Their hair is thinner and eyesight weaker than it was fifty-plus years ago, but there are still plenty of veterans of World War II among us and they are still setting down after all this time their memories of what it meant to live and fight in the Second World War. This time around, brief notes on the memoirs of four American vets, Army and Marines, of France, Italy, and the Pacific.

Cooper, Belton Y. Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1998

ISBN 0-89141-670-6
324 pages

Foreword; Preface; Introduction; Acknowledgments; photos; maps; Epilogue; Suggested Reading; Index.

Appendices: Panzers versus American Armor; Adding More Protection; Field Deployment of an American Armored Division

The "death traps" of Cooper's title were Sherman tanks, outgunned and out-armored by their German opponents. As an ordnance officer in the 3rd Armored Division, Cooper learned more than most about how Shermans could be knocked out, what else could go wrong with them, and how they could be patched back together.

   ...One day in Mausbach, Maj. Dick Johnson told me that a tank from the 2nd Battalion was having difficulty in keeping 75mm rounds in the main ammunition storage box underneath the turret. He said this condition had appeared in other tanks before, and no one knew what was causing it.... For some reason the rounds were dislodging when the tank stopped. If the primer happened to strike a sharp object, the rounds could explode prematurely [inside the tank].... I got inside the tank and examined the front of the rack. This particular tank had thirty rounds of 75mm tank ammunition and four bottles of Cognac [in the rack]. The tank crew had decided this was a good place to store their extra Cognac. The diameter of the bottle of Cognac was slightly larger than that of the ammunition. There was enough clearance in the tube to allow the bottle of Cognac to go in, but not without stretching the clips beyond their yield point. The weakened clips would no longer hold a round of ammunition....
   When confronted, the crew defended their actions. "This ammunition is no damn good anyway against a German tank. If the going got too rough, we could hide behind a building and break out the Cognac and at least ease some of the pain."

Johnston, James W. The Long Road of War: A Marine's Story of Pacific Combat. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

ISBN 0-8032-2585-7
174 pages

Foreword; Preface; photos; Notes; Bibliography.

Johnston fought with the First Marine Division on New Britain, Peleliu, and Okinawa where he saw many of his buddies die gruesome, painful deaths. He hasn't forgotten them, and he hasn't forgotten what it was like to be in brutal, gut-wrenching combat with a determined enemy. Every page of this book -- much of it written in the four-letter language of Marines in battle -- carries the searing pain and anger of coming face-to-face with death.

   Typically, through all the high ground, we moved out over a ridge and caught automatic small arms fire. When we moved against the places from which we were taking casualties, we would take fire from a different direction. If the effort got too costly, we pulled out and attacked the pockets again from a different direction. The results were always the same. Over the ridges and around the coral spines or high points, we would always draw more automatic small arms fire from many interlocking and overlapping lanes of fire. The place was like the catacombs, always impossible to figure where you were coming from and where you were going to, and toward the last we were attacking through the tombs of many young men, both Jap and American.
   On one occasion, as we fought inch by inch through that rugged terrain, we crossed a little knob and came upon the remains of a bunch of Seventh Marine bodies, blackened and swollen from flame throwers cooking them. The flies and the birds and maggots were working on them. It looked to be what was left of a platoon of good, young Marine Corps riflemen and machine gunners.
   It was repulsive beyond imagination.

Ellis, Robert B. See Naples and Die: A Ski Trooper's World War II Memoir. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 1996.

ISBN 0-7864-0190-7
255 pages

Preface; Preamble; photos; maps; Notes; Author's Military History; Index.

Ellis, the "ski trooper" of the subtitle, served in the US 10th Mountain Division. After his vigorous and somewhat specialized training -- not many of the "cookie-cutter" American infantry divisions of World War II received instruction in building igloos -- the author and the division arrived in Italy in time to take part in the campaign north of Rome. Reconstructed from his memory, letters home, and a journal he kept at the time, Ellis' book is another unflinching look at front-line action, albeit without the same sense of rage conveyed in Johnston's The Long Road of War.

   Men were running up and down the mountainside in a frantic search for a way through the hedgerow. Our yells through the roar of exploding artillery helped little. While we watched, the squad leader of the other machine gun squad, Sergeant Leonard Pierce, was killed instantly by exploding shell fragments, while my 6'7" second gunner, Wally Krusell, was knocked unconscious. One of the ammunition carriers in my squad, Warren Steiner, a tall, handsome young man with a beautiful wife, did not escape the steel deluge, suffering from what proved to be a lethal hit in the spinal column which left him helpless where he fell. Unable to do anything other than watch what transpired, we sat there aghast over what we were forced to witness.

Vedder, James S. Combat Surgeon: On Iwo Jima with the 27th Marines. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1984. (Originally published as "Surgeon in Iwo".)

ISBN 0-89141-660-9
226 pages

Maps; photos; index.

James Vedder, a physician, served as "doc" for a battalion of the 27th Marines, landing on Iwo Jima an hour after the first wave hit the beaches and moving with the regiment from one end of the island to the other. While responsible for patching up the badly wounded combat Marines flowing into his aid station, Vedder -- along with his litter bearers and corpsmen -- remained constantly under fire from enemy artillery, snipers, friendly rounds, and suicidal Japanese soldiers infiltrating the medical detachment in the night with bags of hand grenades. For his part in the campaign, Vedder earned a Silver Star.

   A few minutes later, Captain Gray and four of his men from I Company escorted a prisoner into our aid station. They had flushed him out of a cave located in a small grove of trees to our left rear. Gray and his men were elated because the division intelligence section guaranteed twenty samurai swords for each live prisoner. More information about the enemy was badly needed by our high command.
   The prisoner was a small, wiry man about five feet four inches tall and weighed close to 125 pounds. He was in very bad shape. A short blast from a flamethrower had caught him in the face. His eyelids were swollen closed. The lips were also cracked and swollen and pouted outward in a grotesque fashion. The upper teeth could just be seen deep in the tunnel of recently cooked flesh. Shreds of skin were peeling from the ears, nose, and cheeks. The man reeked with the pungent odor of burned flesh.
   When the two Marines who had been half dragging the prisoner into my presence released him, he collapsed at my feet without uttering a sound. After placing the poor man on a stretcher, we gave him a Syrette of morphine before sending him back to the division hospital. I doubt whether the intelligence section ever obtained much information from this prisoner. I do know that Captain Gray did not survive to collect the samurai swords for his company.

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Thanks to the publishers for providing these review copies.