The conventions of World War II fiction are hardening. Following them, the novelists assemble a group of self-conscious types meant to represent a cross-section of America's regional, racial and social problems. The war novelists continue to show us the types in civilian settings, emphasizing the social data. And then they shift the scenes, and the moral and social values, and take their types to war, to share a common experience. The treatment, by convention, is almost always realistic. If the result is not a novel, it has often turned out to be a social document….

[Mr. Uris'] squad is a squad of Marines, and like almost every writer who comes upon that exotic branch of the service, Mr. Uris has tried to explain its mysteries. This has given his types a second function, and a far wider meaning.

If "Battle Cry" is not an original work of the imagination, it is probably, out of all World War II novels about Marines, the most intimate and accurate account of the way Marines were trained to fight and the way they did fight.

Mr. Uris is savvy about the Corps. He knows the mental anguish and the physical agony of boot camp, and he knows that a Marine's training never stops. He knows and describes how a Marine commander will order his men out for close drill the day after they have returned to a rest camp from a battlefield. Mr. Uris knows that, in the Corps, the tension of discipline is never relaxed. And he knows that, to a Marine, what he does is never quite so important as the way he is made to do it.

In Mr. Uris' most exciting chapter, his squad is not fighting a battle. They are on a hike, and not a particularly long hike. But they are speed-marching at a pace that tests first their physical and then their emotional endurance. To what purpose? Apparently to beat a record set by another battalion. But really each man is proving in his mind's eye—not himself, but whether he is a Marine….

The final test, but not necessarily the most trying, is the battlefield itself. Mr. Uris' men first write their names in blood on a childish pact, and then on the beaches of Tarawa and Saipan. By then their civilian problems are hard to remember. And there they find an end, if not a solution to them all.