Voices of the Bulge - Untold Stories from Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge

The powerful German counteroffensive operation code-named “Wacht am Rhein” (Watch on the Rhine) launched in the early morning hours of December 16, 1944, would result in the greatest single extended land battle of World War II. To most Americans, the fierce series of battles fought from December 1944 through January 1945 is better known as the “Battle of the Bulge.” Almost one million soldiers would eventually take part in the fighting.

Different from other histories of the Bulge, this book tells the story of this crucial campaign with first-person stories taken from the authors’ interviews of the American soldiers, both officers and enlisted personnel, who faced the massive German onslaught that threatened to turn the tide of battle in Western Europe and successfully repelled the attack with their courage and blood. Also included are stories from German veterans of the battles, including SS soldiers, who were interviewed by the authors.

Available from:
Zenith Press

Long Hard Road - American POWs during World War II

Between 1941 and 1945 more than 110,000 American marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailors were taken prisoner by German, Italian, and Japanese forces. Most who fought overseas during World War II weren’t prepared for capture, or for the life-altering experiences of incarceration, torture, and camaraderie bred of hardship that followed. Their harrowing story—often overlooked in Greatest Generation narratives—is told here by the POWs themselves.

Long hours of inactivity followed by moments of sheer terror. Slave labor, death marches, the infamous hell ships. Historian Thomas Saylor pieces together the stories of nearly one hundred World War II POWs to explore what it was like to be the “guest” of the Axis Powers and to reveal how these men managed to survive. Gunner Bob Michelsen bailed out of his wounded B-29 near Tokyo, only to endure days of interrogation and beatings and months as a “special prisoner” in a tiny cell home to seventeen other Americans. Medic Richard Ritchie spent long moments of terror locked with dozens of others in an unmarked boxcar that was repeatedly strafed by Allied forces. In the closing chapter to this moving narrative, the men speak of their difficult transition to life back home, where many sought—not always successfully—to put their experience behind them.

Available from:
Minnesota Historical Society

Albanian Escape - The True Story of U.S. Army Nurses behind Enemy Lines

On November 8, 1943, U.S. Army nurse Agnes Jensen stepped out of a cold rain in Catania, Sicily, into a C-53 transport plane. But she and twelve other nurses never arrived in Bari, Italy, where they were to transport wounded soldiers to hospitals farther from the front lines. A violent storm and pursuit by German Messerschmitts led to a crash landing in a remote part of Albania, leaving the nurses, their team of medics, and the flight crew stranded in Nazi-occupied territory.

What followed was a dangerous nine-week game of hide-and-seek with the enemy, a situation President Roosevelt monitored daily. Albanian partisans aided the stranded Americans in the search for a British Intelligence Mission, and the group began a long and hazardous journey to the Adriatic coast. During the following weeks, they crossed Albania's second highest mountain in a blizzard, were strafed by German planes, managed to flee a town moments before it was bombed, and watched helplessly as an attempt to airlift them out was foiled by Nazi forces.

Albanian Escape is the suspense-filled story of the only group of Army flight nurses to have spent any length of time in occupied territory during World War II. The nurses and flight crew endured frigid weather, survived on little food, and literally wore out their shoes trekking across the rugged countryside. Thrust into a perilous situation and determined to survive, these women found courage and strength in each other and in the kindness of Albanians and guerrillas who hid them from the Germans.

Available from:
University Press of Kentucky

Shattered Walls - A World War II Memoir: From Cherbourg to Berlin

The author of Shattered Walls, G. Richard Morgan, served with the Third Platoon, Company G of the Second Battalion, 407th Infantry Regiment - 102nd Infantry Division.

Landing at Cherbourg, directly from the US, in mid-Sept of 1944, the 407th Infantry Regiment was rapidly sent into combat. They saw major action reaching the Roer River and pushed on to the Elbe, being part of the resistance to the Bulge. At one point, Morgan was captured by the Germans, but luckily escaped.

When they reached Berlin, they waited for the Russians and drank vodka with them on May 3.

At that point there remained only two of the original 40 men in his platoon.

View a preview of Shattered Walls on Lulu.com.

Visit the author's website.

Available from:
Lulu

WWII in the Pacific - DVD collection

If your particular interest in the Second World War focuses on the battles in the Pacific, then you are particularly well catered for at the moment.

As well as the mini series The Pacific, and reprinted editions of classic books, Reader Digest have now brought out a 6 DVD collection, containing over 12 hours of footage, including period newsreels.

The 6 DVDs are:

• America Taken by Surprise - The story of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor
• Attack & Counter Attack - America's offensive in the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal and Tarawa
• Victory in the Pacific - American forces turn the tide
• Crucial Turning Points - A look at the stories behind 15 key battles
• Headline Stories of the 20th Century - Authentic Hearst theatrical wartime newsreel footage
• Going for Broke - The largely untold story of Japanese-American soldiers in WWII.

Plenty of material to keep you busy if the US experience of the Pacific War is your thing!

Available from:
Amazon (UK) (note: this is a US import so is in Region 1 - NTSC - format)
Amazon (US)

Crossing the Zorn The January 1945 Battle at Herrlisheim as Told by the American and German Soldiers Who Fought It

Conceived in desperation after the Battle of the Bulge in January 1945, Germany’s Operation Nordwind culminated in the frozen Alsatian fields surrounding the Zorn River. In what was expected to be an easy offensive, the German 10th Waffen SS Panzer Division attacked the American 12th Armored Division near the villages of Herrlisheim and Weyersheim. Neither army foresaw the savage violence that ensued.

Combining the vivid eyewitness accounts of veterans from both sides of the conflict with information gleaned from a variety of long-unavailable print sources, this richly detailed history casts a fascinating light on a little-known but crucial battle in the Second World War. Common stalwart German and American soldiers carried out near-impossible orders.

Available from:
McFarland

Naked Heart - A Soldier's Journey to the Front

Naked Heart: A Soldier’s Journey to the Front is a powerful statement about the dark and vainglorious side of combat as experienced in World War II by a young private, Harold Pagliaro. His true story is a gripping, authentic account of men’s behavior in the face of death on the battlefield.

Pagliaro is sent to the Vosges front in France in 1944, as a solo replacement in a reconnaissance unit, isolated from the men he trained with. Facing death moment to moment, without friends or a sense of belonging, he sees firsthand how the reality of battle distorts men with fear. They look for relief in pathetic shows of false courage or the exercise of arbitrary power. Throughout Naked Heart, Pagliaro’s army life and war experiences connect closely with his personal life: unfulfilled love, friends, family—in particular a younger brother.

Shocked by a lack of truth revealed in letters he sent home from the war, Pagliaro gathered his memories into a book. He committed himself to relate the true story behind the letters’ white-washed surface. His straightforward, informal style blends fact, feeling, and perspective.

There are a number of positive reviews on Amazon.

Available from:
Truman State University Press

The Box from Braunau

As a child, Jan Elvin thought very little about the tin box her father brought home from World War II. What she would soon learn was that the box had been a gift from an inmate at a German slave labor camp. Her discovery would start her on a long journey to uncover some of the fascinating and horrifying history surrounding the War, as well as a search to understand the man still haunted by its memories.

The Box from Braunau is both a daughter's emotional memoir of the unraveling and healing of a father-daughter relationship damaged by the ghosts of war, and a chronicle of a war veteran whose return to civilian life was marred by nightmares of combat and concentration camps. We follow the lives of journalist Bill Elvin and his daughter through excerpts from the riveting diary he kept during the war and private letters and newspaper articles he wrote as a journalist on his return. We follow him from his first days on the battlefield as a lieutenant in Patton's Army to his days at the Ebensee concentration camp, where he witnessed first-hand the prisoners' sufferings brought about by Nazi atrocities. We gain a new understanding of the War and its effects on the men who fought it.

Featuring exclusive interviews with family members and fellow soldiers, as well as with survivors of the camps, The Box from Braunau is an illuminating look at war through the eyes of one family. It is published by AMACOM.

The book has a detailed website which includes an excerpt and the table to contents.

Available from:
Amazon

Heartland Heroes: Remembering World War II

Heartland Heroes is a collection of remarkable stories from ordinary men and women who lived through extraordinary times. They resided in places like Lee's Summit, Independence, and Kansas City, yet their experiences were very much like those of World War II veterans everywhere. Some were marines, nurses, or fighter pilots, others were simply civilians who lived through the war under the martial law imposed on the Hawaiian Islands after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In Heartland Heroes, Ken Hatfield gathers the stories of more than eighty men and women, whom he began interviewing in 1984 while reporting for a small weekly newspaper in Liberty, Missouri. Hatfield's first subject was a marine named Bob Barackman, the uncle of one of Hatfield's coworkers. That interview, which lasted for several hours, had a profound effect on Hatfield. He began to realize that as a journalist he had a unique opportunity to preserve that small piece of history each veteran carries with him.

Hatfield spent the next seventeen years interviewing nearly one hundred World War II veterans and other individuals, but it was not until August 2001 that he decided to compile the stories into a book. The interviewees, most of whom lived in the Kansas City area at the time of the interviews, included Jim Daniels, a Grumman Wildcat pilot, who while trying to land at Pearl Harbor on the evening after the Japanese attack survived a blizzard of friendly fire, which claimed the lives of three of his friends and fellow pilots; Charles McGee, a pilot with 143 combat missions to his credit, who fought the Germans in the air and racism on the ground as one of the Tuskegee Airmen; and Dee Nicholson, who was just six years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and her home on Hawaii. She and her father recall what life was like for them and others, including Japanese Americans, after that fateful day. Through their stories, Heartland Heroes effectively captures this fading period of time for future generations.

Available from:
University of Missouri Press

Japanese Eyes...American Hearts

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, set Hawai`i on a new course of history that would affect every living soul in these Islands. How Hawai`i's people, particularly those of Japanese ancestry, responded to the act of aggression by Japan changed Hawai`i's social, economic, and political history forever.

Much has been written about how Americans of Japanese Ancestry (AJA) in the 100th Infantry Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat Team, Military Intelligence Service, and the 1399th Engineer Construction Battalion answered their country's call through military service - and the high price they paid in human lives in freedom's cause.

Not as thoroughly recorded, however, are the thoughts and innermost feelings of the nisei soldiers who put their lives on the line for their country, and what those experiences meant to them. Those stories have always been the most difficult to pry from the hearts and souls of the AJA men who served our country in World War II. It was that void in the story of Hawai`i's nisei soldiers that Bishop Ryokan Ara of the Tendai Educational Fund asked members of the Hawai`i Nikkei History Editorial Board to fill.

Japanese Eyes... American Heart is the result of that effort. It is a rare and powerful collection of personal thoughts written by the soldiers themselves, reflections of the men's thoughts as recorded in diaries and letters sent home to family members and friends, and other expressions about an episode that marked a turning point in the lives of many.

Available from:
University of Hawai'i Press

World War II Reflections: An Oral History of Pennsylvania's Veterans

Thirty veterans of World War II from Pennsylvania recall their time of service in France, Italy, Burma, Guadalcanal, the Philippines, and the Pacific in this new volume based on Pennsylvania Cable Network's award-winning series "World War II - In Their Own Words".

The very personal and deeply human accounts are presented in the veterans' own words, giving a perspective of the war through the eyes of ordinary citizen-soldiers. The stories range from profound experiences of dealing with death on a daily basis to the everyday facts of camp life, such as food, clothes, and leisure.

Available from:
Amazon

No Better Place To Die - Ste-Mère Eglise, June 1944 - The Battle for La Fière Bridge

In the early hours of D Day, the 505th Regimental Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division was dropped in Normandy. Its task was to seize the vital crossroads of Ste Mère Eglise, and to hold the bridge over the Merderet River at nearby La Fière. Benefiting from dynamic battlefield leadership, the paratroopers reached the bridge, only to be met by wave after wave of German tanks and infantry desperate to force the crossing.

Reinforced by glider troops, who suffered terribly in their landings from the now-alert Germans, the 505th not only held the vital bridge for three days but launched a counterattack to secure their objective once and for all, albeit at heavy cost. In No Better Place to Die, Robert M. Murphy provides an objective narrative of countless acts of heroism, almost breathtaking in its “you are there” detail.

Robert M. Murphy (1925-2008) joined the US Army in October 1942, serving with the 82nd Airborne in Italy, Holland, Africa, and Normandy. He received the Purple Heart (3), Valor (2), Bronze Star, Medal of Honor as well as the highest honor given by France, "The Legion of Honor".

Available from:
Casemate

After the Battle issue 144

The latest issue of the excellent After the Battle magazine has just come out. Issue 144 contains articles on the Battle of El Guettar in Tunisia in 1943 between the US 1st Armored, 1st Infantry and 9th Infantry Divisions and seasoned Axis troops; the story of POW Camp No. 13 at Murchison in Australia - home to 2,100 Italian, 1,300 German and 185 Japanese prisoners from April 1941 to January 1947; Putting a Name to a Face - the story of how American researcher Norman S. Lichtenfeld identified an unknown GI featured in photographs of captured POWs in Jean Paul Pallud's book Battle of the Bulge Then and Now, traced him to New Jersey and put a name to his face: George E. Shomo; and lastly the always interesting From the Editor section - Readers' letters and follow-up stories on previous issues. Highly recommended.

Available in some newsagents in the UK and directly from the publishers After the Battle.

New & Notable - 12th May

Saipan: Oral Histories of the Pacific War
by Bruce M. Petty

The battle for Saipan is remembered as one of the bloodiest battles fought in the Pacific during World War II, and was a turning point on the road to the defeat of Japan. In this work, the survivors—including Pacific Islanders on whose land the Americans and Japanese fought their war—have the opportunity to tell their stories in their own words. The author offers an introduction to the volume and arranges the oral histories by location—Saipan, Yap and Tinian, Rota, Palau Islands, and Guam—in the first half, and by branch of service (Marines, Army, Navy, Airforce & Home Front) in the second half.

Available from:
McFarland



The Bamboo Cage
The POW Diary of Flight Lieutenant Robert Wyse 1942-43
Edited by Jonathon F. Vance

Robert Wyse enlisted in the RAF in the late 1930s. Too old to be trained as a pilot, he became a flight controller and served throughout the Battle of Britain. In late 1941, his squadron was despatched to the Far East. The Japanese soon invaded, and Robert Wyse, along with tens of thousands of his comrades, became a prisoner of war. Shortly after arriving in his first prison camp, Wyse returned to keeping the diary he had begun en route to the Far East. Although P.O.W.s were forbidden to keep diaries, Wyse persevered and hid his journal, usually in a bamboo pole beside his bed. Over two years, he kept a detailed record of life in various camps in Sumatra, only ending in December of 1943 when it became too dangerous. He buried his notes, intending to return to claim them after the war.

The diary is a remarkably detailed and frank portrayal of life as a prisoner. Wyse was sharply critical of some of his fellow P.O.W.s, either for botching the defence of Java and Sumatra or for failing to provide the proper leadership in captivity. Nor did he hesitate to describe the savage conduct of his captors, although sometimes clearly struggling to find the words to adequately describe the brutalities he had witnessed.

Wyse spent over three years in enemy hands (the first two of which are described in this diary) before being liberated in the late summer of 1945. He was hospitalized for some time and didn’t return home until late 1946, his health ruined by the privations of his imprisonment. He died in 1967 at the age of 67.

Available from:
Goose Lane Editions

Mollie & Other War Pieces

A. J. Liebling (1904-1963) was an American war correspondent for the New Yorker. He sailed to Algeria in November 1942 to cover the fighting on the Tunisia front, later participated in the Normandy landings on D Day, and was with the Allied forces when they entered Paris.

'Mollie & Other War Pieces' is a collection of short stories written by Liebling during the war, focusing attention on individual soldiers, sailors and airmen who he met during his time overseas. In the original newspaper stories, these individuals remained anonymous. In the book Liebling has provided their names, in most (but not all) cases.

The stories include 'Confusion is normal in combat' - Liebling's search for the truth behind a 'legendary' soldier in the US 9th Division in Tunisia. Mollie (real name Karl Warner) was reknowned for outlandish dress, attitude to Army discipline, and bravery. Posthumously awarded the Silver Star, Mollie was killed in 1943. The story is supported by excellent descriptions of his daily experiences in Tunisia with the US Army.

'For Boots Norgaard' considers Liebling's time with a P-38 Squadron in Tunisia; 'Direction: Paris' describes the advance across France and the liberation of the French capital; 'And So To Victory', Liebling's famous account of D Day was written while onboard LCIL-88 at Omaha Beach; and 'The Massacre' - a chilling account of the murder of civilians in the village of Comblanchien in Southern France by German forces in August 1944 - an event which seems to be little known 65 years later.

Having picked up this book in a remainder shop, I wasn't sure what to expect. It turned out to be one of the best written personal recollections I've read in a long time. Granted, it was written by a professional journalist, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in personal recollections of WWII.

Available from:
Bison Books (University of Nebraska Press)

Further reading:
Comblanchien - photo gallery (website in French)