Books: Soldiers Must Die

CRACK OF DOOM (313 pp.)—Willi Heinrich—Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.95).

Willi Heinrich is a 37-year-old German novelist whose specialty is the look, smell and sound of military defeat. He came by his competence honestly and bitterly as an infantry soldier in a fearfully mauled German division that bit deep into Russia, withdrew its remnants in broken retreat. Five wounds, Heinrich's personal quota, do not necessarily make a war novelist, but his first book, The Cross of Iron (TIME, April 23, 1956), proved that no contemporary novelist was better than he at the grisly...