The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    WAR Stories

    By cmaukonen on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 2:40pm |

    Death...destruction, disease, horror...that's what war is all about, Anan.
    That's what makes it a thing to be avoided. You've made it neat and painless.
    So neat and painless, you've had no reason to stop it.
    And you've had it for 500 years. Since it's the only way I can save my crew and my ship,
    I'm going to end it for you one way or another.

    ...................................

    I've given you back the horrors of war.
    The Vendikans now assume that you've broken your agreement
    and you're preparing to wage real war with real weapons.
    They'll do the same, only the next attack they launch
    will do more than count up numbers in a computer.
    They'll destroy cities, devastate your planet.
    You'll want to retaliate. If I were you, I'd start making bombs.
    Yes, Councilman, you have a real war on your hands.
    You can either wage it with real weapons, or you might consider an alternative--

    The local PBS station is repeating the Ken Burns series WAR. I have been watching it while having breakfast and lunch in my apartment.  Paying particular attention the the descriptions and stories given by the Vets he interviewed.  They are very moving and very telling, though I am sure not even half as reveling as they would be in person.  However the expressions on their faces while speaking conveys volumes in some cases.

    My father served in WWII and did nearly all the men and more than a few women his age. Though he never talked about it when he was alive. Oh he has a few souvenirs that he brought back. A German Cross and an officers dress dagger. He received the Silver and Bronze Star  but he himself never said how he got them. All the information regarding my fathers service I have received from talking with my mother. He himself, as I said, never talked about it. And I think this was a mistake. I understand why he and many other Veterans of WWII did not talk much about their experience or what the saw and heard. That in a lot of cases it was very painful or that they did not wish to expose their kids or their wife or others to this horror.

    I cannot help thinking thought, this this was not as wise as it may have seemed. That if these experiences had be told and the truth of what it was really like, as apposed to Hollywood's glitz and glamor, that maybe some things would have turned out differently. It's one thing to see some documentary but quite another for those who actually were part of it to giver their experience to you in person. 

    And I cannot help but think that this is true for those who went through the depression of the 1930s as well. War stories all. Passing them down like other bits of knowledge so that maybe those that came after could reflect on them before taking some action that might be ill advised.

    Comments

    They do no like to talk about it.

    But I knew my dad served as a child man-just 18--in some air strip of ours in Czecholsakia. The only military installation there from this country is what I was told.

    But he also claimed to have witnessed the bloated bodies in Europe; the ugliness of it all to the eyes and the nose.

    But some of my Vietnam Vet friends discussed some things a length. After a few drinks they could not stop talking about it.

    Others were psychologically fucked up for life.


    by Richard Day on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 4:07pm

    My dad, who, like Richard Day's, was another one of those child men drafted at the end of WWII, will be happy to tell you or anyone straight out that the glorification of WWII service is a bunch of crap. It's one of his favorite things to share now that he realizes he might not be able to say anything at all soon. He wants everyone to know that serving in WWII was a bunch of crap and he hated it and all this glorification of it is nonsense.

    Also he'd like everyone to know that the Army really sucks and you shouldn't join it. That if you're a young guy looking for adventure, better to join the Merchant Marine or something like that like he did later.

    He didn't see action. He got trained and put on a ship to Japan. They were waiting on the ship to invade Japan. Some guys they picked up told them about what was going on, how you had to throw flame throwers into caves to burn Japanese alive because they wouldn't surrender but would just keep firing from the caves when they had a chance. They were all scared by that. Then Truman dropped the bomb and none of them had to see action but they did have occupation work And once again, he would like everyone to know that a lot of that sucked big time. He saw abuse of Japanese civilians by American jerks and he was treated like crap by higher ups into their little power games, and he had to take it. (Meantime, from my point of view--how about this for existentialism--I probably owe my existence to the bomb being dropped on Japan.)

    Here's an interesting thing I discovered the other day (while reading on military justice as regards the Bradley Manning case,) which is often left out of the WWII glory stories:

    there were approximately 2 million U.S. court martials in WWII! and our military justice system was created after WWII because of all the abuse that occurred!

    After reading that, I found this interesting rant, a guy who is still bitter about the experience of  WWII court martial rules and what he went through:

    http://www.salem-news.com/articles/october162007/leveque_court_101607.php


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 4:34pm

    Doing extensive research on the military survivors of WWII, I found  few vets who were willing to voice their war time experiences.  My father spoke very lttle about the war.  By chance, I moved to a small Iowa town that my former high school principle had retired to.  He had been a B17 pilot and a German POW for 18 months.  He was one of very few vets that would openly speak of his WWII experiences.  I decided to document his story...It took three years of interviews and research to get it all down.  I filled 68, single spaced pages with 36,461 words to complete it.  I include an excerpt:

    After POW interrogation was completed, I was ordered to muster with a bunch of other American airmen and we were herded out of Dulag Luft.  When a small group of us were being marched to the railroad depot in Frankfurt am Main, there was an American flyer hanging from a street light pole.  It really made us close ranks.  A few older Germans would swing at us with their canes.  If anyone said he wasn’t afraid, he was either a big idiot or a damn liar.  I guess it was hard to blame the German civilians.  After all the bombings, death and destruction they had to endure.  All we could do was think what we would do under the same circumstances.  If you see your home, family and friends destroyed, it would be hard to be forgiving and not take your anger and grief out on the closest enemy available.


    by chucktrotter on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 6:21pm

    That's great that you did that, chuck. You should make sure that if you don't use it for publication during your lifetime, it goes to an archive somewhere where other people can access it.

    I had an uncle that was a POW in Germany, shot down in a plane. He was the type with a very good sense of humor, a jokester, and I do remember he would talk about it if people asked. He died of a brain tumor in my early teens, and being into girl stuff rather than boy stuff, I didn't really pay as much attention to the stories as my male cousins and brothers did. From what I did pay attention to, I got a sense he didn't have a lot to say, but that it wasn't withholding as much as he just blocked a lot of details out soon after they happened and a lot of it was just boring miserable camp life not story worthy-i.e., hunger and cold, hunger and cold. His family was German immigrants and he spoke German. One story I do remember him telling is a guard asking him "you are German, how can you fight against your own people?" And he said he answered "it' was my job." Also my aunt says when someone asked him wouldn't he like to visit Germany he would say no thanks, saw enough of that damn country by forced march and he said that jokingly--he really was on some long march from one camp to another with no food. Perhaps part of his attitude was he came from a family of 12 that didn't have a lot and he was one of those teens who got a job in the CCC working out in the woods. One has to think in their shoes--the earlier guys in the war were of age, not little kids, during the Depression, and if they saw hard times in this country up close and personal before they even went into war they might have a somewhat different mindset from the younger ones?


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 7:22pm

    My mother went through the depression before going into the army as a nurse. She has said the depression was horrible especially for my father and his family. Then she said what was going on in Europe during the war was much worse. I am still trying to figure out how something can be worse than horrible.


    by cmaukonen on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 7:26pm

    C...

    What ocurred in Europe cannot be compared with our depression.  Not to mention infrastructure destroyed, a body count should be an apt response.


    by chucktrotter on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 8:04pm

    My Dad stressed the number of dead bodies on the ground and every thing I read underlines the millions lost.

    I always wondered how long it took to bury the dead, even in mass graves.


    by Richard Day on Wed, 12/22/2010 - 12:13am

    When Jack's story was completed, I had no desire to profit from it.  I made it available to anyone that might want to read it.  There is a copy at the AF Academy library and at the USAF Historical Society.  Many of his former students, friends and relatives have received it. The story was run, serially in two local newspapers.  I would guess, art, that the marches were resultant from moving the prisoners to keep them from advancing Russian armies.  Many POW camps were in Eastern Germany and Poland.


    by chucktrotter on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 7:59pm

    Check out the docudrama Pacific. I believe one of the Marine grunts in War was also in the series. In fact, his buddy, Eugene Sledge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Sledge) is the main character from about the 3rd to the end...both were from Mobile, Alabama and good friends. 

    He wrote a book about his war activities called With the Old Breed based on notes he kept tucked away in a pocket-sized Bible he carried with him during battles. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_the_Old_Breed)

    Here a synopsis from the url:

    In contrast to the European theater, Sledge's memoir gives a perspective on the Pacific campaign. His memoir is a front-line account of infantry combat in the Pacific War. It brings the reader into the island hopping, the jungle heat and rain, the "banzai attack" or full frontal assault used by his enemies. Sledge wrote starkly of the brutality displayed by American and Japanese soldiers during the battles, and of the hatred that both sides harbored for each other. In Sledge's words, "this was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands

    Give it a read.


    by Beetlejuice on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 8:58pm

    I've watched "Pacific" three times.  "Private Ryan" four or five times.  The battlegrounds and the psyche of the warriors were not comparable.  The only statistic I can provide that could give a comparison of the two different magnitudes of the two dissimilar wars might be found here:

    http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/statistics.htm


    by chucktrotter on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 9:29pm

    I don't think the number killed is representative of the impact to one's psyche. While Europe had far more military and civilian deaths, there's a lot of ground covered with different ethnic classes with grudges centuries old to carry out. Whereas the Pacific is mostly water with a few oasis of land sprinkled about that some military people decided were of strategic importance to either hold, defend or attack. And those islands weren't big enough to outmaneuver or out flank an adversary so the frontal assault was the strategic battle order. It's one thing to be stranded on a continent to fight a battle, but it's a whole different matter to be stuck on an island fighting an enemy with a finite amount of room and no place else to go. Little hard to retreat and regroup. So an element of savagery permeates into the island campaign that never has a chance to develop in the land campaign simply because the land campaign has the ability to blow off the steam before the pressure builds up. No so on the island campaign...the pressure is always on. So while the number of incidents might be larger with respect to the land campaign,the island campaign incidents, while fewer, were far more savage simply because those who fought really were fight for their very survival. 


    by Beetlejuice on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 10:13pm

    Beetle:

    I do not portend to be an expert on warfare.  I would agree that the Japanese conflict appeared to be more "in your face."  As far as PTDS is concerned, I know far less than those that are, at this time, attempting to deal with its symptoms.  Do not assume that knife to knife combat on Guadalcanal is more mentally distructive than manning a 50 cal while bombing Germany.

    In their early attempts to deal with combat exhaustion and stress, 8th AF flight surgeons found that the absence of a fixed, limited tour of combat missions contributed to the crewmen’s anxiety or emotional breakdown.  Col. Grow, Surgeon of the 8th Air Force,  recognized that the morale of combat crew personnel in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) was not all that it should be to obtain maximum efficiency in operational missions.  A major cause for the low morale, he said, was the fact that combat crews realized they could, at least, theoretically, be wiped out within twenty missions if the average loss of 5 percent per mission, then a conservative estimate, was not reduced.  He therefore urged that combat crew members be released from operational duty upon the completion of fifteen missions.

    Apparently, no immediate action was taken on this recommendation and as a result, moral was at a very low ebb during the winter of 1942-43.  Mounting losses in VIII Bomber Command meant that by the end of January 1943, casualties had exceeded replacements, with only 24 bomber crews arriving in England to replace 67 lost on missions that month.  When B-17s were dispatched to Schweinfurt and Regensburg on 17 August 1943, 60 were lost and many others written off in crashes in England – an unacceptable 19 percent loss rate.  On 6 September, 45 B-17s failed to return from a raid on Stuttgart.  The worst day “Black Thursday” occurred on 14 October when another 60 B-17s were lost, again on a mission to Schweinfurt.

    Beetle:  Each plane equalled 10 young men!


    by chucktrotter on Thu, 12/23/2010 - 11:16pm