HARRER*: I take my hat off to our mines, when they go off they raze everything to the ground, they knock down 80 houses. I have had friends, who in an emergency—that is they should have dropped their mines in the sea—have dropped them on a small town, and they have seen how the houses were lifted up and fell apart in the air. The mines only have quite a thin wall, a light metal shell. And moreover they have a much better explosive than all our bombs.
When such a thing drops on a block of houses it simply vanishes, just falls to pieces. It was the greatest fun.114
V. GREIM: We once made a low-level attack near EASTBOURNE. When we got there, we saw a large mansion where they seemed to be having a ball or something; in any case we saw a lot of women in fancy-dress, and an orchestra. There were two of us doing long distance reconnaissance. […] We turned round and flew towards it. The first time we flew past, and then we approached again and machine-gunned them. It was great fun!115
A hunt consists of locating, pursuing, felling, and eviscerating game. Hunts come in various forms. The most common ones are the hunt in which a solitary rifle wielder goes after his prey together with a game dog, and the roundup, in which beaters drive the prey into the hunter’s sights. Hunting has a sporting aspect. The hunter has to be skillful and alert, smarter than his prey. He has to know how to hide, how to attack without being spotted, and how to shoot well. But hunting also entails special rules. One hunts only at particular times, for instance, and only shoots at individual animals.
Taken together, all these elements correspond to the demands placed upon a fighter pilot. (Indeed, the German for fighter pilot,
A good example of this trope is a metaphor used by German navy Lieutenant Wolf-Doetrich Danckworth, the only survivor from the German submarine U-224:
It’s still good fun today. When we were after a convoy it was always like a wolf after a flock of sheep, strongly guarded by dogs. Dogs are the corvettes and the sheep are the ships and we were lurking round like wolves until we found a way of slipping in, then we attacked, fired our torpedoes and got out again. The best fun is to hunt.117
For soldiers, it made no difference whether the prey consisted of military or civilian targets. In his diary, an enthusiastic Ernst Jünger described how he finally, after two and a half years of war, succeeded in “felling” his first Englishman with a “precise” shot.118 Soldiers’ anecdotes were less concerned with who was killed and why than with the more spectacular results one had achieved. This, too, is an instance of how soldiers saw battle in terms of sports.
The more prominent or important the target, the greater the triumph, and the more interesting the stories that could be told about the kill:
