A Foot Soldier's Story: With the 41st Division in the Southwest Pacific (review)

This book is a straightforward and engaging story of an infantryman who served in New Guinea and the Philippines. As a foxhole-level account, it is notable for shedding light on an oft-overlooked theater in World War II. A Foot Soldier's Story confirms that Army units in the Southwest Pacific underwent as grueling, if different, a war as their brethren in Europe, or the Marines in the central Pacific. As the title indicates, Francis "Bernie" Catanzaro was in I Company, 162nd Infantry Regiment, 41st Infantry Division. He states at the outset that his goal was to simply recount his service, both the exciting and the mundane. While he does not shy away from describing some of the more terrible aspects of combat, he explicitly does not dwell on gruesome details. He succeeds in writing a competent memoir.

Mr. Catanzaro arrived in Australia in February 1944 as a replacement. By the time he arrived, the 41st Division had already seen combat in the Buna-Gona campaign, having been overseas since August 1942. Mr. Catanzaro offers some interesting insights about the U.S. 8th Army operations in the southern Philippines—small scale "amphibious operations" consisting of a few landing craft and a destroyer or two for fire support. Most of the book, however, concentrates on the most significant action that the 41st undertook, the landing on Biak in May 1944. Biak was an unexpectedly hard action. From Mr. Catanzaro's account, for the U.S. infantryman, it was characterized mainly by nerve-wracking attacks from unseen mortars and machine guns.

Since he did not keep a journal, Mr. Catanzaro reinforced his memory by looking to letters he wrote home and a scrapbook of photos that he kept after the war. He also did a fair amount of research into secondary sources; his bibliography reflects the official service histories, a couple of division histories and other general accounts of the Southwest Pacific. He uses these supplemental sources to provide context and to fill in details for his own story. The book is at its best when he is recounting the actions he was personally involved in. When he comments on happenings outside of his personal knowledge, such as the relief of the 41st's commanding general, Major General Horace Fuller, it is apparent that he is basing his opinions on the secondary sources he has read.

A Foot Soldier's Story adds to the too-short bookshelf of accounts from the Southwest Pacific. Mr. Catanzaro's story gives a worthwhile human face to the campaign and operational histories that have been published.