Review - "November 1942," Peter Englund

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

November 1942, Peter Englund

January 10, 2024

 

“I see those men with maps and talk

Who tell how to go and where and why;

I hear with my ears the words of their mouths,

As they finger with ease the marks on the maps.”

                                                                                                                Experience, 1904

                                                                                                                Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

 

As Carl Sandburg wrote, battles are fought far from those who direct them. As Mr. Englund explains in his “Note to the Reader,” this book does not describe what war was during the four weeks in November 1942, but tries “to say something about how it was.” 

 

It was the month of November 1942 that saw Germany stymied at Stalingrad, the American invasion of North Africa and the German-Italian defeat at El Alamein; it witnessed the Guadalcanal campaign that ended Japanese expansion in the South Atlantic and the Japanese retreat in New Guinea. At the start of November, it appeared that the Axis might be victorious. By the end of the month, it seemed certain that the Allies, ultimately, would be victors. It was on November 10, following Montgomery’s victory over Rommel at El Alamein that Churchill spoke at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon in London: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” While he was right, of the estimated 60 to 80 million people who died in World War II most were yet to meet their fate.

 

It is through letters, diaries and memoirs of thirty-nine individuals, and from newspaper accounts, that the Swedish historian and journalist Peter Englund reconstructs the month. With the exception of authors Vera Brittain, Albert Camus, and Ernst Junger, these are ordinary people, innocently caught up in the most devastating war mankind has ever known. We read the letters of a Russian soldier in Stalingrad and the thoughts of an Italian soldier in the North African desert, and those of a Japanese lieutenant on Guadalcanal; we read of an Australian infantry sergeant in New Guinea, the letters and diaries of a Long Island housewife with a son overseas, and the memoirs of an American woman who worked with Enrico Fermi in Chicago on spontaneous nuclear chain reaction. We read the diaries of a young Jewish woman in Paris (who was later imprisoned and beaten to death in Bergen-Belson five days before the camp was liberated in 1945,) the memoirs of an Australian doctor held prisoner on Java, the writings of a German woman journalist in Berlin, the memories of an American sailor in the North Atlantic, the diaries of a teen-age girl, a German-Jewish refuge in Shanghai, the diary of a Korean “comfort woman” in Japanese-occupied Burma, and the letters of a young German woman who will be guillotined in three months for sabotaging the Third Reich.

 

We also read of Casablanca, which premiered that month and whose ending was changed to reflect the American landings in North Africa.  In a brief epilogue, Mr. Englund tells us what happened to the thirty-nine people whose lives during that month comprise his story. 

 

Toward the end of his book, Mr. Englund writes: “How we experience a war is influenced by pictures and mental images acquired in peace, and that often leads to battles playing up to their own myth…” But war is never pins on a map. It is ugly, fought by the brave and the scared, as Peter Englund so vividly describes.