5 ms·

My War (1982)

mitchbob 2y ago
Author of The Great War and Modern Memory [1], an amazing history. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_Modern_Memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_Modern_Memor...
- Michelangelo11 2y ago
  Yeah, war is one of the most frequent topics of his books: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell#Works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell#Works Which actually surprised me, because I first learned about him through his book on class (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-clas...).
- gumby 2y ago
  A week ago I referenced this book in a HN discussion of Tolkien: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40573023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40573023
- hilbert42 2y ago
  You're right, The Great War and Modern Memory is not only an amazing history but it's also a remarkable bit of writing in its own right. It's one of those exceptional books on war and the history of warfare and up there with the likes of John Keegan's The Face of Battle and others that comprise the main text corpus about warfare. It's an essential read for anyone who's interested in the subject. It's author, Paul Fussell, an educator in English, was a WWII veteran and in that nightmarish push across the border into Germany and so had firsthand experience of what it's like to be in battle. Fussell not only looks at the horrors of The Great War but also at those who participated in it, and of the social milieu that surrounded it. Fussell not only speaks from experience but also from the heart, he dedicates the book to the memory of a companion who was killed nearby him. It's a very moving piece of writing. I came to the book just by chance, I saw it on a pile of old books on a table outside a secondhand bookstore around two decades ago. My eye was drawn immediately to the remarkable photo of a tragic figure of a young soldier on its cover. The lost and dejected look on that soldier is forever fixed in my memory. I doubt if that cover photograph could be bettered, it foretells the book's contents to a tee.
dang 2y ago
Related: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33184040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33184040 - Oct 2022 (161 comments) Book Review: Fussell on Class - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32188044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32188044 - July 2022 (1 comment) Book Review: Fussell on Class - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351913 - March 2021 (75 comments) The Real War 1939-1945, by Paul Fussell (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4027749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4027749 - May 2012 (78 comments) Paul Fussell, Literary Scholar and Critic, Is Dead at 88 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4019325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4019325 - May 2012 (3 comments) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22fussell%22%20class&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
philipkglass 2y ago
To this I will add two more longish, striking, compulsively readable pieces about World War II: Thank God For the Atom Bomb (also by Paul Fussell): https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/unde... Losing the War by Lee Sandlin: https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm
082349872349872 2y ago
> Travail...Famille...Patrie (Work, Family, and Patriotism) the opposition of these values to liberté égalité fraternité doesn't seem to have changed much in the intervening eight decades
- a-french-anon 2y ago
  "Patrie" is "Fatherland", not "Patriotism".
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    My bad; I should've known better from « Allons enfants de la patrie » !
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Found an image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France#/media/File:Moneta_FRANCIA_1943.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France#/media/File:Monet... Having reflected, the general problem with "homeland" vs "patriotism" is that the narrower focus might lead to silliness such as the overseas francophonie getting textbooks speaking about "our ancestors, the celts". Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls_nVMZK3rM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls_nVMZK3rM (Euh les filles, are-you sure that the problem of inégalité as posed is, in fact, soluble by radicals?) (at least Vichy France left things at « Famille » and didn't go so far as the teutonic triple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder,_Küche,_Kirche#Third_Reich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder,_Küche,_Kirche#Third_Re... )
djaouen 2y ago
[flagged]
Animats 2y ago
It's worth re-reading works from the trenches of WWII. US troops haven't had to fight a war like that within living memory. Ukraine and Russia are fighting one now. The clouds of war are gathering. Germany is making plans for a draft. Poland tried a small-scale test mobilization of civilians. Poland and Latvia are planning to send back Ukrainian males who dodged the draft there. Sweden and Finland never stopped having a draft. Russia is currently spending over 7% of GDP on its military. The EU averages around 1.5%. US around 2.9%. Russia supposedly lost 40,000 soldiers in Ukraine last month alone, although nobody has solid numbers. That's about 4x the losses on the Allied side for D-Day in 1944. Big wars kill large numbers of people.
- aebtebeten 2y ago
  > Big wars kill large numbers of people (Leaving NBC for a different comment:) Stalingrad had more Allied deaths alone (in ~half year) than Union and Confederate deaths combined of the US Civil War (in ~4 years). To be fair, that was (part of) a big war without medevac, but given (a) the determination of modern actors to ignore Geneva Conventions, and (b) the tech level of the RU/UA war, I'm not sure medevac is still a thing.
  - Animats 2y ago
    > I'm not sure medevac is still a thing. Not the way it was for US troops from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Getting injured people out of the combat zone is much tougher. The combat zone is deeper. The first kilometer is now about as tough as it was before helicopters. Doing something major for a patient in the "golden hour" after injury is often not possible.[1] [1] https://journals.lww.com/journalacs/fulltext/2023/08000/putting_medical_boots_on_the_ground__lessons_from.31.aspx https://journals.lww.com/journalacs/fulltext/2023/08000/putt...
    - KineticLensman 2y ago
      Yes. Western ops in Afghanistan and Iraq - where we had total airspace domination - exhibited a best case view of medevac - all the way up to mobile operating theatres in Chinooks flying to the point of need. A full-on high intensity conflict between peer adversaries would be nothing like this.
ggm 2y ago
John McCarthy (LISP) wrote on USENET about his emotions as a draftee hearing the A-Bomb had been dropped and he wouldn't have to storm the beaches of Japan.
jcynix 2y ago
Interesting article. This reminds me of Peter Cawdrons Sci-fi (sic) book "The Anatomy of Courage" which I finished recently. It related to WW I, not II, but also to the ugly truth about war. To quote from its "Afterword": "This story is based on the non-fiction book The Anatomy of Courage by Charles McMoran Wilson, 1st Baron Moran (1882-1977), who was also known as Lord Moran. He served as the personal physician to Sir Winston Churchill. As a doctor in World War I, Lord Moran had no knowledge of concepts such as PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), but he was a keen observer of human nature and captured the heartache of that tragic war. I’ve drawn from the examples he cataloged from the trenches of World War I and expanded on them in this novel, wanting to keep his insights alive." And, of course, he talks about Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" too …
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
War is horrible, and fought for very stupid reasons - at least on one side, and often both. That said... this guy joined the ROTC because it got him out of gym class in high school. That put him on the path to being a lieutenant in WWII, for all the wrong reasons. Sure, it's a crazy system that makes a person like that a leader of soldiers in the first place, but I also don't consider him likely to be a clear-eyed observer of it all. I mean, the horror he experienced is real, and he describes it eloquently. The larger picture... that's where I don't trust him so much.
- pjc50 2y ago
  A personal account is by nature personal. The historians are there for big picture. > it's a crazy system that makes a person like that a leader of soldiers in the first place You go to war with the people you have available, few of whom are ideally suited to it.
- sdwr 2y ago
  He talks at the beginning about how people who saw the larger picture with clear eyes escaped the front lines: > shrewder friends were enrolling in Navy V-1 or signing up for the pacific exercises of the Naval Japanese Language Program or the Air Corps Meteorological Program
- eleveriven 2y ago
  War leads to significant loss of life. It's horrible indeed.

My War (1982)

Author of The Great War and Modern Memory [1], an amazing history. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_Modern_Memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_Modern_Memor...

Michelangelo11 2y ago
Yeah, war is one of the most frequent topics of his books: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell#Works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell#Works Which actually surprised me, because I first learned about him through his book on class (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-clas...).
gumby 2y ago
A week ago I referenced this book in a HN discussion of Tolkien: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40573023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40573023
hilbert42 2y ago
You're right, The Great War and Modern Memory is not only an amazing history but it's also a remarkable bit of writing in its own right. It's one of those exceptional books on war and the history of warfare and up there with the likes of John Keegan's The Face of Battle and others that comprise the main text corpus about warfare. It's an essential read for anyone who's interested in the subject. It's author, Paul Fussell, an educator in English, was a WWII veteran and in that nightmarish push across the border into Germany and so had firsthand experience of what it's like to be in battle. Fussell not only looks at the horrors of The Great War but also at those who participated in it, and of the social milieu that surrounded it. Fussell not only speaks from experience but also from the heart, he dedicates the book to the memory of a companion who was killed nearby him. It's a very moving piece of writing. I came to the book just by chance, I saw it on a pile of old books on a table outside a secondhand bookstore around two decades ago. My eye was drawn immediately to the remarkable photo of a tragic figure of a young soldier on its cover. The lost and dejected look on that soldier is forever fixed in my memory. I doubt if that cover photograph could be bettered, it foretells the book's contents to a tee.

dang 2y ago

Related: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33184040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33184040 - Oct 2022 (161 comments) Book Review: Fussell on Class - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32188044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32188044 - July 2022 (1 comment) Book Review: Fussell on Class - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351913 - March 2021 (75 comments) The Real War 1939-1945, by Paul Fussell (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4027749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4027749 - May 2012 (78 comments) Paul Fussell, Literary Scholar and Critic, Is Dead at 88 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4019325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4019325 - May 2012 (3 comments) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22fussell%22%20class&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

philipkglass 2y ago

To this I will add two more longish, striking, compulsively readable pieces about World War II: Thank God For the Atom Bomb (also by Paul Fussell): https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/unde... Losing the War by Lee Sandlin: https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm

082349872349872 2y ago

> Travail...Famille...Patrie (Work, Family, and Patriotism) the opposition of these values to liberté égalité fraternité doesn't seem to have changed much in the intervening eight decades

a-french-anon 2y ago
"Patrie" is "Fatherland", not "Patriotism".
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  My bad; I should've known better from « Allons enfants de la patrie » !
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Found an image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France#/media/File:Moneta_FRANCIA_1943.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France#/media/File:Monet... Having reflected, the general problem with "homeland" vs "patriotism" is that the narrower focus might lead to silliness such as the overseas francophonie getting textbooks speaking about "our ancestors, the celts". Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls_nVMZK3rM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls_nVMZK3rM (Euh les filles, are-you sure that the problem of inégalité as posed is, in fact, soluble by radicals?) (at least Vichy France left things at « Famille » and didn't go so far as the teutonic triple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder,_Küche,_Kirche#Third_Reich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder,_Küche,_Kirche#Third_Re... )

djaouen 2y ago

[flagged]

Animats 2y ago

It's worth re-reading works from the trenches of WWII. US troops haven't had to fight a war like that within living memory. Ukraine and Russia are fighting one now. The clouds of war are gathering. Germany is making plans for a draft. Poland tried a small-scale test mobilization of civilians. Poland and Latvia are planning to send back Ukrainian males who dodged the draft there. Sweden and Finland never stopped having a draft. Russia is currently spending over 7% of GDP on its military. The EU averages around 1.5%. US around 2.9%. Russia supposedly lost 40,000 soldiers in Ukraine last month alone, although nobody has solid numbers. That's about 4x the losses on the Allied side for D-Day in 1944. Big wars kill large numbers of people.

aebtebeten 2y ago
> Big wars kill large numbers of people (Leaving NBC for a different comment:) Stalingrad had more Allied deaths alone (in ~half year) than Union and Confederate deaths combined of the US Civil War (in ~4 years). To be fair, that was (part of) a big war without medevac, but given (a) the determination of modern actors to ignore Geneva Conventions, and (b) the tech level of the RU/UA war, I'm not sure medevac is still a thing.
- Animats 2y ago
  > I'm not sure medevac is still a thing. Not the way it was for US troops from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Getting injured people out of the combat zone is much tougher. The combat zone is deeper. The first kilometer is now about as tough as it was before helicopters. Doing something major for a patient in the "golden hour" after injury is often not possible.[1] [1] https://journals.lww.com/journalacs/fulltext/2023/08000/putting_medical_boots_on_the_ground__lessons_from.31.aspx https://journals.lww.com/journalacs/fulltext/2023/08000/putt...
  - KineticLensman 2y ago
    Yes. Western ops in Afghanistan and Iraq - where we had total airspace domination - exhibited a best case view of medevac - all the way up to mobile operating theatres in Chinooks flying to the point of need. A full-on high intensity conflict between peer adversaries would be nothing like this.

ggm 2y ago

John McCarthy (LISP) wrote on USENET about his emotions as a draftee hearing the A-Bomb had been dropped and he wouldn't have to storm the beaches of Japan.

jcynix 2y ago

Interesting article. This reminds me of Peter Cawdrons Sci-fi (sic) book "The Anatomy of Courage" which I finished recently. It related to WW I, not II, but also to the ugly truth about war. To quote from its "Afterword": "This story is based on the non-fiction book The Anatomy of Courage by Charles McMoran Wilson, 1st Baron Moran (1882-1977), who was also known as Lord Moran. He served as the personal physician to Sir Winston Churchill. As a doctor in World War I, Lord Moran had no knowledge of concepts such as PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), but he was a keen observer of human nature and captured the heartache of that tragic war. I’ve drawn from the examples he cataloged from the trenches of World War I and expanded on them in this novel, wanting to keep his insights alive." And, of course, he talks about Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" too …

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

War is horrible, and fought for very stupid reasons - at least on one side, and often both. That said... this guy joined the ROTC because it got him out of gym class in high school. That put him on the path to being a lieutenant in WWII, for all the wrong reasons. Sure, it's a crazy system that makes a person like that a leader of soldiers in the first place, but I also don't consider him likely to be a clear-eyed observer of it all. I mean, the horror he experienced is real, and he describes it eloquently. The larger picture... that's where I don't trust him so much.

pjc50 2y ago
A personal account is by nature personal. The historians are there for big picture. > it's a crazy system that makes a person like that a leader of soldiers in the first place You go to war with the people you have available, few of whom are ideally suited to it.
sdwr 2y ago
He talks at the beginning about how people who saw the larger picture with clear eyes escaped the front lines: > shrewder friends were enrolling in Navy V-1 or signing up for the pacific exercises of the Naval Japanese Language Program or the Air Corps Meteorological Program
eleveriven 2y ago
War leads to significant loss of life. It's horrible indeed.