War Novels: "Johnny Got His Gun"

 

by Pa Rock

Reader

(Note:  This posting is the second in a series which began in this space on November 17th and is intended to explore the use of literature as a way of transmitting the realities of war to students of history.  The first novel discussed in this series was Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage" which dealt with a young man's desire to discover and test his fortitude during a very bloody battle in the American Civil War.  In it, the author was also exploring his own desire to make tales of war more personal, realistic, and ultimately more accessible and interesting to the reading public.  "Johnny Got His Gun" takes realism in war even further, painfully so.)     

"Johnny Got His Gun'" is a novel of World War I that was written by famed Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in 1938.  Trumbo, who was only twelve when the First World War began never served in the military,  but he was a first-rate writer who had a compelling sense of drama and recognized a good story when he came across one.  This novel is based loosely on the experiences of a Canadian soldier in that same war.

The novel, "Johnny Got his Gun" is so deeply thought-provoking and disturbing that it has become an anti-war "classic" and is often banned by library and school boards.  I first read it more than thirty years ago and became so distressed by the sheer savagery of the tale that I had difficulty finishing it.  I have always felt that I should give it another read, but have never been able to summon the inner-strength to do so.

The central character of the novel is not "Johnny," but rather a young American soldier by the name of Joe Bonham.  Joe is stationed in Europe and fighting in the "Great War" when he is brutally injured in an explosion. As Joe awakens, which is where the story begins, he can't see, speak, hear, or even smell, but he somehow senses that he is awake and that he has suffered horrific injuries.  As the days slowly progress Joe realizes that he has some sort of bag or mask over his head, no doubt due to facial injuries, and that he has lost his arms and legs.  He is essentially a stump of a young man with no way to take care of himself or communicate, and with only very limited sensory inputs.

One thing that Joe can feel is the touch of the nurse who tends to him, and he also senses the morning sunlight when it lands on what is left of his body.  He uses that sense of the sunlight to measure the passage of days, and he eventually reaches more than four years in his silent count.

Joe Bonham is a literal prisoner in his own body.  He uses his time as a captive to reflect on his life before the war, his family and his girlfriend, and the experiences that he had in the war which led up to his current situation.  One of his more poignant recollections involves his girlfriend's father who was so proud of Joe for joining the military to fight in the war that he arranged for the new soldier to spend a night with his daughter before he shipped out for overseas duty.  Joe at least had that sweet memory to sustain him in his subsequent life of silent darkness.

The earlier writer, Stephen Crane, wanted tales of war to become more personal and show the horrors of war as they played out among the humans who actually wore the uniforms and did the fighting -  rather than be the tired old musings of the generals and senior officers who managed the wars.   That concept of a personal accounting had to have hit its zenith with the the awakening of Joe Bonham in the military hospital because every detail in the novel comes from his memory and his mind.  There are no third-party interferences

Actually though, there is a bit of outside input into the story, though it, too, is filtered through Joe.  At one point he develops a way of communicating through a slight ability to move his head, and the young soldier who knows Morse code jerks his head as much as he can to deliver a cry for help in dots and dashes.  A nurse finally recognizes what he is attempting to do and responds by tapping. Morse code with her fingers on his chest.    The soldier asks to be put on display to show others the horrors of war, but when the military, who are literally his captors, realize that he can communicate, they quarantine him to keep his subversive thoughts away from others.  When Joe ultimately realizes the extent of his isolation and captivity, he asks the nurse to kill him.

Dalton Trumbo, the writer who took the story of a severely wounded Canadian soldier and grew him into the silent horror that was Joe Bonham, was himself a unique American character whose life merited a 2015 movie called simply "Trumbo."   The title character in the move was played by Brian Cranston, and Trumbo's arch-nemesis, Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, was portrayed by Dame Helen Mirren.  That movie focused on the period during the early 1950's when Dalton Trumbo became the focus of the Joe McCarthy (and Richard Nixon) witch-hunt for communists in the film industry,  Trumbo was accused of being a communist as were many other Hollywood notables, and, as a part of the infamous "Hollywood ten," he was ultimately sent to prison for eleven months for refusing to name other "communists" in the film industry.     During that dark period in order to feed and care for his family, Dalton Trumbo had to do his work under pseudonyms and in the names of other (and lesser) screenwriters.

Dalton Trumbo, like his fictionalized soldier, Joe Bonham, found a way to get his message out past forces that wanted him to remain silent, and the message that Dalton and Joe put out about war was deeply, deeply disturbing.