World War II

     As we approach the 76th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II, I thought it was time to recommend a few books published recently that you might be interested in.

    Countdown 1945 by Chris Wallace and Mitch Weiss tells the story of the Manhattan Project, specifically the 116 days between the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the bombing of Hiroshima. Readers learn about the scientists involved in the project and the men who flew the Enola Gay  to Hiroshima, but they also learn about the women who worked at the top secret Oak Ridge facility and people on the ground in Hiroshima who survived the blast. At 320 pages, it is a relatively quick read, and it's a page-turner.

    The Volunteer  is one of those books that I love - a true story that I had never heard before. It also proves that truth is stranger than fiction, and it's begging to be made into a film. The Volunteer was Witold Pilecki, a Polish reserve army officer who joined the Polish resistance when Germany and the USSR invaded Poland. After Poland's surrender, he went underground. When stories of the deportations of thousands of people to the labor camp of Auschwitz - before it was transformed into a death camp, it was decided to try to sneak an informant into the camp, one who could smuggle out accurate and detailed descriptions of what went on there. The idea was to get the information to the Allied leaders in order to goad them into action on Poland's behalf. Unbelievably, Pilecki volunteered to be that informant. He allowed himself to be swept up in one of the Nazi mass arrests, and he was sent to Auschwitz as a prisoner. On his first day, he witnessed the murders of at least a dozen men, and this only intensified his determination. Within weeks, he had assembled an underground of a thousand prisoners, including some kapos, the prisoners who were given positions of authority over their fellow prisoners. He did as much as he could to gather information, including the numbers and names of the murdered, and he successfully smuggled that information out of the camp. He did his job, more than his job, but the people above him did nothing with it. Eventually, Pilecki escaped the camp, only to find his homeland under the control of the Soviets and the Polish communists. In the last chapters, the reader learns why Pilecki's story was unknown for decades.

    Ensnared in the Wolf's Lair is a Young Adult book, for readers aged 10 and up. It begins with a summary of Hitler's rise to power, and then goes into the Valkyrie plot against him in 1944. A group of German military officers entered into a conspiracy with several German resistance groups to assassinate Hitler and negotiate a surrender with the Western Allies. After several failed assassination attempts, officer Claus von Stauffenberg was charged with planting a bomb in a meeting room, during a meeting with Hitler and other top officials. The plan failed when someone innocently moved the briefcase containing the bomb, and the effects of the blast were dampened by the heavy table the bomb was under. Hitler survived, and the plot unraveled. Stauffenberg was executed along with several others. However Nazi retribution didn't stop there. Over the following weeks, 7,000 people were arrested, and nearly 5,000 were executed. Sippenhaft (blood guilt) laws were invoked; this meant that family members of those arrested shared the guilt of their relatives. This book is about what happened to the children of the conspirators and accused conspirators. (Ann Bausum, the author was a subject of 7 Questions recently https://chattingwiththehistocrats.blogspot.com/2021/04/7-questions-with-author-of-ensnared-in.html )

    I've already written a lot about Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile, but I have to include it here. I think it's Larson's best work. It is the story of England's "darkest hour," 1940-1941, the year that Winston Churchill ascended to the office of Prime Minister, and the year that saw the UK  teetering on the edge of surrender to Germany, the time of constant devastating bombing by the Luftwaffe and the miraculous evacuation of hundreds of thousands of trapped British troops from Dunkirk. It's a must-read for those interested in WWII or Winston Churchill.