An honest look at the horrors of war

I have been reading Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy" tracing the U.S. Army's march across North Africa and Europe during World War II. Atkinson's account is extraordinarily detailed and frank about the errors and shortcomings of some American leaders and the horrific experiences of soldiers and airmen.

In reciting the statistics, still startling 70 years later, of morbidity among Allied bomber crews — an 89 percent casualty rate (which includes injured and captured as well as killed in action) — he quotes a poem by Randall Jarrell, who was a member of a bomber crew before winning fame as a poet. These three lines capture the horrors of the air war:

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I awoke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Young men, the contemporaries of my parents, went forward to almost certain death for their country, for their families, for democracy, for their own sense of responsibility, and because their government, their families and their neighbors expected it of them. The gut-wrenching opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan" is an accurate portrayal of what infantrymen faced on D-Day and on many other days throughout the war. Punching their way into Germany, Allied infantrymen went for days without leaving their stinking foxholes, which were bedroom, dining room and bathroom to the soldiers. Many went weeks or months without changing their socks or underwear. They developed trench foot, sunstroke and frostbite.

I read these accounts not because I share their experiences but because I wish to know what it took to secure the freedoms and advantages we share today.

The experiences of foot soldiers have changed little in the past 200 years. By World War II, the means of killing had been improved by machine guns, heavy artillery, aerial bombs and land mines, but the wretched lives of World War II soldiers were not appreciably different from the lives of our forefathers who huddled in trenches around Petersburg, Va., or who set out across an open field toward batteries of cannon and riflemen on the high ground at Gettysburg. All faced the likelihood of death or mutilation or, if they survived, the nightmares that put their minds back in those trenches or foxholes for decades thereafter.

Gen. W.T. Sherman's aphorism, "War is hell," does not to justice to just how cruel and inhumane war was 150 years ago and still is today.

D-Day plus 70 years

Last night, on the 70th anniversary of the night hundreds of thousands of Allied troops, sailors and airmen set out for the Normandy coast, I began reading Rick Atkinson's "The Guns at Last Light," the third volume of his Liberation Trilogy, tracing the war in Europe from D-Day to the German surrender.

Today, on the Normandy shore, European and American leaders celebrate the success of that greatest amphibious invasion in history with the last survivors of that battle, all of them now in the late 80s or 90s. Commemorations of D-Day have been held every year since then with larger celebrations on these 10-year segments. I recall watching Dwight Eisenhower, by then the former president, walking the beaches and hedgerows of Normandy with Walter Cronkite on the 20th anniversary. On the 40th anniversary, it was Ronald Reagan's turn as he gave perhaps the most moving speech of his presidency, praising "the boys of Point Du Hoc."

These commemorations risk turning mundane, the visual images becoming too familiar to shock. The black-and-white pictures from wartime photographers and the row upon row of white crosses at the American Cemetery have all been seen before. We know what happened there.

What we can't know is the uncertainty of that endeavor. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, was not sure it would succeed. The British, for whom Dunkirk was still a painful, bleeding wound, were doubtful. The Germans had spent four years planning for this day while the Allies found themselves mired in Italy and working to build the ships and landing crafts and airplanes that would be needed for such an invasion. The French coastline was a bastion capable of pushing back a mighty army.

The success of D-Day and the ultimate success of the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany testify to the skill of military leaders, the productivity of American industry, which was untouched by bombs and artillery that devastated Allied and Axis factories, the determination of American and British troops and the amazing resilience of the Soviet army on the Eastern Front, where millions of lives were lost. As Atkinson shows in the first two volumes of his trilogy, Allies' experience in North Africa, Sicily and Italy also paved the way for success at Normandy.

On this D-Day anniversary, we praise the dwindling few survivors of that cauldron, and we marvel at the bravery of the men who stepped off those landing crafts knowing their chances of surviving the day were not good.