Martial Arts

By Paul Gray

WWII

by JAMES JONES

Designed by ART WEITHAS

272 pages. Grosset & Dunlap. $25.

If Viet Nam was the first televised war, World War II marked the coming-of-age of photojournalism. The frontline cameras of Edward Steichen, Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith and Robert Capa brought that war home in living--and dying--black and white. So powerful a messenger did the camera become that it overshadowed the ancient craft of combat artists.

Now, during the 30th anniversary of the end of World War II, the men who went into battle with brush and pencil can finally be fully appreciated. Drawn from U.S. Government archives, this collection of more than 160 sketches and paintings recalls such familiar dogfaces as Bill Mauldin's Willie & Joe and George Baker's Sad Sack, as well as the efforts of many unknowns. Most of the work is by Americans who seem to have been undergoing a collective hangover from the Great Depression. Their styles range from bitter caricature through gritty social realism to the heroic mass of WPA public murals. Art by U.S. Allies is curiously missing, but a smattering of pictures by Japanese and Germans is included. There is even a painting of a town square, allegedly done by the young Adolf Hitler in the manner of an arthritic Utrillo. Yet distinctive styles did emerge from the chaos and mud. Kerr Eby, a professional artist who had also sketched the fighting in World War I, turned smudged charcoal into Miltonic scenes of darkness made visible. Howard Brodie's slumping G.I.s are stark icons of bone-weary courage. Brodie, who was a sergeant attached to Yank during the war, went on to sketch such peacetime battles as the Chicago Seven trial and the Watergate hearings. In The Two-Thousand-Yard Stare, LIFE Artist Tom Lea caught the essence of battle fatigue.

Tropic Lightning. "I've seen men with that look on their faces," writes Novelist James Jones of Lea's picture. "I've had it on my own face." This intense involvement with the illustrations elevates Jones' text well above the level of most studio books, in which grayprint serves to set off the art work.

Jones, of course, lived many of these experiences. As a Regular Army enlisted man, he was at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. As a corporal with the 25th (Tropic Lightning) Division, he was hit by shrapnel at Guadalcanal. As he made his bloody retreat to an aid station, Jones recalls, "the thing I was most proud of was that I remembered to toss my full canteen of water to one of the men from headquarters company lying there."

This quiet, embattled camaraderie is the book's dominant--and winning --tone. Because he was one of them, Jones pays respectful but not sentimental attention to the ordinary Joes who did the fighting, suffering and dying in both theaters of the war. He alludes to distant political decisions and grand strategies when his story cannot avoid them, but his tale is really a loose collection of vivid details: the cheery wave he received from a low-flying Japanese pilot on a strafing run during Pearl Harbor; the suicidal heroism of U.S. Navy torpedo plane pilots during the battle of Midway ("No Japanese kamikaze pilot later in the war ever went to his death more open-eyed or with more certain foreknowledge than these men").

Like the pictures it accompanies, Jones' prose is offered with the stylistic niceties burned away. Sentences are marched out without a full complement of nouns and verbs. Oddly, the very flatness of his writing leaves the horizon clear for the experiences he describes. There may be more comprehensive illustrated histories of the war, but none is likely to come closer than WWII to conveying the feeling of how it was to be there.

Paul Gray

WWII represents a return to the subject that James Jones has never really left. For the past several years he has been working on Whistle, a long novel that will cap the war trilogy of From Here to Eternity (1951) and The Thin Red Line (1962).

Jones, 53, is also marking another return. He has come back to the U.S. after having lived for 16 years in Paris and is now settled on a farm in eastern Long Island with his wife Gloria and two teen-age children. He gives three reasons for his repatriation: "If there is any real cultural revolution going on in the world, it is here. Second, Europe is sinking back into separatism; it is stopping dead in the water. And, third, there is old age. I wanted to come home."

Jones set aside his novel for six months to write WWII. "This project fascinated me," he says. "It gave me the chance to editorialize in a way that my novels do not. When I write fiction, I have to worry about the idiosyncrasies of my characters. In WWII I could concentrate on my own."

Jones is convinced that history has sanitized World War II by concentrating on its sweeping geopolitical designs and the Allies' noble crusade. "There was a lot more bitterness in World War II than historians allow--basically the men were bitter at getting their asses shot off." Novelists and film makers have captured this side of the war, but Jones wanted to cast it in nonfictional form for the public record. Three decades after V-J Day, he still decries facile nostalgia and idolatry: "It is quite a romantic subject, provided it was not staring you in the face."

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