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A Pulitzer Prizewinning combat correspondent recounts his personal experience of covering World War II on the front lines. Legendary reporter Don Whitehead covered almost every important Allied invasion and campaign in Europefrom North Africa to landings in Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and Normandy, and to the drive into Germany. His dispatches, published in Beachhead Don, are treasures of wartime journalism. From September 1942, as a freshly minted Associated Press journalist in New York, to the spring of 1943 as Allied tanks closed in on the Germans in Tunisia, he also kept a diary of his experiences as a rookie combat reporter. The diary stops in 1943, and it has remained unpublished until now. Later, Whitehead started work on a memoir of his extraordinary life in combat that would remain unfinished. In this book, John B. Romeiser has woven both the North African diary and Whitehead's memoir of the subsequent landings in Sicily into a vivid, unvarnished, and completely riveting story of eight months during some of the most brutal combat of the war. Here, Whitehead captures the fierce fighting in the African desert and Sicilian mountains, as well as rare insights into the daily grind of reporting from a war zone, where tedium alternated with terror. These writings by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner offer a unique and up-close view of the Second World Waras well as a reminder of the risks journalist take to bring us the first draft of history. ';No one bore witness better than Don Whitehead... this volume, deftly combining his diary and a previously unpublished memoir, brings Whitehead and his reporting back to life, and twenty-first-century readers are the richer for it.' from the foreword by Rick Atkinson
When literary biographer and memoirist Louise DeSalvo embarked upon a journey to learn why her father came home from World War II a changed man, she didn't realize her quest would take ten years, and that it would yield more revelations about the man-and herself-and the effect of his military service upon their family than she'd ever imagined. During his last years, as he told her about his life, DeSalvo began to understand that her obsession with war novels and military history wasn't merely academic but rooted in her desire to understand this complex father whom she both adored and reviled because of his mistreatment of her. Although she at first believes she wants to uncover his story, the story of a man who was no hero but who was nonetheless adversely affected by the his military service, she learns that what she really wants is to recover the man that he was before he went away.As DeSalvo and her father uncover his past piece-by-piece, bit-by-bit, she learns about the dreams of a working-class man who entered the military in the late 1930s during peacetime to better himself, a man who wanted to become a pilot. She learns about what it was like for him to participate in war games in the Pacific prior to the war, and its devastating toll. She learns about what it was like for her parents to fall in love, set up house, marry, and have children during this cataclysmic time. And as the pieces of her father's life fall into place as works to piece together the puzzle of everything she's learned about this time, she finds herself finally able to understand him.Chasing Ghosts is an original contribution to the understanding of working-class World War II veterans who did not conventionally distinguish themselves through "e;heroic"e; actions and whose lives were not until recently considered worthy of historical or cultural attention. It personalizes the history of those sailors who served in the Navy aboard aircraft carriers and on islands in the Pacific prior to, and during World War II and contributes to the current vital conversation about the often-unrecognized effects of war and its traumas upon those men and their families. It reveals the lifelong devastating consequences of military service on those men and women who fell in love, married, and set up house. And it reveals the complexity of what it is like to be the daughter of a father who has gone to war.
Looks at how American soldiers, sailors, and Marines considered race, ethnicity, and identity in the planning and execution of the wartime occupation of Okinawa, during and immediately after the Battle of Okinawa, 1945-1946.
Analyzes Anglo-American and Italian literary, cinematic and military representations of World War II Italy in order to trace, critique and move beyond the gendered paradigm of redemption that has conditioned understandings of the Allied-Italian encounter.
This book is a rare and important gift. One of the few memoirs of combat in World War II by a distinguished African-American flier, it is also perhaps the only account of the African-American experience in a German prison camp.
The illuminating intellectual biography of one of the most controversial Italian figures of the twentieth century.
A moving memoir of childhood in Dutch colonial Java, coming of age in wartime, and the trauma of life in WWII Labor Camps run by the Japanese. As a boy growing up the Dutch island colony of Java, John K. Stutterheim spent hours exploring his exotic surroundings, taking walks with his younger brother and dachshund along winding jungle roads. It was a fairly typical life for a colonial family in the Dutch East Indies, but their colonial idyll ended when the Japanese invaded in 1942, when John was fourteen. With the surrender of Java, John's father was taken prisoner. Soon thereafter, John, his younger brother, and his mother were imprisoned. A year later he and his brother were moved to a forced labor camp for boys, where disease, starvation, and the constant threat of imminent death took their toll. Throughout all of these travails, John kept a secret diary hidden in his mattress. His memories now offer a unique perspective on an often-overlooked episode of World War II. What emerges is a compelling story of a young man caught up in the machinations of a global warstruggling to survive while caring for his gravely ill brother.
In this compelling book, G. Kurt Piehler and Sidney Pash bring together a collection of essays offering a fresh examination of American participation in the Second World War, including a long overdue reconsideration of such seminal topics as the forces le
Offers a close look at the legacy of a few Jewish families from Sussen-a village in southern Germany
As an Associated Press (AP) correspondent during World War-II, the author fought restrictions that prohibited him from scooping stories from a rival wire service. This title highlights the role of the Associated Press and the war correspondent as important links between the military and the American home front.
Offers a fresh examination of American participation in the Second World War
Presents a first person account of two of the heroes of World War II and of the love that they shared across the years and miles.
James Maurice Gavin left for war in April 1943 as a colonel commanding the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. At war's end, this soldier had become one of our greatest generals. This book includes James Gavin's letters home to his daughter Barbara providing a portrait of the American experience in World War II.
Kurt Frank Korf's story is one of the most unusual to come out of World War II. Drawing on his correspondence and on oral histories and interviews with Korf, the author paints a portrait of a man forced to flee Nazi Germany because the Nuremburg Laws had relegated him to the status of "second-degree mixed breed" as Korf had one Jewish grandparent.
Provides a comprehensive account of one of the most complex, and conflicted, arenas of the Second World War. Drawing on a range of sources, this book synthesizes political, military, social, economic, diplomatic, and cultural history.
This fascinating book tells the remarkable story of an ordinary American woman's heroism in the French Resistance.
As an Army lieutenant, the author served in Tokyo as an intelligence officer. He translated thousands of letters, interviews, and other documents by Japanese citizens of all kinds, and came to know, as few Americans could, the hearts and minds of a defeated people as they moved slowly to democracy. This is a chronicle of his experience in Japan.
How did Japan and the United States end up at war on December 7, 1941? What American decisions might have provoked the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor? In this classic study of the run up to World War II, Utley examines the ways domestic politics shaped America's response to Japanese moves in the Pacific.
This selection of letters offers perspectives on the US experience during World War II. The first published correspondence between GI and CO brothers, the letters chronicle the military service and life on the home front. Frank and Albert Dietrich also argued about the uses of armed force and pacifist non-violence in the face of fascism and Nazism.
"A marvelous story... will be consulted as long as World War II and the Spanish Civil War are studied... Cane is a very good writer." Frank F. Mathias, author of The GI Generation: A Memoir
Offers a portrait of home front Ohio, and how a young boy, his sister, and his mother waited out their war, scanning newspapers and magazines for news of Dad and devouring letters full of humor and expressions of love for and pride in his family and dreams of a good life after the war.
This study examines the response of the Greek clergy to the experience of enemy occupation during World War II. In particular, it evaluates how these men reacted to Axis brutality, the nationwide famine, the Holocaust, and the growth of national resistance movements during the period.
A historian examines why Hungary allied with the Nazis, and the devastating consequences for the country. The full story of Hungary's participation in World War II is part of a fascinating tale of rise and fall, of hopes dashed and dreams in tatters. Using previously untapped sources and interviews she conducted for this book, Deborah S. Cornelius provides a clear account of Hungary's attempt to regain the glory of the Hungarian Kingdom by joining forces with Nazi Germanya decision that today seems doomed to fail from the start. For scholars and history buffs alike, Hungary in World War II is a riveting read. After the First World War, the new country of Hungary lost more than 70 percent of its territory and saw its population reduced by nearly the same percentage. But in the early years of World War II, Hungary enjoyed boom timesand the dream of restoring the Hungarian Kingdom began to rise again. As the war engulfed Europe, Hungary was drawn into an alliance with Nazi Germany. When the Germans appeared to give Hungary much of its pre-World War I territory, Hungarians began to delude themselves into believing they had won their long-sought objective. Instead, the final year of the world war brought widespread destruction and a genocidal war against Hungarian Jews. Caught between two warring behemoths, the country became a battleground for German and Soviet forcesand in the wake of the war, Hungary suffered further devastation under Soviet occupation and forty-five years of communist rule. This is the story of a tumultuous time and a little-known chapter in the sweeping history of World War II.
In this concise, clearly written book, Thomas and Michael Christofferson provide a balanced introduction to every aspect of the French experience during World War II.
Over the course of five years, the Reserve Officers Association of the United States - the nation's oldest such professional military organization - invited its members to write about their experiences in World War II. This title deals with this topic.
One of the legendary reporters of World War II, the author covered important Allied invasion and campaign in Europe-from landings in Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio on the Italian front to Normandy, where he went ashore with the First Army Division. This book collects his dispatches that are classics of war journalism.
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