True Stories of World War II [antikvár]

Years after completing his story of that historic D-day-June 6, 1944when Allied troops stormed ashore in Normandy, France, marking the beginning of the end of the Third Reich, Cornelius Ryan was still getting letters from readers. In 1970 one came from the daughter of a D-day casualty. "I am 27, and I never knew my father," she wrote. "He was killed on Omaha Beach. For years I hated him because I was tired of Mother talking about what the war was like and what a big hero my father was." Then, reading about Omaha Beach, she found that her attitude changed. "My father became real to me," she continued. "I cried because I love him, and he might have loved me. I cried, too, because his life was over before mine ever really began, yet he gave me my life. Thank you for giving me my father after all these years." That letter alone, Ryan said, made his 10 years of work on The Longest Day totally worthwhile.And that letter is one reason why Reader's Digest decided to publish an anthology of World War II stories. Many of us remember, with pride and a kind of reverence, not only D-day but all the wonderful, terrible years of the greatest conflict of our time. We should never forget. And we should make that war real to those too young to have experienced it.All the stories in this anthology are book condensations, giving the full flavor and impact of the complete books in a fraction of their length. All appeared in The Reader's Digest, from the early days of the war to the present. Some are personal accounts, written by the participants themselves soldiers, sailors, civilians caught up in the action. Some are on-the-spot reports by war correspondents. Others could not be told until long after war's end and the lifting of censorship.Selection of the condensations to fit into one volume was a tough editorial jobthere were so many to choose from. Finally, we settled on these 26 stories. To us they best reflect the range of a global war, the first by a correspondent in Britain during the 1940 blitz and the last by an American woman in Japan when Emperor Hirohito, speaking over the radio for the first time in history, announced surrender. And they make the most compelling reading, for they are intensely human. Not statistics but individuals stamp World War II so vividly in our memories.The EditorsI SAW ENGLANDby Ben RobertsonThe plane that flew me to England from Lisbon lastsummer came down in a green field among camouflaged airplanes and beds of roses. The men about us were airmen, all in the blue uniform of the Royal Air Force, and I was astonished to find them so quiet and undisturbed. The Germans already held the French coast, and England was threatened with invasion; somehow I had expected to find everyone in England in a frenzy. Yet mechanics were calmly hammering on the motors, men were wandering leisurely in and out of the hangars, and one man was hoeing the roses. I said to myself, "What a job for a war!" And when the airmen politely served us tea, I thought, "My God, they'll be defeated!"That evening I reached my London hotel, the Waldorf, and a middle-aged chambermaid with a Scots accent came in to pull heavy curtains over the windows. She asked, "Do you have a gas mask, sir?""Not yet," I said."Well, the housekeeper will bring you one that you can use until you get one from the government. Gas masks are free."Then I was left alone in a stuffy Ijreathless room, heavy with war. The black curtains over the windows weighed me down; I had never realized before what light and air meant to a room.Quickly I washed and hurried down to a basement dining roomI was to eat in basements from then on until I left England. After eating I looked out into darkness, into the dreadful depth of the blackout. It was an appalling sight, like death itself. It frightened me, even though I had no reason to fear an air raid. London at that time had suffered no severe bombing.The next morning I was typing at my desk when in came Maude Hall, the Scottish chambermaid. She was very professional for a few minutes, and then sheLondon's subways provided shelter during the blitz. Here the Elephant and Castle station, November 1940.could not hold back any longershe asked me the questions I was to hear a thousand times in England: "What does America think? How does America think we are doing?" At that time I was not so certain what America thought, but I told her that America was sympathetic. With that she began to pour out her thoughts. Later I was to find scores of Britishers like that; they would bare their hearts to you when they found out you came from the United States. Sometimes it would nearly make you cry to see how desperately they hoped for just one word of encouragement.After registering with the police, I went for a long walk through central London. I found soldiers stretching barbed wire along the streets, barricading buildings, digging trenches in the parks; and on rooftops and in courtyards boys and old men were drillingthe Home Guard of England was forming.Resistance was in the airon the streets, in the papers, everywhere and in everything. From my window I could see on the sign of a grocer's shop Winston Churchill's: "Come then, let us to the task, to the battle and to the toil, each to our place." And on a printing shop in huge letters was John of Gaunt's great sentence: " . this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."That night at dinner the headwaiter said to me: "If we must die, we must diewe know why we will be dying."Never, after that day, did I doubt that England would fight to the end. Everyone was working feverishly, conscious that at any minute the Germans might be upon them, but the British continued to be themselves. The flowers were still being cared for, and someone called Nature Lover wrote observations on bird life to the London Times. In Hyde Park the soapbox orators went right on through the war raising hell with the government and with the church. I listened to them one afternoon. There were sociali. s, a communist, an atheistthe usual run of the soapbox milland there was an ex-maid telling what it was