I would not have posted again, but I disagree with you, respectfully, and feel quite strongly that Britten did in fact accomplish conceptually what he set out to do in contrasting Wilfrid Owen’s poetry with the Latin Mass for the Dead.
I’m wondering how others feel.

This is quite a sensitive subject for me.

We performed the work my senior year at Berkeley High School (using young professional soloists for the three leading roles, but otherwise student orchestra, chamber orchestra, and chorus). It was a powerful experience for all of us. The art department made slides of the bi-lingual text and of B & W engravings by Otto Dix and others which were projected as a diptych above the chorus.

That September my youth orchestra visited Berlin and Mainz for two weeks before I began college.

At college, I was interviewed by the composition/theory professor (a Babbitt student) to determine placement in the three-year theory cycle (which was heavy on Schenker), and I recall that when I mentioned then that I had performed in the War Requiem the professor said that – ah, yes, that that was an interesting work but a problematic work. I can’t clearly recall now whether he said “deep problematic” or not. His comment stayed with me for the next three years – and beyond – and colored my impression of academia. I recall spending hours listening to LPs in the library – such as the Penderecki’s Dies Irae – trying to locate what that professor thought was lacking from the Britten work (which was, of course, written for a specific public occasion). (By the way, Gorecki also began an Oświęcim/Auschwitz tribute in the 1960s, but was unable to complete it for personal reasons).

Shostakovich wrote his 8th Quartet in Dresden while writing film music for a film about the fire bombing of Dresden, but it’s really more about his own life: all the self-quotations in the work, and the insistent use of D-S-C-H.

I probably should have mentioned Hartmann, who wrote politically subversive music (and an opera) during the Nazi years. In his Grove article on Hartmann, Andrew McCredie writes, “Works condemned by Joseph Goebbels in official statements outlining the Nazi aesthetic became sources for musical quotation. Other materials were derived from Hebraic incantation and folk music.”

Composers who fought in WWII: the most notorious activist was probably Xenakis, a resistance fighter against the Germans, and later, when the British re-established the Greek monarchy, against the Brits. That’s where he got that facial scar. Messiaen wound up in the camp at Gorlitz where he composed Quartet for the End of Time after being captured as a prisoner of war. Lutoslawski was in the radio corps for the Polish army. B.A. Zimmermann was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Maderna fought for Italy, but later joined the resistance. Ross Lee Finney was an OSS member.

But the piece that nails it for me is Górecki’s 3d Symphony. I know, just the second movement takes its text from WWII, but it is the only piece of music I know that provides pathos on the scale of the event itself.

Vladimir Ussachevsky worked for the Office of Strategic Services (now CIA) and for the U.S. State Department as an analyst of Russian and Chinese.

Milton Babbitt commuted between Princeton and Washington, D.C. during 1943 to 1945 doing research in mathematics useful to the Office of Strategic Services (now CIA).

During the Second World War, Edwar T. Cone served first in the army (as a pianist) and later in the Office of Strategic Services (now CIA).

The names of all OSS personnel and documents of their OSS service, previously a closely guarded secret, were released by the US National Archives on August 14, 2008.

http://www.answers.com/topic/war-and-the-military-in-music

The relevant passage:

Many composers dedicated these works to the war effort. Morton Gould dedicated his Symphony No. 1 (1943) to his three brothers in the service and to their fellow fighters; Marc Blitzstein wrote Freedom Morning (1943) for the black troops of the U.S. Army; Paul Hindemith dedicated his When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d: A Requiem for Those We Love (1946) to the memory of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to the American soldiers killed during World War II; Dai Keong Lee offered his Pacific Prayer (1943) to the fighting men in the Pacific; and Roy Harris originally dedicated his Fifth Symphony (1942) to the USSR before later removing the dedication.

Other composers wrote laments for the soldiers who had died: Bernard Herrmann’s For the Fallen (1943); Douglas Moore’s In Memoriam (1943); and William Grant Still’s In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy (1943). [...] Some of the most intense works deal with the Holocaust. Both Part III: Night of Morton Subotnick’s Jacob’s Room (1985–86) and the second movement of Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988) tragically depict a train journey to the concentration camps. Lukas Foss wrote an Elegy for Anne Frank (1989), which he later incorporated into his Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrows) (1991). Morton Gould extracted a Holocaust Suite (1978) from his music for a television docudrama about the Holocaust.