The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw

First published: 1948

Type of plot: Realistic war novel

Time of work: From New Year’s Eve, 1937, to spring, 1945

Locale: The Bavarian Alps, New York City, North Africa, England, France, and Germany

Principal Characters:

• Christian Diestl, a former ski instructor and a sergeant in the German army
• Michael Whitacre, a successful New York playwright enlisted in the United States Army
• Noah Ackerman, a social worker drafted into the United States Army soon after his marriage
• Lieutenant Hardenburg, a German officer
• Gretchen Hardenburg, his wife
• Laura Whitacre, Michael’s wife, a beautiful actress
• Hope Plowman, Noah’s wife
• Johnny Burnecker, Noah’s best friend in the platoon
• Lieutenant Green, and
• Colonel Colclough, American officers

The Novel

The Young Lions tells the stories of three soldiers, one German and two American, in World War II. Though they are continents apart when the novel begins (Christian Diestl is in Austria, Michael Whitacre is in New York, and Noah Ackerman is in Santa Monica), the tide of events brings their lives together briefly and fatally along a forest path in Germany.

The book’s almost seven hundred pages recount the progress of its three protagonists. Their lives are presented chronologically, kept parallel in time as the narrative focuses first on one protagonist, then on another. Paying little attention to the broad sweep of the war, the novel concentrates on the personal dramas and the small combats that determine each man’s fate. Christian, Michael, and Noah live out destinies shaped by their conscious decisions as well as by unconscious impulses and by the accidents or coincidences of environment. Though the particulars of their experiences differ, these three soldiers learn the common, bitter truth of combat: “You can’t let them send you any place where you don’t have friends to protect you.”

Christian’s career follows the victories and the defeats of the German army in Western Europe. He participates in the easy conquest of France and in the early success of the Afrika Corps; he savors the intoxicating spoils (women and food) of victory. When Nazi fortunes turn at the battle of El Alamein, Christian learns the brutal lessons of survival during a series of retreats. First in North Africa, then in Italy, at Normandy Beach, and finally along the Rhine, Christian fights to live despite Allied troops, German army stupidity, and the dictates of conscience. Considering going underground at the war’s end, Christian plans one last ambush of two American soldiers walking unsuspectingly through a wood.

One of them is Michael Whitacre. Hating Fascism and having enjoyed the good life (marriage to a beautiful woman, financial success, a career writing for Broadway and Hollywood), Michael patriotically enlists in the infantry when the war begins. At boot camp he finds platoon life petty and squalid; quickly, he uses well-connected friends to transfer to a noncombat unit. From this safe vantage, Michael observes the war until he is run down by a truck as he drunkenly seeks shelter during an air raid. Waiting for reassignment, he meets a soldier from his boot camp platoon. Impressed by the man’s attitude toward the war, Michael decides to accompany him to the front lines.

This soldier, the other American for whom Christian lies in wait, is Noah Ackerman. The frail son of an itinerant Jewish salesman, Noah lived miserably before the war: “Noah’s life had been wandering and disordered. Often he had been deserted, . . . left for long periods with vague, distant relatives, or, lonely and persecuted, in shabby military schools.” Then he meets Hope Plowman. She helps transform him into a poetic, passionate lover who triumphantly confronts the prejudice of her Protestant parents toward a Jewish prospective son-in-law.

Drafted into the army, Noah faces the rigors of training as well as the anti-Semitism of his platoon. He fights the ten biggest men in the company, losing nine contests physically but winning all of them psychologically. Hardened in will and body, Noah proves a brave soldier during the Normandy invasion. Wounded and evacuated, he successfully schemes to return to his platoon, where his buddies await him.

The chance encounter of three soldiers in the forest is the novel’s brief, intense climax. Christian fires, killing Noah and wounding Michael. Stalking his attacker skillfully, the anguished Michael wounds Christian with a grenade and then shoots the helpless, taunting German. Michael carries his comrade back to his friends in the platoon.

The Characters

The central characters of The Young Lions, it has been charged, are not real characters but the embodiments of ideas. Critics and reviewers tend to find too little individualization and too much symbolism in the personalities and the actions of Christian, Michael, and Noah. Shaw’s characters, it appears, are propaganda figures rather than rounded characters.

Christian, for example, seems a stereotypical Nazi soldier. There is nothing German about him except his army uniform; whatever might be the influences of geography, culture, and history upon German character are ignored. Instead, readers follow Christian’s moral deterioration as he lives out the consequences of Nazi philosophy. Having heard that Germans are a master race who can rightly rule by force over inferior races, Christian loses all moral scruples as the novel progresses. His actions become increasingly savage: In the struggle to survive, nothing human can be allowed to have value. From callous attacks on enemy soldiers, Christian proceeds to abandoning his own men ruthlessly, to murdering innocent civilians, to betraying a wartime friend to fanatic SS troops. Christian follows out the ultimate logic of his worldview: If Nazism allows the strong to use the weak as they see fit, then the strong may sacrifice even Nazis to stay alive. In his most inhuman act, Christian disguises himself as an inmate during a concentration camp riot and stabs a German officer to death in a successful ploy to hide his identity.

Michael Whitacre likewise appears to embody a social class rather than to exist as an individual. Michael is the typical prewar liberal whose heart is in the right place—he despises the Fascism sweeping Europe—and who speaks enthusiastically of democracy. When Michael comes face to face, however, with fellow Americans who are uneducated, prejudiced, and unthinking, he recants his patriotic gesture of enlisting and seeks to protect himself in a more privileged detachment. Yet even as he flees active service, he experiences the archetypal guilt of the liberal for acting in a way that he knows is weak. It is not surprising that Michael comes to the conclusion that “five years after the war is over, we’re all liable to look back with regret at every bullet that missed us.”

Noah, who emerges as the novel’s most admirable character, seems weakened by being constructed as such an obvious underdog. He is Jewish, an obvious sociological counterpoint to the Christian Germans who begin to carry out genocide and to the German Christian who shoots him. Noah suffers the most physically of any protagonist, but his spirit grows more courageous and undaunted the more he suffers. Noah seemingly represents the democratic hope that out of the furnace of combat, good men find their mettle hardened like iron and ordinary men are transmuted into heroes. Michael clearly owes his spiritual redemption (imaged in his killing of Christian) to Noah’s example.

A similar weakness appears in the minor characters. Rather than being created as individuals, they are created in repetitious clusters around the central characters. Christian, Michael, and Noah stand in relief against the background of a superior officer, a lover (or lovers), and soldiers of their own rank. The comparisons and contrasts among these clustering groups appear obvious and predictable.

Around Christian cluster Lieutenant Hardenburg, Hardenburg’s wife, Gretchen, and the soldier Brandt. Hardenburg is a walking mouthpiece, rationalizing the brutality and enjoying the savagery of war. His wife, Gretchen, who seduces Christian and leads him into depravity, is as ruthless in the bedroom as her husband is on the battlefield. Brandt, a war photographer, sees human suffering only as a propaganda device. Christian absorbs their values readily and acts them out upon others.

Around Michael cluster Colonel Colclough, Michael’s wife, Laura, and soldiers such as Private Keane. Colclough cares as little for his men as does Hardenburg, but out of stupidity rather than arrogance; Laura is no more faithful to Michael than Gretchen is to Hardenburg, but Laura has the civility to divorce her husband. Private Keane smirks at Michael’s military incompetence on several occasions: Without Michael’s personal and social advantages, he shows himself the better soldier.

The best cluster, unsurprisingly, groups around the heroic Noah. His superior is Lieutenant Green: Like Noah, Green is physically frail and intimidated by more robust men. Yet Green proves unflappable in battle, capable of leading when officers such as Colclough go catatonic with fear. Noah’s wife, Hope Plowman, alone of all the women in the novel, is a faithful lover; she inspires her man with noble sentiments about love, family, and honor. Most of the men in Noah’s platoon come to respect him, but none more than Johnny Burnecker. A simple Iowa farm boy, Johnny becomes Noah’s psychological brother. Johnny lived humbly before the war, and Noah wants to live with him and like him after the war: one with the earth, partaking of the cycle of birth, harvest, and rebirth.

Although the symbolism of the main characters and the schematic arrangement of minor characters is obvious upon reflection, it is not obvious during a first reading. Shaw is a fine storyteller who gives his characters strong dramatic as well as thematic functions. Shaw, a playwright and short-story writer before he turned novelist, skillfully creates scenes by dramatic confrontation or by descriptive force. Each chapter, by describing a major event in the career of one protagonist, contributes toward the movement of the novel. Yet many of those individual events are more compelling than the novel as a whole.

Sometimes the compelling force comes from the dramatic interaction of the characters. The chapters that recount Noah’s confrontation with anti-Semitism and Michael’s flight from suspicion during boot camp are among the best in the novel. At other times, the compelling force comes from tension-filled narratives. The chapters describing Lieutenant Hardenburg’s ambush of a British patrol and the siege of Noah’s platoon at a Normandy farmhouse are action-filled, suspenseful descriptions that could stand as separate short stories.

Shaw’s characterization may be defended in another way. Common sense and psychological theories concur that all human beings are shaped by sociological, historical, and political forces to some extent. Given that a war is a sociological, historical, and political event, Shaw’s creation of characters to represent—at least partially— abstract forces is reasonable. That he employs them skillfully for literary purposes is clear from the narrative and dramatic power of the book. In the light of these successful uses, many readers may not care that Shaw did not create memorable, three-dimensional characters.

Critical Context

After the war, literary critics expected much of the novel in general and much of Shaw in particular. Hope was high that World War II would produce the novel that summed up the American experience as Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) had epitomized America’s World War I. Hope was high for Shaw, especially since his prewar plays and wartime stories tackled the issues of a national struggle.

Inevitably such high hopes could not be met. As a genre, novels of American involvement in World War II have generated little critical enthusiasm. Something always seemed lacking: The novels (such as The Caine Mutiny, 1951) that are positive about the war are lamented as jingoistic and naïve; those (such as Catch-22, 1961) that are negative about the war parrot fashionable nihilism. A war novel may be a book that can never be considered apart from its political implications and therefore will never please every critic. General readers respond more favorably to war novels: For twenty years after the war, fictions about World War II constantly made best-seller lists.

Shaw’s novels after The Young Lions continued to draw similar reactions. Brisk sales and favorable reviews confirmed his ability to produce interesting narratives with large, intricate casts of characters, but his works have not received serious critical attention. Shaw’s fiction is limited in its ability to deal with subtle ideas; for the most part, he contented himself with reflecting popular worldviews rather than with shaping a vision of his own. Shaw himself countered that critics have yet to appreciate an ironic vein that underlies his work.

Bibliography

Giles, James R. Irwin Shaw. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Giles provides a critical and interpretive study of Shaw with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references.

Shnayerson, Michael. Irwin Shaw: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1989. Shnayerson reconstructs Shaw’s life from his days as a playwright through his career as a screenwriter and novelist. Shnayerson’s biography offers insights into Shaw’s personality and his times.