And Evil Rears Its Ugly Head Again and Again
I wish to discuss the searingly moving book Their Darkest Hour: People Tested To The Extreme in World War II by Laurence Rees, Ebury Press, UK, 2008.
This book is a good book to read in tandem with any standard history book of the period, and indeed with Jonathan Glover's Humanity: A Moral History of The Twentieth Century which is a tour de force on the moral and ethical implications of War, and which I reviewed in this blog here Glover. I can trace my interest in the topic of evil back to viewing as a boy in my late father's company the wonderful documentary series, which is still considered one of the greatest and most profound summaries of WWII, namely The World at War. This documentary was produced by Jeremy Isaacs, narrated by the famous actor Lawrence Olivier and included a most moving and haunting score composed by Carl Davis. As I write this piece I am listening to the theme music by Davis on YouTube World At War Theme Music. A book, The World at War, was written by Mark-Arnold Foster, and released in 1973, to accompany the TV series. I can remember my mother buying me that book in 1974 when I was 16 years of age. As a young lad, I just could not get my head around why human beings could so willfully torture and kill one another and destroy all the wonderful things various cultures had created over countless years of hard work, creativity, nurture and care. That concern was never merely intellectual because I knew that evil has lurked in the hearts of many since the dawn of civilization and that the goal of any culture worth its salt is its combat and control.
A Note on Covers and Plates
In the early 1920s printers began to realize that pictures could speak a thousand words and that photographic plates in books could often say more than the written text, and furthermore that images could enter into a profound dialogue with texts and enrich and expand them further than mere illustration. Often text could be enlivened by the pictures, if not spring from them even. I say this because what haunted me completely as a sixteen-year-old boy was the iconic picture of a fearful young seven or eight-year-old Jewish boy in The Warsaw Ghetto with his hands raised up that formed the burning backdrop to an engraved inscription of the letters "WW II" also burning and that together served as the opening sequence each week to the 26 episodes of The World at War. An interesting article on this iconic picture can be found at this link here: Little Boy. Also, it was a similar picture on the cover of the current book under review here that caught my unresisting eye. It is a picture from the Gettyimages collection that depicts a very young German soldier with his hands raised in surrender and defeat presumably sometime around the fall of Berlin. Unfortunately, the publishers give no accurate description of the cover photo save that it comes from the Getty collection. Indeed, the young lad pictured looks no more than a mere youth of 15 or 16, which would lead this reader at least to believe that its provenance lies during the fall of Berlin.
Their Darkest Hour: Laurence Rees
Finally, I have come to review the book under discussion here. At long last, I can hear you say. However, I do believe that the previous few paragraphs serve as a fitting and important introduction to my discussion of the present book and hope that the diversion has not been too taxing on the reader. This book is a chilling read, to say the least. Its author, Laurence Rees is a British historian as well as the former Creative Director of History Programmes for the BBC. He is a documentary film-maker and the author of some five books or more on war. What is chilling about this book is that within its covers are the scripts, or at least edited scripts, of interviews that Rees conducted with old men who were once involved in the most brutal of killings, indeed the most brutal of crimes during the Second World War. Suffice it to say, these men were not adjudged to have been as morally responsible and as morally reprehensible as those whom the Nuremberg Trials consigned to their ultimate fate through execution. Indeed, some of them did not even go to prison, and many of them lived highly successful lives after the war, and were often hailed as heroes. However, the reader is left more than a little chilled and rattled that the men interviewed within these covers cared so little about the consequences of the evil they had participated in, or indeed had perpetrated on either their victims, the relatives of those victims, or even on themselves. That they had no empathy at all for their fellow human beings is mind-boggling and frightening, if not disgusting and reprehensible for this reader. That empathy can be lacking in human beings is certainly a scientific fact. Dealing as I do as a Resource teacher with pupils who lie on the ASD spectrum, I am confronted now and again by a certain few of their number who have little if any empathy for other human beings. Often, my task is at the emotional and social education level where I continually work on the development, expression and understanding of human feelings from anxiety to anger, to compassion and empathy. I see this task as very necessary work for any teacher in the ASD spectrum to do.
Let me begin this review of this rather short though chilling book with an account of the crimes of the Japanese soldier Masayo Enomoto who matter-of-factly recounts to Rees how he raped, murdered and ate a Chinese woman prisoner. Presumably, she was one among many. As I write an account of it here, it seems somewhat surreal and not as horrific on the page as it must have been in real life. Maybe this is part of the sheer horror of evil - its bathos, or in the words of the great Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, its sheer banality.
However, it seems that propaganda and brainwashing are a major part of helping people to engage in evil acts. The enemy is always sub-human, indeed animal-like. Hitler called the Jews vermin. After all, it is easier to exterminate vermin than it is human beings. Likewise, Enomoto's opinion of his Chinese enemy dehumanises them as being: "lower than cockroaches." (p. 73). Let me now quote rather more fully from Rees' interview here as it paints in vivid colours the sheer horror of evil from the perspective of the poor women, its sheer superficiality, almost triviality as an act on the part of the then young Enomoto - indeed it is this startling contrast that actually sickens this present reader:
Every chapter of this book, graphic in terms of its depiction in words of unspeakable crimes, jumps off the page at the reader. This is a wonderful book because it shows the sheer depths of depravity to which humankind can stoop as well as on rare occasions the heights of courage to which it can rise. As such this book represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the Second World War, a powerful insight into the behaviour of human beings in a time of crisis and an insight into humanity's motivations for evil.
The first section of the book deals with mass killing, and the interview with Paul Montgomery which opens the book is a suitable companion story to the lurid and horrific Japanese tale just discussed immediately above. Montgomery was a radio operator on the crew of a Boeing B29 Superfortress, the biggest and heaviest bomber of the war. He, like the vast majority of the people Rees met who were involved in killing large numbers of men, women and children was relatively untroubled by their actions during WW II.
Paul Montgomery joined the USAF immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbour which he viewed as most outrageously sly on the part of the Japanese. He and his crew participated in one of the most controversial military operations of the war - the firebombing of Japanese cities. Around 100,000 Japanese died in the firebombing of Tokyo during the night of 9-10 March 1945 - more than were initially killed at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki by the first atomic bombs. Here are Montgomery's reported words:
Again, somewhat later in his interview, he recounted being nauseated after one bombing raid:
This book is very comprehensive indeed, if you forgive the almost redundant superlative adverb, as it covers the psychology of (i) mass killing, (ii) resistance (iii) treating others as inferior and inhuman, (iv) torture and murder of prisoners (v) SS fanaticism (vi) blaming the régime and (vii) mass suicide among others. Every chapter is a gripping read and it is necessary reading for all students of history, psychology and psychiatry, and indeed for anyone with a respect for the rights of every human being who treads this blood-drenched earth we call our home.
This is a book that will make its readers want to fight for the rights of every human person in this oftentimes sorry world. "War No More" must surely be the cry of humanity come of age! Or am I sadly mistaken?
A Note on Covers and Plates
In the early 1920s printers began to realize that pictures could speak a thousand words and that photographic plates in books could often say more than the written text, and furthermore that images could enter into a profound dialogue with texts and enrich and expand them further than mere illustration. Often text could be enlivened by the pictures, if not spring from them even. I say this because what haunted me completely as a sixteen-year-old boy was the iconic picture of a fearful young seven or eight-year-old Jewish boy in The Warsaw Ghetto with his hands raised up that formed the burning backdrop to an engraved inscription of the letters "WW II" also burning and that together served as the opening sequence each week to the 26 episodes of The World at War. An interesting article on this iconic picture can be found at this link here: Little Boy. Also, it was a similar picture on the cover of the current book under review here that caught my unresisting eye. It is a picture from the Gettyimages collection that depicts a very young German soldier with his hands raised in surrender and defeat presumably sometime around the fall of Berlin. Unfortunately, the publishers give no accurate description of the cover photo save that it comes from the Getty collection. Indeed, the young lad pictured looks no more than a mere youth of 15 or 16, which would lead this reader at least to believe that its provenance lies during the fall of Berlin.
Their Darkest Hour: Laurence Rees
 |
| My copy of this book |
Finally, I have come to review the book under discussion here. At long last, I can hear you say. However, I do believe that the previous few paragraphs serve as a fitting and important introduction to my discussion of the present book and hope that the diversion has not been too taxing on the reader. This book is a chilling read, to say the least. Its author, Laurence Rees is a British historian as well as the former Creative Director of History Programmes for the BBC. He is a documentary film-maker and the author of some five books or more on war. What is chilling about this book is that within its covers are the scripts, or at least edited scripts, of interviews that Rees conducted with old men who were once involved in the most brutal of killings, indeed the most brutal of crimes during the Second World War. Suffice it to say, these men were not adjudged to have been as morally responsible and as morally reprehensible as those whom the Nuremberg Trials consigned to their ultimate fate through execution. Indeed, some of them did not even go to prison, and many of them lived highly successful lives after the war, and were often hailed as heroes. However, the reader is left more than a little chilled and rattled that the men interviewed within these covers cared so little about the consequences of the evil they had participated in, or indeed had perpetrated on either their victims, the relatives of those victims, or even on themselves. That they had no empathy at all for their fellow human beings is mind-boggling and frightening, if not disgusting and reprehensible for this reader. That empathy can be lacking in human beings is certainly a scientific fact. Dealing as I do as a Resource teacher with pupils who lie on the ASD spectrum, I am confronted now and again by a certain few of their number who have little if any empathy for other human beings. Often, my task is at the emotional and social education level where I continually work on the development, expression and understanding of human feelings from anxiety to anger, to compassion and empathy. I see this task as very necessary work for any teacher in the ASD spectrum to do.
Let me begin this review of this rather short though chilling book with an account of the crimes of the Japanese soldier Masayo Enomoto who matter-of-factly recounts to Rees how he raped, murdered and ate a Chinese woman prisoner. Presumably, she was one among many. As I write an account of it here, it seems somewhat surreal and not as horrific on the page as it must have been in real life. Maybe this is part of the sheer horror of evil - its bathos, or in the words of the great Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, its sheer banality.
However, it seems that propaganda and brainwashing are a major part of helping people to engage in evil acts. The enemy is always sub-human, indeed animal-like. Hitler called the Jews vermin. After all, it is easier to exterminate vermin than it is human beings. Likewise, Enomoto's opinion of his Chinese enemy dehumanises them as being: "lower than cockroaches." (p. 73). Let me now quote rather more fully from Rees' interview here as it paints in vivid colours the sheer horror of evil from the perspective of the poor women, its sheer superficiality, almost triviality as an act on the part of the then young Enomoto - indeed it is this startling contrast that actually sickens this present reader:
The defining experience in his life happened in May 1945. He and his comrades were hungry and tired; they'd been away from base for many months within enemy territory, and they sought distraction. So when Sergeant-Major Enomoto heard that a Chinese woman from a nearby deserted village had returned, he went to investigate. He spotted her as soon as he entered the village. 'She could speak Japanese,' said Enomoto, 'and she said that her parents had tried to persuade her to leave. But she said that the Japanese people aren't such a bad people, and she'd decided to stay in the village.'
She had made a mortal mistake, because the sight of this woman drew forth one basic response from Enomoto: 'When I saw a woman in this enemy zone the first thing that would come to my mind unconditionally would be to rape her. No hesitation... She did resist, but such resistance did not affect me whatsoever. I didn't listen to what she was saying.' After he had raped her, he did what he always did to women he raped - he killed her: 'I stabbed her with a sword - on television you see a lot of blood flow out, but that's not the reality - I've cut people with swords, but you're not covered with blood. Based on my experience you really do not experience such things. It doesn't splash you like you see in the movies...
Enomoto dragged the woman further behind the shadow of the fence and began to dismember her body. He cut chunks of flesh from her legs, arms and torso: 'I just tried to choose those places where there was a lot of meat.' Then he carried the pieces back to his unit and distributed them among his comrades. (p.73 - 74)Enomoto did serve some years in a Chinese prison for his crimes. He readily admitted to his Chinese captors that he had raped and cannibalised women, but for some reason, the humane Chinese people commended him for his honesty and eventually repatriated Enomoto and other prisoners to Japan as they believed that in so doing the unspeakable crimes which he and others had committed would be acknowledged by the Japanese people as seriously inhuman and reprehensible.
Every chapter of this book, graphic in terms of its depiction in words of unspeakable crimes, jumps off the page at the reader. This is a wonderful book because it shows the sheer depths of depravity to which humankind can stoop as well as on rare occasions the heights of courage to which it can rise. As such this book represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the Second World War, a powerful insight into the behaviour of human beings in a time of crisis and an insight into humanity's motivations for evil.
The first section of the book deals with mass killing, and the interview with Paul Montgomery which opens the book is a suitable companion story to the lurid and horrific Japanese tale just discussed immediately above. Montgomery was a radio operator on the crew of a Boeing B29 Superfortress, the biggest and heaviest bomber of the war. He, like the vast majority of the people Rees met who were involved in killing large numbers of men, women and children was relatively untroubled by their actions during WW II.
Paul Montgomery joined the USAF immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbour which he viewed as most outrageously sly on the part of the Japanese. He and his crew participated in one of the most controversial military operations of the war - the firebombing of Japanese cities. Around 100,000 Japanese died in the firebombing of Tokyo during the night of 9-10 March 1945 - more than were initially killed at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki by the first atomic bombs. Here are Montgomery's reported words:
'I don't have any regrets, to put it bluntly,' said Montgomery. 'I was 21 years old that summer of the fire-bombing. And I really was wanting to get the war over and I wanted to go home. And if they told me to go bomb some cities, I went and bombed cities.'... But he himself articulated... (an) important reason why he felt so little about the destruction he had helped to create: "It's not like you're going out and sticking a bayonet in someone's stomach in the course of combat. It's just different. It's kind of like conducting war through a video game.' (p. 7-8)
Again, somewhat later in his interview, he recounted being nauseated after one bombing raid:
'Kure was burning with such intensity, and we were at such a low level, we had obnoxious odours from the incineration coming up to the airplane. We could see sheets of metal from out-houses and what have you coming up almost to our altitude... I was gagging ... that odour struck me as an odour of indescribable stench. It was somewhere between burning urine and human waste ... It was a nauseating experience.'
'What did it make you feel like?' I asked, 'when you smelt that?'
'I don't know. I felt everything except mercy for the people, for some reason. I was not obsessed with any feeling of sympathy. I just wasn't. I was young and I was case-hardened.' (p. 9)Now, it is important to state that Rees warmed to Paul Montgomery and could see that he was a very caring grandfather and father, indeed a generous and affable human being. He gives Rees a gift of homemade preserve upon parting.
This book is very comprehensive indeed, if you forgive the almost redundant superlative adverb, as it covers the psychology of (i) mass killing, (ii) resistance (iii) treating others as inferior and inhuman, (iv) torture and murder of prisoners (v) SS fanaticism (vi) blaming the régime and (vii) mass suicide among others. Every chapter is a gripping read and it is necessary reading for all students of history, psychology and psychiatry, and indeed for anyone with a respect for the rights of every human being who treads this blood-drenched earth we call our home.
This is a book that will make its readers want to fight for the rights of every human person in this oftentimes sorry world. "War No More" must surely be the cry of humanity come of age! Or am I sadly mistaken?
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