2019 Not-so-bad Military History Books

Steven B. Zwickel

August, 2019

My dear wife hates military history. She says it’s boring and meaningless.
     Consider: 
“At 0944 General so-and-so ordered an attack on the left flank, which met fierce resistance from Field Marshall Blunder’s hussars, uhlans, dragoons, and lancers. Fighting continued until 1414, when the redoubts, parapets, “mamelons and ravelins” were enfiladed and stormed. The battle went on, and on, and on…” 
She’s got a point.
     
I was first exposed to military history in elementary (K-6) school, when we were required to write and present to the class our book reports. This was back in the 1950s and two of the more popular books that (only the boys) reported on were Quentin Reynolds Battle of Britain (1953, Random House) and Richard Tregaskis’ Guadalcanal Diary (1943, Random House). Both of these were about the Second World War—something all of our parents had recently lived through, though they rarely spoke about it.
     The Reynolds book sparked a school-yard discussion about whether the title was misleading or not. Some boys held that, without machine guns or bazookas, it was unfair to refer to the “battle” of Britain, which only involved German bombers and English Spitfires. The “Diary” (a word most of us associated with girly-type writing) gained credibility when one of my classmates claimed his uncle or cousin or other relative had been there and it was just like in the book.
     Book report presentations always ended with the pupil telling the class, “If you want to find out how it ends, read the book.” Not terribly original.
     My elementary school didn’t really teach a lot of history, much less military history. I think we went from Columbus to Lincoln in 5th Grade and as far as the Spanish-American War in 6th Grade.

     ☞ The school building was itself a veteran of that war, having been built in 1898 as a hospital for recovering soldiers. The most famous graduate, although I didn’t learn this until many years later, was the actress and silent film star Clara Bow. 

I peeked (yes, I was one of THOSE kids) and read to the end of the 6th Grade history book, where I discovered that, in 1914, a war broke out in Europe that would eventually embroil the entire world, including the United States of America! This, I assumed, must be the World War that had ended a decade or so earlier. Later on, one of my classmates explained to me that there were TWO World Wars; we won the first one, but the sore losers demanded a do-over, so we had to do it again.
     We read some war-related books in junior high school. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane was required reading, so we weren’t too enthusiastic about it. Books about war seemed to be either personal memoirs or military histories. Memoirs, like Red Badge, gave readers a sense of what war was like, but no real idea of who was fighting, why, and how the war played out. Many of us read Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, a minute-by-minute account of the D-Day landings.
     Later on, we read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead, and I think quite a few of us were scolded for trying to sneak a euphemistic “fugging” into our conversation in imitation of Mailer’s GIs.
     Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, was the big anti-war book that caught on with my generation as we faced the dilemma of the Vietnam War. Vietnam split the nation—doves (peaceniks) who opposed the war and hawks who supported it. I was lucky, in that I was rejected by the Army because I have only one working kidney. This good fortune, however, left me with many decades of guilt: because I did not have to go to Vietnam, many others did, all of whom paid a price for doing so.
     My guilt led me to read everything I could about the Vietnam War (entirely personal memoirs) and that left me feeling even worse knowing what my countrymen had gone through while I sat at home. After that, I lost any interest in reading military history.
     Twenty-five years later, after my father died, I inherited several boxes with his souvenirs from his service in WWII. For a few years, they sat in my basement, but eventually I started going through them to see what was there. That was when I realized I really didn’t know too much about the war in the Pacific and why my dad had spent part of his life on a tropical island. My curiosity induced me to start reading military history; I wanted to learn more about WWII, not just the campaign my dad was in, but the larger picture of the war.
     The war history books were fairly helpful in understanding what led up to the war, what happened during the war, and how it ended, but I also came across lots of books about battles, military units, and warships. Some of these were personal memoirs and I found them incomprehensible. They alluded to people, places, ships, and machines without any discussion. A reader who was not there—in that battle, on that ship, flying that type of airplane—couldn't possibly understand what the authors were talking about.  

      Here is an example:

The Front Royal was a T2-SE-A1 (Navy designation) tanker which was the workhorse of the tanker fleet – 481 being built during the war. A typical tanker crew had 42 to 45 mariners and 17 Armed Guard. A T2 was typically 523 feet long overall, had a 68 foot beam, 30 foot draft, displaced 10,448 gross tons (21,880 loaded displacement tons) , with 6,000 shaft hp turbo- electric propulsion, a speed of 14.5 – 16 knots and a liquid capacity of 141,200 barrels (nearly 6 million gallons). T2’s were named after monuments, national parks, forts, battles, historic settlements, trails, lakes or swamps. The ship was likely named after the 1862 Civil War battle fought at Front Royal, Virginia but this is unconfirmed. *

Surely, only someone who served on Front Royal during the war would find this both interesting and intelligible. 

     I teach communication courses, and a main requirement is that my students write with a clear understanding of why they are writing and for whom they are writing. I will not give them a passing grade if they can’t explain their purpose and audience.
    The WWII memoirs baffled me; I could not figure out why they were written or who the intended readers were. Why were these books written? Why had they been published? Was there really a market for these books? Their very existence was a puzzle.

It was only a few years ago that a news story on TV helped me understand the purpose and audience of the World War II memoirs. 

The United States has been at war in Asia for more than 18 years and as of this writing (in 2019) fighting in Afghanistan continues. We now have a new generation of war vets who have returned from the battlefields with their own memories, including painful recollections of terrifying events that have caused many to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). These men and women may experience symptoms of PTSD as described by mental health experts, such as:

• vivid flashbacks (feeling like the trauma is happening right now)
• intrusive thoughts or images.
• nightmares.
• intense distress at real or symbolic reminders of the trauma.
• physical sensations such as pain, sweating, nausea or trembling.  https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/index.shtml

Many efforts are now underway to understand the effects of PTSD and to help vets deal with the symptoms. The story I watched on TV described how social workers and psychologists were helping a group of Iraq/Afghanistan vets. As part of the process, the veterans were asked to write about their experiences in combat, including those horrifying episodes that had triggered their PTSD. By writing down their stories the vets were somehow able to come to grips with what had happened to them and to deal with the stressful aftermath.

That’s when it hit me: the indecipherable World War II memoirs were the veterans’ way of dealing with the horrors of war. 

The reason for writing the memoirs was to help the authors jettison the psychological pain and trauma. The audience for these stories was no one but the authors—they were writing for themselves, trying to deal with their memories. The World War II vets didn’t have access to all the social and psychological services vets have today, so they came up with their own solution to dealing with PSTD: they wrote it down and got it out of their heads.

And that’s why there are so many “bad” books about warfare out there.

* from A Memoir of Edward Frederick Barta’s Service in the United States Navy Armed Guard during World War II <https://www.armed-guard.com/barta.pdf>