All Reviews Submitted by the Author
for
UNSUNG VALOR: A GI'S STORY OF WORLD WAR II
(ISBN1-5780-214-4 University Press of Mississippi)

by A. Cleveland Harrison, includes two chapters describing serving in ASTP. The book traces ASTP infantry basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, September through November 1943, and pre-engineering at the University of Mississippi from December 1943 to March 1944.

³The story of the ordinary soldier is the hardest of all war-stories to tell. Cleveland Harrison has told his with remarkable clarity and detail. His war-story has no great battles in it, nothing youıd get a medal for; but it captures the day-to-day experiences of one drafteeıs journey through army life: the training, the waiting, and the terrifying confusion of first combat. Itıs an essential part of the total story, and many old soldiers will find their own selves when young in it.²

Samuel Hynes
Author of Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator
The Soldiersı Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War Woodrow Wilson
Professor of Literature Emeritus
Princeton University

³We all owe A. Cleveland Harrison a profound thank you for writing Unsung Valor: A GIıs Story of World War II. Itıs a searing saga of one manıs indomitable spirit, undaunted courage and patriotic humility. One doesnıt have to be a World War II scholar to enjoy this marvelous memoir.²

Douglas Brinkley
Director, Eisenhower Center of American Studies
Distinguished Professor of History, University of New Orleans

³Drafted in 1942 and sent to the Army Special Training Program, Harrison received engineering training. When the desperate need for replacements forced the ASTPıs termination, he was sent to the Ninety-fourth Infantry Division. With it, he was in the siege of the French port Lorient, and the Battle of the Bulge, in which a land mine seriously wounded him. Assigned to military government after hospitalization, he served in occupation forces in Germany until well after V-E day. His memoir adds to our knowledge about many aspects of the American war experience--about GI relations with the English, Germans, and French; about the goof-offs and the genuine heroes among the GIs; about the nightmare of military hospitals; and much else--from the perspective of an educated southerner tossed in among non-southerners. Besides its sociohistorical value, Harrisonıs memoir tells a thoroughly engrossing story, relaying an unusual and articulate privateıs view that makes a fitting companion to such broad views as Tom Brokawıs best-seller The Greatest Generation (1999).²

Roland Green
BOOKLIST of American Library Association

"Harrison was not an enthusiastic draftee--so he was pleased to be assigned initially to an Army Specialized Training Program, which selected the best and brightest draftees for technical and professional education in civilian colleges. (Relatively little is known about that program, and Harrison's description of his days as a uniformed student at the University of Mississippi makes a contribution to the war's social history.) But in 1944, when the program was cut back and men were needed as infantry replacements on the front, Harrison was reassigned to the 94th Infantry Division; shipped to Europe in July, he was badly wounded in his first action. Combining a novelist's sense of people and events with the story of his development into an infantryman--not an eager soldier but a good one--Harrison describes his hospitalization, convalescence in England and subsequent assignment to a branch of the military government of occupied Germany--the kind of assignment ASTP graduates were supposed to receive in the first place. The result is a celebration of every draftee who came when he was called, did his duty where he was assigned and came back to shape America's century, and a reminder that every soldier's experience was, in the end, distinct.²

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW, 02/14/2000