We never knew what became of him, that was so curious;
He embarked, it was in December, and never returned;
No chance to say Good-bye, and Christmas confronting us;
A few letters arrived, long after, and came to an end.
The weeks dragged into months, and then it was December again.
We troubled the officials, of course, and they cabled about;
They were patient but busy, importunities without number;
Some told us one thing, some another; they never found out.
There’s a lot go like that, without explanation;
And death is death, after all; small comfort to know how and when;
But I keep thinking now that we’ve dropped the investigation;
It was more like the death of an insect than of a man.
The nature of battlefield experience varied from nation to nation, service to service. Within armies, riflemen experienced far higher levels of risk and hardship than millions of support troops. The US armed forces suffered an overall death rate of just five per thousand men enlisted; the vast majority of those who served faced perils no greater than those of ordinary civilian life. While 17,000 American combat casualties lost limbs, during the war years 100,000 workers at home became amputees because of industrial accidents.
Contemporary diaries and letters record what people did or what was done to them, but often tell us little about what they thought; the latter is more interesting, but more elusive. The obvious explanation is that most warriors are very young and immature: they experience extremes of excitement, terror or hardship, but only a small minority have the emotional energy for reflection, because they are absorbed in their immediate physical surroundings, needs and desires.
Nobody except national leaders and commanders knew much about anything beyond their immediate line of sight. Civilians existed in a fog of propaganda and uncertainty, scarcely less dense in Britain and the US than in Germany or Russia. Front-line combatants assessed the success or failure of their side chiefly through counting casualties and noticing whether they were moving forwards or backwards. These were, however, sometimes inadequate indicators; for instance, Pfc Eric Diller’s battalion was cut off from the main American army for seventeen days during the Leyte campaign in the Philippines, but he realised the seriousness of his unit’s predicament only when this was explained to him by his company commander after the war was over.
Even those with privileged access to secrets were confined to their own fragments of knowledge in a vast jigsaw puzzle. My old friend Roy Jenkins, the later statesman, decrypted German signals at Bletchley Park. He and his colleagues knew the importance and urgency of the work they were doing but, contrary to the impression given in sensational films about Bletchley, they were told nothing about the significance or impact of their contributions. Such constraints were greater, unsurprisingly, on the other side of the hill: in January 1942 Hitler decided that too many Germans knew too much. He decreed that even officials of the Abwehr should receive only such information as was necessary for their own work. They were forbidden even to monitor enemy broadcasts, quite a handicap for an intelligence service.