Customer Reviews

Daring Missions of World War II

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This wonderful book contains some one hundred (if I counted correctly) little stories of daring-do from the Second World War. Each story is between one and three pages in length, and is told in a fascinating style and tone. These are the stories of men and women, Germans, Italians, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans (of Italian, German, Japanese, etc. descent), soldiers and civilians. Just about every phase of the war is covered, and most theatres of action, as well.

These stories are quite fascinating, and the shortness of each story makes this book easy to pick up and put down (important if you have to snatch your reading time where you can get it). My one complaint is that there are no tales of daring missions involving Imperial Japanese or Soviet forces. That said, though, I did enjoy this book, and recommend it to you.

William B. Breuer wrote 31 other books on military history (p.ii). He dedicates this book to General William C. Westmoreland (Ret.) who "led freedom forces in the Vietnam War with great honor and exceptional proficiency" (p.v). This book has 99 concise stories on covert activities that helped the Allies to win victories on the ground and in the air. Most were spies, some were soldiers caught behind the lines. These stories are grouped into five parts by the course of the war. Some were more important, others are just entertaining. The 'Notes and Sources' has references to books that cover the stories in more detail. The 'Index' has references to the many people named in these stories. They are often "so bizarre or illogical that their telling would have been rejected by Hollywood as implausible - yet they happened" (p.2). The 211 pages allocate about 2 pages for each story.

As a former journalist who is researching many aspects of the European theater, I returned this book because a number of his facts were incorrect. For instance Major Chidson did not work alone in rescuing the Industrial Diamonds. He had the help of Johannes Smit in Amsterdam, Jan Kors Smit (his son from London), William Woltman and Bowerman who was Captain of the destroyer that was placed at their disposal. See the much referenced "Adventure in DIamonds" by David E. Walker. This is worse than what we used to call 'Dim-Sum Journalism'..huge disappointment...

If you can get a used copy for .60 cents, maybe it would be worth it for a peak occasionally or just to look cool on your bookshelf. I did not feel any emotional or intellectual connection reading it. I feel certain that many of the facts are incorrect.

This is an OK book. It really doesn't delve with any details other than a summary of an action that took place. With 100 stories in one book, each is about 3 pages or less, so it's a good reference book to obtain names of people involved and be able to read more in depth about them elsewhere. You could go through this book in a day. I'd recommend the Skorzeny biography "Commando Extraordinaire" (or something like that) as a great read, he alone was in the middle of about 20 exciting missions that in one book can be dealt with some details and insight. I see his books are hard to find, I guess any Nazi is a bad person but his story is full of excitement. Hell, they are making all these revisionist stories and movies about Hitler (truly an evil man) why not make a movie about Skorzeny?