The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  People my age and younger who’ve grown up in the American heartland can’t help but take for granted that war is unnatural. We think of the limitless peace around us as the baseline condition of life. All my life I’ve heard people say “war is insanity” in tones of dramatic insight and final wisdom.

  But there’ve been places and times where people have thought of war as the given and peace the perversion. The Greeks of Homer’s time, for instance, saw war as the one enduring constant underlying the petty affairs of humanity, as routine and all-consuming as the cycle of the seasons: grim and squalid in many ways, but still the essential time when the motives and powers of the gods are most manifest. To the Greeks, peace was nothing but a fluke, an irrelevance, an arbitrary delay brought on when bad weather forced the spring campaign to be canceled, or a back-room deal kept the troops at home until after harvest time. Any of Homer’s heroes would see the peaceful life of the average American as some bizarre aberration, like a garden mysteriously cultivated for decades on the slopes of an avalanche-haunted mountain.

  Out of idle curiosity, I’ve been asking friends, people my age and younger, what they know about war—war stories they’ve heard from their families, facts they’ve learned in school, stray images that might have stuck with them from old TV documentaries. I wasn’t interested in fine points of strategy, but the key events, the biggest moments, the things people at the time had thought would live on as long as there was anybody around to remember the past. To give everybody a big enough target I asked about World War II.

  I figured people had to know the basics—World War II isn’t exactly easy to miss. It was the largest war ever fought, the largest single event in history. Other than the black death of the Middle Ages, it’s the worst thing we know of that has ever happened to the human race. Its after-effects surround us in countless intertwining ways: all sorts of technological commonplaces, from computers to radar to nuclear power, date back to some secret World War II military project or another; the most efficient military systems became the model for the bureaucratic structures of postwar white-collar corporations; even the current landscape of America owes its existence to the war, since the fantastic profusion of suburban development that began in the late 1940s was essentially underwritten by the federal government as one vast World War II veterans’ benefit. (Before the war there were three suburban shopping centers in the United States; ten years after it ended there were three thousand.)

  Then too, World War II has been a dominant force in the American popular imagination. In the mid-1960s, when my own consumption of pop culture was at its peak, the war was the only thing my friends and I thought about. We devoured World War II comic books like Sgt. Fury and Sgt. Rock; we watched World War II TV shows like Hogan’s Heroes and The Rat Patrol; our rooms overflowed with World War II hobby kits, with half-assembled, glue-encrusted panzers and Spitfires and Zeroes. I think I had the world’s largest collection of torn and mangled World War II decal insignia. We all had toy boxes stuffed with World War II armaments—with toy pistols and molded plastic rifles and alarmingly realistic rubber hand grenades. We refought World War II battles daily and went out on our campaigns so overloaded with gear we looked like ferocious porcupines. Decades after it was over the war was still expanding and dissipating in our minds, like the vapor trails of an immense explosion.

  So what did the people I asked know about the war? Nobody could tell me the first thing about it. Once they got past who won they almost drew a blank. All they knew were those big totemic names—Pearl Harbor, D-day, Auschwitz, Hiroshima—whose unfathomable reaches of experience had been boiled down to an abstract atrocity. The rest was gone. Kasserine, Leyte Gulf, Corregidor, Falaise, the Ardennes didn’t provoke a glimmer of recognition; they might as well have been off-ramps on some exotic interstate. I started getting the creepy feeling that the war had actually happened a thousand years ago, and so it was forgivable if people were a little vague on the difference between the Normandy invasion and the Norman Conquest and couldn’t say offhand whether the boats sailed from France to England or the other way around.

  What had happened, for instance, at one of the war’s biggest battles, the Battle of Midway? It was in the Pacific, there was something about aircraft carriers. Wasn’t there a movie about it, one of those Hollywood all-star behemoths in which a lot of admirals look worried while pushing toy ships around a map? (Midway, released in 1976 and starring Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, and—inevitably—Henry Fonda.) A couple of people were even surprised to hear that Midway Airport was named after the battle, though they’d walked past the ugly commemorative sculpture in the concourse so many times. All in all, this was a dispiriting exercise. The astonishing events of that morning, the “fatal five minutes” on which the war and the fate of the world hung, had been reduced to a plaque nobody reads, at an airport with a vaguely puzzling name, midway between Chicago and nowhere at all.

  Is it that the war was fifty years ago and nobody cares anymore what happened before this week? Maybe so, but I think what my little survey really demonstrates is how vast the gap is between the experience of war and the experience of peace. One of the persistent themes in the best writing about the war—I’m thinking particularly of Paul Fussell’s brilliant polemic Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War—is that nobody back home has ever known much about what it was like on the battlefield. From the beginning, the actual circumstances of World War II were smothered in countless lies, evasions, and distortions, like a wrecked landscape smoothed by a blizzard. People all along have preferred the movie version: the tense border crossing where the flint-eyed SS guards check the forged papers; the despondent high-level briefing where the junior staff officer pipes up with the crazy plan that just might work; the cheerful POWs running rings around the Nazi commandant; the soldier dying gently in a sunlit jungle glade, surrounded by a platoon of teary-eyed buddies. The truth behind these clichés was never forgotten—because nobody except the soldiers ever learned it in the first place.

  I think my own childhood image was typical. For me, the war was essentially a metaphysical struggle: America versus the Nazis, all over the world and throughout time. I couldn’t have told you anything about its real circumstances; those didn’t interest me. The historical war was just a lot of silent newsreel footage of soldiers trudging, artillery pumping, buildings collapsing, and boats bumping ashore—fodder for dull school movies and the duller TV documentaries I was reduced to watching on weekend afternoons when our neighborhood campaigns were rained out. I think I was an adult before I fully grasped that Guadalcanal wasn’t a battle over a canal; I’d always fondly pictured furious soldiers fighting over immense locks and reservoirs somewhere where they had canals—Holland maybe, or Panama.

  Granted, children always get the child’s version of war. But the child’s version is the only one readily available. It’s no problem of course, if you have sufficient archaeological patience, to root out a more complicated form of historical truth; bookstores offer everything from thumpingly vast general surveys to war-gaming tactical analyses of diversionary skirmishes to maniacally detailed collector’s encyclopedias about tank treads. The best academic histories—such as Gerhard L. Weinberg’s extraordinary A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II—document and analyze in-depth aspects of the war that even the most fanatical buff may not have heard of before: the campaigns along the Indian border, for instance, or the diplomatic maneuvering about Turkish neutrality. But reading almost all of them, one has the sense that some essential truth is still not being disclosed. It’s as though the experience of war fits the old definition of poetry: war is the thing that gets lost in translation.

  When I was taking my survey a friend told me that he was sitting with his father, a veteran of the European campaign, watching a TV special on the fiftieth anniversary of D-day. My friend suddenly had the impulse to ask a question that had never occurred to him in his entire adult life: “What was it really like to be in a b
attle?”

  His father opened his mouth to answer—and then his jaw worked, his face reddened, and, without saying a word, he got up and walked out of the room. That’s the truth about the war: the sense that what happened over there simply can’t be told in the language of peace.

  But is it really impossible to get across that barrier, even in imagination?

  One somnolent Sunday in Chicago the hush of an old brownstone apartment building was disturbed by a woman running down the hallway knocking on doors. Everybody came out to see what she wanted. At first they couldn’t make out why she was so excited. More and more people emerged from their apartments to find out what the fuss was about. It was December 1941, and the woman was asking everybody if they were listening to the radio.

  My mother told me that story when I asked her what she remembered about the war. This is the sort of story everybody who was around in those days could tell; it was a defining moment in their lives, the way the Kennedy assassination would be for a later generation—where they were when they learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

  So great was the shock of that moment that even now Americans think of Pearl Harbor as the real beginning of World War II. Maybe it’s a sign of how invincibly provincial we are, how instinctual is our certainty that the war, like every other big event in the world, was something that happened mainly to us. The truth was that by December 1941 the rest of the world had had enough of the war to last the millennium.

  In any orthodox history you can find the standard autopsy of the causes. Germany was falling apart after the decades of social and economic chaos that followed its defeat in World War I. Japan’s growing dependence on foreigners to keep its industrializing economy going was leading to widespread and deepening feelings of humiliated anger and outraged national pride. In both countries extremely racist and xenophobic parties had come to power and begun an explosive military expansion: throughout the 1930s the Germans and Japanese built up huge new armies and navies, amassed vast stockpiles of new armaments, and made lots and lots of demands and threats.

  All of this is true enough, yet there’s something faintly bogus and overly rationalized about it. The approaching war didn’t seem like a political or economic event; it was more like a collective anxiety attack. Throughout the ’30s people around the world came to share an unshakable dread about the future, a conviction that countless grave international crises were escalating out of control, a panicked sense that everything was coming unhinged and that they could do nothing to stop it. The feeling was caught perfectly by W. H. Auden, writing in 1935:From the narrow window of my fourth-floor room

  I smoke into the night, and watch the lights

  Stretch in the harbor. In the houses

  The little pianos are closed, and a clock strikes.

  And all sway forward on the dangerous flood

  Of history, that never sleeps or dies,

  And, held one moment, burns the hand.

  For instance, in China—to take one arbitrary starting point—a war had been going on since 1931. This was a nagging turmoil at the edge of the world’s consciousness, a problem that couldn’t be understood, resolved, or successfully ignored. When the Japanese army invaded the city of Nanking in December 1937 they killed tens of thousands of Chinese civilians—some say hundreds of thousands—in the space of a couple of weeks. It was one of the worst orgies of indiscriminate violence in modern times, and as the news of it spread around the world everybody began saying that Nanking would be remembered forever, just as the Spanish civil war’s Guernica (the first town to be bombed from airplanes) would be: shorthand landmarks for our century’s most horrible atrocities.

  But that just shows how little anybody really understood what was happening to the world. Nobody outside of China remembered Nanking a couple years later when the German Reich began its stunning expansion through Europe. The Wehrmacht stampeded whole armies before it with its terrifyingly brutal new style of tank attack (the European press called it “blitzkrieg,” and the name stuck), and rumors immediately began circulating of appalling crimes committed in the occupied territories—wholesale deportations and systematic massacres, like a vast mechanized replay of the Mongol invasions. A story solemnly made the rounds of the world’s newspapers that storks migrating from Holland to South Africa had been found with messages taped to their legs that read, “Help us! The Nazis are killing us all!”

  It was in September 1939, in the wake of the German invasion of Poland, that the phrase “the Second World War” began turning up in newspapers and government speeches. The name was a kind of despairing admission that nobody knew how long the war would go on or how far the fighting would spread. Over the next two years the news arrived almost daily that battles had broken out in places that only weeks before had seemed like safe havens. By the time of Pearl Harbor the war had erupted in Norway and Mongolia, on Crete and in the Dutch East Indies; the Italian Army had marched on Egypt, and the German army was pushing into the outskirts of Moscow; there had been savage fighting in Finland north of the Arctic Circle and sea battles off the coast of Argentina. The United States was one of the last secluded places left on earth.

  But the depths of that seclusion were still profound. This is one of the things about America in those days that’s hardest for us to imagine now: how impossibly far away people thought the problems of the world were. It’s not just that there was no TV, and thus no live satellite feed from the current crisis zone. America didn’t even have a decent road system back then. Any long trip across the country was a fear somely ambitious undertaking—and foreign travel was as fanciful as an opium dream. It wasn’t unusual for them to spend every moment of their lives within walking distance of the place where they were born.

  They weren’t wholly oblivious. But the news they got of the outside world came in through newspapers and radio—which is to say, through words, not images. This imposed even more distance on events that were already as remote as the dust storms of Mars. Their sense of heedlessness wasn’t helped by the style of journalism reporters practiced in those days, which was heavy on local color and very light on analysis. The war as it appeared in the American press was a gorgeous tapestry of romance and swashbuckling adventure—frenzied Nazi rallies, weird religious rites in Japan, hairbreadth escapes on overcrowded trains teetering along mountain ravines, nights sleeping in haystacks in the backcountry of France after the fall of Paris, journeys in remotest Yugoslavia where the reporter “spent hours watching the army, with its wagons, horses, and guns, file past the minareted village in the moonlight.” (I’m quoting, here and elsewhere, from the Library of America’s excellent anthology Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938-1946.) It convinced people that the war was just a lot of foreigners going exotically crazy—nothing for Americans to bother their heads about.

  Still, by early 1941 most Americans had come to understand that they couldn’t stay unscathed forever. Even in the most remote towns of the heartland, people had some hint of the world’s collective terrors: by then the local schoolteacher or minister had come back from a European trip still shaken by the sight of a Nazi book burning, or a neighbor had received a letter—battered, heavily postmarked, and exotically stamped—from a long-forgotten cousin, pleading for help getting out of the old country. A Gallup poll taken in the summer of 1941 showed that a large majority of respondents agreed that America was bound to be drawn into the war eventually; a slightly smaller majority even agreed that it was more important to stop the Nazis than to stay neutral. (Japan wasn’t mentioned; even then nobody thought of Japan as a likely enemy.)

  Yet “eventually drawn in” really meant “not now.” That was what routinely stunned travelers returning to America from the war zones, even late in 1941: how unworried everybody in America seemed. Crowds still swarmed heedlessly on undamaged streets; city skylines still blazed at night, like massed homing beacons for enemy bombers. But if you’d even mentioned the possibility of an air raid out loud, you’
d have been laughed at. New Yorker reporter A. J. Liebling wrote a piece that summer about coming back to Manhattan after the fall of France and discovering just how impossible it was to get his friends to take the thought of war seriously: “They said soothingly that probably you had had a lot of painful experiences, and if you just took a few grains of nembutol so you would get one good night’s sleep, and then go out to the horse races twice, you would be your old sweet self again. It was like the dream in which you yell at people and they don’t hear you.”

  It all changed of course, with a knock on the door, that weekend day in December.

  There’s a phrase people sometimes use about a nation’s collective reaction to events like Pearl Harbor—war fever. We don’t know what a true war fever feels like today, since nothing in our recent history compares with it; even a popular war like the Gulf War was preceded by months of solemn debate and a narrow vote in Congress approving military action. World War II came to America like an epidemic from overseas. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, recruitment offices all over America swarmed with long lines of enlistees; flags and patriotic posters popped up on every street and store window; wild and hysterical cheers greeted the national anthem at every rally and concert and sporting event. Overnight the war was the only subject of conversation in the country; it was the only subject of the movies you could see at the local theater (Blondie and Dagwood were absorbed into the war effort in Blondie for Victory; Sherlock Holmes came out of retirement to chase Nazi spies in Sherlock Holmes in Washington). War was the only acceptable motif in advertising: for years after Pearl Harbor every manufacturer of spark plugs and orange juice routinely proclaimed that its product was essential to an Allied victory.