By TOM LEWIS
Big Sky Publishing, 2012, 359 pages, $34.99 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
The truth of war, says Dr. Tom Lewis in Lethality in Combat, is that it is violent and lethal. Well, no surprises there but coming from a
former Navy officer within the institutional and ideological framework of the
Australian military, it is a deviation of sorts from official military history
which is most comfortable with the ‘honour and glory’ take on war rather than
the killing and bloodshed bit.
Unlike those who are repulsed by war’s human carnage,
however, Lewis thinks we should be realists and celebrate the lethal reality of
war in order to train for a military better at it. Lewis’ book is a long polemic against the
“fashionable arguments” of anti-militarist critics, who, he agrees, correctly “put
killing back into military history” but who, falsely he laments, deplore the
military’s “celebration of violence”.
Anti-militarism is so much moral squeamishness and
humanitarian foolishness, argues Lewis, which would only assist in “the
soldiers of your country’s enemies marching through your capital city in
triumph”. Killing, brutality,
viciousness are, on the contrary, to be “applauded” if “we” want to win. If so, one’s hands would be clapped out at
the sheer extent of the ugly business end of combat documented by Lewis.
Killing rather than taking prisoners, Lewis shows, rightly
“happens frequently” and the killing of the wounded is also “excusable”. Others who no longer pose a threat are also
for killing (fighter pilots cutting in half by propeller bailed out
parachutists, or strafing of sailors in lifeboats). Mutilation and other mistreatment of dead enemy’s
bodies is valuable because it “dehumanises the enemy and makes them
psychologically easier to kill”. So,
too, do derogatory nicknames (‘raghead’, ‘gook’, ‘Kraut’).
Revenge killings are “probably unlawful” but need
“understanding”. Shooting your own kind
(for cowardice, desertion, mutiny, for attempting surrender) is top discipline,
essential for making soldiers obey orders and stay in the killing game.
Killing civilians may be ”unfortunate but inevitable”, Lewis
concedes, but it is certainly not the military’s fault. There was hardly a civilian death in Vietnam,
he argues, that was not warranted – all 12 year old Vietnam girls were
potential ‘terrorists’ whilst his silence on the record tonnage of American bombs
dropped on Vietnam, with their notorious inability to distinguish enemy from
civilian, glosses over the rather clear guilt of the US military.
Lewis has a convenient excuse for all this combat lethality
– “military necessity”. Aggression,
blood lust, avoidance of remorse are essential to winning, and military
training must inculcate these values to “overcome the aversion to
killing”. “It is unfair”, Lewis says,
“to judge [our warriors] by standards set by others who do not understand the
true nature of combat”. ‘So toughen up’
is Lewis’ message to the bureaucrats with their pettifogging ‘rules of
engagement’ and Geneva Convention codes and to anti-war critics who base their
horror of war on such irrelevant standards as moral right and wrong and
international class solidarity against the planners of wars for resources,
profits and geo-political power.
Because “warfare is part of the human condition”, Lewis
pessimistically concludes, we must learn to embrace the smell of blood and
cordite in the morning if we want to stop the Hun/Vietcong/Argies from waltzing
into our shopping malls. Whilst Lewis
departs from the reverential worship of the myths of war’s ‘nobility’ and
‘sacrifice’, his catalogue of combat lethality serves the same flag-waving,
imperialist purpose of militarist history – his realist military history would
have us building a more effective and ethically-immune military machine
promising bigger and better war crimes, atrocities and brutalities.
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