the curatorship of possibilities

A long article by Paul Fussell first published in 1989 in Atlantic - The Real War 1939-1945. One of the best things ever written about the modern war:

“War that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? What was it that made the Americans, especially, so fertile with insult and cynicism, calling women Marines BAMS (broad-assed Marines) and devising SNAFU, with its offspring TARFU (“Things are really fucked up”), FUBAR (“Fucked up beyond all recognition”), and the perhaps less satisfying FUBB (“Fucked up beyond belief”)? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable. They knew that in its representation to the laity, what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied. They knew that despite the advertising and publicity, where it counted their arms and equipment were worse than the Germans’. They knew that their automatic rifles (First World War vintage) were slower and clumsier, and they knew that the Germans had a much better light machine gun. They knew, despite official assertions to the contrary, that the Germans had real smokeless powder for their small arms and that they did not. They knew that their own tanks, both American and British, were ridiculously underarmed and underarmored, so that they would inevitably be destroyed in an open encounter with an equal number of German panzers. They knew that the anti-tank mines supplied to them became unstable in subfreezing weather, and that truckloads of them blew up in the winter of 1944-1945. And they knew that the single greatest weapon of the war, the atomic bomb excepted, was the German 88-mm flat-trajectory gun, which brought down thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of soldiers. The Allies had nothing as good, despite the fact that one of them had designated itself the world’s greatest industrial power. The troops’ disillusion and their ironic response, in song and satire and sullen contempt, came from knowing that the home front then could (and very likely historiography later would) be aware of none of these things.”

Towards the end of the great article there:

Considering that they were running the war, it is surprising how little some officials on each side knew about the real war and its conditions. Some didn’t care to know — like Adolf Hitler, who refused to visit Hamburg after its terrible fire storm in the summer of 1943. Some thought they knew about the real war — like Josef Goebbels, who did once visit the Eastern Front. But there he “assimilated reality to his own fantasies,” as Neil Acherson has said, and took away only evidence establishing that the troops were “brave fellows” and that his own morale-building speeches were “rapturously received.” His knowledge of ground warfare remained largely literary: the course of the Punic Wars and the campaigns of Frederick the Great had persuaded him (or so he said) that in war “spirit” counts for more than luck or quantity of deployable men and munitions.

In addition to a calculating ignorance, a notable but not unique emotional coldness in the face of misery helped insulate him from the human implications of unpleasant facts. In his diary for September 20, 1943, airily and without any emotion or comment (not even a conventional “I was sorry to see” or “It is painful to say”), he totaled up the casualty figures for two years on the Eastern Front alone: “Our total losses in the East, exclusive of Lapland, from June 22, 1941, to August 31, 1943, were 548,480 dead, of whom 18,512 were officers; 1,998,991 wounded, of whom 51,670 were officers; 354,957 missing, of whom 11,597 were officers; total 2,902,438, of whom 81,779 were officers.” If it was callousness that protected Goebbels from the human implications of these numbers, it was rank and totemic identity that protected King George VI from a lot of instructive unpleasantness. According to John W. Wheeler-Bennett, his official biographer, what the King saw on his numerous visits to bombed areas fueled only his instinct for high-mindedness. He concluded that among the bombed and maimed he was witnessing “a fellowship of self-sacrifice and ‘good-neighbourliness,’ a comradeship of adversity in which men and women gave of their noblest to one another, a brotherhood of man in which the artificial barriers of caste and class were broken down.” The King never saw perfect fear operating as Connolly saw it, and it is unlikely that anyone told him that while the Normandy invasion was taking place, “almost every police station and detention camp in Britain was jam-packed full,” as Peter Grafton put it, in You, You and You. “In Glasgow alone . . . deserters were sitting twelve to a cell.” It is hard to believe that the King was aware of all the bitter anti-Jewish graffiti his subjects were scrawling up in public places. Nor is it recorded that he took in news of the thievery, looting, and robbing of the dead which were widely visible in the raided areas.”