The Wall Street Journal News Articles
Books On Soldiers And Warfare
May 27, 2006
For Memorial Day, a former Marine James Webb
salutes these military books
1. Once an Eagle, Anton Myrer, Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1968
Quite simply, America's "War and Peace." "Once an Eagle" is
the finest novel ever written about what it means to spend a career
in the military, and how the military relates to the civilian world.
Myrer traces the career and personal life of a talented, often
selfless career soldier from the 1916 Pershing expedition along the
Mexican border to the beginnings of the Vietnam War, skillfully
blending in human foibles, political debates and the moral dilemmas
that leaders always must face. A Marine veteran of Iwo Jima, Myrer
writes with great skill about combat and with intelligence about a
variety of societal and human issues.
2. Hell In a Very Small Place, Bernard Fall,
Lippincott, 1966
For anyone who believes that France's Dien Bien Phu
operation in Vietnam in 1954 was little more than a blunder, and for
anyone who believes that the French were not capable fighters in
Vietnam, this comprehensive and often surprising non-fiction account
of the siege that brought France to its knees will be a deserved
surprise. Bernard Fall, the Frenchman who was the most perceptive
observer of Vietnam's shaky march away from French colonialism,
wrote several books about Vietnam; he was killed while on a patrol
with the U.S. Marines in 1966. This book -- his best -- shows us the
under-appreciated complexities of that war, the regional issues that
drove many local decisions and the tragic heroism of France's finest
fighting forces.
3. History of the Second World War, B.H. Liddell
Hart, Putnam, 1970
Liddell Hart is most remembered for his essays on strategy
(he largely coined the doctrine of the "indirect approach") and for
his early advocacy of armored warfare in the years following World
War I. It was an advocacy ignored by the British, studied and
adapted by the Germans. But this book, which he was still working on
at his death in 1970, is his masterpiece. Leaving politics behind,
Hart gives us a splendid chronology of the war from a military
context, which allows the reader to cover the entire global
landscape of the war from beginning to end. The book's only defect
is Hart's forgivable imbalance of attention paid to the European
theater as opposed to Asia. Americans who have not read beyond our
own military experiences in World War II emphatically need to read
this book, in order to comprehend the ferocity of the German-Russian
warfare, which is too frequently overlooked in our own discourse.
4. The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer, Harper & Row,
1971
This memoir from the perspective of one who fought on the
German side in World War II is probably the most overwhelming book
ever written about ground combat. Guy Sajer, an Alsatian drafted
into the German Army, fought for three years as an infantry soldier,
mostly on the Russian front. Germany fielded an army of 12 million
soldiers and lost 3.7 million combat dead, a preponderance of those
casualties occurring in the mind-boggling, massive engagements with
the Soviets. Sajer, who had no politics and little enthusiasm for
soldiering, nonetheless demands an understanding of the immensity of
this human experience, and is the perfect voice to ask for it.
5. The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman,
Macmillan, 1962
This is the book that every policy maker pushing for the
invasion of Iraq should have read, marked, learned from and digested
before sending the U. S. off to war. Barbara Tuchman's brilliant
analysis of how World War I began in the summer of 1914 is
remarkable not only for her understanding of the issues at play
among national leaders, but also for her descriptions of how the
trenches became immediately bogged down, resulting in a four-year
war from which Europe has never fully recovered. The Germans were
certain that World War I would be over in six weeks, but unforeseen
circumstances and unintended consequences are the rule in warfare.
Instead of a quick march to Paris, the summer of 1914 saw, horribly,
several nations begin the process of bleeding and spending
themselves away from greatness.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS