Richard Tregaskis and "Stronger Than Fear"

In 1945, former war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, author of the classic book of combat reporting, Guadalcanal Diary, wrote what he considered to be the most important book he produced about the war, Stronger Than Fear, a novel based upon his experiences covering the Battle of Aachen. Here is what he wrote:

In the late fall of 1944, I was working as a war correspondent alone the western front of World War II trying to keep up with our plunging armored columns as they swept through France, across Belgium and into Germany. The Third Armored Division crossed into Germany at a little town called Rotgen, and shortly after Rotgen our forces hit some sizeable cities in the Rhineland: Aachen, Duren, Eschweiler, Koln.

The street fighting in these German communities reminded me of the jungle campaigning I had seen on Guadalcanal and elsewhere in the South Pacific. The enemy fought hard in his home ground, and everything was close in, the rows of houses were like trees and street-corners were like thickets, and every house was a potential sniper’s nest or machine-gun position.

In the city of Aachen, I worked along with a squad of Company C, First Battalion, 26^th Infantry, of the Fighting First Division.

It was a great, battled-tested division with one of the best combat records of any of our fighting outfits, starting with the early days of North Africa and on through Sicily and into Europe. I had been with the First in Sicily through several hard engagements and I was full of admiration for these men and their know-how of night fighting, clever concealment, skillful use of fires and rapid movement through rough country.

Now, as at least we were penetrating Germany, the division was still a marvel of military know-how but by this time, two years after the North Africa landing and after many bloody battles, and casualties of more than a hundred percent of its strength in killed and wounded, it was showing signs of wear.

The platoon of ten men to which I attached myself was made up of soldiers none of whom had take part in the Sicilian or North African campaigns. And just as I joined them, two new replacements were reporting. Naturally, they were from Cook’s and Baker’s School, which was what you expected as qualification for front-line infantry in these days of American Blitzkrieg and the far-stretched battle line that came with lightning advances of tanks and truck-borne infantry. We had no reserves, our companies were stretched out like rubber bands and the few veterans who were still with the First Division knew our position was perilous.

Being veterans, they also knew the chances they were taking as the companies ploughed through the streets of Aachen, block by block and house by house. And those who had been wounded before knew that the likelihood was they would be wounded, not killed, if they were hit, because the odds were four or five to one that you would be wounded, not killed. Those were the statistics that the veterans knew, they had outgrown the presupposition of the raw recruit that he would either be killed or completely spared, and that naturally it would not happen to him.

They knew better, they knew what it was like to be ripped by the jagged steel of shell fragments, they knew the wrenching crump of mortar explosions that could rip your body apart, they knew that the snapping bullets of snipers or machine-guns could do more than make neat holes in arms as in the movies (only a flesh wound), they knew these bullets could tear out eyes, smash jaws and cheek bones, or lodged properly in the back, paralyze a man from waist or neck down.

My company commander was a veteran and he knew these things. His name was Ozell Smoot, he came from the Deep South and I watched him in admiration, almost with reverence, as he coolly ran his company through the advance into Aachen, through so many blocks per day, through smashing artillery shelling, through black nights in the cellars while tanks roamed the streets with rattling, grinding engines and fired down the boulevards; through the days of pushing through the jungle of the houses, and dodging down the streets to avoid giving the snipers and machine gunners good shots, and getting aid men to the unlucky ones who got smeared so their wrecked bodies could be carried to the rear.

By this time, I had seen a good deal of war action on the ground, in the air and at sea, in the Pacific, the Mediterranean and in Europe, and as I watched Ozell Smoot doing his job expertly, I reflected on a central question: to a veteran, like Ozell Smoot and many another good fighting man I had seen, what does it mean when it becomes a way of life, the reality, and peace is only a dream?

What, in other words, are the real values that emerge in a man’s character during a war? I had seen enough of war to know that war brings out nobler traits in a man than he might otherwise know in a thousand lifetimes. I knew that men at the front could be more generous, kind, unselfish than I had ever seen them elsewhere. It was a strange paradox that in a way of life devoted to killing, maiming and destruction of the enemy, men could be kinder and more unselfish and self-sacrificing towards those on his own side than he had ever been before or probably ever would be if he survived the war.

Eight months after the street fighting in Aachen I had finished a novel that grew from watching the men of the 26^th Infantry and a company commander named Ozell Smoot at work in the business of war.

I think this is the most important book I wrote about World War II because it strikes closer to the heart of war than any other I wrote. The New York Times critic Francis Hackett called this book “white-hot, ice-cold” and those were the temperatures of by observations and feelings about war as this story worked itself out of the back of my mind.

I believe it stands up well after the years because it hits into the basic human values involved in a war, aside from politics or patriotism. Some of the critics said I drew on some of my own battlefield experience to write about being wounded and combating fear.

At any rate, the characters show how much I like and admire good fighting men, and they are not literal transcriptions of actual people but drawn from many scores of soldiers I watched at work. Captain Paul Kreider is not Captain Ozell Smoot but he stands for many military men who fought the big battle and come out winners, even if they were killed doing their jobs. That’s what war or anything else is really about, if you get down to fundamentals. Captain Ozell Smoot was killed about a month after Aachen, in the front line in the Hurtgen Forest, but I saw enough of him to know that he was a winner in the important battle, the one that goes on inside. That’s what the book is about.