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Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic
In this highly-praised autobiographical work, the author of "The Great War and Modern Memory" recounts his own experience of combat in WWII and how it became a determining force in his life. "Doing Battle" is at once a summing-up of one man's life and profoundly thoughtful portrait of America's own search for identity in the second half of this century.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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About the author
Paul Fussell
49 books134 followersPaul Fussell was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings covered a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America’s class system. He was an U.S. Army Infantry officer in the European theater during World War II (103rd U.S. Infantry Division) and was awarded both the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. He is best known for his writings about World War I and II.
He began his teaching career at Connecticut College (1951–55) before moving to Rutgers University in 1955 and finally the University of Pennsylvania in 1983. He also taught at the University of Heidelberg (1957–58) and King’s College London (1990–92). As a teacher, he traveled widely with his family throughout Europe during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, taking Fulbright and sabbatical years in Germany, England and France.
He began his teaching career at Connecticut College (1951–55) before moving to Rutgers University in 1955 and finally the University of Pennsylvania in 1983. He also taught at the University of Heidelberg (1957–58) and King’s College London (1990–92). As a teacher, he traveled widely with his family throughout Europe during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, taking Fulbright and sabbatical years in Germany, England and France.
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August 26, 2009
Fussell's preparation for war was limited. ROTC was “a wonderland” of marching and snappy uniforms. Nothing was mentioned of “tree bursts and Graves Registration” or trench foot, nor that first-aid kits were adequate for bullet holes but hardly for a “foot blown off by a Schumine.” They soon realized that they were being trained as lieutenants to replace dead ones. In France, their first operation was to perform a night relief of another battalion. Hopelessly lost, they were ordered to lie down and sleep. At dawn they discovered they were lying in a field of dead Germans. A sobering sight. “My boyish illusions, largely intact to that moment of awakening, fell away at once, and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just.” It wasn’t just the sight of the dead. Many were mere children. Two, no older than 14, had been shot in the head, one with brains dripping from his nostrils. The realization sets in that he has been trained to commit like murders. Nor had training prepared him for other indignities: the gut-twisting cramps of instant diarrhea, ruining layers of clothing, and having no place to wash. Often half the platoon might disappear frantically into the woods.
He soon learned what a marine sergeant told Philip Caputo many years later during the Vietnam War: “Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.” The “Great Turkey Shoot” bore mute witness to that. The men in F Company came upon a trench holding two squads of German infantry wishing to surrender. The Americans gleefully shot all of them dead.
Fussell soon realized that most army documents were intricately prepared falsehoods, that cowards are maimed and injured with the same regularity as heroes, that heroes are often invented post-death to make the survivors feel good, that “the Good War,” when it ended, did not lead to riotous celebrations by the troops, rather a feeling of bitterness at the appalling destruction and death. As Kay Summersby (Eisenhower’s British mistress) said, “No one laughed., No one smiled. It was all over. We had won, but the victory was not anything like what I thought it would be. . . So many deaths. So much destruction. And everybody was very, very tired.”
Finally, a bitter Fussell, having been shunted around after the war to various camps doing all sorts of make-work, mind-numbing activities, came face-to-face with the terrible reality of the way we conduct war. He realized the truth behind military historian Russell Weigley’s comment: “The American army of World War II habitually filled the ranks of its combat infantry with its least promising recruits, the uneducated, the unskilled, the unenthusiastic.” Fussell speculated as to why no one seemed to care terribly that those remaining after the marines, air corps and navy got their pick, were expected to bear the brunt of sustained battle: “Perhaps the reason is that the bulk of those killed by bullets and shells were the ones normally killed in peacetime in mine disasters, industrial and construction accidents, lumbering, and fire and police work. . . . Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, a form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all young American males? Killed in the tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers had the effect, welcome or not, of improving the breed. Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust.” (Deborah Shapeley in her biography of Robert McNamara Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara records his program to enlist thousands of men who formerly had not been able to pass the minimal entrance tests for the army. They were allowed to enter on his assumption the army would raise their skill levels. Most were killed in Vietnam.)
He soon learned what a marine sergeant told Philip Caputo many years later during the Vietnam War: “Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.” The “Great Turkey Shoot” bore mute witness to that. The men in F Company came upon a trench holding two squads of German infantry wishing to surrender. The Americans gleefully shot all of them dead.
Fussell soon realized that most army documents were intricately prepared falsehoods, that cowards are maimed and injured with the same regularity as heroes, that heroes are often invented post-death to make the survivors feel good, that “the Good War,” when it ended, did not lead to riotous celebrations by the troops, rather a feeling of bitterness at the appalling destruction and death. As Kay Summersby (Eisenhower’s British mistress) said, “No one laughed., No one smiled. It was all over. We had won, but the victory was not anything like what I thought it would be. . . So many deaths. So much destruction. And everybody was very, very tired.”
Finally, a bitter Fussell, having been shunted around after the war to various camps doing all sorts of make-work, mind-numbing activities, came face-to-face with the terrible reality of the way we conduct war. He realized the truth behind military historian Russell Weigley’s comment: “The American army of World War II habitually filled the ranks of its combat infantry with its least promising recruits, the uneducated, the unskilled, the unenthusiastic.” Fussell speculated as to why no one seemed to care terribly that those remaining after the marines, air corps and navy got their pick, were expected to bear the brunt of sustained battle: “Perhaps the reason is that the bulk of those killed by bullets and shells were the ones normally killed in peacetime in mine disasters, industrial and construction accidents, lumbering, and fire and police work. . . . Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, a form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all young American males? Killed in the tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers had the effect, welcome or not, of improving the breed. Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust.” (Deborah Shapeley in her biography of Robert McNamara Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara records his program to enlist thousands of men who formerly had not been able to pass the minimal entrance tests for the army. They were allowed to enter on his assumption the army would raise their skill levels. Most were killed in Vietnam.)
October 9, 2020
I read this book when it came out in 1996 and now, after re-reading it, I realize how much I came to internalize many of Fussell’s thoughts about war, the military, and society. I was already starting to come to some of these opinions, but it was Fussell who gave voice to what had been unformed thoughts. For instance, I served in the Navy, and while I have no regrets about doing so, Fussell reminded me not to view those years through rose-tinted glasses and focus only on the good times. I understood exactly what he meant when he wrote “I realized what a lot I had in common with Robert Graves, who wrote in Good-Bye to All That, ‘What I most disliked in the army was never being alone, forced to live and sleep with men whose company, in many cases, I would have run miles to avoid.’” (p. 77)
Fussell served as a second lieutenant in combat in World War II, and what he remembered most were the hardships and suffering of the infantry, and the war as one bloody, blundering episode after another, where men were as likely to be killed by friendly fire, or their own defective ordnance, as by the Germans. There was no glory in this kind of fighting, and if there was any honor at all it was to be found in keeping to one’s own internal values and in the comradeship of fellow soldiers. The war was just a slog: kill, advance, kill again, and hope that you might be among the lucky ones who survive more or less intact, physically and mentally. Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated American soldiers of the war, and a man not known for introspection, when asked how combat soldiers survived having been in a war said, “I don’t think they ever do.” (p. 183)
The book starts with Fussell’s childhood in Pasadena, California, the happy, protected son of an upper middle class family. It was a carefree lifestyle, with a summer house on the beach and his own sailboat, and he was untouched by the Great Depression. When the war broke out he joined the Army, apparently without giving it any thought. He managed to pass the officer training program, just barely, and found himself assigned to the 103rd infantry division. In the spring of 1945 he was seriously wounded by artillery fire and spent the rest of the war in Europe recuperating, then was transferred back to the US for do-nothing assignments until finally released in 1946.
He used the GI bill to complete college, then went to Harvard for a PhD in English. He eventually gained a reputation as an expert in 18th century English literature and poetry, and moved to Rutgers University. Toward the end of his career he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.
The war was never far from his mind, and the older he got, the less patience he had for cant, hypocrisy, and stupidity. American leaders had learned nothing from World War II, and would continue to blunder into conflicts because they could be used for narrow political ends. Fussell saw what was happening and hated it. “Attending these new impulses was revulsion, almost physical, at fraudulent language, especially patriotic clichés” (p. 177) He also started to travel overseas, and began comparing the ancient cultures of Europe with the superficiality of American society. “I perceived that America was not just a bit different but entirely different. It had no antiquity, no Middle Ages, and no Renaissance, and thus lacked, among many other valuable things, a sense of evil and of infinite human complexity. It remained, it seemed to me, mired in the general optimism of the eighteenth century.” (p. 181)
The passing of years did not mellow him. After starting with anger he moved on to a sense of throw-up-your-hands resignation, but it was always grounded in close observation of society. For instance, the following statement is, if anything, more true today that it was in his time: “American culture seemed more than ever bellicose, ignorant, selfish, and greedy, shot through with quasi-religious fraud and hypocrisy.” (p. 229)
He could also be funny in a curmudgeonly sort of way, as in “I began to see American colleges as little more than overgrown and pretentious high schools, where genuine education seemed increasingly unlikely. It was hard to forget Mencken’s satire of the American ‘proliferation of colleges.’ ‘They are even spattered,’ he notes ‘over such barbaric States as Mississippi and North Dakota, where it would be dangerous to be educated in any real sense.’” (p.235)
Fussell saw where he could be of most use to society. “I was now convinced that my duty was criticism, meaning not carping, but the perpetual obligation of evaluation.” (p. 176) Using this understanding he reflected on his own early education.
The defining moment in his literary career was the publication in 1975 of The Great War and Modern Memory, which brought the First World War out from the shadow of the Second, exploring how soldiers raised on Victorian and Edwardian pastoralism interpreted and internalized the war. Published just as the war in Vietnam was winding down it also offered a way to reflect on fortitude, suffering, and military incompetence in a way that transcended any one particular conflict. It is still considered an essential introduction for anyone wishing to understand the Great War.
He closed out his career as an essayist and social critic, publishing half a dozen books of commentary, all of them worth reading. He possessed a keen insight into what motivates people to believe the things they do, and was perfectly willing to evoke outrage in his readers so long as it got them to reflect on what they were mad about. For anyone not familiar with Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory is the book to start with, but all of his books are worth the reader’s time.
Fussell served as a second lieutenant in combat in World War II, and what he remembered most were the hardships and suffering of the infantry, and the war as one bloody, blundering episode after another, where men were as likely to be killed by friendly fire, or their own defective ordnance, as by the Germans. There was no glory in this kind of fighting, and if there was any honor at all it was to be found in keeping to one’s own internal values and in the comradeship of fellow soldiers. The war was just a slog: kill, advance, kill again, and hope that you might be among the lucky ones who survive more or less intact, physically and mentally. Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated American soldiers of the war, and a man not known for introspection, when asked how combat soldiers survived having been in a war said, “I don’t think they ever do.” (p. 183)
The book starts with Fussell’s childhood in Pasadena, California, the happy, protected son of an upper middle class family. It was a carefree lifestyle, with a summer house on the beach and his own sailboat, and he was untouched by the Great Depression. When the war broke out he joined the Army, apparently without giving it any thought. He managed to pass the officer training program, just barely, and found himself assigned to the 103rd infantry division. In the spring of 1945 he was seriously wounded by artillery fire and spent the rest of the war in Europe recuperating, then was transferred back to the US for do-nothing assignments until finally released in 1946.
He used the GI bill to complete college, then went to Harvard for a PhD in English. He eventually gained a reputation as an expert in 18th century English literature and poetry, and moved to Rutgers University. Toward the end of his career he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.
The war was never far from his mind, and the older he got, the less patience he had for cant, hypocrisy, and stupidity. American leaders had learned nothing from World War II, and would continue to blunder into conflicts because they could be used for narrow political ends. Fussell saw what was happening and hated it. “Attending these new impulses was revulsion, almost physical, at fraudulent language, especially patriotic clichés” (p. 177) He also started to travel overseas, and began comparing the ancient cultures of Europe with the superficiality of American society. “I perceived that America was not just a bit different but entirely different. It had no antiquity, no Middle Ages, and no Renaissance, and thus lacked, among many other valuable things, a sense of evil and of infinite human complexity. It remained, it seemed to me, mired in the general optimism of the eighteenth century.” (p. 181)
The passing of years did not mellow him. After starting with anger he moved on to a sense of throw-up-your-hands resignation, but it was always grounded in close observation of society. For instance, the following statement is, if anything, more true today that it was in his time: “American culture seemed more than ever bellicose, ignorant, selfish, and greedy, shot through with quasi-religious fraud and hypocrisy.” (p. 229)
He could also be funny in a curmudgeonly sort of way, as in “I began to see American colleges as little more than overgrown and pretentious high schools, where genuine education seemed increasingly unlikely. It was hard to forget Mencken’s satire of the American ‘proliferation of colleges.’ ‘They are even spattered,’ he notes ‘over such barbaric States as Mississippi and North Dakota, where it would be dangerous to be educated in any real sense.’” (p.235)
Fussell saw where he could be of most use to society. “I was now convinced that my duty was criticism, meaning not carping, but the perpetual obligation of evaluation.” (p. 176) Using this understanding he reflected on his own early education.
They were excellent teachers of what they knew. They just didn’t know enough, or they didn’t know enough about ideas and values and their shifting history. Or if they did know, they didn’t regard that as the most compelling focus for those learning to be grown-ups. To sum up this situation, they’d not been persuaded that their most important responsibility was criticism – artistic, literary, intellectual, political, and social. (p. 56)
The defining moment in his literary career was the publication in 1975 of The Great War and Modern Memory, which brought the First World War out from the shadow of the Second, exploring how soldiers raised on Victorian and Edwardian pastoralism interpreted and internalized the war. Published just as the war in Vietnam was winding down it also offered a way to reflect on fortitude, suffering, and military incompetence in a way that transcended any one particular conflict. It is still considered an essential introduction for anyone wishing to understand the Great War.
He closed out his career as an essayist and social critic, publishing half a dozen books of commentary, all of them worth reading. He possessed a keen insight into what motivates people to believe the things they do, and was perfectly willing to evoke outrage in his readers so long as it got them to reflect on what they were mad about. For anyone not familiar with Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory is the book to start with, but all of his books are worth the reader’s time.
November 13, 2012
--------------------------------------
Most people who have read Paul Fussell have read The Great War and Modern Memory and/or Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. Both are superb analyses
of modern mass war.
And Paul Fussell is a combat veteran of World War II. He has "earned" his right as an historical analyst.
Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic is Fussell's own memoir/confession of his actual experience on the ground in the European Theater as an American Infantry Lieutenant. It is also scattered throughout with historical background of the Allied ground invasion after D-Day--the crawling horror that was the advance across western Europe towards Berlin.
Fussell says he felt that he owed to his readers his own story in the events of which he has written before.
His own story is honest. It is as tedious as warfare. It is horrific in some details. It is as despicable as is politics. It is as pathetic as a flawed human being can be. It is a confession as well as a memoir.
My already deep respect for Fussell found new fathoms through this profoundly honest retelling of this veteran's story.
Paul Fussell is a flawed human being whose excellent, internationally-acclaimed historical writings were informed by his own less-than-spectacular but tragic experience of the pandemic of warfare. And he helps us to understand this.
Paul Fussell is an American treasure.
Most people who have read Paul Fussell have read The Great War and Modern Memory and/or Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. Both are superb analyses
of modern mass war.
And Paul Fussell is a combat veteran of World War II. He has "earned" his right as an historical analyst.
Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic is Fussell's own memoir/confession of his actual experience on the ground in the European Theater as an American Infantry Lieutenant. It is also scattered throughout with historical background of the Allied ground invasion after D-Day--the crawling horror that was the advance across western Europe towards Berlin.
Fussell says he felt that he owed to his readers his own story in the events of which he has written before.
His own story is honest. It is as tedious as warfare. It is horrific in some details. It is as despicable as is politics. It is as pathetic as a flawed human being can be. It is a confession as well as a memoir.
My already deep respect for Fussell found new fathoms through this profoundly honest retelling of this veteran's story.
Paul Fussell is a flawed human being whose excellent, internationally-acclaimed historical writings were informed by his own less-than-spectacular but tragic experience of the pandemic of warfare. And he helps us to understand this.
Paul Fussell is an American treasure.
August 21, 2008
I read two memoirs while away from home this summer - Fussell's and Dirda's (and Percy's Lost in the Cosmos definitely has that interior feel, if its missing all the interior details). Each are learned men, whose books I have enjoyed reading. Each worked exceptionally hard to get where they have gotten. I appreciated the balance of the two - Fussell raised in privelege, driven to literature during WWII. Dirda raised in a working-class environment, driven to reading, in part as a means to escape the literal hell of his father's life in the steel mills.
Fussell's memoir is about anger - and the source of that anger is really the army, its conduct of WWII and especially its treatment of the infantryman, of which Fussell was a platoon leader. His experiences in preparing for war, carrying out war, recuperating from war, and waiting to leave the service, made him into an individual bristling at the incompetencies and follies of the army command. His anger is real in his book Wartime, even overwhelming in the broad amount of detail it contains. Here in his memoir it is more intimate, the particular follies he endured. It is not a memoir of blame, he does not have a particularly high view of himself and his own conduct in war. He fears his own play at bravery after being accused of potential cowardice may have killed two other men. But then, as he notes, soldiers are motivated first by love of and fear of shame among their brother soldiers, and not by any vague sense of patriotism or grand war agenda.
Intellectually, his mind was not stirred much before college, and then mostly in his last year at Pomona after his return from the war. Graduate school at Harvard was disappointing, mixing largely uninspiring teachers with great fear of failure. Critiquing all his education he noted his teachers needed to be persuaded "that their most important responsibility was criticism - artistic, literary, intellectual, political, and social." (56)
The military, of course, never expected to create or tolerate criticism, so perhaps it is good Fussell teachers had not instilled it within him before he entered the Army. During training he realized that only during the hauntingly beautiful playing of taps after lights out "might persuade you that you were really a member of an organization proposing to extirpate totalitarianism and brutality, no matter how brutally one or more of the Four Freedoms that organization violated during the day." (78) There were a few moments when "the boy from Pomona College was learning that happiness consists not entirely in doing as one wants. It can be consistent also with deprivation and pain, exhaustation and tears - so long as self-respect is intact, and even, as here [in the physical successes of training:], augmented." (84) But that was not normally how the army operated.
Instead he came to realize in officer training that "we were meant to be expended, and that's why there were so many of us." (91) Fussell knew how messed up his army division was and thought that fact might keep it from combat, especially since D-Day had occurred and the Germans were supposed to know they were losing the war. But his division shipped out, landed in Marseilles, and marched into the thick of combat against a mixture of seasoned and raw German troops.
Awaking in a field where his unit had camped in pitch black conditions he realized they were surrounded by scores of German dead, "and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just." (105) His youthful intrigues with Mencken would do him no good in the French countryside, "[Mencken:] was limited by a very American malady: skilled as he was with comic irony, he was deficient in the tragic sense. He didn't respond to the classical understanding that all human life is destined to failure, and that only tragic irony is capable of offering a grown-up vision." (112)
But war is not just tragic, it is absurd and that absurdity serves to dull all the senses. He relates the story of his bandaging a fellow lieutenant under fire and after helping him to the medic, eating cheese with the other's blood still on his hands, in fact mingling with the cheese he was eating. Being in the infantry mixes "intense fear, long continued. But another part requires a severe closing-off of normal human sympathy so that you can look dry-eyed and undisturbed at the most appalling things." (123) Even FDR's death hardly seemed significant to him when he learned about it in the hospital. But his injury and the death of two fellow soldiers left "a black fury flow over me. It has never entirely dissipated." (144) Earlier when he had come across a fellow Pomona lieutenant, head blown off installing American antitank mines - always unstable in subfreezing weather - he notes no one was ever held responsible for their faulty manufacturing. It is just one of the many indignaties and follies that make any claim of a "Good War" absurd.
After victory, Fussell who had spent less than a year in actual combat, was low on the release list and so remained in the army another year. "I could tolerate the army when it was engaged in its proper business - killing - but not when it was engaged in make-work and chickenshit. It was willing to accept coercion for a sensible cause - winning the war so we could all go home - but not for a reprehensible one - inviting uniformity of understanding and opinion." (168)
He wonders at the treatment of the infantry, always filled with the least promising, educated, and skilled. Was it "an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all young American males?" (172) This understanding, plus the horrible nature of the units he had been part of, are central to his anger towards the army. He notes, "Thank God the troops, most of them, didn't know how bad we were. It's hard enough to be asked to die in the midst of heroes, but to die in the midst of stumblebums led by fools - intolerable. And I include myself in this indictment." (173)
The end result was Fussell "became a conspicuous non-joiner, and have never happily joined any group since. I became obsessed with the imagined obligation to go it alone, absolutely, and teamwork became for me a dirty word. I became irrationally angry at any attempt to coerce me into group behavior or to treat me as if all human beings are the same.... I was now convinced that my duty was criticism, meaning not carping, but the perpetual obligation of evaluation." (176)
His evaluation of America became harsh. Lacking any deep history, the country also lacked "a sense of evil and of infinite human complexity." Instead America was stuck in the optimism of the 18th century. (181) Examining the architecture of Rome he notes what is lost by the American pursuit of efficiency and utility. The American replacement of "the architectural curve with the architectural straight line" meant the loss of the Baroque, "paradox, intellectual sinuousness, double vision, even metaphor and irony." (219)
After the military and America generally, Fussell's largest attacks come against the academy. For a time I thought him conservative, but that is not the case. He just has no patience with any group thought, whether it be the pacifist objectors to the atom bomb (for him the entire war was morally objectionable, not just this one act) or the leaders of the Wharton school that so infected the University of Pennsylvania where he completed his academic career. He also did not appreciate the sixties, especially as it viewed poetry as "a therapuetic outflow of individualism best unrestrained by publicly known forms." By contrast, "real poetry posed a threat to the popular, sentimental, antihierarchical impulses of late-twentieth-century America." (247-248)
The academic attacks began on Harvard, where none of the other graduate students had served in the infantry, and where faculty were snotty to the returning G.I.'s and generally lazy in their teaching. "I began to realize that the joy of learning was a meaningful idea only where joyous teachers affectionately encourage uncynical students, preferably not in crowds but virtually one by one." By contrast Harvard seemed like the army. (195) Teaching at Connecticut College and at Rutgers did not deepen his respect for the academy - either its administrators ("administrative parasites") or the vast numbers of students who attended, uncertain of what really drove them to school. "I began to see American colleges as little more than overgrown and pretentious high schools, where genuine education seemed increasingly unlikely." (235)
In his research he appreciated the humanism of the past, focusing on the 18th century. The humanist is always concerned with moral existence and an imaginative evaluation of the world that combines "ethics and expression." Even in non-religious works the idea of fall and the necessity of redemption are central, whether that redemption comes through religious or artistic work. High culture thus provides constraint to natural human evil - despite Fussell's anger and despair at the military and at the academy.
He notes he intended his book on the First World War to "reawaken the reader's imagination and power of sympathy in a world too far gone in the complacencies of mechanism, scientism, and abstraction." But also he notes, "I wanted to make the reader's flesh creep. I wanted my readers to weep as they sensed the despair of people like themselves, torn and obliterated for a cause beyond their understanding." (267) He succeeded, noting that "I had cried so often while writing the book..." I know this reader did the same while reading it.
Fussell's memoir is about anger - and the source of that anger is really the army, its conduct of WWII and especially its treatment of the infantryman, of which Fussell was a platoon leader. His experiences in preparing for war, carrying out war, recuperating from war, and waiting to leave the service, made him into an individual bristling at the incompetencies and follies of the army command. His anger is real in his book Wartime, even overwhelming in the broad amount of detail it contains. Here in his memoir it is more intimate, the particular follies he endured. It is not a memoir of blame, he does not have a particularly high view of himself and his own conduct in war. He fears his own play at bravery after being accused of potential cowardice may have killed two other men. But then, as he notes, soldiers are motivated first by love of and fear of shame among their brother soldiers, and not by any vague sense of patriotism or grand war agenda.
Intellectually, his mind was not stirred much before college, and then mostly in his last year at Pomona after his return from the war. Graduate school at Harvard was disappointing, mixing largely uninspiring teachers with great fear of failure. Critiquing all his education he noted his teachers needed to be persuaded "that their most important responsibility was criticism - artistic, literary, intellectual, political, and social." (56)
The military, of course, never expected to create or tolerate criticism, so perhaps it is good Fussell teachers had not instilled it within him before he entered the Army. During training he realized that only during the hauntingly beautiful playing of taps after lights out "might persuade you that you were really a member of an organization proposing to extirpate totalitarianism and brutality, no matter how brutally one or more of the Four Freedoms that organization violated during the day." (78) There were a few moments when "the boy from Pomona College was learning that happiness consists not entirely in doing as one wants. It can be consistent also with deprivation and pain, exhaustation and tears - so long as self-respect is intact, and even, as here [in the physical successes of training:], augmented." (84) But that was not normally how the army operated.
Instead he came to realize in officer training that "we were meant to be expended, and that's why there were so many of us." (91) Fussell knew how messed up his army division was and thought that fact might keep it from combat, especially since D-Day had occurred and the Germans were supposed to know they were losing the war. But his division shipped out, landed in Marseilles, and marched into the thick of combat against a mixture of seasoned and raw German troops.
Awaking in a field where his unit had camped in pitch black conditions he realized they were surrounded by scores of German dead, "and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just." (105) His youthful intrigues with Mencken would do him no good in the French countryside, "[Mencken:] was limited by a very American malady: skilled as he was with comic irony, he was deficient in the tragic sense. He didn't respond to the classical understanding that all human life is destined to failure, and that only tragic irony is capable of offering a grown-up vision." (112)
But war is not just tragic, it is absurd and that absurdity serves to dull all the senses. He relates the story of his bandaging a fellow lieutenant under fire and after helping him to the medic, eating cheese with the other's blood still on his hands, in fact mingling with the cheese he was eating. Being in the infantry mixes "intense fear, long continued. But another part requires a severe closing-off of normal human sympathy so that you can look dry-eyed and undisturbed at the most appalling things." (123) Even FDR's death hardly seemed significant to him when he learned about it in the hospital. But his injury and the death of two fellow soldiers left "a black fury flow over me. It has never entirely dissipated." (144) Earlier when he had come across a fellow Pomona lieutenant, head blown off installing American antitank mines - always unstable in subfreezing weather - he notes no one was ever held responsible for their faulty manufacturing. It is just one of the many indignaties and follies that make any claim of a "Good War" absurd.
After victory, Fussell who had spent less than a year in actual combat, was low on the release list and so remained in the army another year. "I could tolerate the army when it was engaged in its proper business - killing - but not when it was engaged in make-work and chickenshit. It was willing to accept coercion for a sensible cause - winning the war so we could all go home - but not for a reprehensible one - inviting uniformity of understanding and opinion." (168)
He wonders at the treatment of the infantry, always filled with the least promising, educated, and skilled. Was it "an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all young American males?" (172) This understanding, plus the horrible nature of the units he had been part of, are central to his anger towards the army. He notes, "Thank God the troops, most of them, didn't know how bad we were. It's hard enough to be asked to die in the midst of heroes, but to die in the midst of stumblebums led by fools - intolerable. And I include myself in this indictment." (173)
The end result was Fussell "became a conspicuous non-joiner, and have never happily joined any group since. I became obsessed with the imagined obligation to go it alone, absolutely, and teamwork became for me a dirty word. I became irrationally angry at any attempt to coerce me into group behavior or to treat me as if all human beings are the same.... I was now convinced that my duty was criticism, meaning not carping, but the perpetual obligation of evaluation." (176)
His evaluation of America became harsh. Lacking any deep history, the country also lacked "a sense of evil and of infinite human complexity." Instead America was stuck in the optimism of the 18th century. (181) Examining the architecture of Rome he notes what is lost by the American pursuit of efficiency and utility. The American replacement of "the architectural curve with the architectural straight line" meant the loss of the Baroque, "paradox, intellectual sinuousness, double vision, even metaphor and irony." (219)
After the military and America generally, Fussell's largest attacks come against the academy. For a time I thought him conservative, but that is not the case. He just has no patience with any group thought, whether it be the pacifist objectors to the atom bomb (for him the entire war was morally objectionable, not just this one act) or the leaders of the Wharton school that so infected the University of Pennsylvania where he completed his academic career. He also did not appreciate the sixties, especially as it viewed poetry as "a therapuetic outflow of individualism best unrestrained by publicly known forms." By contrast, "real poetry posed a threat to the popular, sentimental, antihierarchical impulses of late-twentieth-century America." (247-248)
The academic attacks began on Harvard, where none of the other graduate students had served in the infantry, and where faculty were snotty to the returning G.I.'s and generally lazy in their teaching. "I began to realize that the joy of learning was a meaningful idea only where joyous teachers affectionately encourage uncynical students, preferably not in crowds but virtually one by one." By contrast Harvard seemed like the army. (195) Teaching at Connecticut College and at Rutgers did not deepen his respect for the academy - either its administrators ("administrative parasites") or the vast numbers of students who attended, uncertain of what really drove them to school. "I began to see American colleges as little more than overgrown and pretentious high schools, where genuine education seemed increasingly unlikely." (235)
In his research he appreciated the humanism of the past, focusing on the 18th century. The humanist is always concerned with moral existence and an imaginative evaluation of the world that combines "ethics and expression." Even in non-religious works the idea of fall and the necessity of redemption are central, whether that redemption comes through religious or artistic work. High culture thus provides constraint to natural human evil - despite Fussell's anger and despair at the military and at the academy.
He notes he intended his book on the First World War to "reawaken the reader's imagination and power of sympathy in a world too far gone in the complacencies of mechanism, scientism, and abstraction." But also he notes, "I wanted to make the reader's flesh creep. I wanted my readers to weep as they sensed the despair of people like themselves, torn and obliterated for a cause beyond their understanding." (267) He succeeded, noting that "I had cried so often while writing the book..." I know this reader did the same while reading it.
January 24, 2023
It’s a fine memoir, but Fussell’s real dignity as an author and interpreter shines in Wartime and the Great War. He comes off as overly self-satisfied, and spends more time dwelling on career arcana than on his own children or struggles with marriage.
December 2, 2012
It’s hard to buy Fussell as a skeptic, First skeptic is too open-minded. Fussell seems more a cynic, a curmudgeon, a man of low-tolerance for what displeases him, particularly the stupidities of others. It’s also hard to buy that he was made so by the war, not for any lack of capacity in war to transform an innocent, but because he seems quite cynical almost from the start. In his own telling he is close to always fussy and something of a snob, the kind of snob who rejects the snobbery of others but doesn’t challenge his own (though he does occasionally wink at it). But cynicism too is a kind of innocence. That said, the war remains a central, life-shaping event in the author’s life and he presents a clear-eyed, bitterly wise account of the conflict called by some The Good War and fought by what others have called The Greatest Generation. Neither is a claim Fussell would himself make, so tip of the hat for that. In his participation in the Ken Burns documentary series The War he provided a stubbornly non-glorifying voice and would likely have agreed with the veteran who asserted that no war could ever be a good war, that some are necessary, but none are good. And in Doing Battle, written before the Burns series, the war veteran and literary scholar turns a debunking but not disrespectful eye on his experiences.
Fussell grew up in California and with the coming of World War II found himself barely 20 and in the infantry as a peach-fuzzed lieutenant leading men into combat in the final months of the war in Europe. It is a brutal introduction to an adult world and timed poorly at that. He arrives when huge violent sacrifices are yet being made, but not to turn the tide of the war, which has been decisively turned, but as sacrifices to a victory that is only a matter of time. All that is left is whatever final reckoning the Nazis and then the Japanese will require before surrender. John Kerry once memorably asked how you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake. Fussell makes it clear that being asked to be among the last (and as a line officer to ask others) to risk their young lives for a largely settled outcome is its own devastating question. Make no mistake there is a big difference between all but surrendered and surrendered in fights, battles, and wars. Still at the start of the war survival was at stake; in the waning months the risk of one’s life to move from inevitable to actual victory kindles doubt of merit and risk aversion. No one wants to die ironically, running across a field into a sniper’s range at the same time a message of surrender is being accepted a thousand miles away.
After the war Fussell becomes a professor of literature and an author who writes scholarly works that become popular, like the brilliant The Great War and Modern Memory, and volumes of essays, including Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, which he borrowed from a little for Doing Battle. Some of the developed cynicism towards the military, its officers and groupthink, settles quite nicely into academia, where the actions of students and administrators bear too close a resemblance to the bureaucratic stupidities of the military, making you wonder is it them or the iconoclasm of Russell. It doesn’t matter much. Russell may be cranky company but he’s entertaining cranky company and his refusal to be sentimental about war warrants respect. He does find happiness in love so I guess he even the curmudgeonly get to enjoy (sic) happy endings.
Fussell grew up in California and with the coming of World War II found himself barely 20 and in the infantry as a peach-fuzzed lieutenant leading men into combat in the final months of the war in Europe. It is a brutal introduction to an adult world and timed poorly at that. He arrives when huge violent sacrifices are yet being made, but not to turn the tide of the war, which has been decisively turned, but as sacrifices to a victory that is only a matter of time. All that is left is whatever final reckoning the Nazis and then the Japanese will require before surrender. John Kerry once memorably asked how you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake. Fussell makes it clear that being asked to be among the last (and as a line officer to ask others) to risk their young lives for a largely settled outcome is its own devastating question. Make no mistake there is a big difference between all but surrendered and surrendered in fights, battles, and wars. Still at the start of the war survival was at stake; in the waning months the risk of one’s life to move from inevitable to actual victory kindles doubt of merit and risk aversion. No one wants to die ironically, running across a field into a sniper’s range at the same time a message of surrender is being accepted a thousand miles away.
After the war Fussell becomes a professor of literature and an author who writes scholarly works that become popular, like the brilliant The Great War and Modern Memory, and volumes of essays, including Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, which he borrowed from a little for Doing Battle. Some of the developed cynicism towards the military, its officers and groupthink, settles quite nicely into academia, where the actions of students and administrators bear too close a resemblance to the bureaucratic stupidities of the military, making you wonder is it them or the iconoclasm of Russell. It doesn’t matter much. Russell may be cranky company but he’s entertaining cranky company and his refusal to be sentimental about war warrants respect. He does find happiness in love so I guess he even the curmudgeonly get to enjoy (sic) happy endings.
October 29, 2023
At the little neighborhood libraries that we have in my hometown, I got a copy of "Doing Battle" by Paul Fussell. The tagline of the book is "The Making of a Skeptic" and the two images on the cover are the author at the time of writing (I assume; the book was written in 1996) as well as the author in wartime service, complete with OD green fatigues, helmet, and M1 rifle. I thought the book was disappointing and I could have really done nothing but laugh at almost every part of it if it weren't for a rather short but graphic part about his WWII service. Fussell starts out by describing his almost unbelievably idyllic childhood and teen years in Pasadena, CA before the war where his perfect family was totally insulated from the Great Depression and all other ills. He then proceeds to the local college where he joins the ROTC, more as a school club than any precursor to military service; indeed, his fairy-tale upbringing disallows him from really believing in war, much less that he could be harmed in one.
His military service was as a 2LT in the Army as an infantryman and this is where he is introduced to any adversity whatsoever for the first time in his life. He finds the foul language (disallowed in not only his house and schools growing up, but apparently by social agreement in any part of town he ever visited), the complete lack of privacy, and the short-arm inspections all humiliating and appalling, but the senseless bureaucracy, seemingly for its own sake, to be the most galling of all. Even before entering combat he is scarred for life by his experience.
Once he arrives in France, he instantly falls in love with it. His privileged upbringing affords him the luxury of despising "utilitarianism" and favoring (and affording) quaintness, which France seems to have in spades while his Pasadena home totally lacks such. His combat experience reveals that his training was mostly a waste of time and neither he nor any of the people he serves with are capable of basic tasks like land navigation, operating radio equipment, or digging a fighting position. He hesitates at one point while a Colonel is watching and is rebuked for it. This results in him later refusing to take cover under artillery bombardment, lest he be accused of cowardice again, and getting wounded. Another officer, not wanting to take cover while Fussell refuses to, is killed by a shell that also wounds Fussell. The section concludes with Fussell recovering in a field hospital where he hears of Germany's surrender on the radio. The Army drags its feet getting Fussell sent back to the USA and then takes more time before discharging him. This experience is, in Fussell's estimation, completely unnecessary and unproductive and further embitters him towards the Army.
At this point I expected the rest of the book to be about how the experience of infantry combat colored the rest of his life but the impression I got was that Fussell didn't get PTSD so much from having to kill his fellow man and see his comrades get killed as he got it from just never quite having his way. Fussell rages frequently about the senseless protocols of the Army but never about its senseless destruction. I expected a significant section on Vietnam later in the book but it only got a sentence or two, total. One gets the impression that Fussell found the JFK assassination to be a bigger tragedy than the war that Kennedy got America into.
Fussell's childhood seems to have taught him that the world was made to serve and please him and that any inconvenience that he came across thereafter was some sort of affront. A self-styled intellectual and die-hard academic, Fussell goes off to an Ivy League college on the G.I. Bill and is infuriated to find that it isn't quite what he expected. This does nothing to dissuade him from becoming a college professor though. He rails against university bureaucracy, not as evil in itself, but because it reminds him of Army bureaucracy, which apparently is.
Fussell also devotes time to writing and is successful at that. He gets married and has kids and travels the world with them, including teaching at a university in Germany for a time. Here he lets his satisfaction at leaving the horribly "utilitarian" USA behind to embrace the more "enlightened" Europe... all the while being filled with disgust at Germany's recent past? (At the end of the book he confesses that he still fantasizes about shipping all ethnic Germans to Madagascar to live in exile and donating the Federal Republic of Germany's lands to Israel).
Apart from delving into the intricacies of forgotten English poetry and literature, which I'm not equipped to appreciate, the rest of the book is mostly railing against how the world might dare to organize itself in some way that doesn't suit Fussell's preferences. His war experience is the only thing that prevents him from being nothing more than a spoiled child turned arrogant academic.
Also, for being a professor of English, his book contains some almost unreadable sentences like "It was in my perception of the essential evil of people acting without the constraints suggested by high culture that the infantry veteran and the scholar coincided." Oof! I'm not totally certain if this is just word salad that sneaked by the editor or an example of "I'm so educated that I can communicate with you in such a way that I know you won't understand a thing I said", a true feather in the intellectual's cap when speaking to the plebes.
I am very biased against academia and view them as a club of people that are considered really smart because the members of that club agree with one another that they are really smart. A worthless, arrogant circle-jerk that would starve in the gutters without the concept of tenure to ensure that their uselessness is lavishly rewarded. Fussell's pride at belonging to this club certainly made me dislike him but compared to the world we live in today (or really, the world that Fussell lived in, if he'd bothered to look past the end of his nose and see it) his incessant complaints seem comically petty and tiresome.
His military service was as a 2LT in the Army as an infantryman and this is where he is introduced to any adversity whatsoever for the first time in his life. He finds the foul language (disallowed in not only his house and schools growing up, but apparently by social agreement in any part of town he ever visited), the complete lack of privacy, and the short-arm inspections all humiliating and appalling, but the senseless bureaucracy, seemingly for its own sake, to be the most galling of all. Even before entering combat he is scarred for life by his experience.
Once he arrives in France, he instantly falls in love with it. His privileged upbringing affords him the luxury of despising "utilitarianism" and favoring (and affording) quaintness, which France seems to have in spades while his Pasadena home totally lacks such. His combat experience reveals that his training was mostly a waste of time and neither he nor any of the people he serves with are capable of basic tasks like land navigation, operating radio equipment, or digging a fighting position. He hesitates at one point while a Colonel is watching and is rebuked for it. This results in him later refusing to take cover under artillery bombardment, lest he be accused of cowardice again, and getting wounded. Another officer, not wanting to take cover while Fussell refuses to, is killed by a shell that also wounds Fussell. The section concludes with Fussell recovering in a field hospital where he hears of Germany's surrender on the radio. The Army drags its feet getting Fussell sent back to the USA and then takes more time before discharging him. This experience is, in Fussell's estimation, completely unnecessary and unproductive and further embitters him towards the Army.
At this point I expected the rest of the book to be about how the experience of infantry combat colored the rest of his life but the impression I got was that Fussell didn't get PTSD so much from having to kill his fellow man and see his comrades get killed as he got it from just never quite having his way. Fussell rages frequently about the senseless protocols of the Army but never about its senseless destruction. I expected a significant section on Vietnam later in the book but it only got a sentence or two, total. One gets the impression that Fussell found the JFK assassination to be a bigger tragedy than the war that Kennedy got America into.
Fussell's childhood seems to have taught him that the world was made to serve and please him and that any inconvenience that he came across thereafter was some sort of affront. A self-styled intellectual and die-hard academic, Fussell goes off to an Ivy League college on the G.I. Bill and is infuriated to find that it isn't quite what he expected. This does nothing to dissuade him from becoming a college professor though. He rails against university bureaucracy, not as evil in itself, but because it reminds him of Army bureaucracy, which apparently is.
Fussell also devotes time to writing and is successful at that. He gets married and has kids and travels the world with them, including teaching at a university in Germany for a time. Here he lets his satisfaction at leaving the horribly "utilitarian" USA behind to embrace the more "enlightened" Europe... all the while being filled with disgust at Germany's recent past? (At the end of the book he confesses that he still fantasizes about shipping all ethnic Germans to Madagascar to live in exile and donating the Federal Republic of Germany's lands to Israel).
Apart from delving into the intricacies of forgotten English poetry and literature, which I'm not equipped to appreciate, the rest of the book is mostly railing against how the world might dare to organize itself in some way that doesn't suit Fussell's preferences. His war experience is the only thing that prevents him from being nothing more than a spoiled child turned arrogant academic.
Also, for being a professor of English, his book contains some almost unreadable sentences like "It was in my perception of the essential evil of people acting without the constraints suggested by high culture that the infantry veteran and the scholar coincided." Oof! I'm not totally certain if this is just word salad that sneaked by the editor or an example of "I'm so educated that I can communicate with you in such a way that I know you won't understand a thing I said", a true feather in the intellectual's cap when speaking to the plebes.
I am very biased against academia and view them as a club of people that are considered really smart because the members of that club agree with one another that they are really smart. A worthless, arrogant circle-jerk that would starve in the gutters without the concept of tenure to ensure that their uselessness is lavishly rewarded. Fussell's pride at belonging to this club certainly made me dislike him but compared to the world we live in today (or really, the world that Fussell lived in, if he'd bothered to look past the end of his nose and see it) his incessant complaints seem comically petty and tiresome.
August 24, 2008
Kinda the Great War and Modern Memory -- Lite
January 27, 2022
I first read about this book some years ago when reading other books on War and the illusion that is conveyed about the myths of men and masculinity. Along with that is the myths of women- femininity . Interlocked with that is the politics of reason or unreason. As Sherman said "War is Hell". As I was reading this book the author took me back to my basic training & AIT and about my being stationed at Polk-Rucker-Fort Sam Houston and finally Fort Bragg. What stunned me was that I had the same thoughts about the nonsense of military training . I read CHANCE AND CIRCUMSTANCE some years back . I was taken back that one of the pervading nuances of the deliberate methods of just plain terror and abuse foisted on the new recruits was because the drill sergeants were practicing revenge on the incoming new fangled newbies because when they (the drill sergeants) were overseas in the jungles of Nam they had not been trained for what was really happening and need. They were revenging the loss off their friends and their own innocence. This book should be required reading for anyone who waxes eloquently about war.The author knew many of is friends killed in WWII but states he didn't know any friend who died in Nam. I do. I also saw suicides..People who died in basic because the drill sergeant was a monster in physical training. I seen guys get beat up by their drill sergeant. The thing with reading a book like this brings back the beast that resides in me. The anger and frustration that broiled in me after wards. I was on month shy of my 19th birthday when I went in...and one month shy of my 21st birthday when I got out. The last I say is much like the author...I was bewildered when I would come home on leave and see how people would be caught up in stupid things that in the realm of insignificance was totally absurd. It was damning and frightening. Damning because it showed the pettiness of American Life. Frightening because Thoreau was right. People lead lives of quiet desperation...I guess Im gonna read some more of his books.
October 3, 2021
I was initially interested to hear about Fussell's experiences in WW II. He does not portray himself as a hero and is increasingly skeptical (one might say cynical) about things such as wartime heroism, soldiers and fighting, military tactics and leadership, the quality of the training (and raw material) of American troops... etc.
All that makes sense, I suppose - he's showing the making of himself as a skeptic.
But he'd have done better not to delve into his post-war personal and professional life in quite the way he does, from my perspective.
I got to a point where I was almost done with the book and I got so annoyed with Fussell and his attitudes that I didn't want to reward him by finishing the last few pages.
All that makes sense, I suppose - he's showing the making of himself as a skeptic.
But he'd have done better not to delve into his post-war personal and professional life in quite the way he does, from my perspective.
I got to a point where I was almost done with the book and I got so annoyed with Fussell and his attitudes that I didn't want to reward him by finishing the last few pages.
July 25, 2022
Paul Fussell's memoir is another necessary exercise in iconoclasm that spares nothing and nobody, least of all the author. His excruciatingly detailed description of World War II's degradations and bloody folly represent the seething heart of this book, but his portrait of pre-war Pasadena and Pomona College are also worth the price of admission for supreme satiric value. Fussell's acerbic indictment of postwar America's bourgeoisie culture begin to ring hollow, especially when he expresses relish for the role of TV celebrity, but overall his observations about the yawning chasm between the reality of, and the reverence for, America's performance in World War II, makes for vital reading once again.
December 13, 2025
Fussell was such a brilliant guy, as miserable and alcoholic as he was and also traumatized by his experience in WWII. This autobigraphy was obviously written for a buck, and firmly edited not to reveal too much about Fussell's well-known peccadilloes but for those who wonder about the White Male Literary Critic of the 50's and 60s and what drove him to write Class and The Great War, this is a passable attempt to grasp someone who loved and loathed himself equally.
August 16, 2020
Wonderful autobiography. It was interesting to see how a Fussell tackled memory and memoir while examining his own life. After reading "Doing Battle," one can see how he was able to so sympathetically write about the officer class of the British Infantry in WW1. "Doing Battle" is yet another masterclass in irony and elergy.
January 24, 2024
Best book I’ve read all year!
“The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and the conscience.”
(An argument against censorship).
Another quote comparing American and European universities:
“Experience at Heidelberg with a very un-American understanding of what a university is also produced a profound impression. As the year went on, I became increasingly disenchanted with the American university, with its nervous concern about student well-being (in every aspect except the intellectual) and its hypertrophied and needless administration, constructed, presumably, on “business” lines. I began to see American colleges as little more than overgrown and pretentious high schools, where genuine education seems increasingly unlikely… The University of Heidelberg allowed its students to live where they pleased in town. There were no “dormitories.” Their social and sexual lives were regarded as their own business, the university having no deans, counselors, or “relationship advisors.” The university assumed that students, being adults, could have their misbehavior, if any, attended to by police, not the university, which had quite a different mission, the development of the intellect, a mission performed by no other social institution.
There was a president elected in the faculty each year. He… occupied the presidential office for a year and, while continuing his scholarship, performed the few ceremonial duties attached to the office. There was a bursar, who took in the student’s and the state’s money and made it over, in appropriate shares, to the faculty. And there was a housing officer, who helped the students find lodging with the town’s many landladies and adjudicated the inevitable disputes with them. There was no provost, no alumni officer, no vice president in charge of development, no head of the division of athletics, no coaches, no head of academic advising (the students were assumed to be bright enough to find in the catalog what they were interested in), no Office of Alcohol and Drug education, no Budget Office, no Career Planning and Placement Office, no university chaplain, and no “bookstore” selling more t-shirts and condoms than books. The students attended the lectures and seminars they considered useful adjuncts to their continuous reading. The point was to pass the examinations at the end of their university years, and any way they prepared themselves was fine.”
“The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and the conscience.”
(An argument against censorship).
Another quote comparing American and European universities:
“Experience at Heidelberg with a very un-American understanding of what a university is also produced a profound impression. As the year went on, I became increasingly disenchanted with the American university, with its nervous concern about student well-being (in every aspect except the intellectual) and its hypertrophied and needless administration, constructed, presumably, on “business” lines. I began to see American colleges as little more than overgrown and pretentious high schools, where genuine education seems increasingly unlikely… The University of Heidelberg allowed its students to live where they pleased in town. There were no “dormitories.” Their social and sexual lives were regarded as their own business, the university having no deans, counselors, or “relationship advisors.” The university assumed that students, being adults, could have their misbehavior, if any, attended to by police, not the university, which had quite a different mission, the development of the intellect, a mission performed by no other social institution.
There was a president elected in the faculty each year. He… occupied the presidential office for a year and, while continuing his scholarship, performed the few ceremonial duties attached to the office. There was a bursar, who took in the student’s and the state’s money and made it over, in appropriate shares, to the faculty. And there was a housing officer, who helped the students find lodging with the town’s many landladies and adjudicated the inevitable disputes with them. There was no provost, no alumni officer, no vice president in charge of development, no head of the division of athletics, no coaches, no head of academic advising (the students were assumed to be bright enough to find in the catalog what they were interested in), no Office of Alcohol and Drug education, no Budget Office, no Career Planning and Placement Office, no university chaplain, and no “bookstore” selling more t-shirts and condoms than books. The students attended the lectures and seminars they considered useful adjuncts to their continuous reading. The point was to pass the examinations at the end of their university years, and any way they prepared themselves was fine.”
March 31, 2024
I'd never heard of Paul Fussell or knew how prolific of a writer he was until I stumbled upon this book in my collection of books. (I've got to clean out that closet of books one of these days!) The first half of this book conveys the adventures (and misadventures) of boyish Paul living an idyllic life in California and attending university. Upon graduation, he is commissioned as a 2nd Lt. and is sent to France at the end of the Battle of the Bulge where he is "ill treated by members of the German Wehrmacht." After his service, he is sent home to the States and achieves his master's degree, teaching at university.
And so begins Fussells cynical disenchantment with all of the stilted patriotism and misplaced ideals that accompanied him to the shores of France when he saw how incompetent and inefficient the US Army was in Europe. Fussell's story resonated with me on a personal level as a US Navy veteran. In 2017 the USS John McCain collided with a civilian tanker in Singapore. Some weeks later the same ship almost had another collision. Later in that same year, yet another US Navy ship collided with another ship. When the top brass finally got down to the lowest ranking seamen on the USS John McCain to talk to them, it was revealed the men weren't getting sleep. It's amazing how some things don't change. I remember months at sea, working 8 hours on and 8 hours off. During the 8 hours off, one stood watches and endured countless emergency drills. That was peacetime Navy for me. I could only imagine what it would have been like in combat status.
The book began to lose its way with me, however, when Fussell returned to civilian life. Not only did he vehemently denounce any kind of glory or real purpose in fighting a war, he became skeptical of the pop culture that grew out of the 1950s and 1960s, and conservatism in politics. The whole tone of this book generates the idea that great literature can save us from warfare. It's a noble idea, but as we all know, it just doesn't work that way.
I don't agree with numerous of Paul Fussell's ideas, but I can't deny this book was written with great passion.
And so begins Fussells cynical disenchantment with all of the stilted patriotism and misplaced ideals that accompanied him to the shores of France when he saw how incompetent and inefficient the US Army was in Europe. Fussell's story resonated with me on a personal level as a US Navy veteran. In 2017 the USS John McCain collided with a civilian tanker in Singapore. Some weeks later the same ship almost had another collision. Later in that same year, yet another US Navy ship collided with another ship. When the top brass finally got down to the lowest ranking seamen on the USS John McCain to talk to them, it was revealed the men weren't getting sleep. It's amazing how some things don't change. I remember months at sea, working 8 hours on and 8 hours off. During the 8 hours off, one stood watches and endured countless emergency drills. That was peacetime Navy for me. I could only imagine what it would have been like in combat status.
The book began to lose its way with me, however, when Fussell returned to civilian life. Not only did he vehemently denounce any kind of glory or real purpose in fighting a war, he became skeptical of the pop culture that grew out of the 1950s and 1960s, and conservatism in politics. The whole tone of this book generates the idea that great literature can save us from warfare. It's a noble idea, but as we all know, it just doesn't work that way.
I don't agree with numerous of Paul Fussell's ideas, but I can't deny this book was written with great passion.
October 27, 2018
Great. Clear eyed view of the horror.
Read
January 22, 2019Uncompromising in its narrative elegance and historical relevance, Fussell impresses again as a master writer, historian, memoirist, and social commentator.
February 22, 2021
Disappointing and unfocused memoir. For such a lived life, Fussell isn't a terribly compelling writer when it comes to himself.
May 23, 2025
An autobiography of Fussell who was a literary critic, professor, and WW II combat infantry vet. Wounded in action in 1944.
Its absurdly labeled "making of a skeptic" because every one of Fussell's attitude's is standard 40/50s Liberalism. And Fussell going out to "fight fascism" during WW II, was just as conformist. As is his post=war cynical attitude toward the Army and Patriotism in General.
I suppose not buying into the "Greatest Generation Ever" nonsense shows some independent thinking but that's about it. Nor do I buy the details in the book. There's something fake about many of the people and incidents. Did a young 2 LT Fussell really think and act like that in 1944? Were the people he describes really that way? Paint Me skeptical.
Anyway, Fussell is sort of vague about why he joined the Infantry instead of joining the Navy or the Air Force. He certainly was smart enough and healthy enough to stay out of the infantry. If he had illusions about the US Army, he only had himself to blame given the Army's unpopularity and anti-war atmosphere of the 1930s. Pretty much everyone knew the Infantry got the short end of the stick, and tried to stay out. Those that wanted some ground combat, normally joined the Armored Divisions, Marines or the Airborne.
I perfer "infantry Soldier" or Bob Dole's Memoir of the war.
Its absurdly labeled "making of a skeptic" because every one of Fussell's attitude's is standard 40/50s Liberalism. And Fussell going out to "fight fascism" during WW II, was just as conformist. As is his post=war cynical attitude toward the Army and Patriotism in General.
I suppose not buying into the "Greatest Generation Ever" nonsense shows some independent thinking but that's about it. Nor do I buy the details in the book. There's something fake about many of the people and incidents. Did a young 2 LT Fussell really think and act like that in 1944? Were the people he describes really that way? Paint Me skeptical.
Anyway, Fussell is sort of vague about why he joined the Infantry instead of joining the Navy or the Air Force. He certainly was smart enough and healthy enough to stay out of the infantry. If he had illusions about the US Army, he only had himself to blame given the Army's unpopularity and anti-war atmosphere of the 1930s. Pretty much everyone knew the Infantry got the short end of the stick, and tried to stay out. Those that wanted some ground combat, normally joined the Armored Divisions, Marines or the Airborne.
I perfer "infantry Soldier" or Bob Dole's Memoir of the war.
September 7, 2015
In many ways, Paul Fussell lived a fortunate life. He survived ground combat in World War II in Europe as that most endangered of species, a second lieutenant, although he was indeed seriously wounded. He was raised in nearly idyllic circumstances in Pasadena, California. After the war, he had an exemplary academic and literary career as the author of many well-received books, notably The Great War and Modern Memory.
But that’s not how Fussell, who died in 2012, experienced his life. He may have recovered from his physical wounds, but he spent much of his life angry and alienated from the American society and academia in which he flourished. That anger was the war wound that never quite healed.
In fairness, Fussell’s outlook and temperament would have probably molded him into some kind of societal critic, no matter what his wartime experience. His account of frontline combat in France is the highlight of the book, an unsparing and frankly cynical account of war’s brutal realities, where sheer human idiocy and accident could be as lethal as the enemy.
Fussell is scathing about the self-deceptions that people employ to characterize war, citing the case of his combat friend, Sergeant Hudson, killed when Fussell was wounded. Years later, Fussell discovered a written commendation extolling Hudson’s heroic conduct. All of it was fiction.
The book’s most memorable moment for me: Fussell’s discovery of the frozen tableau of a German squad in a semicircle, prone, staring ahead, snow falling, with a motionless medic in the center, about to crawl forward with bandages and surgical scissors. How had they died, yet been so eerily preserved? Fussell infers that they were struck by an overhead artillery shell with a proximity fuse – an innovation first used on the front lines in Europe in the winter of 1944.
The balance of the book held only fitful interest for me. I grew up in California, albeit a generation later than Fussell, but his childhood descriptions of sunshine and school are familiar ones. The wars of academia are familiar as well – Fussell earned a Harvard Ph.D. by the skin of his teeth, but proceeded to have successful career at Rutgers and University of Pennsylvania. He wrote his books, often aided by Fulbrights, sabbaticals, and exchange programs – even as he heaps scorn on the increasing vacuousness of high education and American culture in general.
Fussell could be acerbic and insightful in his work, but one quality never changed: anger.
But that’s not how Fussell, who died in 2012, experienced his life. He may have recovered from his physical wounds, but he spent much of his life angry and alienated from the American society and academia in which he flourished. That anger was the war wound that never quite healed.
In fairness, Fussell’s outlook and temperament would have probably molded him into some kind of societal critic, no matter what his wartime experience. His account of frontline combat in France is the highlight of the book, an unsparing and frankly cynical account of war’s brutal realities, where sheer human idiocy and accident could be as lethal as the enemy.
Fussell is scathing about the self-deceptions that people employ to characterize war, citing the case of his combat friend, Sergeant Hudson, killed when Fussell was wounded. Years later, Fussell discovered a written commendation extolling Hudson’s heroic conduct. All of it was fiction.
The book’s most memorable moment for me: Fussell’s discovery of the frozen tableau of a German squad in a semicircle, prone, staring ahead, snow falling, with a motionless medic in the center, about to crawl forward with bandages and surgical scissors. How had they died, yet been so eerily preserved? Fussell infers that they were struck by an overhead artillery shell with a proximity fuse – an innovation first used on the front lines in Europe in the winter of 1944.
The balance of the book held only fitful interest for me. I grew up in California, albeit a generation later than Fussell, but his childhood descriptions of sunshine and school are familiar ones. The wars of academia are familiar as well – Fussell earned a Harvard Ph.D. by the skin of his teeth, but proceeded to have successful career at Rutgers and University of Pennsylvania. He wrote his books, often aided by Fulbrights, sabbaticals, and exchange programs – even as he heaps scorn on the increasing vacuousness of high education and American culture in general.
Fussell could be acerbic and insightful in his work, but one quality never changed: anger.
June 17, 2015
Paul Fussell's "memoir"--really an autobiography--beginning with his rather privileged childhood in Pasadena, CA, but focused on his experience as an infantryman in WW II, his experience of battle, and how that motivated much of his justly famous writing career. The subtitle, "The Making of a Skeptic" is apt--his rage at the injustice of war was not abstract, but rather a response to the dull-headed stupidity of military life and the jingoism of politicians and the higher levels of command (apart from Dwight Eisenhower, the only high official whom he unreservedly commends). Everything that he says resonates very well with Smedley Butler's famous speech, "War is a Racket" (although he does not mention this). Having read a number of his books, including "The Great War in Modern Memory" and "Wartime", I found this book helpful in understanding both his choice of subjects and the depth of feeling with which he wrote. I also found helpful his description of academic life, although here his tone is superior to the point of arrogance, as he dismisses colleagues' worth (and does not spare his own ineptitude as a teacher, especially in his early years). A worthwhile, interesting (but not always pleasant) read.
June 27, 2012
John Thorup told me about him. This is his autobiography and full of his battles of trying to be a good soldier, writer, english faculty and husband/father. For instance he took on the U of Penn administration when they took the student newspaper out of distribution for a day when their donors may have seen news they didn't want them to see. The anti-war part of the book is reminicient of Chris Hedges book so much so I wonder if it was not the model of that book even though it is not referenced. Hedges does reference The Great War and Modern Memory by Fussell which I am now reading. My obsession of war reading has been very good to reorient me to what is real for all the people who have to make risks "on our behalf". We had a 43 yo black policewoman single parent of a 12 yo girl killed by a gang member Sunday, Denver's version of war. I hope I get to discuss all I have learned at some point with my grandson who for now is not "on the list" to go to Afganistan. He's disappointed because he won't be with his unit. This is the psychology of dedication to purpose with denial of self that is necessary to be an effective part of a killing machine.
December 16, 2014
This is Fussell's autiobiography. The main reason I 5-stared this is because of the 65 pages or so describing his WWII experience (pp. 104-69), which has to be some of the best personal experience war-writing. I looked up Fussell for a book because of his appearance and insightful comments in about a half-dozen short interviews in Ken Burns' "The War" series. Fussell comes across as very "human" for being an academic most of his life, and after he retired to write full-time a fearless critic. Some of his criticism approaches the "rant," but when he is talking about the War, it turns distinctly Real.
July 25, 2010
The 1st third (his childhood up to early college years) was generally boring and a waste of time, the second third (war years) was fantastic, the last third (mostly more college and his teaching & writing career) was kind of spotty. Since he was an english proffesor for decades this was like a 300 page lecture and way, way too many poetry quotations for me. If he had stuck to World War 2 for the whole book this would have been a classic. And I did enjoy and share his disgust of college sports.
August 18, 2012
Fussell has done some of the best writing on the harsh realities of war, counteracting the haze of sentimentality which in some quarters has descended over the Second World War. Subtitled "The Making of a Skeptic", this is his autobiography, recounting his path from an idyllic childhood in Pasadena to the brutal wake-up of infantry combat in Europe, and beyond to his career as an academic. Fussell doesn't pull punches.
October 1, 2015
I have great regard for Paul Fussell; His "The Great War and Modern Memory" was a wonderful piece of scholarship and the link to some great reading on WW One. This book is totally different -- not scholarship but a very personal and revealing memoir of Fussell's life and then his service in WW Two. Fussell's thesis is that the WW Two experience affected everything in his life and career.
A bonus -- Fussell cites some good books -- noted for future reading.
A bonus -- Fussell cites some good books -- noted for future reading.
May 31, 2011
I wish I had read this back in 1996 although I doubt the words would have meant as much. Maybe I will still be able to meet him one day.
"I think I was trying to suggest to students the responsibility of the educated, and even those aspiring to be educated, for actively seeking out America's most loathsome faults and then--an imperative obligation--correcting them."
"I think I was trying to suggest to students the responsibility of the educated, and even those aspiring to be educated, for actively seeking out America's most loathsome faults and then--an imperative obligation--correcting them."
June 20, 2007
Fussell is a man of my own kind and this memoir hit home for me. Delightfully and wittily irreverent.
July 12, 2010
Paul Fussell's autobiography - mainly focusing on the effect the experience of being wounded in WWII had on his outlook on life and his attitude towards authorities of all kind.
May 16, 2008
I liked this memoir & took lots of notes from it.
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