In his foreword to Because We Are Canadians, Pierre Berton mentions the relative scarcity of published memoirs by soldiers who participated in the Second World War. Whereas the literature of the Great War is dominated by the men who fought in the trenches, most accounts of the later conflict were written by generals, war correspondents, or historians. Charles D. Kipp’s memoir, then, is a most welcome book, offering us valuable close-up counterpoint to the broad-scope literature on the Second World War.

Kipp arrived in France on July 25, 1944. D-Day had come and gone, but the fighting was still fierce and Kipp soon found himself in the thick of it. The next eight months of his life was an unrelenting blur of grinding tanks, chattering machine guns, freezing cold, little sleep, less leave time – and the constant presence of horror and death.

Implicit here is an explanation for the relative lack of Second World War soldier narratives. Life in the Great War, despite its horrors, had shape: home trenches and salients, periodic offensives and regular periods of leave, all existing to create a terrible, but at least comprehensible, routine. Kipp’s war, we soon realize, had none of this. Terrain was constantly changing, each battle was completely different from the last, and there was rarely time to stop and think. How does one give form to such an experience?

Kipp’s strategy is to simply and directly tell us what he saw, in the order in which he saw it, in all of its horrific detail. He dispenses almost entirely with analysis, whether technical or psychological, and even the nationalist pride apparent in the title gets only a token nod. Such contextual absences may frustrate some readers. Frankly, however, the fact that Kipp – who was wounded eight times and suffered a heart attack during a battle – managed to write this book at all is miraculous. This is war, minus the TV graphics, and it’s a nightmare.