Wartime Quotes

“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.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“In war it is not just the weak soldiers, or the sensitive ones, or the highly imaginative or cowardly ones, who will break down. Inevitably, all will break down if in combat long enough […] As medical observers have reported, “There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat’ … Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their experience.” Thus – and this is unequivocal: ‘Psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“What annoyed the troops and augmented their sardonic, contemptuous attitude toward those who viewed them from afar was in large part this public innocence about the bizarre damage suffered by the human body in modern war.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“The same tricks of publicity and advertising might have succeeded in sweetening the actualities of Vietnam if television and a vigorous uncensored moral journalism hadn’t been brought to bear. America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“The postwar power of “the media” to determine what shall be embraced as reality is in large part due to the success of the morale culture in wartime. It represents, indeed, its continuation. Today, nothing—neither church, university, library, gallery, philanthropy, foundation, or corporation—no matter how actually worthy and blameless, can thrive unless bolstered by a persuasive professional public-relations operation, supervised by the later avatars of the PR colonels and captains so indispensable to the maintenance of high morale and thus to the conduct of the Second World War.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“and it is said that Waugh’s witnessing numerous blunders and acts of overt cowardice there soured him permanently on the army, the war, and the pretense of high purpose claimed by both.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“The Duke of Windsor is there, together with such other losers as General Howard-Vyse and General Gamelin.14 All look entirely inadequate to the cynicism, efficiency, brutality, and bloody-mindedness that will be required to win the war. As”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“When the Allies bombed the Italians on the island of Pantelleria in June, 1943, General Spaatz, of the United States Air Corps, concluded that bombing “can reduce to the point of surrender any first-class nation now in existence, within six months.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“The confusions and delays prompted this graffito scrawled in the troop space of one of the transports: “Never in the history of human endeavour have so few been buggered about by so many” (495).”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War