Soldiers Hate the Media—They Always Have

Ron Chernow’s thousand-page biography Grant explains the life and legacy of the General who won the Civil War, and the President who held the Union together after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the disastrous Presidency of Andrew Johnson.  The book is also fascinating on tension between the military and the free press.

Like the vast majority of Presidents and soldiers before and after him, President Ulysses S. Grant hated the press.  He hated the press as a general and he hated the press as President.  That part of the book was no surprise. 

The interesting thing in Chernow’s book is his comparisons of the newspapers in the South and in the North. 

The Press in the Confederate states spawned across the South as soon as the war of rebellion began and became direct ancestor of Fox News.  The South was not a Democratic country. Like Fox News, the media in the South saw themselves as part of the war effort and wrote accordingly.  They were Совиет Правда (Soviet Pravda) , not the Washington Post.

Grant, like every other general in the North, got pummeled in the press, criticized, second-guessed and sometimes vilified.  In the Southern press, Generals were heroes. Battles were all massive victories, until they weren’t.

But also like Fox News, the press in the South wrote about real events and real people. Grant was an avid reader of Southern newspapers. At one point near the end of the war, Grant was out of direct contact with General William Sherman in his March across Georgia and turn north. Grant followed Sherman’s progress in Southern newspapers that were telling citizens where to defend against the Yankees.

When I first enlisted, I heard from older soldiers that hatred of the press really began during the Vietnam War.  Certainly, the Vietnam War turned up heat on an already simmering conflict, but the conflict itself is part of every army in every country with a free press.

The alternative to a free press is the propaganda machines in Russia and every other current and former tyrannical government.  The depth of the hatred of the press by the military was most clear to me when I was a public relations sergeant for my last unit.  I wrote what my commander wanted me to write, but because I had a camera and a notebook, I was “the press” to the majority of the soldiers in my unit.  In the school for military journalists at Fort Meade, there is no doubt we are public relations, not the press.

Among the many reasons to read Grant, is to see how deep the animosity is between the military and the free press. And to see that state-controlled media did exist in America in eleven states for four years.  

 

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The Painting in My Living Room by a Prisoner of War

 A Picture of Bavaria on My Living Room Wall

Painted by an Afrika Korps Prisoner of War

When I look up from reading on the couch at night when the house is quiet, I see this painting. It was painted by an enlisted man serving in the Afrika Korps who was a Prisoner of War of the American Army.

The POW camp he was a prisoner in for more than two years was in Reading, Pennsylvania. The site is now the Reading Airport.

The painting was a gift from the prisoner to the camp commandant, my father, Capt. George Gussman. When my father took command of the camp in 1944, most of the prisoners had been there for more than a year.

On the day he took command, my father lined up the officers to introduce himself and let them know what he expected from the prisoners. One of the officers whispered that my father was a Jew. Which is true. He was also a ranked middleweight boxer before he enlisted. He called the man out of formation and hit him hard enough to lay him out cold in front of the other officers.

Dad then sent his guards into the barracks for and inspection that led to confiscating hundreds of Hershey bars the prisoners had bought with the money they earned in work on local farms.  These candy bars became my mother's engagement present from Dad.  That story is here.

My Dad never went overseas in World War II. He enlisted before the war started at 34 years old. As a rule, the Army did not send soldiers that old into combat during World War II.

After the initial drama, Dad had no more trouble and got along well with the prisoners.  The prisoners were repatriated several months after the war ended, and few applied to stay in America and pursue citizenship.

The painting reminds of the ironies of war--that soldiers from the country that killed millions of Jews would be prisoners in a POW camp run by the son of Jewish immigrants.  I keep that token of respect and affection on my wall. It hung on the wall of the home I grew up in. I will pass it to the next generation.

The prisoners my father was in charge of were captured far from home in a war that was already going against Germany. Prisoners of War in any Army are brave men who faced the enemy and death and survived.

Reality Catches Up With Fiction 70 Years After World War II

B-25 Bomber Pilot 1st. Lt. Bernard "Bernie" Steed Receiving 

the Distinguished Flying Cross for Bravery 

on a Mission over Avignon, France.

Last month a friend started a Facebook discussion about the worst book we ever read. One of the books that came up was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Published in 1961, the novel was based on life in an Army Air Corps bomber squadron flying B-25 "Mitchell" medium bombers over Italy, Southern France and across the Mediterranean Sea.

B-25 "Mitchell" Medium Bombers

I jumped into the discussion saying Catch-22 was one of my favorite books. I put the comment on my own page and one of the responses was from a guy I worked with almost 20 years ago.  Joseph Steed’s comment:

“My Dad literally lived Catch 22. He was assigned as a pilot to his bomber squadron in Europe within a month of the arrival of a young bombardier from New York City named Joseph Heller. Heller flew as Dad's bombardier on several missions. In the Avignon mission which was a significant scene in the book, like the author, Dad saw one of his friends shot down for the first time. On the same mission, Dad's plane lost an engine and he had to ditch it in the Mediterranean. Dad had told me about the ever-increasing number of missions required before being allowed to leave (he flew 66), and about the one guy in their unit who refused to fly again after reaching 40, the latter becoming the model for the guy who claimed he was crazy to avoid flying but whose sanity was proved by his not wanting to fly -- the original catch 22. When I discovered the Heller connection, Dad was in his 80s. He had heard of the book, but was not aware it was written by one of his bombardiers about their shared time in Europe. We looked up an old picture of Heller, and Dad remembered him as a little guy always running around with a notebook in his hand and writing things down. I got a copy of the book for him, but he made it only a couple of chapters in. He couldn't deal with being satirical about the experience.”

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Joe’s Dad, Bernard “Bernie” Steed was drafted in 1942 at 19-years-old. He qualified for flight training and within a year was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant and training to fly B-25 “Mitchell” twin-engine bombers. These planes were made famous in the “Doolittle Raid” in which the big planes flew from aircraft carriers and bombed Tokyo in 1942. Bernie Steed’s life included the terror and humor of war. While still in pilot training in Georgia, shortly after landing in his trainer plane from a routine flight, a second plane’s propeller began chewing through their plane’s tail section, destroying it most of the way to the cockpit. The guy never saw them until he hit them. “Pilot inattention."

Bernie Steed in pilot training

By May 1944, Bernie Steed was 21-year-old pilot flying bombing missions from a base in Corsica across the Mediterranean theater of operations. On one mission Steed lost an engine, but managed to land the plane safely in the sea and get all of his crew into the life raft. They were rescued by a seaplane just a few hours later.  Bernie Steed earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for that mission and earned many other awards and decorations for flying 66 combat missions.

Joseph Heller was from Brooklyn and was a year younger than Bernie when he was assigned as bombardier in the 488th Bombardment Squadron in May 1944. He flew a couple of missions as part of Bernie’s six-man crew.

Joseph Heller in the Bombardier Compartment of a B-25 Medium Bomber

The characters in Catch-22 were composites of more than one person, Heller said. But about the action described, he said, “All the physical details, and almost all of what might be called the realistic details do come out of my own experiences as a bombardier in World War II. The organization of a mission, the targets—most of the missions that are in the book were missions that I did fly on.”

Thanksgiving Dinner, 1944, on the 488th Bomber Squadron Base, Corsica

A month before I learned about Bernie Steed, I saw a copy of Catch-22 at a book sale and bought it, thinking I would like to re-read it. Now that I know more about the author and one of the heroes in the squadron the novel is based on, I will definitely be re-reading the book.