The Rising Tide by Jeff Shaara

I loved Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, a novel about Gettysburg that featured character sketches of both famous players like Lee and lesser know soldiers like Chamberlain. His son Jeff has created a cottage industry by using that formula for other Civil War events, the Mexican American War, the Revolutionary War, WWI, and, with The Rising Tide, WWII.

I thought that The Killer Angels turned Lee into a classic tragic hero, flaws and all. The Rising Tide doesn't have that classic turn, but Eisenhower, Rommel, Patton, Montgomery, and other famous lights of the era are shown with flaws intact. However, the doubts seem realistically, but the egos seem almost cartoonish.

Jack Logan and Jesse Adams are fairly well drawn characters, but both seem to lack the development that Michael Shaara used to create Joshua Chamberlain.

Nonetheless, the novel does a good job of showing the doubts that have to plague any soldier of any rank in a battlefield situation. Shaara also illustrates the enormous logistical demands of a war.

Grade: B

A Quote: But success will come not just by strength alone. Success will come because history demands it. I will not entertain the notion that Adolf Hitler's vision of the world can ever prevail, that one evil man can erase thousands of years of the evolution of civilized society. You do what you must do, General. Your campaigns for the new year might indeed be difficult. But you will prevail. It cannot be any other way.--Franklin Roosevelt (pages 237-238)