WWII Books

Here is again a wishlist of books I want to read. Time will tell. Taken from WSJ, April 2010.

Five Best
Lynne Olson admires these vivid portraits of wartime Britain
1. London War Notes, 1939-1945

By Mollie Panter-Downes
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971

In 1939, New Yorker editor Harold Ross recruited Mollie Panter-Downes, an English novelist and short-story writer, to contribute a regular feature for the magazine called "Letter From London." Panter-Downes's War II letters, collected in "London War Notes," are gem-like accounts of the everyday life of Britons as they coped with everything from blackouts and German bombing raids to shortages of gin and hot-water bottles. Blessed with a lively wit and an eye for the telling human detail, Panter-Downes brought wartime Britain alive for her American readers. When U.S. troops and supplies flooded into the country shortly before D-Day, she remarked that living in Britain was like taking up residence "on a vast combination of an aircraft carrier, a floating dock jammed with men, and a warehouse stacked to the ceiling with material labeled 'Europe.' "
2. The War Years

By Harold Nicolson
Atheneum, 1967

Harold Nicolson was a member of Parliament, novelist, biographer, journalist, former diplomat, noted gardener—and the husband of writer Vita Sackville-West. But he is best known now for his richly detailed wartime diaries and letters. ("The War Years" is the second volume in a three-volume collection of his wartime papers.) Nicolson composed masterly word portraits of leading political and government figures during the period, including Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain and exiled French leader Charles de Gaulle. Equally compelling are his eyewitness accounts of crucial parliamentary debates. For those who want a front-row seat from which to view history in the making, Nicolson's diaries are required reading.
3. The London Journal of General Raymond E. Lee, 1940-1941

Edited by James Leutze
Little, Brown, 1971

As military attaché and head of intelligence in the American embassy in London, Gen. Raymond E. Lee was supposedly a neutral observer of events in Britain in the critical years of 1940 and 1941. The U.S. had not yet entered the war and showed little sign of being eager to do so, despite Lee's urging—much to his consternation, as his brilliantly written journal makes clear. A cultured man who wore Savile Row suits (as a neutral military officer, he could not appear in uniform) and loved good food, wine and conversation, Lee endured the nightly Luftwaffe bombing raids on London with grace and good humor. "If ever there was a time when one should wear life like a loose garment," he noted, "this is it."
4. Here We Are Together

By Robert S. Arbib Jr.
Longmans, Green, 1946

In 1942, hordes of American GIs descended on East Anglia, a sleepy rural area in eastern England, to build a network of Eighth Air Force bases from which to bomb Germany. The resulting clash of cultures between the brash young Americans and the area's residents, most of whom had never met a foreigner before, is marvelously recounted in this delightful little memoir by Robert S. Arbib Jr., a former New York advertising executive who was one of the GIs. "I thought these people were supposed to speak English," complained one U.S. soldier after his first exposure to the East Anglians' impenetrable rural dialect. "Someone should teach them how to speak their own language." Arbib, who grew to love the British, ends his book with one of the most moving and eloquent tributes to wartime Britain and its people that I have ever read.
5. The Siren Years

By Charles Ritchie
Macmillan, 1974

Although low on the diplomatic ladder, Canada's Charles Ritchie was welcomed into the leading social and cultural circles of wartime London. He shared tea with the queen, lunched with writer Nancy Mitford, spent Christmas with the Duchess of Westminster and had a long, intense affair with the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. His diaries, compiled in "The Siren Years," are filled with sharp, insightful observations of these experiences, among many others. Just as interesting is his sardonic perspective as a Canadian—and thus an outsider—on the U.S.-British partnership. "How the English hate being rescued by the Americans," he observed. "They know they must swallow it, but, God, how it sticks in their throats."
—Ms. Olson is the author of "Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour," recently published by Random House.