World War II

Review: The Wounded Generation

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Cover image of "The Wounded Generation" by David Nasaw

The Wounded Generation

The Wounded Generation, David Nasaw. Penguin Press (ISBN: 9780593298695) 2025.

Summary: The experience of veterans returning from World War II, their invisible wounds and their impact, and the G.I. Bill.

We know them as “The Greatest Generation.” They were the veterans of World War II who fought a two-front war against fascist Italy and Germany and against Japan. My father was among them. Over 16 million Americans served in the military. For many of the men and women who fought on the front lines, they returned as different people than when they departed. Some bore obvious physical wounds. But others bore invisible wounds, traumas we would not begin to understand until the Vietnam era.

Those traumas took their toll on the veterans and their families. While these traumas were poorly understood at the time, our government did understand its need to reintegrate these large numbers of people into American9 society. The G.I. Bill may have represented one of the greatest social programs up to that time, targeting the welfare of a particular population, although Black benefits did not share many of those benefits. David Nasaw, whose father was also one of those veterans, offers in this book, an analysis of the experience of Americans returning home from the war.

Nasaw begins by describing how news reporting and the film reels shown in theatres told a heroic version of the war. Meanwhile, the details of the horrors of the war were carefully censored. This also included many of the bad habits troops acquired while in service. Nasaw describes the free distribution of cigarettes which addicted a generation, the alcoholism, and the sexual ventures of the troops. Then there were those left behind, particularly wives and girlfriends. They did not always wait faithfully.

When the war ended, the government faced the challenge of demobilization. European veterans faced possible reassignment in the Eastern theatre until Japan’s surrender. Nasaw analyzes the tension between gradual demobilization cushioning the impact of returnees with the pressures of waiting families. No one quite anticipated what both the veterans and their families would face.

There was the challenge of marital readjustments and the resultant rise in divorce rates. Then there were the psychological problems. On one hand, no one wanted to be labeled a “psych,” Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of the book describes the experience of those sent to hospitals enduring electroshock treatments or even partial lobotoimies. Most dealt with the nightmares and psychic pain by drinking, with resultant climbs in the incidence of alcoholism. and they tried to ignore the problems by throwing themselves into civilian life

But physical challenges also confronted the veterans, from getting jobs to finding housing to purchasing scarce consumer goods. Nasaw also describes each of these challenges and steps the government took to address them. The biggest of these was the G.I. Bill. Veterans benefits included a weekly benefit while they sought employment, mortgage assistance, and most prominently, educational benefits.

But not all veterans equally enjoyed those benefits. Nasaw chronicles the systematic discrimination against Blacks, both during the war and in access to benefits, often controlled by the states. Particularly, the Jim Crow South did not want Blacks to advance. And even in the North, Black veterans were often shut out of certain housing markets. Women and homosexuals also faced forms of discrimination.

However these programs did have a huge impact on the American landscape. Millions used G.I. benefits to go to college. Housing developers like William Levitt found ways to streamline home construction, building the American suburbs achieving record levels of home ownership, especially among Whites. The social programs extended to veterans fed the advocacy of the Civil Rights movement.

Nasaw also reminds us of the darker toll of the war reflected in the rising incidence of lung cancer and early deaths from alcoholism. Only after Vietnam did doctors identify and develop treatment for PTSD. For World War II veterans, it was often the death of a spouse or retirement that finally led them to talk to someone. Others had traumatic brain injuries, undiagnosed for decades.

None of what Nasaw describes in this book takes away from the accomplishments of “The Greatest Generation.” Rather, he brings to light the quiet heroism of those who went on to fight other battles. Some struggled with inner wounds while others faced discrimination. He also calls attention to the effectiveness of the social programs linked with the G.I. Bill, even with its shortcomings.

As I read this book, I wondered about my own father and how the war changed him. He was proud of his service in a mobile field hospital in Germany but he said little about his service apart from a visit of a general to award medals to troops. While he was close to but not on the front lines, he saw the effects of war. Like many veterans, he threw himself into work on returning home, providing for his family. He neither smoked nor drank. But I wonder what he carried from those years. Whatever is the case, he was certainly a part of “The Greatest Generation” in my eyes.

Review: Book and Dagger

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Cover image of "Book and Dagger" by Elyse Graham

Book and Dagger

Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham. Ecco Books (ISBN: 9780063280847) 2025.

Summary: The contribution of scholars and librarians to undercover and intelligence operations during World War II.

James Bond they were not. They were Ivy League academics. Among them were literature professors, historians, librarians, and archivists. But they played a critical role for a nation desperately in need of an intelligence service.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States found itself in a global conflict, government leaders recognized our profound lack of good intelligence. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed, the predecessor to today’s CIA. One of the decisions they made was that academics were people good at ferreting out information. They knew how to spend time in archives and make sense out of disparate and sometimes apparently insignificant sources like a phone book or a newspaper ad or even trash. As researchers, their vocation also allowed them to go undercover to find that information.

Elyse Graham focuses her story around three of these academics. Joseph Curtiss was a literature professor who was able to recruit a network of German double agents in Turkey. Adele Kibre was a single archivist who went to Stockholm to acquire critical information about German plans, using charm when needed to dupe those who didn’t think a woman librarian could be a spy. Meanwhile, Sherman Kent, a historian, pioneered and led research and analysis efforts, sifting through mountains of information to create actionable intelligence.

Graham describes the training agents underwent. The goal was to survive capture for 48 hours. However, this wasn’t the time until rescue, but rather the time for other agents to evacuate to safety. Of course, there was the cyanide capsule. Along the way, Graham describes a number of operations, including a raid on a Norwegian heavy water plant. She also describes all the intelligence disinformation efforts surrounding D-Day. Consequently, a number of German resources were elsewhere.

Here is an example of what academics could accomplish. A group from Yale went to the library and from publicly available information reconstructed over 90 percent of the U.S. military’s order of battle and strategic plans. All of this was supposed to be classified. Other analysts studied returning bombers to recommend where to put extra shielding from anti-aircraft fire. They noticed that engines didn’t suffer a lot of hits. Counter-intuitively, that’s where they recommended shielding. Bombers with engine hits didn’t return.

My one criticism of the book is that the author included so many stories that didn’t involve Curtiss, Kibre, and Kent, that one lost the thread of the narrative of their experiences. Not that the stories weren’t interesting. It’s just that after a while, it felt like one story after another that proved the author’s thesis rather than developing the narrative.

However, the thesis itself is worth noting. The scholars turned spies were so successful because of the disciplines they developed as scholars. Graham lists these:

“How to sift through paper evidence like newspapers, leaflets, and novels. How to gather clues from unlikely sources like advertisements and society columns. How to read a lot in just a little time. How to look at a pile of cracked and curling pages and see a treasure hunt. How to evaluate claims. How to tell stories. How to come up with audacious methods of solving problems using unlikely data: figuring out military secrets, say, by tracking ball bearings, or railroad rates, or the serial numbers of tank components. How to make arguments that aren’t merely summaries of what has been said, but that say something new. How to understand another country–because the past, too, is another country–on its own terms” (p. 297).

Graham doesn’t pass up the current relevance of this lesson from history. Scholars, especially from the humanities, are routinely disparaged. Yet doesn’t this story demonstrate that there is a kind of intelligence that we ignore at our peril? Thankfully, there were leaders during World War II who recognized the importance of such intelligence and people who had cultivated the intellectual discipline it required.

Review: Sergeant Salinger

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Sergeant Salinger, Jerome Charyn. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2021.

Summary: A fictional account of J.D. Salinger’s early adult life, centered around his wartime service with the CIC including the landing at Utah Beach, fighting in Normandy’s Hedgerows, the interrogation of German captives, the harrowing fighting of Huertgen Forest during the Battle of the Bulge, and the discovery of a Nazi death camp.

J. D. Salinger was one of the more enigmatic and reclusive authors in the twentieth century. Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey are among the most significant novels of the twentieth century and arguably influential on the style of other more recent works. In this work of fiction, that closely follows Salinger’s biography Jerome Charyn explores the impact of World War Two on the trajectory of Salinger’s life between opening and closing scenes in New York.

The work opens with Salinger invited by the debutante Oona O’Neill to join her as Walter Winchell held court at Table 50. At this time he’s completed prep school, has had a few stories published while Oona is serving as eye candy as Winchell hobnobs with the likes of Hemingway. He loves Oona but the war interrupts their relationship. After a tantalizing but unfulfilled last night, she goes to Hollywood while he is drafted and sent to England with the Counter Intelligence Corp while training as a rifleman.

He carries a satchel with a manuscript whose main character is Holden Caulfield and he writes when he can on an old army issue Corona. That is, until the horrors of war interrupt. He witnesses a horrible training accident at Slapton Sands and has to help with the coverup, burying the bodies. He is in the second wave to hit Utah Beach, shepherding his captain, who is shell-shocked to safety. He joins the fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy. He survives the horror of Huertgen Forest in the Battle of the Bulge. He stumbles on a Nazi death camp, unable to get rid of the smell of burning and rotting bodies, and the horror of the walking dead, the few survivors. All of this actually happened to Salinger.

Charyn portrays a Salinger psychologically damaged, needing to check into a psychiatric institute, where he meets and later marries Sylvie, another brief and failed relationship. He feels so damaged, he helps with de-Nazification rather than going home as soon as possible. He’s not lost his humanity, tenderly rescuing and paying for the care of Alicja, a young girl assaulted in the camp, left tongue-less. When he does return, he has episodes of “zoning out” and only with the care of family, especially his sister Dottie does he get to the place where he can write in an apartment on Sleepy Hollow Lane.

Was Salinger a victim of PTSD? That is what Charyn and others who have written of Salinger would have us believe, His daughter Margaret would contend otherwise. But the novel offers a compelling portrayal of a psychologically scarred Salinger, leaving us wonder how things would have been different apart from the war.

Charyn frames the work with two unfulfilled relationships, with Oona and Sylvie. That maps with much of Salinger’s life. His second marriage ended in divorce after eleven years. He had at least two more brief relationships before marrying for the third time in 1988, a marriage that lasted until he passed in 2010.

Finally, we are left wondering what will happen to Holden Caulfield. Will the manuscript in the satchel see the light of day? We know the answer to that, but the end of the novel leaves us wondering what else that Salinger wrote has yet to see daylight. His last published work was in 1965 but he continued writing throughout his life. We’re left wondering whether we’ve seen Salinger’s best.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Storm on Our Shores

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storm

The Storm on Our Shores, Mark Obmascik. New York: Atria Books, 2019.

Summary: The story of a forgotten battle in 1943 on Attu in the Aleutians, and two soldiers, “enemies” to each other, one who died, one who survived, and the after story.

You are living quietly as a Japanese-American on the west coast, caring for an aging widow, whose husband died in the Japanese war effort. An elderly man visits your home who was in the battle in which your father died. As he leaves, he finally blurts out the reason the real reason for his visit: “I’m the one who killed your father.”

Mark Obmascik tells the story of the battle that the devoted pacifist Japanese husband and father, Dr. Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, died in, and the story of Dick Laird, the scrappy, courageous soldier at whose hand he died. He fleshes out the life story of each that brought them to this moment, the moments that followed, and the healing Laird finally found as he and Laura Tatsuguchi Davis eventually talked.

Paul Tatsuguchi had emigrated from Hiroshima to California in the 1920’s, was raised in a Seventh Day Adventist home, and eventually enrolled in medical school, where he excelled as a surgeon. While there he met, and married Taeko Miyake, who he had known from childhood in Japan. Family needs brought them back to Japan where Paul served as a doctor in an Adventist tuberculosis sanitarium. As the clouds of war gathered, their first daughter Joy was born. Then Paul, who was a pacifist, was drafted into the Japanese war effort. Fortunately the need for doctors meant he would not be called on to kill the enemy. But he could still encounter those who once had been his American friends.

Dick Laird grew up in a southeast Ohio coal town. Enlisting in the army seemed the one thing that promised a better life. He met Rose in Columbus while going through training. They had a tumultuous relationship until the army finally grew him up. Laird was the guy you wanted on your side in a fight and he became a leader among men, rising to sergeant. He could have risen further except for his doubts about his education, offered the opportunity to go to Officers Candidate School.

In June of 1942, Japan invaded a lonely island at the western end of the Aleutians named Attu, about as far west as the U.S. goes. They thought they were getting a stepping stone, but the storms, the spongy soil, the cold and the fogs made it more or less useless as a base. They eventually took Kiska to the east. None of this afforded them much strategic advantage but they did not relinquish it.

American pride could not let this invasion of even these insignificant islands go unchallenged and so in May of 1943, Dick Laird was part of an invasion force sent to retake Attu. Much of the book chronicles this effort and the horrors to which this led. There was the Japanese no-surrender policy of fighting to the death, either in battle or in bushido (ritual suicide). There was the fog in war, in this case the literal fog that led to Laird accidentally killing one of his own runners, mistaking him for the enemy, and nearly taking innocent lives at another point. There were the gruesome deaths all around him of friends and others he fought alongside.

Meanwhile, there was the diary kept by Paul Tatsuguchi chronicling the deteriorating conditions that led to the giving of grenades to his patients so they could take their lives rather than be captured. There is also his faith, and his love for his daughters, including Laura, born during the war. The end came when the remaining Japanese defenders mounted a banzai attack. Tatsuguchi was among a group of soldiers charging Laird and his men. Laird had no choice but to throw a hand grenade, followed by his and his men’s rifle fire that wiped out the group.

When they searched the dead, Laird found Tatsuguchi’s diary, later widely copied and circulated by others. Someone else found his Bible. Laird struggled after the war with what we now know as PTSD, the memories of gruesome deaths, the runner, the innocent he almost killed, and the death of Tatsuguchi, a pacifist doctor mixed up in a fatal charge. He had nightmares for years, even as he tried to leave the war behind in the daylight.

The most moving part of the book is the encounters he has with Laura, including the incredible letter she wrote him that finally enabled him to sleep at night. The book also raises the questions war so often raises about soldiers each doing their duties honorably, mixed up in what was a needless battle because of the decisions of others and bearing the consequences in their deaths, or their lives. Laird is the embodiment of the tension of doing what he must do, deeply regretting what he had done and yet seeing no way out of this tragic dilemma. All the decorations he received could not unravel this. Only the aggrieved mother and daughter could do so. The wonder of this book is how they did.

Review: Indianapolis

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indianapolis-9781501135941_lg

Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man, Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Summary: A narrative of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis by a Japanese submarine at the end of World War Two, the five day struggle for survival that took the lives of nearly two-thirds of those who made it into the water, and the fifty-year effort to exonerate her court-martialed captain.

The U.S.S. Indianapolis was a storied ship. For a time, it was the ship of state for Franklin Roosevelt. Subsequently, it was the flagship of the naval fleet in the Pacific theater, winning ten battle stars. After refitting due to a kamikaze strike, it is sent on a super-secret mission to deliver the components of one of the atomic bombs that ended the war. Then, just after midnight on July 30, 1945, a Japanese submarine surfaced within striking distance as Indianapolis, under command of decorated Captain Charles McVay III, was steaming unescorted to the Philippine Island for crew training. Two torpedos sink the ship in twelve minutes. Nine hundred of the twelve hundred men, including McVay make it off the ship due to his abandon ship orders. SOS messages had been sent, although whether the radio equipment was working at that point was in doubt.

Days and nights elapse in the oil-slicked waters where survivors board rafts, nets, or simply hold onto each other, staying afloat with their slowly water-logging life jackets. Somehow, no one realizes the ship is missing and no search is mounted. Men succumb to injuries, or the consequences of drinking salt water when desperately thirsty, or to sharks. After five nights and four days, only a little over 300 are still alive. Only then are they spotted by a patrol plane and a rescue operation mounted, some dying even as they attempt to swim to rescue. Only 316 survive.

While the men’s physical ordeal has come to an end, that of Captain McVay is only beginning. Before leaving for the Philippines, he was assured there was no enemy activity along his route, despite intelligence to the contrary never communicated him. Because of overcast conditions, he had secured the ship from zig-zagging, a defensive measure, which was normal practice given what he knew. Nevertheless, he faced a rushed court martial for negligence that resulted in the ship’s sinking, on which he was found guilty, even while exculpatory evidence was either being covered up or developed. The failures of others were covered up, only he was held to account.

The last part of the story is about the efforts of a group of the survivors, the captain of the modern namesake submarine, William J. Toti, and a precocious eighth grade boy. Hunter Scott’s history project turns into a crusade that takes him to the halls of Congress and an appearance as witness in a Senate hearing, and is the most inspiring and heartening part of the book. Sadly, Captain McVay did not live to see this, only one of his sons.

This is a wonderfully told story that manages to fuse human and technical elements into a page-turning narrative. We experience the moments of fear, panic, and the shipboard disciplines of those last twelve minutes of Indianapolis. We sense the growing despair and struggles to sustain hope and sanity as hours stretch into days, and good friends succumb to injuries or sharks. We share the growing awareness of all who look into the court martial of McVay that a cover up has taken place, and an injustice done. All of this propels us to keep reading to see how this will resolve, and whether there will be survivors to celebrate. Whether you are a naval history buff, or simply enjoy a good story, this one has all the elements to be your next great read.

Review: The Cloudbuster Nine

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Cloudbuster 9

The Cloudbuster Nine, Anne R. Keene. New York: Sports Publishing, 2018.

Summary: The story of the 1943 Navy training school team on which Ted Williams, Johnny Sain, Johnny Pesky and others played, and the baseball hopes and disappointments of the team’s batboy, the author’s father.

In baseball circles, many consider Ted Williams to have been the greatest hitter to have ever played the game. Williams made a science out of hitting. Many wonder what his records would have been like had he not served in the military during World War II and been called up during the Korean conflict, while admiring his service.

What is not widely known is that Williams played on a Navy team during his pre-flight training in 1943 In Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The team was known as the Cloudbuster Nine, and perhaps reached the pinnacle of its fame in a game at Yankee Stadium to raise funds for the war effort. The game was the second half of a doubleheader between the Indians and the Yankees. The second game featured a combined Cleveland-Yankees team known as the “Yanklands” against the Cloudbuster Nine, whose roster included major leaguers Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, Johnny Sain, Buddy Hassett, and others. Babe Ruth managed, and took an at-bat with the Yanklands while Donald Kepler managed the Cloudbusters, who handily won the game 11-5.

Anne Keene became interested in the Cloudbuster story after her father’s death, as she rummaged through an old chest in the process of composing his eulogy. She discovered an old scrapbook with photos of the Cloudbuster greats along with their batboy, her father, James Raugh, Jr. His father, Lt. Commander James Raugh, Sr., was second in command at the pre-flight school. This sparked a research and writing project to tell the story of this team, as well as to understand more of her father’s own failed baseball career.

Focusing on Williams, who stands out among the players she researched, she tells the story of the team, how its formation was part of pre-flight training, their travels in old buses, and victorious season. She traces the development of the pre-flight training school, and the demanding regimen of classes, physical work and training, including survival training that was the first part of these men’s preparation to be fliers. She recounts her interview with 96 year old Ivan Fleser, a pitcher who was the last survivor of the team and his recollections of Williams and the others. She reveals the fights to save the team from those who thought it a luxury, and the role Eleanor Roosevelt played. She talks about other pre-flight graduates, notably John Glenn and George H.W. Bush, and how many of the men who went through it counted it as the most formative experience of their lives.

The other part of this story is how this experience inspired a dream in Johnny Raugh, Jr. to play professional baseball. He played in the minor leagues until 1961 with flashes of brilliance, but never enough to make it to the parent team, the Detroit Tigers. By 1961, his arm was finished as he tried for the “extra something” that it took for a major league fastball that was not in him. As she researched his boyhood with the Cloudbusters, and his minor league career, she came to understand both his love of the game, and the sadness that hung over his life of not having “made it” to the majors.

Keene gives us a previously unknown glimpse into the Cloudbusters, Ted Williams’ military years, and the influence pre-flight training had on this “greatest generation” of baseball players. The narrative moves between the Cloudbusters, the training and her father’s story, all interesting, but perhaps a bit disjointed. Yet her account gives us a personal glimpse into the character of Ted Williams, his passion for the game, even played on fields before crowds of a few thousand. She helps us see how these are both fields of dreams and disappointments–and how baseball played a role in the winning of World War II.