Shrapnel, by William Wharton - review

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William Wharton, the celebrated American author, had few reasons to be cheerful. His first novel, Birdy, about a psychiatric case who believes himself to be a bird, contained harrowing scenes of wartime destruction. As a US Army sergeant stationed in liberated Europe in 1945, Wharton had witnessed (and occasionally participated in) acts of blind violence, looting and drunkenness. Though Birdy was turned into a film by Alan Parker, Wharton remained a malcontent and stubbornly withdrawn personality. He died in 2008, a mystery to many of his admirers.

Shrapnel, Wharton’s posthumously published war memoir, divulges a horrific episode from the past. In unsparing detail, Wharton describes a massacre of German prisoners that took place under his command in France at the war’s end. The Germans were first tortured and shot in the legs, then dumped in shallow graves. To the US soldiers who committed the crime, the PoWs were mere “Krauts” who deserved to die. Though Wharton was not directly responsible, he was implicated in the killings as the duty officer in charge. “The brutality of it all is sickening,” he confesses now.

In Wharton’s view, the allied troops who defeated Hitler were rarely as virtuous as the propaganda made them out to be. During the struggle to liberate Normandy in the summer of 1944, in which Wharton took part, US soldiers often behaved appallingly towards the local population. Americans saw themselves as “the great liberators”; in reality, Wharton writes, “we were worse than the Russians”. In French towns abandoned by the Germans, champagne cellars were looted and women gang-raped; Wharton stole what jewellery he could and concealed it in a German gas mask canister. Fifty years on, he reflects sorrowfully on his behaviour, though it was all too common at the time.

After the war, not surprisingly, the 19-year-old Wharton was in trauma and disturbed in a way that only combat veterans could understand. He no longer had the same enthusiasm or believed in people the same way. “My morale was pretty low,” he says. After the nightmare intensity of the conflict, his release back into civilian life in America was bound to be unsettling. Like all exiles, Wharton felt he had come home to a different world; everywhere he went in America, civilians spoke of Hitler’s defeat as a triumph immune from judgment or regret. To Wharton, though, the war had been a “soul-shaking trauma” that ripped the innocence clean out of him. A burning question stalked his hoped-for recovery: why me and not the others? His survival in faraway France when so many of his comrades had died there had become his shame.

Written in a bracingly plain prose brocaded with slang (“Those guys are going stir crazy”), Shrapnel provides a moving account of the horrors and vainglories of war. Throughout, Wharton considers his own war-shattered nerves and the dawning of uncomfortable truths about GIs stationed abroad. In spite of the occasional humour, the book is saturated with survivor guilt and, at times, rage. Few in late Forties America were aware of the disturbance — the neurotic aftermath — that lay ahead for soldiers so soon after the conflict’s end. Indeed, the effect on the psyche of those who had survived the war was simply not known. Having been discharged from the US Army, all Wharton knew for sure was that his present suffering must be followed by more suffering. “Boy, did I luck out,” he writes. Shrapnel is a brave, unsettlingly frank memoir, that engages from start to finish.

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