Reviewed by John Whiteclay Chambers II

Sunday, September 21, 2003; Page BW06

Deadly Silence

In The Battle for Rome: The Germans, The Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944 (Simon & Schuster, $28), Robert Katz supplies an extraordinarily detailed account of the nine-month German occupation of the Italian capital. Drawing on new material, he provides fresh insight into a complex saga of brutality, inefficiency, expediency and betrayal, leavened with occasional acts of moral courage and heroism. The book fully documents the Gestapo's atrocities in the Eternal City: its roundup and deportation to Auschwitz of more than a thousand of Rome's Jews in October 1943 and its massacre of 300 innocent Catholic and Jewish Romans in the Ardeatine Caves outside the city's walls in March 1944.

Katz uses his own interviews with German occupiers, Italian partisans and Vatican officials, plus new documents from the Vatican and Italian archives, and -- most dramatically -- American wartime intelligence intercepts of radio messages between Berlin and Rome, declassified by the CIA over the past three years. These decoded intercepts are startling. They reveal that Washington and London had advance notice of the planned roundup and removal of the Roman Jews. This information, had it not been suppressed at the time, might have been used to rescue the captives. The documents also provide an indisputable paper trail linking Adolf Hitler directly to this act of genocide. The führer personally confirmed the overruling and reprimanding of the German consul who protested against the plan to have the Jews of Rome seized, deported and "liquidated."

With his 1967 book Death in Rome, Katz emerged as one of the early critics of Pope Pius XII's policy of silence toward the Holocaust. Now armed with additional sources, Katz emphasizes divisions within the Vatican and assails its policy of silence as stemming from the pontiff himself. That policy applied, he indicates, even to the atrocities against Jews and Catholics in Rome itself. It was based not simply on an attempt to mediate between Germany and the West to stop communism; in the Roman case, the author argues, the policy of silence was fueled by a papal obsession with protecting by any means the physical integrity of Vatican City against potential threats by Nazis or communists. Katz insists these threats were less real than the Vatican imagined.

In The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (Modern Library, $19.95), Paul Fussell continues the attack on the heroic view of combat in World War II that he began in his 1989 book Wartime. Fussell, an iconoclastic literary critic who as a young lieutenant led a rifle platoon in Europe and was severely wounded, has never taken kindly to a genre he derides as "military romanticism."

Instead of the camaraderie, courage and respect emphasized by Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw, Fussell focuses on the dark side of combat -- the absurdity, tragedy and horror. With considerable insight, he stresses the many costly foul-ups ("snafus"), the failures of training, communication and supply, the casualties from "friendly" as well as enemy fire, the desertion and self-inflicted wounds, and the meaning of the "deterioration" of units eroded by continuous service on the front lines.

In Wartime, Fussell largely ignored the moral justification for the war against the Nazi regime and was correctly criticized for it. In The Boys' Crusade, he includes seven pages on the concentration camps. But the thrust of this rather one-sided account remains the brutality and stupidity of warfare and the sacrifice of American youth in the campaign that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower exalted as the "Crusade in Europe."

McKay Jenkins's The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler's Europe (Random House, $25.95) traces this elite military unit from its origins among aristocratic and professional skiers in 1940 to its deployment and combat success against the Germans in the mountains of northeastern Italy in 1945. Jenkins provides an insightful tale of these army skiers and mountaineers, but the division's having spent most of the war (and the first half of the book) training in the United States hampers the narrative somewhat.

The action scenes in the second half are worth the wait, however. Jenkins uses oral histories of combatants to give the reader gripping accounts of the bloody but successful assaults on the heavily fortified Gothic Line in the Apennine Mountains. In five days of heavy fighting in February 1945, the newly arrived troops of 10th Mountain Division scaled and captured the foreboding Riva Ridge and Mount Belvedere. But the effort cost them a thousand casualties.

Spearheading the American offensive in Italy in the final four months of the war, the division pushed the enemy out of their mountain fortifications, effectively destroying five full German divisions. The cost again was high. Nearly 5,000 of the division's soldiers were killed or wounded (among the severely wounded was a young replacement lieutenant from Kansas named Bob Dole). Disbanded after the war, the 10th Mountain Division was reactivated in 1985 and deployed most recently in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud's A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II (Knopf, $27.95) begins as an exciting story of a group of heroic Polish fighter pilots fighting for England after their own country fell to Hitler in 1939. Named after a Polish patriot who fought in the American Revolution, the squadron chalked up twice as many kills as any other RAF unit, its skilled and daredevil pilots swooping their Hawker Hurricanes directly at the bombers and fighters of the Luftwaffe. In their enthusiasm, the authors overreach by crediting this single squadron with making the difference between victory and defeat in the 1940 Battle of Britain.

This is indeed a tale of heroism, camaraderie and glory. The dashing, gallant, impetuous Poles became the darlings of British high society and were lionized by the press in Britain and America. The authors vividly recreate the airmen's daily bouts with death and nights of partying, their lost lives and loves, and their frustrations with English fastidiousness and idiosyncrasies -- everything in the British planes seemed to be the opposite of where it was in Poland. (Because none of the fliers remains alive, this husband-and-wife team interviewed the pilots' children to augment written sources.)

Olson and Cloud dilute their otherwise fascinating account of the Kosciuszko Squadron by devoting the second half of this lengthy book to a history of Poland in World War II. The result is an unwieldy and ultimately unsatisfactory effort to meld two different stories. The long recapitulation of the generally well-known wartime history of Poland overwhelms the fresh material about the aviators.

In addition, this retelling of the Polish national saga has some rather peculiar aspects. The emphasis is on non-Jewish Poles; references to anti-Semitism or the Holocaust are minimal. The authors have chosen to stress Polish individualism, nationalism and resistance to Nazism and communism on the one hand and the manipulation and betrayal of Poland by other major powers on the other. In their lengthy and rather polemical account of Allied diplomacy, the authors vigorously (and rather simplistically) condemn President Franklin Roosevelt for "betraying" Poland to the Soviet Union.

As these four books illustrate in such different ways, the many disparate aspects of the epochal conflict of 1939-45 can be re-examined through new perspectives and newly obtained sources, from previously classified documents about decision-making to fresh oral histories of ordinary people living in that extraordinary time.

World War II was a defining moment in the 20th century. It was a time of enormous challenge and also of great hope for a better world at home and abroad. Is it any wonder that it continues to be so fascinating today? •

John Whiteclay Chambers II teaches history at Rutgers University and is editor-in-chief of "The Oxford Companion to American Military History."