Resistance to Occupying Armies (and Hollywood
World War II Memories)
by Bob Mattingly
I was far too young for the World War II draft,
but old enough to view the war through Hollywood’s lens. No part of that
experience is sharper in memory than the plot lines that had resistance and
underground forces taking on their country’s occupiers. In small groups,
supplied by Allied air, or carrying arms looted from the enemy, the depicted
brave souls wreaked revenge, bloody and thorough. In the war films, train
tracks were frequently targeted with explosives, causing freight cars to burst,
depriving the saboteurs’ foes of their critical contents. Drivers of military
vehicles, often motorcycles with sidecars, met their unanticipated end on
narrow, curving nighttime roads. Sometimes an entire convoy was halted and
raked with machine gun fire from well-hidden emplacements.
Being impressionable, I too waited in the
darkened theater for an enemy sentry to turn his back just long enough to rise
up behind him, throw a forearm across his throat, and drive a sharpened weapon
first through a military greatcoat and finally into the enemy’s yielding flesh.
It didn’t seem unfair to strike silently and from the rear, and not just
because “All’s fair in love and war,” but simply because as the screenplay had
it, an occupier deserved no better.
Many years later I worked with a man who had
served in the German occupation in Russia. One day, in a small village, he was
shot in the backside. Shot by a peasant youth, not quite in his teens. I
sympathized with him, but felt kinship with his attacker. Perhaps, I felt that
way because I was brought up to side with the underdog. Maybe I picked up that
viewpoint from the Saturday ten-cent matinees. I can’t be sure. But I am sure
that Hollywood is largely responsible for my knee-jerk, visceral sympathy for
underdog guerrillas, fighting against heavy odds. In some way, I’ll always be
lying beside a train track, a roadside, or a sentry box, waiting stealthily to
fight the good fight.
So I guess I can partly blame Hollywood for my
take on the dark work currently under way by Iraqi “irregulars,” against
occupying forces that like all occupying forces claim to be liberators. It’s
reported that they use stealth and deceit to get just close enough to strike
back. It’s reported that they don’t engage in frontal attacks on tanks and
such. It’s reported that they crouch in sandy ditches, waiting for the right
moment to fire, and after firing they melt away. It’s said that they wait for
the main force to pass by and then attempt to pick off the rear guard, sneakily
attacking when the troops have their backs turned.
Make no mistake: my heart goes out to the fallen
troops. If it were up to me, the troops would be brought home right now, to go
about their everyday affairs like the rest of us. Sadly, as is well known, no
one asked them (or me) for our vote when the decision was made to put them in
harm’s way. Still, I know how the Iraqi irregulars must feel as their swirling
sands are invaded. I know partly because of Hollywood; it’s an understanding a
much, much younger me brought home from the movies.