The World Within War: America's Combat Experience in World War II

America's two principal ground combat environments in WWII were essentially different, according to Univ. of Michigan history professor Linderman (Embattled Courage) in this expert study that weaves together letters and recollections published by approximately 500 combat soldiers. Combat in the European theater was ""a war of rules,"" or at least of mutually accepted conventions. In the Pacific, however, where no common battlefield culture held sway, barbarity reigned. These contrasting environments nevertheless produced common results. An ""exuberant aggressiveness"" that shaped the initial expectations of battle among the infantrymen, who are the focus here, was followed by a process of shock and reappraisal that led them to view themselves as set apart from other military risk-takers, especially their higher-ups. Linderman provocatively suggests that the concept of war as work, as a job that had to be done, was a significant means of making combat meaningful for men who had passed through the Great Depression. Direct coping mechanisms like belief in luck, religious faith and fatalism contributed as well to the ""wall"" that combat veterans erected to screen themselves from their situation and their prospects. Comradeship, he suggests, permitted levels of intimacy rare among men, then laid bare the vulnerability of that intimacy to shells and bullets. Combat soldiers had looked into the abyss; the overwhelming majority, Linderman argues, were also able to withdraw from it, nursing if not always healing the unique wounds of the spirit suffered in WWII's front lines. This is a shocking, gripping survey of one war's battlefield mind-set. (Nov.)