Revealing the Hidden Truths of World War II
The media loves to paint war as heroism and duty. World War II is a great example of this in representations of the Allies’ war. In Paul Fussel’s Wartime, he hopes to reveal the misconceptions and unspoken truths of the Second World War. In the Preface, Fussel states that the book is about “the phycological and emotional culture of Americans and Britons during the Second World War . . . The Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized . . . I have tried to balance the scales.” Fussel wrote this book to open people’s eyes to World War II by creating a realistic representation of the lives of soldiers, government decisions, and the civilian perception of the war.
Fussel gives the reader an in-depth
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In media about the war, it is portrayed that Allied soldiers are indispensable heroes, but Fussel presents a different idea. “Jarrel’s servicemen are ‘Just collective objects, or attitudes, or killable puppets’ . . . ‘You care very little what happens to them’ says Dickey, ‘and that is terrible’ . . . that is precisely the effect of the wartime anonymity” (Fussel 67). Fussel goes on to talk about how it was necessary to treat soldiers as expendable so that others can keep their mental stability. He references The Sick Nought as a poem that tries to deal with the expendability of the soldiers. Fussel tries to make the reader realize how, contrary to how it is portrayed, members of the military in WWII felt anonymous. He does well at conveying this, later supporting it with evidence of soldiers wearing rings and lockets, as well as the dressing freedom of “Pachucos” having a part in the Zoot-Suit Riots. He cites The Licentious Soldiery, The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the 20th Century, and The Zoot-Suit Riots as sources for this evidence. Through this format, Fussel is able to assert a misconception about World War II, support it with evidence from multiple sources, and create a convincing argument about why it’s