For many of the Americans who crossed the Atlantic to confront Hitler’s Third Reich, the Second World War was a traumatic and transformative experience about which they were reticent to speak. This volume presents the memoirs of five individuals who served in Europe and later told their own stories with honesty and insight. Remarkable literary achievements that capture history with powerful immediacy, all five are lasting contributions to the modern literature of war.

Charles B. MacDonald led rifle companies on the Siegfried Line, in the terrifying chaos of the Battle of the Bulge, and in the final Allied offensive into Germany and Czechoslovakia. He writes with startling candor in Company Commander (1947) about the “cold, dirty, rough, frightened, miserable” life of the infantryman and his own fears of failing as a combat leader. Former counterintelligence officer J. Glenn Gray drew upon his letters, journals, and wartime memories of Italy, France, and Germany in writing The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (1959), a profound and compassionate meditation on the nature of war and its impact on soldiers and civilians alike. All the Brave Promises (1966) is novelist Mary Lee Settle’s account of her service as an airfield radio operator in the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Settle brilliantly evokes both the working-class culture of the WAAF’s “other ranks” and the petty and degrading regimentation inherent in military life.

In The Fall of Fortresses (1980) Elmer Bendiner vividly recalls the fear and excitement he felt as a B-17 navigator flying bombing missions deep into Germany in 1943 without fighter escort. Originally written in 1947, The Buffalo Saga (2009) is James Harden Daugherty’s deeply felt account of his frontline service as a Black soldier in the 92nd Infantry Division, as he fought the Germans, endured the harsh Italian winter, and confronted the racism of his army and his country.

With eight pages of photographs and endpaper maps.

Elizabeth D. Samet, editor, is professor of English at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She is the author of Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point; No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America; and Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness.