Reflective follow-up

I had to grow up and see war and its backwash to absorb the viewpoint my father and uncles took of nearly all war movies: that they were good smash-em-up entertainment, completely divorced from reality. None of them lived long enough to see the likes of Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and The Pacific, and pass judgement on them.

I do remember my father watching the 1960s series Combat! with interest. He commented that it was the only depiction he'd ever seen that approached reality. The hallmarks of the series were unrelenting grimness and a sort of film noir cinematography. After reading Atkinson, it strikes me that one departure from reality was the amount of sunshine in that and other series and films of the time. It appears that the war in Northwest Europe was mostly fought under cloud cover varied only by the amount and type of precipitation. Only the more recent films and series have captured the meterological context.

Hindsight again suggests that a veteran in a position to say whether a TV show was a tolerably accurate depiction of the fighting in Europe must have had a fair sample of the real thing.

Pause for reflection

The Canada thing is mumbling along in the background, but it's time for a break.

I just finished Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light, and with it his Liberation trilogy of World War Two in the European theatre.

There was an unexpected connection for me in the first volume, An Army at Dawn. In it was a quote from the beloved eldest son of the couple who lived across the road where I grew up: the son who had died in the North African campaign, leaving his parents devastated for the rest of their lives.

I had no such connection with the second volume, The Day of Battle, which deals with the Sicilian and Italian campaign up to the liberation of Rome, but trudged through it with a rising appreciation of the horrors of both campaigns. But it was the third volume I wanted. That, in part, addressed my father's piece of the war.

One of my peers is an Army brat whose father was in the artillery. My dad was an engineer.  My father spent a good part of his postwar life getting his balls busted by ex-infantry and Marine friends and relations for being not a real soldier. The same was true, as I understand, of the artillerist. Censorship zipped their lips during the fighting, and this childish harassment kept them zipped afterwards: in my dad's case, for the rest of his life.

I had hoped to find in The Guns at Last Light something that would shed light on the missing weeks of my father's narrative. Hindsight informed by a war of my own tells me that he cherry-picked his experiences to provide fodder for "what did you do in the war, daddy" stories. Once the facade nearly slipped, when he explained to us what the Hitler Youth were and what they did in the war. Once it cracked completely, one summer when we went to camp and got to lightly calling it "concentration camp." It upset him, so much that he described, just once, what the words really meant. As I grew older I realised that there were several weeks of his experience of which we knew nothing, had nothing but speculation.

That's what I have now, after reading this book: speculation, with corroborative detail. I might have known that even the stories he did tell were bowdlerised. My brother, a Marine in a very hot corner of Vietnam, had done the same thing in his letters home. Save only for two or three weeks of full German retreat, Dad's Ninth Army was deeply involved in combat from February to May, 1945. Engineer battalions like his, which were hard on the heels of front-line infantry, saw as much danger as any unit. Fools who like to count the merits of military experience by the number of days in action should think of this: my Marine uncle, who fought at Guadalcanal, Bougainville and Iwo Jima, saw about as many days of combat as the average Ninth Army engineer.  (If one wants to apply the calendar test, veterans of the Italian campaign beat pretty much everyone else.) My dad had no reason to feel defensive about his experience, and I wish I could tell him that.

Not just him, either. Atkinson quotes a German prisoner who was asked whether the Wehrmacht felt intimidated by American armour. Not especially, he said. What about infantry, then? Naah. But man, that American artillery! That scared the crap out of them.