I enjoyed the first edition of "My War" and this, the second edition, seems to contain a bit more fact and opinion, all seen from the point of view of "Andrew Rooney", a war correspondent in the U. S. Army who spent most of his time with the Eight Air Force in England and the rest of the time with ground forces fighting their way through France and Germany. Oh, he's an old curmudgeon. Many of the things you and I would take for granted or disregard, he's annoyed by. It's not "the holocaust." It's "genocide." People are proud of being color blind, like Walter Cronkite. The only reason Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation" was "the greatest generation" was that they had a war to fight. He likes reporters generally but some of them have quirks he finds annoying. But he doesn't heap on anybody or anything the ire he expends on, say, those damned green peppers that come bundled three to a package in the supermarket when he only needs two.
He doesn't really explore his own emotions but he does admit, in an abstract way, as if talking about someone else, to being horrified by some incidents he witnessed. When a Sherman tank is grinding along a narrow path in the hedgerow country and, if it stops, becomes a target, it keeps moving ahead, even if there are dead bodies on the road before it.
The amusing incidents are just as impressive and which he describes with the same detachment as the unpleasant ones. I'll give two examples.
In England, he worked under a reporter and novelist named Oram Clark Hutton, known to everyone as "Bud" Hutton. Hutton wrote a story for "Stars and Stripes" about the newly arrived P-47. High up the food chain someone read into it a revelation that the P-47 was now flying out of England, which would have been interesting to the Germans if Hutton had actually written such a datum. I will quote in extenso.
"On the second day a half-inch-thick manila evelope marked THE EDITOR was hand-delivered by Fighter Command Headquarters to the offices of "The Stars and Stripes." It was routinely handled and Joe McBride put it in Hutton's IN basket on the news desk. Hutton routinely tore open his mail, including the manila envelope. Inside was a sheaf of papers constituting a formally drawn-up request for a court-martial of M/Sgt. Oram Clark Hutton. Hutton looked through the legal document, put it down on his desk, and thought a minute. At that point he picked up a pen, and scribbled on top of the document DISAPPROVED! Under the word he wrote his initials, "BH". Bud put the official-looking document into his out basket with RETURN TO SENDER noted on the outside of the fat brown envelope. No further word was ever heard about General Hunter's demand that Sergeant Hutton be tried for treason."
Equally funny is the story of Rooney's being issued a jeep in Normandy in 1944 and then, on being transferred to China, casually handing it over to another reporter. A year or so later, Rooney received an official document from the U. S. Army demanding to know the whereabouts of the jeep, serial number such and such. (He ignored it.)
The book is full of casual but thought-provoking observations. "I was always impressed with the idea that each .50-caliber bullet cost about $1 then and when all ten guns were firing over a target with German fighter planes diving in on the formation, the air gunners could fire away about $10,000 worth of ammunition in a few minutes. The tail gunner's machine gun had to be fed by a track of ammunition from a storage magazine amidships. The ammunition on his track alone would have probably sent him to college. The ball turret rotated and revolved on a complicated set of geared wheels inside a piece of equipment worth five times as much as any car the gunner ever owned." Eisenhower was given to making similar comparisons independently.
It's an easy book to read, relaxing despite its sometimes horrible contents, and informative as well. We're unlikely to get many more such first-person accounts like it.
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