World War II

Robert Capa’s Slightly out of Focus: A Captivating Photographer’s Memoir of World War II

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Robert Capa’s Slightly Out of Focus is absolutely one of the best war memoirs I’ve ever read. Capa, was born in Hungary in 1913 and then killed by stepping on a mine in Vietnam in 1954. In between, he made a career as a war photographer. Slightly Out of Focus covers Capa’s experiences before and during World War II. As an Hungarian Jew, he was basically stateless, but nonetheless managed to get to the United States and then got an American magazine to send him to London to photograph the war. Capa was in North Africa and Italy, and then landed with the first troops in Normandy on D Day. His book has astonishing photographs, but it also recounts his adventures. Capa makes cutting through all the American and British red tape to get to the war zones sound almost as daunting as the War itself. As if his own story weren’t amazing enough, Capa’s tales include cameos by Ernest Hemingway, and Ernie Pyle, among others. Robert Capa is an amazing raconteur who writes with tremendous brio, but he also zeroes in on the terrors of the war and demonstrates a profound understanding of the horror and waste. You really need to read this book.

Incidentally Robert Capa was one of the people featured in Katie Marton’s 2006, The Great Escape — Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, which is another great book.

Nikita Khrushchev, One of the Most Interesting Characters of the Cold War Era

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William Taubman’s 2003 biography, Khrushchev — The Man and His Era won a Pulitzer Prize, and deservedly so. Taubman is a political science professor at Amherst and has written extensively on the Soviet Union. His biography of Khrushchev is very long at 651 pages, but it provides crucial insight into one of the most unusual personalities of the Soviet era. If you want to understand Nikita Khrushchev and his place in history, this is an excellent place to start.

Khrushchev was born in 1894 and died in 1971, so he was there for the rise of Communism in Russia. Largely uneducated and often crude, Khrushchev managed to rise through the ranks and then survive the Stalinist era. No political survivor of that period could emerge with clean hands, but Khrushchev managed to avoid the worst of the blame for that period.

Taubman, in great detail, shows how Khrushchev became a Bolshevik and was chosen by Stalin to be one of his principal lieutenants. How Khrushchev managed to out-maneuver his rivals and become top dog remains something of a mystery, but Taubman offers a lot of information to consider. As a leader, Khrushchev presented a bizarre combination of bumbling peasant, lucky political tactician and good-hearted realist. At the end, he became increasingly impulsive and oblivious to the opposition to his rule. He didn’t see. it coming.

Although Khrushchev wasn’t exactly surrounded by rocket scientists, he was always insecure about his lack of education. At times he trumpeted it and claimed that he had particular insight into how collective farms and factories need to be run. To Khrushchev’s discredit, he was stained by Stalin’s purges, but to his credit, he disavowed Stalinism as he came to power. Crucially, Khrushchev was often impulsive and frequently put world peace at risk as he lurched through the Cold War period with ill-considered pronouncements and initiatives.

He risked nuclear war with some of his “antics. Fortunately, Eisenhower and Kennedy, although highly frustrated by Khrushchev’s pronouncements and behavior, generally did their homework and responded with appropriate restraints and quieter displays of force.

This book is rich because Khrushchev talked a lot about what he had done and what he was thinking. He even wrote a memoir. He may have started as a Zelig, but he became the leader of the Communist world during a particularly dangerous part of history. Because he survived, he was able to write about Stalinism and its excesses, even as he went back and forth about how much personal responsibility he was prepared to assume.

All in all this is a very good book. It is a necessary, scholarly book. It did cause me to wish at times that a more abridged version were available, a shorter book that did not describe so many meetings and so much of Khrushchev’s daily activities in such great detail. Maybe that is biography-light, but the sheer length of this book renders it somewhat inaccessible for non-scholars who could really benefit form its core content.

My recommendation is to read this book if you want to better understanding of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.

Last Boat to Yokohama — The Life and Legacy of Beate Sirota Gordon

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Here is the first review of 2018.  

This little book is an odd conglomeration of material surrounding the life of the late Beate Sirota Gordon.  Beate was the daughter of Leo Sirota, the Jewish Russian/Ukrainian emigre pianist who ended up in Japan from the 192o’s through the end of World War II.  The material about how he and his wife Augustine ended up in Japan and why they elected to stay in Japan through World War II provides an anecdotal glimpse into how people coped with an unstable Europe and Japan’s global ambitions.  Beate herself spent a great deal of her childhood in Japan, where she became the family’s principal Japanese interpreter.   She then travelled to the United States for her education as a teenager and attended Mills College.  She also began monitoring Japanese radio broadcasts and doing other Japanese language related work during the war.  

What happened after the war is truly remarkable.  Beate returned to Japan and managed to locate her parents, who had lost their home and been interned during the war.  Then, in her early twenties, Beate proceeded to help write the new Japanese constitution.  Specifically she drafted in large part the Japanese constitution’s equal rights for women clause, which provided Japanese women with more specific rights than anything the United States has produced.  Remember, we couldn’t even pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States.   Beate’s own observations from spending her childhood in Japan, combined with a thoughtful, research-oriented approach served her well.  She consulted constitutions from countries all over the world before settling on an approach for Japan.  This book is far too brief to consider what it meant for Westerners to impose a constitution upon Japan, but clearly post-World War II was an unique era in many ways.

Beate Sirot Gordon spent the remainder of her life based in New York, where she served as the director of performing arts first at the Japan Society and then at the Asia Society.  focused on bringing the culture of the Far East to the United States.   As just one example, through her efforts the iconic dancers Eiko and Koma were introduced to the United States.

I highly recommend this somewhat disjointed, but highly interesting book.  Also, please note that Ms. Gordon wrote her own book, The Only Woman in the Room, which I imagine is well worth reading.

Berlin Diary – The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 – A Terrifying Read for Our Own Era

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People really need to read this book!  William L. Shirer, the famous author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – A History of Nazi Germany, kept a diary while he was stationed in Berlin from 1934 to 1941.  Shirer began as a print journalist but was converted to a radio journalist in Berlin the 1930’s and though 1940.  I recently read his diary from that period, Berlin Diary – The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941.  Shirer’s writing is clear and absorbing. His diary is a primary source, and it makes for harrowing reading.

Shirer was a foreign correspondent for various American outlets when he found himself in Germany in the 1930’s and through the pivotal year 1940.  His own experiences of struggling with censors and putting out his broadcasts in the midst of heavy bombing are justification enough for his book.  His visits to the countries Germany has defeated are fascinating and ominous all at the same time.  Many of his colleagues were kicked out by the Germans.  Shirer tries to stay on the grounds that his witness is important, but he knows the Germans are using him or at least think they are.  It is a fascinating game.  Shirer’s narrative bounces from visits to battlefields, to encounters with Nazi leaders, to every day life in Berlin, to worries about his own safety and self-respect.  He tries to figure out exactly what is happening and get the word out without getting kicked out of Germany.

The transcending importance of this book is that Shirer’s personal experiences occur within the malevolent atmosphere of Nazi Germany and the countries it defeated.  I found it impossible to read about the unrelenting cruelty and domination of the Nazi’s and not think about what is happening in the United States today.  Whereas here we have attempted censorship of the press and ham-handed efforts to exclude reporters, in Nazi Germany this is what actually happened as a matter of course.  Germans had long been denied accurate internal reporting of hardships and loss, so they became inured to it and stopped believing anything they read.  Now we find ourselves in an era of “fake news,” where our leaders feel no compunction to tell the truth or keep their promises.   Bullying has become an accepted political tactic.  Are Americans getting to cynical and complacent to resist?   Similarities with Nazi Germany are growing, and we should fear what might come next in our own country.

Shirer’s diary underscores the point that the truth ceased to matter in Nazi Germany and that the Nazi leaders felt emboldened to create an endless, self-agrandizing narrative to dress up and justify their criminal actions.  So, too, were they emboldened to villify Jews and other handy scapegoats because they felt they could. This is a terrifying blueprint.

Although Shirer’s book feels particularly prescient at this time and he openly states his opinions, he has not written a polemic. This is the diary of someone trying to be a journalist in the midst of Nazi Germany.  Shirer’s own American perspective is very much in place and enhances the value of his diary, which he obviously kept hidden while in Germany.

Lastly I should note that whereas liberals like myself may read this book and draw ominous analogies with current American politics, even if your politics are far to the right of mine, this book has profound historical significance and is an excellent read.  I recommend it.

Thomas Keneally’s Shame and the Captives -A Riveting Novel about Australia During WWII

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Thomas Keneally has written a memorable novel, Shame and the Captives.  Set in Australia, away from the fighting during World War II, this novel focuses on prisoners of war held in a prison camp in Australia, as well as some Australians who have husbands and sons held in Axis prisoner of war camps.  Apparently some Japanese prisoners of war actually did break out of their Australian prison camp during World War II, and this is a fictionalized account of that break out.  As always Keneally focuses on what his characters are feeling and why they are doing what they do, and there are a wealth of personalities in play.  The Japanese prisoners can scarcely believe they have been captured instead of killed, and basically feel their lives are over.  Prisoners from Korea and Italy are more stoic about their present circumstances and ultimately more optimistic that they will have a future.  Alice, the major female character is a young Australian bride whose husband went to war and was soon captured.  She doesn’t know what to feel and is trying to find her way.  The Australian officers running the camp seem uncomfortable with their situation and take an instant dislike to each other.  Their hostility to each other is more intense than any feelings they might have toward their prisoners.

This book presents an odd juxtaposition of characters in an unfamiliar (to me) setting.  People are doing their jobs and are careful to treat the prisoners carefully for a number of reasons:   the prison officials in this book aren’t motivated by cruelty, they are acutely aware of the Red Cross’s requirements and they are particularly motivated to treat their Japanese prisoners well so that their own sons held in captivity won’t face reprisals.   This makes for a very interesting book showing aspects of the “War at Home” that aren’t frequently addressed.

Finally, it is impossible to write about Thomas Keneally and a fictionalized novel based on wartime events without mentioning his epic novel Schindler’s List.  To see the movie Schindler’s List is to focus on the horrors of the Holocaust and to recognize some of the heroic rescuers.  To read the book, is to delve into why Oskar Schindler, of all unlikely people, was moved to take such imaginative and heroic actions.  And then there is the next question, if Schindler did it, why were so few others similarly motivated.  All this is by way of saying that if you haven’t read Schindler’s List, you really need to do that.

 

 

A Family’s Holocaust Memoir – Agata Tuszyska’s Family History of Fear

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Agata Tuszynska has written a remarkable family memoir, Family History of Fear, A Memoir.   Tuszynska is a Polish poet and writer who tries to find out what happened to her family, both before and after the Holocaust.   As the daughter of a survivor, she has some family assistance with her search, but in the end there is a lot she cannot know.  The author’s efforts to uncover the past are founded on one basic story.  Her grandmother nearly survived, but died just when she had reason to feel she might be safe.  Despite her own death, the grandmother managed save to her daughter, the author’s mother.

For Polish Jews,  it wasn’t enough to to survive the Holocaust.  Pogroms survived World War II, and then Poland had its own anti-Semitic purge in the late 60’s.  A surprising number of the author’s relatives survived and elected to remain in Poland to work with the new Communist regime.  The decision to stay despite having lost so many family members and barely escaping death themselves during the war years is bewildering.  Poland may have been their home, but it never felt really safe.   

This isn’t a book where the author’s story is neatly sewn up.  There are stray ends and elderly relatives who either don’t know much or have chosen to forget.  It isn’t all the surprising that Tusznska’s family history is difficult to pin down, because so much was lost during the war, and this was not a cohesive family unit.  Episodic poverty and the near-constant threats to their security, combined with a series of deaths, divorces, second marriages and various alliances depict a family under considerable stress.  At times I found it difficult to keep all the aunts and cousins straight, but that didn’t detract from the author’s story.   To the contrary, this somewhat messy family history where not all relatives are forthcoming about the past and where everyone didn’t always behave all that well rings very true.  At some level the people who survived are very ordinary.  They seem to go about their lives without a lot of reflection about their extraordinary experiences.

In addition to being a wonderful family saga, Family History of Fear also adds to what we know about the Holocause and how some people managed to survive, as a result of bravery and luck, was well as the kindness of those who chose to help.   

 

 

Hubris – The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century

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Alistair Horne’s Hubris – The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century focuses on the dangers of over-confidence in the military arena.  He begins with a brilliant quote from the German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck:  “A generation that deals out a thrashing is usually followed by one that receives it.”

While focusing on the fateful decisions made by various admirals and generals, Horne provides a useful history of warfare in the Twentieth Century.  This is no history of the Korean War or of the Russo-Japanese War, but I learned a lot about both from this very readable book.  Again and again Horne shows how prior victories gave outstanding tacticians unfounded confidence in their ability to keep winning.  At some point, they stopped reflecting and accounting for worst case scenarios and just got carried away by feelings of invincibilty.

Horne’s study of why wars unfolded as they did is well told.  Plainly there are a myriad of factors, but I’d much rather focus on individuals and their fateful decisions.  There were plenty of fundamentally evil players on the battlefields of the Twentieth Century, but Horne also shows how more thoughtful and nuanced individuals also got carried away and just kept pushing until they seized defeat from the jaws of victory, as one of my colleagues used to say.

I recommend this book for its focus on the folly of hubris and also because it provides a lucid tour of warfare in the Twentieth Century.

 

Still More English Princesses

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I can’t quite kick the habit of reading royal biographies, but at least I’m coming to terms with the fact that English princess led boring lives, largely devoid of intellectual challenge.  The bored looks on the cover photos of Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, and Queen Elizabeth II as a girl pretty much make the case that there lives were neither interesting nor fun.  As depicted in their respective biographies, Queen Victoria’s Mysterious Daughter – a Biography of Princess Louise, by Lucinda Hawksley, and Young Elizabeth, the Making of the Queen, by Kate Williams, both Princesses Louise and Elizabeth had some intelligence and potential, but their parents pretty much squeezed it out of them.

Queen Victoria couldn’t see beyond her own excessively demanding personal needs and generally regarded her children as her slaves throughout their lives.  Princess Louise apparently had some artistic talent and was provided with some opportunities to sculpt, but her personal life and interests were consistently disregarded by her mother.  Queen Victoria never got over thinking that her daughter Louise was difficult and needed to be watched.  Lucinda Hawksley, the author of Louise’s biography, takes some imaginative  leaps and provides Louise with a scandalous love story.  If true, it makes her story all the sadder, given her subsequent marriage.

Queen Victoria at least had the excuse of being a widow and having nine children, although it’s card to imagine her being a loving and caring mother under any circumstances.  Queen Elizabeth’s parents, George VI and his Consort Queen Elizabeth, should have had it a bit easier.  They were a loving couple, and they only had two children.  There seems to have been a decent amount of love and affection to go around.  It is true they were traumatized by George’s sudden ascent to the throne after his brother Edward VIII abdicated to “marry the woman he loved.”  Still, Elizabeth’s parents spent time with her.  Unfortunately they completely short-changed her when it came to education.  They were so determined that their daughters have a carefree life, that they didn’t bother to give them an education.  They seemed to think that education was a loathsome thing to be avoided.  Trivial pursuits and playtime pretty much ruled the day.  One will never know if Elizabeth could have become an intellectual, but it certainly seems possible that she might have expanded her interests between horses and dogs had she been given a broader education.  The one lesson Elizabeth seems to have learned very well was to fulfill her responsibilities as a monarch.  That she has done.  She has also picked up a certain amount of political acumen and appreciation for other cultures along the way.  Her life hasn’t been a tragedy, but so much of it has seemed boring and useless waste.

Both of these women suffered from being born into impossible and ridiculous lives of privilege, but their parents certainly made things worse.  Victoria crushed and disdained her Louise, as she did her other children.  Elizabeth’s parents just abdicated their responsibility to educate her.  In a way, that seems the saddest deficit of all.  If nothing else, these books made me think quite a lot about what it means to be a good parent and what we really owe our children.

 

The Immigrant Experience — Growing Up Asian American

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Growing up Asian American – Stories of Childhood, Adolescence and Coming of Age in America from the 1800s to the 1990s,  edited and with an introduction by Maria Hong, is a collection of 33 pieces, both fiction and non-fiction, about the Asian American immigrant experience in America.   The stories share many themes  —  concerns about parents’ expectations, awareness that parents don’t quite fit in or don’t quite get what is going on. and then the writers’ own concerns about how to get along.  A number of the writers feel considerable stress between their families’ insular worlds and their own experiences in American schools and communities.  There are also cringing moments when the writers and their families face discrimination, both blatant and (hopefully) unintended.  These stories don’t have many happy, cohesive families.  Instead, most of the writers come across as loners who have been thrust into an alien environment without the proper tools for survival.

This book is highly recommended.  The sheer volume (33) of the pieces underscores the fact that, regardless of immigration status or economic circumstances, it can be really tough to move to this country and that it can be uniquely traumatic for children.

A Mighty Fortress — A New History of the German People

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Steven Ozment has written a sweeping history of the German people since the time of the Romans in a mere 325 pages  —  A Mighty Fortress – A New History of the German People.  I just read this book, which was written in 2004, before the Angela Merkel era, so an update might  be in order.  Nonetheless this is a useful book.   I was put initially put off by the language, which seemed unnecessarily dense at the beginning.  Clearer language and a few timely references for some of the more obscure figures would have been helpful in the dense narrative.

However, the story of all the different regions coming together was impressive  —  if only it hadn’t ended up with the machinations of Bismarck, the awful comedy of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the utter horror of the Third Reich.  The discussions of Hitler’s coming to power, the Third Reich and the Holocaust were particularly interesting.

Today, it is beyond terrifying to see the parallels between Hitler’s appeal and the current state of American politics.  After the thumping defeat in World War I, many Germans were scared, humiliated and looking for anyone who claimed to be strong.  They seem to have decided that they were in such a state of crisis, that extreme action (and extreme rhetoric) were absolutely necessary.  And, of course, they were susceptible to a candidate targeting scapegoats.

In Hitler’s case, this led to unprecedented tragedy.  The people in a position to oppose him didn’t take him seriously until it was too late.  It is hard not to hold the Germans who voted for him to account, because Hitler pretty much did what he said he was going to do.   With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, there was nothing inevitable about Hitler, but he was nonetheless voted into power.  Fortunately for the world, Hitler considered himself a military genius (despite his paltry military record), and made a number of fatal strategic mistakes that brought the war to an end.  Unfortunately this defeat came only after the deaths of millions upon millions.

Americans like to think that such tragedy couldn’t happen here, but the current election seems to be testing the theory.   Today, a substantial number of American voters seem untroubled by candidates’ lack of foreign relations and military experience.  It is enough for candidates to declare that American will regain its power and be strong, and then to trumpet the candidates’ lack of experience, common sense and humanity as virtues.  Being a boor has somehow become an asset.  Similarly the blanket targeting of Muslims, the bullying of opponents and a determined disregard for factual accuracy all hark back to tactics prevalent in Hitler’s rise to power.

The German people’s response to the Nazi genocide is inevitably unsatisfying.  Even where guilt is acknowledged and reparations are paid, I’m left with the feeling that so many Germans, past and present, really don’t understand or accept that horrific crimes were committed in the name of the German people.  There is  a distancing and a lack of accountability.  Hitler wasn’t just some curse Germany had to endure  —  he was elected and then supported for a very long time.  As with many accounts of this period, this section of the book left me disappointed and unconvinced.  My qualms aside, Germany has taken important steps to quash Anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi revivals.

The reunification of Germany at the end of the Cold War brought the book to a close.  The conclusion felt anticlimactic, and certainly didn’t anticipate Angela Merkel or Germany’s current role as one of the more humanitarian countries in Europe.  I can’t help thinking how furious Hitler would be about all the immigrants flocking to Germany, and of course he would be even more furious about the welcome they have received.  The scenario calls for a Mel Brooks treatment.

I did think A New History of the German  People was an interesting book, and it probably deserves a second look.   A lot of important material was set out in remarkably concise fashion.