Soldier Boys

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

Set during World War II, this well-researched novel is about a group of
young men from Northern Ontario who volunteer for military service
overseas with the Algonquin Regiment. The six friends call themselves
“the Little League of Nations” because of their various national
origins—Irish, Lebanese, Italian, Russian, Cree, and French Canadian.
The author says he based much of this story on the wartime letters of an
uncle who joined up as a youngster: “Like most of the men who made it
home, my uncle never spoke about his war experience, but the letters he
wrote to his family and the newspaper clippings the family collected
were enough to get me going on the primary and secondary source
material.”

McCauley tells the story from the viewpoint of the diary of Barney
Berman, a Jewish youngster. He describes the training in Canada, the
long months of waiting in England, sexual encounters, savage battles in
Northwest Europe, and brutal mistreatment in a German POW camp. His
accounts of army life and combat are for the most part accurate, save a
few minor technical errors. The author also has done his homework in
gathering contemporary details about life in 1944, often alluding to
everyday objects, sports, and entertainers of the era. The reader enters
into the spirit of the era, and the story rattles along nicely (though
it is a bit disconcerting when the 1944 character interjects information
about a movie that was actually produced 20-odd years later).

All in all, Soldier Boys is a well-written novel that can be read as
both a fictional story and a factual summary of the experiences of
Canadian soldiers 50 years ago.