Books Discussed
I have been a student of WWII for many years. One of the things I'm always a sucker for are memoirs and small unit stories. I have a decent collection of books detailing the campaigns of various Fleet Boats. I thoroughly enjoyed Pegasus Bridge and Band of Brothers when those books first appeared, and the HBO miniseries of the latter when it came out.
Some years ago, I acquired a copy of E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed when it was reprinted in the Naval Institute's series _Classics of Naval Literature_. It lived up to its billing as one of the finest combat memoirs ever written, it is well worth searching out. I will not provide a detailed review here, it's been too long since I read it.
When I found out that the producers of Band of Brothers had decided to do a followon series based on Sledge and on Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow, well, I found that pretty interesting. I had heard about Leckie, but had yet to find a copy and read it. Well, I found one and read it. It is in the same tier as Sledge, a well written and memorable book about the personal experiences of an enlisted Marine in the Pacific. Leckie enlisted imediately after Pearl Harbor was attacked, and was in the initial landing of the First Marine Division on Guadalcanal. He was already a professional sports writer, and writes naturally and well. No ghost writer was needed here, Leckie was good, and he wrote about things that affected him very directly. One of the lessons we sometimes overlook is that the enlisted men have a very different picture of reality than the battle commanders, it doesn't extend much beyond their fighting hole sometimes. Leckie wrote about things like jungle rot, eating wormy rice captured from the Japanese, and stealing from the Army supply tents (after the Army finally showed up on the island.) Both Sledge and Leckie's accounts ring true, they were writing about things that were truly important to them.
The final book I am going to talk about is _I'm Staying With My Boys_, by Jim Proser (with Jerry Cutter). This book is somewhat difficult to review fairly, because of what it is and how the material is presented.
This section of the review contains spoilers for upcoming episodes of _The Pacific_. I'd prefer not to do that but to discuss the things I wish to discuss, I have to.
Sgt. John Basilone is a legendary figure in the USMC. A machine gunner in the 7th Marine Regiment, he arrived on Guadalcanal a little over a month after Leckie and the first wave of Marines. His unit was given responsibility for defending a key portion of the defensive lines on the ridge above the airfield. This ridge had already been the site of a major attack, _The Battle of Bloody Ridge_, when the position was defended by Merritt Edson's Raider battalion. The ridge was renamed Edson's Ridge, and when it was attacked again, the second, equally violent battle was called the Battle of Edson's Ridge. Basilone received a Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions during the Battle of Edson's Ridge, and returned to the US to go on tour selling war bonds. He found he much preferred to go back to the war, and eventually got himself assigned to a new unit. He was killed by a mortar shell on the first day of the US assault on Iwo Jima.
His story is inspiring and facinating. It fully deserves to be told. The issue is with how it is told. The authors (and Jerry Cutter is Basilone's nephew) decided to tell Basilone's story in the first person. It is well written, and effective as a story telling device. But, well, there are some buts. You can kind of persuade yourself that this is a book that Basilone might have written, but every so often you hit something like "... but I'm even worse at writing than I am at speaking", which coming in the midst of a well written book, kind of breaks the spell. We don't really know how articulate a writer Basilone might have been, but this is jarring. Secondarily, there is the obvious problem with writing a book in the first person when the book necessarily ends with their death. The authors address this by ending with Basilone writing "... the word was that you never heard the mortar round with your name on it", and then following up with an epilogue, not in the first person, summarizing the facts from that point on.
But those are not the real problem. The real problem is that the authors can't really say that they know enough about what was on Basilone's mind. Earlier I mentioned that Leckie discussed Jungle Rot, everyone on Guadalcanal had it, it was very much on everyone's mind. It is barely mentioned in the Basilone biography. Now maybe he wouldn't have written much about it, but I'm not so sure about that.
So what it comes down to is this: the problem with the choice of first person voice is really that it's well done, well enough done to cause you to almost forget that this is a fabricated account. It's well fabricated and based on the facts, but it still isn't a true personal account. And for this reason, I'll recommend reading Sledge and Leckie first.
