How often did young men( pre-Viet Nam) think going off to war would be glorious? A soldier’s frustration and optimism of being at war are well balanced in this book . Chris Lynch writes this first book in his World War II series about a young man, Roman, who lives and breathes baseball, as a member of the minor league Red Sox team, that his going off to fight the Nazis will have to down sides to it. Roman enlists, even before Pearl Harbor and the United States involvement is declared. The town’s people have a send off for the baseball players who have enlisted, as this is the last game of the season.  Roman is so gun ho. Then comes the many long months of training. “But I still couldn’t help feeling that, as much as we were learning in Louisiana and East Texas, in Kentucky and the Carolinas, it wasn’t nearly as much as the Nazis were learning in Poland and Czechoslovakia, in France, in Norway and Denmark, and the Soviet Union.”  (p. 48)           Why can’t they get to the actual fighting.  “While I’ve been training, practicing, maneuvering for the better part of a year, the Nazis have been playing for real, dominating, spreading carnage and rewriting maps, with what seems to be feeble resistance along the way.”    (p. 51)   These first four chapters that make up Part 1 of the book are full of foreshadowing.   Part 2 begins with more training, but this time in Northern Ireland. Then just two pages short of the middle of the book, Roman gets his first taste of battle- all the months of maneuvers couldn’t prepare them for this. Roman is a tank driver in North Africa. There is still down time, but now it is often due to waiting for the other squads to all aline before the battle can begin. There is down time traveling from one location to another, too, weeks of driving the tank cross country. Then, there are the actual battles. Landing on a beach, being shot at by the German Luftwaffe, seeing an enemy tank driver being burnt, having his tank partner loose his hearing due to the enemy bullets and shells hitting the outside of their tank, the retreating from the German, and later getting surrounded Germans and having their tank’s turret shot off along with three of its company while he survived.

The book is never graphic in its descriptions, but Lynch gets the point across. Roman learns of the mortality involved in war, but also knows that the Nazis must be stopped. This book ends with Roman and the only other living member of his tank comrades in Italy.