Clocking in at the Front Lines: ‘To Hell and Back’ (Audie Murphy, 1949)

The Grunt Work of the Killing Business.

A review of ‘To Hell and Back’, by Audie Murphy (1949)

My reflections on Audie Murphy’s 1949 memoir To Hell and Back that led to this review were difficult to navigate, and this review proved no easier to write. I think this was because ‘war’ is such a well-trodden subject that any supposed insight into it, especially from a book written in the 1940s, has already been absorbed into our wider cultural consciousness. The current military recruitment crises in both the U.S. and the U.K. demonstrate that the current generation approaches war differently than previous ones, especially those who fought in the Second World War. Even in 2003 Rolling Stone reporterEvan Wright noticed this difference, stating that the U.S. Marines he embedded himself with during the controversial invasion of Iraq, ‘entered Iraq predisposed toward the idea that the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation’.Very few people approach conversations about war armed with abstract concepts like ‘valor,’ ‘honor,’ and ‘camaraderie’ anymore. Indeed, the once-groundbreaking insights delivered by international ‘Lost Generation’ writers such as Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves, et. al. — that modern industrialized war is a ruthless, impersonal killing ground where sheer luck determines survival, and where the soldier is ultimately a victim of politicians and industrialists’ greed and leaves the battlefield with irreconcilable physical and/or mental wounds — would likely be answered today with a shrug and the following response: ‘Yeah? Well what else would you expect? That’s war.’

Additionally, Audie Murphy’s peculiar status in American history and culture makes approaching his account with any degree of nuance difficult. Though Audie does try to present his experiences as more-universal — nowhere in his account does he mention any sort of military decoration, and the actions that won him the Medal of Honor compose only six pages in a 274-page book — he cannot fully escape his status as a ‘war hero,’ the most decorated U.S. soldier of the Second World War, which would have been common knowledge in 1949. He also cannot escape his own biography. ‘War hero’ (in ‘The Good War,’ no less) constitutes only one section of an easily idealized American life. As Tom Brokaw ebulliently states in his introduction, Audie Murphy was an authentic Texas cowboy before the war and a Western movie star after it (he also starred in the 1955 film adaptation of To Hell and Back as himself) — he was the kind of man who denied charges of assaulting somebody with a firearm by stating, ‘If I had [shot at him], do you think I would have missed?’ Basically, regardless of what Audie Murphy says about war, his story taken as a whole constitutes enough of a Republican wet dream of rugged self-sufficiency and patriotic ‘citizenship,’ bundled up in the nostalgic American imagery of the Old West for good measure, that readers predisposed to this worldview will read whatever they want in it — Tom Brokaw enjoying this book is evidence of that. Audie’s status also alienates the other reader, the ‘anti-war’ reader, because it implies an allegiance to that conservative, patriotic worldview — how could a cowboy find war as ‘wrong’ as a poet? And this is true to an extent, insofar as Audie, contrary to the expectations of ‘anti-war’ readers, does not wholly present war as a carnival of horrors that can be indulged in as a form of ‘trauma tourism’. Though Audie’s war undeniably has its horrors — a comrade trying to hobble away on bloody stumps before machine gun fire blows out his stomach, Audie and a fellow soldier executing horses who have been maimed by American artillery, tank crewman rolling out of burning tanks and writhing around in the snow to try to put themselves out — it is not purely horrible.

At least, Audie never says that his war was horrible. He presents war in a very Hemingwayesque way, depicting events in a matter-of-a-fact, ‘hard news’ style punctuated by hyper-masculine but strangely poetic metaphors and similes — ‘We look like a phantom body of troops doing a forced march through hell’ (255); ‘I weigh the weapon in my hand and admire the cold, blue glint of its steel. It is more beautiful than a flower; more faithful than most friends’ (272). Otherwise, the lens through which Audie depicts war is that war is just a job. This, I think, is brilliant in retrospect. While Audie is as far from criticizing an economy based on ownership and wage labor and professing communist sympathies as John Wayne sucking down a rolled cigarette and tilting his Stetson to the camera with his eager squaw sitting across his lap, his framing of war as repetitive blue-collar work tells the reader all that they need to know about war, and, correspondingly, can reflect back negatively on ‘work’ as the reader understands it.

Because the ‘job’ that Audie and his comrades undertake is not a job like any other, is it? At first glance, to the uninitiated, describing the task of delivering death with every weapon from the bayonet to the M101 Howitzer as a ‘job’ or ‘work’ is an extreme understatement. But as one reads on this comparison seems more apt, and its implications more horrifying, because with repetition what else can a human being do besides become accustomed to certain conditions?

Audie adjusts to the conditions of war and frames it as ‘work’ pretty early on, responding to criticism for shooting down fleeing Italian soldiers with the following argument: ‘That’s our job, isn’t it? They would have killed us if they’d had the chance. That’s their job’ (11). While Audie subsequently explains that ‘it is not easy to shed the idea that human life is sacred,’ doing so is the first step to being able to kill with ‘no qualms; no pride; no remorse’. That’s the job, and with repetition Audie and his comrades do it with professional precision and detachment. Upon seeing a German patrol approaching their position, Audie and his squad ‘accept the facts coolly; remove the safety locks on our rifles,’ and wait for the squad’s BAR gunner Swope, a man whom Audie repeatedly expresses admiration for, to open fire; when the fight ends Audie observes, ‘Already the blood wells from their middle-parts. Swope aims not too high, not too low. He seldom misses the vital organs’ (38-39). After the fight, with the German wounded still writhing on the ground, Audie continues his observations: ‘Swope, sitting stolidly behind that gun of his, has lit a cigarette. He does not take even a professional interest in his targets […] He has done his work without hatred, pride, or compassion. Now he relaxes’ (42). This sort of description sounds like it could refer to any type of worker clocking off after their shift. Audie provides a further insight into this mindset when approaching a German defensive position at Anzio, stating that, ‘It will feel better when the guns open up […] The brain will turn to animal cunning. The job lies directly before us: Destroy and survive’ (99). This sentiment, destruction as work, appears several more times in the book, but it is most notable when he is in the midst of the actions that won him the Medal of Honor — holding a crossroads with a radio linked to friendly artillery and the 50. Caliber gun turret on a disabled tank — ‘For the time being my imagination is gone; and my numbed brain is intent only on destroying’ (242).

Despite the conditions of this job, or perhaps because of them, the only goodness that Audie can extract from his war experiences is in the display of ‘masculinity’ present in the war. But Audie does not glorify his comrades’ ‘manhood’ because they kill, or to the extent to which they can kill, but because they showed up at all and do the job. In dangerous conditions, doing a dirty and unappealing job — not unlike the other blue-collar work associated with this time period — Audie concludes that his comrades are ‘the great ones’ because ‘when the chips are down, they do their jobs like men’ (142). This praise, of course, comes with a corresponding criticism. Men who can’t stand up to the strain and do the job are irreconcilable cowards, worthy of the deepest contempt and condemnation, like a soldier named Olsen who suffers a nervous breakdown under fire, and who Audie and his comrades watch leave the lines ‘with hatred in our eyes’ (13). The greatest and perhaps the only nobility that Audie can see in war — his only remaining belief following VE-Day except ‘the force of a hand grenade, the power of artillery, that accuracy of a Garand — is in his comrades ‘who stood up against the enemy, taking their beatings without whimper and their triumphs without boasting’ (273). Audie’s praise of masculinity in warfare does not mean that war has some indirect positive effect, however, as the comparison of war to work implies that this same stoic and resilient masculinity could be observed at any blue-collar job site in the 1940s; these are not ‘men’ because they participated in combat — this implies a belief in combat as a means of unlocking exclusive qualities in men, which Audie does not profess — but simply because they endured a dangerous, filthy job.

Now, it’s clear where Audie could be said to be critiquing war — as I have claimed he is — by continually comparing war to ‘work’. Referring to the most extreme endeavor that humanity can undertake as ‘work,’ becoming so accustomed to killing other human beings that it becomes comparable to felling trees or nailing rivets, speaks in itself to the dehumanizing effect of industrialized warfare. But how could this comparison also function as a criticism of industrialized work, something that Audie very likely did not intend? The answer, I believe, is two-fold. Firstly, Audie and his comrades would never have become accustomed to wartime conditions without repetition. Just as, say, a factory worker in this time period would clock in and clock out at the same time every day to do unpleasant, repetitive work punctuated by short breaks that allow for just enough recovery to clock back in, but never fully rest, Audie and his comrades are cycled in and out of the line to do the repetitive work of killing Germans and then are granted short rests in rear echelon areas to heal their bodies and salvage their nerves, but never to the standard that they were in before the war — both the factory worker and the soldier become adept at the respective industrial ‘functions’ they perform and become desensitized to the unpleasantness of those functions through repetition. And despite their mental defenses, both the factory worker and the soldier are used by their respective authorities until they can no longer perform. I couldn’t help but thinking about this comparison while reading the book, as well as the question, ‘If repetition can blunt our emotional responses and make us indifferent even to war, what suffering does it render us indifferent to in our day-to-day lives?’ Secondly, Audie’s belief that the nobility of masculinity and the functional usefulness of men is tied to men’s ability to stoically endure suffering and conduct dirty, unpleasant work for ends they cannot understand is undeniably a belief that was born from war and conceived in an impoverished childhood as a sharecropper. This idea of masculinity is cruel and — though I hesitate to use such a contemporary and, let’s face it, cunty word to describe a working-class WWII veteran’s perception — reductive, and it is not a view that Audie pioneered or inherently possessed; it was one that he was conditioned to by growing up in an industrial society and fighting in a war conducted within that society’s assumptions and capabilities.

So, amateur literary analysis aside, would I recommend this book? For fans of twentieth-century American literature, absolutely. As stated earlier, it’s writing style is Hemingwayesque — intense experiences distilled into short declarative sentences, entire battles clipped through in single paragraphs like a ‘hard news’ article, and an earthy philosophy about masculine resilience in a hardscrabble existence. The dialogue is straight out of the popular fiction of the era - think Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade in the trenches, or, given the characters’ youths, Holden Caulfield. In a sense, this is the ultimate dime paperback war novel, a conglomeration of all of the conventions of mid-century working-class American literature. And Audie generally refrains from taking a definitive stance about his experiences and war in general, giving the reader a lot of space for personal interpretation. While I disagree with Tom Brokaw’s assessment of this work’s meaning — and loathe him generally — I think that me and him both reading and enjoying this book through different interpretive lenses speaks to this work’s interpretive potential. This is also highly recommended for those who are interested in the Second World War generally. While Audie doesn’t go into virtually any detail about the battles that he participated in, it isn’t that kind of bookanyways, and his strengths as a storyteller are in immersing the reader into the experience of the Second World War — Audie is also a significant enough figure for the time period that the book is well worth reading for those interested in it. I would hesitate to recommend this to fans of general fiction or those with only a passing interest in the Second World War. For the former this work would likely be a bit too niche and repetitive — because Audie doesn’t go into much depth about his childhood or reference his status as a mid-century celebrity at all, this book really is all mud, bayonets, and death. There also isn’t much characterization or any ‘arcs’ as such — soldiers pass in and out of Audie’s perception and are generally defined by singular traits or quirks, and Audie doesn’t provide any lyrical introspection about how the war changed him (for instance, one would not know from reading this that he was a lifelong alcoholic following the war and slept with a loaded handgun under his pillow every night). For those with a passing interest in the Second World War, I wouldn’t recommend this if you’ve read a WWII memoir or two before, as this one will likely blend into what you’ve read and bore you; aside from Audie’s historic and cultural significance, he was not in a unique role during the war. If you’ve not read a WWII memoir before, I’d recommend E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed (1981), as it provides a much better balance between context, journalistic depictions of the war’s horrors, and deeper introspection on their impact and wider meaning — it is simply a more comprehensive work.

-Noah Perez

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