by Ira Glass
The American military, meanwhile, was conducting campaigns that to this day are almost impossible to understand or justify. What was the point, for instance, of the Allied invasion of Italy in the summer of 1943? None of the reporters who covered it could figure it out. It was poorly planned and incompetently commanded, and its ultimate goal seemed preposterous: even if it had gone perfectly, it would have left a large army in northern Tuscany faced with the impossible task of getting across the Alps. Most baffling of all, Allied commanders up the line didn’t even seem to care whether it worked perfectly—or at all. One reporter, Eric Sevareid, watched it go on for eighteen months of brutal stalemate and wrote an essay for The Nation (it’s the angriest and most honest piece in the whole of Reporting World War II) suggesting that its only real purpose was “to lay waste and impoverish for many years the major part of Italy.”
Somewhere in the bureaucratic stratosphere, of course, there were people who did know the justification for it and for everything else the Allies were doing. They just didn’t want to tell anybody what those reasons were. The Italian invasion, as it happened, was the result of a complicated attempt to appease the Russians, who were increasingly doubtful that their allies were serious about taking on Germany. It was intended as an expedient compromise—a direct confrontation with the Axis, in an area where defeat wouldn’t be fatal. In other words, there was no compelling military logic behind it; it was just an arbitrary way of marking time while the buildup for the real invasion went on.
No wonder American combat troops in those years started calling themselves “G.I. Joe.” Reporters passed the term back home as a charming bit of sentimentality; they didn’t know, or chose to ignore, that it was really a despairing joke—“G.I.” for “general issue,” a mass-produced unit of basic military hardware. The soldiers knew the score: for all the halos of glory they were being heaped with in the press, they were nothing more than anonymous, interchangeable items in the limitless inventory of the war. No “politician” (as they called any noncombatant decision maker) gave a damn what they were going through; you’d never find one of them getting anywhere near an actual battle. But for the soldiers who had to go into them, the combat zones were proving to be more horrible than their darkest imaginings.
“The infantryman hates shells more than anything else,” Bill Mauldin wrote about the front lines in Italy. His phrasing makes it sound like the men were expressing an aesthetic preference, like a choice among distasteful rations. But “shells” weren’t a few rounds of artillery floating in at odd intervals. They were deafening, unrelenting, maddening, terrifying. One fortified American position in the Pacific recorded being hit in a single day by sixteen thousand shells. In the middle of an artillery barrage, hardened veterans would hug each other and sob helplessly. Men caught in a direct hit were unraveled by the blast, blown apart into shards of flying skeleton that would maim or kill anyone nearby. Afterward the survivors would sometimes discover one of their buddies so badly mangled they couldn’t understand how he could still be breathing; all they could do was give him the largest dose of morphine they dared and write an “M” for “morphine” on his forehead in his own blood, so that nobody else who found him would give him a second, fatal dose. (One soldier marked with that “M” was Bob Dole, wounded in Italy in 1945; he wasn’t released from the hospital until 1948.) Commanders came to prefer leading green troops into combat, because the veterans were far more scared. They knew what was coming.
There was the brassy, metallic twang of the small 50mm knee mortar shells as little puffs of dirty smoke appeared thickly around us. The 81mm and 90mm mortar shells crashed and banged all along the ridge. The whiz-bang of the high-velocity 47mm gun’s shells (also an antitank gun) was on us with its explosion as soon as we heard it. . . . The slower screaming, whining sound of the 75mm artillery shells seemed the most abundant. Then there was the roar and rumble of the huge enemy 150mm howitzer shell, and the kaboom of its explosion. The bursting radius of these big shells was of awesome proportions. Added to all this noise was the swishing and fluttering overhead of our own supporting artillery fire. Our shells could be heard bursting out across the ridge over enemy positions. The noise of small-arms fire from both sides resulted in a chaotic bedlam of racket and confusion.
This is from a memoir by Eugene B. Sledge, a marine who fought in the Pacific. It was issued by the marines’ own printing house, with prefaces by a couple of brigadier generals. That might lead it to be discounted as the usual party-line war-memoir whitewash, especially since Sledge does try to put the best possible spin on everything the marines did in the Pacific, finding excuses for every act of grotesque cruelty and softening the routine drone of daily barbarism. He even claims that marines said things like “all fouled up” and “when the stuff hits the fan.” (To be fair, Sledge is an unusually kindhearted man, who records with great satisfaction the rescue of Okinawan ponies trapped in the combat zone.) But notice the connoisseurlike precision in this passage, the sense shared by writer and readers that each shell in a barrage sounds its own distinct note of lethality. And one may notice too that Sledge’s whole memoir is free of reporters’ words like “occult” and “eerie” and “ghostly.” The adjectives that occur most often are “insane,” “hellish,” and “unendurable.”
The major campaign Sledge fought in was Okinawa, which took place toward the end of the war. It was expected to be quick: one more island recaptured from a defeated enemy. But the Japanese withdrew deep into Okinawa’s lush interior, where the rains and the dense foliage made the few roads impassable. The marines had to bring their supplies in on foot—carrying mortars and shells, water and food on their backs across miles of ravine-cut hills. Often they were so exhausted they couldn’t move when the enemy attacked. The battle lines, as so often happened in the war, soon froze in place. The quick campaign lasted for months.
Conditions on the front rapidly deteriorated. Soldiers were trapped in their foxholes by barrages that went on for days at a time. They were stupefied by the unbroken roar of the explosions and reduced to sick misery by the incessant rain and deepening mud. They had to use discarded grenade cans for latrines, then empty the contents into the mud outside their foxholes. The rain washed everything into the ravines; the urine and feces mixed with the blood and the shreds of rotting flesh blown by the shell bursts from the hundreds of unburied bodies scattered everywhere. The smell was so intolerable it took an act of supreme will for the soldiers to choke down their rations each day. Sledge calls it “an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.”
He writes, “If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings, and the like. Then he and a buddy would shake or scrape them away with a piece of ammo box or a knife blade.”
The soldiers began to crack. As Sledge writes, “It is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane.” He catalogs the forms the insanity took: “from a state of dull detachment seemingly unaware of their surroundings, to quiet sobbing, or all the way to wild screaming and shouting.” Sledge himself began having hallucinations that the dead bodies were rising at night. “They got up slowly out of their waterlogged craters or off the mud and, with stooped shoulders and dragging feet, wandered around aimlessly, their lips moving as though trying to tell me something.” It was a relief to shake himself alert and find the corpses decomposing in their accustomed spots.
The casualty figures from Okinawa were a demonstration that even at the end of the war the military bureaucracies of the combatant nations hadn’t yet learned, or didn’t care, what the combat zones were routinely doing to the soldiers who fought in them. Aroun
d one hundred thousand Japanese soldiers died on Okinawa—a few hundred were captured, mostly those who were too badly wounded to commit suicide. About one hundred thousand of the native inhabitants of the island died as well. Almost eight thousand Americans were killed or missing; almost thirty-two thousand were wounded. And there were more than twenty-six thousand “neuropsychiatric” casualties—more than a third of the American casualties in the Okinawa combat zone were soldiers who were driven insane.
Long after the war John Keegan, who’d been evacuated with his family from London to the quiet depths of the English countryside, recalled a particular night when he was ten years old. “The sky over our house began to fill with the sound of aircraft, which swelled until it overflowed the darkness from edge to edge. Its first tremors had taken my parents into the garden, and as the roar grew I followed and stood between them to gaze awestruck at the constellations of red, green and yellow lights which rode across the heavens and streamed southward towards the sea. . . . It seemed as if every aircraft in the world was in flight, as wave after wave followed without intermission.”
It was the night of June 5, 1944. Twelve thousand planes were rising from airfields all across England and roaring into the darkness over Europe. The next day Keegan’s family listened as the BBC repeated over and over an austere news bulletin: “Early this morning units of the Allied armies began landing on the coast of France.”
The Allied Expeditionary Force was on the ground in Europe at last. The great invasion had achieved its first goal. The decisive battle unfolded in the middle of August. The Germans launched a major offensive to break apart the Allied armies and force them back toward the English Channel. Twenty German divisions raced forward into the Allied lines in the wooded countryside south of the small town of Falaise. It was a large-scale version of the blitzkrieg attack that had terrorized and stampeded whole armies in the early days of the war. But the Allies were expecting the blitzkrieg, and they’d had years to work out the correct tactical response. The “Falaise pocket,” they called it afterward. The Allied army allowed the forward wedge of panzers to penetrate the lines, then made a flanking attack and encircled them from the rear. Then Allied barrages opened up from all sides, and massed air force squadrons swept overhead and bombed at will. The Germans were trapped in the pocket for more than a week. Their best panzer divisions were torn to pieces. More than two hundred thousand German soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. Only a death stand by a lone division of Hitler Youth held open a gap in the rapidly tightening lines long enough for the remnants of the forces to make a frantic escape.
That was the end of the greatest myth of the war: the invincibility of the German army. Overnight the blitzkrieg had been made obsolete. It was now just another classroom exercise at the world’s military schools, an object lesson in the dangers of leaving your flanks exposed.
Meanwhile, more than a thousand miles to the east, the Red Army was launching its own big offensive. Two weeks after the first wave of Allied invaders came ashore at Normandy a gigantic Soviet force crashed down on the German positions in Belorussia. The German soldiers there were already exhausted, their supplies were chronically low, and their faith in their cause was dwindling—the result of having spent three years in a nightmarish stalemate with an enemy their commanders had too often told them was on the verge of surrender. The overwhelming attack caught them completely by surprise, and they were routed. Within weeks the battle line that had been writhing across the immensity of Russia for the last three years was torn apart; hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were falling back to the west, and the Red Army was pouring by the millions through the disintegrating front.
So that was the result of the Allies’ grand invasion plan: after all those years of delays and equivocations and false hopes and murderously bungled diversions it had in the end gone just the way it was supposed to. The Allies had confronted the most fearsome army in history and had broken it in battle. The Greater Reich was falling apart, its troops in retreat all across Europe. And with Germany gone, Japan couldn’t hope to stand up to the world alone. The war was won.
As the news of the victories in Europe spread, a mood of jubilation broke out among the Allied nations. For the first time newspapers in America and Britain predicted the imminent surrender of the Axis. People made bets about whether the war could last till Labor Day, Thanks-giving at the latest. In anticipation of the end, the American government announced that food and gas rationing were being suspended. The word was everywhere: our boys will be home by Christmas.
Every day the war persisted after that became a puzzle, and then an agony. As Martha Gellhorn wrote that September, “It is awful to die when you know the war is won anyhow. . . . Every man dead is a greater sorrow because the end of all this tragic dying is so near.” But how near? Into the fall, news continued to arrive of battles and large-scale counterattacks all over Europe. Meanwhile, the Allied forces in the Pacific were just beginning to position themselves for the invasion of the Philippines, with their ultimate goal, the Japanese home islands, still thousands of miles away. And no rumors were circulating, on or off the record, of Axis offers of surrender. The war was won, but it was mysteriously accelerating into fresh violence by the day.
The Allied commanders in northern Europe were still sure that victory was within reach. It was true that German forces were fighting everywhere with savage tenacity. But the Allied hold on the continent was daily growing stronger, the networks of resupply and reinforcement were jelling, and the battle lines were pushing inexorably toward the old borders of Germany. And yet the Allies still hadn’t crossed the Rhine. By the beginning of winter their armies were only beginning to move through eastern France and Belgium, gradually unfolding, like a river slipping past a rock, around the immense forests of the Ardennes. And that was where, in the middle of December, they met what one reporter on the scene called “the most frightening, unbelievable experience of the war.”
The German army had been building up its strongest forces for a counterattack. For months in the remote wooded valleys of the Ardennes—the last surviving old-growth forests in Europe—hidden from Allied reconnaissance flights by the dense tree cover and the perpetual fog of late autumn, thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of troops had been massing. The Allies suspected nothing; their lines along the western fringes of the Ardennes were lightly manned and casually patrolled. No one in the command hierarchy even realized what was happening when the first reports began filtering in on December 16 of mysterious movements in the deep reaches of the forests. Then Allied forward positions began receiving furious barrages. German tank battalions came rumbling out of the snow-buried valleys to shatter the thin Allied lines. Gradually the Allied commanders began to understand that the German army had come roaring forward with a major new offensive.
The weeks that followed were a nightmare. German divisions broke through all along the front in Belgium and northern France. Allied positions were wiped out, and the troops fell back in panic. As the German forces advanced west the weather turned foul, and Allied troops trying to pull together new lines found themselves baffled by heavy snows that buried the roads and obliterated the few landmarks. The fog and snowstorms shrouding the interior of the forests made reconnaissance and bombardment behind the lines impossible. The troops on the ground were left to wander through the interminable woods or hole up in the charred wreckage of evacuated villages while the storms worsened, the temperature dropped, and blizzard winds reduced visibility to zero. Everywhere, in uncertain vistas of ground fog, among the countless tapered pillars of snow-heavy pine trees, they saw sinister movement: endless lines of advancing German soldiers, wraithlike in their white winter camouflage gear; thundering herds of tanks; booming artillery pieces scattering torrents of snow and slush; and mist dissolving in swirls around the burning hulks of trucks left behind as the long, straggling convoys of Allied soldiers retreated.
The troops called it the Battle of the Bulge, after
the way the front bulged so alarmingly to the west. It’s counted in the history books as an Allied victory. The way the story is usually told, after a brief period when the Allies were forced to pull back they reorganized and by the middle of January had recaptured all the territory they’d lost. The invasion of Germany was staved off for only a few negligible weeks. But for a lot of people, soldiers and civilians, the Battle of the Bulge was the moment they finally lost hope. The size and ferocity of the attack meant that the Germans had no intention of ever giving up. The war was simply going to go on, from horror to horror, into the indefinite future. The year of the great Allied victories wouldn’t end with tender holiday homecomings or triumphant parades, but with Americans soldiers dying by the thousands in the snowbound forests of Europe.
Back when the forest still stretched in an unbroken expanse from Scandinavia to the Urals, the Vikings who inhabited its northernmost reaches wrote down their own stories about war. Their legends may have been garish fantasies—cursed rings and enchanted gold and dragon slayers and the fall of the realm of the gods—but when they wrote about battle, they were unsparingly exact. Their sagas still offer the subtlest and most rigorous accounts of the unique psychology of combat. The anonymous authors knew that the experience of being on a battlefield is fundamentally different from everything else in life. It simply can’t be described with ordinary words, so they devised a specialized Old Norse vocabulary to handle it. Some of their terms will do perfectly well for a world war fought a thousand years later.