parts of Wartime by Paul Fussell - week 6::
This last reading was also about WWII. Paul Fussell, the author, was also involved in WWII.
The first paragraph of the chapter "The Real War Will Never Get in the Books" was really good:
"What was it about the war that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was rather the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable. They knew that in its representation to the laity what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockewellized, not to mention Disneyfied." (267)
The Marines knew their arms and equipment weren't as good as the Germans and everything... but the publicity didn't say that.
"The real war was tragic and ironic, beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest, but in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible. As experience, thus, the suffereing was wasted." (268)
"In Shakespearse's Henry V, the solider Michael Williams assumes the traditional understanding when he observes,
But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place'--some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their lives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their chidlren rawly left. (IV, i)" (269)
Pictures of WWII never showed what was really happening, all dead American bodies were all clothed and intact.
"In the face of such horror, the distinction between friend and enemy vanishes, and the violent dismemberment of any human being becomes equally traumatic. After the disastrous Canadian raid at Dieppe, one German solider observed: 'The dead on the beach--I've never seen such obscenities before'..." (271)
WAR MADE EVERYONE MAD"In one way, of course, the whole war was mad and every participat insane from the start, but in a strictly literal sense the result of the years of the bombing of Berlin and its final destruction by the Russian army was, for much of the population, widespread madness." (273)
"As the U.S.
Officer's Guide goes on to instruct its anxious tyros,
Physical courage is little more than the ability to control the physical fear which all normal men have, and cowardice dos not consist in being afraid but in giving away to fear. What, then, keeps the soldier from giving away to fear? The answer is simply--his desire to retain the good opinion of his friends and associates...his pride smothers his fear." (274)
men "pissed [their] pants" many times. "An occasional reaction to the terror of shelling like this was audible 'confession.' " (278)
then no one would mention the confession afterward, "...everyong understanding its stimulus and its meaning." (279)
"For every frontline soldier in the Second World War there was the 'slowly dawning and dreadful realization that there was no way out, that... it was only a matter of time before they got killed or maimed or broke down comopletely.' As one British officer put it, 'You go in, you come out, you go in again and you keep doing it until they break you or you are dead.' " (281)
"As medical observers have reported, 'There is no such thing as 'getting used to combat'..." (281)
"The problem is that this questioner [someone who just asked a very ironic question having to do with the war] has somehow been led to expect 'sense,' not to mention decency, in a war actually characterized by insensate savagery. This questioner seems innocent of such standard wartime materials as the British
Handbook of Irregular Warfare (1942): 'Never give the enemy a chance' the days when you could practice the rules of sportsmanship are over. ... Every soldier must be a potential gangster... Remember you are out to kill.' " (284)
"As John Steinbeck finally confessed in 1958, '
We were all part of the war effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it... I don't mean that the correspondents were liars... It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.' " By not mentioning a lot of things, a correspondent could give the audience at home the impression that there were no cowards in the service, no thieves or rapists and looters, no cruel or sutpid commanders. It is true, Steinbeck is aware, that most military operations are examples of 'disorganized insanity,' but the morale of the home front must not be jeopardized by an eye-witness saying so.
And even if a correspondent had wanted to deliver the noisome truth, patriotism would join censorship in stopping his mouth." (286)
One reporter got the real story.. on page 286-287
"The postwar result for the Allies, at least, is suggested by one returning soldier, wounded three times in Normandy and Holland, who disembarked with his buddies to find on the quay nice, smiling Red Cross or Salvation Army girls. 'They gave us a little bag and it has a couple chocolate bars in it and a comic book... We had gone overseas not much more than children but we were coming back, sure, let's face it, as killers. And they were still treating us as children. Candy and comic books.' " (288)
"Because forbidden in all theaters of war lest their capture reveal secrets, clandestine diaries, seen and censored by no authority, offer one of the most promising accesses to actuality. The prohibition of diaries often meant increased devotion and care on the part of the writer." (291)
" 'We were expendable. It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little values is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience.' (100). " (293)
parts from William Manchester's Goodbye Darkness - week 6::
Continuation of week 6.. and continuing with WWII. This book is a memoir of Manchester's time in the South Pacific.
I'm sorry, I don't know who Morison is but he says something good:
"The troops were all hyped up: Morison later wrote: 'Lucky indeed for America that in this theater and at that juncture she depend not on boys drafted or cajoled into fighting but on 'tough guys' who had volunteered to fight and who asked for nothing better than to come to grips with the sneaking enemy
who had aroused all their primitive instincts." (171)
HA. Obviously, I love the last part (the part in bold). It's like this guys were apes just wanting to come across more manly than the others...
I have a note on pages 176 and 177: Marines used everything Japanese, food, supplies, plates, paper, bowls because they weren't getting anything from the US.
There's lots of good stuff on page 182. He talks about the "typical Marine" and what his sicknesses were and everything..
Sections from "The Good War" by Studs Terkel - week 6::
World War II is the topic for week 6.
This was a really good reading. I checked out the book (my History prof had chosen parts of the book) from the Los Altos library so I can read the whole thing if I want. There were some really neat and thought-provoking points brought up in all of the interviews. Here are some...
The first inteviewee is a man named John Garcia. He's a Hawaiian and was involved in the WWII (obviously, since "The Good War" is about WWII). Towards the end of his interviewer he said this:
Aaaahh, I feel that if countries are gonna fight a war, find yourself an island with nobody and then just put all your men in there and let them kill each other. Or better, send the politicians, let them fight it out. Yeah, like this stupid race that we're having of atomic wars. So much money is being devoted to killing people and so little to saving. It's a crazy war. (22)
And this..
He was working on the island.. everything was very tight "If you failed to be there [at work] or were goofing off, you went to jail. All civil liberties were suspended." (19)
"There was no act of treason by anyone I know of. There were spies, but they were all employed by the Japanese embassy. If they had arrested the ordinary Japanese, there would be no work force at Pearl Harbor. There were 130,000 Japanese on the islands." (19)
When he got into the military (after writing a letter to Roosevelt because he wasn't at first allowed into the military) they asked him what race he was. "I had no idea what they were talking about because in Hawaii we don't question a man's race. They said, 'Where are your parents from?' I said they were born in Hawaii. 'Your grandparents?' They were born in Hawaii. 'How about your great-grandparents?' I said they're from Europe, some from Spain, some from Wales. They said, 'You're Caucasian.' I said, 'What's that?' They said, 'You're white.' I looked at my skin. I was pretty dark, tanned by the sun. I said, 'You're kidding.' (Laughs) They put me down as Caucasian and separated me from the rest of the Hawaiians.
Some of my new buddies asked me not to talk to three of the men. I asked why. They said, 'They're Jews,' I said, 'What's a Jew?' They said, 'don't you know? They killed Jesus Christ.' I says, 'You mean them guys? They don't look old enough.' They said, 'You're trying to get smart?' I said, 'No. It's my understanding that he was killed about nineteen hundred years ago.' " (19)
I love this (long) quote because it just shows the pretty much just stupid reasoning that many people have around the world. I think this is totally true during this time period too, just during WWII. People hate other people just because of what religion they are or what they did to "their" people hundreds of years ago. I think this quote also brings up how sometimes people's reasoning is so stupid that it's funny.
Another quote I really liked:
"I was drinking about a fifth and a half of whiskey every day. Sometimes homemade, sometimes what I could buy. It was the only way I could kill. I had friends who were Japanese and I kept thinking every time I pulled the trigger on a man or pushed a flamethrower down into a hole: What is this person's family gonna say when he doesn't come back? He's got a wife, he's got children, somebody." (21)
Another interviewee, Betty Basye Hutchinson, said this:
It's only the glamour of war that appeals to people. They don't know real war. Well, those wars are gone forever. We've got a nuclear bomb and we'll destroy ourselves and everybody else." (130)
I wrote at the end of her interview:
people didn't want the bad parts of war, the soldiers coming back with burns and everything. The bad thoughts of war had been pushed into the backs of people's minds.
John H. Abbott:
First paragraph of his interview:
"We were ready for a war. We'd had a long depression. people needed a change, and a war promised to make things different. Get off those bread lines. Build another bomber for peace. They just changed the slogans. (Laughs.) That was the most popular war we ever have had. People sang, danced, drank--whooppee, the war." (163)
"These gasoline stickers for rationing that you had on your windshield had a little note on it: Is this trip really necessary? We'd scratch out 'trip' and write 'war': Is this war really necessary?" (164)
"My older brother tried mightily to get into the military. He tried every way he could. They wouldn't accept him because he was too short and too underweight. He was very gung ho. While I was sitting in solitary at the reformatory, my brother wrote me from Los Alamos. He was working on a device which would shorten the war and save lives. Later on, I heard there was an explosion at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That's what my brother was working on to shorten the war and save lives. (Laughs.)" (166)
He went to jail numerous times for not wanting to be drafted... "I felt like I was some sort of criminal. All I was doing is saying I refuse to murder people. Hey, everybody else wants to murder, but I refuse to." (168)
"I told the warden at El Reno as soon as I got there, 'If you're interested in reforming me or rehabilitating or changing me, you must explain to me why you got these guys in here who have been convicted of murder and why you've got me in here, too, because I refused to murder people.' " (169)
"All prisons are the same. All wars are the same. In war, both sides are trying to kill each other over a 'principle.' And the principle Thou shalt not kill got lost in the shuffle.
What about Hitler [asks Terkel]?
What about Hitler? He was one person. They were all doing what Hitler said. What do all prisoners do? They do what the warden says. The only power Hitler had was the power the people gave him. I felt the whole world had gone absolutely mad, crazy. They were in love with war... It didn't make any sense. To me, neither did World War One or World War Two or any other war." (170)
Admiral Gene LaRocque:
RACE
"We'd thought they were little brown men and we were the great big white men. They were of a lesser species. The Germans were well known as tremendous fighters and builders, whereas the Japanese would be a pushover. We used nuclear weapons on these little brown men. We talked about using them in Vietnam. We talked about using our military force to get our oil in the Middle East from a sort of dark-skinned people. I never hear about us using the military to get out oil from Canada. We still think we're a great super-race." (186)
"After the war, we were the most powerful nation in the world. Our breadbasket was full. We enjoyed being the big shots. We were running the world. We were the only major country that wasn't devastated." (186)
John Houseman, "Actor-producer. During World War Two, he had worked for the Office of War Information (OWI). It was the overseas branch, known as The Voice of America.":
"Little by little, as we began to win victories, just before the invasion of France, the Voice of America became, quite rightly, the voice of the military. The invasion was a very delicate operation, and the army wanted certain things said to the civilian population." (350)
Telford Taylor "He was chief American prosecutor a twelve of the thirteen Nuremberg trials.":
"Why did they [the men being tried] do these things? Because it had become the thing to do. People most of them were followers. Moral standards are easily obliterated... The safe way to be comfortable in life is that way: following orders." (465)
"Most of our heros have been ordinary people. The ordinary man is capable of enormous heroism and enormous bestiality. That's the hard lesson of Nuremberg. It's very easy to blame Nazism on the bestiality of these people. If a thousand people are killed by an earthquake, it's a terrible thing, but it's not tragic. There's no tragedy because there's no human element in it. It doesn't teach you any lesson except to watch out for earthquakes. the hard lesson of the tragedy is that ordinary people can be brought into a condition to do these things. That's much more dangerous." (466)
I agree with him and I don't... hmm I'll think about this one.
Philip Morrison, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project:
"We heard the news of Hiroshima from the airplane itself, a coded message. When they returned, we didn't see them. The generals had them. but then the people came back with photographs. I remember looking at them with awe and terror. We knew a terrible thing had been unleashed. The men had a great party that night to celebrate, but we didn't go. Almost no physicists went to it. We obviously killed a hundred thousand people and that was nothing to have a party about. The reality confronts you with things you could never anticipate." (514)
"This is the legacy of World War Two, a direct legacy of Hitler. When we beat the Nazis, we emulated them. I include myself. I became callous to death. I became willing to risk everything on war and peace. I followed my leaders enthusiastically and rather blindly." (516)
"We fought the war to stop fascism. But it transformed the societies that opposed fascism. They look on some of its attributes. All these cliches, all these slogans: Total War. No Appeasement. No More Pearl Harbor." (516)
"It took me only one lesson to learn the mistake. I don't know what the future holds. But I do know we're beginning to understand the climate, beginning to understand the oceans, beginning to understand the cell and the nucleus of the cell. We're beginning to understand things we didn't understand before. It is simple not possible to have war and nation states in the old way, with this kind of knowledge and this kind of technology. It cannot work into the next century." (517)
Marnie Seymour, wife of Harry Seymour who worked at Oak Ridge (Manhattan Project):
"They all seemed to know what they were doing, but what they couldn't figure out was how they were going to defuse this blockbuster bomb. Nobody knew the damage it was going to do. Even Oppenheimer had no idea. I don't think they ever thought about it being used against anybody." (519)
"These postwar babies feel that they will not live out their lifetime to expectation. I have one boy who's become a master carpenter. He's not making any provisions, even at thirty-four. He takes off and wanders at leisure. As for getting married or buying a home, he doesn't think there's any future. He's just one of the thousands of young people who grew up ducking under their desks in atomic-bomb drills at school. Why would they think there's a future? All their lives they've heard about the bomb being dropped. That's a sad way to live." (522)
My note below this quote: their parents were the ones who CREATED the bomb! I don't really understand this.
Sections from Hard Times by Studs Terkel: week 5::
I just finished reading the week 5 reading, some parts of the book,
Hard Times, written by Studs Terkel. This was extremely readable!
What I got out of this week's reading was that the Depression wasn't all black and white. Everyone who lived in America during the Depression thought totally different things during the same time period. I had thought EVERYONE was poor and everything was horrible. Not really, the richer people weren't that affected by the Depression... and the poor people lost their farms, their houses, money. Terkel interviewed people from totally different backgrounds with totally different jobs during the time.
A common theme from the interviews of the poorer people were that there was some kind of connection, bond. "The hard times put farmers' families closer together... Sympathy toward one another was manifest. There were personal values as well as terrible hardships." (220) Oscar Heline, an Iowa farmer, said.
It seemed like there was more of a bond between the poorer people than the rich people. I think it was because they really had nothing to lose... The rich people (and more powerful people) still had some money (and power) which they needed to keep. Through these interviews it felt like the rich people had to be own their own and they were all against each other.
Another thing that was interesting to me was that it wasn't all black and white concerning who liked FDR or Hoover better. There was a real mix of who people liked during this time.
Also, it was puzzling and interesting to see what people remembered, what people thought were important, what they were doing at the time, and what they thought of other people.
I definitely enjoyed reading these interviews because I know that I love seeing into people's lives and the details and events that changed their lives.
Perils of Prosperity: "Revolution in Morals" chapter - week 4::
Now that I've read the whole chapter I notice that the first sentence really sums up everything that's discussed in this chapter:
"The disintegration of traditional American values--so sparply recorded by novelists and artists--was reflected in a change in manners and morals that shook American society to its depths." (158)
There was "the new woman" who "...wanted the same freedom of movement that men had and the same economic and political rights. By the end of the 1920's she had come a long way." (159)
There was the women's suffrage, women could vote! This was discussed on page 160. "The literature of the time reflects the growing male sense of alarm..." (161)
"By the turn of the century, women were demanding more of marriage than they ever had before and were increasingly unwilling to continue alliances in which they were miserable." (161)
Divorce rates went up since now marriage depended more on the two people in the relationship and not just what they were DOING. page 162
"As the family lost its other social functions, the chief test of a good family became how well it developed the personalities of the children, and parents, and distrustful both of their own instincts and of tribal lore, eagerly sought out expert advice to avoid the opprobrium of having raised unhappy children." (162)
behavorists were popular now!
"To inculcate the proper attitudes at an early age, Watson warned parents, 'Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap.' " (163)
BUT! Then there was Sigmund Freud!
"In the years after the war, psychology became a national mania. Books appeared... People talked knowingly of 'libido,' 'defense and mechanism,' and 'fixation,' confused the subconscious with the unconscious, repression with suppression, and felt with the tortuously difficult theories of Freud and of psychoanalysis as though they were simple ideas readily grasped after a few moments' explanation." (164)
People had so many misinterpretations of Freud's ideas. They wanted it to be EASY to understand.
POPULARITY!
Then America wanted SEX SEX SEX!
"The vast popularity of Freud in America... alarmed many psychoanalysts. They realized that the popularity had been achieved less through an understanding of Freud than through a belief that he shared the American conviction that every man had the right not merely to pursue happiness but to possess it." (166)
My comment next to this quote was: WOW! the public want it for their own happiness. My history prof told us this when he gave us this week's assignment, "Although you may not recognize modern America in everything you read, I think many things will surprise you with their familiarity." YES. I absolutely see many similarities. Morphing into my cynical self, I think that many Americans want and need happiness. They want to buy it and get all of it for themselves. But yes.. back to my "normal" self, I don't think that's with all people in America and not in the 20's either, but this author thought it was a big part of this time in America.
SEX SEX SEX!! ADVERTISING!
"In the attempt to work out a new standard of relations between men and women, Americans in the 1920's became obsessed with the subject of sex... The newspaperman Frank Kent returned from the tour of the country in 1925 with the conviction that 'between the magazines and the movies a lot of these little towns seem literally saturated with sex.' "(168)
Not only do Americans want happiness, they want sex too!
Page 168, tabloids started!!
"Not even the tabloids exploited sex with the zeal of Hollywood; it was the movies which created the American love goddess.... Movie producers found that films like
The Sheik drew large audiences, while
Sentimental Tommy or epics like
America played to empty houses. When it was apparent that sex was infinitely more profitable than the prewar sentimental-patriotic Faustian, the country got a steady diet of movies like...[movies about sex]." (168)
"Taboos about sex discussion were lifted; women talked freely about inhibitions and 'sex starvation.' Speech became bolder, and men and women told one another off-color stories that a short while before would have been reserved for the Pullman smoker." (169)
"The woman who once was shocked by everything now prided herself, observed a writer in
Harper's, on the fact that nothing at all shocked her; 'immunity to the sensation of 'recoil with painful astonishment' is the mark of our civilization.' " (170)
The author goes on to discuss that everything just got more open and easy going.. "Parental control of sex was greatly lessened..." (170)
Dancing! page 170
There was more sexual experimentation page 171
"Not only the American woman but the American girl was reputed to be freer with her sexual favors than she had ever been before..." (171)
"They [women] dressed more freely; they wore bathing suits which revealed more than had ever been revealed before.
Excerpts from The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell - week 4
I haven't been keeping up with this blog. From now on I will. I decided to create this blog (and keep it up) because at the end of the quarter I'm turning in a paper on my thoughts and comments of all the readings in this seminar. So, if I want to have anything to write about I need to keep up with this blog (or at least write about the articles SOMEWHERE).
So, for Monday I'm reading a couple of different things. The reading I just finished is about the Great War (World War I), page 7-18 and 69-74 from Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. Something I've learned very quickly in this seminar is that I don't like reading about war. I know there are tons of people who like it, well maybe not like but enjoying finding out about history through readings about war, but I just don't like it. Hmm why don't I? I guess I don't because most of the time I don't know who is who (who is whom?), I can't keep track of which side is winning or being written about that moment, and most of all I just hate war. I can't figure out which side is the "good side" because there is never a clear answer because there are bad (and good) parts of every group. The first part of this reading was about the major "battles" in the War and the significance of each. Much of the descriptions of each battle was about how many men died on both sides (Germany vs. Britain, France, and at the end the US). In Fussell's explanations the number of deaths were very important. Something I thought Fussell did very well was including real thoughts from men during the war. After reading some of the personal thoughts of people in the war I could understand what was happening a whole lot more. I remember Barbara Tuchman said that she never ever used long words in her books. I notice that many many writers say extremely complicated things just so it looks good. But I don't care how it LOOKS, I want to be able to understand what they're writing about! And yeah, I know it's adult reading and everything and there will be words and phrases I don't know, but don't use words that even my dad doesn't know! I'm reading this stuff to understand it and develop my knowledge of the certain topic, not to get more confused and frustrated with it and then not want to read anything more about whatever I'm reading about.
However, I'm getting off on another tangent, back to this reading.
Towards the end when Fussell was discussing how during and after the Great War, many many people thought that every war would never end. Here are some parts I liked:
"At the front, as might be expected, views were considerably darker. It was there, in dugouts and funk-holes, that they built of what were called the Neverendians could be found. R. H. Mottram remembers one pessimistic officer who, in the summer of 1917,
roughed out the area between the 'front' of that date and the Rhine,... and divided this by the area gained, on the average, at the Somme, Vimy and Messines. The result he multiplied by the time taken to prepare and fight those offensives, averaged again. The result he got was that, allowing for no setbacks, and providing the pace could be maintained, we should arrive at the Rhine in one hundred and eighty years." (72)
I liked this quote because it made it more obvious what the men were feeling and what I should know about the war to be able to understand what happened.
Here's another part I liked:
"German prisoners interviewed by Philip Gibbs after the Somme battles agreed:
'How will it end?' I asked [a German doctor].
'I see no end to it,' he answered. 'It is the suicide of nations...'
I met other prisoners then and a year afterward who could see no end of the massacre.' "(72)
Back to page 71 with this (the title of this section is: "Will it Ever End?")...
"One did not have to be a lunatic or a particularly despondent visionary to conceive quite seriously that the war would literally never end and would become the permanent condition of mankind. The stalemate and the attrition would go on infinitely, becoming, like the telephone and the internal combustion engine, a part of the accepted atmosphere of the modern experiences. Why indeed not, given the palpable irrationality of the new world?" (71)
This last section, Will it Ever End?, was the most interesting to me. I like knowing about the effect something has on the society and the people living during the time. That's why I like reading historical diaries or journals, fiction or nonfiction. I'd rather read about one person's experience during an important time than the step by step stuff that went on. However, I do understand that I should take the time to know about what happened overall, like who won which battle and what different people on both sides thought about whatever was happening. I want to know the dates that wars started and ended so I can know what people are talking about when they say, oh 1914 was a horrible time or something like that. But I guess I just want to know, I don't want to have to take the time to understand. I'm like that with a lot of things (like learning languages). But I guess I have to do it the "hard" way and actually read, the reading is actually getting pretty interesting... onto the 1920's!
