Covering War: Team Players in WWII : REPORTING WORLD WAR II; Part One: American Journalism, 1938-1944. Part Two: American Journalism, 1944-1946. <i> Edited by Samuel Hynes, Anne Matthews, Nancy Caldwell Sorel and Roger J. Spiller (The Library of America: $35; 1,882 pp.)</i>

World War I was a poet’s war: static, claustrophobic and filled with the disillusion of suffering without purpose. The distilled language of verse fit the mood of the trenches, those waiting, thoughtful hours before one jumped over the top into an uncertain fate in the mud of no-man’s-land.

World War II, by contrast, was a war of great scope and movement. Armies swept across Europe, Africa and Asia. Huge armadas dueled in naval battles that lit the night sky. Swarms of planes filled the skies. And this was Armageddon, good versus evil, the future of free peoples at stake. That is the stuff of prose, and this surprisingly fresh and readable collection of nearly 200 articles is filled with prose at its best: intense, immediate, tough.

Listen to Martha Gellhorn who was chilled to find SS flower gardens amid the cruelty and death at Dachau: “Behind the barbed wire and the electric fence the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky. They watched us but did not move. No expression shows on a face that is only yellowish stubbly skin stretched across bone.”

William L. Laurence flies with the planes delivering the bomb on Nagasaki and gives a firsthand description of an atomic bomb: “The pillar of purple fire reached our altitude. Awestruck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes . . . seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam . . . struggling in an elemental fury . . . its giant petal curving downward, creamy white outside, rose-colored inside. It still retained that shape when we last gazed at it from a distance of 200 miles.”

Bill Mauldin’s tales of endless marches in the rain, of cold food and wet feet, of idiot officers, boredom, terror and bizarre escapades of bravery, are gems of insight. His language cuts through diplomatic niceties: “Italy reminds a guy of a dog hit by an automobile because it ran out and tried to bite the tires. You can’t just leave the critter there to die, but you remember that you wouldn’t have run over it if it had stayed on the sidewalk.”

Not every dispatch was written. Tom Lea’s unforgettable paintings of combat in the Pacific--most notably the iconic, dead-eyed Marine with the “Two Thousand Yard Stare”--speak more emotion and horror than photography ever could. Margaret Bourke-White’s images of Russian partisans come close, however, as do the famous Life photographs of Americans dead in New Guinea. But in the age before television, the best pictures were drawn with words.

Interestingly, the journalists are better at it than the novelists. John Steinbeck is here, so is John P. Marquand, Irwin Shaw, Gertrude Stein and of course Ernest Hemingway. But Hemingway’s wife, Martha Gellhorn, is a far better reporter than he is. Gellhorn uses all the language she has at her command to show us what she sees. She is completely absorbed in the moment; this is her bearing witness. Hemingway seems to be saving his skills for something bigger. Like the other novelists in this volume, his dispatches have a self-conscious, uncomfortable quality, like an actor having to be himself on a talk show.

Some truths, however, are elusive to journalists writing in the heat of the moment. Among the millions of Marines, sailors and GIs who go nameless in these volumes were Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, James Jones and Herman Wouk. Years after the war, “The Naked and the Dead,” “Slaughterhouse 5,” “Catch 22,” “From Here to Eternity” and “The Caine Mutiny” would engage the deeper, inner truths about the war with more firepower than any of the journalists in the midst of it could muster. But that does not take away from the value of this reporting, which over and over grabs the reader by the throat and says: “I was here, this happened, believe it.”

These articles form a vast tapestry of war experience, from the home front to the battlefield, an incredible lode of journalism of surpassing vividness and emotion. But despite this incredible variety, some omissions are troubling. There is a wealth of stories about the coming of genocide and war in Germany, but absolutely nothing about how Japan invaded China and slaughtered millions of Chinese civilians with a guilt-free conviction of Japanese racial destiny. Perhaps this is the unavoidable result of our European myopia at the time, a defect in attention to be corrected by Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death march. We see the beginning, and we see the end: the rubble of Cologne and Berlin, of Hiroshima and Tokyo.

John Hersey’s deeply disturbing account of what it was like at ground zero with the atomic bomb in Hiroshima ends these volumes, which makes sense in a chronological way, but like the bomb itself, threatens to overwhelm all that went before it. I found myself thumbing back to remind myself of what had come before the bomb; one of the best accounts of the brutality of the Pacific War was Hersey’s own coverage of the battle of Guadalcanal.

Reporters who covered the war in Europe and then came to the Pacific war were stunned at its violence. One doctor on a hospital ship told Robert Sherrod that at Iwo Jima, 90% of the men needed major surgery, compared to 5% when the ship was off Normandy during D-Day. The Japanese fought with a fanatic refusal to surrender. They, and the Americans, died with what Sherrod called “unbelievable violence.”

Each island closer to Japan became worse. More civilians died in the battle of Okinawa than at Hiroshima. Reading this book makes a mockery of the claims of today’s historians that casualties from an invasion of the Japanese mainland would have been relatively light.

It is good that we have forgotten much of the intensity of the war over the years, that the old wounds have healed, that the old anger has cooled, that our old enemies are now our allies and friends. Peace is better than war. But to understand those times, we must recall how the men and women who fought that war felt at the time.

Let Gellhorn remind us. She has just interviewed German women crying over furniture shattered by bombs, who “kept saying, ‘We are not Nazis.’ It is their idea of the password to forgiveness . . . ‘We were never Nazis! We are friends.’ There are hundreds of thousands of people in khaki around here--and equal numbers of foreigners in rags--who simply cannot see it that way. . . . In Germany, when you see absolute devastation you do not grieve. We have grieved for many places in many countries, but this is not one of the countries. Our soldiers say, ‘They asked for it.’ ”

These volumes remind us that the evil of World War II was war itself. If it ended with terrible justice, the Germans and Japanese who began it had only themselves to blame.