True Stories of the Second World War

This is a non fiction book published in 2003, written by Paul Dowswell, who specialises in children's information books.

Indeed Second World War, is as ‘As dirty a business as the world has ever seen…..’

Recounting the stories of some of the most heroic, devastating and pivotal moments of World War II, this book gives young readers a strong sense of the suffering, but also the bravery involved in the war. It also gives an understanding of the experiences which may have affected their grandparents.

The war involved a desire by the Axis powers (Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) to gain power over the Allies (Great Britain, USSR, USA). Also Japan’s military rulets sought to take over the Asian and Pacific territories fading European powers. The war began with the German Invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

From the voyage of the Bismarck (Germans greatest battleship) , and the Battle of Iwo Jima to Cracking Enigma, the Manhattan Project and attacks on Japan, this book proves an unpatronizing and approachable insight into this conflict.

In the Voyage of the Bismarck, there is the extraordinary scene, of Captain Lindemanns death, as the deck slowly turned over into the sea, Lindemann stopped and raised his hand to his cap in a final salute, then disappeared. In 1989, marine archaeologist Robert Ballard, have found that Bismarck’s hull remains intact, and the swastikas, on bow and stern have made a sinister reappearance.

The story of Violette Szabo, the sales girl/British agent who worked for the Special Operations Executive, was really touching. The atrocities committed on them, seems to be worse or akin to the one shown in the movie Kalapani…Her surviving coprisioner, Marie Lecomte described it, and was finally able to kiss each of her family members as was promised.

Then there is the brave story of the Russia’s women pilots, headed by Marina Raskova, commonly known as the Stalin’s female ‘Falcons’.

In the book-keepers storage problem, you get to read about the Adolf Eichmann and the Wannsee Conference 1942, with his boss SS General Reinhard Heydrich, an ‘Aryan’ (was the Nazi term for pure-blooded Germans)!!!! Planning to make Europe Judenfrei, or ‘Jew Free’. Jews were gradually rounded up. Some were shot, or gassed in special vans designed for the process. But most were placed on Freight trains, packed in their hundreds and thousands into cattle wagons, and transported to death camps-Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec, Chelmno and Auschwitz-names which would haunt the lives of an entire post-war generation.

In the war of the rats, at Stalingrad, there is the incredible story of Vasily Zaitsev and Tania Chernova.

The lost hero, is about Raoul Wallenberg’s from Sweden, studied in US, with the mercy mission to Hungary .. There was frequent encounter with Euichmann..What happened to him is a question of much speculation, he was missing, after the war, and as per the most reliable records available, he was executed in his Moscow cell on July 17,1947. The war produced more than its fair share of senseless moments, but for a man who had saved anything up to 100,000 lives through sheer bare-knuckle courage, it was a desperately unjust fate…

‘…Like running through rain and not getting wet.’…Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a historic photograph taken on February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal.


It depicts five United States Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman raising the flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. The photograph was extremely popular, being reprinted in thousands of publications. Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography On February 19, 1945, as part of their island-hopping strategy to defeat Japan, the United States invaded Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima was originally not a target, but the relatively quick fall of the Philippines left the Americans with a longer-than-expected lull prior to the planned invasion of Okinawa. Iwo Jima is located half-way between Japan and the Mariana Islands, where American long-range bombers were based, and was used by the Japanese as an early warning station, radioing warnings of incoming American bombers to the Japanese homeland. The Americans, after capturing the island, deprived the Japanese of their early warning system, and used it as an emergency landing strip for damaged bombers, saving many American lives. Iwo Jima is a volcanic island, shaped like a trapezoid’

The destroyer of worlds, is about the Manhattan Project and the atom bomb attacks on Japan, in 1945. The chief scientist, Oppenheimer, mouths the words ‘I am become Death The Destroyer of worlds’ from BG, while trying in Alamogordo, New Mexico on 16th July 1945. Later the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from Enola Gay and B-29 Superfortress ; the bombs were named Little Boy and Fat Man respectively. There are arguments for and agains bombing…Some claim if not for the bomb, they would have died long before; You’ve got to kill enough people, only then they stop fighting. Some cried with relief and joy…Some say, Japan was ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing…

Alias ‘Uncle Ricardo’, Adolf Eichmann, 1945-1961, lived in exile for years…and then was hanged….Indeed…when you taken the life of one man for the murder of six million, you cheapen the value of the death.

From Technicolor to black and white, after the war ended…has a small poem by John Maxwell Edmonds, which was popular with both American and British troops,

When you go home,
Tell them of us and say,
‘For your tomorrows
These gave their today’


Have often heard of the Turkey blocking the way to the Middle East…was wondering how much have they contributed/saved the war? Indeed Creating blocks, is indeed very troublesome, whatsoever the motive….

The cause of any war is usually too complex to reduce to a simple explanation, and none of us want a war….but there is……either a cold or hot war….everywhere, every time….
War against terrorisms, family feuds, Can we stop them? Can there ever be so much of understanding to avoid wars?