Soldiering for Freedom: A GI's Account of World War II
by Herman J. Obermayer
Texas A&M. 324 pp. $32.95
Coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, a clutch of new books has focused on the day-to-day life of American soldiers, mostly as conveyed in letters home to families and loved ones. A number of these books have the additional feature of being organized around the theme of Jewish identity, while others inevitably raise the issue of the Jewish fate in the great battle against Nazism.
Two problems immediately arise from this sort of exercise. The first has to do with the inherent value of personal correspondence as history. War letters tend to be written not in the heat of battle but during downtime, as armies rest or prepare to fight or to move on. As devices for warding off boredom and contending with loneliness, they are tedious almost by their very nature, filled with the dry particulars of barracks life—packages that have arrived or failed to arrive, gripes about the weather, the food, the privileges unfairly afforded to officers, and so on.
Rare are the letters, or the books made from them, that actually illuminate larger events or add meaningfully to our understanding of those events. This is certainly the lesson one takes away from one of the most ambitious recent efforts, Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters.1 Drawn from highly disparate conflicts ranging from the Revolutionary war to Iraq, this collection not only lacks a unifying theme but offers very few “powerful and revealing” sentiments, unless the sentiment that war is hell qualifies as one.
A second problem bedevils World War II letters by American Jewish soldiers in particular, or at least those chosen with an eye for what they can tell us about issues of “identity” (hardly a common obsession in those days). Wrestling on paper with one's Jewishness has its poignancy, no doubt, but in context it can also seem rather small beer against the vast scale of the enterprise in which these soldiers are involved and the human stakes that hinge on its outcome.
A useful example here is GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation. Deborah Dash Moore,2 the author, a professor of religion at Vassar, has drawn on a selection of letters, monographs, interviews, and other material in order to tell the individual tales of some fifteen Jewish GI's hailing mostly from New York City. In her pages we encounter the Jewish loner whose sense of isolation drives him to join a Christian-fellowship group; the assimilated Jew who during a tour of duty in India, brought face to face with the local Jewish community, discovers his own hitherto unsuspected ethnic pride; the Orthodox student from Yeshiva University forced to confront simultaneously the prejudice of Catholic mates and the hostility of a Reform chaplain; and so forth. Unfortunately, despite certain vivid episodes, Moore's hodgepodge of “great moments in Jewish consciousness” adds up to a rather less than instructive whole.
Can one do better by concentrating on a single man's experience? That depends on the man. The GI's Rabbi: World War II Letters of David Max Eichhorn3 is rich in promise but short on delivery. If the details recorded in a grunt's letters home generally tend to the pedestrian, the clergyman reaching for large themes and deep insights tends regularly to the grandiloquent. “Heavy is the responsibility,” Rabbi Eichhorn intones to the congregation of Temple Israel in Tallahassee, Florida on Rosh Hashanah 1940, “which devolves upon him who seeks to bring his people a message in such a time.”
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To be fair, there is one experience—the encounter with the Nazi death camps and their survivors—that can transform the most banal letter-writer, Jewish or non-Jewish, into a true witness, forcing him to put into words what he can barely comprehend. From Behind the Lines, complete with original typos, here is a letter home from Sergeant Arthur I. Wallace of Dayton, Ohio, describing the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by American forces in the spring of 1945. Using a captured SS typewriter whose keys he cannot quite manage, Wallace vividly conveys his feelings of unalloyed astonishment and revulsion:
The real xxxx horror greeted us in the compound and the adjacent railroad tracks. Bodieswere stacked, perhaps piled would be a better word, like so much coal. . . . Seeing those poor starved people of all nationalities was bad enough but here was something one read about it books or a bad dream. Some of the furnaceswere still under fire, others with doors open where in full view were more bodies actually stuffed in like paper. . . . There were ten huge furnaces in this building for the soul purpose of burning the bodies. . . . The box cards held more bodies loaded to top. There must have beenten or twelve cars. We still cant figure out the boxcar idea but when yous ee all this reaseoning departs and you run for the nearest corner to vomit.
As it happens, Rabbi Eichhorn was also at Dachau soon after liberation, where he attempted to hold a campwide Sabbath service for the survivors under the auspices of the International Prisoners' Committee. The ceremony was to include a delegation from every national group represented in the camp, “as an indication of . . . brotherly sympathy for the Jewish people.” On arriving at the main square, however, Rabbi Eichhorn discovered to his amazement that no preparations had been made. According to the committee's representative, the non-Jewish Polish inmates had threatened that “if a Jewish service were held in the square, they would break it up by force.” The murderous European hatred of Jews, we see once again from these words, was a passion capable of outrunning even the Nazi Holocaust.
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Herman J. Obermayer, now a retired newspaper executive in Washington (and a member of this magazine's Publication Committee), did not see battle, and was not present at the liberation of the death camps. Like other recent offerings, Soldiering for Freedom, a collection of letters written to his family while serving in the Army from 1943 to 1946, has plenty to say about tedium in the barracks and other discomforts. Nevertheless, it stands out not only for its acute observations about everyday life in the Army but for its insights into world-historical events going on in the background.
Drafted at the end of his freshman year at Dartmouth, Obermayer was billeted in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he was trained to become an Army engineer. Eventually he arrived in France, placed deep behind Allied lines as a medic and a roustabout on a gasoline pipeline. By the time of his arrival, in January 1945, the war was nearly over, but he stayed in Europe long enough to wangle a hard-to-get gallery pass to the postwar Nuremberg trials; there he witnessed Hitler's designated successor Hermann Goering in the dock and befriended John Woods, the Army's professional hangman, at whose hand those convicted at Nuremberg would meet their deaths (but whom Goering would cheat by suicide).
Particularly noteworthy are Obermayer's reflections on his time in France, and on relations between the French and the Americans. While few today still cling to the myth that most or even a majority of French citizens supported the resistance, many believe that France was an American ally much like Britain and Russia. In fact, while the French may have cheered the arrival of Allied troops in their streets, many among them, particularly the hundreds of thousands who had avidly collaborated with the Nazis and now feared retribution, were hardly rooting for an Allied victory.
For their part, American GI's, often with reason, viewed the French as potential saboteurs. Obermayer took part in this overlooked aspect of the war as a member of a group assigned to protect the pipeline that ran north across France from Normandy to the German border, feeding the tanks and equipment of General Patton's 3rd Army as it advanced on Berlin and fell subject to continuous attempts by avaricious Frenchmen to siphon off the fuel. As he writes in one of the book's brief retrospective essays, “I observed firsthand how effectively French saboteurs, both amateur and professional, slowed the forward progress of America's armies.”
In addition to filling in such small but important facets of the war, Obermayer's letters are notable for the honest, straightforward manner in which this young man endeavored to stay in touch with his family, and for a warmth and respect toward his parents almost impossible to imagine in this day of instant messaging and hip-hop vernacular. Trying (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to join the Normandy invasion, he writes to his father:
Dear Daddy: . . . Today I signed on the dotted line and volunteered for the paratroops. I feel confident that the invasion will prove them to be the outstanding unit of the U.S. Army, as well as all modern armies. . . . I am writing to you at the office because I thought this might disturb Mother a little. I would rather have you tell her. Daddy, please believe that I am not trying to cause my parents extra worry and be inconsiderate. I am only doing what I think is right.
To be sure, young Obermayer had grown up in privileged circumstances. His father, a member of Philadelphia's German-Jewish upper class, was a prosperous lawyer, his mother one of America's first female research biologists. The local Jewish country club was central to the Obermayers' social round. At home, the family dressed for table and dined together every evening.
These letters offer an assured and surprisingly self-aware glimpse into that world as well. Especially interesting is young Obermayer's sense of his own Jewishness, which seems of a piece with his upbringing and, in contrast to some of the inner torments recorded in the pages of G.I. Jews, refreshingly untroubled.
In his matter-of-fact way, soldier Obermayer was a proud Jew. References to Passover seders missed, to Sabbath services attended, are easy and unstrained. He searches out synagogues wherever he can, and reports carefully on what he finds in them. No special concern is evinced for fitting in with the Gentiles in his barracks; stirred to anger by the fate of Europe's Jews, he presents no ponderous disquisitions on its significance. Throughout, he engages in an open, rolling discussion about Zionism, seeking arguments both for and against the establishment of a Jewish state and finally coming out squarely on the “pro” side.
For this natural pride in being Jewish, no less than in being brought up in Germantown, Pennsylvania, attending Dartmouth, and wearing the uniform of the United States Army, Soldiering for Freedom makes a worthwhile contribution to the genre of history in the first person.
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1 Edited by Andrew Carroll, Scribner, 501 pp., $30.00
2 Belknap, 352 pp., $25.95.
3 Edited by Greg Palmer & Mark S. Zaid, Kansas, 260 pp., $29.95.
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