June 17, 2000

Annotated: February 4, 2001

ARTICLES ON WORLD WAR II

It has taken me 50+ years to record what I have put here. For all those years I did not want to talk about it, think about it or to have anything to do with anyone involved intimately with me (except my squad buddies).

In keeping with my moral obligation to disperse my knowledge to those who are coming along I have written these articles about the blunt truth of combat, training , weapons and combat casualties in World War II.

In the past 55 years since World War 2 I have read at least 50 books on war and other insanities of mankind. I have read every book by John Keegan, the famous military historian. I note that John Keegan makes a point of the fact that his generation has not suffered through a world war and that he was never in battle:

"I have not been in a battle; nor near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath....But I have never been in a battle.And I grow increasingly convinced that I have very little idea of what a battle can be like."The Face of Battle". John Keegan, Penguin Books, 1978, page 13.

I have read a great deal of fiction (e.g.: The Thin Red Line) about infantry combat including some of the books about combat in the Pacific in WW2. I have never found or read a book about infantry combat by someone who has done it!

There are memories or memoirs of some combatants but they are mostly a veneer.

I have tried to write the whole story about myself as a a civilian who went into infantry combat because his country told him to do it (as if I had a choice!). The decision was strictly a question of age: the youngest and the strongest were always sent into infantry!

ASTP (The Army Specialized Training Program) was for the relatively high IQ's of the U.S. Army, all of whom were college age (18 to 24). All or almost all of the ASTP students were sent into the infantry when the war got rough in 1944. They sent the highest IQ's into the Infantry where combat would kill or wound at least 99 percent of them (yes, 99 percent!). It's called the selective elimination of the brain power in your country or brainicide (my word)!

These articles are all about the Infantry of the U.S. Army as I knew it. No bull, no whining, no flag waving but the blunt truth as well as I remember it including some things about which nobody either writes or talks about (of all those in combat what percent get wounded or killed?).