1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

Book Overview

From the author of Forrest Gump and A Storm in Flanders comes a riveting chronicle of America's most critical hour. On December 6, 1941, an unexpected attack on American territory pulled an unprepared... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871138891
• ISBN13: 9780871138897
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Brilliantly conveys the feeling and context of the early days of WWII

Winston Groom's history of an early year of WWII, 1942, is an excellent book. For those that read little on WWII, 1942 gives a fast-paced overview of that difficult year of the war. If you are already well-read on WWII, 1942 provides some reasonable social history of the war, linking together actions, backgrounds and connections of key personalities of the war and giving some useful citations along the way. Of course better histories have been written of this period - Groom is not trying to outdo professional historians. Rather he has created a fairly thorough and entertaining narrative of the early part of WWII (early for Americans) and does an excellent job of placing the reader in the shoes of Americans living through that difficult time. One minor weakness of the book is that emphasis is given to U.S. campaigns in the Pacific; much less time is given to the Atlantic and the European Theatre. Maybe Groom will do another book on that topic, perhaps covering the famous battles of operation Barbarossa. By all means read this book, it is very well-written and a page-turner from start to finish. Hopefully, Hollywood will do another feature length film on one of the book's many subtopics, such as the British and American code breakers. It would prove as entertaining as Forrest Gump.

One of the Best WWII Books I Have Read!

Winstom Groom has written a terrific book around the subject of the year 1942. After laying some WWII groundwork (cause/effect), he shows the devastation that our country faced after Pearl Harbor. A country of isolationists became a country set on justice, but found themselves without the tools to fight the war. He develops how we as a country rose to the challenge of a World War, working with our allies to defeat the Axis. Groom delves into the popular details, along with the "nooks and crannies" of the war. He does not present the facts in dry detail as some historians do, but makes history come alive with human details. As to the remarks of a previous reviewer regarding the fact that Groom presents no new facts, perhaps he should have read the introduction where the author tells his readers that this book is not for the WWII buff who knows everything, but for the common person who desires a better understanding regarding the events that made this war the defining event of the 20th century.

I agree with the high ratings

I agree with the other high ratings for this book. Groom did an excellent job in his previous historical efforts, and has surpassed that. The narrative is entertaining, well sourced, and fuses the chronology and topical accounts to create a very readable delivery. Without using a historical bludgeon, he addresses some of the main controversies - did FDR manipulate events to instigate a Pearl Harbor? The answer is no, but he did blunder and vacillate at key times. Did the US have some justification for its suspicions of resident and citizen Japanese who had divided loyalites; and hence, their incarceration? - Yes, but not in the manner some other ideologues, such as Michelle Malkin have portrayed. Groom handles these, and other areas of polemic in a detached, but still engaging fashion. For instance, he discusses MacArthur and criticizes him, but does not rail incessantly. It is balanced and informative. It is almost novel level excitement as he walks you through the Doolittle raids and the subsequent fate of the pilots. Both the nuggets and the big picture are woven into quality storytelling. I would rate it a rank higher if the scoring permitted.

A pageturning narrative by a talented historian/storyteller

Best known for his novel Forrest Gump, Winston Groom is also the author of Shrouds of Glory (1995), an account of Gen. John Bell Hood's Tennessee campaign, culminating in the battles of Franklin and Nashville, the last significant Confederate offensive of the American Civil War. In 1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls, Groom combines a historian's careful attention to substance with the novelist's flair for style to produce an impressive account of the first year of World War II. While Groom includes the requisite facts and figures of a historical chronicle, his forte is storytelling. Avoiding the boring presentations of many academic textbooks, he presents a vivid and suspenseful narrative filled with graphic descriptions of horrendous events. In every sense of the word, 1942 is a page-turner. In the first months of 1942, the outlook for the Allies was grim. The Japanese had captured Wake, Guam, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Manila, and Thailand. Following the fall of the Philippines, Japanese atrocities increased in intensity during the infamous 65-mile Bataan Death March. "The Japanese octopus continued to crawl all over the Pacific," writes Groom. There seemed to be nothing to stop its tentacles from reaching out in every direction. "Following the Pearl Harbor disaster [Dec. 7, 1941]," Groom continues, "America was in grave military danger. Most of our Pacific fleet and air force no longer existed and the Japanese were running amok all over that ocean and in the Far East, banging at the very gates of Australia and India and even invading U.S. territory in Alaska. "America was almost totally unprepared for war and would not be fully equipped for another year. By a wide margin she was losing the battle of the Atlantic to German submarines, and the U.S. fighting forces were nowhere near to being properly trained and ready to fight. That they did so anyway--so that by the end of 1942 the worldwide Axis onrush was blunted for good--should be considered nothing less than awe-inspiring." The lion's share of the book deals with the war in the South Pacific, and the heart of the book deals with two "turning points" in this theater: the Battle of Midway, in which the U.S. fleet destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers (the Kaga, the Soryu, the Akagi, and the Hiryu), and the tenacious and heroic defense of Guadalcanal (in the Solomon Islands) by the First Marine Division. "The importance of the Battle of Guadalcanal," writes Groom, "can hardly be overstated. First it stopped the huge Japanese Pacific offensive in its tracks. It helped make Australia safe from Japanese air attacks on its sea-lanes of communication and supply. It sucked up Japanese troopers destined for the New Guinea campaign. It gave the Allies a solid, strategic forward base from which to launch the long and bloody war across the Pacific to Tokyo. It relieved the menace to shipping lanes from the United States to Australia and New Zealand and protected vital U.S. outposts

If Only High School History Was This Good

Most of the Pacific fleet resting at the bottom of the ocean. Wake Island's stalwart defenders forsaken like at a modern Alamo. The Philippine garrison under siege. German U-boats menacing Atlantic shipping lanes. Trying times, indeed, at the outset of America's involvement in World War II. "1942" is Winston Groom's brilliant, often lyrical, account of America's desperate struggle to overcome years of un-preparedness and underestimation of the enemy, and to turn the tide against the Axis powers. The book, by definition, is primarily (though not exclusively) focused on the Pacific War, and Groom eloquently re-tells the epic battles that halted the Japanese offensive on the threshold of Australia: Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, New Guinea, etc. It abounds with colorful anecdotes of individual heroism: Claire "High Pockets" Phillips, a Manila nightclub impresario who risked her life to deliver food and medicines to starving prisoners at the infamous Cabanatuan prison camp. A young American woman known as "Cynthia," who literally bared all to help procure the Vichy naval codes prior to Operation Torch. Columbus Darwin Smith, the first American captured by the Japanese, who escaped from captivity and survived a harrowing, 700-mile trek through Japanese-held China. The famous Doolittle raid, Bataan Death March, etc., etc. Groom is not the first to recount these events. But he has an unsurpassed gift for storytelling and a writing style that produces an engaging, highly accessible narrative. Even readers who loathed high school history will find this book irresistible. Five stars all around.