Jack Belden was a legendary war correspondent during the Sino-Japanese War, World War II and the Chinese Revolution, and who worked mainly for Time and Life. Graduating from Colgate University early in the Depression, he became a merchant seaman but jumped ship in Shanghai -- where else would a young man jump ship? -- in 1933. There he became a journalist, learned Chinese, and soon found himself covering the Chinese-Japanese War that had broken out the year before his arrival. Since the outgunned Chinese Army was in a more or less constant state of retreat, Belden spent much of his time amidst the complete chaos of lost battles and of floods of desperate refugees. He was the sort of reporter who was constantly in the front lines, dodging bullets and artillery shells, sharing the hardships of soldiers and refugees, and providing the kind of coverage that his fellow reporters couldn't touch.
After a stint in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, eventually he made his way to Burma, where he accompanied US General Stilwell on yet another retreat from the Japanese Army. Finally, he was posted to North Africa, and for a change he got to cover a successful campaign, as the British 8th Army drove Rommel's Afrika Corps across Libya and Tunisia where the Germans eventually surrendered. Belden then covered the Allied landings in Sicily and on the Italian mainland, where he was seriously wounded and evacuated back to the US to recover. It was during his convalescence that he wrote this series of essays (published in 1944), some of which are ruminations about the nature of war, but are mostly his accounts of his experiences as a war correspondent, often written in an almost novelistic style.
Belden was generally contemptuous of officers and of elites generally. His sympathies lay almost entirely with the common foot soldier, whose sufferings and whose achievements he strongly identified with. He was not much of an ideologist in his writings, however, and does not appear to be the communist that many accused him of him during the Red-baiting post-war years -- at least, he does not use the vocabulary of that school of thought. (In fact, in his later book about the the Chinese Revolution, called China Shakes the World and published in 1949 just after the Communist victory, he stresses how he avoided covering Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung whom he thought was a party apparatchik and a potential dictator in waiting. Very prescient.)
Belden's "from the trenches" view has its strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, you won't get a broad picture of the conflicts he covered. On the other hand, you will understand what was really happening at the sharp point of the spear. It's a much messier, bloodier, more confused, and perhaps truer picture, because it wasn't cleaned up with an after-the-fact, deliberate, carefully plotted narrative. Oddly enough, the part of the book that I found most interesting was the extended introduction entitled "The Nature of the Battlefield". In it, he argues that almost everything written about war is a lie. Not only is there the problem of "the fog of war", there are many other complications: decision-making in the face of wildly inaccurate information, the sharp disconnect between battle plans and the actual battle, the fear and exhaustion of the soldiers, and so on. It is a very profound meditation on war, and among the best I have read on the subject. In very compressed form, it reminded me of John Keegan's The Face of Battle.
Not a book for everyone, and definitely not a standard military history or war reportage, it is a very unusual and interesting work. I recommend it.
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