Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War [Paperback]

Paul Fussell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195065778 | ISBN-13: 978-0195065770 | Publication Date: October 25, 1990

Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's classic The Great War and Modern Memory remains one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. In its panoramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world.
Now, in Wartime, Paul Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict in which he himself fought, to weave a more intensely personal and wide-ranging narrative. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on soldiers and civilians. He compellingly depicts the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II by analyzing the wishful thinking and the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality; by describing the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most importantly, by emphasizing the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and wit.
Of course, no book of Fussell's would be complete without serious attention to the literature of the time. He offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world. In this stunning volume, Fussell conveys the essence of that war as no other writer before him has.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Paul Fussell, a distinguished literary historian, served as an infantry officer during World War II, and the experience has haunted him ever since. It has also informed his books, among them The Great War in Modern Memory and Wartime, a book that is part memoir, part cultural-critical study, and that is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of conflict. Fussell conjures the small details of battlefield experience -- the way a bird's song falls silent just before an artillery barrage, the curious plunking sound a spinning bullet makes, the drift of smoke over an obliterated village; he also evokes the Zeitgeist of the war years, an era when hometown grocery stores bore signs like this one: "Did you drown a sailor today because YOU bought a lamb chop without giving up the required coupons?"

From Publishers Weekly

Most of the men who fought World War II were young--with those over 27 or 28 likely to be called "Dad." For most of the troops, the war's purpose seemed remote and vague, according to Fussell. He contends that many Americans had little comprehension of Nazism; to "our boys" the war was about revenge against the Japanese. In this sequel to The Great War and Modern Memory , Fussell presents American and British soldiers as alcoholically insulated against reality, suffering boredom, absurdity, sexual deprivation and, above all, full of subversive contempt stoked by the official mix of optimism and euphemism that falsified the war experience. Separate chapters cover wartime rumors and blunders, service slang, the despair in the trenches, and the sanitized, sanguine messages emanating from radios, films, songs and high-minded literature back home. This brilliant, engaging cultural history quietly subverts our whitewashed collective memory of the war. Illustrations. First serial to the Atlantic.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 330 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 25, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195065778
• ISBN-13: 978-0195065770
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #108,638 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Removes the cartoon caricatures from WWII History., July 7, 2000

By 

Patrick McCormack (New Brighton, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Hardcover)

World War II was defended, at the time, as a high minded war. In recent years, historians have viewed the war in a monolithic way -- the Good War, the Crusade, the most legitimate use of American power...

Fussell corrects this view by adding nuance, by capturing the background. His essays on the culture of wartime range from music to literature, radio to army camp life, scatological humor to the horrors of battle. The result is a rare and unusual history, which captures some of the variability of this large war.

The book reads well. Most chapters can be read as stand alone essays, but read as a whole the book builds a layered depiction of the back lines, the home front, and the fighting man.

The last chapter horrifies and moves the reader. Fussell has a goal of helping to bring Americans to a greater maturity about behavior during war, and the costs of battle. It is clear that America is immature about battle and death -- witness the end of the Gulf War -- and that this has a cost in how we pursue foreign policy.

Great book, great read, excellent corrective to the outsized heroic histories of the war.

63 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars War and the GI, December 18, 1999

By 

Douglas S. Wood "Vicarious Life" (Monona, WI) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Hardcover)

Contrary to some of the recent reviews, I consider Fussell's work the best I have read on WWII. I've read some of Stephen Amborse's works and enjoyed them as well, but Fussell provides a much needed critical, even cynical, antidote to Ambrose's telling of the story. Fussell definitely departs from the mainstream representation the war and that is immensely refreshing.

Fussell provides detailed insight into the daily lives of the average soldier, the mundane and the horrific. He tells of many errors (in fact in his view the whole war should be viewed as a series of errors) such as shooting down friendly planes and bombimg of friendly troops. Fussell discloses the tremendous amount of drinking that went on, the physical deprivations, and the cruelty of inept martinets that were officers. To me, the war was a just one, but that's no reason to remain ignorant of just how horrible the war was.

This book is not a telling of whole story of WWII and isn't meant to be, but it's an absolutely necessary complement to the standard histories.

36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I could carve a better man out of a banana!", August 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Paperback)

I want to disagree with the three previous reviews, to defend Fussell's project. One reviewer seems to be confusing "Wartime" with Fussell's memoir "Doing Battle." The former is not intended as a memoir but as an alternate history--an alternative to the kind of history represented by a book recommended by another of the reviewers, i.e.,, Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers." If Ambrose's book can be seen as a companion to Spielberg's romantic (and therefore disappointing) "Saving Private Ryan," then "Wartime" is parallel to--in fact is clearly inspired by--Heller's satirical "Catch-22." What Fussell and Heller have in common is that they both reject absolutely the work of the apologists of war--a category into which all three of these reviewers probably fit. What the reviewer who labels Fussell's book "unadulterated junk" seems to object to most is that Fussell, by training a literary critic, should have the presumption to write HISTORY. The reviewer suggests that, instead of reading Fussell, one should read anti-war novels, including Heller's "Catch-22." Here's what Heller had to say about Fussell's book: "No novel I have read surpasses its depiction of the awful human costs to all sides of modern warfare. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it is unforgettable" (jacket blurb). What these reviewers find unFORGIVEable is that Mr. Fussell has, in writing this book, stepped outside the established conventions of historiography--that is why a book that to Heller and to me (another of those blasted literary types--YUCK!) is eminently readable appears to them "confused." They haven't yet learned how to read the sort of history Fussell is writing. It is THEY who are confused, not Fussell. I suspect these reviewers would prefer the sort of history written by Kurt Vonnegut's Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. And Rumfoord's attitude toward Billy Pilgrim, whose very existence problematizes Rumfoord's "official" history of the bombing of Dresden, rather nicely parallels that of these three reviewers toward Fussell: "It was difficult for Rumfoord to take Billy seriously, since Rumfoord had so long considered Billy a repulsive non-person who would be better off dead. Now, with Billy speaking clearly and to the point, Rumfoord's ears wanted to treat the words as a foreign language that was not worth learning" ("Slaughterhouse Five"). The language Fussell is speaking is well worth learning. These reviewers should take a lesson.