Kevin OConnor Second Memo

(My great grandfather, U.S. Army 3rd Division. He won medals fighting in the Marne.)

As a Cadet in todays Army, I have had many opportunities to talk to soldiers that have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite their varying experiences, one common theme arises from many of their stories. As soon as the bullets start to fly, all sense of glory dies. There are those that live, and those that are less fortunate. There is a major discrepancy between what the general public knows, and the ordeals the soldier experiences. When I spoke to my grandfather, who fought in World War Two, I got the same impression. The fact is, the general public has little knowledge of what is actually going on over on the battlefront. The only ones that can fairly asses what war really means are those who have lived it. There is a case for the idea that there is an inherent fog, in all warfare, that prevents the civilian population, and in some cases, the commanding officers, from seeing the reality of the battlefront. This fog was particularly deadly in World War One, as the disconnect between soldiers, their Officers, and their civilian masters grew ever greater. In World War One, the war-drum beating rhetoric of politicians and the masses pit millions of men against each other in bitter struggle for life. Ernst Junger wrote an honest account of his experience in The Great War in Storm of Steel. Jungers writing style is very methodical. He very rarely writes about any emotional injury in the book. The only injuries he writes on are physical and numerous. He goes about writing on the physical aspect in a very callous nonchalant way. This methodical, This happened, followed by this style is typical of the German Cult of Technique. He writes with vivid and exact almost machine-like detail, but lacking any broad sense of humanity. The emotions he does write about are his pre-battle senses of finding glory and beauty on the battlefield. Storm of Steel begins with Jngers first deployment in the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment in 1915. When Junger is first deployed, he wrote We thought of it as manly, as action, a merry dueling party on flowered, blood-bedewed meadows. (Junger,5) He is first wounded in April 1915, the first of many minor wounds he

receives throughout the war. Following his recovery, he is redeployed to the Arras region of northern France and later participates in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, to which he dedicates a significant portion of his book. As one might expect, his views on the glory to be earned on the battlefield changed very dramatically by the time his ordeal in Gullimont, in the heart of the Somme offensive, had ended. After all, Between 1914 and 1916, a lot had changed in the way war was fought. As the war began in 1914 it was generally held that no matters who was victorious, the war would be both quick and decisive. The Germans planned for a two front war against the French and Russians. Their exactingly elaborate mechanical plan of attack was named the Schlieffen Plan. The plan consisted of an attack on the French through Alsace and Lorraine, and a massive German hook through Belgium into northern France to Paris and tightening a noose around the French armies. In short, the plan failed resoundingly. After a short period of maneuver warfare, by the winter of 1914, trenches stretched all the way from the fortress of Verdun, north of Louvain to the North Sea. (McKay,876) 1915 became a further test in futility. There were nearly two and a half million casualties between France, Germany, and England in 1915 alone, merely exchanging the same 3 miles of cratered, blood soaked terrain. (McKay,879) This bitter stalemate was the result of far expanding knowledge of how to operate the new machines of war. The speed of moving forward was not nearly high enough to counter the effectiveness of the defense. As one would make gains in one area, counters to those gains would be put up almost as instantaneously. For example, as one advancing army would use a creeping barrage, the other would put up a impassible wall of artillery fire making advancing suicide. The war of maneuver turned into a war of attrition. Each defensive line drawn was backed with thousands of pieces of artillery. In a sense, a war of attrition is like a siege where both parties are

besieging each other. The goal of a siege being to starve your enemy of resources until they surrender or they are too weak to continue struggling is impossible without total war. As the war intensified, The Great War became a way of life for all, not just the soldiers fighting. In order to keep the war machine greased, the governments had to take near total control of their countries economies. For example, the German government set up the War Raw Materials Board to ration and distribute materials. As artillery was proliferated, the demand for shells skyrocketed. For the Somme offensive alone, there were over 3 and a half million shells fired. In June 1915.a serious shortage of shells led to the establishment of the Ministry of Munitionsthe Ministry allocated labor. By December 1916 the British economy was largely planned and regulated by the state. (Mckay, 883) In the race for resources, Artillery being the key piece of both successful offensives and defensives, a continuing stream of shells was necessary for any gains. The proliferation of Artillery and the change from a maneuver war to an attrition based style of battle literally shaped the battlefield, and also shaped the soldiers fighting in it in dramatic ways.
As aforementioned, Junger described his pre-battle image of the battlefield as a merry

dueling party on blood stained meadows. That statement does not begin to grasp how much more horrific the war became. In the chapter Guillemont, in Storm of Steel, Junger describes a a landscape resident only to hissing metal, cratered defilade, the dead, and those soon to meet their end. During the Somme offensive, Junger was stationed in the village of Guillemont. Soon after the initial bombardment the village was wiped off the map. All that remained were white silhouettes on the battered earth where the limestone buildings were pulverized. The sheer volume of the initial bombardment alone resulted in a ceaseless cacophony, even at its most tame moments, lasting for days.At the bombardments fever pitch, Junger describes the noise as a

demented furywhere the sky seemed as a boiling cauldron of howling metal. The artillery eroded the landscape to its core. All that remained was the barren empty wastes of no mans land. The only reminders of life being a few stray tree trunks stripped of branches. The shaping of the landscape is a fitting metaphor for the landscape of the soldiers mind that artillery and the bleak landscape took. Even if he was one of the few that remained standing, he would be stripped of all signs of what made him what he is. A forest destroyed, a lone remaining tree stripped of its branches. A regiment destroyed, a lone remaining soldier stripped of almost all sense of humanity, living day to day by primeval instinct.

(The remains of Guillemont)

The defile proved to be little more than a series of enormous craters full of pieces of uniform, weapons, and dead bodies; the country around, so far as the eye could see, had been completely ploughed by heavy shells. Not a single blade of grass showed itself. The churned up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug up foxholes, we realized that they were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mowed downnow it was our turn. (Junger, 98)

"The roar of the battle had become so terrific that we were scarcely in our right senseswe had gone over the edge of the world into superhuman perspectives. Death had lost its meaning and the will to live was made over to our country; and hence every one was blind and regardless of his personal fate (Junger,254)."