Cara’s Blog

I found The Greatest Generation Comes Home to be very useful to understanding the differences between World War 2 and the wars we have studied before. Professor McClurken told us about the efforts that FDR put forth to help the veterans but there was even more of an effort than I would expect. For example, this text discussed that a lack of doctors was rare. I remember from our readings about the Revolutionary and Civil Wars that it was a problem at times to obtain medical help for the number of casualties.

The Veterans Administration even made sure that the medical help was to a higher standard than before. Omar Bradley, their new leader called the U.S. Civil Service, the doctors who had been used previously to be “the dregs of the medical profession.” I was also surprised by the real push to get veterans employed. Was it the strong executive power that made Americans more concerned with the soldiers returning home or the massive numbers of men who fought?

Wages of War went into a lot of depth about difficulties that veterans had when they reemerged back in society but Doing Battle allowed me to understand the troubles soldiers faced. By this point in the book, the reader has gotten to know Paul Fussell both before and during the war. I expected his fate to be similar to other soldiers we had learned about. Combat exhaustion, poverty, and social isolation came into a whole new light as I saw the change in the character that had been developed in previous chapters. Fussell was deeply troubled with his own guilt. He asked himself “How could I justify my life?” upon reading memoirs of Tobias Wolff. Fussell wondered why he was still alive and why so many others were dead. I found his college life after the war particularly interesting as well. Now, the author explained “[I was] in an entirely different spirit than before. This time, no playful boyisms: rather a serious search for answers to overwhelming questions and deep annoyance with intrusions and diversions that might interrupt that process.”

When I read the passage on pages 178-181 about Fussell’s interest and passion with war-time poetry I was reminded of a friend of my father’s. The man, now in his 70s published a book of his own poetry about his reflections to the Korean War which he fought in. I was surprised by both Fussell and this local man because both came off has having very tough exteriors. Seeing and reading about grown men, moved to tears by poetry of combat, gives one a scene of how damaging war really is psychologically.

Although Fussell’s piece can be used as a great learning tool, we, as readers, have to keep in mind that his piece is undoubtedly bias. This is one reason it is important to read more than one primary source when researching. One example of this was when Fussell was talking about his classmates as being military snobs. Although this may have been how the author saw these people and himself, it most likely wasn’t this way everywhere. His comparison of classroom professors and sergeants would be seen differently depending on who was observing it. A non-military person probably would not have seen this comparison.

Doing Battle was by far my favorite book for this course. Fussell’s style of writing was personal and engaging. The other memoirs we have read so far have been enjoyable too, but they used a level of constraint and self-censorship. A few passages were too personal like the one about Fussell’s bowel movement during a march but I felt that stories such as this and his description of army food, as “shit-on-a-shingle” gives the reader a better sense of army life. I found the section about the college students’ romantic relationships interesting. There were certainly similarities to the present generation. Pregnancy is still a big fear but now we have the pill and it is more socially acceptable to buy condoms.
The Greatest Generation Comes Home was also an enjoyable read. I thought it was well written and more appealing than Keene’s book. Her introduction raised a lot of interesting questions about the postwar period and explained her thesis very effectively. This is something I need to work on with my own writing. I found her excerpt about women who stayed in the work force after the war. I was under the impression that most returned back to their roles as primary care-givers and home keepers.

The pattern of hatred and discrimination as described in our readings never surprised me but it certainly does continue to bother me. Through history there has always been a targeted group. African Americans seemed to always be a target. Severo and Millford have made very conscience efforts to dedicate large portions of their text to their portrayal. Wages of War described the oppression of Italian immigrants as stronger than other ethnic oppression during this time period. Although my Grand father was very young at the time of the Great War, he has told me about some of the challenges he faced as an Italian Immigrant in America.

I found it interesting to read about the Bonus March from a different perspective. I found Keene’s text to be informative, but a bit tedious. This text went more in-depth about the fear of communism. The government certainly had reason to be concerned with large groups of former military men congregating in the nation’s capital but I didn’t see it as a legitimate threat of communism. Perhaps if the government was more willing to work with their veterans some conflicts could have been resolved.

I found this reading a lot harder to get through this week. It’s a lot more dense and dry than the other passages we’ve been assigned. However, it did contain a lot of information that helped me understand the time period better. I hadn’t even learned about WWI until my senior year in European History. For some reason, we always seemed to skip this war and go on the 2nd world war. Learning about it from the prospective of Europeans was interesting though.

I noticed a lot of similarities between this war and the others we’ve learned about. First off, racial tensions between blacks and whites were still very common, despite what Roy Wilkins may have claimed. I still have to hand it to him for having the courage to say this especially at this point in history. Another similarity I saw was the uprising of veterans against their government. The march of veterans on Washington and their confrontation with reminded me of Shay’s rebellion. The protesting with Shay didn’t go as far as the man who buried himself alive though!

A few things stuck out to me as similarities from previous texts. The first was Alvin York’s strong connection to his religion. Many times in his diary he wrote about praying, being saved, and the how he turned to God while he was at war. This reminded me of the accounts of Sam Watkins from CO. Aytch. Through out the text Watkins and York referred to God as a force that gave them faith even through the horrors of war that they witnessed. York seemed to be more deeply rooted in his faith than Watkins however. It seemed like every other diary entry made a reference to his faith. I would find if hard to keep my faith under the same circumstances.

I noticed that the term Citizen-soldier was used over and over again in the other reading. This is something that was first brought up around the Revolutionary War. I’ve also seen it referenced in newspapers from time to time. The “Doughboys” book referenced the civil war several times, which I felt was important. The Civil War seemed to repeat too many mistakes that were made in the Revolution because it was not learned from. For WWI people like President Wilson looked back on the previous great war to make more educated decisions to avoid issues such as desertion. If we don’t learn from history we are doomed to repeat it, which I think the people of this era realized.

The ignorance of some of the individuals from the reading dumbfounded me. No wonder soldiers were widely feared when they came home and no wonder there was such an outbreak of violence in America after the Civil War. With 10,000,000 pills and 2,841,000 ounces of opiates given out liberally to wounded veterans how could this not happen? With large portion of the country readjusting to society and fighting the “soldiers disease” of heroin and morphine addiction I can imagine that there was a lot of chaos. By the time it was realized how serious these drugs were, it was too late. The damage had been done. Something else that shocked me was that families of confederate soldiers were not allowed to lay flowers on the graves of their dead. One man went as far as to say that it was desecration to do this because the confederates were rebels. That men and women had to hide flowers in their clothing to lie down is absurd.

While I do not identify with the hatred that was felt by many Southerners towards blacks, I think the North was to blame for a lot of the racial out lash. Based on the readings from To Appomattox and Beyond we know how much southern men valued their masculinity. They were pressured from all sides of society to preserve their manhood and this included the power of human ownership. As the south was rightfully stripped of this right they felt as if their manhood was “crushed.” Right away the same men that they had recently owned started to hold offices and essentially govern them. Furthermore, black troops were sent by the north to try to control order after the war’s end because white troops had no desire to. “Social Fraternities” like the KKK helped Southern men regain what manhood they believed they lost.

The similarities between all the wars we have studied so far are remarkable. As the war went on Sam Watkins grew sick of fighting. He saw horrific sights of the hanging of two teenage spies, “blood covered ground… [and] the groans of the wounded and dying” (169) in many battles, and the remains of men which he regretted to kill. Wages of War picks up almost where Co. Aytch leaves off. Yet again the nation is faced with the dilemma of what is to happen to the veterans who come home along with many more questions. What would happen to the freed blacks? If they were even to be freed, and what would happen to the South? The death of Abraham Lincoln complicated these questions more.

I wasn’t terribly surprised to read that Nathaniel Hawthorne though that “no war should be fought over [slavery]” and that it would “ultimately go away by itself.” However, it made me a little frustrated with human ignorance. To say that slavery would “ vanish like a dream” after its used has been fulfilled is foolish, heartless, and makes about as much sense as assuming, as the author points out, that the Axis Powers during WWII would just “vanish like a dream.”

The first thing that struck me about Co. Aytch was the colorful character whom told the story. As he introduces himself Sam Watkins tells the reader that his story was of the “little misconception of there being such a thing as a north and a south.” He was careful in the first chapter to refer to the Northerners and Southerners by the way their water courses ran. As the story went on Sam Watkins found that Patriotism was different upon enlisting as it was in the actual war. Men eagerly signed up for the War of 1812 only to find the blood shed and hardships to suck all the spirit of ’76 of out them. This was the case also with the main character in the novel Across Five Aprils. In this story a young man, Jethro Creighton joins the Union Army thinking that war will be fun and full of expressive patriotism. After seeing his brothers and his cousins die in battle Jethro has to grow up quickly and realizes that War was nothing like he imagined.

Many things surprised me in the Co. Aytch. In the two wars we’ve already studied we had learned that there were hardships. One could assume that the modern army would have learned from some of these mistakes. Men freezing due to lack of proper clothing, brutal punishments from within their own troops, and high rates of deserters seemed a little too familiar to me. Since this is a confederate soldiers memoir perhaps some of these accounts do not apply to the Union Army which was more organized and run by the President. The bravery of some men I found remarkable. Watkins recollects a time when one of his soldiers grabbed the reins of Union army’s horse and told him to surrender. The man pulled out his gun quickly and shot the confederate. Surely he must have known this could have happened yet he still remained loyal to his troops.

I could not believe the drastic difference between how the Revolutionary Soldier was viewed during the time of the war and at the turn of the century. The men who, twenty years ago, were thought of as scum, the dregs of society, were now being portrayed as heroic. Why the sudden change? It couldn’t possibly be that people of this later time were more simply more compassionate. I found a few reasons that it would be convenient to portray Veterans in such a light.

The first thing I noticed was that publications were being more through. John Marshall’s The Life of George Washington, and Mercy Otis Warren’s children’s history of the Revolution described the horrors and hardships of the winter at Valley Forge. Other publications such as Port Folio, Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, and Military Monitor and American Register were very effective in changing public opinion with a hint of historical tweaking.

Another observation I made was that the “spirit of ‘76” seemed to become a popular way to almost force nationalism. When Americans found themselves in another armed conflict, it needed some way of getting men to enlist. Stories of the revolutionary soldiers bravery and patriotism were successful at getting young men to join stand up and fight. Eventually the numbers dwindled as the soldiers found that war is not so glorious. To me the “spirit of ‘76” was almost a way to make people feel obligated to go along with patriotism. They knew from the revolution that they very well may turn out to be homeless, penniless, cripples, however, to contemplate joining for these reasons would be unpatriotic. Through the examples of popular texts, these people would be heavily criticized.