I Marched with Patton

May 1, 2020

Joining the commemorative commentary on the 75th anniversary of Gen. George Patton's death, still robust 94-year-old Sisson recalls his World War II service under Patton as a soldier with the American Third Army. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

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August 17, 2020
WWII veteran Sisson recounts his wartime experiences in this spirited yet familiar memoir. A farm boy from Weleetka, Okla., Sisson dropped out of high school to help support his family after his father’s death. Drafted when he turned 18, Sisson shipped off to Europe in 1944 as a member of the Tenth Armored Division in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army. His job was to string communication wires between observation points and the artillery, and to repair the wires when they were cut by German soldiers. Most of the book’s anecdotes about Patton are well-worn and add little to his legend. Still, Sisson narrates his battlefield observations and close scrapes with death in aerial assaults and artillery shelling with verve, and renders his dialogues with fellow soldiers in charmingly folksy vernacular (“When Patton took the command,” a Texan soldier tells Sisson, “he started the Third Army kicking them German’s asses like slapping fleas on a dog. Them Nazis didn’t know what hit ’em”). In the book’s most intriguing sections, Sisson details his experiences as a military police investigator in Berlin after the war and his return home to the U.S. WWII buffs will welcome this comforting snapshot of the Greatest Generation in action.

September 1, 2020
A 94-year-old World War II veteran tells his story. Raised in Depression-era rural Oklahoma, Sisson enlisted in 1943 at age 18, sailed to Europe in 1944, served through the final, freezing winter, and fought into Germany. His unit finished the war in Munich, where he witnessed the horrors of the nearby concentration camp at Dachau: "Death hung in the air like a maleficent fog. We stopped, and the men got out. We could see barracks and buildings. Barbed wire lined the perimeters. On the far side of the camp stood a blackened brick chimney. The crematorium, I realized with horror." After Germany's surrender, the Army transferred him to the military police, where he served in the occupation of Berlin for nearly a year, which included a long, apparently platonic relationship with his female interpreter before returning home to enjoy a long and prosperous life. This is not the first as-told-to memoir from an elderly veteran by the prolific Wise. Like 82 Days on Okinawa, which Wise wrote with veteran Art Shaw, he produces an unashamedly novelistic narrative with plenty of action and long stretches of "reconstructed" dialogue that resemble an old Hollywood film and--like the movies--get some details wrong. Most readers of World War II memoirs know something of the war's history, but Wise takes nothing for granted, so he portrays Sisson as an omniscient observer, privy to the thoughts of the higher command and actions of other armies. At times in the text he encounters another soldier who helpfully proceeds to describe the current state of the fighting, including events on the Russian front and politics at home. In his defense, it's unlikely that Sisson's recollections from 75 years ago could fill out an entire 300-page book. What survives is a convincing story of an innocent young man who experienced a vicious war and then a year of adventures in postwar Berlin. Some parts require grains of salt, but this is a believable portrait of a soldier present at the defeat of the Reich.

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