Tag Archives: World War 2

The Thin Red Line by James Jones

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James Jones enlisted in the army in 1939. He witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was the basis for his first novel From Here to Eternity. The Thin Red Line is a kind of sequel to From Here to Eternity, since it’s based on his experiences as an infantryman on Guadalcanal, the Pacific island the Allies invaded nine months after Pearl Harbor.

The novel is 500 pages long, but engrossing and fast-moving. If I were a military recruiter, I would not recommend this book to prospective soldiers. 7,100 members of the Allied forces, mostly Americans, died on Guadalcanal, and 31,000 Japanese. It’s hard to believe that the men who survived lived through it. In addition to the actual fighting, there was heat, exhaustion, lack of food and water (especially water), lack of sleep and malaria.

It’s hard to follow the battle scenes sometimes, since the geography is confusing, and it’s sometimes hard to remember which character is which, since there are so many of them, but that’s o.k. Combat is said to be confusing. Jones does a great job expressing the inner thoughts of his characters, almost all of whom would rather be anywhere else. Among these recurring thoughts are fear of dying, fear of cowardice, the pleasure and relief that comes from killing instead of being killed, the numbness that results from extended combat, and the love and hatred of one’s fellow soldiers.

One minor complaint: for some reason, 90% of the characters have single-syllable last names. Maybe it was common practice to use shortened last names in the Army, but it’s distracting to see a bunch of characters named Stein, Band, Whyte, Blane, Gore and Culp (the officers); Welsh, Culn, Grove, Keck, Spain, Stack, Storm, Beck, Field, Fox, Potts, Thorne and Wick (sergeants); Fife, Jenks and Queen (corporals); and Bead, Cash, Dale, Doll, Earl, Fronk, Hoff, Land, Marl and Park (privates first class).

Jones describes some relatively pleasant moments for his characters, but they are rare. Much more common are descriptions like these:

“Digging. Their neverending, universal digging. Sweating and panting with exhaustion, digging. Like last night. And almost every night in the world. And sometimes two or three times in the day. A place to lay your head. Three by three by seven, slit trench. Only the very lucky ever inherited another outfit’s holes. Nobody ever dug the round deep foxholes here because there weren’t any tanks. Here the home was the slit trench.”  

“As they crawled, suddenly, for no real reason, he found himself remembering that young, foolish, innocent, gullible Corporal Fife, that total stranger, who once had stood forth in the dawn on Hill 209 and had stretched out his arms willing to be killed for mankind, and the love of mankind. Well, fuck mankind, that bunch of ‘honorable’ animals. Piss and shit on them. That was what they deserved.”

No wonder these guys dreamed about getting wounded, just seriously enough to get the hell off that island.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

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The author Timothy Snyder calculates that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for the murder of 14 million people between 1933 and 1945, mainly in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. This didn’t include those who died from combat. The 14 million were civilians or prisoners of war intentionally killed by starvation, gunshot or gas, including the roughly 5.4 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

It is almost unbelievable that so many innocent people could have been killed. Stalin mostly killed citizens of his own country. Hitler mostly killed citizens of other countries. Stalin began by collectivizing Soviet agriculture and then tried to eliminate anyone who might conceivably pose a threat. Hitler wanted to colonize Eastern Europe and, while doing so, eliminate as many Jews and Slavs as possible. If Germany had conquered the Soviet Union, Hitler intended to kill as many as 30 million. 

I didn’t know that Stalin invaded Poland soon after Hitler in September 1939, while Stalin and Hitler were still allies. Or that relatively few German Jews were killed. The concentration camps that were liberated by the Americans and British weren’t the main site of the Holocaust, which occurred farther east and mostly targeted non-Germans. 

Snyder ends his book with a chapter that tries to explain how this all happened. Part of his explanation is that both Hitler and Stalin had utopian ideas. Stalin wanted to quickly turn the Soviet Union into a socialist paradise. Hitler wanted to quickly defeat the Soviet Union and create a vast empire that would serve Germany alone. In Snyder’s words:

“Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative utopia, a group to be blamed when its realization proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory”.  (1/10/13)

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

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Rogue Male, a novel published in 1939, isn’t about an elephant on the loose. It’s about a wealthy English nobleman who is a famous adventurer and apparently a big-game hunter. He decides to stalk the leader of a foreign country, supposedly not to assassinate him, but to see if an assassination would be possible. The Englishman, who is never named, is captured before he decides whether to pull the trigger. 

The foreign leader is never named either, but his country borders Poland, so it’s apparently Hitler. The Englishman is tortured and left for dead but escapes, eventually making his way back home. Unfortunately, he has to keep running, because the bad guys, not having found his corpse, are looking for him. So, eventually, are the police. Most of the novel takes place in the English countryside, and, surprisingly, underneath it. Once again, the hunter has become the hunted (hunters should be used to that by now). 

I heard about this novel because it’s one of the out-of-print books that the New York Review of Books has been reissuing. It’s a terrific adventure story and has been filmed twice. As with most adventure stories, it isn’t quite plausible, but it would be interesting to see a film version, or try to write one.  (5/17/12)