D-Day

Review also includes:

Hiroshima, Jason Hook, ‎978-0750235730

Here are two samples from the publishers’ ‘high-drama series’ looking at ‘momentous days in the last century when great and terrible things transpired in 24 hours’ to ‘leave an impact … for decades afterwards’.

It was the build-up to D-Day that had the greatest impact on me as a small child – suddenly the Cheshire lanes were filled with columns of soldiers, marching almost noiselessly on rubber soles. They were American, they were black, and they habitually smiled (probably at my bubble-curled sister). It was a shock, then to read that British military authorities had asked the U.S. not to send black troops to join the invasion force. Sheehan’s book begins with this ‘friendly invasion’ before going on to a day-by-day countdown to June 6th and an hour-by-hour account of that longest day. Contemporary photographs dominate a dense text and display the determined hobnailed British soldier at his unsmiling, up-against-it grittiest. Here is a workmanlike documentary of the beginning of the end of WWII extrapolated into the development of the EC.

The end of the end of WWII (and the beginning of the Cold War) was signalled by the obscenity of Hiroshima. Hook provides a chillingly impartial account of the political and military background to the dropping of Little Boy (only 3 out of 55 hospitals remained in Hiroshima) and its repercussions (which are still resonantly with us) through Bikini Atoll, Aldermaston marches, Cuban missile crisis and Doctor Strangelove.

This is a pair of worthy companions to a serious look at the Second World War and its legacies, and we all have to live with them.