The closing dispatch of Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck sends a lieutenant up a hill on an Italian island in December 1943 carrying a white flag, and his white flag is a bath towel. There are forty-three American paratroopers behind him and eighty-seven heavily armed Germans dug in ahead. He has memorised a short speech claiming six hundred men ashore and cruisers waiting offshore to open fire. Neither exists.
He is, as he puts it to himself on the way up, holding a pair of treys against three showing deuces, and hoping very hard that nobody asks to see his hole card.
That is the last sequence in Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck, and the first thing to say about the book is that it is a great deal more entertaining than its subject suggests.
The Shape of Once There Was a War
Around fifty short dispatches, filed between June and December 1943 for the New York Herald Tribune syndicate and gathered by Viking in September 1958 as Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck. England first, then North Africa, then Italy. Each piece runs two or three pages and does exactly one thing.
The fifteen-year gap matters more than anything else about the book, because Steinbeck used it to write an introduction that takes the reporting apart. He calls the pieces period pieces, says the attitudes in them are archaic, and offers the possibility that the whole collection is warped and one-sided. Everything in it happened, he writes. The untruth is in what went unmentioned.
A group therefore gets two texts for the price of one, and they disagree with each other.
The Rules Behind Once There Was a War
This is the discussion, and he hands it over in the first twenty pages.
Three conventions governed what a correspondent could file. Cowardice did not exist in the American Army, and the infantry private was the bravest and noblest man in it. There were no cruel, ambitious or incompetent commanders, and any disaster was part of a larger strategy. And five million young men had set aside any interest in women for the duration, a proposition maintained alongside the pin-ups in every barracks and an order for millions of contraceptives explained as waterproofing for machine-gun barrels.
He is clear that this was not mostly imposed. Correspondents carried the rule book in their heads and invented extra restrictions for themselves, because anything that got in the way of the War Effort was by definition bad, and because a reporter who broke the rules would be removed from the theatre and a reporter with no theatre has no job.
His own test of the censors is the funniest thing in Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck. Feeling bruised, he filed Herodotus’s account of the battle of Salamis, fought in 480 BC. The Navy killed the whole story, because it contained place names.
What He Admits He Left Out
Two specific stories are named in the preface to Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck, and a group should sit with them.
He knew that Patton had struck a sick soldier in a hospital. He knew that American naval gunners at Gela had shot down fifty-nine of their own troop carriers. Eisenhower asked the correspondents not to file either, on the grounds that it would damage morale at home, and they did not. The stories came out anyway through a leak in Washington, and he notes that nobody in the field helped.
He also lists, without names, what the press corps routinely knew and never used: a famous general who changed press officers because he was not getting enough headlines, a commander who broke a photographer for shooting the wrong profile, good field officers removed by jealous superiors, medical discharges issued for cowardice and brutality. Not one reporter he knew used any of it.
The consequence he draws is the sharpest line in the book: when soldiers’ novels appeared after the war, a public that had been carefully protected found them shocking.
What Survives the Admission in Once There Was a War
All of it, which is the surprise of Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck.
There is the song. A German number from 1938 about a girl who works her way up from stripes to shoulder bars until she lands a brigadier, rejected by two dozen publishers, rescued because a bombed Belgrade station had almost no records left and put Lili Marleen on the air to the Afrika Korps. The Eighth Army captured it along with the prisoners, the Australians wrote new words, the Americans added an off-beat, and Steinbeck observes that the authorities sensibly gave up and treated the song as a prisoner of war.
There is a wing commander who is a goat, holds a decoration, and is expected to die in due course of cirrhosis of the liver and be buried with full military honours.
And there is a bomber crew over flat wartime beer, working out that the home front is fighting a different war from theirs and has nearly won it. One of them has read a magazine piece explaining that aircrew have nerves of steel and want nothing but a crack at the enemy. He says he read it three or four times trying to convince himself he was not frightened.
Where It Will Lose People
The author of Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck is almost never near the fighting, and a reader expecting combat will be disappointed.
A dozen pieces are affectionate filler about entertainers, mascots and a sergeant who can obtain anything.
The segregation of the army appears repeatedly in Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck and is never once treated as a subject.
If an author’s admission that his work is one-sided settles the matter for you, the remaining two hundred pages will feel pointless.
Reading It With the Novels
Set Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck beside our analysis of The Grapes of Wrath, written five years earlier by the same observer with nobody telling him what to leave out, and the difference is almost entirely in what he permits himself to conclude. At the point when he finally let these dispatches be collected he was deep in the material covered by our analysis of East of Eden, a novel about individual moral responsibility, and the word at its centre is the subject of our piece on the timshel debate. The island that closes the book is Ventotene, a prison island off Naples, which is why there were cells ready for the prisoners.
Questions for the Table
He says everything in the book happened and the untruth is in the omissions. Is that a defence or a confession?
Eisenhower asked and the correspondents agreed. Would you have filed?
Does knowing the rules make the dispatches better or worse to read?
He never once writes that he saw something himself. Everything is in somebody else’s mouth. Why?
The army in these pages is segregated and he does not mention it. What does that omission belong to?
Is a lieutenant bluffing eighty-seven men with a bath towel a war story or a card story?
Before You Assign It
Aircrew dying at length, including one bomber watched all the way down. Civilian deaths in the London bombing, among them a man who cut his own throat during a raid. Prisoners taken at gunpoint. Racially segregated units and the racial vocabulary of 1943, used plainly and without comment.
What It Leaves Behind
A better question about journalism than most books about journalism manage.
Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck is two things at once, and a group that reads them against each other gets the whole value. The 1943 writer is doing propaganda he believes in, and doing it so well that a trembling dog on an airfield tells you more about waiting than any casualty figure. The 1958 writer knows precisely what the price was and prints the invoice at the front.
He did not go back and repair the dispatches. He left the ragged sentences alone and explained what they had been allowed to say, which is a harder and more useful thing to do.
The bath towel worked, by the way. The German officer looked at him for a long moment, then said that surrendering to superior forces is no dishonour, and brought all eighty-seven men down the hill.
There were no superior forces.