Making Killers: Hate Training and the US Army’s War in Europe, 1942–5

Abstract

During the Second World War, the US Army was faced with the problem of turning average civilians into soldiers capable of destroying the German army. To ease their adjustment to their new duties and overcome what US officers saw as the unsuitability of Americans for soldiering, the Army Ground Forces adopted a training regimen designed to produce an ‘induced urge to hate the enemy’. This training would make soldiers into enthusiastic killers by portraying the enemy as brutal and ruthless and warfare as a fundamentally lawless activity. As the war went on, hate training increasingly emphasized German atrocities, breaking down the distinctions between soldier and civilian and painting all Germans as potential threats. This antinomian approach achieved only marginal effectiveness in getting US troops to kill, but had dire results for military justice. Blurring the lines between lawful killing and murder, the army’s hate training program crippled its ability to police its soldiers. As violence against German civilians and POWs mounted, many officers felt these war crimes were the natural and inevitable result of the army’s training regimen. Unwilling to hold soldiers responsible, confessed war criminals were only lightly punished, explicitly because the Army believed they had only acted on their training.