Books: WORLD WAR II & KOREA

No book on World War II equaled in stature or importance Winston Churchill’s memoirs, concluded last year. The generals, U.S. and foreign, kept publishing their personal accounts, all useful to historians but unlikely to change the main outlines set in past years. More immediate and sobering were the lessons of the war in Korea. Like other top commanders, Mark Clark, in FROM THE DANUBE TO THE YALU, argued that the Korean war should and could have ended in victory instead of an uneasy stalemate that was in effect a defeat for the’ U.S.

GENERAL DEAN’S STORY, by Major General William F. Dean, told the story of his captivity in Korea, a shocking reminder of the true nature of the enemy.

COMBAT ACTIONS IN KOREA, by Captain Russell A. Gugeler, contained some of the best descriptions of small-unit warfare yet printed.

SICILY-SALERNO-ANZIO, by Samuel Eliot Morison, could hardly have been pleasant reading for the Allied commanders of World War II. This ninth volume of Morison’s history of the naval side of the war (five more to come) criticized Montgomery for his handling of the Sicilian campaign, claimed the Italian surrender was fluffed, and flatly denounced the Anzio invasion as a “mistake.”

THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS, by Ewen Montagu, was one of the “best single stories to come out of World War II, a grisly account of how the German command was given a wrong steer on the Sicilian invasion by phony papers taken from a uniformed corpse prepared by British intelligence and washed ashore in Spain.