Mary Louise Roberts. Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII.

Abstract

War inescapably degrades and destroys human life. Although conflict’s architects and apologists often obfuscate the character of armed violence, the infliction of damage constitutes the essence of warfare. In Sheer Misery, Mary Louise Roberts places soldier bodies—variously stinking, aching, oozing, or lifeless—under the microscope, magnifying both the vulnerability and resilience of men in uniform and in extremis. Roberts’s subjects fought in some of the bloodiest European engagements of World War II. These “high-water marks for infantry misery” (4) encompass the winter campaign fought in Italy over the grim months spanning 1943 and 1944, the summer battles waged in Normandy after the D-Day landings, and the Allies’s final push through Belgium and Luxembourg toward Germany. French and German soldiers make intermittent appearances, but Roberts’s principals are British and American infantrymen, along with a handful of senior commanders and surgeons, whose letters, diaries, and memoirs she has filleted to reconstruct a “somatic history of war” (3).