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Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War
Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Frank Kermode, in The New York Times Book Review, hailed it as "an important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds," and Lionel Trilling called it simply "one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time." In its panoramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world.
Now, in Wartime, Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict he himself fought in, to weave a narrative that is both more intensely personal and more wide-ranging. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, on the image of the Great War in literature, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. He analyzes the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality (the early belief, for instance, that the war could be won by "precision bombing," that is, by long distance); he describes the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most important, he emphasizes the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and wit. Of course, no Fussell book would be complete without some serious discussion of the literature of the time. He examines, for instance, how the great privations of wartime (when oranges would be raffled off as valued prizes) resulted in rococo prose styles that dwelt longingly on lavish dinners, and how the "high-mindedness" of the era and the almost pathological need to "accentuate the positive" led to the downfall of the acerbic H.L. Mencken and the ascent of E.B. White. He also offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world.
Fussell conveys the essence of that wartime as no other writer before him. For the past fifty years, the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by "the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty." Americans, he says, have never understood what the Second World War was really like. In this stunning volume, he offers such an understanding.
Now, in Wartime, Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict he himself fought in, to weave a narrative that is both more intensely personal and more wide-ranging. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, on the image of the Great War in literature, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. He analyzes the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality (the early belief, for instance, that the war could be won by "precision bombing," that is, by long distance); he describes the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most important, he emphasizes the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and wit. Of course, no Fussell book would be complete without some serious discussion of the literature of the time. He examines, for instance, how the great privations of wartime (when oranges would be raffled off as valued prizes) resulted in rococo prose styles that dwelt longingly on lavish dinners, and how the "high-mindedness" of the era and the almost pathological need to "accentuate the positive" led to the downfall of the acerbic H.L. Mencken and the ascent of E.B. White. He also offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world.
Fussell conveys the essence of that wartime as no other writer before him. For the past fifty years, the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by "the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty." Americans, he says, have never understood what the Second World War was really like. In this stunning volume, he offers such an understanding.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
63 people are currently reading
1456 people want to read
About the author
Paul Fussell
56 books134 followersPaul Fussell was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings covered a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America’s class system. He was an U.S. Army Infantry officer in the European theater during World War II (103rd U.S. Infantry Division) and was awarded both the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. He is best known for his writings about World War I and II.
He began his teaching career at Connecticut College (1951–55) before moving to Rutgers University in 1955 and finally the University of Pennsylvania in 1983. He also taught at the University of Heidelberg (1957–58) and King’s College London (1990–92). As a teacher, he traveled widely with his family throughout Europe during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, taking Fulbright and sabbatical years in Germany, England and France.
He began his teaching career at Connecticut College (1951–55) before moving to Rutgers University in 1955 and finally the University of Pennsylvania in 1983. He also taught at the University of Heidelberg (1957–58) and King’s College London (1990–92). As a teacher, he traveled widely with his family throughout Europe during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, taking Fulbright and sabbatical years in Germany, England and France.
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August 6, 2010
A joke told during World War Two in England :
Man goes into a cafe, asks for the menu. He wants breakfast.
"I'll have bacon and mushrooms please."
Waiter says "Sorry sir, we haven't got any bacon or mushrooms, it's because of rationing."
"Okay, I'll have eggs on toast."
"Sorry sir, no eggs."
"No eggs? No bacon? What have you got then?"
"Well, we've got sausages. And a few kind words."
"All right, I'll have that then."
After a few moments the waiter brings a plate of sausages. The man says
"What about the few kind words?"
The waiter says "I wouldn't eat those sausages."
*************
I read this book years ago and I remember it was a kind of anti-romantic-myth anti-heroism corrective to the bucketfuls of soft focus and soft soap which you see in all those WW2 movies which were cranked out from the 40s to the 60s and which men of a certain age used to lap up. It's old fashioned because Paul Fussell clearly thought he was saying some shocking things, and times have moved on a whole lot since then and we all know these shocking things. We assume them.
That's what I thought when I read this. But now....every other day, miserably, the BBC reports the death of another British soldier in Afghanistan. And they dutifully report how he was very brave, a credit to his company, beloved by all, died a hero, the very heart and soul of our glorious fighting forces, a great guy, a father, a friend, a brother, a son. And conversely, even now, in 2010, every act by the other side, the Taliban is described routinely as dishonourable, using civilian shields, using roadside bombs - be assured, my radio, tv and newspapers tell me, our enemy has no courage, will soon turn and run, their soldiers motivated only by money and having no loyalty, their ideology despicable, their so-called army a joke. And yet there they still are, and there we still are, and we haven't beaten them, with our drone plane attacks and our helicopter gunships and our billions of dollars. Something doesn't add up. I think this propaganda thing is still going on. Paul Fussell... not as out of date as I thought.
Man goes into a cafe, asks for the menu. He wants breakfast.
"I'll have bacon and mushrooms please."
Waiter says "Sorry sir, we haven't got any bacon or mushrooms, it's because of rationing."
"Okay, I'll have eggs on toast."
"Sorry sir, no eggs."
"No eggs? No bacon? What have you got then?"
"Well, we've got sausages. And a few kind words."
"All right, I'll have that then."
After a few moments the waiter brings a plate of sausages. The man says
"What about the few kind words?"
The waiter says "I wouldn't eat those sausages."
*************
I read this book years ago and I remember it was a kind of anti-romantic-myth anti-heroism corrective to the bucketfuls of soft focus and soft soap which you see in all those WW2 movies which were cranked out from the 40s to the 60s and which men of a certain age used to lap up. It's old fashioned because Paul Fussell clearly thought he was saying some shocking things, and times have moved on a whole lot since then and we all know these shocking things. We assume them.
That's what I thought when I read this. But now....every other day, miserably, the BBC reports the death of another British soldier in Afghanistan. And they dutifully report how he was very brave, a credit to his company, beloved by all, died a hero, the very heart and soul of our glorious fighting forces, a great guy, a father, a friend, a brother, a son. And conversely, even now, in 2010, every act by the other side, the Taliban is described routinely as dishonourable, using civilian shields, using roadside bombs - be assured, my radio, tv and newspapers tell me, our enemy has no courage, will soon turn and run, their soldiers motivated only by money and having no loyalty, their ideology despicable, their so-called army a joke. And yet there they still are, and there we still are, and we haven't beaten them, with our drone plane attacks and our helicopter gunships and our billions of dollars. Something doesn't add up. I think this propaganda thing is still going on. Paul Fussell... not as out of date as I thought.
December 3, 2014
------------------------------------------------
This is my second attempt to write a responsible, but emotionally honest review of this powerful and important book.
Paul Fussell was an American Infantry Lieutenant, and a combat veteran of World War II.
This is the book that put Paul Fussel on the map for me. And, although The Great War and Modern Memory is Fussell's most acclaimed work, and is deservedly an excellent book; this book is a far greater work, in my own opinion.
He published this book in 1990 at the beginning of the (too frequently called) “Celebrations” of the 50 year anniversaries of that war in this country, more properly, called “Commemorations” or “Memorials” in other countries. My guess is that the timing of this publication was intentional. Paul Fussell was no fan of World War II, nor America's fatuous glamorization nor sanctification of that war. Paul Fussel, like his fellow writers and WWII combat veterans Kurt Vonnegut and Howard Zinn was not at all impressed with the political piety that has come to represent that war in place of actual, accurate memory
Wartime is his extended analytic essay or collection of essays. These essays bluntly relate the on-the-ground experiences, the grotesque and demeaning experiences of those people (military and civilian) unfortunate enough to find themselves at the physical center of World War II's mass warfare. It is not a picture, which renders that experience as anything but brutal and meat-grinding. It is not a picture to inspire “Celebration”
The word "fatuous" is one that I learned from Paul Fussell. And there is no fatuous flag waving celebration of our "Greatest Generation" in this book..
Fatuous is his description of the arrogant mindless pride of those 95% American veterans who were behind the front lines and therefore ignorant of actual battle conditions. And fatuous are those flippant, self-satisfied Americans who experienced the war in their living rooms during or after the war. Fatuous were those "patriots" who did not see fellow combatants or civilians decapitated by flying body parts nor experience the horror of wading through pools of decaying human flesh saturated with tropical maggots.
Fussell pulls no punches as he deconstructs the experience of World War II as experienced by those who fought it or those who found themselves directly in its path.
This book should be required reading for any "fan" of World War II history.
Quote from the book:
"Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances....Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war."
This is my second attempt to write a responsible, but emotionally honest review of this powerful and important book.
Paul Fussell was an American Infantry Lieutenant, and a combat veteran of World War II.
This is the book that put Paul Fussel on the map for me. And, although The Great War and Modern Memory is Fussell's most acclaimed work, and is deservedly an excellent book; this book is a far greater work, in my own opinion.
He published this book in 1990 at the beginning of the (too frequently called) “Celebrations” of the 50 year anniversaries of that war in this country, more properly, called “Commemorations” or “Memorials” in other countries. My guess is that the timing of this publication was intentional. Paul Fussell was no fan of World War II, nor America's fatuous glamorization nor sanctification of that war. Paul Fussel, like his fellow writers and WWII combat veterans Kurt Vonnegut and Howard Zinn was not at all impressed with the political piety that has come to represent that war in place of actual, accurate memory
Wartime is his extended analytic essay or collection of essays. These essays bluntly relate the on-the-ground experiences, the grotesque and demeaning experiences of those people (military and civilian) unfortunate enough to find themselves at the physical center of World War II's mass warfare. It is not a picture, which renders that experience as anything but brutal and meat-grinding. It is not a picture to inspire “Celebration”
The word "fatuous" is one that I learned from Paul Fussell. And there is no fatuous flag waving celebration of our "Greatest Generation" in this book..
Fatuous is his description of the arrogant mindless pride of those 95% American veterans who were behind the front lines and therefore ignorant of actual battle conditions. And fatuous are those flippant, self-satisfied Americans who experienced the war in their living rooms during or after the war. Fatuous were those "patriots" who did not see fellow combatants or civilians decapitated by flying body parts nor experience the horror of wading through pools of decaying human flesh saturated with tropical maggots.
Fussell pulls no punches as he deconstructs the experience of World War II as experienced by those who fought it or those who found themselves directly in its path.
This book should be required reading for any "fan" of World War II history.
Quote from the book:
"Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances....Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war."
April 5, 2019
Nothing kills the glamour of war like actually being in one. There are photos of enormous crowds of young men outside recruiting stations the day after Britain declared war in August 1914. They all wanted to be part of the greatest adventure of their times, and were afraid the show would be over before they could get in. Six months later they would be standing in freezing, flooded trenches under constant shell fire, and a few months after that 72,000 of them would be scythed down at the battles of Neuve Chappelle and Loos, with even greater battles and greater casualties to come. Not much glamour there.
By 1930 the classic Great War memoirs had been published to widespread acclaim: All Quiet on the Western Front, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Good-Bye to All That. They clearly described the horror and brutality of combat, and yet the day after the United States declared war on Japan in December 1941 the recruiting stations were once again mobbed. Four hundred thousand Americans would die in World War II, and many, many more would be maimed for life.
It brings to mind the cynical old saying that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
The young men who signed up were quickly disabused of any ideas that Service life would be glorious. It was tedious, dehumanizing, and subject to endless petty harassment from officers and NCOs with nothing better to do. And that was before they found themselves in a combat zone, where the physical hardships were redoubled and the ever-present tension from the possibility of death or dismemberment ate away at the mind.
The soldiers at the front saw war in all its terror and barbarity, knew that it was soul-killing and indescribable; words are inadequate to encompass the sights and sounds of combat. In Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut, repeats “and so it goes” and “there is no why” over and over again as talismans, placeholders for the memories that no words can capture. Vonnegut fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and was taken prisoner there when his regiment disintegrated.
To keep up morale on the homefront, and protect the feelings of their families, the realities of war were not to be described, and for anyone who tried to write honestly about what was happening, censorship was vigorously applied in the name of security. The result was a disconnect between the soldiers' lives and way the war was described at home, where readers were assured our boys had the world’s best generals, the world’s best arms and equipment, the world’s best training, medical care, and logistics support. With all these advantages it’s a wonder the enemy even bothered to fight. But fight they did, savagely and tenaciously, on miserable coral islands and in the hedgerows of France. Infantry casualties rose so fast that men were culled out of aviation and supply units, and boot camp was reduced to just a few weeks, sending half trained soldiers to the front lines.
It is this disconnect that Paul Fussell examines in Wartime, the contorted ways the soldiers tried to wrap their minds around the realities of combat while immersed in the insanely optimistic propaganda of the day. It may have cheered the people back home, but it just infuriated the soldiers themselves, and it had a lasting impact on them. They realized that governments will lie about anything if it suits their purposes, and therefore all official pronouncements should be treated as exaggerations at best, and worthless bullshit most of the time.
For the soldiers themselves it was just one long slog, waiting for the day their number would come up, and wondering whether it would be quick and painless or slow and agonizing, and whether, if they survived, they would have all their limbs and at least part of their sanity. They had long since given up on patriotism, or honor, or any of those other words that old men use to get young men killed. They recognized that the only way to win the war was to kill the enemy, and the more they killed the faster it would end, and so they slaughtered their way from one battlefield to another.
When it finally ended the world was different, but so too were the ones who survived. When I was growing up we had a neighbor who was missing three fingers from one hand, the result of a defective hand grenade fuse. I once asked him if he was going to march in the 4th of July parade and he laughed and said no, that the ones who puff out their chests and march in those parades are the ones who were miles behind the line and wouldn’t have recognized a German if they sat on one. He said that real soldiers stayed home on parade days and drank, some to remember, some to forget.
By 1930 the classic Great War memoirs had been published to widespread acclaim: All Quiet on the Western Front, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Good-Bye to All That. They clearly described the horror and brutality of combat, and yet the day after the United States declared war on Japan in December 1941 the recruiting stations were once again mobbed. Four hundred thousand Americans would die in World War II, and many, many more would be maimed for life.
It brings to mind the cynical old saying that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
The young men who signed up were quickly disabused of any ideas that Service life would be glorious. It was tedious, dehumanizing, and subject to endless petty harassment from officers and NCOs with nothing better to do. And that was before they found themselves in a combat zone, where the physical hardships were redoubled and the ever-present tension from the possibility of death or dismemberment ate away at the mind.
The soldiers at the front saw war in all its terror and barbarity, knew that it was soul-killing and indescribable; words are inadequate to encompass the sights and sounds of combat. In Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut, repeats “and so it goes” and “there is no why” over and over again as talismans, placeholders for the memories that no words can capture. Vonnegut fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and was taken prisoner there when his regiment disintegrated.
To keep up morale on the homefront, and protect the feelings of their families, the realities of war were not to be described, and for anyone who tried to write honestly about what was happening, censorship was vigorously applied in the name of security. The result was a disconnect between the soldiers' lives and way the war was described at home, where readers were assured our boys had the world’s best generals, the world’s best arms and equipment, the world’s best training, medical care, and logistics support. With all these advantages it’s a wonder the enemy even bothered to fight. But fight they did, savagely and tenaciously, on miserable coral islands and in the hedgerows of France. Infantry casualties rose so fast that men were culled out of aviation and supply units, and boot camp was reduced to just a few weeks, sending half trained soldiers to the front lines.
It is this disconnect that Paul Fussell examines in Wartime, the contorted ways the soldiers tried to wrap their minds around the realities of combat while immersed in the insanely optimistic propaganda of the day. It may have cheered the people back home, but it just infuriated the soldiers themselves, and it had a lasting impact on them. They realized that governments will lie about anything if it suits their purposes, and therefore all official pronouncements should be treated as exaggerations at best, and worthless bullshit most of the time.
For the soldiers themselves it was just one long slog, waiting for the day their number would come up, and wondering whether it would be quick and painless or slow and agonizing, and whether, if they survived, they would have all their limbs and at least part of their sanity. They had long since given up on patriotism, or honor, or any of those other words that old men use to get young men killed. They recognized that the only way to win the war was to kill the enemy, and the more they killed the faster it would end, and so they slaughtered their way from one battlefield to another.
When it finally ended the world was different, but so too were the ones who survived. When I was growing up we had a neighbor who was missing three fingers from one hand, the result of a defective hand grenade fuse. I once asked him if he was going to march in the 4th of July parade and he laughed and said no, that the ones who puff out their chests and march in those parades are the ones who were miles behind the line and wouldn’t have recognized a German if they sat on one. He said that real soldiers stayed home on parade days and drank, some to remember, some to forget.
May 24, 2012
"For the past fifty years the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scales."
With those two sentences Paul Fussell, a severely wounded Second World War veteran turned literary critic and scholar, ends the first paragraph of the preface in "Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War." It's a shattering book. Using primary source materials Fussell demonstrates, from the average Allied soldier's point of view, the war was fought in an ideological vacuum devoid of higher meaning. He also debunks the fantasy that many citizens and soldiers needed to believe to keep up morale: the Allies were all good, the Axis all evil. This fantasy has survived.
The men in the trenches, jungles and beaches knew this to be bunk, for it was they who stepped in the guts of their comrades and enemies. And it was they who resented the sanitized, uninformed version of events that was presented to the American and, to a lesser extent, British people. As a result, the war years eroded critical thinking and originality, to say nothing of the willingness to confront difficult moral questions. (British civilians tasted war in 1940 in ways American civilians never did throughout the entire conflict).
Said British Officer Neil McCallum,
"The game does not appear to be worth the candle. What is seen through the explosions is that this, no less than any other war, is not a moral war." Fussell describes McCallum's depiction of actuality as "an implicit warning against the self-delusive attempt to confer high moral meaning on these grievous struggles for survival."
And that was what the war boiled down to for just about every man at the front witnessing his comrades getting ripped to pieces by machine gun bullets or in a bomber's cockpit incinerating defenseless German civilians: survival. The faster the war ended, the faster he would go home. The war ends faster the more enemies we kill. Therefore, the enemy must be dealt with utterly remorselessly. It's kill or be killed. There was no grandiose talk of freeing the world from Fascism. The combat troops knew what they were fighting against, but a clear definition of what they were fighting FOR had to be invented for everyone else. For the troops, it was to survive.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. But it certainly doesn't square with what we've been taught in movies, books and news broadcasts about what I often call everyone's favorite war. How often did someone invoke in one of your conversations WWII when debating whether the U.S should be in Iraq or Afghanistan?
Fussell wraps up his book with a chapter titled "The Real War Will Never Get in the Books." The unspeakable suffering and destruction perpetrated by all sides in the Second World War (12,000 French and Belgian civilians were killed by the Allies during the fighting in Normandy) could not be presented to the American public in any way that could do it justice or be acceptable to their eyes and ears.
The troops so greatly resented the antiseptic portrayal of their physical, emotional, and psychological suffering that they, too, sought escape in satire and euphemism. Also, soldiers responded with "constant verbal subversion and contempt." Optimistic publicity about fighting the good fight and euphemism rendered their real experience falsely. The troops knew, said Fussell, the home front would be made aware of none of the bad stuff, even something as banal as soiling one's underwear under fire.
Gross military blunders, officers abusing troops (called chickenshit), soldiers' sexual desires and deprivations of every kind: they are a soldier's life at war.
"Wartime" takes you into the lives of ordinary soldiers in a way you won't get from watching most movies or even reading most books about WWII, as he indicates with that chapter title and readily admits about his own book. The consequences of this sanitized view of the most destructive war in history are worth pondering.
With those two sentences Paul Fussell, a severely wounded Second World War veteran turned literary critic and scholar, ends the first paragraph of the preface in "Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War." It's a shattering book. Using primary source materials Fussell demonstrates, from the average Allied soldier's point of view, the war was fought in an ideological vacuum devoid of higher meaning. He also debunks the fantasy that many citizens and soldiers needed to believe to keep up morale: the Allies were all good, the Axis all evil. This fantasy has survived.
The men in the trenches, jungles and beaches knew this to be bunk, for it was they who stepped in the guts of their comrades and enemies. And it was they who resented the sanitized, uninformed version of events that was presented to the American and, to a lesser extent, British people. As a result, the war years eroded critical thinking and originality, to say nothing of the willingness to confront difficult moral questions. (British civilians tasted war in 1940 in ways American civilians never did throughout the entire conflict).
Said British Officer Neil McCallum,
"The game does not appear to be worth the candle. What is seen through the explosions is that this, no less than any other war, is not a moral war." Fussell describes McCallum's depiction of actuality as "an implicit warning against the self-delusive attempt to confer high moral meaning on these grievous struggles for survival."
And that was what the war boiled down to for just about every man at the front witnessing his comrades getting ripped to pieces by machine gun bullets or in a bomber's cockpit incinerating defenseless German civilians: survival. The faster the war ended, the faster he would go home. The war ends faster the more enemies we kill. Therefore, the enemy must be dealt with utterly remorselessly. It's kill or be killed. There was no grandiose talk of freeing the world from Fascism. The combat troops knew what they were fighting against, but a clear definition of what they were fighting FOR had to be invented for everyone else. For the troops, it was to survive.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. But it certainly doesn't square with what we've been taught in movies, books and news broadcasts about what I often call everyone's favorite war. How often did someone invoke in one of your conversations WWII when debating whether the U.S should be in Iraq or Afghanistan?
Fussell wraps up his book with a chapter titled "The Real War Will Never Get in the Books." The unspeakable suffering and destruction perpetrated by all sides in the Second World War (12,000 French and Belgian civilians were killed by the Allies during the fighting in Normandy) could not be presented to the American public in any way that could do it justice or be acceptable to their eyes and ears.
The troops so greatly resented the antiseptic portrayal of their physical, emotional, and psychological suffering that they, too, sought escape in satire and euphemism. Also, soldiers responded with "constant verbal subversion and contempt." Optimistic publicity about fighting the good fight and euphemism rendered their real experience falsely. The troops knew, said Fussell, the home front would be made aware of none of the bad stuff, even something as banal as soiling one's underwear under fire.
Gross military blunders, officers abusing troops (called chickenshit), soldiers' sexual desires and deprivations of every kind: they are a soldier's life at war.
"Wartime" takes you into the lives of ordinary soldiers in a way you won't get from watching most movies or even reading most books about WWII, as he indicates with that chapter title and readily admits about his own book. The consequences of this sanitized view of the most destructive war in history are worth pondering.
August 19, 2022
Something of a follow-up to Fussell's classic The Great War and Modern Memory. (1975) The biggest difference is that World War II occurred in Fussell's lifetime and he was an active participant. Paul Fussell served in the war as an infantry officer with the 103rd Infantry Division (France & Germany). His first book was an academic analysis of a war and a time that occurred before he lived. "Wartime" is a much more personal book and this intimacy give the book a more personal edge, but it is also weighed down by what I perceive to be bitterness on Fussell's part.
First let me examine the strong points. Fussell does a good job of showing the truth of the war and what life was like for both the soldiers and the civilians. In June 2012, after his death, "The Economist" ran an obituary article about Fussell. The writer hit the nail on the head in describing the man's work.
"Wartime" flies in the face of popular myth and sentiment. It's no secret that Fussell hated "Saving Private Ryan" and I have no doubt he had several choice words for Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation".
This attitude permeates "Wartime" and can make for a rather caustic read. It's a refreshing counterweight to some of the cloying sentimentality that other writers engage in. World War II was a war after all. It consisted of destruction and death on a massive scale and that is not pretty. Fussell does an excellent job of showing that and he is to be commended for doing just that. It's a very readable book and an intelligent book. It makes one think and question. Which is always a good thing in my opinion.
Okay so now for the weak points. Fussell was a very caustic, bitter and superior man it seems. Lord knows his ex-wife, Betty, has some less than flattering things to say about him in her autobiography My Kitchen Wars. Much of his later works are polemics in which he attacks his countrymen and tears into everything that makes up the United States. As he neared the end of his life, he took on a vicious angry outlook that I found to be unpleasant. This nasty edge comes out in "Wartime", and I found it distracting. Fussell is angry at everything and nothing. It detracts from the writing. There are times that I found myself wondering exactly what his point was. I understand the anger, but there are times that it overrides the writing. I suppose he has a right to be angry, but he fails to maintain distance. The distance that exists in "The Great War".
In the end I have to rate it three stars because of this lack of balance. It's still an interesting book, but it's anger and over-all "pissed off" attitude gets in the way at times.
First let me examine the strong points. Fussell does a good job of showing the truth of the war and what life was like for both the soldiers and the civilians. In June 2012, after his death, "The Economist" ran an obituary article about Fussell. The writer hit the nail on the head in describing the man's work.
War—especially the two “great” wars of the 20th century—had to be sanitized, justified, even glorified, for public consumption. But Mr Fussell made a public career out of refusing to disguise it or elevate it.
"Wartime" flies in the face of popular myth and sentiment. It's no secret that Fussell hated "Saving Private Ryan" and I have no doubt he had several choice words for Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation".
This attitude permeates "Wartime" and can make for a rather caustic read. It's a refreshing counterweight to some of the cloying sentimentality that other writers engage in. World War II was a war after all. It consisted of destruction and death on a massive scale and that is not pretty. Fussell does an excellent job of showing that and he is to be commended for doing just that. It's a very readable book and an intelligent book. It makes one think and question. Which is always a good thing in my opinion.
Okay so now for the weak points. Fussell was a very caustic, bitter and superior man it seems. Lord knows his ex-wife, Betty, has some less than flattering things to say about him in her autobiography My Kitchen Wars. Much of his later works are polemics in which he attacks his countrymen and tears into everything that makes up the United States. As he neared the end of his life, he took on a vicious angry outlook that I found to be unpleasant. This nasty edge comes out in "Wartime", and I found it distracting. Fussell is angry at everything and nothing. It detracts from the writing. There are times that I found myself wondering exactly what his point was. I understand the anger, but there are times that it overrides the writing. I suppose he has a right to be angry, but he fails to maintain distance. The distance that exists in "The Great War".
In the end I have to rate it three stars because of this lack of balance. It's still an interesting book, but it's anger and over-all "pissed off" attitude gets in the way at times.
June 10, 2017
Review to follow. I am still trying to put my thoughts together about this very disturbing but honest look at the soldiers' experiences during WWII.
March 31, 2014
A book that sometimes made me smile (as governments worked to deceive and soldiers wrote doggerel verse and learned to curse ever more freely), but mostly made me wince and cry at the foolishness and horrors of war. But Fussell's horrors are of a different sort than the violence we see in the movies. It seems Iraq, and the incompetence of waging war, is nothing new (Having just read new histories of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War - it may seem a particular military speciality - along with bold heroics and a certain American tenacity) Fussell's book is full of the propaganda, the half-truths, the rumors, and the real truths unspoken and unshown that make evident the devastation of war. He includes the books kept from the soldiers (no All's Quiet on the Western Front) and the soldier's obscene and angry songs kept from the general public (how does the f-bomb fit 57 times into a 10 stanza song?). He reminds us that precision bombing has been promised in previous wars and that American military technology remained far behind German technology throughout the Second World War.
What America had in the end was production and numbers, and in the end it was enough, though at tremendous cost. Fussell quotes one journalist who wrote about the horror of the amphibious invasion of Tarawa, the 1943 reporting on which finally brought home the war's cost to many at home. The reporting finally included pictures of dead soldiers and at Tarawa the water was thick with Marine corpses. As the journalist said, "There is no easy way to win a war; there is no panacea which will prevent men from being killed." (13)
Too many of the deaths came from military errors, the blunders due to incompetence and an unquestioning military hierarchy. Together they resulted in many useless missions and friendly fire incidents. These details do not make the military history books because unlike the typical "popular histories of the war written on the adventure-story model," these stories do not "ascribe clear, and usually noble, cause and purpose to accidental or demeaning events." The stories we hear are of gallantry and the histories that contain them "convey to the optimistic and the credulous a satisfying, orderly, and even optimistic and wholesome view of catastrophic occurences - a fine way to encourage a moralistic, nationalistic, and bellicose politics." (22) Fussell's descriptions of horrible folly included American planes shot down during the invasion of Sicily by an American navy unable to discern them from the enemy, a Japanese ship full of American prisoners of war torpedoed by an American submarine, and a Canadian soldier forced to shoot an American who had mistaken him for a German and would not stop firing at him. "It's him or me," the Canadian thought and did what was necessary to save his own life.
Writers have known these details of the war: "Bringing to bear their instinct for civilized irony, the most intelligent contemporary writers have perceived blunders, errors, and accidents as something very close to the essence of the Second World War." The authors, Waugh, Heller, and Vonnegut among others, have used the war to disclose the imperfection of the modern world of the Cold War, "dependent on predictability, technology, and bureaucracy." (26) Such dependence has always brought frustration, if not blundering death. The military bureaucracy and "the boredom and the inefficiency" it created and "the petty injustice" it perpetuated are recounted in a chapter Fussell titles "Chickenshit, An Anatomy."
Fussell ends his book quoting Walt Whitman on another war. "The real war will never get into the books." In Fussell's vision, the reader gets just enough horrible pieces to begin to understand that war always brings horrors and evil and that despite the attempts of propaganda to tar the enemy as the only evil, evil in its deliberateness and its foolishness, saturates each side. Not equally and Fussell is certainly not saying World War II should not have been fought. He fought in it himself and is the author of a book titled "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," which contains an essay which claims exactly that. But in this book, Fussell is after a more complex past for the "Good War," one that acknowledges failure, moral and technological among others, and the heroism of just getting through. It still seems timely today.
What America had in the end was production and numbers, and in the end it was enough, though at tremendous cost. Fussell quotes one journalist who wrote about the horror of the amphibious invasion of Tarawa, the 1943 reporting on which finally brought home the war's cost to many at home. The reporting finally included pictures of dead soldiers and at Tarawa the water was thick with Marine corpses. As the journalist said, "There is no easy way to win a war; there is no panacea which will prevent men from being killed." (13)
Too many of the deaths came from military errors, the blunders due to incompetence and an unquestioning military hierarchy. Together they resulted in many useless missions and friendly fire incidents. These details do not make the military history books because unlike the typical "popular histories of the war written on the adventure-story model," these stories do not "ascribe clear, and usually noble, cause and purpose to accidental or demeaning events." The stories we hear are of gallantry and the histories that contain them "convey to the optimistic and the credulous a satisfying, orderly, and even optimistic and wholesome view of catastrophic occurences - a fine way to encourage a moralistic, nationalistic, and bellicose politics." (22) Fussell's descriptions of horrible folly included American planes shot down during the invasion of Sicily by an American navy unable to discern them from the enemy, a Japanese ship full of American prisoners of war torpedoed by an American submarine, and a Canadian soldier forced to shoot an American who had mistaken him for a German and would not stop firing at him. "It's him or me," the Canadian thought and did what was necessary to save his own life.
Writers have known these details of the war: "Bringing to bear their instinct for civilized irony, the most intelligent contemporary writers have perceived blunders, errors, and accidents as something very close to the essence of the Second World War." The authors, Waugh, Heller, and Vonnegut among others, have used the war to disclose the imperfection of the modern world of the Cold War, "dependent on predictability, technology, and bureaucracy." (26) Such dependence has always brought frustration, if not blundering death. The military bureaucracy and "the boredom and the inefficiency" it created and "the petty injustice" it perpetuated are recounted in a chapter Fussell titles "Chickenshit, An Anatomy."
Fussell ends his book quoting Walt Whitman on another war. "The real war will never get into the books." In Fussell's vision, the reader gets just enough horrible pieces to begin to understand that war always brings horrors and evil and that despite the attempts of propaganda to tar the enemy as the only evil, evil in its deliberateness and its foolishness, saturates each side. Not equally and Fussell is certainly not saying World War II should not have been fought. He fought in it himself and is the author of a book titled "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," which contains an essay which claims exactly that. But in this book, Fussell is after a more complex past for the "Good War," one that acknowledges failure, moral and technological among others, and the heroism of just getting through. It still seems timely today.
December 15, 2007
I attempted to catch up on WWII, after reading Fussell's fantastic book, The Great War and Modern Memory, but this one just didn't hold my attention. Alas, I'm just a WWI kind of reader...
September 19, 2012
This scholarly work was chock full of information about WWII and fascinating to read (despite it sometimes being a difficult read due to the level of detail). What was eye-opening and why I rated it at 4 stars was the authenticity and sharing that The Greatest Generation was certainly created later. The reality of the time was much more gritty and uncertain and well...inglorious. This was published in 1989 and well before a lot of popular treatments of WWII (which do strive come much closer to capturing the filth and horror of war and shows how soldiers prevailed). An entire chapter is devoted to chickenshit but also there is a chapter addressing reading habits of soldiers and the yearning (need) for beauty and culture in books to combat the horror/boredom/chickenshit of the sheer ugliness of fighting/filth, etc. The author who has recently passed away was a solider in WWII and knew well his topic in addition to scholarship to address the topic. For those interested in WWII, I recommend this as a 'must read.' There are many references to other works so this book is a wonderful resource.
September 18, 2007
Fussell writes in the voice of your favorite cranky old-man professor. He also happens to be a veteran of World War II, and uses that experience to illuminate the life of GIs during the war and the literature they created. Wartime is a follow-up to Fussell's much better book on World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory. Its greatest strength, I think, is Fussell's refusal to submit to all the Greatest Generation sentimentality that obscures the reality, which is to say the horror and the stupidity, of war.
September 16, 2020
Cuts through the "greatest generation" crap about WWII by a scholar who was there (an infantry lieutenant in Italy, one of the grimmest theaters of operation on the western front). The war went on way too long, too many people died for the wrong reasons, U.S. weaponry and leadership sucked, all the stuff that most GIs and folks on the home front knew. This is the guy who wrote The Great War and Modern Memory, one of the best books about war ever written. And a very entertaining read.
September 18, 2015
Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory is a classic and a seminal work in the history of WW1, so I was keen to read his take on WW2, a war he himself participated in as a young soldier. This book doesn't take the same approach - whereas Modern Memory focused on how we have to come to remember WW1 through the prism of its literature, this book looks at the impact of WW2 on soldiers and civilians and how it shaped their thoughts, feelings, beliefs and actions.
Through chapters on rumours, rules and regulations, dehumanisation of the enemy, rationing and deprivation, censorship and deliberate sentimentalism, he largely undermines the myth of the 'Good War'. We have come to remember WW2 as in some ways as opposite to the earlier WW1 - where that was a pointless slaughter, WW2 was supposedly a war with purpose, a war for a cause, in which everyone participated whole-heartedly, no-one complained or grumbled, and everyone exhibited to varying degrees the 'Blitz Spirit'. Not so, Fussell argues - there was every bit as much fear and cowardice and chickenshit regulations and petty-minded bureaucracy and boredom as any war in history, perhaps even more so.
Whilst not having perhaps the same impact as Modern Memory, this book is as important to the history of WW2 as that book was to the first. It serves as the flipside to almost all of those WW2 histories that rarely mention the individual soldier as anything more than an anonymous number, where armies and divisions and battalions move almost without any human intervention, and lives are just numbers on a page. An excellent book.
Through chapters on rumours, rules and regulations, dehumanisation of the enemy, rationing and deprivation, censorship and deliberate sentimentalism, he largely undermines the myth of the 'Good War'. We have come to remember WW2 as in some ways as opposite to the earlier WW1 - where that was a pointless slaughter, WW2 was supposedly a war with purpose, a war for a cause, in which everyone participated whole-heartedly, no-one complained or grumbled, and everyone exhibited to varying degrees the 'Blitz Spirit'. Not so, Fussell argues - there was every bit as much fear and cowardice and chickenshit regulations and petty-minded bureaucracy and boredom as any war in history, perhaps even more so.
Whilst not having perhaps the same impact as Modern Memory, this book is as important to the history of WW2 as that book was to the first. It serves as the flipside to almost all of those WW2 histories that rarely mention the individual soldier as anything more than an anonymous number, where armies and divisions and battalions move almost without any human intervention, and lives are just numbers on a page. An excellent book.
December 2, 2010
Paul Fussell is clearly angry with the overt sentimentalism that surrounds our 'memory' of the Second World War. This book strips away some of the romantic glow years of platitude-spouting Remembrance Day-milking politicians and do-gooders have layered over the brutal truth: War is a dank hell of body parts, fear, lies, hatred, and manipulation.
Fussell does a good job in Wartime of using brutal examples of hypocrisy and violence to strip away the propaganda layered on the war over the years, but his reliance on examinations of cultural and literary expressions of wartime might leave wanting those expecting a deeper analysis of the experience of the troops. I recommend his book The boy's crusade: The American infantry in northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 for a more gritty, boots-on-the-ground perspective.
Fussell does a good job in Wartime of using brutal examples of hypocrisy and violence to strip away the propaganda layered on the war over the years, but his reliance on examinations of cultural and literary expressions of wartime might leave wanting those expecting a deeper analysis of the experience of the troops. I recommend his book The boy's crusade: The American infantry in northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 for a more gritty, boots-on-the-ground perspective.
July 13, 2012
For anybody who wants to understand where euphemism and special war vocabulary came from. Honesty and bright ideals - already damaged beyond repair in WW1 The Great War and Modern Memory - took their final nosedive in WW2 and dishonesty and cynicism became the order of the day. Fussell's books are sad, but very acute. This book is a must-read for anyone studying twentieth century warfare, or the development of language and culture in that time.
October 25, 2012
An extra star for honesty.
July 24, 2022
An utterly vital counterpoint to the sentimentalizing hagiography of Brokaw, Ambrose, Spielberg, and Hanks, Fussell's "Wartime" is a relentless wrecking ball of a book from a physically shattered veteran of "The Good War." It is the prototypical "MUST READ" on World War II, and an essential starting point for all reading on modern war from 1939 going forward. Fussell could be misunderstood as a pacifist opponent of the greatest conflict in human history. He is no such thing. He demands and delivers unflinching honesty about the complete thoroughgoing MESS that the war was, and that extreme degradation and lingering destruction is its most enduring monument. I doubt that I will ever dogear the pages of another book the way that I did with this one.
February 5, 2022
Creo que es un libro que a cualquier entusiasmado del mundo bélico le puede apasionar a nivel social del impacto de la guerra. Me encanta que Fussel mencione comparativas con fuentes y relatos de ambas guerras mundiales.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 21, 2023
I loved this book almost as much as his “The Great War and Modern Memory.” Fussell is just great.
October 11, 2012
This book, written with great erudition and style by someone who served in World War II, is the best gift you can give to a literate young man who is infatuated with the glories of war. It will show him that war is the enterprise of the young -- "virgins with rifles," as one recalls the song from Sting -- pushed forward into the bloodletting by aged ignoramuses.
Focusing on World War II, it reveals how men moved themselves forward to certain death, mostly because everyone around them was doing it, and sometimes because they were drunk or stoned on drugs.
Fussell gets great mileage in mockery of the term "precision bombing," which in fact was nothing more than propaganda. He states that Allied ground troops routinely and knowingly fired on their own "air cover" when the planes came near their positions, out of fear of "friendly fire."
The author recounts notable cover-ups of men killed needlessly: During the mock invasion of Normandy near Dover, during the Normandy invasion when "friendly-fire" bombing killed some 200 Allied soldiers in one incident alone, and during the invasion of Naples when the 36th Texas Division was sent to certain death under German shelling.
Ferociously silly events are recounted in the style of Evelyn Waugh, who indeed is quoted at length on several occasions. Some two dozen armored tanks were launched at sea during the Normandy invasion -- tanks which were supposed to float and paddle themselves to shore. Yet virtually all sank like a stone, complete with their crew. The punch line? They were launched seriatim, and not one officer intervened to draw the lesson from each failure.
Priceless is the chapter on chickenshit, the author's precise term for the animating emotion of the military when the bullets are not actually flying, upon which he dilates with the caressing detail born of personal experience. What is chickenshit? It is the savage pettiness that goes beyond digging trenches by one company to have them filled in by another; it is the vermin passion that minutely relishes the infliction of humiliations on those lower in rank, or on those in some way trapped at the mercy of a clerk vested with power -- in short, the heart and soul of everyday life in the military.
Focusing on World War II, it reveals how men moved themselves forward to certain death, mostly because everyone around them was doing it, and sometimes because they were drunk or stoned on drugs.
Fussell gets great mileage in mockery of the term "precision bombing," which in fact was nothing more than propaganda. He states that Allied ground troops routinely and knowingly fired on their own "air cover" when the planes came near their positions, out of fear of "friendly fire."
The author recounts notable cover-ups of men killed needlessly: During the mock invasion of Normandy near Dover, during the Normandy invasion when "friendly-fire" bombing killed some 200 Allied soldiers in one incident alone, and during the invasion of Naples when the 36th Texas Division was sent to certain death under German shelling.
Ferociously silly events are recounted in the style of Evelyn Waugh, who indeed is quoted at length on several occasions. Some two dozen armored tanks were launched at sea during the Normandy invasion -- tanks which were supposed to float and paddle themselves to shore. Yet virtually all sank like a stone, complete with their crew. The punch line? They were launched seriatim, and not one officer intervened to draw the lesson from each failure.
Priceless is the chapter on chickenshit, the author's precise term for the animating emotion of the military when the bullets are not actually flying, upon which he dilates with the caressing detail born of personal experience. What is chickenshit? It is the savage pettiness that goes beyond digging trenches by one company to have them filled in by another; it is the vermin passion that minutely relishes the infliction of humiliations on those lower in rank, or on those in some way trapped at the mercy of a clerk vested with power -- in short, the heart and soul of everyday life in the military.
May 26, 2021
Really valuable look at the ways World War II was portrayed in various media, including advertising, and the way the TRUE story of the war was kept from the public. Deals with both the Brits and the Americans, with some slight mention of the same issue in Germany. In short, Fussell thinks (writing 30 years ago) that the real horror of war, and especially WW II, still is only comprehensible by those involved in combat or maybe on the receiving end of bombing.
Fussell's "The Great War & Modern Memory" on World War I was one of my favorite "key" books -- a book that suggested many, many more worthy of reading. Now comes this book, which could do the same -- suggest many books on WW II I'd like to read. Interestingly enough, I've already read many of the books he mentions, and more already are on my wish list.
5/25/21: Just discovered that I had read this in 1991. Notes from then: "Examines honor, boredom, stuff not widely known about war." I liked it then, and I liked in in 2016.
Fussell's "The Great War & Modern Memory" on World War I was one of my favorite "key" books -- a book that suggested many, many more worthy of reading. Now comes this book, which could do the same -- suggest many books on WW II I'd like to read. Interestingly enough, I've already read many of the books he mentions, and more already are on my wish list.
5/25/21: Just discovered that I had read this in 1991. Notes from then: "Examines honor, boredom, stuff not widely known about war." I liked it then, and I liked in in 2016.
May 29, 2017
This is a workmanlike repository of literature about the horrid experiences of combatants. In typical Fussell fashion, the author's own experiences as an infantry officer in Europe during the late stage of WW2 is used as benchmark for every experience in any aspect of warfare by all personnel who have served in all wars. He also, in typical English literature lecturer manner, leaves his readers hanging by tossing out unresolvable rhetorical questions, such as 'what is the meaning of WW2?'. Okay, what is the meaning of having breakfast today? And what is the meaning of sitting around staring at the wall? He also rails against seemingly everyone who is in charge of any and all aspects of the war, whereas his real gripe is with human nature. But my own frustrations aside, the daunting catalog of authors and their works that marches through the pages of this book make it worth the time invested to read it all.
September 3, 2014
An absolute gem. Fussell clears away the bloodless prose of divisions and generals for a look at how the war was experienced, which means fear, hatred, abuse of power, boredom and nonsense, or as in the parlance, chickenshit. Fussell served in NE Europe during the war and went on to become a cultural critic.
Fussell is acerbic and has a reputation as a curmudgeon. It came out even more in his bitter Boy's Crusade, which aimed to dispel a number of myths about the war. Here he is acid, but not bitter. He aims merely to talk about how the war provided the chance for those who wanted to abuse others to do so, for people to accept pleasant lies, for men to dream of booze and sex and to drown in it when they could and for people to get so tired of saying fuck that they came up with new words.
Fussell is acerbic and has a reputation as a curmudgeon. It came out even more in his bitter Boy's Crusade, which aimed to dispel a number of myths about the war. Here he is acid, but not bitter. He aims merely to talk about how the war provided the chance for those who wanted to abuse others to do so, for people to accept pleasant lies, for men to dream of booze and sex and to drown in it when they could and for people to get so tired of saying fuck that they came up with new words.
August 7, 2012
An okay book with a number of important points, but I found myself mostly annoyed with the style of the book, which was little more than the style of a college history: point made, examples given, point made again. This was especially obnoxious in his extended use of a single memoir (a trilogy) about one soldiers sex and masturbation habits. It summarized the plot for pages and pages, making me wonder if he was leaning so heavily on it because he liked it so much, or if he just didn't have any other relevant examples.
I don't want to underestimate the importance of this book, most notably in one of the great observations of soliders in combat, but I just found it to be a particularly unenjoyable read.
I don't want to underestimate the importance of this book, most notably in one of the great observations of soliders in combat, but I just found it to be a particularly unenjoyable read.
December 30, 2024
Paul Fussell is a giant in the academic world for his studies of the legacy of the First and Second World Wars in the Western world. His work has received a ton of attention, for good reason, in large part due to his trailblazing techniques and critical focus on war's destructive nature. However, he has been criticized for drawing on unrepresentative sources to make broad claims about society (a point that Jonathan Vance makes in Death So Noble). These criticisms ring true to my reading of Wartime. Fussell has some valid points to make about the glorification of war in Western society, particularly the Second World War, but his cited evidence is too often unrepresentative. For the time it was written, it is particularly cutting edge in the sense that it critically examines the Allied conduct of the war in a way that had not been done up to that point. Because of the uncharted territory that the book tackles, it gets a bump in rating from this reader. In particular, I found that the best parts of the book related to the experience of the soldier at war. This topic rang particularly true because Fussell had experience as a soldier during the war. In writing about how men actually experienced combat, while he himself might not be representative of the average man, his sample size of shared experiences is large enough to guide the writing in a way that is interesting and refreshing. Fussell's impact on this aspect of the field is clear, there is now a great degree of media that specifically addresses the Second World War as a horrific and violent endeavour (Eugene Sledge's memoir that Fussell cites extensively was one of the main sources for HBO's The Pacific miniseries). My favourite chapter of Wartime concerned the various forms of acronyms and slang that emerged during the war.
All that being said, there are aspects of Wartime that are confusing at best and downright misleading at worst. The scope of the book is unclear. Early chapters deal with the experience of individuals in various aspects of the war, while the meat of the book is more of a literary history concerned with how popular culture suffered during the war and how the war was remembered in the immediate aftermath. The vagueness of the title, "Understanding and Behaviour" foreshadows Fussell's tendency to hop between topics. The result is a lack of a clear thesis aside from the overall argument that the Second World War was not a heroic or good event. The lack of a cohesive central argument means that individual chapters vary greatly in quality. As mentioned above, some chapters are phenomenal, particularly when they centre on the experiences of men overseas. Other chapters, make broad claims about society which are only weakly supported by the evidence Fussell provides. Take, for example, the chapter on reading during the war and men in uniform. Fussell writes at length about the different kinds of reading that men hungered for, and the degree to which men consumed literature that had critical undertones. In doing so, he focuses on the notion that vast numbers of men overseas had a sufficiently critical view of the war, conflict in general, and the innocence of the civilian population that had sent them to risk their lives. Only at the end of the chapter in a brief paragraph does Fussell reveal that the most popular choice of literature overseas was the comic book. To Fussell's credit, he acknowledges this fact, but what he doesn't acknowledge is that it practically undercuts the entire chapter before. This specific critique of Fussell is not original; others have made it about his earlier book on the Great War, but it is disappointing to see the same sorts of weaknesses in his later writing.
Overall, this book was very important in the overall historiography of the Second World War. Fussell was writing critically about an event long before it was acceptable in polite society to critique it. At the same time, the importance of Wartime to the overall historiography has rendered it obsolete (to a degree) compared to current studies of the war. To assert that war is not just romance and heroism and that it is instead a bloody and brutish affair is the sort of thing that is now relatively commonplace, at least among serious studies of conflict. Fussell's anger (about the conduct of the war and civilian society's ignorance) bleeds through in a way that sometimes hurts his overall argument. To assert, for example, an equivalency between Nazi propaganda that blamed Jews for the nation's ills, and Allied propaganda that blamed the Nazis for their evil ways, is a prime illustration of a comparison taken to unacceptable lengths by Fussell's deep rooted dislike for the war as a whole. Another point in which the historiography has left Fussell behind, is apparent in the section on the absurdity of the war. Fussell holds that the allied powers had to essentially trick their soldiers into fighting with inferior weaponry and technology, lest there be some breakdown and general mutiny. Recent scholarship, for example in James Holland's study of Normandy, actually argues that despite the quality of some individual German weapons systems, the allies put a tremendous amount of emphasis on using technology and industry to win rather than expending human lives. Where some veterans might have taken a deep dislike of the Axis powers to their grave, Fussell has instead turned the spotlight of blame onto Allied commanders and their governments. It is a view that in my opinion, too often strays into the absurd to be taken absolutely seriously. Nevertheless, Wartime is a fascinating snapshot of the earliest critical theory surrounding the Second World War. Fussell is important for how he impacted the field, but this book should be read with a whole host of caveats in mind about the biases and nature of the author.
All that being said, there are aspects of Wartime that are confusing at best and downright misleading at worst. The scope of the book is unclear. Early chapters deal with the experience of individuals in various aspects of the war, while the meat of the book is more of a literary history concerned with how popular culture suffered during the war and how the war was remembered in the immediate aftermath. The vagueness of the title, "Understanding and Behaviour" foreshadows Fussell's tendency to hop between topics. The result is a lack of a clear thesis aside from the overall argument that the Second World War was not a heroic or good event. The lack of a cohesive central argument means that individual chapters vary greatly in quality. As mentioned above, some chapters are phenomenal, particularly when they centre on the experiences of men overseas. Other chapters, make broad claims about society which are only weakly supported by the evidence Fussell provides. Take, for example, the chapter on reading during the war and men in uniform. Fussell writes at length about the different kinds of reading that men hungered for, and the degree to which men consumed literature that had critical undertones. In doing so, he focuses on the notion that vast numbers of men overseas had a sufficiently critical view of the war, conflict in general, and the innocence of the civilian population that had sent them to risk their lives. Only at the end of the chapter in a brief paragraph does Fussell reveal that the most popular choice of literature overseas was the comic book. To Fussell's credit, he acknowledges this fact, but what he doesn't acknowledge is that it practically undercuts the entire chapter before. This specific critique of Fussell is not original; others have made it about his earlier book on the Great War, but it is disappointing to see the same sorts of weaknesses in his later writing.
Overall, this book was very important in the overall historiography of the Second World War. Fussell was writing critically about an event long before it was acceptable in polite society to critique it. At the same time, the importance of Wartime to the overall historiography has rendered it obsolete (to a degree) compared to current studies of the war. To assert that war is not just romance and heroism and that it is instead a bloody and brutish affair is the sort of thing that is now relatively commonplace, at least among serious studies of conflict. Fussell's anger (about the conduct of the war and civilian society's ignorance) bleeds through in a way that sometimes hurts his overall argument. To assert, for example, an equivalency between Nazi propaganda that blamed Jews for the nation's ills, and Allied propaganda that blamed the Nazis for their evil ways, is a prime illustration of a comparison taken to unacceptable lengths by Fussell's deep rooted dislike for the war as a whole. Another point in which the historiography has left Fussell behind, is apparent in the section on the absurdity of the war. Fussell holds that the allied powers had to essentially trick their soldiers into fighting with inferior weaponry and technology, lest there be some breakdown and general mutiny. Recent scholarship, for example in James Holland's study of Normandy, actually argues that despite the quality of some individual German weapons systems, the allies put a tremendous amount of emphasis on using technology and industry to win rather than expending human lives. Where some veterans might have taken a deep dislike of the Axis powers to their grave, Fussell has instead turned the spotlight of blame onto Allied commanders and their governments. It is a view that in my opinion, too often strays into the absurd to be taken absolutely seriously. Nevertheless, Wartime is a fascinating snapshot of the earliest critical theory surrounding the Second World War. Fussell is important for how he impacted the field, but this book should be read with a whole host of caveats in mind about the biases and nature of the author.
July 14, 2011
One of my favorite "war" books. Mainly because it strips war down to what it really is - destruction, and analyzes its effect of the world and culture. Gone are the Hollywood heroics of battle, replaced with a realistic view of maimed body parts, and tons of piss and feces. A warning though, this book will ruin your favorite WWII movies for you.
May 23, 2008
Fussell discusses aspects of WWII not generally found in other sources including drinking, sexual behavior, books read, errors and military blunders, idioms, music, language and psychological behavior. This is forthright text and not for gentle readers...he uses first-source documents.
February 10, 2009
It is enormously satisfying to read accounts of wartime deprivation and rationing, like those that are depicted in this book, and then drink an entire pot of rich, fragrant coffee and eat a pile of bacon and eggs, as I'm about to do right now.
March 2, 2012
A great book and I would rate this as highly as his THE GREAT WAR & MODERN MEMORY but for the fact that Fussell makes some comparisons that needlessly over-state his case and lend fuel to critics who would fault him for characterizing WWII as anything but 'The Good War'.
November 4, 2022
This book is a great example of a common soldier during WWII. It does a fantastic job explaining how different the war was advertised, versus how it actually played out for the people participating in it.
July 22, 2010
Fussell is one of the best. Put this book with "The Lucifer Effect" for understanding the unthinkable.
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