One of the most accomplished American novels of World War II, Harry Brown's A Walk in the Sun (1944) begins with the American landing at Salerno in September 1943.

During the landing, an infantry platoon loses its commanding officer and one of its sergeants. Isolated from the rest of their company (in the infantry, a company consists of four platoons), the platoon leaders move toward a vaguely described goal, a farmhouse some six miles inland, which they are to occupy, if empty, and overcome, if the enemy is within. As they move toward their goal, they lose their remaining two sergeants--one from a nervous breakdown--leaving a corporal in charge and reinforcing the men's fear that they are operating in the dark. Eventually they discover that their task involves subduing the enemy in the farmhouse and blowing up a nearby bridge.

One of the outstanding features of this novel is its quiet, understated tone, conveyed in a clear, clean prose style. Like the soldiers he chronicles, the author goes about his business, building dramatic tension, highlighting the down-to-earth dialogue of the men, and conveying the underlying sense of fear that the wisecracks try to disguise. Brown makes no attempt to probe the men in depth. He sees them not as individuals but as a functioning platoon, a group of men with a job to do, which they successfully perform--theirs not to reason why. In this, Brown captures a basic truth of soldiers under fire and shows how they maintain their sanity by focusing on the task at hand.

A fine film version of A Walk in the Sun, directed by Lewis Milestone, who also directed All Quiet on the Western Front, appeared in 1945.

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