If bad novels make good movies, it may stand to reason that good wars make bad prose. That, at least, is one conclusion the reader may draw from this copious collection of pieces, vignettes, essays, and polemics gleaned from the journalism of the Second World War. It may also be seen as a kind of cultural regression: in observing the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s conclusion, the editors of the Library of America chose journalism, not literature, as their emblematic form. They may have had no choice. In assembling an anthology of war fiction, after all, they would be scraping a shallow barrel: Cozzens, Wouk, Mailer, Jones—leavened, perhaps, with some military memoirs.

So here we have two thick volumes of what journalists like to call “the first rough draft of history.” On the whole, they make for wearying reading. There is no question that many men and some women took extraordinary risks, and sometimes lost their lives, to report the war from its various fronts, to bring the battlefields home to America. But let’s not evade the issue: their sacrifice was largely for commerce, not art, and access paid the dividends. First rough draft, indeed: the rhetoric here is not for the ages, but for birdcages.

Of course, there are exceptions. But first, let us survey the landscape, and find out where we are. War reporting is largely divided between those who seek to duplicate the experience of combat and those who see a World in a Grain of Sand. The latter group, on the whole, is more successful. This may largely be due to the fact that language can insinuate, but cannot quite communicate, the substance of war. Battles, after all, are a fog of sensation, a cinematic roar, not a sequence of ideas, or instructive tale. The explosions right and left, the flying body parts, the thunderous noise, the nervous expectation—packed into paragraphs, the horror and banality are bewildering, not enlightening. The conscientious reporters— Robert Sherrod in the Pacific, for example, or Homer Bigart in Italy—cannot help but be consumed by their stories, by details upon details, by the numbing succession of startling events. Sherrod, in particular, writes with a kind of ill-suppressed hysteria. His fury at the Japanese, his anxious excitement, his shock, remorse, and exhaustion nearly fly off the page and throttle the reader. It’s impressive, in its way, but perplexing to read, and palls in time.

The reporter who avoids the big picture and settles, instead, for the cautionary snapshot is easier to swallow. The supreme practitioner of this minor art, of course, was Ernie Pyle, who, very nearly alone among his colleagues, retains some semblance of a writer’s reputation. It is not difficult to see why. Pyle tended to leave strategy to others, concentrating instead on the homely distractions of citizen-soldiers. World War II was not the first mass mobilization of American fighting men, but it was the first to be covered by the mass media. Pyle assumed, probably correctly, that most newspaper readers would be either bored or confused by intricate weaponry and amphibious tactics; he settled, instead, for the joys and discomforts of yeomen at war. Being a creature of his times, he preferred heroics to neuroses, and frequently lapsed into bathos and schmaltz. But his prose has a kind of refreshing directness, and he wrote about what he saw instead of what he felt, or kept his feelings to a minimum. In that sense, his limited talent served him well. His simple drawings are more vivid than Bigart’s giant canvases, his plain speech more eloquent. If this introduces Pyle to a generation of journalists, so much the better.

Still, any anthology is more than the sum of its parts, and invites speculation about how it was assembled. In this instance, there are certain contemporary trends: affirmative action, for one. Some of the better-known war reporters (William L. White comes to mind) are excluded altogether or given short shrift, in order to make room for more women than expected. Too bad, really. The proportion of female to male reporters in World War II cannot have been as high as it is here; at any rate, some of the women reporters are appalling. Janet Flanner’s mannered style will appeal to those who yearn for the old New Yorker, and Marguerite Higgins was surely as distinguished as her rival Homer Bigart. But it is painful to grope through Martha Gellhorn’s prose: awkward, immature, muddled, boastful—no wonder she and Hemingway divorced—and Helen Lawrenson at the death camps, Lee Miller in Normandy, Virginia Irwin in Berlin, and (on the home front) Susan B. Anthony II and Mary Heaton Vorse are embarrassing to read.

Surprisingly, in our armchair age, there is very little of what we would now call analysis. There is an interesting review of the Italian campaign advanced by Eric Sevareid in The Nation, a taut, relentless, unconventional tract that questions the premise of Churchill’s Mediterranean strategy. The editors, of course, could not include punditry in a book of reportage, but pieces like Sevareid’s, written past the outskirts of military censorship, are frequently as pertinent as on-the-site reporting. And saddening too, when compared to his subsequent network incarnation. At any rate, let us be grateful for small favors: Sevareid’s radio-TV colleague, the portentous Walter Cronkite, is nowhere to be found here.

Two glittering celebrities, however, are in evidence: William L. Shirer and Edward R. Murrow. If these two volumes do nothing else, they may put those soaring reputations in perspective. Shirer’s Berlin diary, which seems to have been revised and annotated with greater care even than Mary Chesnut’s, sounds ludicrous to modern ears. His judgments are not just easily predicted, but juvenile in tone, and painfully hackneyed in final execution: Chamberlain pulls a “clever face-saving stunt,” Daladier is a “beaten and broken man,” heel-clicking Germans swagger and gloat, cynical colleagues snicker and grin, only William L. Shirer perceives the awful truth. Murrow’s famous radio broadcasts from London, when reduced to cold type, very nearly push the reader to the side of the Luftwaffe. His solemn intonations— “This … is London, at three-thirty in the morning,” or “I’m standing on a rooftop looking out over London”—drag us to a series of picturesque banalities: “What the policeman was doing there, I don’t know. He may be there still.” Or: “In front of Buckingham Palace there’s a bed of red and white roses—untouched—the reddest flowers I’ve ever seen.” Hearing is believing.

Other famous names may be found. E. B. White journeys to San Francisco to cover the founding conference of the United Nations in his choicest whimsical style. For White, of course, the apparent establishment of World Government must have been a kind of religious experience: “The atmosphere,” he says, “was that of a cathedral.” All the appropriate notes are struck. Molotov, executioner of millions, is “direct … and seems to possess unlimited endurance, both physical and mental … never ruffled, never doubtful,” even when assailed by a skeptical press. Stettinius, the American Secretary of State,

tries hard to develop an easy manner … but it doesn’t always come off… . When he is being needled … he leans forward over the table, thrusts an ear out to catch the question, licks his lips as he prepares to reply, and clearly shows embarrassment if he is withholding information for diplomatic reasons.

Stettinius would benefit from Molotov’s directness.

There are some pleasant surprises. Ernest Hemingway recounts his approach to Paris with an uncharacteristic self-deprecating note. Told that the French general Leclerc is anxious to meet him, he strides toward his admirer with a pair of boon companions: “His greeting—unprintable—will live in my ears forever. ‘Buzz off, you unspeakables,’ the gallant general said.” John P. Marquand, on a battleship off Iwo Jima, recounts the invasion from the sidelong perspective of the officers’ bridge: a kind of Marquand story set in the Pacific, savagely charming. Two familiar works are reprinted in full: Bill Mauldin’s Up Front and John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Both, on the whole, may survive into posterity. Mauldin’s aw-shucks tone may irritate at times, but his deadpan account of a democratic army, enduring the comic horror of war, is compelling to read. And his cartoons are still funny. Hersey’s calm accounting of atomic destruction, refreshingly free of argument and cant, remains a model of professional restraint.

One contributor, however, stands apart from the rest: A. J. Liebling. I confess to a near-total avoidance of Liebling in the past, based largely on his cult status and affinity for subjects (gastronomy, Earl Long) of little interest to me. I stand corrected. His dry, dispassionate, elegant accounts, his meticulous detachment, his clear-headed sense, his mixture of phlegm and unexpected clarity, are plainly seductive. A landing craft plumbs toward the Normandy coast, and a soldier is killed, the shell passing through him and tearing into rations: “I went forward to the well deck, which was sticky with a mixture of blood and condensed milk.” His natural curiosity parallels the reader’s. The death of one eccentric private in Italy prompts Liebling, back in New York, to ferret out his background as a busboy in Manhattan. In 1941, Liebling returns to an apathetic, pre–Pearl Harbor America, and patiently listens to one fellow- correspondent rail about complacency: “It was only the second day after Boyer’s return, and he still looked at people with astonishment, because they did not seem worried enough. I, who knew the symptoms, understood the way Boyer felt as soon as I saw him come into the office.” Americans, it would seem, are never so impassioned as journalists think they ought to be. But in the midst of the preening self-congratulating set—the Shirers and Gellhorns and Murrows in the field Liebling’s narration strikes a civilizing note.

Which comes, in the end, to a fundamental question: What is the purpose of wartime reporting? The effects are obvious enough. After two thousand pages of mayhem and violence, the reader is nearly immune to sensation, accustomed to death in the soldierly fashion. But the challenge often transcends the journalist’s art. It is one thing to chronicle the sights and sounds of battle—the glossary abounds with graphic terminology for bombs, torn flesh, and jeeps entombed in mud—but another to explain why troops stand and fight, how death may become more vivid than life, how cowardice and heroism bubble to the surface, and conflict appears to be natural to man. For that, even now, the artist is better equipped than the reporter.