The Real World War II:

WWII was a 'good' war--good against clearly-defined evil.  Everyone did his or her part.  Combat fatigue was defined by George Patton as cowardice, a view likely shared by many.  How could anyone complain, how could anyone share the horror of their own personal experience, when London was relentlessly bombed, Jews were deported to who know what fate at the time, Korea had suffered decades of enslavement, and China, invaded in 1931 by Japan, had suffered 200,000 civilian casualties in Nanking alone?  If you were alive and not physically maimed, you were lucky--so contemporary wisdom went.

Yet the reality was different.  No amount of military glory, honors, medals, parades or the benefits of the GI Bill could prevent the years of survivor guilt, the nightmares, what the historian William Manchester, a combat Marine in the South Pacific, called "the Darkness".

It is very important to understand what it was really like, as much as we can ever comprehend it when we are not being shot at, when, until September 11th, we have all had confidence in a secure future in this country.  Even in the frightened state of America today, it cannot compare to an America when there was a serious possibility--discussed by Roosevelt with his staff--of having to let the Japanese invade as far as Chicago, and a time when German U-Boats raided shipping within sight of the East Coast--burning freighters were a common nighttime scene--and shipping crates floated up onto beaches.  Gold domes of statehouses were painted gray because they were obvious targets, and Americans in 1942 lived in daily fear of expected air raids.  Everyone had instructions on what to do when the bombs fell; blackouts were a nightly routine in American cities.

Stephen Ambrose and other historians, but especially Ambrose, have in recent years done an excellent job of telling the soldiers' stories.  Ambrose's Citizen Soldier addresses the lives of average men in the European theater.  His next book will be Citizen Soldiers of the Pacific.  His recent bestseller--there have not been less than two World War II books on the New York Times' hardcover bestseller list in recent years--tells the extraordinary story of Senator George McGovern's B24 bomber crew during the war.  The New York Times concluded its review: "If I had done at 22 what McGovern did at 22, I might have tried to live on those merits ever after.  I don't know if McGovern's generation was the greatest, but I certainly admire his ratio of sense of obligation to sense of entitlement."

Recent movies have done a superb job of beginning to deal with the reality of World War II events previously portrayed as simply heroic.  Contrast Daryl Zanuck's The Longest Day and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.  It is not just an idle thought to wonder if Spielberg had made Private Ryan or Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line, in the 1950's, would Vietnam have been as easy to sell to the American people?  With the justifiable myths of World War II deeply ingrained, wasn't it easy for America to believe that John Wayne would lead us to victory over another bunch of little yellow people?

Band of Brothers, another Ambrose/Spielberg creation, I found to be so real as to be unwatchable.  I've seen enough documentaries I feel I have to watch; I've spent time with Dick Winters and I've heard him tell these stories, and I've been moved at the tears streaming down his face as he tells them.  I can't watch it on TV.

The areas specifically that I want to address today are: The mood in America at the outbreak of the war; the attitudes and beliefs both those on the combat and home fronts needed to have to survive; and the difficulty they have had in surviving having survived  the war.

A major difference between December 7th and September 11th was that on December 7th America knew where the enemy was and the way in which a war would be fought.

But they didn't know the Japanese as well as they thought they did.  The Japanese had been characterized as somewhat comical little yellow people with thick glasses and buckteeth.  Their intelligence, cleverness and tenacity were greatly underestimated.  They continued to be portrayed this way on the American home front throughout the war.  Their conquests of Korea and China had gone virtually unnoticed by almost all Americans.  Very few Americans were of Oriental descent, and few had any idea of Asian geography.  They were shocked and disbelieving that within six months of Pearl Harbor, Douglas MacArthur's entire Army of the Pacifiic was dead or captured.  There were no American troops in Asia except Prisoners of War.

The German soldiers, on the other hand, had been portrayed in America as supermen, creating myths about their superiority, especially the legend of Erwin Rommel.  Most Americans were of European descent and had been following the European war.  They knew the geography and the march of German conquests seemed unstoppable.  This attitude that the Germans were supermen would haunt American soldiers until Allied success in North Africa showed that they could be defeated.

In 1941 America was barely more than twenty years from the First World War.  People were toughened by the struggle for survival in the 1930's Depression.  In 1940, 40% of draftees were rejected, most of them because of malnutrition, bad teeth and eyesight--all results of the Depression.  Many new soldiers came from farms in rural America where a familiarity with guns was necessitated by subsistence hunting.  Audie Murphy, America's most decorated World War II soldier, was a sharecropper's son.

The historian William Manchester wrote in what most consider to be the best personal narrative of the war, Goodbye Darkness, about America in 1941: "...You...needed the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations, a country which had never done anything infamous, in which nothing was insuperable, whose ingenuity could solve anything by inventing something.  You felt sure that all lands, given our democracy and our know-how, could shine as radiantly as we did.  Esteem was personal, too; you assumed that if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity, respected as well as adored by your children.  Wickedness was attributed to flaws in individual characters, not to society's shortcomings.  To accept unemployment compensation, had it existed, would have been considered humiliating.  So would committing a senile aunt to a state mental hospital.  Instead, she was kept in the back bedroom, still a member of the family.  Debt was ignoble. Courage was a virtue.  Mothers were beloved, fathers obeyed.  Marriage was a sacrament.  Divorce was disgraceful.  Pregnancy meant expulsion from school or dismissal from a job.  Couples did not keep house before they were married and there could be not wedding until the girl's father had approved.  Your assumed that gentlemen always removed their hats when a woman entered the room.  The suggestion that some of them might resent being called 'ladies' would have confounded you.  You needed  a precise relationship between the sexes, so that no one questioned the duty of boys to cross the seas and fight while girls wrote them cheerful letters from home, girls you knew were still pure because they were saving themselves for marriage.  All these and 'God Bless America' and Christmas or Hanukkah and the certitude that victory in the war would assure their continuance into perpetuity--all this led you into battle, and sustained you as you fought, and comforted you if you fell, and, if it came to that, justified your death to all who loved you as you had loved them...."

The initial home front reaction to Pearl Harbor couldn't be controlled or even significantly influenced by the government.  The country was outraged.  Jack Lucas was only 13 years old on December 7th, and the future Medal of Honor recipient's reaction typified the nation: "I was devastated and outraged that a foreign country attacked us and killed our people.  I just wanted to fight--to avenge Pearl Harbor and defend my country." He told his mother he was going to join the Marines, and he did--at 14, by forging her signature to a letter saying he was 16 and had her permission to join.

The country was also scared.  US currency circulating in Hawaii was overprinted with the word Hawaii so that if Hawaii was invaded by the Japanese, the United States could void all of the overprinted currency.  The possibility of Hawaii being invaded was that realistic, and fears of an invasion of the West Coast were nearly as great.

Fear of the Japanese swept the West Coast, and Japanese-Americans, in one of our country's worst domestic acts, were put into internment camps.  Americans of German or Italian birth or descent were not rounded up, because they were such a part of mainstream American life that it was impossible.  Also, they weren't physically concentrated like the Japanese-Americans; they weren't physically distinct; and neither Germany nor Italy had directly attacked our country--but the main reason was that the Germans and Italians were so integrated into American society.

American home front propaganda stressed on one side that the Japs were the enemy and on the other that Hitler was the enemy.  The emphasis was on "kill the Japs" with little emphasis on Tojo and none on Hirohito.  In sharp contrast, anti-Nazi propaganda was anti-Hitler, with less emphasis on Goering, Himmler and Goebbels.  There was little direct anti-German propaganda. Caricatures were of the bucktoothed, comical Japanese wearing thick glasses, and Hitler in various situations, frequently involving toilets.

Fear of spies, however, concentrated more on Germans--perhaps because so many Japanese were interned.  Posters warned of sabotage and careless talk, especially about ship sailings.  These fears were very real--German U-boats waited in the mid-Atlantic and information on convoy sailings was crucial to their success.

Rationing, while never as severe as in England, was very real and necessary. Price controls to control inflation were a shock to the American principle that people could measure their progress in material goods.  Having finally come out of the Depression, people had money to spend and new products, such as home appliances, had just been developed.

Rubber was the first shortage.  Until synthetic rubber was invented, there was a severe shortage as Japan cut off rubber sources in southeast Asia.  Initially, gas rationing was intended to save tires, but as U-boats sank shipping off the East Coast, gasoline rationing became important.  An average American could get enough gas to drive 60 miles a week; a new Victory Speed Limit of 35 mph was introduced to save gas.

Posters urged Americans to stay home.  In sharp contrast to today, travelers were criticized--"Is Your Trip Really Necessary?" was emblazoned on posters.  Others showed the happy family sitting at home around the fire.  Railroads, people were reminded, were "war roads" and were needed to transport soldiers.

Following a natural progression, automobiles became scarce, as none were manufactured for private use after February 1942.  Numerous other manufactured products were not made during the war years.  Factories were converted to wartime needs, and previous domestic products now went directly to the military, or military products were being produced by the factories.  An obvious example was Chris Craft, which made landing and assault boats rather than pleasure boats.  Less obvious was the Remington Typewriter Company and the IBM Corporation, both of which became major manufacturers of machine guns.

By February 1943, shoes were rationed and metal taps--common after the war and into the late 1940's and early 1950's--became a common way to lengthen the life of footwear.  Half-soles also appeared, again to save scarce leather.

Food was rationed; this was to some degree psychological, to keep everyone invested in playing their part in the war, and also because many staples were needed for the military.  Candy and cigarettes were abundantly available to troops, but not on the home front.  Whiskey, to a lesser extent, was made available to the military while it was harder to find in domestic markets.

The American food situation was never as precarious as England's.  England had to import food to feed its population, and the U-boat successes in sinking convoys from America very seriously threatened England with starvation.  Major efforts to have the English people plant and raise Victory Gardens were made and helped greatly.  Every area that could be planted for food was.

Hand in hand with rationing were government campaigns to save and salvage everything.  Posters showed, for example, how fats from cooking were used in making explosives.  It seemed that nothing should be discarded; everything was recycled.

Production was another area of major home front propaganda.  Posters related the home front worker to the soldier in combat: produce more and better for the men whose lives are literally on the line.  Ingenious posters thanked workers for being late and taking longer breaks--signed by Adolf Hitler.

Campaigns urged better nutrition so people could work more efficiently and longer.  Taking care of one's health was patriotic, and unnecessary illnesses drained valuable medical personnel and supplies.  Even campaigns against forest fires and accidents were based on not hurting production.

It was crucially important to keep home front morale high.  America could, after all, conceivably tire of the war and get out of it by recognizing Japanese conquests in Asia and German conquests on the continent.

The American media and propaganda seemed to be representative of the mood of Americans, unlike the situation in England during the period from the declaration of war in September 1939 to the invasion of France in May 1940.  This was a period when both the British media and propaganda were reflecting the views of upper-class England.  The elite of British society were overwhelmingly ready to make a deal with Hitler or to emigrate to America.  Their lack of any resolve in the face of Nazi tyranny was evident in both their defeatist attitude and their appalling condescension.

The reality was that the average Briton did not want to see pictures of battleships or so-called morale-boosting slogans; they wanted to know what to do. Churchill appreciated this and, immediately upon become Prime Minister in May 1940, dramatically changed propaganda to provide information on how to defend England.  This is what people wanted.

I am reminded of this attitude of Britain's elite in many New York Times' front pages this fall containing stories about whether America has the resolve to maintain our war on terrorism. It seems clear that the people in doubt are the journalists who need to create these stories to fill newspapers and the air waves.  The basis has changed from the 1940 genuine defeatist attitude to today's attitude of treating the news as entertainment.

Until late 1943 the war went very badly for the Allies.  American home front morale was protected by censorship of the news as well as propaganda posters and films.  During the first two years the news was heavily censored, and there was, in retrospect, such a transparently positive attitude--too strong to be called a slant--to make one wonder why people didn't see through it--until one reflects on much of the news coverage we have seen since September 11th and our desire to believe what we want and need to believe.

The wartime guide of the National Association of Broadcasters very appropriately forbid the use of the phrase "Now for some good news" until the war news finally did become "good news."

Magazines portrayed soldiers always as handsome officers, unfailingly being adored by equally perfect and beautiful women.  News glossed over the fact that Americans would actually be killed or maimed--that would only happen to our enemies.

Propaganda posters in 1942 showed meticulously groomed GI's in clean, pressed uniforms with statements that we will win because "we're on God's side". It's interesting to note that God is always on everyone's side--the enlisted man's belt buckle in the German army bore the inscription "God is with us".

Weekly newsreels showed naval ships hitting their targets every time--an impossible feat.  Allied ships "foundered" while enemy ships were always spectacularly blown apart.

A very common misperception early in the war was the myth of precision bombing.  The war would be won by bombing alone--anti-aircraft fire, or flak, is not mentioned--and the terrible toll of air crews would later attest to the fallacy of the safety of high-altitude bombing--a fallacy in itself.  Until the Norden bombsight, which calculated the effects of wind speeds at various altitudes, was invented, it was an accident if an area, let alone a specific target, was hit by bombs.  My favorite comment was a report from an analyst of reconnaissance photos of bombing raids who accompanied a reconnaissance photo of a farmer's field crated by bombs that had missed a German city with the notation, "We made a major assault on German agriculture."

By late 1943, Allied fortunes began to dramatically change.  Rommel's Afrika Corps was defeated.  Sicily was invaded and the Italians had surrendered (that was the easy part--the Germans took over the defense of Italy and a very violent campaign began). The Germans were surprisingly and soundly defeated at Stalingrad--a city thought to be of so little defensive importance that the German invasion plans did not include street maps of Stalingrad as they did for other cities. In the Pacific, the Battle of Midway dealt the Japanese naval fleet a decisive blow and enabled the successful landings on Guadalcanal.

As the real events dramatically improved, the news reported to the home front became more realistic in describing the violence and the price soldiers were paying for the victories.  In November 1943, America was shocked at the first pictures of combat dead--Marines in the surf at Tarawa.  The figures of 1,000 dead and 2,000 wounded at Tarawa were, relative to the war, fairly normal, but the pictures for the first time showed a reality America had not faced.  The country was stunned.

Propaganda posters also began to change in 1943.  One showed a drowned soldier on a beach with the theme, "A careless word...A needless loss",  pictured with a sinking ship in the background.  By the following year, the same message was accompanied by an illustration of a dead paratrooper hanging under his parachute.  Uniforms were no longer cleaned and pressed; they were torn and bloody.  By 1945 posters had changed even more dramatically.  The violence was very graphic, and the theme consistent--"Get it over". 

The fundamental fact of war was being realized: Death in war is random, and success is only partly related to one's actions.

Wartime movies followed a standard formula that further illustrates that people in crises are always susceptible to what they want and need to believe.  A suspension of disbelief is necessary to survive.  Two 1943 popular films established the paradigm of the "normal" infantry unit: They were always melting pots made up of the following lines:  One leader who dies; one inexperienced youth; one comic; one cynic who is transformed before the end of the film into a true believer; one black or Hispanic; one person each from Brooklyn, Texas and the Midwest.

It is noteworthy that the government was sufficiently concerned about home front morale that a series of documentaries entitled "Why We Fight" was produced.

Some degree of the reality of the war was finally being realized on the home front, but soldiers still generally believed the home front had no idea of the reality of their lives and their deaths.  Paul Fussell, a World War II combat veteran, wrote Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War and included a chapter entitled The Real War Will Never Get In The Books.  "What was it about the war that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and depravation, it was rather the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experiences so falsely that it would never be readily communicable.  They knew that in its representation to the laity what was happening to them was systemically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied."

Fussell was severely wounded in the spring of 1945, and he expresses far more negative and critical views of every aspect than anyone I have talked to or read who had combat experience. Some of his chapter say it all: Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Far Too Little  needs little amplification. A very amusing chapter is entitled Chicken Shit, An Anatomy.  He writes: "What does that rude term signify? It does not imply complaint about the inevitable inconveniences of military life: overcrowding and lack of privacy, tedious institutional cookery, depravation of personality, general boredom.  Nothing much can be done about those things.  Chicken shit refers rather to behavior that makes military life worse than it needs to be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; an insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.  Chicken shit is so-called, instead of horse or bull or elephant shit, because it is small-minded and ignoble, and takes the trivial seriously.  Chicken shit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war."

Rumors were a major part of life for the average soldier, and no matter how improbable or how ridiculous, they took on a life of their own, propelled by the youth and immaturity of the soldiers.  The stamina of youth and their belief that they are invincible are the foundation of armies.  Nearly all were teenagers, and their officers were in their early twenties.  Saving Private Ryan accurately showed many wounded soldiers crying out for their mothers.

It has always been logical to me that the petty rules and nonsense that soldiers talked about would be commonplace when you have an army of teenagers being led by young officers, with few, if any, of these people having had any work or life experiences, and certainly not in such life and death situations.  The WWII term snafu was not a surprising result of ordinary military life: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.

What has surprised me was that really stupid things happened because of rivalries between commanders who treated war like a game. Outrageous errors were commonplace.  The US naval gunners during the invasion of Sicily in 1943, shot down 23 of our own planes full of paratroopers, airplanes on a flight path and on a schedule all of these ships had been told of.  Undoubtedly terrified teenagers were manning the antiaircraft guns.  But where were the officers?

US and British bombers leaving England for missions over Europe had to fly around London because the London antiaircraft batteries would shoot at any planes that flew near the city.

The landings in Normandy on D-Day are frequently cited as the great example of planning and perseverance that they were, but the number of things that went wrong that should not have was dumbfounding.  American commanders scoffed at the ingenious devices the British invented to deal with landmines--rotating drums extended from the fronts of tanks whipping chains around that would set off the mines a few feet in front of the tanks. The Americans thought the whole thing was silly, but on D-Day the American tanks were disabled when the landmines blew their treads off.

One of the most outrageous examples of what the English call 'bloody mindness' was the launching into heavy seas, by the Americans, of tanks equipped with flotation collars. The tanks were launched many miles further from shore than planned, and as they were put into the water, each one of them, one right after the other, was swamped and promptly sank with the loss of the crew.  Twenty-seven tanks in a row were launched, with no one countermanding an order that obviously was idiotic in heavy seas.

Large numbers of landing boats arrived at the wrong locations on the coast because no one had realized that smoke from the naval and air bombardment of the Normandy coast would so obscure the coastal landmarks that the navy helmsmen relied upon for navigation that they could not accurately steer their boats.

Completely inexplicable was the aerial bombardment of the cliffs defending the Normandy beaches.  These were heavily fortified with bunkers, and a major air bombardment preceded the landings.  Thirteen thousand bombs were dropped, not one of which hit the cliffs or plateaus behind them.  They all landed far inland in farmers' fields.

The troops were told the beaches would be cratered by bombs, and this would give them cover in crossing the long distance from the water to the cliffs, Instead, those bombs intended to crater the beaches all fell far short, so as the soldiers jumped out of their landing craft, they fell into underwater craters and many drowned.

These are not the stories I read about in the popular books, or saw in the movies about the D-Day landings in the 1950's.

It is a rare combat veteran who can talk about their experiences without tears.  It truly was hell.  For many dangerous missions troops with no combat experience had to be used, because the commanders knew that veteran troops would know the carnage that lay ahead, and they had to have the enthusiasm of unknowing, inexperienced troops who had no real idea of what they were facing.

Infantry troops soon realized that there, quite literally, was no way out--no way off the combat line unless you were killed, seriously wounded, or taken prisoner.  A wound that would get you out of combat was called the 'million-dollar wound', and in every battle soldiers were heard cheering that they had been wounded badly enough to be taken out of hell.  Eugene Sledge was a teenager who had joined the Marines.  After the war he became a professor of biology, and wrote his memoir With The Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa because his own experiences in the front lines of battle were so different from the books being published about these battles.  He writes that he is proud to be a Marine.  He isn't critical or cynical, but takes great exception to these battles being described as sane activities, for what he experienced was nearly completely insane. "We lived in an environment totally incomprehensible--not just to civilians at a great distance but to men behind the lines....We were expendable.  It was difficult to accept.  We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual.  To find oneself in a situation where life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness.  It is a humbling experience."

The journalist Robert Sherrod, with the Marines at Tarawa, wrote, "The Marines didn't know what to believe in, except the Marine Corps."

I have never thought that I had any understanding of how people mentally survived, but I must say that I have been astounded that virtually all combat veterans talk about their relationship with their buddies.  If only a few mentioned this in telling their stories, it probably wold never have made a great impression on me, but the sense of camaraderie is so universal and so sincere that it is overwhelming.  In the final paragraphs of Goodbye Darkness, Manchester eloquently addresses the subject: "In one of those great thundering jolts in which a man's real motives are revealed to him in an electrifying vision, I understand at last why I jumped hospital that Sunday thirty-five years ago, and in violation of orders returned to the front lines and almost certain death.  It was an act of love, those men on the line were my family, my home.  They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friend who had been or ever would be.  They had never let me down, and I couldn't do it to them.  I had to be with them rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them.  Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction, they fight for one another.  Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or for whom he is willing to die, is not a man at all, he is truly damned."

I spoke earlier about the great challenge of surviving having survived. Survivor guilt has been a well-recognized problem for victims of the Holocaust, but I think it has largely gone unrecognized as a very significant problem for combat veterans.  This was considered the good war; the good guys won and evil was defeated. Millions died, and those who came back had to suffer individually and alone with their nightmares from combat.  I have heard literally hundreds of combat veterans get upset when they are called heroes, vehemently stating that they are not heroes, the heroes are in the cemeteries.  The heroes are the ones who didn't come back.

It took Manchester 35 years of nightmares before he could face his experiences and write about them.  Kurt Vonnegut said that immediately after the war he wanted to tell everyone about his experiences as a POW during the firebombing and destruction of Dresden, but it took him 23 years before he could deal with his experiences and write Slaughterhouse Five. Many other writers who experienced combat firsthand, such as Karl Shapiro and John Ciardi, just couldn't write about their experiences.

This past spring I was on Iwo Jima with half a dozen veterans of the most horrible and bloody battle in World War II.  On this island, 4 1/2 miles long and about 1/4 of a mile to 2 miles wide, 6,000 Marines were killed, 24,000 were wounded, and 22,000 Japanese killed.  Fifty-six years after that battle, these Marines broke down and talked about the friends they had lost there.

The documentary produced by the Shapiros that aired this last June on Iwo Jima is a moving portrayal of what happened on Iwo Jima.  While principally about the flag raising--half the flag raisers were dead before the photo was developed--the Shapiros captured on film much of what I am talking about.

There are many comparisons to September 11th.  I was very struck by an interview I saw with a New York firefighter who had barely managed to escape the collapse of the World Trade Center.  He was being called a hero for going in to rescue people, but with the words and emotion that precisely echo WWII veterans, he said he was not a hero at all, that the heroes were the firefighters who didn't make it out of the collapsing buildings.

I thought we were moving further and further away from the experience of WWII, but September 11th is a reminder that human nature does not change and the terrible events of last fall have united us with the WWII generation in ways I never thought possible.