Anyone who knows me knows how emotional I feel about war and its narratives, be it WWII, WWI, fought in the Orient or Orissa. Anyone who knows me knows how I feel about war veterans coming back home (incidentally, if you'd like to know what it feels like, visit this
site). Perhaps one day soon, when I dont have such looming assignment and thesis deadlines hovering above my head, I'll tell you more about it. As such, when I chanced upon this article visiting my Mekkah of daily news, DailyMail Online, I couldnt stop crying because of the various stories reflecting upon a time that I was completely removed from. I reproduce this here in its entirety (without permission,
full article here), a brilliant article promoting a book written by Max Hastings, which I will strive to buy soon when I reach India. Or sooner.
Do read.
He longed for his mother. William Crawford was a 17-year-old Boy Second Class serving aboard the storm-tossed British battle cruiser Hood in 1941, from where he wrote home with a heartfelt plea.
‘Dearest Mum, I can’nae eat and my heart’s in my mouth. We struck bad weather today and waves as big as houses came crashing over our bows.
‘I wonder if it would do any good, Mum, if you wrote to the Admiralty and asked them if there was any chance of me getting a shore job.’
Crawford, however, was still aboard Hood when she was sunk with almost all hands, including him.
On the far side of Europe, Red Army Private Samokhvalov was in an equally wretched condition as young Crawford.
He was lining up for battle at Kursk, where the Soviet and Germans armies were about to clash in the biggest battle of the war and a million men would be killed or wounded.
‘Mama,’ he wrote in a letter. ‘I have not known such fear in all my 18 years. Mama, please pray to God that I live. When I was at home I did not believe in God, but now I think of him 40 times a day. I don’t know where to hide my head.
‘Papa and Mama, farewell, I will never see you again, farewell, farewell, farewell.’
Here were two teenagers from different lands, different cultures and thousands of miles apart but with a single thought. Like the vast majority of the millions drawn into World War II, they hated it.
There were many, of course, who fought bravely, proud and happy to serve — and die if necessary.
‘I suppose our position is about as dangerous as is possible in view of the threatened invasion,’ Lt Robert Hichens of the Royal Navy wrote in July 1940, one of the most perilous times in British history.
‘But I couldn’t help being full of joy.
‘Being on the bridge of one of His Majesty’s ships, being talked to by the captain as an equal. Who would not rather die like that than live as so many poor people have to, in crowded cities at some sweating indoor job?’
He was killed two years later but the heroic Hichens was that comparatively rare commodity even in wartime — a happy warrior. For such people, bearing their share of their nation’s struggle for conquest or freedom rendered their sorrows tolerable and ennobled loneliness and danger.
Others were not so keen. ‘I am absolutely fed up with everything,’ a British officer wrote to his wife from the Mediterranean. ‘The dirt and filth, the flies — I’m having a hideous time and I wonder why I’m alive.’
What was it really like to be at war in a world that was tearing itself apart? When, afterwards, men and women from scores of nations struggled to find words to describe what they had been through, many resorted to a familiar mantra — ‘All hell broke loose.’
We may be tempted to shrug off the banality of this phrase. Yet it captures the essence of what the struggle meant to vast numbers of people as they were plucked from peaceful, ordered existences to face ordeals that, in many cases, lasted for years, and for at least 60 million were terminated by death.
All hell did indeed break loose. Many people witnessed spectacles comparable with medieval visions of hell — human beings torn to fragments; cities blasted into rubble; ordered communities sundered.
Almost everything that civilised peoples take for granted was swept aside.
The war was fought on many fronts by many different nations. Some battlefronts were worse than others. Russians and Germans were at each other’s throats continuously for almost four years on the Eastern Front in far worse conditions than British and American forces ever encountered, and with vastly heavier casualties.
‘Death is everywhere here,’ a Private Ivanov, of the 70th Army, wrote despairingly to his family. ‘I shall never see you again because death, terrible, ruthless and merciless, is going to cut short my young life. Where shall I find strength and courage to live through all this?’
He probably didn’t. One in four Russian and one in three German combatants died in the War — against one in 20 British and one in 34 American servicemen.
But the fact that, statistically, the suffering of some individuals was less terrible than that of others elsewhere was meaningless to those concerned. It was no consolation for a British soldier facing a mortar barrage on D-Day to be told that Russian casualties were many times greater.
Pain and suffering were universal, as were fear and grief. Everywhere, young men and women were obliged to endure new existences utterly remote from those of their choice, often under arms and at worst as slaves.
Most of those suddenly thrown into these extremes of excitement, terror and hardship were conscripts, who clung stubbornly to their amateur status. They saw themselves as performing a wholly unwelcome duty before returning to their ‘real’ lives.
An American war reporter looked at U.S. marines on the blood-soaked Pacific island of Guadalcanal and concluded that ‘the uniforms and the bravado were just camouflage. They were just boys — ex-grocery boys, ex-bank clerks, ex-schoolboys, boys not killers.’
Life in the military was a shock for these youngsters from the moment they were called up. Many had never lived away from home before and hated the indignities and discomforts of military discipline and communal barrack-room living.
Some were upset by swearing and crudity they had never encountered before. Among Americans, everything seemed to be ‘tough sh*t’ and no sentence was complete without its obscene expletives — the effing officers made them dig effing foxholes before they received effing rations or stood effing guard.
Even the most delicately reared recruits acquired this universal military habit of speech. British soldier William Chappell never ceased to ache for the civilian world from which he had been torn.
He missed his home and his friends and bemoaned the loss of his career. His feet hurt, he was ‘sick of khaki, and all the monotonous, slow, fiddle-de-dee of Army life.’
But if service life was bad enough before going into action, then combat itself was an infinitely worse experience. ‘With our tent and clothing wet and half-frozen,’ wrote one soldier, ‘I felt numb to the point of almost not caring what happened to me.’
Trench foot was endemic, dysentery commonplace. Eugene Sledge, an American marine, recoiled from the brutish state to which the battlefield reduced him. ‘The personal bodily filth was difficult to tolerate. I stank! It bothered almost everyone I knew.’
Excretory processes became an obsession. In battlefield conditions, many never made it to a latrine. But as one soldier recalled: ‘No one said anything about how you smelt, because everyone smelled bad.’
And then there was fear, an ever-present sensation, for all that some tried to deny it. Sledge was terrified when his unit came under shell fire. ‘Every muscle in my body contracted. I braced myself but felt utterly helpless. My teeth ground against each other, my heart pounded, my mouth dried, my eyes narrowed, sweat poured over me, my breath came in short irregular gasps, and I was afraid to swallow lest I choke.
‘I always prayed, sometimes out loud. To me, artillery was an invention from hell. To be killed by a bullet seemed clean and surgical. But shells would not only tear and rip the body, they tortured one’s mind almost beyond the brink of sanity.
'After each shell I was wrung out, limp and exhausted.’
Lieutenant Peter White of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers recalled a youngster in his troop reduced to ‘whimpering misery’ as bombs fell. ‘He grovelled in the sand moaning: “Oh God! Oh God, when will it stop, sir?” I felt a wealth of sympathy for him, but dared not show it for he would just collapse the more.
‘No one mocked him or made fun. We had all tasted too vividly of the ordeal ourselves to feel anything but great compassion.’
As Lt Norman Craig waited for the Battle of Alamein to begin in the North African desert, he, too, reflected on the universal nature of fear.
‘The popular belief that in battle there are two kinds of person — the sensitive, who suffer torment, and the unimaginative few who know no fear and go blithely on — is a fallacy. Everyone is as scared as the next man, for no imagination is needed to foresee the possibility of death or mutilation. It is just that some manage to conceal their fear better than others.’
But officers like him could not afford to show their feelings. ‘We had to feign a casual and cheerful optimism to create an illusion of normality and make it seem as if there was nothing in the least strange about what was going on.’
Fear could be contagious if it took hold, spreading faster than a fire. ‘Once the first man runs,’ said an American paratrooper, who witnessed it happening to fellow Americans in the Battle of the Bulge, ‘others follow. Soon there are hordes of men running, all of them wild-eyed and driven by fear.’
With experience, men overcame their initial delusion that all those beneath an artillery barrage or manning a foxhole on the front line were doomed to die. They discovered the truth — that most soldiers survive most battles.
Thereafter, it became a matter of personal taste whether an individual decided that he himself was going to be among the fortunate, or condemned to join the dead. ‘Fate, not the Germans, was our undiscriminating enemy,’ wrote a Royal Engineer corporal in the thick of the fighting in Sicily.
Some men resigned themselves to the inevitability of death, and were all the calmer for it: ‘Strangely, the giving-up of hope re-instills hope in you. You concentrate on little things — the next meal, the next bottle of booze, the next sunrise, the next bath.’
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.
But there was much to unnerve them. In combat, the grotesque became normal. An American infantryman watched a shell hit a fellow soldier: ‘He disintegrated, leaving only patches and puddles of flesh and bone spattered in the mud. I sat and ate my food. I had not known him.’
Another young GI was stuck in a foxhole when his buddy was ripped by a machine-gun burst from the thigh to the waist and through the stomach. ‘We were cut off and by ourselves, and we both knew he was going to die. We had no morphine to ease his pain, so I tried to knock him out. I whacked his jaw as hard as I could with a helmet, because he wanted to be put out. It didn’t work, and he slowly froze to death and bled to death.’
A different soldier in the same battle became so desperate in his misery that he found himself gazing with envy at corpses. ‘They looked peaceful. The War was over for them.’
Horrific experiences like these opened a chasm between those who went through them and those who did not. In all armies, soldiers serving with forward units shared a contempt for the much larger number of men in the huge logistics ‘tail’ at the rear, who faced negligible risk.
The gulf was even greater with loved ones back at home. Canadian Farley Mowat wrote to his family from the Italian front: ‘We are in different worlds, on totally different planes. I don’t really know you any more.’
To cope with the horrors they were experiencing, most men under fire focused upon immediacies and loyalties towards each other. ‘Life was free of all its complexities,’ Norman Craig recalled.
‘To stay alive, to lead once more a normal existence, to know again warmth, comfort and safety — what else could one conceivably demand. To be allowed to continue to live — nothing else mattered.’
Although soldiers often talked about women, under the stress and unyielding discomfort of being at war most craved simple pleasures, among which sex scarcely featured. It was home they wanted, whether that was in London, New York, Berlin or Tokyo.
A U.S. Marine officer in the South Pacific fantasised about what he would do if he got back in one piece. His dreams were surprisingly mundane. ‘I’m going to start wearing pyjamas again. I’m going to polish off a few eggs and several pints of milk. A few hot baths are also in order.
‘But I’m saving the best for last — I’m going to spend a whole day flushing a toilet, just to hear the water run.’
Another American officer, 25-year-old Captain Henry Waskow, yearned for toast. ‘When we get back to the States, I’m going to get me one of those smart-aleck toasters where you put the bread in and it pops up,’ he declared. A few seconds later, he was mortally wounded by a fragment from a German shell.
No wonder a powerful sensation among millions of people was that of injustice. They did not believe they merited the plagues of peril, privation, loneliness and horror that had swept them away from their familiar lives into alien and mortally dangerous environments.
Some didn’t mind. The Wehrmacht’s Captain Rolf-Helmut Schröder remembered his campaign experience ‘with gratitude’, despite being wounded three times. ‘We were proud to belong to the German army,’ said another officer, who ended up as a prisoner-of-war in Russia.
But few soldiers were actually eager to join battle. A 19-year-old American recruit was not unusual in openly admitting he had no lust for glory. He and his comrades went to war in the hope that ‘somehow we wouldn’t be in harm’s way’.
It was a tough job for their officers to turn at least some of them into fighters with the guts and the tenacity to close with the enemy, which was the only way to win battles. That meant, ‘conditioning them to enjoy killing’, according to one battalion commander, and it was no easy task with men from democratic nations.
Such qualms did not seem to affect recruits to the armies of totalitarian regimes. Germany and the Soviet Union produced formidable citizen soldiers who again and again fought more convincingly than their Anglo-American counterparts.
With more freedom of choice, British and American soldiers were less willing to accept sacrifice. They expended prodigious quantities of ammunition to secure even modest local objectives and required far larger quantities of food and comforts than other armies deemed necessary. For every pound of supplies the Japanese transported to their garrisons, the U.S. shipped two tons to its own forces.
The same reluctance to endure went for civilians. It is unthinkable that British people would have eaten each other rather than surrender London or Birmingham — as happened during the 900-day siege of Leningrad.
The inhumanity of the war on the Eastern Front was beyond the imaginings of those in the West. A Soviet fighter plane landed back at its base with human flesh adhering to its radiator grille, after a German ammunition truck exploded beneath it. ‘Aryan meat!’ the squadron commander pronounced to laughter as he picked off fragments.
‘This is a pitiless time, a time of iron,’ a war correspondent who observed this wrote in his diary.
Another met a Russian peasant carrying a sack of frozen human legs, which he proposed to thaw on a stove in order to remove their boots
A people who could endure such things displayed qualities of endurance the Western Allies lacked.
Those qualities were an essential aspect of the hell let loose in World War II and, like it or not, they were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism.
All content here copyright Max Hastings
