Since its 1997 publication, Lee Sandlin's 'Losing the War' has been on countless college reading lists and was adapted in an abbreviated version for the public radio show This American Life. MemorialDay
: nothing magical or supernatural happens, and the setting is as close to documentary as Wagner ever got . But the realism keeps fading away into dreaminess. None of Wagner’s other operas seems so much of a fairy tale: the plot about the winner of the contest marrying the mayor’s daughter is straight out of the Brothers Grimm. And the tone isn’t Wagner’s normal metaphysical gloom; it’s miraculously sunny and serene, as though there’s no darkness in the world deeper than benign melancholy.
But in the feverish atmosphere of the war years nobody could have remained blind to what was really at stake. The country was swarming with secret police, there were mass arrests and deportations of everybody thought even remotely undesirable, there were daily triumphant announcements of the latest spectacular military victory obliterating all those decades of national humiliation, and there were an awful lot of patriotic parades.
Which is as much as to say that the actual result of the battle shouldn’t be allowed to dent the myth. This is where the falsification of the war began—not in the movies and not in government propaganda, but in the simple refusal of reporters in the field to describe honestly what they were seeing. But there was another reason as well: a kind of psychological block. There was something essential about the battlefield that reporters didn’t tell the folks back home. They weren’t being censored exactly; they probably could have published it if they’d wanted to. They just didn’t know how. In any anthology of wartime journalism , you can find instances of reporters coming up against the fundamental truth of the war and being unable to say what it was.
It’s worth following the implicit logic here in some detail. There’s an obvious meaning you would expect Murrow to find in the sight of a white sheet waving in the middle of an air raid: it’s a flag of surrender, a pathetic gesture of submission made to the unseen forces thundering across the night skies overhead. But that’s exactly what Murrow doesn’t say.
In the months after Pearl Harbor the driving aim of Japanese strategy was to capture a string of islands running the length of the western Pacific and fortify them against an American counterattack. This defensive perimeter would set the boundaries of their new empire—or, as they called it, the “Greater Asia Coprosperity Sphere.” Midway Island, the westernmost of the Hawaiian Islands, was one of the last links they needed to complete the chain.
Now there was nothing left of the Japanese attack force except a scattering of escort ships and the planes still in the air. The pilots were the final casualties of the battle; with the aircraft carriers gone, and with Midway still in American hands, they had nowhere to land. They were doomed to circle helplessly above the sinking debris, the floating bodies, and the burning oil slicks until their fuel ran out.
What were they supposed to say about what they were seeing? At Kasserine American soldiers were blown apart into shreds of flesh scattered among the smoking ruins of exploded tanks. Ernie Pyle called this “disappointing.” Well, why not? There were no other words to describe the thing that had happened there.
For most soldiers the dominant memory they had of the war was of that vast structure arching up unimaginably high overhead. It’s no coincidence that two of the most widely read and memorable American novels of the war, Joseph Heller’s, are almost wholly about the cosmic scale of the American military’s corporate bureaucracy and mention Hitler and the Nazis only in passing. Actual combat could seem like almost an incidental side product of the immense project of military industrialization.
But who was controlling the growth of this fantastic edifice? Nobody could say. People who went to Washington during those years found a desperately overcrowded town caught up in a kind of diffuse bureaucratic riot. New agencies and administrations overflowed from labyrinthine warrens of temporary office space.
The plan set the true clock time of the war. No matter what the surface play of battle was in Africa or the South Seas, the underlying dynamic never changed: every hour, every day the Allies were preparing for the invasion of Europe.
Somewhere in the bureaucratic stratosphere, of course, there were people who did know the justification for it and for everything else the Allies were doing. They just didn’t want to tell anybody what those reasons were. The Italian invasion, as it happened, was the result of a complicated attempt to appease the Russians, who were increasingly doubtful that their allies were serious about taking on Germany.
This is from a memoir by Eugene B. Sledge, a marine who fought in the Pacific. It was issued by the marines’ own printing house, with prefaces by a couple of brigadier generals. That might lead it to be discounted as the usual party-line war-memoir whitewash, especially since Sledge does try to put the best possible spin on everything the marines did in the Pacific, finding excuses for every act of grotesque cruelty and softening the routine drone of daily barbarism.
The soldiers began to crack. As Sledge writes, “It is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane.” He catalogs the forms the insanity took: “from a state of dull detachment seemingly unaware of their surroundings, to quiet sobbing, or all the way to wild screaming and shouting.” Sledge himself began having hallucinations that the dead bodies were rising at night.
. It’s a shameless come-on, because the most striking thing about Hitler’s conversations is how profoundly unsecretive they were. Just like Alexander, he had nothing to say about himself—except to frequently and modestly admit to his genius. He never made jokes, or told stories, or described his emotions about anything he’d done or seen.
Speer’s memoirs reproduce some of the sketches he did to illustrate the idea of ruin value. They show the immense public works projects he’d been designing—the titanic capitol dome, the new ministerial buildings, the 300-foot-tall triumphal arch—in a state of picturesque decay, half-crumbled and overrun by weeds. Hitler adored them. The members of his inner circle loathed them.
The essential core of the Greater Reich was the complete remaking of its population. This was another aspect of Hitler’s vision that had been around for a long while; the extermination of those he considered undesirable began in the opening stages of the war. In 1939 special units of the SS accompanied the army into Poland and carried out systematic massacres of Jews.
This proved to be his great strength as a military commander. His generals were cautious about taking on the armies of Europe, but Hitler knew they would pose no challenge because he simply couldn’t credit them with being real. They were hollow, he insisted—only a coward would be intimidated by them. One big, decisive blow and they’d collapse. He was right, but this was almost a coincidence.
The catastrophe came at the end of January 1943. The Red Army had gradually encircled the enormous German forces massed in the frozen wastes outside the city. Hitler denied his generals permission to break out, and finally one vast Soviet attack overran and destroyed 20 German divisions. It was the worst calamity the German army had suffered since the war began. It was too large for the government to conceal; they suspended normal broadcasts on state radio and instead played solemn music .
Alexander the Great died of a fever in 323 BC. The exact nature of the fever is unknown, but it may not have mattered. He was already so weakened by a wound he’d received in his campaigns in the Indus valley two years before that he was in constant pain and could no longer walk unaided.
Two days later Ernie Pyle wandered along that coast. The front line of the invasion was now several miles inland. The choppy channel waters off the coast were jammed with hundreds of ships; squadrons of bombers were still thundering from England toward targets deep in the French interior; thousands of troops were splashing onto the sands in interminable snaking processions. But Pyle ignored all that. He was spellbound by the wreckage that had been left behind along the shoreline.
The decisive battle unfolded in the middle of August. The Germans launched a major offensive to break apart the Allied armies and force them back toward the English Channel. Twenty German divisions raced forward into the Allied lines in the wooded countryside south of the small town of Falaise. It was a large-scale version of the blitzkrieg attack that had terrorized and stampeded whole armies in the early days of the war.
As the news of the victories in Europe spread, a mood of jubilation broke out among the Allied nations. For the first time newspapers in America and Britain predicted the imminent surrender of the Axis. People made bets about whether the war could last till Labor Day, Thanksgiving at the latest. In anticipation of the end, the American government announced that food and gas rationing were being suspended. The word was everywhere: our boys will be home by Christmas.
The weeks that followed were a nightmare. German divisions broke through all along the front in Belgium and northern France. Allied positions were wiped out, and the troops fell back in panic. As the German forces advanced west the weather turned foul, and Allied troops trying to pull together new lines found themselves baffled by heavy snows that buried the roads and obliterated the few landmarks.
Another Viking term was “fey.” People now understand it to mean effeminate. Previously it meant odd, and before that uncanny, fairylike. That was back when fairyland was the most sinister place people could imagine. The Old Norse word meant “doomed.” It was used to refer to an eerie mood that would come over people in battle, a kind of transcendent despair. The state was described vividly by an American reporter, Tom Lea, in the midst of the desperate Battle of Peleliu in the South Pacific.
It’s possible to quibble about the exact point at which the war was decided: Midway, Stalingrad, Falaise, Okinawa. In one sense, of course, the Axis never had any real hope of winning, because their whole strategy depended on a hopelessly idealized assessment of their chances. In effect, they’d convinced themselves that they were bound to win because their enemies would never fight back.
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