Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
[Linderman's] mournful, compelling history is the best of the books discussed here, an enduring work in the field...No one will soon surpass Linderman in treating the American combat experience so comprehensively, frankly, and humanely. Summoning both enormous empathy for servicemen and the scholar's critical distance from them, Linderman identifies many qualities among them--their individualism and initiative, for example...Linderman's infinitely modulated account honors, but also demythologizes, the small fraction of Americans in uniform who entered combat...The World Within War persuasively challenges, without wholly demolishing, images of World War II as a "good war." Michael Sherry
Review
The World Within Warviews the war without nostalgic or romantic filters. Rather it presents a sober, insightful treatment of battlefield realitiesand#133;[and] engages in detailed, skillful analysis of expectations, dangers and appeals of combatand#133;For a thought provoking account of combat's ambiguities and pressures, investigate The World Within War.
Review
Destined to rank among the finest books about the American fighting experience in World War II. Chronicle of Higher Education
Review
A shocking, gripping survey of one war's battlefield mind-set.
Review
An eminent social historian who writes of combat like a novelist, Linderman tells what it was really like to experience combat in World War II. New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Gerald F. Linderman is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Michigan.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Battle: Expectation, Encounter, Reaction
2. Battle: Coping with Combat
3. Fighting the Germans: The War of Rules
4. Fighting the Japanese: War Unrestrained
5. Discipline: not the American Way
6. The Appeals of Battle: Spectacle, Danger, Destruction
7. The Appeals of Battle: Comradeship
8. War Front and Home Front
Conclusion: the World Within War
Notes
Reference and Bibliography
Index