Paul Fussell's War

World War Two, in which Pasadena-born Paul Fussell served as an infantryman, was to dominate the following seven decades of his life. Indeed, as he later put it, “it will never be over.” His memoir, Doing Battle, the Making of a Skeptic, originally published in 1996, ends with the following vignette:

“In the late forties [when he was doing his Ph.D. at Harvard] I was having lunch alone in a Cambridge restaurant. A middle-aged woman was watching me so closely that I felt uncomfortable. Did I know her? Had we met somewhere? Suddenly, without warning, she burst into uncontrollable tears.

Did I remind her of her dead son?

Had she been angry for a long time too?”

Fussell emerged from the war, in which he had battled the Wehrmacht in Alsace in 1945 and was badly wounded, with an overflowing, lasting anger, a great deal of irony and wit, and a scathing pen.

All of these are abundant in Doing Battle and make for a terrific, thought-provoking read. (And, of course, I highly recommend Fussell’s masterpiece of cultural history, The Great War and Modern Memory. In that book, Fussell writes in Doing Battle, “I wanted to make the reader’s flesh creep. I wanted my readers to weep” – as Fussell himself did while writing it.).

Fussell, as all intellectuals should be, was “a bit of a troublemaker,” as he was designated by the president of the University of Pennsylvania, his last academic career stop. The president had been miffed by an article Fussell had written, arguing that “intellectually pretentious universities would do well to scale down, if not abandon entirely, their high-powered athletics programs, which seem … to have little to do with their proper (their only?) business, the development of intellect …”

And Fussell, died aged 88 in 2012, was a very deliberate and conscious iconoclast. In Doing Battle, Fussell admits that in writing his essay “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb,” published in The New Republic in 1981, he was “not innocent of a desire to make trouble.” There, defending the August 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he had riled many of his professorial colleagues. He had argued that “to the [American] ground troops about to invade Japan, the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hardly an occasion for guilt. Just the opposite – [it was the occasion] of rejoicing and relief so overwhelming that it was hard to hold back tears, and gratitude so genuine that even those [like himself] who had spent the preceding months violating many of the Commandments, especially ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ assumed that their standing with the Almighty was still so unimpaired that they could without anomaly thank Him most fervently.” Of course, all or almost all, of Fussell’s academic critics had never seen combat.

Yes, Fussell knew that while “gratifying to the aging ex-infantrymen [who in summer 1945 were about to be disgorged on the beaches of Honshu and were likely to die or be maimed in great numbers by Japanese heishi],” his essay would “annoy pacifists, certain social scientists, international reformers, and others ignorant of the ugly physical and psychological details of the war they had little intimate knowledge of.” Some 210,000 Japanese died in the nuclear-bombed cities. Fussell did not argue, as he could have, that many, many more Japanese would surely have died had the American army been forced to invade Japan and had the American air force blanket- and fire-bombed all of Japan’s cities, until victory was achieved - had not the war been abruptly, “prematurely,” halted by the atomic-bombing of the two cities. After the publication of Fussell’s article, The New Republic was flooded with letters of outrage and rebuke, “virtually all from obvious noncombatants.”

In that essay, Fussell had observed that “the pity is not that the bombs were dropped on the Japanese but that they weren’t ready in time to be dropped on the Germans …. [perhaps] saving the lives of around four million Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies, not to mention the lives and limbs of millions of Allied – and German – soldiers. If the bombs had only been ready in time, the boys in my platoon would not have been so cruelly killed and wounded.”

It is that killing and wounding that is the centerpiece of Fussell’s memoir. Elsewhere he described a firefight a few days before he was wounded: “Before that day was over I was sprayed with the contents of a soldier’s torso when I was lying behind him and he knelt to fire at a machine-gun holding us up; he was struck in the heart and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket flew little clouds of blood, tissue and powdered cloth. Near him another man raised himself to fire, but the machine-gun caught him in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves” (in “My War,” Harper’s Magazine, 1982).

In Doing Battle, Fussell relates how he himself, a platoon commander in the 103^rd Infantry Division, was struck down on 15 March 1945 near St. Die in Alsace. The shell-burst, which also killed his platoon sergeant, Edward Hudson, and Lt. Raymond Biedrzycki, “sent red-hot metal tearing into my body. One piece went into my right thigh. Another entered my back … [there was] indescribable pain … Hudson, lying a few inches to my left, let out a couple of subdued groans and was silent. I saw his face turn from ‘flesh color’ to white, and then to whitish green as his circulation stopped.” When the medic told him that both Hudson and Biedrzycki were dead, “a black fury [flowed] over me. It has never entirely dissipated.”

Once back in the US, “when riding in a car or on a train, I still locate in the passing landscape good positions for machine-guns, antitank guns, or minefields.” Fussell was “given to tears at late-night parties,” “jumped at loud noises in the street,” and buttoned down “all pocket flaps religiously.”

Fussell had spent months in a succession of army bases stateside before reaching the killing fields of Europe – and then almost a year, until his release in June 1946, pushing paper in other bases. In Doing Battle he recalls in accurate detail the mind-numbing routine of soldiering, the endless marches and parade-ground drills, the kit inspections, the hectoring of sergeants, the idiocy of bored officers, and the moronic banter and crudities of the grunts.

And, like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), that masterpiece of the Vietnam War, Fussell goes into the nitty-gritty of what he carried in the fields and hilltops of Alsace. “We got rid of all but essentials … I ended up carrying nothing but a rifle and a light sleeping bag, suspended from my shoulder by a piece of tent rope, like a tramp. The only item you needed for eating was a spoon, carried in the breast pocket. Mess kits, backpacks, and musette bags were simply an impediment and a bore. Anything you couldn’t carry in a pocket you shouldn’t be carrying. That’s where we carried extra socks and gloves and cigarettes and matches and K rations and toilet paper and letters from home and V-mail for writing back and a pen to write with. That’s where I carried the company’s mail-censoring rubber stamp and stamp pad when it was my turn [to censor the troops’ letters] … Carrying a toothbrush was regarded as effeminate. My greasy field-jacket pockets were large enough to hold the food treats my parents sent from Pasadena … stuffed olives in bottles, malted milk tablets, Mexican tamales in jars, and candy. …. Most of us also carried amulets and charms as secret protection against wounds and death, but few ever talked about them …” Fussell, an agnostic, also carried “a small brown leatherette-bound New Testament in the left-hand breast pocket of my shirt … It was a half-inch thick [and] might slow down shell and grenade fragments and deflect a bayonet thrust to my chest. I did look into it from time to time, noting the unequivocal Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ ….”

Fussell also describes his spiritual-psychological baggage, to wit, courage. “We came to understand what more have known than spoken of, that normally each man begins with a certain full reservoir, or bank account, of bravery, but that each time it’s called upon, some is expended, never to be regained. After several months [of combat] it has all been expended, and it’s time for your breakdown.”

There’s nothing moral about war, any war. “A true war story is never moral,” he quotes Tim O’Brien. “It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior.”

Wars, all wars, engender atrocities – by all sides. Wars bring out the propensity for evil in men’s souls. World War Two was no different. Fussell devotes a page to the “Great Turkey Shoot” – in which his platoon shot dead fifteen or twenty German soldiers they came upon in “a deep crater.” The Germans wanted to surrender. But, “laughing and howling, hoo-ha-ing … and good-old-boy yelling, our men exultantly shot into the crater until every single man down there was dead. A few tried to scale the sides, but there was no escape … The result was deep satisfaction, and the event was transformed into amusing narrative, told and retold over campfires all that winter.” Fussell segues to Philip Caputo, another platoon commander (US Marine Corps, Vietnam) and, later, a writer, who quoted what a sergeant had once told him: “Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.”

Why were his men fighting? Fussell offers the following: “Some few may have been following the higher morality and offering their lives and limbs for the Allied cause and the Four Freedoms, but 90 percent of us were engaged in something much less romantic and heroic. We were maintaining our self-respect, protecting our manly image from the contempt of our fellows.” Fussell is probably right about most soldiers in most wars. But I suspect that many who fought in the war against Hitler were sustained by something ideological as well. Elsewhere in the book Fussell acknowledges that there is much evil in the world and that, in World War Two, the Americans were fighting it.

But he frequently speaks ill of the United States and American society, especially when he recalls his return home and his years as a student and teacher in academia. America was “mired in a general sense of optimism.” Television and advertisements and social chatter projected only a pleasant world. Fussell says he became acutely aware of “the paucity and meanness of American social usages, architecture, and general culture … I perceived that America was … entirely different [from Europe]. It had no antiquity, no Middle Ages, and no Renaissance, and thus lacked … a sense of evil and of infinite human complexity.”

When Fussell arrived at Rutgers University, where he was to spend most of his academic life, “the English Department was totally Judenfrei, as if we were teaching in Germany in 1937. When the department hired its first Jew ever, in 1959,” he was “courteously invited … to join the local Episcopal church.”

Fussell devotes not a few pages to racism and antisemitism. Both were rife in the American Army during World War II – and, at least as pertained to blacks, reflected the mores of American society at large. But World War Two and combat apparently changed him. “In Pasadena before the war, ’Negroes’ had seemed creatures quite alien, comical and harmless, not to be teased or tormented but also not to be taken on as intimates and hardly to be imagined as social equals. That is, they were not like us.” Then, in Alsace, he came upon the body of a black American soldier, and “… it came to me that Negroes were not at all what I’d thought them before. In important things, they were like us. In fact, they were us.”

The bleakness of the foregoing might give the wrong impression of Doing Battle. Many pages are full of humor, albeit biting, and wit, especially when he deals with what he encountered in American academia - a full generation before the dominant horror of Wokism and the moral relativism generated by post-modernism.

Fussell expresses “disgust with the American university, its central and simple mission clouded by the hordes of administrative parasites clinging to its body.” By these he meant the “division of athletics … [the office\s of] academic advising, the Office of Alcohol and Drug Education, …[the] Budget Office … [the] Career Planning and Placement Office …[the] university chaplain [and the]’bookstore’ selling more T-shirts and condoms than books.” He compared this to Germany’s famed Heidelberg University, where he spent an enjoyable sabbatical, which sported only three “administrative officers” – a president, who was rotated out every year, a bursar and a housing officer. But there was a problem with Heidelberg in the late Fifties, he tells us: no one recalled the Hitler years, they had been blacked out. (That was to change a few years later.)

In general, Fussell was appalled by the America he saw during the following years: “American culture seemed more than ever bellicose [i.e., the Cold War context, saturated with McCarthyism], ignorant, selfish, and greedy, shot through with quasi-religious fraud and hypocrisy.” And there were the absurdisms and sloppiness. In Rutgers he saw the “Department of Physical Education” re-named “the Department of Human Kinetics.” “The Rutgers style of mistakes and getting it slightly wrong seemed to pervade everything.” Commencement ceremonies saw the faculty standing “while the students entered.” The library was completely mismanaged and there was an “epidemic” of book thefts. When Fussell left Rutgers in 1983, after 28 years of service, he was unsurprised to receive a “would-be elegant” certificate “with my name meticulously misspelled.”

Fussell was appalled by the country’s solid class divisions and class consciousness. On arriving in Harvard, Fussell was nonplussed to discover that “most of [his fellow] graduate students … had been in the navy, and a few had been admirals’ aides. I met no one who’d been in the infantry.” He was unsurprised to see in the Sixties and Seventies the army in Vietnam manned effectively by the lower classes and blacks. “Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all young American males? Killed in their tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers has the effect, welcome or not, of improving the breed.”

“What someone doesn’t want you to publish is journalism” is one of the many aphorisms that sprinkle the book.

You will be right to aver that this is not really a “book review.” Rather, I have let Fussell speak. True, I simply found little to criticize. But more importantly, I wanted you to hear Fussell. Like Fussell, in my conscript years I was an infantryman (though a mere corporal), and, thankfully, did not endure the months of close quarter combat endured by the author. And though once wounded, too, I recovered quickly and did not undergo the extended physical and psychological trauma that runs through Doing Battle like a motif.

I am now off to a two-week vacation in Europe. But I leave you with a taste of the man and the book. Tr