I watched a dismal film last night. I am not sure what it was called: the box said it was called
Anzio, but the opening title said
The Battle for Anzio.
Starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Falk, it purported to be a dramatization of the American army's landing at Anzio, Italy in 1944, and its missed opportunity to drive straight to Rome. The box spoke of "30,000 casualties" being sustained in a four-month campaign, though the film itself did not portray action on this scale, as it really only told the story of a couple of days' worth of behind-enemy-lines action by a group of six men, one of whom compulsively sings to prostitutes.
What I found most indigestible was the attitude and posturing of the Mitchum character, a "war correspondent" who, pushing himself into the very front lines of battle, is a better strategist and has better intelligence on German positions than any of the US generals do. God-like, he passes fearsome judgment upon all the decisions of the top brass, and he writes
fearsome newspaper articles about their follies. By the way, he refuses to carry a weapon, though near the end he machine-guns a German sharpshooter (apparently without any crisis in his principles or transformative effect upon his character.)
At the conclusion of the film, as triumphant American troops parade through liberated Rome, to the unbridled joy of the
Romani, he offers the following bit of "wisdom":
Just look at history...Wars never solve anything, and they never will. Why do we fight? We fight because we like it!This is claptrap of a low order. "Wars never solve anything" is childish, 1968 pacifism, but the Mitchum character's smugly exuberant "We fight because we like it!" could be a kind of debonair, tough-guy existentialism, also appropriate for 1968, though already being swallowed up by radical left-wing activism in the popular culture. The idea goes something like this:
humans love killing each other, and any 'reasons' they give for a war are just rationalizations; no wars have any purpose other than giving men an excuse to kill and take pleasure in killing. But I am enlightened enough to see through humanity's love of violence, am therefore liberated from it, and my rare, cosmopolitan insights place me far above the fray. (This could also be half-baked pop-Freudianism, which would also be appropriate for 1968.)
Was 1968 so far removed from 1945 that serious people could write such a line, and act it with conviction, and thinking audiences around the world, watching it delivered on the silver screen, would nod in the dark, saying to themselves, "By golly, he's right: wars really don't solve anything!" Was historical memory so fogged in 1968 that no one remembered DeGaulle entering Paris in 1944, the liberation of Auschwitz, or the trials of German war criminals? How could anyone recall the recent destruction of the Nazi empire and seriously claim that
wars never solve anything?
This is just terrible stuff. It reminds one of Spielberg's most odious line from
Saving Private Ryan, where the Hanks character asserts that "saving Private Ryan may be the only decent thing we manage to pull out of this whole, godawful mess". Right. "Rescuing" the Matt Damon character from a duty he was willing and able to perform without one self-pitying thought about the deaths of his brothers trumps the destruction of Hitlerism.
The fact is that there are some problems that can only be solved by wars. This is not to say that wars do not create problems. Nor is it to say that all wars solve the problems they set out to solve. But the only possible solution to Hitler's "New Order" was a war.
You must of course grant that the New Order was a "problem" that admitted a solution. To call it an absolute evil, and then to call a war against it an absolute evil as well is a deeper despair than I can imagine.