Not much frightened the Wehrmacht, but the Australians did. When ANZAC troops captured Tobruk at the point of a bayonet, blood ran in the streets. Caesar would not have been impressed: unlike his own proto-Nazis, the Ozzies left women, children and animals alone.
Later that evening groups of Australians were found celebrating arm-in-arm with their captives, swapping hats and sharing bottles liberated from Italian cellars.
The morals of warfare have never been much of a discussion topic among the soldiers I have known. For those who considered themselves religious,the Old Testament was ambiguous: you were not allowed to look at a comrade’s wife but exterminating the inhabitants of a village earned divine approval. Most professional troops leave the higher questions to the higher-ups. For Hitler’s myrmidons – brave, efficient and brutal – this was, conveniently, also a legal obligation.
What intrigues me is the attitude of thoughtful people in uniform. With few exceptions, poets regard war as intrinsically bad. With few exceptions, prose-writers accept it as natural. In the late twentieth century readers could choose between two polar extremes: John Keegan or Greenham Common. Serious analysts like Philip Matyszak leave the subject alone, using various techniques – in his case, wit – to isolate the question: how can good men kill?
When I was thirty I had a hero. He was the head of a large electronics company and my job was to write his speeches. He had many virtues: a champion swimmer, he was also an expert calligrapher and could have been a four-star chef; he looked like Harrison Ford and had several patents on military electronic devices. He was also an ardent Roman Catholic.
I was once giving him a lift home and asked how a religious person could spend his life inventing weapons. He was silent for a minute and I imagined he was struggling with this moral quandary. Then I looked across at him and realised he simply didn’t understand the question.
Science seems as ready to produce cluster-bombs as air-conditioning. Do scientists work in a moral vacuum?
The life of Fritz Haber was ambiguous to an extreme degree. He won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for inventing a chemical method of producing fertiliser. Half the world’s food production now depends on the Haber-Bosch process. But at the same time he played a pre-eminent role in the development of chemical warfare during World War One; he is often called the ‘father’ of poison gas. Besotted with the Kaiser’s militaristic society and anxious to be recognised as a true German, Haber devoted himself to inventing ever more deadly battlefield toxins, despite their prohibition by the Hague Convention of 1907.
It cost him his wife, who committed suicide, aghast, and his son, who also died by his own hand. Haber said: ‘In peace-time a scientist belongs to the world, but in wartime he belongs to his country’.
Robert Oppenheimer was also dubbed a ‘father’, this time of the atomic bomb. A brilliant, troubled and deeply enigmatic personality, Oppenheimer was a child prodigy who could master any subject and any language at the drop of a hat. As a physicist he was world-class but never focussed sufficiently to reach the heights of which he was capable. He made his mark on history when General Groves, the obnoxious but highly-effective manager of the Manhattan Project, picked Oppenheimer – to everyone’s amazement – as head of the Los Alamos research enterprise. This unlikely candidate turned out to possess extraordinary leadership skills, co-ordinating and driving a galaxy of scientific talent racing against time to create the bomb before the Germans.
When the Trinity test at Alamogordo proved successful, producing the world’s first atomic fireball, Oppenheimer quoted (from memory, and in the original language) the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’. Witnesses described his reaction as one of intense relief.
Later in life Oppenheimer did his best to encourage neutral, international supervision of atomic weapons and opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. He was ostracized by the US atomic community when the Cold War gathered pace, losing his security clearance in dubious circumstances. He travelled the world lecturing on nuclear issues and the cause of peace. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson took steps to rehabilitate him with the award of the Enrico Fermi Medal in 1963; he died in 1967. Oppenheimer may personify the conflict between moral sensibility and scientific or patriotic urges - one which caused Haber no problems at all.
Wernher von Braun’s moral ambivalence has been immortalised by the musical mathematician Tom Lehrer. Dedicated from childhood to the embryonic science of rocketry, von Braun dreamed of space-flight and spent every waking hour experimenting with ways of defeating gravity. The problem was always lack of money. The solution came in the form of the Third Reich where, in spite of Hitler’s lukewarm support, the Wehrmacht and the SS competed to own the missile systems which von Braun was developing. He joined the party in 1937 and the SS in 1940.
Von Braun’s V2 caused such catastrophic damage to London (not to mention Antwerp, Liege and twelve other cities) that the British Government imposed a news blackout. There was simply no defence against this weapon, an ICBM years ahead of its time. Over 3,000 were launched.
The black shadow on von Braun’s reputation stems not from the use of rockets against civilians but from the methods used to manufacture them. Over 20,000 slave labourers died in the Mittelbau-Dora production caverns from beatings, starvation and exemplary hangings. Did von Braun know? He denied it, but both Guy Morand and Robert Cazabonne testified after the war that von Braun not only watched executions but also personally ordered floggings.
Von Braun, too, is known as a ‘father’ - in his case of the United States’ successful mission to land men on the moon. He was without question a brilliant scientist and a visionary. His adherence to the Nazi state was, he claimed, passive. The US authorities were happy to acquiesce. But there are doubts about von Braun’s veracity and similar misgivings about the allies’ willingness to overlook alleged war-crimes in the case of valuable ex-Nazis. Perhaps Mort Sahl’s sardonic comment stands as an epitaph: ‘I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London’.
Of the three, it is easiest to sympathise with Robert Oppenheimer. He seems to have possessed a conscience and to have spent the post-war years trying to minimise the consequences of his wartime endeavours. But, ironically, his achievements caused more death and destruction than the efforts of Haber and von Braun combined.
Do scientists live in a moral vacuum? In these three examples, not to mention my hero’s, they certainly appear to suspend their moral principles when governments tell them to. Maybe Haber was right, and in wartime a scientist does indeed ‘belong to his country’. How depressing, and how dangerous.