Raymond Gantter

It's really hard to make war stories boring but that being the case stay away from Gantter's Roll Me Over. He's a German speaking Episcopalian with a college degree drafted to serve in the 1st Infantry Div as a replacement just as the Germans were countering the D-Day push to the Rhine River. Written for his family, this journal should probably never have been published. I think this might be a book used as a research supplement, if I wanted to be kind. If I'm honest it is the writing style that disappoints rather than the author himself who seems to want to convey compassion during a time of wartime fighting.… (més)

A refreshingly candid and honest memoir. The book description is a bit misleading - Gantter arrived in Normandy in November, and so while bodies were still 'washing up from the invasion', the implied combat he saw there was non-existant. Still, that gilding of the lily is hardly the authors fault.

He writes very well, and the the immediacy of it all (the book was finished by 1949) comes through loud and clear.

It's a good book for details, too, if you read betwen the lines. Descriptions of repple depples, urban fighting, screwups, co-operation with armour and artillery, the chaotic and fragmentary nature of even large battles, and so on and so forth.

Highly recommended on a number of levels.… (més)