Literature, War and the Military in

Literature, War and the Military in. Fascination with war continues in the twentieth century, and no less fascinating is the literature that war has spawned. In novels, poems, memoirs, and plays, the subject finds an immense readership. Half a century after the end of World War II, books continue to issue from major publishers. Manuscript memoirs circulate widely among former warriors. Diaries and journals (kept secretly during wartime service, and subject to court‐martial if discovered) surface every day to find their way into print. As the literature of war grows, readership grows too among combat veterans, professional historians, and students of the matrix of twentieth‐century military life who yearn for the intimate details of war told by those who experienced it.

War fiction—short stories and novels—has had a major impact on readers in this century. For the most part, the significant war fiction finds its roots in the classic tales of earlier centuries. Writers on war often cite Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage as inspiration. At the core of Crane's small masterpiece lies a preeminent theme: the rapid, tragic maturation of youth. This theme is also included in Erich Maria Remarque's classic, All Quiet on the Western Front, the tale of a naive and idealistic German lad who slowly loses his idealism as trench warfare inexorably destroys his comrades and, eventually, himself. No novel of World War I more poignantly captures the utter futility of war and of an epoch.

Much of this nihilistic attitude is also found in William March's Company K and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises. Although the last cannot be categorized as a novel of World War I in the sense that it is a chronicle of combat, it does speak of the aftermath of that war and the symbolic emasculation of all its participants. The Australian novelist Frederic Manning addresses this same futility in The Middle Parts of Fortune, first published anonymously in 1929 and a year later in an expurgated version, as Her Privates We.

The poetry of World War I continues to reach as wide an audience as did the fiction of that war. Thematically, this verse differed little from the novels: loss of innocence, idealism, and patriotism; the shock of combat and its aftermath; the wanton destruction of the natural world. Wilfred Owen (the best of the poets), Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, and the American soldier‐poet Joyce Kilmer, all died in the Great War, leaving behind them a considerable body of small masterpieces. Others— Edmund Blunden, Herbert Asquith (son of the British prime minister), Robert Graves, A. P. Herbert, Herbert Read, and Siegfried Sassoon—survived the war, but each in his own way was indelibly marked by it. They expressed their psychic wounds in a number of memorable poems, all speaking to the same theme: the intense violence of battle, the long reflection after combat, and the anguish suffered over lost comrades. The war's greatest verse is marked by these themes.

Much of the literature evinces language that war itself engenders. Warriors tend to be word merchants. They manufacture words and phrases that seem appropriate to themselves and to their plights. In every war—and surely most obvious in World War II—warriors created a vocabulary that proved to have remarkable staying power. Few military men or women speak a genteel language, for the very magnitude of what they do and the traumas they undergo spawn a vocabulary that fits their moods, actions, thoughts, and ideals. The ubiquitous word fuck (used with great frequency for every situation and as practically every part of speech) began to appear in print soon after the end of World War II. (In World War I, the British bloody served a similar function.) Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees appeared first in Cosmopolitan magazine. His Colonel Cantwell's “f‐ ‐ ‐” was considered a breakthrough in the era's publishing censorship; but in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, fuggin became for the general reading public what all veterans of World War II (and other wars) understood: The warriors' curse. The ingenuity of their cursing became the subject of some mirth and eventually found its way into a great deal of the literature of the twentieth century. Some language was simply dusted off from earlier wars: K.P. and AWOL date from the American Civil War. But the scope, mechanization, and immensity of World War II gave rise to an entirely new and highly imaginative language. The acronyms WAVE, WACK, and SNAFU, along with words and phrases like “TS cards,” “flak,” “chickenshit,” “K rations,” “jerry cans,” “gremlins,” “sky pilot,” and the ubiquitous “Kilroy Was Here,” all attest to the fanciful coinages of war. Thus no novel, poem, or short story needed a gloss to help readers define terms or fathom dialogue. And years after that war, many such words and phrases (for veteran and civilian alike) remain in our vocabulary. The wars in Korea and Vietnam have added to, and in some cases enriched, the language. The flexibility and breadth of English in great measure account for this phenomenon.

The huge differences between World Wars I and II account in some ways for the quality and scope of their literature. World War I, as historians and literary critics have noted for years, was a relatively contained war; that is, the major battles were fought in the trenches and bunkers of Western Europe. Day after day, week after week, stalemated armies fought and died over a few yards of mud and rubble. There were no great decisive sea battles in World War I—battles involving massive task forces, submarines, and thousands of aircraft. The daily horrors of trench warfare, then, became the metaphors of the war and found their way into impressive works of literature. World War II was a vastly different war. It covered a huge geographic area, involved far more combatants and civilians, and resulted in far greater casualties. It also involved massive amounts of highly sophisticated and deadly efficient weapons (radar, aircraft, tanks, and the like) and at times moved with blinding speed across the terrain. Unlike World War I, when battles like the Somme and Verdun symbolized the entire war experience, World War II was marked by many battles sprawled across vast areas, each one a tragic symbol of the era. Guada canal, Midway, Iwo Jima, Kasserine Pass, Anzio, Leyte Gulf, Okinawa, the bomber campaign over Germany, the invasion of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge—all represented separate and distinct facets of the World War II experience.

Just as American novelists from the World War I era strove to share their stories soon after the armistice was signed ( William Boyd's Through the Wheat and William March's Company K), novels of World War II began to appear as early as the mid‐forties and into the early fifties. First, in 1944, was John Hersey's A Bell for Adano. In 1946, Thomas Heggen's Mr. Roberts was published. John Horne Burns's The Gallery and James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific appeared in 1947; and a year later came James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor. Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead were both published in 1948. James Jones's From Here to Eternity appeared in 1951, as did Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny. All were critically acclaimed; several became successful films; Hersey, Cozzens, and Michener won Pulitzer Prizes.

American dramatists soon followed suit. In 1947, Arthur Miller's All My Sons was staged. In one sense, Miller's drama was a more political statement than the famous World War I play by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings, What Price Glory? A chronicle of wartime profiteering, All My Sons dwelt on many of the same themes employed by the fiction writers of the period: human waste, Pyrrhic victories, and self‐aggrandizement in both military and civilian life. Since then, Vietnam (far more than Korea) has become a metaphor for American involvement in foreign wars—as well as the basis for a literature of angst that has dominated the contemporary creative imagination.

England's role in World War II has been captured in a number of significant novels, many of them masterpieces of the genre. Alexander Baron's From the City, from the Plough, written soon after the novelist's return from six years as a combat infantryman in the British army, is a graphic account of a rifleman's life given in a tone that belies its content. No better novel of the war at sea has been written than Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea; and few novels of World War II—or any war—captured the degradation and pain suffered in prisoner‐of‐war camps better than Pierre Boulle's Bridge on the River Kwai, based on the story of the Burma‐Thailand rail line built by British POWs and impressed native laborers.

Now, more than half a century from the end of World War II, personal memories dominate the English and American literary scene. In recent decades, the works of both professional and amateur writers have flooded the market; many have received high praise, and rightly so. Joseph Heller's Catch‐22 is both a comic novel and a bitter indictment of war. The book quickly became a cult favorite, and the title has become part of contemporary vocabulary. War in the air has been graphically portrayed by Samuel Hynes's Flights of Passage, Elmer Bendiner's Fall of Fortresses, and Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy. Last Letters from Stalingrad, edited by Franz Schneider, reveals the full horrors of Adolf Hitler's military and political madness in throwing German youth against Russia's might and its winter ally. Guy Sajer compounds those horrors in The Forgotten Soldier, the best German warrior's memoir of the eastern front. Harold Bond's Return to Cassino and Farley Mowat's And No Birds Sang are gripping accounts of the Allied campaign in Italy. John Hersey's Into the Valley, Richard Tregaskis's Guadalcanal Diary, and Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed on Peliliu and Okinawa deal with Pacific jungle warfare in all its Goyaesque images. Few prisoner‐of‐war chronicles achieve such power and poignancy as Manny Lawton's Some Survived. Donald Burgett's Currahee, told with chilling fidelity to detail, is the only first‐person account of the invasion of Normandy by an American paratrooper. D‐Day, a collection of memoirs by participants in the greatest seaborne invasion in history, has been edited by Stephen Ambrose.

In all of these memoirs, themes found in World War II fiction are evident; and all speak of the sense that each participant in war is aware in some vague way that he or she is involved in a monumental undertaking—but that the full scope and significance of that participation can never be fully fathomed. Personal memoirs of war also focus on the demeaning nature of man in battle, the atavistic nature of combat, and the agony experienced by boyish warriors assigned tasks they never believed they would experience. The most memorable memoirs all ring with war's bitter truth spoken by Walt Whitman: “I was the man, I suffered, I was there.”

World War II memoir writers pay homage to their predecessors, especially the artists of World War I. English participants in the Great War wrote a remarkable number of evocative memoirs. The tone of most is modest and straightforward, but beneath their surface lies a deep vein of anger, fear, and chaos engendered by the daily brutality of trench warfare. Among the genuine classics in this genre is Siegfried Sassoon's trilogy, Memoirs of a Fox‐Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston's Progress. Assuming the persona of George Sherston, Sassoon relates his wartime experiences, the Edwardian world he grew up in, and his growing bitterness at the graft, political maneuvering, and civilian indifference to the meaningless slaughter on the western front. No writer of his generation was more responsible for the widespread antiwar movement in England in the years following the war.

War correspondents—men and women who sketched, painted, photographed, and wrote about war from front‐line positions or as part of vast sea and air armadas—achieved some considerable measure of distinction through the quality and quantity of their work. Their collected dispatches have now become a distinct genre in the literature of war and deserve high praise. Among the best journalistic writings to emerge from World War II are those of Ernie Pyle—Brave Men; Bill Mauldin—Up Front; and Homer Biggart—Forward Positions. Biggart's fierce competitor and colleague, Marguerite “Maggie” Higgins, reported brilliantly from Korea. Her dispatches are among the finest from that war.

Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History is the definitive work on the period and the war, while Michael Herr's Dispatches is among the best work by a correspondent who covered the jungle battles. A gripping, fanciful novel on Vietnam is Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July is among the finest of the personal accounts of war and the nation's attitude towards its returning veterans. Nathaniel Tripp's Father, Soldier, Son is a brilliant memoir of Vietnam; the work alternates between the Vietnam years and Tripp's father's emotional struggles in World War II.

To many, verse is not an art form that lends itself to a depiction of war. Yet the shock of combat and the chaos of the battlefield became a muse for a number of American and British warrior‐poets of World War II. The best of these poets seemed to find that only verse could capture the immensity of what they had experienced—that only verse could speak the unspeakable. World War I verse disproves William Butler Yeats's maxim that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.” Compared with the quality and quantity of poetry of the Great War, however, little verse from World War II measured up. The lengthy immersion in war by British soldiers on the western front from 1914 to 1918 supplied them with the subject matter of the loss of all illusions and death in its most horrible forms. At the same time, there seemed to develop among these poets a particular sensibility and ironic feeling that in the beauty of verse lay the vehicle to express that what they were doing and seeing. During and after World War II, no American poet captured the vision or intensity of an Owen or a Sassoon. But a handful of American poems stand out. Among them are Randall Jarrell's Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, Richard Eberhart's The Fury of Aerial Bombardment, and Louis Simpson's The Runner. In England, Henry Reed's collection, Lessons of War, represents one powerful voice to emerge from the era.

From the ancient historian Thucydides to those writing in the waning decades of this century, men and women continue to strive for words to articulate their war experiences and to share them with others. One thing is certain, however. Thomas Hardy, too old to serve in World War I but caught up in the hideous drama unfolding before him, wrote that one day “war's annals will fade into night.” Judging from the continuing flow of war literature in our time, it appears that “war's annals” are far from that. Rather, they lie at the dawn of the memories and imaginations of creative artists.
[See also Korean War; Vietnam War: Postwar Impact; World War I: Postwar Impact; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course; World War II: Postwar Impact.]

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Alexander Medlicott, Jr.