This book poses the inevitable question of how someone who has never worn a uniform, let alone fired a shot in anger, dares to write about men’s experience in battle. John Keegan’s severe polio precluded any chance of military service, yet he managed to write one of the classics of military history, The Face of Battle (1976), which dissected the experience of Englishmen on the firing line from Agincourt to D-Day. Alexander Rose, author of American Rifle (2008), now attempts to do something similar with the experience of the typical American soldier in three historic campaigns: Bunker Hill in 1775, Gettysburg in 1863, and Iwo Jima in 1944.
It seems pointless to debate whether Rose does as good a job as Keegan did, or whether he chose the best battles to illustrate his overall point that, while the nature of combat has greatly changed, Americans’ response to it remains (largely) the same. The fact is that Men of War moves and educates, with the reader finding something interesting and intriguing on virtually every page.
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