When Japan decided to go to war with the United States in 1941, it went with the realization that it could not win in a war of attrition. The average Japanese soldier (marine, aviator, etc.) had about four pounds of logistical support behind him (weapons, fuel, munitions, food, shipping, etc.) while the same fighter for the U.S. had over four thousand pounds. Admiral Yamamoto was correct when he said that Japan had awoken a sleeping giant.

The results of this disparity were shown early in the war, when after suffering a naval setback, Japan left over 150,000 troops stranded in New Guinea with the advice to live off the land. Unfortunately, New Guinea was not Western Europe or the Ukraine; instead, it is a hard land with little farmable land, but many high mountains, extreme heat, and humidity, covered in thick jungle with few roads. The result was that only about 10,000 Japanese military personnel survived the campaign. The stranded troops were left, as were so many other Japanese on dozens of isolated islands, to fend for themselves. The result was widespread examples of cannibalism.

James Badley in his book, Fly Boys, details the lives, capture and execution of several American flyers who were shot down over the island of Chichi Jima, a small island some 240 km. north of Iwo Jima. The aviators were all executed by the Japanese either by beheading or bayoneting and sections of their bodies were cut off and served, knowingly to Japanese officers in keeping with a belief that such action would strengthen the fighting spirits of the diners. For several decades after the war, the exact details of those actions were kept secret even though several of the Japanese officers were tried and either executed or imprisoned for their actions. The author, spend years and conducted many interviews with survivors, including Japanese veterans and surviving relatives of the executed Americans to build out the story.

History can be the best of subjects or the worse depending on your individual mindset, for any event in history can be a huge puzzle that can and does cause debate years and years after any given event. History is not as bad as the saying about economics (ask four economist a question as to what will happen and you will receive five opinions), for at least with history there are certain proven facts, records, confessions, etc.

In this historical novel, the author pulls on diaries, interviews, memoirs, and other sources to provide the reader with an excellent overview of numerous personalities (Churchill, Halifax, Goebbels, Goring, Beaverbrook, and others), their strategies, fears, personalities, and so on and how by interacting with one another, they created the saga of the Battle of Britain. How close to defeat was England at that time and how great the burden on the shoulders of men like Churchill, Beaverbrook, and others as they had to hold together and create a national will against not only the forces of Hitler, but also against those within their own country and even cabinet who wished to take a different course. How easy it would have been to simply make some sort of deal with Hitler in the vain hope that he, who had broken every agreement, could be trusted.

Over the decades, I have read many books, transcripts, interviews, done personal interviews, etc. regarding the killing squads and death camps of the Nazi regime. “How” I wondered, “could a cultured nation like Germany march so easily into the brutal murder of millions of individuals who the deemed as sub-human?”  This is certainly not a new question as it has been debated for decades, by those who like Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” theory to those who felt that there was some sort of missing component to the German soul. Perhaps there were two types of killers, especially in the SS; the bureaucrats such as Eichman and the officers who stood at the receiving dock at Auschwitz, and those who murdered by executing men, women, and children in the killing pits of Ukraine, Poland, and the rest of Europe. Could they have been indoctrinated by their SS training to believe that they were doing good, freeing the world of vermin to create a better world? But, what about the Police battalions? They were made up of ordinary police officers, men trained up uphold the law, yet they were able to overcome their training and became killers as deadly as the SS Eizengruppen. There were also sadists such as the hardened criminals and perverts of the Kaminski Brigade and the 36^th SS division under the command of Oskar Dirlewanger, but even they were viewed with distain by the regular SS divisions. It was a question that is still debated today by historians, psychologists, and others; was it due to their training, beliefs, or a mass psychosis. Somehow another group of men, who were under strict military control managed to become even worse that the groups I have mentioned; that group is the officers and enlisted men of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy

Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder’s monumental work has been complimented by Black Earth, The Holocaust as History and Warning. I must admit that I was initially put from this book due to numerous reviews which seemed to focus on one small portion of this work, that of trying to link the lessons of the Holocaust to climate change.  Such a premise held no interest to me as the horrors documented in Bloodlands was the result of conscious decisions by political systems which denied the basic humanity of mankind, whereas the arguments re: climate change are open to sloppy science at the worse as well as subject to hyperbole (we only have twelve years left) which undercut the actual science.

Given the reviews, rather than purchase the book as I would do with any Snyder book, I found it during a cruise in the ship’s library. I was wonderfully surprised that ninety-eight percent of the book was an excellent historical work which consolidated and exposed many forgotten historical facts as well as providing a key analysis between the goals and policies of Hitler’s Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union not only leading up to the Holocaust but also the misconceptions of those three powers and how they impacted the course of history.

For years, Hitler’s Germany attempted to woo Poland into an alliance which would result in a joint German-Polish invasion of the Soviet Union; the goal was the fulfillment of Hitler’s dream of Lebensraum but also (as the Poles realized) making Poland a client state of Germany.  For Stalin, the eliminate of Poland was key, in large part due to the Soviet’s defeat by the Poles in 1921 and Stalin’s part in the defeat, and to create a bigger buffer against Germany.  For the Poles, caught between two more powerful neighbors, the key was to play one off against the other by having non-aggression pacts with both Germany and the Soviet Union.

When the Cold War ended, many felt that it signified the end of totalitarianism and dictatorship. The world would move forward into a new age where individuals and societies would be freer to determine their futures. As we have seen however, there are those societies and individuals who seem to have chosen to continue along the path which limits the freedom of the individual and seeks to continue what is the main course of human history, that of strong leaders who believe they have found the true path to a better world as outlined by their own vision, paranoia and sense of victimhood.

Are the visions of the leaders of Russia, China, Turkey, North Korea, and others simply anomalies or do they reflect a natural inclination of mankind? How is it that leaders can be supported as they move to limit freedoms, begin to imprison opponents, and even move toward genocide, often of their own citizens? This book allows us to learn from the past and see how it is often those who are considered the “best and the brightest” to begin to move down the path of tyranny and destruction.

From my reading of the subject, this is the best history of the RSHA which incorporated the SD, Gestapo, and the Criminal Police and provided the leadership for the killing squads that roamed through Europe from the invasion of Poland in September 1939 until late in the war.

     Unlike the popular image of the SA, the street enforcers of the Nazis especially prior to the “revolution” when Hitler rode into power, much of the leadership of the RSHA came out of the university student unions which gained such power after WWI. Today, at many of our universities, we see leftist demonstrations aimed at seizing administrative power at all levels, blocking dissenting views, demanding the ouster of “unenlightened” professors, etc. But in the 1930’s it was the right wing at the universities which interrupted lectures, led massive demonstrations and frequently started violent conflicts with those who dared to challenge them. Although most of the students had little contact with Jews, by 1930 only a couple of fraternities accepted Jews as members and the anti-Semitism was directed not only at students but also professors and administrators.

     With the Nazi seizure of power, leading students joined first the SA, then moved into the SS and were transferred to the RSHA. Many had received their doctorates in law and were perfectly trained to administer the ever-expanding realm of the RSHA.

     Totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union operate on several levels. You have the official state apparatus which is called the “Normative State” and then you have the “Prerogative State” which exists and operates outside the normal boundaries of the State and Society. The “Prerogative State” consists of paramilitary militias, the secret police, informers, etc. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union relied on the police to maintain control and not the army (which was co-opted, infiltrated, etc.). The real rule of the secret police, according to Hanna Arendt, begins when domestic opposition (traditional political foes) ends (usually through extermination) and then the search for “objective” foes begins.

    This is an excellent book for those who are genuinely interested in this subject. It traces numerous individuals, often from their university days through their movement within the RSHA. With no indication of previous thoughts or actions, top university students move from studies to anti-Semitism to active participation in the shooting of hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of men, women, and children. And in the end, after the war, the overwhelming majority went back to Germany and led ordinary lives. Some became government officials in post-war Germany while others became police officials and even members of the bar. How those men who had ordered and participated in the slaughter of thousands could escape any form of retribution is due in part to the post-war fear of the Soviet Union, the efforts of the average Germans to deny any knowledge of crimes and blame it all on the highly visible SS, the ignorance of the victors about the organization of the Nazi state and smart politicians such as Konrad Adenauer who managed to play East against West in his effort to resurrect the new German state.

Thousands of youthful, idealistic minds were bent to oppressing others all in the name of a greater good. It should serve as a lesson to responsible adults that youth throughout history are more easily led by demigods and that indulging them in their folly without adult guidance can lead to terrible, even deadly consequences.

     This is not an easy book to read as it is extremely detailed, and the novice will quickly be lost in the details. But for anyone interested in this fascinating subject, it is well worth the effort.

Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton are names which will stand for the Allied victory in Western Europe during World War II.  But who were these men, what were their backgrounds, how were they picked to hold their commands and finally, how secure were they in those commands.  Mr. Jordan does an excellent job in answering these and other questions in a concise and excellent manner.  These men did not suddenly appear with stars on their shoulders with full knowledge of their craft; they served decades in backwater posts, seemingly forgotten, grinding out their lives (and the lives of their families) believing that they might never practice what they were learning.

Then came World War II, but more importantly, a man by the name of Marshall, George C. Marshall.  He was charged with creating from a puny, ill equipped army a force that could fight around the world, something that no one and no country had ever done.  Breaking the careers of several hundred generals, Marshall had the ability to reach into corners of the military and find individuals who had spent up to twenty years in obscure posts due to tight budgets, their thinking outside of the military “box”, etc.

Time can be cruel as it leaves behind many important things. This book, The Cruel Sea is on such loss for it is seldom read any longer. Set in the Atlantic during World War II, it is a story of ordinary men called upon to do extraordinary deeds. Most of the men are young, a lieutenant of twenty who is called upon to be second in command, other junior officers who a few weeks earlier were bank clerks or shoe salesmen. The recruits don’t have any experience, and many cannot remember port from starboard but are responsible for staffing guns, handling depth charges and being on call to fight fires. At the top, on the bridge, is a retired captain who must mold his crew into a fighting unit while patrolling the hostile north Atlantic.

During the Second World War, Allied bombing was responsible for over 500,000 deaths in Europe. The bombing was one part of a war to defeat Nazi Germany and is little appreciated for its impact on the course of the war.  Stalin constantly wanted a second front to help his war, and little understood how the air war contributed to his ability to defeat the Nazi war machine.  As usual, Richard Overy has provided us with the one book we would recommend for anyone to understand the Allied air war.

For anyone who has read books which deal with how men react in wartime, this novel is often referred to as a realistic description of military life. In a sense, it could in certain parts, be an English version of Joseph Hellers novel, Catch-22 with better character development and a darker form of humor. Evelyn Waugh is best known for his novel, Brideshead Revisited, but this novel is a semi-biographical account of his war time experiences as well as his relationship with his Catholicism (he converted to Catholicism in 1930 after the failure of his first marriage).

Richard Rhodes is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and has written both fiction and non-fiction, on topics as diverse as the Donner Party, the invention of the Atom Bomb and the Audubon Society.  In this work, he traces how the Einsatzgruppen were organized, their scope of activity, their relationship with the Wehrmacht and the impact of mass killings on the individuals within the units.

Originally deployed in Poland at the start of the war, their primary directive was the murder of the leaders of Polish society; lawyers, doctors, educators, political leaders, etc. as the conqueror Poles were destined to be a source of ignorant slave laborers who did not need to count much above 100 in their future live.  The “special action groups” also targeted any Poles who offered any resistance either real or imagined.  At the same time, they went after suspected communists and finally, the Jews of Poland.  As the original plan was to move the Jews out of Europe, the concept of committing mass murder of the Jews was not in their primary list of objectives.  Yet once the killing began, and they were under the protection of SS-Reichsfuehrer Himmler, their murderous campaign quickly expanded.