November 1942
An Intimate History of the Turning Point of World War II
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4.3 • 18 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • An intimate history of the most important month of World War II, completely based on the diaries, letters and memoirs of the people who lived through it
At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the Axis powers could still win the Second World War; at the end of that month, it was obviously just a matter of time before they would lose. In between were el-Alamein, Guadalcanal, the French North Africa landings, the Japanese retreat in New Guinea and the Soviet encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. It may have been the most important thirty days of the twentieth century. In this hugely innovative and riveting history, Peter Englund has reduced an epoch-making event to its basic component: the individual experience.
Englund’s narrative is based solely on what he learned from the writings of soldiers and ordinary citizens alike. They comprise a remarkable, deeply personal resource. In thirty memorable days, among those we meet are: a Soviet infantryman at Stalingrad; an American pilot on Guadalcanal; an Italian truck driver in the North African desert; a partisan in the Belarussian forests; a machine gunner in a British bomber; a twelve-year-old girl in Shanghai; a university student in Paris; a housewife on Long Island; a shipwrecked Chinese sailor; a prisoner in Treblinka; a Korean “comfort woman” in Mandalay; Albert Camus, Vasily Grossman and Vera Brittain—forty characters in all. In addition, we experience the construction and launching of SS James Oglethorpe, a Liberty ship built in Savannah; the fate of U-604, a German submarine; the building of the first nuclear reactor in Chicago; and the making of Casablanca.
Not since the publication of the author’s last book, The Beauty and the Sorrow, which similarly looked at the First World War, have we had such a mesmerizing work of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Swedish historian Englund takes a captivating firsthand look at a pivotal month of WWII by drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of 39 people who lived through it—the same approach he utilized in The Beauty and the Sorrow, his 2012 study of WWI. Over the course of November 1942, the momentum toward victory shifted away from the Axis powers and to the Allies: U.S. troops landed in North Africa; the British defeated the Germans in Egypt; the Soviets trapped the German army in Stalingrad; and the Japanese suffered defeat in Guadalcanal and New Guinea. Englund's subjects, who document aspects of this turning of the tides, include Sophie Scholl, a German university student leading a secret war against the Nazis; Mun Okchu, an 18-year-old Korean woman forced to work as a sex slave for the Japanese army in Burma; and Adelbert Holl, a German officer embedded behind enemy lines in Russia. There are also such well-known figures as Albert Camus, living outside Lyons, France, while recovering from tuberculosis and finishing his novel The Plague, and Humphrey Bogart, waiting in Hollywood to shoot the new ending of Casablanca as news of U.S. troops in Africa dominates headlines. This gripping and propulsive account, expertly translated by Graves in lyrical prose, recreates the daily uncertainty of war as experienced by regular people with limited information and few resources. It's a monumental work of history.
