revbry's Journal

Voices of My Comrades
America?s Reserve Officers Remember World War II
Edited by Carol Adele Kelly, Foreword by Sen. Ted Stevens, and Sen. Daniel K. Inouye
$39.95
ISBN: 9780823228232
Book (Hardcover)
Fordham University Press
7X10
480 pages
48 black and white illustrations
December 2007

 

?Voices of my Comrades features so many exhilarating and untold accounts, it is as if the story of the war were being told for the first time. This book is an extraordinary achievement and a much-needed contribution to the canon of great World War II literature.??Andrew Carroll, author of War Letters and Behind the Lines

"Tracks the years of WWII through stories from 240 veterans."?Publishers Weekly

Stories from 240 veterans?representing all theaters, ranks, and services?track the years of World War II month by month.

From the young ensign?s letter to his fianc?e, describing his escape from the USS Cassin minutes before it explodes at Pearl Harbor, to the battle-seasoned colonel?s account of his flyover at the peace-treaty signing aboard the USS Missouri, the stories give a human face to the moments of war, written by men and women who intimately lived those history-making days, on bombing missions and invasion duty, on front lines and the home front.

Readers will meet a survivor of the USS Reuben James, sunk by a German U-boat before December 7, 1941, and eight D-Day invaders of Normandy, including Lieutenant Colonel J. Strom Thurmond, paratrooper. They will also meet a bodyguard to General Douglas MacArthur and the nurses who healed the fallen in huts on Bataan, the hospital ship Shamrock in the Mediterranean, and field hospitals in France.

Here, too, are personal accounts by Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) and the battlehardened engineers of the Seabees in the Pacific. Other veterans tell of surviving the sinking of the troopship Leopoldville, when 750 Americans died in the English Channel on Christmas Eve, 1944; the horrific discovery of the Nazi extermination camps; and the tragic bombings near war?s end of unmarked Japanese ships transporting U.S. POWs from the Philippines.

Featuring photographs, a chronology, and historical introductions, this book?thanks to these stories by ordinary soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and nurses?is destined to become an enduring testimony to the American experience in World War II.

CAROL ADELE KELLY, a Cincinnati-based editor and writer, is project officer and copy editor of The Officer magazine of the Reserve Officers Association of the United States, where these stories originally appeared.