Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

I purchased the Kindle addition. There were a few grammatical errors but the errors didn't interfer with the reading. I enjoyed this book. The book deals with not only historical aspects of WWII but also military rhetoric in general. The military rhetoric is why I ordered the book and I feel I more than got my money's worth. A professor advised me to read "Wartime". I must say I was surprised by some of the revelations in the book; I don't want to spoil the contents so I won't give specifics. Although I'm familiar with WWII I need to investigate some of the claims the author made. I'm not saying they aren't true but some of the incidents surprised me. I guess I forget, sometimes, to not believe everything I read. I thought war had gotten "dirtier" with time, but apparently tactics have been around forever and humanity certainly spends a lot of time thinking about how to hurt others especially when they're unarmed. The propaganda by all the militaries was also very interesting including "cleaning up" the pictures of death and dehumanizing the statistics.. I felt the author's discussion of eventually how 'the home front' came to realize the grizzly war and mass destruction gave me a clearer understanding of why Americans, myself included, had little stomach for Vietnam. I had not realized these attitudes started in WWII. If anyone else knows of military rhetoric books please post the name and/or author. I'm interested in doing a thesis, Masters, but I'm having a very difficult time finding information. Thank-you.

Interesting book about how the war was fought. He made some compelling arguments and gathered statements and information from a wide variety of sources. Mostly left me feeling sad for all of the men who died due to stupid mistakes and friendly fire. This is not a light read and could easily be several college courses. It’s a book to study for sure.

In his other works, Paul Fussell has described his growing up and his experiences in battle -- battle in a literal sense, not just serving in the armed forces. This book contrasts real combat with the way it's presented back home in America and Britain, with some attention paid to Germany. His examples are drawn from diaries, literature, and the popular press and they deal mostly with World War II. However, it really doesn't take much imagination to apply it to today's wars. Personally, I have a hard time remembering when the United States was NOT involved in an armed conflict somewhere in the world, and I'm pretty old. Having said what the book is about, I wonder if it's really necessary to limn in the contents. Maybe it is. At the Chicago Tribune, one of our premier newspaper, "Recently Ron Grossman took a survey in the newsroom, asking colleagues to identify the iconic World War II photo of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima. While some recognized the image, others couldn't quite place it. "I know I ought to know it. It was in the movie, Flags of Our Fathers," one co-worker said. Some, seeing military uniforms, figured out it must be a war photo. Maybe Vietnam? One suggested it was D-Day. Journalists are probably more attuned to history than many people who have less motivation to keep up with the past (almost 25% of 17-year-olds couldn't identify Adolf Hitler in a survey)." It's no better in Britain. A survey by a veterans charity has revealed that school children (aged 9-15) are increasingly ignorant of the history of World War II, with 1 in 20 believing Adolf Hitler to be a national football team coach of Germany and 1 in 6 thinking that Auschwitz is a theme park. 1 in 20 said that the Holocaust was the celebration of the end of the war, 1 in 12 thought The Blitz was a huge cleanup operation after the war, 25% believed that D-Day stood for "Dooms Day" and "recalled" that a nuclear bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbour. 40% of children did not know that Remembrance Day was 11 November, while 12% thought the McDonalds logo was the symbol of Remembrance Day. Yes, SOMEBODY ought to read books like Fussell's. He knows whereof he writes because he was there, in the Eastern Theater of Operations, and was severely wounded. But when he combed through the period literature he found nothing like reality. The magazine advertisements for items like hand lotion emphasized how much the visiting soldier or sailor would appreciate a soft palm. And the service men were rarely enlisted. They were all beribboned officers, generally belonging to some glamorous group like the Air Force, the paratroopers, or the Marine Corps. In the commercials being read at hom there was no such thing as a buck private. Combat is a harrowing experience. It isn't very much like a Hollywood war movie, in which men who are hit twirl around and die Hollywood deaths, perhaps gasping out a few last words: "Don't worry about me. Just -- save yourselves." (The face rolls slowly to the side and the eyes close.) Nor do men often receive a "flesh wound" in the arm, leg, or shoulder. Instead, they are literally blown apart. After a shelling, the battlefield isn't littered with intact dead bodies. It's littered with parts of dead bodies. And when no one is around to clean them up, they decompose, friend and foe alike. Fussell quotes from Eugene Sledge's book about the Marines' assault on the island of Peleliu, which turned out to be pointless. Surrounded by rotting bodies that are alive with bloated flies, the men try to eat or drink, though the same flies feasting on flesh are now clustering on your food or in your coffee cup. In the Navy, you don't need to deal with this problem if your ship is hit, but wounds and deaths are even more gruesome, if possible, and there are charred remains about. It's all quite different as it's presented to the public and to recruits in training camps. I've seen one of those training camp films from World War II, which treats the GI's fear of the German machine gun, the MG42, which fired an incredible number of rounds per minute, so it sounded like an eructation. "Sounds scary, doesn't it?," asks the narrator. "But don't worry. Its bark is worse than its bite." The narration then advises the soldier to stick to what he learned in basic training. Half the platoon provides covering fire and the other half runs around the MG42 and takes it out from the side. A walk in the park. There are quotes, in extenso, from poems and diaries written by men under fire and Fussell adroitly contrasts the style of British and American records. The Brits are elegant and witty. (To be called into the CO's office and reprimanded is to be "shat upon from a great height.") The Americans sound angry and blunt. Both express a terrible bitterness at what is often called the "insanity" going on around them. Mistakes are common, both at the top and at the bottom. Wounds and deaths seem to take place at random. Dysentery, rarely mentioned in the press, could be epidemic and embarrassing. To relieve the constant anxiety, men make up ditties, almost always profane. I can't copy any here, but some of the doggerel is pretty funny and inventive, especially among the Brits. Well, I can give one example. In the Pacific, the song, sung to the tune of John Brown's Body, goes something like, "Dugout Doug (ie., General Douglas MacArthur) lies a-shaking on the rock, safe from any danger or any sudden shock....." War-time movies (eg., "Wake Island") sometimes showed the men singing a song borrowed from the British. "Bless 'em all....", except that the word "bless" was another word. Here's a quote that encapsulates Fussell's attitudes: "A young British officer issues an implicit warning against the self-delusive attempt to confer high moral meaning on these grievous struggles for survival. Far from rationalizing their actions as elements of a crusade, McCallum and his men, he says, 'have ceased largely to think or believe at all'." One would guess that it's even worse when the person under fire doesn't even know if anyone has even bothered to try to dream up some moral meaning for a conflict that may be senseless even to the politicians who initiated it. He only deals briefly with what was called "shell shock" in World War I and "PTSD" in today's lingo and there isn't space to deal with it here. It doesn't go away overnight. It wrecked Audie Murphy's life in ways I won't describe. As an anthropologist, I remember interviewing one Vietnam vet at the VA hospital in Palo Alto, Calfornia. He'd been picked up on the beach as he was about to kill himself, and he broke down while describing the hundreds of Vietnamese his artillery unit had killed. And this was ten years or more after Vietnam was behind us. But, again, as a behavioral scientist, I find warfare fascinating. It's rather like a smoldering cancer that flares up frequently and seems to afflict all of Homo sapiens. The cause may lie in evolutionary psychology but I can't imagine a cure. What do we do -- excavate the entire limbic system?

the real deal. pulls back the shrouds of censorship and propaganda. exposes the true guts of war seldom seen by those who weren't there.

This is a remarkably straightforward look at the experience of the people enacting and affected by the Second World War. Written from the Anglo-American perspective, with insights from the enemies in the war, it gives a view unlike anything you were taught in primary or secondary school in the US. Fussell stays clear of moralizing or philosophizing on just wars or the balance of revenge and victory. It is a compelling account at the level of people, not a grand discourse on the actions of nations or a conceptual analysis of human nature. His illuminating examples of the evolution of language and literary art during the war is both erudite and wonderfully down to earth. Just now done reading, and I will right away start his earlier volume on the First World War that examines the development of memory around that conflict. This book brings thinking about global conflict to a very personal and unsentimental level.

Written in a clear style, this book is highly informative and it provides thorough understanding of wartime, especially that of the Second World War.

Looks to be a good read though a bit ponderous.