To the south, in the Crimea, Alois Dwenger expressed similar sentiments. “I am often angered by the hollow accounts from incompetent pens,” he noted scornfully in May 1942.
Recently I read a report of an attack where… they recounted so many details and in the process forgot the everyday life of the war, the actions of simple soldiers.
These simple infantrymen are, without doubt, heroes. There in his hole… lies only a Landser, and he may not stick his nose out without getting it cracked and yet he must observe the enemy. Therefore he always peeks carefully out from cover, any moment a bullet can hit him. Shells strike every day… shaking and spraying the ground, the dugout trembles, shrapnel whistles overhead. In the nights, where nothing is to be seen but more heard, the eyes tearing from perpetual staring, the imagination working feverishly, he sits wrapped in his shelter half, freezing, hour after hour, listening with strained nerves. In the gray dawn he crawls into the dugout, frozen through and dead tired; it is crowded, damp, loud, half-dark; the lice torment. I believe that true heroism lies in bearing this dreadful everyday life.2
Over fifty years later, much of Dwenger’s complaint regarding the neglect of the Landser, or what the men themselves more vulgarly called the Schütze Arsch, remains true. Although the average soldier has been at the center of events in this century of wars, historians have traditionally focused on matters “at the top”: the strategy, tactics, decision-making, and organization which, although of undeniable importance, do not constitute the whole of war. From this perspective, the common soldier appeared only as an object, a mere vehicle for receiving and carrying out orders. “Depersonalized, the anonymous crowd that just receives orders performs the events [of this drama],” Claus Hansmann complained in his diary. “A strategic picture far removed from the bloody tragedy. What’s that got to do with him who stands at the top? He can’t hear the screams, nor the agitated panting…. Is he supposed to think about them, the seven that the Dnieper carried off, is he supposed to calculate how far they have now gone, how soggy their uniforms are, how pale their faces? Is he supposed to think about the hearts that are breaking at this moment, the mothers, wives, children?” Little wonder, then, that Hansmann branded “the soldier’s existence [as] merely an oath to the death.” “The soldier must have so much luck and so often,” lamented another Landser in hauntingly similar terms. “Soldier’s oath, soldier’s joy, soldier’s tunes, soldier’s death, everything is one!”3
War, even the most primitive, as Robin Fox points out, has always been a complicated, intricate, highly organized act of human imagination and intelligence, so the fascination with the “larger” dimensions of war is readily understandable. But as Leo Tolstoy suggested, the true reality of war, as well as history, lies in the unconscious, common swarm life of mankind. “I am no general staff officer or military expert who sees the war only through the eyes of a tactician,” the German Landser Kurt Vogeler commented in December 1941, “but a man, who has experienced the war as a man.” Indeed, as Field Marshal Archibald Wavell wrote to the famous military historian B.H. Liddell Hart, “If I had time… to study war, I think I should concentrate almost entirely on the ‘actualities of war,’ the effects of tiredness, hunger, fear, lack of sleep, weather…. The principles of strategy and tactics… are absurdly simple: it is the actualities that make war so complicated and so difficult, and are usually neglected by historians.”4
John Keegan has suggested much the same, that there remain areas, largely unexplored by historians, where social history and military history abut. Military history “from below,” war from the perspective of the common soldier, constitutes one of those areas. After all, as Wolfram Wette has pointed out, the German armed forces in World War II comprised almost twenty million men, of whom fewer than 1 percent were officers in the narrow sense of the word (that is, holding the rank of major or higher). The great remainder, the 99 percent of the Wehrmacht not of the “elite,” consisted of enlisted men, noncommissioned officers, and junior officers. These men came from a variety of social, economic, and educational backgrounds yet had one thing in common: they lived the war from below, where the problems of everyday life could be frighteningly concrete. In order to understand the real war, the war from below, then, the historian has to provide a face for the anonymous Landser and examine his dual role as both perpetrator and victim. As perpetrators, whether out of conviction or not, these common men existed as part of a great destructive machine, ready and willing to kill and destroy in order to achieve the goals of a murderous regime. In the role of victims, they lived daily with the physical hardships, the psychological burdens, and the often crushing anxieties of death and killing that constitute the everyday life of all combat soldiers. Seen by their political leaders as instruments in the furtherance of Nazi goals (the individual must die even as the Volk lives on), perhaps the most ironic fear of the Landser was that he would achieve ultimate success and die as a fallen hero. “There is no bitterer death,” wrote one Landser in his diary, “than a hero’s death.” Or as he puzzled on another occasion, “Is the hero’s death, then, the ideal of this world?”5
The past often exudes a legendary quality, and nowhere is this truer than in dealing with the immensity of World War II. The historian cannot hope to recapture wholly the past life of the average Landser but can merely strive to depict the drama as accurately as possible in terms of human aspirations and perceptions, to assimilate the experience of others and distill it into an honest and thoughtful perspective. “When today I look at pictures of the war in the illustrated magazines,” wrote one anonymous soldier, “I notice immediately: virtually all give anything but the core of the war.” “Superficially, as it appears in the weekly newsreels, the soldier’s life seems to be beautiful and above all romantic,” noted another of these common soldiers to his parents, “but how soon and how quickly these illusions and delusions disappear in the raw reality [of war].”6