Bookworm Room

Tweet The generation that experienced the attack on Pearl Harbor is fading away, which makes it all the more important that we remember Pearl Harbor.  Regular readers know that we’ve always taken the attack on Pearl Harbor very seriously in my family, because it marked the beginning of Japan’s assault against the entire Pacific region.  [...]

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Tweet One of the most memorable advertising campaigns from WWII was the all-out effort to make sure that people didn’t inadvertently reveal military secrets that they’d gleaned from their work or from contacts with loved ones.  The most famous is probably this one, because it’s got that memorable rhyme: The “loose lips” poster wasn’t the [...]

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Tweet Almost since Truman drooped the bomb, historians have been claiming that he did so, not to end World War II but, instead, to fire the opening salvo in the Cold War. In other words, the post war academics claimed that Truman sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives just to prove a point to [...]

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Tweet Many people forget, or never knew, that the war in Europe was virtually non-existent before June 6, 1944.  Until that time, the Nazi’s had successfully repulsed Allied efforts to bring the war to European soil.  The Nazis owned the land in Europe.  Sure, there were aerial bombing raids, spies, in-country resistance movements, etc., but [...]

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Tweet One of the best history books ever written, bar none, is Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, a book that elegantly and seamlessly manages to be a comprehensive overview of WWI from the English point of view and of British literature during WWI.  My copy of the book, which I got during [...]

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Tweet A friend sent me a link to an editorial bemoaning the fact that, by abruptly pulling out from Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan, the Obama administration is ensuring that we’re leaving a job undone — something that invariably means one has to do it again.  If history is going to keep repeating itself, why can’t [...]

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Tweet Back in 2004, entirely coincidentally, I ended up at the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the same morning that veterans of the Battle of the Bulge had gathered for a reunion. Some got there under their own steam. Many, though, were on walkers or in wheelchairs. They were so frail. And so many [...]

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Tweet My mother’s heading to the hospital again today.  She’s not aging gracefully, in large part because of the damage done to her body and soul during WWII.  I thought that this would be a good day for me to reprint what I once wrote about her war (originally part of this longer post about [...]

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Tweet Seventy years ago today, America’s self-imposed isolationism, to which it had managed to cling for twenty years, ended when the Japanese launched their savage surprise attack against Pearl Harbor.  All told, 2,402 people died.  It was, until 9/11, the deadliest attack on American soil.  A mere six months later, the American Navy met the [...]

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Tweet To my chagrin, I forgot to make my salute to D-Day on this blog.  My head was so taken up with my Midway post, that I simply lost track of time.  Two pivotal battles that changed the course of World War II, one marking the beginning of the end for Japan, and one the [...]

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Tweet I’m reading Gordon Prange’s Miracle at Midway, as preparation for the Battle of Midway Celebration I’m attending in less than two weeks.  Last year, when I went to the celebration, I knew the vague outlines of Midway (turning point in war, yada, yada, yada); this year, I wanted to know more.  It’s out of [...]

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Tweet A matched set:  The first about the beasts at the top of the Nazi hierarchy, the second about the beasts at the bottom.

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Tweet In my “real” facebook world, there’s been a lot of outrage over Glenn Beck’s excavation of George Soros’ adolescent work for the Nazis, work Soros (a Jew) engaged in to stay alive while passing as a Christian in Nazi occupied territory.  Liberals howl “How dare Beck judge Soros? ” But is that what Beck [...]

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Tweet One of the best things we did on our vacation was something we slotted in during the short time we had between arriving in Seattle at the end of our cruise and boarding our plane for home.  During those few hours, we went to the Museum of Flight, which is every bit as wonderful [...]

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Tweet D.E. Stevenson, born in Edinburgh in 1892, wrote 42 novels in the years between 1923 and 1970.  Most are out of print, so I’ve had the pleasure of reading only the small handful I’ve stumbled across in local libraries over the years.  She writes about the British and Scottish middle class, always with a [...]

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Tweet “Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods,” he told the magazine. “They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to [...]

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Tweet One of the most emotionally charged experiences I’ve ever had was standing in the Hawaiian sunlight, watching drop after drop of oil rise up from the USS Arizona. The past was not past — it was there, in front of me, in the water, still moving. Let’s remember today those who died on December [...]

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Tweet Disillusioned members of the World War II generation state honestly that, had the England that now exists been the England in 1939, they would not have believed it was a country worth saving.  Most feel that their fellow veterans, those who died in the fight, are rolling in their graves as they look at [...]

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Tweet Extreme experiences produce extreme courage, this article, which summarizes the highlights of a book about Capt. Freddy Spencer Chapman, describes a level of courage and commitment that is well nigh unbelievable.  Capt. Chapman was a British army officer who, when trapped behind enemy lines in Malaya, launched a massive guerrilla warfare offensive that ultimately [...]

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Tweet It’s a 20 second video clip, but you see a moment of life in 1930s Germany [or Holland, if it's a late enough movie clip] — and Anne Frank, high in a window above, looking down on the bride and groom:

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Tweet So often, there are what I call “matched sets” of stories in newspapers.  This happens when one article makes a point, and another article perfectly illustrates that point.  Today, Spiegel provided the perfect pairing of the way in which the modern Western (that is, Leftist) world refuses to learn lessons, but insists on repeating [...]

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Tweet Today is the 70th anniversary of Germany’s bombing campaign against Poland, the official start of World War II.  I thought, therefore, that this song from 1941′s Babes on Broadway was just right.  It is an explicit tribute to beleaguered Britain, which was, at the only time, not only the sole nation fighting the Nazis, [...]

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Tweet I am extremely fond of Vera Lynn’s music.  I was therefore delighted to read that (a) she is still alive and, at 92, looking wonderful and (b) she is still a chart topping hit in England: Dame Vera Lynn yesterday became the oldest living artist to make it into the Top Twenty. At the [...]

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Tweet Tomorrow is the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, and you can expect the usual breast-beating about how unutterably evil we were to target Japan’s civilian population.  Here in Marin, a “Hiroshima survivor” is going to read poems and speak about her experiences. I freely acknowledge that this survivor went through a horrific [...]

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