Night: World War II

Exploring World War II, this reference presents 15 excerpts from primary sources related to this period, including speeches, diary entries, newspaper accounts, novels, poems and memoirs.

Although the United States tried to remain out of the Second World War, a surprise attack pushed the nation into the fight against fascism. Soldiers, presidents, and average citizens on America's home front relate their tales of what it was like to be swept up in the last great, global conflict.

World War II, a new addition to Facts On File's critically acclaimed Eyewitness History series, provides hundreds of firsthand accounts of the period from letters, speeches, and newspaper articles that illustrate how important historical events appeared to those who lived through them. Among the eyewitness testimonies included are those of Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Charles Lindbergh, James Farmer, John Steinbeck, William H. Hastie, Anne O Hare McCormick, George Marshall, James A. Michener, Douglas MacArthur, and Audie Murphy. In addition to the firsthand accounts, each chapter provides an introductory essay and a chronology of events. Valuable appendixes include excerpts from such informative documents as the Neutrality Act of 1937; Franklin Delano Roosevelt's address to Congress, December 8, 1941; the Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations; and the Nuremberg Trials Final Report as well as capsule biographies of more than 55 key figures and a look at the issue of refugees.

Each engrossing story has perilous and tragic moments--school children in Leuna who are sent home during an air raid but are strafed as moving targets; fathers who exist only as distant figures, returning to their families long after the war--or not at all; mothers who are raped and tortured; families who are forced into a seemingly endless relocation that replicates the terrors of war itself. In capturing such experiences from nearly every region of Germany and involving people of every socio-economic class, this is a collection of unique memories, but each account contributes to a cumulative understanding of the war that is more personal than strategic surveys and histories. For Samuel and the survivors he interviewed, agony and fright were part of everyday life, just as were play, wondrous experience, and above all perseverance. "My focus," Samuel writes, "is on the astounding ability of a generation of German children to emerge from debilitating circumstances as sane and productive human beings."