C. A. Petuch
Bonham, Frank,
Burma Rifles
, Berkeley Paperback, 1960. A Japanese-American becomes a member of Merrill’s 109 Marauders in the China-Burma-India Theater and fought against prejudice as well as the enemy.
Boulle, Pierre,
The Bridge Over the River Kwai
, Vanguard Bantam paperback, 1954. Colonel Nicholson, compelled to build a bridge by his Japanese captors, so loved his masterpiece that he could not contemplate its destruction even by his own countrymen.
Brinkley, William,
The Ninety and Nine,
Doubleday, 1960 (nonfiction). Adventures on a LST, including the transporting of supplies, nurses, refugees and German prisoners.
Cowan, Lore,
Children of the Resistance
. True accounts of teenagers in the underground resistance against Nazis.
David, Janina,
A Square of Sky
: Recollections of my Childhood, Norton Publishing Co., 1966: (biography) A moving memoir that pictures the German invasion of Poland and the four years she spent as a Jewish child amid the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto.
Donovan, Robert J.,
PT 109: John F. Kennedy in WW II,
McGraw, Crest paperback, 1961. (nonfiction) When John Kennedy’s PT boat was hit by a Japanese destroyer in the South Pacific, he was able, by almost superhuman effort, to get his crew safely ashore and eventually rescued.
Houston, Watatsuki, Jeanne and James B. Houston,
Farewell To Manzanar
. A Japanese-American family during WW II attempt to survive in a detention camp.
Lawson, Ted,
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo
, Random, 1953. (nonfiction) This is a first-hand account of the Doolittle raid over Tokyo. It describes the secret preparations, the raid itself, and the unbelievable adventures of the surviving Americans.
Time-Life World War II
series. A combination of prose and very good photography.
Westheimer, David,
Von Ryan’s Express
, Doubleday, 1964. An American martinet escaped from an Italian prisoner of war camp during WW II and led to freedom the men he had formerly treated harshly.
Wouk, Herman,
The Caine Mutiny
, Doubleday, 1951. In WW II a young Willie Keith served a year aboard the old minesweeper Caine, under the tyrannical Captain Queeg and emerged commander of his shop and master of himself.
Zarubica, Mladin,
The Year of the Rat
, Harcourt, 1964. Spellbinding true saga of a dangerous masquerade by Allied intelligence to drop false plans into Nazi hands during WW II.
Reiss, Johanna,
The Upstairs Room
. A young Jewish girl and her sister are forced into hiding during Hitler’s reign.
ten Boom, Corrie,
The Hiding Place.
The novel is the author’s experiences hiding Jewish refugees during the Nazi occupation of Holland.
Tregaskis, Richard,
Guadalcanal Diary
, Random, 1943. (nonfiction) Tregaskis records the thoughts, feelings and actions of the men who fought inch by inch to recover Guadalcanal from the Japanese.
Tunis, John R.
Silence over Dunkerque
, Morrow, 1962,Berkeley. Aided by the French underground, an English soldier caught up in the German occupation of France tried to return home.
Werstein, Irving,
The Long Escape
, Scribner, 1964. All the horrors of war were seen by Nurse Justine Raymond and her 50 sick children as they made their way to Dunkerque after Hitler’s devastating attack on Belgium.