World War II Revisited
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing WORLD WAR II REVISITED BY BARRY GEWEN FRom letters, diaries, interviews, memoirs published and unpublished, and any other personal materials that he was able to lay his hands...
...And as in any work of this kind (Studs Terkel's popular volumes are paradigms), Hoyt was faced with finding some way of preventing his book from self-destructing into a thousand atomized episodes...
...If the [Vichy] French aren't waiting beside their guns we'll be lucky," was General Lucian Truscott's publicly kind comment...
...over long stretches the narrative flow slows to a trickle...
...Troops on the way to the North African desert were certain they were going to Norway because they still had woolen uniforms...
...Utah Beach was, relatively speaking, a simple operation, "a piece of cake" in the words of the British...
...The troops in Southeast Asia frequently could not tell friend from foe, so that liberating villages came to mean destroying them...
...Dantini was hit in the elbow, then in both legs, yet he managed to crawl through the sand as bullets whizzed around him...
...You could tell that he hadn't been overseas long...
...For the most part, they drill, dig, wait around, gripe, play cards, get drunk, talk about women, gripe some more, skulk, and smell...
...Six hours after it began, General Omar N. Bradley was close to conceding defeat...
...The havoc of war aged the men rapidly...
...He is treated like an object and even a victim, he faces dangers wholly beyond his control, he is led into battle not by those at the head of the charge but by individuals far behind the lines studying maps...
...That notorious poseur George Patton was commonly regarded as the biggest "B.S...
...Once his boat reached shore, "it seemed we had entered hell itself...
...One officer was identified as a newcomer because he ordered a single at a bar...
...The poop they had been fed earlier, to the effect that they would be facing 'old men and kids under 16,' turned out to be false...
...Hoyt has not been entirely successful...
...No one ever claimed war wasn't hell...
...A major part of the maturing process was learning to deal with death at close quarters, and as a daily occurrence...
...Some of the wounded on Omaha Beach who survived the German onslaught were finished off by shells from offshore American guns...
...Tell it like it was," urged the veterans who wrote to him with their wartime experiences, not realizing that the problem was to discover just what the "it" consisted of...
...paratroopers were killed by U.S...
...Real-life soldiers do not swagger like John Wayne or, except on the rarest of occasions, strike poses like the Marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi...
...After General Lord Ismay traveled to the U. S. and witnessed American infantry in training, he said to Churchill: "To put these troops against Continental troops would be murder...
...Anyone who wishes to know what it felt like to participate in the Omaha Beach slaughter, trying to advance through enemy fire while those to the left and right were dying, should read Hoyt's account...
...Military necessity dictated that soldiers then, as now, be treated like pawns, to beshipped off to fight without warning or explanation, ordered into life-threatening situations with little sense of what was going on...
...Indeed, the division between officers and foot soldiers seems tobe another constant of the two wars...
...Yet to go on fighting requires positive reinforcement of some kind, and it is here that the contrast between World War II and Vietnam is most evident...
...Sergeant Barnett Hoffner, aboard a landing craft that was part of the second wave, remembers: "The surface of the water was covered with thousands and thousands of helmets [floating upside down...
...The Army had an amphibious tank that it was counting on as a "secret weapon...
...In Europe, victories were genuine John Wayne victories, complete with cheering crowds, lavish gifts of food and drink, grateful young women who knew how to show their appreciation...
...Equipment didn' t work...
...There was no German resistance and casualties were light...
...artist and asshole" in the Army...
...The reason he fights, as scholars such as S.L.A...
...Some went into battle drunk, much as their sons faced the Vietcong stoned...
...For this reason, the finest section is the one that comes with a structure already built in—the set piece known as D-Day...
...During the first several months, when the object was to get as many civilians into uniform as quickly as possible, the GIs were wretchedly green, horrifying the battle-hardened British who saw them...
...When they are obliged to go into battle, they shoot and duck, run for cover, try to get the enemy before they are got by him, and in general do no more than is necessary to accomplish the dual end of staying alive and keeping faith with their buddies...
...God help us...
...One sergeant explained that he had developed the ability to distinguish German and American corpses by smell...
...machine-gun platoons were wiped out by artillery during the last days of the War...
...The importance of these celebrations for morale cannot be overestimated...
...The hypocrisy of overblown patriotism increased the alienation, and generals with a fondness for rhetorical excess were no more appreciated in war-torn Europe than they were 20 years later in Vietnam...
...There is no analysis here, no big picture, only a collection of little ones...
...The troops that survived waded toward shore where they were mowed down by machine guns, "like clay pigeons...
...This is worm's eye history, recounting battlefield events from the perspective of those most immediately involved, in the spirit of Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin, with more distant antecedents in Stendhal and Stephen Crane...
...Lacking a radio or wire, one major employed runners for communication— "it might as well have been the Battle of Waterloo...
...The snafus started before anyone set foot on shore...
...The water was burning...
...Other vessels were hit by German artillery...
...Bungling that results in needless death is common to all modern wars as, it appears, is a quality of alienation...
...The struggle for Omaha Beach, on the other hand, was a near-disaster...
...antiaircraft fire in Sicily...
...When he reached some rocks near a cliff, he passed out...
...None of the other sections of the book possesses the drama or tightness of the Omaha Beach chapter, but many do succeed in conveying something of the flavor of the World War II military...
...When the tanks were released into the water, they promptly sank...
...In between the terror was the tedium— and if the troops in Vietnam became famous for using drugs as an escape, the GIs of World War II employed alcohol to the same end...
...A modern soldier's lot, clearly, is not a happy one...
...Friendly fire"—bombings and shellings by their own planes and guns —seemed to follow the GIs from battlefield to battlefield like a diabolic malediction: U.S...
...As the boats carrying his battalion approached the land, they took on water and some were swamped, drowning those aboard...
...Through a masterstroke of bad timing, President Roosevelt announced the landing in Morocco before the ships had arrived...
...In evitably, in the post-Vietnam era a reader looks for points of comparison between America's one undilutedly "good war" of this century and the nation's most divisive conflict...
...All around were burning vehicles, piled up bodies...
...The American landings on Utah and Omaha beaches in Normandy, France, were a study in contrasts...
...Everything on the beach was a mess...
...To the men who did the fighting here, as grippingly related in The GTs War, the invasion appeared a combination of foulups and spilt blood, a tragedy of errors...
...The training exercises were more difficult, Hoyt declares, and he devotes only five pages to this part of the invasion...
...Private First Class Richard Dantini's experience was equally harrowing...
...This fact is strikingly brought home by one of the men in TheGI's Warwho entered Paris...
...Once the GIs had the experience of combat, however, there was no mistaking them for greenhorns...
...Once the men were sent in, they were often shipped or airlifted miles from their objectives...
...The whole beach was a great burning fury...
...In another year or two he would be drinking doubles also...
...The GI's War gives us a stiff dose of this nitty-gritty reality...
...They were "too quiet and too well disciplined...
...German resistance was heavier than the troops were led to expect...
...Marshall have indicated, is because of the bond that exists between himself and his comrades...
...Eisenhower, who watched maneuvers in Scotland on the eve of the North African campaign, was similarly concerned...
...Elsewhere, mortar squads without mortars lobbed rocks at the Germans...
...No bragging about what they were going to do to the Germans when they met them...
...infantrymen were attacked by divebombers near the German border...
...To judge from The GI's War, the men drank anything they could swallow at every chance they got...
...This one moment made all the time we've spent overseas seem worthwhile...
...You have to fight the enemy and your own brass hats too...
...Writers & Writing WORLD WAR II REVISITED BY BARRY GEWEN FRom letters, diaries, interviews, memoirs published and unpublished, and any other personal materials that he was able to lay his hands on, Edwin P. Hoyt has put together a rewarding if uneven book, TheGI's War: The Story of American Soldiers in Europe in World War II (McGraw-Hill, 620 pp., $24.95...
...The decomposition of the uniform material gave off two distinct odors...
...That's war," said one...
...The more battle experience the GIs gained, the less confidence they had in those giving the orders...
...Crucial supplies never reached land, or arrived at the wrong places, reducing the GIs to utilizing any means at hand to carry on the battle...
...They had met the enemy and they knew...
...The similarities are more striking than might be expected...
...The value of such an effort is long-established: It punctures arrogance, deflates bombast, undermines sentimentality and pretense...
...Movingly, he describes the mobs, the delirium, the tears and the laughter, and then, in a statement that tells more than he realizes, he sums it all up: "The excitement was so contagious that we hardly knew what we were doing...
...Even in less dire circumstances than the Normandy invasion, foul-ups were a fact of life, or at least the aspect of life that the GIs tended to recall...
Vol. 71 • October 1988 • No. 17
