One thing that perplexed me the most was when one of the veterans attested that the Battle of Attu was "10x worse than Okinawa"
597808
An interesting in-depth documentary about a battle that should definitely get more recognition. One thing that perplexed me the most was when one of the veterans attested that the Battle of Attu was "10x worse than Okinawa". I would highly recommend at least renting it. Well worth the 3$.
3206745
This author misses the mark completely.  His account gives none of the day to day feel of the misery and discomfort of living in the field in Vietnam and putting life on the line every day.  His recollections are so stale and  based on one line journal entrys that they never live up to the promise.  I  was sorry to see him fall in to the I "I was the best" trap that  so many first hand accounts fall into. He clearly wasn't the best, nor was  his platoon any better than most.  His glee at hearing that a Col who  chewed him out for getting too many men blown up in a booby trap had been  shot down and seriously injured was, to say the least, morbid!  They are  too many good first hand accounts available to waste time on this one.
950454
The What-if scenarios are baseless when the actual combat conditions nullify those strategies. James Lucas explains all of the obstacles that were partially or wholly unaddressed. Nazi refusal to utilize anti-Stalin sentiment in Ukraine sealed defeat. In addition, the communist mindset and that of the peasant soldiers meant there would be no surrender.

Ive read many books on the Eastern Front but none of them addressed the horrific conditions that killed the majority of Germanys best soldiers. And then you must add the delusions of the Berlin officers which were equal to Hitlers. I came away with a much deeper impression of the necessity to not go directly to Moscow before first defeating some of the Russian armies trapped in pockets. At the same time, the war frequently had troops of either side surrounded and relief columns and breakouts were common place. It was interesting to compare the Germans trapped in 1941 in the Cholm pocket with those in 1944 in the Korsun pocket.
The discussion of the equipment the Germans used to knock out T-34s, the large scale use of horses by both armies, and the difference in tactics was very detailed.

The same logistics failures doomed Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. History repeats because humans do not learn from the past. The books details and eyewitness accounts are a sobering lesson. Simultaneously, the belief that if you cause enough pain, the enemy will sue for peace is shown to be without merit. In few cases in history has an enemy quit without being on the verge of total annihilation. And an enemy that would rather die than surrender has been rarely defeated.
3368178
I too served in Vietnam, but I was in the Air Force, not the Army.  I met the enemy often because my job was to Iinterrogate prisoners of war.  My experience was much different than Joe Haldeman's, even though we were in Vietnam contemporaneously.  Stationed at Bien Hoa Airbase., we endured 28 rocket attacks, some of which caused extensive damage, but no one on base was killed the year I was there.  Therefore, the horrendous casualty figures in the Forever War just don't ring true.  Casualties in the war were horrendous, both for us and especially for the Vietnamese, but nowhere near the unit percentages Joe depicts.  In the end, the Vietnam war was a futility, as was the Tauran war, but it was much more (and less) than the communications difficulties between two very different civilizations -- it was very much a difference in viewpoint  about human freedoms and goals. Joe didn't really explain much about the viewpoint or goals of either the Taurans or the Clone humans -- that would have been the interesting part had he done so.
4055331
Americans may be startled to pick up a 256-page book about the Pacific War and discover that Pearl Harbor isn't mentioned until page 135. That's a consequence of Ienaga's belief that the war actually began with the Japanese army's 1931 coup in Manchuria, which led inevitably to war with China, which in turn led to the wider war agaisnt the western Allies. Despite Japan's claims about liberating Asians from colonialism, its purpose in going to war was to obtain the raw materials with which to defeat China. That was one reason the Japanese treated the "liberated" peoples so badly--as badly as they treated their white PWs.
Part of the blame goes to the Japanese military tradition, in which the officers were an elite and the troops were conscripted from the younger sons of tenant farmers. Brutality was the norm, and the enlisted men who stayed in the army and became sergeants were precisely those who would most brutalize the next batch of recruits. Draftees were called issen gorin--roughly, "penny postcards," because that was the cost and the method of obtaining one. Why husband the life of a soldier when he could be replaced for a penny? Ienaga explains that the enlisted soldiers were the bottom of the food chain, that they had no on upon whom to vent their brutality in return.
During WWII, it was fashionable in the U.S. to show General Tojo as the Japanese dictator, making a trio with Germany's Hitler and Italy's Mussolini. But of course that was very far from true, as even American propaganda recognized, since sometimes the emperor Hirohito filled the same role. Ienaga is especially good at explaining this mystery, in which a dictator was imposed by a group of elder statesmen--then deposed when his usefulness was over. Tojo ruled the government and the army, but he never managed to rule the navy--he didn't even learn about the defeat at Midway until a month after four aircraft carriers and a major portion of the navy's fighter planes had gone to the bottom.
This is a valuable book, one of only a half-dozen serious studies by Japanese scholars of World War II available in English. We didn't know our enemy in 1941; we hardly know him any better today.
939227
Interesting reading until one reads page 77.  Then several of the vets he contacted did not want to continue talking about painful memories;  the author wondered "what had I done to warrant this response?"
So Bob, you sound like you have never talked with a vet before.  Nearly every vet I know talks very little about what they had to do in battle.  Obviously there is much pain they would rather forget, and our author Bob doesn't seem to get it.  Instead he drives on to question all kinds of relatives; IE dragging them into his little personal game/adventure.
He showed such a lack of social skills, lack of care or compassion for others, that I glanced thru a more pages and closed the book in disgust.
4629184
Never read so much BS in my life, but will give a fellow veteran the benefit of the doubt and give it two stars instead of one.
2056569
Livi exhibits an incredible memory of a horrible experience.  The reader reads the undiluted "truth" without apparent embellishment.  I became more physically ill and terribly sad as the chapters unfolded.  Yet, there was something "heroic" about Levi as he carefully recalled and described the "unspeakable"..
3281288
To the individual who wasn't there. Words couldn't describe to you what it was like during that time. I was there, I read the book and too say this book is trash is an insult to my fellow brothers and I who had the courage defend this great country during that period intstead of from the sidelines, and though I am sorry for your loss you do no justice to him by your disgusting book review.
Semper FI
1243366
This is Dr. Benjamin's attempt to match a much better book by Prof. Roger Shinn which he had his students read called "Wars and Rumors of War".
It is shockingly shallow and unreflective for an emeritus college professor. He makes many points that might have been come from the mind of
Rush Limbaugh, then proceeds to contradict himself at further points in the text.
One example: He complains that during the 1930s, there was very little respect for the US military. In one port city with a naval base, (Seattle?)
residents put out signs warning dogs and sailors from walking on their front lawns. This for him was the supreme insult.
Well, later in the book, he relates how he enlisted in the Navy Air Corps training in the closing days of World War II, but ended up as a
miitary policeman when the war ended. He tells of having to deal with trainloads of drunken rowdy sailors being transferred from one point
to another. He seems to indicate that he broke a sailor's nose in one incident trying to keep order on a train.
Doesn't he realize that Seattle residents were fed up with drunken, rowdy sailors a decade earlier?
As he reflects on World War II, he gives the reader such bromides as "Our boys stopped Hitler" when any serious student of the conflict
knows that Russian "boys" deserve most of the credit for the defeat of Nazi Germany. Dr. Benjamin needs to do extensive reading about
the subject. I recommend books by Paul Fussel for anyone with romantic notions about our involvement in that war.
He describes several Vietnam War anecdotes told to him by ex-soldiers who attended his classes in the 1970's about how terrible the
Viet Cong were, and later in the book admits that the real villains were the American statesmen who got us involved in the war.
He is at his worst when reflecting on the atomic bombs we used to end the war. He says that the aggressive economic policies of
Japan after the war to promote their exports have done more damage than our use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki !
668585
Well I can't take it anymore.  I am more than halfway through it and will not finish it.  My brother was in that war and I was looking forward to reading it.  His experience was very interesting.  On just one hill or town or whatever where the American soldiers were out numbered greatly his whole platoon was killed.  When the enemy came through to make sure everyone was dead he hid under the body of a dead soldier and when the enemy left he found his way back to where other American's were.  I don't know how much I paid for this book but it wasn't worth it.  I also resented how he portrayed the American soldiers, raping and killing children.  Somehow I doubt that is the real history.  Sounds a lot like John Kerry after the Vietnam war when he testified before Congress.
4011822
I WAS ON A TROOP SHIP TWO WEEKS OUT OF SAN FRANCISCO WHEN THE FIRST BOMB WAS DROPPED. WHAT I HEARD ABOUT THE END WAS A LITTLE DIFFERENT THAN WHAT IS REPORTED IN THE BOOK. NOT SURPRIZING BECAUSE WHAT I GOT WAS PASSED DOWN THE VERBAL PATH.  MANY PEOPLE IN HIGH PLACES SAID WE SHOULD NOT HAVE DROPPED THE BOMB; THE WAS WAS WON. NOT SO, WHEN ONE PARTY PUTS THEIR GUNS ON THE GROUND AND THEIR HANDS OVER THEIR HEADS,THAN MAYBE THE WAR IS OVER. WHAT I HEARD WAS THAT TOJO INSISTED ON CONTINUING THE WAR. HIROHITO FINALLY SAID "WE ARE GOING TO LOSE ALL OUR CITIES. THAT FINALLY ENDED THE FIGHTING. THE ALLIES EXPECTED TO LOSE UP TO 2 MILLION MEN. JAPAN WAS EXPECTED TO LOSE AT LEAST 2 MILLION. THE DESCRIPTION OF THE EFFECTS OF THE BOMBS WAS REALISTIC AND VERY SICKENING. BUT AN  INVASION WOULD HAVE BEEN FAR WORSE. THE JAPANESE PEOPLE WERE TAUGHT TO FIGHT TO THE LAST PERSON!
3007195
Though I was alive during the Vietnam war, I never knew how bad it actually as for the military there.
3804036
I was serving in the Green Zone during some of the period described in this book, and still recall the unimaginable confusion Sanchez writes about. When CENTCOM and the Army component commander, LTG McKeirnan, withdrew leaving the V Corps Commander in charge of all military operations, the circuit overload peaked beyond comprehension. To learn near the end of the book that Sec Def Rumsfeld claimed he never knew about Sanchez having to manage the war on the ground with only a skeleton staff makes one's gorge rise. My analysis: too many elites each running his own stovepipe, leaving Sanchez to make the best of it. Worst of all, the soldiers and marines were jerked around needlessly with predicable consequences. Sanchez makes a lot of wanting to retire with 3-stars. This may seem a little selfish, but who can fault him for keeping his pride intact?
1545066
marginalized & denied by the perpetrators. Most people are aware of  "the rape". It gets a paragraph in most history books. I  thank Iris Chang for adding a major mainstream book on the subject. It can only add to the pressure on Japan to confront this stain on their national reputation. Ms Chang's story is a chapter in the much larger war of annihilation waged by Japan against the people of China. This war made hardened Nazi recoil in horror. Ms Chang recounts the days before, how could it have been prevented & the absymal condition of the Chinese army unable or unwilling to put up even token opposition despite superior numbers. After a while her blizzard of numbers becomes to much: number of rapes, numbers of murders, combinations, numbers of torture, those used for bayonet practice etc. They  become meaniless. Her suggestion that Japan pay reparations (such as The United States did to its Japanese citizens intered in World War II) is unrealistic. More real is an official apology from the Japanese government. Maybe when every Japanese soldier form World War II & their next of kin are dead will that apology come.
679943
The author's service in the Air Force rather than the Army is demonstrated by his errors in the book.  All replacements for the 101st had in-country training and adaptation to RVN at the Screaming Eagle Replacement Training School (SERTS) before reporting to a unit.  The author repeatedly refers to '3rd Battalion, 101Airborne'; the unit that fought much of the battle of Hill 937 was the 3rd Battalion,187th Infantry Regiment (The Rakkasans), 101st Airborne and he dishonors them with the omission.  There were other numerous errors on weapon calibers, tracer color, radio procedures, etc.  Also far too much religious overtone and sanitized language . . . if your beliefs won't let you write 'four letter words', you need to pick a subject other than the US Army in RVN,
1665508
I disagree with A Customer. I found this book to be poorly written. What is one to make of this tortured example of mis-punctuation? "But, he was still surprised."(p. 45).
  Dialogue is obviously invented. Did Japanese senior admirals address their subordinate admirals by their given names (p. 90)?
  Then we read that American gun fire "enrages" (p. 104) the Japanese captains who "redden" and "grow incensed. (p. 105)"
  Really? I doubt it. My observation is that senior officers in any armed service obtain their ranks from demonstrating sangfroid. I believe that the Japanese are particularly repressed in their emotions. I am disappointed that Cortesi does not know this. It undercuts his credibility generally. It reduces the value of this book.