Doing Battle Paul Fussell Analysis

In his autobiography Doing Battle Paul Fussell writes of his personal experiences which also tie in to several themes touched upon by social historians such as George Roeder in The Censored War. Roeder documents how the participation and suffering of African-American soldiers was censored carefully so as not to offend racists. While photographs showing dead American soldiers were a propaganda staple (as long as not too gruesome and not showing faces of the corpses), photos of black American soldiers in the field of combat were typically not allowed to be publicized, even if they were wounded. A major motivation of this was to still the fears of Southern whites that this could call into question white racial superiority and promote the idea …show more content…
Fussell heard a campfire story that a number of U.S. soldiers gathered around a large crater in a forest where twenty or so German soldiers had attempted to hide. Instead of taking the Germans ' surrender as they begged for their lives, the Americans gleefully shot them one by one in a prolonged sadistic game (that utterly flouted the Geneva Convention). Fussell heard the story told over and over again, often with the justification that it was payback for a previous incident when Germans had allegedly killed Americans trying to surrender. Fussell also rather indirectly alludes to the failure or reluctance of soldiers under his own command to take surrenders offered by helpless German soldiers, such as when one man, frustrated at the failure of a few Germans to come quickly out of a bunker after indicating surrender, threw in among them a hand grenade with instructions to “divide that among …show more content…
combat veterans harder for them to bear. They felt that the sharing of such traumatic incidents would be understood or well received. Fussell killed several German soldiers by direct rifle fire as they themselves shot or were preparing to shoot him. The capstone traumatic event was when during an ill planned offensive he was struck by shrapnel from a German tank destroyer and while writhing and fainting from pain, kept conscious long enough to see his first sergeant (and new best friend) die as he bled out from his own wounds. He witnesses a French woman grieving over the corpse of her husband on a village road, an architect needlessly killed by shellfire from his own division. Fussell witnessed the immediate and sudden death of numerous comrades physically near to him, including his sergeant at the end of his time in combat. He also saw a kindly lieutenant whose head was blown off accidentally by antitank mines he was planting on a road. Fussell mentions how it was well known that the fuses of these devices were known to become unstable in cold weather. Much of the book is about similar failures of planning, competency, or skill by the U.S. Army