CRITIQUE – This young man wants to be the one to write, for the Second World War, the equivalent of what was A Farewell to Arms for the Great War. And he will succeed.
He wanted to see the war up close. The young Norman Mailer, born in Brooklyn in 1923, was 18 when the Japanese attacked. Pearl Harbor and his country went to war against the Axis of Evil. Fresh from his studies as an aeronautical engineer at Harvard (he already had a taste for rockets, a taste that would continue into the late 1960s in his book-length reports on the Apollo mission, Bivouac on the Moon), he enlisted as a private. After completing his training, he embarked on the Pacific adventure with General MacArthur’s army.
Mailer joins 112e armored regiment in San Antonio and, too far from the action for his liking, was transferred to a reconnaissance section where he spent a few days behind Japanese lines in Leyte, Philippines. At the same time, in the same area, James Jones was fighting in the 25e infantry division, and Herman Wouk is a destroyer officer. Like Mailer three years earlier, the former will publish his first novel, As long as he…
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