warexperiences

     In 1861, soldiers from throughout the newly divided American states were preparing to fight. The soldiers were fighting on opposite sides of a clearly divided nation. Just less than eighty years after this Civil War, soldiers of these United States of America were preparing to fight again. This war, which would be known as World War II, was a foreign war. Soldiers would have new issues and uncertainties to deal with. To be sure, there were clear differences between these wars in motivation. But, the experiences of war for the soldiers in each of these conflicts were essentially the same.
      The American Civil War was a war of clear causes and ideals. The South seceded to defend slavery and gain their independence. They feared that "our property will be confuscated...& our people reduced to the most abject bondage & utter degradation" (McPherson, p. 21). The claim behind this move for independence was clear as one southern soldier stated, "We can only live & exist by that species of labor(slavery) and hence I am willing to fight to the last" (McPherson, p. 107)." The North, on the other hand, fought against secession in order to preserve the Union, and later, to abolish slavery. Even common soldiers understood that, "The government must be sustained [for] if the Union is split up the government is distroid and we will be a Rewind{ruined} nation" (McPherson, p. 18). And, a little more than a year into the war, "antislavery pragmatism and principle fused into a growing commitment to emancipation as both a means and goal of union victory" (McPherson, p. 120). In the words of one soldier of Wisconsin, "Slavery must be cleansed out" (McPherson, p. 120). But, despite the interaction of these two main themes, no soldier in that war had any illusion that the war was about anything other than Union and slavery.
     Such clarity did not exist in the Second World War. Many soldiers had such little grasp on what the purpose of the war was that "for most of the troops, the war might just as well have been about good looks" (Fussell, p. 129). None of these soldiers were fighting to defend their home. They did not have to worry about the safety of their wives, children, or land. They had no clear-cut, righteous cause of independence or Union. They were fighting an international war on foreign land. One writer at the end of the war said that he was suspicious of "any war poet now who says he knows what the current calamity means" (Fussell, 139).
      In the absence of clear ideological purpose, soldiers found other things to believe in. It was reported from one United States military outpost that, "The Marines didn't know what to believe in except the Marines" (Fussell, p. 140). This is representative of the importance that many soldiers put on their military unit. This group cohesion, was relatively easy to dedicate one's self to. "It took me darn near a whole war to figure what I was fighting for," one soldier said. "It was the other guys. Your outfit, the guys in your company, but especially your platoon" (Fussell p. 140). This was true not only because of the comforts of camaraderie, but also because of the reality that the men near you were fighting with you and a percentage of that whole would not survive any given battle.
      Another cause to fight for was manufactured by the military leaders. As people, soldiers generally have a home they want to return to, a family they want to be with. One General depended on the strength of this idea by issuing a "Personal Message from the Army Commander" to his troops while they prepared for battle. This message said, "The sooner we win this battle the sooner we shall all get back home to our families" (Fussell, p. 141). This appears to be an overall theme as the Infantry Journal printed a poem that read

     To kill is our business and that's what we do.
     It's the main job of war for me and you
     And the more [Japs] we rub out, the sooner we're through
     To return where they wait for a soldier. (Fussell, p. 141)

They were attempting to inspire the soldiers to risk their lives fighting fearlessly in order to get away from that risk return to the security of their homes.
     The difference in inspired motivation between the Civil War and World War II may be symptomatic of the legacy of each conflict's preceding war. The Civil War had been framed by the American Revolution. "Americans of the Civil War generation revered their Revolutionary forebears" (McPherson, p. 104). Therefore, "Both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis appealed to this intense consciousness of parallels between 1776 and 1861" (McPherson, p. 104). Everyone would want to emulate a war that breed such heroes as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and was remembered for the great success of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. The Second World War had no such luck. It was preceded by World War I - a war whose most renown protagonists may have been the characters of Earnest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms or Frederick Manning's Her Privates We. The Great War's legacy was further portrayed in context of the controversial and conflicted Treaty of Versailles and the failed League of Nations. The result of all this was that the Second World War was "the first war in American history in which the general disillusionment preceded the firing of the first shot" (Fussell, p. 130).
     The basic experiences in each of these wars was very similar at their outsets. At the beginning of each of these wars, expectations were for a quick and easy war. Just one day before the Battle of Bull Run, in 1861, "congressmen, society ladies, and various picnickers and pleasure-seekers came out from Washington in coaches to watch from
nearby hill what they assumed would be a gratifying rout" (Fussell, p. 10). These civilians
had failed at this early point of the war to realize the cruelly lethal and attritional nature of
their civil conflict.
     Society at the time of World War II had a similarly lacking understanding of the nature of war. One zealous, young journalist fought hard to gain an assignment as a war correspondent because she was anxious to see the process by which the Allies were succeeding up close. Upon gaining this assignment, she was ill prepared for the "mosaic of misery" she would encounter. Entire cities were ruined and stinking and there were dead bodies everywhere. But, even more shocking to this journalist were her encounters with the wounded, many of whom shared her young age. "Some were blinded, others cruelly disfigured . . . Many people had lost hands or feet to frostbite" (Fussell, p. 12). The irony is that she had gone to see the troops expecting to find satisfaction because of their tide toward victory. Instead she found that they were "weary" and "bitter." (Fussell, p. 12)
     These soldiers were feeling a shared knowledge of incredible casualty and mortality rates. Staggering numbers of men were losing life or health in the Second World War. One poet wrote to an injured soldier, "You are something there are millions of" (Fussell, p. 67). United States Marine Eugene Sledge said that it was not unusual for "replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff" (Fussell, p. 66).
      Because of fear caused by such horror, the consumption of alcohol was rampant. One Canadian bomber pilot said that "fear of death...was so strong in some of the aircrew that no form of discipline was effective. These were the ones who had convinced themselves they would be killed and everything else was therefore trivial" (Fussell, p. 100).An American soldier remembers that "I'd get up each day and start drinking. How else could I fight the war?" (Fussell, p. 101). But, this was nothing new to war time. During the civil war, "There were several egregious examples of high-ranking officers so
drunk during a battle that they could scarcely stand up" (McPherson, p.52). This was not
exclusive to officers. One soldier talks of the opposing side's troops who "were so drunk when they charged that they could hardly stand on their legs" (McPherson, p. 53).
     The realities of the Second World War could probably not be ignored even with the help of that liquid courage. Before it was over "soldiers and civilians would be killed in quantity and without scruple, their bodies cremated en masse or tipped into lime pits, and only a couple of years (later) A-bombs and the remorseless hanging of German officers convicted of terrible crimes would exemplify the heavy duty the war had necessitated" (Fussell, p. 11). That use of the A-bomb by the American military on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima came in addition not only to the horror of the firebombings and gruesome land combat that came in course of the war, but also the unmatched tragedy of the Holocaust which cost more than two million people their lives.
     The Civil War body counts are not as high as those of World War II. There was no nuclear weapons and no calculated attempt to eradicate a race. But, the horrors that the soldiers of that war experienced were still immense. One soldier wrote, "A battle is a horrid thing. You can have no conception of its horrors" (McPherson, 12). The experience of battle was quite more than many soldiers could easily deal with. "Of course I saw a great many hard sights the day of the fight," wrote one soldier. "But, I will not tell of them ever" (McPherson, p. 12). And, it did not stop when the battle ended. "Even when I sleep," wrote a soldier from Massachusetts, "I hear the whistling of the shells and shouts and groans, and to sum it up in two words it is horrible" (McPherson, p. 43). Another soldier, from Louisiana, said that "in my sleep I see nightly the ghastly upturned faces of the dead, and hear the groans of the mangled and dying, the hissing of the shot and shell" (McPherson, p. 43).
       The incredible destruction and tragedy of World War II is undeniable. That war "was a savage, insensate affair, barely conceivable to the well-conducted imagination (the
reason there's so little good writing about it) and hardly approachable without some
currently unfashionable theory of human mass insanity and inbuilt, inherited corruption"
(Fussell, p. 132). But, the fact that technologies at the time of the Civil War were not as proficient at creating death and destruction as they were during World War II does not in any way indicate that their experiences were less traumatic. The experiences of soldiers in these two wars have the similarity that they were worse than anything those soldiers could have imagined or easily handled. It does not matter how far beyond their imagination the reality went. Soldiers in both wars feared death to an extant greater than they could handle under their own strength. A survey of veterans of World War II "found that the foremost factor enabling them to keep going when the going got tough was prayer" (McPherson,
p. 63). And, "Civil War armies were, arguably, the most religious in American history" (McPherson, p. 63).
      The lives of soldiers were basically the same in both the Civil War and World War II. They had the same fears of death and the same dependence on religion. They were in vastly different geographical locations, but the visions of misery and death were the same.
There were differences in motivation and technology, but the lives of the men fighting the battles were effected in essentially the same ways.

WORKS CITED

Fussell, Paul. Wartime. Oxford University Press: New York, 1989.

McPherson, James M. For Causes & Comrades. Oxford University Press: New York,
     1997.

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