This week we serve up a double helping of the "Good War."  There's a new novel from bestseller Jeff Shaara chronicling the early campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy and an account of a not-so-merry Christmas 1944 in the frigid and deadly Ardennes Forest by historian Stanley Weintraub.

The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II, by Jeff Shaara.  Ballantine, $27.95 (672 pp.) ISBN 0-345-46141-X

One of our finest historical novelists, Shaara has chronicled America's wars from the   Revolution (Rise to Rebellion, The Glorious Cause ) to the Mexican War (Gone for Soldiers), Civil War (Gods and Generals, The Last Full Measure ), and World War I (To the Last Man).  Now, Shaara turns his talent to the most destructive and deadly conflict in human history: World War II.

The Rising Tide follows the early tentative steps of the U.S. Army as it endures its baptism by fire in North Africa and pushes on to invade and conquer Sicily and invade the Italian mainland.  The first of a planned trilogy on the European Theater, Shaara ends this first volume with the Allies trying to get traction in Italy and, at the same time, planning for a cross-channel invasion of France.

The proposed second installment will cover the Normandy invasion and breakout, and the third will carry the story from Bastogne through the end of the war in Europe.  Shaara has indicated that he eventually hopes to write about the war in the Pacific.

Shaara's fiction is character-driven, and the characters are drawn from history.  Here he allows the story to unfold from the diverse perspectives of commanders (e.g. Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton and German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel) and common solders (e.g. Jack Logan, a tank gunner with the First Armored Division and
Paratrooper Jesse Adams, a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division).

Drawing on extensive research into his characters' lives-their diaries, letters, and memoirs-Shaara exposes the frustrations of command:  from the petty rivalries among commanders to the impossible demands of ill-advised politicians and the "idiotic" notions promulgated by the press.  At one point, Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall commiserates with an irate Ike: "'Newspapers are a great place for cowards and malcontents to have their say.'"  Some things, it seems, never change.

From the big picture, Shaara segues seamlessly to the grunt-level world of fear, chaos, and violent death.  He is especially good at describing the unique agony of desert warfare and the mass confusion of combat jumps.

Novelist Shaara seems to be following in the footsteps of historian Rick Atkinson whose An Army at Dawn covers much of the same ground and is the first of a proposed nonfiction trilogy on World War II in the west.  Read them together for a definitive understanding of the early, tentative years of the watershed event of the twentieth century.

11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944, by Stanley Weintraub.  Free Press, $25 (201pp) ISBN 0-7432-8710-0

Prof. Weintraub (Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, December 1914) returns to the subject of war and Christmas in this anecdotal account of a nightmarish holiday for the troops caught up in Hitler's desperate offensive against the "sparsely held" Allied front in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium.

The German offensive, launched on December 16, 1944, caught the Allies unprepared and punched a bulge in their lines.  That Christmas season and into January, 1945, U.S. troops-only a very few British units participated-fought valiantly to contain the salient and roll it back.

The weather was miserable-overcast, snowy, bitterly cold-and made resupply problematic.  Many of the defenders, most famously the 101st Airborne Division, were rushed to the front without winter clothing or sufficient ammunition.  It made for "the most bitter [Christmas] since Valley Forge."

The Battle of the Bulge was one of the bloodiest of the war and is one of the most celebrated.  A small library has been written about the battle, and Hollywood has featured it in numerous movies-never more vividly perhaps than in the HBO mini-series "Band of Brothers."

With this in mind, Weintraub is quick to admit his limited focus.  This is "not a detailed military history" of the battle he writes but "a look at [the battle] through the lens of Christmas."  As a result, there is little new here, and serious students of World War II will be disappointed.

Casual readers will find the narrative-a pastiche of anecdotes featuring the exalted (Eisenhower, Patton) and the humblest soldiers in their frozen foxholes-an absorbing introduction to the larger story of the battle.