![]() McManus shows the extent to which the Army also was responsible for the American victory in the Pacific. Popular memory suggests the Marine Corps stood alone against Japanese forces, fighting their way across numerous remote islands. Although not the author’s main objective, the series acts as something of a historical corrective. McManus’s Island Infernos is the second installment of a trilogy detailing US Army operations in the Pacific in 1944 (the preceding work won the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History). Island Infernos: The US Army’s Pacific War Odyssey, 1944 Recommendation by Michael Bell, PhDĮxecutive Director, Institute for the Study of War and Democracy ![]() Gladwell’s insights into the cognitive dissonance of what other American senior leaders, such as Secretary of War Henry Stimson or General Joseph Stilwell, understood LeMay was doing to Japanese cities and civilian populations are particularly perceptive. In addition to the inventors and chemists that played a role in US efforts to hasten the end of the war, the treatment of General Curtis LeMay and his predecessor Haywood Hansell, central figures in the story, are particularly insightful. Leaders, their ideas, and their character are central to Gladwell’s story, as are the moral implications of wartime decisions. The book is a quick read, but the lengthier quotations are most effective in the podcast. In so doing, Gladwell exposes a broader audience to strategic bombing, wartime decision-making, and the events leading up to the end of World War II that have long been topics of debate among historians. Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War IIĬrafted as part of his Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia provides a deeply provocative exploration into the 1945 fire-bombing of Tokyo. ![]() We should also realize, however, that we live in a world in which drugs and alcohol are available everywhere, in the tendency to hate all too common. On one level, it’s comforting to hear that men have to be in a drunken stupor to commit horrific crimes like the Holocaust. The book is perhaps best read in concert with Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Of course, we might say that another kind of intoxication is at work here, with Hitler and the German people alike being drunk on visions of dominance, empire, and racial superiority. The schnapps flowed freely before, during, and after the roundups and shootings, and some of the grisly scenes of sadism and torture carried out by drunken SS-men or German soldiers simply beggar the imagination. He is struck by the number of times that alcohol figures in the mass murder of Jewish victims. His latest, Drunk on Genocide, explores the intersection between alcohol, images of masculinity, and German atrocity on the Eastern Front. Ed Westermann is a highly prolific scholar and author on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
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