A War Correspondent’s Summary

Previously unpublished material from Bernard Levin’s Field Notes 1946, courtesy The Samuel and Sarah Plotkin War Correspondent Collection at Yitzuri University
Bernard “Bunny” Levin, the legendary New York Times theater critic from 1917 to 1943, volunteered to be a war correspondent (a “warco”) in 1944. In December of that year, Levin famously reported from The Siege of Bastogne. The Times’ Opinion Section Editor, Finley Mertz, did not welcome columns from reporters. Levin’s brilliant and very personal post-war summary never ran.

A Warco’s Summary

by Bernard Levin

New York, February 6, 1946 — The Nazi leaders are dead or in jail, the rank-and-file has swallowed their party pins. Now they are victims. There’s a year’s backlog on Frageboden, the questionnaire on which the Germans can self-report their Nazi affiliations and activities.

Anyone can buy an Entnazifizierungsurkunde, the certificate of denazification, on the black market for 25,000 marks. It’s called a Persilschein, Persilbeing laundry soap. Whitewashing your war crimes. Lady Macbeth should be so lucky.

There were too many guilty Germans to jail them all. Nor did American soldiers care to be agents of collective retribution. They rebelled against anti-fraternization orders. Most of the German bureaucracy — allof the German bureaucracy — were Nazi party members. Who else will run the place if we are ever going to leave? There is only one engineer left who knows how the Berlin power grid works, and he was a local party leader.

As Churchill said, America stands at the summit of the world. But our soldiers will vote in the mid-term elections, and they all want to come home. Wives and parents vote, too. Congressmen want to get re-elected. Our mighty army is melting away, no matter how hard Ike tries to hold it together.

The biggest casualty of this war is the myth of European civilization. There has been a complete moral collapse. Most of the European Jews and half the Roma people were murdered. It’s been all versus all since 1939.

Europe is changed for good. The first world war moved national borders. This time it’s the people that are moving. The monoculture that polyglot America established through radio and movies has been established in European countries by extermination or forced migration.

Not just Jews are on the move. The Soviets are scraping ethnic Germans, Hitler’s Volksdeutsche, out of eastern Europe. Some have been there for centuries. Headed to Germany, or already here. Berlin has become the world’s largest boarding house.

The Soviets had a dozen million killed, at least, breaking the teeth of Hitler’s war machine. They lost more men at Stalingrad than America did in the entire war. Now Uncle Joe has all of Eastern Europe in his grip. He isn’t going to let go and we aren’t going to make him. If American isolationism prevails as it did after the first war, he will reach for Western Europe.

-2-

The Brits can hold their heads high, thanks to their grit, American aid, and the English Channel. But they do it from their knees. They are exhausted and broke.

The French Government’s collaboration with the Nazis made the true patriots into criminals. Now every Frenchman must come up with a story. Pissing on a German-language traffic sign in the middle of the night is transformed into a courageous act of resistance. De Gaulle’s endless carping from the safety of London is transformed into a myth of French greatness.

Those days are gone. Like the Brits, the French mean to keep hold of their colonies. Like the Brits, they will be too weak. The Japs were bastards to everybody, including themselves, but they destroyed the foundations of the colonial system in Asia.

The atomic age probably brings down the curtain on traditional war fighting. When one bomb can wipe out a city, why put an army of millions in the field? There will be conflicts, however, because fighting is human nature.

My last words have to be about our boys who went to war on the ground. They were in a completely different army than the armies of the other belligerents. Germany’s was an army of professionals up until late in their war. The Red Army was filled out by peasants and factory workers with guns at their backs. The British army reflected that nation’s traditional class distinctions. The Japanese Army was its own feudal society, emphasizing loyalty to superiors and a strong sense of honor and self-sacrifice. By 1944, all four of these armies were wasting assets. America’s army was increasing in size and power as the war neared its end.

The American army was larger than the nation’s other military services combined. Unlike the Navy and its Marine Corps, the Army had to rely on the draft to fill its ranks. If the other services were to some extent cherry-picked from American society, the Army was America itself, a cross-section of all of the nation’s geographic, religious, economic and ethnic groups, including Catholics, Protestants and Jews (“The Three Fighting Faiths”). In service of victory, we invented both the atom bomb and the idea of a Judeo-Christian nation.

-3-

The Army drafted Americans from the economically backward South to the bustling industrial cities of the Midwest, from the fisheries of Maine to the timber country of the Pacific Northwest, from the Wyoming ranches to the garment factories of New York, from the North Dakota wheat fields to the Mississippi cotton fields. The Army drafted PhDs, the Army drafted immigrants who the Army taught to read and write the language of the country they served. It had to be this way, given the manpower needed to fight a world war on two fronts. It was also fitting, given the ideals America said it was fighting for.

America fielded millions of citizen soldiers who disliked the goddamned Army, were ambivalent about their officers, and resisted the trappings of military hierarchy, aka, chickenshit. Yet many of them will remember their service as the ennobling experience of their lives. If you ask them, they will tell you they fought not for their country, or lofty ideals, but for each other, for their buddies. To get the job done and get home.

I met many soldiers who fought and some who died. I met many more soldiers who never fought, just gave up two or three of the best years of their young lives. I met Negro soldiers fighting for the freedoms they are denied in America. I also met a few soldiers who were not supposed to fight, but turned and faced the enemy when called upon. I recall with the greatest respect SNAFU soldiers at Bastogne, who suffered there, all of them, and died, some of them, in anonymous support of the gallant and justly celebrated 101st Airborne Division. I remember one in particular, a Morale Corps entertainment soldier who turned and fought at Bastogne, and when called upon produced for his wounded brothers there the best variety show I have ever seen. And I have seen hundreds.

We owe him, we owe all our soldiers, a debt we can never repay. They have had interesting — too interesting, some of them — lives in this war. May the rest of their days be happy and may they be many. And may God continue to bless their America.

– Bernie Levin

Tell A Friend