| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The GI War against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II. By Peter Schrijvers. (New York: New York University Press, 2002. xvi, 320 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8147-9816-0.)

American Soldiers: Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. By Peter S. Kindsvatter. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. xxiv, 432 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1229-7.)

Drawing extensively on wartime letters, unpublished personal memoirs, diaries, and questionnaires completed by veterans, Peter Schrijvers compiles a rich and compelling cultural and social history of American servicemen and -women serving in Asia and the Pacific during World War II. His broad panorama includes personal testimonies and narratives from all the military branches describing the diversity of wartime experiences from frontline riflemen trying to live out a single day to supply clerks stuck for months or years on end in the lonely backwaters of the Pacific, India, or China. This is not a fashionable "memory study," but a fresh account derived from contemporary first person descriptions and impressions of the phenomena of modern, total war in the mid-twentieth century. To place these testimonies in the larger context, the author supplements the personal and impressionistic versions of a military society at war in Asia and the Pacific with judicious reliance on secondary sources and official U.S. military histories.

For analytical purposes, Schrijvers organizes his book into three main sections. Part 1 examines the conception of the American G.I.'s of the Asia-Pacific theaters of war as another frontier to be evaluated, tamed, and Americanized. As he vividly demonstrates in part 2, the frontier terrain, with its multitudinous cultures and peoples, proved resistant to American control, producing among G.I.'s a sense of frustration "flowing from the region's oppressive wilderness, threatening demographics, and impenetrable mentality" (p. ix). Part 3 plumbs the escalating fury unleashed by a modern, industrialized society against an unforgiving environment and foe. Beyond the personal rage of flesh and blood unleashed in wartime loomed the impersonal industrial violence that developed geometrically during the war.

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