G.I. Wisdom

The future world is likely to be shaped as much by the attitudes of the American people as by the decisions of their leaders. TIME Correspondent William Walton, recently returned from two years with the U.S. Army in Britain and Europe, here reports his impression of the changed attitudes of some millions of Americans --those whose views will be better known when they come home from the fighting fronts.

"I figure on getting home about the end of 1946," said one sergeant moodily.

"Maybe sooner," said the other, "but I won't mind being a policeman for six months or so if the Army sends me to school part-time."

These two sergeants, talking over two bottles of beer not far behind the western front, were making an assumption, widely accepted among Americans in Europe, that a long job of policing Germany will be a necessity after the war. Acceptance of that responsibility -- or resignation to it --is one of many changes that have come over American soldiers since Dday.

Soldiering, of course, is mostly lugging ammunition, digging foxholes, fighting cold and rain and snow or jungle heat, killing the enemy. Also it is waiting. And in the long waits soldiers talk. When the subjects of girls and life at home are exhausted, talk is sometimes serious. Opinions are as diverse as men. No one set of opinions could be called the G.I. mind, but certain new patterns seem to be emerging.

Friends & Enemies. Most profound is the sharp increase in hatred of Germans. Perhaps Americans at home still look to ward Japan with deeper hatred, but front line troops in Europe turn their hate to ward the Reich, now that they have struggled with it in bitter combat. That sharpening of hatred is accompanied by increasing concern over what to do with Germany, and by a fellow feeling for the Russian Army, which still kills the most Germans.

Up and down the western front, since the present Russian offensive started, I have heard an amazing unanimity: "I hope the Russians get to Berlin first. They'll know what to do with those Krauts!" Such sentiment indicates no slackening of G.I. will to fight. Rather it shows an appreciation of the tremendous human cost of beating Germany. In cold and mud and anguish the brotherhood of battle leaps across barriers of place and ideas.

What to do with Germany is more difficult. Of course not all G.I.s ponder the problem, but it furnishes food for many an interminable bull session in lonely artillery batteries, company command posts and airfield barracks. G.I.s agree that it is impossible to exterminate this foe. The next best thing, many of them believe, is to carve Germany into numerous smaller states and then keep permanent guard to make sure that the Germanic states do not reunite into a powerful Reich. Perhaps this is not farseeing, but the G.I.s have not yet heard a better plan.

The G.I. attitude toward England has changed most. Soldiers who sweated out a year or two in England waiting for the Invasion were pretty unanimous in a feeling toward the English that varied from pity to hatred. No plumbing, bad teeth, uneatable food, weak beer. Now their attitude has shifted so far that many an American soldier on the Continent thinks wistfully of England as another home where people were genuinely friendly, spoke the same language, practiced understandable politics.

Political Maturity. When G.I. bull sessions dig deepest, they all run up against one thorny question: just what are we fighting for? No one searches any harder for the answer than the man who is doing the fighting. But here is most apparent the characteristic U.S. lack of political education, the failure of both Government and Army to define for the fighting men valid political objectives. Both the German and Russian armies have taught their soldiers better, whatever the lesson.

Floundering G.I.s are thrown back on their own analytical resources. Some get no farther than the conclusion that they are fighting for home & mother. Some progress to the inalienable right of each nation to decide its own form of government. A few see the oneness of freedom and democracy throughout the worlds Most were shocked by Greece.

Now the soldier's deep yearning for home is beginning to be tinged with a sense that in order to stay home, once he gets there, Europe must be left in better shape than he found it. Just how to achieve it bothers him intensely. Somehow, the more articulate ones feel, a way must be found to allow Europeans to choose their own political systems and yet to hold them in check so that the strong do not again oppress the weak.

That is why, in accepting responsibility for policing Europe, the G.I. has made one step toward political maturity. The next step--deciding on the means of doing it--is more complex. But the first step was the longest from the prejudices of his past.

Sentimentally, G.I.s want home to be just as they left it. But they know too that they themselves have changed. Often they wonder aloud if their families and friends have changed as much or in the same directions. Out of danger and suffering comes a new, unfamiliar searching for beliefs and principles. And from the searching comes maturity.

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