I picked these three up at the last local used book sale back in July, and since then I've been gradually working through them and reflecting on the genre of war correspondence. These books -- and, I think, the entire genre -- are balanced in an interesting netherland between reporting, propaganda, and occasional sheer fiction.
Behind the Steel Wall is not quite traditional war reportage. The subtitle is "A Swedish Journalist in Berlin, 1941-43". The book was originally published in Stockholm in 1943, then reprinted in the USA and Canada in the early months of 1944. Fredborg represented the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in Berlin until mid-1943, when his continual run-ins with the German authorities made it advisable to leave. Then he returned to Sweden and penned this book, which is divided into three roughly equal (and intermingled) themes. The first is a telling of what life was like for neutral journalists in Berlin during the early years of WWII. The Swedes, like the Swiss, were neutral in that war and so able to retain journalists in all of the combatant nations. However, these journalists had to pay attention to the wishes of their hosts; in the case of journalists in Berlin, this meant increasingly being forbidden to write about anything other than what was handed out at official press conferences on pain of expulsion. (I'd love to know how Swedish journalists in London and Washington DC fared in the same period). Fredborg does a good job of portraying the strange mix of bumbling bureaucracy and blunt repression that characterized the official dealings of Germany with the press.
The second theme is that of the first years of the war as they were reported to the German people. Fredborg shows how the news was spun and sanitized for domestic consumption, and how the themes for the German home front changed from that of "glorious victories are ours" to "we must all work harder to avoid defeat". This part of the book provides a study from the inside of some of the finest (that is, most effective) moments of propaganda in modern history. Fredborg also manages to show, though, that the propaganda never convinced everyone, by reporting jokes and grumbles and the news of internal resistance even when German power was at its height.
The third theme concerns the overall political status of the Third Reich in what was already clearly its declining hours, and Fredborg's speculations about how a lasting peace could be achieved after the war was over. This part, in retrospect, is not very successful. His hopes that the USA would leave Europe to determine its own postwar future proved naive, and he completely missed the part the Russians were determined to play in the postwar theatre of operations. And despite his own thorough acqaintance with the Third Reich, he seems not to have taken the rumblings of scorched earth and Gotterdamerung seriously.
One disturbing part of the book passes in a few pages as Fredborg discusses the repression in Germany and its conquered territories. He makes it clear that it was common knowledge within the press community and public in Berlin (and presumably Germany as a whole) that millions of Jews were being systematically executed in the east. He mentions a variety of methods including gas chambers for this. With this being so bluntly in print in English six months before D-Day, how could the US government maintain that the discovery of death camps a year later was a complete surprise?
Here is Your War comes from a pen on the other side of the same war. Ernie Pyle was arguably the most famous war correspondent of World War II, covering the war from the early days until nearly the end, when he was killed by Japanese machine gun fire. Rather than reporting only from the headquarters handouts, Pyle became the friend and confidante of the "regular Joes" in the war, and did his reporting from the front. This book is a collection of his columns from the Allied invasion of North Africa, the first major operation for the American army in WWII.
Although Pyle didn't write from official press releases, his work was propaganda nonetheless. You must remember that he was with the US Army by their permission, that his columns went through the military censor, and that he believed in the moral necessity of an Allied victory just as much as the military and political leaders. One obvious way this attitude shows is in the blood in this book - there is very little of it. Pyle discusses the difficulties of a military campaign primarily in terms of hard beds and lousy food and lack of sleep. He visits valiant wounded soldiers. He discusses how the boys have been changed and toughened by the campaign. But he almost never mentions the ones who were blown to bits, maimed, crippled for life, or ripped to shreds by machine gun bullets. The overall tone here is one of "we've got a tough job to do but we're doing it."
Pyle, like the rest of the US press during WWII, helped Americans left at home form their opinions of the war. The war, seen through his eyes for domestic consumption, seems almost like an extended football game. Perhaps a few guys will get hurt, but in the end the best team will win. The hardships are reported, not to emphasize how crappy life was for enlisted soldiers in North Africa, but to make it clear that any sacrifices asked of the housewife or clerk at home are nothing compared to those the soldier was making.
I don't know if this was a Pyle innovation, but one hallmark of his writing is an emphasis on the human face of the serviceman. Pyle doesn't write of anonymous platoons and sergeants. Rather, he reports names, cities, and sometimes street addresses of those he talked to, drove with, and bunked with. No doubt this helped make him more popular with the enlisted men, who provided his best source of material.
Fast-forward 23 years to Elaine Shepard's The Doom Pussy. Like Pyle, Shepard was an offically-accredited correspondent with the US Army. However, she worked in Viet Nam. Some of the similarities of her book to Pyle's show just how standardized the genre of war writing became: she concentrates on victories rather than setbacks, reports from the front lines and real foxholes, and personalizes her tales with names and addresses of soldiers and pilots. With the increasing sophistication of weaponry there is more blood in Shepard's book than Pyle's, but it still is a far cry from the reality of body counts and bombings.
Two things stand out as differences from Pyle. First, Shepard makes a deliberate effort to be racy, from the title (a reference to an emblem worn by pilots who had carried out night missions over North Viet Nam) to her suggestive tales of a pair of pilots, one of whom was always trying to sleep over in her room (she suggests, without saying so, that he eventually succeeded).
Second, Shepard has an overt political agenda in this book. She obviously knows that there is political opposition at home while she's writing, but minimizes this in her stories. She mentions the leftist opposition to the war, but characterizes this as the actions of a few hotheads completely out of touch with the bulk of the American people. This strikes me as a sort of propaganda in reverse: she's not so much trying to convince the folks back home as she is trying to fit in with the ones on the front lines who are her friends and sources. Though we've all heard stories by now of poor morale in Viet Nam, Shepard portays the military as uniformly dedicated and heroic, very much as Pyle did, and does her best to keep the morale high. One wonders whether this was the price of admission to the front lines.
Overall, I wouldn't rate any of these three books as great literature, but I'm glad I read them. The Fredborg book is, I think, an essential source for anyone trying to understand day-to-day life in the Third Reich, and how the German people could continue fighting in the face of overwhelming opposition in 1943 and later. The Pyle and Shepard books, in retrospect, are a long way from being balanced sources on their respective wars (though both are still valuable primary sources for the student of history). But reading them, and comparing their on-the-spot reportage to the verdicts of history, leads to inescapable questions about all war reportage: what confidence do we have that CNN's reporting on the bombings in Kosovo or the skirmishes in the Middle East, for example, are any less deliberately biased than Pyle's or Shepard's writing?