Soldier's Tale, The - Bearing Witness to Modern War

War in this century has changed in radical ways: in the weapons used, the movement of armies, the shape of the battlefield, but most of all, in the number and variety of accounts that men in combat have written about the wars they saw. This has been the century of the literate soldier, who tells a very different tale from the command-post-view histories of the great campaigns.

Focusing on the soldiers of the two world wars and Vietnam, and on the accounts written by victims of war - survivors of POW camps, the Nazi death camps, and the atom bombs - Samuel Hynes shows us how war looks to a soldier on the field at the Somme, or Khe Sanh, or the Salerno beachhead, to a pilot in a spitfire over the channel or a B-17 over Schweinfurt, or to a sailor at the Coral Sea. He draws from accounts recorded under fire and from memories that look back over decades.