Mollie & Other War Pieces

"A.J. Liebling is my favourite of all the American writers who covered the Second World War . He died in 1963 and is forgotten now, but he was an extraordinary jewel in The New Yorker ’s crown. He had many passions in life. Boxing was one, and he wrote a great book on boxing called The Sweet Science . He loved his food, he loved France. The combination of those gave him another book, Between Meals . But the book I’ve picked here will always stay with me, Mollie and Other War Pieces . Mollie was an American GI—short for ‘Molotov,’ a nickname from his combat troops because he was very pro-Russia, which was at that time an ally of the United States in the war. Liebling came across Mollie when he was with the Second Batallion of the 60th Infantry in the North African campaign against both the Italians and the Germans; he heard talk of this extraordinary soldier who always went out front alone, who had captured 600 Italians in a single action on his own, and who was regarded as an almost mythical figure by his fellow troops. He only caught up with Mollie when Mollie had finally been killed after another amazingly suicidal action. Liebling began to dig into the background of this soldier and discovered that he’d been a barman in the Village, he was really called Karl Warner, and that he was simply a poor kid who’d assumed this identity in the North African campaign. He wore outrageous clothes, was court martialled twenty times when he was behind the lines, but when he was at the front, his officers let him do what he wanted to do, because what he was, was a great leader—he led troops into battle—and this is what caught Liebling’s interest. He writes absolutely beautifully. Here’s a paragraph from the beginning of the foreword: I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war. That tells you something about the human condition—or particularly the male condition, let’s make that clear—there is a sort of DNA that inspires men to go to war. As I said at the beginning, reporters like this have to say what they see. They have to get as close as possible to the tanks, the snipers, the fallen dead and the screaming wounded. That is absolutely part of their job. But also they must try to humanise that for their readers, to reach out for particular characters. Can we talk about Marie Colvin next? Because I think she really illustrates this point."