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5 Instants of Excitement and Terror Listen to the names at roll call, or read these names from a casualty list in the New York Times of 29 March 1945: Agostinello . . . Cohen . . . Curran . . . Grunwald . . . Hrubec . . . Ivanoski . . . Kuzian . . . Marshall . . . Thomas . . . Warblanski. Were any of these inferior? —“Prejudice,” Armed Forces Talk, 1948 The World War II army experience was more than a mass excursion of young Americans to visit distant lands and meet different people. All of the tedium of everyday military life—the drilling, routine, scrounging for food, waiting for letters—could make it easy to forget that the army had to attend to serious business. There was a war to be fought, a war on two broad fronts against determined and lethal foes. Even in the modern era of great air and sea power, fighting that war meant that American soldiers would have to close with their enemies on the ground. They would have to take and hold territory. They would have to sow destruction and death by their own hands. They, millions of them, would have to come under fire during World War II. That experience, more than anything else they faced in the military, would live on in them for the rest of their lives. The hatred, anticipation, terror, excitement, death, and destruction of battle gave powerful meaning to all that the soldiers had gone through in uniform. The blood and sacrifice made the war’s lessons all the more powerful. Whatever their general feelings toward the people of Italy, Japan, or Germany as a whole, American soldiers resented their enemies in uniform. It was the Italian, Japanese, and German militaries who had forced the Americans to go to war, forced them from their homes, forced them to fight and die on battlefields all over the world. This resentment for the enemy turned into dislike or hate, and it fed into the emotions of the men under fire. That emotion gave the men something on which to focus, something to take their Instants of Excitement and Terror 128 minds off their own anxieties. It reinforced their belief that the Americans were on the good side in the war. That belief helped sustain the men in the overall fight; it helped them get from one day to the next. But while this disdain or hatred for the German and Japanese soldiers helped sustain the American fighting man, his emotions under fire on the actual battlefield in World War II did not really involve the enemy. Modern warfare and modern weapons stretched distances. Rarely did World War II soldiers kill at close range, looking into the other man’s eyes as he died. Rarely did the fallen see their killers before they died. The enemy was a shadow, a silhouette, something distant and impersonal. At the same time, combat in World War II acted to separate comrades from one another. In a general sense, the men already felt anonymous in the army. Soldiers in that greatest of all wars realized that they were part of something huge, and that there was certain obscurity about being just one among millions in modern war. To emphasize that feeling, they called themselves “GIs,” an abbreviation of “government issue.”1 The implication of this nickname was obvious: When it came to combat, the average soldier was just another piece of expendable equipment. For a variety of reasons, that feeling of anonymity only intensified on the battlefield. For example, the thick jungles of Pacific islands such as New Guinea hid both friend and foe from the average soldier on the ground. Even in a hectic area a man could feel totally alone.2 And when terrain did not separate the men, the realities of combat kept them apart. For much of the war the army had a real problem with American troops bunching together under fire, especially under artillery bombardment. The natural instinct of the troops was to find safety in numbers, but that instinct was wrong. Nothing was more dangerous than to present a bigger target to the enemy. Yet time and time again American troops fresh to the front lines gathered together and suffered terrible casualties from only one or two enemy weapons. As a result, the army made a special point of training men to keep their spacing under fire, and veterans learned to stay separated in combat zones.3 The nature of modern war, the exigencies of the modern battlefield, meant that the instants of excitement were terrifyingly lonely. Anxiety exacerbated...

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