17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It is indeed "bearing witness to modern war.", January 26, 2001
This review is from: The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to a Modern War (Paperback)
Who best can describe war but the men who fought them? True, all personal accounts of war are highly focused, confined as they are to the tight little theater of each writer's involvement. Or involvements as in the case of that German officer's memorable account of his entire career, "Soldat."
Here, Hynes zooms out, assembling with great skill personal micro-views that together are a broad picture of war. His narrative weaves the recollections into a whole fabric.
Some sage once observed that old men start wars and young men fight them. Old men write glorious and expansive military histories, the young men who fought the battles write about the miseries of the battlefields -- and, occasionally the humor -- and the miseries of captivity. Soldiers who were unlucky enough to be prisoners of the Japanese became the real experts on the miseries of captivity.
This excellent book is marred at the end by an almost apologetic discussion of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That kind of warfare was unique, says Hynes, and so it was, being the only uses of nuclear bombs in world history. But what was the alternative? An invasion of a nation that had demonstrated repeatedly that every soldier would fight to the death? And at what cost, another several hundred thousand allied dead? Hynes writes:
"And although [the bombing] was an attack not on a specific military target but on a city, that was not new in August 1945; many cities were in ashes by then. But it was a strange, unique act of war; an action without a battle, without armies, without a visible enemy, in which neither courage nor cowardice mattered; an action for which there was no possible retaliation; an action so far outside the capabilities of armies up to then that it seemed like some catastrophic natural disaster -- only it was UNnatural. That was what was most disturbing about it, and still is. . . . So it was different from other bombed, burned-out cities, where there were guns and fighter planes to oppose the attack. . . It is more entirely a victim war than Auschwitz, where resistance was just barely possible and survival might be an act of will; more than the prisoner-of-war camps, helpless though those captives sometimes were. It was a unique event in the history of man's capacity to destroy his species."
By demonstrating that the U.S. DID have the capacity to level the entire island nation of Japan -- if not the ability to destroy the species of man -- a beaten but still ferocious warring nation was brought to the table.
The casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined were perhaps less than the deaths in that single massacre in Nanking, China, where Japanese soldiers systematically killed between 100,000 and 300,000 men, women and children. Shot them one by one. But somehow, in Hynes's view, that kind of killing is war, where the unprecedented atomic explosions were not war, but something else, something UNnatural. I don't agree. Was the barbarism of the Japanese military during WWII natural? I don't think so.
Regardless of this objection, I consider "The Soldiers' Tale" to be an outstanding contribution to war literature.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Through the eyes of those who fought, February 27, 2000
This review is from: The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to a Modern War (Paperback)
Samuel Hynes background as a Marine bomber pilot in World war II helped intensify his focus in bringing "Soldier's Tale" to life. His keen eye for detail and brilliant anaylsis of human experiecnce makes this a fascinating read.
The accounts bear witness to the difficulties men faced in World War II and Vietnam and is a discovery of mankind and how they act and react during times of intense struggle.
The accounts, filled with fear, anger, frustration and courage must be remembered and not just stored away on some dusty shelf. Within these pages you stare face to face into the brutal reality of survival versus death, and walk away with a glimpse into what it was like for those who were there.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Useful Gathering of Anglo American Tales, December 27, 2001
This review is from: The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to a Modern War (Paperback)
Having looked at this book with my primary interest in the experiences of the common soldier in mind, I am struck with the many interesting personal narratives herein. That said, I was disappointed to some extent that there were not any narratives from opponents or from other allies whose native tongue is not English. Perhaps this was the author's purpose, perhaps he did not have source permissions, or perhaps the publisher did not want to acquire rights to other stories.
That said, although this is therefore a one sided view, it has much literary merit and deserves a place in the personal narrative collection.
I would also recommend the author's own personal narrative of service as an aviator. Flights of Passage (c.f.)
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