Before Their Time: A Memoir [Paperback]

Robert Kotlowitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 1999

in this memoir of his experiences as a teenage infantryman in the US Third Army during World War II, Kotlowitz brings to life the harrowing story of the massacre of his platoon in northeastern France, in which he--by playing dead--was the only one to survive. 208 pp. 15,000 print.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the summer of 1943, Robert Kotlowitz, an indifferent premed student at Johns Hopkins University, was drafted into the army. "I told myself," he writes in his affecting memoir of World War II, "that it was better than being blatantly tossed out of college." In any event, he continues, "part of me, at eighteen, was eager to suffer the hazards and humiliations of war."

Hazards and humiliations he found in abundance. He was assigned to a company led by an inept captain and put to work in a Browning Automatic Rifle unit. In combat school at Fort Benning he learned that, in battle, such units had a life expectancy of eleven seconds. "That is not hyperbole," he adds wryly. "It is scientific fact." But Kotlowitz lived through the war, fueled by his hatred, as a Jew, for the German enemy, and burning with the patriotic fervor of a young man. Both his hatred and his fervor diminished as he endured battle, living close to the bone and watching as his comrades fell.

Kotlowitz writes with skill and mordant humor of the infantryman's life, of the incredible instinct to survive, of "the sounds ... never before heard, swelling over the noise of small-arms and machine-gun fire, of men's voices calling for help or screaming in pain or terror--our own men's voices, unrecognizable at first, weird in pitch and timbre." His fine memoir belongs on readers' shelves alongside such books as Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers and Paul Fussell's Doing Battle, primary documents of a terrible time. --Gregory McNamee

From Kirkus Reviews

Novelist Kotlowitz acts as his fallen buddies' unofficial company historian of their combat duty in WW II, from army basic training to a precipitous, disastrous encounter with the enemy. More than 50 years after WW II, with over half its veterans now dead, Kotlowitz (His Master's Voice, 1992, etc.) recounts his own experiences, in part to find ``a definitive end to the accumulated weight of sadness and nostalgia.'' With this simple goal, his straightforward prose captures both the mundane and the horrific features of a soldier's life, as well as his own teenager's na‹vet‚. After getting bucked out of a training program in order to supply his division with live bodies after D-day, Kotlowitz is thrown into an eclectic mix of soldiers in the so-called ``Yankee Division.'' His commanding officer is a textbook-trained OCS graduate and former university football tackle from Ohio, his squad leader a generally reliable soldier with a tendency to go AWOL under pressure, and his buddies a melting-pot mix of draftees. Infantry life quickly sorts them into a soldiers' hierarchy, right down to the squad's sad sack, but Kotlowitz gives each man his balanced due. After an uneventful delay awaiting deployment orders in France, he and his buddies find themselves on the front, dug in a few hundred yards from the well-prepared Germans, in the fall of 1944. When they are finally sent forward, the assault is so disastrous that he survives only by ``playing the living corpse'' among his platoon, one of just three survivors. After subjecting him to grilling by the division's historian and its psychiatrist, the army, ironically, sends him behind lines to recuperate by guarding a warehouse of duffel bags, some of which belonged to his fallen buddies. An unsentimental, honest testament to the individual experience of war--the kind that history overlooks. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (June 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385496036
• ISBN-13: 978-0385496032
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #369,405 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars HE NEVER FIRED A SHOT BUT HE KNOWS THE HELL OF WAR, March 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Before Their Time: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Kotlowitz' memoir is just one bit of personal history that reflects the additutes and experience of a million privates during WWII. Filled with irony, this account vividly details what it was like for Kotlowitz, a nineteen year old grunt (and virgin) to train and participate in battle in the European theater. The first half of the memoir reveals the attitudes and personalities of the men of C company, as they are forced to live together, train together, and fight together.His describtions are so vivid, the reader becomes part of the company, and it becomes easy to imagine what it was like to live with these men. The second half of the book is the horrific account of the only battle of C company, of which there were just three survivors. It must have been painful for Kotlowitz, as he relives the night time attack by a German infrantry unit. Kotlowitz begins the battle playing dead, face down in the mud. He then spends the next twelve hours in cold black silence, as he listens to his buddies cry out for their mothers, get picked off by snipers, and slowly die screaming. All of this horror, and he never fired a shot. His guild of surviving has inspired this freightening and well written memoir. An excellent read for anyone who is interested in seeing the war through the eyes of a private.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful, moving memoir of an infantryman, December 20, 1999

By 

Dennis J. Buckley (Harrisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Before Their Time: A Memoir (Paperback)

In a society seemingly addicted (or at least benumbed by) on-line polls, the personal, written memoir is an all too often overlooked source of experience-- and wisdom. This compact volume is the wartime memoir of Robert Kotlowitz, who served with the 26th Infantry Division during the Second World War. Deeply (and appropriately) personal, it shares a place on my bookshelf with Mowat's, _And No Birds Sang_, and Sledge's _With the Old Breed_.

Even for those of us who have not served in combat, Kotlowitz's thumbnail word-sketches of his fellow soldiers and their dealings with one another have the hard edge of sometimes uncomfortable truth. Part of this story is untold, and cannot be told, but only lived. I deeply respect Kotlowitz as he tries, with each line, to be as scrupulously honest and accurate as he can be in conveying his experience.

Towards the end of this book, the author brings up the valid point that the majority of World War II veterans who survived the war have since died. As that generation passes, memoirs of the sort written by Kotlowitz are increasingly important. This is war, at the infantryman's level, and in our rush to embrace "smart weapons," we had best not neglect the voices, such as Kotlowitz's, that still resound from cramped, cold, filthy foxholes.

The candor Kotlowitz employs in this straight-forward narrative is in the best tradition of those combat veterans who, in the past 30 years, have tried to be forthcoming about their experiences.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent and Effective ASTP Memoir, September 26, 2007

By 

John P. Rooney "John" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Before Their Time: A Memoir (Paperback)

"Before Their Time" by Robert Kotlowitz. Subtitled: "A Memoir".
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. New York, 1997.

In 1943, Robert Kotlowitz was in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) at the University of Maine when mounting casualties in the European Theater of Operation (ETO) required fresh men for the war. General George Marshall ordered the termination of ASTP program so as to release some 175,000 young soldiers to the battlefields of Europe. So, this young man from Baltimore found himself on the liner, "Argentina", at the city of Cherbourg, "...the old Norman city" in France. The soldiers of the 26th division, the old Yankee Division, had to climb down rope ladders, hanging on the hull of the ship, into Higgins boats below. The details of this relatively unimportant event... i.e. disembarkation, fill many pages in this small book of memories written many years after the war. In this small section, the recounts how his contemporaries reacted to the requirement of climbing down rope cargo nets into the boats below, and by so writing, analyzes those young men of the Yankee Division.

The author not only analyzes the men but also the 26th Division.
On page 8, he writes ...
"By 1944 there were no longer many true Yankees in the Yankee division. (O)ther ethnic and national groups had begun to infiltrate the roster:,, Italians, ... Armenians, Greeks" ... and so on. Then, Kotlowitz notes that there was "... a substantial cluster of despised WASPs, who didn't yet know that they were a symptom of the future, as well as a handful of isolated Jews, who were also despised; but the unlike the WASPs, the Jews were quite used to it".

The writing continues in this analytical tone until the day when his regiment, the 104th, was ordered to advance against the German lines. Almost everyone was killed or wounded. Kotlowitz was one of the few physically unharmed survivors; he spent the entire day under the sights of the Germans. He did not move and played dead. This affected his outlook on the war and on the army and on his future life. After this single day of terrible combat, where so many casualties were caused by incompetence, Private Kotlowitz was assigned to rear-echelon job. Safe for the duration. So, unlike many World War II memoirs, this book is not a bang-bang, shoot `em story. Rather, it is a sensitive and subtle analysis of the experiences of one American soldier.