A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2013, Henry Holt and Co On October 22, 2013, Henry Holt and Co., a publishing company that operates under the umbrella of Macmillan Publishers, released the box set of  Rick Atkinson's  The Liberation Trilogy, a monumental account of how the Anglo-American alliance liberated Western Europe and helped usher in the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.  The trilogy consists of the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-1943 ; The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-1944 ; and The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945 . Published over a period of 11 years, these works showcase some of the best historical writing about World War II since Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far came out in 1974.  (Want to read my reviews of the three books? Just click on the links you see on the preceding paragraph.) The definitive chronicle of the Allied triumph in Europe during World War II, Rick Atkinson's Liberation Tri

American military history - as well as that of our adversaries - is full of controversies. And even though the Second World War is a rare case where the morality of the Allied cause is indisputable, the nature of the conflict and the fateful decisions made by the Axis and Allies still stir up heated debates about how it was fought - and how it was brought to an end. As historian Richard B. Frank writes in his introduction to Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, "[h]ow World War II ended in the Pacific remains one of the great controversies in American - and Japanese - history. At the center of this controversy is the atomic bomb. Indeed, almost all accounts of this period position atomic weaponry as the hub around which other considerations orbit. This approach, however, profoundly fails to recreate history as it originally unfolded." As a result of this fixation with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a mythology has been created in both the U

(C) 2007 Random House/Vintage In 2007, three years after the publication of Max Hastings’ “Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945,” the British imprint HarperPress published a companion volume about the end of World War II in the Pacific, “Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945.” Like its predecessor set in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), “Nemesis” is an examination of the various military and political maneuvers that led to the Allied (primarily American) victory against the Japanese Empire during the war’s closing months. When Knopf, Hastings’ U.S. publisher, released the book for the American market as “Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945.” In this highly readable 688-page tome, Hastings depicts the earthshaking events that led to Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War in vivid prose and clear-eyed analysis of the various campaigns and battles that culminated with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hastings sets up his Pacific War chessboa

(C) 1974 Simon & Schuster Fifty miles south, in towns and villages close to the Belgian border, the Dutch were jubilant. They watched incredulously as the shattered remnants of Hitler's armies in norther France and Belgium streamed past their windows. The collapse seemed infectious; besides military units, thousands of German civilians and Dutch Nazis were pulling out. And for these fleeing forces all roads seemed to lead to the German border. Because the withdrawal began so slowly -- a trickle of staff cars and vehicles crossing the Belgian frontier -- few Dutch could tell exactly when it had started. Some believed the retreat began on September 2; others, the third. But by the fourth, the movement of the Germans and their followers had assumed the characteristics of a rout, a frenzied exodus that reached its peak on September 5, a day later to be known in Dutch history as  Dolle Dinsdag , "Mad Tuesday." Panic and disorganization seemed to characterize

(C) 2015 W.W. Norton On August 7, 1942, exactly eight months after the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, elements of the First Marine Division landed on Guadalcanal and two other islands occupied by enemy forces. Two months earlier, the U.S. Navy had won a decisive engagement at the Battle of Midway and stopped Japan’s eastward offensive by sinking four aircraft carriers and a heavy cruiser and thwarting Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plans to destroy the American Pacific Fleet. Now, for the first time in World War II, American forces were seizing the strategic initiative and taking offensive action against a major Axis power. Code-named Operation WATCHTOWER, the landings on Guadalcanal, Tonombago, and Gavutu had one goal: the capture of a new Japanese airfield under construction on Guadalcanal’s north coast. If the Japanese completed it, the air base could be used to cut the lifeline between the U.S. and Australia. If this occurred, Australia could face a Japanes

(C) 2011 W.W. Norton On Sunday, December 7, 1941 – “a date which will live in infamy” – a massive Japanese aerial armada swooped over Pearl Harbor and struck a devastating blow against the U.S. Pacific Fleet.  Almost six months later, four of the six aircraft carriers – Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu – which had launched those planes were ambushed and sunk by American naval aviators at the Battle of Midway. In less than 180 days, the battered but determined Pacific Fleet, commanded by a soft-spoken and strategically savvy Texan named Chester W. Nimitz, halted the seemingly unstoppable string of Japanese victories and gained the initiative in the Pacific. Ian W. Toll’s “Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942” is a vivid and searing account of the early months of the long, bloody and vicious struggle between the United States and Japan. In its 640 pages, Toll – a former Wall Street analyst, Federal Reserve financial analyst, and a political aide and speechw

Imagine, for a moment, living in a world where, among other things, 27,000 human beings die violently every 24 hours, most of the Eurasian landmass is either a battlefield or under brutal occupation, the seas – particularly the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans – are viciously fought over by the navies of several world powers and death rains down from the skies in an almost indiscriminate manner, killing or maiming thousands of persons – most of whom have never worn a uniform or carried so much as a handgun to protect themselves.  Dystopian science fiction? The plot of the latest Tom Clancy novel?  Hardly; this is a thumbnail portrait of planet Earth as depicted in Sir Max Hastings’  Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945,  a one-volume history of the Second World War written by the author of  Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy  and (among many other history books)  The Battle for the Falklands,  which he co-wrote with Simon Jenkins.  Published late in 2011 in Great Britain as  All H

(C) 2003 Penguin Books For over 60 years, the narrative of the last chaotic months of World War II in Europe has been dominated by the Battle of Berlin and the fall of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in the spring of 1945. The last 100 days of the war against Nazi Germany were full of drama and tragedy for soldiers and civilians on both the Western and Eastern Fronts as the Allied and Soviet armies attacked Hitler’s battered armies. But even as the anti-Nazi coalition was on the verge of certain victory, dissension between the Anglo-American allies and their Soviet counterparts planted the seeds of a new conflict – the Cold War. Since the 1960s, many authors – including Cornelius Ryan and John Toland – have covered the tumultuous events that led to Hitler’s downfall in books such as “The Last Battle” and “The Last 100 Days.” These books, which are based on eyewitness accounts by military and civilian participants, follow the “you are there” style popularized in Ryan’s classic 195

Hi there, Constant Reader. It’s 11:03 a.m. EST on a cool Saturday morning in Miami. The current temperature is 76 degrees Fahrenheit under cloudy skies. With an east-northeasterly wind blowing at 15 mph (gusts of up to 21 mph) and humidity levels at 51%, the feels-like temperature is 76 degrees Fahrenheit. So it’s not too chilly here, but not warm enough to turn on the air conditioner. I have been reading a lot over the past few days. Partly because I have been a voracious reader since I was a child, partly because I am a book reviewer for Examiner, but mostly because I need to read a lot in order to be a good writer. Right now my main focus is non-fiction, with an emphasis on U.S. military and political history. I’m also half-heartedly reading some fiction, especially Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and his epic Dark Tower series. I used to post my “current reading lists” at the now-defunct Bubblews and the soon-to-be defunct Persona Paper every so often, especially in “blog doldrums

www.liberationtrilogy.com For as long as I can remember, I've been interested in almost every aspect of the Second World War, partly because movies such as  The Sands of Iwo Jima  made the war seem like an exciting adventure with "good guys" and "bad guys,' but more importantly because as I grew older I realized that even though wars aren't something to be longed for, the conflict between the Allies and the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis was one of the few justified clashes of arms of modern history, even if some of its causes were the result of bad decisions made by the victors of World War I. As I've grown older, I've noticed that non-fiction books about World War II have evolved from the almost propaganda-like  the Anglo-American Allies fought a brilliant campaign of liberation from 1942 to 1945 with an unprecedented spirit of cooperation and strategic savvy  to the more realistic view of  while the western alliance was one of the most succes