Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War Book

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This is my second attempt to write a responsible, but emotionally honest review of this powerful and important book.

Paul Fussell was an American Infantry Lieutenant, and a combat veteran of World War II.

This is the book that put Paul Fussel on the map for me. And, although The Great War and Modern Memory is Fussell's most acclaimed work, and is deservedly an excellent book; this book is a far greater work, in my own opinion.

He published this book in 1990 at the beginning of the (too frequently called) "Celebrations" of the 50 year anniversaries of that war in this country, more properly, called "Commemorations" or "Memorials" in other countries. My guess is that the timing of this publication was intentional. Paul Fussell was no fan of World War II, nor America's fatuous glamorization nor sanctification of that war. Paul Fussel, like his fellow writers and WWII combat veterans Kurt Vonnegut and Howard Zinn was not at all impressed with the political piety that has come to represent that war in place of actual, accurate memory

Wartime is his extended analytic essay or collection of essays. These essays bluntly relate the on-the-ground experiences, the grotesque and demeaning experiences of those people (military and civilian) unfortunate enough to find themselves at the physical center of World War II's mass warfare. It is not a picture, which renders that experience as anything but brutal and meat-grinding. It is not a picture to inspire "Celebration"

The word "fatuous" is one that I learned from Paul Fussell. And there is no fatuous flag waving celebration of our "Greatest Generation" in this book..

Fatuous is his description of the arrogant mindless pride of those 95% American veterans who were behind the front lines and therefore ignorant of actual battle conditions. And fatuous are those flippant, self-satisfied Americans who experienced the war in their living rooms during or after the war. Fatuous were those "patriots" who did not see fellow combatants or civilians decapitated by flying body parts nor experience the horror of wading through pools of decaying human flesh saturated with tropical maggots.

Fussell pulls no punches as he deconstructs the experience of World War II as experienced by those who fought it or those who found themselves directly in its path.

This book should be required reading for any "fan" of World War II history.



Quote from the book:

"Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances....Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war."