This is a middling offering in a very real sense: it comes from the middle layer. On the one hand, The Company Commander was an officer, and an officer of the 1940s—back when things were “the way things should be”—GIs were still GIs, even then, though. (The treatment of civilian women was perhaps the most obvious faux pas; every woman is yearning for a stranger with a gun, right. What to me is fear of the Negro soldiers is also a little off-color to my interpretation.) So because of this 1940s middle class formality and dryness, there’s little of courage and hate and so on. (Hate is when you don’t want the other man to be brave; Narnia Jack could never approve, whereas The Company Commander could simply never mention.) And the book was never intended to be about strategy and the higher officers. So we’re left with the middle. Chapter break. Incoming artillery, two wounded. Chapter break. Ate food, quiet day. Chapter break…. But The Company Commander knew what it was like to be a man in an engine of war, and it was an important engine.

…. Though, incidentally, when Jack was about to be drafted into WWI, he made an agreement “with (his) country”, that he would serve when called upon, but not waste time beforehand on the journalistic drudgeries of modern war; and I think that, to some extent at least, our modern skepticism for the classical poetry of heightened sense perception in time of war, relates to the sort of modern war journalistic pieces of deadened sensitivity in war written by people like The Company Commander.

…. They weren’t as trigger-happy as the Soviets, but I’m not proud of everything they did.

…. But he freed the captives.

…. I moralize, so I’ll say this. Talk of justice can annoy, and perhaps some might find too much of that here. (White American men in the 1940s and their foibles, right.) The Company Commander too, though, speaks of justice; the mid-level officer thinks at one point that he’s a little bit more macho than the higher officer eating hotdogs or whatever at headquarters. Personally I think that if he had a little bit more awareness of himself, he, like all of us, would find less cause for complaint, who as a body gives so much cause for offense on our own part. My own apology for pointing this out can only be that I try to play more the part of a “Pop” Winans (or, rather, his father, I suppose), than a Malcolm X. Though, of course, Winans would not have served in this particular company.

This is of course, to speak of words not spoken, more than things as they appear, hahaha.

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https://www.instagram.com/p/CXBNvcqhMr2/ ( )

MacDonald was a |Captain in the US Army. His outfits were Companies I and G of the 23d Infantry which he joined in September 1944 as replacement. He was green having never experienced combat. Fearing the men he led would be suspicious of his abilities, he held self-doubted his leadership ability. But his caring for his men and his lack of fear at the front soon made him a popular officer. He led his units across France, Belgium, Germany and ended the war in Czechoslovakia.

He includes such tremendous detail in his narrative that more than once I checked to see that I wasn't reading a novel. He includes the names of men who he spoke to, who were wounded, who were killed plus the names of German officers he met near the end of the war and even women he danced with in the celebrations in the Czech Republic when the war ended. Once in a while when his narrative may leave you wondering what happened to some one, he adds in italics what he found out years later or information someone who read the first edition of the book told him later.

This is a great read if you wish to know what it was like to be a basic infantry soldier fighting your way across Europe in 1944-45. One caution about the text is that German soldiers were often cited as killers of prisoners or wounded soldiers. While MacDonald never admits to actually seeing American GI's performing the same atrocities, he definitely never leaves you in doubt that some prisoners sent to the rear never made it there. As well, German wounded were frequently left to die if it was inconvenient to care for them. ( )

Apt portrayal of the mental and physical stress of war at the individual and unit command level. Those of us who have never experienced such can only marvel at the strength and commitment of those who did. ( )

Classic account of lower level command in combat in WWII. ( )