Common Cause, Uncommon Courage: World War II and the Home Front in Cambridge, Massachusetts (review)

Books featuring oral history interviews with World War II veterans abound. One of the things that makes this particular collection unique is the choice to interview people from a specific geographic place. The people interviewed in this book all came from the area in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts; it is the place they were raised, called home, moved to, and chose to come back to. Cambridge is where they raised their families, and now as they grow older, continue to live. And while the book is a compilation of their stories, it is also the history of Cambridge and surrounding areas during the war years.

Boyer organizes the book into three main sections: the European, China-Burma, and Pacific theaters of war. The first chapter for each section "discusses the war from three perspectives: the world, the American home front, and Cambridge" (xi). Each section offers individual oral histories from men and women that are telling, moving, and poignant. Also included are small items from local newspapers of the times such as the Cambridge Chronicle, Cambridge Sun, and Boston Sunday Herald that bring a "neighborhood" and "small town" perspective to the individual stories contained in the book. The individual newspaper items bring a nice historical and small town perspective to the contributions that Cambridge made to the war effort and to the memories and experiences contained within the individual oral histories.

Each person's history starts with an introduction of the interviewee and his or her photograph, if one is available, and a profile with a synopsis of his or her wartime experience. It then continues with a transcription of the interview that Boyer conducted. Reading through the transcriptions, the reader gets an immediate and true picture of the person's wartime experience. And while I am very well-read about the World War II experience of many, it never ceases to amaze me how oral histories such as those included in this book can jump off the page and grip you into understanding what the veteran and his or her "buddies" went through.

One such example is the oral history of Marvin Gilmore who was a corporal in the U.S. Army and, like many others, experienced the European front firsthand. However, for me, his experience dealing with racist officers, segregation, and the discrimination that so many black American servicemen and women went through was even more gripping. Gilmore comes away from his military experience wanting "to be somebody. I came back trying to make a difference, trying to help young people" (96). Gilmore says at the end of his interview that "War is a terrible thing. It just breeds violence. How could it reach that magnitude of cruelty? Why was it necessary? I don't know how men could become animalistic. Was it in them before, or did the war create that?" (96).

You will also find interviews with prisoners of war. Gabriel Paiva was a Chief Torpedoman's Mate in the U.S. Navy and serving on Corregidor when General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered the American forces to the Japanese on May 5, 1942. Paiva was imprisoned in many different camps in the Philippines and finally liberated in late 1945. He says of his last months there: "I encountered more fleas than I had experienced before. They kept me from sleeping, and this was taking its toll on my nervous system and energy. They were not only in the woodwork of the building; they were everywhere. They would jump around under one's clothing, bite and suck blood as they pleased. I felt so depleted that I feared I would not survive another winter as a POW" (221).

The book's compiler, Sarah Boyer, includes a personal note in the preface stating that this project was...