To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (2)

Dear Brendan,

Five years ago, when I made the shift from academic writing to popular history in General George Washington: A Military Life, my editor at Random House warned me how important it was to tell a good story. Americans, I learned, have a peculiar and sometimes distressing way of looking at history. They need a good beginning and a clear end, sympathetic characters, and a clear, fast-moving story. Anyone who reads popular reviews on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.com knows that the highest compliment a reader can give a history book is to say that it “reads like a novel.” So, finding the story in history is really critical with an American audience; even more important in some cases—though I hate to say it—than telling the truth.

My biggest challenge in writing about the Meuse-Argonne, then, was not to discover the truth of what happened—the source material is so rich, indeed, that the facts are really unavoidable—but to discover the story. I think one of the reasons that World War I remains so little studied or understood in the United States today is the perception that it lacks story. As some publishers told me when I was shopping the proposal, World War I has poor entertainment value. And for Americans, entertainment really trumps our desire to know the facts, or to honor the sacrifices of our ancestors. Terrible to say, but I really believe it’s true.

So, how to find the story while remaining true to the facts? I started with the presumption that any war is really made up of millions of individual stories. We can generalize, but each person takes his or her own unique background into the war, and emerges with his or her own unique set of experiences and interpretations of what happened. The key to understanding World War I, then, is to look at the stories of individuals, to approach each perspective as equally meaningful and valuable.

This is not really all that difficult to do. As an avid, longtime collector of war literature who has published the only comprehensive bibliography of published accounts in English, I know about and have access to literally hundreds of accounts—letters, diaries, memoirs—of Doughboys from all walks of life. My goal was to bring their experiences together into one grand narrative, and tell the story of America’s bloodiest battle from the bottom up. Thus you will get to know not just the “big names”—Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, Mitchell, Truman, and so on—but those of obscure private soldiers, as well. Bringing these together gives us a complete sense of what happened, even though it consists of a multitude of individual human stories rather than just one.

Yet for all that, it is the story of the man at the top—Pershing—which remains one of the most compelling. I think that Pershing’s conduct in the battle was heavily influenced by his own personal tragedy of having lost almost all of his family in the Presidio fire of 1915. From the time of that fire, which gutted him inside, Pershing survived very much by willpower alone. And it was that belief in willpower that informed his whole approach to battle—that the will to win, to persevere whatever the casualties—made the difference between victory and defeat. And so he pushed his soldiers on, without regard to casualties, in some of the most horrendous casualties that American soldiers have ever experienced.

Billy Mitchell is another interesting, almost luminous figure—and yet I believe that his conduct left much to be desired. He, even more so than Pershing, was motivated by a tremendous arrogance and vanity that left him unwilling and even incapable of seeing what did not fit into his preconceived schemes. In the Meuse-Argonne, be it noted, the Germans enjoyed almost complete air superiority over the front lines, even though Mitchell’s planes were better supplied and probably more numerous.

To your final question, whether my book will encourage Americans to remember, I can only say I hope so. Many individual descendants of veterans have contacted me and thanked me for remembering their ancestors. In other quarters, however, there has been a studied indifference to my subject that cannot help but be distressing when many of these same people fall over themselves to trumpet the 500th history of the Battle of Gettysburg or the Battle of the Bulge.

Regards,

Ed Lengel

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1

IMAGE: Brig. Gen. William “Billy” Mitchell stands by a Vought VE-7 Bluebird at Bolling Airfield, Washington, D.C., in May 1920. According to Lengel, “Mitchell emblazoned his aircraft with his personal symbol, an eagle in a circle, in a bid to pose as an ‘intrepid airman.’”

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Comments

[June Archer]

I just came across your blog in a search regarding the Meuse-Argonne battle in 1918.

I am doing family research on my grandfather's brother who died in that battle - just three days after it began - at the age of 24.

I'm interested in buying this book to get an idea of what this young man from Connecticut faced. By the time he went to war, he was already a widower - his wife having died in an accident in 1917. Apparently, he was the darling of the family - outgoing and personable - and therefore the polar opposite of his older brother, my grandfather, who was a shy stutterer.

I came across a letter written to his mother just after he arrived in France. According to newspaper articles we have, that was the last letter my great-grandmother received from him. I also have the letter from the Red Cross to my great-grandparents confirming earlier reports that their son had been killed. It took nearly three years for the body to be returned to Connecticut for burial.

Fascinating stuff. Looking forward to this book

[Brendan Wolfe]

Sounds like your great uncle's story was a sad one. Thanks for sharing it, June. And thanks for reading.