cover image Unsung Valor: A GI's Story of World War II

Unsung Valor: A GI's Story of World War II

Allie Cleveland Harrison, A. Cleveland Harrison. University Press of Mississippi, $28 (376pp) ISBN 978-1-57806-214-0

Half a century ago, Harrison, now emeritus professor of theater at Auburn University, experienced just a single day of combat in his two years of military service. Still, he, no less than other more experienced soldiers, was shaped by WW II. A relatively privileged middle-class boy from Little Rock, Ark., Harrison was not an enthusiastic draftee--so he was pleased to be assigned initially to an Army Specialized Training Program, which selected the best and brightest draftees for technical and professional education in civilian colleges. (Relatively little is known about that program, and Harrison's description of his days as a uniformed student at the University of Mississippi make a contribution to the war's social history.) But in 1944, when the program was cut back and men were needed as infantry replacements on the front, Harrison was reassigned to the 94th Infantry Division; shipped to Europe in July, he was badly wounded in his first action. Combining a novelist's sense of people and events with the story of his development into an infantryman--not an eager soldier but a good one--Harrison describes his hospitalization, convalescence in England and subsequent assignment to a branch of the military government of occupied Germany--the kind of assignment ASTP graduates were supposed to receive in the first place. The result is a celebration of every draftee who came when he was called, did his duty where he was assigned and came back to shape America's century, and a reminder that every soldier's experience was, in the end, distinct. (Mar.)