Remembering The Good War: Minnesota's Greatest Generation

War Experienced: Military Service in Europe and the Pacific

During World War II, millions of men and women in locations around the globe were subjected to the emotionally intense, oftentimes horrifying experience of combat. Those who share their memories on these pages fought in many places: in Germany’s bombed-out cities, in a submarine hundreds of feet under the ocean’s surface, in the humid jungles of Burma, on the beaches of Normandy , on tropical islands across the Pacific, and in aircraft over Europe and Japan. The conditions they faced varied enormously, as did their individual experiences, as do their memories of that time. There are both advantages and drawbacks to individual accounts of combat experiences. As noted in the introduction, memory is at times untrustworthy, even fallible. Additionally, time can alter how events and situations are remembered; memory, as Samuel Hynes comments in The Soldiers’ Tale, is reflective and selective, “more selfconsciously constructed than the immediate reports, an old self looking back at what the young self did” (xiv). Yet construction of the collective tale relies on these voices; indeed, it is the sum of these accounts that allows for a multidimensional whole. Perhaps nowhere 121 War Experienced Military Service in Europe and the Pacific [4] is the personal story more important—yet also more complicated— than with combat. While some did not survive to record their experiences and while the psychological stresses associated with such situations make recollection difficult or undesirable for others, getting “on the ground” in a combat situation is the only way to understand the role of the soldier and the various impacts of warfare on his or her life. In contrast to the larger canvas of narrative accounts, the purpose in this collection is to examine the individual brushstrokes, the participants . While these recollections often lack panorama, they provide something equally valuable: the perspective of one who was there, communicated through the individual voice, using words, phrases, and descriptions selected by that person, explaining how he acted or reacted, felt, and suffered. Here is the story of what happened ; more precisely, here is the story of what happened to this soldier personally. What is recounted is less the story of why things happened and more the actual human experience. One thing is clear: those who were involved in or dispatched near the actual killing experienced a radically different war than those in rear-echelon jobs. Soldiers on the front line—those doing the killing and observing the dying—dealt with a different reality. Consistent themes also emerged, whether one served in Europe or in the Pacific: the development of animal instincts; long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror; hatred for the enemy; an awareness of being transformed; and above all the power of certain events to evoke strong emotions more than fifty-five years after the fact. It also bears considering whether these recollections reflect any particular Minnesota heritage. Responses to the subject of racism provided consistent evidence that growing up in this region instilled different values that evoked different emotions as one was confronted with prejudice in the South and elsewhere. After conversations with dozens of veterans across the region, however, it is clear that such is not the case with combat experience. The events recounted here— and how people recall them—are remarkably similar in content, feeling , and emotional response to those of a larger oral history literature on combat experience during World War II. R e m e m b e r i n g t h e G o o d W a r 122 Voices from the European Theater The European war began on  September  with Germany’s attack on Poland. By the time the United States entered the war more than two years later, in December , German forces had conquered much of Europe and had launched a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. The United States committed millions of men and women overseas , the majority of them to the conflict in Europe. Of the country’s , military deaths during –, the largest number were suffered on the European continent. Direct U.S. involvement in the European war began with invasions of North Africa () and Sicily and Italy () and a bombing campaign of German military and industrial targets (–). The American commitment gradually intensified, culminating with landings in southern France and Normandy (). For Americans, the ground war that lasted from mid-  until war’s end in...