Ben Yagoda: Why We Got a Better Feel for What It Was Like to be a Soldier in WW II

At 5:30 a.m. on February 24, 1941, a twenty-one-year-old Dartmouth graduate named Walter Bernstein reported to Draft Board 179 in his native borough of Brooklyn. He and his fellow future soldiers were greeted by a member of the draft board: “a small, round, baldheaded man,” Bernstein wrote later, “who came in smiling and rubbing his hands, and immediately knocked on a table for silence.”

After calling out a roster, the man led the inductees outside.

“They walked down the dark street toward the subway. The street lamps shone yellowly on the sad, dirty remains of the last snowfall. ‘I should have brought my rubbers,’ someone said. At the subway the baldheaded man stopped and took a pack of government transit tickets from his pocket. He gave these to the lead man, together with a printed list of instructions as to where he should go. Then he beamed at all the men and said in a loud voice, ‘Good luck, fellows.’ He waved cheerily as the men trooped down the subway stairs. ‘You little baldheaded son of a bitch,’ one of the men said, but the little man did not seem to hear.”

Those words appeared in Bernstein’s 1945 book, Keep Your Head Down. They provide a flavor of what makes the book so extraordinary. In clear-eyed, crisp, unsentimental, highly cinematic, and resolutely unjingoistic prose, Bernstein offered a sense of what it was like to experience World War II, from induction to discharge. The correspondents who got the most acclaim at the time, and who are read in the survey courses today, tended to be the Bigfeet: Liebling with the big voice, Hemingway with the big irony, Hersey with the big story, Ernie Pyle with the big heart. Bernstein was a miniaturist by nature, and as such was and is easy to look past. His work bears a resemblance to Pyle’s, but the differences are telling. Pyle had been a newspaperman for two decades when he started covering the war, and in his pieces you feel that he had taken on the official role of Chronicler of the American GI: he was polished, occasionally sentimental, always sympathetic, and inevitably a bit at arm’s length from the men he was writing about. Bernstein was an enlisted man; the view from the ground was the view he saw. It is a view that today’s embedded reporters, despite a wealth of gadgetry that brings Iraq into our living rooms, are unable to deliver. Bernstein’s grunt’s-eye perspective, combined with his literary talent and his innate skepticism, produced meticulously observed set pieces that evoked the near-constant fear, uncertainty, and hunger felt by men involved in achieving profoundly unspectacular objectives — the fog of war, as the currently popular formulation goes. ...

s I write, there is a war going on, and among its many differences from World War II is the nature of the prose it has generated. Walter Bernstein was one of thousands of current and future writers drafted into service. He produced outstanding journalism; his counterparts refracted their experience into fiction (Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut), poetry (Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell), drama, film, and even humor. Those talented chroniclers saw to it that the war was in an important sense a shared national experience.

With some notable exceptions (like Anthony Swofford and Joel Turnipseed, authors respectively of Jarhead and Baghdad Express), the all-volunteer army doesn’t attract many literary types. We have the brave and sometimes eloquent embedded reporters, but they’re mainly producing stories about “the organization” — strategy and training, objectives and preparedness, mission and manpower. Even when they attempt to turn from macro to micro, they are inevitably, like Ernie Pyle, at arm’s length from the grunt on the ground — able to share his tent but not the feeling in his gut.

The result is an unfortunate irony. As we often hear, digital communication has made the world a smaller place. We can see the troops in Iraq in real time. Yet their experience remains profoundly remote and distant from us at home. A book like Keep Your Head Down reminds us of a time when a talented writer, utilizing a manual typewriter and airmail, could make his home-front readers feel what making war was like.