Coming out in the wake of a flurry of fact - inspired (if not fact - based) World War II novels, including Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, James Jones's From Here to Eternity, and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Battle Cry was highly
praised by critics and was a huge seller, possibly helped by the fact that it was a much more unquestioningly patriotic work
than many of those other books, most of which took a more cynical, jaundiced, and complex look at the
motivations behind the men fighting the war.