“On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Ever since, by odd coincidence, wars seem to be linked in our history with years ending in five. The Revolution began, and the Civil War, Second World War, and Vietnam War all ended, in 5’s, while Iraq-Afghanistan has persisted through a pair of 5’s. The year 1915 saw the start of the German U-boat campaign and the sinking of the Lusitania, and was also the beginning of many later evils: aerial bombing of civilians, poison gas, and, of course, the Armenian genocide. After the recent anniversaries of our two deadliest wars, let’s look at some of the ever-growing list of books describing the later years of those wars, or their persistent aftermaths.
After reading several such volumes, including Joseph Wheelan’s Their Last Full Measure: The Final Days of the Civil War and Ian Kershaw’s The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945, I am tempted to paraphrase Tolstoy: All wars begin differently, but they end much alike, reluctantly and traumatically.
Wheelan’s book is the most purely historical. He chronicles, almost day by day, the final Virginia campaign against Robert E. Lee’s army, ending his book with events that occurred a month after Appomattox. This much military history may be more than enough for some, but by including the words of contemporaries, both military and civilian, Wheelan brings humanity to the chronicle of divisions, commanders, and casualties. Many of the quotations Wheelan highlights seem as true today as they did then, from Ulysses S. Grant’s “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought,” to one Confederate general’s prophetic, “You may forgive us, but we won’t be forgiven. There is a rancor in our hearts which you little dream of.”
Ian Kershaw asks not simply how World War II ended, but why Germany defiantly invited such prolonged and unnecessary suffering during its final months. Kershaw offers not one cause, but several interlocking ones. Much of the reason, of course, depends on Hitler’s absolute power, which “was not over until his suicide,” and which carried his megalomania to its logical conclusion: condemning his own people to destruction because “[t]he German people, in his eyes, had failed him, had not proved worthy of his leadership. They were expendable. Without him, in fact, his monstrous ego told him, everything was expendable.”
Two other factors also played roles in World War II’s drawn-out denouement: awareness on the part of many military and civilian leaders of the atrocities for which they would be held responsible if the war were lost, and general terror at the possibility of falling under Soviet and communist dominance. Holding out in the East until the Western powers had entered most of Germany seemed the better option — as the next 40 years proved it to be, at least for West Germany.
Several books take us beyond what T.S. Eliot called “the recurring end of the unending.” Brian Matthew Jordan’s Marching Home follows Union veterans of the Civil War and the challenges they faced after demobilization, from unemployment to addiction to “neurokinetic” illnesses, the first recorded version of post-traumatic stress disorder. Jordan argues that most civilians were so eager to forget the war that they not only ignored the plight of the Union soldiers but even accused the veterans of exaggeration and of holding back reconciliation.
His case is not based on analysis of legislation, demographics, or large events, but on the words of hundreds of men who told their stories in any forum they could find. One of the strangest documentary troves comes from a postwar handwriting competition for men who had learned to write after losing their dominant hand in the war. Even though the point of the sponsors was to show the resilience of these soldiers, the contest gave veterans a chance to tell the world — at a time when most were not listening — what it was like to be an amputee in the mid-19th century.
In the past, I had always taken some sort of satisfaction from the fact that I was born (barely) in the post–World War II era. I literally wasn’t here for Dresden, the Holocaust, or Hiroshima. Having read Ian Buruma’s Year Zero, a History of 1945, I’m no longer so complacent.
Buruma — who is Anglo-Dutch in origin, a student of Asian history, and a professor of human rights in America — uses his global expertise to examine late- and postwar events from America to Malaysia. Sadly, the picture bears very little resemblance to photos of sailors kissing nurses in Times Square. Flanked by chapters on “Exultation” and on the slow rebuilding and joining together of formerly warring European nations, his book spends two-thirds of its length chronicling the evils of the postwar world, which included ongoing violence almost everywhere: a Greek civil war, retribution against alleged collaborators, further pogroms against the remaining Jews in Poland, colonial uprisings in Algeria and Vietnam, intercultural fighting in Malaysia, the slaughter of German civilians in Czechoslovakia, the slaughter of Russian soldiers by their own country, ethnic cleansing, assassination, and more. (The same was true of World War I, which spawned years of lesser wars, including six fought by Poland alone. In the words of David Reynolds, in The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century, “For millions across Eastern Europe, the Armistice of 1918… was of relatively little consequence.”)
Buruma comments resignedly on these manifestations of the worst in human nature, but often focuses his anger on the ease with which war criminals with money, contacts, or useful skills escaped punishment and even prospered, often with the collusion of the victorious allies.
Then there were the wars within wars. For most of us, World War I means endless trench warfare on the Western Front, the fall of Tsarist Russia, submarine and naval battles, and Gallipoli. But the Armenian genocide was by far the worst civilian atrocity of the war, causing twice as many noncombatant deaths as occurred in all the other belligerent countries combined. Peter Balakian has memorialized the events in Eastern Turkey in two complementary volumes, The Black Dog of Fate, a personal and family memoir, and The Burning Tigris, a thorough history of the genocide’s roots, contemporary and later responses around the world, and this history’s encouragement of World War II’s genocides. When Hitler ordered his Eastern armies “to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language,” he reassured them, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Those last words are particularly chilling, as Balakian shows that only two decades earlier, Turkey was frank about the genocide, and even began punishing its perpetrators under a flood of international pressure, especially from the United States. But once Western businesses began to seek Turkish oil, the world quickly forgot what wasn’t to its economic advantage to remember. A U.S. senator in 1924 attacked the Coolidge administration’s abandonment of the Armenians, saying, “Show this administration an oil well, and it will show you a foreign policy.”
After these books, I was ready for any plausible reason, however slight, for optimism about the conduct and aftermath of war. I found it, not in the chronicles of Oskar Schindler or The Monuments Men, but in a little book that would hardly be filmable, Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War. It turns out the Greatest Generation may also have been the best-read generation. Prompted by news of German propaganda and book burning, the American Library Association started a nationwide book drive for the troops. In an outcome that might seem implausible today, reading became a national priority, leading to cooperation between publishers and the government, to produce the Armed Services Editions, ultra-inexpensive paperbacks of everything from Great Expectations to Tarzan of the Apes to Walter Lippmann’s U.S. Foreign Policy. The latter appears to confirm the era’s Army Basic Field Manual’s assertion that “[n]othing irritates American soldiers so much as to be left in the dark regarding the reason for things.”
Although few of these books now survive — they were read and passed on until they disintegrated — archives of veterans’ correspondence provided Manning with rich color to enhance the raw data. A particular favorite was Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which caused one soldier to tell Smith “it’s like being home in Brooklyn again,” and a hospitalized, war-traumatized Marine to write her, “I don’t think I would have been able to sleep this night unless I bared my heart to the person who caused it to live again.”
Among the results plausibly attributable to this effort were that “The Great Gatsby was rescued from obscurity,” the rise of the paperback at home, and the best preparation for veterans to take advantage of the G.I. Bill. The 123 million books distributed from 1943 to 1947 also provided a symbolic wartime victory without blemish. As Manning triumphantly concludes, “More books were given to the American armed services than Hitler destroyed.”