Author:James Bradley,Ron Powers
In this remarkably powerful book, James Bradley takes as his starting point one of the most famous photographs of all time. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima and into a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire from 22,000 Japanese. After climbing through a hellish landscape and on to the island's highest peak, six men were photographed raising the stars and stripes. One of those soldiers was the author's father, John Bradley. He never spoke to his family about the photograph or about the war, but after his death in 1994, they discovered closed boxes of letters and photos which James Bradley draws on to retrace the lives of his father and his five companions.
Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island - an island riddled with sixteen miles of tunnels and defended by Japanese soldiers determined to fight to the death. In the thirty-six days of fighting, almost fifty-thousand men lost their lives.
Above all a human - and personal - story, few books have captured so brilliantly or so movingly the complexity of war and its aftermath and the true meaning of heroism.
One of the most instructive and moving books on war and its aftermath that we are likely to see... unforgettable... Mr Bradley has produced an arresting meditation on the nature of heroism... Like the best books, Mr Bradley's goes beyond its narrow subject to invite reflection on deeper patterns of human behaviour.
—— New York TimesThe best battle book I ever read.
—— Stephen Ambrosethe stories range from the humdrum to the heroic and all of them are full of pathos
—— BBC Who Do You Think You Are Magazinevividly and compellingly recalls a time when the nation stood as one
—— ChoiceWith the rawness and immediacy that only this kind of oral history can provide.
—— Sunday TimesMagnificently researched and fluidly written...Witnesses of War is a powerful, unsentimental book, in which Stargardt tries to give all his subjects a fair hearing...This is an ambitious and impressive effort to see Nazi society in the round, which, for all Stargardt's sympathy for suffering across the board, never suggests a moral equivalence, never loses sight of the crucial moral distinctions between those he describes
—— Geraldine Bedell , ObserverNicholas Stargardt's compelling new book tells exactly what was happening to the children of Europe who had been living under the Nazi regime...Stargardt's is, indeed, a terrible story: it is an account of the endless tramp of the innocents across Europe, a saga of cruelty, starvation, separation, loss and abject misery with lives without number ending in death
—— Juliet Gardiner , Daily MailChildren are history's forgotten people; amidst the sound and fury of battle, as commanders decide the fate of empires, they are never seen. Yet as Nicholas Stargardt reveals in his heart-rending account of children's lives under the Nazis, to ignore them is to leave history half-written. This is an excellent book and it tells a terrible story... As Stargardt so eloquently reminds us, the tragedy is that children were part of the equation and suffered accordingly
—— Trevor Royle , Sunday Herald'Nicholas Stargardt evokes the individual voices of children under Nazi rule. In re-creating their wartime experiences, he has produced a challenging new historical interpretation of the Second World War
—— History Today
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