To Hell and Back by Audie Murphy

 

My discussion of Audie Murphy’s Famous Book

First Sergeant (Retired) Martin Swirko, United States Army

The battalion commander and executive officer visit the front lines. They want to see with their own eyes what is holding up our advance. They would like to peek into the quarry itself. Excellent and courageous leaders, they pick only four men to escort them up the treacherous hillside… Picking up several hand grenades and a carbine, I trail the patrol up the hill. As I prepare to round a huge boulder, two enemy grenades explode. A machine gun ripples. Silence returns. My scalp tingles as the hair starts rising. That machine gun is only a few yards away. 

I pause, pull the pin from the grenade, and peer around the rock. The Germans have not been overly clever with their ambush. Instead of picking off the officers first, they threw the grenades at the four men, and machine gunning one of them as he writhed upon the ground. 

That was their mistake. Before the gunner could swing his weapon, the officers had tumbled into a shallow hole, where they now lie pinned. The krauts, evidently not considering a rear guard, have become downright careless with their concealment as they attempt to slaughter the officers. 

Grasping the carbine in my left hand and a grenade in my right, I step suddenly from behind the rock. The Germans spot me instantly. The gunner spins the tip of his weapon towards me. But the barrel catches in a limb, and the burst whizzes to my right.

I lob the grenade and grab the carbine trigger with one movement. Before the grenade has time to burst, two krauts fall with carbine slugs in their bellies. I quickly lob two more grenades into the position. Four of the eight Germans are killed; three are out of action by wounds.

The eighth man, a squat, fat man, tries to escape. He dashes down the hill with a waddling gait, like a duck being chased by an ax-man. I line my sights upon his helmet, but hesitate in pulling the trigger. How can one shoot such a ridiculous figure. It is like killing a clown. 

But the clown has a gun and is, therefore, dangerous. I squeeze the trigger. The helmet jumps. The man falls as if struck in the head with a club.

I snap the safety lock on my carbine and turn to the battalion commander. He is as cool as an October morning…We pick up our wounded and start down the hill. A single feeling possesses me. It is one of complete and utter weariness.- Excerpt from the book TO HELL AND BACK

The above excerpt from To Hell and Back is just a small example of Audie Murphy’s unique (in my opinion) style he used in this book to recall and write about his experiences during World War Two. In it he documents what he and his buddies experience fighting their way across Sicily, Italy, Southern France and into Germany. 

I read this book several years ago, and when I finally finished it, I put it away and shook my head. It wasn’t a fun book to read, and I thought there was something unusual and out of the ordinary about the way Murphy choose to tell this story. Having been an admirer of Murphy myself and his heroics since my childhood, I knew a lot about him and his travails. But, I found at the time when I had finished his book, it left me less than satisfied. The feeling was something that I couldn’t really describe, it was just there.

Fast forward to about a month ago after I had finished a couple of books I had been reading. One night before bedtime, I found myself in my office at home looking through the collection of books I had previously read but decided to keep, for whatever reason. My eyes settled on To Hell and Back. What the heck, I thought to myself as I removed the book from the spot it had occupied for several years. Let me give it another chance. So, I cracked the book open and began to reread it with an open mind. 

As I followed Murphy and his platoon from his earliest days in combat, I was introduced to his closest buddies. These were soldiers he had lived with, got to know, and they took care of each other. They came to trust each other with their lives despite the fact that when they weren’t under fire they often bickered amongst themselves, sometimes joking and other times insulting each other on a regular basis. Often times they got on each others nerves. Nevertheless, each would lay their own lives on the line for the other. They became familiar with each other intimately and became brothers in a way that only the who shared combat together could. 

As I followed Murphy along in his perverse journey (If ground combat isn’t perverse, I don’t know what is) I was introduced to soldiers and buddies like Beltsky, Snuffy Jones, Brandon, Kerrigan, Novak (the Pole) Johnson, Swope, Horse Face and others. This is a tough, hardened group of men that found themselves together in a lethal environment. Murphy gives no indication how long he has been with this crew because when we enter into his world within the first two pages of the book, a soldier named Griffin was joking around and imitating Rochester, the butler from the Jack Benny show.  A minute later and artillery round hits nearby and Griffin is dead. Murphy lets us know, through the conversation that follows between the surviving members that Griffin was married and had two kids. The soldiers get up, make a few hard bitten, cynical comments to each other, gather themselves up, and moved out. Beltsky lectures the troops about how easy it is to get killed out there (It’s not as if these troops don’t already know that) and inside of the first two pages we have been introduced the Griffin, learn one or two things about him and we never hear of him again. 

And that is how it is as their war goes on. Soldiers, green replacements mostly, come and go. Murphy introduces them to us the way the replacements were introduced to the older, more experienced men. That is, barely, if at all. These soldiers, the young men who have a few weeks of combat under their belt have come to realize that their only way home was to follow orders, fight and kill the enemy, lest they be killed themselves. They have no rotation dates to look forward to the way we did in Iraq. 

When it comes to survival, these men initially strike me as machines who give their enemy no quarter, and expect none be given in return. But as you get to know them somewhat (if they stay alive long enough so that anyone can get to know them) you realize that they really aren’t machines, they are made of flesh and blood, human beings ripped away from all and everything they knew and loved. They quickly become blooded and hardened by their experiences in combat. Hitler got it so wrong when he decided that the privileged, spoiled American youth was incapable of standing up to what he thought was his superior Aryan race of soldiers when he decided to take on the United States Army. Those GIs that survived long enough developed a cold blooded, matter of fact attitude when confronted by the enemy. Like Audie Murphy, most of his comrades are young men who have grown old and bitter long before their time. 

Murphy tells his story, really Their story as much as his, in two ways. First, by relating the conversations they have among and between themselves. Their arguments, both good natured and serious, and in this way you get to know those that come and go. Or maybe not.  Secondly, he describes the deadly combat that they are all involved in. Throughout the book he moves back and forth between the two effortlessly, without any rhyme or reason. As I read the book the second time, it finally occurred to me what is was that made the book unique. Again, this is only my opinion and perception, but is how I came to regard the book.  

Murphy describes the actions he is involved in from a cold, matter of fact point of view almost without emotion. Murphy might as well have been an observer who happened to be present, but not a participant. He sounds more like Jack Webb portraying Sergeant Friday in the old TV show Dragnet (Just the facts please).as he escorts us through his world of carnage, dark humor and the desperate desire to survive another day. And as he does so, his descriptions of these events would have the reader, if he or she didn’t know any better, think that what Murphy was experiencing was just another day at the office. The sad part is that, maybe for him, each event was just another day. But the reader knows better than that. And maybe that’s what Murphy counted on. Or, maybe after experiencing all that he did, this cold, indifferent approach to telling his story wasn’t selected by him at all. Perhaps, I think as I sit here and type, it’s just possible that this method of communication is the only way he knew tell his story, just because of how horrible his experiences were. I think it is possible that Murphy was so traumatized by his experiences (who wouldn’t be) that this was the only way he could communicate his experiences.. 

The reason I started my piece about this book with the excerpt I selected was because I thought it was typical and an excellent example of his writing style in this book. In it Murphy describes  the incident, seemingly like just another day, and he might as well have been chronicling his decision to remodel his kitchen and how he did it. He lets readers know what happened when he decided to take on that job, filing us in on what tools he used, how he used them, and the results of each and the overall outcome, and he does so without any self praise. He certainly didn’t let on that he had any passion for the event (which was bad news for the clownish enemy soldier he describes) nor do I think he used any melodramatic language to keep the reader hooked. Anyone who reads this book is either interested in Murphy’s day to day existence, possibly from an historical perspective or they aren’t interested at all. Other than Murphy’s closing statements, there certainly isn’t any moral to the story, nor any suspense beyond who loves and who dies. 

And yet, in the end, I have to ask, what the reason was that he took the time to write down and share his experiences with us all who read his book? In the paragraph that I shared above, he described the death of several American soldiers, eight Germans soldiers (all eight were killed by Murphy) and the cold calculated decision to kill a terrified, fleeing enemy soldier. Murphy made that decision only after feeling just a tiny, momentary bit of compassion for the retreating soldier. Then in a millisecond he gunned the clownish looking soldier using cold, hard logic to justify his action. To me, his initial hesitation to dispatch that escaping soldier does show that he hadn’t lost all his compassion, at least not up until that time. However, I found it telling that at the end of the paragraph I shared here Murphy describes how he felt after the incident as complete exhaustion, but certainly does not mention whether or not he had any remorse about killing any of those eight men. Maybe that feeling of remorse is a luxury that the combat soldier cannot allow himself.

Murphy doesn’t seem to dwell very long on how close he himself came to death, nor does he seem to bother to mention that fact that he saved his battalion commander and executive officer’s lives, as well as the wounded American soldiers. It’s as though nothing really special happened that day, and this is the method Murphy uses pen his story. 

Murphy, the most decorated American soldier during WWII, and arguably one of the most decorated soldiers in US history, fails to mention the fact that he receives any awards during his extraordinary saga, much less the Medal of Honor. Furthermore, as for the various citations to his awards that I have read over the years, Murphy certainly downplays his accomplishments in both the book and the movie that followed. No, the book was as cold and matter of fact as a algebraic equation or scientific description of what he experienced and survived. 

The day by day, hour by hour conversations between the squad and platoon members which make up a large part of the book are told, I came to realize, in vernacular of the time, that is, probably the way and manner that regular folks talked and used various expressions back in 1944. It was, I am guessing, how people and soldiers talked to each other then and certainly not exactly the same language that we soldiers used with each other in 2006 or even today. For example, when Kerrigan tells Horse Face “you horse’s patoot, pass over my dough” todays equivalent might be “You asshole, fork over my money!” Once you realize that, you can also recognize the historical accuracy of the book, a moment in time, while at the same time you are able to translate, in your mind, what each solder said to each other into todays language. When you do that, you can both enjoy and appreciate the egging on and kibitzing these guys are going back and forth with. One message does come through, despite Murphy not saying it outright, pains in the ass or not, Murphy loves them all. 

As Murphy’s story continues, officers and leaders come and go, most killed or seriously wounded, but the focus remains on the soldiers to Murphy’s left and his right at any given time in the book. One minute a soldier is sitting and talking, the next minute he is dead, sometimes literally blown into pieces, while the soldier sitting next or laying next to him escapes without a scratch. As a combat veteran myself, I know that we can drive ourselves crazy if we think too much about ‘Why him and not me? Why am I still here?’ I can’t help wondering what those soldiers, the ones who survived, experienced after they retuned home. 

Murphy’s story goes on, as he and his soldiers slog their way across a miserable landscape, fighting not only the enemy but the terrain and weather which are almost as deadly as the enemy. Both torment the solder almost as much as the enemy, as only an infantryman can be tortured.

One by one, many of the “old men”  the veterans, die off. Some die instantly, others taking time for the life to bleed out of them. Some, the luckier ones, suffer wounds that remove them from combat, maybe even send them home. Some of those wounds included the loss of limbs and other life changing injuries. But sadly, many of Murphy’s friends die. One minute they are there, the next, gone forever. This book is certainly not a “Feel Good” story. Anyone feeling like reading that type of story can take a pass on this book. other than Murphy’s survival, there are no happy endings.

Murphy of course continues to survive, and as he does he introduces us to a never ending stream of soldiers who come to his platoon. Sometimes he talks a little about them and some of them survive long enough that we get to know a little about them. Some of the old timers who last well into the book, the ones you do get to know, end up dead. As a reader, I imagine that I felt just a bit of what Murphy must have felt as his closest friends disappear from the battlefield. While that goes on, we meet new guys like Steiner, Thompson, Jackoby, Owl, Barker, Paderwitz and a host of other young men. They come and go, to and from the platoon as it fights its way across Europe. Some you get to know a bit, others not. 

As the replacements come and go, the more experienced men do their best to mentor them. The old timers themselves initially keep their distance from the replacements. They’ve all lost too many friends already and try not to get too close to anyone. In their minds, they think by becoming more aloof, the pain of losing those newer men won’t be as devastating. However, to their credit, once the newcomers are involved in combat and overcome their fears, do their job, once or twice, the old timers consider them combat veterans like themselves, and consciously or not, they ultimately accept them into their brotherhood. 

As far as Murphy’s transition goes, he is regularly promoted and eventually earns a commission and becomes an officer and platoon leader. As he rises in the ranks as a NCO and then an Officer, while mentoring and encouraging his troops as best as he can, he also, out of necessity, makes cold, hard, on the spot decisions about his men. Many of these decisions can and often do take on the importance of life and death. His reasoning seems simple and to the point “we have a job and you’re (we) we are going to do it. Failure is not an option”. 

Having been a combat veteran who saw more than enough butchery myself, the amount of carnage and loss of life that Murphy describes in his dispassionate style is both staggering and astonishing. I think that most of us know that Audie Murphy survived the war and became a well known actor and played himself in the movie named after his book. Whatever good things happened to Murphy during the remainder of his life, the cost he paid for it was enormous. I can say with certainty, that Murphy, both in his book and in the movie severely understated his accomplishments as a soldier during that war. He truly spent time in hell. Sadly, it wasn’t without consequences.Despite this, Murphy ended his book, or tried to end it on an uplifting note. 

In the end, after thinking about his book, I come to the conclusion that he wrote the book not about himself, but about those brave and sometimes flawed soldiers he had worked with and wanted to make sure none of us forget the sacrifices made by those men for our country. I don’t think he wanted to talk about himself, but the only way he could get his message across was to tell their stories as seen through his eyes. He couldn’t have done it any other way. In his own way he is able to condemn the concept of war by starkly describing combat for the soldier on the ground without lecturing or moralizing. His crisp, gloomy and somber narrative should be all anyone needs to experience to come to the conclusion that war truly is hell on earth, and Audie Murphy truly went to Hell and Back.