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The Steel Wave A Novel of World War II Jeff Shaara Books

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The Steel Wave A Novel of World War II Jeff Shaara Books

Jeff Shaara's The Rising Tide is the first of a projected trilogy on World War II. Those familiar with his other works--such as his Civil War novels, Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, his Revolutionary War and Mexican War works--will recognize the technique here. Shaara picks a handful of characters and uses their experiences to create the forward movement of his works.

In The Rising Tide, the key characters whose views are used to create the narrative include George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, Erwin Rommel ("The Desert Fox"), Albert Kesselring, and a couple American soldiers, Jack Logan and Jesse Adams. The advantage of this is that you see the role of individuals, from different perspectives in a series of military engagements. This provides a certain richness of texture to the novel. On the other hand, there are limits to this. The reader does not get a bird's eye view of the action. All is through the eyes of specific individuals grounded in very specific circumstances. This works well enough, of course, but things can get left out.

The novel begins with Rommel's combat against the English in North Africa and his ability to win against long odds. However, the weight on British and then British and American troops is too much, as his army cannot receive enough gasoline, replacement troops and tanks , and so on to compete effectively. After the allies defeat the German and Italian forces in North Africa, the action of the novel moves to Sicily, where the hard fought campaign is described well. The conclusion of the novel points to the nasty Italian campaign and the early days of organizing the invasion of France.

The reader is left looking forward to the next volume in this series. While the structure of Shaara's novel has lost its novelty, it can still be effective as a story telling device.


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The Steel Wave A Novel of World War II Jeff Shaara Books Reviews

This is the first Jeff Shaara book I’ve read. It’s a long book and the beginning is a bit of a slog. We see and expect action-packed, fast-paced movies and TV, but this is a book. War planning is hard work and the interactions of the military personnel from the many countries who joined the ally coalition made the story. The action in North Africa showed the difficulties of the soldiers at a time when the best weapon we had was the tank, not the high-tech weaponry of today. As the war moves north into Sicily with the paratroopers, Shaara brings the reader into the battle and there are many tense moments when things go wrong. Then we see the ingenuity of the men in the field and how they learn to work together. Interesting read and brought WWII to life in a good and different way.
Guilty pleasure? Well, the pleasure is more of the thank-goodness-it's-actually-readable persuasion. The reality is, I am a WWII buff, I've read innumerable histories, and one day I found myself wishing I could read a fictional presentation of D-Day and its aftermath. I am a fan of Michael Shaara's Killer Angels (I've reviewed it here) but haven't found his son's work nearly as compelling based on various free samples. Steel Wave started out better than those, so I ordered the entire book and finished it last night.

This is a satisfying read for those who like a book to last a while. If I wanted to pay $5-10 for books I could read in a day, I'd be either a millionaire or completely insane, since I tend to read quickly. Steel Wave is a dense, chewy nugget of a book that will keep well in your mental refrigerator. Shaara gives the reader his/her money's worth.

The format is fairly simple. Chapters that take place in the minds of fictional characters alternate with those from the POV of Eisenhower, Rommel, Patton, and Bradley, among others. Sgt. Jesse Adams, the leading non-real person, is well-drawn, a thoughtful, clear-thinking individual whose surface toughness conceals an ... inner toughness. This isn't Steven Spielberg's D-Day. Picture the word "wuss" encircled with a slash across it, and you'll have some idea of the perspective here. Adams is a consistent presence across the book, and I was always glad to get back to him.

Glad, because as characters in a narrative the historical figures are less skillfully presented. Shaara does not render Winston Churchill well at all. I realize he is writing for a mass audience with scantier vocabularies and less delight in wordplay than the great man himself, but honestly, this is a very thin gruel. Churchill probably never referred to anything as "a crock" -- that's contemporary usage. Shaara has him make exclamations like, "Dammit! Tell me again it's going to work! Tell me!" and "Scares hell out of me, Ike. What's that damned Nazi cooked up?" I can imagine John Wayne saying those things, but Sir Winston? Uh, no. He was a Prime Minister who said and did many outrageous things, but employing strings of terse pedestrian monosyllables was not one of them.

Additionally, Churchill was never quite the boozer that Shaara (and many others) have tried to show him to be.

The author does better with Eisenhower, whose bland personality lends itself better to the tenor of this book. Ike's inner turmoil is believable as portrayed here. His irritation with Montgomery, who is as close to a villain as anyone gets on the Allied side of the novel, is consistent with Stephen Ambrose's authoritative version. Shaara's best portrait, though, is that of George S. Patton, with dialogue like, "I like people to shut the hell up when I walk into a room. I like raising the blood pressure of stodgy old farts." Yeah, that sounds like Patton, all right.

Shaara's Rommel deserves special mention. The picture we see is Erwin Rommel the "good" German, the reluctant warrior who placed his men over his own career, who cared nothing for Hitler and his frothing, drug-fueled madness, who was devoted to his wife and son and who chomped down on a poison capsule rather than expose them to ignominy and disgrace. There are some to say that Rommel refused to execute Jewish POWs despite Hitler's demands, and that he was never a Holocaust-booster. I don't know if this is true -- there are schools of thought on the subject -- but it is true that Rommel embraced Nazism early and loudly, and that he was not a participant in the failed assassination of 1944, although he was actively recruited by the plotters (for an outstanding literary novel on that subject, read Paul West's The Very Rich Hours of the Count Von Stauffenberg). Rommel's complexity as a human being is without question; the Rommel we see here embodies the "in another world, we could have been friends" philosophy that has been kicked around since the man's death. Some will buy it, some will not, and others, like me, will remain hopeful but skeptical.

Perhaps the book's greatest weakness, and this is completely subjective, is the author's penchant -- although he may see it as a necessity -- for pages and pages of exposition laboriously explaining which division went where, what rivers were crossed, and other details large and small about D-Day and the weeks that follow, all of which are available to the reader from any number of sources. Younger people, which is to say anyone who graduated from high school after the PC police took over the history textbooks, may not have this information, and will need it to follow the story. On the other hand, you can see World at War on Youtube, along with gazillion other documentaries, and thus obviate the need for Shaara's rehash. Frankly, I skipped much of this turgid retelling.

There is also a strange prudishness operating here. Damn, hell, bitch and bastard pop up frequently; any stronger language is either only hinted at ("f------" this or that) or omitted altogether. Don't look for sex, or even romance; all the women, and there are pitifully few of them, are offstage. This is a tough-guy war book your Aunt Agatha might read without a blush (were she so inclined). There's little or no cultural context, i.e. references to music, movies, cars, clothes, all the non-war things that make this period so fascinating. One could argue that those have no place in a battlefield book -- but could you write about Vietnam without sex, drugs, and rock and roll? The Greatest Generation (and I dislike that phrase) cared just as much for pop ephemera as any other humans. Some of these guys must have been thinking about jitterbugging even as they lobbed grenades.

What works in this book are the battle scenes, the tension before and the shock that follows. What satisfies is the growth of some fictional characters, in particular Unger, the scrawny, underaged kid from Iowa who Jesse Adams sees as most likely to cave under pressure and who (wholly predictable, but so what) turns into a coolheaded killer. Fiction, even genre fiction, can illuminate a historical event in ways documentaries and nonfiction cannot, with some notable exceptions. If you are interested in D-Day but, like me, yearn for some quotation marks mixed up with the history, you will warm to Steel Wave.
Jeff Shaara's The Rising Tide is the first of a projected trilogy on World War II. Those familiar with his other works--such as his Civil War novels, Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, his Revolutionary War and Mexican War works--will recognize the technique here. Shaara picks a handful of characters and uses their experiences to create the forward movement of his works.

In The Rising Tide, the key characters whose views are used to create the narrative include George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, Erwin Rommel ("The Desert Fox"), Albert Kesselring, and a couple American soldiers, Jack Logan and Jesse Adams. The advantage of this is that you see the role of individuals, from different perspectives in a series of military engagements. This provides a certain richness of texture to the novel. On the other hand, there are limits to this. The reader does not get a bird's eye view of the action. All is through the eyes of specific individuals grounded in very specific circumstances. This works well enough, of course, but things can get left out.

The novel begins with Rommel's combat against the English in North Africa and his ability to win against long odds. However, the weight on British and then British and American troops is too much, as his army cannot receive enough gasoline, replacement troops and tanks , and so on to compete effectively. After the allies defeat the German and Italian forces in North Africa, the action of the novel moves to Sicily, where the hard fought campaign is described well. The conclusion of the novel points to the nasty Italian campaign and the early days of organizing the invasion of France.

The reader is left looking forward to the next volume in this series. While the structure of Shaara's novel has lost its novelty, it can still be effective as a story telling device.