Wall, Watchtower, and Pencil Stub

Writing During World War II

John R. Carpenter

• Editorial: Yucca
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781631580376
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World War II

It has been said that during times of war, the Muses fall silent. However, anyone who has read the major figures of mid-twentieth-century literature—Samuel Beckett, Richard Hillary, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others—can attest that it was through writing that people first tried to communicate and process the horrors that they saw during one of the darkest times in human history even as it broke out and raged on around them. In Bearing Witness, John Carpenter explores how across the world those who experienced the war tried to make sense of it both during and in its immediate aftermath. Writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Theodore Plievier questioned the ruling parties of the time based on what they saw. Correspondents and writer-soldiers like John Hersey and James Jones revealed the chaotic and bloody reality of the front lines to the public. And civilians, many of who remain anonymous, lent voice to occupation and imprisonment so that those who didn't survive would not be forgotten. The digestion of a cataclysmic event can take generations. But in this fascinating book, Carpenter brings together all those who did their best to communicate what they saw in the moment so that it could never be lost.

Notes

Preface

1. “Inter arma silent Musae”; the Latin phrase for “The Muses are silent in time of war” is often repeated, see Czeslaw Milosz, A Year of the Hunter (New York, 1994), 217–18.

2. Andre Malraux, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, trans. Fielding (London, 1954), “Note of the Author”; Deming Brown, Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin (Cambridge, UK, 1978), 74; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I, 136–37; Curzio Malaparte, The Volga Rises in Europe (London, 1961).

3. Tzvetan Todorov, “Humanly Plural” in the Times Literary Supplement (London), June 14, 1985.

4. Dmitri Shostakovich, quoted by Manashir Yakubov to Symphony No. 7, the USSR Ministry of Culture Orchestra, Melodiya Stereo A10 00257 006 (1987).

5. Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing (New York, 1984), 490–92.

6. One of Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” at the Versailles Peace Conference was that no secret treaties would be made in the future, all treaties would be reviewed by the League of Nations. Later this was not observed; Grenville and Wasserstein, The Major International Treaties of the Twentieth Century (London, 2001).

7. On deception, Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 53, 66, 106; Raymond Aron, Clausewitz, Philosopher of War (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1985), especially “The Meeting of Two Revolutions” and “War is a Chameleon.” On Stalin’s “necessitarian deception,” Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom (Stanford, 1995), 430.

8. On Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender and his awareness of German “atrocities” and “crimes”: Churchill, “The Hinge of Fate” (vol. IV of The Second World War), 615–18; and Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 696. Russian discoveries of German massacres of civilians in 1941–42 strongly motivated subsequent defense; the Dyess escape from Mindanao to Melbourne influenced strategies of MacArthur and Truman.

9. B. H. Liddell Hart, “National Object and Military Aim” and “Grand Strategy” in Strategy Second Rev. ed., 1991); and Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (New York, 1971), 415.

10. Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (New Haven, 2000), 72; Ronald Lewin, Hitler’s Mistakes (London, 1984), 25, 67; Jan Patocka, Essais heretiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris, 1981), 141–45. John Keegan noted that war is always an expression of culture: Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York, 1993); Christopher Lehman-Haupt, “On the Making of War . . .” in New York Times, Oct. 25, 1993; Leszek Kolakowski’s Jefferson address “The Idolatry of Politics,” given in Washington D.C. on May 12, 1986; Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago, 1990), 146–61.

11. Donald Keene, “The Barren Years. Japanese War Literature,” Monumenta Nipponica, XXXIII, 1 (Spring, 1978), 106–7.

12. Ants Oras, Baltic Eclipse, 33; Arved Viirlaid, Graves without Crosses (Toronto, 1972), 43. Possible annihilation was taken seriously, partly explaining why the war against evidence was so ferocious. See Alexander Nekrich, Forsake Fear, 201–2; Nikolai Tolstoy, Stalin’s Secret War, Chapter X “Forest Murmurs”; Matthew P. Gallagher, The Soviet History of World War II, xiii; and Petro Grigorenko, Memoirs (New York, 1982), 330–33.

13. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (New York, 1952), 221.

14. Robert Wistrich, “The Politics of Rescue” in Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 4, 1981.

15. Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy. From Macchiavelli to the Modern Age (Princeton, 1986), 8; and “Grave Guesses” in The Economist, May 6, 1995, 22; Paul Fussell also complained about U.S. “military romanticism” in The Boys’ Crusade.

16. Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (New York, 1992); John Byrne, The Whiz Kids (New York, 1993); and George Ball, “The Rationalist in Power,” New York Review of Books, April 22, 1993. The lingering bias continued into the twenty-first century, probably contributing to the misadventures of the U.S. military in Iraq; see Victor Hanson, Carnage and Culture, “Epilogue.”

Chapter I (“Unreal War!”)

1. Herbert Read, Collected Poems (Horizon, NY, 1966), 157–64.

2. B. H. Liddell Hart claimed “nothing may seem more strange” to future historians than the failure of Western democracies to respond to Hitler’s “well-advertised warnings”: Strategy (London, 1967), 207; even Napoleon, he wrote, did not disclose his intentions as clearly as Hitler in his many speeches and Mein Kampf.

3. Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (London, 1962), 172. The attack against the Incas by Pizarro in 1532 was a copy of an identical strategy by Cortez several years earlier. Jared Diamond has posed a question: If the Incas had learned of the previous Spanish strategy and attack, what defense might they have made? Guns, Germs and Steel (New York, 1997), 79.

4. George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (New York, 1968), vol. II, “My Country Right or Left 1940–1943,” 56.

5. J. B. Priestley wrote a perceptive portrait of a Nazi follower in one of his Postscripts (June 23, 1940); and Harold Nicolson’s journal gained in awareness from his prewar experience in Berlin as a diplomat. Winston Churchill was well informed about Germany in the 1930s: Ronald Lewin, Church...