FREEWARTIME: UNDERSTANDING AND BEHAVIOUR IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR EBOOK Paul Fussell | 341 pages | 25 Oct 1990 | Oxford University Press Inc | 9780195065770 | English | New York, United States Naomi Symes Books: Women's History and Social History Books Paul Fussell, Jr. Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War to the US, Fussell wrote extensively and held several faculty positions, most prominently at Rutgers University and at the University of Pennsylvania He is best known for his writings about World War I and II, [1] which explore what he felt was the gap between the romantic myth and reality of war; [2] he made a "career out of refusing to disguise it or elevate it". Born and raised in Pasadena, CaliforniaFussell was the second of three children. His mother, Wilhma Wilson Sill —was the daughter of a carriage trimmer in Illinois. Fussell attended Pomona College from until he was commissioned as an officer in the U. Army in He landed in France in as a year-old second lieutenant with the rd Infantry Divisionwas wounded while fighting in Alsaceand was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Following the end of the war in Europe, Fussell returned to the United States where he was assigned to the 45th Infantry Divisionwhich was preparing for the invasion of Japan. Fussell's recollection of hearing the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasakiwhile waiting stateside to deploy, would later form the basis of his essay Thank God for the Atom Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War. He was honorably discharged from the Army inreturned to Pomona to finish his B. He began his teaching career at Connecticut College —55 before moving to Rutgers University in and finally the University of Pennsylvania in As a professor, he travelled widely with his family throughout Europe from the s to '70s, taking Fulbright and sabbatical years in Germany, England and France. Betty Fussell has described their marriage and its breakup in in her memoir, My Kitchen Wars. He retired from the University of Pennsylvania in and lived with his wife in Oregon. When he first entered college, Fussell intended a career in journalism. His plans changed when his sergeant was killed beside him in combat, about which he wrote in his memoir Doing Battle He pointed to what he saw as the hypocrisy of governmental speech and the corruption of popular culture. His published thesis, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century Englandwas developed into Poetic Meter and Poetic Forma popular textbook for understanding poetry. The award-winning The Great War and Modern Memory [14] was a cultural and literary analysis of the impact of World War I on the development of modern literature and modern literary conventions. John Keegan [1] Joseph Heller called it "the best book I know of about world war one". Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars was a pioneering academic examination of travel literature which examined Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War travel books of Evelyn WaughGraham GreeneD. Lawrence and Robert Byron. Fussell stated that he relished the inevitable controversy of Class: A Guide Through the American Status System [15] and indulged his increasing public status as a loved or hated "curmudgeon" [1] in the rant called BAD: or, The Dumbing of America In between, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays [16] confirmed his war against governmental and military doublespeak and prepared the way for Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War He was elected in a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Fussell died of natural causes on 23 May at a long-term care facility in Medford, Oregon. He had previously lived in Portland, Oregon for two years. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. American cultural and literary historian. The Daily Telegraph. The Economist. Retrieved 30 August Retrieved Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic. Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War Little, Brown and Co. Thank god for the atom bomb and other essays. My Kitchen Wars. Doing battle: The making of a skeptic. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. Class: A guide through the American status Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War. Thank God for the atom bomb and other essays. Wartime: Understanding and behavior in the second world war. National Book Foundation. Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 5 March Retrieved 8 August Associated Press. Retrieved 23 May Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. Fussell in Paris, France, May Educator; historian; social critic ; author. Pomona College B. Betty Fussell —; divorcedHarriette Behringer? United States of America. Purple Heart ; Bronze Star. Wikiquote has quotations related to: Paul Fussell. The Real War | AMERICAN HERITAGE At H-plus, American guns bombarded enemy lines, and the regiments moved forward. Paul Fusse!! His legs buckling under the slightest strain, and gasping for breath when he even thought of more combat, Fussell was pronounced fit for duty and reassigned to the 45th Infantry Division, then preparing for its part in the invasion of Japan. When word came of the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Fussell later wrote, he and his fellow soldiers celebrated. Very simply, the bombs meant they would live. After demobilization in and then graduate work at Harvard, Fussell began his academic career as a scholar of eighteenth- century English literature, publishing four books on poetic form, rhetoric, and humanism, including Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. That book won the National Book Award. In his newest book, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War Oxford University PressFussell attends directly to the war in which he fought, exercising a critical and provocative judgment on its passage into history. Now the Donald T. This interview took place at his home in Philadelphia. Vincent Millay have in common? Ignorance preeminently. Who have an abundance of food and goods. And who have never had the experience of most Europeans of almost starving for a six-year period. If they would read more Oedipus Rex and King Learunder decent instruction, it would help. This is why my literary interests parallel my political and social and critical interests. The first of September,was the fiftieth anniversary of the Polish invasion, which inaugurates for the next six Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War a great line of fiftieth-anniversary commemorations. It would be impossible to go too far in the other direction. War as an institution is so nasty and so vile. I quote Cyril Connolly in the book, saying something that I agree with entirely: that one must never forget that the war was a war, and therefore stupid, destructive, opposed to every decent and civilized understanding of what life is like. So part of it is a question of literary tact. I Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War write a whole book about the disposal of human bodies in Europe, which would be fascinating, but 1 think nobody would like to read it except medical doctors and funeral directors. Would you say then that since the nation really has not come to grips with the actualities of that war? I do say so. And Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War of the reasons for that are praiseworthy, actually. It was the beneficence, say of the GI Bill, from which I profited. It helped pay for my Ph. The beneficence and benignity of that tended to suggest that human nature was benign, whereas the war itself had argued the opposite, that human nature has a very dangerous leaning toward wickedness, original sin, vileness, and delight in destruction and sadism. So it was partly American decency, which is always to be praised and celebrated, that helped wipe out some of the viler memories of that war, and it set us back on a highly American optimistic track again. How much of that optimism would you be willing to see in our later involvement in the Southeast Asian wars? The problem was that we misidentified the South Vietnamese government as being connected in any way with the cause of freedom. But at its start, the war could be conceived of as a fairly noble enterprise. It was only as it turned sour that people began to see ways in which it was not. No war starts out vicious. It starts out as an attempt to clean up something that is vile and to redress some injustice. Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia on the excuse of rescuing the Germans there—giving the action a plausible color. War takes charge, in other words. And war knows nothing about the ideological reasons that have propelled it. The war is an engineering operation. Your division, as we have noted, went into the line on Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War 16, near St. The Germans set fire to St. Just after we attacked, there was an outpouring of priests and nuns from St. After the war I found out something very interesting, which has had a lot to do with my sense that more is going on in the Army than you think is going on. I got an order from battalion to send out a patrol with an NCO and three or four men to see how deep the river was between our positions and the Germans. So I sent out my best sergeant and three or four of the six or eight men I had with me, and they went out for a couple of hours and reported that the river was nine inches deep and was very easy to cross without bridging equipment.