Pugwash UK
Movement for the Abolition of War

1. The nature of war

To some, war will seem like a remote curiousity, something that other people get involved in, a long way away. So in this chapter let us see what it can really mean to those involved. One way to do that would be to look at the figures. In World War 2 there were several tens of millions of casualties. In Vietnam, three million is a rough estimate. Such figures are inevitably imprecise. While military casualties may be countable, civilian casualties are not. In the second Iraq war, the Americans apparently did not even try to count the number of civilians they killed when bombing supposed enemy strongholds. The above figure for Vietnam includes around 2 million civilian casualties. In the civil war in Rwanda it was primarily civilians who were killed: the distinction between civilian and combatant is not always easy to make.

But it is hard to attach meaning to such figures. Just as when we read of the billions of pounds or dollars in the national budget, for most of us the numbers are beyond our imagination. And death is only one of the consequences of war. The number of wounded is likely to exceed by many times the number of deaths. And of those wounded, some will suffer for the rest of their lives. Many will have lost limbs, others will have lost sense of sight or hearing. Others will be incapacitated by poisonous substances to which they have been exposed, deliberately or adventitiously, as part of the machinery of war. Yet others will be traumatised by the dangers and experiences to which they have been exposed.

And death and wounds are only part of the story. Military training can lead to a change in personality: individuals in civvy street who abide by the law and try never to hurt anyone are transformed into members of a group whose membership entitles or requires them to kill. Many are further affected by the experience of combat and find it difficult to readjust to ordinary life.

War also induces starvation and disease. In the Introduction I mentioned the report of 45,000 war-related deaths each month in the Congo: apparently most of these were due to starvation or disease, or complications of pregnancy or the frailty of newborns, but in each case a consequence of war. We have all seen pictures of refugee camps, with figures for the number of refugees, so-called “displaced persons”, but it is not easy for most of us to imagine what it must be like to lose your home, your family, your livelihood, and most serious of all, every scrap of hope for your future. In the civil war in Rwanda the great majority of the refugees had lost family members, and nearly half had lost both parents. In every war, for each death there is at least one bereavement, usually several, perhaps widow, children and parents.

But this list of horrors may have lost you. We preserve ourselves by turning away, by feeling that this has nothing to do with us, it is remote, distant, in another world. It is the individual cases that are easiest to identify with. So here is a tiny incident, pretty insignificant in the total scheme of the conflict, from World War 2. It happens to concern my brother, a doctor and medical officer in a Field Ambulance of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Fairly recently qualified, he joined up soon after war was declared and was stationed in various places in Norfolk. Having volunteered for overseas service, he sailed from England on about July 20th 1941. His wife and my parents were told that he was missing on Sept 8th, but could get no further information about him from the War Office. After some weeks they heard through friends in Liverpool of a newspaper report about the survivors of a torpedoed ship which mentioned a doctor who had died in the lifeboat. Only on November 3rd was official notification of his death from wounds received. My father managed to obtain the names of the survivors, and this is a copy of part of the letter from one of them:

This letter tells not of dramatic action but of long drawn out suffering followed by agonising death. Imagine the effect on his widow and on my parents. The suspense they suffered and the nature of my brother’s death made the loss many times worse.

My brother’s death also made them more sensitive to suspense when, about 18 months later, they received a letter of condolence from the landlady on whom I had been billetted in Oban. It was a case of mistaken identity: another aircrew had been killed at about the time that I flew to the Far East. The Air Ministry refused to release any information about me and, for a variety of reasons, it was several weeks before I could communicate with my family. Put this against the facts of my parents’ situation: my father was a busy doctor, near retirement, taking frequent night calls in the blackout. My mother was an Air Raid Warden, out whenever the air raid siren blew and often at other times. One of my sisters, a newly qualified doctor, was doing the work of my father’s partner, who was in the army; my other sister was working on the decoding of German radio messages in Bletchley, and I, the youngest, was in the RAF. The family did not suffer to the extent that some families in battle-zones did, but the whole family was engulfed in the war. After my brother’s death, I can honestly say that my parents were never truly happy again. Indeed the life of everyone in the country was changed by the war. It permeated every corner of the lives of every citizen – fear, rationing, blackout, the call-up touched everywhere. It was even worse, of course for those living in the European countries where the land battles were fought. In this respect, for UK citizens World War 2 differed from more recent wars in which the forces of one country were fighting the forces of another in the territory of the latter. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, indescribably horrific though they have been for many and totally disruptive as they have been for the citizens, barely touched the lives of most in the USA and UK.

Of course, in time of war the public is shielded from many of its worst horrors. War is sanitised, especially the suffering of one’s own countrymen. In World War 1 a trench was constructed in a London park to show the public what trench warfare was like. Of course it was clean and tidy: there was no mud, no rotting corpses, no rats feeding on them, no shell holes where the protective parapet had been blasted away. More recently, in the Second Iraq war, reporters have been embedded in combatant units and their reports have conveyed some of the drama of battle, but what they were allowed to report has been strictly limited. Too seldom, combatants tell their own tales: I will quote only three sentences from a man who later suffered extreme post-traumatic stress disorder: “Because we were the initial fighting force, we did not stop to mess around with dead bodies (Iraqis). There was a little girl clinging on to her dead dad screaming her eyes out. We never had time to stop”.
In this context, I should perhaps make clear that, although I was involved as a pilot in World War 2, my own job was a relatively easy one. Sixteen hour patrols over the sea looking for ships or submarines had its moments, but was innocuous compared with what many had to experience. My boyhood friend Graham Cozens-Hardy also joined the Royal Air Force and flew as a navigator with Bomber Command at a time when it was experiencing very heavy casualties. Graham had nearly completed his tour of thirty missions and was 21 when he was killed. I went to the base where he had been stationed to try to find out more about his death from other aircrew. Beyond the fact that he had been lead navigator on a daylight raid and they had broken cloud over the Ruhr, they seemed strangely unwilling to talk about it. I could see the reason in their tired eyes and strained faces: although I also was a pilot, I was an outsider to what they were enduring and I seemed to them almost not to exist. Graham is buried with his crew side by side in a beautifully kept cemetery near the Netherlands/German border.

Hiroshima: A watch stopped at a quarter past eight.
(Source: http://www.hiroshima-spirit.jp/en/museum/morgue_e12.html#e12-1)

The war we are all most afraid of now is nuclear war. The horror of nuclear weapons is difficult to convey. Once again, the figures give little idea of the reality. When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, about 140,000 died in the next few months. And now nuclear weapons are many times more powerful than this. One simply cannot imagine it. I came nearer to being able to see the meaning of the figures when I visited the Peace Museum in Hiroshima a few years ago. It was not the pictures and models of the devastation, nor the figures of casualties, but something more personal. The watches stopped at a quarter past eight. The stone steps with the shadow of a person —was it a man or a woman?—etched on the stone: the person sitting there had been vapourised, the shadow was all that was left.

Nearby in the Museum are glass cases, each with a smock or a pair of trousers, burnt and torn, with a small card with a vignette of the owner. Mostly they were teenagers, clearing a fire-break, about 1000 metres from ground zero, dying immediately or the next day. One little girl, who had been 4,000 metres from ground zero, seemed unaffected, and grew up into a fine schoolgirl, noted for her athletic abilities. For ten years. And then the radiation sickness struck. She died slowly, over the next few months. She believed in a Japanese myth that if you made a thousand perfect paper cranes, you could have your dearest wish. Her wish was to live. Many of the paper birds she made are in the Museum, some no larger than your finger nail. She made over 500: her school friends made the rest.

You will find another picture of war in the commemoration services and war memorials, a picture that carries a different sort of truth. “Their name liveth for evermore” and “At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them”. Such words carry important messages to those suffering the desparate longing of bereavement. Having lost much of the meaning in their lives, they can cling to the belief that it was not a total waste (“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”) and the name on a war memorial provides a focus for their grief. My brother was buried at sea, and I remember my mother saying “He has not even got a grave”: later she got some comfort from a memorial in a local church. But one must not forget the euphemisms that are nearly always present. For the most part they did not “lay down their lives”, they were killed. There is a real contrast between the message on the memorial and the reality. One of the bloodiest battles of World War 2 is commemorated at Kohima, in Burma. The memorial in the Kohima cemetery says:

Contrast this with descriptions of the battle: “The garrison was remorselessly shelled and mortared and slowly driven into a small perimeter on Garrison Hill…… they were very short of drinking water. The dressing stations were exposed to Japanese fire, and wounded men were hit again as they waited for treatment.” After the long-drawn out battle, in which there were over 4,000 Allied and 7,000 Japanese casualities, “The terrain had been reduced to a fly- and rat-infested wilderness, with half-buried human remains everywhere.”