Wartime

Paul Fussell lays out his reasons for writing Wartime in the first sentences of his brief introduction:

This book is about the psychological and emotional culture of Americans and Britons during the Second World War. It is about the rationalizations and euphemisms people needed to deal with an unacceptable actuality from 1939 to 1945.

He then proceeds to not necessarily puncture the myths of the Second World War, but to sweep away any romance associated with it -- from how "Precision Bombing Will Win the War" (title of Chapter 2), to chronicling new soldiers' harsh reaction to the new military discipline, (with one saying "I thought the caste system was restricted to India,") to the bullshit spewed by the propaganda apparatus, with all its rhyming, simplistic poster slogans. Fussell then moves on to the war's effect on English and American letters, (as one may expect from a professor of English), and despite being an unrepentant Anglophile there's a lot of insight here.

Wartime has a blurb from Joseph Heller on the back cover on the insanity of war, and honestly, this is the closest to a non-fictional version of Catch 22 that I've seen. In fact the chapter on "chickenshit" certainly reads like something out of Catch 22. Absolutely worth picking up -- shows the lack of glory and the horrors of war without becoming a polemic.