck appealed directly to Hitler to straighten out a confusion in the supply of tanks and trucks, Hitler’s failure to deal with the situation came as no surprise to Balck. “As it turned out,” reports Balck, “Hitler never was able to gain control over the industry.” Jodl went on fighting to the bitter end because he had made Hitler’s will his highest law. Balck went on fighting because it never occurred to him to do anything else.
I chose my two examples of military professionalism from Germany because the German side of World War II displays the moral dilemmas of military professionalism with particular clarity. Both Jodl and Balck were good men working for a bad cause. Both of them used their professional skills to conquer and ravage half of Europe. Both of them continued to exercise their skills through the long years of retreat when the only result of their efforts was to prolong Europe’s agony. Both of them appeare
d to be indifferent to the sufferings of the villagers whose homes their tanks were smashing and burning. And yet the judgment of Nuremberg made a distinction between them. Whether or not the Nuremberg tribunal was properly constituted according to international law, its decisions expressed the consensus of mankind at that moment of history. Jodl was hanged; Balck was set free; and the majority of interested bystanders agreed that justice had been done.
Roughly speaking, the distinction which the tribunal established and the public approved was a distinction between strategy and tactics. Balck was forgiven for waging war aggressively at the tactical level. Jodl was condemned for waging war aggressively at the strategic level. In the view of the tribunal, it is a sin for a soldier to plan campaigns for the overthrow and destruction of peaceful neighbors, but it is no sin for a soldier serving in such a campaign to be master of his trade. Rightly or wrongly, the public still approves the old tradition of military professionalism, giving honor and respect to soldiers who fight bravely in a bad cause.
The distinction between strategy and tactics is not the only difference between Jodl and Balck. There is another difference, which is equally important, although it was not used by the Nuremberg judges to justify their condemnation of Jodl, namely the distinction between soldiering and Soldatentum, the distinction between soldiering as a trade and soldiering as a cult. Balck was a likable character because he did not take himself too seriously. He went on winning battles, just as Picasso went on painting pictures, without pretentiousness or pious talk. He won battles because the skill came to him naturally. He never said that battle-winning was a particularly noble or virtuous activity; it was simply his trade. Jodl was unlikable and in the end diabolical because he set soldiering above humanity. He made his soldier’s oath into a holy sacrament. He believed that he must be true to his ideal of Soldatentum even if it meant dragging Germany down to destruction. To be a good soldier was to him more important than to save what was left of Germany. He identified his duty as a soldier with loyalty to Hitler, and so he became infected with Hitler’s insanity. The ideal of Soldatentum became an obsession, detached from reason, from reality, and from common sense.
The Scientist as Rebel Page 9