Customer Reviews

Unexplained Mysteries of World War II

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I can not recommend this book. While reading it I found 4 major errors. This leads me to believe that the author did not do any research nor did his editors do any fact checking. The 4 errors I found are as follows: 1. The author states that no trace of the crew of the B-24 Lady Be Good was ever found. All but one of the bodies of the crew of the Lady Be Good were found by the mid-1960s. 2. The author states that Zeke was the allied name for a kamikaze. Zeke was the U.S. Navy code name for the Japaneese Mitsubishi Zero-sen fighter plane. The U.S. Navy gave Japaneese fighters male names and bombers female names. Any WWII historian should know this. 3. The part about the rescue of Eddie Rickenbacker says that a 2-man Kingfisher float plane spotted their raft and they were picked up by a PT boat. In reality, the Kingfisher landed on the ocean and picked them up. Since the plane only had two seats, the survivors held on the wings and the pilot taxied across the water to an island. 4. In the section on the death of Joe Kennedy Jr. he states that the mission was to attack the London Gun sites. This is incorrect, the mission was to attack U-boat pens. He also incorrectly states the crews of the bombers were to bail out over German held territory. The crews were to bail out over England and the bomber would be flown by radio control to the target. There are other things in the book that just don't seem correct. I can not recommend this book. Mistakes like this make one doubt the accuracy of the rest of the book. The author is supposed to be a WWII historian. If he is, then why are such obvious errors in the book.

I thought it was a fairly interesting book with a lot of interesting WWII trivia that you won't get from many other places. The thing that brings this book down is the fact that if you decide to look deeper into a story, one has to wonder if the author didn't just convienently ignore facts to keep things interesting. I must agree with what the other reviewers have said about the sloppy research when dealing with stories. The author finishes the story about the Lady Be Good with this ominous sentence: "No skeleton or other signs of the Lady Be Good's crew have ever been detected." That piqued my interest, as it would for many other people. A quick internet search turns up information that 8 out of 9 of the crew were found. My book was published in 1997- the crew members were found in late 1959 and early in 1960. The worst part is, at the end of that sentence, the author had the gall to put a footnote, which when looked up reads: "Author's Archives". It would seem as if anyone with internet access and even a little interest is better informed than the author of this book.
Although I'm sure some of the information in this book is completely true, the glaring errors that are there make it hard to seperate the two. And no one reading what is supposed to be nonfiction should have to find out for themselves what is true and what isn't.

This compilation of about 100 "strange coincidences, ominous premonitions, and baffling mysteries" contains a lot of tantalizing little tidbits, but one has to be a little dubious about some of the stuff. Especially since others with much more detailed WWII knowledge than me have pointed out factual errors that undermine the entire book's credibility. Even so, it's worth reading for some of the incidents are remarkable and would make great grist for the Hollywood Mill. If you've got limited time or interest, the sections "Puzzling Events," "Uncanny Riddles," and "People Who Vanished" are much, much stronger than "Odd Coincidences," "Curious Happenings," "Peculiar Premonitions," and "Strange Encounters."

Having recently completed this book I have to agree with a previous reviewer, the inaccuracies (despite claims of extensive "research" in the introduction) destroy its credibility, at least in my eyes. In addition to the already quoted errors I found that the Gestapo was not controlled by Heinrich Himmler but rather it fell under the auspices of Herman Goering. And the Wellington bomber had not four but two engines. I may have misunderstood the intent in the particular passage but Germany invaded Russia on the 22nd of June not the 21st.
The point is I am not an expert on the subject, I have not carried out formal or extensive research, and yet I can see these glaring factual errors. As a final point any serious book on this subject might perhaps avoid historical figures "barking" or "growling" at their subordinates. I guess men were tougher in those days and sounded a lot like canines. A potentially interesting subject flawed by poor research and, perhaps, editing.

I bought a paperback copy of Unexplained Mysteries of World War II, at, of all places, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. I am a World War II buff and it looked like an interesting and somewhat offbeat read. It was that, and in general I enjoyed the book until I became aware of numerous factual errors and numerous instances of what appear to me to be copying from other sources.

The most grievous factual error was on page 160 in the People Who Vanished section, dealing with the B-24 bomber Lady Be Good. The story says that other than a few bits and pieces of clothing, etc., nothing was ever found of the crew. This is incorrect, and could have been verified with even some casual research in the library or on the Internet. In fact, all but one of the nine crewmember's bodies have been found and recovered. This is set out in great detail in the book, The Lady Be Good - Mystery Bomber of World War II, by Dennis E. McClendon. It was published in 1962 and updated in 1982 when new information about the Lady Be Good's final mission was discovered. Diaries recovered from two of the crewmembers gave stark details of their doomed but determined trek north to try and escape the limitless desert.

On page 174 in the People Who Vanished section, the book stated that the U.S. Navy was unable to explain why Flight 19 vanished, despite an exhaustive investigation. In actual fact, the Navy's 1946 report lists a number of Facts, Opinions and Conclusions based on multiple sources of evidence.

More than a dozen specific factors were cited that led to the loss, the changing of any one of which would have resulted in a different outcome: the failure of Lt. Taylor's compass; Lt. Taylor's unfamiliarity with the area; the fact that none of the airplanes had an operable/accurate clock; bad radio reception; delays in sending out rescue airplanes; inability to obtain a prompt RDF fix on the flight to help guide it home; the onset of night, which meant the pilots were ditching at sea in the most hazardous conditions imaginable; failure of the teletype system to keep shore stations apprised of the situation, etc. A good summary of the information can be found in The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved, by Larry Kusche, first printed in 1986 and updated in 1995. The Navy is not mystified about what happened to Flight 19 - they screwed up, got lost, and died.

On page 166 of the People Who Vanished section is told the discovery of the ship Rubicon adrift in the Florida Straits in 1944, her crew nowhere to be found. While newspaper stories at the time hinted that something odd, the final paragraph of the New York Times story about the incident indicates that the ship was moored in Havana and the lines may have given way during hurricane-force winds, blowing the ship out to sea sans crew. Again, see The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved, by Larry Kusche. This is another non-mystery that is shown as such by examining all the facts.

On page 28 of the Puzzling Events section, the advertisement for the game The Deadly Double that ran in The New Yorker just a few weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack is discussed, and it is stated that an unknown person who did not identify himself placed the ad - and that the man later met a violent end. In fact, the couple that placed the ad, Mr. and Mrs. Roger Craig, were interviewed by the FBI and completely cleared of anything other than being involved in a rather odd coincidence. The incident was discussed in some detail in The Broken Seal, by Ladislas Farago, first published in 1967.

My final comment is in regards to pages 58-59 in the Odd Coincidences section, A Couple of Mixed-Up Britons and A Postcard with a Unique View, and page 177 of the Peculiar Premonitions section, Churchill's Sudden Impulse. While I realize that all of these incidents drew from some of the same sources, it strikes me as odd that they bear a striking resemblance to the way the same incidents are described in Mysteries of the Unexplained, Reader's Digest Association, published in 1982.

Since I love unexplained-mystery books, I glanced through this one to see if it addressed some of my favorite tales. I looked up the story of the Lady Be Good (a WWII bomber discovered deep in the Libyan desert 16 years after the war, under rather eerie circumstances), only to find the author claiming that none of the plane's missing crew were ever found. Since all but one of them WERE found, and within a couple of years of the bomber's discovery, this looked like an unresearched rehashing of an old newspaper clipping - and made me lose interest in checking out any of the other "unexplained" mysteries. [By way of a pointer, here are the two books I've read on the Lady Be Good: "Lady's Men," by Mario Martinez, and "The Lady Be Good: Mystery Bomber of World War II," by Dennis E. McClendon.

Mostly condensed summaries of stories available in more depth in other places. Some are stories that will probably never be heard in depth due to a lack of solid factual evidence (destroyed or classified records, heavy on rumor light on fact, etc.) Still, an enjoyable collection with a bibliography and notes that point to some excellent books on World War II. This book seems light on new scholarship (One section refers to a Reader's Digest book as source material) but I still enjoyed the book immensely.

I don't know how factual this really is. I was dubious about some of these stories, others made me cringe at how not mysterious they were. Some have not enough info, some are just silly. The one about Brit & German paratroopers landing at the same drop zone at the same time in Sicily doesn't seem so "against the odds" as the author makes it out to be. That was the front & a good drop zone so the odds go way down. Besides I thought the Germans gave up on jumps after Crete?

The ones that got to me were the ones in which it was thought British intelleigence (with US help one assumes) sacrificed Dutch agents, allowed a bomber raid to be slaughtered, told Canaris no deal when he offered surrender before D-Day or tried to have DeGaulle killed. Anyone know if these are true or partly so?

More like a "Believe it or Not" kind of book. It was entertaining reading for a plane flight I took. Due to the many errors I would only recommend it as fluff reading for fun. Barely lasted a two hour flight, so buy it used if you do buy it.

Hopefully few prospective readers will approach a work entitled "Unexplained Mysteries" as an academic treatise. As other reviewers have commented, there are factual errors here. Nevertheless, one of my biggest problems with the book was the inclusion of minimally significant premonitions and coincidences that almost beg to be padded with unnecessary verbiage. (What more is there to say when a person switches from one chair to another and the former gets obliterated a few seconds later.) Further, the author's attempts at a casual writing style often end up sounding silly. ("As cunning and ruthless as he was, Reinhard Heyrich, the son of an opera singer and an actress, had more than met his match in the cagy Canaris.")

On the positive side, Unexplained Mysteries includes some genuinely fascinating tales, most of which appear in the first half of the book. Some of these may have real significance to the study of the war and might profitably become the focus of longer, more careful studies. Why, for instance, did Hitler cancel attacks on Gibraltar and Switzerland after making such extensive plans to capture them? Were more than fifty Dutch and British agents deliberately sacrificed to convince the Germans that the Allies would attempt to land in the Netherlands? How about the nearly one thousand RAF casualties taken in the disastrous raid on Nuremberg on March 30-31, 1944, which may have been deliberately leaked to the Germans?

The 217-page work is broken into 122 articles, making it a great bathroom book.