by Ira Glass
The Vikings knew, for instance, that prolonged exposure to combat can goad some men into a state of uncontrolled psychic fury. They might be the most placid men in the world in peacetime, but on the battlefield they begin to act with the most inexplicable and gratuitous cruelty. They become convinced that they’re invincible, above all rules and restraints, literally transformed into supermen or werewolves. The Vikings called such men “berserkers.” World War II was filled with instances of ordinary soldiers giving in to berserker behavior. In battle after battle soldiers on all sides were observed killing wantonly and indiscriminately, defying all orders to stop, in a kind of collective blood rage. The Axis powers actually sanctioned and encouraged berserkers among their troops, but they were found in every army, even among those that emphasized discipline and humane conduct. American marines in the Pacific became notorious for their berserker mentality, particularly their profound lack of interest in taking prisoners. Eugene Sledge once saw a marine in a classic berserker state urinating into the open mouth of a dead Japanese soldier.
Another Viking term was “fey.” People now understand it to mean effeminate. Previously it meant odd, and before that uncanny, fairylike. That was back when fairyland was the most sinister place people could imagine. The Old Norse word meant “doomed.” It was used to refer to an eerie mood that would come over people in battle, a kind of transcendent despair. The state was described vividly by an American reporter, Tom Lea, in the midst of the desperate Battle of Peleliu in the South Pacific. He felt something inside of himself, some instinctive psychic urge to keep himself alive, finally collapse at the sight of one more dead soldier in the ruins of a tropical jungle: “He seemed so quiet and empty and past all the small things a man could love or hate. I suddenly knew I no longer had to defend my beating heart against the stillness of death. There was no defense.”
There was no defense—that’s fey. People go through battle willing the bullet to miss, the shelling to stop, the heart to go on beating—and then they feel something in their soul surrender, and they give in to everything they’ve been most afraid of. It’s like a glimpse of eternity. Whether the battle is lost or won, it will never end; it has wholly taken over the soul. Sometimes men say afterward that the most terrifying moment of any battle is seeing a fey look on the faces of the soldiers standing next to them.
But the fey becomes accessible to civilians in a war too—if the war goes on long enough and its psychic effects become sufficiently pervasive. World War II went on so long that both soldiers and civilians began to think of feyness as a universal condition. They surrendered to that eternity of dread: the inevitable, shattering resumption of an artillery barrage; the implacable cruelty of an occupying army; the panic, never to be overcome despite a thousand false alarms, at an unexpected knock on the door, or a telegram, or the sight out the front window of an unfamiliar car pulling to a halt. They got so used to the war they reached a state of acquiescence, certain they wouldn’t stop being scared until they were dead.
It was in a fey mood that, in the depths of the German invasion, Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin took the only copy of his life’s work, a study of Goethe, and ripped it up, page by page and day by day, for that unobtainable commodity, cigarette paper. It was because feyness poisons ordinary life that British writer Walter de la Mare could in 1943 begin a poem about the English countryside with the line “No, they are only birds” and not bother to say what he’d first thought they were. Everyone knew; they had learned the reflex of sudden terror, followed by infinite relief, triggered by the sight of small black forms moving quickly against a bright sky.
Feyness might also explain the deepest mystery of the war: why the surrender everybody expected never came. The Germans and Japanese refused to surrender even though they knew the war was lost.
It’s possible to quibble about the exact point at which the war was decided: Midway, Stalingrad, Falaise, Okinawa. In one sense, of course, the Axis never had any real hope of winning, because their whole strategy depended on a hopelessly idealized assessment of their chances. In effect, they’d convinced themselves that they were bound to win because their enemies would never fight back. The Americans would surrender after Pearl Harbor, the Soviet Union would crumble as soon as German troops crossed the border—the whole world would bow down before their inherent racial superiority. But by some unmistakable point—the autumn of 1942 at the latest—they should have understood that they’d been wrong and that their prospects for long-term victory were inexorably zeroing out. They still had the economic and military strength to sustain their armies in the field indefinitely, no matter how grim the strategic situation became, but by any rational calculation of the odds, they should have begun hinting through backwater diplomatic channels that they were willing to negotiate a cease-fire. Neither Germany nor Japan ever did so. Not until the last days of the war did either government even begin to consider the possibility of a negotiated settlement—not until they had absolutely nothing left to negotiate with.
But then, that’s the point. A rational calculation of the odds is a calculation by the logic of peace. War has a different logic. A kind of vast feyness can infect a military bureaucracy when it’s losing a war, a collective slippage of the sense of objective truth in the face of approaching disaster. In the later years of World War II the bureaucracies of the Axis—partially in Germany, almost wholly in Japan—gave up any pretense of realism about their situation. Their armies were fighting all over the world with desperate berserker fury, savagely contesting every inch of terrain, hurling countless suicide raids against Allied battalions (kamikaze attacks on American ships at Okinawa came in waves of a hundred planes at a time)—while the bureaucrats behind the lines gradually retreated into a dreamy paper war where they were on the brink of a triumphant reversal of fortune.
They had the evidence. Officers in the field, unable to face or admit the imminence of defeat, routinely submitted false reports up the chain of command. Commanders up the line were increasingly prone to believe them, or to pretend to believe them. And so, as the final catastrophe approached, strategists in both Berlin and Tokyo could be heard solemnly discussing the immense weight of paper that documented the latest round of imaginary victories, the long-overrun positions that they still claimed to hold, and the Allied armies and fleets that had just been conclusively destroyed—even though the real-world Allied equivalents had crashed through the lines and were advancing toward the homeland.
Not everybody succumbed to these fantasies. But another, even stronger pressure worked against those who understood how hopeless the situation really was: they knew that defeat meant accountability.
The consequences of the Axis commitment to total war were becoming inescapable. This was particularly true in Germany; the Japanese people never learned much about the appalling behavior of their armies. But the real purpose of the concentration camps had seeped through the Nazi bureaucracy and into Germany’s civilian world through a million rumors and confessions. Tens of thousands of people were directly involved in the administration of the camp system; countless others knew or had guessed the truth. All of them had a reasonably good idea what would happen to them if they were ever forced to answer for what they’d done.
So while their colleagues fell into daydreams of imminent victory, the few remaining rational men of the Axis bureaucracy grew just as convinced that surrender to the Allies on any terms was tantamount to suicide. As far as they were concerned, every additional day the war lasted—no matter how pointless, no matter how phantasmal the hope of victory, no matter how desperate and horrible the conditions on the battlefield—was another day of judgment successfully deferred.
This is the dreadful logic that comes to control a lot of wars. (The American Civil War is another example.) The losers prolong their agony as much as possible, because they’re convinced the alternative is worse. Meanwhile the winners, who might earlier have accepted a compromise peace, become so maddened by the refusal of th
eir enemies to stop fighting that they see no reason to settle for anything less than absolute victory. In this sense the later course of World War II was typical: it kept on escalating, no matter what the strategic situation was, and it grew progressively more violent and uncontrollable long after the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The difference was that no other war had ever had such deep reserves of violence to draw upon.
The Vikings would have understood it anyway. They didn’t have a word for the prolongation of war long past any rational goal—they just knew that’s what always happened. It’s the subject of their longest and greatest saga, the Brennu-Njáls Saga, or The Saga of Njal Burned Alive. The saga describes a trivial feud in backcountry Iceland that keeps escalating for reasons nobody can understand or resolve until it engulfs the whole of northern Europe. Provocation after fresh provocation, peace conference after failed peace conference, it has its own momentum, like a hurricane of carnage. The wise and farseeing hero Njal, who has never met the original feuders and has no idea what their quarrel was about, ultimately meets his appalling death (the Vikings thought there was nothing worse than being burned alive) as part of a chain of ever-larger catastrophes that he can tell is building but is helpless to stop—a fate that seems in the end to be as inevitable as it is inexplicable.
For the Vikings, this was the essence of war: it’s a mystery that comes out of nowhere and grows for reasons nobody can control, until it shakes the whole world apart.
From the fall of 1944, the Allies at last acknowledged that, despite the decisive battles of the previous summer, the Axis was never going to surrender. That was when the Allies changed their strategy. They set out to make an Axis surrender irrelevant.
From that winter into the next spring the civilians of Germany and Japan were helpless before a new Allied campaign of systematic aerial bombardment. The air forces and air defense systems of the Axis were in ruins by then. Allied planes flew where they pleased, day or night—five hundred at a time, then one thousand at a time, indiscriminately dumping avalanches of bombs on every city and town in Axis territory that had a military installation or a railroad yard or a factory. By the end of the winter most of Germany’s industrial base had been bombed repeatedly in saturation attacks; by the end of the following spring Allied firebombing raids had burned more than 60 percent of Japan’s urban surface area to the ground.
There was no precedent even in this war for destruction on so ferocious a scale. It was the largest berserker rage in history. The Allies routinely dropped incendiary bombs in such great numbers that they created firestorms in cities throughout the Axis countries. These weren’t simply large fires. A true firestorm is a freak event, where a large central core of flame heats up explosively to more than one thousand five hundred degrees, and everything within it goes up by spontaneous combustion—buildings erupt, the water boils out of rivers and canals, and the asphalt in the pavement ignites. Immense intake vortices spring up around the core and begin sucking in oxygen from the surrounding atmosphere at hurricane speeds. The Allied raids reduced cities in minutes to miles of smoldering debris. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed—about 20 percent of them children. Tens of thousands suffocated, because in the area around a firestorm there’s no oxygen left to breathe.
Tens of millions of Germans and Japanese were driven from the wreckage of their homes to join the hundreds of millions of people already flooding the roads of Europe and Asia. They were seen everywhere. “DPs,” they were called, displaced persons: interminable lines of refugees in an anonymous stream. Not everyone joined the stampede, but those who stayed to protect their homes learned that their worst fears had been wholly justified. The Red Army murdered more than a million civilians in the eastern provinces of Germany as it marched toward Berlin.
Meanwhile the crimes the Axis had so long fought to conceal were coming to light. Every day brought news of some large-scale atrocity. When the three-year siege of Leningrad was at last broken, it was learned that more than a million people had died of starvation; they’d killed their house pets for food, and before the end there were pervasive rumors of cannibalism. The collapse of the Japanese empire revealed famine throughout China; more than ten million people in provinces once controlled by the Japanese were dying or dead. And in April 1945 the line of German defenses finally shrank back far enough that the death camps were discovered by Allied troops. “A crime beyond the imagination of man,” the first news reports called it. People who thought they’d been permanently numbed to horror found they were wrong.
But by then the Holocaust seemed almost lost in the universal destruction. The deaths are still being counted. In the decades after the war it was believed that between fifteen million and twenty million people had died in the war, but historians now believe the real number was at least three times higher, and some recent estimates (based on studies of newly declassified archives in Russia and China) put the total at close to seventy-five million. The extent of the material damage was incalculable. The civilian economies of Europe and Asia were a shambles. Most industries not related to war production had been shut down or destroyed outright. Basic commodities were unobtainable, even on the black market. Roads and bridges throughout two continents had been blown up, ports had been wrecked, and commercial shipping had stopped. The submarine war had sent rivers of oil into the ocean—a torrent that made the great postwar spills look like irrelevant trickles; oil from torpedoed tankers was washing up on beaches all over the world.
Whenever people talk about the meaning of history somebody brings up that old bromide from Santayana, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But that’s nonsense. The circumstances that created an event like World War II couldn’t be duplicated no matter how many millennia of amnesia intervened.
Besides, even if we did want to follow Santayana’s advice and remember the war, how could we do it? Too much of its detail and complexity is already gone, even at this narrow distance. As Thomas Browne wrote, “There is no antidote to the opium of time.” There are warehouses of secret wartime documents still scattered in nondescript factory districts all over the world—stacks of debriefings from some nameless Pacific island that fifty years ago was swallowed up in an artillery barrage. No one will ever unearth them all and produce a final accounting of the war—any more than the world will finally achieve justice for the war’s innumerable, officially sanctioned crimes. Oblivion has always been the most trustworthy guardian of classified files.
But there is another and simpler reason the war has been forgotten: people wanted to forget it. It had gone on for so many years, had destroyed so much, had killed so many—most U.S. casualties were in the final year of fighting. When it came to an end, people were glad to be rid of everything about it. That was what surprised commentators about the public reaction in America and Europe when the news broke that Germany and then Japan had at last surrendered. In the wild celebrations that followed nobody crowed, “Our enemies are destroyed.” Nobody even yelled, “We’ve won.” What they all said instead was, “The war is over.”
That was the message that flashed around the world in the summer of 1945: the war is over, the war is over. Huge cheering crowds greeted the announcement in cities across America and Europe. A spectacular clamor of church bells rang out across the heartland. Wails of car horns and sirens soared up from isolated desert towns.
But a mysterious letdown awaited as well. Even amid the endless parades, the night-long parties, and the prolonged and tearful home-comings, the veterans discovered the first signs of impatience when they tried to tell of the horrors they’d endured, the first delicate hints from their families that nobody cared about those grisly things, the gentle message that the world was different now and whatever they’d done in the war didn’t matter anymore. It was no doubt just what Noah had had to endure from his descendants, muttering at the edge of ear-shot that the flood was no big deal—if he hadn’t built the ark, somebody else would have, because the Lord him
self had promised that the world would always be saved by somebody.
In his memoirs Eugene Sledge recorded that he eventually stopped trying to tell the folks back home what had happened to him on Okinawa. Even among veterans, he writes, “we did not talk of such things. They were too horrible and obscene.” And what was the point of recalling them anyway? The next generation would just see the stories as the product of some pardonable desire to exaggerate, of an old-fogy insistence that things had been much rougher back when the teller was young. Sledge himself had a hard time seeing that the things he’d been through meant anything now. He went back to Alabama after the war and returned to the college he’d dropped out of to enlist; ultimately he got his graduate degree and became a professor of biology and a respected ornithologist. His life continued on that track as though the war had never happened. The only problem was that he was having nightmares. Forty years later it still had the power to wake him in a blind panic—he was back on Okinawa, and orders were about to come through that would return him to the front.
How many such visions troubled the peace of the new American suburbs? In the decades after the war ended there probably wasn’t a single night in which thousands of men across America didn’t wake up sweating in terror—the patrol was about to set out again, the first alarms were arriving from the sentinels, the barrage was about to resume. Sometimes only those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
In the mid-1960s, when my friends and I were out infiltrating Nazi strongholds along the mossy stillness of an apartment-building gangway, charging phantom Nip battalions in the green depths of a park, executing daring flanking attacks against the Wehrmacht among the weed towers and cinder paths of the commuter railway corridor, I never stopped to wonder what it must have sounded like to the veterans of the war to hear us at our games. All through those elm-shaded mazes of old brownstone and white clapboard our voices shrilly rang out with “Nazi!” and “Japs!” and “Look out! Jerries attacking!” Maybe they were relieved when we finally outgrew the game and went on to fight wars against space monsters.
