On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

by Dave Grossman

But in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, psychiatric casualties during naval warfare have been nearly nonexistent. The great military physician Lord Moran noted the remarkable absence of psychological illness among the men he ministered to aboard ships in World War II. Discussing his experience in two ships, he said, “One was sunk after surviving more than two hundred raids and the whole of the first Libyan campaign. The other was in four major actions in addition to many raids at sea and in harbour, and twice sustained actual damage.” Yet the incidence of psychiatric casualties was almost nonexistent. “There were more than five hundred men in the two ships and of these only two came to me about their nerves.” After World War II the fields of psychiatry and psychology attempted to find out why, and again they suggested gain through illness. A sailor obviously had nothing to gain by becoming a psychiatric casualty and therefore did not elect to do so.