When We Were One, Stories of World War II. . - book review

Parameters, Spring, 2003 by Dr. Henry G. Gole

When We Were One, Stories of World War II. By W. C. Heinz. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2002. 262 pages. $23.00.

W. C. Heinz (b. 1915) has enjoyed a full and successful writing career. It began as a war correspondent in World War II while he was still in his twenties and continued as he became a highly respected sportswriter who was inducted into the National Sports Broadcasting and Sportswriting Hall of Fame in 2001. Heinz has written for The New York Times, Life, Look, True, The Saturday Evening Post, colliers and Reader 's Digest. Among the ten books he has authored, coauthored, and edited are Run to Daylight (with football coach Vince Lombardi) and the novel MASH, under the pseudonym Richard Hooker (with H. Richard Hornberger, M.D.), which was the basis for the popular film and long-running television series of the same name.

His publisher says that Ernest Hemingway, whose sparse writing style was Heinz's model, called Heinz's The Professional "the only good novel I've read about a fighter." The same publisher says that novelist Elmore Leonard and writers Damon Runyon, Red Smith, and David Halberstam praised the writing of Heinz. The man is a skilled writer of brisk prose, and his kudos are many. So why, one asks--other than exploitation of a current market receptive to World War II films and books--did he produce the warmed-over yesterday's breakfast that is When We Were One?

The book consists of reprints of 23 dispatches written in 1944 and 1945 for the New York Sun, four previously published magazine articles, and an excerpt from one of the author's books. Topics include naval gunfire support of the infantry on D-Day, fighting as the Allies enter Germany, combat at the end of the war in Europe, and a few magazine pieces that essentially repeat the newspaper dispatches. For example, the first half of "The Retreat from Mons," published in True in 1950, repeats the 4 September 1944 dispatch to his newspaper that is also reprinted in this book. There is nothing fresh here, nor is the book carefully edited. The author seems to have dropped out of sight in the late 1960s, after MASH, to reappear in 2002.

One suspects that publication of the odds and ends that constitute When We Were One was inspired by the commercial success of the film Saving Private Ryan and the several World War II books of Stephen B. Ambrose, Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, Gerald F. Linderman's The World Within War, and Hampton Sides' Ghost Soldiers. Perhaps public interest in war, an interest that ebbs and flows, has been stimulated also by the war on terrorism, the fighting in Afghanistan, headlines about American plans for "regime change" in Iraq, events in the Middle East, or films like Blackhawk Down and We Were Soldiers.

Your reviewer takes no exception to an author making a buck from the words he wrote in the past. One wishes, however, that the passage of time had tempted Heinz to reflect more deeply on the events he reported some 60 years ago and to synthesize them for readers coming to his theme for the first time in the 21st century. But, unfortunately, Heinz is not Paul Fussell, whose several reflections on specific wars and war in general demand our attention, nor is he up to the major contribution to students of war that Samuel Hynes gives us in The Soldiers 'Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War.

What one finds in When We Were One is not bad stuff. But it is rehashed reporting, not an attempt by a deep thinker to wring the essence of combat from twice-told tales. It seems to be an attempt to strike while the iron is hot, to capitalize on the current popular interest in war. Accompanying the terse prose, there is something of the dated chest-thumping, a Hemingwayesque machismo here that draws the reader's attention to the writer rather than to the subject. To get what Heinz does rather well in a purer form, readers interested in the close observation of ground combat should return to Ernie Pyle's deferential and admiring Brave Men and Here Is Your War. That's the real stuff that features soldiers, not scribes.

Dr. Henry G. Gole (Colonel, USA Ret.), a frequent Parameters reviewer and contributor and a combat infantryman in two wars.