The front and end papers of FIELDS OF BATTLE are the rosters for the teams in the 1942 Rose Bowl, played between Oregon State and Duke at Durham, North Carolina. None of the names are overly familiar; the only one that’s close to being recognizable is that of Tommy Prothro, a star for the Duke team who is best remembered for his later career as a college and pro coach. There’s nothing odd or unusual about either roster --- nothing to indicate that most of the young men on both teams would soon be in uniform, defending their country in far-flung outposts across Europe and Asia.

World War II did more than move the Rose Bowl from Pasadena to North Carolina. The first bombs that dropped at Pearl Harbor sent shock waves throughout the nation, upending college plans, careers, relationships, ambitions --- and even college football. Brian Curtis’ book details the experiences of many of the men who played in and coached the teams in the oddest Rose Bowl of them all, following their careers in football and in uniform.

"If all the book does is remind us of the sacrifices of those who went to war, it would have been a success. That it does so with passion and grace makes it remarkable."

FIELDS OF BATTLE is calculated to please two groups of readers: people who like books about college football, and those who like books about war. It’s a tenuous balance, and Curtis manages to keep his footing throughout. The first half of the book is focused on the histories of the respective programs, starting with Duke coach Wallace Wade’s career at Vanderbilt and Alabama, and the rag-tag history of football on the Oregon frontier. Curtis does an excellent job of explaining the prevailing ethos of the college football of the day, replete with long, waterless practices, rollicking cross-country train rides, and the exhaustion of playing single-platoon football for 60 minutes. What’s left out is a sense of how the game was played in the 1940s; there isn’t nearly enough detail about what kinds of formations and strategies were used, likely due to the lack of game film from the era.

Curtis deftly describes the disruption that the Pearl Harbor attack caused to the Rose Bowl, and focuses on the logistics of moving the game to the Carolinas due to jitters about an impending Japanese attack on the West Coast. While the Duke team went on strike in order to force a break in their practice schedules for Christmas, the Oregon State team piled on a train and embarked on a whistle-stop tour of the country, culminating in a near-riot of Southern hospitality.

The Rose Bowl game gets its own chapter, but Curtis’ interest is in tracing the players throughout the war. His research in this area is remarkable, and the stories he tells of the lives and deaths of the Blue Demons and the Beavers in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters have the breathless immediacy of great storytelling. But the story is so big, and the stories are so meandering, that the overall narrative is diffused. More than once, we’re introduced to a character we haven’t met before --- someone who played in the game but didn’t have a starring role --- who is stuck in a bad situation on a foreign field and becomes a casualty of war. These are great stories, mind you, and Curtis tells them well, but the bond of playing in the game isn’t always enough to hold the threads of the stories together. His brand of expressive prose also isn’t always suited for the battlefield, with perhaps one too many tales of bloodied Rose Bowl rings being taken off the fingers of dead soldiers to be returned to their families.

FIELDS OF BATTLE is a fascinating portrait of a society setting down its fascination with sports and games to go to war. As the Greatest Generation passes, it becomes harder and harder to imagine an America at total war, where every institution has to make changes and adjustments to the war effort. If all the book does is remind us of the sacrifices of those who went to war, it would have been a success. That it does so with passion and grace makes it remarkable.