THE SHARP END - The Fighting Man in World War II by Ellis, John

Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1980. US first edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 6 1/2 x 9 1/2, VG/VG condition, 396 pages, illus., notes, bibliog., index.---------------------------------------- Only those who served in the front lines can understand what the ordinary infantryman had to endure in World War II, but now John Ellis describes it, telling of human experience, not strategy.This book gives a detailed account of what the Second World War was like for the common fighting man. A soldier in the fierce combat around the River Waal in November 1944 recalls: "In the trenches, the December rain and hail, one clear day in four, two hours of windy sunshine a week, mud to the ankles. Some days we lie in mud...." Contrast those conditions with the heat of Burma: "You wipe the sweat out of your eyes, then you feel your heart pounding so violently you think it must burst its cage."------------------------------------------------------ Or of Guadalcanal, where the sweat "ran down into their shoes, filling them, so that they sloshed along ... as if they had just come out of wading a river." Everywhere men were afraid. An officer in Tunisia wrote: "How I hate the shells. I have seen strong, courageous men reduced to whimpering wrecks, crying like children. . . . And when one has nothing to do, the fumes and dust and echoed cries of 'stretcher bearer' strain one's nerves almost to breaking point."The common bedrock of suffering is Ellis's main theme. Ranging over all the major theaters, he has compiled a history of World War II from the point of view of the front-line soldier. The extensive quotations from letters and memoirs give a deeply moving and always authentic picture of the physical and mental anguish that were part of the grim realities of combat.