The Wartime Years

A fascinating chronicle of how the character of American society revealed itself under the duress of World War II The Second World War exists in the American historical imagination as a time of unity and optimism. In 1942, however, after a series of defeats in the Pacific and the struggle to establish a beachhead on the European front, America seemed to be on the brink of defeat and was beginning to splinter from within. Exploring this precarious moment, Tracy Campbell paints a portrait of the deep social, economic, and political fault lines that pitted factions of citizens against each other in the post–Pearl Harbor era, even as the nation mobilized, government†‘aided industrial infrastructure blossomed, and parents sent their sons off to war. This captivating look at how American society responded to the greatest stress experienced since the Civil War reveals the various ways, both good and bad, that the trauma of 1942 forced Americans to redefine their relationship with democracy in ways that continue to affect us today.

Acclaimed New York Times journalist and author Chris Hedges offers a critical -- and fascinating -- lesson in the dangerous realities of our age: a stark look at the effects of war on combatants. Utterly lacking in rhetoric or dogma, this manual relies instead on bare fact, frank description, and a spare question-and-answer format. Hedges allows U.S. military documentation of the brutalizing physical and psychological consequences of combat to speak for itself. Hedges poses dozens of questions that young soldiers might ask about combat, and then answers them by quoting from medical and psychological studies. • What are my chances of being wounded or killed if we go to war? • What does it feel like to get shot? • What do artillery shells do to you? • What is the most painful way to get wounded? • Will I be afraid? • What could happen to me in a nuclear attack? • What does it feel like to kill someone? • Can I withstand torture? • What are the long-term consequences of combat stress? • What will happen to my body after I die? This profound and devastating portrayal of the horrors to which we subject our armed forces stands as a ringing indictment of the glorification of war and the concealment of its barbarity.

‘A bad reputation has its commitments.’ So wrote home Jochen Peiper from the fighting front in the East in 1943, characterizing his battle-hardened command during the Second World War. Peiper’s War is a new serious work of military history by the renowned author Danny S. Parker which presents a unique view off the Second World War as seen from a prominent participant on the dark side of history. The story follows the wartime career of Waffen SS Colonel Jochen Peiper, a handsome Aryan prodigy who was considered a hero in the Third Reich. Peiper had been Heinrich Himmler’s personal adjutant in the early years of the war, and, having procured a field command in Hitler’s namesake fighting force, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, he become famous for a flamboyant and brutal style of warfare on the Eastern Front. There, in his sphere, few prisoners were taken, and motives of racial genocide were never far from unspoken orders. Transferred to the west, Peiper’s battlegroup incinerated a tiny town in Northern Italy and killed the village mayor and priest. Being well-connected to Himmler and other generals of the period, Peiper finds a place in the narrative as a storied witness to the inner workings of the Nazi elite along with other prominent SS officers such as Kurt Meyer. In this meticulously researched work, we witness the apex and then death spiral of Nazi military intentions as Peiper fights for Germany across every front in the conflict. Peiper’s War provides a telling inside look at Hitler’s war and then how the dark secrets of his security-minded command were improbably unearthed at the end of the conflict by an obscure top-secret surveillance facility in the United States.

This book, first published in 1989, combines the broad themes of diplomatic, political and military events with the human dimensions to form a major global analysis of the second world war. It also explains the difficulties encountered by the European powers in mobilising their colonies, and examines the economic and social reorganisation of the belligerents. It shows the impact of the collaboration of occupied peoples with the axis powers, and discusses in detail the resistance movements and the Holocaust. The book also looks at advances in science and technology, the application of social sciences to war, the intelligence services, and the arts.

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Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Frank Kermode, in The New York Times Book Review, hailed it as "an important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds," and Lionel Trilling called it simply "one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time." In its panaramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world. Now, in Wartime, Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict he himself fought in, to weave a narrative that is both more intensely personal and more wide-ranging. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, on the image of the Great War in literature, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. He analyzes the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality (the early belief, for instance, that the war could be won by "precision bombing," that is, by long distance); he describes the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most important, he emphasizes the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and wit. Of course, no Fussell book would be complete without some serious discussion of the literature of the time. He examines, for instance, how the great privations of wartime (when oranges would be raffled off as valued prizes) resulted in roccoco prose styles that dwelt longingly on lavish dinners, and how the "high-mindedness" of the era and the almost pathological need to "accentuate the positive" led to the downfall of the acerbic H.L. Mencken and the ascent of E.B. White. He also offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world. Fussell conveys the essence of that wartime as no other writer before him. For the past fifty years, the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by "the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty." Americans, he says, have never understood what the Second World War was really like. In this stunning volume, he offers such an understanding.

A fascinating re-evaluation of the social history of the second world war, looking at the diaries kept by nine 'ordinary' people in wartime Britain for the Mass Observation social research organization.

Why is it that just about every single one of us just loves a good old wallow in nostalgia? It’s probably as simple as when most of us look back we have a tendency to ‘accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative’. Then again as we get older, perhaps, there’s more to look back on, than to look forward to! However, a remembrance of things past is not just confined to old people hoping to recapture their lost youth, many younger people also cherish things from years ago – it might be retro design, fashion or a life that seemed somehow more exciting – in a slower kind of way. The idea of accentuating the good from times past is actually a line from an old Bing Crosby song, so that tells you that nostalgia has been around for a long time, but shows no sign of losing its appeal. There’s no chance that nostalgia is going to go out of fashion any time soon. They say that a picture’s worth a thousand words and so on that basis there’s about 100,000 words in what follows – that’s many more than most average books contain and more than enough to keep you entertained and informed about people, places, sights and history. During the early part of the World War II all places of entertainment were closed, but it soon changed when the government realised that it was important, under such testing circumstances, that everyone somehow tried to keep enjoying themselves. How Britain coped with war through the music, films, dancing and comedy is all here in this superbly illustrated book. It takes us on a journey through the six years of war with fantastic archive photographs that bring to life the faces, places and personalities that made these years so memorable. Global pandemics aside, we had hoped we shall never see such times again but it’s fascinating to see, and hear, what helped Britain to ‘keep smiling through’. This book tells a fascinating story of how the war kept people ‘smiling through’, with the likes of Vera Lynn, Sinatra, Glenn Miller, Dance Bands and many more. Life, especially today, seems to be moving ever faster, while constantly shifting and changing, which is perhaps why our own memories are so special, particularly when combined with a great photograph. Sometimes these thoughts are very intimate; at other times they are more of a shared, collective memory affecting how we view the world or momentous events.