Forgetting Why We Fought
O'NEILL, WIII.IAM L.
Forgetting Why We Fought Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War By Paul Fussell Oxford. 331 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history,...
...Despite its many fine passages, however, Wartime is not a successful effort...
...He also misses the significance of his own observation that it was not until the Second World War that "one could realize how near Victorian social and ethical norms the First World War really was.' For him, the interest of World War I is precisely that the men who fought it had been raised by Victorians...
...and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances...
...His charges are justified as far as they go...
...Still, it is easy to understand how he can write of the First War as— among other things, of course—a sort of literary event, and treat the Second all too personally...
...The First War not only caused the Second, he writes, but at the same time invalidated it...
...People expected World War II to be horrible...
...One chapter alone, "Chickenshit, An Anatomy," virtually offsets the book's shortcomings...
...Fussell's deep loathing for the War consistently warps his judgment, on small matters as well as large...
...division sustained 100 per cent casualties among its riflemen and their officers suffered 150 per cent, taking replacements into account...
...Chickenshit is so called —instead of horse- or bull- or elephantshit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously...
...But his own reinterpretation—that the War was purely Hobbesian, and the Allied cause utterly lacking in mission or merit—is so perverse that it will probably leave an uncertain reader more confused than before...
...cummings) and leaned heavily on their eloquent writings...
...In fact, the scale and cruelty of the combat can hardly account for the relatively scant literary response...
...Fussellfeelstheloss keenly...
...The First War, Fussell himself has remarked in another context, was at least as appalling to contemporaries as the Second —if not more, given that there was no precedent for it...
...Yet regardless of how accurate his description of the War's ugliness may be, he misleads by ignoring what it was about...
...author, "American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960" Readers who pick up this book expecting a sequel to the author's 1975 classic, The Great War and Modern Memory, will be in for a surprise...
...One of the chapter headings in his earlier work, "Oh What A Literary War," makes the point nicely...
...In a historical event of this proportion there is plenty of room for criticism and condemnation, and Fussell holds nothing back...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline...
...If Wartime pales by comparison with the earlier study, it is certainly not without wonderful moments...
...A chapter called "Type-casting" summarizes in a few pages pretty much everything there is to say about racial and national stereotyping in wartime...
...As a historical judgment this is absolutely false...
...Both works exploitarich variety of sources, are clearly the products of an original mind, and have similar formats...
...Rather, the reason would seem to be that the First War happened to other people...
...This is not simply because they are about quite disparate conflicts, nor because as a scholar and critic Fussell was bound to find World War I more intriguing...
...Had the Axis powers won, practically the entire world would have sunk into barbarism and bondage...
...On the face of it the two volumes seem much alike, even though the earlier one deals mostly with the British while the focus of Wartime is Anglo-American...
...it consequently shocked the world less than the Great War did, even though it was far worse than anticipated...
...The War itself was a hideous thing, and various aspects of the American War effort were tasteless and downright sordid...
...George F. Kennan once wrote in an essay that as late as 1916 either side would have been better off to accept the other's terms than to prevail in a longer struggle...
...Indeed, everything was at stake in that war: the lives of countless millions who would have been slain by the victorious Nazis and their only slightly less genocidal Japanese allies, the independence of many nations, and personal and political rights that had been centuries in the making...
...For most historians and political scientists who have studied the subject, the biggest difference between the two world conflicts is that nothing at issue in the First War was important enough to justify waging it, whereas this was decidedly not the case in the War against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan...
...This was partly because none of the combatants threatened their enemies with slavery or national extinction, and partly because as the fighting dragged on the harm done to every belligerent nation—and to Europe as a whole—far exceeded any possible gain that might have resulted from victory...
...As Robert E. Sherwood noted long ago, the Second World War was one "in which the general disillusionment preceded the firing of the first shot...
...Everyone who has served in the military knows the term, but no one has ever defined it so perfectly...
...the Second War happened to him...
...Wartime is not the book Fussell could have written...
...Fussell's key sentence, tossed of f casually some 30 pages before the end, reads as follows: "America has not yet understood what the War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to reinterpret and redefine the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity...
...Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war...
...open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige...
...By infantry standards the author, although severely wounded, was lucky since he survived...
...During the Normandy campaign alone one U.S...
...Another, "Real War," contains some of the most vivid writing about combat that I have ever read...
...Highminded and progressive prior to battle, as veterans they struggled to come to terms with their War experience in ways consistent with their education and background...
...It has an emotional authenticity for the author that is all the truth he needs, but stands in the way of wisdom...
...Chickenshit, Fussell explains, is "behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak bythe strong...
...For Fussell the principal difference between the two Wars is that World War II was longer and more dreadful...
...He claims, for instance, that there is "so little good writing" about World War II because it was a "savage, insensate affair, barely conceivable to the well-conducted imagination...
...Fussell prized the fluent young soldiers of the Great War (although he dealt mainly with the British, he included Americans like Hemingway and e.e...
...Fussell uses this quote but misses what Sherwood was getting at: that World War II was fought in a matter-of-fact fashion because people knew the job had to be done yet could not, as earlier, cherish romantic notions about it...
...Yet in essentials they could scarcely be more different...
...a constant 'paying off of old scores...
...Fussell led an infantry platoon in Europe—about the most dangerous job an American could have in World War II...
...In World War II, by contrast, the outcome mattered enormously...
...Twenty years later there was no counterpart to that generation of warrior-poets...
...Perhaps the United States would have survived, but only as a garrison state with little or no democracy...
Vol. 72 • October 1989 • No. 15
