BOOK REVIEW: JOSEPH SHOEMON'S "CROSSES IN THE WIND"

Here was a royal fellowship of death. -- "Henry V," Act IV, Scene 8

There are certain aspects of war which have been written about endlessly. Memoirs by infantrymen, for example, abound. Ditto paratroopers, fighter pilots, bomber crewmen, snipers, commandos, submariners, and Marines. And when we think of the Second World War, it's important to remember that something like fifteen million men and several hundred thousand women served in the military in one capacity or other. There are other areas, however, which are neglected or in some cases, totally unexplored. CROSSES IN THE WIND covers a subject which, up 'til now, I had only seen briefly examined by the legendary WW2 journalist Ernie Pyle: Graves Registration. The soldiers who had to collect the dead, identify them, and bury their remains. Author Joseph Shoeman was well qualified to paint this picture, having commanded a G.R. company in WW2 (European Theater) which buried 21,000 American soldiers and probably two or three times that many Germans.

Now, and at the risk of interjecting a commercial for my own work in this review, I must say that when it comes to the Second World War especially, Americans have a protective and occasionally stupid attitude -- stupid meaning literally stupid, i.e. willfully ignorant. WW2 is for Americans a sacred moment in our history: it is far more mythologized than the Revolutionary War or even the Civil War, and as a result of a mountain of half-fantastical war movies and libraries full of cheerleading "history" books heavy on propaganda and light on history which have been produced in the last eighty years, the uglier and nastier realities of our involvement in the conflict have been forgotten, denied or dressed up in angelic clothing. When I wrote SINNER'S CROSS, the first of my own WW2 novels, I did so with the conscious purpose of discussing subjects which by and large have been ignored because they don't fit the haloed Ambrose - Spielberg narrative. Now, I am not claiming this haloed narrative, complete with stirring and elegaic music by John Williams, is wrong per se: I am merely stating it is incomplete, because it ignores or minimizes much of what is uncomfortable.

If you doubt me on this, allow me to provide irrefutable evidence provided by none other that General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, who, when he wrote his own memoir of the war, CRUSADE IN EUROPE, devoted exactly fifteen words to the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, which was the longest battle ever fought in the history of the United States Army. Those words were: "The Germans, aided by geography, put up an unusually stubborn defense, but Yankee doggedness won through." That's it. That's all the ink he spent on a battle in which 14,000 American soldiers were killed and anywhere between 33,000 and 50,000 were wounded. Dear old Ike could not afford to say more, because even a cursory analysis of the campaign would have exposed glaring deficiencies in his leadership, the leadership of Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges, "Lightning" Joe Collins and various other much celebrated brass hats who could think of no better strategy than feeding one infantry division after another into the meatgrinder almost without results. It was better for Ike to stay silent. As a result, the American public is almost totally ignorant of the Huertgen Forest Campaign, because it is "inconvenient to history." It is the spatter of blood, the clot of mud, the faint smell of decomposition, the scream in the distance that unsettles our pride and makes nonsens of the red, white and blue cartoon we see up on the screen.

CROSSES IN THE WIND is a short but very effective memoir of Shoemon's service with the Graves Registration company, and by its very existence it goes against this sanitized, deficient sort of narrative, by probing the grisly, unglamorous side of the war, one which cannot be made attractive by beautiful sountracks, snappy dialog or brilliant cinematography. Shoemon takes the reader from his training in the States, to deployment to England, and finally to France just after D-Day. He explains how the unit operated and what its responsibilities were, which included the creation of both temporary and permanent military cemeteries. He explains what tasks the individual soldiers in the company had, and some of the difficulties they faced -- internally, from interfering superiors, and externally, from German bombs and shells. (In one instance he records a massive night air raid by the Luftwaffe which blew up some fuel and ammo dumps near his position.) He takes the reader from Normandy to the end of the war, when much additional work was done locating bodies, identifying and burying them, and erecting some of the largest military cemeteries in Europe. I was struck, and moved, by his pride in his unit and by the reverence he and his men had for the dead. They took everything they did with the utmost seriousness and never seemed to become cynical, taking great care to produce cemeteries, even temporary ones, of the greatest aesthetic beauty possible: they went as far as to obtain truckloads of gravel, enormities of seeds and flowers, and all other items necessary to beautify the cemeteries. They even created grave sites for dead Germans, though they were somewhat less ornate and always kept well separated from Allied dead. His greatest passion, and that of his men, was in doing everything possible to identify unknown soldiers. Dental records, photographs, fingerprints and various other methods were used, including the rehydration of fingertips to get prints, and when these sometimes failed, the unit did not give up but sidelined the case for additional investigation when time permitted. The respect an army shows its fallen goes a long way to explaining what kind of values it has -- witness the dead of the present-day Russian army in Ukraine, abandoned and left to rot.

Now I would be lying if I said the book had the detail that I wanted. It's under 200 pages (a lengthy appendix gives it a deceptive thickness), and Shomon provides too much poorly written historical background, and not enough detail about what he and his company did, sometimes -- quite often -- resorting to bland generalities when the narrative calls for disgusting honesty. If memory serves, he explicitly states in the opening that he doesn't want to go into too much anecdotal detail because it would be too painful for those who lost loved ones in the war to read about. Since he wrote this book in 1947, just two years after the end of the war, I completely understand this impulse, but it left me with the feeling that there was a great deal left on the table. Gruesome details kind of go hand in hand with war memoirs, and I would think most especially in this case. Lest I seem as if I'm contradicting myself here, Shoemon is manifestly not trying to sanitize the war or glamorize it in any way whatsoever, but his humanity prevented him from slamming home its full horror.

That having been said, Shomon's picture of the Graves Registration companies in war is just about the only one we have of which I'm aware, and this little book is highly readable and quite informative despite its omissions and modest size. It's fascinating to think that the graves of which he speaks are still standing and still just as meticulously tended in 2022 as they were in 1946. Whatever your opinion of the military, anyone who claims that it is disrespectful to the memory of its dead is simply lying to you. (How it treats its living veterans is another matter entirely. But then again, how American society treats its living veterans vs. its "honored dead" is also another matter entirely, and one in which we are all of us complicit.

Now, it so happens I have a slight, accidental connection to the author. At a criminal trial that took place this year, I was chatting with one of my witnesses before he took the stand, and somehow the subject of this book came up. He expressed complete astonishment that I had read it, and told me that his father not only had served with Shoemon's company, he is mentioned no less than nine times in Shoemon's book. I confirmed this to be true. It is a mark of what a small world we live in, and how closely connected we are both to each other and to the dead who gave up their tomorrows so that we could sit here in comfort and, perhaps, spare a moment to reflect upon their sacrifice.