Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938-1944. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 6, 1995 by Terry Teachout

"THE real war will never get in the books," Walt Whitman wrote in Specimen Days. This sentiment is echoed throughout Reporting World War II, the Library of America's superlatively edited new collection of wartime journalism. Time and again, those who were paid to tell Americans about the war confessed in print their feelings of inadequacy. Even Bill Mauldin, whose Up Front (reprinted in its entirety here) is perhaps the most vivid chronicle of its kind, felt unable to explain to civilians the essence of war:

You can't understand it by reading magazines or newspapers or by looking at pictures or by going to newsreels. You have to smell it and feel it all around you until you can't imagine what it used to be like when you walked on a sidewalk or tossed clubs up into horse-chestnut trees or fished for perch or when you did anything at all without a pack, a rifle, and a bunch of grenades.

It's not for a civilian born in 1956 to second-guess Bill Mauldin, but it strikes me that anyone seeking to understand World War II could do a lot worse than start here. Mauldin's own drawings of Willie and Joe, two hapless dogfaces shivering in the sticky mud of Anzio, speak volumes. So do Ernie Pyle's Scripps-Howard wire dispatches, each one a Goya canvas translated into a few hundred uncomplicated words ("You feel small in the presence of dead men, and you don't ask silly questions"). So do A. J. Liebling's mordantly witty New Yorker stories, possibly the best American writing, not excluding fiction, to come out of World War II.

A few of these pieces are famous: Pyle's recounting of the death of Captain Henry T. Waskow; Edward R. Murrow's tight-lipped, barely controlled report from Buchenwald ("I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words"); William L. Laurence's first-person description of the bombing of Nagasaki; John Hersey's Hiroshima, at once a dazzling piece of reportage and the founding document of postwar liberal guilt. Most, like their authors, are obscure or entirely forgotten. Yet they hold up, especially by comparison with the handful of pieces by such celebrated writers as Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, and Gertrude Stein, virtually none of which is of any value whatsoever. It was the working journalists -- most of them, anyway -- who knew how to keep their personalities out of the way and tell what they saw, and who thereby managed to get a thousand bits and pieces of the real war into the books for all time.

Read in sequence, the selections reprinted in Reporting World War II provide a point of view missing from conventional histories: they tell you what ordinary Americans knew about World War II, and how and when they found out about it. The Japanese - American internment camps, for example, were not a shameful secret hushed up by an embarrassed White House, but a decision known about and publicly debated, often quite angrily, almost from the outset. Nor were the Nazi death camps suddenly discovered by Americans in the spring of 1945: Murrow first described them via shortwave from London on CBS in 1942. The diary-like quality of these volumes adds greatly to their value, and reminds us that despite all the retrospective complaining about how Americans saw World War II through the eyes of military censors, the fact is that they saw a lot.

Not that Reporting World War II tells the whole story of how World War II was reported. Except for Martha Gellhorn's awful Collier's stories, most of the self-aggrandizing I-was-there journalism so beloved of Thirties book buyers has been omitted. So has any hint of how pre-war isolationists made the case for American non- involvement (one or two of H. L. Mencken's Baltimore Sun columns from 1939 and 1940 would have added useful perspective), or any suggestion that the Soviet - American alliance might pose strategic problems for the future, much less that it was morally problematic (one may take leave to doubt that it ever occurred to the editors to include "The Ghosts on the Roof," Whittaker Chambers's famous 1945 essay for Time about the Yalta conference).

Certain other editorial decisions seem to have been motivated by political correctness. Women writers are overrepresented, for the most part to little effect. On the other hand, the selections by black journalists, nearly all of them correspondents for the great black newspapers of the Forties, are consistently illuminating, not least because they contain the only voices of dissent to be heard in these volumes. For example, Roi Ottley's "Negroes Are Saying . . ." offers a deeply unsettling reminder that many blacks at first saw little reason to fight for a country that treated them as subhuman; I flinched when Ottley compared the "atmosphere of judicial fairness and public calm" in which suspected Nazi saboteurs were tried to a lynching of a black man that took place in my Missouri hometown in 1942.

In a way, the most fascinating thing about Reporting World War II is the almost complete absence from its pages of debate about the wisdom or morality of the war. Fascinating, that is, for those of us who grew up listening not to Ed Murrow but to Walter Cronkite, and whose war was not World War II but Vietnam. Such unanimity of purpose is hard for baby-boomers to grasp, or even imagine: we were taught to believe that truth was a matter of opinion, patriotism a bourgeois relic, and military service an obligation of the lower classes. America was a very different country in 1941, and these two volumes, among their many virtues, do much to explain the difference.