Scan barcode
mykeenknife's review against another edition
2.0
this book surprised me. i enjoyed it much more than other histories of war.
zelanator's review against another edition
3.0
This is as best of an analysis of war memoir that I have read, and one of the few books that I know of that deal specifically with how soldiers have described their experiences in war across the twentieth century. This is part literary analysis and part military history. Hynes studies war memoir as a genre of non-fiction writing that he says is like history, biography, and fiction but also very much unlike all of those modes of writing.
There is a more recent book on wartime writing and memoir that challenges some of Hynes contentions (I can't recall the name, atm), that I still have to read.
Hynes' general argument, if there is a single thread uniting the book, is that soldiers have described war with some psychological and descriptive continuities from World War I through the Vietnam War: war is uniquely strange, it's inaccessible to all except those who experienced it with their flesh, that technology is largely alienating, and that most soldiers did not hold ideological or patriotic motivations for enlisting and did not conceptualize their role in a war from these perspectives. There's also an underlying argument concerns the evolution of war literature alongside the evolution of battlefield technology, contending broadly that technologies (machine gun, atomic bomb, etc.) have shattered soldiers' romanticism since 1914 and led the genre of writing more and more toward soldiers' "pure victimhood"at the hands of indiscriminate annihilation. One caveat, though, is that certain technologies—chiefly, the aircraft and the tank—allowed soldiers to re-experience individual combat in different modes and thus, from their point of view as pilots or tank commanders, warfare resumed its romantic or chivalric aspects through World War II.
Hynes covers the First World War in two chapters, the Second World War in a longer chapter, and finally the Vietnam War. He concludes with some commentary on "victims and agents" in each conflict, meaning the memoir written by those either removed from the battlefield (POWs, escapees) or those at the other end of the bombs and guns (civilians, victims of the atomic blasts).
This is a great book, although it can sometimes become rather dense with some literary studies jargon. Also, this book is part memoir, ironically, as the author was himself a combat veteran.
Note to self—Important for various historiographical schools within military history: face of battle studies, psychology of combat, "physics of the battlefield," motivation, and veracity of traditional military history source materials.
There is a more recent book on wartime writing and memoir that challenges some of Hynes contentions (I can't recall the name, atm), that I still have to read.
Hynes' general argument, if there is a single thread uniting the book, is that soldiers have described war with some psychological and descriptive continuities from World War I through the Vietnam War: war is uniquely strange, it's inaccessible to all except those who experienced it with their flesh, that technology is largely alienating, and that most soldiers did not hold ideological or patriotic motivations for enlisting and did not conceptualize their role in a war from these perspectives. There's also an underlying argument concerns the evolution of war literature alongside the evolution of battlefield technology, contending broadly that technologies (machine gun, atomic bomb, etc.) have shattered soldiers' romanticism since 1914 and led the genre of writing more and more toward soldiers' "pure victimhood"at the hands of indiscriminate annihilation. One caveat, though, is that certain technologies—chiefly, the aircraft and the tank—allowed soldiers to re-experience individual combat in different modes and thus, from their point of view as pilots or tank commanders, warfare resumed its romantic or chivalric aspects through World War II.
Hynes covers the First World War in two chapters, the Second World War in a longer chapter, and finally the Vietnam War. He concludes with some commentary on "victims and agents" in each conflict, meaning the memoir written by those either removed from the battlefield (POWs, escapees) or those at the other end of the bombs and guns (civilians, victims of the atomic blasts).
This is a great book, although it can sometimes become rather dense with some literary studies jargon. Also, this book is part memoir, ironically, as the author was himself a combat veteran.
Note to self—Important for various historiographical schools within military history: face of battle studies, psychology of combat, "physics of the battlefield," motivation, and veracity of traditional military history source materials.
More...