How soldiers deal with the job of killing

[Sigaba]

I know less about the Japanese case than the German. The standard published point of departure is John Dower’s War without mercy.

While I was and remain impressed with Dower's work, I also agree with John Shy's assessment that:

the actual links between thought and action are more often assumed in [Dower's] book than explored.

Citation from: John Shy, "The Cultural Approach to the History of War," Proceedings of the Symposium on "The History of War as Part of General History", 12-13 March 1993, The Journal of Military History, 57:5 (special issue) (October 1993): 15. Shy recommends the book that was published after his presentation Craig Cameron, American Samurai: Myth and Imagination in the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division 1941-1951 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). I have not yet gotten around to reading this book--which I may or may not own.

There certainly did seem to be some important differences—I’ll call them cultural and/or social, though some would haggle over whether either is the appropriate term—between the Japanese and U.S. troops.

With respect, I think you're taking lightly the debate that has caused an extraordinary degree of intellectual, political, and personal conflict among professional academic historians over the past two decades. While some historians are comfortable with a formulation in which the relationship between the 'base' and the 'superstructure' is much more dynamic than initially thought, American social and cultural historians are still slugging it out--to the unending sorrow of those who don't have tenure, to say nothing of a tenure-track job, in the Ivory Tower.

As for the SS and particularly the Einsatzgruppen, they were fighting international Bolshevism. There were other things in the mix beyond a hatred and fear of Marxism (Omer Bartov’s work is once place to look) but the perpetrators saw themselves as enmeshed in an existential conflict. That may completely implausible motivation seven decades on, but I suspect future generations are going to have a hard time buying contemporary motivations for the Global War on Terror (before anyone suggests otherwise, I am not equating the Holocaust and the Global War on Terror), as well.

IMO, the historiographical debate is much more nuanced than you present in this summary. Yes, the Nazis viewed the conflict with Bolshevism as existential. However, this mortal struggle contained a racial component that was unrecoverable. Moreover, a number of historians including Peter Fritzsche, Peter Longerich, Wolfram Wette, Alan E. Steinweis, and Stephen G. Fritz (who has sparred with Bartov over an unfavorable review) have provided compelling arguments that rank and file Germans (both civilians and soldiers) had a higher level of 'buy in' to this component of Nazi ideology than previously thought.

American troops have never perpetrated anything of the scale that Japanese and German forces did during World War Two. But I don’t think any American should kid themselves about some sort of inherent American decency. The Philippine-American War is an example too often overlooked in our country’s military history. During World War Two American soldiers and Marines are well known to have collected Japanese skulls as trophies (I understand perfectly well how the conditions they were under could have lead them to find that to be acceptable behavior, I’m just pointing out that being American didn’t stop them from being capable of it). And we can be quite inhumane to our own. Look at our country’s history of lynchings and the fact that something like 1% of our adults are imprisoned on any given day and 600 or so of them are sexually assaulted on that day and the public at large doesn’t really seem too concerned about it.

Here, you present an interesting linkage between the American soldier (broadly conceived) and his/her former life as a civilian. If your interpretation is correct, what does it say of the efficacy of the training and indoctrination of American servicemen? Are they provided the technical expertise to kill while relying more on their social and cultural upbringing rather than the ethos of professional soldiers? If such is the case, can the "warrior spirit" be learned (much less taught)? Or, as many of the QPs at PS.COM aver, are warriors born and not made--and thus individual differences trump social and cultural backgrounds?