The China Mission by
As World War II came to an end, General George Marshall was renowned as the architect of Allied victory. Set to retire, he instead accepted what he thought was a final mission--this time not to win a war, but to stop one. Across the Pacific, conflict between Chinese Nationalists and Communists threatened to suck in the United States and escalate into revolution. His assignment was to broker a peace, build a Chinese democracy, and prevent a Communist takeover, all while staving off World War III.
In his thirteen months in China, Marshall journeyed across battle-scarred landscapes, grappled with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and plotted and argued with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his brilliant wife, often over card games or cocktails. The results at first seemed miraculous. But as they started to come apart, Marshall was faced with a wrenching choice. Its consequences would define the rest of his career, as the secretary of state who launched the Marshall Plan and set the standard for American leadership, and the shape of the Cold War and the US-China relationship for decades to come. It would also help spark one of the darkest turns in American civic life, as Marshall and the mission became a first prominent target of McCarthyism, and the question of "who lost China" roiled American politics.
The China Mission traces this neglected turning point and forgotten interlude in a heroic career--a story of not just diplomatic wrangling and guerrilla warfare, but also intricate spycraft and charismatic personalities. Drawing on eyewitness accounts both personal and official, it offers a richly detailed, gripping, close-up, and often surprising view of the central figures of the time--from Marshall, Mao, and Chiang to Eisenhower, Truman, and MacArthur--as they stood face-to-face and struggled to make history, with consequences and lessons that echo today.
Code Girls by
Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them.
Indianapolis by
Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, days after delivering the components of the atomic bomb from California to the Pacific Islands in the most highly classified naval mission of the war, the USS Indianapolis is sailing alone in the center of the Philippine Sea when she is struck by two Japanese torpedoes. The ship is instantly transformed into a fiery cauldron and sinks within minutes. Some 300 men go down with the ship. Nearly 900 make it into the water alive. For the next five nights and four days, almost three hundred miles from the nearest land, the men battle injuries, sharks, dehydration, insanity, and eventually each other. Only 316 will survive. For the better part of a century, the story of USS Indianapolis has been understood as a sinking tale. The reality, however, is far more complicated. Following a decade of original research and interviews with 107 survivors and eyewitnesses, Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic tell the complete story of the ship, her crew, and their final mission to save one of their own. The survivors fight for fifty years on behalf of their skipper, Captain Charles McVay III, who is wrongly court-martialed for the sinking. The courtroom drama weaves through generations of American presidents, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, and forever entwines the lives of three captains: McVay, whose life and career are never the same after the scandal; Mochitsura Hashimoto, the Japanese sub commander who sinks Indianapolis but later joins the battle to exonerate McVay; and William Toti, the captain of the modern-day submarine Indianapolis, who helps the survivors fight to vindicate their captain.
The Jersey Brothers by
Documents the extraordinary story of three brothers in World War II, describing the rescue mission launched by the elder two when their youngest brother was declared missing in action in the Philippines. "They are three brothers, all navy men, who end up coincidentally and extraordinarily at the epicenter of three of World War II's most crucial moments. Bill is tapped by Franklin D. Roosevelt to run the first Map Room in Washington. Benny is the gunnery and antiaircraft officer on the USS Enterprise, one of the only ships to escape Pearl Harbor and, by the end of 1942, the last aircraft carrier left in the Pacific to defend against the Japanese. Barton, the youngest, gets a plum commission in the Navy Supply Corps because his mother wants him out of harm's way. But this protection plan backfires when Barton is sent to the Philippines and listed as missing-in-action after a Japanese attack. Now it is up to Bill and Benny to rescue him. Based on ten years of research drawn from archives around the world, interviews with fellow shipmates and POWs, and letters half-forgotten in basements, The Jersey Brothers whisks readers from America's front porches to Roosevelt's White House, from Pearl Harbor to Midway and Bataan, and from the Pacific battlefronts to the stately home of a fierce New Jersey mother. At its heart The Jersey Brothers is a family story, written by one of its own in intimate, novelistic detail. It is a remarkable tale of agony and triumph; of an ordinary young man who shows extraordinary courage as the enemy does everything short of killing him; and of brotherly love tested under the tortures of war."
Reporting World War II by
This Library of America volume is the first of a unique two-volume anthology. Drawn from original newspaper and magazine reports, radio transcripts, and wartime books, Reporting World War II captures the intensity of the war's unfolding drama as recorded by the best of a remarkable generation of journalists, whose talents, sense of purpose, and physical courage remain unsurpassed in the annals of war reporting. Here in one collection, over eighty writers, famous and forgotten alike, confront the crucial events of those years in writing of exceptional skill and emotional force.
The first volume traces the buildup to war and the first years of fighting: the Munich crisis, Kristallnacht, the fall of Poland and France, Pearl Harbor and Bataan, Guadalcanal and Salerno. William L. Shirer, Sigrid Schulz, and Howard K. Smith observe Nazi Germany from the inside; Edward R. Murrow and Ernie Pyle report from London during the Blitz; A.J. Liebling chronicles the Tunisian campaign; Margaret Bourke-White casts her eye on the Russian and Italian fronts. In a time when public perceptions were shaped mainly by the written word, correspondents like these were often as influential as politicians and as celebrated as movie stars.
Writers who covered the home front are included as well: E.B. White at a bond rally in Maine, Brendan Gill on gas rationing, James Agee's caustic reviews of Hollywood war movies. And so are the famous literary figures who covered the war: Gertrude Stein in occupied France, John Steinbeck on a troopship bound for Italy. Here too are writers on aspects of the war still often neglected: George S. Schuyler and other African-American journalists attacking racism and segregation in the armed forces; Mary Heaton Vorse on the women working in the defense industries; a firsthand account of the internment of Japanese-Americans.
This volume contains a detailed chronology of the war, historical maps, biographical profiles of the journalists, explanatory notes, a glossary of military terms, and an index. Also included are thirty-two pages of photographs of the correspondents, many from private collections and never seen before. A companion volume covers 1944-1946.
Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's fight over World War II, 1939-1941 by
Traces the crisis period leading up to America's entry into World War II, describing the nation's polarized interventionist and isolationist factions as represented by the government, in the press, and on the streets.
The Train to Crystal City: FDR's secret prisoner exchange program and America's only family internment camp during World War II by
Focusing on a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, a dramatic account exposes a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II where hundreds of prisoners were exchanged for other Americans behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.
For more information on Japanese-American internment, please visit our LibGuide on this topic.
War between the Central European Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and allies) on one side and the Triple Entente (Britain and the British Empire, France, and Russia) and their allies, including the USA (which entered in 1917), on the other side.
When World War I ended in 1918, the victorious Allies, led by the UK, France, and the USA, held discussions at the palace of Versailles in 1919 on Germany and how to reorder Europe.
Broadly, the extension of rule or influence by one government, nation, or society over another.
The United States used an atomic bomb against the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Three days later, on August 9, it dropped a bomb on Nagasaki.
After World War II, the trials of the 24 chief Nazi war criminals November 1945-October 1946 by an international military tribunal consisting of four judges and four prosecutors.
US Pacific naval base on Oahu island, Hawaii, USA, the scene of a Japanese aerial attack on 7 December 1941, which brought the USA into World War II.
The wartime effort to design and build the first nuclear weapons (atomic bombs).
Or A-bomb, weapon deriving its explosive force from the release of atomic energy through the fission (splitting) of heavy nuclei.
A detention site outside the normal prison system created for military or political purposes to confine, terrorize, and, in some cases, kill civilians.