It's worth re-reading works from the trenches of WWII. US troops haven't had to fight a war like that within living memory. Ukraine and Russia are fighting one now.<p>The clouds of war are gathering. Germany is making plans for a draft. Poland tried a small-scale test mobilization of civilians. Poland and Latvia are planning to send back Ukrainian males who dodged the draft there. Sweden and Finland never stopped having a draft.<p>Russia is currently spending over 7% of GDP on its military. The EU averages around 1.5%. US around 2.9%. Russia supposedly lost 40,000 soldiers in Ukraine last month alone, although nobody has solid numbers. That's about 4x the losses on the Allied side for D-Day in 1944. Big wars kill large numbers of people.
To this I will add two more longish, striking, compulsively readable pieces about World War II:<p><i>Thank God For the Atom Bomb</i> (also by Paul Fussell): <a href="https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/unde...</a><p><i>Losing the War</i> by Lee Sandlin: <a href="https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm</a>
Author of <i>The Great War and Modern Memory</i> [1], an amazing history.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_Modern_Memory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_Modern_Memor...</a>
> <i>Travail...Famille...Patrie</i> (Work, Family, and Patriotism)<p>the opposition of these values to <i>liberté égalité fraternité</i> doesn't seem to have changed much in the intervening eight decades
John McCarthy (LISP) wrote on USENET about his emotions as a draftee hearing the A-Bomb had been dropped and he wouldn't have to storm the beaches of Japan.
Related:<p><i>The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33184040">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33184040</a> - Oct 2022 (161 comments)<p><i>Book Review: Fussell on Class</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32188044">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32188044</a> - July 2022 (1 comment)<p><i>Book Review: Fussell on Class</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351913">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351913</a> - March 2021 (75 comments)<p><i>The Real War 1939-1945, by Paul Fussell (1989)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4027749">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4027749</a> - May 2012 (78 comments)<p><i>Paul Fussell, Literary Scholar and Critic, Is Dead at 88</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4019325">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4019325</a> - May 2012 (3 comments)<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22fussell%22%20class&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a>
Interesting article. This reminds me of Peter Cawdrons Sci-fi (sic) book "The Anatomy of Courage" which I finished recently. It related to WW I, not II, but also to the ugly truth about war. To quote from its "Afterword":<p><i>"This story is based on the non-fiction book The Anatomy of Courage by Charles McMoran Wilson, 1st Baron Moran (1882-1977), who was also known as Lord Moran. He served as the personal physician to Sir Winston Churchill. As a doctor in World War I, Lord Moran had no knowledge of concepts such as PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), but he was a keen observer of human nature and captured the heartache of that tragic war. I’ve drawn from the examples he cataloged from the trenches of World War I and expanded on them in this novel, wanting to keep his insights alive."</i><p>And, of course, he talks about Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" too …
War is horrible, and fought for very stupid reasons - at least on one side, and often both.<p>That said... this guy joined the ROTC because it got him out of gym class in high school. That put him on the path to being a lieutenant in WWII, for all the wrong reasons. Sure, it's a crazy system that makes a person like that a leader of soldiers in the first place, but I also don't consider him likely to be a clear-eyed observer of it all.<p>I mean, the horror he experienced is real, and he describes it eloquently. The larger picture... that's where I don't trust him so much.