World War II Resources: Find Books

Martin Gilbert's highly-acclaimed "Churchill: A Life" is a story of adventure. It follows Winston Churchill from his earliest days to his moments of triumph. Here, the drama and excitement of his story are ever-present, as are his tremendous qualities in peace and war, not least as an orator and as a man of vision. Gilbert gives us a vivid portrait, using Churchill's most personal letters and the recollections of his contemporaries, both friends and enemies, to go behind the scenes of some of the stormiest and most fascinating political events of our time, dominated by two world wars and culminating in the era of the Iron Curtain.

"In this biography Conrad Black makes a case for Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the most important figure of the twentieth century, the nation's most accomplished leader since Abraham Lincoln, and one of America's greatest presidents. FDR transformed an isolated and isolationist country into the most formidable super-power the world has ever known. He was both the savior of American capitalism, in peril from its own excesses and the competing systems of Communism and Fascism, and the foremost reformer in the nation's history. And it was Roosevelt's bravery and remarkable leadership skills that brought America into the world's conflicts at mid-century as, in Winston Churchill's words, "the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old." It is Black's contention that the second half of the twentieth century was so much more successful than the first because Roosevelt permanently engaged America and Europe in the Far East." "How could this man, whose political life nearly ended with an illness at age thirty-nine, have accomplished so much as a politician, war leader, strategist, and global visionary? The sheer scope of FDR's life and achievements has deterred many historians and biographers from attempting a comprehensive biography. Additionally, FDR's remarkable personality was terribly difficult to decode - leading famously to comparisons with the similarly unmovable, and unknowable, Sphinx. Conrad Black has risen to the challenge. He tells us how this privileged seemingly facile young man became the vigorous young president and then the redoubtable older president. Roosevelt was underestimated as a young man and, as Black makes clear, continues, incredibly, to be underestimated, particularly by the propagators of the Yalta myth, according to which Roosevelt was swindled by Stalin. This book demonstrates that Roosevelt's dealings with Stalin were far more successful than the myth would have it."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"In this biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete look at the enigmatic leader whose sixty-three-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Bix shows what is was like to be trained from birth for a lone position at the apex of the nation's political hierarchy and as a revered symbol of divine status. Influenced by an unusual combination of the Japanese imperial tradition and a modern scientific worldview, the young emperor gradually evolves into his preeminent role, aligning himself with the growing ultra-nationalist movement, perpetuating a cult of religious emperor worship, resisting attempts to curb his power, and all the while burnishing his image as a reluctant, passive monarch. Here we see Hirohito as he truly was: a man of strong will and real authority." "Supported by previously untapped primary documents, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan is perhaps most illuminating in lifting the veil on the mythology surrounding the emperor's impact on the world stage. Focusing closely on Hirohito's interactions with his advisers and successive Japanese governments, Bix sheds new light on the causes of the China War in 1937 and the start of the Asia-Pacific War in 1941. Bix documents in detail the strong, decisive role Hirohito played in wartime operations, from the takeover of Manchuria in 1931 through the attack on Pearl Harbor and ultimately the fateful decision in 1945 to accede to an unconditional surrender."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Continuous and very large popular obsession with Nazis and Hitler fed by constant media attention. Ian Kershaw is a best-selling author and a household name thanks to his highly acclaimed 2-volume history of Hitler. 40 very strong black and white photographs. Focus on the key question of power ? not a conventional biography. This is an illustrated edition of Hitler, a best-seller in the Profiles in Power series. Adolf Hitler has left a lasting mark on the twentieth century as the dictator of Germany and instigator of a genocidal war, culminating in the ruin of much of Europe and the globe. So why, of all the fanatics in Germany after the First World War, was it Hitler who found such a mass appeal? How did such an unimpressive figure some to take control of the machinery of a complex modern state? Why, contrary to all expectations, was his authority not curtailed by the traditional ruling classes and constitutional constraints? Ian Kershaw answers these questions, and more, to provide an interesting and lucid introduction to the character and exercise of Hitler's dictatorial power.This is valuable reading for anyone wanting a better understanding of the Hitler, Second World War , Germany and Europe in the twentieth century.  Ian Kershaw is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. He has written widely on Hitler and the Third Reich, including the widely-acclaimed two-volume biography published by Penguin. In addition to his publications, he was consultant to the BAFTA-winning BBC-TV series The Nazis: A Warning from History, to the BBC2 programme War of the Century, to ZDF's Hitler: eine Bilanz and to ZDF's series in preparation on the Holocaust.

Hardly the buffoon he is frequently made out to be, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was an able politician who won the esteem of many statesmen and who knew how to cooperate peacefully with foreign governments when it suited him. Mussolini, the first comprehensive biography in fifteen years, offers a penetrating and provocative portrait of the Fascist dictator whose own ruthless and rapacious appetite for power ultimately doomed him and his regime.

From one of our greatest contemporary historians of Russia and author of the bestselling Lenin, Robert Service's Stalin brings us closer than ever before to the enigma of this terrifying, fascinating and complex figure.Drawing on a wealth of unexplored materialavailable for the first time since the collapse of the former Soviet UnionRobert Service's biography of Stalin is the most authoritative yet published. It concentrates not simply on Stalin as dedicated bureaucrat or serial political killer, but on a fuller assessment of his formative interactions in Georgia, his youthful revolutionary activism, his relationship with Lenin, with his family, and with his party members.

This unique window on history employs hundreds of images and written records from Japanese periodicals during World War II to trace the nation's transformation from a colorful, cosmopolitan empire in 1937 to a bleak total war society facing imminent destruction in 1945. The author draws upon his extensive collection of Japanese wartime publications to reconstruct the government-controlled media's narrative of the war's goals and progress--thus providing a close-up look at how the war was shown to Japanese on the home front.

Many of these visual and written sources are rare in Japan and were previously unavailable in the West. Strikingly, the narrative remains consistent and convincing from victory to retreat, and even as defeat looms large. Earhart's nuanced reading of Japan's wartime media depicts a nation waging war against the world and a government terrorizing its own people.

At once informed, scholarly, and readily accessible, this lavishly illustrated volume offers an accurate representation of the official Japanese narrative of the war in contemporary terms. The images are fresh and compelling, revealing a forgotten world by turns familiar and alien, beautiful and stark, poignant and terrifying.

Like so many soldiers of his generation, William V. Spanos was not much more than a boy when he went off to fight in World War II. In the chaos of his first battle, what would later become legendary as the Battle of the Bulge, he was separated from his antitank gun crew and taken prisoner in the Ardennes forest. Along with a procession of other prisoners of war, he was marched and conveyed by freight train to Dresden. Surviving the brutal conditions of the labor camps and the Allies’ devastating firebombing of the city, he escaped as the losing German army retreated.   For Spanos, this was never a “war story.” It was the singular, irreducible, unnameable, dreadful experience of war. In the face of the American myth of the greatest generation, this renowned literary scholar looks back at that time and crafts a dissident, dissonant remembrance of the “just war.” Retrieving the singularity of the experience of war from the grip of official American cultural memory, Spanos recaptures something of the boy’s life that he lost. His book is an attempt to rescue some semblance of his awakened being—and that of the multitude of young men who fought—from the oblivion to which they have been relegated under the banalizing memorialization of the “sacrifices of our greatest generation.”

Japan's Contested War Memories is an important and significant book that explores the struggles within contemporary Japanese society to come to terms with Second World War history. Focusing particularly on 1972 onwards, the period starts with the normalization of relations with China and the return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972, and ends with the 60th anniversary commemorations. Analyzing the variety of ways in which the Japanese people narrate, contest and interpret the past, the book is also a major critique of the way the subject has been treated in much of the English-language. Philip Seaton concludes that war history in Japan today is more divisive and widely argued over than in any of the other major Second World War combatant nations. Providing a sharp contrast to the many orthodox statements about Japanese 'ignorance', amnesia' and 'denial' about the war, this is an engaging and illuminating study that will appeal to scholars and students of Japanese history, politics,cultural studies, society and memory theory.

Yasutaro Soga's Life behind Barbed Wire (Tessaku seikatsu) is an exceptional firsthand account of the incarceration of a Hawai'i Japanese during World War II. On the evening of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Soga, the editor of a Japanese-language newspaper, was arrested along with several hundred other prominent Issei (Japanese immigrants) in Hawai'i. After being held for six months on Sand Island, Soga was transferred to an Army camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and later to a Justice Department camp in Santa Fe. He would spend just under four years in custody before returning to Hawai'i in the months following the end of the war. Most of what has been written about the detention of Japanese Americans focuses on the Nisei experience of mass internment on the West Coast--largely because of the language barrier immigrant writers faced. This translation, therefore, presents us with a rare Issei voice on internment, and Soga's opinions challenge many commonly held assumptions about Japanese Americans during the war regarding race relations, patriotism, and loyalty. Although centered on one man's experience, Life behind Barbed Wire benefits greatly from Soga's trained eye and instincts as a professional journalist, which allowed him to paint a larger picture of those extraordinary times and his place in them. The Introduction by Tetsuden Kashima of the University of Washington and Foreword by Dennis Ogawa of the University of Hawai'i provide context for Soga's recollections based on the most current scholarship on the Japanese American internment.

This engrossing and meticulously researched volume reexamines the decisions made by Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff in the crucial months leading up to the Battle of the Bulge. In late August 1944 defeat of the Wehrmacht seemed assured. On December 16, however, the Germans counterattacked. Received wisdom says that Eisenhower's Broad Front strategy caused his armies to stall in early September, and his subsequent failure to concentrate his forces brought about deadlock and opened the way for the German attack. Arguing to the contrary, John A. Adams demonstrates that Eisenhower and his staff at SHAEF had a good campaign strategy, refined to reflect developments on the ground, which had an excellent chance of destroying the Germans west of the Rhine.

"This is new account of the Pacific war, using archival materials and the recollections of several participants as well as published sources in English and Japanese, explores a number of topics not commonly considered together, and from them offers a number of new perspectives." "First, the author chronicles the complex and often tense relationship between Japan and the US in the four decades before Pearl Harbor, showing how each nation repeatedly misgauged not only the other's intentions and capabilities but even its cultural values and national psyche. An exposition of the several failed diplomatic initiatives in the weeks prior to 7 December 1941, culminating in various miscues in the hours and minutes before the attack, is followed by a primer on how military strategy is actually invoked, as Johnson delineates the process by which Admiral Ernest J. King obtained approval from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to commit the US Marine Corps to significant early ground action in the South Pacific, despite the President's earlier promise not to engage Japan until Germany was defeated. In the process of effecting this crucial change in American strategy, King also managed to outmaneuver General Douglas MacArthur for leadership in the Pacific theatre." "Shifting from strategic to tactical concerns, the author explains how the Marines on Guadalcanal, despite inadequate logistical support and horrendous living conditions, managed to prevail in the Americans' first ground campaign of World War II, an achievement of such magnitude as to make Japan's ultimate defeat in the war inevitable."--BOOK JACKET.

The A to Z of U.S. Diplomacy from World War I through World War II relates the events of this crucial period in U.S. history through a chronology, an introductory essay, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on key persons, places, events, institutions, and organizations.