The Real War Will Never Get Into the Books
The best way to avoid the next terrible war is to unflinchingly look at the reality of the last one
Today, June 6th, 2025 is the anniversary of the incredibly famous Normandy Landings. “D-Day”. This huge historical event is rightly commemorated each year. There's lots going on today to remind us of that famous landing in France. But every year another thought regularly intrudes upon my thinking. It's not about the few big events in a conflict, it’s instead about all the littler ones put together. And how many awful individual incidents go into every large war.
It's not a knock on the big events in a war like The Second World War to acknowledge that the big events always overshadow the day-to-day sacrifice and heroics and tragedy that goes on during continuous operations. It's also worth realizing that to focus only on the giant temporary big battles obscures the reality of those ongoing operations, which in turn influences the way we civilians see war. We see it as a series of big encounters with little of importance occurring in between, instead of envisioning it as the sum total of all the fighting going on everywhere all the time. Gleich alles zusammen as Mozart might have said.1
We might be better served (IMHO) if we try to zoom out and realize that, for example, while those D-Day landings were happening (and even more so soon afterward) young men on all sides—and tons of civilians of all stripes—were being ground up every single day of that conflict like an horrific ever-increasing KIA/WIA/MIA telethon tote board. Most of the people who were killed or who suffered injury were part of this everyday death grind and not the celebrated bigger events that make it into the history books. Does that mean we shouldn't commemorate the big days and events? Of course not. The Normandy landings were an extraordinarily big deal, carried out extremely well, for shockingly little cost compared to what might've happened. It could easily have failed. That makes it inherently interesting to us all. It reads like a prizefight. There's high drama. A clear winner and loser. And it deserves to be commemorated! It is indeed, A Big Day.
But the Big Day overshadows all the (many more) “little” days. And it does so in a way that warps the way we see the conflicts. This fact hits me out of the blue from time to time. When it does, I try to remember to just take a second and stop and think about those days those soldiers went through. Those many days that had lots of blood, suffering and toil, but little notoriety. And that are little recalled. I try to remember to have a little moment of silence for example, for the TEN TIMES the number of Americans (and lots of Canadians and Brits and others) that died in the breakout campaign that followed June 6th and which gets FAR less notice. It's ten times as likely that someone's dad or grandpa was killed or maimed in that campaign than were on June 6th 1944. Yet it gets little attention. I'm sure many soldiers who have fought in conflicts since then can relate. Most of the suffering in war is unchronicled.
This is not to downplay what the veterans of big events went through, it is instead to play up the experiences of those who went through the everyday hell that makes up the largest part of big war continuous operations.
Historians often focus (especially in the era soon after a conflict's end) on those big dates, along with the big battles, big generals and big turning point moments of a war. Hence something like a D-Day's enduring notoriety. This is probably inevitable. The era following a war is often still subject to the afterglow of wartime propaganda and it's chroniclers possess incomplete information (of the sort that will become available decades later). But war is less romanticized, more real, as it were, if we realize just how many of those guys were taken from us all in the daily "wastage" of ongoing operations. Losses taken while storming the beach in Normandy seem more purposeful, decisive and meaningful than the mundane day-to-day death toll. But while the daily operations may seem less glamorous (is that even a thing?), they're just as crucial to bringing about the eventual outcome. And the suffering, while not in the amplified amounts that come during the large battles, adds up daily.
To me, trying to focus on the human toll of the less sexy (is THAT even a thing?) mundane side of a conflict provides a more stark example of just what the term "wastage" implies: Look at all the dead people. On all sides. Look at all that human potential that was wasted. The lives of the dead, and the lives of their loved ones who outlive them ruined. Look at all the opportunity costs of all that waste and money and lives and international productivity gone up in literal smoke. Look at the incalculable suffering. Suffering that goes on and on in the ongoing ripples of downstream pain (physical, moral, spiritual, psychological and emotional) that stretch out for at least a generation after the conflict ends--until those left damaged, first hand or second hand, eventually pass away.
Every time one of these anniversaries comes up my weird brain fixates on the less-hailed events and soldiers. And I stand in awe of how terrible war can be. Our human tendency as we get farther away from it is to forget how awful it actually all was. Although there are always some, in any era, in the war-torn places that at least somewhere on our globe always exist, that could remind us.2 So, let's DO remember the big achievement and event and heroism and sacrifice done on this date in 1944. But let's also recall the rest. And let's not sanitize what it was like. To quote a WW2 veteran cited in Paul Fussell's classic work Wartime “The real war will never get into the books”. But we can't learn the right lessons if it doesn't.
In Wartime, Fussell, who was himself a (wounded) American combat veteran of the post-D-Day campaigns in Europe, described the difference during the Second World War between what the civilians back home were being exposed to and what the soldiers were actually dealing with. He relates a story where he says “Very occasionally there might be an actual encounter between home-front, sentimentality, and frontline vileness.”
Fussell quotes a Charles MacDonald story3 saying “One glib reporter got far enough forward to encounter some infantry men on the line, to whom he put cheerful questions like, 'what would you like best from the States about now?' At first he got nothing but sullen looks and silence. But finally one soldier spoke:
“I've got something to say. Tell them it's too damn serious over here to be talking about hot dogs and baked beans and things we're missing. Tell them… They're (sic) men getting killed and wounded every minute, and they're miserable and they're suffering. Tell them it's a matter more serious than they'll ever be able to understand”—McDonald then says there was a choking sob at this point in the soldier's voice… then he got out the rest of his “inarticulate, impatient message”, 'Tell them it's rough as hell. Tell them it's rough. Tell them it's rough, serious business. That's all. That's all.”
And so as a society we hide the true face of war from ourselves. In part to make it easier to do this again.4 Only those involved in the actual blood and gore see it for what it really is. And then live with those scars and memories forever after among the rest of us who couldn't possible understand what they've been through.
Graphic and realistic post-war books published by combat veterans, along with the more modern, less influenced by the emotions of the era histories (Fussell's book is both) help to re-enter the true horror of those events into the historical record. Eventually. But it might be a case of “too little too late” in terms of allowing us to see enough reality in real time to “learn from History”. After all, Fussell points out that even as recently as 1977, more than three decades after the war, when the photojournal Life Goes to War was published5 there was not a single human body displayed in the book that was dismembered. Yet this was a common occurrence in the conflict. This was what the soldiers in combat saw and experienced. It happened all the time. If we want to better understand what they went through, we need to be exposed to the truth. Life Goes to War only included three photos in the entire work that showed any sort of dismemberment. All three were severed heads or skulls (and as Fussell points out, all three were Asian, none were of “our boys”).
Now you may say that you don't purchase a big glossy photo history to see a bunch of dismembered and ground up humans (and who can blame you?), but that's the Real War and that's why it's (for the most part) absent from the (near-contemporary) books. Because it's an obscenity. And few want that sort of book displayed on their dining room coffee table.
“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it” as U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman once said. He also said: “I confess without shame that I am tired & sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. Even success, the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies […] It is only those who have not heard a shot, nor heard the shrills & groans of the wounded & lacerated (friend or foe) that cry aloud for more blood & more vengeance, more desolation & so help me God as a man & soldier I will not strike a foe who stands unarmed & submissive before me but will say ‘Go sin no more.’” It is because he saw first hand the hellish truth of what happens to humans in war that Sherman developed such feelings.
So, by all means let's commemorate the June 6th Normandy landings. They were a big deal. A lot of people (on both sides) suffered and it was a turning point moment in the Western European theater. But let's also remember the tenacity, the privation, the suffering, the physical and emotional damage, and the willingness to endure of those troops who faced their hardship in places never remembered. And additionally, let's not glorify anything in such a way that makes it more likely their descendants will have to endure the same thing. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want that.
The tendency towards glorification is hard to shake though and has a long pedigree in human civilization. Perhaps the earliest work of Western literature we have, Homer's Iliad, glorifies war. But unlike the sanitized version of human conflict often fed to the public in the modern world the Iliad also includes the occurrences where war unabashedly shows it's true horrific face. The battle encounters, written in an age when humans knew what those encounters looked like, are worse than any Manson murder crime scene. It's the sort of stuff Life Goes To War tended to (understandably) downplay:
“Peneleos stabbed him at the root of the eye, under the brow, and tore out the eyeball; the spear went through the eye and out the nape of the neck, and the man sank down stretching out both hands. Peneleos drew his sword and cut right through the neck; head and helmet fell to the ground with the spear still sticking in the eye.”6
Not the sort of stuff you want to put on military recruiting posters. And not the sort of photos you want on your coffee table for the kids to see. Confederate General Robert E. Lee said that “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” Sounds about right. But for that to happen, “the real war needs to get into the books”.
"At the same time all together”.
Ukraine and Russia, Gaza, Sudan, etc. etc.
Fussell identifies him as a rifle company commander in Europe.
If we showed our own soldiers, in high-def smartphone clarity, experiencing what they routinely do in war, how do you think Americans back home would react? Differently than they do when such images are kept from them?
Fussell says of this book “a volume so popular and widely distributed as to constitute virtually a definitive and official anthology of Second World War photographs”.
From the W. H. D. Rouse translation.