"You know, Bill, war is a bad thing. Even if we leave out combat deaths and injuries, property damage, rape and pillage, lingering danger of unexploded munitions, economic disruption, refugees, starvation and disease, and possible wiping out of the planet, we’re still left with things like increased drug addiction”
- Cecil Adams, the world's most informative smartass, in the Straight Dope

In choosing Paul Fussell’s Wartime as my contribution to jay1051971’s Anti-War Writeoff, I’m choosing to write about World War II. Which is odd, because proponents of America’s latest and greatest war, against Saddam Hussein, also seem to want to talk about World War II. Mentions of "Munich" and "appeasement" keep popping up in discussions, as if Iraq -- a pathetic third-world nation who couldn’t beat Iran in a war and whose president has consistently preferred to allow inspectors to destroy what weapons he has when under threat, a nation whose draftees have usually been eager to surrender en masse -- could somehow be compared to Nazi Germany, an advanced industrial country that consistently defeated the Allies in any battle where the Allies didn’t have a huge numerical advantage. World War II is the Good War, the Just War. Tom Brokaw, who did not fight in WWII (was too young), wrote about the World Warriors as the Greatest Generation. John Wayne, who was the right age to fight WWII but didn’t go, made glorious movies about Allied courage. Ronald Reagan, who was the right age to fight WWII but didn’t go, made glorious movies about Allied courage and then ran our country on an effort to recapture that glory.

On the other hand, Joseph Heller was actually in WWII, and wrote Catch-22, showing his fellow warriors and his bosses as nincompoops, cowards, scam artists (these all being the ones he understood and liked), or much worse, as gung-ho believers in need of a lesson. Kurt Vonnegut fought in WWII, and wrote the horrific Slaughterhouse Five. Evelyn Waugh fought in WWII and wrote the scathingly sarcastic Sword of Honor. Edmund Love was an army historian in WWII, but still got to be at Guadalcanal, and his Arsenic and Red Tape includes real-life portrayals of the army’s best Milo Minderbinders and Yossarians. President George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) fought in WWII, and had the basic brains during Vietnam to make sure his son didn’t have to go near any combat field.

And Paul Fussell, another fighter of WWII, did an immense amount of research, and came out with Wartime. Because World War Two may have been the Necessary War; but the scam that it was in any way Good or ennobling has gone on too long. It's affected the worldviews of too many elite draft-evaders who, decades later and high in government service, now have Nintendo-crazed looks in their eyes. Fussell, however ineffectively, wishes to set the record straight.

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The first thing he wishes to clarify – and we might as well put this on the record before Resident Bush’s troops engage directly with Hussein’s “elite” (and ironically-named) Republican Guard, either winning easily or not – is that all wars start out as picnics. Literally, in the case of the Civil War, where women brought lunch-baskets to the viewing of the First Battle of Bull Run; but any survey of World War I popular culture in any participating country (Fussell apparently has written one of those too, the Great War) shows expectations of easy victories and Christmas homecomings. WWI let down that expectation, of course, but Fussell shows that things were going to be different in WWII. “Instead of marching to war, today’s soldier rides to war on wheels”, Colonel William Donovan announced. Both Sides Agree Not to Bomb Civilians, announced the Washington Post on September 3, 1939, years before the firebombing annihilations of Dresden and Hamburg and Tokyo and Hiroshima. “Precision bombing will win this war!”, announced publicity releases for the B-17 “Flying Fortress”.

Lest it look like hype, we see the energetic preparation (in 1941!) of U.S. Cavalry units, proud on horseback, two years after Poland’s cavalry was vaporized by Nazi tanks. We see the numbingly precise Field Manual instructions for tent-pitching (“each man steps obliquely with his right foot a full pace to the right front… Each odd-numbered man places a pin in the ground on the spot which he had previously marked with his heel… the odd-numbered man driving the rear guy pin two-and-a-half tent pin lengths from the rear triangle pin”); Fussell wonders “who could imagine, in the face of such Boy Scoutism, the troops in the forests of Europe crouching in freezing holes roofed with logs or railway ties and mounds of dirt to protect against artillery tree-bursts?”. He shows repeated inter-military bombing plans that refused to acknowledge the likelihood that bombing raids would miss their target cities entirely; in the first German raids on London, only half the bombs fell on land at all, and only 6% hit London. On the other hand, we see Allied bombers on and after D-Day cause tremendous numbers of deaths: of the Americans invading. Oops. But, a typical oops.

“The main cause of such fatal errors”, writes Fussell the old soldier who has read many many old soldiers, “is simple fear. The planes must not be allowed to get too close, and hence you fire at distances too great for positive identification. The planes _might_ be the enemy; in fact, they’re quite likely to be. Thus it took time for Allied bombers on their way to the Continent to learn that London was in no way to be flown over…. One Canadian bomber pilot testifies that ‘the jittery army gunners always cut loose at you, despite the fact that we were flying north to south and there were 800 of us. We could hardly be Germans to the most unimaginative mind and yet they always pounded up the flak’. But the classic recognition error prompted by fear is the one occuring at the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. American navy and ground gunners had been told that transports and gliders carrying the airborne troops would be flying over them, yet at the crucial moment they seemed to forget and blasted away, some of them shouting ‘German attack! Fire!’… Ernie Pyle witnessed the Sicilian debacle but either chose not to mention it or, more likely, was forbidden to. It is still insufficiently known. For example, the volume the Italian Campaign of the Time-Life series devoted to World War II doesn’t mention it at all. This is typical behavior for the series… It is doubtful that many former World War II servicemen were astonished to learn, in summer 1988, that the American navy had shot down an Iranian airliner, mistaking it for a hostile fighter plane, and killed 290 innocent humans. As usual, fear, or something like it, was the cause”.

The censorship (unofficial as well as official) of World War II, or of any war, is a recurring theme of Wartime. Listing the bestselling pictorial histories of WWII by name, he notes of each that “no American dismemberings are registered… everyone has all his limbs, his hands and feet and digits, not to mention expressions of courage and cheer”. (Similarly, “To this date, the appearance of the site of a major airplane accident is unknown to almost everyone”). “You would expect front-line soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell-fragments, but such is the popular insulation from facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by… his sergeants detached heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain’s severed head”. Enough examples are cited – though no pictures – to quell some of this innocence.

Apparently, the stay-at-home celebrators of The Greatest Generation have not felt it useful to cite, for example, the statistics of the anonymous questionnaires of WWII Americans, in which over a quarter admitted to having vomited out of fear, and almost a quarter admitted to have pooped their pants (I repeat the word “admitted” to suggest that the estimates are probably rather on the low side).

But then, apparently the citers of The Greatest Generation don’t like to celebrate the (often quite clever) popular song and verse among the soldiers of the time. I particularly like the British song of the not-yet-deployed, which carries on for ten stanzas the theme

”The f---ing town’s a f---ing cuss:
No f---ing trams, no f---ing bus.
Nobody cares for f---ing us
In F---ing Halkirk.
“No f---ing sport, no f---ing games,
No f---ing fun. The f---ing dames
Don’t even give their f---ing names
In F---ing Halkirk”

But then again, once the Royal Air Force went into battle, there was always

“We had been flying all day long at 100 f---ing feet,
the weather f---ing awful, f---ing rain and f---ing sleet;
the compass it was swinging f---ing south and f---ing north,
but we made a f---ing landfall in the Firth of F---ing Forth.
“Ain’t the Air Force f---ing awful?
Ain’t the Air Force f---ing awful?

Ain’t the Air Force f---ing awful?
We made a f---ing landing in the f---ing Firth of Forth”.

The problem, I suppose, is not the cussing but the cynicism, which doesn’t even approach that of the great military legacy words FUBAR (F---ed Up Beyond All Recognition) and the evilly blasé SNAFU (Situation Normal: All F---ed Up). But as Fussell also demonstrates at extravagant length, World War II for most people was a cynical war, and probably should have been. Carnage was everywhere, be it “the fact that in order to invade the Continent the Allies killed 12,000 innocent French and Belgian civilians who happened to live on the wrong part of town, that is, too near the railway tracks”, or in the likelihood by 1944/1945 that “if a division was engaged for more than three months, the probability was that every one of its second lieutentants, all 132 of them, would be killed or wounded”. Troops were fighting to get home; troops were officially _urged_ to win as quickly as possible in order to get home, and hopeful rumours circulated everywhere that after-we-win-this-battle we’ll be returned home to train new troops, or that the first 100 troops to land on Okinawa had been promised free Fords when they got home. Troops were fighting to get home, and as a lengthy survey of their writings (scatological or diaristic or poetic) reveals, that’s all they were fighting for. Advertising of the day makes it plenty clear that’s all the folks back home were expecting either: “a return to normalcy”, as Warren G. Harding had promised en route to being elected president after World War I.

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Does any of this have relevance to wartimes today? You might wonder. “Precision bombing” is still a recurrent theme, but technology’s had fifty years to justify the old lie. All I can really contribute is my memories of the first Gulf War, when CNN, in the glorious tradition of Ernie Pyle and Time-Life, showed us dramatic footage of Patriot missiles rocketing into the air and shooting down Soviet-made Scud missiles with 90% accuracy. Not until two years later did we learn, from veterans of the Patriot program, that the Patriot missiles had been 2% accurate at best, and that the Scud missiles had (thankfully) been the sort of missiles you buy at Salvation Army, and fell apart spontaneously in mid-air (sort of like American helicopters but much much worse). We saw, many times, a spectacular shot of a guided missile winding its elegant course through the earth and exploding an Iraqi bunker where, we knew, Iraq’s own missiles were being made. In retrospect, it is possible that Iraqi missiles were being made there, but it’s only certain that more than 400 schoolchildren were being hidden there. As of 1991, mistakes are still made; as of 1991, mistakes are still being lied about. We can’t really say beyond that.

Do I think the U.S. will win the war in Iraq quickly? Sure I do; it's a guess, and there's a fine tradition of making that guess, and it's _my_ guess. The consequences will last decades, though. That I know.

Was World War II a noble war? In retrospect, clearly the Nazis needed to be fought, but Fussell makes it clear (as any high-schooler’s guide to propaganda can) that World War II, _at the time_, was mostly about destroying the subhuman cunning Japs, and the Germany had to be fought mainly because they’d followed treaty obligations and declared war on us. Are Islamic terrorists the #1 deadly threat to world order, and does Saddam have a blessed thing to do with them? A decade from now, it may well be obvious that they were or even (despite current evidence) that he did. But right now it seems as important that they all have funny names, refuse to speak fluent English, and believe in a slightly different God whose views on women are slightly less charitable than the Pope's.

War is a bad thing. Even if we leave out combat deaths and injuries, property damage, rape and pillage, lingering danger of unexploded munitions, economic disruption, refugees, starvation and disease, increased drug addiction, and possible wiping out of the planet, we’re still left with death from flying body parts, with wallowing through other people’s intestines and our own soiled pants. We’re still left with dishonesty, fake news, loose stereotypes and willing murder, and post-traumatic stress syndrome so serious that its sufferers refuse to say how it came about. We’re still left with cynical and depressive poetry from the front lines. We’re still left with cock-of-the-walk politicians slapping high-fives at the deaths of people who, whatever else they may be, are not the relatives of any politician. We’re still left with boredom, and chickensh*t regulations about proper tent procedure, and soldiers being singled out to walk fatal night patrol because their commanding officer doesn’t like how they make their beds. We're still left with too many heterosexual men hanging out with too few heterosexual women and too much fear, half the time, to even want them. We’re still left with F---ing Halkirk, at least until some bomb aimed at Inverness knocks it out.

We’re still left not knowing. But it would help if we traded the ignorance of John Wayne and Tom Brokaw and CNN for the knowledge of those who go through it.

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Say hi to fellow Anti-War Writeoff contributors:
beckytcy
briandalsmom
dedemw
foxy_shy
ingysdayoff
jankp
jay1051971
jordan_tar
lemon_lime
matthewn
sampo24
sfarmer76


Recommended: Yes