Escape from Corregidor by Edgar D. Whitcomb
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ESCAPE FROM CORREGIDOR IS “ONE OF THE MOST FANTASTIC AND INCREDIBLE TRUE STORIES TO COME OUT OF WORLD WAR II.”
(Seattle Post Intelligencer)
“One of the best of the war-escape books … the more impressive because of its simplicity.”
(San Francisco Call-Bulletin)
“. . .an incredible, fascinating account.”
(Virginia Kirkus Service)
“This strange, true adventure of World War II is both interesting reading and a tribute to the American fighting man.” (Pittsburgh Courier)
“. . .exciting, fast moving. …” (Chicago Daily Calumet)
“WORLD WAR II HAS PROVIDED US WITH MANY BIZARRE ESCAPE STORIES, BUT NONE CAN SURPASS ESCAPE FROM CORREGIDOR.”
(The Jackson Sun)
Agent in Italy: A Memoir of a Spy in World War II with a Study Guide
I couldn’t hear a sound, either from the corridor and offices beyond the door or from the sleeping city of Milan outside. All the rest of the world could have died.
It was stifling. Italian police stations are badly ventilated. My throat was very dry and I kept coughing. I smoked another cigarette but that made it worse. The smoke hung in the dead air.
I tried the door again. My wet palm slipped on the unclean handle. The door was still locked, of course.
I didn’t know exactly what time it was because they’d taken my watch away from me. I guessed about three in the morning. I was going to be shot at six.
Thus begins this amazing; book—both a thrilling story of personal danger in Italy’s underground movement, and a fully detailed, authentic report on the crumbling of Italian Fascist morale under the terror of German occupancy.
The gripping adventures experienced by S. K. during his undercover work in Italy give us a picture of methods which more than match all we have heard of German and Russian espionage work. Yet they are absolutely bona fide—the author’s credentials have been carefully checked. He remains anonymous for the protection of those colleagues still carrying on the Democratic revolution.
Working with groups of fearless Italian patriots, it was S. K. who first revealed to the outside world through confidential information on Germany’s flame-throwing tanks, the intention of Mussolini to move against Greece, the use of American dollars for the purchase of oil in French African ports by submarine captions, the shipping of Messerschimitts to Central America, the existence of camouflaged airports in Nicaragua and Bolivia, the sending of Stukas to Japan, and the building of new Condors in Holland.
In addition to these sensational disclosures, agent in Italy now reveals fully detailed story of the German occupation of Italy, giving facts and figures, including an estimate of 400,000 Germans now keeping the junior Axis partner under shaky control.
Filled with tense and breathless incident, this book, the first to disclose the bitter ordeal of Italy, bring the excitement of the mystery novel to one of the most important factual documents of our day.
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Agent In Italy
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An Army of Amateurs
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AN ARMY OF AMATEURS is the incredible story of the resistance of the ordinary Frenchman in the street to the Nazis—secretly sapping the strength of the invading armies until the final Allied victory. Here is a picture of a group of dedicated but inexperienced citizens who risked their lives and displayed enormous courage—winning despite the many blunders that amateurs were bound to make.
Philippe De Vomécourt, who with his two brothers, and the aid of Great Britain, helped to organize the resistance, began his operations by obtaining a job with the Nazis as an inspector of railroad trucks-enabling him to see that these trucks failed to get to the proper destination, to plan “escape routes” and assist in smuggling Jews to safety.
It was not long, however, before the Nazis began to suspect Philippe of being a traitor and eventually the luck of the de Vomécourt brothers ran out. One of them—who saw to it that every single torpedo ship leaving Germany was blown up—paid for his work by death in a concentration camp. Philippe was sentenced to hard labor but soon showed his unfailing ingenuity and daring by managing to escape—taking with him fifty-three other prisoners. Departing for England with a small group, he returned to France before D-Day to supervise the cloak-and-dagger activities of his own group, Special Operations Executive, enlisting anyone who was willing to help them harass the Germans.
AN ARMY OF AMATEURS is an important book, packed with heroism, hair raising escapes, and some sharp criticism of France’s allies.
Philippe De Vomécourt was born in France in 1902 and educated in England. As a young man, he joined the Flying Corps (British) in World War I, later studying agriculture and managing a farm in Africa. After marrying, he lived in the New Herbrides and then Australia before settling in France.
They Called it “Purple Heart Valley”-A Combat Chronicle of the War in Italy by Margaret Bourke-White
An excerpt from The New York Times review by Foster Hailey, November 26, 1944:
“Reading Miss White’s remarkable book and looking at her even more remarkable photographs, many of them taken under fire, you know that all the American men and boys, in Italy, in France, in India, China, Burma and the many Pacific islands, have what it takes to defeat their country’s enemies. That’s why they’re winning the war.
“Margaret Bourke-White’s photographic-written record of the weeks she spent slogging through the mud, riding a Jeep up and down Highway 6, climbing mountain peaks in the dark with her heavy equipment to get just the right place and the right light to shoot her pictures, photographing the quick, the dead and the dying in gun emplacements. front-line foxhole, emergency dressing station and rear-base hospital, is one of the best and most remarkable books to come out of the war. The author prefers to be known perhaps as a photographer; but this book qualifies her as a first-rate reporter, in command of a lean, hard prose that is the only true medium of description for the ordered insanity of war…
“…Although the most exciting photographs and the best reading are of battle. Miss Bourke-White gives the whole picture. She tells of the misery of the Italian civilians behind the lines; the black market through which some Italians fleeced other Italians; the bungling of the American Military Government, which (by a confession to her, she said, of one of its high officials) was more interested in how the United States would react to what it was doing than of getting a disagreeable job done quietly and efficiently.”
From Foreign Affairs: Reviewed By Robert Gale Woolbert July 1945
In this intimate, first-hand description of the Cassino campaign in Italy the author has accompanied her usual superb photography with exciting text.
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From a Pulitzer-Prize Winning War Correspondent with Maps and a Study Guide
Read about the first year of the Korean War in “War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent.” The author, Marguerite Higgins, was the first woman to win a Pulitzer for international reporting. The book is about the battles at the start of the war as the armies moved up and down the Korean Peninsula. But Higgins is not concerned with military strategy. She writes about the lives of U.S. GIs, the Korean civilians, and how she navigated through a male dominated military who wanted to send her home.
The military historian, S.L.A. Marshall appreciated Higgins’s work: “This Maggie’s eye view of the Korean police action is downright irresistible in its candor, in its simple expression of the things which most of us feel strongly but can’t say very well, in its change of pace between the tragedy of the battlefield and the high comedy of much of human behavior in close relationship to it….Many of her word pictures are remarkable in their ability to convey much in little; where she philosophizes at all about men in battle her style is almost epigrammatic, and many of her observations have such a true ring that they deserve to be remembered and widely quoted.”
According to the Saturday Review of Literature it is “….a whale of a war story.”
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War In Korea The Report Of A Wo – Marguerite Higgins
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The Patriot’s Progress by Henry Williamson
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If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.
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Reviews
From Goodreads:
Very unexpected memoir/novel of WW I — totally different from the many I have read. Five “phases” each are one long paragraph — not conventional in any way. “Stream of consciousness” comes to mind, but some of it is more “stream of impressions” — hard to describe, other than to say it’s all immensely powerful. Talk about “fog of war” — this is “black night of war.”
“Very unexpected” because when I ordered it I thought it was a straight memoir. Not quite!
Call it 4.5 stars. I’ll give it 5 stars for impact and 4 stars for “enjoyability,” whatever that is.
I did like it better than Henri Barbusse’s “Under Fire” semi-autobiographical novel, which is said to be the first novel to come out of WW I (published while to war was still in progress).
From the New York City Tribune (Herschel Brickell) 20 July 1930:
“Patriot’s Progress” is the attempt of a finished literary artist who has full command of his medium, and who was in the mess himself, to portray Everyman at War. [Takes reader through the tale.]
The undercurrent that lies beneath the whole book seems to mean that wiser men than John bullock have no business to let him and his kind go dumbly and uncomprehendingly into wars. . . . Mr Williamson’s battle scenes are extraordinarily good. . . .
[“The Patriot’s Progress”] will be of especial interest to those who know the other work of its author, because it shows him in a changed mood as well as a changed manner. He has suppressed that sensitivity . . . that makes him seem sentimental at times; he writes with feelings so deeply harrowed, . . . and the effect is all the stronger.
From The Nation, 17 September 1930; short and to the point:
Mr. Williamson, in his luminous descriptive prose, has written a second fine war book. It is the story of a young English private who might well have been named Everyman. For we are not shown the inner life of John Bullock in those respects wherein he differed from his fellows but we recognise him at once because he typifies his fellows. The reader follows Everysoldier from the time he joins up with high hopes and inflamed spirits on through his terrible ordeals and into the Valley of the Shadow [note the nod to Bunyan and the Bible] of agony to his emergence, crippled, forever handicapped. The story is short, graphic and haunting. It belongs among the best of the increasing number of war memorials in literature.
Oakland Tribune California, 13 July 1930:
Henry Williamson Increases His Stature With “The Private’s Progress,” Courageous and Candid Book of a War Private
. . . His use of abruptly broken sentences, his forceful punctuation, tell so much more than even his own precise and brilliant verbage could otherwise. . . .
If more such narratives of the war are to be written, let them be by those of the greatness of soul and the literary equipment of Williamson.
Toward the Flame: A War Diary by Hervey Allen
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Reviews of the Print Edition
“TOWARD THE FLAME is written in admirable and simple prose throughout … an important record.”—Saturday Review
“Filled with drama and humor. … It is unforgettable and beautiful. It has the marks of a classic.”—Bookman
“The main comfort, as seen by Mr. Allen, is that on the one hand a certain disregard for death comes from familiarity with the worst that death can do. . . . On the other hand, life, shortened in prospect, increases in intensity. . . . [One has] a quite special regard for the scholar in arms, the man who does his duty coolly and intrepidly, though his intelligence knows other allegiances.” —The New York Times
More Recent Reviews
From Goodreads 4.04 rating:
Considered by many to be the finest American combat memoir of the First World War, Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame vividly chronicles the experiences of the Twenty-eighth Division in the summer of 1918. Made up primarily of Pennsylvania National Guardsmen, the Twenty-eighth Division saw extensive action on the Western Front. The story begins with Lieutenant Allen and his men marching inland from the French coast and ends with their participation in the disastrous battle for the village of Fismette. Allen was a talented observer, and the men with whom he served emerge as well-rounded characters against the horrific backdrop of the war.
From http://roadstothegreatwar-ww1.blogspot.com/2013/07/toward-flame-memoir-of-world-war-i-by.html
…Throughout his memoir Allen describes the attrition of war, especially the hideous affronts of war upon soldiers’ bodies and minds. Describing the effects of a shell burst he reports: Then we heard those awful agonized screams and cries for help that so often followed. It is impossible to make people at home understand what listening to them does to your brain. You never get rid of them again.
Allen continues his observations of the war as a semi-detached observer throughout his book and it is only toward the end that he records how his unit, a company down to less than half strength, finally comes in direct contact with the enemy. They are continually whittled down by German artillery at the battle of Fismette village, part of the Second Battle of the Marne, while the withdrawal order of an American officer is overruled by an obsessed French general. The narrative ends as Allen’s troops are overwhelmed by German flamethrowers, thus explaining the title of his memoir.