The judgment of contemporaries and later critics reflects the ambivalence of the work, which describes the war in all its brutality, but neither expressly condemns it nor goes into its political causes.

Here Jünger was wounded again, and absent shortly before the final British assault which captured the village — his platoon was annihilated.

He was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class, House Order of Hohenzollern and was the youngest ever recipient of the Pour le Mérite.

[2] The first version of Storm of Steel was essentially Jünger's unedited diary; the original English title was In Storms of Steel: from the diary of a Shock Troop Commander, Ernst Jünger, War Volunteer, and subsequently Lieutenant in the Rifle Regiment of Prince Albrecht of Prussia (73rd Hanoverian Regiment).

[4] Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels praised the work: “A man of the young generation speaks about the war’s deep impact on the soul and describes the mind miraculously.

The historian Jeffrey Herf wrote, "Unlike the pacifist and expressionist novels and plays of the early 1920s such as Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or Toller's Gas, Jünger's Stahlgewittern [Storm of Steel] celebrated the Fronterlebnis [Front-experience] as a welcome and long overdue release from the stifling security of the prewar Wilhelmian middle class.