… no women to be heroes in front of, damn little wine to drink, precious little song, cold and fairly dirty, just toiling from day to day in a world full of insecurity, discomfort, homesickness and a dulled sense of danger.
Ernie Pyle286 We were the Willie [sic] Lomans of the war.
286 Cited in: Tobin, Pyle’s War, p. 84.
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Harold P. Leinbaugh, The Men of Company K.287
We were the Willie [sic] Lomans of the war. Harold Leinbaugh᾽s allusion to the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman contains much that is true about the self-conception of the dogface soldiers. Like Miller’s sales representative, who broke down under the demands of the American dream, they discovered themselves in a reality where death and the often mentioned but rarely occurring million-dollar wound288 constituted the only exits from a world bereft of humanity, dignity and civilization.
Within the Armed Forces, the dogfaces occupied the low end of the food chain.
Among the combat elements of the Army of the United States, for example, airborne troopers and rangers could draw on their self-awareness as elites. The prestige of flying, much greater in the 1940s than it is today, accrued to aviators of the Army Air Forces. Armored Corps289 members personified the horror but also the fascination of mechanized warfare that had astonished the world when it was introduced into the vocabulary of military history by the German Wehrmacht between 1939 and 1941 under the name ῾blitzkrieg᾽. Non-combat elements of the Army of the United States had to be content with less prestigious roles, of course, but these assignments allowed them to live under the comparatively greater security and relative comfort of the rear echelon.
Service in the infantry involved none of these attributes. The infantry was not high-tech, nor did its soldiers constitute an elite force. It was made up, for the most part, of (often reluctant) draftees, and it – or service in it – ran little risk of being perceived as something glamorous. Each branch of the Armed Forces had specific battlefield tasks. The Air Forces, tank formations and artillery were charged with preparation and support. Their tasks were directed against their exact enemy counterparts or were of a specific nature, such as tank operations deep within enemy territory. The central mission of any army at war, to close with and destroy the [main] Enemy, was
287 Cited in: Fussell, Crusade, p. 10.
288 The term million-dollar wound described an injury that was serious enough to require immediate evacuation from the front but that, on the other hand, caused no permanent damage.
289 Tank forces.
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reserved to the infantry, known in an astonishing euphemism as the Queen of Battle.
If there was an organization designed to live (and indeed to die) under inhuman conditions, this was the infantry. Its riflemen were the war’s expendables, the wear parts in a giant death machine.
Naturally, the war was also a dangerous and ultimately deadly affair for the other combat services and the non-infantry components of the Army Ground Forces. Air or ship crews, for example, were as much in danger of losing their lives. In fact, over much of the war, it was the bomber crews of the 8th and 15th USAAF that experienced the comparatively highest losses; this was the problem confronting Yossarian, Joseph Heller’s hero in Catch-22. In spite of this, service in the Army Air Forces, the Navy and the other fighting elements of the Army Ground Forces was distinctively different from infantry service. At the conclusion of their missions, air crews and sailors returned to a structured environment where they regularly received hot meals, showered and slept in beds. Warfare for them, while still deadly, was a nine-to-five job, one that featured breaks and the recuperation that goes with them, and at least a bit of separation from the battle. For most dogfaces, the only way to withdraw from the front lines was in a body bag or on a stretcher. They endured long stretches unprotected from the elements, slept – when sleep was at all possible – in foxholes under the stars at all seasons of the year, and rarely had an opportunity to change their uniform or even take their shoes off for a short time; in sum, they rarely had the possibility to lead a life worthy of a human being.
Author and literary scholar Paul Fussell served as a young infantry officer in southeastern France in 1944. His memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic is an outstanding source for those interested in learning about the absurdity, suffering and humiliation intrinsic to the infantry experience. Among his descriptions is an account of a situation in the winter of 1944 that took on increasingly epidemic proportions due to poor hygienic conditions, circumstances that, in various forms, were known to virtually every dogface:
One night I was marching with my platoon toward a town where we were to be billeted. Suddenly, with no warning at all, my stomach churned and terrible cramps forced out a cascade of liquid shit before I could scuttle to the side of the road and drop my trousers … I spent fifteen minutes in a rutabaga patch trying to clean myself up. I first used my trench knife to cut off my soaking, stinking long
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underwear. I then tried to wipe off my legs, not with toilet paper, which I’d not yet learned never to be without, but with the only paper I had, some fancy stationary I’d bought in a town we’d passed through … This cleanup was only barely successful: socks and shoes were still wet, brown, and offensive … In the next few days, I somehow found some washing water and a few clean articles of uniform.290
It should come as a surprise to few that Fussell describes war as a theater of terror, mortality, humiliation [and] the absurd291. The most absurd external circumstances, no realistic chance of improvement within sight, and the constantly present danger of losing one’s life were the cornerstones of the dogface’s existence. Finally, Bill Mauldin’s short instruction to readers back home on how to approximate the infantry experience is, in equal measure, impressive in its simplicity and revealing:
Dig a hole in your back yard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and, so there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire.
Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you. After ten or twelve miles (remember – you are still carrying the shotgun and suitcase) start sneaking through the wet bush. Imagine that someone has booby-trapped your route with rattlesnakes which will bite you if you step on them. Give some friend a rifle and have him blast in your direction once in awhile.
Snoop around until you find a bull. Try to figure out a way to sneak around him without letting him see you. When he does see you, run like hell all the way back to your hole in the back yard, drop the suitcase and shotgun, and get in. If you repeat this performance every three days for several months, you may begin to
290 Paul Fussell, Doing Battle. The Making of a Skeptic (New York 1998), p. 113 ff.
291 Ibid., p. 112.
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understand why an infantryman sometimes gets out of breath. But you still won’t understand how he feels when things get tough.292
When things got tough
The state of exhaustion, latent fear of death, hunger, lack of sleep and weather conditions to which the dogfaces were exposed on an almost continual basis represented, in a way, the hazy background of their existence as they periodically engaged in battles and skirmishes. To paraphrase John Keegan, I am in the fortunate situation to be able to say that I was never in a battle or even near one, never heard one in the distance or saw its direct impact.293 I have read about battles, seen and read interviews with participants, and studied photographs and films of battles. Nevertheless, the attempt to construct a picture from a distance, as it were, using available sources and reflective processes in order to describe the reality of a battle to an acceptable degree can only end in euphemism.
The arsenal of weapons systems that confronted the infantry in World War II had an applicable range and volume of destructive power against the human physique that would have been inconceivable in the 19th Century. In The Face of Battle, his reference work on the nature and character of battles, Keegan examines the effects of anti-infantry weaponry during World War I. Apart from the fact that precision and destructive power had become even greater in World War II, the dogfaces essentially faced the same risks.
Shell wounds were the most to be feared, because of the multiple effects shell explosion could produce in the human body. At its worst it could disintegrate a human being, so that nothing recognizable – sometimes apparently nothing at all – remained of him … shell blast could create over-pressures or vacuums in the body’s organs, rupturing the lungs and producing hemorrhages in the brain and spinal cord … Much the most common wounding by shell fire, however, was by splinter or shrapnel ball … they often travelled in clusters, which would inflict several large or many small wounds on the same person. The splinters were irregular in shape, so producing a very rough wound with a great deal of tissue
292 Bill Mauldin, Up Front (New York 1949), p. 140 ff.
293 John Keegan, The Face of Battle. A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (London 1996), p. 15.
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damage, and they frequently carried fragments of clothing or other foreign matter into the body, which made infection almost inevitable. Very large fragments could
… amputate limbs, decapitate, bisect or otherwise grossly mutilate the human frame … As a killing agent over long as well as short ranges, however, the bullet was champion … the high-velocity conical bullet, spinning quickly about his long axis, could produce inside the human body a variety of extremely unpleasant results … Should it be caused to ‘tumble’ inside the body, however, either hitting bone or for some ballistic reason, its path beyond the point of tumble became very much enlarged and the exit wound … ‘explosive’ in appearance. The effects of a tumble produced by striking bone were enhanced by the bone’s splintering under the impact, its own fragments the becoming secondary projectiles which produced massive damage to tissue round about. Some bullets also set up hydraulic effects, their passage driving body fluids away from the wound track at pressures which the surrounding tissues could not withstand.294
It is possible to describe in detail the catastrophic casualties that World War II weaponry inflicted on the human body, or to discuss the physical implications of this experience for troops on the battlefield. I am convinced, however, that it is impossible to conceive the reality of a battle. Even if one stresses how specific actions, whether proper or not, are immaterial to a person’s own survival, how brutally arbitrary death can be in claiming one victim but not the next, or how terror, mortal fear, exhaustion, aggression, hatred and panic dominate the physical and psychological landscape, these observations remain merely an anemic description of a battle’s isolated effects on individuals. Their concentrated effects must be felt, not merely read in a book. In this regard, the outstanding opening sequence of Steven Spielberg᾽s otherwise mediocre Saving Private Ryan295 is highly recommendable. Its portrayal of the infernal slaughter on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 expands the limits of audiovisual reproducibility of battles and shows how closely one can approximate such an experience without actually being present.
Another way to achieve at least an idea of the hell humans can create on the modern battlefield is to focus on the image of a battle’s aftermath. In Crusade in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s memoir of his performance as Supreme Commander Allied
294 Ibid., p. 264 ff.
295 Saving Private Ryan, Director: Steven Spielberg (USA / Dreamworks 1998).
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Expeditionary Forces, describes what he saw in summer 1944 near Falaise, the site of the Western Allies’ decisive maneuver in the fight for France:
Roads, highways, and fields were so choked with destroyed equipment and with dead men that passage through that area was extremely difficult … I was conducted through it on foot, to encounter scenes that could only be described by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.296
What Eisenhower leaves out of his account of this scene, possibly out of consideration for his readers, is the stench of (summer) battlefields. The author Kingsley Amis, who, as a soldier of the British army, took part in the same battle at Falaise, allows his readers the following description:
I saw a lot of people whom that [being killed] happened to around Falaise, so recently that there had been no time to bulldoze some to the roadside. Like life-sized dolls, everyone said, as everyone always has. The horses … seemed almost more pitiful, rigid in the shafts with their upper lips drawn above their teeth as if in continuing pain. The dead cows smelled even worse. The stench of rotting human and animal bodies was so overpowering that the pilots of the spotter planes flying above the scene to direct more and more artillery damage vomited.297
In 1945, Stars and Stripes, the daily newspaper of the Army of the United States, published a compilation of poetry sent to it by soldiers during the war. In this volume, Puptent Poets of the “Stars and Stripes Mediterranean”, two poems in particular stand out that describe the heavy fighting in Italy that was a key element in the origin of the dogface soldiers. They give witness to the devastating yet non-scarring effects of the war, thus concluding our attempted excursion into the realities of battle:
BATTLE (Sergeant S. Colker)298 The blackness was in me,
296 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York 1952).
297 Cited in: Fussell, Crusade, p. 63.
298 Charles A. Hogan / John Welsh, Puptent Poets of the “Stars and Stripes Mediterranean” (Naples 1945), p. 18.
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Such fate and fury as I had never known:
Complete amnesia from love and spring, And tenderness of home.
Surging through me, I could feel it rise And lift me with it.
I was free, to lust for blood, And I could use my hands
To tear and smash.
My eyes to sight for killing!
The noises, whistling, wooming In the blackness
Became a part of me,
Spurred my passion, lashed me on,
Became fused with my mind’s unwholesomeness:
I would caress, with savagery, And put them all in hell forever.
I willed to butcher as they had butchered, Destroy as they had destroyed.
I sobbed aloud as no man has ever cried:
Someone screamed, maybe me. I could smell Powder, burnt flesh, maybe mine.
I think I died then.
I don’t want to remember any more.
God knows – I wish I could forget.
HOME FROM WAR (Corporal Anthony Carlin)299
Who can say at war’s end
“We are lucky living men?”
After so much of us has died How can we be satisfied That we, the so-called living men,
Will find a way to live again?
For when a man has daily faced The brute within him, low, debased,
Can he look forward to the light,
299 Ibid., p. 109.
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Wipe out the memories of the fight Forget the strange erotic bliss
That comes with some cheap purchased kiss?
Ah, no! And it will be his fateful lot To live on and find that he lives not
Though like the living we’ll behave We’ll be the dead without a grave.