Voices of my Comrades: America's Reserve Officers Remember World War II (review)

This thick volume consists of first hand accounts from World War II veterans who either served as reserve officers in that war, or at some later point in their military careers. Most of the stories originally appeared in The Officer, the official publication of the Reserve Officers Association of the United States, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of World War II. As copy editor and project officer for the magazine, Carol Adele Kelly helped, over the years, to prepare many of the stories for publication. At the suggestion of Colonel Norman Burzynski, The Officer's longtime editor, she decided to arrange the accounts chronologically into book format. Voices of my Comrades is the result of her worthy efforts.

The book begins in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor and ends immediately after the war's end. In between, the pages teem with testimony—ranging from brief recollections to in-depth accounts—from over one hundred veterans. Each chapter covers one month of the war. Thus, as the chapters unfold, the reader vicariously experiences the events of World War II in the moment, as the participants did. Along the way, the main characters who contributed lengthy accounts, appear in various chapters. By the end of the book, they are almost like old friends, and their passages constitute the most compelling aspect of the book. The best example of this is the moving POW diary of Colonel Michael Quinn who endured forty months of captivity at the hands of the Japanese. Kelly tells his story by sprinkling pieces of it throughout her chronological chapters until detailing his ultimate liberation in September, 1945. This sort of effective editing technique brings a narrative cohesion and purpose to what began as a diverse collection of individual stories.

Nonetheless, the book has some problems. The publisher failed to differentiate Kelly's passages and the veteran's accounts with separate fonts, instead relying completely on quotation marks. Consequently, there is a great deal of confusion in the reader's mind as to who is saying what. Kelly unwisely chose to refer to her veterans by their ultimate rank in the Reserves, rather than their World War II rank, thus sparking another source of confusion. She began each chapter with a recitation of wartime events which occurred in that particular month—a fine idea but she wrote these synopses with an ineffective, present tense literary method.

In spite of these issues, Voices of my Comrades is a valuable resource for World War II scholars, especially those interested in primary source, first hand accounts from participants. Few people will read the volume from cover to cover. But many will use it as a reference. As such, the book is ideally suited to university and public libraries as well as the personal reference collection of any serious student of World War II.