Charles MacDonald Essay on “Company Commander”

Essay on Memoir of Charles MacDonald

For class U.S. Military History

WORTH 20% OF MY GRADE (have a 94 and need to keep it)

The essay on Charles MacDonald’s memoir, Company Commander, will represent the most substantial piece of writing you’ll do this term. You should aim for four-to-six pages in length (roughly 800-1200 words), so probably longer than any of the other essays you’ve submitted this term. The essay also requires making some decisions about what themes you want to address, as well as the evidence or examples you want to use in your papers. Writing history is always about making choices about what to include and what to exclude. The more evidence you have – in this case, three hundred pages worth – the more decisions you have to make about what you are trying to do. But keep in mind that it is your paper: what it is that you want to tell the reader about this memoir and what it tells us about tactics and operations in the Western European at the tail end of World War II?

The book is divided into two halves. The first half recounts the MacDonald’s experiences in the Battle of Bulge, during which he was wounded. The second half picks up with his return to the regiment and concludes with the end of the war. His company (a different one in the second half) saw quite a bit of combat in the last weeks of the war but of a very different kind and in different circumstances than in the first half of the book. During the Battle of the Bulge, MacDonald’s company was desperately defending a position against superior enemy forces; as the war is coming to an end, his regiment was rapidly advancing against a collapsing German army and against occasionally fierce but increasingly sporadic resistance. His company also came into much more frequent contact with civilians in the last weeks of the war.

For the purposes of the paper, you can use either the first half, the second half, or both halves. If you want gung-ho depictions of combat, you’ll want to focus on the first half; if you want to witness victory, the second half might be more attractive. The two halves also provide interesting points of comparison. And you should aim for the entire book: not only is this is one of the great US memoirs of WWII, it is a good idea to know what both halves contain, if only to avoid saying something that is contradicted in the other half.

There are a couple of themes of themes that you can think about: 1) company-level combat operations in WWII (how we should describe and characterize them); 2) connected to that is the role or function of an infantry captain; 3) and finally the qualities or characteristics that make someone an effective low-level combat officer (and of course the opposite: what qualities or characteristics lead to failure?).

If you’ve got an idea for a different theme, you can run it by me. But what you want to do is first to select a theme (I would do so after having begun the book), then give some thought to what issues or topics you want to discuss as elements of that theme (for example: these are three basic function of the company commander as portrayed in this book …). Having identified your topics, you can then think about evidence. Select your evidence or examples as a function of the theme and topics. Make a decision about the order in which you want to talk about them (I usually advise starting with the simplest and letting the order of discussion build more complex arguments. If one issue is dependent on another, the dependent one goes later) and you’ve got an outline. Each one of those topics should get a paragraph (or more, if you have a lot to say). With an introduction and conclusion you should have at least four pages.

So: 1) general theme; 2) issues or topics; 3) examples and evidence; 4) order in which you’ll talk about them.