The Triumph and the Glory

Rating:
Summary: Great!
Review: This novel revolves around the bomber pilot, Lindberg, who is fighting off what was then referred to as 'combat fatigue' but what could more accurately be called being scared out of your mind at the thought of climbing into the cockpit one more morning and flying off to let death in the form of Messerschmitts or Focke Wulf's turn mama's boy into a bloody pulp with high-velocity, heavy-calibre machine gun or cannon fire. My uncle was in the 8th Air Force and refused to read this novel, he still has nightmares once in awhile. Rustad handles the dogfight chapters superbly, and has obviously done a lot of research. The most heart-rending chapters though, were about the old Russian guy, Arkady, hauled off to Stalin's death camps, while his son was fighting to defend the very government that was snuffing out his life one brutal day at a time in Siberia. The Triumph and Glory is a deeply moving novel, but if the reader isn't pretty familiar with the WWII era and the psychological motivations of the common soldiers or airmen at the time a lot of the understated but very real impact of the book is going to sail right over their heads. They just aren't going to get it. There is more than one theme being presented here, the obvious theme is a sort of bitter satire of the rampant patriotism of the time, while the shadow theme, the theme that drives the plot, involves the dark repercussions of hurling such young men into a war that is mass murder unleashed in the name of national survival.