An exercise in raining on the Greatest Generation’s parade, best read by those who were not alive during that time.
The end of the Third Reich brought Nazi-occupied Europe a new set of troubles, maintains Hitchcock (History/Temple Univ.; The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945 to the Present, 2003, etc.) in this thoroughly revisionist, middling history.
“Liberation came to Europe in a storm of destruction and death,” the author writes. As many French civilians died at D-Day as American soldiers, while German civilians were made to pay for the sins of the Nazi regime in a rain of bullets and bombs fired and dropped by men who knew full well that noncombatants would die. The cause of liberation was virtuous, Hitchcock allows, but the Allied soldiers who prosecuted it were not necessarily so. The power that liberation brought to them was sometimes manifest in episodes of drunkenness, looting, rape, murder and other untoward behavior. Some once-occupied countries fared better than others; France, for instance, soon fell under its own administration, thanks to brokering long since undertaken by Free French leader Charles de Gaulle. Others were not so fortunate, and material conditions did not always substantially improve once the Germans had gone, as in the poverty-stricken southern districts of Italy. Hitchcock points to the irony of Jim Crow: Whereas only about ten percent of all troops in the European Theater were African-American, 75 percent of soldiers executed for rape and other crimes were black. On another front, about 500,000 American soldiers had contracted venereal diseases by June 1945. Hitchcock argues that the high price of liberation was compounded by political expedience. Churchill and Roosevelt wanted self-government and freedom, but of course “Stalin did not desire to return Europe to the status quo ante bellum.” The result was still more suffering for Europeans. Hitchcock does not sufficiently allow that the liberation of Europe had its good aspects, too, not least ending Hitler’s rule.
An exercise in raining on the Greatest Generation’s parade, best read by those who were not alive during that time.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7381-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing study for students of military culture and mental health.
A challenge to conventional wisdom about the military ignoring PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and suicide among troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kieran (History, American Studies/Washington & Jefferson Coll.; Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory, 2014, etc.) never denies the seriousness of PTSD, TBI, and suicide among active and discharged veterans. However, he contends that critics of the military and federal bureaucracy often downplay the complexities of understanding the problems and finding effective solutions. In fact, he contends, implacable anti-war critics have unfairly used the psychological injuries for political ends. “In a climate in which anti-war sentiment was often dismissed with assertions that critics were not supporting the troops,” writes Kieran, “pointing out how the wars were harming those troops facilitated broader policy critiques.” Before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, research about PTSD, TBI, and suicide was based on the premise that deployments would be brief and that the same troops would not be ordered to return to the same war zones multiple times. When the nature of war changed, the military and the Veterans Administration had to recalibrate their policies and their research to react to new realities. As the author points out, those recalibrations take time and don’t usually conform to the urgent needs of combat veterans. Kieran’s research takes readers inside the medical arm of military services and civilian government bureaucracies, showing dedicated researchers and administrators trying to reach consensus about how to treat—and perhaps even prevent—serious mental damage and suicide. The author stresses that the disagreements about how to proceed derive from compassionate advocates relying on science-based research. Kieran rejects the commonly held belief that those in charge of warfare are dismissive of effective treatments for veterans. Throughout, the author provides memorable individual case studies. Much of the book, however, relies on dense academic research and a scholarly writing style, so general readers will need to pay close attention to digest the author’s arguments.
An intriguing study for students of military culture and mental health.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4798-9236-5
Page Count: 404
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
In another of this year's lunar memorial volumes, Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, vividly recalls that nearly disastrous moon mission in superb, measured, dramatic prose. It was to have been NASA's third lunar landing. But on April 13, 1970, almost 56 hours and 200,000 miles away from Earth, an explosion aboard the spacecraft left astronauts Lovell, Fred Haise, and John Swigert with almost no power and less than two hours' worth of oxygen. If something wasn't done, the three men would soon suffocate and the crippled craft would continue in an ``absurd, egg-shaped orbit...for millennia.'' While the world watched and waited, inescapable comparisons were drawn with the January 1967 tragedy in which Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White were killed in an explosion during a dress rehearsal for the first manned Apollo mission. The authors (Kluger is a contributing editor of Discover) provide a gripping version of that event and an excellent history of the whole Apollo program. Lovell had been on Apollo 8, the first manned ``trans-lunar journey,'' and his description of his initial glimpse of the moon as the spacecraft began orbit is extraordinary. But sightseeing was far from his mind when Apollo 13 went haywire. The scientists at Mission Control, those ``responsible for keeping the mechanical organism alive in a place that it really had no business being,'' put the spacecraft through a series of maneuvers that they could only hope would return the astronauts safely. Lovell and his men, meanwhile, abandoned ship, climbing into the tiny but intact lunar excursion module (LEM), where they stayed until just prior to splashdown. They then returned to the command module, jettisoned the LEM, and landed in the Pacific, shaken and ill from their ordeal. Even the hard science comes clear here. Lovell and Kluger recapture—and rekindle—our sense of awe and wonder at manned space flight. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-67029-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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