When Books Went to War (14 page)

When word finally came that the invasion would begin during the early-morning hours of June 6, the news was a great relief. As members of the airborne forces suited up for their night mission, Axis Sally issued a final blow before they paid the German army a visit. “Good evening, Eighty-Second Airborne Division,” she personally greeted them. “Tomorrow morning the blood from your guts will grease the bogey wheels of our tanks.” Although some were bothered by Sally's comments, others just shrugged them off. After all, she had made similar taunts for days.
As the Navy and Army Air Forces prepared to bomb the smithereens out of Germany's pillboxes and coastal fortifications, they took comfort in knowing they were taking a momentous step toward ending Axis Sally's threats.

 

Meanwhile, back at home, President Roosevelt spent the evening of June 5 delivering an important radio broadcast. He announced that Rome was the first major Axis capital to fall, and branded the event a great achievement toward total conquest of the enemy. Roosevelt was quick to acknowledge that there was “much greater fighting [that] lies ahead before the Axis is defeated.” “We shall have to push through a long period of greater effort and fiercer fighting before we get into Germany itself,” he said. “The victory still lies some distance ahead,” but the president assured Americans that the “distance will be covered in due time—have no fear of that.” After congratulating and thanking all those involved in the Italian operation, President Roosevelt concluded his address, “May God bless them and watch over them and over all of our gallant fighting men.”
Although his listeners had no inkling of it, the president knew that as he uttered these words the invasion of France had already begun.

Roosevelt spent the early-morning hours of June 6 drafting and reciting a prayer for an Allied victory in France. With his blackout curtains drawn, the president kept vigil. Detailed invasion reports trickled in to the White House, informing the president of when the first vessels began their trips and, later, when the Allied forces first landed. The next morning, President Roosevelt dispatched a copy of his prayer to Congress, where it was read on the House floor and in the Senate; the prayer was also printed in newspapers across the country so the entire nation could recite the words along with the president during his radio address that night:

 

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, and steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessing. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph . . .

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

And for us at home—fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them—help us, Almighty God, to rededicate in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice . . .

Give us strength, too—strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be . . .

. . . Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace . . . a peace that will let all men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Amen.

 

The Americans who landed at Utah and Omaha Beaches had vastly different experiences. The American Fourth Division poured ashore at Utah Beach, meeting very little opposition. In fact, some men were a little let down at how anticlimactic the landing was; they described it as seeming like just another practice invasion. The early waves of troops landing at Omaha Beach, by contrast, faced near-certain death. As soon as the transports lowered their ramps, the exiting men were thrust into the line of fire. German machine-gun spray ripped across the boats, instantly killing the hapless Americans on them. For the first wave of LCIs that reached Omaha Beach, the death rate was nearly 100 percent; no one got off the beach. Later waves of troops faced grievous losses on the shore. Shell-shocked, many men simply froze, unable to move toward safety. Others who forded through the barrage of gunfire and mortar blasts and moved to the shelter of the cliffs at the top of the beach suffered injuries along the way. Unable to go farther, their shattered bodies dropped to the sand and stayed there until medics arrived. Many men who climbed the beach later that day would never forget the sight of gravely wounded soldiers propped up against the base of the cliffs, reading.

 

In the first twenty-four hours of the invasion, 1,465 Americans were killed, 3,184 wounded, 1,928 were missing, and 26 captured. These numbers billowed as the battle moved inland. Eleven days into the invasion, 3,283 Americans had died, and 12,600 were wounded.

Throughout the war, media reports of the growing number of GI casualties troubled those who were still fighting to no end. Many men objected to the anonymity the term “GI” conveyed. “When we think of GI we think of items of issue, but we are not issued,” Sergeant Frank Turman explained. “When we walk over our dead buddies we wouldn't refer to them as dead GIs. And when we get home again, and see our buddies' loved ones, we just couldn't say: ‘Your son died a GI's death.'” “Anybody can be a GI,” Sergeant Turman said, “but it takes a man to be a soldier, sailor or marine.”
For those who were fighting on the frontlines, the dead were not nameless or faceless. The war claimed men they knew and loved, and it was torture. The pilot who negotiated his plane through storms of flak knew the crew member who was fatally struck; when the Marines charged a beach in an amphibious landing and enemy snipers opened up on them, they knew which of their friends had fallen; and when Japanese pilots swung their planes into Allied ships, damaging and destroying them, the sailors who survived knew who had perished. For the men at war, death was agonizingly personal. Yet they rarely talked about it.

Over the course of fighting, many things went unspoken. Soldiers knew the savagery of their war experience—it did not need to be discussed. Every man who went through battle felt the terror of it. Mental and emotional baggage accumulated over time, but there were few outlets that enabled the men to deal with the burdens they carried. Men rarely bared their hearts to family. Every letter mailed home was read by a censor to ensure that no sensitive information was divulged, in case the letter fell into enemy hands. Because each letter was read by another soldier, many men resisted the opportunity to tell loved ones how miserable they were; besides, servicemen did not want to concern family members with the truth of their unhappiness and stress. Unable to describe the battles they fought, or share the feelings they felt, most letters were reduced to weather reports and vague pleasantries.

Books, however, did provide a catharsis for many men. This intangible response becomes evident by the reactions of servicemen to certain books. One unlikely author to earn wide appeal was Katherine Anne Porter. Her short stories delicately exposed private, deeply personal experiences and emotions that tended to give readers the impression that she understood their innermost thoughts and feelings. Hundreds of men wrote to her after reading her ASE: some described how they had connected to a certain character; others felt as though a layer of loneliness and isolation had been stripped away as her prose washed over them. By writing to the person who had touched their hearts, servicemen brought to life the relationship they felt through the pages they read. These letters frequently delved into incredibly personal experiences and feelings; in fact, details that often went unexpressed to loved ones were divulged to authors.

One man had treasured Porter's
Selected Short Stories
to such a degree that he carried his copy with him throughout the war and kept it for his trip home. “Inching back eastward across the long wastes of the Pacific toward discharge and home, I've had an opportunity once more to read some of your stories—in the paperbound Armed Services Edition. We can read better, with leisure and the perspective of long absence, under the conditions; thus I've appreciated your writing more than ever before,” he said. What attracted him to Porter's stories all along was her ability to “put bewildered little things who were you and I back in the world,” and capture “frightening emotions where we all . . . once lived—lost when rejected, content when loved, made into small witch-ridden animals when abused.”

Another man had also found great comfort in Porter's words and wrote to tell her so. He was delighted to receive a letter back from Porter, who asked if he was hospitalized and disclosed concern for her nephew in the Ninth Field Artillery Regiment. This man immediately wrote back, admitting he was “almost glad that I can say I am a patient” if it might induce Porter to keep a correspondence with him. He had spent the last four months hospitalized with jaundice, and was thankful to have books, such as Porter's, to read. Porter's reference to her nephew opened a wellspring of pent-up anxiety this man felt for a friend, who also belonged to the Ninth Field Artillery. “I worry about him more than I do myself; he is a good man, and since the landings in Africa so long ago he has been going through all hell. His buddies have been killed before his eyes again and again; in January the five men of his group—his best friends—were killed and he himself was hit. I think to myself: ‘Dear God! A man can only take so much! And yet he goes on and on.'” This man admitted that he had felt “ashamed to write to [his friend] before I came to the hospital” because as his friend faced death, he himself had toured Italy, taking in concerts, operas, and palaces, and then was stationed thirty miles behind the frontlines—always outside the zone of danger. Compared to his friend, he did not feel like a real soldier. Having cleared his conscience to Porter, he felt much better.

After the war ended, Porter reflected on the role she played in helping some men get through the war. “I had three [servicemen] in my own family, and more than six hundred letters from [soldiers],” she said, “and I hope I may be forgiven if I rather feel, on the evidence of these letters, that that was a very superior army indeed. Not all of them wrote to praise, either. I mention this out of pride and pleasure that at least a few GI's felt that I understood them very well.”

Betty Smith's
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
was perhaps the most popular ASE of them all. It provided such a vivid account of childhood that many men felt as though Smith were writing about theirs. When word spread that Smith had published an essay, “Who Died?,” that personalized the thousands of Normandy casualties, servicemen wrote to her begging for a copy. Smith received a steady stream of letters from men around the world, thanking her for the effect her writing had on them.

“When I first picked up your book, I was down in the dumps, a sad sack, as the boys say,” a sergeant said to Smith. But as he read, “my spirits rose until at the end I found myself chuckling over many of the amusing characters.” He needed the lift that
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
had given him. He had felt depressed and lonely for months, and nothing had given him any relief from these feelings, until Smith's book. “I haven't laughed so heartily since my arrival over here eight months ago,” he said. A man in the Army Air Forces said that Smith's book “made [him] feel homesick,” and that it was “the first time I've ever been homesick in my life.” He was amazed at how capably her words transported him to what life was like back home—a life that he sorely missed and hoped to return to. Yet he did not write to complain. “After being in the Army only a short time and reading all types of novels and classics, I can sincerely say after reading
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
, my cup runneth over.” Many of the letters written to Smith echoed these sentiments. One man in the 716th Bombardment Squadron felt such a strong connection to Smith's characters that he compared
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
to “a
good
letter from home.”

From a hospital, one man wrote that
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
was a “source of never-ending enjoyment” to him, as it reminded him of his own childhood in Brooklyn. “To me,” he said, the book was like “living my life over again.” Another man wrote in the hopes that Smith might be “nursing another literary seedling into full treehood.” Smith's publisher received a note from a serviceman who previously did not care for books: “but for the first time, I found a book I really enjoyed reading, and that's Betty Smith's novel named
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
.” He wanted to know what other titles she had written. Thanks to Smith, “books are one of our rare pleasures,” he said.

As with other books,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
also helped eclipse some of the everyday irritations that could get on a soldier's nerves. In one spirited letter from R.H., Betty Smith got an earful about an annoying bunkmate. R.H. lived with happy-go-lucky Gus, who one day waved a copy of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
before him and declared: “‘
This
is a
fine
book.'” “Gus calls everything fine,” complained R.H. “He doesn't seem to know any other adjective, and he uses the word indiscriminately. His girl is a fine girl. ‘Dragon Seed' is a fine movie, his buddy is a fine boy, a B-29 is a fine plane, it's a fine day—almost every time he opens his damned mouth fine pops out,” R.H. said. “And I grit my teeth and pray.” R.H. joked that one day he might be driven to the point of punching poor Gus, but it would not do any good. “I can see him now, picking himself up from the floor and laughing (not able to believe I'm really angry) and saying, ‘Gee, that was a fine blow you floored me with, friend.'” Getting to the point, R.H. said that he began reading
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
, and it made his exasperation with Gus melt away. “I haven't the power to tell you, as I'd like, how it has affected me,” R.H. disclosed. “But I know this: from now on I won't be annoyed the least bit when Gus speaks of it and calls it fine.”