스티븐 앰브로즈 - [밴드 오브 브라더즈] (Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers) [2005년]

* Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers, Simon & Schuster

[Band of Brothers] 미니시리즈를 보고 난 다음, 영상이 못다 전해 준 이야기를 듣기 위해서, 나는 미니시리즈의 원작을 사들었다. 내용은 영화와 비슷하지만, 그 밖에도 많은 이야기가 실려 있었다. (영화 자체도 총 10시간이나 되는 대작이라 많은 이야기를 들려주었지만.)

전쟁이라는 극한 상황, 그러한 상황을 발생시키고야 마는 삶, 이런 것에 대해 많은 생각을 하게 해주는 작품이었다. 그리고 이 작품은 전쟁을 불러일으키는 그 원인에 대한 깊이 있는 성찰은 아니지만, 전쟁이 개개인의 인간에게 주는 인상이나 영향력은 소상하게 기록했다고 할 수 있다.

아이러니컬한 것은 전쟁이라는 극한 상황 속에서 다른 곳에서는 경험하기 힘든 우애, 전우애가 발생한다는 점이다. 필자는 그 점을 다음과 같이 적고 있다.

They thought the Army was boring, unfeeling, and chicken, and hated it. They found combat to be ugliness, destruction, and death, and hated it. Anything was better than the blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands made on the body--anything, that is, except letting down their buddies.

They also found in combat the closest brotherhood they ever knew. They found selflessness. They found they could love in other guy in their foxhole more than themselves. They found that in war, men who loved life would give their lives for them. (289)

*Forty-Eight Members of Easy Company had given their lives for their country. More than 100 had been wounded, many of them severely, some twice, a few three time, one four times. (292)

 

(전쟁은 어느 쪽도 물러날 수 없는 맞섬이다.)

 

*Each of the 140 men and seven officers who formed the original company followed a different route to its birthplace, Camp Toccoa, Georgia, but they had some things in common. They were young, born since the Great War. They were white, because the U. S. Army in World War II was segregated. (16)

*When someone was late returning on Sunday night, the next evening, after a full day's training, Sobel would order him to dig 6 x 6 x 6-foot pit with his entrenching tools. When the pit was finished, Sobel would tell him to "fill it up." (23)

*No matter how hard you train, nor however realistic the training, no one can ever be fully prepared for the intensity of the real thing. (61)

*Taylor told Malarkey's platoon to fight with knives until daylight, "and don't take any prisoners." (64)

*"You had to be a little bit awed that you were part of a thing that was so much greater than you." (67) (Carson)

*It <the plane which hit a hedgerow and exploded> was the plane carrying Lieutenant Meehan, 1st Sergeant evans, and the rest of the company headquarters section, including Sergeant Murray, who had held that long talk with Lipton about how to handle different combat situations. (69)

*With twelve men, what amounted to a squad (later reinforced by Speirs and the others), Company E had destroyed a German battery that was looking straight down causeway No. 2 and onto Utah Beach. . . . The significance of what Easy Company had accomplished cannot be judged with any degree of precision, but it surely saved a lot of lives, and made it much easier--perhaps even made it possible in the first instance--for tanks to come inland from the beach. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Easy Company saved the day at Utah Beach, but reasonable to say that it made an important contribution to the success of the invasion. (83-4)

*Easy had jumped into Normandy on June 6 with 139 officers and men. Easy was pulled out of the line on June 29 with 74 officers and men present for duty. (The 506th had taken the heaviest casualties of any regiment in the campaign, a total of 983, or about 50 percent.) (105) <이지 중대 사망자 : 19명>

*Lipton felt that "when men are in combat, the inevitability of it takes over. They are there, there is nothing they can do to change that, so they accept it. They immediately become callused to the smell of death, the bodies, the destruction, the killing, the danger. Enemy bodies and wounded don't affect them. Their own wounded and the bodies of their dead friends make only a brief impression, and in that impression is a fleeting feeling of triumph or accomplishment that it was not them. [Thank God it was him and not me is a feeling common to many combat soldiers when their comrades fall; later it can produce guilt feelings.] There is still work to be done, a war to be won, and they think about that." (111)

*For Easy, as for the 101st, the 82d, and the British armored and infantry outfits involved in Market-Garden, it had been a dispiriting experience. For the British 1st Airborne Division, it had been a disaster. It had landed on the north side of the Lower Rhine on September 17 with 10,005 men. It evacuated on September 26 only 2,163. Nearly 8,000 men were killed, wounded, or captured. (138)

*On a larger scale, the trouble with Market-Garden was that it was an offensive on much too narrow a front. The pencil-like thrust over the Rhine was vulnerable to attacks on the flanks. The Germans saw and took advantage of that vulnerability with furious counterattacks all along the length of the line, and hitting it from all sides.

In retrospect, the idea that a force of several divisions, consisting of British, American, and Polish troops, could be supplied by one highway could only have been accepted by leaders guilty of overconfidence. Easy was one of 150 or so companies that paid the price for that overconfidence. It jumped into Holland on September 17 with 154 officers and men. Ten days later, it was down to 132. (140)

*It is almost impossible to think of anything but survival in a life-threatening situation, which accounts for the opposite phenomenon to souvenir-grabbing--the soldier's casual attitude toward his own possessions, his indifferent attitude toward money. (155)

*Webster wrote his parents, "I'd never fight again. Having no choice, I'll go back to E Company and prepare for another jump. If I die, I hope it'll be fast." (170)

*Army psychiatrists found that in Normandy between 10 and 20 percent of the men in rifle companies suffered some form of mental disorder during the first week, and either fled or had to be taken out of the line (many, of course, returned to their units later). For others, visible breakdown never occurs, but nevertheless effectiveness breaks down. (203)

*They knew fear together. Not only the fear of death or wound, but the fear that all this was for nothing. Glenn Gray wrote, "The deepest fear of my war years, one still with me, is that these happenings had no real purpose. . . . How often I wrote in my war journals that unless that day had some positive significance for my future life, it could not possibly be worth the pain it cost." (221)

*The soldier's concern is with death, not life, with destruction, not construction. The ultimate destruction is killing another human being. When snipers hit a German on the other side, they would shout, "I got him! I got him!" and dance for joy. (228)

*"Life has become strictly a day to day and hour to hour affair," Webster wrote his parents. (228)

*The night of April 12, Leach <a Major who wanted to make a career out of the Army> set out at the head of a four-man patrol from the S-2 section at regimental HQ. But he made one fatal mistake: he failed to tell anyone he was going. Easy Company men on outpost duty heard the splashing of the boat the patrol was using as it crossed the river. As far as they were concerned, unless they had been told of an American patrol at such and such a time, any boat in the river contained enemy troops. They opened up on it; quickly the machine-guns joined in. The fire ripped the boat apart and hit all the men in it, including Leach. Ignoring the pitiful cries of the wounded, drowning in the river, the machine-gunners kept firing bursts at them until their bodies drifted away. They were recovered some days later downstream. In the judgment of the company, Leach and four men had "perished in a most unnecessary, inexcusable fashion because he had made an obvious and unpardonable mistake." (254)

*"There was Germany and all it stood for," Webster concluded. "The Germans had taken these people from their homes and sentenced them to work for life in a factory in the Third Reich. Babies and old women, innocent people condemned to live in barracks behind barbed wire, to slave twelve hours a day for an employer without feeling or consideration, to eat beet soup, mouldy potatoes, and black bread. This was the Third Reich, this was the New Order: Work till you died. With cold deliberation the Germans had enslaved the populace of Europe." So far as Webster was concerned, "The German people were guilty, every one of them." (256-7)

*The looting was profitable, fun, low-risk, and completely in accord with the practice of every conquering army since Alexander the Great's time. (261)

*On April 29 the company stopped for the night at Buchloe, in the foothills of the Alps, near Landsberg. Here they saw their first concentration camp. It was a work camp, not an extermination camp, one of the half-dozen or more that were a part of the Dachau complex. But although it was relatively small and designed to produce war goods, it was so horrible that it was impossible to fathom the enormity of the evil. Prisoners in their striped pajamas, three-quarters starved, by the thousands, corpses, little more than skeletons, by the hundreds. (262)

*"The memory of starved, dazed men," Winters wrote, "who dropped their eyes and heads when we looked at them through the chain-link fence, in the same manner that a beaten, mistreated dog would cringe, leaves feelings that cannot be described and will never be forgotten. The impact of seeing those people behind that fence left me saying, only to myself, 'Now I know why I am here!'" (263)

*Powers gathered up his loot, mainly pistols, got his paperwork done, drew his back pay, and joined the ten other lucky men for a ride to Munich. Going around a curve, a G. I. truck hit their truck head on. Powers flew out and over the top of the truck, hit the pavement, broke some bones, and got a bad concussion. Another one of the "lucky" soldiers was killed. Powers went to hospital, where he lost all his back pay and souvenirs to thieves. He eventually got home via a hospital ship, months after the comrades he had left behind. (282)

*They thought the Army was boring, unfeeling, and chicken, and hated it. They found combat to be ugliness, destruction, and death, and hated it. Anything was better than the blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands made on the body--anything, that is, except letting down their buddies.

They also found in combat the closest brotherhood they ever knew. They found selflessness. They found they could love in other guy in their foxhole more than themselves. They found that in war, men who loved life would give their lives for them. (289)

*Forty-Eight Members of Easy Company had given their lives for their country. More than 100 had been wounded, many of them severely, some twice, a few three time, one four times. (292)