A Soldier Strips the Romance Out of Life at War

Thanks Steve I will certainly try . I just hope that others will read this thread too and may come to an understanding of what our country's vets and others went through. That war is not sometimes what you see in the movies and TV. And certainly not in Videogames. And a Merry Christmas to you also.

 

Haunted

Did the soldiers of the Good War really come home psychologically unscathed by the horror and stress they experienced? Or did they simply suffer in silence?

by Mark D. Van Ells

Combat stirs up a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. Feelings of exhilaration, love, hatred, guilt, rage, helplessness, disgust, and fear race through the minds of soldiers in battle. How the human mind responds to these emotions has long perplexed military officials, medical professionals, and especially veterans and their families. Sixteen million Americans served in World War II. Of those, perhaps one million were exposed to extended periods of combat. These men often suffered deep emotional pain as a result of their battle experiences, and the effects lasted for years. Some carried the pain for the rest of their lives.
To be effective in combat, soldiers must learn to suppress the feelings it generates, a process psychiatrists refer to as "emotional numbing." For some, the numbing begins in basic training. In the civilian world, killing is a most grievous crime, but in war, it is a necessity. According to James Jones, noted novelist and combat veteran, "To teach a young American male to love war and enjoy killing his fellow man--even a Jap or a Nazi--was about comparable to teaching his fresh, dewy-eyed, virginal sister to love the physical aspects of simple [sex]."
The anticipation of combat was an emotionally taxing experience in its own right. Raymond Gantter of the 1st Infantry Division simply denied the prospect of death. "I willfully repudiate the possibility of death," he wrote his wife. "My reason, insisting on cold logic, tells me 'maybe,' but emotionally I reject it entirely." According to Jones, the soldier must think of himself as "essentially a dead man" so he can "function as he ought to function under fire."
Fear is the most common emotion associated with combat. "We are all afraid," wrote B-17 pilot John Bennett, "and only liars and fools fail to admit it." The aspects of combat that soldiers feared most varied from individual to individual. Gantter found patrolling behind German lines the most unbearable. He wrote in his wartime diary:
I think I have never been so cold, so wretched, so frightened. It is the slow piling up of fear that is so intolerable. Fear moves swiftly in battle, strikes hard with each shell, each new danger, and as long as there's action, you don't have time to be frightened. But this is a slow fear, heavy and stomach filling. Slow, slow...all your movements are careful and slow, and pain is slow and fear is slow and the beat of your heart is the only rapid rhythm of the night...a muttering drum easily punctured and stilled.
What marine E.B. Sledge feared most was shell fire. "During prolonged shelling," he wrote, "I often had to restrain myself and fight back a wild, inexorable urge to scream, to sob, and to cry." For airman Bennett it was the feeling of helplessness. "The bomber pilot can't fight back, but must sit there and take it," he wrote. Jones reflected, "Learning to live with [fear], and to go ahead in spite of it took practice and a certain overlay of bitter panache it took time to acquire. There were damned few fearless men."
Study after study has shown that the primary motivating factor for most men in battle is not patriotism but the respect of their buddies. Combat veterans develop unique bonds, and watching close friends die was tremendously painful. Jones recalled a time when he saw a fellow soldier killed: "He cried out, 'Oh, my God!' in an awful, grimly comic, burbling kind of voice. Thinking about him, it seemed to me that his yell had been for all of us lying there, and I felt like crying." Many soldiers felt pangs of guilt about escaping death when their friends died, a phenomenon known as "survivor guilt." Francis O'Donnell of the 1st Infantry Division survived the carnage of Omaha Beach on D-Day in June 1944, but asked himself, "Why was I chosen to make it when men with wives and children didn't?"
Soldiers felt guilty about killing the enemy, too. Sledge remembered shooting a Japanese soldier about to throw a grenade at him. "I had just killed a man at close range," he wrote. "That I had clearly seen the pain on his face came as a jolt…. The expression on that man's face filled me with shame and then disgust for the war and all the misery it was causing." Half a world away, in Italy, future US Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii--then a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team--entered a farmhouse and found an injured German soldier inside. The wounded man "reached into his tunic," he wrote, "and I thought he was going for a gun, and I pumped the last three shots in my rifle clip into his chest." As the man fell, he "held up a snapshot, clutching it in death"--a photograph of a woman and two children whom Inouye presumed were the dead man's family. "For days I fought the image down," he remembered, "but it kept returning."
The sights and sounds of battle could be disturbing. In Burma, Richard Bates of the US special operations unit commonly known as Merrill's Marauders remembered listening to a wounded Japanese soldier "scream all night" and then "spending three days out there looking at that corpse and watching it swell up." He found nighttime in Burma most unsettling. "You think the silence bothers you," he remembered, "but in the jungle areas the noise bothers you. There are so many bugs making noise, and so many things going, that if things are quiet it's almost deafening. God, anyone could pick up a rung on me and I wouldn't hear." For many, continued exposure to combat conditions wore them down. "It was not going [into battle] the one time, but the going back again and again, that finally got to you," " a sailor from the USS Yorktown told Jones in a Honolulu bar in May 1942. A navy veteran from Texas compared his service on a destroyer off the Tokyo mainland during the Okinawa campaign to a death sentence:
They strap him in the electric chair, he can see the warden's hand on the switch, he knows he is going to die, and he waits all day. Then at the end of the day they come and get him, take him back to his cell, and all night the other prisoners try to kill him. The next day they come get him and strap him in the chair and he expects to die again--this goes on and on day and night for three months....
Combat veterans had to find ways to block out the madness and tragedy of war. Marine noncommissioned officer. William Manchester claimed that "a foot soldier retains his sanity only by hardening himself." Wrote E.B. Sledge, "I vividly recall grimly making a pledge with myself. The Japanese might kill or wound me, but they wouldn't crack me up." Inouye remembered that humor was effective, even in the face of death. "Even knowing that every agonizing second may be their last on earth," he wrote, "a man has to vent the terrible pressures inside, and of course laughing is better than crying. So we laughed, sometimes heartlessly, sometimes hysterically, sometimes in the final instant of life."
Soldiers also turned to alcohol to numb themselves. It was widely available to troops in Europe as they liberated towns from German control. "Wine was given to us by the gallon," wrote infantryman Charles Golub from France to his wife in Massachusetts. Wilbur Berget of the 12th Armored Division wrote to his parents that drinking "makes me forget where I am and brings me back to better days, because it changes the ever present atmosphere that adheres to everything we do or say during the day, [and] can expel the serious thoughts that run through our minds as we go about this business of fighting a war."
Some soldiers could not cope with the stress of combat. Nearly every combat veteran can recall an instance when someone broke down under fire. During the Battle of the Bulge, Gantter recalled, a seasoned veteran of his 1st Infantry Division suddenly "went to pieces" during an artillery barrage, "weeping hysterically and cowering in a dugout." Combat-induced mental and emotional breakdowns like this have always been a part of war. Historically, soldiers who fell apart in battle were viewed as cowards or considered predisposed to psychological problems. During World War I, the phenomenon was known as "shell shock." In World War II, the term was "battle fatigue." By that time, most psychiatrists understood that any soldier could suffer a mental collapse. According to one team of army psychiatrists, most men could tolerate only about 180 days in combat before their fighting effectiveness diminished.
World War II soldiers had mixed views of battle fatigue. Many continued to see it as cowardice or as angling for the infamous Section Eight discharge. General George S. Patton's slapping of battle-fatigued soldiers is legendary. Roth Schleck, a combat officer with the 32nd Division, attributed battle fatigue to poor leadership. While some units suffered high battle fatigue rates, Schleck noted that others were "subjected to about the same thing and they didn't have that at all." Other veterans were more sympathetic. Of the man he saw collapse in combat, Gantter wrote that he had simply "reached the saturation point. He couldn't take it anymore, that's all, and no one blamed him." Manchester remembered a hardened veteran sobbing and unable to fight. "I priggishly disapproved," he wrote. "A Marine is supposed to cry inside; he can be afraid, but he can't bring shame upon himself for showing fear." Yet, he added, "The fact is that I wanted to weep myself."
Despite the host of conflicting opinions about battle fatigue, few people questioned that combat had profound effects on the minds of soldiers. "We were all psychotic, inmates of the greatest madhouse of history," claimed Manchester. Two psychiatrists who worked with veterans after the war noted that "mild traumatic states...are almost universal among combat troops immediately after battle."
Most psychiatrists believed, however, that once a soldier was removed from the battlefield, his emotional state would return to normal. Unfortunately, veterans often found that the ghosts of war followed them into the postwar world. Memories long buried began to resurface upon returning home. "As the old combat numbness disappeared, and the frozen feet of the soul began to thaw, the pain of the cure became evident," recalled Jones. "The sick-making thoughts of all the buddies who died. The awful bad luck of the maimed."
These veterans were showing symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The term--coined in 1980, after the Vietnam War had brought the subject of combat stress back into the public spotlight--was unknown in 1945. The symptoms fall into three categories. The first is the persistent reliving of the trauma. Nightmares, for example, were common among veterans. Some "woke up in the middle of the night, thrashing around and trying to get their hands on their wives' throats," wrote Jones. Suppressed war memories often leapt from the subconscious through memory flashbacks during waking moments, too. Manchester once had a war memory hit him while on an airplane "with a clarity so blinding that I surged forward against the seat belt, appalled by it." The second category of symptoms involves intensified physical responses that psychiatrists term "increased arousal." Some carried guns or knives, because having a weapon nearby "just made them feel more comfortable," according to Jones. Manchester recalled, "The sudden zip of a heavy zipper made me jump for a year after I discarded my uniform." The third category is avoidance of stimuli that might trigger war memories. Veterans often refused to discuss the war with loved ones, in part to keep memories suppressed, though also because, as Jones described it, there was "no common ground for communication" between veterans and civilians.
Nearly all combat veterans experienced some of these symptoms, but not all developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. To diagnose a soldier as having the disorder, he must exhibit symptoms in all three categories, and the symptoms must significantly impair his ability to function normally. They can be acute (short term) or chronic (long term) and can sometimes emerge years after the trauma occurred.
Why did some veterans develop the disorder while others did not? Susceptibility to it is determined by a "complex interplay of the event and the psychological baggage one brings into the event," according to Dr. Jerry L. Halverson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. The severity of the trauma, the absence of social support (which increases feelings of isolation), stress from other causes, and a history of emotional trauma can all make a soldier more likely to develop the disorder.
Returning veterans coped with their symptoms in various ways. Many continued the process of emotional numbing by keeping their memories buried. Italo Bensoni of the 99th Division stated simply that war memories were not "going to drive me off my rocker." How successfully veterans were able to do this is debatable. John Bradley, one of five men who participated in the famous flag-raising on Iwo Jima in 1945, wept in his sleep for several years after the war. "His body would shake," his wife recalled, "and tears would stream out of his eyes." Some turned to alcohol to dull painful memories, which led many to addiction and more misery. "You can't drown your troubles, not the real ones," wrote Manchester, "because if they are real they can swim." A few turned to suicide. Years after the war, Edward Wood, a replacement soldier severely wounded on his first day of combat, wrote that he took the belt from his bathrobe, "tied one end of the belt to a hot water pipe, stood on the stool, [and] tied the other end around my neck. It seemed like the only reasonable thing to do." He changed his mind and called a psychiatrist.
For some veterans, the shock of war memories gradually began to fade. "Time heals," wrote E.B. Sledge, "and the nightmares no longer wake me in a cold sweat with a pounding heart and racing pulse." According to Halverson, "Most people learn to be less stressed by their memories and live normal lives." Many suffered in silence for decades, fearful of the social stigmatization often associated with mental illness and ashamed of not being able to handle their emotions. Said Halverson, "Every psychiatrist has many stories of the 85-year-old World War II veteran reduced to tears in their office with a flashback."
Despite the greatest return of veterans in American history from the greatest war in human history, a comprehensive understanding of the emotional effects of combat eluded World War II America. The activist veterans of the Vietnam War, however, spoke to a generation that enjoyed a more thorough, scientific understanding of the human mind. So, they had some success convincing people to recognize that war can have severe, long-term consequences for those who do the fighting. The emotional experiences of America's World War II veterans are familiar to anyone who has been in war. As an Iraq War veteran recently wrote to me:
There are times that a door is slammed, or a clap of thunder will get me startled and my heart will beat a little faster. I find myself being reminded of events and sights from over there. It sounds silly, but round-abouts [traffic circles], and certain situations, specifically while driving will create feelings of anxiety. In general, the vets that I have spoken to have related a feeling of being separated, and that we can only speak to others who have been there and who can associate with our feelings.
Some aspects of war are timeless. The emotional trauma it causes is one of them.

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Mark D. Van Ells, a history professor at the City University of New York , wrote the book To Hear Only Thunder Again: America's World War II Veterans Come Home. This article originally appeared in the August 2005 issue of America in WWI</B>I.

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Top pair of photos: Horrific stories lie behind the dazed eyes of a marine returned from two days of fighting on Eniwetok beach in the Marhsall Islands in 1944, and of an infantryman waiting with other wounded for medical care after storming Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
Bottom pair of photos: GIs witnessed all sorts of terrible and shocking scenes such as this once-mighty B-17 tumbling helplessly through the air and these bodies of fellow Americans unceremoniously washed up like sea shells on Tarawa beach in November 1943 .

America in WWII magazine: post traumatic stress, mental illness, alcoholism, shell shock​

 

Having been attached on TDY with the 17th AB I felt I was
taken back in time to the March Operation Varsity Jump and
the memories are still very vivid even after all these years.
JCFalkenberg III has done a great service in posting this data
and I'd like to say a heart felt thank you for his having done
this. Monty,to the dismay of a lot of people, sat on the 17th's
participation for 4 days and only mentioned the Brit 6th AB originally.

Sgtleo

 

Thanks. Like I said Im glad to think that some are actually reading the thread and understand its purpose .

 

"Outmanned, outgunned

Our family had another Christmas story that brings tears to my eyes every Christmas season. My stepfather was a typical 19-year-old boy from the Midwest when he felt obligated to sign up with the army to fight in World War II.

He arrived in the forested Ardennes mountains just before Christmas. It was thought to be a relatively safe region for the new recruits to get used to army life before they were sent to the front.

The Battle of the Bulge began on Dec. 16, 1944. Andy had arrived on Dec. 22. He had been with his unit for only three days when the world around them exploded.

The American forces were outmanned and outgunned. Andy’s helmet saved his life, but the bullet ricocheted upon contact and caused some serious damage to his ear. He and his comrades became prisoners of war on Christmas Eve, 1944.

They marched for days toward a prison encampment. Anyone who stumbled and fell was shot in the head. The boys held and dragged each other day after day.

The only sustenance provided them was a piece of bread dipped in gruel each day. Eventually, they were put on a train that was bombed by Allied planes whose pilots believed it was carrying arms, not brothers.

When they finally reached the encampment, they were forced to dig trenches for the German army. The amount of food did not change, and the boys continued to weaken.

Andy and two others befriended one of the German guards. Eventually, word was received that the Allied forces were winning and the prison camp would be emptied.

Prisoners again were forced to march to a new encampment.

Under the floorboards

Andy and his friends (one French, one English) begged the German guard to hide them under the floorboards of their barracks but count them present as the camp was emptied. Andy gave up his boots, and the others gave a coat and heavy gloves and socks.

For three days, the men lay under the floorboards. It was freezing, but they dared not move. Finally, they struggled out of their hiding place and stumbled out onto the road.

Within minutes, they heard tanks coming up the road. Andy says he lifted his hands in the air, closed his eyes, and waited to die.

“Come on boys, we’re taking you home!” came the cry from the men in the first tank. Allied forces had rescued them.

Andy’s picture was on the front page of his local paper on the day he first touched U.S. soil. This formerly dapper, 6’4” boy weighed only 98 pounds when he returned.

Through the years, his peers did not welcome him. The soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge were considered cowards by most who had fought in different theaters.

Eventually, the health effects of his imprisonment would take his life. He was a wonderful grandfather to my sons. He loved to fish and marvel at my son’s achievements. The only regret I have each year at Christmas is that he is not with us. He never was.

Christmas in the trenches

Christmas brought back the nightmare of comrades screaming and dying in the night. Christmas reminded him of the horrors he and his friends had to endure.

All they wanted to do was to defend their country from evil forces. They were drawn into the evil and carried the scars for the rest of their lives.

Andy never joined the family at Christmas. He preferred to stay away and pay tribute to those comrades he stood next to so very long ago, friends who survived — but as different men — and friends who did not survive."

The Dunn County News Online - Our Front Page

 

Out My Window:-

Today I have some time from my caretaker duties of my wife
since there is no way I could take my her anywhere even for
a drive with no purpose.

Consequently,I am sitting here at my PC looking out at the
snow which has been predicted to be at the 7 to 9 inch level
before it stops and the high winds move in and the
temperatures drop.

Doing this causes me to reminisce about December 1944 and
the Battle of the Bulge. Try as I may I cannot honestly visualize
how we survived living and fighting in those conditions.

Everything back then was frozen and one had to be very careful
that it did not include your weapon especially. There were times
when everything from your toes to your knit hat under your pot
were so cold you thought you'd never warm up. Your feet and
your boots were a real problem in as much as,even if you were
lucky enough to have dry socks you were afraid to remove your
boots for fear they'd freeze and you'd ever get them back on
again.

I also remember guys that were hoping to get a minor wound
so they would be sent back to a field hospital where they had
tents with heaters and served "HOT" food and if they were
declared to be RTU they'd fake it that their condition did
warrant a longer stay.

Just a few of my thoughts for today!!

Sgtleo

 

Some memories tend to stick with Vets over the years no matter how much they try to forget.

 

Not sure what your point is Steve. Was your post supposed to be here or in the Peleliu thread?

http://www.ww2f.com/war-pacific/28695-bloodbath-peleliu-island.html

 

Sorry J C,

Should of been more soldier specific. Just trying to strip the romance outa' the war.

Best Regards,

Steve

 

LOL Thats ok . Thanks for posting still.

 

JCFalkenberg III

This may not be exactly the expression of the thoughts you
want but I have seen that elephant and can tell you he is
alive and around today.

The other day I had some time from my Care Taker Duties,
the whole house was quiet and it was snowing to beat the
band with high winds and a dangerous wind chill in the air.
A nearly perfect setting to have the memories stifled
and/or - hidden creep back into my head.

Unconsciously, I started to stare out the window and suddenly
it was December 1944 and I was back in the Battle of the Bulge
in every sense of the word. The years fell away and I was with
those men that I served with and I felt the same emotions I did
back then. Faces of men I hadn't thought of for years, their
names,their wounds etc were as real as the PC I was staring
into. I felt the same emotions,the fear of getting "hit",the cold,
the hunger, all of it came roaring back. I thought I had
pigeonholed these feelings but there they were again.

Don't honestly know how long I sat there but one of my
daughters called and the telephone's ring brought me back to
2008 thankfully. Next time it snows I will close the Venetian
blinds. 64 years isn't a perfect fire wall!!!

Just some random thoughts for your thread.

Sgtleo

 

Sarge,

Happy new year my friend I hope you and your bride are doing well !

J.C. ,

Wait untill I post on the dates of the Rapido River crossings on January 20-22.

Hope to travel with a group to Italy in May. They include 3 soldiers captured at the Rapido.

Best regards,

 

Steve Schaeg:-

Thanks for your concern. Of necessity I have to take it one
day at a time and it has gotten to the point I'm housebound.

Guess that's why my mind wandered yesterday. Uneventful days!!

Sgtleo

 

"In a 1945 interview with the Herald after the war, Bolgioni described the conditions as a diet consisting of synthetic coffee for breakfast and thin soup and bread at night; they slept on cots with chicken wire for springs and no blankets; there was no sanitation, no way to bathe and lice everywhere."

http://www.timesargus.com/article/20081027/NEWS/810270298/-1/WW2

 

We have a couple of forums for people looking for information.

Information Requests - World War II Forums

Military Service Record & Genealogical Research - World War II Forums

 

Well Sarge ya can't do too much in this weather anyway. I recently put my lifelong disabled sister in a nursing home and well....... I'm over there looking after her all the time because I guess they'll never do as well as me !! Just keep your chin up and be proud for being a great husband.

It sure is nice of J.C. letting us post on his thread. It's topics like this that smack us with the realities of a terrible thing called war.

Best Regards to both of ya'.

Steve

 

More winter. But this time in Manchuria.
"In the following months we ate much rice and damn little of anything else. It wasn’t long till beri-beri and scurvy broke out. Many died and are now lying in unmarked graves. Some were beaten to death!"

"Later they sent out a 1200 man detail from our camp and 900 from camp 1. We were told we were going to Japan, but we didn’t. It was 38 degrees below zero the night we arrived in Mukden, Manchuria. Everyone’s blood was thinned after being in the tropics and coming into sub-zero weather like that was damned hard to take. We had no socks, just bare feet in G.I. shoes, and no hats, or gloves.
I spent most of the first winter in the camp hospital with a bad case of diarrhea and a mild case of beri-beri and scurvy. I look back and shake with horror at the things we ate to keep alive. I had weighed only 94 pounds and now I was discharged on light duty nearly six months later. All during the past month a great many men had been beaten with clubs, clapped and kicked around. Three men were shot for trying to escape. Two marines and one sailor.
In the spring of ’43 we took all the dead bodies out of the warehouse where they were stored; piled up like cord wood. We chipped large holes in the ground, big enough to hold 19 men each and held our mass funeral. We buried about 225 men who had passed away the first winter. It was tough going."

A Sailor’s Horrific Tale of Life as a POW » HistoryNet

 

Amazing how reality just doesn't jive up with what is sometimes portrayed in Film and TV.

 

Former WWII POW diary published

​

By Wes Ferguson


Monday, January 05, 2009
KILGORE — In July 1943, a young radio operator from Overton was shot down over Germany.
During the nearly two years that followed, Sgt. Freddie Ward kept a daily diary that observed the wretched conditions he experienced as a prisoner of the Nazis. He filled a series of composition books that documented the fear and misery of daily life in the prison camps.
Ward's particular camp was known as Stalag XVII B.
"I claim to be a Christian American," Ward wrote in one entry dated Sept. 16, 1944. "What shall I do with the turmoil of hatred and desire for revenge which churns furiously in my brain? How shall I reconcile 'Love Thy Neighbor' with the desire to throttle every German in the Reich?"
Ward spent 21 months in captivity. One day, he and his fellow prisoners were evacuated and forced to march across the cold and wet countryside.
Writing materials grew scarce, so he scribbled on the backs of cigarette wrappers and K rations, and he stowed the diary in his backpack as he marched for 18 days.
"It's a wonder these little old things didn't fall apart, because they were exposed to all kinds of weather," he said.
More than 60 years later, Ward and his wife, Frances, have published the diary.
"It was just lying there, and after all these years our family members said we needed to get it typed so our kids will have a record of it," said Ward, 87, who is the longtime pastor of Highland Park Assembly of God in Kilgore.
He said he dictated the diary to his wife, who learned to use a computer so she could type the book.
Each chapter comes from a different composition book. It was published by Hudson Printing and Graphic Design in Longview.
"I wanted to preserve it to let people back here know what it was like. I kept it almost every day," he said.

Former WWII POW diary published

 

"However, the 90-year-old Richmond resident and St. Joseph, Mo., native "never discussed it. He said he'd like to forget it," his wife said.
But forgetting was difficult because he carried reminders with him. Several years ago when a shoulder was bothering him, doctors taking X-rays told him that his left side was full of shrapnel and that some was still lodged in his head, his wife said."

Lewis Everette Wright, veteran of WWII, dies | Richmond Times-Dispatch