Strauss had grown up in Virginia surrounded by the veneration of Southern military heroes from the "War Between the States", but a tour he took in summer 1918 to the devastated battlefields of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood removed from his worldview any such glamorous or romantic notions. Similarly, his exposure to Communism in 1919 in seeing the effects of the Polish–Soviet War led to a powerful and lifelong anti-Communist sentiment.