PROFILES IN COURAGE

By R.Z. Sheppard

Like the U.S. Cavalry in the last reel, Stephen Ambrose arrives just in time to rescue American history from total deconstruction by ethnocentrists, genderists and soreheads of the left and right.

The bugle sounded last year with Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, a retelling of the Lewis and Clark expedition that made skillful use of the explorers' journals. That best seller rekindled appreciation for an achievement as remarkable in 1807 as the first manned moon landing was in 1969. And in case it has gone unnoticed, the journey was an undertaking by an ethnically and racially mixed group.

Defying conventional skepticism about the public appetite for history on the hoof, Undaunted Courage sold more than 750,000 copies, about half of them in paperback. "I had no idea that it would become so big," says the recently retired University of New Orleans history professor, whose more modest literary successes include books on Custer, Crazy Horse, Eisenhower and Nixon. "It's a whole new game," he says. "At the age of 60, I became a rich man."

A year older and still bemused by his good fortune, Ambrose is following up his 1996 breakthrough with three volumes, two new and one newish. The latter, the hefty American Heritage New History of World War II (Viking; 628 pages; $50), was first published in 1966 with text by the late New York Times correspondent C.L. Sulzberger and photographs culled from international archives. It was an elegant memorial to the war's unimaginable destruction, anguish and fortitude. Ambrose furthers that tragic sense in his revision, which includes updated material on code breaking, Japanese war crimes and Hitler's atom-bomb project.

Americans at War (University Press of Mississippi; 200 pages; $28) is a new collection of Ambrose's essays that demonstrates deep knowledge and common sense about mankind's most senseless activity. Its author, whose military experience ended in 1955 after two years of R.O.T.C. at the University of Wisconsin, deftly avoids the punditry and globaloney of armchair adjutants and mediagenic experts.

Winning wars is obviously a vast and complex team effort. But as Ambrose bluntly says of World War II, "None of this would have mattered if the infantry had failed to do its duty, because in the end it came down to the poor sons-of-bitches making the attack." The proof is in Citizen Soldiers (Simon & Schuster; 512 pages; $27.50), Ambrose's 20th book and a high point of his long fascination with the nature of leaders and followers.

Combining a crusty overview with extensive oral histories, Citizen Soldiers follows combat units and individual battle-numb troopers from the invasion of Normandy to the Allied victory in Berlin. Not many starters finished. The period from June 7, 1944, to May 7, 1945, is saturated in blood, sometimes frozen solid. What was called the Crusade in Europe is in large part a story of questionable judgments, dumb luck, trial and error (the easiest way to dig a foxhole in icebound terrain is to start with a hand grenade; the main lesson learned in street fighting, says one survivor, is to stay off the street). "I feel very close to these guys," says Ambrose, who looks and sounds like a hardened field commander yet admits he sometimes cries at the computer.

Memory has truncated the liberation of Western Europe into 11 months of steadily grinding the Wehrmacht with fresh replacements and endless supplies from America's factories. Even the Battle of the Bulge is generally regarded as a momentary setback to an inevitable Allied victory. Ambrose, founder of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, hears a different story from the veterans--especially those who were ordered to advance continuously through the Hurtgen Forest despite appalling losses. The 28th Division alone suffered more than 6,000 killed and wounded, many by falling branches cunningly blasted from towering evergreens by German artillery.

Ambrose's macro war is suitably conventional. Allied Commander Eisenhower was the right man in the right job; British Field Marshal Montgomery was an obstructionist and all-round pain in the keister; Patton was the best field general of the war, despite eugenic notions that were strictly Third Reich--he pulled the bravest men off of the front to preserve their bloodlines.

But the heart of Citizen Soldier is with Willie and Joe, Bill Mauldin's famous editorial-cartoon dogfaces. Today they would be well into their 70s, if the Lucky Strikes and Spam didn't do them in. They would probably be bypassed in more ways than one. But they won't be forgotten as long as citizen-scholar Ambrose keeps his desk job.