The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness World War II: Over 200 First-Hand Accounts from the Six Years That Tore the World Apart (Mammoth Books)

The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness World War II takes you into the Second World War—the most destructive conflict in history. Testaments from all sides gathered by editor Jon E. Lewis bear witness to that gigantic war, fought on vast terms but experienced on a human scale. The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness World War II is more than a history of the 1935–45 conflict, a chronicle of events from Hitler's blitzkreig across Europe to the war crime death sentences carried out by the Nuremberg court. This anthology is a firsthand record of what it felt like to live and fight in that time—whether as a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, a G.I. in a foxhole in Okinawa, a Frontsoldaten in the abattoir of Stalingrad, a woman worker alongside "Rosie the Riveter" at an aircraft plant, a U.S. Marine in boot camp, a kamikazi pilot in training, and many others. Of the famous, there are addresses by the titanic statesmen Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin, battle reports by commanders such as Erwin Rommel and Tokyo-bomber Jimmy Doolittle, on-the-ground descriptions of the Blitz by Edward R. Murrow, J. B. Priestley, and Virginia Woolf, and the experience of the Nazis' genocide of Jewish Europeans by Anne Frank and Primo Levi. From the war in Europe and on the Atlantic, through the African campaign, the Russian Front, and the battle for the Pacific, and finally to the siege of Berlin and the atomic bombing of Japan, what unfolds in these pages is World War II in all its brutality, heroism, stupidity, inspiration, and destruction.