Summer Reading

Good history, whatever the subject, invariably raises profound moral and ethical questions.  Look behind any field of historical study, and you will discover injustice, failure, fallibility, and suffering of one kind of another.  That is the story of our race—not the whole story, of course, but a central part of it.  The history of war is a case in point, only more so than almost any other field.  Rick Atkinson's recently released, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (Henry Holt, 2013), is an outstanding example of this same point.  The book is a magisterial, well-written, well-sourced study of the last year of World War II on the Western Front.  The text runs to 641 pages, the end notes another 170, and together they describe virtually every aspect of the war from D-Day to the fall of Berlin and slightly beyond.  The courage of the soldiers is here, as is the seamier side of their lives.  The generals for the most part don't do very well in this book as Atkinson devotes painful detail to documenting the many ways they mismanaged their way to victory (or defeat, for the Germans).  The death camps are here also, as is the unnecessary suffering of civilians at the hands of military establishments quick to pull triggers for their own ends.  God, too, makes a couple of brief appearances as Atkinson's sources try to make some sense out of it all.

Good historians are good story-tellers, and Rick Atkinson is a good historian.  He competently (almost wisely) and evenhandedly portrays the immense sadness of war.  He also chisels out a monument to the human spirit, which somehow manages to find its way through war—scarred but also in a way transcendent in the face of all of the unimaginable horror and the depths of human suffering. The Guns at Last Light is going to win its share of prizes, and it should.  It brings Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy," which also includes An Army at Dawn (2002) and The Day of Battle (2007) to a fitting close.  If you enjoy reading history and haven't read any of these books, start with An Army at Dawn and read through them all.

I'm on night duty with a hundred corpse-like patients, wrecks of humanity...Many have tuberculosis, enterocolitis (constant diarrhea) and huge bed sores...Patients wear just pajama shirts as they can't get the bottoms down fast enough to use commodes.

God, where are you?

Lt. June Wandrey,

Nurse, Seventh Army

Caring for Dachau Death Camp Survivors

From: Bedpan Commando: The Story of a Combat Nurse During World War II (Elmore, 1989)

Quoted in: Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light (Henry Holt, 2013), p.  614

Telling the Truth About War

James Holland, The Battle of Britain (St. Martin's, 2010), poses a serious question concerning how we view war generally.  Drawing mostly on personal stories of those involved, especially pilots from both sides, Holland renders an almost intimate portrait of the Battle of Britain, which celebrates the courage of the pilots and the role the British played in turning the tide against Nazi Germany.  The larger elements of strategy and tactics and the ways and means of the war are included, but in a less prominent role than usual.  The book is about the people that fight wars as much as it is about war itself.

War is not good, the lesson seems to be, but there are things related to war that can be taken to be good.  Pilots were courageous, Britons and Germans sacrificial, and Britain's staying power and superior skills at waging modern war praiseworthy.  That's fine as far as it goes, but what do we do with it?  Do courage, heroism, grit, and fortitude tip the balance sheet of war, if even slightly?  Or, do they serve to highlight the evil of war by their contrasting goodness?  Is war itself a mixed bag of good and evil?  Or is it unmitigated evil to which people respond with good qualities?  For my money, it is the latter.  The human spirit does find ways to turn even the most evil aspects of human nature to a good that is not inherent in the evil.  We can create good out of the evil, just as we seem endlessly able to subvert good to evil ends.

Perhaps it is not necessary to come away from every book about war with a feeling of revulsion for the institution itself, but perhaps we should remain at least somewhat conscious of what lies behind the courage and heroism—the backdrop of war.  That is what I personally found understated in Holland's portrait of the Battle of Britain, the backdrop of pain and misery the whole world suffered because of World War II.  It is there, for example, in the deaths of individual pilots, but understated nonetheless.  Pain, death, suffering, and destruction are the main themes of any history of war, and where they are not sufficiently present in the historian's prose her or his history is less than adequate.  It is less than an accurate historical portrayal of war.