Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History Emeritus at Lafayette College and author of ten books, including Vicksburg, and Masters of the Air, currently being made into a television series by Tom Hanks. He has hosted, coproduced, or served as historical consultant for more than thirty television documentaries and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications.

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The Story of World War II

Simon & Schuster

Preface

In 1995, the death of my father, a World War II veteran, reawakened my interest in the war that transformed his life and the lives of his friends and family in the close-knit working-class neighborhood where he grew up, graduated from high school, and met my mother. They were married not long after my father entered the Army Air Forces in 1942 at the age of nineteen. And when he left Reading, Pennsylvania, for basic training, she took a job at a local plant that produced parts for the planes of the air arm he served in for the next three years. Her father, a Slovak immigrant, worked in a steel mill that forged weapons of war for General Dwight D. Eisenhower's great army of liberation. In 1944, that army swept across France and into Hitler's Germany, where my uncle, John Steber, a mud-slogging infantryman, was captured and spent the remainder of the war in a Nazi prison camp. Before that, he had served in North Africa and fought and nearly died on Omaha Beach on D-Day.

Except for those like him who saw combat, Americans did not directly experience the plague of war. We were not invaded, nor were our great cities turned to rubble and ash. Yet Americans at home did suffer. Born in late 1944, 1 was too young to experience the war, but engraved in my mind is the living room of our neighbors, the Adamses, turned for many years after the war into a shrine for the boy who never came back. After the war, my father was President of the Catholic War Veterans post that was named after Francis Adams, and it was there, over a number of years, that I coaxed and pulled stories of the war out of tight-lipped veterans, many of them tough steel workers, like my uncle, who wanted to forget.

When my father died, these stories took a stronger hold on me. At the time, I had just finished one book and was well into the research for another, a history of the Vicksburg Campaign, the turning point of the American Civil War. But as I was about to begin writing, I discovered a book that moved me in the direction I really wanted to go. This was Henry Steele Commager's The Story of the Second World War.

I found the book on a pile of papers in the office of my friend Lou Reda, a documentary film producer who has made over a hundred films on World War II for national television, all of them in his small shop in Easton, Pennsylvania, where I live with my family and teach at Lafayette College. Commager had played a part in my life. In college, the first serious book I read on American history was the magisterial work he co-authored with Samuel Eliot Morison, The Growth of the American Republic, one of the most influential, entertaining, and widely read general histories of the United States. That book and a number of others I read over the course of a lazy summer, playing basketball and chasing the girl I would marry, convinced me to switch my major from business administration to history, and years later, Commager himself gave my career a push by encouraging an editor to publish one of my first books. By 1995, I had read almost all of Commager's work, yet I had no idea he had written a book about World War II. 1 was embarrassed to admit this to Lou Reda, who had been a close friend of Commager's and made a film for television, The Blue and the Gray, with Commager and Bruce Catton serving as historical consultants.

Reda handed me one of his spare copies of The Story of the Second World War, and I took it home and got lost in it for the next two days. Written during the war, while Commager, a forty-three-year-old professor at Columbia University, was working as a propagandist and historian for the War Department in London, Paris, and Washington, it brought together some of the best stories of the war, many of them by correspondents whose work drew them into the thick of the fight. There are also official reports, public speeches, newspaper and magazine pieces, radio broadcasts, and selections from popular histories written while the war was being fought. Commager stitched together these various accounts with a vigorously written history of the war. He wrote with passion and patriotic fervor, picturing World War II as a clearly drawn conflict between good and evil. It is a work of history as well as moral partisanship, from the pen of an aroused humanist who believed that fascist tyranny threatened to plunge civilization into a new dark age. As his Columbia colleague Allan Nevins said: "When [Commager] takes up a cause...it is with fervor almost volcanic."

Commager did not set out to write a comprehensive history of the war. In late 1945 it was too soon for that; the official records were not yet available. "But war is not only a matter of information and statistics," he wrote in the book's preface. "It is felt experience, and no later generation can quite recapture that experience. Here is the story of the war as it came to the American and British people -- as it looked and felt while the fighting was going on."

For me, the book's pulling power was these qualities of immediacy and emotional empathy, the feeling it gave of living inside a tremendous moment in historical time. Reading of those grim days in the middle of the war, when it looked to knowing observers in the West that the Axis powers might prevail, one is quickly disabused of the idea of historical inevitability. It was a war the Allies could easily have lost.

This was a book, I thought, that deserved to be back in print, but in a greatly revised and updated form, to reflect not only the latest scholarship on the war but also the eyewitness accounts of those who lived through that world-transforming event.

Commager was, understandably, too emotionally involved in the war to write an unsparing account of it. He also had to contend with wartime censorship. There was tight government censorship of the letters of American servicemen and of the dispatches of war correspondents. This was done for reasons of military security, but the military also did not want folks back home to know how ferocious the fighting was on land, at sea, and in the air. Until the middle of the war, no pictures were published in the American press showing dead American boys, not even photographs of fallen fighting men with blankets covering their battered bodies.

Some of this censorship was self-imposed. "We edited ourselves," John Steinbeck remarked, "much more than we were edited." Steinbeck and his fellow war correspondents wanted to contribute to victory by bolstering homefront morale -- not by twisting the truth but by not telling everything. Or as playwright Arthur Miller writes of the legendary war reporter Ernie Pyle: by telling "as much of what he saw as people could read without vomiting." There was a shared feeling "that unless the home front was carefully protected from the whole account of what war was like," Steinbeck writes, "it might panic." It was only after the war, when those who had seen it up close began telling their stories in novels and memoirs, that the protected American public learned what a "crazy hysterical mess" much of the war had been.

Commager had access only to the filtered reports of combat, and he never got close to the dirty and dangerous front lines. Here was an opportunity to enrich and broaden his book, drawing on material he might have used had it been available to him. Starting in my own community, I began interviewing World...