AN EPIC AMERICAN EPISODE OF THE WAR
BEALS, CARLETON
An Epic American Episode Of The War The Persian Gulf Command's Trek To Russia's Frontiers PERSIAN GULF COMMAND. Some Marvels on the Road to Kazvin. By Joel Sayre. Random House, New York. 140...
...Never, according to Mr...
...It was a fierce relentless undertaking, much of it in temperatures of ice and snow up in the high passes to 140° or more on the coast...
...BUT all in all it is a most readable book, with a chuckle or a neat epigram on every page, and will provide a pleasant hour or two of reading...
...Reviewed by Carleton Beals THE Persians, or, as I suppose they should now be called, the Iranians, have one custom worthy of universal adoption: the professional paid mourner...
...Customs, historical flashes, persons, heat, snow, bugs, and what not are here "snap-shotted" in the brief smart style of The New Yorker, where most of the material ' recently appeared...
...boots under a religious robe, but how about this particular G.I...
...in order to sneak out of bounds ? What noble ambitions beat in his bosom during the bitter battle of supply...
...and it is all told about by Sayre lightly, vividly, in an airy hop-skip fashion, not very intimately, so far as human beings go.*Lurking behind his good-humor, one senses the note: "it can't be told yet" of conscious or unconscious censorship or perhaps a more than able discretion...
...Sayre had told of the tragedy for Iran and Iranians, then, now, and in the future...
...140 pages...
...and the Nebraska boys who wielded shovels and crowbars might well have been obliged to use those tools valiantly as real weapons before being pushed back into the Persian Gulf...
...and some of the brass hats—fortunately there were not too many—who tried to push folk around in the wrong manner, should think this over...
...It is amusing to observe an M. P. discovering G.I...
...Sayre, did he hear such satisfactory wailing and such copious shedding of tears...
...Personally I should have liked to know more about the individuals in the command...
...This saves a lot of wear and tear on relatives, and in these days of mass deaths, the possibilities should not be overlooked by the Reader's Digest, in its series on how the little man can beat the game and be prosperous in a world not overly concerned, except by platitude, with the fate of little men...
...Here is the hit-and-run story of the battle against time, slavish custom, heat, geography, in the effort to move an incredible amount of war material from the Persian Gulf to the Soviet frontier, or at least to the point the Soviets would permit American troops to go, and this little appreciated battle of ships, and docks, and unloading and road-building and track-laying may well have determined the outcome of the war, for the Germans were at the gates of Stalingrad, and the Russians—had it not been for this American material— quite likely would not have held there...
...who braced the guard-house or at least extra K.P...
...The book points up the fact very clearly that modern war, even more than front-line fighting, is a vast engineering job that begins way back in Bridgeport and Detroit and Seattle where men peer through their magnifying lenses to trace out the fine lines for the patterns and dies of new machinery...
...If Mr...
...if he had given us even the slightest inkling of the imperialistic struggle involved in this "hands-across-an-Asiatic-plateau," a struggle now shaping up after the disillusioning London conference, a struggle strongly flavored with oil and the loot of all wars, then Persian Gulf Command sihiply could not be the amusing and delightful 4ittle book it is...
...This pocket-size book is full of many such" sidelights and anecdotes about the Iranians and their country...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 43
