John Steinbeck on war and the Second World War (3 of 3)

John Steinbeck's Introduction to his Second World War articles collected in Once There Was A War (1958) has a number of comments about vain and pompous officers, thieving soldiers, and carousing war correspondents. And one of the refreshing things about it is that Steinbeck holds up some of the standard clicheés of the time about the military and asks the reader to see them for what they were.

This is a great one, from his discussion of the habits that came to dominate war reporting:

Meanwhile strange conventional stories were born and duly reported. One of the oddest concerned the colonel or general in the Air Force whose duty required that he stay in reluctant comfort on the ground and who ate his heart out to be with his "boys" out on mission over Germany among the red flak. It was hard, stern duty that kept him grounded, and much harder than flying missions. I don't know where this one started, but it doesn't sound as though it came from enlisted personnel. I never met a bomber crew which wouldn't have taken on this sterner duty at the drop of a hat. They may have been a little wild, but they weren't that crazy.

He lists some of the standard conventions they followed:

There were no cowards in the American Army, and of all the brave men the private in the infantry was the braavest and noblest. The reaon for this in terms of the War Effort is obvious. The infantry private had the dirtiest, weariest, least rewarding job in the whole war. In addition to being dangerous and dirty, a great many of the things he had to do were stupid. He must therefore be reassured that these things he knew to be stupid were actually necessary and wise, and that he was a hero for doing them.

A second convention was that we had no cruel or ambitious or ignorant commanders.

A third sternly held rule was that five million perfectly normal, young, energetic, and concupiscient men and boys had for the period of the War Effort put aside their habitual preoccupation with girls.

On the latter point, he add mischievously:

When Army Supply ordered X millions of rubber contraceptive and disease-preventing items, it had to be explained that they were used to keep moisture out of machine-gun barrels - and perhaps they did.

And he summarizes the gloomy result of obsession with secrecy combined with unrealistic images of the military and the realities of war:

Since our Army and Navy, like all armies and navies, were composed of the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the cruel, the gentle, the brutal, the kindly, the strong, and the weak, this convention of general nobility might seem to have been a little hard to maintain, but it was not. We were all a part of the War Effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it. Gradually it became a part of all of us that the truth about anything was automatically secret and that to trifle with it was to interfere with the War Effort. By this I don't mean that the correspondents were liars. They were not. In the pieces in this book everything set down happened. It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.

And it was this unreal quality in the reporting that for Steinbeck gave them a fairy-tale, once-upon-a-time quality re-reading them years later. Or, as he puts it, "Once upon a time there was a war, but so long ago and so shouldered out of the way by other wars and other kinds of wars that even people who were there are apt to forget."

And unlike our Keyboard Commandos today, Steinbeck hasn't forgotten that if war is sometimes a necessary evil, it is still an evil:

Perhaps it is right or even necessary to forget accidents, and wars are surely accidents to which our species seems prone. If we could learn from our accidents it might be well to keep the memories alive, but we do not learn. In ancient Greece it was said that there had to be a war at least every twenty years because every generation of men had to know what it was like. With us, we must forget, or we could never indulge in the murderous nonsense again.

Tags: john steinbeck, once there was a war, second world war

John Steinbeck on war and the Second World War (2 of 3)

John Steinbeck's Introduction to his Second World War articles collected in Once There Was A War (1958) has a number of worthwhile observations about the idiocies of war, not least of which are the effects of censorship. He tells this anecdote:

Navy censors were particularly sensitive to names of places, whether they had any military importance or not. It was the safest way. Once when I felt a little bruised by censorship I sent through Herodotus's account of the the battle of Salamis fought between the Greeks and Persians in 480 B.C., and since there were place names involved, albeit classical ones, the Navy censors killed the whole story.

Steinbeck talks about how official censorship interacted with self-censorship on the part of reporters themselves:

We edited ourselves much more than we were edited. We felt responsible to what was called the home front. There was a general feeling that unless the home front was carefully protected from the whole account of what war was like, it might panic. Also we felt we had to protect the armed services from criticism, or they might retire to their tents to sulk like Achilles.

And he describes the larger environment of which this attitude was part, resulting in various things not being reported:

That they were not reported was partly a matter of orders, partly traditional, and largely because there was a huge and gassy thing called the War Effort. Anything which interfered with or ran counter to the War Effort was automatically bad. To a large extent judgment about this was in the hands of the correspondent himself, but if he forgot himself and broke any of the rules, there were the Censors, the Military Command, the Newspapers, and finally, most strong of all in discipline, there were the war-minded civilians, the Noncombatant Commandos of the Stork Club, of Time Magazine and The New Yorker, to jerk a correspondent into line or suggest that he be removed from the area as a danger to the War Effort. There were citizens' groups helping with tactics and logistics; there were organizations of mothers to oversee morals, and by morals I mean not only sexual morals but also such things as gambling and helling around in general.

The Noncombatant Commandos of the last decade were better known as the Keyboard Commandos. That, at least, changed since the Good War. And The New Yorker in recent years has been running pieces by Seymour Hersh, providing some of the best critical reporting we've had. That has changed for the better since seven decades ago.

What he has to say about secrecy is unfortunately very current:

Secrecy was a whole field in itself. Perhaps our whole miasmic hysteria about secrecy for the last twenty years had its birth during this period. Our obsession with secrecy had a perfectly legitimate beginning in a fear that knowledge of troop-ship sailings would and often did attract the wolf packs of submarines. But from there it got out of hand until finally facts available in any library in the world came to be carefully guarded secrets, and the most carefully guarded secrets were known by everyone.

He gives a couple of examples of how dysfunctional the secrecy could get:

When General Patton slapped a sick soldier in a hospital and when our Navy at Gela shot down fifty-nine of our own troop carriers, General Eisenhower personally asked the war correspondents not to send the stories because they would be bad for morale at home. And the correspondents did not file the stories. Of course the War Department leaked to a local newsman and the stories got printed anyway, but no one in the field contributed to that bit of treason to the War Effort.

It's worth noting that these two public revelations did no damage to the war effort of the time. If anything, the public revelation of the Navy's deadly "friendly fire" mistake surely created pressure on them to be sure to shoot at the enemy and not at American troops.

Tags: john steinbeck, once there was a war, second world war

John Steinbeck on war and the Second World War (1 of 3)

John Steinbeck published a collection of his newspaper articles as a war correspondent during the Second World War under the title Once There Was a War (1958). The title reflects the position he takes in the Introduction, in which he looks back on the war as though it were a kind of fairy tale or dream.

But not a dream of the Good War, as it is now revered in the general American culture. Steinbeck understood the war and its purposes. He wasn't taking some isolationist position that the US should not have been part of the war. Nor was he arguing that the war aims weren't good or that the defeat of Hitler Germany and militarist Japan were unworthy results.

What he means is more like the following. I first read this Introduction years ago. And re-reading it now, I was surprised at how I found something on almost every page that I remembered and that made a particular impression on me. But this portion, which gives a sense of the title, is what stuck with me the most:

For what they are worth, or for what they may recapture, here they are, period pieces, fairy tales, half-meaningless memories of a time and of attitudes which have gone forever from the world, a sad and jocular recording of a little part of a war I saw and do not believe, unreal with trumped-up pageantry, so that it stand in the mind like the battle pictures of Crécy and Bunker Hill and Gettysburg. And, although all war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal, still there was in these memory-wars some gallantry, some bravery, some kindliness. A man got killed, surely, or maimed, but, living, he did not carry crippled seed as a gift to his children.

Now for many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoned in our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic terror. [my emphasis]

Biologists and anthropologists would quarrel with a literal assertion that fear produces "no good product." After all, the famous fight-or-flight reaction presumably offered humanity some comparative advantage over millennia of natural selection. (By "sarcomic," Steinbeck apparently meant "cancerous."

But the kind of generalized, sometimes hysterical fear of the early Cold War period about which he was commenting in 1958 does yield the kinds of results Steinbeck describes, "Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness."

And Steinbeck was writing in 1958, ten years into the Cold War if we count the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade in 1948 as the beginning of the Cold War. The Cold War continued for over three more decades. And for the last decade, the United States has largely "suckled on fear" during the War on Terror. Only this time the bogeyman that justified multiple "small wars" and Cold War levels of military spending was not the nuclear-armed Soviet superpower but small band of Islamic terrorists known as Al Qa'ida. Our new Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, says there are only 20 or so of them left. But the security establishment and its wars continue to function as if they were every bit the menace that many Americans imagined the Communist world to be in 1958.

This kind of generalized fear is corrosive to democracy. Fortunately, not everyone has been afraid all the time during the Long War that encompassed the the Cold War and the War on Terror. Which is why democracy in some ways has also thrived and expanded during that period. But the long-term trend isn't encouraging. And in recent years the corrosion of democracy and the rule of law has been severe. From Bush v. Gore to Guantánamo to a Democratic President opposing Social Security and Medicare and embracing plutocratic economics, the trend has been bad.

Tags: john steinbeck, once there was a war, second world war