Opposing a war

...Another Part of the War is full of surprises for a generation of readers who know little about the opposition to World War II or the modest beginnings of war resistance by American Catholics only forty years ago...

...between 25,000 and 50,000 others who performed noncombatant service in the armed forces, and perhaps another 6,000 who spent time in Federal prisons, for conscience...

...Michael True (Michael True is a professor of English at Assumption College in Massachusetts...

...In the face of an almost universal corruption of mind and sensibility by the prevailing militarist mentality, these resisters maintained an unpopular antiwar position...

...Zahn contrasts his own recollections of the daily experience of life at Camp Simon with the "romantic" descriptions of their routine in the Catholic Worker newspaper, the only regularly published record of the experiment at that time...

...He succeeds in giving the story an appropriate structure and tone, reminiscent of other wartime tales about wasted time, wasted talent, frustration, and boredom...

...Those of us who think of World War II as a "popular" war have a hard time remembering that there were more than 60,000 war resisters during that period: 12,000 conscientious objectors who served in civilian public service camps throughout the United States...

...He makes no attempt to hide the flaws and inconsistencies of the participants and describes their changes in perspective over the years, including the effects of their pacifism on their own children, who came of age during a later war...

...Camp Simon, Zahn notes, was "in a very special sense the first corporate witness against War and military service in the history of American Catholicism...

...Writing with a modesty and disinterestedness characteristic of his previous studies of war and conscience, particularly German Catholics and Hitler's War (1962) and In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Ja-gerstatter (1964), Zahn as a sociologist and a participant makes every effort to keep his account from deteriorating into "a pacifist equivalent of those old soldiers' tales replete with self-congratulatory recitation of wartime exploits and adventures...

...Another Part of the War is an important contribution both to Catholic social teachings and to American intellectual history...

...Whenever people are subjected to conscription, a practice regarded by Daniel Webster and others as both un-American and antidemocratic, the results are likely to be wasteful as well...

...Interspersed with personal reflections and occasional work songs that parody traditional war songs and militarist hymns, it is told with a novelist's eye for personal foibles of the participants and an appreciation of their courage...

...At a time when the shadow of the draft once again falls across the lives of young Americans, it is pertinent to recall Zahn's conclusion that the Selective Service's handling of places like Camp Simon was "a shameful experiment in mismanagement that must never be repeated...

...Anyone reading Another Part of the War can hardly fail to be challenged by the audacity of these isolated, intelligent, and articulate resisters...

...There were no brutal games, no barbed wire, no dogs, no gas chambers," at Camp Simon, but it was primitive and useless nonetheless, resembling other, more repressive jails, "inspired by and conducted under de facto military authority...

...Zahn's account of the experiment includes intellectual and historical background and individual portraits of the seventy-five resisters...

...Of particular interest is his delineation of the Civilian Public Service Program for what it was: a program that was punitive in intent and practice, by which the Selective Service, with the church's help, kept objectors invisible and suppressed a religious minority in time of war...

...Set up under the direction of the Association of Catholic Conscientious Objectors, an organization with strong ties to the Catholic Worker movement, Camp Simon was a place where anarchists and pacifists shared quarters with the reactionary and sometimes anti-Semitic followers of Father Charles E. Coughlin and where many residents resented the unwarranted intrusion of the Catholic Worker philosophy and lifestyle...

...Some of those experiences have been recounted in general histories of pacifism and in personal memoirs, but Gordon Zahn is the first person to tell the more detailed story of Camp Simon, a camp under Roman Catholic auspices, at Weaver and Stoddard, New Hampshire, in 1942-1943...