The History Buff's Guide to World War II (47 page)

In 1943, for purposes of posterity and analysis, the U.S. Army formed its own historical department. Consisting of professional historians, cartographers, linguists, and support personnel, the unit began to chronicle the operations of the largest and most involved branch of the U.S. armed forces (two out of three Americans in uniform were in the army). At war's end, writing of the official histories began. The end result was the famous “green books.”

Every major American university has (or should have) the lion's share of these seventy-eight texts. Most popular are the ten European theater of operations volumes, detailing everything from the Normandy invasion in
Cross-Channel Attack
to the conquest of western Germany in
The Last Offensive
. All are thoroughly researched and widely respected. John Eisenhower, son of the supreme commander, depended on nearly the entire theater series for his rendition of the B
ATTLE OF THE
B
ULGE
titled
The Bitter Woods
.

Written of, by, and for the military, some of the works stumble from the sheer weight of military formation details and dry statistics. But each volume is enlightening in its own way. The most candid volumes may be the four on the Medical Department, the most alarming are arguably the three on the Chemical Warfare Service, and the most censored appear to be the three pictorial records gleaned of casualty images.

Also available are the multivolume sets of
The Army Air Forces in World War II
and
The History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II
. Supremely written is the fifteen-volume
History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II
, created under the direction of Harvard professor Samuel Eliot Morison.

During the war, the U.S. Army produced seventeen thousand tons of records—equal to the weight of ten brigades of Sherman tanks.

5.
RUSSIA AT WAR, 1941–1945
ALEXANDER WERTH (1964)

Churchill described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But a working knowledge of the Second World War requires at least a basic understanding of the Soviet Union's role. The Allies landed in N
ORMANDY
with nine divisions; Hitler attacked the Soviet Union with 170 divisions. Of all the war's dead, roughly half were Russian or Ukrainian. Of Germany's four million military fatalities, the Red Army and Air Force could take credit for 80 percent of them.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a marked increase in available information on and objective treatment of the “mystery.” One of the best examinations of the Red riddle is one of the oldest.
Russia at War
was written by a journalist born in Russia, educated in Britain, and present in the Soviet Union for almost the entire duration of World War II. Alexander Werth witnessed firsthand the privations in Moscow. He also saw starvation in his birthplace of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), combat on battlefronts, desperate resolve in factories, and liberation of concentration camps. He maintained connections with generals and the Kremlin yet remained grounded among citizens and soldiers. Werth wrote
Russia at War
as both a holistic and personal account of the darkest years in Russian history.

From his observations, the author credits the battle of Kursk rather than S
TALINGARD
as the turning point against Germany. He considers Stalin deserving of accolades and vilification for the demands he placed upon his people. Most valuable is Werth's presentation of the Russian perspective on invasion and retreat, on home life and battle casualties, and on victory and the atomic bomb, not from the official line of the Communist Party, but from the independent and dynamic viewpoints of everyday people.

In 1944, BBC correspondent Alexander Werth accompanied the Red Army in liberating the Nazi death camp at Maidanek, Poland. His description of the place was so horrific, the BBC dismissed the report as an exaggerated piece of Soviet propaganda.

6.
THE RISING SUN: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE JAPANESE EMPIRE
JOHN TOLAND (1970)

His 1982 book on P
EARL
H
ARBOR
conspiracies is unconvincing. His 1976 biography on Hitler reads well but is not at the top of its class. But John Toland’s
The Rising Sun
is arguably the most lucid and engaging presentation of the Japanese military perspective yet available in English. The effort rightly landed him a Pulitzer Prize.

To assemble the account, Toland went through the standard sources of transcripts, diaries, and records. He and his Japanese wife also interviewed nearly five hundred veterans, politicians, and civilians, including Harry Truman, members of Japan's royal family, and members of Tojo Hideki's cabinet.

Unveiled through extensive quotes and dialogue is the empire's often lethal infighting—between the royalty and cabinet members, between ultranationalists and cautious conservatives, between the army and navy. Also poignantly illustrated are the flesh-and-blood experiences of individuals: Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku's fatalism after P
EARL
H
ARBOR
, Lt. Ohno Toshihiko's struggle to stay alive in the caves of Iwo Jima, and Dr. Akizuki Tatsuichiro's attempt to treat the dying of Nagasaki.

Scholastic purists may dismiss Toland's narrative style as “storytelling,” but the fact remains he can paint a scene and thereby transport an American reader to the deck of a Japanese flagship or general staff meeting or a Hiroshima hospital. That he builds these moments upon the words of the actual participants only adds to the authenticity.

Of John Toland’s interviewees, twenty-one died before
The Rising Sun
was published. Among them were Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Hiroshima mayor Hamai Shinzo.

7.
THE CHRONOLOGICAL ATLAS OF WORLD WAR TWO
CHARLES MESSENGER (1989)

Maps in historic atlases are frequently too convoluted or too basic to be functional.
The Chronological Atlas of World War Two
, however, strikes a solid balance. With prudent economy, the atlas manages to incorporate the essentials of an operation without tangling the image in superfluous detail, primarily by matching subject and substance.

Panoramic views concentrate on panoramic conditions, such as areas of occupation, shipping lanes, and aircraft ranges of operation. Where greater detail is required, as in the marine assaults upon Iwo Jima, the cartography zooms in to pinpoint marine formations, their movement (over weeks, days, even hours), and the topography over which they traveled.

Air operations are especially well portrayed, showing not only where fighters and bombers flew, but also what their specific targets were, such as factories, submarine pens, and railroad depots. Also of tremendous benefit are maps addressing the commonly ignored but strategically vital battlegrounds of Austria, Burma, Crete, and Indochina.

To clarify the big picture even further, illustrations are accompanied by a day-by-day account of the war's progression. With ample text, the atlas describes not only the military overview of any given moment, but also the economic and political atmosphere in which it existed.

Arguably the work's weak point is its conclusion, which grossly underestimates the human losses and overall importance of operations in continental Asia, an arena otherwise well covered in the body of the book. Regardless, few works match this one in providing visual navigation through a long, churning tempest.

Charles Messenger wrote the text for
The Chronological Atlas.
He had been a cadet at Sandhurst, where he studied under John Keegan.

8.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
WINSTON CHURCHILL (1948–53)

Winston Churchill's six-volume series
The Second World War
cements his reputation as an artisan of English and a celebrator of empire. It also reveals a man wholly convinced of his own greatness.

Volume one,
The Gathering Storm
, discusses the era in which he was largely an outsider heavily critical of military caution against rising Nazism. Following is
Their Finest Hour
, featuring Churchill's ascendancy to prime minister and a passionate recollection of the Battle of Britain.
The Grand Alliance
addresses operations in North Africa and the Middle East as well as P
ERL
H
ARBOR
.
The Hinge of Fate
focuses on the devastating loss of S
INGAPORE
. Volume five,
Closing the Ring
, begins with the invasions of G
UADALKANAL
and proceeds to the eve of D-day.
²

The final volume rushes through the last year and a half of the conflict, but the title itself,
Triumph and Tragedy
, summarizes Churchill's ultimate view of the British national experience. He presents his beloved kingdom as victorious in war but relegated in peace, a diminished, bankrupt, international also-ran. Evident throughout, he sets this bitter tone in the series introduction, warning the two superpowers that eclipsed his: “Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred blood-soaked battlefields.”
³

For those repulsed by his militant verbiage, his blatant Anglocentrism, and his ornate and self-idolizing style, Churchill's
The Second World War
is still worthy of full attention for one supreme reason: it is the only memoir completed by one of the “Big Three.” Stalin and Roosevelt left no equivalent written legacy.

Churchill completed his monumental series despite three strokes, one after publication of
Their Finest Hour
and two after releasing
Closing the Ring.

9.
INSIDE THE THIRD REICH
ALBERT SPEER (1970)

Defeat was lethal for the Nazi elite. Suicide eliminated Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, H
ERMANN
G
ÖRING
, Heinrich Himmler, and a host of generals. Hangings for war crimes subtracted ten more. Highest-ranking among survivors was the minister for armaments, Albert Speer, who was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment.

While incarcerated he began to write, as he said, “to relieve some of the burden that pressed so heavily upon me.” Speer was one of the few defendants at Nuremberg who accepted responsibility for his actions, which included procuring and using thousands of slave laborers to manufacture weapons. Strangely, his admission of guilt led some Americans and British to label him “a good Nazi.”

Within a decade, Speer completed a rough draft of his manuscript,
Inside the Third Reich
. Technically an autobiography, it is the most intimate account of the Nazi privileged from their early days in Bavarian beer halls to their final pleas in an international tribunal. In between, Speer details his unexpected and sudden rise in the party, the concrete and ethereal aspirations of an inherently inefficient system, and Hitler's eventual loss of control over the war, his country, and his physical and mental health.

Naturally, Speer's view is incomplete. Sheltered from armed service, claiming to be ignorant of death camps, Speer was also absent from the Berlin bunker at the end (the best account of which is Hugh Trevor-Roper's
The Last Days of Hitler
). But his is a compelling elucidation of how a talented, educated person can rationalize, if not eagerly seek, participation in a regime he knew to be immoral and destructive.

At Nuremberg, opinions varied on what Speer's sentence would be. Some American jailers predicted acquittal. His defense lawyer thought he would get four years. Speer assumed he would be condemned to death.

10.
ORDEAL OF TOTAL WAR, 1939–1945
GORDON WRIGHT (1968)

The big picture often reveals more than microscopic scrutiny. Few histories demonstrate this better than Gordon Wright's examination of Europe in
Ordeal of Total War
. Through a mere three hundred pages, Wright manages to cover everything from Polish tank production to French existentialism. Touching many subjects, he employs a central theme: war consists mostly of intangibles.

Wright observes how both sides grossly overestimated the effects of area bombing, whether by planes or rockets, upon civilian morale. Instead of “breaking” the opposition, aerial bombardments often created solidarity among citizens. Case in point: Churchill's popularity was never higher than when London was under the Blitz.
⁴

Regarding weapons production, in which the Americans and British prospered and the Germans foundered, Wright credits dialogue more than economics. Allied manufacturers and military men were frequently one and the same, well versed in engineering and willing to exchange ideas. In Germany, scientists and the general staff worked within cliques and were consequently ignorant of each other's basic needs and abilities. In comparison, the Allies eventually perfected torpedoes, landing craft, high-altitude bombers, and an atomic weapon, whereas the Germans could not make a tank that ran well in mud.

The study of armaments can be reassuring in a way. Guns, ships, and planes are solid things. They can be drawn, measured, weighed, and counted. In contrast, elements such as motive, hope, fear, anger, and aspiration are far less containable, but as Wright demonstrates, they have a much greater leverage upon war than any weapon.