thewinterotter:

GOSH I LOVE GETTING QUESTIONS LIKE THIS BLESS YOU.

I think in the particular case of the Howling Commandos this question would have an awful lot to do with what exactly their duties were, where their missions took them, and for how long. We don’t really get much of a sense of it in The First Avenger, and honestly I think you can do this in a lot of different ways and sort of lean in whatever direction is convenient for the plot. (I’m working on a Howlies-era story now and that’s exactly what I’m doing. Need privacy for a threesome? Oh how convenient you’re holed up in a perfectly suitable location for ~*~mission related reasons!~*~) I’d think it would be fairly situational depending on things like exactly how filthy they are (like if they remain unwashed is it going to compromise their ability to do their job or impact them physically like with hypothermia? Are they going to be unable to sneak up on the enemy because they are way too fucking rank and they crinkle when they walk? Is Sgt. Barnes going to get into a fight with anybody else in the unit because they’re all sick of him complaining about how bad his hair looks?), how far from a base they are, that sort of thing.

In the field, I’d imagine they’d do whatever worked. Bear in mind that a lot of the fighting in WWII was ranging through populated or recently-populated areas; depending on where they were, it might not be too difficult to find a well, a rainwater barrel, a pump for a livestock trough, or some other handy water access that might allow a fella to clean up some. And there are plenty of actual houses and whatnot with actual bathtubs, I’d imagine, though hanging around an area with townsfolk or other unknown quantities around might not be worth the risk of getting shot. But they could also just as easily be moving through an area where everything’s been bombed to shit, every splash of water in a 10-mile radius is choked with waste and decomposition, and even if it’s been raining for a week the word “clean” is no longer their vocabulary.

For regular soldiers, they’d be occasionally rotated back to camp where they’d be able to get in a wash, a delousing, some square meals, maybe some R&R, before they had to head back to the front. Once they were out there, availability of any kind of personal grooming would’ve depended a lot on whether having a wash would get you shot. A lot of times they’d be washing just out of a bowl or helmet, or not at all if the available water was all needed for drinking. Shaving was more or less mandatory (considered part of the uniform, basically), but when you’re in the field awhile it all depends on what you have the time and resources to do. And the Commandos aren’t a regular unit, anyway. I’d guess their war experience was unconventional to say the least.

In camp, things would be a bit easier. Laundry would be handled by the Quartermaster Corps (these are also the supply folks who’d be handling whatever other stuff you needed issued, they basically keep the armed forces fed, clothed, and supplied; they handle logistical concerns of all kinds). They’d have a trailer with the necessary equipment, which is interestingly enough how these units still operate today, just a lot fancier. This page about the Quartermaster service has some super interesting information on these laundry units operating in WWII in Europe and through other US military conflicts. If the clothing was really destroyed, it’d probably be replaced, though it’s hard to imagine the Howlies allowing that since most of them had decidedly non-regulation uniforms. (Plz write me a story about Sgt. Barnes and how fussy he is over his sweet blue coat and what he keeps tucked carefully in the inside pockets and whether his button-sewing skills are the best in the unit and that time in Poland when he somehow sweet-talked a grandmother into helping him wash his coat because he loves it tooooo much. Bonus points if the grandmother gives him amazing tips on how to get blood stains out and they somehow bond despite the fact that Barnes doesn’t speak a word of Polish.)

This page has some recollections you might find informative (I like in the comments where he complains about his “nice Yankee shirt” being cut off him because it was soaked in blood), and you might find the entire WW2 People’s War archive interesting; it’s all first-hand accounts of people’s experiences during wartime, whether they were on the home front or elsewhere. (There are 47,000 personal accounts on there, holy shittttt.) You might be particularly interested in this story about a group of soldiers rigging up a huge horse water trough into a communal bathtub for a nice hot scrubbing. 😀

As you might imagine, sanitation is a pretty big deal in the field, and just like all militaries struggled to keep their soldiers from taking themselves out of the fight with things like venereal disease, they also wanted to prevent other hygiene-related problems that would impact troop readiness. We’d think of stuff like foot fungus or lice as a fairly minor but totally gross issue; in that period, in the war, if your troops had lice you were going to have a problem with typhus, and that’ll straight-up kill them. This link has a whole book chapter about the sort of procedures and training the Army had in place for troop hygiene, both the intro to personal sanitation that they’d receive in boot camp (they’d be shown “Mickey Mouse movies” I wonder if they literally had Mickey Mouse in them) and the ongoing drumming in of the message as they were shipped out to different theaters in the war.

Personally I like to imagine a Bucky who was once fastidious and tremendously well-groomed and has left all that behind because if war has changed anybody it has definitely changed him, only one day he loses his goddamned mind and they’re going to cross this nice slow-moving river and it’s kind of turning into a warm, bewilderingly beautiful day, and Barnes just puts his gun down and kicks off his boots and everybody’s like “oh shit Sarge has lost it” and he just walks into the river fully clothed and everybody’s like “Hey Barnes what’re you doing?” and he’s just like “My laundry. Fuck off.”

And he just like crouches down in the river so his nose is above water and he just stays there because he stinks and he’s incredibly tired of it, okay.

And maybe Captain America himself puts down his shield and his gun belt and wades in to drag his damn fool sergeant out of the river because what the hell, Buck, this area isn’t exactly cleared, there could be snipers, you idiot. And maybe Sgt. Barnes does or does not dunk the symbol of American freedom and give him a noogie.