Off Topic ---Company D, 2nd Ranger Battalion In Its Own Words, In Europe, In WW2

Dog Company: The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, The Rangers Who Accomplished D-Day's toughest Mission and Led The Way Across Europe, Patrick K. O'Donnell, DaCapo Press, 320 pp., 2012, $26.99.

Patrick O'Donnell's Dog Company: The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, The Rangers Who Accomplished D-Day's toughest Mission and Led The Way Across Europe is a very dramatic account of the U.S. Army Rangers 1944 to 1945 combat history.  He has collected the Ranger's oral accounts of Pointe du Hoc, the Normandy breakout, and Hill 400 in Hurtgen Forest and has woven them into a vivid, well paced, suspenseful work of history.  Bravery nearly beyond belief and courage that nearly beyond endurance is a constant in these episodes.

The words of the soldiers of Company D, Second Ranger Battalion were transcribed by O'Donnell, himself a combat veteran.  He understands combat from a boots-on-the-ground perspective. Creeping artillery barrages, death by friendly fire, and deaths from sharpshooters are not unique single occurrences but regularly occur throughout the book. O'Donnell is also a masterful interviewer who is able to elicit candid remarks from the veterans. There are frank recollections of the insubordination of enlisted men toward commissioned offices; the one and two syllable responses of enlisted men to officers is not rare.

O'Donnell sets the strategic and tactical information forth in a concise manner.  The veterans voices are heard more often than the authors.  There is an occasion when O'Donnell enters the story. The ferocity of the combat in the Hertgen Forrest during late November and early December should have warned the generals that the U.S. Army had advanced into a situation that was indicative of something larger to come. O'Donnell is clear in his own interpretation that the  Hertgen Forest was a trip wire for the Ardennes Forrest, which was to explode the last weeks of December.

Patrick K. O'Donnell is a military historian and the award-winning author of seven books, including the bestselling  Beyond Valor, Give Me Tomorrow, and We Were One, the remarkable and highly acclaimed account of the Battle of Fallujah. He was an historical consulting for DreamWorks'  the miniseries Band of Brothers and for documentaries produced by the BBC, the History Channel, and Fox News.

Off Topic---Professional Adventurer Finds Hundreds of WW2 USAF Crash Sites In Mountains

Off Topic---Professional Adventurer  Finds Hundreds of WW2 USAF Crash Sites In Mountains: Hunting For Hero Fliers From Lost Era, Fox News, May 30, 2012.

Nothing James Browne learned in flight school prepared him for “The Hump,” a perilous, Himalayan no-man’s land that became a graveyard for hundreds of fearless WWII-era fliers who battled Japanese fighters, impossible weather and a supply route from hell. Just 21 years old on Nov. 17, 1942, when he took the co-pilot’s seat of a C-47 bound for Dinjan, India, from Kunming, China, Browne was one of hundreds of fearless American fliers who took the infamous supply route over the Himalayas, ferrying supplies to China as it battled Imperial Japan. Browne, like many others, had signed on before the U.S. entered the war that was rapidly engulfing the globe.

“He was deeply aware of the threat to this country even though we were yet to declare war,” recalled Browne’s cousin, Bob Willett, now 85 and retired in Florida. “He said to himself, they need fliers and I’m a good one.”

"I find a lot of shoes."

Somewhere high above the Himalayas, the aircraft’s wings iced over. The best guess is that it stalled out and dropped like a rock, landing in the rugged mountain jungle, its location a mystery that would endure for more than 70 years. Browne, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Capt. John Dean, the pilot and a veteran of the legendary Flying Tigers, and a Chinese crewman were listed as missing in action.  The plane was one of hundreds to go down in the rugged and remote mountain region fliers dubbed “The Hump” by American fliers who dodged Japanese fighter planes, steering their unarmed and rickety aircraft for 20-hour stretches with unreliable instruments in winds that could reach 200 mph. Experts believe more than 700 planes crashed trying to surmount the Hump, making the Himalayan region an inaccessible tomb of legendary fliers and rusted fuselages.

Other names earned by the dangerous route, from northeastern India, over Burma and into western China, included “Skyway to Hell” and “Aluminum Trail,” both testament to the hazardous path and the courage of the men who flew it.

"I'm so impressed by the sheer courage of those Hump airmen, flying their almost suicidal missions over the Himalayas, while knowing all the time that the odds were heavily against their safe return," said Clayton Kuhles, a self-described “professional adventurer” from Arizona who has made it his cause to seek out crash sites and bring closure to the families of the lost fliers. "In fact, many of their buddies never did return, but simply vanished up there in those rugged and remote mountains," he added. "They were good men."

In eight separate trips, Kuhles has located 22 crash sites and helped account for some 193 U.S. airmen once classified as missing in action. Kuhles, 58, an avid mountaineer, was in India in 2002 when he first heard of old crash sites in the treacherous mountains. His guide mentioned in passing that he had heard of a plane wreck buried in the jungle.

“He could’ve been B.S.ing me in hopes of racking up a few extra days of guide fees but, in my gut, I knew he was probably telling the truth,” recalled Kuhles. The tale intrigued Kuhles, and launched him on a crusade he says has already cost him $100,000 of his own money. Sometimes, the only sign of crew left in the tangled metal is a dogtag, a few scattered bones or the garments worn by long-dead pilots and crewmen.

“I find a lot of shoes,” Kuhles said.

Photo album and the article is continued at  Fox News.  Photo source is Mia Recoveries.org

Off Topic: Suppressed 1946 Film on WW2 Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome Interviews

1946 Interviews With Veterans Suffering From Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome: Film Restored and Post On the Internet   

LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946)

Let There Be Light (1946)
Producer: U.S. Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps. Director: John Huston. Writers:Charles Kaufman and John Huston.Photographers: Stanley Cortez, John Doran, Lloyd Fromm, Joseph Jackman and George Smith. Narrator: Walter Huston. Music:Dimitri Tiomkin. Editors: William Reynolds and Gene Fowler, Jr. Transfer Note:Transferred from a 35mm B&W negative preserved by the National Archives and Records Administration. Running Time: 58 minutes.

John Huston’s World War II documentary Let There Be Lightis so legendary for its censorship controversy that its sheer power as a film has been easy to miss. Produced by the U.S. Army in 1945, it pioneered unscripted interview techniques to take an unprecedented look into the psychological wounds of war. However, by the time the film was first allowed a public screening—in December 1980—its remarkable innovations in style and subject, which in the 1940s were at least a decade ahead of their time.

.Let There Be Light (1946)

Producer: U.S. Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps. Director: John Huston.Writers: Charles Kaufman and John Huston. Photographers: Stanley Cortez, John Doran, Lloyd Fromm, Joseph Jackman and George Smith. Narrator:Walter Huston. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.Editors: William Reynolds and Gene Fowler, Jr. Transfer Note: Transferred from a 35mm B&W negative preserved by the National Archives and Records Administration. Running Time: 58 minutes.

John Huston’s World War II documentaryLet There Be Light is so legendary for its censorship controversy that its sheer power as a film has been easy to miss. Produced by the U.S. Army in 1945, it pioneered unscripted interview techniques to take an unprecedented look into the psychological wounds of war. However, by the time the film was first allowed a public screening—in December 1980—its remarkable innovations in style and subject, which in the 1940s were at least a decade ahead of their time, could be taken as old hat, especially because of the poor quality of then-available prints. This new restoration finally reveals the film’s full force.

The subject of Let There Be Light is what we’d now label PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—among returning soldiers, and if the term is of more recent invention than Huston’s film, that’s in good part precisely because such sympathetic examinations of the condition were swept under the rug until after the Vietnam era. What World War II soldiers still called “shell-shock” was variously labeled “psychoneurosis” or “neuropsychosis” by physicians, and it was under the working title of The Returning Psychoneurotics that the assignment was given in June 1945 to Huston, then a major in the Army’s Signal Corps. He later described how he went about the project:

The new negative was scanned to create a high-definition image file. The version shown here derives from that file. It is presented at a lower resolution to facilitate downloading and web viewing. Our hope is to improve this restoration still further. NARA plans to rescan the film at a 2K resolution (2048 x 1556) and use digital restoration tools to correct density shifts introduced during successive re-printings and to remove as much as possible of the dirt, dust, and scratches accumulated over the years. The resulting file will be synced with the restored magnetic track made by Chace Audio by Deluxe and then reformatted as HD, DVD, and web-quality copies. We hope to complete this additional work by the end of 2012. —Criss Kovac, NARA

WWW Link to film is National Film Preservation Foundation 

Off Topic---Classic World War 2 Memoir: With The Old Breed On The Pacific Islands

With The Old Breed At Peleliu and Okinawa, E. B. Sledge, Presidio Press; 352 pages, paperback, $16.00.

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa is a United States Marine's World War II Pacific Theater memoir. Eugene Sledge first published his memorior in 1981. With the Old Breed along with A Helmut For My Pillow by Robert Leckie, has been recognized as being among the best first-hand accounts of combat in the Pacific. Sledge, in a pocket-sized New Testament he carried with him during battles, kept a diary. In 1944 Sledge began making personal notes after Peleliu while in a rest camp on Pavuvu Island. As a 60 millimeter mortar man in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division Sledge experienced combat during the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa. After completing a re-working of his diary, With the Old Breed was published in 1981 and has gone through ten other printings in the U.S., U.K., Japan and Thailand.

Sledge presents details of the utterly exhausting struggle of fighting and living living in a tropical battlefield: perpetual fear, fatigue, and filth. Marines could not stay dry, could not dig latrines in Okinawa's mud or Peleliu's coral, could not sleep. While digging a fox hole, Sledge found graves; he protested to the sergeant who ordered him to continue. Sledge continued to complain until a captain ordered him to move the hole three feet to one side. Instances of mutilations on the battlefields are a part of Sledge's memories. With a buddy, he discovered the mutilated bodies of three Marines, one of which had been sexually mutilated. He does not neglect the behavior of some Marines towards dead Japanese, such as the removal of gold teeth from Japanese corpses.

The descriptions of receiving several night time "banzai" or frontal assaults are horrific. The brutality displayed by American and Japanese soldiers and the hatred that each for each other is described on the personal level. This is contrasted with Sledge's childhood and youth. Born in 1923 in Mobile, Alabama Eugene Sledge was the descendant of Confederate officers. A frail child and avid reader, his physician father brought him up in the out-of-doors. Fishing and hunting, he came to love adventures the woods. Rheumatic fever and then a rheumatic heart murmur kept him out of the Marines until he graduated from high school in May 1942 and entered Marion Military Institute in the fall. In December 1942, he left the academy for the Marine Corps. The Alabamian entered officer training program and was sent to Georgia Tech.

He intentionally failed his exams in order to become an enlisted Marine. Sledge survived the islands and was stationed in China until 1946. He returned to Alabama and attended Auburn University where he began his career in helminthology, which is the study parasitic worms. At the behest of his wife and children he dealt with his PSTD by reviewing his New Testament diary and producing With The Old Breed. Rich in the details of combat, weapons, buddies, the enemy and Marine life, Sledge's memoir leaves the reader with indelible images of the horrors of combat in the Pacific. It is ironic that Sledge's diary was kept along side the words of Jesus and Paul. CWL would love to study the original diary and see what Sledge wrote beside the Gospel of John, Chapters 15 through 17 in which Jesus teaches his disciples the night before his crucifixion.

Off Topic--- Germany During the Rise of Hitler Through The Eyes of a Virginian

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, Erik Larson, Crown Publishing, black and white photographs, map on end papers, bibliography, notes, 464 pages, notes, $26.00.

In the Garden of Beasts is a vivid but grim portrait of Germany and particularly Berlin in the 1930s. Virginia citizen and University Chicago professor William E. Dodd in 1933 became America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s regime. With his wife, son and his daughter he moved from his Winchester, Virginia farm to the political cauldron of Wiemar-Nazi Germany. Martha, his daughter was quite free with herself; she bedded both Gestapo and Soviet agents.

Ambassador Dodd, political science professor who had studied in Germany before World War One, admirer of Thomas Jefferson, biographer of Woodrow Wilson, Shenandoah Valley gentleman farmer, doesn't fit into semi-disguised fascism of 1930's Germany nor in among the State Department's career administrators. He personally is uncomfortable with the carnal extravagance of the Nazi elite and bureaucratic incest of the State Department. His frugality annoys the Nazis and his fellow State Department colleagues.

Dodd is cautious toward all Nazis and has misgivings towards Hitler’s ambitions. Conversely, Martha is embraces the glamorous parties and the pseudo-intellectualism of Berlin's wealthy elites. Her life in Berlin’s salon society and pursuit of sexual partners among Berlin's elites lead her to dangerous liaisons. Both her Gestapo and Soviet lovers expose her to exhilarating and risky sex during a political revolution fought in Berlin's office buildings and on streets. She even goes on a blind date and spends the evening with Adolf Hitler. William Dodd spends afternoons with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In the destruction of the Nazi SA during the Night of the Long Knives Martha loses acquaintances. During Kristalnacht, Ambassador Dodd loses friends. With In the Garden of Beasts Erik Larson achieves a suspenseful, intimate story that climaxes with murders and flights. Those who enjoy Larson's Devil In The White City and Thunderstruck will not be disappointed. Those who enjoy Philip Kerr's series featuring Berlin detective Bernie Gunther will be well satisfied.

Off Topic---World War Two Classic: A Helmet For My Pillow, A Helmet For My Heart

Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific, Robert Leckie, Bantam Books, 305 pp., 1957, 2010 edition, 16.00.

First published in 1957, Helmet for My Pillow is the World War Two memoir of Robert Leckie, United States Marine Corps veteran and military historian. Born in 1920, Philadelphia Pennsylvania native Leckie served in the Pacific Theatre with the First Marine Division as a machine gunner and intelligence scout during the Battle of Guadalcanal and later campaigns. One of eight children born into an Irish Catholic family began his writing career, at age 16 as a sports writer for The Bergen Evening Record in New Jersey.

In 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Leckie enlisted in the Marines. He was assigned to H Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment. He deployed to Guadalcanal, Australia, New Guinea, and Cape Gloucester and participated in every major First Marine Division campaign except Okinawa. Drill instructors, disappearing individuality, drunkeness, and new comrades enter Leckie's life during boot camp in MCRD Parris Island, South Carolina, and then during his first post at New River, North Carolina.

Each take their toll on Leckie: heavy combat at Guadalcanal, jungle patrols in New Guinea, bread-and-water in the brig twice, more months of combat at Point Glouster, assignment to the psychiatric ward for a month, more combat at Bloody Nose Ridge, and blast concussion.

His comrades are Artist, Chuckler, Commando, Hoosier, Ivy League, Runner, Souvenir, and Straight Talk. Officers steal his cigars and his foot locker. Like William Manchester's Goodbye, Darkness Leckie's memoir offers brilliant descriptions, an amazing use of language, and masterful storytelling. The 2010 HBO mini-series The Pacific was adapted in large part from Helmet for My Pillow, and Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa.

Leckie's memoir is literature. Leckie's work is fascinating, compelling, highly descriptive writing by one who lived through what hell mankind could make. The conclusion of the story is humane and heartfelt with reflections of the use of the atomic bomb, the loss of comrades, and the nature of sacrifice. A few weeks ago David McCullough prescribed a remedy for the dearth of knowledge about American history among citizens, young and old. He wishes teachers would create history lab exercises for students much like National History Day competitions. CWL would teach history through biography and on the list would be Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific.

Off Topic---Six Armies in Normandy

Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris, June 6 - Aug. 5, 1944, John Keegan, Penguin Books, 366 pp., notes, bibliography, index, b/w illustrations,maps, revised edition, 1994, $16.00.

Noted military historian John Keegan doesn't offer a comprehensive narrative of the Normandy invasion and the six armies progress to Paris. The chapters at times stand alone and offer aspects of the inception, planning, command and control of the armies, air forces and navies. There are some fine descriptions of personalities and combat. There are some digressions that tell incomplete stories, in particular regarding French, Polish and Canadian troops.

Keegan at times reveals his background knowledge of British military history. For some readers it may be a distraction. Also, it at times is British-centric and carries a bit of condescension towards the French and Americans. But Six Armies is a fine narrative that readers with a background in the European Theatre may enjoy. First time readers in the field may put this aside as being dense.

Off Topic: World War 2--- Playing the Nazis For Chumps

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, Ben Macintyre, Crown Publisher, 416 pages, illustrations, maps, $25.99.

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Ben Macintyre’s account of a British double agent,Agent Zigzag, his second effort seemed appealing. Operation Mincemeat is a thorough updating of a previous book, The Man Who Never Was, that I had read during junior high study halls.

Operation Mincemeat and The Man Who Never Was reveal the elaborate British deception of the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning an invasion southern Europe from Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily.

Ewen Montagu, author of The Man Who Never Was and co-planner of Operation Mincemeat could not have been more different than Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and British naval intelligence officer. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister and Cholmondeley was an adventure seeker. Together they created an ingenious up tenuous plan: Plant a corpse on a Spanish beach and load it with false and misleading documents concerning the invasion. Approved by Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond) and other British intelligence officials the plan was present to Winston Churchill who believed it might look real to the Nazi and mislead them.

Presenting previously top secret material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war. Most importantly, the corpse does not remain anonymous.

Macintyre's discovery of the identity of the corpse, its route into the hands of the British intelligence officers and then its delivery into the sea currents that took it ashore is astonishing and compelling. At the end of the book, the reader is conveyed to a Spanish cemetery that holds the body of an improverished and mentally disadvantaged Welshman who inadvertently committed suicide and afterward heroically served his country.

Top Image: Paul Davis On Crime

Off Topic----Wired For History: World War 2, A College Text, and A Web Game

Wired For History: Company, Harvard Prof Work on Web-Linked Textbook, WWII Game, Paul Restuccia, Boston Herald, May 24, 2010.

A renowned Harvard professor is teaming with a local software company to change the way students learn history.

Niall Ferguson, a revisionist economic historian best known as the author of “The Ascent of Money” book and TV series, has helped create a World War II strategy game and is also developing a Web-enabled history textbook that integrates his lectures on Western civilization with data, images and minigames for students to play at critical moments. “Today’s students want to be engaged, and those who play strategy games know more about history than those who just read today’s textbooks,” said Ferguson. “The interactive approach to learning history is going to be a game-changer.”

Dave McCool, who founded Newburyport-based Muzzy Lane Software in 2002, is a pioneer in creating complex simulations for classroom use. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology grad developed networking systems for Bedford-based Shiva and Chelmsford’s Aptis Communications, which he co-founded and later sold to Nortel Networks. For Muzzy Lane, McCool created the Sandstone 3-D platform, which allows seamless integration of video, audio, images, games and live chat.

McCool developed “Making History I” for the education market, licensing it to several hundred high schools and colleges as a World War II teaching aid. The company, which now employs 20 people, is also developing interactive content for clients such as McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, the MacArthur Foundation and the Defense Department’s DARPA research agency.

Ferguson has been a Muzzy Lane consultant since 2005, after responding to a request for an expert that McCool made to Harvard faculty. Ferguson has a dual appointment as a professor of European history and business administration at Harvard Business School. Ferguson said his role as a “counterfactual historian” who explores “what-ifs” drew him into the endeavor, even as McCool describes the globe-trotting prof as “the busiest person I’ve ever known.” “I also saw how much my sons have learned from playing computer strategy games,” Ferguson said. With Ferguson’s input, “Making History” has undergone a two-year reworking into a full-fledged commercial game, with the subtitle “The War of the World,” named after Ferguson’s book that analyzes the economic and ethnic forces that led to World War II.

Ferguson supplied “Making History II” with enormous amounts of economic and natural resource data for the some 224 countries modeled in the game, which was upgraded with a “Civilization”-style 3-D interface with realistic topography. He added features such as the option to either annex a defeated country, or turn it into a colony or puppet state. Ferguson is happy with how the game has turned out. “It’s a pretty good cartoon stylization of what the world was like back then,” he said. “We did had to leave out some things, so that the game is also fun to play.”

Muzzy Lane hopes to sell 50,000 to 100,000 copies of the game, which has just become available for digital download and will be on store shelves next month. And it’s seen as the first in a series of grand strategy games on 20th-century global conflict, which will feature titles on World War I, the Cold War and the current “New World Disorder.”

Ferguson, in the middle of writing a warts-and-all biography of Henry Kissinger, said he is even now exploring Cold War “what-if” scenarios with the former secretary of state that will no doubt be incorporated into a future game’s artificial intelligence. While he has penned more than a dozen books, Ferguson has also developed a number of TV series for the BBC and PBS. “I’ve learned from my work on television that multimedia is a great way of teaching history,” he said.

But when he and McCool first approached textbook publishers about multimedia textbooks five years ago, no one was listening. Now, the recession, coupled with student’s low opinion of traditional textbooks, has publishers rushing to develop them. Companies in “the educational market tend to be slow adopters, but the time has arrived,” said Ferguson.

Next year, Pearson Education plans to publish a Web-enabled textbook that uses Muzzy Lane’s Sandstone engine and Ferguson’s Harvard lectures on Western civilization. The written textbook will be augmented by a course-specific Web browser where students can get additional video, data and images and play minigames at critical historical moments. “I plan to use the Web-enabled textbook in my Harvard undergrad course,” Ferguson said.

At the business school, he envisions interactive learning complementing the traditional case studies model, including micro-corporate strategy and energy-allocation minigames. Muzzy Lane’s Sandstone platform is also being used to create an interactive textbook for McGraw-Hill as well as the ClearLab learning project to develop better ways to teach middle-school science. “The education-side market for games is just going to explode within the next five years,” McCool said. “We want to be the technology platform educational publishers use.”

CWL: Hmmmmmm . . . How about Stephen Recker (Virtual Gettysburg) and Jim McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom) having a chat?

Text and Image Source: Boston Herald, Photo by Stuart Cahill
Middle Image Source: Channel 4
Bottom Image Source: Gamezplay.org

Off Topic---Biography: Bill Mauldin and the Common Soldier

Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, Todd DiPastino, W. W. Norton Publishing, 370 pp, illustrated, index, notes, 2008, $27.95 (hc), $14.95 (pb)

American Civil War readers often encounter Walt Whitman's statement, “The real war will never get in the books.” That statement is now assumed to be true of all American Wars. Todd DePastino shows how cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose subject was the American combat soldier during World War II, did get the real war into the books. Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front is authoritative but not exhaustive biography. DiPastino's focus is on the creative work of Mauldin. There are many more stories that could be told

Mauldin grew up during the Great Depression in the mountainous region of New Mexico. Raised by eccentric parents, Mauldin's family was very poor. Taking advantage of very limited resources such as his high school's ROTC-style club, student newspaper and yearbook, as well as several very fine art teachers, Mauldin managed to gain admission and pay the tuition at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for one year. To establish an income he joined the newly mobilized 45th Infantry Division of the Arizona National Guard and then became the 45th Division News's cartoonist.

Deployed to North Africa in 1943, Mauldin participated in the invasions of Sicily and Italy; later he was assigned to France. In 1944, while on staff at the army's newspaper Stars and Stripes, Mauldin created unique characters that irritated the army brass, even George Patton. The weary, disheveled, officer-abusing enlisted men Willie and Joe became soldiers' heroes as the cartoon characters uttered thoughts that could not be spoken to an officer.

After the war and in the course of his life, Mauldin published several bestselling cartoon collections, two autobiographies, acted in Hollywood, ran unsuccessfully for Congress and received his career with two Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning. Thoroughly researched with the immense cooperation of Mauldin's family and friends, DePastino's biography is an introduction to an American who set standards for illustration and content that are stilled used today. His impact on his profession is immense. Charles Schultz, leader of a machine gun squad in Europe and creator of the cartoon Peanuts, recognized Mauldin as a hero of both WWII infantrymen and cartoonists.

DiPastino's focus is on Mauldin's career and dwells on family issues as they relate to his journalism. The author's thorough research supports his frankness in describing the women, alcohol, and personal tensions in Mauldin's post WWII career. Containing more than ninety cartoons and photographs, DiPastino's work sets the reader within Mauldin's historical era. Accessible in style, DiPastino's work moves thoroughly but not tediously through WW II and post-war veteran issues, American journalism and politics, and the changes in Mauldin's drawing techniques. Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front is recommended for advanced placement high school students and up. Anyone who enjoys reading a biography of a soldier and artist whom the odds of success were set firmly against, who at times created his own luck and at other times had unexplainable good fortune, who was born with a gift and did not squander it will be satisfied with DiPastio's work.

Image: Bill Mauldin, Willie and Joe (1944)


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New In the Personal Stack: Infantry Tactics of WWII

Infantry Tactics of the Second World War, Stephen Bull, Gordon L. Rottman, Osprey Publishing, photographs, maps, illustrations, diagrams, index, bibliography 224 pages, 2008, $24.95.

When CWL is not reading in the American Civil War, then World War II and modern wars are a substitute. A common thread among each of the wars is house to house fighting. Recently CWL has posted on Fallujah and Saigon and is looking at accounts of street fighting in the American Civil War. With an query regarding house-to-house and street-to-street fighting to online discussion group, an appetite grew for a greater familiarity with World War I and World War II infantry tactics. I managed to find a great deal on a new book from Osprey Publishers. Heavily illustrated with drawing, photographs and maps, Infantry Tactics of the Second World War covers squad and platoon, company and battalion, and anti-tank tactics of the European and Pacific Theatres. Diagrams of weapons, watercolors of street fighting highlight the chapters. I'll be looking for a companion volume on World War I. For upcoming reading on Leningrad, Moscow, Sicily and the Italian peninsula CWL will keep Infantry Tactics of the Second World War close by.

Off Topic---Stalingrad, Soldiers' Voices, and Oral History

Voices from Stalingrad: Unique First-Hand Accounts from World War II's Cruellest Battle, Jonathan Bastable, David and Charles Publishing, subject index, contributors index, chronology, glossary, illustrations, maps, 304 pp., 2006, $24.99.

If CWL had to rank the earth's battles in order of ferocity and casualties, Stalingrad would be among the top three. The Siege of Stalingrad is among the very bloodiest battles in all of history. Combined casualties are estimated to be above 1.5 million. Brutality toward military causalities and disregard toward civilian casualties was a characteristic of both sides. The Nazi offensive against the Soviets began in June 1941; in June of 1942 the German offensive to take Stalingrad began. The campaign lasted from June 28 1942 to February 2 1943. The battle toward the city, then inside the city, and the Soviet counter-offensive which trapped and destroyed and captured remnants of the German 6th Army with European auxiliaries was the first large-scale German defeat of World War II.

Jonathan Bastable's Voices from Stalingrad is a compelling work. The campaign' history told by the battlefront soldiers is difficult to put down. On nearly every page, Bastable offers several paragraphs of a direct quote from a soldier, prisoner, and casualty. He tightly brings the words of the soldiers together with a chronological narrative, photographs and maps. His own text is never extraneous to the voices of the soldiers but firmly and succinctly builds the context for the soldiers narratives. A Soviet rifleman brings down a plan that is 300meters overhead. German soldiers die at night from no obvious cause; autopsies reveal that 20 year olds had the hearts of 80 old men, such was the starvation and fatigue of the armies. Rats are rampant and gnaw on corpses; horse meat is the only meat for soldiers. The war on the Volga River is treacherous: snipers, ice flows, and artillery interrupt Russian support to the beleaguered city in which cannibalism is not unheard of.

From house to house, factory to factory, and street to street, Bastable offers a chorus of voices that describe a 200 day battle in which the distance between life and death is the distance which can be covered by the toss of a hand grenade.