Edgar L. Jones (1915–2001) was an ambulance driver and journalist during World War II, then for most of his life a reporter and editorialist for the Baltimore Sun. His Atlantic piece from February 1946 does two things, one familiar and one new. The familiar thing is that like Hemingway and others, he deromanticizes war, even “the good war,” describing soldiers’ actions and attitudes unsparingly and fully, thus making unreflective support of war more difficult. The new thing is how this knowledge is deployed: not against the home front or the commanders, but toward a political goal. The war was over, and the question before the United States was whether to continue the draft in peacetime. In the end, the answer was yes, and the draft was reinstated in 1948; but in the years intervening, the question was open, and a means for thinking about war and peace generally.
In opposing a peacetime draft Jones is not opposing war; rather he is asking, in relation to his knowledge of what war actually is, that everything possible be done to give peace “a fair trial”: an anticipation of John Lennon’s 1969 protest rally favorite, “Give Peace a Chance.”
PROBABLY I shall be tagged as a psychoneurotic veteran of too much bloodshed when I say that I get alternately fighting mad and cold sick inside whenever I hear people talk about the next war. I cannot understand how they can be resigned to the prospects of another global conflict, so casual in their assumption that wars are inevitable, so damnably unaware of the consequences of their current complacency.
Has everyone in this country lost faith in peace? Here we stand at the threshold of what could be a new and better world, and our fainthearted citizenry insists upon looking backward and muttering that what has always been must be. Maybe the United Nations Organization will succeed in preventing further global conflicts, but the men from Missouri and forty-seven other states have to be shown. World peace, according to our self-acclaimed realists, is at best a heart-warming dream: common sense demands that we put our trust in bombs and battleships. So let us teach our youths, along with the new generations in Germany and Japan, that wars are wrong, but at the same time let us be practical and bring up our children to be good soldiers, just in case.
Cynical as most of us overseas were, I doubt if many of us seriously believed that people at home would start planning for the next war before we could get home and talk without censorship about this one. Although our hopes and fears for the future were varied, our common goal was most assuredly more than the elimination of a few world powers so that the remaining nations could square off for yet another war. Nor did we endure the half-life of a regimented military existence just to have people tell us that it is inevitable that our children will have to suffer similar bitter experiences.
We had a right, I think, to expect that in return for our services the global home front would give peace a fair trial. We made our various sacrifices to give our own and younger generations a chance to improve on the past, not to have the unchanging Old Guard take our victory from us and rebuild the world along their deadly pre-war pattern of distrust, secrecy, and intrigue. We wanted peace, not a world divided into armed camps; permanent peace, not a short wait between wars. Many of us had to bomb, burn, and blast into oblivion an untold number of helpless victims of total war. Only a few of us are so unaware of our own war crimes that we can let it be said that we fought only to preserve the old way of life.
Surely the entire home front could not have suffered through four years of anguished waiting, dreading each incoming telegram, shuddering at each new invasion headline, and still consider war to be the only dependable solution to international controversies. Instead of viewing the rest of the world with suspicion and singling out the next enemy, there must be some Americans willing to rely upon the fact that millions of global citizens are as peace-loving as ourselves. Certainly we do not all believe that we can successfully talk peace at the point of a gun or bring up our children as conscientious civilians by first exposing them to military indoctrination, the very antithesis of education for democracy.
But if there are some Americans who want peace badly enough to give up their right to wage war, they are being outvoiced by our militant Old Guard, whose idea of a foreign policy is to keep the United States armed to the teeth and ever ready to challenge any country which disputes our world leadership. Regardless of the existence of personal misgivings, we, as a nation, are placing our reliance not on international coöperation but upon the atomic bomb and the willingness of “our boys” to back our decisions with their lives. If it takes two to make a war, we are making certain that we are one of them.
I do not pretend to speak for all veterans. In the course of forty months of war duty and five major battles I was only an ambulance driver, a merchant seaman, an Army historian, and a war correspondent, never a downright GI. Possibly the men who were subjected much more completely than I to the whims of militarism are now satisfied with their hollow victory, but I doubt it. I never met that fabulous character, Typical GI Joe, whose every thought and post-war desire was so well known to politicians and the writers of advertising copy. But I met a lot of other Joes, and my guess is that before long—and the sooner the better—the veteran serviceman is going to wake from his deep dreams of peace, a job, and a home and realize that his country has let him down, and badly.
Being a GI was a point of view, not a military classification, and the more thoroughly one was exposed to the waste, unfairness, senselessness, and horror of war, the more completely one substituted the serviceman’s perspective for an anachronistic civilian way of thinking. The man in uniform stood apart from society and judged it, often too harshly, in the light of his own insecurity, the sacrifices which were demanded of him, and the possibility that he was being played for a sucker. In varying degrees, depending upon a man’s length of service, the GI perspective included bitter contempt for the home front’s abysmal lack of understanding, its pleasures and comforts, and its nauseating capacity to talk in patriotic platitudes.
The fighting man was not a deep-thinking man, despite all the lofty sentiments attributed to him. He left the peace talk to the civilians who had the time and place for it. Having been maneuvered into a position where he had to kill or be killed, he did not trouble himself with pretenses that he was a crusader. He fought because his people at home expected him to fight, and he let them seek the necessary justification for his own ruthlessness. The most he wanted was to end the war, and all wars, as soon as possible, so that he could live in peace and let others, including his own children, live in peace. He expected the home front to share his aversion for war and to figure out a better way to settle future disputes.
Civilian Joe is too concerned at present with his personal problems of readjustment to get mad at what he habitually blasphemed in his uniformed days as home-front stupidity. He is still too dazed from being home and free again to be bluntly vocal. When the veteran does start talking back, this country is going to have its wartime illusions badly shattered.
Observers not subjected for long periods to the serviceman’s barren existence were in no position to interpret accurately a GI’s life, because they lacked the necessary perspective. Congressmen on fly-by-night overseas tours did not understand the men doing the fighting, nor did press representatives, with one notable exception. To a greater extent than any other civilian, Ernie Pyle saw the war from the GI point of view, and he hated it with GI thoroughness. But even Ernie found it difficult to sympathize with States-side soldiers and shore-based sailors who complained as bitterly as the dirtiest dogface about their lot in life while enjoying all the physical comforts which the infantrymen lacked.
The plain, unpublicized fact of the matter was that nine out of ten servicemen wanted nothing more to do with wars after their first week of basic training. Whether stationed in Washington or on a scrap of coral sand, the average GI considered himself to be the purposeless victim of malignant justice. As he so often remarked, “From where I stand, this whole thing stinks!” He hated everyone conceivably responsible for his misfortune, cursing out the home front as vehemently as the Japanese and the Germans. His special gripes, however, were reserved for the undemocratic, stupefying, favor-ridden totalitarian nature of military life itself. He had no use for a system in which one class got the best of everything, and the other class got less than what was left.
WE Americans have the dangerous tendency in our international thinking to take a holier-than-thou attitude toward other nations. We consider ourselves to be more noble and decent than other peoples, and consequently in a better position to decide what is right and wrong in the world. What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers. We topped off our saturation bombing and burning of enemy civilians by dropping atomic bombs on two nearly defenseless cities, thereby setting an all-time record for instantaneous mass slaughter.
As victors we are privileged to try our defeated opponents for their crimes against humanity; but we should be realistic enough to appreciate that if we were on trial for breaking international laws, we should be found guilty on a dozen counts. We fought a dishonorable war, because morality had a low priority in battle. The tougher the fighting, the less room for decency; and in Pacific contests we saw mankind reach the blackest depths of bestiality.
Not every American soldier, or even one per cent of our troops, deliberately committed unwarranted atrocities, and the same might be said for the Germans and Japanese. The exigencies of war necessitated many so-called crimes, and the bulk of the rest could be blamed on the mental distortion which war produced. But we publicized every inhuman act of our opponents and censored any recognition of our own moral frailty in moments of desperation.
I have asked fighting men, for instance, why they—or actually, why we—regulated flame-throwers in such a way that enemy soldiers were set afire, to die slowly and painfully, rather than killed outright with a full blast of burning oil. Was it because they hated the enemy so thoroughly? The answer was invariably, “No, we don’t hate those poor bastards particularly; we just hate the whole goddam mess and have to take it out on somebody.” Possibly for the same reason, we mutilated the bodies of enemy dead, cutting off their ears and kicking out their gold teeth for souvenirs, and buried them with their testicles in their mouths, but such flagrant violations of all moral codes reach into still-unexplored realms of battle psychology.
It is not my intention either to excuse our late opponents or to discredit our own fighting men. I do, however, believe that all of us, not just the battle-enlightened GI’s, should fully understand the horror and degradation of war before talking so casually of another one. War does horrible things to men, our own sons included. It demands the worst of a person and pays off in brutality and maladjustment. It has become so mechanical, inhuman, and crassly destructive that men lose all sense of personal responsibility for their actions. They fight without compassion, because that is the only way to fight a total war. To give just one illustration, I asked an infantry colonel whether he gave his battalion a pre-battle lecture. The colonel replied approximately as follows:—
“You can damn well bet I put ’em straight ahead of time, and they were the best damn outfit in the Philippines. I taught ’em ethics, fighting ethics. I taught ’em there were two kinds of ethics, one for us and one for the yellowbellies across the line. I taught ’em that the best way to kill a man was when he was lying down with his back up; the next best way was when he was sitting with his back towards ya, and the third best was when he was standing with his back towards ya. . . . Always shoot ’em in the back if possible; that’s what I taught ’em, and there wasn’t another battalion could touch ’em!”
Among other things about modern warfare, I think the home front should also comprehend the full significance of the fact that a front-line soldier had a good chance of being killed in this war by his own side as well as by his opponents. Battle positions changed so rapidly that American soldiers were shelled by American artillery and warships, bombed and strafed by American planes, and machine-gunned by American tanks—not occasionally, but often. We also sank our own ships and shot down numbers of our own planes—how many no one knows, but the ship I was on in the invasion of Sicily knocked out four German planes and three of our own, which was considered a good average.
Peter Bowman summed up our victory to date in Beach Red when he wrote, “Battle doesn’t determine who is right. Only who is left.” We destroyed fascists, not fascism; men, not ideas. Our triumphs did not serve as evidence that democracy is best for the world, any more than Russian victories proved that communism is an ideal system for all mankind. Only through our peacetime efforts to abolish war and bring a larger measure of freedom and security to all peoples can we reveal to others that we are any better than our defeated opponents.
Today we stand on trial—we are either for peace or for war, and the rest of the world is prepared to move with us or against us. The burden of proof is on us; and our willingness to make peace, not our capacity to wage war, is the true measure of our good-neighborliness.