Includes bibliographical references (pages 383-394) and index.

Battle : expectation, encounter, reaction -- Battle : coping with combat -- Fighting the Germans : the war of rules -- Fighting the Japanese : war unrestrained -- Discipline : not the American way -- The appeals of battle : spectacle, danger, destruction -- The appeals of battle : comradeship -- War front and home front.

Historian Gerald Linderman has created a seamless and highly original social history, authoritatively recovering and capturing the full experience of combat in World War II. Based on a vast array of letters, diaries, books, and a survey of veterans by the Army War College, The World Within War cuts through the many layers of protective shielding in soldiers' memoirs to find the shards of direct experiences that lie beneath. The Allied-Axis conflict was far more complex than even the Great War, and much has been made by previous historians of the differences between the European theater and the grimly barbaric Pacific. Yet Linderman demonstrates that there were more similarities than differences, that for American soldiers around the globe the war was disintegrative. Examining how Americans prepared for battle, how they treated each other, how they conceived of the enemy, how they thought of home, and how they reacted to battle itself, Linderman argues that ultimately, in both theaters, combat had its own grim logic, independent of causes and countries, flags and commanders.