Salinger’s family was in the food import business and he spent some time in Europe before the war, picking up German and French. That’s how he wound up in the Army Counterintelligence Corps. The CIC guys followed right behind the combat units, searching corpses for documents and interrogating prisoners. Salinger must have seen a lot of decomposing, burned, and mutilated soldiers.

Other WWII CIC alumni include writer and philosophy professor J. Glenn Gray (“The Warriors”, which contains descriptions of Gray’s CIC work), Cold War journalist and probable CIA asset George Bailey (“The Germans”, which also describes his CIC work), and poet Anthony Hecht. I saw Hecht read at Auburn shortly before his death. He read an essay on “the Good War”, which described how the infantry unit he was attached to shot down surrendering German civilians after a costly firefight at the end of the war. None of the WWII veterans I grew up among ever called it “the Good War”. My uncle, who fought at Bitche, said “we called it Bitchy and that’s what it was–bitchy”.

Absolutely.

“For Esme, With Love and Squalor.”

However, as the war progressed, camps of all sizes and types, anticipating being overrun, sent their prisoners to other camps more likely to last a few more months. Bad as Dachau was, the results of the shipments (see “The Train Near Magedurg for one which was lucky) made it look infinitely worse. Before getting to the main camp, US troops found a trainload of dead people. For starters.

There was a significant difference between “concentration camps” and the post-Wannsee extermination effort.

My father’s division (104th ID Timberwolves) liberated Mittelbau-Dora. And, with hardly a breath after VE Day, the Infantry guys were going up and down back roads and forest paths looking for the dead of the death marches from one camp to another. Idea was to put them into a mattress cover and make a note on a map for the Graves Registration guys to come along and pick them up. “We used up every mattress cover in Third Army,” my father said.

The back lesson of the Magedeburg story is the Germans would lose a war in order to kill more jJews.

R2L:

I understand. It’s an old see-saw in literature — understand a work in terms of the times and the biography of the writer, or treat the work on its own terms as a self-enclosed literary object (which was the quest of the New Criticism movement).

I can see both approaches and take both myself depending.

However, I specifically mentioned Salinger’s horrific experiences during WW II because many people, particularly conservatives, write off Salinger as an adolescent proto-hippie, unworthy of serious attention and a blight on youth reading him in high school.

No. Salinger was shattered by WW II and much of Holden Caulfield’s ranting against phonies and his desire to rescue innocent children in “The Catcher in the Rye” was a cry from an American soldier who had stared straight into the blast furnace of world war and death camps.

Kurt Vonnegut had a similar story.

I can see that also snowballing into related interpretations of the presumed contextual background and its relevance, validity, authority, etc. Then of course we get into the recursion of the interpreter’s background and experience, etc. etc.

This kind of parallels my prior assertions about learning history, that you have to already know a lot of related contextual history to really understand the history you are currently reading/ learning. From my perspective as an engineer, I would also add we might benefit from a review of the relevant technological state within which these people did their work, and how that might also have influenced their thinking or output. What did they know about chemistry, electricity, nuclear power or similar issues; was their world pre or post steam powered railroads and telegraph, or jet planes and internet; etc.

Yes. J.D. Salinger, author of “The Catcher in the Rye,” was among the liberators.
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In April 1945 [Salinger ] entered Kaufering IV concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau. Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant and served in five campaigns. His war experiences affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated, and later told his daughter: “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger
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Salinger fought in the Army across Europe from the day after D-Day to the German surrender. IMO it’s important to read Salinger in the context of those shattering experiences.

We don’t even stop for 9/11 anymore, and it’s only been 24 years. We’re a vastly different country than Israel, and whatever unity we had began crumbling after only weeks back then. But nothing else causes us to pause. Not July 4th, not Memorial Day, Veterans Day. Each of those days is still fraught.

This is a country that overcomes, but so is Israel. We’ve been lucky. The most horrible catastrophe our country has ever faced, the Civil War, is so long ago that it doesn’t have the visceral power the Holocaust has for Israelis. Think about what would have to happen to really unite the United States. It’s unthinkable. If California had The Big One tomorrow morning and slid into the ocean, by nightfall “Serves Them Right” would be trending on X.

I guess I hope we never have something happen that would unite us like the Israelis on Yom HaShoah.