Never Will We Forget: Oral Histories of World War II (review)

On February 27, 2011, Frank Buckles, the last living American veteran from World War I died. His passing serves as a poignant reminder that the generation that witnessed the next great conflict, World War II, is departing this world at a rate estimated to be as high as 1000 per day. Rescuing the personal side of this conflict, Marilyn Mayer Culpepper’s Never Will We Forget: Oral Histories of World War II, is the latest to collect accounts from those who served both at home and abroad in the formative experience for that generation, World War II.

Following in the same footprints as Studs Terkel’s The Good War and Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, as well as the video efforts of Ken Burns’ 2007 documentary The War, Culpepper offers personal reminiscences of over 400 ordinary men and women who were transformed by the World War II experience. The author, Professor Emerita at Michigan State University, links a collection of personal interviews conducted both in person and by telephone, with accounts gleaned from oral history collections nationwide and memories of family and friends gathered by others into a series of thematically arranged chapters. The net result is the preservation of the memories of ordinary people in what she considers extraordinary times, which collectively provide personal and often emotional insight into lives shaped by war.

Never Will We Forget does neither offer much in the way of deep analysis nor does attempt to break new ground in the historiography of World War II. Instead, it serves as a vehicle that allows those affected by the World War II experience to offer their own “glimpses of a world at war and the changes that radically transformed people and the world they lived in” (i). She includes not only soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who served in World War II but also nurses, Women’s Army Corps, Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service, and “Rosie the Riveters” on the home front. Many of Culpepper’s stories are particularly poignant. One such example is the heart-wrenching experience of Sonia Dudek, who came home with a newborn daughter only to be greeted shortly thereafter by a solemn soldier holding her husband’s dog tags, wallet, and a Purple Heart that had supposedly been awarded posthumously. When a postcard from her husband arrived a few weeks later, her life was thrown into turmoil as she was not sure if he was dead or alive. After what can only be described as a series of miracles, Dudek discovered that her husband was in fact alive, rescued by a pair of GIs on the battlefield after German soldiers left him for dead (208–09).

Although Culpepper’s efforts successfully illuminates the human side of the American experience in World War II, minor inaccuracies and editing issues often obscure an otherwise compelling series of stories. An understanding of World War II chronology is required to place the assembled recollections in a larger historical context, for the author jumps from month, to year, to location, emphasizing themes over a cohesive historical narrative. Opening with Pearl Harbor, Culpepper follows with a chapter on women in the war and then jumps to Operation Overlord, the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy. The subsequent chapter, “Europe,” begins with a veteran’s account of the July 9 and 10, 1943 amphibious landings on Sicily, which took place almost a year before D-Day (55–56). In another account, a veteran spoke of crossing the Rhine, Mosel, and Saar rivers before referencing a tragic crossing of the Merderet near St. Mere Eglise, followed by references to fighting in the hedgerow country and his experiences in the Battle of the Bulge (146), an unnecessary jumbling of European geography and World War II chronology. Other incongruities suggest a need for a more discerning eye in the editing process. For example, Culpepper cites the recollections of John Kennedy, flying “his first mission out of...