Armageddon - Max Hastings [70]
Because battles are fought by men who wear uniforms and carry weapons, it is easy to forget that, in the Second World War, the vast majority of those who served in every army did not think of themselves as soldiers. They were civilians, who strove even upon the battlefield to secrete a part of themselves from their military superiors and soldierly functions, from all the horrors around them. Even as they saluted, fired weapons or sheltered from bombardment, in their innermost selves most cherished the conviction that these horrors did not represent reality, that real life remained the small town or great city from which they had come; their loved ones; the civilian jobs they prayed desperately to survive to return to. Corporal Iolo Lewis said: “The whole experience didn’t seem real to me. It was something big going on, that I was just a tiny part of. We knew so little about what was happening—our field of vision was so small.” Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger of the U.S. 84th Division observed drily: “I cannot say that digging foxholes or carrying a heavy pack was my idea of fun. It’s not what you’re brought up to do, as a nice middle-class Jewish boy. But, for me, it was the way I got to know America.”
Some American soldiers enjoyed the chance granted to them by the war to see the world, especially if they were not required to earn their passage by service with infantry or armour. “For my generation,” wrote the historian Arthur Schlesinger, who served in France with America’s intelligence service the OSS, “the Second World War was the supreme experience. And for many not killed or maimed, it was a liberating experience, annulling routine expectations, providing new contexts and challenges, testing abilities, widening horizons and opportunities, nourishing honesty, individuality, complexity, irony, stoicism. Above all, war was a reminder of the savagery of life.” Private Rueben Cohen came from the lower east side of New York. He enjoyed a much harsher and less glamorous war than Schlesinger, yet as he travelled from North Africa through Sicily into France as a field artilleryman with the 1st Division, his thoughts often veered along the same path as those of the historian, albeit expressed in less elegant language: “Gee, I’ll have something to talk about if I get through the war.” But Cohen was a mature man of thirty-one, whom the boys of his battery called “Pop.” Most soldiers were at least a decade younger, naive and innocent.
Like millions of young Americans, twenty-year-old Corporal Roy Ferlazzo from Jersey City found Europe a bewildering place. He was disgusted by primitive French notions of hygiene, and by his first sight of a bidet. A teetotaller, he felt no urge to join off-duty drinking orgies, nor for that matter to chase girls: “Very few of us were sexually active.” Where some men became ambitious looters of cameras, pistols, binoculars, Ferlazzo’s simple tastes confined him to pipes—the smoking kind—of which he amassed an impressive collection by the end of the campaign. From being a confused, frightened, very homesick young soldier at the outset, he learned to accept the army, and the war, without deep commitment, but also without much complaint. He simply lived each day as it came, and did the job he was asked to do, in the manner of millions of other young Americans shipped to Europe. Even the ubiquitous destruction of villages and cities made little impact on him: “I guess it was the same in the Crusades with swords and shields.” His unit was lucky. It suffered a few casualties from shrapnel, but lost not a single man killed. Like most soldiers in the Western allied armies who were spared the whitest heat of combat, he traversed Europe amid the grimmest events of the twentieth century without being significantly touched by them.
An American officer combing abandoned Belgian houses for furniture for the mess was embarrassed to come upon a girl of seven, living with her three-year-old sister and eighty-year-old grandmother “in indescribably cold and dirty conditions.