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C.W. Schuler
The novel begins in Czechoslovakia on the day the shooting stopped in the European Theater of Operations, May 8, 1945, and ends on August 8, two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima....view moreThe novel begins in Czechoslovakia on the day the shooting stopped in the European Theater of Operations, May 8, 1945, and ends on August 8, two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The narrative follows a U.S Army infantry battalion as it disengages from its combat mission and moves back across the border into Germany. Along the newly established Czech border the battalion occupies an administrative district approximating the area of an American county where they are responsible for internal security within their zone of operation. In addition the battalion is required to monitor the flood of refugees crossing the border as they attempt to escape the Czech police and the Soviet army advancing from the East. The former German forced labor camps in the area, whose occupants are now officially designated “Displaced Persons”, await repatriation to their countries of origin as required by the Potsdam Accord. These also fall within the battalion’s jurisdiction. During this hiatus from combat the rifle companies are ordered to resume tactical training exercises in anticipation of possible early deployment to the South Pacific Theater of Operations as part of the massive build up to an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands.
The story unfolds from the point of view of Lieutenant Henry Snyder, a staff officer, S-2 Intelligence Section, on the Battalion Headquarters Staff. In the early weeks of the occupation there is in place an official policy of non-fraternization, consequently Lieutenant Snyder, with the assistance of a small detachment of Security Guards, is made responsible for all contacts between the Battalion and the German Civil Administration. He is also expected to oversee the operation and security of a large Displaced Persons camp populated mostly by conscripted laborers of Polish origin. Although the small Military Government detachment quartered in a nearby town is technically responsible for organizing some semblance of local administrative authority, the tactical combat troops retain control of all actions and policies concerned with internal security in the area.
The action that follows explores the many operational difficulties and moral ambiguities that surface during the transition from killing to administration, from the relatively black and white ethical certainties of combat where the mission was clearly defined and the enemy easily identified, to one of peaceful and, hopefully, non-coercive negotiation. However, this latter role was one that the soldiers’ military training and long exposure to the unambiguous brutalities of the battlefield has left them ill prepared to address.
The drama takes place on a relatively small stage; the actors are mostly bit players from the lower echelons of the Chain of Command. There are no obvious heroes or villains in the traditional sense, only ordinary citizen soldiers pulled out of mostly ordinary civilian lives with all the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that “flesh is heir to” and thrown into situations for which nothing in their previous lives had prepared them. Consequently, the larcenies are largely petty and the homicides are acts of unreflective reflex. Each of the characters must come to terms in his own way with the many opportunities for economic plunder via a thriving black market and the temptations for sexual adventure with a compliant population of young women starved by six years of war and deprivation, many of whom can be seduced with as little as a package of cigarettes or a carton of American rations. Although each character adjusts to the realities of this unfamiliar environment in his own way, some are better able to adapt than others, hence the title: WINNER TAKE ALL.
If there is any general theme to be derived from this story it may possibly be as simple as this: no matter how strongly we may wish otherwise, we are all subject to an iron Law of Unintended Consequences which is as implacable and indifferent to human desires as the Law of Gravity itself. But on that score the reader will have to come to his or her own conclusions.view less