Went to se Das Boot in Norfolk. Most of the audience were Bubbleheads. I think it was entirely inappropriate when the theater erupted in cheers when the tanker got torpedoed. Don’t care, cheered right along with them. There really are only two kinds of ships, Submarines and Targets. We were wandering aimlessly about the Arabian Sea one time. Came to PD, and just within sight of our scope, was more tanker tonnage than the entire US Navy sank during WWII. The captain had to go have a lie down. Muttering, “Just ONE! They wont miss just ONE! I only want ONE!”
I understand completely the concept that makes a soldier cheer at the destruction of an enemy...I saw a video a while back of a bunch of Marines in Iraq (during the Fallujah campaign, maybe) who were all huddled behind a berm calling in an airstrike on a house with a bunch of jihadis in it.
When the JDAM came down and blew the buildings to smithereens, you would have thought they were at a football game, they were jumping around, whooping, hollering, and giving high fives. Some people were horrified by that, but...I think I understand it. They looked and sounded like they were 19 year old guys.
And I can see a sub crew going bonkers when they hit an enemy ship.
I forget where I read it, though, about a UBoat that sank a ship and the crew cheered wildly, but as the ship began to go down, they could hear the screeching and screaming of the metal as it rent, twisted and broke...they could hear the compartments imploding and the bulkheads collapsing and pancaking onto each other, the death throes of the doomed ship, seeming to scream horribly in pain as it began to descend. The person describing it in the book said that after the initial jubilation wore off, almost at the same time, every man could envision himself in that sinking ship, trapped, going to their imminent death only seconds away, and it was clear they were all thinking the same thing, and it wasn’t jubilation any more. It was the reflection that they had to do it, but it could just as well be them taking that terrible ride to the bottom. He said you could see it on the face of every man.
I suspect you probably get that.
There is a famous quote by then Captain John Woodward Philip of the cruiser USS Marblehead after they pounded the Spanish cruiser Vizcaya during the Spanish American War and it was aflame from stem to stern, upon hearing his men cheering wildly he was hear to say “Don’t cheer, boys. The poor devils are dying.”
I get that too, though I believe I would initially cheer pretty wildly.