WW2 Vet Takes a Rare Look Back
By John Crouch, Attorney at Law,
Crouch & Crouch, Arlington, Virginia; (703)
528-6700;
Brown Daily Herald , Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (U.S.)
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Fifty years ago this weekend, Professor Emeritus Richard Goss was thinking,
"I'm glad I'm only fifteen. This war is going to be over." Four
years later he had crossed France with General Patton, killed people, watched
his sergeant "literally disappear" in a mortar shell blast, and
experienced mass panic, trench foot, a "suicide mission," and
integration. And all this was "ordinary it was just something everybody
was doing. You didn't want to miss the action."
Professor Goss's experiences were so widely shared, he feels, that he never
thinks of labeling himself as a "veteran." In his home town being
in a war seemed like the rule, not the exception, and he knows no veterans
who ever talk about their common experience. In fact, "I never think
a heck of a lot about it." Yet he has strong opinions about the war.
His biggest regret is not just that he killed people, but that he let himself
be indoctrinated so that "I didn't think very deeply about it."
"If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't do it. If they didn't have
enough 18- and 19-year olds," Goss believes, "they couldn't run
a war. You have to have people who are naïve enough." The cold,
wet, nerve-wracking months, when they would exchange fire with the Germans
every day without ever seeing them, made their final appearance an "exhilarating"
release of tension - not a moment for thinking about what they were doing.
When his unit panicked after capturing more Germans than they could handle,
Goss realized what the world would soon discover: "Any human being"
can perform "unforgivable acts. In a moment of anger or fear the beast
surfaces." Fleeing before a German counterattack, a friend of his unthinkingly
shot two prisoners who had obediently joined the rout. This war crime gained
his unit an international reputation as "butchers," so that none
of them dared get captured.
Goss spent the last winter and spring of the war in "fox holes"
in the mud, which filled with water every two hours. If he was being shelled,
he couldn't use his helmet to bail himself out. Just about the time he realized
that he was the penultimate survivor in his platoon, he caught a bad case
of "trench foot," a sort of underwater frostbite. Evacuated to
England, he discovered the long-lost pleasures of being able to stand up
straight and hearing children acting their age.
"Everybody was hoping for a million-dollar wound," he recalled,
and he was no exception. Like cartoonist Bill Mauldin's "Willy,"
he felt "like a fugitive from the law of averages." Everyone felt
they had worked hard, taken their chances, and now could use a break from
the daily probability of being killed. This feeling was not seen as cynical,
or detracting from everyone's prior determination to do their duty and be
part of the war. He tried to stay in the hospital as long as he could, realizing
on V-E day that he "would probably die on the beaches of Japan."
Saved by A-bomb
He mused that without the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "the Pacific
would have been a lake of blood. The atom bomb in a sense saved my life."
Another veteran emphasized that had we invaded Japan, most of the "baby
boom" would never have been born.
Goss is not fond of paradoxes, but one or two are still unresolved. He is
certain that the allies "had no choice." Another veteran added
that, given time to develop rockets and atomic weapons, Germany or Japan
certainly would have used them to conquer the world. Yet the actions which
were necessary were things that few mature adults would do. "I don't
lose sleep over it," Goss admits, glad that he has had more important
things to do in his life than think about the war.
It unsettles Goss to see how easily young people learn the habits of war,
rationalize them and wholeheartedly believe in them. More inexcusable, in
his view, is that nations do not move beyond that level, and still make
wars when other options remain. "You'd think people could learn,"
he protests, and then expresses cautious hope that "the Japanese learned"
to live peacefully. He sees one concretely "encouraging" development.
Since people everywhere, not just the Japanese, own so much in other lands,
perhaps at some point "every nation is going to think twice" before
starting wars.
"Horizontal" Experience
In some incidental ways the war changed people and societies for the better,
especially when compared with the prevalent poverty and warlike sentiments
in previous decades. Personally, Goss learned what his personal threshold
for stress was, and gained understanding of people driven to act irrationally.
In training, he was surprised at how much he could endure, especially when
supported by peer pressure. "You've got to learn to be horizontal.
Training was much harder than combat," he recalled. In an actual war,
you mostly "sit around. You can goof off."
The war provided a democratic "education," forcing classes of
people who ordinarily never would have met to rely on each other to survive.
This effect didn't happen easily, though. Goss's unit mixed "intellectual"
college-bound New Englanders with often-illiterate Kentucky mountaineers
who "didn't know quite how to react" to them. The cruel tension
between them vanished only under fire, where Goss found that while other
urbane "smart-alecks turned tail and ran," the bravest man
there was a hillbilly with a double row of teeth. The army threw everybody
together and sorted them out by "character."
Back in the states, Goss found himself in a barracks that President Truman
had integrated. "Everybody waited for the other shoe to drop,"
but "nothing happened." No one questioned anything the army did
- even putting black and white men in adjacent bunks!
Chorus Girls & Fire Hoses
Goss received a "storybook" welcome home, with a tugboat full
of chorus girls dancing beneath the Statue of Liberty while firemen blew
their hoses into the air. Everyone treated him and his fellow-veterans with
extraordinary respect - even university administrators. "We got away
with things you couldn't get away with today," he recalled of his years
at Harvard. Another veteran advances the theory that G.I.s' presence on
campuses is what led to the sixties. His contemporaries were more serious
about their studies than they would otherwise have been, but they were equally
serious about celebrating the fact that, miraculously, they were still alive.
After surviving what had seemed to be a "suicide mission" in a
German village, Goss had decided that the rest of his life was "all
bonus."
Another veteran of the war here echoed most of Goss's thoughts. At the time,
he said, most people his age saw it as an adventure. "You never thought
about killing somebody, just like you never think about being killed. You
just can't. You'd go crazy." Though he endured indignities, both tragic
and comical, that he couldn't stand now, it was completely different because
he never suffered alone. Every little thing that happened was bantered about
by the group. Though everyone complained about conditions, most of the guys
probably had a better standard of living in the service than ever before.
Yet he was so young, and the war was so much a mass "fantasy"
experience of ignorant young people, that it seemed to belong more to its
time than to his life. "It's something younger people don't recall,
and even I have trouble recalling it. It's like it didn't happen."
Copyright John Crouch 1991
- John Crouch
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