Shrapnel [Kindle Edition]

This is an autobiography by William Wharton (pen name) of part of his service during World War II. In it he recounts the bits of his war that he could never bring to share with his children. The reason soon becomes obvious in that they are too painful and that is for a number of reasons. Firstly he recounts the incompetence and bullying of early training, some of which is both touching and funny. Especially his attempts to help one of his buddies at rifle cleaning skills.

Then he moves on to the War proper with being transported to England on the Queen Mary and ending up somewhere in the North. His stories are always very human with none of the gung ho that so often comes across in such tales. By the time he gets caught up in the fog of war that was D Day he has already had more than his fare share of near misses. His fight across France and Germany is often visceral and with genuinely felt fear and simmering outrage at the stupidity of those in charge. A feeling that has been expressed by soldiers on all sides throughout history, sadly.

He gets wounded on a number of occasions and it is always by shrapnel. The title alludes to this and also to the little pieces of hurt that happen to all of us through out our lives and that we can often carry around with us, being unable to let go or properly recover, just like the real shrapnel wounds endured by so many during those dark years. He never does get the million dollar injury that would see him being sent back home and has to endure the war until its bitter end.

This is a very accessible read; his style is colloquial and engaging. You can feel for him when he recounts some of the shameful things that he saw and some that he participated in himself. He explains the justifications that he used at the time, but realises with the passing of the years that they really could not be justified, whether it be theft, random cruelty or jaded cowardice, if one can even call it that. At the end of the day being a judge and an arm chair critic is without value if you had not been there at the time. This is both brave, honest and life affirming in the approach that Wharton has taken. Whilst this is not the best memoir of war ever it certainly adds to the rich library of such novels. I found it so engaging that I read it in a couple of days, and have been thinking about it on and off ever since. Now in his seventies Wharton hopefully will still have some more books in him, I for one sincerely hope he does.

"Shrapnel" is a posthumous memoir of William Wharton's experiences as a teenage soldier in World War II, published now for the first time in English (it was previously published in Poland, where the author is very popular). Wharton says of the tales he tells: "Some of them are humorous, many tragic, but in all of them I appear in a light I didn't want my children to see." This reluctance to tell his children about his war, and the painful nature of his memories, means that Wharton only felt able to write about his experiences fifty years' later.

"Shrapnel" is an engaging book, told in a direct present tense. Wharton is a reluctant soldier, terrified of dying and doing anything he can to try and stay alive; therefore he lies, shirks, and steals his way through his service, frequently facing courts martial and demotions. Often Wharton's escapades are very funny, but his anger and regret at what he sees as a pointless war are also apparent, culminating in an horrific episode that he can barely bring himself to describe.

Anyone who has read the work of William Wharton before, knows that his personal "writer's demon" (the thing that he is trying to exorcize, ala the famous quote by Mario Vargas Llosa) is the time he spent in the Army during WWII. It's there, in the beginning, in his National Book Award-winning novel, BIRDY. It resurfaces in his third (semi-autobiographical) novel, A MIDNIGHT CLEAR. And it rears its head again in FRANKY FURBO, which (like BIRDY) is a stylistically complex novel that uses the tropes of science fiction and children's fantasy to "cast out" Wharton's particular demon.

No surprise, then, to find that he finally sat down to write a nonfiction account of his time in Europe. And no surprise to find that Wharton didn't write this memoir earlier in his career, since he was always a low-key, no publicity, kind of writer (the only time that changed was when he wrote an account of an accident -- WRONGFUL DEATHS -- that resulted in the death of his daughter, her husband, and their children -- and even then, his only desire was to get the word out about some ongoing, unsafe, and government-sanctioned practices).

The aptly named SHRAPNEL reads like a war diary, with Wharton setting down only the high points of the years he spent in the Army, and subsequently in Europe, fighting during WWII (in France and Germany). The memoirs begin in boot camp and go on all the way until VE day in Europe. I won't dissect the book too much, since it is a fairly short memoir, and I wouldn't want to ruin the read. But I can say that Wharton was involved in just a heck of a lot of action, even having been wounded by shrapnel about half-a-dozen times (one such incident caused inner ear damage that wasn't discovered till near the end of the war -- not surprising for anyone who has served in the military). And one early incident, involving a secret mission dreamed up by a general, sounds like something out of CATCH-22 or MASH -- and it is, once again, _very_ believable for anyone who has served, and knows about the usual caliber of men who inhabit the "upper echelons" (officer territory: the majority of them are stone-cold morons, and most of the others are career savvy-morons -- men like Capt. Winter, who was immortalized in the book, BAND OF BROTHERS, are few and far between).

From the outrageous antics that go on in boot camp at Ft. Benning Georgia, to his meeting with a beautiful, violet-eyed, young woman in England, to several different engagements with the enemy(several of which Wharton was lucky to survive), and an impromptu flight in a light airplane, right on through to incidents of looting (to which Wharton was an accomplice) and one major incident that haunted the author for years, SHRAPNEL makes for a page-turning, eye-opening, moving and even comical reading experience.

Some savvy publisher (Everyman's Library, perhaps), should group Wharton's war novels (mentioned above) with this memoir, and republish them all for posterity.
Wharton was a gifted writer, who could write clean, crisp prose -- as he did in SHRAPNEL -- while being stylistically innovative (as he did in BIRDY and FRANKY FURBO).

Either way, SHRAPNEL is a five star, read, well worth the money!