World War II: Official and Personal

...Starting with the Treaty of Versailles, he sketches with broad strokes the major developments in Europe and Asia down to 1939, the German blitzkrieg in Poland, the fall of France, the battle of Britain, the war on the Eastern front, Pearl Harbor and U.S...

...Apparently the author relied heavily on newspaper accounts, some documents and memoirs, and popular histories written without access to the record...

...The strategy of the war, for example, is never adequately explained, so that the reader is at a loss to understand the reason for all the postwar controversy...

...But a new generation has arisen since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a generation to whom Hitler is only a strange mustached figure in the history books and Bataan, Tarawa, Normandy and Bastogne the names of faraway places that hold no personal recollections of a time of greatness or tragic loss...

...Considering the scope of the conflict, it is surprising how much he has managed to include...

...Reading it side by side with Snyder's history, one is struck by the honesty of its language and the absence of contrived effects...

...One looks in vain for a systematic account of the establishment and organization of the Combined and Joint Chiefs of Staff or the evolution of the major strategic concepts of the war...

...This alone is a real accomplishment, and for this Synder deserves much credit...

...Harpers...

...The range of topics that must be covered to do justice to a war of this size is broad indeed, and includes not only military events, but also diplomacy, politics, economics, technology and a host of other subjects in which no single person can claim expertness...

...The first, Louis L. Snyder's The War, A Concise History, is a straightforward history, work of a professional historian and experienced writer...

...Each complements the other and together they provide a coherent and integrated narrative on two levels, the official and the personal...

...10.95...

...Nor does he describe the elaborate organization by which the Allies conducted the most successful coalition war in history—an achievement that may well rank as one of the most important of World War II...

...From these writings, wherever found, the editors have skillfully wrought a narrative that conveys all the high drama of the conflict, the sound of battle, and the individual experiences of the fighting man from all services and in all theaters of war...

...It draws on the stuff from which history is made—the words of statesmen and common people, memoirs, newspaper stories and the writings of participants...

...Brief chapters or sections on the home front, on Allied conferences, on the problems of supply and production, furnish a welcome respite from the descriptions of campaigns and battles...

...In dealing with the military aspects of the war, Snyder's work is most disappointing, not only because of his superficial and sometimes misleading account of campaigns, but also because he has ignored or slighted some of the larger and more significant aspects of modern warfare, and failed to comprehend the true meaning of many of the events he describes...

...Snyder's account of the fighting itself is also disappointing, marred by shallowness and a style suited more to Madison Avenue than the battlefields of World War II...

...Perhaps most instructive for our own time, provided we read its meaning right, is World War II...

...Some parts of the history are strangely out of balance, reflecting a contemporary interest in small incidents rather than a historical judgment of their relevance...

...it was not the author's intention to make it so, though many of his readers will disagree with him about what he has decided to omit...

...entry into the war, the shift of the Allies from the defensive to the offensive in 1943 and 1944 in the Pacific and in Europe, and then the massive blows by which Germany and Japan were brought down in defeat...

...The weapons have changed, but it is questionable whether the nature of war has so greatly altered as to make the past, as some claim, wholly irrelevant to the present and future...

...Finally, the narrative is written in a breezy journalistic style, with an obvious striving for effect that is most inappropriate for a work of historical scholarship, even when it is designed for a popular audience...

...Any historian would be hard pressed to equal the testimony of eye-witnesses, but Snyder's concise history of the war, useful as it is, falls far short of the mark...

...The Taste of Courage, is a collection of personal narratives covering the years from 1939 to 1945, a sort of eye-witness history of the war...

...Constantly, Snyder tries to keep before his reader the interrelationship between political and economic developments and the progress of the war...

...Edited by Desmond Flower and James Reeves...

...Still, Professor Snyder has made the effort, and has produced a comparatively short book ("concise" is perhaps misleading) that compresses the story of the war into about 550 pages...

...In some ways, The Taste of Courage, though it does not pretend to be history, is a better history of World War II than Snyder's work...

...They have done this and more...

...The makers of this book are those who directed and fought the war, the leaders of nations and the soldiers of all ranks and all nationalities—American, British, Russian, German and Japanese...

...But it is difficult to know just what he based his story on, for he has failed to take the reader into his confidence by listing his sources...

...It contains also a number of factual errors and omissions that give evidence of careless research and a failure to make use of the large and excellent collection of published materials, monographs and official histories of World War II...

...For this new generation as well as for those whose memory of those days may have faded, there are two recent books on World War II that tell the story of the war in its entirety...

...And with the passage of time, as we gain better perspective and a broader knowledge of the years from 1939 to 1945, the lessons of World War II emerge more and more clearly...

...Reviewed by Louis Morton Professor of History, Dartmouth College ONE OF THE RESULTS of the current concern with military affairs and the problems of national security is the growing interest of Americans in their military past, evidenced by the steady stream of books dealing with American wars and military history...

...We still need a really competent short history of World War II, but The Taste of Courage is likely to last a long time...

...to see, to hear, to smell, to feel the war at first hand...

...1,120 pp...

...The aim of the editors of The Taste of Courage was to give the reader a feeling "of how it actually felt to be alive twenty years ago...

...Writing the history of a great war like World War II, global in scope and calling forth all the energies of the nations involved, is a task to challenge the most intrepid...

...By arranging their selections into separate chapters, each covering a specific aspect of the war or campaign, and tying these together with introductory and explanatory texts, they have produced a documentary history that is both compelling and life-like...

...It has only one flaw, and that is the difficulty of identifying the source of the selections, a fault not likely to bother the general reader...

...Admittedly, this "concise" history is neither complete nor detailed...

...the second...

...To put all these between the covers of a single book, and to make such a work complete, objective in tone and readable is well-nigh impossible...