Books in Brief: Lines of Battle

Lines of Battle: Letters from American Servicemen, 1941-1945, edited by Annette Tapert (Times Books, 297 pp., $22.50)

The reception given her Despatches from the Heart (1984), an anthology of letters by British soldiers, has encouraged Mrs. Tapert to repeat the performance on behalf of our GIs. For readers beguiled by the lore of World War II, the result is well worth having. From thousands of items of correspondence, she has selected one hundred, printed chronologically and covering the major theaters of war. There is a slight emphasis on the European theater because, as David Eisenhower puts it in his perceptive foreword, there “the ideological cast of the U.S. intervention . . . shines clearest.” Both officers and dog-faces from the Air Corps, Army, and Marines are equitably represented, and their language is left inviolate. (Except for two missives by John F. Kennedy, the Navy does not appear.) The volume is lavishly illustrated, including some of Bill Mauldin’s cartoons. A few celebrities rear their heads, such as Randall Jarrell and Ernie Pyle, but the show belongs preponderantly to the combat personnel. We find them describing at first hand the Iwo Jima flag-raising, Pearl Harbor, the Elbe River link-up. The longest epistle is a graphic account of life behind enemy lines in Italy by an OSS captain. The overwhelming impression is of the articulateness of the letter-writers. Dumb cow-hand? Mute, inglorious truckdriver? Don’t you believe it. Here are some selections: Under a bombing, “the earth retches and writhes.” “It’s the fellows that have gone before us who make us willingly bear our burdens.” “There is no beauty in war. There is heroism at times, but the desperate heroism of desperate necessity.” Should the late Mr. Dryden, from some vantage point, be perusing this volume, he most probably will choose to repeat his maxim about God’s plenty. curtis carroll davis

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Curtis Carroll Davis

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Lines of Battle: Letters from American Servicemen, 1941-1945, edited by Annette Tapert (Times Books, 297 pp., $22.50)

The reception given her Despatches from the Heart (1984), an anthology of letters by British soldiers, has encouraged Mrs. Tapert to repeat the performance on behalf of our GIs. For readers beguiled by the lore of World War II, the result is well worth having. From thousands of items of correspondence, she has selected one hundred, printed chronologically and covering the major theaters of war. There is a slight emphasis on the European theater because, as David Eisenhower puts it in his perceptive foreword, there “the ideological cast of the U.S. intervention . . . shines clearest.” Both officers and dog-faces from the Air Corps, Army, and Marines are equitably represented, and their language is left inviolate. (Except for two missives by John F. Kennedy, the Navy does not appear.) The volume is lavishly illustrated, including some of Bill Mauldin’s cartoons. A few celebrities rear their heads, such as Randall Jarrell and Ernie Pyle, but the show belongs preponderantly to the combat personnel. We find them describing at first hand the Iwo Jima flag-raising, Pearl Harbor, the Elbe River link-up. The longest epistle is a graphic account of life behind enemy lines in Italy by an OSS captain. The overwhelming impression is of the articulateness of the letter-writers. Dumb cow-hand? Mute, inglorious truckdriver? Don’t you believe it. Here are some selections: Under a bombing, “the earth retches and writhes.” “It’s the fellows that have gone before us who make us willingly bear our burdens.” “There is no beauty in war. There is heroism at times, but the desperate heroism of desperate necessity.” Should the late Mr. Dryden, from some vantage point, be perusing this volume, he most probably will choose to repeat his maxim about God’s plenty. curtis carroll davis