It can sometimes seem as though half of all published military history books are about World War II. I usually try to avoid these tasks because there are so many other conflicts to discuss. But sometimes I give up and try to pick out some good books from the impending flood.
There’s always room on the bookshelf for solid accounts of how commanders-in-chief handled their roles in war. NIMITZ AT WAR: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay (University of Oxford, $29.95).
Symonds focuses on the remarkable qualities of Admiral Chester Nimitz, a senior naval officer in the Pacific War of World War II. First, Nimitz had an enviable ability to work calmly and patiently with people of all kinds. “I have complete confidence in your abilities and judgment,” Nimitz told a distraught member of the headquarters staff as he assumed command of the Navy at Pearl Harbor just weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. , shook hands with each staff member. In 1942, he successfully gambled and came close to his two important naval battles in the Coral Sea and the waters near Midway Island.
It seems that such thoughts were swirling during the war. On the other side of the world, James Gavin, who had been thinking about death before going into battle for the first time, wrote in his wartime diary, “I take calculated risks.” Gavin was one of the most interesting generals of the era. He grew up partly in an orphanage and dropped out of school in eighth grade, but he was able to learn his way to West Point as an enlisted soldier. At the young age of 36, he was promoted to brigadier general.
GAVIN AT WAR: Lieutenant General James Gavin’s World War II Diary (Casemate, $34.95) Provides a vivid self-portrait. His diary is particularly notable for his skeptical assessment of his comrades and his army. “Our artillery is good, and our air force is not bad,” he wrote in his 1945. Everyone wants to live to a ripe old age. ”
Those poor infantry probably wouldn’t have agreed. A powerful new volume, Machine Gunners’ War: From Normandy to Victory in WWII with the 1st Infantry Division (Casemate, $34.95)one of which, Ernest Andrews Jr., tells the story of his own struggle to fight and survive as an unsuspecting foot soldier.
On June 6, 1944, just one year after graduating from high school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Andrews prepared to land on Omaha Beach as part of the Allied invasion of France. Instead of disembarking from their ship, they fell into the raging waters and one of them was never seen again.
To his surprise, the most difficult battle he experienced was not in Normandy, but when his forces approached Germany. During an all-night shootout in a thunderstorm, a sudden bolt of lightning struck two German soldiers just six feet apart, nearly killing him. he shot them both. As dawn came, he turned and saw hundreds of small craters in the cement wall behind him, created by bullets fired at him by his enemies.
After one battle, Andrews found the newly captured enemy escorted from the front line. Andrews envied the man.
The German was perhaps one of the luckiest of the 20 million soldiers taken prisoner during the war. An important fact about their incarceration was how varied it was. Bob Moore, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sheffield, England, describes their experience in his encyclopedia. POWs: Europe, 1939-1956 (Oxford University, $45)The best place to be taken prisoner was Canada, where German soldiers enjoyed beer halls, football fields, and well-stocked libraries. According to a medical study, in one fence, the average captive person’s weight increased by 5.4 kilograms in her 10 months. In contrast, German Russian POWs and some Russian German POWs engaged in cannibalism, led by famine.
Moore’s explanations are competent but dry, which is a plus, especially when movies like The Great Escape and Stalag 17 deal with romantic subjects like World War II prisoner-of-war camps. The numbers he speaks of are mind-boggling. Of his 5.7 million Red Army soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans during the war, 3.3 million died in captivity.
The Russians treated everyone badly, but most impressive were their own returned prisoners. Those who surrendered without a fight were sometimes inevitably considered traitors. One Russian woman, of whom more than a million had served in the Red Army, reported that after liberation from the Nazis she and her companions were “treated worse by their own soldiers than by the Germans.” Did.
Again, much more needs to be said about World War II. Unfortunately, much of it reinforces the harsh lesson that there is no end to the ways humans abuse each other.