Sinking ships without warning significantly lowered the chances that anyone would survive attacks. On the 5,150 merchant vessels the Allies lost to German submarines in World War II, more than thirty thousand sailors were killed.133
German sailors did not need to be socialized in order to kill. No one questioned whether crews of enemy merchant vessels should have to die. Such “collateral casualties” had been an accepted part of naval warfare since 1917. Individual navy men had only limited opportunities to demonstrate their individual skill, bravery, or virtuoso handling of their machinery. If your ship was hit, you sank. If you hit someone else’s ship, that person went down. With that in mind, it is not surprising how ostentatiously detached and emotionless German navy POWs were when they told their stories of sinking ships and causing others to drown. The sailors didn’t want to let death get too close to them. Torpedoes are fired from a relatively great distance, and in contrast to fighter pilots, submarine crews rarely saw the results of their work. When a submarine launched a surface attack, there were usually only four men on deck, and the captain with his periscope was the only one who saw the target during an underwater attack. At most, the rest of the crew only heard the sounds of a ship sinking—hardly a basis for a great amount of empathy.
Human beings’ understanding of what a war crime is has varied considerably from antiquity to the present day. There is no one standard as to what forms of violence constitute “normal” warfare. In light of the countless people who have lost their lives to war in the course of human history, it’s worth asking whether limits set on violence during wartime are the exception and not the rule. Conversely, there has never been a war, or for that matter any form of social behavior, that has been completely without rules. That includes World War II. The frame of reference of that conflict provided soldiers with a clear idea of what forms of violence were and weren’t legitimate—although soldiers did occasionally transgress such boundaries.
Nonetheless, the Second World War saw limits on violence, in both a qualitative and quantitative sense, removed to an unprecedented degree. More than any other conflict, World War II approximated the theoretical state of total war.134 The experience of World War I continued to influence military discussions in the interbellum period, and many people saw the radicalization of war as unavoidable. The experts all agreed that the next war would be a total one.135 Thus, despite no shortage of initiatives in that direction, there was no way to regulate or restrict the brutalization of armed conflict. The power of the major political ideologies, the general resistance to liberal ideas, the continued development of weaponry such as strategic bombers, and the intensifying plans for mass mobilization doomed all efforts to contain violence.136 Additionally, the experience of a number of armed conflicts between 1918 and 1939—the Russian Revolution, the suppression of uprisings in Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1939—diametrically opposed attempts to subject wartime violence to accepted rules. The adoption of the Second Geneva Convention on the humane treatment of prisoners of war was not enough to counteract this trend.
Much has been written about the horrible dimensions of unfettered violence in World War II, with many experts trying to explain it as the result of a combination of both situation and intent. Their reasoning draws comparisons with religious and colonial wars, maintaining that the ideologization of war prevented soldiers from recognizing the enemy as a fellow human being. Enemies could thus be killed on a whim. The perspective of the political and military leadership has been well documented, but the question remains: how did ordinary soldiers feel about these issues? What did they regard as war crimes, and which rules of warfare were anchored in their frame of reference?
