Just Another Grunt

Early on, the Indy Neidell World War Two documentary split off a series War Against Humanity from its narrative of the ground and surface naval wars. Their story presents the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ in December 1944 as a trivial thing, because the allies quickly put forces in place so that German forces could never break through to anywhere really dangerous, and because by the standards of winter 1944/1945 the forces involved were not huge. They even spend lots of time talking about how specific Anglo generals tried to take credit or shift the blame. I feel like that is the wrong story to tell, because the real story is all the ordinary people who ended up dead, or crippled, or frostbitten when they had started to think they would survive the war more or less intact. Here is one of those stories by the late Fred Pohl:

Unfortunately Cyril (Kornbluth’s) health was deteriorating. Partly this was due to the quantities of coffee, cigarettes, hot pastrami sandwiches and alcohol he had been ingesting since his teens, but mostly it was due to the war. Cyril’s draft number had come up early, but he caught a break. He had worked for a time in a machine shop and thus had experience of operating metal-working machinery. This was just what the artillery people wanted, so they recruited him to work in cannon-repair shops, always located far enough from the front lines that the enemy couldn’t sweep down in a lightning raid and steal the precious machines. It was the kind of a safe and cushy job that several million GIs would have traded their right testicle to get, but in 1944 what looked like a better deal came along.

Higher-ups in the Army’s command circles were calculating that the war was likely to last for years yet, and if so there might be a serious shortage of college-educated candidates to serve as commissioned officers. They didn’t want to get caught short of these valuable resources, so they quickly set up what they called the Army Specialized Training Program, under which the GIs lucky enough to be accepted would be relieved of all duties except going to college. This sounded like a dream of heaven to most GIs, not least because the service’s unrelenting drafts of manpower had left most college student bodies heavily weighted with an excess of young single women.

Cyril applied, was accepted and went happily back to school, though in uniform … until some person higher still than the higher-ups noticed that both the Germans and the Japanese were losing most of the recent battles, and the war might end sooner than they had feared. So ASTP was peremptorily abolished and all its personnel transferred willy-nilly to the infantry. For which branch of service the Army had a great and unanticipated immediate need, since Hitler had managed to launch an immense surprise Christmas attack on the unsuspecting Allied troops in the Ardennes Forest.

So Cyril, who was always a slightly pudgy and definitely unathletic young man, found himself lugging a 50-caliber machine gun around the freezing temperatures and unremitting combat of the Battle of the Bulge. He survived, having acquired for his efforts, 1) a Bronze Star, and 2) a serious case of what the medics called severe essential hypertension.

The hypertension won. Cyril’s editorial career was cut short — a pity, because he would have been an outstanding one. Early in spring of 1958 he had a meeting scheduled with Bob Mills in New York. It had snowed heavily in Levittown, where Cyril lived. He had to shovel out his driveway, which made him just barely able to catch his train, so he ran to the train station and died of a heart attack on the platform.

Frederick Pohl, “Cyril,” The Way the Future Blogs, 20 April 2009 http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2009/04/cyril/ (Wayback Machine)

There were tens of thousands of stories like that. Any one of them is more interesting to me than the stories of the narcissists, careerists, and self-promoters who made up both sides’ high commands. The documentary says that in a technical military sense the offensive never had much chance of success, and that seems to be the majority view today. But I don’t think that the documentary communicates just how much misery and destruction the Battle of the Bulge created for people who had started to believe that they might have a future.

More people fought in World War II than fought for all the Roman emperors from Augustus to Constantine.

(scheduled 14 January 2024)