The material in this book was taken from a longer, highly personal, and detailed account of my experience and observations as a military government officer concerned with food and agriculture behind the advancing armies in World War II from North Africa, to Sicily, Italy proper, briefly in Austria, finally in Germany ... first as an officer and later as a civilian.
Beginning on the night of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, and extending through three years and nine months of active participation in the problems of restoring agricultural production and feeding people, I kept brief notes of time, place, and situations. These notes, though scant, have guided me in the preparation of a longer manuscript now in the custody of the Harry S. Truman Library at Independence, Missouri.
That manuscript presents, as does this shorter version, a picture of what happens to people when a modern army rumbles over their land, their homes, villages, cities, and towns, and some of the problems which people confront when they try to restore their shattered villages and personal lives. The document in the library is there for future generations, if they choose to read and ponder one aspect of World War II that rarely got into the headlines, the radio, or the news-reels. The observations and comments are reflections of one person on the situations and in the atmosphere of the war years 1941 to 1945.
Incidentally, World War II was not my introduction to a war scene. I was an infantry soldier during World War I on the front in France and as such saw war from the standpoint of the combat soldier. However, as a military government officer attached to the fighting forces one is more or less a hybrid torn between the necessity of doing everything possible to enhance the fighting forces and at the same time trying to assist a distracted and sometimes terrified civilian population back to some sort of order and stability.
As an infantryman in World War I, I also kept a notebook, and as I review those notes some 57 years later I find my concern then was almost wholly with the day-to-day business of carrying on a war. Actually, they reveal more periods of diversion, rest camps, delousing stations, quiet fronts, recreation areas, rare good meals, and show troops, with periods of nothing much but wait and loaf between active combat. In contrast, my notes in World War II seem to reflect that I started running in North Africa and never stopped until I returned to the US three years and nine months later. There was never a minute it seems that some problem did not arise.
This experience in two World Wars has convinced me of two things ... namely that war is never justified in terms of the total cost to human beings for the aims gained; that it is at best a dirty, degrading, and senseless business which mankind seems unwilling to give up or unable to escape. Woodrow Wilson's call for a "war to make the world safe for Democracy" and the phrases in the UN charter about the peaceful world, seem rather hollow indeed as we write this in 1975. Even the small and most helpless nations seem to want to settle their accounts by the sword instead of reason in a world where malnutrition is standard for nearly two thirds of the globe and millions of that number are at the very edge of starvation ... we find the enlightened men on this globe spending 240 billion dollars annually in the arms trade, even as we face a world shortage of fertilizer and lack of facilities to produce the abundance of food that we can produce. The US defense budget for 1983 is 258 billion alone.
My second conviction is that there are no real heroes in combat; that the real heroes are those innocent and helpless women, children, old people and others who are trampled down by the war machine and who, after the holocaust, can somehow look around their shattered homes, families, and lives and still see a ray of hope, their hands clutching the tender threads of survival.
If the following pages reflect anything it is the hope that in these little people, once they have a real voice in world affairs ... maybe future wars might be avoided.
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