The World within War: America's Combat Experience in World War II [Paperback]

Gerald F. Linderman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 1999

Gerald Linderman has created a seamless and highly original social history, authoritatively recapturing the full experience of combat in World War II. Drawing on letters and diaries, memoirs and surveys, Linderman explores how ordinary frontline American soldiers prepared for battle, related to one another, conceived of the enemy, thought of home, and reacted to battle itself. He argues that the grim logic of protracted combat threatened soldiers not only with the loss of limbs and lives but with growing isolation from country and commanders and, ultimately, with psychological disintegration.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Many works seek to explain why soldiers fight as they do, but this one stands out. Historian Linderman explores the social and psychological forces working on America's citizen-soldiers when they found themselves thrown into vast conflicts beyond their expectations. His Embattled Courage (Free Pr., 1989) has become a classic study of the factors that motivated America's Civil War armies. In the present study, Linderman blends the letters and memories of some 500 American mud soldiers?combat infantrymen and Marines?sent against a highly trained enemy in a highly mechanized war. Few real surprises emerge, but the material as a whole is impressive and useful, and the chapters on the differences between fighting the Germans and the Japanese are well worth the price. This book is more penetrating than Geoffrey Perret's There's a War To Be Won (LJ 9/1/91) and makes a nice companion to Michael Doubler's Closing with the Enemy (LJ 11/15/94).?Raymond L. Puffer, U.S. Air Force History Prog., Edwards AFB, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

An academic's largely successful and consistently absorbing effort to convey the varied experience of American fighting men during WW II. Drawing on a host of sources, Linderman (Embattled Courage, 1987) creates a vivid mosaic depicting how US soldiers and marines (albeit not airmen or sailors) dealt with the hard roles they played in bloody campaigns in arenas ranging from Guadalcanal, North Africa, and the Rhineland through Iwo Jima. Observing that most if not all American troops had little sense of personal mortality before enduring their baptism of fire, the author (History/Univ. of Michigan) documents how they adjusted to the grim realities and unrelenting shocks of battle. He goes on to show that rules of a sort governed engagements with German foes; in the Pacific theater, by contrast, both US and Japanese forces waged what another historian, John Dower, has called a ``war without mercy.'' Covered as well are the tacit attractions of combat, the widespread disaffection of American enlisted men with their caste- conscious officers, fierce loyalties to comrades in arms, the average GI's reaction to USO performers and the Red Cross, and the editing of casualty reports, as well as the high cost of rugged individualism among American POWs, the adverse impact on morale caused by news of home-front profiteering, and the emotions of those whose only ticket off the line was a fatal or million-dollar wound. Among the notables (literary and otherwise) whose eyewitness testimony informs Linderman's tellingly detailed overview are Art Buchwald, John Ciardi, Orval Faubus, Tom Lea, William Manchester, Bill Mauldin, Audie Murphy, Ernie Pyle, and Eric Sevareid. A fine contribution to WW II scholarship, one that atypically offers human-scale perspectives on those at the sharp end of the bayonet in a horrific global conflict. -- Copyright ©1997, 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: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674962028
• ISBN-13: 978-0674962026
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #440,281 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A penetrating look at war from those who fight, April 16, 2001

By 

odanny (Peoria, Illinois) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The World within War: America's Combat Experience in World War II (Paperback)

Linderman has written an extremely informative look at the dynamics of combat, and he leaves nothing out. The reason this author is so successful is he expertly weaves his scholarly approach with an equal amount of first-hand accounts, and the result is a book both deeply personal and unbiased.

Judging from the extensive list of references in the Bibliography (which I refered to often, as many of these books I plan on purchasing) Linderman did extensive research, especially reading those books written by the soldiers themselves. The areas this author explores are often overlooked or deliberately avoided by others, and that is what makes this book so refreshing to read. Questions such as "Why him, and not me?", the reactions of ones buddies when someone on the line cracks up from battle fatigue, how soldiers dealt with inept officers, (and the brutally honest assessments of some of these green officers themselves),how the art of war in North Africa was a chivalrous display of honor and prisoner exchanges, and how this was radically different from the no-quarter violence of the Pacific, how the breakdown in discipline at war's end in Europe, and the rumor that those soldiers would be sent to the Pacific, almost caused near riots, and how soldiers reacted to those on the homefront, whether it be the shared pain of a Dear John letter passed among the squad, or the total contempt for the 4-F's that were often healthier than those in combat, or the rounds that didn't fire or grenades that didn't explode because some factory worker decided to stay out too late the night before spending that huge paycheck, this book is startling in it's clarity, and profound in the feelings it can generate, stripping away layers of patriotisim, and exposing this war for what it really was, a violent and thankless job, fought by the young, who fought for their buddies and the sake of getting it over with, and back home to loved ones.

My hat is off to all the brave veterans of this war. Well Done.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Real Tribute, January 19, 2001

By 

Jeffrey L. Thurston (Oakland, Ca USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The World within War: America's Combat Experience in World War II (Paperback)

The author of this book succeeds where others far more famous or currently popular fail: he slowly and deliberately peels away the layers of fantasy and denial about the American WW2 combat experience to show the hellish world of the US frontline soldier. Linderman approaches combat as a dark mysterious area undescribable to anyone who hasn't experienced it. He shows its corrosive effect on all who experience it for prolonged periods by using the words and descriptions of veterans. WW2 was especially hard on the American combat soldier(partly because he was American and thus individualistic)- treated like a dog by his officers and the military- unrelieved (unlike even the Germans or other combatants) for any length of time by anything but a wound or death and finally subjected to the heroic fantasies of that "Greatest Generation" of Americans back home or in the rear. I gained new respect for WW2 combat vets by reading this work so refreshingly free of the current rah-rah BS about WW2. Taking a second look at "Saving Private Ryan" after finishing "The World Within War" I realise what was so weird about the movie- it gave us a glimpse at how combat looks but the soldiers as characters were all wrong with their "aw shucks" kind of quiet heroism. Never in a million years in a million parallel universes would actual soldiers have attacked that radar tower with its machine gun emplacement under the circumstances set by the movie. And if they had- no way they would have let that German go.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb analysis of the human mind in combat, February 21, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Leavenworth, KS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The World Within War (Hardcover)

Linderman masterfully sorts out the complex, human dimension of war. He provides those who have not experienced battle with a taste of its grim realities and the toll it takes on the human mind. Linderman reminds us that there is a cost to war that goes beyond the casualty figures: combat effects those who survive it for the rest of their lives. More importantly, World Within War helps combat veterans understand the thoughts, attitudes and feelings they experienced in battle. They realize that the complex range of emotions they thought so unusual and strictly their own were in fact common given the nature of the environment. The light World Within War sheds on the human aspects of combat makes the book critical to achieving an understanding of men in battle.