The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  In an earlier time poet Rupert Brooke had written that people hurried into war out of the moral griminess of civilian life “like swimmers into cleanness leaping.” In World War II the leap was perfect, complete, and profound. To the end there were none of the signs of disaffection we’ve come to expect from Americans over the course of a long war: no peace rallies, no antiescalation petition drives, no moves in Congress for compromise or a negotiated settlement. Men who appeared able-bodied found themselves harassed on the street by strangers demanding to know why they weren’t in uniform; baseball players who hadn’t yet enlisted, godlike figures like DiMaggio and Williams, were loudly booed by the hometown crowd when they came out on the field.

  Why? You’d have a hard time figuring out the answer from reading the nation’s press. From the beginning the issues of the war were discussed only in the dreariest of platitudes. “America is the symbol for freedom,” Life magazine patiently explained to its readers—as though there might have been some confusion about whether the other side was the symbol for freedom. But Life firmly refused to be drawn into a debate about what “freedom” might mean: “Freedom is more than a set of rules, or a set of principles. Freedom is a free man. It is a package. But it is God’s package.”

  End of discussion. Hard to believe anybody was moved to go to war by such tripe, but it was typical. When they’re consumed by war fever, people don’t need considered rationales for the use of military force; they don’t even bother with the appearance of logic. As it happened, a purely cynical and cold-blooded calculation of the world crisis could have suggested to Americans that they could easily have stayed out. There were no treaties compelling the nation into the war, no overwhelming strategic or economic pressures; it was self-sufficient in food and raw materials, and it was geographically impregnable. Neither the Japanese nor the Germans would ever have been able to mount an invasion—and, in fact, neither ever seriously considered the possibility; Hitler at his most expansive still thought any transoceanic war was a century away. But when the Germans and Japanese looked across the ocean at America, what they saw was a nation of weaklings and cowards, with no honor or fighting spirit. One of the reasons behind the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—apart from the obvious military necessity of taking out the American fleet so that the Japanese military could conquer the western Pacific unopposed—was the unshakable conviction that Americans would collectively fold at the first sign of trouble; one big, nasty attack would be enough to get a negotiated settlement, on whatever terms the Japanese would care to name. In the same way Hitler and his inner circle were blithely sure that America would go to any lengths to stay out of the fight. Hitler’s catastrophic decision to declare war on America three days after Pearl Harbor was made almost in passing, as a diplomatic courtesy to the Japanese. To the end he professed himself baffled that America was in the war at all; he would have thought that if Americans really wanted to fight, they’d join with him against their traditional enemies, the British. But evidently they were too much under the thumb of Roosevelt—whom Hitler was positive was a Jew named Rosenfeldt, part of the same evil cabal that controlled Stalin.

  As fanciful as that was, it shows the average wartime grasp of the real motives of the enemy. It was at least on a par with the American Left’s conviction that Hitler was an irrelevant puppet in the hands of the world’s leading industrialists. Throughout the war all sides regarded one another with blank incomprehension.

  Millions of young men poured into the military—and most everybody not signing up was hiring on at some new war-related industry. (The American economy grew by almost half during the war; unemployment was wiped out, and skilled workers were in such short supply that wages began a steep upward spiral.) But it was the soldiers who became the natural focus of the nation’s sentimental refusal to wonder about what it was doing, as though they were a kind of collective vector for war fever. In the press and the popular imagination the whole American military was merged into one archetypical meta-soldier: the singular emblem of the mass noun “our boys.” This soldier was decent, soft-spoken, down-to-earth, and polite; he was shrewd, but he was honest; he was clever, but he wasn’t an intellectual. When asked what the war was all about he would scratch his head and slowly drawl that he guessed the Jerries and Japs had started this fight and they had to get what was coming to them. When asked what he himself most wanted to have happen he’d look sincere and say softly that he wanted to get the job done and go home.

  In one of his pieces for the New Yorker A. J. Liebling caught the soldier’s style in a single word. He describes how he found a typical American soldier passing time before a battle by reading Candide—which (Liebling carefully noted) he said was by some “fellow” named Voltaire. There it is: the soldier has never heard of Voltaire but is smart enough to read a good book if he wants to. Liebling evidently never met a soldier who’d read Voltaire before the war—much less read him in French. Our boys weren’t bothering their heads with culture or history when they were out there in foreign parts; they were going to win the war and come back untouched.

  As the war darkened over the years, the figure of the soldier eventually darkened as well. In magazine illustrations later in the war—where a soldier contemplated the memory of breakfast cereal or reflected on how rubber cement saved his platoon—he looked a little wearier and his face was harder, his jaw not always clean-shaven, his eyes more nakedly homesick. But his soft-spoken manner was unruffled—though in feature stories and ad copy from around 1943 on he’d sometimes coyly admit to having fudged his birth date on his enlistment forms. The reason did him nothing but credit, of course. He had to make sure he got overseas and into combat “before it was all over.”

  You’d think nobody would have had to worry about that: after the first flush of enthusiasm everybody knew the war wasn’t going to be over for a long while. But at the same time, people in America remained consistently vague about what the real status of the war was—how soon victory would come, what our boys were going through. The ordinary sources of information were closed, and not just because the news was sanitized by the government. Draftees in those days didn’t get to serve out a specified time and then go home—at which point they could tell everybody their war stories. They were in “for the duration”—that is, until the war ended or they were killed. They were swallowed up by the service and were gone, for months and then years, with only a fitful stream of officially censored letters fluttering back from the remoteness of the world to say that everything was still OK. New recruits in the later years of the war were going in essentially as innocent of the realities of combat as enlistees had been before Pearl Harbor.

  Caught up in the glory of being soldiers, they soon invented a ritual to be performed as soon as they were fitted with their new uniforms. They’d rush out to photographers’ studios and document the occasion for their proud families. The mantels and nightstands of America were strewn with these relics—soldiers posed with quiet dignity against a studio backdrop, half turning to face the camera with an expression both grave and proud. Some guys couldn’t help clowning and left photos that baffle people to this day: foreheads furrowed, jaws clenched, eyes fixed and furious—tinted by the studio not ordinary pink but a belligerent orange rose, like a Halloween mask. When you see these photos now, they look like antique novelty items from carnivals, or illustrations for Ripley’s Believe It or Not: “The Angriest Soldier in the World.” We don’t remember the pride behind them, the innocence, the mysterious and happy ferocity—the warning to all enemies of just how tough the American soldier would be when he got into the war.

  “You folks at home must be disappointed at what happened to our American troops in Tunisia. So are we over here.” That was how wire-service reporter Ernie Pyle began a dispatch in February 1943. A few days before, at Kasserine Pass, in the desolate mountain ranges fringing the Sahara, American troops had had their first major encounter with the Germans. The Americans had been undertrained and overconfident; confr
onted by the ferocity of an artillery barrage, they’d panicked and run. Pyle sounds like he was breaking the news that the hometown swim team had lost at the state finals.

  That was pretty bold by the standards of the time. From the beginning of the war any little setback like Kasserine had been veiled in impenetrable layers of vague regret and consolatory wisdom. “No one here has the slightest doubt that the Germans will be thrown out of Tunisia,” Pyle goes on to say almost immediately. “It is simply in the cards.” That was a lucky thing, because right then there was no compelling military reason to expect an Allied victory. Pyle then adds this remarkable bit to the mythology of “our boys”: “As for the soldiers themselves, you need feel no shame nor concern about their ability. I have seen them in battle and afterwards, and there is nothing wrong with the common American soldier. His fighting spirit is good. His morale is OK. The deeper he gets into a fight the more of a fighting man he becomes.”

  Which is as much as to say that the actual result of the battle shouldn’t be allowed to dent the myth. This is where the falsification of the war began—not in the movies and not in government propaganda, but in the simple refusal of reporters in the field to describe honestly what they were seeing.

  American soldiers early on grew accustomed to the idea that the truth of their experience wasn’t going to be told to the folks back home. They knew the score: despite the drone of triumph surrounding their every deed, the American entry into the war was a gory fiasco. The military had been caught wholly unprepared and was rushing troops into battle all over the world with a minimum of training and a maximum of chaos. To this day, if you ask any veteran for war stories, what you’re likely to hear first is some appalling epic of American military incompetence. Every unit rapidly accumulated its share of grim legends. There was the arrogant lieutenant fresh out of officer school who was assigned to lead troops into battle and turned coward under fire or was fatally befuddled by ambiguous orders. There was the murderous stupidity of a supply clerk up the line who contemptuously mishandled an urgent request for emergency provisions—on Guadalcanal, for instance, desperately needed drinking water arrived in used oil drums nobody had thought to wash out first. And there was the almost daily occurrence of the routine patrol turned into a nightmare by friendly fire. Friendly fire was a worse problem in World War II than in any other American war before or since. American troops on the ground were so frequently bombed by their own planes that they were known to shoot back with their heaviest guns.

  The folks at home learned none of this. The news was being censored of course: American reporters in the field, like those of every combatant nation, had to submit all stories for official clearance, and reporters who tried to describe the war honestly would quickly find their stories going unapproved and their press credentials in doubt. But the First Amendment was still in force back home; unlike the newspapers of the Axis, which were wholly given over to government-enforced fantasies of imminent global triumph, American newspapers were still free, at least in theory, to publish whatever they liked. Some of them did so: The Library of America’s Reporting World War II anthology contains reasonably honest and critical pieces from major newspapers and magazines on conditions in the internment camps, on the lack of enthusiasm for the war in African American ghettos, and on the institutionalized racism of the military. But when it came to what was happening on the battlefields themselves the unbreakable silence closed in.

  Part of it was the deep reluctance of the American military to approve stories that suggested—as A. J. Liebling put it—that American soldiers might “die in an undignified way.” Part of it was simple patriotism: the reporters were under no obligation to be neutral; they wanted America to win and weren’t going to risk hurting home-front morale by writing honestly of the terror and desperation of the battlefield.

  But there was another reason as well: a kind of psychological block. There was something essential about the battlefield that reporters didn’t tell the folks back home. They weren’t being censored exactly; they probably could have published it if they’d wanted to. They just didn’t know how. In any anthology of wartime journalism (it happens constantly in Reporting World War II), you can find instances of reporters coming up against the fundamental truth of the war and being unable to say what it was. Instead they resorted to a curious verbal tic, almost an involuntary distress signal, to mark the place where their verbal abilities left off and the incommunicable reality of what they were witnessing began.

  Here’s a typical example, from Ernie Pyle’s Tunisian reporting: “One of our half-tracks, full of ammunition, was livid red, with flames leaping and swaying. Every few seconds one of the shells would go off, and the projectile would tear into the sky with a weird whang-zing sort of noise.”

  That seems unexceptionable enough. Like most of what Pyle sent in over the wire, it has a striking visual vigor and simplicity, down to the comic-book sound effects—put a grinning American soldier in the foreground, and you’ve got a perfect Norman Rockwell war poster. But compare it with this, from John Hersey’s reporting of the Guadalcanal campaign for Life magazine: “But weirdest of all was the sound of our artillery shells passing overhead. At this angle, probably just about under the zenith of their trajectory, they gave off a soft, fluttery sound, like a man blowing through a keyhole.”

  This seems to be out of another universe of literary style: compared with Pyle’s report, this is a sinuously Jamesian prose poem. But it has an unexpected point of resemblance. Hersey, like Pyle, calls the sound of a shell in flight “weird.”

  That word and its cognates recur countless times in American war reporting. The war was weird. Or it was haunted, or spectral, or uncanny, or supernatural. Battle zones were eerie, bomb craters were unearthly, even diplomatic conferences were strange and unreal. Here’s an elaborate example, from Edward R. Murrow’s famous radio broadcasts from London during the German air raids of September 1940. Murrow was standing on a rooftop at night, looking out on a blacked-out roofscape lit up by flashes of antiaircraft fire and distant swarming searchlights. His eye was caught by an odd detail: “Out of one window there waves something that looks like a white bedsheet, a window curtain swinging free in this night breeze. It looks as though it were being shaken by a ghost. There are a great many ghosts around these buildings in London.”

  It’s worth following the implicit logic here in some detail. There’s an obvious meaning you would expect Murrow to find in the sight of a white sheet waving in the middle of an air raid: it’s a flag of surrender, a pathetic gesture of submission made to the unseen forces thundering across the night skies overhead. But that’s exactly what Murrow doesn’t say. There was a straightforward reason: he was passionately pro-British and wasn’t about to suggest that anybody in London was about to surrender—even metaphorically. But then what did the sheet look like? Now we get to that short-circuit: another reason it didn’t look like a white flag was that a white flag was something you’d see in a battle—and this wasn’t like a battle. It was much too strange for that. It was more like a haunted house: some kind of border zone where the barriers between this world and the next were dissolving, and ghosts came fluttering up out of nothingness. It was certainly not a place where the traditional language of warfare had any meaning. As Murrow himself put it directly: “There are no words to describe the thing that is happening.”

  So what was this “thing” these reporters were seeing? Is there any way for us now to get a sense of what they were seeing?

  There was a battle soon after Pearl Harbor that may, better than any other, define just what was so strange about the war. Unlike most of the war’s battles, it was contained within a narrow enough area that it can be visualized clearly, yet its consequences were so large and mysterious that they rippled throughout the entire world for years afterward. It happens that no American reporters were around to witness it directly, but it has been amply documented even so. From survivors’ accounts, and from a small library of academic a
nd military histories, ranging in scope and style from Walter Lord’s epic Miracle at Midway to John Keegan’s brilliant tactical analysis in The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare, it’s possible to work out with some precision just what happened in the open waters of the Pacific off Midway Island at 10:25 a.m. local time on June 4, 1942.

  In the months after Pearl Harbor the driving aim of Japanese strategy was to capture a string of islands running the length of the western Pacific and fortify them against an American counterattack. This defensive perimeter would set the boundaries of their new empire—or, as they called it, the “Greater Asia Coprosperity Sphere.” Midway Island, the westernmost of the Hawaiian Islands, was one of the last links they needed to complete the chain. They sent an enormous fleet, the heart of the Japanese navy, to do the job: four enormous aircraft carriers, together with a whole galaxy of escort ships. On June 4 the attack force arrived at Midway, where they found a smaller American fleet waiting for them.

  Or so the history-book version normally runs. But the sailors on board the Japanese fleet saw things differently. They didn’t meet any American ships on June 4. That day, as on all the other days of their voyage, they saw nothing from horizon to horizon but the immensity of the Pacific. Somewhere beyond the horizon line, shortly after dawn, Japanese pilots from the carriers had discovered the presence of the American fleet, but for the Japanese sailors, the only indications of anything unusual that morning were two brief flyovers by American fighter squadrons. Both had made ineffectual attacks and flown off again. Coming on toward 10:30 a.m., with no further sign of enemy activity anywhere near, the commanders ordered the crews on the aircraft carriers to prepare for the final assault on the island, which wasn’t yet visible on the horizon.

  That was when a squadron of American dive-bombers came out of the clouds overhead. They’d gotten lost earlier that morning and were trying to make their way back to base. In the empty ocean below they spotted a fading wake—one of the Japanese escort ships had been diverted from the convoy to drop a depth charge on a suspected American submarine. The squadron followed it just to see where it might lead. A few minutes later they cleared a cloud deck and discovered themselves directly above the single largest “target of opportunity,” as the military saying goes, that any American bomber had ever been offered.