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As a young officer candidate in the Austrian army in 1938, Francis Heller refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler. Had he stayed in Vienna, he would have been arrested by the Gestapo. He subsequently made his way to America and earned a law degree but was drafted into the U.S. Army. Heller opted for service as an enlisted man in a combat unit and so distinguished himself in combat in the Pacific theater that he received a battlefield commission and served in the occupation of Japan. Escorting German nationals home from the Far East, he witnessed evidence of the horrors at Dachau that he had barely escaped.

Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez 's edited volume Mexican Americans & World War II brought pivotal stories from the shadows, contributing to the growing acknowledgment of Mexican American patriotism as a meaningful force within the Greatest Generation. In this latest anthology, Rivas-Rodríguez and historian Emilio Zamora team up with scholars from various disciplines to add new insights. Beyond the Latino World War II Hero focuses on home-front issues and government relations, delving into new arenas of research and incorporating stirring oral histories. These recollections highlight realities such as post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on veterans' families, as well as Mexican American women of this era, whose fighting spirit inspired their daughters to participate in Chicana/o activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Other topics include the importance of radio as a powerful medium during the war and postwar periods, the participation of Mexican nationals in World War II, and intergovernmental negotiations involving Mexico and Puerto Rico. Addressing the complexity of the Latino war experience, such as the tandem between the frontline and the disruption of the agricultural migrant stream on the home front, the authors and contributors unite diverse perspectives to harness the rich resources of an invaluable oral history.

World War II has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands, of films produced in the United States alone. From training camp scenes in See Here, Private Hargrove to images of brutal combat in Saving Private Ryan, filmmakers have been tasked with replicating pivotal moments in the war. But sometimes story lines and dramatic manipulations of audiences have led to less-than-faithful re-creations of what men and women have endured during times of conflict. In Real War vs. Reel War: Veterans, Hollywood, and World WarII, Suzanne Broderick looks at how on-screen portrayals hold up against wartime experiences of actual combatants—soldiers, sailors, pilots, code talkers, and prisoners of war. In addition, two women—real-life \"Rosie the Riveters\"—compare depictions of the homefront with their experiences during the war. These members of the Greatest Generation share personal memories and offer commentary on the films that have sought to capture what it was really like. Among the films discussed in this book are such classics as Battleground, Twelve O'Clock High, The Best Years of Our Lives, Since You Went Away, The Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Great Escape, as well as more contemporary films such as Swing Shift and Windtalkers. By providing a \"human\" look at the military, the war effort, and how such people and events were depicted on screen, Real War vs. Reel War makes a unique contribution to the conversation about Hollywood's role in shaping history. This book will appeal to historians, cultural critics, and anyone interested in war cinema.

Contrasts between fighter combat and the bombers' war support Klinkowitz's belief that notions of the air war were determined by one's position in it. He extends his thesis by showing the vastly different style of air war described by veterans of the North African and Mediterranean campaigns and concludes by studying the effects of such combat on adversaries and victims. Air combat, Klinkowitz writes, offers a unique perspective on the nature of war. The experience of combat has inspired authors to combine exquisite descriptions with probing thoughtfulness, covering the full range of human expression from exultation to heartbreak. Here is a tightly drawn, highly readable account of the European air war.

No one bore witness better than Don Whitehead . . . this volume, deftly combining his diary and a previously unpublished memoir, brings Whitehead and his reporting back to life, and 21st-century readers are the richer for it.-from the Foreword, by Rick AtkinsonWinner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Don Whitehead is one of the legendary reporters of World War II. For the Associated Press he covered almost every important Allied invasion and campaign in Europe-from North Africa to landings in Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and Normandy, and to the drive into Germany. His dispatches, published in the recent Beachhead Don, are treasures of wartime journalism.From the fall of September 1942, as a freshly minted A.P. journalist in New York, to the spring of 1943 as Allied tanks closed in on the Germans in Tunisia, Whitehead kept a diary of his experiences as a rookie combat reporter. The diary stops in 1943, and it has remained unpublished until now. Back home later, Whitehead started, but never finished, a memoir of his extraordinary life in combat.John Romeiser has woven both the North African diary and Whitehead's memoir of the subsequent landings in Sicily into a vivid, unvarnished, and completely riveting story of eight months during some of the most brutal combat of the war. Here, Whitehead captures the fierce fighting in the African desert and Sicilian mountains, as well as rare insights into the daily grind of reporting from a war zone, where tedium alternated with terror. In the tradition of cartoonist Bill Mauldin's memoir Up Front, Don Whitehead's powerful self-portrait is destined to become an American classic.

No Time for Fear summons the voices of more than 100 women who served as nurses overseas during World War II, letting them tell their story as no one else can. Fessler has meticulously compiled and transcribed more than 200 interviews with American military nurses of the Army, Army Air Force, and Navy who were present in all theaters of WWII. Their stories bring to life horrific tales of illness and hardship, blinding blizzards, and near starvation—all faced with courage, tenacity, and even good humor. This unique oral-history collection makes available to readers an important counterpoint to the seemingly endless discussions of strategy, planning, and troop movement that often characterize discussions of the Second World War.

\"This lieutenant gets up there and says, 'American soldiers don't huddle and put their hands in their pockets on a cold day. They stand at attention.' . . . [there was a] buzz . . . in Spanish . . . 'Hey, they called us Americans!'\"-Armando Flores, Army Air Corps. Many Catholic families blessed their children before they left home. After the Blessing tells the stories of many young Mexican Americans who left home to fight for their country. During the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), many families fled Mexico to prevent their underage sons from being forced to fight. Ironically, the offspring of these immigrants often ended up across the ocean in a much larger war. Despite the bias and mistreatment most Mexican Americans faced in the US, some 500,000 fought bravely for their country during World War II. Their stories range from hair-raising accounts of the Battle of the Bulge to gut-wrenching testimony about cannibalism in the Pacific. In After the Blessing Mexican Americans reveal their experiences in combat during WWII-stories that have rarely been told.

Toyo Suyemoto is known informally by literary scholars and the media as \"Japanese America's poet laureate.\" But Suyemoto has always described herself in much more humble terms. A first-generation Japanese American, she has identified herself as a storyteller, a teacher, a mother whose only child died from illness, and an internment camp survivor. Before Suyemoto passed away in 2003, she wrote a moving and illuminating memoir of her internment camp experiences with her family and infant son at Tanforan Race Track and, later, at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, from 1942 to 1945. A uniquely poetic contribution to the small body of internment memoirs, Suyemoto's account includes information about policies and wartime decisions that are not widely known, and recounts in detail the way in which internees adjusted their notions of selfhood and citizenship, lending insight to the complicated and controversial questions of citizenship, accountability, and resistance of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans. Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. A small collection of poems written in the years following her incarceration further reveal the psychological effects of her experience.

\" With a foreword by Stephen Ambrose and a preface by Franklin D. Anderson Forrest Pogue (1912-1996) was undoubtedly one of the greatest World War II combat historians. Born and educated in Kentucky, he is perhaps best known for his definitive four-volume biography of General George C. Marshall. But, as Pogue's War makes clear, he was also a pioneer in the development of oral history in the twentieth century, as well as an impressive interviewer with an ability to relate to people at all levels, from the private in the trenches to the general carrying four stars. Pogue's War is drawn from Forrest Pogue's handwritten pocket notebooks, carried with him throughout the war, long regarded as unreadable because of his often atrocious handwriting. Pogue himself began expanding the diaries a few short years after the war, with the intent of eventual publication. At last this work is being published. Supplemented with carefully deciphered and transcribed selections from his diaries, the heart of the book is straight from the field. Much of the material has never before seen print. From D-Day to VE-Day, Pogue experienced and documented combat on the front lines, describing action on Omaha Beach, in the Huertgen Forest, and on other infamous fields of conflict. He not only graphically -- yet also often poetically­­ -- recounts the extreme circumstances of battle, but he also notes his fellow soldiers' innermost thoughts, feelings, opinions, and attitudes about the cruelty of war. As a trained historian, Pogue describes how he went about his work and how the Army's history program functioned in the European Theater of Operations. His entries from his time at the history headquarters in Paris show the city in the early days after the liberation in a unique light. Pogue's War has an immediacy that much official history lacks, and is a remarkable addition to any World War II bookshelf. Franklin D. Anderson, Forrest Pogue's nephew by marriage, is a longtime educator. He lives in Princeton, Kentucky.

Not Without Honor threads together the stories of three American POWs-Carano; his buddy Bill Blackmon, who was also at Stalag 17 b; and John C. Bitzer, who survived the brutal \"Death March\" from northern Germany to liberation in April 1945. At times the journal reads like a thriller as he records air battles and escape attempts. Yet in their most gripping accounts, these POWs ruminate on psychological survival. The sense of community they formed was instrumental to their endurance. This compelling book allows the reader to journey with these young men as they bore firsthand witness to the best and worst of human nature.