PAUL FUSSELL
Hors de combat
On August 31st, 1989, I took a flight from Los Angeles to London, arriving on September 1st, 1989, which was universally celebrated as the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War.
This is true if you accept that this massive transformative experience, begun in Poland in 1939, ending in 1945, was a sequel to the previous massive transformative experience of 1914-1918, or really just the end of the restive uneasy peace of the interregnum that had been the state of international affairs, in the West, at the very least, for two decades.
Of course, we can also trace the beginnings of this massive transformative experience to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, but that doesn’t fit into the tidier narrative we’ve been telling ourselves for ages. See, as an example of this, The World War II Museum in New Orleans…or, as a pal of mine calls it, the United States of America’s World War II Museum.
In an actual and honest appraisal, from my perspective at any rate, that mid century massive transformative event begins and ends in Asia.
That said, after deplaning in the UK, Glen Miller’s IN THE MOOD was playing everywhere and all the time. This seemed to be the anthem of recollection for those who’d survived the war, and those too young to have been there, who chose to remember it with a warped sort of giddy nostalgia for a catastrophic experience they’d been blessed by missing.
Significantly, and yes, oddly coincidentally, I read Paul Fussell’s WARTIME: UNDERSTANDING AND BEHAVIOR IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR on the flight. I had read an excerpt from the book, published in THE ATLANTIC, a few months earlier. This piece, a chapter, which could and perhaps should have been entitled WAR AND DISMEMBERMENT, shook me in the brutal matter-of-factness of its prose.
The book continues this pitiless perspective, never romanticizing his very real and life changing experience in combat as a twenty year old Lieutenant in field command of a rifle company. Fussell manages to drain all but the grimly dreary terror from the day to day business of his wartime experience.
This reading reminded me of what THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE might have been in a less censorious time. One significant passage in WARTIME leapt out at me, and I paraphrase; that the depiction of severed heads and limbs in Medieval tapestries is more honest and closer to the actual experience of combat than, say, the American Civil War images of the celebrated photographer Matthew Brady.
His discussion of drunkenness in combat, and the very necessity of that drunkenness for many of his fellow soldiers in order to fulfill their duties, of cowardice under fire, of debauchery on leave, is relentless and is, of course, of no interest to a consumer base that wants nothing more than to elevate what has come to be called, without an iota of irony, The Greatest Generation, to the status of demigods.
It’s no wonder that the general public embraced the boy scout romantic hagiography of Stephen Ambrose, too young to have served or seen combat, and conspicuously ignores this, and other narratives by Fussell, a veteran wounded and damaged in more ways than the merely physical.
When I saw Steven Spielberg’s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, I was struck by how much of those first horrific minutes of the film, of the savagery of machine gun slaughter cutting men down and in half on Omaha beach, was informed by Fussell’s WARTIME, while so much of the rest of the film cleaved to the source material for the screenplay, Stephen Ambrose’s book on D-Day.
The HBO series, BAND OF BROTHERS, further enhanced Ambrose’s reputation as a source of enlightenment in regard to the United States Army’s role in the liberation of Europe, with no real indication of the sort of on the ground under fire real life experience recorded in Fussell’s book and further writings on the subject.
In 2007’s THE WAR, a Ken Burns documentary series about the Second World War, Fussell appears briefly, one of several talking heads, and visibly loses it on camera, bursting into tears in his recollection of that experience. His eminence, by dint of his actual wartime experience, and his brilliant writing on that experience, was never particularly acknowledged. As noted, only one of several talking heads.
From all reports, I’ve come to think of Fussell as a difficult and complex figure, a man comfortable in his own skin, in his own perception of reality, with little regard for others, or for the way those others might regard him.
I find his work occasionally intimidating, and I have little regret in never having met him in person. His wife’s memoir of her relationship with him paints a picture of a man who took the notion of not suffering fools gladly to what sounds like potentially damaging ends.
Fussell spent much of his adult life as an academic, in the States and in Europe. His THE GREAT WAR IN MODERN MEMORY has a detachment from its subject, a detachment understandably absent from his own retelling of his wartime combat experience. Its concentration on the work of the wartime poets is illuminating, much bereft of the harsh tone that informs his other work. It led me to the work of Robert Graves, and of Siegfried Sassoon, as well.
All that said, I’ve come to believe that it’s a specific essay in that other work, an essay that doesn’t so much as relate a lived experience but offers an opinion on an issue that harked back to the Second World War, that conveniently informs and implicitly justifies the distance created by the popular historians and Fussell’s experiences, and experiential memory.
Fussell was wounded in Europe, earning the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. After the defeat of Germany, he returned to the States, rehabilitated, and was reassigned to another unit, charged with the incipient invasion and conquest of Japan. He rightfully assumed he had survived war in Europe, only to likely be killed in the Pacific.
Like most, if not all, of his fellow combat veterans, he was far from disappointed in the destruction wrought by Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bombs.
In 1995, in the run up to the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the end of the Second World War, first V-E Day, May 8th, 1945, and V-J Day, September 2nd, 1945, there was a sudden outburst of public retroactive guilt from representatives of the public and private sectors, over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, the first and so far only deployment of nuclear weapons in war, which put a rapid end to combat in the Pacific, a war still being brutally fought, island by island. To say that this media mea culpa enraged Fussell is to grossly understate the case.
He replied with a scathing essay, provocatively entitled, to say the very least, THANK GOD FOR THE ATOMIC BOMB. I won’t litanize the bullet points; whether you agree with his point of view or not, the piece, like just about everything Fussell wrote, is worth the time invested in reading it.
In sum, Fussell explicitly states his gratitude for the two bombs, which, and rightfully so, he insists ended a war that was likely to continue until 1947 with an eventual victory; a victory that would have cost several hundred thousands of American lives in what was projected by strategists to be two additional years of hard fought combat and conquest.
He singles out John Kenneth Galbraith, a major player in the symphony of guilt, as one of those strategists, a man who spent his war manning a desk, as opposed to using a rifle. It is a harsh and scathing screed, bilious in its contempt for the second guessing imposed on those who made choices a half century earlier, by men and women with no dog in the fight.
I have not read every word Fussell wrote, but quite a bit of it. His prose, its passion, its disdain for banality, even, as much as I hesitate to say it, his condescension, has informed my way of thinking since that overnight flight in 1989.
Trust me on this.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince.