Deserter: A Hidden History of the Second World War - Softcover

Glass, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007345933 ISBN 13: 9780007345939

Publisher: William Collins, 2014

Synopsis

A poet, a gangster and an agent of the Resistance; ’Deserter’ details three astonishing lives shaped by the decision to flee during WWII.

During the Second World War, the British lost 100,000 troops to desertion, and the Americans 50,000. Commonwealth forces from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Britain's colonial empire also left the ranks in their thousands. But, surprisingly, only one WWII deserter was executed for his crime.

In ‘Deserter’, veteran reporter and historian Charles Glass gives voice to the powerful stories of three soldiers, two Americans and one Brit, who all ran from the conflict to meet with distinctly different fates. He follows each into the heat of battle, exploring the pressures that formed their decisions and the lasting impact of their choices. The result is a highly emotional and engaging study of an under-explored area of World War II history.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Glass was the chief Middle East correspondent for ABC News from 1983 to 1993 and has covered wars in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He is the author of Americans in Paris, Tribes with Flags, The Tribes Triumphant, Money for Old Rope, and The Northern Front. His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Independent, and The Spectator. Born in Los Angeles, Glass divides his time among Paris, Tuscany, and London.

www.charlesglass.net

Review:

“Powerful and often startling...The Deserters offers a provokingly fresh angle on this most studied of conflicts... This is a stripped down, unromanticized, intimate history of battle in all of its confusion, chaos, terror, and moral ambiguity. Intricately structured — the author deftly juggles three narrative strands — and beautifully paced to build suspense, this tightly focused account, which draws on memoirs, archives, police files, psychiatric records, is neither reverent nor disapproving.” --The Boston Globe

"Glass is to be commended for his take on WWII through the eyes of those who ran away from it... Glass's history might be one of the best ways of relaying the experience of war: through the eyes of the young men who charged into the line of fire, gave up the ghost, and whose only reward was living to tell the tale." --Publishers Weekly (STARRED REVIEW)

“The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II, by the historian and former ABC News foreign correspondent Charles Glass, thus performs a service. It’s the first book to examine at length the sensitive topic of desertions during this war, and the facts it presents are frequently revealing and heartbreaking... The Deserters has much to say about soldiers' hearts. It underscores the truth of the following observation, made by a World War II infantry captain named Charles B. MacDonald: 'It is always an enriching experience to write about the American soldier in adversity no less than in glittering triumph.'" --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“A veteran correspondent in war zones, Glass is richly credentialed to write The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II. He is qualified by talent, by the good fortune of finding surviving veterans, and by exploring their lives with diligence and, most crucially, a deep compassion... Glass tells the soldiers' stories with novelistic vividness and a good historian's grasp of research detail." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Glass brings something new to the table by going deep with desertion, an overlooked aspect of the wartime experience. The result is an impressive achievement: a boot-level take on the conflict that is fresh without being cynically revisionist... [Glass] pulled off something special here: showing respect to what the deserters endured while acknowledging that the war—gruesome and unfair and nonsensical though it was—had to be won, and that this happened because enough men somehow found the will to keep going." --The New Republic

"[Q]uite provocative... A well-written, fast-moving treatment of an issue still relevant today." --Kirkus

"Sensitive and thought-provoking ... As this compelling and well-researched book shows, the battlefield was not a place for heroes, but a place where young men were dehumanised and killed ... Given such conditions who among us would not also have considered walking away?" --Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"[These] stories of individual human beings who eventually cracked under the strain of hardly imaginable fear and misery – are wonderful, unforgettable acts of witness, something salvaged from a time already sinking into the black mud of the past." --The Guardian (UK)

"Gripping ... painstaking ... sympathetic ... Glass reveals just how inglorious war really is." --Times (UK)

About this edition

• Publisher: William Collins
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0007345933
• ISBN 13: 9780007345939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416