When I was a kid, Winston Churchill was still very much alive. I remember the newspapers always noted his birthday, which seemed to come around with unnatural frequency. I used to ask my Dad, “What’s the story with Winston Churchill? The guy has a birthday every three months!” Churchill died in 1965. I was in boot camp that same year. Yet proximate in time as were the great Englishman’s final years, his youth reached back to an era so colorful and so swashbuckling that its events seemed to spring more from the pages of Lord of the Rings than from…

One of these things is not like the others: Crackpot. Problem Child. Great Fighting Leader. Or is it? What does a leader look like? Eisenhower called Patton a “crackpot” and a “problem child” and a “great fighting leader in pursuit and exploitation.” (See letter below from General Eisenhower to General Marshall.) “Old Blood and Guts” Patton was like many of history’s great warriors. He came with flaws—and those working with him had to decide if they could accept him, warts and all. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response after being asked about Patton during a press conference: I think probably that…

Along with Bill Mauldin, Ernie Pyle was probably the most famous American war correspondent of World War II. His dispatches from the front were carried by over 300 newspapers. (Thanks to Tina McCann for sending in this piece.) Pyle loved the foot soldiers, the dogfaces, the grunts; he ate with them, tramped beside them under fire and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for writing about them. One column of his urged that combat infantrymen be given extra “fight pay,” just as airmen got “flight pay.” Congress responded by authorizing ten dollars a month, a princely sum in those days.…

George MacDonald Fraser, author of the famous Flashman novels, joined the Border Regiment straight out of school, and first saw active service in 1944, at the age of 19, in the ‘forgotten front’ of the Burma campaign. In his memoir, Quartered Safe out Here, Fraser remembers his experiences with his infantry section, employing all the considerable skills of his craft to roll back half a century and bring that terrible jungle campaign to life. In this passage from the very start of the book, Fraser makes a point about the dehumanized way that military campaigns are often presented in histories…

Pierre Clostermann was a Free French aviator who flew over 400 missions as a Spitfire and Tempest pilot in RAF squadrons during WWII. He is credited with the destruction (reports vary) of between 15 and 33 Luftwaffe aircraft. Clostermann was awarded, among numerous other decorations for valor, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Silver Star and the Croix de Guerre with 19 palms. His memoir, The Big Show (Le Grand Cirque), has sold two and a half million copies. “Take a look at those eyes,” says a friend of mine who was a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force. “That’s…

Once a year in ancient Athens, the city came together to honor her sons who had fallen in battle. “The bones,” wrote Thucydides, “are laid in the public burial place, which is in the most beautiful quarter outside the city walls. [Then] a man chosen by the city for his intellectual gifts and for his general reputation makes an appropriate speech in praise of the dead.” In 431 B.C., that duty fell to Pericles. Here are portions of his speech, taken from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner: I have no wish to make a long…

E.B. Sledge was a Marine mortarman on Peleliu and Okinawa in WWII. His first-person memoir, With The Old Breed (that he reconstructed from notes scribbled in a New Testament he carried with him throughout the fighting), stands with the very best combat narratives not just from World War II, but from any war in history. Ken Burns (who drew extensively from Sledge’s text for his celebrated PBS documentary, The War) wrote, ” … in all the literature of the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir. This is the real deal, the real war;…

Special thanks to Tina McCann for sending in this piece on the great Russian writer, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward and The First Circle. The post is in two sections. The first (short) one is from Solzhenitsyn’s autobiographical The Oak and The Calf. In it, he “recalls how he ‘wrote’ in the camps, where writing was forbidden—and how vulnerable his work was.” The second section is from Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize lecture. Here is an artist—and a man—who towers over just about everybody: From The Oak and the Calf:…

Of all the excellent non-fiction accounts written by participants in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the most underappreciated is Brandon Friedman’s The War I Always Wanted. That’s a great title, isn’t it? I suspect that was part of the problem. Mr. Friedman, an infantry lieutenant in the 101st Airborne, takes a point of view that is decidedly non-hero-centric, if there is such a word. His account is war as he actually found it and not as he had secretly always wished it would be. I’m a big fan of The War I Always Wanted. I’d love to…

The following is from The Sinai Campaign by Moshe Dayan. Dayan had been Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces and in overall military command during this campaign of 1956—fifty-five years ago and only eight years after the founding of the state of Israel. The Sinai clash became inevitable after Egypt’s president Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, closed it to Israeli shipping and then blockaded the straits of Tiran, bottling up the critical Israeli port of Eilat. The situation rapidly devolved into an international boondoggle as the armed forces of Britain and France became involved, seeking a pretext to force…