The Story Of World War II By Henry Steele Commager

My high school education prior to the reading of this book had World War II as some semi abstract event consisting of Nazis, Kamikaze pilots, The Holocaust, the dropping of the nuclear bomb. After reading this book, I feel I have a much more thorough and detailed understanding of World War II, from start to finish. I have a pretty good grasp of everything that was involved in the decisions that were made, rather than some abstraction.

Besides providing a detailed account of events, this book also provides correspondence and quotes from people on both sides of the battlefields, which fleshes out the reality of many of the battles. It certianly doesn’t track every individual soldier, but it lets you know pretty well the kind of brutality and hardship that the soldiers involved in any given battle must have faced. The tragedies and the heroism involved in the battles and campaigns of the war are touched just upon the surface I imagine, but just the same, this account of World War II is moving not only in it’s honest portrayal of the brutality that mankind is capable of, but also the nobility that mankind is capable of. There is also an accounting of the people who were able to look past the slights they’d suffered in America and see the true enemy of fascism. The contribution of blacks from the 1940’s south, and of japanese-americans who had relatives being held in camps in America, are accounted for in both the european battlefront and the pacific battlefront. While such a thing is usually portrayed for political correctness, the accounts in this book are about individuals rather than groups, which preserves the true heroism of the individuals described.

I highly reccomend this book to anyone who would like to have a more thorough understanding of World War II. It will take a few months of dedicated reading to read through it all, and I found myself taking a day off sometimes just because of how powerful some events were, but when you are done with the read, you’ll have a gift of knowledge that you will in turn want to share with your family and friends.

I found this book both eye opening and educational. Being a post war child you think you pretty much knew what WWII was about – but reading this deep and revealing truth of a catastrophe that occurred upon mankind was good to know and realizing the fact that war is not worth it and leaves a devastating impact upon life forever.

The title says it all. Great book on WW2 for history buffs and anyone interested in WW2. I recommend in highly.

I was born 13 years and a couple of weeks before Pearl Harbor, and I finished High School the same year Roosevelt died and ‘THE WAR’ ended. The years between 1941 and 1945 were a milestone in my life. I have been impressed by the way a lot of technological inventions from the 1930s were developed for military use during the 1940s and came into wide civilian use soon afterward.
I have just finished reading Miller’s revision, and enjoyed it immensely – mostly for its extremely detailed descriptions of events I heard about 70 years ago, only vaguely.
I have just now ordered Commager’s original, to compare mid-twentieth century vs twenty-first century views of “what really happened” – what went wrong and what went right.
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One stylistic item in Miller’s book, that I got pretty tired of, is that almost everything that happens is “the most” important, destructive, ingenious, … of its kind that had ever happened till then. I suppose a lot of “records” were broken every month, week, or day, and some of them were superseded by a new record for the same kind of event before the war ended.
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The African American and Japanese American fighters seem to be well represented in the text – also the role of American Indians (Navajo “code-talkers” and Comanches) is described.
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One facet that kept surprising me was the many situations when advanced technology turned out NOT to be the winner, but hard and dangerous work by infantrymen was required to win the day.

A must read for a younger generation to help them understand and comprehend how fortunate they are to benefit from the sacrifice that so many have given and appreciate the freedom they have