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The
Origin of the Myth of Distant Punishment
During World War I the probability of a soldier becoming
a psychiatric casualty was greater than that of being killed
by enemy fire. This was a new phenomenon in human history,
resulting from the manifestation of day-and-night combat
for months on end. When these hundreds-of-thousands of psychiatric
casualties began to occur in World War I, they were termed
"shell shock" and it was sincerely (and quite incorrectly)
believed by psychiatrists that these casualties were a result
of the physical impact of prolonged concussions on the brain.
At the end of World War I, psychiatrists and psychologists
believed that similar concussions, delivered by air and
inflicted on enemy troop concentrations and civilian populations
in cities, would result in similar mass psychiatric casualties.
As a result of this fallacy, air power adherents sincerely
envisioned vast numbers of "gibbering lunatics" being
driven from enemy cities by a rain of bombs.
The fields of psychiatry and psychology were truly "voodoo
sciences" during this period, far removed from the
scientific body of experimental-based, peer-reviewed, replicatable
data that has been so painfully established in the Post-World
War II era. And it was a tragically flawed but widely accepted
conclusion by the embryonic science of psychiatry that formed
the theoretical foundation for the German attempt to bomb
Britain into submission at the beginning of World War II
and the subsequent Allied attempt to do the same to Germany.
This unpredictable, uncontrollable reign of shock, horror,
and terror inflicted on civilian populations in World War
II is exactly what psychiatrists and psychologists believed
to be responsible for the vast numbers of psychiatric casualties
suffered by soldiers in World War I. And yet the Rand Corporation's
Strategic Bombing Study published in 1949 found that
there was only a very slight increase in the incidence of
psychological disorders in these populations as compared
to peacetime rates. In the words of historian Paul Fussell,
these post-World War II studies ascertained that: "German
military and industrial production seemed to increase just
like civilian determination not to surrender the more bombs
were dropped."
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