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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