World War II (review)

This volume of the “Daily Life Through History” series describes and analyzes the experiences of Americans in uniform during World War II with extensive examples drawn from interviews and other primary documents. Piehler draws upon many fine secondary sources as well as his own involvement as founding director of the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II.

Aiming for a general audience, the book begins with an overview of the entire war in the first chapter, introducing the reader to many essential facts already familiar to military historians, such as the basic organization of units and the “Europe First” strategy. Next come chapters on the Navy, Army, Army Air Forces, and Marines, also containing a good deal of general background information intermixed with anecdotes and details of human experience. Two further chapters on the experience of POWs and the war’s aftermath are perhaps the most interesting, followed by a final chapter of selected primary documents, “The Words of Soldiers.”

One notable strength is the book’s attention to the U.S. Coast Guard, given its due despite being tucked into the chapter on the Navy. Issues of race and gender are addressed appropriately in every chapter, and we learn that the Coast Guard was the first service to end formal segregation in 1942–43.

Unfortunately the book also contains significant flaws that could have been avoided by more competent editing. Some are merely quirky or annoying, for example inconsistent capitalization of the armed services, and malapropisms such as medical aid and riflemen in foxholes being “disbursed,” ammunition loaded “unto” ships, soldiers ordered to “affix” bayonets, and “aircrafts” as the plural of aircraft. References to “the German .88 artillery piece” and the “.57 mm gun” are trivial but symptomatic inaccuracies. In other cases, poor phrasing leads to ambiguity mixed with factual errors, for example: “… the Japanese had little problem destroying British naval power trying to defend Malaysia by sinking the battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales on December 10, 1941” (p. 22). Referring to “scores” of troops killed at Gallipoli in 1915 misses the scale of that fiasco by several orders of magnitude (p. 115). Misspelled names such as “Mindano” (Mindanao) and “Beito” (Betio) may cause confusion (pp. 100–101, 128). Elsewhere we read that the Japanese lost five aircraft carriers at Midway, four of them in less than an hour (pp. 22, 47–48); that the USS Monterey (CVL-26) foundered in December 1944 (p. 50); that the Pershing tank was a modified version of the Sherman; that the BAR was a heavy machine gun (p. 70); that the Doolittle Raid involved B-17s flying off two carriers (p. 101); and that “flack jackets” as well as helmets sometimes offered U.S. infantrymen a “modicum of protection” in World War II (p. 72).

Aside from such errors, Piehler’s work is well suited to provide broad context and background for general readers, and the book is recommended especially for those engaged in oral history projects. Many of the excerpts from primary sources will also interest more specialized readers. However, one hopes that Greenwood Press will try harder to uphold its reputation as an authoritative source of scholarly work in which details sometimes matter.