Customer Reviews

Fate's Finger

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I am 80% through the paperback edition available locally at the Littleton NH bookstore and have not been aware of any typos that the other reviewer criticized. However, typos would not have distracted me from the engaging and informative narrative that Dr. Christie has provided us who were not there. I missed the War by 5 years, but followed the course of battles daily, and could only picture in my mind what it was like to be "on the front line." Of course, in those days the movie houses had a short world news movie that gave us a glimpse of what out troops were faced with. And I had an uncle who described some of the horrors of tank warfare.

Now many years later, "Fate's Finger" brings it all back and paints a clear picture of the American armored assault across France and into Germany. The author does an excellent job of detailing the minutiae of the soldiers' lives, their deeds and thoughts, as they coped with the alien world of open combat, without ever lapsing into sentimentality, graphic horror, or exaggerated descriptions of events. I suspect the brief episodic events he describes appeared the same to the soldiers involved, as death, explosions, and misery unfolded around them. However, Christie reveals his future in the medical world by his very telling descriptions of the thoughts, fears, anxieties, and hopes that constantly filled his and his compatriots' minds as they struggled on to their objective in the heart of Germany.

In addition to learning much about tank and infantry warfare, the reader will come away with a better understanding of the essential chain of command that drives the armed services, the difficult role played by officers and men at each level, and the unfortunate inability of those at the top, and those in Washington, to anticipate or furnish the most important tools needed by the troops on the ground. Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld was criticized in the Iraq war for stating the obvious but unfortunate fact that when you go to war you go with the army and weapons you have. In a perfect world, we would have had tanks that could best the German tanks instead of the inferior Sherman machines.

In a perfect world, senior officers would have tried to minimize casualties rather than rely on an unending supply of replacement tanks and second lieutenants. The author shows how the soldiers understood and accepted these realities of war, and steadfastly made do and did their best in a world they could barely grasp. This exciting book reads like a diary and a novel, combining the intimate details of an on the scene observor, and the personal story about the lives and families of the major participants. The author disguised the names and identities of those characters, although I suspect those close to him at the time could pick out who was who. However, I have not yet figured out which character represents the author, except that he, unlike many of the others, was one of those lucky enough to have survived.

The combat scenes described so well in this book should be required reading for all those people who seem ever-ready to send American soldiers into foreign engagements. Christie makes the emotions and sacrifices of the soldiers real to the reader, and one comes away wondering how many of America's foreign entanglements were worth the cost involved.

Overall I enjoyed reading this book. The BIG drawback was all the typos which I found to be highly distracting. The publisher really needs to consider re-printing after a proofreader has made corrections.