World War II

Four new looks at history's worst conflict.

Reading Stanley Weintraub's 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (Free Press, $25) is like sitting down with an entertaining raconteur steeped in World War II's history and literature. This is a rewarding mosaic of personal stories, woven around two themes: Christmas and a broader military picture of a battle in which, according to official estimates, almost 81,000 Americans and more than 98,000 Germans were killed, wounded or captured.

This is no hymn to the Greatest Generation; Weintraub, a Penn State professor emeritus, notes that as the battle began on Dec. 16, 1944, "the equivalent of two divisions" of GIs were AWOL, "vanishing into French cities, brazenly living on stolen rations and trafficking in black market military goods, even hijacking vehicles." He is unsparing about the Allied intelligence failures, and his portraits of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Bernard L. Montgomery and other generals are scathing to the point of caricature. Only George S. Patton, whose Third Army executed a magnificent pivoting movement to break through to the besieged Belgian town of Bastogne, and Anthony C. McAuliffe, who led Bastogne's defenders, emerge with any redeeming qualities.

There are many entertaining vignettes of the celebrities who were in and around the Bulge -- the unlikely USO trouper Marlene Dietrich, standing naked in the back of a tent as an "awed" GI applied delousing powder, may be the one likely to stay in readers' minds -- but Weintraub's most powerful stories are of soldiers trying to survive desperate combat and celebrate Christmas in some small way. The poet Louis Simpson, then a private with the 101st Airborne at Bastogne, offered a vivid memory:

At dawn the first shell landed with a crack.

Then shells and bullets swept the icy woods.

This lasted many days. The snow was black.

The corpses stiffened in their scarlet hoods.

Operation Pedestal

The sportswriter Sam Moses recounts a much less-remembered saga of the war -- the British-led convoys to the besieged island of Malta, an Allied strategic linchpin in the Mediterranean. At All Costs: How a Crippled Ship and Two American Merchant Mariners Turned the Tide of World War II (Random House, $25.95) is the story of Operation Pedestal, a convoy of 13 merchant ships and one vital U.S. tanker, escorted by nearly 50 British warships. Relentless attacks by German and Italian aircraft, torpedo boats and submarines took a heavy toll: two carriers and four cruisers sunk or damaged, nine of the 14 merchant ships sunk.

Moses makes clear what was at stake with Pedestal, but he overhypes it as a hinge (that subtitle!) upon which turned political survival for British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill and victory for the Allies. His central characters, Frederick Larsen and Francis Dales, are young American merchant mariners who survived the loss of their ship and then went aboard the abandoned tanker USS Ohio to help fight off the last Axis air assaults as British destroyers towed the sinking ship into Malta. The sailors' own words tell this story beautifully, while Moses's prose often veers between 1940s war movie dialogue ("This one's for Minda"; "Glory is fifty Royal Navy warships and fourteen British and American merchant ships fighting a flaming hell of Axis firepower") and jarring slang. Churchill is "blown away" by the Allied defeat at Tobruk; an Italian submarine is "busted"; an RAF flier is "the baddest of the bad boys and rock-star reconnaissance pilot." At some points, you wonder whether this is At All Costs or "Dude, Where's My Convoy?"

The Italian Job

On Jan. 22, 1944, about 36,000 British and American troops landed behind German lines at Anzio, only 25 miles from Rome. Surprise was almost complete; two days later, a British reconnaissance platoon "drove completely unopposed up the local minor roads to the southwest suburbs of Rome." But that promising beginning to the end of Mussolini's regime soon faded; the next day began a descent into disaster for the Allied effort to break the stalemate in Italy.

Given more recent events, it's worth remembering that coalition warfare can go much worse than it has in Iraq, as the British historian Lloyd Clark's masterly Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome -- 1944 (Atlantic Monthly, $25) shows. This is deep history, told with a novelist's sense of storytelling. Clark is equally skilled at analyzing the planning and generalship and at bringing to life what the soldiers endured; from one engagement, at Cisterna, only six of 767 Army Rangers returned.

Clark recounts the bitter Anglo-American struggles over strategy and leadership that led to squandered battlefield opportunities, and he lets us meet the deeply flawed commanders -- most notably U.S. Maj. Gen. John Lucas, who led the invasion but did not believe it would succeed. ("They will end up by putting me ashore with inadequate forces and get me in a serious jam.") His boss, Maj. Gen. Mark Clark, is a case study in preening duplicity, and his obsession with capturing Rome -- disregarding orders in the process -- draws the author's most eloquent scorn. The story of Anzio is one of initial success, ferocious German assaults that nearly destroyed the beachhead and an eventual Allied breakout. In the end, Gen. Clark marches into Rome after allowing much of the German 10th Army to escape, and Italy returns to stalemate. It is a heartbreaking, beautifully told story of wasted sacrifice.

Finest Hour

After the Byzantine rivalries in Italy, Alex Kershaw's The Few: The American "Knights of the Air" Who Risked Everything to Fight in the Battle of Britain (DaCapo, $25) offers a welcome counterpoint. This is a book about uncomplicated men and motivations: the story of the eight Americans who flew for the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Among them are Gene Tobin, for whom "flying a fighter in combat is just about the greatest game in the world"; Art Donahue, an idealistic Minnesota farm boy; and Billy Fiske, Anglophile, son of a wealthy banker, Olympic bobsled champion. All made circuitous, illegal journeys to join the RAF, and three, seeking to fly for France, barely escaped to Britain. Five survived the Battle of Britain; only one survived the war.

Their voices emerge in the keep-your-chin-up stoicism and God-and-country faith of diaries and magazine articles of the time, leavened by one reflective contemporary memoir by Donahue. The American fliers are vividly rendered yet somehow still remote; introspection doesn't seem to be a defining quality of fighter pilots. Kershaw, the author of The Longest Winter, has written a book that often reads like the screenplay of a reverential Hollywood blockbuster with periodic cameos by Churchill and Hermann Göring. (He is fond of air-combat clichés, with Daimler-Benz engines "roaring to life," and Vickers machine guns that "burst into life," radio transmitters "crackling to life" and so on.) But in the end, the power of the story -- the Battle of Britain really was a hinge of history, and the Luftwaffe really did come within a hairsbreadth of eliminating the RAF as an effective fighting force -- redeems the often melodramatic writing. You mourn the losses as the pilots fall, one by one, to combat, bad weather and accidents. In Britain, at least, they are not forgotten. ·

Vince Rinehart is an editor on The Washington Post's editorial page.

Finest Hour

After the Byzantine rivalries in Italy, Alex Kershaw's The Few: The American "Knights of the Air" Who Risked Everything to Fight in the Battle of Britain (DaCapo, $25) offers a welcome counterpoint. This is a book about uncomplicated men and motivations: the story of the eight Americans who flew for the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Among them are Gene Tobin, for whom "flying a fighter in combat is just about the greatest game in the world"; Art Donahue, an idealistic Minnesota farm boy; and Billy Fiske, Anglophile, son of a wealthy banker, Olympic bobsled champion. All made circuitous, illegal journeys to join the RAF, and three, seeking to fly for France, barely escaped to Britain. Five survived the Battle of Britain; only one survived the war.

Their voices emerge in the keep-your-chin-up stoicism and God-and-country faith of diaries and magazine articles of the time, leavened by one reflective contemporary memoir by Donahue. The American fliers are vividly rendered yet somehow still remote; introspection doesn't seem to be a defining quality of fighter pilots. Kershaw, the author of The Longest Winter, has written a book that often reads like the screenplay of a reverential Hollywood blockbuster with periodic cameos by Churchill and Hermann Göring. (He is fond of air-combat clichés, with Daimler-Benz engines "roaring to life," and Vickers machine guns that "burst into life," radio transmitters "crackling to life" and so on.) But in the end, the power of the story -- the Battle of Britain really was a hinge of history, and the Luftwaffe really did come within a hairsbreadth of eliminating the RAF as an effective fighting force -- redeems the often melodramatic writing. You mourn the losses as the pilots fall, one by one, to combat, bad weather and accidents. In Britain, at least, they are not forgotten. ·

Vince Rinehart is an editor on The Washington Post's editorial page.