Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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and danger. But the humbler their personal circumstances, the slighter seemed the compensations for sacrifice. William Crawford, a seventeen-year-old Boy Second Class serving aboard the battlecruiser Hood, wrote home miserably: ‘Dearest Mum…I know it’s wrong to say but I sure am fed up. I feel kind of sick, I can’nae eat and my heart’s in my mouth. We struck bad weather today. Talk about waves as big as houses, they’re crashing over our bows…I wonder if it would do any good Mum if you wrote to the Admiralty and asked them if there was no chance of me getting a shore job at Rosyth. You know, tell them you have got two sons away and that. Be sure to tell them my age. If only I could get off this ship it would not be so bad.’ Crawford, however, was still aboard Hood when she was sunk with almost all hands in May 1941.
As his letter illustrates, stoicism was no more universal among sailors at sea than soldiers on the battlefield. ‘I am absolutely fed up with everything,’ a naval paymaster-commander named Jackie Jackson wrote to his wife from the Mediterranean in May 1941. ‘The dirt and filth, the flies and heat and more than anything the fact that I am not hearing from you.’ He complained that he had received only one letter in six weeks, ‘the most depressing I have ever received in my life. Add to that a cable which more or less implied that the house has been wrecked and you can get a fair idea of how much I want to hear from you occasionally, and at the same time how I dread it, as I am probably going to have even worse news and more complaints…I’ve had a hideous time and I wonder why I’m alive.’ It is easy to see why such people as Winston Churchill, George Patton or pilots flying Mustangs or Spitfires – a small and privileged minority – enjoyed the war. It is equally apparent why many others – especially a Russian infantryman or Chinese peasant, a Polish Jew or Greek farmer – could not.
Most of those who fought clung stubbornly to their own amateur status, performing a wholly unwelcome duty before returning to their ‘real’ lives. As a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant in action against the Germans with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Peter White, reflected: ‘It must take about seven years…to make a being feel really like a soldier and not just a civilian dressed up. The situation seemed so ludicrously unreal and yet grimly real at the same time. We could at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the poor blighters opposite us were in the same boat even though it was a boat of their seeking.’ John Hersey wrote of the Marines on Guadalcanal: ‘The uniforms, the bravado…were just camouflage. They were just American boys. They did not want that valley or any part of its jungle. They were ex-grocery boys, ex-highway laborers, ex-bank clerks, ex-schoolboys, boys with a clean record…not killers.’
RAF Corporal Peter Baxter lamented: ‘My whole generation…are wasting some of the finest years of their lives in the dreary business of war. Our manhood has come to full fruition, but it is stifling and decaying in these wasted years…The deadening, paralysing influence of service life has blighted my middle twenties.’ Many young men had never before lived away from home, and hated the indignities and discomforts of barracks existence. Frank Novy, a twenty-one-year-old, spent his first night in the army at a depot in Leeds. ‘After a few minutes on the palliasse I heard complaints from all sides. My own was terribly hard, and I had no pillow, my teeth were aching and soon I had a headache. I felt depressed and tired out. I tried to sleep, but I kept thinking of home, and all I had left went round and round in my head, ceaselessly, persistently…At times I felt so depressed that I wanted to cry, but couldn’t.’
Recruits found themselves growing new skins. Len England described how a fellow soldier delivered a stream of wisecracks to a girl behind the counter in the YMCA, then turned to England and said in surprise, ‘I’ve never flirted before in my life. I’ve only been in the army five days, and now look at what I’m doing.’ England observed that he and his new comrades felt different people, ‘more authoritative and self-assertive in uniform’. Educated men recoiled from the crude banality of barracks vocabulary: among Americans, everything seemed to be ‘tough shit’; an alleged coward ‘was shaking like a pup shitting carpet tacks’; civilians who escaped military service were ‘4-F bastards’.
No sentence was complete without its obscene expletives: the fucking officers made them dig fucking foxholes before they received fucking rations or stood fucking guard. Even the most delicately reared recruits acquired this universal military habit of speech, though officers’ messes aspired to more gentility. Cultured men were pained by translation into a world in which art, music, literature had no place. Captain Pavel Kovalenko of the Red Army wrote one night in the line: ‘After dinner I sat down to read Nekrasov. My God, when will I be able to spend as much time as I want enjoying Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov. I saw a photograph of Tolstoy as a young man in officer’s uniform…Tears choked in my throat, almost overwhelming me.’
Captain David Elliott of the Welsh Guards found himself ‘terribly depressed’ on returning to his barracks in Britain after a weekend leave: ‘There is nothing so utterly boring, so utterly narrow and so utterly petty as regimental soldiering which lacks the accompaniment of a state of battle…Certainly in this battalion there is no charity, no loving kindness, no loyalty…Among the officers, if not among the men, there are many problem children.’ While embryo airmen revelled in the thrills of flight training, few recruits found comparable compensations in discovering how to become infantrymen. Pfc ‘Red’ Thompson from Staten Island, New York, felt that he acquired limited skills: ‘I learned to take care of myself; to be wary, to look and listen; and to dig holes.’ Every soldier became reflexively familiar with the order ‘Get your gear on and stand by to move out,’ usually with scant notion of where he was going. Ignorance of anything beyond a man’s field of vision was the norm. As a 1942 recruit training in North Carolina, nineteen-year-old Missourian Tony Moody decided that he and his comrades cherished no lust for glory: ‘We somehow hoped we wouldn’t be in harm’s way.’
Pressures on manpower caused the conscription of more than a few recruits who should never have been obliged to serve. ‘My comrades were mostly from Yorkshire and Lancashire,’ wrote the eighteen-year-old Pte. Ron Davidson.
The 1930s had been a bad time for many and physically some found things very difficult and others were barely literate. I remember one who did not make the grade, aneuretic and also sub-normal – needless to say he had been passed A1 by the army doctors! He could just about dress himself, but the intricacies of army gear were beyond him and we used to get him into it. We used to lay out his kit in the prescribed manner, but this was done at night so [he] slept on the wooden floor which he regularly wet. The army in its wisdom decided [he] was ‘idle’ and a malingerer and set about ‘waking him up a bit’. This took the form of huge P[hysical] T[raining] I[nstructor]s chasing him all over the barrack square, yelling in his ear the most frightful obscenities.
This misfit was eventually discharged, but most rifle platoons included one or two subnormal men, whose conduct in battle was unsurprisingly erratic. British soldier William Chappell avowed his own submission to military service, but never ceased to ache for the civilian world from which he had been torn: ‘I accept this life. I accept the loss of my home, the collapse of my career, the bomb that injured my mother, the wide scattering and disintegration of the web of friendship I had woven so painstakingly for myself…I still want the same things. More chocolate; longer hours in bed; easily acquired hot baths, delicious, varied and delicate food; all my own possessions around me…I am bothered by my feet, sick of khaki, bored and annoyed by my companions, all the monotonous, slow, fiddle-de-dee of army life. I long for it all to be finished with, and sometimes vaguely envy those who have gone.’
An American officer wrote from the Pacific: ‘When the tents are down, I think every man feels a loneliness because he sees that this wasn’t home after all. As long as there were four canvas walls about him, he could kid himself a little…Standing on barren ground surrounded by scrap lumber piles and barracks bags with nothing familiar on his horizon he feels uprooted and insecure, a wanderer on the face of the earth. That which is always in the back of his mind now stands starkly in the front: “Will it ever end, and will I be here to see it?”’ S/Sgt. Harold Fennema wrote to his wife Jeannette in Wisconsin: ‘So much of this war and army life amounts to the insignificant job of passing time, and that really is a pity. Life is so short and time so precious to those who live and love life that I can hardly believe myself, seeking entertainment to pass time away…I