The Big War: National Bestseller – A Panoramic WWII Epic of Marines in the Pacific and the Love They Left Behind

by Anton Myrer

“One must go back to All Quiet on the Western Front to find another novel as charged as this one!” —  Philadelphia Inquirer NATIONAL BESTSELLER They were our husbands, our fathers, our lovers, our sons. They were Americans and Marines. And this is their story:  The Big War , Anton Myrer's panoramic novel of Marines in the Pacific in World War II.  This is the story of Alan Newcombe, the Boston society Harvard man; Danny Kantaylis, the natural-born leader; Jay O'Neill, the barroom scrapper. Myrer does not glorify war; he does not flinch from describing what the actual experience of warfare was like for a desperate group of Marines trapped in some of the worst fighting conditions of the war. We learn about their lives at home and their fates on the battlefield.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, War, Military Fiction, World War II, Historical

512 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Anton Myrer, who died of leukemia in 1996, was a best-selling author whose themes were America's loss of innocence and the use and abuse of power. He is particularly remembered for The Last Convertible (1978), a summation of the American experience during and after World War II, and for Once an Eagle (1968), which traces the life of a regular Army officer and his family from before World War I to Vietnam. Orville Prescott, in The New York Times wrote of Once an Eagle: "Myrer is a superb story teller....who cares about the narrative and is a master." The Army War College Foundation, which is republishing the novel this year, describes it as "a perceptive study of the profession of arms an a chilling overview of armed conflict... Myrer forces us to smell and feel the battlefield as well as hear and see it."

Myrer also wrote Evil Under the Sun (1951); The Big War (1957), of which one critic wrote, "I doubt if it is possible to come much closer... to an American War and Peace"; The Violent Shore, (1962); The Intruder: A Novel of Boston (1965); The Tiger Waits (1973); and A Green Desire (1981). The Library has copies of all eight novels in much-read first editions and, in the case of six of the eight, in leather-bound volumes recently donated by Mrs. Myrer.

Born in Worchester, Massachusetts, Myrer grew up in the Berkshires, Cape Cod, and Beacon Hill -- all settings for his novels. A 1941 graduate of Boston Latin School, he interrupted his education at Harvard after Pearl Harbor to enlist in the Marine Corps and spent more than three years in the Pacific. He rose to the rank of corporal, took part in the invasion of Guam, and was wounded. He returned to graduate from Harvard magna cum laude and subsequently lived on the Cape, in Portugal, and at the time of his death, in upstate New York where he received books by mail from the Library

All who have read Myrer's novels know the strength and passion of his moral vision.

by Barbara H. Stanton

http://www.nysoclib.org/notes/notes4-...

Reviews

[Sansa snark · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 because I feel like the story can get lost sometimes under the weight of its wordiness

Girls who have only read the naked and the dead reading another mid century ww2 novel that takes place in the PTO: getting a lot of naked and the dead vibes from this

“Know stranger, all you confront is strange—and your own image”

[Patrick J. Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Myrer is brilliant once again.

[Bill Tadler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not your typical war novel

Fully two thirds of the novel is not about battles and firefights . It is more importantly about the men and women who are tested in and by the crucible of war. A remarkable, very special book.

[MisterLiberry Head · Rating 5 out of 5]

They say there are no atheists in foxholes [no opinion on that]. But there are poets in foxholes—as there have been in trenches, manning warships, on battlements and watchtowers—throughout the history of warfare. The main character of THE BIG WAR, Alan Newcombe, is—like the author—a scion of Old Boston and a Harvard man who enlisted in the Marines to serve as a buck private in an infantry platoon. As the primary sensibility through which the action is presented, the narrative is often highly lyrical, as if Homer had written contemporaneous dispatches from the Trojan War. After proving himself first of all a good marine, his buddies nickname him “Newk” despite his Latin quotations, his high-flown mock-heroic speeches that include “all kinds of wild literary allusions you couldn’t even follow half the time” (p345). They accept Newk, even as they tease him as “poet laureate of the Second Platoon. Bard of the boondocks” (p261). And Newcombe comes to a fuller appreciation of his fellow Marines: “not one of them would have held his interest for five minutes on the outside…and yet now they affected him: their breezy vulgarity, their illogicality, their squabbles and mawkish sentimentality moved him deeply“ (p247). Also important to the story is Cpl. Danny Kantaylis, who picked up a big medal fighting on Guadalcanal and was “invalided back riddled with steel and malaria” (p21), then declined to do a war bonds tour–choosing instead to join the Thirty-ninth Replacement Battalion and return to combat. Without false modesty, just giving out the straight skinny, Danny tells his pregnant wife: “I just did what I had to do to stay alive, that’s all. You ask any guy that’s been on the line if there’s heroes. He’ll laugh like a bastard, he’ll tell you just what I’m telling you: you do all you can and hang on” (p123) Newcombe recognizes that, like Achilles at Troy, “all our fortunes were bound up in his: as long as he stands we will triumph; if he falls we will all perish” (p254). Pugnacious, high-energy orphan Jay O’Neil is a “redheaded Irishman from Pawtucket or thereabouts” (p42). Newcombe tells Jay: “You’ve got to curb that Celtic madness of yours or you’ll wind up like John the Baptist” (p52). But Jay is both irrepressible, and bleed with luck.
Myrer invests plenty of time on detailed pictures of "the home front,” complete with the fast-paced patter and slang of the day, focusing on interactions between the soon-to-ship-out Marines (during leave) and their families and romances. Then a long sea voyage west to the Pacific War. In fact, Newcombe contends that “Unlike the heroes of antiquity, it seems we are to have our odyssey before our iliad” (p225). It’s around p261, roughly the midpoint of the novel, before “the big moment” when the platoon launches an amphibious landing on Faneráhan, a small, rocky, jungle-thick, mountainous speck of an island that had become the next tactical objective of the Big War. (“It has leaped from oblivion to become the most important isle of our young lives – p238).
Myrer compellingly describes the horrors and terror of combat, particularly as suffered by young American men who are confused, dehydrated, poorly fed, and struck by a host of tropical diseases. “Aching sick, worn to the bone, they groped their way forward” (p353)—because Marines always go forward. For Newcombe: “He would never have believed one could be this tired—so drunk with sheer exhaustion and despondency it became a prodigious effort simply to lift one’s head or raise a hand. And yet sleep was out of the question” (p358)—because nighttime brought wave after wave of frenzied Japanese banzai charges. To a contemporary reader, Faneráhan and the other island battles might seem unsurvivable. In fact, in THE BIG WAR only four Marines out of the original 30-plus live to see the enemy pushed across the island and backed into the sea. THE BIG WAR is unforgettable in its intensity and raw truthfulness, much more personal to the author than his great classic, ONCE AN EAGLE (!968), which deservedly stands high as a guide to military leadership and honorable conduct in the profession of arms.

[Sean Dowd · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not extensively trained as a literary critic, but I believe that Anton Myrer should be more well known in the canon of American Literature.

I read other criticism on his description of battle as being unrealistic. I am not a veteran, but my consumption of modern war film prepared me for a reasonable appreciation of his narratives of battle.

More importantly I felt connected to the young characters both male and female in the 1943-44 time period of the United States as well as the characters as presented in the Pacific on a US Navy ship en route to their ultimate combat destination. This was an interesting change of pace from reading "Band of Brothers."

I would consider this to be intermediate to advance level reading. I enjoyed this reading and I'm looking forward to reading "Once an Eagle," that was the original reason I was set with discovering Anton Myrer in the first place.

[Rob Roy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book displays the horrors of war better than any other than I have read. It does so, not simply with combat sciences but also the comradery of the wait part of hurry up and wait. It also, deals with those at home, and the civilians caught up in the horror. Alas, what it does not do well is the characterization, and the flow of the nutritive. It all just doesn’t come together. The author would get much better in his later works.

[Bryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very disappointing. I’ve been looking forward to reading this book for sometime, and following up with the huge “once an eagle”! This author was trying very hard to impress the reader with his literary skills. He ended up drowning the story in an unnecessary abuse of poetry and Shakespeare style eloquence. A good story survives somewhere under all the unnecessary fluff!

[Don Diego · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three US Marines, from different backgrounds, are shipped to combat in a South Pacific island. The island in the book is fictional, but it sounds like it is based on the author's service in the battles to take Guam back from the Japanese. The passages describing jungle island combat are very gripping and moving.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still true

Nothing has changed as young men go through basic, carouse with girls and spend endless hours waiting for war to happen. Myrer’s novels about the 1940s are among my favorites. I was 10 years old when these battles were fought and so many wars have happened since. The prose get a bit purple in this book but the truth of it all prevails.

[Phillip Hatfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhat tedious, but a great read.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

second reading

I read this book forty or fifty years ago. It’s still a good read. I think I’ll re read once an eagle next

[Chris Watson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave it 2 stars, because the author fought in the Pacific war, and a few of the battle chapters do seem reasonably authentic. Not all; most of them are pure fantasy.

This is genuine pulp fiction. If you like pulp fiction - Raymond Chandler etc - you'll probably love it. Full of two dimensional characters, groan-inducing conversations, outrageously pretentious attempts at profundity, tacky love scenes - it's got it all!

As 50s pulp it was historically interesting, but it was a struggle to get through it - even skipping the worst bits - a struggle even to stay awake apart from the passages where people's organs and body parts are being strewn around (oh, didn't I mention that?). A real relief to get to the end.

Anton Myrer was clearly shocked and moved by his experiences, but sadly, that wasn't enough to turn him into a writer.

[Melissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't finish it.

[Ginny]

started, but couldnt get into it. read to close to the last convertible. will pick it up again soon.

[Dan Hays · Rating 2 out of 5]

An exercise in mannered writing. I kept reading to see if it got any better - it didn't!

[TIMOTHY · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book hard to concentrate on and to read. I suppose the story was not what I expected from the title.

[Salome · Rating 4 out of 5]

There weren't really scenes I would remember for being outstanding, but there was such an overwhelming feeling that it was so bad and it was going to end even worse...

[Jessica Overbeck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really interesting parts, some really dull parts, so.....

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another WWII story by Anton Myrer. It's good if you can't get enough of this genre.