Clint Eastwood’s $65 million World War 2 box office bomb is given high marks for realism by a former Marine Corps special ops team leader.

Mark Hass. Peconic First Books, $25 trade paper (402p) ISBN 979-8-9899094-0-7 Hass debuts with a memorable tale of discrimination and hardship faced by a young Jewish man in pre-WWII eastern Poland.

Only a couple of decades later, at the onset of World War II, most military tasks assigned to animals were done by machines, and warfare would never again rely so heavily on animal power.