It was extremely rare for soldiers to talk about negative emotions, at least not those that they themselves had felt. This reluctance is by no means unique to World War II. We find it in all modern wars. Being confronted with extreme violence, be it as a perpetrator, observer, or victim, likely changes individuals in ways that cannot be easily communicated. There may be discursive forms for talking about violence that one has committed oneself: the adventure tales of shooting down planes, “knocking over” civilians, or raping women. But there seem to be no formats for speaking about one’s own fears, especially fears of death and dying. The reason for this, psychologically speaking, is probably simple: members of combat units are so close to violence and death that those things are constant, realistic possibilities, and the idea of one’s own death is as terrible and unreal for soldiers as it is for civilians. Even in normal social circumstances, people rarely enjoy talking about their own deaths. That reluctance is no doubt all the greater in situations where dying is far more likely, and the likely manner of death will be violent, brutal, painful, and usually lonely and dirty.
One of the few POWs to talk explicitly about his fears, in this case being burned alive in a plane crash, was Luftwaffe Sergeant Rott:
ROTT: Then I joined our unit. Hauptmann MACHFELD was there then. He was burnt to death at BIZERTA—he was our first Gruppenkommandeur, he had the Knight’s Cross. On 26th November he landed in a [Focke-Wulf] “190,” and ran off the runway into all those damned bomb craters, the aircraft turned over and caught fire; he screamed like an animal—it was horrible. I was always terrified of being burnt to death, especially in the [Messerschmitt] “109”—I’ve seen a great many of those aircraft turn over myself. Anyway, his aircraft was blazing, and you would hear his screams, in spite of the fact that there were aircraft warming up their engines. The mechanics themselves couldn’t bear to hear it, and they let the aircraft engines run at full speed, so that the screams couldn’t be heard. The fire service couldn’t do anything—the ammunition was exploding.297
Fears about dying also resonated in soldiers’ irrational attempts to formulate “rules” about who would be killed:
BOTT*: In our “Gruppe” there is the superstition that “Oberfeldwebel” are always shot down.
HÜTZEN*: That’s curious. We, too, have the same superstition.298
Moreover, certain types of warfare were unpopular because they were particularly dangerous. Nighttime sorties were one example in the Luftwaffe, as two veteran bomber pilots made clear in November 1943:
HÄRTLING*: I don’t like night bombing. When you come over at night you don’t really know where you are, and if you crash you don’t know what you are falling onto.
All the people in this camp are lucky devils who have still got away safely. The fighters’ bullets must have hit the bombs, as ricochets entered the machine, which could only have come in this way.299
LOREK: I could never sleep after a sortie if I came back about three o’clock. I swear by day-flying only, I detest night-flying. I far prefer day to night. That uncertainty; you may get it on the neck any minute. You can’t see the blighter.300
