PAUL FUSSELL

Paul Fussell

Paul Fussell (1924 - 2012) was an American historian and professor.

He came to hate the lies of the government and the military.

Paul Fussell was involved in World War II.

At the start of the war, he was a 19-year-old boy, aching to prove his manhood.

"His unit ran into an artillery barrage in which pieces of shell ploughed into his leg and back.

"As he lay there, bellowing with anger, he felt fine red spray falling on him; his buddy Edward Hudson had been so riddled with bullets that the contents of his torso were forced out of the holes in the back of his field jacket."

Paul Fussell | The Economist



The government and the generals described war as good, and necessary, "but for those on the ground (a quarter of whom admitted to vomiting or soiling themselves, out of panic, before they went into battle) the war had no meaning, beyond the fact that the quicker they got it over the sooner they could go home."

Paul Fussell | The Economist

Paul Fussell noted that the Ten Commandments told him not to kill.



After the war, he was happy to criticise Americans "for their class divisions and status symbols."

He criticised the sort of mass-tourism that "made all places comfortably alike."

He attacked everything that he saw as phony, from processed cheese to stretch limos.



But, was Paul Fussell just another naive American?

In 1979 he wrote an essay in praise of the Boy Scout Handbook. 

He believed that a boy who tries to obey Scout Laws, "will not grow up like Richard Nixon."

D.A.N. Jones reviews 'The Boy Scout Handbook and Other ...

D A N Jones has written that in Britain, "Scoutcraft entails wiliness", and "such a boy might well grow up like Harold Wilson" 

Wilson was a devious UK prime minister.

Perhaps Paul Fussell was devious?

He appeared to be an old fashioned Republican.

His former wife, Betty, once found him rolling around on a couch, ''buck naked'' and drunk, with a male student. 

Skewered - New York Times

Files released by MI5, in March 2010, show that Baden Powell, founder of the Scouts, was invited to meet Hitler after having tea with senior Nazis. (Lord Baden Powell invited to meet Hitler, MI5 files show)

In 1937, Baden Powell met the German Ambassador to the UK, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

In 1939, Baden Powell wrote in his diary: "Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf.

"A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc."

Baden Powell told the Scouts’ International Commissioner, Hubert Martin, that the Germans were "most anxious that the Scouts should come into closer touch with the youth movement in Germany."

Baden Powell talked of his problems with the "socialist press when our boys had appeared in uniform at a Fascist Demonstration in Germany."

MI5 reported on the visit of Hartman Lauterbacher, Chief of Staff Hitler Youth, to Britain.

Lauterbacher met Baden Powell, and visited the top private school Eton and the Army Gymnastic School at Aldershot.


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Two modern biographers of Baden-Powell consider him to have been a repressed homosexual, Michael Rosenthal of Columbia University and Tim Jeal. (Baden-Powell and boy scouts)

Jeal mentions an episode in 1919.

While on a visit to Charterhouse, his old public school, he stayed with an old friend, A. H. Tod, a bachelor teacher and housemaster who had taken large numbers of nude photographs of his pupils as part of a photographic record of public school life.

Baden-Powell's diary entry about his stay reads: "Stayed with Tod. Tod's photos of naked boys and trees. Excellent."

In a subsequent communication to Tod regarding starting up a Scout troop at the school, Baden-Powell mentions his impending return visit and adds: "Possibly I might get a further look at those wonderful photographs of yours."