Once There Was a War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  ENGLAND

  AFRICA

  ITALY

  PENGUIN

  CLASSICS

  ONCE THERE WAS A WAR

  Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, JOHN STEINBECK grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California fictions, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

  MARK BOWDEN is the author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist Black Hawk Down as well as Road Work, Killing Pablo, and Guest of the Ayatollah. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and teaches creative writing and journalism at Loyola College in Maryland.

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  First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1958

  Published in Penguin Books 1977

  This edition with an introduction by Mark Bowden published 2007

  Copyright © John Steinbeck, 1943, 1958

  Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck IV and Thom Steinbeck, 1971, 1986

  Introduction copyright © Mark Bowden, 2007

  All rights reserved

  The dispatches in this book appeared in the New York Herald Tribune and other newspapers.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968

  Once there was a war / John Steinbeck ; introduction by Mark Bowden.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-4406-3399-7

  1. World War, 1939-1945. I. Title.

  D743.S65 2007

  940.53—dc22 2007016061

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  Introduction

  There is little in this classic collection of reporting that reveals the fascinating journey of the Nobel Prize-winning author behind them.

  John Steinbeck could easily have avoided World War II. When he shipped out as a correspondent in 1943, he was already world famous for The Grapes of Wrath, which had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature and turned into a popular and acclaimed film. He was too old for the draft at age forty-one, and was living an enviable professional life, with publishers eager for his next novel and Hollywood as his playground. He was a celebrity. Newspapers had covered every detail of his recent divorce and remarriage, and when he decided to leave his bride in New York in order to help cover the war, that, too, was news.

  So why go to war? Patriotism was part of it. Steinbeck had benefited early in his career by some of the New Deal programs for writers and artists during the Depression, and may have felt a desire to give something back, to use his talent to further the “War Effort,” a concept he described with typically wry insight in the introduction to this volume. But perhaps the deeper reason was the urge felt by most men in those years to “see action,” to play some role in, if only to witness, the sweeping historical drama of the age. The world was traumatically changing shape, and to be on the sidelines must have felt like being dealt out of the future. Recruited directly by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the novelist first contributed by writing propaganda—perhaps the most talented hack ever pressed into such service. He wrote a novel, The Moon Is Down, for a precursor to the CIA, and the book Bombs Away, about a bomber crew, for the Office of War Information. But when Steinbeck pressed for work closer to the front lines, he was told he would need to be commissioned as a military officer. As if determined to prove that there is no boon too great for government bureaucracy to squander, his request to become an air force intelligence officer was scuttled by his local draft board in California, which concluded on the basis of rumor and suspicion alone that the author of The Grapes of Wrath was sufficiently “communistic” to be regarded as a security risk. Thwarted, Steinbeck complained to friends at a dinner party in New York, lamenting that he would “never see the war.” He was promptly offered the job of correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune.

  His six-month stint produced these reports, which show that for all his acclaim as a novelist, Steinbeck had not lost his humility as a writer. His reporting shows the same extraordinary empathy for the common man that ran so deep in all his work. There is a point he makes repeatedly in these dispatches, and it is this: The closer you get to war, the less you know about what is going on. He quotes a soldier, “
I remember before I joined up I used to know everything that was happening. I knew what Turkey was doing. I even had maps with pins and I drew out campaigns with colored pencils. Now I haven’t looked at a paper in two weeks.” Close to action one sees only what is happening in the immediate vicinity, and in action that perspective is all one can afford.

  It is a different thing, then, to be at war than to be observing and watching it from a safe distance. Steinbeck surrendered any attempt to understand the big picture, and immersed himself. Nowhere in these reports are there assessments or critiques of campaign strategy or accounts of massive troop movements. With the novelist we are simply in the war, swept along with millions of our countrymen. And like the others, mostly what we experience is neither thrilling nor terrible. Steinbeck understood that for most soldiers, the real experience of the war involved a lot of sitting around and waiting, often in unfamiliar and uncomfortable places, with many other men in the same boat.

  In England, where forces were massed for the coming great assault on France and Germany, correspondents had already been competing for years over every scrap of news and every obvious feature story. Many journalists considered the place tapped out. Yet Steinbeck immediately found new material by focusing on things that “serious” journalists might regard as insignificant, and filling his accounts with workmanlike description, such as this meticulous picture of the barracks housing a Flying Fortress bomber crew: “The room is long and narrow and unpainted. Against each side wall are iron double-decker bunks, alternating with clothes lockers. A long rack in the middle between the bunks serves as a hanger for winter coats and raincoats. Next to it is the rack of rifles and submachine guns of the crew.” Details that would escape the eye of most reporters captured his, like the little gray dog that is “almost a Scottie,” who knew exactly which of the returning bombers carried his crew and would race out to greet it the moment it landed. Far more than the particulars of troop movements or the pronouncements of generals, far more than news of small victories or defeats, Steinbeck knew his readers craved stories that captured what the war looked like, how it sounded, how it smelled, how it felt. Millions of fathers, mothers, sisters, girlfriends, and wives were desperate to better understand the experience of their warriors overseas. So in each column of only eight hundred to a thousand words, Steinbeck crafted a picture in language out of the places he visited and the characters he met. He listened for the fears, joys, rumors, superstitions, and small triumphs and spun them into small stories that defined life in these long, tense months of waiting and preparation.

  Stuck for months in London, a lesser writer would have been frustrated, would have felt himself banished from the story. But Steinbeck realized that this tedium, suffered against a backdrop of fear, was the war for most soldiers. Each of these selections, filed on deadline over nine months, is a self-contained short story. Some are jokes, some parables, some straightforward reports. Some are sad, many are funny, some of them are angry, and others are filled with wonder and admiration. Some read like treatments for possible films, which Steinbeck may in fact have had in mind. Many are gems. He wrote about his driver, a quintessential American character he dubbed “Big Train Mulligan,” a man who aspired to no rank above private and screwed up deliberately in order to get himself busted back down whenever promotion to corporal loomed. Big Train was a type, a survivor, a man who embodied the enduring wisdom of the GI: Never volunteer. He shunned promotion and status because that meant responsibility, which meant hard work, long hours, and quite possibly danger. “. . . He is firmly entrenched in his privacy. There is nothing you can do to Mulligan except put him in jail and then you have no one to drive you.” There was room in Steinbeck’s army for a Big Train.

  He found heroism in unlikely places. He was moved by the untiring dedication of Bob Hope and other USO performers, and was impressed by the crisp professionalism of the women who served on coastal battery crews. In “A Hand,” he pays a visit to a hospital and finds a small, perfect portrait of hope. It is about a wounded soldier struggling to recover feeling and function in his shattered left hand. Rare for the Steinbeck story, most of the piece is just quotation. The unnamed soldier worries about how his wife will react to him if he returns with a crippled hand, but he is hopeful. A few days ago, he tells Steinbeck, when he was absorbed in trying to adjust a brace, he was startled to notice function in the wounded hand. He started searching for a photograph of his wife to show the writer:He puts his left hand in his pocket and brings out a little leather wallet. And suddenly he sees what he has done and the fingers relax and the wallet drops to the table. “God Almighty!” he says. “Did you see that?” He looks at the crooked hand still suspended in the air. “That’s twice in two days,” he says softly. “Twice in two days.”

  He seized any chance to get closer to the action. He visited the B-17 crews who took off every day to drop bombs on Germany. Just about every day one or more of the bombers failed to return, their crews shot out of the sky to death or, for the lucky, internment in a POW camp. His ten-day stay at an army air base that summer resulted in seven of the stories reprinted here, including one that contains the passage of description from a barracks quoted above, and the small classic of observation called “Superstition, ” which deftly sketches the thick tension in such a life, and one coping strategy. The crews ignored army discipline and left their beds unmade when they departed on a mission because “There was the radio man who one morning folded his bedding neatly on his cot and put his pillow on top. . . . He had never done anything like that before. And sure enough, he was shot down that day.”

  Steinbeck’s reports were widely reprinted, in both the United States and England, and very well received. It was a different approach, and it did not endear him to many of the younger journalists. In his biography John Steinbeck, Writer, Jackson J. Benson quotes from a letter the novelist wrote his wife that summer, after an unpleasant outing to a club in London:There were some young American correspondents there, quite drunk and consequently very brave. And then came out the thing I have heard about, the hatred of me. They really told me where I stood as a newspaperman and how my stuff stunk, etc., for a long time. It made me very sad because they were quite fierce about it. I’m not in any way in competition with them so I can’t see why it should be. I suppose I can though. This island was sucked dry of material or so it was supposed and then I came over and found more stories than I could write, most of which had been lying under their noses all of the time.

  It is safe to say that Steinbeck’s stories, more than six decades later, are the only ones still being widely read.

  When the author got a chance to ship out of this viper pit, he did, flying to Algiers, where the war came home in nightly German bombing raids over the city, painting a surreal urban landscape. As Benson describes it, “At night, the air raid sirens would wail. . . . Barrage balloons, as in London, were moored all around the city, which lay inside a cup of surrounding hills. As enemy planes approached, large quantities of smoke were released, filling the cup, and batteries of ack-ack would open up, dotting the sky above with tiny orange explosions.”

  But despite the spectacular setting, again Steinbeck found himself beached with a waiting army preparing for war. He still found delightful stories, some of them likely apocryphal, but the kind that circulated among the soldiers and reflected their circumstances. My favorite of these, “Over the Hill,” reflects the growing disgust with endless waiting and training, and the mounting homesickness, in the story of an Italian American soldier from Brooklyn who wins the wistful admiration of his buddies by falling in with a ragged line of Italian prisoners who are being shipped to a POW camp in the States. At the last minute he makes a big show of pleading with the MPs that he is an American—in a false Italian accent—and that he is being shipped out by mistake, but they refuse to believe him. Battling with the guards, he is knocked cold and carried on the plane and flown home—in time for the World Series.

  Finally, three months after
shipping out, Steinbeck got what he wanted, a chance to see the war. He observed the allied landing at Salerno from a ship, and then went ashore to survey the consequences of the battle himself, adopting in his story the third person, tiptoeing around army censors by using the conditional tense: “He might have seen the plash of dirt and dust that is a shell burst, and a small Italian girl in the street with her stomach blown out, and he might have seen an American soldier standing over a twitching body, crying. . . .” And he got his wish to see action, to expose himself fully to the dangers of battle, accompanying a fearless British torpedo boat captain named Greene-Kelly (later killed), who specialized in daring frontal assaults on much larger enemy ships. That resulted in two November reports under the headline “The Plywood Navy.” Steinbeck does not write about himself at all in these dispatches, but it was as daring an effort as any war correspondent has ever made to see the fight up close. To the extent that he went to war to prove something to himself, he had done so.

  Steinbeck eventually secured a berth with a unit of navy commandos led by none other than the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr., whom he had met years before in Hollywood. Here the author’s admiration is clear and unabashed. Fairbanks was a genuine war hero who would eventually be decorated for bravery by four allied nations, but whose work during the war was considered so secret no one would learn of it for decades. The unit specialized in conducting very realistic but false amphibious island landings, using a small number of boats and men to fool those ashore into thinking they were being invaded by a much larger force. It was terribly risky bluff, designed to draw the attention of German and Italian defenders away from the actual landing site, and in one instance succeeded so brilliantly that it led to the surrender of a much larger force on the island of Ventotene. Steinbeck went along on this mission with Fairbanks and his men, and wrote five very compelling stories at the end of this collection that tell the story completely, culminating in an unnamed lieutenant (actually Fairbanks) bluffing the German commander into surrendering with his force of eighty-seven men to a force less than half that big. Forbidden by censors to report many specifics of this dramatic encounter, Steinbeck nevertheless captured both the daring and, yes, swashbuckling black humor of the commandos.