William Shirer and Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

A review of Shirer’s epic text is here.  The author of the review… he’s pretty good.

Don Burgett and The War

If you happened to catch Episode 4 of Ken Burns’ The War (this is the invasion episode), you may have noticed the paratrooper/smashed pumpkin simile, with no author attributed. It was referenced as “one man described it as…”. That one man is Don Burgett, member of the 101st Airborne (A-1st-506), and noted author of four memoirs concerning the war in Europe.

So on page 87 of Currahee: A Screaming Eagle at Normandy, Burgett sets the scene: he has just landed and was getting out of this jump gear laying on his back as another plane flew overhead, “hedge-hopping” out of cowardice the author suggests, with paratroopers jumping. Burgett writes:

Their chutes were pulling out of the pack trays and starting to unfurl when they hit the ground. Seventeen men hit the ground before their chutes had time to open. They made a sound like a large ripe pumpkin being thrown down to burst against the ground.

It’s a shame Burns’ crew chose not to highlight this writer by name. I mean you can’t even say “paratrooper Don Burgett” and let others in the world google the name and discover his work? Please, visit his web site and buy his books.

Giving credit…there is just no substitute.

ww2 book reviews in the Washington Post

Reading the Book World section of the Washington Post, I came across two ww2 themed reviews.  An American Hero looks like a winner, and After the Reich looks like the dog of the pairing.  Check’em both out.

IKE–An American Hero
By Michael Korda

AFTER THE REICH–The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
By Giles MacDonogh

Shark Week, #5

I got to thinking about a passage I read in Fussell’s Wartime (I keep going back to that, I know, but it’s a great read) about public discourse (or what people could/would actually say in the 1940s regarding the actualities of conflict). Much of F’s argument has to do with light v. heavy duty, his metaphor for addressing how Americans conceived the war at the start v. what they discovered along the way (those many hard lessons).

The passage from the chapter Accentuate the Positive I’m thinking of connects to Ocean of Fear (Shark Week!) and has to do with morale. Fussell writes:

Another way for those in charge to raise service morale is by outright lies, as in the US Navy’s assuring its personnel that danger from sharks has been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the Navy said, “Sharks are amazingly overrated, there being only three cases of shark bites in all records” (emphasis is mine).

Fussell’s footnote leads to a source called Service Newspapers of the Second World War by M. Anglo, page 130. So this quote appeared in a news rag consumed by the service masses. It’s interesting that this kind of idea was “out there” as a way helping/persuading sailors to do their job and have one less thing to worry about. After all, if you knew differently, that there was a chance you’d be ripped to shreds after surviving the sinking of your ship, would you ever go near the ocean again?

I know many would, since that sense of duty (”this has to be done”) was firmly built into the culture then. But perhaps a less than forthright message in many circumstances helped to do this.

Band of Brothers?

Some time ago in a ww2 forum, I read a post that basically said this:

“You mean Ambrose didn’t coin the term Band of Brothers?”

Sometimes I have these moments where I’d like to scream through the computer and say something bad, like “mix in some other kinds of reading now and then, eh?” But I don’t. That person is probably real young and just beginning her/his journey as a student of history.

So just for fun, let’s watch some youtube, specifically a five minute scene Shakespeare’s Henry V, where we learn that the term “band of brothers” predates WWII and Mr. Ambose by a few years. Enjoy.

Don Burgett mp3

Many years ago, I read my first Burgett memoir. That was Currahee! A Screaming Eagle of Normandy. I wrote about that here at the ww2db. He is the author of three other books that document his experiences in the war, all of which are must reads for 101st Airborne students/researchers.

Just doing some surfing today and came across this mp3 of a Don Burgett speech hosted by the the World War II Veterans Committee, a group whose mission it is to “preserve the legacy of the ‘Greatest Generation.’” The audio of the speech is here. There are many highlights, including Burgett’s thoughts on Saving Private Ryan and Fritz Nyland. You mean SPR wasn’t a true story? I’m shocked.

Randall Jarrell

In the 102 class I teach (comp and lit), I have a section of “conflict” poems. For me, it’s not enough to include all the old standards about love or death, identity, or the many in that fat anthology about animals. That’s too easy. “Conflict” types of poems are important to read as well. Among them…

* Hardy: The Man He Killed
* Owen: Dulce et Decorum est
* Reed: Naming of Parts

There are others, of course, that show different things, but mostly I want my students to get a close up look at _irony_. And the war poets do this well. But the one poem that most students say is the most dramatic of the bunch (and it’s the shortest), is Randell Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turrett Gunner.” Here it is:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Above all, I want my students to see what a poet can do with so little, yet expand significantly on such a terrible thing so simply and with such power. Most of my students are surprised to learn that many of the poems in this section of the course go back to WWI. Most say they liked the other poem sections of the course better, but the “conflict” section was important to see as well. I feel the same way most days, but sometimes the best poetry is about the most uncomfortable things.

Paul Fussell

Way back in the day, I read The Great War and Modern Memory. That was grad school in a class called Continental European literature. We read a wide variety of texts there, but Fussell’s stood head and shoulders above all others. Much later, I came to Fussell’s other works, notably Wartime and his memoir Doing Battle.

Fussell is veteran of WW2 and this obviously colors his writing. His work isn’t so much about battles, but about culture, history, language. He is after all, a Harvard PHD, English professor type. In a 1996 interview, he said this:

Hackney: Is it also true that you find language so inadequate to describe war, disproportionate?

Fussell: Right. And after every war, there’s an immense overhaul of language, which in the Western world has created really the cultural and artistic phenomenon of what we call modernism; that is, a paring down of everything to minimal size, including language and ideas of grandeur, and ideas of a possibility of the state making everybody happy, and things like that. That modernism is really a form of skepticism or minimalism. You cut out everything that has deceived you and throw it away, and that leaves you with things like the Eames chair and Picasso and numerous other outcrops of modernism.

Many other gems are in the full interview here.

Image source: scan from Doing Battle back cover. His list of works is here, too.

Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965)
The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (1965)
Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (1966)
Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1969) editor with Geoffrey Tillotson and Marshall Waingrow
Samuel Johnson: The Life of Writing (1971)
English Augustan Poetry (1972)
The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
The Ordeal of Alfred M. Hale: The Memoirs of a Soldier Servant (1975) editor
Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980)
The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations (1982)
Sassoon’s Long Journey (1983) editor, from The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston
Class, A Guide Through the American Status System (1983)
Caste Marks: Style and Status in the USA (1984)
The Norton Book of Travel (1987) editor
Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (198
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989)
BAD: or, The Dumbing of America (1991)
The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War (1991)
The Norton Book of Modern War (1991) editor
The Anti-Egotist. Kingsley Amis: Man of Letters (1994)
Doing Battle - The Making of a Skeptic (1996) autobiography
Uniforms : Why We Are What We Wear (2002)
The Boys’ Crusade : The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (2003)

Source: wikipedia