Download Almost Beyond Human Conception

Almost Beyond
Human Conception
Conveying an adequate idea of the Second World War is close to impossible because, as war correspondent Robert Goralski has said, "What we
did to each other is almost beyond human conception." For one thing,
the sheer numbers defeat attempts to flesh them out with actual, unique
human beings. Killed and wounded were over 78 million people, more of
them civilians than soldiers. Close to 6 million Jews were beaten, shot, or
gassed to death by the Germans. One million people died of starvation
and despair in the siege of Leningrad. Over 50 million young men and
women worldwide were mustered into armies, navies, and air forces, 12
million in both the Soviet Union and the United States, io million in
Germany, 6 million in Japan, 4.5 million in both Italy and Britain. If the
battle of the Somme constitutes a scandal because 20,ooo British soldiers were killed in one day, twice that number of civilians were asphyxiated and burned to death in the bombing of Hamburg. Seventy
thousand died at Hiroshima, 35,000 at Nagasaki, and the same at Dresden. Among British bomber crews, over 55,000 were killed, more than
all the British officers killed and wounded in the First World War.
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, they did so with 165
divisions, and the Soviets finally threw them back with 800. The number
of Germans who surrendered at Stalingrad was 91,ooo. ( The number
surviving years of captivity to return home was 6,ooo.) Two million men
were engaged in the battle of Kursk, in the Soviet Union. Fought in
1943, it remains the greatest land battle in history. Six thousand tanks
fought each other, and four thousand planes. "At times," says Robert
Leckie, "the smoke from burning tanks blotted out the sun," and "out of
the blackened sky fell shrieking, burning airplanes." It was like something supernatural: "Frightened peasants screaming in terror ran for the
forests with their hands over their ears." In such circumstances, only
small numbers and a few actual names can resume human significance,
like the number three-three men came out alive when, on May 24,
1941, the British battle cruiser Hood blew up. The rest of the crew,
308
The Second World War
1,418 men, disappeared. Only Signalman Briggs, Midshipman Dundas,
and Seaman Tilburn survived.
No easier than imagining its magnitude is specifying the starting
point of the Second World War. Some would say it began back in 1919
with the Treaty of Versailles, when Germany was branded as the instigator of the First World War and was shortly to be charged with "reparations," humiliating and unpayable. German re-armament and aggressive
national self-justification seem an inevitable reaction. Others might
point to Japanese aggression in China beginning in 1931. The world- wide economic depression of the 193os assisted the rise to power of
Hitler's National Socialists, who contrived the re-militarization of the
Rhineland in 1 936 and the annexation of Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Meanwhile, Japan was flexing nationalist muscles and
preparing to lead an anti-colonialist effort expelling Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States from their traditional possessions in the Far
East. Up to this time, Britain, still horrified by her massive losses in the
First World War, tried by numerous expedients of compromise and
persuasion to satisfy Hitler's territorial hunger, but when the Germans
demanded Poland too and invaded it on September 1, 1939, Britain and
France finally drew the line, declaring war on Germany three days later.
For several months little happened, French and German troops regardi ng each other from behind their border fortifications of the Maginot
and Siegfried lines. But in May 1940, the Germans simply flanked the
Maginot Line to the north and swept through Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and finally France. A British Expeditionary Force sent to assist
the French army was forced back and fled across the Channel from
Dunkirk, leaving all its heavy equipment behind. British propaganda
tried to salvage what hope it could from this debacle, but it was now
apparent that Germany could do what it wanted on the Continent until
there was a change in international dynamics. Although clearly distressed by these European events, the United States had so far displayed
no great willingness to come to Britain's defense. Its neutrality puzzled
and angered many Britons. As Philip Warner has said, at this time
the British opinion of the United States was that at heart it was really still a
part of the British Empire. The fact that it had been an independent
country for over 150 years and that Americans included millions of people
whose ancestors had migrated from European countries such as Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia, and even Russia, and thus had no feelings of affinity
towards Britain, did not break into the consciousness of the average Briton.
. . . In fact most Americans hardly gave a thought to Britain.
Not to mention the outright hostility to Britain among many Irish
Americans, as well as the opposition to British colonialism habitual
among American liberals. Britain's problems were now multiplied by
Almost Beyond Human Conception
309
Italy's declaring war on her and invading Egypt. Soon General Rommel's Afrika Corps was pressing against the British in North Africa.
On June 22, 1941, Germany surprisingly turned eastward and invaded
its erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, at first with dramatic success, plungi ng hundreds of miles into unsuspecting and unready Russian defenses.
And if the war spread in that direction in 1941, i n early 1942 it became
genuinely a world war when Japan seized the Philippines and Malaya
and Burma and advanced in the Pacific right up to Australia. Germany
had an understanding with Japan, and when, reacting to the attack on
Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan, Germany responded by declaring war on the United States. This, together with its
i nvasion of the Soviet Union, proved a terrible mistake, but it required
years for the obviously superior industrial capacity of the United States
to get into gear and for America to muster and train an army capable of
j oining the British in recapturing the Continent and entering Germany.
Ultimately American forces outnumbered British, the reason Eisenhower was designated Supreme Allied Commander. Getting American
tanks and planes to Europe was not easy, for U-boats sank trans-Atlantic
vessels virtually at will until radar, the convoy system, and extended air
protection shifted the advantage to the Allies. For Germany the turning
point of the war was probably the battle of Stalingrad, in February 1943.
After that, German forces were engaged in practically full-time retreat.
To add to Germany's troubles, the Allies invaded Italy and began a slow,
painful advance north.
It was clear to the Allies that getting back onto the Continent would
be costly. When they had raided the French coastal town of Dieppe in
August 1942, they suffered 50 percent casualties and achieved nothing.
Although the Soviets insisted that the Allies invade the Continent in
1943, the United States and Britain required a year more to build the
landing craft and to achieve the absolute air superiority required for
i nvasion. Despite the relative success of the landings in Normandy, conquering the still powerful and energetically officered German army took
almost another year, during which Hitler's "secret weapons," the V-1
and V-2 self-propelled bombs and rockets, killed many civilians in England and Belgium. In the final year of the European war the Allies
overran what earlier had been only the substance of terrible rumors, the
extermination camps in which the Germans killed millions of "subhumans"-Jews, Poles, Slavs, gypsies, and homosexuals.
In the Far East Japanese power had been eroding ever since the naval
battle of Midway, in 1942, but it was clear that given the suicidal Japanese resistance as island after island was seized by the Americans, the
home islands would have to be invaded. To provide bases for the ultimate infantry and marine battle on the Japanese homeland, the Philippines were recaptured and Okinawa occupied. Incendiary bombings of
civilians prepared the way for invasion: more people (18o,ooo) were
31 0
The Second World War
killed in "conventional" attacks on Tokyo in April
1945, than in both
the atomic bombings. After the German surrender in May
1945, the
Americans began shifting troops and supplies to the Pacific, but the
atom bombs made invasion unnecessary. When the Japanese surrendered in August 1 945, General MacArthur expressed the understanding
of billions when he designated the war "a great tragedy." A tragedy
generates fear and pity, and there had been plenty of fear and pity for
the past six years. The main cities of Japan were ashes, and if years of
bombing had ironically stiffened rather than softened the German will
to resist, there was scarcely a German city of any size that was not in
ruins, with people starving in holes. (Although in the Third Reich irony,
the normal attendant of modern war, was rare, there were occasional
outcrops. After the bombing of Dresden, someone painted on the sidewalk, "Thank you, dear Fiihrer.") Millions of suddenly freed foreign
workers, enslaved for years by the Germans, wandered across Europe,
many of them looting and raping in revenge. It would be decades before
civilized conditions would be half-restored, and to this day, if you look
past the facades of new buildings in Warsaw to the areas behind, you will
see war ruins standing there just as in 1945.
It was not until the Second World War that the relative civility of the
First was apparent. Most of the atrocity stories imputing extraordinary
cruelty to the Germans then were revealed to have been concocted by
Allied propagandists. Not so the appalling narratives emanating from
this war, telling of Japanese bayoneting of nurses and hospital patients in
Hong Kong and of their inexplicably cruel treatment of helpless prisoners of war. In Britain today, there are still thousands of former prisoners
of the Japanese who will refuse forever to buy anything bearing the name
Sony or Toyota. Unthinkable in the First World War would have been
the German Einsatzgruppen, special SS units accompanying the army as
it conquered Eastern Europe, whose duty it was to murder commissars,
Jews, intellectuals, and peasants slack in obedience. Unknown in the
First World War was an institution like the Gestapo, which tortured
and killed freely while trying to repress civilian resistance in Germanoccupied countries. And although the Spanish Civil War had made
familiar the idea of "partisans" and guerrillas, the hatred of the Germans
among ordinary people, as well as among confirmed communists, occasioned large risings of irregular forces all over Europe, but especially in
France, Russia, Yugoslavia, and Greece. These were kept supplied by
air-drops from Allied planes and were sometimes led and abetted by
Allied officers parachuted at the same time. Partisan units, which ambushed the Germans, blew up railway tracks, roads, bridges, and vehicles, paid heavily for their patriotism and daring: in Yugoslavia alone
over 300,000 were killed and over 400,000 wounded. Those the Ger-
Almost Beyond Human Conception
311
mans captured-"bandits," they called them-were unceremoniousl y
shot or hanged, their bodies left dangling to discourage others. Widespread was the German practice of rounding up admittedly innocent
people chosen at random-the local schoolteacher, the pharmacist, an
adopted child, the town drunk-as hostages against partisan attack in
the district, ten hostages to be shot for each German soldier killed. It was
hard to decide whether the world in general, increasingly uninhibited b y
former scruples deriving from religion, had grown more cruel since the
First World War or whether the Germans, nourished on the adolesce nt
and pathological imperatives of National Socialism, had accomplished a
unique breakthrough into a new anti-ethics of pedantic viciousne ss .
When the German surrender was finally consummated at Rheims, General Eisenhower felt so revolted by the recently disclosed death carll ps
that he refused even to be present when the surrender was signed b y
General Jodl, later hanged at Nuremburg.
Faced with events so unprecedented and so inaccessible to norm al
models of humane understanding, literature spent a lot of time standi ng
silent and aghast. Journalism was different. Even though it was eith er
officially censored or self-censored (usually both), it performed its norm al
task of registering the facts, and practiced by a correspondent like Martha Gellhorn it delivered a credible, useful version of events. But a
version not only credible but morally and artistically significant som e
-timesdbyonhpwerflitauodv.Onempiment was suggested by the poets. It is demoralizing to be called on to
fight the same enemy twice in the space of twenty-one years, and what is
there to say except what has been said the first time? Canadian Poet
Milton Acorn put it this way:
This is where we came in; this has happened before
Only the last time there was cheering.
British poet Keith Douglas, in his poem "Desert Flowers," refers to
Isaac Rosenberg's "Break of Day in the Trenches" from the First World
War and admits, "Rosenberg I only repeat what you were saying." Herbert Read's poem "To a Conscript of 1940" exhibits a similar weariness
at this replay of a former disaster. The time for idealism, Read notes, is
long past. The soldiers of the Second World War can perform satisfactorily, he observes, only if they know in advance that no social good 'i11
come from the war.
Another problem for literature was the difficulty of making moral
sense out of circumstances and behavior so destructive of normal moral
assumptions. Barbara Foley has defined the problem while commenti ng
on the Holocaust. It's not, she says, that its data are "unknowable." The
312
The Second World War
i mpediment to understanding the Holocaust is that "its full dimensions
are inaccessible to the ideological frameworks that we have inherited
from the liberal era."
Almost entirely absent from the Second World War were those gungho celebrations uttered at the beginning of the First War by Rupert
Brooke and W. N. Hodgson. By the time Hitler had invaded Poland and
the Allies knew they would have to fight, the old illusion that war was
anything but criminal and messy was largely in tatters. As Robert E.
Sherwood said, the Second World War was "the first in American history [and of course even more so in British history] in which the general
disillusionment preceded the firing of the first shot." Or as one Briton
remembered the national state of mind at the outbreak of the war, "We
were all conscientious objectors, and all in [the war]." When E. M.
Forster was asked in 1940 what he felt about the war, he replied, "I don't
want to lose it. I don't expect Victory (with a big V!), and I can't join in
any build-a-new-world stuff. Once in a lifetime one can swallow that, but
not twice." As a motive for self-immolation among the Allies, patriotism
seemed close to obsolete. "Who the hell dies for King and Country
anymore?" asked a Canadian soldier. "That crap went out in the First
World War."
Consequently, regardless of its danger, for those implicated in it the
Second War could seem almost boring. One of the best and most representative poems from the Second War is Alun Lewis's "All Day It Has
Rained," which catches the sense that while ultimate significance may
be possible, at the moment the war is a great emptiness. A sigh, not a
scream of pain or a shout of outrage, seems a typical sound of this war.
Unlike the loquacity which is one of the cultural attendants of the First
War, silence is the stigma of experience in the Second. Writers as articulate as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Samuel Beckett
had little to say about the war, and Edmund Wilson, John Berryman,
and Delmore Schwartz sometimes acted as if it were not taking place.
The Allied troops likewise tended to silence, or at least to a brevity
suggesting severe disenchantment. Once the war was over, for most of
the participants there was little to be said either. "When I came back,"
one soldier said, "I didn't realize how silent I had been through those
four years, and I ... continued silent. It was funny." Soldiers who were
writers became silent too. As Karl Shapiro says, speaking of John Ciardi
and other young writers who'd been in combat and had plenty to testify
about, "We all came out of the same army and joined the same generation of silence."
This time, less said the better, as John Pudney writes in his poem
"Missing," deploring the death of his friend "Smith":
Almost Beyond Human Conception
313
No roses at the end
Of Smith, my friend.
Words will not fill the post
Of Smith, the ghost.
That suggests the exhaustion by modern war of elegiac language and
i magery. Gavin Ewart implies as much by avoiding traditional elegiac
procedures in his poem "When a Beau Goes In." The destruction of a
pilot in his airplane has become so routine and meaningless that "Nobody says, `Poor lad.' " The irony of Second World War poetry seems
effortless, inevitable, natural, as in Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the
Ball Turret Gunner"-representative also in its brevity. This unwillingness to embroider suggests a world where sensitive users of language have
been virtually forced into the laconic mode by the excesses of propaganda, advertising, publicity, and nationalistic lying.
Because of both censorship and the desire to win the war on its own
contemporary terms, it's not easy to find people writing interestingly of
the war while it's going on. Given the sentimentality of much patriotic
wartime journalism and the deceptiveness of official emissions, and given
the false conceptions of character and motivation nourished by Hollywood and by writing aimed at Hollywood, one turns with relief to the
letters and diaries of soldiers. These admit a reader to something like
actuality, that is, the soldier's war. As the historian Roger J. Spiller has
said,
Because the soldier's history of war does not readily submit to the orderly
requirements of history, and because, when uncovered, it often challenges
the orderly traditions by which military history has shaped our understandi ng of warfare, the soldier's war has been the great secret of military history.
And within this special, secret history of war, the darkest corner of all has
had to do with war's essential, defining feature--combat, what it is like to
have lived through it, and to have lived with one's own combat history for
the rest of one's life.
There is no more illuminating testimony about the soldier's war in the
selections that follow than that of United States Marine Eugene B.
Sledge, whose memoir, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, has
become a classic of modesty, honesty, and simplicity, more telling than
any amount of literary sophistication. And from the Axis side there is
Guy Sajer's memorable account of his soldier's war in The Forgotten
Soldier. American Private First Class Mitchell Sharpe, who fought the
Germans with the infantry in France and Germany, gets the soldier's
war right when he tells his mother,
314
The Second World War
If you could only see us kids killed at eighteen, nineteen and twenty fighti ng in a country that means nothing to'us, fighting because it means either
kill or be killed, not because you're making the world safe for democracy or
destroying Nazism.
The death of his friend Neal, killed near him and left by the side of the
path "with eyes and mouth open," has shown him "what a hopeless and
senseless mockery this war is." That perception seems to arise only from
experience, and experience in the library, film theater, debating society,
or classroom will not seem to suffice.
HERBERT REA:
1893-1968
Read learned in 1914-1918 (see his poem "The
881) that modern war is very likely to subvert it
reducing its actors to fighting without any aim r
1940 he was shocked to see the operation beginn
TO A CONSCRIPT OF 19.
Qui n'a pas une fois desespere de l'hoi
j amais un heros.
Georges Ben
A soldier passed me in the freshly falh
His footsteps muffled, his face uneartl
And my heart gave a sudden leap
As I gazed on a ghost of five-and-twer
I shouted Halt! and my voice had the
And he obeyed it as it was obeyed
In the shrouded days when I too was
Of an army of young men marching
Into the unknown. He turned toward
"I am one of those who went before 1
Five-and-twenty years ago: one of the
returned,
Of the many who returned and yet w
" We went where you are going, into
We fought as you will fight