Friday, June 11, 2004

Trying to Understand the Second World War

Day by day we pass through the long anniversary of World War II, which was in many ways the defining chapter of the twentieth century. At this distance, we locate impressions and understandings of the war as best we can. I spent some time this week at the Northern Indiana Center for History, looking at the new exhibition called World War II: The Home Front. I came away with a new understanding of the roles workers at local industries played in the war. Surrounded as I was by the clothing styles and products and radio news of those years, I found myself intrigued once again by the ways people grappled with their wartime experiences. For me, then, the letters between several soldiers and their loved ones were highlights of the exhibition.

I’ve long wanted to understand the war better. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, when the country was still thinking over what the war meant, and its images were all around us in the movies. My childhood buddies and I played combat games in the neighborhood, hiding behind hedges and moving as a squad across the street.

Later, as an adult, I visited France for a few days. I spent four or five hours walking down country roads just inland from one of the Normandy invasion beaches. The landscape was beautiful, with tree-lined lanes and green fields and old stone houses beside their gardens. I saw that each little stretch of country road was named after one of the liberators, some particular American soldier who had died nearby. The many commemorative signs were a small clue to the scale of terror and sacrifice that went on there.

I’ve looked, too, at the Naval Historical Center’s current web exhibit of paintings and drawings made by soldiers who were present during the Normandy invasion. One artist in particular, Alexander P. Russo, helps me find hints about the experience, especially in his portraits of soldiers taking short breaks. Their faces show weariness and shock that borders on horror. Even when seen on the web, the paintings show that battle physically and emotionally exhausted these young people.

I am also rereading Unto This Feast, an unpublished novel completed in 1950 by Gordon Henderson, an American veteran who fought in France and Germany. The author follows a young soldier much like himself from innocence to experience in a landscape where brutality is often repaid with brutality and all the ordinary rules of life are called off.

In 1982, when we shared an office, Gordon told me that he had never come to terms with one thing he saw in the war. That was the concentration camp his unit had passed by on the second day after it was liberated. The surviving prisoners, having nowhere to go, were still there. Some were dying and others were trying to nurse themselves back from starvation.

Gordon also told me about the time he had been most afraid. He was helping to call artillery fire one night when the phone wire back to the guns went dead. His unit leader asked him to find where the wire was cut and mend it.

“Hold the wire loose in your hand, and let it run through as you go,” the sergeant told him. “You’ll find the cut for sure. See you avoid the ones that cut it.” So Gordon set off into the night, alone, crossing the dangerous, battle-torn land, seeking to patch up a bit of wire that would allow the artillery to continue firing.

As you know, our chance to learn what soldiers experienced is quickly receding. I would like to ask my friend more questions and hear more of his stories, but I can’t. In 1984, Gordon Henderson followed another sort of wire into the night—late-detected widespread cancer. Like many others of his generation, suddenly, it seemed to me, he was gone.

Related links: Northern Indiana Center for History and their World War II: The Home Front exhibition.

Naval Historical Center Invasion of Normandy exhibit and works by Alexander P. Russo. 

Broadcast by Ken Smith on June 11, 2004
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