Books: Lessons of War

STILL TIME To DIE — Jack Belden—Harper ($3).

ONE MAN’S WAR—Sergeant Charles E. (“Commando”) Kelly—Knopf ($2).

Since TIME and LIFE Correspondent Jack Belden (Retreat with Stilwell) saw his first battle outside Peiping in 1937, he has reported war in Burma, India, North Africa, Malta, Sicily, Italy, been wounded at Salerno, recovered to get in the thick of the current European invasion. Still Time to Die is mostly expert, on-the-spot description of the battles he has seen. But it rises a notch above other able war reporting through Correspondent Belden’s provocative summing up of what he has learned in his seven war-filled years. Some of the prime lessons:

“Falseness is a product of any battle. . . . No one ever knows what happened.” Before the firing stops, the “lying legend” starts on its way to the public. On the Sicilian beachhead it looked at one time as though the U.S. ist Division might be driven into the sea and the whole invasion fail. When Belden went to G-2 for information, “an exceptionally intelligent lieutenant colonel” simply handed him “the bare telephone conversations and orders of that day.” Said he: “This is the only thing that contains any truth. . . . We are making out a report now, but it is already so different from what happened that in a few days it will be unrecognizable legend.”

Readiness to spread and act upon rumor and exaggeration is a fault to which Chinese and U.S. soldiers are especially prone. The Chinese like to indulge “the vicious habit” of self-dramatization, and flattery of their superiors. But, “of the many exaggerated stories I have heard in seven years . . . none can surpass those told by American pilots and infantrymen.”

Uncertainty is the quality that most distinguishes a battle from any other kind of activity. It is also the most harrowing agony a soldier can endure. Belden believes that the U.S. soldier is the best trained he has ever seen, “but no one seems to have taken the proper trouble to introduce [him] to the uncertainty of war. . . . Men study maps and practice jumping off landing boats; but when . . . a Salerno comes along, they fly out of their boats into the uncertain darkness ahead and refuse to jump, or jump ashore and [then] jump back . . . and have to be exhorted by chaplains to advance into the unknown. . . .”

“Physical courage exercises almost no influence on the outcome of a war”—because it “generally exists in such equal quantities on both sides.” But the higher courage that springs from deep beliefs is invaluable. Belden believes that the U.S. soldier is “brave, daring and resourceful,” but fatalistic. “Our men do not believe they are fighting for anything. Not one in a hundred has any deep-seated political belief.”

Spirit v. Ghost. Still Time to Die is often frankly bitter, often overemotional, occasionally theatrical (in phrases such as “Battles are merely the flashing, seductive garments that hide the passionate but terrible whore’s body of war”). But it carries the conviction of a man whose spirit has been tried by seven years’ intimacy with war’s “dumb, bestial suffering, weariness, and utter and devastating exhaustion.”

These aspects scarcely exist in Sergeant Charles (“Commando”) Kelly’s happy-go-lucky story of how he became the only enlisted man of World War II to win (in Italy) both the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Silver Star (TIME, March 20 et seq). Smoothly ghostwritten by Pete Martin, One Man’s War reads like the heroic adventure story it is. “As for having fun,” says Sergeant Kelly, or his ghost, “I don’t know of anything that gives you more of a lift and shoots your veins fuller of soda-pop bubbles than risking your life and coming out all in one piece.”