Old Stories: WWII Novels
From the Men who Fought the War
Welcome to False Choices. On Fridays I review books, movies, TV shows, from the past to understand our present; what the tides rolled in, and what was left when they rolled out again. Please subscribe to support my work, thank you!
WWII was devastating to many young men who found themselves in the fire of violent war and destruction. It’s easy to forget how many came back from Europe or the Pacific and didn’t really make it. They might have kept a job, but they spent a lot of time with an elbow on the bar. Of course we remember the men who came back in one piece, had a life with a family, like my father-in-law Pete Mandich. But their success does not tell the whole story of the war and the men who fought it.
My Dad’s barbershop was located on Chalmer’s Avenue in Detroit and next door was Mauro’s Bar. A brick facade with just two glass cinder blocks to let in a little light, and a steel door that was held open in the summer; it was typical of the bars of that period, dark and smoky. They were places for serious drinkers, men who wanted to get lit the moment it opened and keep the fire burning most of the day. Many, though not all, of these men were veterans of the war, and from time to time they found themselves in the chair at Dad’s shop for a haircut and shave. Sometimes he had to wake them up when he was done. This was the 1960’s, already twenty years after the war’s end.
Men’s clubs at that time were also hotbeds of drinking. The Catholic Knights of Columbus, for all their charity work, were renown for their late into the night card games and drinking marathons. Of course the VFW halls were very popular as well. Drunkenness was considered a joke during these years, presented for its comedic effect. In 1972 on the way home from the dentist my Mom and I were t-boned by a drunk in the middle of the afternoon. It wasn’t until the mid 80’s that people started to notice the link between drinking and driving. The drunk who hit us didn’t go to jail; not sure if he was even ticketed, or fined.
If you want some sense of the war and its aftermath, let me suggest a few of novels, and the films they inspired. First, From Here to Eternity by James Jones, is a good place to start. Jones’s debut novel from 1951 takes place on Hawaii around the attack on Pearl Harbor, based considerably on his personal experience. Three characters, Sargent Warden, played in the film by Burt Lancaster, and two Privates, Prewitt and Maggio, played by Montgomery Cliff and Frank Sinatra respectively, work through their love for women, for drink, for the army, for fun, and their hatred for cruelty, pettiness and status. The dialogue will sound strange to viewers used to what we find in film and TV today. There’s no winching or beating around the bush; men and women alike come right out and say what’s on their mind. ‘Judge me as you wish,’ they seem to think, ‘but this is what I want.’ Status, then and now, was important. Neither love interest, Deborah Kerr nor Donna Reed, would marry a soldier. An officer was all they would stand for, even if it meant infidelity and loneliness.
My second suggestion is The Naked and The Dead by Norman Mailer from 1948. Also a debut novel, and also from Mailer’s own experience of the war in the Pacific, the novel covers the life of the average soldier slogging through the horrors and the physical and mental abuse of soldiering, looking for some meaning in all their suffering, and for liquor, whatever was available. It’s a more serious book than From Here to Eternity, or maybe I should write that its subject and context, the actual, grueling Pacific war, are more serious. Army life, like corporate life but with salutes and death, is still full of egos and pettiness and status. This is a more difficult book to read, maybe a whole summer to really afford it a thorough reading, but it’s worth the effort. Mailer was a gifted writer and the sort of man of ideas we had in the 20th century. (I’ll devote another review to Mailer and his work in the future - he was not afraid of controversy.)
The final novel I’ll mention, which made a very popular movie, and lately a six part TV show, is Catch 22, the work of Joseph Heller. To be honest it takes place during WWII, that’s the set if you will, but it’s more about war in general than an incisive novel about WWII, which is unusual since Heller was in the Army Air Corps during the war and flew 61 missions. The book took eight years to write, 1953 to 1961, which helps explain why it takes a 10,000 foot view of the war. It was eight years before Heller put a single word to paper, and sixteen before he finished; by that time the war was perhaps less a concrete memory and more an abstraction. The movie version came out in 1970 and pushed the novel further from WWII, making it into an anti-war movie.
One theme in both the novel and the film was the economic aspect of war, especially in a capitalist country like ours. Yes, many American businesses made money in the war, as you would expect. There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union, so only the bureaucrats made bank. But then again, the Soviets shots their own soldiers in retreat, and threw other into gulags for a wrong joke, while Allied troops, as in the Battle of the Bulge, retreated, and regrouped to fight again. So, two different systems, and save me the hand wringing and the sermon!
The three novels share a common ‘war is hell’ theme; lots of things blow up, especially normal human lives. And the natural inclination of men is to turn to drink in such horrific circumstances. Their souls and dreams may have gone missing, but the bottle is right there in front of them. For some, the war’s end changed little. The bottle wasn’t put away for a special occasion, and it took forty years for the country to notice there was a drinking problem, at which point there was a drinking and drugging problem.
Wars change men, and of course their societies, too. While the veterans of WWII are now passed from the scene, the effects of the war on them still surround us.