The Other Side of Time: A Combat Surgeon in World War II

by Brendan Phibbs

Book Overview

As an American combat surgeon assigned to the German front, Brendan Phibbs saw it all: those wounded in battle, the horrors of the concentration camp Dachau, and the insensitive Army bureaucrats who... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316705101
• ISBN13: 9780316705103
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 341 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Shows you the heroism of the Greatest Generation

The Other Side of Time, is, along with Paul Fussell's Wartime, one of the best books ever written about World War II. Brendan Phibbs was a combat surgeon drafted into the Army in 1942 who saw service in Europe later in the war. The book is written from the diaries he kept at the time and re-read years later. Some of the passages in this book are incredibly beautiful, the firststory, about the burial of an ordinary soldier named Wally isfantastic. The book pulls no punches, Phibbs talks about the anti-semitism of his fellow doctors, the incompetence of many US military officers, the evil of the Germans and the stupidity of our Department of State in repatriating Russian POWs and displaced persons back to Stalinist Russia after the war. These stories make it hard to read, you want to weep when you read about the indifference of American medical authorities to the suffering of death camp inmates and gnash your teeth at the incompetence of our officers who sent inferior American tanks into head to head battles with the superior German panzers, only to see them destroyed. But despite these stories the heroism of the soldiers that Phibbs served with shines through. I really wish that they would reprint this book, or that HBO would do a series based on it as they did on Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers.

Truth is stranger than fiction!

This book deserves the accolades all of the reviews to date have given it. It is simply a great book, and no review can do justice to Phibbs' story and the way he tells it. This is a different take on war, from a surgeon who was 'there' but not fighting, at the end, as the Allies raced across Europe to cross the Rhine and end the bloody mess. Phibbs was like a fly on the wall in the command tents, and the things this fly saw were truly amazing. A poignant and beautifully told memoir of the horror of it all.

Combat Surgery from Ground Up!

Dr. Phibbs has documented in superb detail all the frustations, rewards and horrible reality of the frontline surgeon detailed to ground troops. This book should be read by anyone now in the US Army Medical Corps, and will remind those of us not in active service how demanding and shocking is the real work of the Battlion Surgeon. He has also shown clearly the delicate threads that make up the fabric of the combat soldier's brotherhood.

Read this book.

This book should be required reading for every human being on the planet. The author not only paints pictures with words, he makes you feel the emotion of the moment in your own heart. Wait until you read about the girl playing the piano and you will know what I mean.Enough said.

Beautifully written portrayal of US Infantry in WWII

One of my all-time favorite books, this is a beautifully written account of what WWII was actually like for US Infantry in western Europe. Unlike many WW II books in which the men who did the actual fighting are reduced to footnotes, the ordinary soldier is the "hero" of this book. These men come across in Phibb's book as what they were: ordinary Americans who overcame mind-numbing horror and fatigue in order to force the Nazis back into their holes. Steven Spileberg should have made this book into a movie instead of "Saving Private Ryan" if he had wanted to show what the war in western Europe was really like for ordinary soldiers.