Will o'the Glen on Books

Rachel Lance, the biomedical engineer who authored the first book I reviewed here at Will o'the Glen on Books : In The Waves , about the fate of the Confederate States submarine CSS Hunley and its crew after the sinking of the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor on February 17th, 1864; is back with another deeply researched scientific thriller: The Chamber Divers .      The Chamber Divers , by In The Waves  author Rachel Lance is a       true-life scientific  thriller that the reader will find is hard to put down. In The Chamber Divers Dr Lance has jumped forward in time 70+ years from the time of the Hunley to one of the most critical periods in modern history, the Second World War, bringing to light the efforts of a dedicated group of scientists who put their own bodies on the line in support of the Allied effort to conquer fascism. The Chamber Divers draws the reader in with a prologue chapter about the ill-fated Dieppe raid, an infamously fa...

Before reading Hitler’s Last Hostages I was vaguely aware of Adolf Hitler’s background as a failed artist, and I had heard of the Führermuseum project. I had also read the excellent book, The Monuments Men , by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter, and I was expecting something that expanded upon the information contained in that book. What I found was very much more than that. The book opens by looking into the discovery of the hoard of looted/stolen artwork that was in the possession of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a notorious Nazi art “dealer”—though Gurlitt senior was in fact just a licensed looter, given carte blanche  by the Third Reich to acquire works of art by coercion, for pennies on the dollar, or by outright theft.  The narrative then shifts to Adolf Hitler’s early life and background in art, other German artists that were active before, during, and after the First World War, and the effects of that war on the world of the arts, and the artists who worked within it—i...

Meredith Hindley’s Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II  succeeds on so many levels that I had trouble deciding where to begin this review. With so much attention having been paid in recent years to WW II action in mainland Europe and the Pacific, especially through feature films and TV mini-series that reach huge audiences ( Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, The Pacific ) it’s gratifying to see the spotlight turned on a lesser-known theater of operations. Casablanca, a port city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, in the northwest corner of Africa, became an important place in the world in the aftermath of the fall of France, when the French government, and their military forces, capitulated to Nazi Germany, compromising with their conquerors by establishing a collaborationist Fascist government in the south of France in exchange for giving up Paris and the north. Refugees from France, and...

World War II history, and particularly the period between the fall of France and the United States’ entry into the war, has always been of great interest to me. Most of my reading on this period has been focused on the Battle of Britain—the quite brief span of time in the late summer/early autumn of 1940 when the men and women of the Royal Air Force fought a desperate battle to prevent the Luftwaffe from achieving air superiority over the English Channel and southern England as a prelude to an invasion of the British Isles. Lately, however, I have been seeking out books that deal with the larger picture of that fateful period of over 2-1/2 years when England and the Commonwealth stood alone against the Fascist tide that had swept across continental Europe. Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile chronicles this crucial period; specifically, the first year of Churchill’s tenure as Prime Minister of England, and the author takes a unique approach, mining the journals and personal dia...

Joseph Wheelan’s new book,  Bloody Okinawa,  a  comprehensive look at the Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest, most destructive single campaign of World War II,  is a detailed, extensively researched account of the battle for this strategic island, an important stepping stone in the Allies’ march to Japan—but it goes overboard, in my opinion, in the depiction of the more grisly details of the campaign. The bitterly stubborn defense of the island of Okinawa by Japanese forces was prosecuted as a purposefully attritional campaign to give Japan time to prepare the defenses of the home islands, or to force the Allies to the bargaining table before they could get into a position to invade. Japanese soldiers, sailors, airmen, and many Okinawan civilians saw it as their duty to lay down their lives for the Emperor, and to take as many U.S. personnel with them as possible. The incomprehensively brutal fighting, when battlefields became muddy charnelhouses as U.S. Army and Ma...