World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension

The story of the origin of Vatican Radio provides a unique look at the history of World War II

The book offers the first wide-ranging study on the history of Vatican Radio from its origins (1931) to the end of Pius XII’s pontificate (1958) based on unpublished sources. The opening of the Secret Vatican Archives on the records regarding Pius XII will shed light on the most controversial pontificate of the 20th century. Moreover, the recent rearrangement of the Vatican media provided the creation of a multimedia archive that is still in Fieri.

This research is an original point of view on the most relevant questions concerning these decades: the relation of the Catholic Church with the Fascist regimes and Western democracies; the attitude toward anti-Semitism and the Shoah in Europe, and in general toward the total war; the relationship of the Holy See with the new media in the mass society; the questions arisen in the after-war period such as the Christian Democratic Party in Italy; the new role of women; and anti-communism and the competition for the consensus in the social and moral order in a secularized society.

WINNER, JAVIER COY BIENNIAL RESEARCH AWARD, BEST MONOGRAPH

Offers a fascinating window into how the fraught politics of apology in the East Asian region have been figured in anglophone literary fiction.

The Pacific War, 1941-1945, was fought across the world’s largest ocean and left a lasting imprint on anglophone literary history. However, studies of that imprint or of individual authors have focused on American literature without drawing connections to parallel traditions elsewhere. Beyond Hostile Islands contributes to ongoing efforts by Australasian scholars to place their national cultures in conversation with those of the United States, particularly regarding studies of the ideologies that legitimize warfare. Consecutively, the book examines five of the most significant historical and thematic areas associated with the war: island combat, economic competition, internment, impris­onment, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Throughout, the central issue pivots around the question of how or whether at all New Zealand fiction writing differs from that of the United States. Can a sense of islandness, the ‘tyranny of distance,’ Māori cultural heritage, or the political legacies of the nuclear-free movement provide grounds for distinctive authorial insights? As an opening gambit, Beyond Hostile Islands puts forward the term ‘ideological coproduction’ to describe how a territorially and demographically more minor national culture may accede to the essentials of a given ideology while differing in aspects that reflect historical and provincial dimensions that are important to it. Appropriately, the literary texts under examination are set in various locales, including Japan, the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, New Mexico, Ontario, and the Marshall Islands. The book concludes in a deliberately open-ended pose, with the full expectation that literary writing on the Pacific War will grow in range and richness, aided by the growth of Pacific Studies as a research area.

WINNER, SOCIETY FOR MILITARY HISTORY DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARDS - FIRST BOOK

This book informs the public for the first time about the impact of American psychiatry on soldiers during World War II.

Breaking Point is the first in-depth history of American psychiatry in World War II. Drawn from unpublished primary documents, oral histories, and the author’s personal interviews and correspondence over years with key psychiatric and military policymakers, it begins with Franklin Roosevelt’s endorsement of a universal Selective Service psychiatric examination followed by Army and Navy pre- and post-induction examinations. Ultimately, 2.5 million men and women were rejected or discharged from military service on neuropsychiatric grounds. Never before or since has the United States engaged in such a program.

In designing Selective Service Medical Circular No. 1, psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan assumed psychiatrists could predict who might break down or falter in military service or even in civilian life thereafter. While many American and European psychiatrists questioned this belief, and huge numbers of American psychiatric casualties soon raised questions about screening’s validity, psychiatric and military leaders persisted in 1942 and 1943 in endorsing ever tougher screening and little else. Soon, families complained of fathers and teens being drafted instead of being identified as psychiatric 4Fs, and Blacks and Native Americans, among others, complained of bias. A frustrated General George S. Patton famously slapped two “malingering” neuropsychiatric patients in Sicily (a sentiment shared by Marshall and Eisenhower, though they favored a tamer style). Yet psychiatric rejections, evacuations, and discharges mounted.

While psychiatrist Roy Grinker and a few others treated soldiers close to the front in Tunisia in early 1943, this was the exception. But as demand for manpower soared and psychiatrists finally went to the field and saw that combat itself, not “predisposition,” precipitated breakdown, leading military psychiatrists switched their emphasis from screening to prevention and treatment. But this switch was too little too late and slowed by a year-long series of Inspector General investigations even while numbers of psychiatric casualties soared.

Ironically, despite and even partly because of psychiatrists’ wartime performance, plus the emotional toll of war, postwar America soon witnessed a dramatic growth in numbers, popularity, and influence of the profession, culminating in the National Mental Health Act (1946). But veterans with “PTSD,” not recognized until 1980, were largely neglected.

“Chasing Ghosts” describes how the daughter of a World War II veteran comes to understand her emotionally wounded father through his stories about his childhood, naval service in the late 1930s, and wartime experiences, and through the research she undertakes to understand her father’s life in the context of history.

Süssen Is Now Free of Jews offers a close look at the legacy of a few Jewish families from Süssen—a village in the District of Göppingen, which is located in the state of Baden Württemberg in southern Germany. The author, Gilya Gerda Schmidt, looks at this rural region through the lens of two Jewish families—the Langs and the Ottenheimers—who settled there in the early twentieth century. As a child, she shared with the Langs the same living space for just a few months. She remembers her mother’s telling her of the Jews who lived in Süssen until the Holocaust. More than thirty years later, in a used bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, the author accidentally found documentation verifying the Jewish presence in a book about the surviving Jews of Württemberg. In it, she found confirmation that there had been Jews living in Süssen until the Holocaust. For the first time, she had the proof she needed to look into the reality behind this lingering mystery. Here began her detective-like journey to find out what happened to the Jews of Süssen. A decade of research into local and regional archives ensued, and this very penetrating study is the result. In it, the author attempts to shed light on not just the original question of what happened to the two families during the Holocaust but also on a host of other questions: What was it like to be Jewish in rural southern Germany a century ago? What were the Jewish traditions of this region? What were the relations between Jews and Christians before the Holocaust? And where did those family members who were able to escape or who survived the concentration camps go when they left Süssen or Göppingen? Few witnesses came forward, yet the documents in the archives spoke volumes. This micro-history records the not-so-romantic journey of two Jewish families who lived in the Fils Valley. The study also addresses issues of being an American prisoner of war; of resuming life after the Holocaust; of the bureaucratic nightmare of requisitions, restitution, and reparations; and of life in America. This unique book will be of interest to a general readership and is an important book for scholars in German and Holocaust studies.

Thoburn H. "Toby" Wiant was a fighter from an early age, and words were his weapons of choice. During World War II, he fought to scoop stories from rival reporters on the front lines as an Associated Press war correspondent. In chronicling the war from the China-Burma-India and European theaters of operation, he skillfully reported the battles of an all-too-real war while often in personal peril. In letters to his parents he revealed his personal reactions to the war. In this remarkable book, his daughter brings together Wiant’s printed articles and his private letters. With her aid, we view the war through his eyes as we watch a scrappy boy grow into manhood and an eager cub reporter develop into a seasoned war correspondent.

In his 36 years of military service, Lt. General James V. Edmundson had extensive experience in combat operations and command at every level in the Air Force. He had over 10,000 hours of pilot time in 137 types of airplanes. In addition to the 107 combat missions in World War II, he led 32 combat missions in Korea and 42 in Vietnam. Two years after General Edmundson's death in 2001, his daughter, Celia discovered a trunk of his letters and was particularly fascinated with the correspondence between her father and mother, Lee. This very personal story is told through chronological vignettes, letters, newspaper and magazine articles of the period. The vignettes were written in 2000 - the letters begin in 1939 in the beautiful Territory of Hawaii. The two are interwoven and provide incredible descriptions and detail of the conditions both before and after the U.S. entry into the War; of the early fighting in the South Pacific; of the highly secret development and implementation of the Superfortress, which ultimately brought an end to Japan's war against the United States; and of the China-Burma-India Theater, as the war accelerates and the last mission is flown. Correspondents from the United Press and Newsweek who accompanied Edmundson on combat missions enrich the story. Letter to Lee is a first person account of two of the heroes of World War II and of the love that they shared across the years and miles. They lived their lives with integrity and courage, one example of this great generation and this incredible period in time.

In this compelling book, G. Kurt Piehler and Sidney Pash bring together a collection of essays offering a fresh examination of American participation in the Second World War, including a long overdue reconsideration of such seminal topics as the forces leading the United States to enter World War II, the role of the American military in the Allied victory, and war-time planning for the postwar world, but also tackle new inquiries into life on the home front and America's commemoration of one of the most controversial and climatic events of the war-the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. These outstanding historians cover crucial moments such as: Franklin D. Roosevelt's pivotal, if at times indecisive, role in leading the United States The miscalculation of Japanese intentions by American diplomats and the failure of deterrence in preventing war in the Pacific The experiences and contributions of conscientious objectors to American society in this time of total war The decision of the United States to fight with an ineffective battle tank at the expense of American lives The Coast Guard's contribution to the D-Day Landing How elite foreign policy organizations prior to V-J Day sought to influence American occupation policies regarding Japan With these essays and much more, The United States in the Second World War is sure to prove a classic to World War II buffs.

“I see this book as the story my father never got to tell,” John Toffey writes. And what a remarkable story it is that Lt. Col. Jack Toffey never got to tell. In this moving account of a young man’s journey to know a father who went to war in 1942 and never came back, John Toffey weaves memory, history, and his father’s vivid letters home into a fascinating tale of a family, a war, and the threads that connect them. John Toffey was nine when his father’s National Guard outfit was mobilized. For two years Toffey, his mother, and his sister moved from post to post before his dad shipped out—to North Africa, fighting the Vichy French in Morocco, then the Germans in Tunisia, where he was wounded. In July 1943 he went back to war, leading an infantry battalion in the invasions of Sicily and southern Italy. In January 1944 he landed his battalion at Anzio and was wounded again. After a long, bitter stalemate, Toffey’s regiment led Mark Clark’s push on Rome. On June 3, 1944, Jack Toffey was killed in the hill town of Palestrina, one day before the Allies marched into Rome. In a brutal campaign, Jack Toffey had commanded a combat battalion longer than any other officer in the Mediterranean theater. Only in 1996, when his father’s letters were discovered, did John Toffey begin to piece together what happened to his father. And he tells this contested story of Allied success and failure with drama, steely reserve, and balance, adding an invaluable perspective to the portrait of Jack Toffey created by Rick Atkinson in his bestselling Day of Battle. This book is also a lovingly crafted portrait of home front Ohio, and how a young boy, his sister, and his mother waited out their war, scanning newspapers and magazines for news of Dad and devouring letters full of easy humor and expressions of love for and pride in his family and dreams of a good life after the war.

Over the course of five years, the Reserve Officers Association of the United States—the nation’s oldest such professional military organization—invited its members to write about their experiences in World War II. The response was an impressive outpouring of memories, now compiled here in an extraordinary record of courage, sacrifice, and commitment.

Stories from 240 veterans—representing all theaters, ranks, and services—track the years of World War II month by month.

From the young ensign’s letter to his fiancée, describing his escape from the USS Cassin minutes before it explodes at Pearl Harbor, to the battle-seasoned colonel’s account of his flyover at the peace-treaty signing aboard the USS Missouri, the stories give a human face to the moments of war, written by men and women who intimately lived those history-making days, on bombing missions and invasion duty, on front lines and the home front.

Readers will meet a survivor of the USS Reuben James, sunk by a German U-boat before December 7, 1941, and eight D-Day invaders of Normandy, including Lieutenant Colonel J. Strom Thurmond, paratrooper. They will also meet a bodyguard to General Douglas MacArthur and the nurses who healed the fallen in huts on Bataan, the hospital ship Shamrock in the Mediterranean, and field hospitals in France.

Here, too, are personal accounts by Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) and the battlehardened engineers of the Seabees in the Pacific. Other veterans tell of surviving the sinking of the troopship Leopoldville, when 750 Americans died in the English Channel on Christmas Eve, 1944; the horrific discovery of the Nazi extermination camps; and the tragic bombings near war’s end of unmarked Japanese ships transporting U.S. POWs from the Philippines.

Featuring photographs, a chronology, and historical introductions, this book—thanks to these stories by ordinary soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and nurses—is destined to become an enduring testimony to the American experience in World War II.

James Maurice Gavin left for war in April 1943 as a colonel commanding the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division—America’s first airborne division and the first to fight in World War II. In 1944, “Slim Jim” Gavin, as he was known to his troops, at the age of thirty-seven became the 82nd’s commanding general—the youngest Army officer to become a major general since the Civil War. At war’s end, this soldier’s soldier had become one of our greatest generals—and the 82nd’s most decorated officer. Now James Gavin’s letters home to his nine-year-old daughter Barbara provide a revealing portrait of the American experience in World War II through the eyes of one of its most dynamic officers. Written from ship decks, foxholes, and field tents—often just before or after a dangerous jump—they capture the day-to-day realities of combat and Gavin’s personal reactions to the war he helped to win. And provide an invaluable self-portrait of a great general, and a great American, in war and peace. The book’s more than 200 letters begin at Fort Bragg in 1943 and continue to December 1945, as Gavin came home to lead the 82nd at the head of the Victory parade in New York. This correspondence constitutes the majority of Gavin’s private wartime letters, but except for rare appearances in regimental newsletters, it has never before been published. In her Introduction, Epilogue, and Notes, Barbara Gavin Fauntleroy gives a privileged glimpse of the private man. Edited by Gayle Wurst, the book features historical overviews by Starlyn Jorgensen, a preface by noted Gavin biographer Gerard M. Devlin, and a foreword by Rufus Broadaway, Gavin’s aide-de-camp.

Valdis Lumans provides an authoritative, balanced, and comprehensive account of one of the most complex, and conflicted, arenas of the Second World War.

Struggling against both Germany and the Soviet Union, Latvia emerged as an independent nation state after the First World War. In 1940, the Soviets occupied neutral Latvia, deporting or executing more than 30,000 Latvians before the Nazis invaded in 1941 and installed a puppet regime. The Red Army expelled the Germans in 1944 and reincorporated Latvia as a Soviet Republic. By the end of the war, an estimated 180,000 Latvians fled to the West. The Soviets would deport at least another 100,000.

Drawing on a wide range of sources—many brought together here for the first time—Lumans synthesizes political, military, social, economic, diplomatic, and cultural history. He moves carefully through traditional sources, many of them partisan, to scholarship emerging since the end of the Cold War, to confront such issues as political loyalties, military collaboration, resistance, capitulation, the Soviet occupation, anti-Semitism, and the Latvian role in the Holocaust.

In this concise, clearly written book, Thomas and Michael Christofferson provide a balanced introduction to every aspect of the French experience during World War II. Synthesizing a wide range of scholarship, the authors integrate political, diplomatic, military, social, cultural, and economic history in this portrait of a nation and a people at war. Here is a chronicle of the battles and campaigns that stained French soil with blood. Here, also, is the full historical context of the war—its origins, realities, and aftermath—in French society. The authors pay particular attention to the key failures of institutional France—especially the officer corps, political elites, and the Catholic Church. They also assess the controversial history of the Vichy regime and the German occupation, in carefully crafted accounts of resistance and collaboration, Vichy’s National Revolution, and the fate of France’s Jews. Accessible to both students and general readers, France during World War II develops a full understanding of the actors, events, issues, and controversies of a turbulent era.

One of the few non-Japanese Americans trained to read, write, and speak Japanese, Princeton undergraduate Grant Goodman had a privileged position during World War II. As an Army lieutenant, Goodman served in the Philippines at the close of the war and in Tokyo as an intelligence officer on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff. Goodman translated thousands of letters, interviews, and other documents by Japanese citizens of all kinds, and came to know, as few Americans could, the “hearts and minds” of a defeated people as they moved slowly to democracy.

This book is a not only a fascinating personal chronicle of Grant Goodman’s unique experience in Japan. Moving deftly between his role as an Army officer gathering essential information and as a young scholar fascinated by Japanese culture, he provides a vividly drawn portrait of daily life in occupied Tokyo.

Here he looks back at signal events: Japan’s responses to occupation, the writing of the new constitution and the de-deification of the Emperor, the International Military Tribunal and the issue of Japanese war crimes, reactions by ordinary Japanese to American occupiers, and much more.

September 2, 2005, marks the 60th anniversary of the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri. First published in Japanese in 1986, America’s Japan is not only superb history. It is also a timely reminder of the realities of war and the responsibilities of victors and vanquished alike.

This fascinating book tells the remarkable story of an ordinary American woman’s heroism in the French Resistance. Virginia Roush fell in love with Philippe d’Albert-Lake during a visit to France in 1936; they married soon after. In 1943, they both joined the Resistance, where Virginia put her life in jeopardy as she sheltered downed airmen and later survived a Nazi prison camp. After the war, she stayed in France with Philippe, and was awarded the Légion d’Honneur and the Medal of Honor. She died in 1997. Judy Barrett Litoff brings together two rare documents—Virginia’s diary of wartime France until her capture in 1944 and her prison memoir written immediately after the war. Masterfully edited, they convey the compassion and toughness of a nearly forgotten heroine as they provide an invaluable record of the workings of the Resistance by one of the very few American women who participated in it. “An indelible portrait of extraordinary strength of character . . . [D’Albert-Lake] is sombre, reflective, and attentive to every detail.”—The New Yorker “A sharply etched and moving story of love, companionship, commitment, and sacrifice. . . . This beautifully edited diary and memoir throw an original light on the French Resistance.”—Robert Gildea, author of Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940-1945 “At once a stunning self-portrait and dramatic narrative of a valorous young American woman . . . an exciting and gripping story, one of the best of the many wartime tales.” —Walter Cronkite “An enthralling tale which brims with brave airmen and plucky heroines.”—David Kirby, St. Petersburg Times

Kurt Frank Korf’s story is one of the most unusual to come out of World War II. Although German-Americans were America’s largest ethnic group, and German-Americans—including thousands of native-born Germans—fought bravely in all theaters, there are few full first-person accounts by German- Americans of their experiences during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on his correspondence and on oral histories and interviews with Korf, Patricia Kollander paints a fascinating portrait of a privileged young man forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1937 because the infamous Nuremburg Laws had relegated him to the status of “second-degree mixed breed” (Korf had one Jewish grandparent). Settling in New York City, Korf became an FBI informant, watching pro-Nazi leaders like Fritz Kuhn and the German-American Bund as they moved among the city’s large German immigrant community. Soon after, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving in Germany as an intelligence officer during the Battle of the Bulge, and as a prisoner of war camp administrator. After the war, Korf stayed on as a U.S. government attorney in Berlin and Munich, working to hunt down war criminals, and lent his expertise in the effort to determine the authenticity of Joseph Goebbels’s diaries. Kurt Frank Korf died in 2000. Kollander not only draws a detailed portrait of this unique figure; she also provides a rich context for exploring responses to Nazism in Germany, the German-American position before and during the war, the community’s later response to Nazism and its crimes, and the broader issues of ethnicity, religion, political ideology, and patriotism in 20th-century America. Patricia Kollander is Associate Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University. She is the author of Frederick III: Germany’s Liberal Emperor. “I Must Be a Part of This War” is part of her ongoing research into the experiences of some fifteen thousand native-born Germans who served in the U.S. Army in World War II. John O'Sullivan was Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University.

Frank and Albert Dietrich were identical twins whose lives took very different directions during World War II. Drafted into the Army Air Corps and trained as a radio operator, Frank was shipped to the Philippines in 1945, where as a sergeant in the Fifth Air Force he prepared for the invasion of Japan. Albert, a pacifist, struggled mightily to become a conscientious objector and spent two years building dams, saving farmland, and helping the poor at Civilian Service Camps in South Dakota, Iowa, and Florida. Raised in a close, religious, Pittsburgh family, Frank and Albert were inseparable as boys, sharing a strong social conscience. Divided by war, they kept in touch by writing hundreds of letters to each other. The correspondence concerns everything from the daily drudgery of service—loneliness, lousy food—to heartfelt debates about war, peace, and patriotism. This absorbing selection of letters offers fresh perspectives on the American experience during World War II. The first published correspondence between GI and CO brothers, the letters are an uncommonly articulate chronicle of military service and life on the home front, including GI marriage and parenthood. Back and forth, Frank and Albert also argued about the uses of armed force and pacifist nonviolence in the face of fascism and Nazism. Frank Dietrich’s letters from Manila are vivid descriptions of a liberated city under an uneasy occupation. Albert provides an insider’s view of the pacifist experience, especially the protracted efforts pacifists often had to wage to obtain CO status. Together, the letters bring to life different ways Americans chose to serve their country during one of its most dangerous and demanding times.

Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Don Whitehead delivered battlefield dispatches that were classics of frontline reporting. One of the legendary reporters of World War II, Whitehead covered almost every important Allied invasion and campaign in Europe-from landings in Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio on the Italian front to Normandy, where he went ashore with the First Army Division. Writing for the Associated Press, he covered the brutal beachhead fighting and followed the Allied sweep to victory across France, Belgium, and Germany. Daring, valiant, and fearless, "Beachhead Don" was one of sixteen correspondents awarded the Medal of Freedom by Harry S Truman. Collected here for the first time, his dispatches are classics of war journalism. This book, long overdue, will help a new generation discover Whitehead's vivid, powerful, and unforgettable stories of men at war. John Romeiser provides a richly detailed introduction and background to the man, his work, and his world.

On his first day in basic training in 1942, Lawrence Cane wrote his wife Grace from Fort Dix, New Jersey. "I'm in the army now?really!" he wrote, complaining, "I don't have enough time to write a decent letter." Three years later, Capt. Lawrence Cane went home from World War II. He'd landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, helped liberate France and Belgium, and survived the Battle of the Bulge. He won a Silver Star for bravery. And he still managed to write 300 letters home to Grace. This book is a different kind of war story--both an powerful chronicle of life in battle and a unique portrait of courage fueled by a life-long passion for political justice. Cane's fight for freedom began well before D-Day. In 1937, joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and got wounded fighting for democracy in Spain. In 1942, at age 30, he enlisted in the new war against fascism, and as an officer with the 238th Combat Engineer Battalion, went ashore in Normandy to clear mines, destroy fortifications, and open roads from Normandy to the Siegfried Line. Of the 400 Spanish Civil War veterans in World War II, Cane was the only one to go ashore on D-Day. After the war, Lawrence Cane fought for civil rights and peace until his death in 1976. Discovered in 1995 by Cane's son David, his letters are not only classic accounts of war and unforgettable expressions of love for family. They are the fiercely patriotic words of a left-wing, working-class New York Jew (and one-time Communist Party member) who knew exactly why we fought---to create a better world by destroying all forms of fascism, one battle at a time. With a fascinating introduction by David Cane, detailed notes, and much additional material, these letters add a new dimension to the meaning of American patriotism and an invaluable chapter to the history of "the greatest generation."