Review

General Books

Peter Schrijvers's well-researched study is an important contribution to the literature on World War II. It continues a historiographical trend begun by Paul Fussell, but it also taps into a recent mood in popular literature on the War. Schrijvers examines American GIs (he focuses on combat ground forces) perception of Europe. His method is to examine the intersection of wartime conditions and traditional American prejudices about Europe. To achieve this Schrijvers examines letters, memoirs, reports, War Department guides, and other sources. He concludes that for GIs World War II confirmed the decline of "the Old World," that many of their fathers had diagnosed during the First World War. The average GI, according to the author, concluded that European society was prone to war, rife with class conflict, stagnant and inflexible. The experience of war made the GIs secure in their belief in the moral superiority of the U.S. and its right to a post-war nuclear monopoly.	1
Recent events, whether the debate surrounding the World War II monument or the Hollywood extravaganza Pearl Harbor, demonstrate the continuing saliency of the Second World War to American culture. The significance of the War to American society makes any class on the subject rewarding and challenging to teach. Enrollment figures for courses on World War II reflect this popularity. However, this book, despite its scholarly merits, is not appropriate for undergraduate courses. It is rather long and too narrowly conceived for a typical course on the War. The organization of the text is not intuitive; the first chapter, "Nature," should be placed deeper in the text. The chapter "The Limits of Communication" is a hodge-podge that addresses medicine, women, food, and alcohol and tobacco. The anecdotes of GIs' encounters with the Old War may also blur to redundancy for undergraduates. The space the author devotes to the Holocaust is most disappointing. Instructors in search of a book assignment about the behavior of soldiers in World War II would do better to adopt Fussell's Wartime, Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army, or Robert Browning's Ordinary Men. The text is appropriate and useful for graduate students interested in military history.	2
Colby-Sawyer College Brian A. McKenzie

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