Stephen Ambrose: Americans at War

When I opened this book and saw the first essay concerned the Civil War, I wasn't sure I wanted to read it.

But Stephen Ambrose being Stephen Ambrose, and me being a stubborn reader who doesn't like to give up on books, I read. And read. And kept on reading.

Ambrose, in 252 pages, takes the reader from the U.S. Civil War to today's world, accurately predicting pilotless aircraft and conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and shedding light on the events and figures in America's wars from the mid-1800s into the future.

I enjoyed his profiles of Douglas MacArthur and George Patton as a World War II buff.

But his essays on the homefront and later on the My Lai massacre were the best parts of the book.

Ambrose, in only a few dozen pages, took me beyond the rah-rah of a nation united into a nation I vaguely remember reading about in some of the history books we had a home: Fighting a racist war against Japan while maintaining a segregated army and putting Japanese-Americans into prisons for the duration. He took us from Franklin Delano Roosevelt hoping to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible to advocating for firebombing cities in the hopes it would end the war sooner.

Mistakes sown there led to similar mistakes in Vietnam, where racism continued to bubble and mixed signals really fuddled the mission of the US in that nation.

Ambrose, of course, has the advantage of looking back at history to see the rights and wrongs, but also reminds us that we have no control over the past and that the only control we have on the future is remaining aware of what's going on now. He mentioned this quote from humorist James Thurber, and it's really stuck with me:

That's something I'm going to try to remember myself.

Book Review: The Dirks Escape, by C. Brandon Rimmer

I'm going to be a little more cautious with this review than I've been on others, because I don't want to denigrate the families that experienced this awful situation.

First, the cover:

I'm an absolute sucker for World War II nonfiction, particularly Holocaust literature. And the word "Holocaust" certainly appears on the cover of this book.

However.

The Holocaust -- the actual Holocaust -- is mentioned in passing in this telling. But the characters are certainly not "fleeing from the specter of the Holocaust." They are a family of German Lutherans fleeing the Soviet occupation of East Germany, yes, but the Holocaust plays no role whatsoever in their story.

I imagine -- I hope -- this was more of a marketing trick on the part of the publisher than a misdirection of the part of the author, but you never know.

So take that in mind as you read this book.

Told as a tale of a family fleeing Soviet occupation, this story works. Like many functionaries who were even moderately successful during the War, Gerhard Dirks was a member of the Nazi party, though it's made clear on some kind of Scientology level that his membership was more perfunctory than ideological, at least as it's presented in the book. Nevertheless, live under occupation would not have been pleasant, so Nazi or not I'd have want to have left as well.

There was a lot more telling in this book than showing, which makes it a bit harder to read. This might be more of a service to the books' intended audience (it's also sold as a conversion to Christianity from atheism, and is reviewed by Billy Graham on the back cover). The audience might not want a more vivid telling, as is typical in about 99.9% of the World War II books I've read.

So a good read, but go in with lower expectations than the cover might demand.

Also, Rimmer:

[Swallows a Yo-Yo]

There seems to be a lot of division among the World War II cognoscenti concerning Gregory A. Freeman's book "The Forgotten 500," telling the tale of more than 500 Allied servicemen rescued by the OSS from Yugoslavia, due in part to the sheltering of the servicemen by those allied with Draza Mihailovich. Some are accusing Freeman of projecting modern conservative anti-Communist political leanings into the story.

That's as may be; I know nothing of Freeman's politics.

But some of the criticism leveled at the story is laughable, and comes with modern projecting of its own, so I'm not going to discuss it. Suffice it to say that Communism *was* as much of a bogeyman in the 1930s and 1940s as it was in the 1980s, and the Stuka bombers, while vulnerable to figher attack, were also used to extreme success during the Blizkreig and afterward.

What I do appreicate are the firsthand stories shared in this book -- and I'll always go with firsthand stories over anything else. Freeman tells a good tale, from start to finish, even in parts of the book that others have described as "boring." I wasn't bored reading this. I was surprised many times, shocked a few times, and reminded many times of the concern raised -- and I wish I could remember who said it -- in stating that nations excelled at doing great things at times of war, and often fail to rise to that level of dedication and excellence in times of peace. Freeman's book is a good reminder of people getting stuck in a bad situation and fighting their way through it to survive. And if that's the lesson I get from reading this book, I'm better off for it.

The book is also a good reminder that even the Allies -- the US included -- didn't always fight with honor during what Studs Terkel called The "Good" War. Anyone looking for a saint will be disappointed to find them in the company of devils.

The photo above is from Google Maps and shows the "aerodrom" at Pranjane, as described in Freeman's book. It seems someone there thought it fitting to remember what happened there, despite the politic slop and modern projections, anti-communist or what have you, aside. Seems like these airmen, who saw the sacrifices these people did, and fought for recognition for them and their leaders for decades, still have some fights to make.

Let Us all Unite!

Just read this on the final page of Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers," and for what it's worth I think it's accurate:

"In general, in assessing the motivation of the [World War II] GIs, there is agreement that patriotism or any other form of idealism had little if anything to do with [being able to do what they did]. The GIs fought because they had to. What held them together was not country and flag, but unit cohesion. It has been my experience through four decades of interviewing ex-GIs, that such generalizations are true enough.

And yet there is something more. Although the GIs were and are embarrassed to talk or write about the cause they fought for, in marked contrast to their great-grandfathers who fought in the Civil War, they were the children of democracy and did more to help spread democracy around the world than any other generation in history.

At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful."

[Pulls out soapbox.] In our political world, the "unit cohesion" that exists generally doesn't care about the difference between right and wrong, but only about having power. We're much closer to George Orwell's future of "imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever" than these GIs would care to have us be.

Anzio, by Lloyd Clark

Of any of the books I’ve read about World War II, Lloyd Clark’s “Anzio” has succeeded the most in driving home the point that the average soldier did not see the war in campaigns, in maps, in rolling columns of vehicles achieving objective after objective, but rather as an intimate, nasty little thing that tried to kill you as you were already very likely cold, wet, miserable, homesick, scared to death, smelly, hungry, and entirely unsure you’d survive to see the next lull.

And maybe that’s just the proximity of reading “Anzio” talking.

But there are moments.

I kept wanting to see the bigger picture. But Clark writes the book in a claustrophobic fashion, offering only the smattering of a bigger picture with the maps that end each section. I kept bookmarking the maps, referring back to them often, and often feeling frustrated that my knowledge of Italian geography was limited enough I didn’t really know what was beyond the map edges.
Thus it must be like to be a soldier.

Clark quotes Private Paul van der Linden, in such a claustrophobic moment, both literally and figuratively:

It was a curious experience. There I was lying on a hard cold floor quite safe really, whilst outside it was hell . . . my arm and chest were painful. The doctor had taken some of the shell splinters out, but other were too deep. I floated in and out of consciousness. I preferred it when I was out, because then the pain went away and I couldn’t hear what was going on  . . . The sounds were confusing. I’d hear a yell, then a rat-a-tat-a-tat followed by the boom of a grenade. It was a real scrap . . . Sometimes I woke up to find out own guns targeting the Caves trying to keep the Germans at bay. A massive explosion would rock the floor and suck the air out of the place. The noise was so great that you’d be deaf for minutes or hours afterwards. And so on it went.

So too does Ted Jones recall in Clark’s book:

But for Ted [the names of the places he fought] only provoke memories of sights, smells and sounds. Momentarily lost in the past, the distinguished-looking old man stares at the carpet. Then, with no prompting, he recalls the moment when a vicious German artillery bombardment shattered his company’s position during an enemy counter-attack hear the Via Anziante. From the perspective of his narrow slit trench he remembers the whine of approaching shells, the convulsive heave of explosions, the chest-pounding concussion. The smell of wet earth mixed with cordite. He remembers the buzz of a passing bullet and the staccato reply of the Bren guns. He remembers the screams of the wounded and the terrifying yells of the advancing German infantry. Ted Jones recalls his friend dying beside him with absolute clarity. “He made a gurgling sound and was gone.”

Thus it must be like to be a soldier.

Jones survived to tell his story to Clark as an old man. But it’s clear Anzio never really left, or he never left Anzio.

And thus it is today, with parts of the world plunged into what feels like perpetual “we have always been at war with East Asia” war. Only one thing can be said: Poo-tee weet?

Louis L'Amour Was Right

Writers are often scrambling to find resources to use to get things right.

Anyone writing about World War II ought to find a gem in Bill Mauldin’s 1945 book “Up Front,” which I’m reading at the moment. I have no plans to write a World War II story, but y’all know the war is kind of a hobby of mine. Reading about it, anyway.

Mauldin is best known, of course, for his cartoons, and admits up front in “Up Front” that’s he’s not a writer. Anyone from the Greatest Generation is familiar with his cartoon GIs, Willie and Joe. Willie was featured on the cover of Time Magazine on June 18, 1945 – and both appeared in a Peanuts comic strip in 1998 (incidentally the last time Maudlin drew Willie and Joe for publication before he died in 2003).

Here’s a great example of what I mean when I say writers ought to find Maudlin useful:

You can usually tell what kind of fighting went on in a town, and how much was necessary to take it, by the wreckage that remains. If the buildings are fairly intact, with only broken windows, doors, and pocked walls, it was a quick, hand-to-hand street fight with small arms and grenades and perhaps a mortar or two.

If most of the walls are still standing, but the roofs have gaping holes, and many rooms are shattered, then the entry was preceded by an artillery barrage. If some of the holes are in the slopes of the roofs facing the retreating enemy, then he gave the town a plastering after he left.

But if there isn’t much town left at all, then planes have been around. Bombs sort of lift things up in the air and drop them in a heap. Even the enormous sheet-metal doors with which shop-owners shutter their establishments buckle and balloon out into grotesque swollen shapes.

In three short paragraphs, Mauldin drops a treasure into the laps of any World War II writer. Many a good scene and many a good character could be inspired by this concise bit of information (kinda like Louis L’Amour implies in his book “Education of A Wandering Man”).

Want more? Here’s the germ of a story right here:

I heard of a soldier who spent his entire time overseas in repple-depples, and went home on rotation without ever having been assigned. His home-town paper called him a “veteran of the Italian campaign.”

(It helps to know a repple-depple is a “replacement depot,” where newly-arrived soldiers and soldiers leaving hospital awaited reassignment to a combat unit.

Mauldin also includes this common-sense caution, aimed (now) directly at writers:

Often soldiers who are going home say they are going to tell the people how fortunate we were to stop the enemy before he was able to come home and tear up our country. They are also going to tell the people that it is a pretty rough life over here.

I’ve tried to do that in my drawings and I know that many thousands of guys who have gone back have tried to do it, too. But no matter how much we try we can never give the folks at home any idea of what was really is. I guess you have to go through it to understand its horror. You can’t understand it by reading magazines or newspapers or by looking at pictures of by going to newsreels. You have to smell it and feel it all around you until you can’t imagine what it used to be like when you walked on a sidewalk or tossed clubs up into hose chestnut trees or fished for perch or when you did anything at all without a pack, a rifle, and a bunch of grenades.

Even with good source material, sometimes the best way to write about something is to be there.

Of course, that’s not always possible. Next best thing? Find someone who’s been there. Like Bill Mauldin.