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