James F. Dunnigan - Dirty Little Secrets of World War II : Military Information No One Told You About the Greatest, Most Terrible War in History

This is not a history of World War II , but revelations about many of the lesser-known details. Because it is a book of facts, you don't read it from beginning to end, but rather you jump in wherever it strikes your fancy. There are over three hundred separate items, each a complete

story in itself.

As a rule, much of the information found in one section of the book will usually also be applicable to the others as well. After all, although aircraft carriers are inseparably associated with the Pacific war, they also performed yeoman service in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, while the problems of troop transport transcended theater.

After reading this book, you'll never look at World War II the same way again. We have not changed the story of that conflict; we are providing information about it that is not generally known. We often look at the same subject from several different angles, giving you a better appreciation of, for example, how a blitzkrieg was conducted, what it took to supply partisans, and why the U.S. Army had more ships than the U.S. Navy.

World War II was the most enormous human drama in history. No

one volume could ever really come close to examining all of the

unusual, and often important, aspects of this, history's greatest war. So

much has had to be left out, from the drama of Dunkirk to the U.S.

Navy's coal-burning, paddle-wheel aircraft carriers on the Great Lakes;

from the Marine Corps's Navaho communications specialists to the

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Japanese Navy's "American" pilots; not to mention the improbable adventures of FDR's son, the extraordinary antiarmor tactics of the Finns, and the secret missions of Harry Hopkins. Also left out are many interesting items from the "secondary" theaters such as China, Burma, Finland, and the Middle East. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has thrown open the Soviet World War II archives. Much fascinating material is coming out. We were shown a volume (in Russian) of some of the newly revealed material already being published in Russia and realized that we could have added several dozen pages of previously

unknown goodies for this book from that one Russian volume alone. Well, if we sell enough copies of this book, there may be more. We certainly have enough to fill several more volumes.

This book undoubtedly displays an "American" bias. This is natural, given the audience. Without much difficulty the authors could produce a book of similar length with a "British" or "German" or "Chinese" bias which, while being somewhat repetitive, would still manage to include a lot of unusual and interesting material. World War II was the most enormous human drama in history, and there is far

more to be told about it than can possibly be included between the covers of a single book.