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353 books match the query 'World War II' and 10 start with g
G Company's War
Two Personal Accounts of the Campaigns in Europe, 1944-1945Bruce E. Egger and Lee McMillian Otts, edited and with commentary by Paul Roley
University of Alabama Press, 1999
A unique account of combat in World War II provides parallel day-to-day records of the same events as seen by two men in the same company, one an enlisted man, one an officer
G Company’s War is the story of a World War II rifle company in Patton’s Third Army as detailed in the journals of S/Sgt. Bruce Egger and Lt. Lee M. Otts, both of G Company, 328th Regiment, 26th infantry Division.
Bruce Egger arrived in France in October 1944, and Lee Otts arrived in November. Both fought for G Company through the remainder of the war. Otts was wounded seriously in March 1945 and experienced an extended hospitalization in England and the United States. Both men kept diaries during the time they were in the service, and both expanded the diaries into full-fledged journals shortly after the war.
These are the voices of ordinary soldiers—the men who did the fighting—not the generals and statesmen who viewed events from a distance. Most striking is how the two distinctly different personalities recorded the combat experience. For the serious-minded Egger, the war was a grim ordeal; for Otts, with his sunny disposition, the war was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, sometimes even fun. Each account is accurate in its own right, but the combination of the two into a single, interwoven story provides a broader understanding of war and the men caught up in it.
Historian Paul Roley has interspersed throughout the text helpful overviews and summaries that place G Company's activities in the larger context of overall military operations in Europe. In addition, Roley notes what happened to each soldier mentioned as wounded in action or otherwise removed from the company and provides an appendix summarizing the losses suffered by G Company. The total impact of the work is to describe the reality of war in a frontline infantry company.
Gas Mask Nation
Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime JapanGennifer Weisenfeld
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Airplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons.
Gas Mask Nation explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense—or bōkū—through a diverse range of artworks, photographs, films and newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, and state propaganda. Gennifer Weisenfeld reveals the immersive aspects of this culture, in which Japan’s imperial subjects were mobilized to regularly perform highly orchestrated civil air defense drills throughout the country.
The war years in Japan are often portrayed as a landscape of privation and suppression under the censorship of the war machine. But alongside the horrors, pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present in a period before air raids went from being a fearful specter to a deadly reality.
Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp
A Nisei Youth Behind A World War II FenceLily Yuriko Nakai Havey
University of Utah Press, 2014
In this creative memoir, Lily Havey combines storytelling, watercolor, and personal photographs to recount her youth in two Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. In short vignettes snapshots of people, recreated scenes and events a ten-year-old girl develops into a teenager while confined. Vintage photographs reveal the historical, cultural, and familial contexts of that growth and of the Nakais’ dislocation. The paintings and her animated writing together pull us into a turbulent era when America disgracefully incarcerated, without due process, thousands of American citizens because of their race.
These stories of love, loss, and discovery recall a girl balancing precariously between childhood and adolescence. In turn wrenching, funny, touching, and biting but consistently engrossing, they elucidate the daily challenges of life in the camp and the internees’ many adaptations.
Winner of the Evans Biography Award.
Selected by the American Library Association as one the Best of the Best from University Presses.
Finalist in the cover design category in the Southwest Book Design and Production Awards.
General Lewis B. Hershey and Conscientious Objection during World War II
Nicholas A. Krehbiel
University of Missouri Press, 2012
Seeking to correct these omissions in history, Nicholas A. Krehbiel provides the most comprehensive and well-rounded examination to date of General Hershey’s work as the developer and protector of alternative service programs for conscientious objectors. Hershey, whose Selective Service career spanned three major wars and six presidential administrations, came from a background with a tolerance for pacifism. He served in the National Guard and later served in both World War I and the interwar army. A lifelong military professional, he believed in the concept of the citizen soldier—the civilian who responded to the duty of service when called upon. Yet embedded in that idea was his intrinsic belief in the American right to religious freedom and his notion that religious minorities must be protected.
What to do with conscientious objectors has puzzled the United States throughout its history, and prior to World War II, there was no unified system for conscientious objectors. The Selective Service Act of 1917 only allowed conscientious objection from specific peace sects, and it had no provisions for public service. In action, this translated to poor treatment of conscientious objectors in military prisons and camps during World War I. In response to demands by the Historic Peace Churches (the Brethren, Mennonites, and the Society of Friends) and other pacifist groups, the government altered language in the Selective Service Act of 1940, stating that conscientious objectors should be assigned to noncombatant service in the military but, if opposed to that, would be assigned to “work of national importance under civilian direction.”
Under the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and with the cooperation of the Historic Peace Churches, Hershey helped to develop Civilian Public Service in 1941, a program that placed conscientious objectors in soil conservation and forestry work camps, with the option of moving into detached services as farm laborers, scientific test subjects, and caregivers, janitors, and cooks at mental hospitals. Although the Civilian Public Service program only lasted until 1947, alternative service was required for all conscientious objectors until the end of the draft in 1973.
Krehbiel delves into the issues of minority rights versus mandatory military service and presents General Hershey’s pivotal role in the history of conscientious objection and conscription in American history. Archival research from both Historic Peace Churches and the Selective Service makes General Lewis B. Hershey and Conscientious Objection during World War II the definitive book on this subject.
German Ways of War
The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War FilmsJaimey Fisher
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Ghosts of Fascism
Italian Intellectuals After MussoliniSimon Levis Sullam, Translated by Stuart Oglethorpe
University of Wisconsin Press, 2026
While public intellectuals are typically thought of as inherently nonconformist and critical of established power, in practice many adapt themselves to the views of the majority—particularly in the context of repressive governments and dictatorships. When the political winds change, such figures often refashion themselves to fit the new paradigm. Ghosts of Fascism follows the trajectories of four major Italian intellectuals who, despite their passivity and at times collaboration with Fascist institutions, became some of postwar Italy’s iconic anti-Fascists: Federico Chabod, a prominent historian who would join the Resistance; the jurist Piero Calamandrei, who later participated in drafting the Italian democratic constitution; the influential literary critic Luigi Russo, who presided over the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa; and Alberto Moravia, the internationally renowned novelist. Simon Levis Sullam weaves together their histories to show how postwar Italian intellectuals quietly revised their previous political positions, redefining themselves—and their recent pasts, together with that of the entire nation—as consistently anti-Fascist.
Glidermen of Neptune
The American D-Day Glider AttackCharles J. Masters
Southern Illinois University Press, 1995
Although the word gliderman does not appear in the dictionary, a brave group of World War II soldiers known as glidermen flew into combat inside unarmed and unarmored canvas-covered gliders known as "flying coffins."
Charles J. Masters points out that because World War II was the first truly mechanized and armored global conflict, the role of the glidermen and their combat gliders was at best anachronistic. Fighter planes exceeded speeds of 400 miles per hour and were heavily armed with multiple machine guns. Dogfights had taken on new dimensions, eclipsing the tactics, speed, and firepower first evidenced by the fragile biplanes of World War I. Tanks achieved a lethal efficiency barely dreamed of even five years before the war. An array of weaponry never seen in any previous military engagement confronted the combat soldier during World War II.And yet there were gliders. And glidermen.
Masters tells of these men and of their fragile aircraft in a war of mechanized chaos. In copious detail, he describes the gliders and the Americans who boarded them during the American D-Day glider attack, a mission that was part of the overall cross-channel plan code-named "Operation Neptune." The son of a gliderman with the 82nd Airborne Division, Masters had unique access to the surviving glidermen and comrades of his father. During the course of his research, he located and interviewed 106 of the men who had flown the D-Day mission in gliders. As an insider—in a sense almost a member of the family and fraternity of glider-men—Masters was cordially received by the members of the American airborne divisions that participated in D-Day, many of whom told him stories they had seldom told their own friends and families. Often harrowing and always riveting, the stories these men told an eager listener and researcher are very much a part of this narrative.
Masters has also assembled the finest existing collection of photographs of the American D-Day glider attack. These photographs—many of which have never before been published—provide a spectacular photographic record of a little-known aspect of this war. In fact, because of the short military history of the American combat glider, most readers, including veterans of World War II, will not have seen one of these "flying coffins," even at a distance. These photographs afford the opportunity to actually examine the inside of the combat gliders used on D-Day, to observe the glidermen in action, and to witness the often tragic consequences of the glider attack.
Glory in Their Spirit
How Four Black Women Took On the Army during World War IISandra M Bolzenius
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Good-Bye to Old Peking
The Wartime Letters Of U.S. Marine Captain John Seymour Letcher, 1937-1939John Seymour Letcher
Ohio University Press, 1998
Captain Letcher describes the flavor of life in pre-Communist China — the food, servants, cold Peking winters and torrid summers, hunting, and excursions to the major tourist sites.
But his letters also tell of the Japanese slaughter of Chinese troops in the opening days of the Sino-Japanese War. He wrote about life in a city under Japanese occupation and the stirring story of the Chinese guerrillas rebounding from devastating defeat.
These letters and accompanying introduction, preface, and notes, draw attention to the Western experience in a place and time largely overlooked by military historians and modern China specialists.
Good-bye to the Mermaids
A Childhood Lost in Hitler's BerlinKarin Finell
University of Missouri Press, 2026