Customer Reviews

The Greatest War, Volume III: The Battle of the Bulge to Hiroshima

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I read all three volumes and they are all three worth reading by anyone wanting all overall view of WWII. The thing that really bugged me about volume III was the hundreds of typos. Someone should have proofread this volume! I assume the problems were from scanning and having OCR software render the scanning to text. Many of the typos included "rite" for rifle, "Shun" for Shuri on Okinawa, "Haster Sunday" for Easter Sunday, "lire" for fire, "in Phib commander" for who knows what kind of commander, "put :ing" for putting, "theentire company" for the entire company, "mast" for most, "Harl" for Earl, "JaiDanese" for Japanese, "itshours" for its hours, "die" for the, "re;ir" for rear, etc., etc. Just messes up a book for me.

This is the third book in Gerald Astor's WW2 series covering American servicemen in all theaters, for the duration of the war. Now that I've finished the series, I can more completely comment on the books. While I enjoyed them, I must comment that there's as much left out (in terms of types of fighting, etc.) as there is included in the books.

For one thing, there's almost nothing on the Navy's war with the Japanese, and nothing at all on the War in the Atlantic. Combat in Italy seemingly stopped with the capture of Rome, the war in Burma is only briefly mentioned, and parts of the campaign in the Pacific are completely ignored. I will grant, however, that what's here is well-presented, with a thoughtful commentary hanging it together so that it makes sense.

I will comment on one further annoying thing. There are several places here where he quotes from books or authors that are reasonably well-known. For instance, two of the best known Marines-turned-military historians, Richard Wheeler and E.B.Sledge, get quoted in this book. Now I've read both men's accounts of their time in the war, so I don't need them rehashed, and I would have preferred something about someone I didn't have access to myself.

That being said, this is still a good book, and well worth the time invested reading it.