Fighting Words.

Gen. Bunting has been superintendent of Virginia Military Institute since 1995.

The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys: The Men of World War II, by Stephen E. Ambrose (Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $20)

FOR whom is serious history written? The American academy has long answered: for other university scholars. On occasion, works of academic scholarship become popular: one can think of any number of such books. But in the eyes of university colleagues, their authors as a consequence soon become suspect-quietly derided, yet envied. Historians vulgarly praised as "good writers" are similarly fretted over. Propulsive narrative, pellucid prose, epigrammatical assertion or conclusion, vivid exemplification: such things virtually guarantee the wary regard of other professional historians.

There is a sub-species of history writing that particularly excites academic contempt. This is the history of men at war: not of ministers of war or defense secretaries, but of military leaders and ordinary soldiers. That military history should occupy the lowest caste in the history profession is unsurprising. The fact of organized slaughter in the service of state policy is deeply offensive to the liberal dream of human perfectibility, a reminder that mankind at the close of the twentieth century remains in the end no more advanced, as Richard Eberhardt wrote, than in our ancient furies. And since the end of the military draft in 1972, not many are those men and women, one day to become scholars and writers of history, who have voluntarily served in uniform. Few historians have any feel for the grit and heft and horror, for the enduring attraction for some, of "making war."

For these reasons, military history is usually written by historians without either academic credentials or academic appointments. One thinks of the great historian of the British army, Sir John Fortescue; of John Wheeler-Bennett, of Douglas Southall Freeman (who continued to edit a large daily newspaper while he wrote his magnificent histories of Lee and his lieutenants), of Barbara Tuchman, Elizabeth Longford, Brian Farwell, and John Keegan-all of whom wrote or are writing for large audiences.

Writers like these grip hands with the great historians of an earlier century-Macaulay, Parkman, Bancroft, Henry Adams. Their concern is fundamentally with human character and intelligence under the grossest and most unremitting stresses life furnishes: those of sustained military campaigning.

Among such historians, no American now writing is read more widely than Stephen Ambrose. The popularity of his recent books is reminiscent of G. M. Trevelyan's comment about Lord Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome-that their sales might be said to vary directly with the price of coal. Ambrose is an academic historian and brilliant classroom teacher who may be said, using a naval metaphor, to have slipped his moorings.

In his books and lectures Ambrose often concludes by describing small units of young soldiers, walking through towns in the great theaters of war in 1945. Almost alone among such groups, squads of American GIs evoked smiles of delight, reassurance, gratitude, and confidence among those who saw them pass by. They were a soldiery whose military training had not effaced the essential goodness of the people and culture that had bred them. They were instinctively trusted by people who saw them-who perhaps a week earlier had watched enemy armies pass along the same streets, armies whose military men had been instructed that they represented superior races and cultures, with a destiny to conquer and subdue.

The picture is of course somewhat idealized. It reminds us of Saving Private Ryan (for which Ambrose was the principal technical advisor) and dozens of older war movies in which American squads are microcosmic melting pots of citizenship and ethnicity. And it reminds us also-which explains much of Ambrose's popularity-of the degree to which we yearn for the emotional adhesion of a country united in a just and mighty purpose.

His newest book-the author's fifth since 1994-The Victors, bears the sub-title Eisenhower and His Boys: The Men of World War II. It is an integration of several earlier works, including the enormously popular Citizen Soldiers and its various predecessors. Among these are Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, and D-Day: June 6, 1944. The titles suggest the continuing focus of most of this historian's work: young Americans brought to their country's service by a variety of motives-pure patriotism, the desire to prove something and earn distinction, the felt obligation to serve. But the soldiers Ambrose writes about were sustained in their combat service above all by an irreducible unwillingness to break faith with those of their own small units.

Thus while Ambrose has been criticized for reducing history to an immense series of episodes and anecdotes, strung together loosely in a narrative making few moral judgments, but allowing the facts to speak for themselves, this critique misses the point altogether. Ambrose is determined to show, as Thucydides did in the The History of the Peloponnesian War, and as Lincoln pronounced in the Gettysburg Address, that the essential goodness of a moral, democratic society makes of its citizens military defenders who will triumph over enemies whose soldiers are the products of totalitarian, racist, and authoritarian regimes. Someone once wrote: Churchill speaks of the soft underbelly of Europe, and a private crawls forward three feet in the rain. Ambrose is the recorder of the private's progress. To fasten upon multiple, unregarded lives and tiny incidents is to illuminate the larger thesis by accretion. Ambrose accomplishes this with great power.

So while The Victors summarizes and reconsiders Ambrose's earlier World War II themes, it does so for the declared purpose of making a narrative history of "the Supreme Commander and the junior officers, NCOs, and enlisted men carrying out his orders-generally ignoring the ranks in between."

Like Emerson's Lincoln, Ambrose's wartime Eisenhower seems in some sense-however ironic the word in 1998-an aboriginal American, the very embodiment of American leadership in war: slow to anger, vast in wrath, yet boyish, bumptious, always able to get a kick out of things, understanding that no crisis, however distended and destructive, can be allowed to register in the persona he presents to those he leads, his soldiers, and those he represents, his countrymen. Ambrose writes: "He spoke with great earnestness, a perfect expression of the devotion to duty that he felt deeply . . . but all followed by that big grin and a verbal expression of bouncy enthusiasm . . . he was so big, so generous, so optimistic, so intelligent, so outspoken, so energetic-so American." But the soldiers he led are the real subjects of The Victors. Ambrose's mission throughout is not unlike that of Joseph Conrad. The novelist said he wanted to take his audience by the lapels and demand:

Don't you see? Can't you understand? This is what your countrymen are like, in their best selves, in the hearts of their hearts, when once the blast of some mighty and worthy crusade has blown in their ears. Once they were this, and you must be worthy as their heirs, and nothing can make you worthy that does not lift you beyond the petty dreams and ambitions of your contracted lives.

Near the end of The Victors, a representative GI remembers: "We did our duty because our country asked us to, and our comrades depended on our doing it." That was all. Or as Churchill said of Eisenhower's own hero, George Marshall: Succeeding generations must not be allowed to forget his example.