"Few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the real truths about ourselves and the whirling earth to which we cling. This is especially true of men in war. The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink."--
-J. Glenn Gray, author and World War II combat veteran.
There is a special and hallowed place for World War II and America's involvment in it in popular culture. A famous newsman, Tom Brokaw, wrote a book that dubbed the men and women who went overseas to fight the Axis, "The Greatest Generation". That many of these men were great I have no doubt, but there is a tone of triumph to that moniker that belies the fact that this was, according to filmmaker Ken Burns, the greatest disaster in the history of human kind. 50-60 million people died, most of them civilians.
And yet today, according to Newsweek, many American students in high school know little about the war; some will answer that their grandparents fought on the side of the Germans in 1942! My generation, the mostly-pampered 1950's-60's baby-boomers, at least were under no illusions about who stood with America--and what nations had stood against Hitler before we entered the war. But now a couple generations have passed since then. The fathers and uncles and schoolteachers who fought and/or at least lived during that war told us enough at least of the basic details of how and why the war had to be fought. Today, these men grandfathers and greatgrandfathers and we lose 1,000 vets a day in America to death. Ditto all the women who served in auxillary roles and as nurses. It seems we have to be told the story again. And again.
Necessary as it might be in circumstances, war is also hell, as General William T. Sherman put it to a class of West Pointers sometime after the Civil War. "They say war is all glory. But war is hell--all hell", he emphasized to those future officers.
When young men went off to war after Pearl Harbor many were anxious to go and hoped for glory. Had Sherman, an architect of total war against the stubborn Confederates, been around in 1940-41 he probably would have offered his services for the coming storm but I doubt he would have been exuberant about leading men into such pain and despair. He'd had his lesson.
Maybe the only way to really understand war is to feel the hell of it for yourself. How else to explain the enthusiasm for it in some hearts, notably the young who have no idea what really is in store for them until they feel the fear in the marrow of their bones. And yet most fight on somehow. Maybe this is how our species, homo sapiens, survived back when our pre-historic ancestors were just a few thousand souls on the East African plains.
Such is the spell war holds over a society, at least at first. Nothing else much matters in the public sphere. Those living here after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 understand that much. And yet, in the end, how many men who survived the war came back with tales of glory? Most who went through air or ground combat didn't want to talk about it. Some still don't. This film, which covers only four American cities and the men and women who were effected, sheds light on why the reticence of the survivor is so prevalent.
Ken Burns' multi-part documentary played its first four parts on PBS stations last week. It resumed yesterday with events leading up to the diasterous setback for the Americans, known as The Battle of the Bulge, in December of 1944. This followed the Britsh and American diaster known as Operation Market Garden , where the September, 1944 invasion of Holland fell afoul of what happens when complicated Allied plans met with bad luck, diasterous oversights and logistical breakdowns.
But its not surprising: even the battles where the Allies won over the Nazis and the Japanese Empire are filled with tragedy. The hedgerows of Normandy after D-Day had Yanks, Brits and Canadians, in all sorts of little battles against Germans. Easy to imagine there was plenty of individial and platoon and tragedies in those battles, no matter what uniform you wore. And yet it was a victory.
The Australians and Americans defeated the Japanese in New Guinea in 1942, where my Uncle Mel--an infantryman in the Oregon National Guard before the war--fought and acquired the tropical diseases that shortened his life and kept him a sick man for years before his early passing. I don't think my uncle talked about what he had personally experienced, in combat at least, even with his kid brother, my dad, who served in the Marines (thankfully, starting boot camp just after the Japanese surrendered.) Their closest friend, a cousin named Randall Townsley, had died in action in the Philippines. His father had died at "The Bulge". There was nothing unusual in this in America as those my age already know; in other Allied nations I imagine the toll to individual families was generally worse.
In this Burns documentary, there was something I hadn't seen before--viewers were given color footage of dead US Marines washed up by the score on the beaches on tiny Tarawa Island. That some of this footage was shown in movie theaters back in the States surprised me; I thought Vietnam was the first war where the Home Front got to see what the horror of death from battle looked like. We also hear something of what I had learned about as a fourth-grader at a school in San Jose: what it was like for Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to be rounded up for detention camps in remote and inhospitable locations in Inland America after the panic of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Ken Burns' has a great knack for the art of "witnessing". The first time I saw ths technique was in actor-director Warren Beatty's rather too-long film about John Reed, the American journalist-radical, called Reds (1981). Beatty interviewed a number of aged men and women who either knew John Reed before his death in Russia in 1920 or lived during the tulmultous period of what was then called The Great War (1914-18) and the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
He interspersed the "witnesses" with the dramatic action in the film. I don't know who perfected this style of cinema, Burns or Beatty or someone else, but it creates a second layer in a story: a first-hand testimony of what the men and women remember of their times. Watching "The War", I felt like a juror in a murder trial where no one can be found guilty or innocent but the evidence should be seen and heard.
I have a four year old grandson in my family. I don't know what the future holds for him or his generation. But, when he is older, I hope to get him to sit down and watch Burns' "The War" with me. History will not repeat itself the same way as this, I know, and my own ideas on war and the military life have been learned second-hand. But no one should go to war, or prepare for it, or even vote for men and women to potentially lead the USA into war, without knowing as much as possible of what has come before. The lives of the young are too precious for them to remain innocent of what they may be called upon to witness and carry out under the politican's banner of doing something "glorious" for their country.
(above) medic attending a wounded Marine on Saipan, 1944.
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