All Hell Let Loose (56 page)

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 nightmare. 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:

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:

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.

Only a small number of warriors articulated hopes more ambitious than those for personal survival. One of these was a British officer who wrote to his parents before being killed in his first North African battle: ‘I should like you to know what it is I died for … There is, I feel, both in England and America a tremendous surge of feeling, a feeling which, for want of a better word, I shall call “goodness”. It is not expressed by the politicians or the newspapers, for it is far too deep for them. It is the heartfelt longing of all the “middling folk” for something better – a world more worthy of their children, a world more simple in its beliefs, nearer to earth and to God. I have heard it so often among soldiers in England and America, in trains, in factories in Chicago and in clubs in London, sometimes so poorly expressed that one can hardly recognize it, but underlying it all there is that craving for a new life.’

All this was true. While Winston Churchill saw himself conducting a struggle to preserve the greatness of the British Empire, most of his fellow countrymen yearned instead for domestic change, most vividly anticipated in the Beveridge Report, published in November 1942, which laid the foundations of Britain’s post-war Welfare State. The
Spectator
editorialised: ‘The report has almost eclipsed the war itself as a subject of discussion in the country; it has been keenly debated by British troops overseas.’ Captain David Elliott wrote to his sister, after hearing a discussion among his Guardsmen about Beveridge: ‘If it is not accepted
in toto
I feel there will be a revolution.’ Independent Labour MP Aneurin Bevan told the House of Commons with unwonted accuracy: ‘The British Army is not fighting for the old world. If hon Members opposite think we are going through this in order to keep their Malayan swamps, they are making a mistake.’

There was a striking contrast between the attitudes of European and Asian peoples, who sought social and constitutional change as a reward for victory, and that of Franklin Roosevelt’s fellow countrymen, who were largely content with the society they had got. A
New York Times
writer observed sardonically about the American overseas: ‘Tea from the British and
vin rouge
from the French have only confirmed his original convictions: that America is home, that home is better than Europe.’ Ernie Pyle recorded the aspirations of soldiers whom he met before the invasion of Sicily, overwhelmingly dominated by the hunger to go home: ‘These gravely yearned-for futures of men going into battle include so many things – things such as seeing the “old lady” again, of going to college, of holding on your knee just once your own kid, of again becoming champion salesman of your territory, of driving a coal truck around the streets of Kansas City once more and yes, of just sitting in the sun once more on the south side of a house in New Mexico … It was these little hopes that made up the sum total of our worry rather than any visualization of physical agony to come.’