On the Beaches of Northern France
The English Channel was rough, waves slapping against the sides of the landing craft. It was the morning of June 6, 1944. The young soldier felt the cold salt spray on his face. The horizon w as a blur of smoke and fire.
As the craft closed on the beach, the ramp dropped with a thud. The soldier plunged into the surf, the icy water seizing his breath. His heart was a hammer in his chest, and his pack felt as if it had been filled with bricks.
Friends fell around him, cut down by German machine gun fire. He could barely hear anything over the constant roar of artillery, which rang in his head like a heavy bell.
Slowly, he pushed forward, every step a battle against the tide and the chaos to the blood-soaked sand. He made it to the beach, scrambling for cover behind one of the sinister-looking iron cross structures that dotted the shore. The Germans had set these up to ensure any assault would be as deadly as possible, but in this brief moment, they at least provided a few seconds' respite before the next charge into the gunfire.
In the Hürtgen Forest
It was now November 1944, and the soldier moved cautiously through the dense undergrowth of the dark forest. The trees were thick, forming a canopy that shut out the sky. The cold ran up from the sodden ground through his boots and into his bones.
Every step brought with it the risk of death from hidden mines or unseen snipers. Even without the snow and the mud, the woods made perfect defensive terrain. Often, there was no way to evacuate the wounded.
The battle had already been going for two months by this stage. There was almost another month to go. It was a slow, grinding fight, with each day blending into the next in a haze of fatigue and fear.
In the Frozen Ardennes
By mid-December, the fight had moved to the Ardennes region of Belgium. The trees were somewhat less dense, but the battlefield was even colder. The cold attacked the young soldier like a flesh-eating disease, gnawing at his skin.
A surprise German offensive had thrown things into disarray. Snow fell on the battlefield in thick, heavy flakes. The terrain was like a thick white blanket edged with blood-red lacing.
The air was filled with the acrid smell of gunpowder and burning flesh. The enemy soldiers were fresh but poorly trained and equipped. Nevertheless, they threw everything into this.
It felt unbelievable that, after six months of constant battle, the Germans could still launch an offensive like this. The weather was too bad for air support to save the soldier and his colleagues. All they could do was keep repelling the attackers and hold out until reinforcements could arrive.
Amid the Rolling Hills of Bavaria
It was now April of the following year, and the soldier had been chasing the retreating Wehrmacht across Germany. The war was drawing to a close, and though danger remained, the point of maximum peril had passed. His company was now amid the picturesque villages of Southern Germany.
The soldier felt that whatever the future might bring, nothing would ever be as horrific as the last year of fighting.
That was until the gates of Kaufering IV swung open to reveal an entirely new kind of nightmare. Living skeletons walked around aimlessly inside, staring at the soldier and his friends. Their eyes were hollow and lifeless, sunken deeply into their gaunt faces.
Moving deeper into the camp revealed hastily dug pits filled with the bodies of the dead. The crude mounds of earth barely covered the grotesque tangle of limbs and lifeless faces that the fleeing guards had left behind. The only sounds were the weak and failing moans of the prisoners who had, somehow, survived.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t war.
Extraordinary and Extraordinarily Common
What were you doing when you were 25 years old? Still in your mid-twenties, were you full of ambition and ready to face the challenges of the world? Did you thank God that you were not about to have a year like our young soldier did?
His experience is so alien to anything we moderns are called upon to face. Yet it was utterly common. Men from all over the world were thrown into those circumstances, faced death and terror we can’t comprehend, and then went back to their lives to work as farmers, factory workers, teachers, salesmen, caretakers, and office clerks.
He Lived Through It All
In the case of the young soldier—J.D. Salinger—he went on to become an acclaimed novelist. He survived Normandy, the Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge before his 26th birthday. He was then among those tasked with the haunting liberation of Kaufering IV.
In the aftermath of the war, he began writing The Catcher in the Rye, which was published in 1951. It is considered to be one of the greatest novels of all time. Those who have not read it may be surprised to learn it is not about his war experiences but about an alienated teenager wandering the streets of New York trying to find authenticity and meaning.
Unlike we postmoderns, who often feel compelled to process and share every trauma in vivid detail, Salinger never wrote any kind of memoir or fictionalised account of his war experiences. Perhaps the fact that hundreds of thousands of men had been through the exact same thing had something to do with that.
A Perspective Beyond Age
I am in my late 30s now. That’s well beyond the age where one would be called upon to fight in an invasion, even if we still lived in the era of such cataclysmic warfare. For me, what these men went through is something I have to try to imagine because, thank the Lord, I’ve never been called upon to experience anything remotely like it.
Very few people now living in this country have. Yet we remain ever willing to appropriate the experiences of these unimaginably young men to make petty points about our present-day politics. Woke idiots share memes about Normandy being an “antifa” gathering, as if they wouldn’t be the first to condemn those men in real life for having "problematic” opinions. They’re opposed by phonies on the right who wrap themselves in the sacrifices of those men to score points of their own.
They were tougher than we are because the times were tougher
J.D. Salinger's daughter recounts that despite his increasing reclusiveness, her father never concealed nor boasted about his military service. It wasn't the core of his identity, but he always acknowledged its significance. His wartime experiences were a part of who he was, as with most of his contemporaries. They shared a toughness that we can’t access because we’ve never had to be as tough as they were.
We all know the St. Crispin's Day speech before the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V. The famous phrase "we band of brothers," has been invoked often to describe the bonds forged by war. But the true climax of that speech speaks of those not there feeling themselves accursed for that fact, and holding their manhood cheap when any speaks who fought that day.
So much experienced by men so young
I don’t feel particularly accursed. The 25-year-old Salinger fought off the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. The 25-year-old Liam Hehir was just knocking on doors, trying to get a National Party candidate elected in Palmerston North.
I am grateful that this was the impossible task the universe alloted me rather than the calling to walk through Hell in service of my country. Everyone who has never been put to that test should feel that way. I am sure Salinger would have been the first to agree.
But I certainly do hold my manhood cheap thinking about that generation. That’s how we should feel about the men of both world wars. No more, no less.
There are so few of them still alive today. The funny thing is, however, is that with every passing year I get older and fatter and uglier. But whenever I read about Normandy and everything that followed, those men just seem younger and younger.
I would count this piece as probably the best piece of writing that I’ve ever found on Substack. Overwhelming in its depth.