Here’s an early suggestion for your holiday gift lists. Soldiering for Freedom: A GI’s Account of World War II, by Herman “Obe” Obermayer, was published this year by Texas A&M Press in its military history series. Obe is a dear friend so this isn’t a neutral review. I strongly recommend it, not only as history but also as social commentary.

Obe comes from German Jewish stock. His ancestors immigrated shortly before the Civil War. He was a freshman at Dartmouth in 1942. At halftime during the Harvard game in October, they announced the draft for men 18 and older. Because his father was chairman of the local draft board, Obe was on the fast track for induction; five months later he was in the U.S. Army.

His book is drawn from more than 400 letters he wrote to his parents in Philadelphia from July of ’43 through March of ’46. There are no battle stories. The casualties Obe witnessed were 200 GIs killed and hundreds more wounded by French saboteurs. I found his commentary on the Nuremberg Trials quite striking -- and he may well be the last person alive to have witnessed Hermann Goering’s testimony.

Among the most intriguing aspects of Obe’s book is an exploration of why the French display such hostility to America. (Short answer: Germans treated their parents and grandparents much better than did the Americans.)

Obe asks: Why would Le Havre -- a city the Luftwaffe spared but the Allies destroyed, randomly killing more than 5,000 civilians -- welcome Americans? “Aerial bombs kill anonymously, but they have return addresses.”

Obe’s primary job was to help reduce French sabotage of the American war effort. Tight U.S. censorship kept the growing French-American hostilities from the papers. After the French capitulation in 1940, the Nazis treated France as a “friendly constituency.” During the four years that the Germans governed Normandy, “they enhanced its agricultural and industrial infrastructure. In contrast, we ruined much of it.”

GI’s were dismayed “by the opulence Paris enjoyed when it was the Third Reich’s second most important city.” French bureaucrats enjoyed opera and horse-racing as before, at the same time issuing “the directives that sealed the fate of France’s Jews: between 75,000 and 100,000 were executed in Gestapo death camps.” The anti-Semitism currently plaguing France has deep roots.

While the French elite were sending their Jewish compatriots to the gas chamber, the American elite served side-by-side with countrymen of all classes. Obe encountered many of his Ivy League cohort serving in Europe. This is in marked contrast to our experience in Viet Nam and conflicts thereafter. Obe’s book helps me understand why some well-intended progressives, as well as some conservatives, favor a draft for national service. They believe it would again mix folks from radically different circumstances.

Unfortunately for the least well endowed and those ill-favored by circumstances, today’s military requires high human capital. Those who would benefit most from military experience are denied acceptance and are excluded from the training and discipline they so desperately need. Concurrently, the most fortunate opt out. Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Brown, and Yale haven’t allowed ROTC training for a generation. Hence, the WWII mixing of classes that Obe describes no longer exists.

Obe’s letters include numerous well-founded complaints of enlisted men resentful of officers’ privileges. We read multiple accounts of soldiers denied access to restaurants, baths, and bars. Here was a young man from the Philadelphia Main Line with parents who graduated from top schools. Until a soldier, Obe’s life was one of luxury. He spent summers at a camp in Maine, attended black tie cotillion, and socialized at the most prestigious Jewish country club. However, “every man I knew between 18 and 30 was in military service.” Most were enlisted men and hence experienced degrading demonstrations of their lower status.

I believe it is important for classes to mix and for those of high status to endure such common treatment. Men of Obe’s generation had direct experience with the penalties inherent to subservient positions. Today this is far more rare. America suffers the consequences of having an elite class increasingly insulated from the hardships of military service.

The reader of Soldiering for Freedom should gain both appreciation and understanding. Obe’s experience is worth sharing.