Sheer Misery
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Marching across occupied France in 1944, American GI Leroy Stewart had neither death nor glory on his mind: he was worried about his underwear. “I ran into a new problem when we walked,” Stewart wrote, “the shorts and I didn’t get along. They would crawl up on me all the time.” Complaints of physical discomfort like Stewart’s—or worse—pervade infantrymen’s memories of the European theater, whether the soldiers were British, American, German, or French. Wet, freezing misery with no end in sight—this was life for millions of enlisted men. Crawling underwear may have been a small price to pay for the liberation of millions of people, but in the utter wretchedness of the moment, it was quite natural for soldiers like Stewart to lose sight of that end.
Sheer Misery trains a humane and unsparing eye on the corporeal experiences of the soldiers who fought in Belgium, France, and Italy during the last two years of the war. In the horrendously unhygienic and often lethal conditions of the front line, their bodies broke down, stubbornly declaring their needs for warmth, rest, and good nutrition. Feet became too swollen to march, fingers too frozen to pull triggers; stomachs cramped, and diarrhea stained underwear and pants. Turning away from the accounts of high-level military strategy that dominate many WWII histories, acclaimed historian Mary Louise Roberts instead relies on diaries and letters to bring to life visceral sense memories like the moans of the “screaming meemies,” the acrid smell of cordite, and the shockingly mundane sight of rotting corpses. As Roberts writes, “For soldiers who fought, the war was above all about their bodies. It was as bodies that they had been recruited, trained, and deployed. Their job was to injure and kill bodies but also be injured and killed.”
Told in inimitable style by one of our most distinctive historians of the Second World War, Sheer Misery gives readers both an unprecedented look at the ground-level world of the common soldier and a deeply felt rendering of the experience of being a body in war.
Mary Louise Roberts is the WARF Distinguished Lucie Aubrac Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also the Charles Boal Ewing Chair in Military History at the United States Military Academy at West Point for the 2020-21 academic year. Her most recent books are What Soldiers Do and D-Day through French Eyes: .