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The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
- simonblack 4y agohttps://archive.ph/LmRUs https://archive.ph/LmRUs
- lisper 4y agoThe willingness of societies to sanitize the realities of war is easily understood in evolutionary terms: genes that build brains that are willing to suspend disbelief and engage in violence reproduce better than genes that build brains that are not willing to do so because the former can use a credible threat of violence to exploit the latter as resources. The sad fact of the matter is that the answer to Rodney King's famous rhetorical question is that no, we can't all just get along, because we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and at the end of the day it is Darwin who runs the show, not Jesus. (Which is, ironically, a big part of the reason that belief in Jesus is so persistent and pervasive.)
- nine_k 4y agoWe can definitely go along most of the time. Bigger wars become more and more of a losing proposition with modern (conventional) weapons, and the complexity needed to run a prosperous society. Starting a war to grab riches (as it was in ancient times) usually does not work, and definitely does not work on larger scale. The only relatively reasonable case for starting a war today is a war for independence, for liberation from someone else's strangling control. It does not always lead to prosperity as a result though; look at Eritrea, for instance.
- lisper 4y ago> Bigger wars become more and more of a losing proposition You've missed the point. Yes, a war is generally a losing proposition nowadays. But a credible threat of war often is not. Even more to the point, wars were often winning propositions in our ancestral environment, and so we are more likely to be descended from people who were willing to wage them in the past. That is a very difficult legacy to overcome.
- colinsane 4y ago> we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and at the end of the day it is Darwin who runs the show, not Jesus. natural selection/Darwinism isn’t any sort of genius. from one angle, you outsmart it every time you use a condom. from another angle, if Darwinism leads to such an apparently contradictory behavior — one which popped into being suddenly, after millions of years without — how certain can we really be about the outcomes this mechanism will produce into the future?
- lisper 4y ago> you outsmart it every time you use a condom Not really. All you're doing is moving the needle a tiny bit so that in the next generation there will be fewer people inclined to use condoms. > if Darwinism leads to such an apparently contradictory behavior What contradictory behavior are you referring to? The ability to suspend disbelief is useful to survival in all kinds of situations, especially in our ancestral environment. Where is the contradiction?
- colinsane 4y ago> All you're doing is moving the needle a tiny bit so that in the next generation there will be fewer people inclined to use condoms. so you claim, yet condoms have been around for generations now and my perception is that their use has only increased over generations. am i mistaken in this? > What contradictory behavior are you referring to? i said "apparently contradictory": on first look it appears to be contradictory, whether it objectively is or not. better would have been for me to use "unexpected", best would have been "unpredictable": because evolution produces so many random effects along the way. > we can't all just get along, because we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and at the end of the day it is Darwin who runs the show Darwinism suggests here that solving for limited resources will someday be required for an organism to be successful. it doesn't care how that's solved for: how can you be so confident that the emerging solution won't be coupled with "all [of this organism] just getting along?" for example, an unending arms race over physical superiority may be disastrous against resource use, and a more successful strategy might be some level of cooperation that avoids that arms race. if today's humans are a Darwinian product consider that they differ from parts of the past both along increased large-scale cooperation (e.g. cities) and less individual-against-individual violence (e.g. violent crime). that already looks a lot more like us "just getting along" than many stages of the past. how long will this be stable? where lies the next local optima? can anyone really know?
- annowiki 4y agoI can strongly recommend Fussel's (the author of this essay) book "The Boys' Crusade", which provides a very eye opening account to WWII. It is most likely a longer version of this essay (I haven't read this essay). I can also recommend his book Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, but for different reasons. Other books in the same vein: - The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle by J Glenn Gray (Gray was a philosophy PhD and a 2nd Lieutenant in the war) - War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges (Hedges was a war correspondent during the balkans and numerous other conflicts, this is much more interested in the psychological build up to war in common society, and its effects on society) These books make me very pessimistic about human nature, but Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors provides a nice antidote: the total number of people killed by warfare in the 20th Century, if we followed similar patterns to our prehistoric ancestors, would have dwarfed what actually happened. We are becoming less warlike, even if its not cured.
- siavosh 4y agoI read the Chris Hedges book when it came out and it's left a lasting impression on me. I think it got rid of any academic notions of war I may have had. One part that I'll always remember was him saying the war criminals were the pundits on TV leading up to and during the Bulkan war, they held much guilt in leading the masses to the terrible outcomes. The other counter intuitive insight it gives is how wars have this strange effect on some people where they can relinquish their day-to-day worries/anxiety/failings and instead can find some kind of strange peace or even thrive in a more black/white just-survive reset of society. I should probably read it again.
- rospaya 4y agoThe Hague is full of poets, playwrites, psychiatrists and lawyers and the media was heavily used to incite hatred. Not in the way that directed violence in Rwanda for example, but it was propaganda.
- branko_d 4y ago> the war criminals were the pundits on TV Mila Štula comes to mind. I still remember watching the hysteria on Radio-Television Belgrade in disbelief that people would actually believe it. But they did. And the rest is history, as they say. Ugly, murderous, and utterly unnecessary history. I see some signs of this in the contemporary US media landscape, and I worry the consequences might be similar.
- ARandomerDude 4y agoI didn't fight in WW2 obviously, but I did fight in a war. For me, the reticence to describe every detail to people who weren't there boils down to this: I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. I want them to be happy and safe, that's why I went. No need to bring it to their doorstep if I don't have to. I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way.
- yibberish 4y agotalking about it does not quite bring it to their doorstep; but it surely takes you back there; it's understandable to not want to go back. your choice to shoulder this burden for all, is well your choice. but be advised that this choice may have unintended consequences in a longer term. consequences of your choice to witholding bad things "for them". I don't belive you're doing this (bearing the horrible things) only to shield your relatives from your past. it is important you recognize that it's something you do for yourself, you are the main person who doesn't want to remember whatever horrible events you had to experience; don't pin this choice on them.
- krrrh 4y agoHe didn’t say anything about not revisiting those events personally or with other vets, he said by with “people who weren’t there”. Give a guy a break for choosing to not sit his kids down to hear all the gory details.
- yibberish 4y agoI'm not telling him to go scare his kids. I'm pointing out some possible self-deceit. "I did it for them!".. sure, why not? but my point is that first and foremost he's making those choices for himself; which is pefrectly fine. what's not fine (IMO) is to pretend such choices aren't selfish.
- jimbokun 4y agoWho gives you the authority to judge the morality and motivations behind this person's actions?
- denton-scratch 4y agoOld soldiers rarely want to talk about what they've experienced. My father was horrified by my proposal to interview him on video about his WWII career. And when they ask us And they're certainly going to ask us The reason why we didn't win the Croix de Guerre Oh we'll never tell them No we'll never tell them. There was a front, but damned if we knew where. [WWI soldier's song, based on a popular song of the time]
- iwillbenice 4y agoMy grandfather was a WWII B-29 pilot. For a very long time he didn't talk in much detail about the horrors. It was only in his later years before he passed did he talk openly about some of the real nasty aspects. One time I asked him what the most unpleasant thing he experienced was during his time in the military. His answer was the stench of burning humans. When they started low level firebombing, his initial spot was the center-rear wave. So when he flew in to drop his stuff... the smell was horrendous. I suspect he shared that with us younger folks to illustrate that war is not glamorous, even if you win. Yes they won, but it was a disgustingly ugly affair for all parties involved. I'm glad he shared that, because I have a very healthy aversion to unnecessary conflict, in part due to a few stories shared by him.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoI wish more of our politicians and pundits had the enlightenment and empathy that comes from such an experience. So many rude, riled-up chickenhawks these days.
- wantoncl 4y agoI read something a while ago, a veteran who said something to the effect of: "all war would end immediately if the perpetrators had to smell it." I think he had liberated a concentration camp. I wish I had remembered it better. I think that this informed a lot of the fury towards the ordinary German population, that they could allow something like that to happen, or that they would ever just get used to it and go on with their lives. I'm probably conflating that with a scene from Band of Brothers, or some other written work.
- rossdavidh 4y ago"They knew that in its representation to the laity, what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied." The author seems to have little understanding of how much this was true of World War 1, or probably every large scale war ever. The home audiences for news reports in World War 1 (in pretty much every country) were not allowed to know how FUBB'd things were, and it was only after the war ended and troops went back home that the word partially got out. There were governments that did not let troops go on home leave for long periods because they didn't want them talking to the civilian population. I don't think this was something unique about World War 2.
- hutzlibu 4y agoWell, in WW1 in britain they actually did an authentic frontline documentation for the home front to watch in the new cinemas. It turned out, this was kind of bad for the morale of the civilians, who were expecting heroics and glory and were devastated by the gruel pictures of reality of war and so they never showed it again in this shape. (I try to find the video again)
- williamcotton 4y agoThe author does mention this: “IN THE POPULAR AND GENTEEL ICONOGRAPHY OF war during the bourgeois age, all the way from eighteenth and nineteenth-century history paintings to twentieth-century photographs, the bodies of the dead are intact, if inert, sometimes bloody and sprawled in awkward positions, but, except for the absence of life, plausible and acceptable simulacra of the people they once were.”
- hulitu 4y agoIt is because the propaganda machine does not want you to see what the war is about. They dont want you to see bodies of desecrated children spread all over the place.
- pschw 4y ago> The author seems to have little understanding of how much this was true of World War 1... Fussell wrote _The Great War and Modern Memory_, so I'd say he was pretty well-versed on how WW1 was portrayed.
- philipkglass 4y agoThis meditation on World War II and memory is probably my favorite essay ever: "Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm Sandlin refers to Fussell's writings on the war too. It's long, but every time I look it up I end up re-reading all of it.
- strangattractor 4y agoIf anyone is interested in Vietnam "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien is excellent.
- stormdennis 4y agoThe author was a veteran of WW2. In 1989 he was 65. He died in 2012, aged 88.
- greedo 4y agoA bit off on his age in 1989; he was actually 75. Otherwise he would have been pretty young to have served in WW2.
- tlear 4y agoThe introduction seems questionable. Practically in every category that counted Americans were ahead. Artillery The God of War, number of tanks vastly outnumbering Germans and Sherman was as good as PzIV, Airpower, motorized transport. Most importantly logistics Americans had food, clothing, fuel. The way that intro is written it sounds like he is talking about Finland vs USSR ;)
- yamtaddle 4y agoI expect the perception on the frontlines was rather different than what it looks like in a spreadsheet. I mean, that actually ends up being kinda the thesis of the article.
- mynameishere 4y ago
- strangattractor 4y agoI watch https://www.youtube.com/user/funker530 https://www.youtube.com/user/funker530 for this reason. It is not a gore channel. Their intent is to document what actual combat is like. I have never served and likely never will given my age. My only rational is to stay informed. One of my enduring memories of childhood is the nightly casualty reports on the news and pictures of body bags from Vietnam. The US military is incredibly professional now compared to the 60's which is good. The downside is that our Gov't is quick to use them without thinking about the long term consequences.
- gerikson 4y agoI think Fussel had a point in 1989, but after that there's been plenty of depictions of war that have been less sanitized. "The Pacific" comes to mind in TV, and "Fury" in movies, even if it's very formulaic. Memoirs can be raw too: - https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Helmet-For-My-Pillow.html https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Helmet-For-My-Pillow.ht... - https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/With-the-Old-Breed.html https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/With-the-Old-Breed.html And even before 1989 novels like Waugh's "Sword of Honour" trilogy problematized WW2.
- hef19898 4y agoAfter skimming the article, I can't shake the feeling that the author fell for Wehrmacht propaganda when it comes to equipment. The Wehrmacht lacked auto and semi automatic infantry weapons, the main rifle was bolt action . SMGs were not half as widespread as propaganda reel made it look and having the first true general purpose MG is not a war winner in itself. The only German tank from 42/43 onwards, when the US started to see combat angainst the Nazis, that could outgun Western allied tanks was the Tiger (great gun, but no longer up to date on armor), Panther (mostly used on the Eastern Front, inreliable and with weak side armor) and the Tiger II (available in homeopathic doses). The occassions where Tigers were encountered in France are far less numerous than believed, also because a barely on-par Panzer 4 kind of looks like a Tiger I. The bulk of the Wehrmacht was on foot, horse drawn, barely above WW1 infantey force. The highly mechanized army fielding invincible super tanks and vehicles is a propaganda myth. And everything beyond heavy weapons, like boots, load bearing equipment, trucks, rubber, food, sweets, you name it, the Western allies were lightyears aheaf of the Nazis. And since those things hint at highly effecient supply chains, the Allies also out performed the Nazis on spare parts and medical supplies. EDIT: That the author was a WW2 vet doesn't mean he couldn't fall for some scewed view of the enmies capabilities, because of course you can. Not war related, but the things that go well are taken for granted while the things not going well, in reality or just perception, stand out.
- gerikson 4y agoFussell references the belief among GIs that the Germans had better kit. It's one thing to objectively assess this after the fact, it's quite another to get hit by an 88mm in Normandy and not see the Hurricane obliterate it. The Wehrmacht fought tenaciously in Western Europe using second-rate troops compared to the Eastern front where the real struggle was. Defending is easier than attacking, and the defenders were inching closer and closer to their homeland. This counts for a lot in warfare.
- eduction 4y agoBizarre to write something called "the real war" that is focused on American forces, who were, by any measure, enjoying vast advantages and resources unavailable to other combatants (including being able to choose the time and place of engagement). Below is a table of WWII military casualties by nation: World War II casualties - Wikipedia Soviet Union 8,668,000 to 11,400,000 Germany 4,440,000 to 5,318,000 China (1937–1945) 3,000,000 to 3,750,000+ Japan 2,100,000 to 2,300,000 United States 407,300 United Kingdom including Crown Colonies 383,700 Italy (in postwar 1947 borders) 319,200[68] to 341,000
- stereolambda 4y agoNot having fought in a war (yet?) I won't dare to speak about the core message here (it's well worth reading), but I sometimes wonder about dissemination of this knowledge. The fragments about Hitler and Goebbels shielding themselves from gory reality on the ground are interesting in this context. This shows well how the leadership operates on the level of its own fantasies, and moves the "chess pieces" while clueless about what they're really doing. The current difficulty in Russia with actually mobilizing many parts of society gives one a glimmer of hope: they have a handle mainly on marginalized and poor village dwellers. Maybe the modern living standards and communications landscape does ultimately make people more resistant to being mobilized for dumb wars, even if for 100% selfish reasons and (sadly) without necessarily getting rid of imperialistic nationalism. This one of the crucial reasons defending untampered speech is important, and why communist China has the information policies it has. (To be sure, draft evasion was very much a widespread thing even in republican Rome.) I sometimes think that middle 20th century was such a horrible time in many respects (not to deny earlier and later brutality) because they did have many technological means of communication, coordination and mass broadcast already--but to the degree it was usable only by the central elite. Thus they could enforce social conformity and mass projects, often wars, with relatively little difficulty. Compare how war journalist work is described in the article.
- yamtaddle 4y ago> The current difficulty in Russia with actually mobilizing many parts of society gives one a glimmer of hope: they have a handle mainly on marginalized and poor village dwellers. Maybe the modern living standards and communications landscape does ultimately make people more resistant to being mobilized for dumb wars, even if for 100% selfish reasons and (sadly) without necessarily getting rid of imperialistic nationalism. This one of the crucial reasons defending untampered speech is important, and why communist China has the information policies it has. (To be sure, draft evasion was very much a widespread thing even in republican Rome.) Despite the wartime propaganda efforts, Fussell notes in this piece that one of the things King George VI may have been ignorant of was that all his jails and prison-camps were full to bursting with deserters and draft-dodgers, as D-Day approached.
- WalterBright 4y ago> And they knew that the single greatest weapon of the war, the atomic bomb excepted, was the German 88-mm flat-trajectory gun, which brought down thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of soldiers. I beg to differ. It was radar-guided anti-aircraft guns, and proximity fuzes for artillery shells. This had the effect of doubling the firepower. Another was high-octane gasoline, which enabled much more powerful aircraft engines. The Axis did not have these technologies.
- agumonkey 4y ago> proximity fuzes interesting, it's rarely mentioned indeed. Also I wonder if that was the reason for developping those flares scattered by planes ? or maybe that was only after the invention of guided missiles.
- WalterBright 4y agoThe Germans did use radar to detect, track, and guide forces to the targets. German night fighters had onboard radar for this, too. What the Germans didn't have, however, was connecting the radar directly to the weapon.
- pfdietz 4y agoThe effect of the proximity fuze on non-AA artillery was profound. The Germans certainly noticed when the fuzes were released for general use at the Battle of the Bulge. A similar fuze was also made available for use in bombs, but I don't know if that was used in Europe. It was used in the Pacific against airfields, late in the war.
- softcactus 4y ago> I beg to differ. It was radar-guided anti-aircraft guns The 8.8cm german flak gun WAS a radar-guided AA gun. > and proximity fuzes for artillery shells The axis may not have had proximity fuzes, but the 8.8cm flak was so accurate that during a statistical analysis it was determined that the part of the gun that introduced the most accuracy were the timed fuzes. They switched to shells that detonated on impact and actually ended up scoring more kills than before. The actual piece of equipment that made this thing so accurate was the fire control computer, the Kommandogerat 40. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UnrEetRYIuLoUT--ic0irCNXbCC7UcWf?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UnrEetRYIuLoUT--ic0i... Here is a Google Drive link to some scans I made in college of the book written by the designer. It explains all the calculations that the analog computer is doing.
- civilized 4y agoIt's a fine essay, but I am coming to this long dissertation on dismemberment many years after Saving Private Ryan, which covered it better than any words could.
- rawgabbit 4y agoA side comment. Paul Fussell mentioned the origin of the GI slang “FUBAR.” One thing I disliked early in my career were the many tutorials and demos that named the first object Foo and the next object Bar. I doubt any of these tutorial authors served in WW2 or in any war. It seemed to me similar to suburban raised children mimicking Gangster Rap. It feels fake and phony to me. War is horrific and evil. Writing a tutorial is the complete opposite. I guess I am the dude who yells at kids to get off my lawn.
- aidenn0 4y agoUsage of foo/bar/baz as metasyntactic variables dates to the 60s. It appears that Foo predates bar, and was possibly more related to the usage of it as a nonsense word in pre-ww2 comics. It seems unlikely that "bar" was added after foo for any reason other than FUBAR though.
- teddyh 4y agoI suspect that even well-meaning articles like this does society a disservice when it characterizes war as horrifying. People are not afraid of horror; people believe they can handle it. People watch horror movies. Calling war horrifying is still, in a way, glamorizing war. But even though war, the reality of war, does contain horror, war is not, I believe, on the whole, horrifying. It is instead (I suspect) boring. An oppressive and grinding kind of boring, and only punctuated with brief interludes of horror, which only contributes to its oppressiveness. I suspect that it is this aspect which destroys most people who wage war. I suspect that while some/many people do experience the horror of war (which indeed is quite horrible), most people in war do not experience much horror directly. It is instead the boredom; the oppressive, grinding, fearful boredom, which destroys most of them. Of course, I’m only speculating; I’m not a sociologist or a psychologist.
- mannykannot 4y agoThe article is not a sociological or psychological treatise, but if you put some credence at all into what is partly (but not exclusively) anecdotal evidence, it makes the case that for many (probably the majority) who find themselves in infantry combat, it is worse than they feared or imagined. If it is protracted (and a figure of ~200 days is given), essentially all the survivors are traumatized, often profoundly. During the 82-day battle of Okinawa, I believe American lieutenants were in combat on average less than two weeks before being killed or becoming a casualty through traumatic injury (and it was worse for the Japanese troops), which cannot be passed off as long periods of boredom. The article is specifically about front-line experience, which (it is claimed, plausibly) is very different than even that of rear-echelon troops, and commingling the two does a disservice to the former. I feel fairly confident in saying that watching a horror movie is nothing like any of it.
- gryson 4y agoThe author is addressing front line combatants, not the people in the far more common support roles.
- DubiousPusher 4y agoThis is where I have found studying the Eastern front of the war to be incredibly informative. The U.S. quickly ceased to propagandize the Eastern front because they did not want to valorize the Soviets as the cold War matured. What this has left in the West is a much more sober literature regarding that part of the conflict. What is most clear from that is what a disaster for humanity WWII was. It's much harder to romanticize it in the face of that kind of unguilded brutality. Similarly, the experiences of underground fighters and the partisans paint a picture of unredeemable cruelty. When the slightest mistep will cause your compatriots to bury you in a shallow grave, the bullet in the back of your head branding you a traitor forever whether you deserved it or not, it's hard to sell the idea that valor is rewarded with proportional glory. The mess of war is indiscriminant.
- shswkna 4y agoThis article is about how the USA as a country lacks the political and cultural maturity about war, compared to for example Europe (and other countries where war was fought on its territory). Countries that advocate a war or conflict, should fight this out on their own territory. This would solve a lot of problems in the world and would make up for the developmental deficit.
- tux2bsd 4y agoThat would do the world a whole lot of good. (I haven't read the article and am choosing to believe your summation.) US participation in WWII was clearly vital and pivotal. Korea and Vietnam were unfortunate necessities - anyone that believes otherwise is naive and has no idea of the true horror communism always brings. The Cold War was ultimately the very long tail of WWII... After those times there wasn't any need for the US to be an aggressor in other lands.
- justshowpost 4y ago
- ggm 4y agoCame here to say "why no fussel refs" and checked the author before posting. A similar vibe to Fussel is in Farlay Mowatt's war writing, or arguably Spike Milligan's pretty bizarre but also honest autobiography of his PTSD