"Was General Ike Eisenhower's book, Crusade for Europe, in reality a Children's Crusade?"

An alternative look at Kurt Vonnegut's character of Billy Pilgrim.

UTEP Senior English Abstract

Kurt Vonnegut was himself no Billy Pilgrim. Instead, he was a U.S. Army combat infantry scout in his own right. One, moreover, with more than the modicum of basic training that was the lot of the Billy Pilgrim crew. For it was the Billy Pilgrim's sorry lot to be led to an unrelieved horror of suffering, or of captivity, or of death.

For this indeed was the lot that pertained to so many thousands of Billy Pilgrims in the European Theater by the Fall of 1944. And it was a lot which grew out of General Dwight David Eisenhowers's written authorization giving the go-ahead for sending tens of thousands of poorly trained teenage GIs, some with as little as three or four weeks of basic training [as Stephen Ambrose and others have claimed], into instant close battle against a tenacious well-supplied enemy. And without the time either to adjust to the combat zone, nor the time to receive the orientation in front line survival they so vitally needed.

A written authorization which in turn may have derived from the disturbing rumors picked up by U.S. Army Intelligence in 1943, what authors John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr call "vague rumors of secret German-Soviet peace negotiations," in their recent book, Verona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.

Be as it may, we are prepared to stake out a literary claim of our own, and our literary claim is going to be this:

The results of General Eisenhower's policy would make a lasting impression on at least one former US Army combat infantry scout named Kurt Vonnegut, whether as author or narrator author -- that he would never seem quite able to shake...

And therein hangs a tale!