Reviewed by Richard Overy
Sunday, June 4, 2006; BW10
JUST AMERICANS
How Japanese Americans Won a War
at Home and Abroad
By Robert Asahina
Gotham. 339 pp. $27.50
BITTER OCEAN
The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1945
By David Fairbank White
Simon & Schuster. 350 pp. $26
JUNE 1941
Hitler and Stalin
By John Lukacs
Yale Univ. 169 pp. $25
Few subjects in human history have generated such a remorseless flood of books as World War II, and the waters show no sign of receding. Historians have found new things to say and new ways to write the history of war. The meaning of the cataclysm for those who fought it or who suffered its destructive passage has increasingly become the central concern. The battles are now the backwater.
Fighting ForceThe fresher history is exemplified by Robert Asahina's remarkable account of the Japanese Americans who fought in the U.S. Army against the Axis. Just Americans is a timely reminder of the dangers of the popular prejudices that can be thrown up by emergencies, as well as of the capacity of American society to redress its wrongs and reassert its core values.
The story Asahina tells is a complex one of identity and allegiance. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, some 110,000 Japanese Americans -- most of them U.S. citizens -- were herded into internment camps for most of the wartime period. What is less well known is that thousands of young males from the camps and the Japanese population of Hawaii volunteered to serve in the very military that had dispossessed, rounded up and incarcerated their community. The key units were segregated, made up of just Japanese Americans (albeit with Caucasian officers) and used in the European theater rather than the Pacific one. Asahina, a former magazine and book editor, focuses on the 100th Battalion/442d Regimental Combat Team, which became, man for man, the most highly decorated unit in the U.S. Army.
The motives of the volunteers were mixed (as were those of Japanese American conscripts from the pre-Pearl Harbor Army). No doubt getting out of the camps was motive enough, but a desire to do what millions of other young Americans were doing also probably played a part; Asahina is careful not to assume that every volunteer wanted to prove his loyalty. But once these Japanese Americans were in the Army, they proved to be a formidable fighting force. The combat team famously rescued the 36th "Texas" Division, cut off in France's Vosges Mountains in November 1944, after ferocious hand-to-hand fighting against the defending Wehrmacht in which, as the 100th Battalion diary noted, "Very few prisoners were taken." When the New York Times ran a headline about the rescue, it chose "Doughboys Break German Ring to Free 270 Trapped Eight Days" and pictured a white officer shaking hands with one of the rescued Texans.
The descriptions of the fighting, much of it faithfully reconstructed from the accounts of survivors, is yet another reminder of how ill-matched the almost unprotected human body is against battlefield armory. One who suffered and survived these horrors was 2nd Lt. Daniel K. Inouye. Fighting against fanatical German resistance in northern Italy just before the Nazi surrender, Inouye led a hillside assault on three German machine-gun posts. Though hit in the stomach, he ran on; he was struck by a German grenade that shattered his right arm, but he still managed to prise his own primed grenade out of his severed fist and destroy the last Nazi machine-gun nest before a bullet to the right leg finally knocked him out. Inouye was lucky to survive. He arrived back in the States with a hook hand, only to be told in a San Francisco barber's shop, "You're a Jap, and we don't cut Jap hair." He went on to become a U.S. senator for Hawaii. His nation made amends. In 2000, President Clinton awarded him the Congressional Medal of Honor. Asahina tells this staggering story, and many others, with a welcome degree of detachment and honesty. There is no sermonizing or breast-beating here, just clear facts. Just Americans is a thought-provoking book that says a great deal about the ambiguities of America's democratic legacy and the complex issues of American national identity.
Battle of the AtlanticDavid Fairbank White's Bitter Ocean treads much more familiar ground. Though he tells the story of the war in the Atlantic with economy and vigor, he adds little to what is already well-known.
The Battle of the Atlantic was a critical campaign during the middle years of the war, and, as White (a former New York Times reporter) makes clear, intelligence, radar and airpower played the key role in finally subduing one of the Germans' most fearsome weapons, the submarine. The subs preyed on Allied shipping until vessels were sinking almost faster than they could be replaced. Of course, ships were also lost in the usual ways; in 1940 alone, around 350 ships, according to Admiralty records, sank from ordinary marine causes, not by the enemy. The reasons for this are clear enough from White's account, which is littered with purple passages on the trials of seamanship and the cruelty of the oceans: "The North Atlantic that winter was a vacant, slate gray wilderness, streaked with foam." (And every other winter, one might add.) Nonetheless, for those who like their wartime history the old-fashioned way, full of lively accounts of battle, this is as clear an account as they may need.
The Caucasian ChietainFor his part, the well-known historian John Lukacs has written a book that is not so much old-fashioned as exotic. His June 1941 is in the grand tradition of the 19th-century historical essay, with a sonorous Macauley-esque quality to much of the writing. Occasionally elegant, the style is both seductive and entertaining, as that of all great essays should be.
The book's substance matches its form well. Following on the success of Five Days in London, a brief portrait of Churchill in the vital last days of May 1940, Lukacs brings his spotlight to bear on the confrontation between Hitler and Stalin after the Nazis' invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. This too is well-plowed turf, and Lukacs adds little to the story, though he writes it well, for he has strong views and parades them robustly.
On two issues, Lukacs is unlikely to meet with general approval. He claims that the argument that Stalin was a fanatical Marxist -- as sustained up to now by what he calls honest biographers -- is nonsense; rather, Stalin was a "Caucasian chieftain" -- an unhelpful description that he asks the reader to grasp uncritically as the key to the Soviet leader's personality. Alas, this has about as much historical merit as claiming that Osama bin Laden is not a militant jihadist but a Saudi sheik.
The second assertion is that Hitler's ultimately disastrous decision to attack the Soviet Union really was governed by his desire to defeat Britain by removing the one potential ally it had left in Europe; most German historians regard Hitler's primary motive as his embedded hatred of Jewish-Bolshevism, the sinister conspiratorial force that the Führer hoped to crush by defeating Moscow. Strategic calculation no doubt played a part in Hitler's thinking, but it scarcely explains the "General Plan East," drawn up by the German leadership in 1941 to create a vast new colonial empire in the conquered regions; nor does it explain Hitler's refusal to accept the Wehrmacht's more limited plan, prepared in July 1940, for a quick strike to wound the Red Army and keep the Soviet Union in line while finishing off Britain -- a far more realistic option than the vast gamble Hitler eventually took.
In their different ways, all three of these books show how much we already know about the war and the limits of that understanding. The fact that we know a great deal has never restrained publishers from swelling the tide, of course. But Asahina's fine book, in particular, shows that there are plenty of historical nuggets still to discover. ·
Richard Overy is a professor of history at the University of Exeter. His books include "Why the Allies Won," "Russia's War" and, most recently, "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia."