In August 1989, to
commemorate the 50th anniversary of the beginning of World War II, Fussell has
given much more than I could have wanted in The Real War: 1939-1945—An
Experience in Horror and Madness.
It’s not hammock reading.
But it’s the kind of thing that could give anniversaries a good name. I
heartily second the Inquirer’s “A pox on anniversaries: Will ‘60s nostalgia
never come to an end?” (July 21). “First Annual This” and Halls of / anything /
Fame are Band-Aids that are easier to paste on an empty hand than it is to
develop a real sense of history.
Fussell shows us how to
commemorate in his brilliant essay. The main drift is that the war was so
horrible that everyone who wasn’t in the combat zone uses every conceivable
technique to avoid the reality of those horrors. He examines the synoptic
photographic records of the war: Lo and don’t behold, you don’t see maimed
bodies—unless they be of the hated enemy.
It was this kind of
structural euphemizing that, Fussell says, “moved the troups to constant verbal
subversion and contempt…They knew that in its representation to the laity, what
was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not
to mention Disneyfied.”
They knew, for example,
that their World War I-vintage automatic rifles were slower and clumsier than
the lighter German machine gun. Allied tanks were undermanned and under-armored
compared with the Panzers. The Allies’ anti-tank mines were unstable in
freezing weather, and in the winter of 1944-45 whole truckloads of them blew
up.
The Western tradition of
imaging war, with notable exceptions (say Goya on the Peninsular War), was
touched up. In Fussell’s harrowing phrase, no “members were missing.” Modern
weapons, like modern aircraft crashes, tend to make mincemeat of the bodies
involved. You have to go to non-literary workaday memoirs to learn that
soldiers were not always hit by bullets—they could be “wounded” by flying body
parts.
American stay-at-homes
could avoid such realities in ways that Europeans in the middle of the action
couldn’t. People could go mad if this level of horror lasted for months, even
years. And soldiers did go mad. The sub-literary genre of booklets to ease the
entry of “replacements” into combat is amazing: “Everybody is afraid, but you
can learn to control your fear.” Big help.
The casualty data are
mind-numbing. “In six weeks of fighting in Normandy, the 90th Infantry Division
had to replace 150% of its officers and more than 100% of its men. If a
division was engaged for more than three months, the probability was that every
one of its second lieutenants, all 132 of them, would be killed or wounded.
“For those being prepared
as replacements at officer candidate schools, it was not mentally healthy to
dwell on the oddity of the schools’ turning out hundreds of new junior officers
weekly after the army had reached its full wartime strength.”
One of the most interesting
aspects of his analysis is the way journalists were housebroken by the censors.
Even Ernie Pyle is reduced to the stature of a hack, asking none of the
threatening questions. War correspondence was a kind of cheerleading for hometown
consumption.
Fussell’s essay has cleared
up a puzzling reaction I got from a retired English professor three years older
than I am. I had sent him a tear-sheet of a piece wallowing in the nostalgia of
a revisit to the Pensacola Naval Air Station, where I had “served” 43 years
before.
He said that he hated “pissant”
stories of stateside “duty.” He had spent three years in Europe in “considerable
discomfort” and he wanted to “puke” at such rosy recollections. I was stunned.
I had enlisted in the Navy
at 17 in 1944, in a surge of patriotism, even before I had graduated from high
school. But after eight weeks of boot camp and ten months of radar school, the
war was over, and I awaited discharge at Pensacola.
The high points of my navel
service were farting through my bugle when trying to sound Attention when
Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal visited our base, and running a sailboat
aground in Pensacola Bay.
Until I read Fussell, I had
only the most abstract notion of the horrors of war. I don’t feel any guilt
about the happenstance that I was born a year too late to wage war personally.
But now I comprehend the bitter rhetoric of my friend’s “pissant” and “puke.”
Fussell’s chapter in The
Atlantic was so good that it led me to the book Wartime: Understanding and
Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford U. Press), of which Fussell’s is the
concluding and conclusive chapter. Its leitmotif is that the bad media habits
and cultural attitudes formed to fight the war still silently debilitate our
society.
Faithful Fussell fanciers
will want to journey to the New York Public Library (October 10 at 6 p.m., $5)
to hear “The Poetry of Three Wars: World War I, World War II, and Vietnam.”
From Welcomat: After Dark, August
30, 1989
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