Back to News

War is misery

A new book by distinguished history professor Mary Lou Roberts explores the visceral suffering of soldiers through their diaries.

by Conrad Allen November 10, 2021
Share

This review is condensed from the original article by Conrad Allen.

Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII by Mary Louise Roberts.

“Dogfaces.” “Dough feet.” “The poor bloody infantry.” Soldiers in Europe during the second World War called themselves a range of names, and neither knew nor cared much about their generals’ plans. But they filled their diaries with sensory descriptions of the front, like the sound of artillery shells, the taste of rations, and the sight of corpses. In Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII, Mary Louise Roberts, WARF Distinguished Lucie Aubrac Professor and Plaenert Bascom Professor of History, examines the physical and mental lives of infantrymen fighting on the Western Front from 1943 to 1945, offering a compelling account of the hardships that World War II foot soldiers bore, and offering historians stimulating new ways to think about wartime sources.

Roberts’ new book (University of Chicago Press, 2021) centers on three “high-water marks of infantry misery:” the Allied attempts to break through the Winter Line in Italy, the bloody fighting in Normandy after D-Day, and the battles in Holland and the Ardennes during the final winter of the war. Each chapter is brimming with firsthand accounts from dozens of diaries and memoirs, some of them very obscure. Roberts draws mostly from the American and British perspectives, with the occasional quote from French and German sources to show that infantry suffering transcended army lines.

In a chapter titled “The Foot,” Roberts explores soldiers’ views on trench foot, the skin rot which set in when men went too long without removing soaked boots and socks. In 1944 and 1945 the condition afflicted over 46,000 American infantrymen, yet trench foot was preventable. Why, then, did US forces in Europe suffer so severely from it? One reason was the poor quality of GI boots, but Roberts argues that “at a more profound level, trench foot emerged as a result of the military logic governing the infantryman’s body.” In order to turn men into manpower, army training focused on endurance and discouraged recruits from showing signs of weakness. This toughening up worked too well, for on the battlefield, where bodies did break down, many troops either ignored or did not notice the signs. When trench foot ravaged American lines during the winter as a result, the army blamed its own soldiers for “poor foot discipline.”

The overarching theme of these essays is the conflict between regular soldiers and their commanders over control of the body. Roberts explains that military authorities saw management of the body as the key to producing fit and obedient troops. Basic training taught men to ignore their bodies’ limitations, while manuals regulated even the smallest details of bodily hygiene, reminding recruits, for instance, that bowels were to be moved “regularly once each day at as nearly the same time as possible.”

But control of men’s bodies broke down on the frontline. War made bodies filthy, damaged, and sick. Artillery shells tore off limbs, and dysentery ran so rampant in American battalions that troops took to calling diarrhea “the GIs.” Combat revealed the paradox of military logic: armies demanded that infantrymen remain healthy and clean, and simultaneously put them in positions that made it impossible to do so.

Combat troops developed their own ideas about what it meant to be a body at war. The ability to distinguish types of gunfire by their sound separated the veterans from the replacements. Smell, too, functioned as an indicator of a man’s worth. Everyone stank at the front, but losing control of your bowels was humiliating. Food also weighed heavily on infantrymen’s minds. Men dreamed of home-cooked meals and griped about bland army rations, which they considered evidence of their poor treatment by an ungrateful high command. Roberts offers insight on wartime memoirs by showing how infantrymen used their senses to survive and comprehend the battlefield.

American and British officers insisted on spotlessness even in places like the frozen Apennines, where they forced men to shave with ice-cold water or locked them up when they appeared on leave with muddy uniforms. Roberts showcases the unusual feud between General George Patton (1885-1945) and Sergeant Bill Mauldin (1921-2003), creator of the cartoon characters “Willie” and “Joe.” Mauldin’s fictional GIs incensed Patton because of their dirtiness. When Patton met Mauldin in 1945, he accused him of trying “to start a goddamn mutiny.” While an obsession with cleanliness reflected army training, Patton was hopelessly out of touch with the way ordinary soldiers perceived dirt. GIs loved Mauldin’s cartoon because they saw themselves in its grimy, miserable characters. Everyone at the front knew that a real combat soldier was not clean like Patton – he was dirty like “Willie” or “Joe.”

Dead bodies were an unavoidable sight on the Western Front, and like the wounded they bore different meanings depending on who was looking at them. To commanders, corpses were a strategic problem to be cleaned up. Units listed their killed-in-action as “dead stock,” and Graves Registration teams piled up fallen US troops and their personal effects like logs. To soldiers, the dead and their treatment served as reminders of their own expendability. GIs treated the fallen with respect, even dead Germans, most of the time. By doing so they sought to assert the human dignity of infantrymen in a war which constantly denied it.

Sheer Misery is a visceral account of life in war, but it is also much more. Roberts’s analysis of the “language of sense” is a reminder that even history’s largest industrial war was fought at the end of the day by human bodies, and that it was the infantryman’s body which suffered most.

Conrad Allen is a former PhD candidate and George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his M.A. in history from UW in 2018 and his B.A. from the Ohio State University in 2016.