Preface In 1995, the death of my father, a World War II veteran, reawakened my interest in the war that transformed his life and the lives of his friends and family in the close-knit working-class neighborhood where he grew up, graduated from high school, and met my mother. They were married not long after my father entered the Army Air Forces in 1942 at the age of nineteen. And when he left Reading, Pennsylvania, for basic training, she took a job at a local plant that produced parts for the planes of the air arm he served in for the next three years. Her father, a Slovak immigrant, worked in a steel mill that forged weapons of war for General Dwight D. Eisenhower's great army of liberation. In 1944, that army swept across France and into Hitler's Germany, where my uncle, John Steber, a mud-slogging infantryman, was captured and spent the remainder of the war in a Nazi prison camp. Before that, he had served in North Africa and fought and nearly died on Omaha Beach on D-Day.Except for those like him who saw combat, Americans did not directly experience the plague of war.

We were not invaded, nor were our great cities turned to rubble and ash. Yet Americans at home did suffer. Born in late 1944, 1 was too young to experience the war, but engraved in my mind is the living room of our neighbors, the Adamses, turned for many years after the war into a shrine for the boy who never came back. After the war, my father was President of the Catholic War Veterans post that was named after Francis Adams, and it was there, over a number of years, that I coaxed and pulled stories of the war out of tight-lipped veterans, many of them tough steel workers, like my uncle, who wanted to forget.When my father died, these stories took a stronger hold on me. At the time, I had just finished one book and was well into the research for another, a history of the Vicksburg Campaign, the turning point of the American Civil War. But as I was about to begin writing, I discovered a book that moved me in the direction I really wanted to go. This was Henry Steele Commager'sThe Story of the Second World War.

I found the book on a pile of papers in the office of my friend Lou Reda, a documentary film producer who has made over a hundred films on World War II for national television, all of them in his small shop in Easton, Pennsylvania, where I live with my family and teach at Lafayette College. Commager had played a part in my life. In college, the first serious book I read on American history was the magisterial work he co-authored with Samuel Eliot Morison,The Growth of the American Republic,one of the most influential, entertaining, and widely read general histories of the United States. That book and a number of others I read over the course of a lazy summer, playing basketball and chasing the girl I would marry, convinced me to switch my major from business administration to history, and years later, Commager himself gave my career a push by encouraging an editor to publish one of my first books. By 1995, I had read almost all of Commager's work, yet I had no idea he had written a book about World War II. 1 was embarrassed to admit this to Lou Reda, who had been a close friend of Commager's and made a film for television,The Blue and the Gray,with Commager and Bruce Catton serving as historical consultants.Reda handed me one of his spare copies ofThe Story of the Second World War,and I took it home and got lost in it for the next two days. Written during the war, while Commager, a forty-three-year-old professor at Columbia University, was working as a propagandist and historian for the War Department in London, Paris, and Washington, it brought together some of the best stories of the war, many of them by correspondents whose work drew them into the thick of the fight.

There are also official reports, public speeches, newspaper and magazine pieces, radio broadcasts, and selections f.