The Face of War

THE AMERICAN HERITAGE PICTURE HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II, edited by David G. McCullough; text by C. L. Sulzberger. 640 pages. Simon & Schuster. $20 (deluxe edition: $25).

There are at least 14.9 million experts on World War II in the U.S. That is the number of Americans still living, out of a total of 16.3 million, who served in the armed forces during the war. A good proportion of this group will almost certainly find something to carp about in this bulky history--a skirmish ignored, a river crossing forgotten, a campaign brushed off, a battle mentioned only in passing, a hero underrated, a sequence out of order.

In a brief introduction, the editors disarmingly acknowledge that they are prepared for such criticism; they admit that no one book could ever contain the complete history of a global war involving 56 nations. Their aim instead is to present in words and pictures the essential history of the greatest war and try to re-create a feeling of what it meant to the people who were caught up in it. By and large, they have succeeded. Although the text by New York Times Columnist C. L. Sulzberger is sometimes stiff and distant, the book contains engrossing eyewitness accounts from such diverse types as a Japanese kamikaze pilot, a Berlin housewife, an Englishman at Dunkirk and a U.S. Marine sergeant on Guam. By far the best value is found in the 720 pictures (92 in color), which capture the events from the Treaty of Versailles to the rise of Hitler to the Japanese surrender on the deck of the Missouri in 1945.

Commendably, the book never tries to glamorize the war. The pictures of Hiroshima, the faces of Hitler and Goebbels, the stacks of dead at the Gusen concentration camp in Austria, are reminder enough that it was a war in which compassion and decency lay among the victims.

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