Having made a name for himself as a novelist of wartime thrillers, Guy Walters co-edited a collection of wartime writings, The Voice of War, and has recently just published a brilliant - and surely definitive - account of Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, Berlin Games.

Why American memoirs are More Compelling than European Memoirs
by Guy Walters

FOR THOSE who don’t have strong stomachs, then I suggest you read no further. What follows is an extract of an account of the battle of Okinawa, written by a US Marine who was trying to dig in for the night.

‘The men digging in on both sides of me cursed the stench and the mud. I began moving the heavy, sticky clay mud with my entrenching shovel to shape out the extent of the foxhole before digging deeper. Each shovelful had to be knocked off the spade, because it stuck like glue. I was thoroughly exhausted and thought my strength wouldn’t last from one sticky shovelful to the next.

Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse. There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed my mouth and inhaled with short, shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath them were pushing them out. I cursed, and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into.
“You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart.”
In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket buried in the mud – and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with the ribs attached. The shovel skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels.
I began choking and gagging as I yelled in desperation, “I can’t dig in here! There’s a dead Nip here!”’

Such was the gruesomeness of the assault on Okinawa, a foretaste of the carnage that would probably have ensued had the war not been shortened by the dropping of the atomic bomb. This extract, written by Eugene B Sledge, is typical of many memoirs written by those US servicemen – often Marines – who were unfortunate enough to have fought against the Japanese in the Pacific.
Often, the accounts are brutal, no-holds-barred accounts of the sheer horror of war. Unlike many European memoirs, the
American accounts do not gloss over the real nastiness. You get the maggots, the smells, the bloated corpses of dead children, the drunkenness, the bad language, and the real sense of loathing felt not just for the enemy, but sometimes for their fellow Americans.
The difference between American and European memoirs only became apparent to me when I was researching my anthology The Voice of War, a collection of first-hand accounts of the Second World War. Whenever I read a British memoir, I always felt that the writer was holding back from presenting the full horror of the situations in which he found himself.
At first, I thought this part of the British reserve, but I soon discovered, upon reading memoirs from Germany and Russia, that writers from those countries were also inclined to skip the real brutality. They cannot be blamed for doing so, but part of me felt that I was being cheated of the true nature of war in all its bloody, reeking vileness.
Perhaps, like many of my generation, exposed to gore and violence in film and on TV, I required something a little stronger to turn my stomach. As memoirs are written by those of a gentler generation, perhaps I should not have been surprised that the former combatants were minded to hold back from revealing the full repugnance of what they had seen.
It was not until I read Eugene Sledge’s With The Old Breed, that I realised that there were memoirs that did not hold back. After Sledge, I read William Manchester’s sensational Goodbye, Darkness, a classic account that once again does not deprive its readers of the truly repellent. In this extract, the author describes how he killed his first Jap.

My first shot had missed him, embedding itself in the straw wall, but the second caught him dead-on in the femoral artery. His left thigh blossomed, swiftly turning to mush. A wave of blood gushed from the wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across his legs, pooling on the earthen floor. Mutely he looked down at it. He dipped a hand in it and listlessly smeared his cheek red. His shoulders gave a little spasmodic jerk, as though someone had whacked him on the back; then he emitted a tremendous, raspy fart, slumped down, and died. I kept firing, wasting government property.
Already I thought I detected the dark brown effluvium of the freshly slain, a sour, pervasive emanation which is different from anything else you have known. Yet seeing death at that range, like smelling it, requires no previous experience. You instantly recognize the spastic convulsion and the rattle, which in his case was not loud, but deprecating and conciliatory, like the manners of civilian Japanese. He continued to sink until he reached the earthen floor. His eyes glazed over. Almost immediately a fly landed on his left eyeball. It was joined by another. I don’t know how long I stood there staring.

Can you imagine a British or German soldier writing that? Perhaps occasionally (although I’ve yet to find one), but with American memoirs they are all like that. It is impossible to read more than two or three such memoirs back-to-back, but I’m now going to inflict a passage from George Lince’s Too Young The Heroes for those too jaded to have found the Sledge and the Manchester unpleasant.
Again, this extract is from the assault on Okinawa.

‘We could see four dark figures moving quietly down the road. We hollered “Toamati!” (Japanese for “Halt!”), and they started running even faster toward us! The four of us, highly trained, scared shitless, young marines, opened fire, and watched as they fell in their tracks.
Then, a piercing scream broke the black silence. For a split second, we all froze. Someone was still alive! Then, driven into action by the sound, we ran to the fallen forms and found that they were all civilians. We had killed civilians! We had shot innocent people.
The continuous screaming was coming from a baby, still tied to its mother’s back. A bullet had pierced the mother, killing her instantly, and severing the baby’s arm on the way out. Shocked, my mind and body turned to ice. I was literally frozen with horror. I wanted to run, to disappear, to hide forever from the shame! God, please wake me up from this nightmare!
There was no choice. God forgive us, there was no choice! Against our will, we did the only thing we could. We ended the baby’s life quickly, the cries stopping suddenly. In the silence that followed, we buried all of them. Sweat took the place of the tears we could not shed. I felt empty, lifeless, stripped of the ability to feel any emotions. The last shreds of our own innocence died that night; the sound of a baby’s cry would awaken that horrible memory, forever.’

Why is it that the Americans write so differently about the war? I believe there are three reasons. The first has to be a question of culture – Americans have stronger stomachs than most Europeans for violence, and their writing reflects this. The second lies in the fact that many US memoirs from the Pacific War were written by Marines, and it does not require me to tell you that Marines are not ordinary soldiers. The third reason is that the War in the Pacific was uniquely brutal and savage.
I don’t doubt that this is all a little glib. Of course war anywhere at any time is horrific, but I can only urge you to see for yourself. And to get the full putrefying flavour, you really have to read the Yanks.

Further reading
NB Publishing Houses and dates of publication are only indicative of my collection. Doubtless more recent editions can be found.

The Voice of War edited by James Owen and Guy Walters (Viking 2004)
Too Young the Heroes by George Lince (McFarland & Co 1997)
Goodbye, Darkness by William Manchester (Birlinn 2001)
With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge (OUP 1990)
Company Commander by Charles B MacDonald (Burford Books 1999)
Those Devils in Baggy Pants by Ross S Carter (Signet 1951)
Midnight of the Soul by William F Arendt (PRA, Nebraska)
Seven Roads to Hell by Donald R Burgett (Dell 2000)
A Marine Remembers Iwo Jima by Alfred Stone (Eakin Press 2000)

For more information on Guy Walters and his books, visit www.guywalters.com