The War Diaries: An Anthology of Daily Wartime Diary Entries Throughout History (review)

The editors of this book have assembled a fine collection of diary entries from civilians, combatants, writers, government officials, and others. Excerpts from almost two hundred diaries are included, from the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century to the Iraq War of 2003. Together, they poignantly depict the countless ways in which warfare affects individual lives. The entries are organized by calendar date, such that a whole sweep of history is covered in a day's worth of entries. Careful attention to the date and location of the entry is therefore required in order to properly contextualize the narrative therein. Readers should also take note of a certain skew toward British diarists from the two world wars. Entries related to the Korean War and the Arab-Israeli conflicts are notable omissions despite the collection's wide breadth, while the usefulness of including mere handfuls of entries from the Boer Wars and the Kosovo and Chechnyan conflicts is unclear.

Diaries are by their nature instruments for depositing the writer's perceptions of events on a given day. This collection of such deposits captures an interweaving of everyday concerns with the effects of massive geopolitical events. The onset of war, for example, is perhaps best described by one diarist as the "sudden destruction of the accustomed" (p. 106). The War Diaries succeeds in reflecting this relationship between the brutal realities of history's battlefields and the disrupted lives of those affected by them. The civilian concerns found in this volume may be preoccupied with the privations associated with wartime but are also related to the search for some sense of meaning and identity through which to endure them. For combatants, entries revolve around the movements and conditions of their units and the often gruesome events which befall them. Therefore, one of the greatest benefits of this collection may be insight into the many commonalities found in experiences of war throughout history, among both civilians and combatants.

The entries range from elites' recounting of snippets of amusing gossip, to civilians' quick diffusion of rumors (such as those following Rudolf Hess's flight to Scotland), to graphically detailed accounts of field hospitals. Of the many fascinating diaries included in this collection, readers may be particularly interested in those kept by Galeazzo Ciano, Lady Bird Johnson, Siegfried Sassoon, and Virginia Woolf, as well as combatants from the American Revolutionary War (William Digby and Ambrose Serle) and the Vietnam War (David Parks and Michael Lee Lanning).

The mix of perspectives contained in the collection is perhaps its greatest strength, as accounts of elite intrigue follow tales of combat patrols. Ciano's self-exculpatory recollections of his conversations with Mussolini and Ribbentrop at times border on the absurd. A curious entry in the Josef Goebbels diary describes Hitler's postwar plans for carrying out "social reforms and his building projects" and then retiring in order to write the "bible of National Socialism" and leave the reins of power to others (p. 38). Lady Bird Johnson's vivid descriptions of the Johnson White House appear rather earnest, as in her recollection of a raucous encounter with Eartha Kitt over the draft and juvenile delinquency or of conversations with her husband about American intervention abroad.

As in any human enterprise, humor and irony inevitably emerge, as when George Orwell takes note of a Wrigley's Chewing Gum advertisement in London, assuring the product to be a "first aid in wartime for health, strength, and fortitude" (p. 250) or Goebbels's vigorously praising Disney's Snow White as a "fairy tale for grown-ups" and "artistic delight" (p. 75). Naturally, the melancholy that tinges many wartime diaries is also easily found, as in Anne Morrow Lindbergh's description of the Lidice massacre as a worm that "has eaten into the apple of happiness—everybody's apple and forever" (p. 501).

Although the volume...