The War Complex

World War II in Our Time

Marianna Torgovnick

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780226808796
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The recent dedication of the World War II memorial and the sixtieth-anniversary commemoration of D-Day remind us of the hold that World War II still has over America's sense of itself. But the selective process of memory has radically shaped our picture of the conflict. Why else, for instance, was a 1995 Smithsonian exhibition on Hiroshima that was to include photographs of the first atomic bomb victims, along with their testimonials, considered so controversial? And why do we so readily remember the civilian bombings of Britain but not those of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo?Marianna Torgovnick argues that we have lived, since the end of World War II, under the power of a war complex—a set of repressed ideas and impulses that stems from our unresolved attitudes toward the technological acceleration of mass death. This complex has led to gaps and hesitations in public discourse about atrocities committed during the war itself. And it remains an enduring wartime consciousness, one most recently animated on September 11.Showing how different events from World War II became prominent in American cultural memory while others went forgotten or remain hidden in plain sight, The War Complex moves deftly from war films and historical works to television specials and popular magazines to define the image and influence of World War II in our time. Torgovnick also explores the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the emotional legacy of the Holocaust, and the treatment of World War II's missing history by writers such as W. G. Sebald to reveal the unease we feel at our dependence on those who hold the power of total war. Thinking anew, then, about how we account for war to each other and ourselves, Torgovnick ultimately, and movingly, shows how these anxieties and fears have prepared us to think about September 11 and our current war in Iraq.

C H A P T E R O N E

D - D A Y

On the Beach

On the beaches today, there’s not much to see in a material sense: a few rotted and deserted landing craft; intermittent monuments where groups stop to read inscriptions; a small museum and remnants of portable harbors; a few surviving German bunkers, and (at Pointe du Hoc) huge, moonlike craters made by the Allied bombardment. Random picnickers, children at play, a few surfers. Dramatic sky, with roiling clouds against the blue bluster, and intermittent showers, even in July.

But it would be wrong, finally, to say that there is nothing to see on the beaches. The sky testifies to the invasion’s risks, since weather in such a climate might quickly change. The small groups include families sharing information with children or teens—a generational chain into the future. Most of all, from Sainte-Mère-Èglise and Utah Beach in the west to Cabourg in the east, the full front of the invasion measures some fifty miles—and the visual impression of distance is impressive in itself.

At Omaha, the bloodiest beach by far, the one the Americans spent all day on, I walked down to the water and then considered the view toward the land. At Colleville-sur-Mer, one would have found a shingle of stones soldiers reached for protection, now a slightly vertical row. One would have seen roads from the beach, which would probably have formed special targets for attack and defense. One would have seen a bluff, now green and peaceful, with other tourists looking down on the beaches while I looked up at them. GIs and Germans would have been in the same visual proximity. Distant. But still discernible as tall or short—much like singers in an opera, seen from the upper balcony.

But what really counts in Normandy is the symbolism of the place, the way that this sand, these beaches, have become a synecdoche for the Allied victory, for the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, and, once the Nazi camps had been breached and opened, for the defeat of a system of evil that shocked the world. In 1984, President Reagan used the site to invite the Soviets, his former “evil empire,” back into the circle of Allies; in 2004, President Bush used the site to shore-up a sagging Atlantic Alliance. When it comes to Normandy, the symbolism is enormous; and, for American presidents, there is truly something about D-Day.¹

Like its entry into World War I, the U.S. entrance into land combat in Western Europe came very late. Americans had fought for years in the Pacific and had already landed in Italy, capturing Rome at roughly the same time as Operation Overlord; they would fight in Europe for almost a year after D-Day, including the very difficult and costly Battle of the Bulge. Still, D-Day has come to represent the United States’ most significant land presence in the Nazi war. After 1945, it came to justify the triumph of American wealth and power and to naturalize the story of American triumphalism, which leads strongly from 1945 to the present.

Some facts, found in almost every history of the war: the Germans expected the invasion at Calais, the shortest distance across the English Channel and a harbor able to receive the supplies and reinforcements any invasion force would need. Because surprise was key to success in Normandy, the Allies surrounded their plans with substantial secrecy. They staged fake build-ups in the south of England to support the idea that the invasion would come at Calais; having broken Nazi codes, they sent false messages intended to be intercepted and to mislead. They built two manmade harbors called mulberries over an extended period of time, breaking them into parts and submerging them underwater so that they wouldn’t be seen by German aircraft before they were surfaced, towed after the invasion fleet, and quickly reassembled. Operation Overload had a complicated plan that depended on secrecy and on all components working well. It also depended on tides and weather.

The original date, June 4, 1944, had to be postponed. Continuing bad weather lulled the Germans into thinking no invasion could come in early June when the tides otherwise favored one. Eisenhower cast a roll of the dice when he decided to launch the invasion on June 6 since the next window of opportunity, two weeks later, might have given the Germans time to break the secrecy so important to the Allied plan. He wrote a short, frank letter taking full responsibility if the invasion failed.²

With 5,000 ships, the invasion fleet was the largest ever launched and left England slightly after midnight on June 6; landings began around dawn and continued through the day. As anticipated, some of the landings were relatively easy, while others were brutally hard. On Sword and Juno beaches, where the British and Canadians landed, casualties proved light, less than 1 percent of those landed.³ On Utah beach, successful bombardments also eased resistance, resulting in what John Keegan calls “little loss” there as well (Second World War, 386). Cloud cover misled pilots over Omaha Beach, so that the Americans who landed there not only found the fiercest resistance, they also found the least protective cover. Descriptions stress how, at Omaha, the Americans were “visitors to Hell.”

Already, the familiar story of the invasion tells only part of the truth. Contemporary sources like the New York Times and Life covered the story in detail both in advance of the much-anticipated invasion and afterward—how could they not? But the coverage differs from what many today would expect. Pitched in cultural memory as a matter of a single day, of winning or losing the war, the invasion on June 6, 1944, formed only one of a plethora of important military stories albeit, in early June, the newest one and first among equals. The headline of the extra edition of the New York Times for that day reads “Allied Armies Land in France in the Havre-Cherbourg Area; Great Invasion Is Under Way.” It showed an accurate map, though the full understanding that Normandy was the invasion’s site (versus ports like Le Havre or Cherbourg) seems not yet to have been fully digested. Three subheadings cross the front page: “Roosevelt Speaks,” about the fall of Rome; “Pursuit on in Italy”; “Eisenhower Acts.” Three other front-page stories back up the invasion headline: “Parade of Planes Carries Invaders”; “Allied Warning Flashed to Coast”; and “Eisenhower Instructs Europeans; Gives Battle Orders to his Armies.” But the fall of Rome earns two other front-page stories as well. In miniature, the page conveys the sense of Europe at war, the world at war, in which the day’s news could be, quite simply, overwhelming.⁴

Because magazines have long lead times, a periodical like Life did not run a story about the invasion in its June 12 issue. The coverage arrived in the June 19 issue, with Eisenhower on the cover identified simply by name; his image was one in a series of military cover portraits in 1944, most likely held until the invasion began. The coverage features Robert Capa’s photos of the invasion as well as a D-Day diary, which covers most of the standard events.⁵

What’s most surprising today is how long it took to declare the invasion a success. When the generals arrive onshore (a few days after June 6, according to the June 26 Life), reporters took it as a sign that the invasion will succeed, though success, the magazine reports, cannot be “determined” for about five weeks (21). And, in a tribute to secrecy, both the Times and Life depend on and quote German sources for some news.

The June 26, 1944, issue of Life captures the sense of the invasion dominant at the time. Entirely devoted to America at war, the issue leads off with a story about Normandy, moves to a more extensive story about Rome, and includes stories about the South Pacific and Burma. It prints maps of the war fronts, which show quite graphically that D-Day existed as one among several other fronts. In American cultural memory, D-Day is a singular. In the contemporary record, it formed part of a sequence. The first casualty figures given in Life, for example, record those dead in the eleven-day period that began with the invasion (June 26, 1944, 32). As a symbol, D-Day has acquired symbolic importance. But, at the time, it was perceived of and called the opening of a European Second Front.⁶

Although the Allied advance stalled several times, D-Day speeded the liberation of France and shortened the war by taking German troops and supplies away from the Eastern front, a killing field in the summer of 1944 where hundreds of thousands died. Given their diminished air power, it’s unlikely that the Nazis could have forced the British, Canadians, and Americans back into the sea, though it would have been possible, had the Germans reacted more quickly to send in better reinforcements (Keegan, Second World War, 370 –71, 3388–89). Had the Normandy invasion failed, the war would have dragged on, with the Allies continuing the advance from the south and the Soviets continuing the advance from the east until the British and Americans tried again from the west.

But by June 1944, the Reich was done for—and many people, save perhaps Hitler, knew it and had begun to plan, at least provisionally, for what would come after the war. (The famous plot against Hitler’s life occurred in July 1944, and was motivated by interest in suing for peace. Although anything but a great humanitarian, Heinrich Himmler issued orders soon afterward stopping the deportation of Jews from Hungary.) The Germans had only a minimal number of fighter planes left in Normandy and precious few to defend German cities, bombed since midsummer 1940 and increasingly so after 1942.⁷ After the German retreat from Stalingrad—a major, perhaps the major, turning point of the war—the Soviets roared from the east in a way the Germans rightly feared and the United States, fearing it too, downplayed once the war ended and has downplayed ever since.⁸ World War II would almost certainly have been won without success on D-Day. But, had Operation Overlord failed, the war would have lasted longer and the Soviet role in postwar Europe might have been even larger than it was after 1945.

I begin on the beach because, in some ways, American cultural memory of World War II begins there too, albeit somewhat illogically. The United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor; other battles in the Pacific and European wars had been common subjects for newsreels and films made between 1941 and 1944. But D-Day emerged as the chosen symbol of U.S. glory. Britain has its Blitz; the French have the Resistance (the latter, as many scholars have shown, quite equivocal). The United States has Normandy and the D-Day beaches. No wonder, then, that Saving Private Ryan, the first major film about World War II combat in some twenty-five years, begins near the beach.

Representing D-Day: Saving Private Ryan, The Longest Day, and Other Movie Cameos

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998)—a film intellectuals love to hate and so often under-rate—opens with a family visiting the Normandy American Cemetery. A patriarch who was, pretty clearly, a soldier in the war visits a grave, accompanied by an older woman likely to be his wife, a younger man likely to be his son, and others one assumes to be his daughter-in-law, three granddaughters, and a grandson. The man is tearful and garrulous, seeking reassurance and even admiration from his wife. For anyone who frequents World War II memorials, as I do, he is a familiar type: aging, but still vigorous and healthy looking; proud of what he did and wanting it acknowledged by those within earshot; saddened by the memory of the men in the graves he has come to visit. The film then switches, for an exceptionally long twenty-five-minute sequence, to June 6, 1944, and the invasion itself, cutting directly from the patriarch’s eyes to those of Tom Hanks, later identified as Captain John Miller. For any audience worth its salt, the cut sets up the film’s structure of identification and sympathy: with rare exceptions, we see the invasion through the eyes of the character played by Tom Hanks.

The very long invasion sequence, a focal point of reviews, keeps the camera at or below Hanks’s eye level, even floating below water at times. It shows us men riddled with bullets before landing craft ever reach the beach. It shows us men drop off boats and, given their heavy war gear, sink like stones. It shows us legs and arms torn off, heads separated from bodies, brains pierced by bullets. Through a cumulative set of horrific images—the sequence’s twenty-five minutes are extremely long in cinematic time—Spielberg manages to convey an overwhelming question: how could these men possibly have been deposited on or near these beaches, to face these guns and cliffs, apparently without effective air or tank support or cover?

As the enemy’s machine guns begin to rattle and bullets pierce helmets and bodies, one gets the answer: how could these men not charge the cliffs at the end of the beach? The invasion included no contingency plans for failure, so that they had, quite literally, nowhere else to go. In a bit of dialogue that deliberately inverts dialogue in movies that had shown the invasion in the past, Tom Hanks delivers one of Saving Private Ryan’s memorable lines. In response to a question about what will be his unit’s rallying point, he says, “Anywhere but here.”

Spielberg exploits the resources of point of view in rendering confusion as the invasion plan collapsed—”collapsed” not being too strong a word at all for the first landing on Omaha Beach. Soldiers in the first wave of the assault would have been aware of soul-shaking exposure; they would have registered men turning all around them from living bodies to detritus. The film’s emphasis on carnage rings true on the pulses. But it differs from other films taken on or made about D-Day.

The Army Signal Corps and Coast Guard sent a few cameramen along with the first waves of the D-Day invasion—John Ford, later a famous director, shot color footage, some of it transposed into black and white for movie newsreels. But the government stored the footage for years and years rather than displaying it, and some of the film (including Ford’s) was lost, so that we will probably never have a complete, filmed record.⁹ Were one to exist, it would probably show much of what Spielberg did. But, with rare exceptions, regulations at the time prohibited magazines, newspapers, or newsreels from showing graphic pictures of the American dead. Ashore with the second wave of the invasion, Life’s Robert Capa took several shots of Americans in body bags and one of three dead GIs lying neatly near the shore; the caption describes them romantically as “at the end of their adventure.” As Susan Sontag says, “to display the dead, after all, is what the enemy does”;¹⁰ so it’s not surprising that the only truly graphic photograph in Life depicts a rotting German corpse.

The Fox Movietonenews, an important source of filmed information in 1944, positioned D-Day much as the New York Times and Life had: as the next logical step after the fall of Rome.¹¹ It emphasized the preinvasion bombardment, the invasion plan, and the officers’ control over that plan, showing shots of Ike and generals in command on the invasion fleet. It did not show any dead or dying on the beach, nor did it mention any confusion. Indeed, the voice-over assures viewers—some of whom no doubt had family abroad—that the invasion, while difficult, was more difficult in some places than in others.

Reassurance. Control. These two bywords guide one outright falsification in the Movietonenews shots. When it displays soldiers exiting the landing craft, they exit the boats neatly, with no sign of panic or even of hurry. Not a single soldier falls dead or wounded. It looks routine and tidy, almost like a barracks inspection; the troops might almost dust and clean the craft before they disembark. But the light in the shot does not match that in the rest of the news footage: it’s nighttime, not daylight, with klieg lights discernible just outside the frame. Although no words announce a reenactment, that was in fact the case: Movietonenews recreated the unloading to reassure and buoy the folks back home. Since the light doesn’t match, and so clearly doesn’t match, the falsification might have been an open secret; it’s hard to tell at this distance, because such facts tend to remain below the radar screen.

In our own day, cameramen on site by chance at the World Trade Center on 9 /11 left their cameras rolling during events but chose not to film dead or dying bodies. On one tape, audible thuds can be heard, but the tape did not show people hurtling through the atrium, some of them aflame. The image of a severed hand circulated in one edition of New York’s tabloid Daily News, but then disappeared completely (Sontag, 68). After the first few days, newspapers stopped printing and television stopped showing pictures of solo or group jumps from the Towers, perhaps because too many had an uncanny calm and beauty. Given how painful I found it to see shots of people trapped on the upper floors, leaning out of windows and waving for help, these decisions did not register in my mind as censorship, though of course that’s what they technically were. Again in our own day, during the war with Iraq, embedded reporters sent home only the shots seeable from the U.S. front lines and even these were preselected for public viewing. Networks almost entirely deleted pictures showing U.S. casualties; indeed, a minor flap erupted when al-Jazeera broadcast films of American prisoners of war and news channels removed two reporters after remarks deemed too critical.

As I write (it is August 2004), newspapers and television (The News-Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, for example) still print the names and sometimes the pictures of American dead, although the effect has changed since May 2003, when President Bush announced the end of major combat.¹² The much larger number of Iraqi casualties (military and civilian) may never be known, although BBC broadcast an early estimate of around 3,500 civilians (based on hospital figures), noting that the actual totals would likely prove higher and later broadcast estimates from Iraq Body Count suggesting as many as 10,000 killed, with 20,000 wounded.¹³ Because fighting has continued, with urban bombardments and siege, the final figures are likely to be higher still. I mention these facts and ellipses for an important re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Prologue After 9/11
• Introduction
• Chapter One • D-Day
• Chapter Two • Eichmann’s Ghost
• Chapter Three • Citizens of the Holocaust: The Vernacular of Growing Up after World War II
• Chapter Four • Unexploded Bombs
• Chapter Five • “They are Ever Returning to us, the Dead”: The Novels of W. G. Sebald
• Conclusion • Toward an Ethics of Identification
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index