The "book review" was an excuse to bring out the same tired old complaint's about class warfare in the US. There definitely was elitism in the American Military during WWII. There were some really stupid officers who mis-treated their men and there were soldiers (both Enlisted and Officer) who had very real doubts about why the war was being fought.

If the Communist fellow traveler who wrote the review had read some basic WWII history he would have known that already instead of swallowing Mailer's literary license, hook, line and sinker. What Mailer wrote was his idea of how a fictional group of people might behave under the most difficult of circumstances; not a history of what actually happened at a given time and place.

If the reviewer has a case of the ass with US Foreign Policy; he should just come out and say why and try to prove his points. Instead he has tried to suck the reader in with the distraction of class hatred until he delivers the sucker punch at the end of his polemic. This review was just a sorry example of a literary slight of hand designed to place some worn out arguments in play again ad nauseam.