World War II is an utterly ridiculous subject for a blog post: there simply isn't enough Internet to hold it all. But I think about World War II a lot and I finally have a way in to a small but important piece of it, so here goes.
Choose a topic, any topic, and follow its path through the 20th century. Five will get you ten that path breaks when it hits the war, and then, when it comes out the other side, it does so at a completely different spot from where it went in. (Not the best imagery, I suppose, but it's better than the trite "the war changed everything.") This disjuncture, this fault across the landscape of history, makes World War II, for me, endlessly fascinating, as does the sheer enormity, in every sense, of the war itself.
And so I read: Studs Terkel's
"The Good War," Morison's
History of United States Navel Operations in World War II (15 volumes, don't miss even one), Overy's
The Dictators,
Das Boot, Churchill's own history of the war (a thousand pages in its condensed version; I'm starting the full six volumes next week, having found, yes, found, five of them on the street a few days ago). I read and I read, but I do so haphazardly, and so it is that I have only now consumed what everyone over here read
while the war was going on, namely the articles of Ernie Pyle, famously the greatest American war correspondent of that conflict.
Perhaps it's the day-by-day nature of his recounting, perhaps it's the man-on-the-ground perspective and his close focus on the grind as experienced by the average front-line soldier, but the net effect of reading these many articles is what feels like a realistic sense of the experience, a sense, almost, of having been there. For the first time I find myself uninterested in the big questions and wholly focused upon the quotidian, which, of course, is how most people took it most of the time. So thank you, Ernie Pyle, for allowing me some satisfaction after all this time of wondering.
And as if that's not enough I find I love the man. Pyle was a wanderer and a writer and a truly great journalist, and his life was the best story of all. I have read biographies for many years now (having been turned on to the genre not by my own historical studies but by my mother's suggestion of Sandburg's bio of Lincoln, about which another time) and what tends to happen if you read enough biographies is that you start thinking in those terms, that is to say in terms of an entire life, start to finish, a life as a whole, and not just about people as individuals, changing from day to day, sometimes this, sometimes that. You start thinking in those terms, and you start valuing people in those terms, too. Lincoln's life is a perfect example, and it's part of why I love the man so: much struggle, many years of wandering in the wilderness (literally and figuratively), the shaping of character by the hammer blows of experience, until finally he becomes the ideal tool for that one very particular job. But what makes Lincoln's life perfect--and apologies if this seems a bit morbid--is his death: the tool, having been used, having done its destined job, was then immediately cast aside.
And so it was for Pyle. He lived the war and he wrote about what he saw and felt, hundreds and hundreds of articles that communicated the battle itself to the (primarily American) millions who did not experience the fight directly. And then, as the war was drawing to its close, after years of marching with the infantry, sleeping on the ground, eating dirt, after living with the terror of air attack and shelling, after participating in the greatest amphibious actions, naval battles, and air bombings of this or any other war, after experiencing and relating all this and with the end clearly in sight, he, like Lincoln, was killed by a bullet to the head, fired by a Japanese soldier a third of a mile away. As
Wikipedia notes, "He was buried with his helmet on, laid to rest in a long row of graves among other soldiers, with an infantry private on one side and a combat engineer on the other." Perfect.
I have no desire to go to war, and certainly no desire to die so. I would, though, love to live a life with a real shape, with a unique purpose, and would, I think, be willing to forgo some of its later years if in doing so the ones that I did have were thereby made into a narrative, burnished and perfect, like Ernie Pyle's.
