Abstract
Allied soldiers in the World War II marched, ate, sweat, froze, grumbled, sobbed, defecated, and urinated their way to victory. Transporting several million bodies from the beaches of Salerno and Normandy to the heart of Hitler’s Third Reich meant, for the military authorities, dealing with the corporeal realities of the frail and sometimes disgusting human form en masse. Mary Louise Roberts, the WARF Distinguished Lucie Aubrac Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of two previous well-received books on the war in northwestern Europe, reflects on these corporeal realities in this new collection of essays.
Roberts’ goal is to sketch a ‘somatic history of war’ (p. 3) which draws on the sense-memories of ordinary front-line soldiers as recorded in diaries, letters, and memoirs. Her focus is on the experience of infantrymen (though not always consistently, as several of her primary sources were written by soldiers in other combat branches such as armor) and draws mostly on Anglo-American literature, with an occasional contribution from French and German veterans. Roberts has a good eye for anecdote. Much of the book consists of verbatim quotes from British and American soldiers in Italy, France, and the Low Countries, describing in arresting and sometimes stomach-churning detail the manifold miseries of heat, cold, hunger, and squalor that the war subjected them to.
The writing is crisp throughout. The author’s approach is subtle, compassionate, and often cleverly conceived, with the chapter on wounded soldiers particularly good. Sheer Misery will certainly disabuse readers of any naïvely anodyne assumptions about what front-line soldiering in 1944 Europe felt like for the P.B.I. (‘Poor Bloody Infantry’) who had to endure it. That said, there are weaknesses to Roberts’ subjective first-person approach which are never really addressed. She argues in her introduction that ‘studying sensations and bodily events can tell us much about how frontline soldiers saw their world’ (p. 7). This is true enough. But it is also important to stress the limitations of that world view. It might well have seemed to some beleaguered grunt in a fox hole that the powers-that-be thought of him and his buddies merely as ‘abstract units of violent force … taught to choose obedience over anything else’ (p. 67). But the wartime Anglo-American armies devoted enormous attention to the physical and psychological well-being of their men (however imperfectly delivered at times) precisely because they understood that temporary citizen-soldiers from prosperous democratic societies could not be treated as automatons. Indeed, much of the British and American way of war in 1944 to 1945 was built around casualty conservation, substituting firepower and machinery for manpower to preserve life. Foucauldian musings about the body and power are not an adequate substitute for looking at the infantry experience from the top down as well as bottom up.
Sheer Misery offers little engagement with the existing historiography of the European campaigns. That is perhaps understandable given that it is a slim volume aimed at a general audience. It is a shame, though, that it does not reflect on some of the larger questions its evidence raises. For instance, given the undoubted fact that the infantry experience in northwestern Europe could be every bit as dismal as Roberts’ sources suggest, why was there never any large-scale breakdown in morale or discipline in the Anglo-American armies? The US Army executed only one man for desertion in the whole war. The British Army had abolished the death penalty for desertion in 1930. The punitive mechanisms available to German generals (who shot 15,000 of their own men) and Soviet generals (who executed a stunning 158,000 soldiers of the Red Army) simply did not exist in the West. That being the case, why did so many miserable British and American front-line troops stick it out regardless? Sheer Misery whets the appetite for such broader questions. But readers wanting answers to them are still better directed toward older literature such as Peter Schrijvers’ The Crash of Ruin: American Combat Soldiers in Europe during World War II (1998).