Recently I enjoyed reading about Guy Sajer’s experiences in The Forgotten Soldier, and am now looking for similar axis memoirs, some from the Japanese point of view would be nice, as they seem to be rather rare, according to my googling and Amazon searches. Anyone clue me in on some they enjoyed?
Controversy aside, was still a good read from the other side’s point of view.
This thread has a number of suggestions in it that you might find helpful.
The book I specifically want to reccomend is Japanese Destroyer Captain by Tameichi Hara with Fred Saito and Roger Pineau. I believe it’s out of print, now, but not impossible to find.
Bah, helps if I actually include the link I’d meant to offer…
Excellent! Many thanks fellow.
Another one, Saburo Sakai’s book Samurai about the life of a Japanese naval fighter pilot, written by the only surviving top-scoring ace.
Stuka pilot by Rudel Hans Ulrich is one that I own. Rudel does a good job describing the things I’m interested about in war.
If you want a memoir about civilian life, I’d reccomend “A Boy Called H”, Kappa Senoh’s story of his childhood in wartime Japan. You also might like “Europa, Europa”, which is Solomon Perel’s really unbelievable story of trying to survive as a secret Jew in Germany.
Not combat-oriented, but fascinating, even mesmerising, look at the internal struggle in Japan to surrender:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4770028873/102-7313111-8312134?v=glance&n=283155
I’ve always been interested by Inside the Third Reich, by Albert Speer, who I believe is the highest-ranking Nazi to have published an account of his experiences. On the other hand, that’s more about Germany, politics rather than the military, and everything inside should be taken with more than a pinch of salt- several of his accounts have been severely disputed by later historians.
It’s an absolute must read. In the novels Winds of War and War and Remembrance there are interspersings of the memoirs of General Armin von Roon (a fictional character) are largely based on Speer’s. Wouk points out that with Roon (as with Speer) that his hatred and condemnation and desire for the death of Hitler all seem to begin about the time the Nazis started to lose.
There are books written by and about the children of Nazi high officials that are interesting as well. They range from one of Martin Bormann’s sons (a former Catholic priest who currently lives under a pseudonym and hates his father and has dedicated his life to trying to help people to remove the stain from his family) to Gudrun Himmler (essentially the High Priestess of her father’s cult) to Thorwald Eichmann (leader of a neo-Nazi movement in South America) to Manfred Rommel (an extremely powerful and influential businessman with conflicted feelings for his father). Again: some of these books are about rather than by the people.
Akira Kurosawa’s “Something like an Autobiography” has some excellent war time Japan chapters.
Id actually popped in here looking for some Italian WWII memoirs. Anyone have any suggestions?
Fires on the Plain and Taken Captive, both by Shohei Ooka, are very good. The first is based on his experiences fighting in the Philippines, the second on his time spent in an American POW camp.
A couple of suggestions on life in Japan in 1945 from a child’s perspective: the manga Barefoot Gen, about the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing, and the anime Grave of the Fireflies, about a brother and sister slowly dying of starvation – and based on a true story, though in real life the older brother lived to write a book about the experience.
I still think that the allied bombings of civilians in Japan in WW2 was probably justified, because it was needed to win the war, but it does help to see the other side, of those who lived through both atomic bombing and fire bombing (which was probably just as bad in Japanese cities built of wood and paper).
The First And The Last by Adolf Galland tells of Galland’s rise from a fighter pilot in the Spanish Civil War to a general in the inner circle of the Third Reich and his disagreements with Göring and Hitler.
Iron Coffins by Herbert Werner. Werner was a U-Boat commander, and his account of life on U-Boats is both fascinating and horrifying.
Another by Albert Speer is The Spandau Diaries, about his 20 years in Spandau Prison after the war.
One book that I liked was Die Festung by Lothar-Günther Buchheim (the author of Das Boot). Buchheim was the war correspondent fictionalized as Lt. Werner in Das Boot. He is still alive at age 88.
Die Festung (unfortunately I have not found a reference to an English-language edition; the English translation of the title would be The Fortress) is sort of a sequel to Das Boot - after the mission of Das Boot Buchheim further covers U-boat crews based in France as a war correspondent, with some leave back in Germany and commissions to paint propaganda oil pictures of heroic (i.e. dead) U-boat commanders. U-boat crews tend more and more not to return; Buchheim chillingly recounts procedures on dealing with their belongings after a stated time. After the Allied invasion he travels a last time in a crowded U-boat to be evacuated, then does a personal retreat across France.
BTW there is a further sequel - Der Abschied recounting Buchheim accompanying the U-Boat commander from Das Boot on his last voyage as a civilian freighter captain some time around 1980. But that’s not about the war, obviously.
<hijack alert!>
I’ve read Barefoot Gen, and seen Grave of the Fireflies. Both are extremely moving stories, I agree. I regularly recommend GotF whenever someone comes onto the board asking to be introduced to anime that’s not insipid.
However both, GotF especially, strike me as being only half the story. I know that none of the protagonists in the stories can be held acountable for anything that their parents have done in the war - they had no say in what was happening. In spite of that, while I’m moved by the callousness of the fate of these children, I can’t help remembering things like the Rape of Nanking. Or, less well publicized, how the Japanese treated the Filipinos, or most of the other peoples they conquered.
I wouldn’t have such a sense of bitter aftertaste with these stories if there weren’t still major Japanese politicians trying to deny the incredible human cruelty that their military had indulged in during the same time period.
It doesn’t invalidate anything in the stories themselves. It just leaves me a tad sour all the same.
<hijack off>
Of course it’s only half the story, and there were far worse atrocities than the firebombing of German and Japanese cities – including the Holocaust and the treatment of civilians in China, Korea and South East Asia by the Japanese.
In addition, what kills Seita and Setsuko is not just the American bombing and blockade, leading to a shortage of food in Japan. It’s also that Seita and Setsuko drop out of the food rationing system in Japan, because of the hostility of relatives and the indifference of others. So, even if the Americans who are indirectly responsible, their immediate problems are purely Japanese in origin.