BOOK REVIEW : Chronicling the Four-Letter War

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford University Press: $19.95; 330 pages, illustrated).

As the networks keep reminding us, World War II began 50 years ago, and Paul Fussell has something to say about our cultural memories of that war: We still haven’t got it right. We are celebrating the 50 years as if they constituted a jubilee. If ever there were a war that deserved to be fought, declaims one commentator after another, the war that began in the fall of 1939 was it. The Good War. The Just War.

Fussell, professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of a seminal work about World War I. In “The Great War and Modern Memory,” he argued that the “civilized” European nations had no effective traditions to fall back on when confronted with the mustard gas, the shellshock, the trench warfare and the deadly attrition of those five years, 1914-18. The Great War became therefore a myth-historical watershed, at once the source and the center of what is modern about modern life: self-doubt, philosophical fragmentation, biographical discontinuity, perpetual irony, the loss of heroic prospects.

What then of the next war, which demoted the Great to the First? Like many a second child hardly as confident, boastful or dashing as the elder, World War II assumed to itself not glory but goodness, not brilliance but technical skill, not moral suasion but high-mindedness. The Allies entered the war, as Fussell shows in his new book, with displays of light armor and daydreams of “finesse, accuracy, and subtlety.” They began with the conviction, for example, that through precision sighting, bombs could tell enemy soldiers from civilians, munition depots from milk depots, the guilty from the pure of heart.

But war is obscene, insists Fussell, who led infantry troops into combat at age 20 in 1944, and World War II was as obscene as it was “long, bloody, brutal, total and stupid.” More civilian men, women and children were killed between 1939 and 1945 than were soldiers, sailors and airmen. If four-letter words, uncivil, indecent, remain unprintable, then, as Walt Whitman said of an earlier and equally obscene conflict, “The real war will never get in the books.” Until we make our way past the fictions of its higher purpose to the facts of men befouling themselves, maiming, being maimed, we can have no grip on the experience of World War II, in and of itself a four-letter word. Until we attend to the carnage that scared soldiers witless and the explosions that shook them inside out, we cannot come to terms with the war. “America has not yet understood what World War II was like and thus has been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and redefine the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity.”

So Fussell takes us on something of a Devil’s Dictionary tour of World War II, from light infantry blown to bits by massive German tanks to “precision bombing” that wreaked more havoc upon friends than foes; from constant military blunders to persistent stories of cannibalism and corruption, of enemy agents disguised as nuns and the unknowing rumor circulated by Allied counterintelligence of a “terrible catastrophe that would befall Japan during the first week of August,” 1945. In battle, young men discovered that neither craft nor caution nor black humor nor counterintelligence could redeem them. Fitness, foresight, courage--these too had nothing to do with survival. Living was merely a matter of luck. British soldiers upon waking made sure that their first spoken word was “rabbits.” Servicemen everywhere carried St. Christopher medallions or talisman brassieres. Eisenhower rubbed a lucky set of seven coins before each campaign.

For the “common man” whose fanfare Aaron Copland composed in 1943, wartime was less about winning than about getting through and making it back home recognizably human. Fussell chronicles the interminable waiting that drove men up walls, the emotional and psychic casualties of the war on the front lines and back on the “home fronts.” With particular vehemence he describes “the petty harassment of the weak by the strong” that had nothing to do with winning, everything to do with humiliation.

In the resilient obscenities of the fighting men, not in the bland fiction and poetry produced during the war, Fussell discerns that current of modernism that he explored in his book about World War I. Tracking the lives of those “utilitarian, unchivalric, unheroic” GI Joes whose only recourse was scurrility and scatology, Fussell locates the only truly “modernist impulse toward subversion and Making New.” These modernists used their f-stops as every possible part of speech to express an inexpressible contempt or to explain the inexplicable hell into which they were sent time and again.

Himself an inveterate word man, Fussell claims to be saying something meaningful about World War II that we have not already intuited from film of bulldozers shoving fleshless bodies into pits or from photos of the residue of the “Fat Man” dropped by the Enola Gay. Yet beyond this condemnation of vacuous high-mindedness and his foursquare approach to the “fresh idiom” of Army slang, Fussell contributes little to our understanding of behavior during wartime.

He contradicts himself concerning the denial or exploitation of fear, the absence or presence of a sense of the ironic, the recourse to words or to silence in the midst of the horrors of the war. And his generalizations amount to cliches. Wartime rumors “illustrate the principle that a complex human motive is more interesting to contemplate than a simple cause”; in the widespread typecasting of Germans, Japanese, Italians, “each enemy has taken on the characteristics of his primary geography.”

Rather a demoniacally entertaining potpourri than a coherent, profound account of World War II experiences, “Wartime” is ultimately less moving than Studs Terkel’s oral history of “ ‘The Good War,’ ” or Archie Sattefield’s oral history of “The Home Front,” neither of which slips so quickly past the Jewish experience of World War II as both the holiest and unholiest of conflicts, the bitter experiences of the million American blacks in uniform, the hard lives of women during the war. Fussell’s book is primarily an excursus upon a white Christian male Anglo-American wartime, and despite his apparent exaltation of the creatively vile-mouthed “common man,” the figures dominating the index are Winston Churchill, Evelyn Waugh, Adolf Hitler, British dandy Julian Maclaren-Ross, F.D.R., Eisenhower and T.S. Eliot.

“Wartime” is a book that could have been written only in the aftermath of Vietnam, and it is not by chance that Fussell’s best chapter concerns “The Ideological Vacuum” into which art and literature fell during World War II. Nor is it by chance that Fussell’s most original point concerns the absence of images of dismemberment in all pictorials of World War II combat. “Wartime” is essentially an afterthought conditioned by the images we now have of a war without glory. Like good graffiti, the book will shock some people,will linger for a time on walls and shelves, then fade beneath other, bolder strokes.