Inferno - Max Hastings [211]
Active service, when it came, changed everything. The American correspondent E. J. Kahn wrote from New Guinea: “As an urban selectee’s military career progresses, he changes gradually from a preponderantly indoor being into a wholly outdoor one.” The marine Eugene Sledge recoiled from the brutish state to which the battlefield reduced him: “The personal bodily filth imposed upon the combat infantryman by living conditions on the battlefield was difficult for me to tolerate. It bothered almost everyone I knew … I stunk! My mouth felt … like I had gremlins walking around in it with muddy boots on … Short as it was, my hair was matted with dust and rifle oil. My scalp itched, and my stubble beard was becoming an increasing source of irritation in the heat. Drinking water was far too precious … to use in brushing one’s teeth or in shaving, even if the opportunity had arisen.”
Combat opened a chasm between those who experienced its horrors and those at home who did not. In December 1943, the Canadian Farley Mowat wrote to his family from the Sangro front in Italy: “The damnable truth is we are in really different worlds, on totally different planes, and I don’t really know you any more, I only know the you that was. I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space. It is one of the toughest things we have to bear—that and the primal, gut-rotting worm of fear.”
The great Duke of Wellington justly remarked, “Believe me, not every man who wears a military uniform is a hero.” In all armies, soldiers serving with forward combat units shared a contempt for the much larger number of men in the rear areas who fulfilled roles in which they faced negligible risk: the infantry bore 90 percent of global army casualties. An American or British rifleman who entered France in June 1944 faced a 60 percent prospect of being killed or wounded before the end of the campaign, rising to 70 percent for officers. Armoured and artillery units suffered much smaller proportionate losses, and those in the huge logistics “tail” were exposed to no greater statistical risk of death or mishap than industrial workers at home.
Bombardment imposed an intense trauma. “There was nothing subtle or intimate about the approach and explosion of an artillery shell,” wrote Eugene Sledge, remembering Peleliu:
When I heard the whistle of an approaching one in the distance, every muscle in my body contracted. I braced myself in a puny effort to keep from being swept away. I felt utterly helpless. As the fiendish whistle grew louder, my teeth ground against each other, my heart pounded, my mouth dried, my eyes narrowed, sweat poured over me, my breath came in short irregular gasps, and I was afraid to swallow lest I choke. I always prayed, sometimes out loud. I felt utterly helpless … To me, artillery was an invention of hell. The onrushing whistle and scream of the big steel package of destruction was the pinnacle of violent fury and the embodiment of pent-up evil. It was the essence of violence and of man’s inhumanity to man. I developed a passionate hatred for shells. To be killed by a bullet seemed so clean and surgical. But shells would not only tear and rip the body, they tortured one’s mind almost beyond the brink of sanity. After each shell I was wrung out, limp and exhausted.
Enforced passivity in the face of bombardment was among the most dismal predicaments of every soldier. “Give a Jock a rifle or a bren gun and allow him to use it, and however frightened he may be he will face up to most things,” wrote Capt. Alastair Borthwick of the 5th Seaforth Highlanders. “Put him, inactive, in a trench and danger becomes progressively more difficult to bear. Fear is insidious, and it grows in inactivity.” Most soldiers discovered a special horror in enduring a mortar barrage—one fancifully likened the sudden, repetitive dull crumps