In the other war in Ukraine, that of propaganda, the idea has taken hold that Russian troops go into combat possessed by drugs, which gives them especially reckless behavior. Reports from soldiers at the front and from the intelligence services of Western countries suggest that the distribution of drugs is a widespread practice in the Russian army. However, such a claim, used as a tool to smear Putin’s forces, would hardly raise the eyebrows of a World War II or Vietnam veteran since the use of these substances has historically been widespread in armed conflict.
Testimonies from Ukrainian soldiers compare the modus operandi of the members of the Wagner group with waves of zombies. Soldiers who keep advancing despite being hit or who rush against defenses without regard to machine gun fire. A report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, pointed out last month that the Russians use part of their men as “disposable soldiers”, to whom they supply “amphetamines and other narcotic substances taken (…) normally in liquid form”. However, this information could not be verified.
But the fact that they have not been verified does not mean that they are not credible, among other reasons because the use of drugs is a constant in the history of armed conflicts. Without going any further and regarding amphetamines, a well-known precedent is the use of Pervitin, by the German army in World War II. As Norman Ohler points out in The Great Delirium (Criticism), the extra stimulus provided by this drug would have had no less contribution to the success of the German blitzkrieg.
The power of the German pharmaceutical industry would have allowed its army to exploit more than anyone else the possibilities of this substance, which was distributed on a massive scale (35 million pills in the early stages of the conflict). The pills had the effect of greater courage in combat and reduced the feeling of hunger and sleepiness.
Drug use also occurred on the Allied side. Soviet troops on the front line received a daily allowance of a tenth of a liter of vodka to combat the cold but also the stress of combat. The Polish historian, Lukasz Kamiensky explains in Drugs in War (Criticism) that the presence of this liquor in the Russian military (and civil) tradition is extremely important. The anecdote is told that in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/1905 the commander of the Port Arthur fortress surrendered when he discovered that the 10,000 boxes of supplies he had received contained vodka for the troops and not the ammunition he expected. And that in the battle of Mukden, of the same conflict, the tsar’s soldiers were so drunk that they could not stand up. they lost.
Alcohol has been a resource used very often by armies to promote disinhibition and combat stress in combat situations. Kamiensky precisely indicates in his book that, as his end approached, the Japanese kamikaze received increasingly generous amounts of sake. And in World War I, the French military authority, for its part, gave its soldiers a drink of brandy before launching an attack and assigned up to a liter of wine per day per man. In 1917 alone, the consumption of this drink in the French army amounted to 1,200 million liters, a sufficient quantity for the idea that “wine was what saved France” to spread among the population after the war, as he explains. this author.
What wine was for the French army, for the British were gin –which they called dutch courage- and, above all, rum until the beginning of the 20th century. The British press has gone so far as to point out that in the late 19th century the UK armed forces were “regularly and proudly drunk”; his consumption of this last liquor exceeded two million liters a year.
It wasn’t just that alcohol was used to improve soldiers’ performance in combat, but that its absence undermined troop morale. The historian Jorge Marco published two years ago Paradises in Hell; Drugs and the Spanish Civil War (Comares Historia), an in-depth study that shows that the two opposing sides did not escape these drunken tendencies. In both cases, alcohol consumption was widespread and getting it to the front was an inexcusable task. Despite the fact that the excesses caused problems of all kinds in the ranks themselves, the drink served to dehumanize the enemy. “Its disinhibiting effect opened in some cases the floodgates for the most extreme expressions of sadism,” Marco explained to La Vanguardia.
During the Civil War, not only was alcohol consumed, but there was also a notable increase in addiction to substances such as morphine and the use of cannabis, introduced by Franco’s North African troops, expanded. This last drug, precisely, was widely consumed in the US ranks in Vietnam. But it was one more among the multiple substances, abundant alcohol on the side, that the soldiers had within their reach.
Kamiensky considers this conflict as “the first drug war.” Between 1966 and 1969, US troops received 225 million stimulant pills, mostly amphetamines, which were used in combat and to maintain alertness. Painkillers and opiates were also supplied. The researchers point out that this war dramatically increased the number of drug addicts in civilian life.
But neither the Pentagon nor the German pharmaceutical industry nor the rum producers of the 17th century invented the use of substances at the front. A quick review of military history explains the feared ferocity of the Viking berserkers due to the consumption of a psychoactive component found in the fly agaric; shows that the legendary Greek hoplites were opium users; and evidence that the Roman military consumed in the confines of the empire industrial quantities of wine produced in southern Europe (or did someone believe that the Roman taste for wine was merely gastronomic?). And it does not seem that consuming these substances was bad for them.
