Voice of War: The Second World War Told By Those Who Fought

by James L. Owen, Guy Walters

The Second World War was the first truly global conflict and sixty years on its consequences continue to shape the modern world. Season by season The Voice of War charts the course of the central event of the twentieth century using the diaries, letters and memoirs of those who were there, from Russian women fighter pilots to the prisoners of the Japanese to Londoners enduring the Blitz. Their first-hand accounts place us on the ramparts of Colditz, in the hiding places of the Warsaw Ghetto, aboard a dive bomber at Pearl Harbor, with Rommel in the desert and by Churchill's side in Downing Street. Unrivalled in the immediacy, range and power of the experiences it contains, it includes writing by, among others, Joseph Goebbels, Benito Mussolini, Christabel Bielenberg, Noel Coward, Robert Capa, Airey Neave, George Patton, Hermione Ranfurly, Arthur Koestler, James Lees-Milne, Martha Gellhorn, Sophia Loren and Primo Levi. Ambitious, instructive and entertaining, this is the definitive portrait of a world at war.

Genres: History, World War II, War

656 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2004

Reviews

[zed]

Fantastic anthology. The compilers are to be congratulated.

[Michael Steger]

This is a truly astounding collection of first-hand accounts of the Second World War, from the invasion of Poland to the Nuremberg Trials. In between, there are eyewitness accounts from just about major realm of the war, from Burma to Treblinka to Tobruk to Normandy. Often horrific, frequently moving, and on a few occasions amusing (there are one or two funny stories told), this is a book that everyone should read, for both a better understanding of the Second World War and a better understanding of the extremes of which human beings are capable, for better and for worse.

[SP]

If you like military oral history or war stories just read it.