There is little to criticize in Slotkin’s work. Maps and illustrations are sparse but the ones that are there are helpful, and Slotkin is certainly aware that such items are legion in archival realms for those interested in pursuing them. The book flows like a good novel, and though he must touch a large range of subjects he never loses his focus. Slotkin offers carefully detailed accounts of battles, particularly those of the 369th and the 307th and 308th Infantry regiments, the crux of his thesis. Readers familiar with the Lost Battalion story and the ethnic units of the AEF will find much that is familiar here. Still, as a broader social history, Lost Battalions makes a significant contribution to military studies and studies devoted to the achievements and struggles of ethnic soldiers, asking readers to “understand the political forces and ideas” that undergird America’s all-too imperfect attempt to emerge as a “democratic multicultural and multiracial society.” The work is thoroughly researched and documented, and includes 36 pages of notes.
This reviewer found Slotkin’s work a complimentary and expanded examination of social, political, intellectual, and military themes of America’s entry into the Great War exemplified by Meirion and Susie Harries earlier work, The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917-1918 (New York, 1998). In the end, Lost Battalions is not simply a compilation of the errors of our distant past. It is important today because the ideologies of racial nationalism that “plunged both Germany and Japan into dictatorship and wars of conquest that proved ruinous to themselves and the world” is a lesson no nation or national leader should ever forget.
Jeffrey C. Alfier, a Southwest regionalist poet, divides his time between Tucson and Germany. He holds an MA in Humanities from California State University at Dominguez Hills. A member of Poets Against War, he has been reviewing books of poetry for several years. His first chapbook, "Strangers Within the Gate" (2005), was published by The Moon Publishing and Printing, based in Tucson.
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