A Blitz of WWII Books

The longest, most daunting slog of World War II may well be battling the blitz of books published for this year’s 50th anniversary of combat closures in Europe and the Pacific.

Everybody’s rejoined the fight. Here are not just new volumes on an “ungolden” anniversary, but reissues of 38-year-old wartime classics, new translations of old works and books expanded by little more than epilogues, prologues and assorted second thoughts.

Heavier than a box of grenades, the pile covers America’s four-year involvement from 7:55 a.m. on a still, December Sunday at Pearl Harbor, to the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The European chronicles, indeed its war, start two years earlier with Britain’s internment of Germans and Austrian aliens in 1939, ending with the gasoline cremation of a bunkered-down Hitler and an Italian mob kicking the dead face of Benito Mussolini.

Several books present the Holocaust for its millionth, justifiable haunting to further etch plus jamais. Never again.

And this military bazaar has Andy Rooney telling about Ernie Pyle and Walter Cronkite at war; and Cronkite writing an introduction to a book containing the work of Ernie Pyle with nobody really liking Hemingway. Or Patton.

Oddly, after a half-century, there remain things to learn, even for intermediate students of the six bloody years and two days that killed millions: That a mother (and five children) died in Oregon in 1945 after picking up a balloon bomb that drifted from Japan. That Anne Frank did not get on that well with her mother. That Stalin’s war souvenir was Hitler’s jaw and part of his skull that eventually disappeared with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

And, in the latest twitch of a global tumult, one study claims that intransigence on the part of Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese government gave President Truman and his military commanders little choice but to employ nuclear weapons.

Adding revelation to this commemorative reading is MACARTHUR’S UNDERCOVER WAR (Wiley: $24.95; 257 pp.) by historian William B. Breuer, and MARCHING ORDERS (Crown: $30; 624 pp.) by Bruce Lee, former editor-research for the late military author Cornelius Ryan.

Breuer writes that in the 30 months between announcing he would return and actually wading ashore to retake the Philippines, Gen. Douglas MacArthur didn’t exactly fade away.

MacArthur actually spent those months in Australia, creating, then commanding, the Allied Intelligence Bureau. By gripping anecdote and detailed research, Breuer tells how this 70,000-man Allied force formed among Australian coastal watchers on remote Pacific islands used double agents within Japanese headquarters and organized Americans stranded in the Philippines to regroup and lead guerrilla armies in the interior.

For “Marching Orders,” military expert Lee scanned 1.5 million pages of Army documents and 15,000 pages of decoded intercepts of Japanese diplomatic communiques to see if Hiroshima or Nagasaki might have been spared.

Those decrypts, says Lee, prove the Japanese government defied an Allied ultimatum to surrender, or face “complete and utter destruction.” And a city, Hiroshima, was named. Japan also heard, but ignored a recommendation from one of its own ambassadors to radio the United Nations for an orderly, dignified end to the war.

In a study of alternatives, Truman was advised of a plan to invade Japan. He was also told that if the offensive lasted 90 days it might cost one million American lives. Or he could give the order for B-29s to head for Japan with atomic bombs and end it with one blow.

Stanley Weintraub’s THE LAST GREAT VICTORY (Dutton: $29.95; 704 pp.) covers the summer of 1945 and the final eight weeks of World War II, and Truman is aboard the USS Augusta when most of Hiroshima disintegrated. He ran around the ship spreading the word. Truman smiled, he waved the official message, he told sailors: “This is the greatest thing in history. It’s time for us to get home.”

War correspondents weren’t quite so inquiring in those days. They wore military uniforms, enjoyed officer status and obeyed censors whether the motive was military security or political embarrassment. They generally heard no evil, saw no evil and wrote no evil--only drama, courage, victory and personal experience.

So TYPEWRITER BATTALION (William Morrow: $23; 320 pp.), an anthology of six dozen dispatches culled from a collection of late Los Angeles journalist Jack Stenbuck, reads dated, flat and too inclined to glorify the correspondents’ personal involvement.

There are, however, classics; Frank Conniff’s piece for International News Service equating Bastogne and the Battle of the Bulge to the Alamo, Bunker Hill and Gettysburg.

Or Ernie Pyle’s report for Scripps-Howard on his vigil at the side of a dead infantry captain. Or Richard Tregaskis’ INS story describing his own terrible wounds that came with absolutely no pain. It lead him to decide that was “the only worthwhile bit of information gathered in that otherwise unproductive day of news-gathering.”

The rest of the dispatches could have stayed on microfilm.

Yet Andy Rooney’s MY WAR (Times Books: $25; 288 pp.) deserves a long life in print. All the better for not having been written in 1944 when he was dark-haired and tough-looking but, as with all of us, presumably a less seeing writer, Rooney’s recall of wartime years in Europe as a Stars & Stripes correspondent has evolved with understanding and feeling in the half-century since.

His written words are softer, not so grumpy as essays spoken on “60 Minutes.” It may be that war is too significant for something as easy as complaining. For war, says Rooney, is real life lived at full speed; concentrated, intense, even exhilarating by its extremes of living and dying, winning and losing, marching home or being buried.

Of his war: “We call World War II ‘The War’ as though there had never been another. . . .”

Of Col. James Stewart, movie star and bomber pilot: “When it comes to Jimmy Stewart, I’m the kind of sycophant I dislike. . . .

Of who was first in Paris: “Bob always claimed he was the first correspondent to enter the city by virtue of the fact that he had been careful to be the one sitting in the front seat of the Jeep.”

This is a warm, entertaining, thoughtful, honest and a very different Andy Rooney looking back in wisdom.

LONDON AT WAR, 1939-1945 (Knopf: $27.50; 351 pp.) by Oxford scholar, diplomat, publishing executive and biographical author Philip Ziegler is a profile in coping.

The blitz, buzz-bombs, Churchill, horse-meat meals and evacuation of London’s children is pretty ancient fodder. But Ziegler tells of city crime, even bank holdups, organized by military deserters of all Allied nations. Also sheep grazing on the hallowed center court at Wimbledon.

There were substandard air raid shelters and prosecution of contractors; anti-Semitism; a dozen hookers per street corner and some foods for the rich, none for the poor. And, of course, there was the American Occupation, the fun it stirred and a subtle benefit continued to this day.

“Since the Americans did not understand the subtle gradation of British social class, they ignored them,” notes one source. “So sweeping them aside far more effectively than decades of socialist preaching.”

ACCIDENTAL JOURNEY: A Cambridge Internee’s Memoir of World War II (Overlook Press: $23.95; 288 pp.) by Mark Lynton. Do not be off put by a clumsy title that smacks of “Brideshead Revisited” and fops of great privilege. This is the fun autobiography of a German-born Jew, a law student interned by Britain as a potentially subversive alien.

Lynton is released, serves with the British army for six years, and survives in a romp to write a book that is Evelyn Waugh’s class system satire versus David Niven’s sense of nonsense. A topping read, chaps.

CHILDREN IN THE HOLOCAUST AND WORLD WAR II: Their Secret Diaries (Pocket Books: $20; 409 pp.) compiled by Laurel Holliday. Children, always so precious, especially since recent pictures from Oklahoma City, assume divinity in this poignant volume that touches the worst level of inhumanity.

Twenty-three young people are on its pages. Most are dead. Eva Heyman, 13, and Moshe Flinker, 16, who died in Auschwitz. An 18-year-old boy executed as a partisan. A 14-year-old girl chosen by Mengele for medical tortures.

From these young minds come adult writings. Because the writers became adults in weeks. They speak of life with inordinate focus. Because death was always so close and quite visible.

It was young Eva who wrote: “I don’t want to die because I’ve hardly lived. . . .” And Kim Malthe-Bruun whose last letter from his condemned cell was signed, “Yours, but not for always.”

This is a bedside book. For days when perspective, priorities and our human resolve need a jolt.

In the 50th anniversary recycling bin are two epics by the late Cornelius Ryan, THE LAST BATTLE (Simon & Schuster: $14; 571 pp.), first published in 1966 and telling the battle for Berlin that ended Hitler’s 1,000-year Third Reich in three weeks; then A BRIDGE TOO FAR (Simon & Schuster: $15; 670 pp.) , originally issued in 1974 and detailing the disaster of the Allies’ Operation Market-Garden against bridges crossing the Rhine.

As Bernhard, Prince of the Netherlands, noted after the tragedy: “My country can never again afford the luxury of another (British Field Marshal Bernard) Montgomery success.”

The courage of Anne Frank once again touches our sadness and admiration in THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL: The Definitive Edition (Doubleday: $25; 340 pp.). Originally edited by her late father, Otto Frank, who survived Auschwitz, it has been expanded by German author Mirjam Pressler and includes entries excised by the propriety of the ‘40s--Anne’s emerging sexuality in the confines of her attic, self-doubts and disagreements with her mother.

It adds an appealing normalcy to a teen-ager too easily misidentified by history as unflawed, even saintly.

Bill Mauldin’s UP FRONT (Norton & Co: $19.95; 240 pp.) is a redux of archetypal GIs Willie and Joe in all their scuzzy, cynical, unshaven, M-1 toting, chain-smoking unglory. A half-century after the fact and his Pulitzer Prize for cartooning, Mauldin’s little book reveals a certain immortality. Change the uniforms a little, switch enemies, update the weapons and his captions would fit dog-faced Willies and Joes from Korea, Vietnam or Desert Storm.

First published in 1957, Gerda Klein’s ALL BUT MY LIFE (Hill & Wang: $21; 261 pp.) is another re-issuance, another holocaust memoir. But Klein survived the camps and now lives in Arizona, the wife of a former U.S. officer who liberated her hard labor factory.

In a new chapter to her book, Klein writes of returning to the place, now abandoned and in what was Czechoslovakia. She visits graves of friends who found another freedom. She looks at candles guttering on headstones.

“It brought up the unanswerable question that has haunted me ever since the day I left them there: Why?”

The epilogue of her book, it is the epilogue of war.