Writers on World War II: An Anthology

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

On first dipping into this rich anthology, thoughts surface about the
course of literature in the last 50 years. There are very few poems
here, and perhaps only one memorable one, but there are powerful
excerpts from novels, diaries, and memoirs from around the world. There
is poetry in the prose of Richard Hillary’s account of being shot down
in the Battle of Britain, Primo Levi’s description of events in
Auschwitz, and letters from Japanese Kamikaze pilots; and the novel has
never seemed more forceful than in these pages from Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead, Lothar-Gunther Buchheim’s The Boat, and Joseph
Heller’s Catch–22.

The seven years of the war are covered in chronological order and each
extract is headed by a brief note on its author. But this is a book to
refer to again and again, and readers would have been helped by an index
of authors and events.

The expected stories are here—Pearl Harbor (James Jones), the sinking
of the Bismarck (Ludovic Kennedy), Babi Yar (Anatoli Kuznetsov), Dieppe
(John Keegan). The high drama is leavened by surprises, such as George
Orwell’s review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, John Costello’s pieces on
American women struggling to get in the war and English women struggling
with American soldiers (although the desperation of the search for humor
is evident in a few bizarre short fillers), and accounts of life out of
uniform by Elizabeth Bowen in London, Janet Flanner in Paris, Marie
Vassiltchikov in Berlin, and Natalia Ginzburg in Italy.

The full emotional impact of the collection comes in the final pages,
and here lies the skill of Richler as editor. As the war came to an end,
stories surfaced of black marketeers, collaborators, deportations,
emaciated camp survivors, politicians with their own agenda—stories of
the horrors that festered behind the battle lines, stories of the
business of war. And after Hiroshima, the last word is from William
Manchester on the American acceptance of the Japanese delegation
admitting defeat. General MacArthur spoke about peace.