Wilson's Weblog

by James Bradley, 2003, Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company, New York

When I first started reading this book, I thought that it was going to be just another collection of reminiscences from veterans of WWII that would tell how horrible their situations were.  I was pleased to find that the author has given a great deal of thought to what made the Japanese behave the way that they did, particularly individuals who were in the lower ranks.  In addition, he is balanced in his assessment of American atrocities that occurred in that time frame.  He does not excuse the behavior, but simply provides some insight into the circumstances under which they occurred. The book purports to be primarily about the nine Americans who were shot down over Chichi Jima and the cruel fate that six of them suffered.  The author, however, clearly did not have enough information and material to write an entire book on the subject.  He, therefore, spread out his story to include other topics such as the bombing of Japan.  Since I was not aware of the many facts surrounding these other topics, the book became much more interesting to me than if he had confined the book to just the the circumstances surrounding these nine flyers.  Overall, I think the book was pretty good, despite some pretty gruesome pages describing the fate of some of the flyers.

by David Safford, 2007, Little, Brown and Company, New York

This book is about the final few months of World War II, covering April of 1945 through June.  To show the various events, the author uses the personal experiences of six individuals, ranging from an infantryman fighting his way up the Italian peninsula to a reilef worker arriving in Northern France.  The events are drawn from interviews with the individuals as well as their diaries.

The book portrays the historical and military events that occured during this period interspersed with the personal events of the individuals.  Some of the historical events covered are quite surprising, such as the fact that the local German government was left in place to run things for quite a few weeks after VE Day in such areas as Schleswig-Holstein and Holland until the allies were able to take control.  Other information in the book such as Hitler’s death and the rounding up of the Nazi leaders has been told before but is interesting nonetheless.

The book’s treatment of the individual stories seems to lack focus, however.  The historical events that are occuring during that period seem to overwhelm the individual stories in their significance and continually moving from one individual story to another seems to give the book a sense of choppiness.

Much of the material in the book, other than the individual stories, has no doubt been documented elsewhere, so I think the claim that this book represents the missing final chapter of World War II is a bit of a stretch.  Overall, however, the book is worth reading.