As his letter illustrates, stoicism was no more universal among sailors at sea than soldiers on the battlefield. ‘I am absolutely fed up with everything,’ a naval paymaster-commander named Jackie Jackson wrote to his wife from the Mediterranean in May 1941. ‘The dirt and filth, the flies and heat and more than anything the fact that I am not hearing from you.’ He complained that he had received only one letter in six weeks, ‘the most depressing I have ever received in my life. Add to that a cable which more or less implied that the house has been wrecked and you can get a fair idea of how much I want to hear from you occasionally, and at the same time how I dread it, as I am probably going to have even worse news and more complaints … I’ve had a hideous time and I wonder why I’m alive.’ It is easy to see why such people as Winston Churchill, George Patton or pilots flying Mustangs or Spitfires – a small and privileged minority – enjoyed the war. It is equally apparent why many others – especially a Russian infantryman or Chinese peasant, a Polish Jew or Greek farmer – could not.
Most of those who fought clung stubbornly to their own amateur status, performing a wholly unwelcome duty before returning to their ‘real’ lives. As a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant in action against the Germans with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Peter White, reflected: ‘It must take about seven years … to make a being feel really like a soldier and not just a civilian dressed up. The situation seemed so ludicrously unreal and yet grimly real at the same time. We could at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the poor blighters opposite us were in the same boat even though it was a boat of their seeking.’ John Hersey wrote of the Marines on Guadalcanal: ‘The uniforms, the bravado … were just camouflage. They were just American boys. They did not want that valley or any part of its jungle. They were ex-grocery boys, ex-highway laborers, ex-bank clerks, ex-schoolboys, boys with a clean record … not killers.’
RAF Corporal Peter Baxter lamented: ‘My whole generation … are wasting some of the finest years of their lives in the dreary business of war. Our manhood has come to full fruition, but it is stifling and decaying in these wasted years … The deadening, paralysing influence of service life has blighted my middle twenties.’ Many young men had never before lived away from home, and hated the indignities and discomforts of barracks existence. Frank Novy, a twenty-one-year-old, spent his first night in the army at a depot in Leeds. ‘After a few minutes on the palliasse I heard complaints from all sides. My own was terribly hard, and I had no pillow, my teeth were aching and soon I had a headache. I felt depressed and tired out. I tried to sleep, but I kept thinking of home, and all I had left went round and round in my head, ceaselessly, persistently … At times I felt so depressed that I wanted to cry, but couldn’t.’
Recruits found themselves growing new skins. Len England described how a fellow soldier delivered a stream of wisecracks to a girl behind the counter in the YMCA, then turned to England and said in surprise, ‘I’ve never flirted before in my life. I’ve only been in the army five days, and now look at what I’m doing.’ England observed that he and his new comrades felt different people, ‘more authoritative and self-assertive in uniform’. Educated men recoiled from the crude banality of barracks vocabulary: among Americans, everything seemed to be ‘tough shit’; an alleged coward ‘was shaking like a pup shitting carpet tacks’; civilians who escaped military service were ‘4-F bastards’.
No sentence was complete without its obscene expletives: the fucking officers made them dig fucking foxholes before they received fucking rations or stood fucking guard. Even the most delicately reared recruits acquired this universal military habit of speech, though officers’ messes aspired to more gentility. Cultured men were pained by translation into a world in which art, music, literature had no place. Captain Pavel Kovalenko of the Red Army wrote one night in the line: ‘After dinner I sat down to read Nekrasov. My God, when will I be able to spend as much time as I want enjoying Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov. I saw a photograph of Tolstoy as a young man in officer’s uniform … Tears choked in my throat, almost overwhelming me.’
Captain David Elliott of the Welsh Guards found himself ‘terribly depressed’ on returning to his barracks in Britain after a weekend leave: ‘There is nothing so utterly boring, so utterly narrow and so utterly petty as regimental soldiering which lacks the accompaniment of a state of battle … Certainly in this battalion there is no charity, no loving kindness, no loyalty … Among the officers, if not among the men, there are many problem children.’ While embryo airmen revelled in the thrills of flight training, few recruits found comparable compensations in discovering how to become infantrymen. Pfc ‘Red’ Thompson from Staten Island, New York, felt that he acquired limited skills: ‘I learned to take care of myself; to be wary, to look and listen; and to dig holes.’ Every soldier became reflexively familiar with the order ‘Get your gear on and stand by to move out,’ usually with scant notion of where he was going. Ignorance of anything beyond a man’s field of vision was the norm. As a 1942 recruit training in North Carolina, nineteen-year-old Missourian Tony Moody decided that he and his comrades cherished no lust for glory: ‘We somehow hoped we wouldn’t be in harm’s way.’
Pressures on manpower caused the conscription of more than a few recruits who should never have been obliged to serve. ‘My comrades were mostly from Yorkshire and Lancashire,’ wrote the eighteen-year-old Pte. Ron Davidson.
The 1930s had been a bad time for many and physically some found things very difficult and others were barely literate. I remember one who did not make the grade, aneuretic and also sub-normal – needless to say he had been passed A1 by the army doctors! He could just about dress himself, but the intricacies of army gear were beyond him and we used to get him into it. We used to lay out his kit in the prescribed manner, but this was done at night so [he] slept on the wooden floor which he regularly wet. The army in its wisdom decided [he] was ‘idle’ and a malingerer and set about ‘waking him up a bit’. This took the form of huge P[hysical] T[raining] I[nstructor]s chasing him all over the barrack square, yelling in his ear the most frightful obscenities.
This misfit was eventually discharged, but most rifle platoons included one or two subnormal men, whose conduct in battle was unsurprisingly erratic. British soldier William Chappell avowed his own submission to military service, but never ceased to ache for the civilian world from which he had been torn: ‘I accept this life. I accept the loss of my home, the collapse of my career, the bomb that injured my mother, the wide scattering and disintegration of the web of friendship I had woven so painstakingly for myself … I still want the same things. More chocolate; longer hours in bed; easily acquired hot baths, delicious, varied and delicate food; all my own possessions around me … I am bothered by my feet, sick of khaki, bored and annoyed by my companions, all the monotonous, slow, fiddle-de-dee of army life. I long for it all to be finished with, and sometimes vaguely envy those who have gone.’
An American officer wrote from the Pacific: ‘When the tents are down, I think every man feels a loneliness because he sees that this wasn’t home after all. As long as there were four canvas walls about him, he could kid himself a little … Standing on barren ground surrounded by scrap lumber piles and barracks bags with nothing familiar on his horizon he feels uprooted and insecure, a wanderer on the face of the earth. That which is always in the back of his mind now stands starkly in the front: “Will it ever end, and will I be here to see it?”’ S/Sgt. Harold Fennema wrote to his wife Jeannette in Wisconsin: ‘So much of this war and army life amounts to the insignificant job of passing time, and that really is a pity. Life is so short and time so precious to those who live and love life that I can hardly believe myself, seeking entertainment to pass time away … I wonder sometimes where this is going to lead.’ Yet if camp life was monotonous, at least it was closer to home than the theatres of war. Pfc Eugene Gagliardi, a nineteen-year-old newspaper pressman from Brooklyn, regarded his entire later experience of service in Europe as ‘a nightmar
e. All my good memories of the army were before we went to France.’
Active service, when it came, changed everything. American correspondent E.J. Kahn wrote from New Guinea: ‘As an urban selectee’s military career progresses, he changes gradually from a preponderantly indoor being into a wholly outdoor one.’ Marine Eugene Sledge recoiled from the brutish state to which the battlefield reduced him: ‘The personal bodily filth imposed upon the combat infantryman by living conditions on the battlefield was difficult for me to tolerate. It bothered almost everyone I knew … I stunk! My mouth felt … like I had gremlins walking around in it with muddy boots on … Short as it was, my hair was matted with dust and rifle oil. My scalp itched, and my stubble beard was becoming an increasing source of irritation in the heat. Drinking water was far too precious … to use in brushing one’s teeth or in shaving, even if the opportunity had arisen.’
Combat opened a chasm between those who experienced its horrors, and those at home who did not. In December 1943, Canadian Farley Mowat wrote to his family from the Sangro front in Italy: ‘The damnable truth is we are in really different worlds, on totally different planes, and I don’t really know you any more, I only know the you that was. I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space. It is one of the toughest things we have to bear – that and the primal, gut-rotting worm of fear.’
The great Duke of Wellington justly remarked, ‘Believe me, not every man who wears a military uniform is a hero.’ In all armies, soldiers serving with forward combat units shared a contempt for the much larger number of men in the rear areas who fulfilled roles in which they faced negligible risk: infantry bore 90 per cent of global army casualties. An American or British rifleman who entered France in June 1944 faced a 60 per cent prospect of being killed or wounded before the end of the campaign, rising to 70 per cent for officers. Armoured and artillery units suffered much smaller proportionate losses, and those in the huge logistics ‘tail’ were exposed to no greater statistical risk of death or mishap than industrial workers at home.
Bombardment imposed an intense trauma. ‘There was nothing subtle or intimate about the approach and explosion of an artillery shell,’ wrote Eugene Sledge, remembering Peleliu:
When I heard the whistle of an approaching one in the distance, every muscle in my body contracted. I braced myself in a puny effort to keep from being swept away. I felt utterly helpless. As the fiendish whistle grew louder, my teeth ground against each other, my heart pounded, my mouth dried, my eyes narrowed, sweat poured over me, my breath came in short irregular gasps, and I was afraid to swallow lest I choke. I always prayed, sometimes out loud. I felt utterly helpless … To me, artillery was an invention of hell. The onrushing whistle and scream of the big steel package of destruction was the pinnacle of violent fury and the embodiment of pent-up evil. It was the essence of violence and of man’s inhumanity to man. I developed a passionate hatred for shells. To be killed by a bullet seemed so clean and surgical. But shells would not only tear and rip the body, they tortured one’s mind almost beyond the brink of sanity. After each shell I was wrung out, limp and exhausted.
Enforced passivity in the face of bombardment was among the most dismal predicaments of every soldier. ‘Give a Jock a rifle or a Bren gun and allow him to use it, and however frightened he may be he will face up to most things,’ wrote Captain Alastair Borthwick of the 5th Seaforth Highlanders. ‘Put him, inactive, in a trench and danger becomes progressively more difficult to bear. Fear is insidious, and it grows in inactivity.’ Most soldiers discovered a special horror in enduring a mortar barrage – one fancifully likened the sudden, repetitive dull crumps to the sound of a woman beating a carpet. Bombs which detonated in overhead trees broadcast deadly wood splinters and steel shards across the area below. Peter White was overcome by pity for one of his soldiers amid such an assault:
Young Cutter, who was really quite unsuitable for such a pastime, gave way completely each time we listened with fascination to the plopping of the bombs’ ascent from the enemy hill and lay quivering during the tantalisingly long wait for the whisper of their descent which sounded for a moment before our surroundings erupted to shattering crashes painful to the ear. As each climax came, the whimpering misery of Pte. Cutter broke out in an uncontrollable stream of verbal pleading. He recovered enough in between to murmur ‘I’m sorry, Sir’ … I felt a wealth of sympathy for Cutter, but dared not show it for I felt he would just collapse the more. He had so lost control of himself by the time a pause arrived long enough for us to scamper out and continue digging that I told him to stop where he was until he had collected his wits. He was in such a state his condition might have put ideas into the heads of others. He grovelled in the sand moaning ‘Oh God! Oh God, when will it stop … Sir … I, sorry. God! Oh stop it.’ No one mocked him or made fun. We had all tasted too vividly of the ordeal ourselves to feel anything but great compassion.
With experience, men overcame their initial delusion that all those who found themselves beneath a storm of high-explosive must be doomed to die: they discovered that most soldiers survive most battles. Thereafter, it became a matter of personal taste whether an individual decided that he himself was bound to be among the fortunate, or condemned to join the dead. ‘We had learned our first lesson, that fate, not the Germans or Italians, was our undiscriminating enemy,’ wrote a Royal Engineer corporal in Sicily. ‘With the same callousness as Army orders; without fairness or judgement. “You and you dead, the rest of you, on the truck.”’ Farley Mowat wrote in August 1943 with the gaucherie of his twenty-two years: ‘It’s hard for guys my age to grasp that nobody lives forever. Dying is just a word until you find out differently. That’s trite but horribly true. The first few times you almost get nicked you take it for granted you are almost immortal. The next few times you begin to wonder. After that you start looking over your shoulder to make sure old Lady Luck is still around.’
Many men fantasised about earning the privilege of a light wound, what the British called ‘a Blighty one’, which would enable them honourably to escape the battlefield. Chance, however, was often ungenerous: a young officer of the Burma Rifles was flown fresh from India to join an embattled Chindit column in 1944. On the very night of his arrival, he had been in action for less than two hours when a bullet lodged in his right thigh, severing his penis and right testicle. Corporal James Jones wrote of Guadalcanal: ‘It’s funny, the things that get to you. One day a man near me was hit in the throat, as he stood up, by a bullet from a burst of MG fire. He cried out, “Oh My God!” in an awful, grimly comic, burbling kind of voice that made me think of the signature of the old Shep Fields’ Rippling Rhythm band. There was awareness in it, and a tone of having expected it, then he fell down, to all intents and purposes dead. I say “to all intents and purposes” because his vital functions may have continued for a while.’
Jones suggested that some men found consolation in resigning themselves to the apparent inevitability of their own deaths: ‘Strangely, for everyone, the acceptance and the giving-up of hope create and reinstil hope in a kind of reverse-process mental photonegative function. Little things become significant. The next meal, the next bottle of booze, the next kiss, the next sunrise, the next full moon. The next bath. Or as the Bible might have said, but didn’t quite, Sufficient unto the day is the existence thereof.’
The grotesque became normal. ‘One learned to accept things one would not have thought possible,’ said Dr Karl-Ludwig Mahlo, a German army medical officer. Hans Moser, sixteen-year-old gunlayer with an 88mm flak battery in Silesia, was surprised to find himself unmoved when an explosion killed the neighbouring crew, leaving their gunpit strewn with body parts: ‘I was so young I didn’t think a lot about anything.’ US infantryman Roscoe Blunt watched the impact of a shell on a fellow soldier: ‘The man disintegrated, leaving only patches and puddles of flesh and bone spattered in the mud. Graves registration would never find this
one, not even his dog tags. Another unknown soldier. I sat and ate my food. I had not known him.’
Most men under fire focused upon immediacies and loyalties towards each other. Their hopes and fears became elemental, as described by British lieutenant Norman Craig in the desert: ‘Life was so free of all its complexities. What a clarity and a simplicity it really had! To stay alive, to lead once more a normal existence, to know again warmth, comfort and safety – what else could one conceivably demand? I would never chide circumstance again, never question fate, never feel bored, unhappy or dissatisfied. To be allowed to continue to live – nothing else mattered.’ Comradeship was fundamental: ‘Nobody has the courage to act in accordance with his natural cowardice with the whole company looking on,’ said a Luftwaffe NCO named Walter Schneider, pleased with his own paradox.
The intimacy forged by even a few weeks of shared battle experience caused some units to behave with cynical ruthlessness towards newcomers – outsiders. A veteran American staff sergeant said about Anzio, where his unit had eight replacements killed within twenty-four hours of their arrival: ‘We weren’t going to send our own guys out on point in a damn-fool situation like that. We had been together since Africa, and Sicily, and Salerno. We sent the replacements out ahead.’ It was the same in every army: ‘The company was the Heimat,’ said SS Unterscharführer Helmut Gunther, ‘the people you wanted to be with. What mattered about being wounded was separation from your unit. You had a completely different feeling towards those who had been with you a long time as distinct from those who hadn’t. A few months are an eternity for a soldier in war.’ Some Scottish soldiers of 51st Highland Division mutinied at Salerno in September 1943, rather than accept posting to another formation.
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