After reading a few fascinating articles about Ms. Miller, I picked up her only child’s biography of his mother called, “The Many Lives of Lee Miller,” by Antony Penrose. It was really good and furthered my interest in his mother.
I just finished, “Lee Miller, a Life,” by Carolyn Burke and it is a much more comprehensive look at this amazing woman who started off as a model, moved to France during the twenties and thirties and was a big part of the Surrealist’s movement of the era. She continued to model, and then became a photojournalist, and covered the war, right up front with many of the soldiers. Her photographs of the concentration camps are simply bone chilling. After the war, she visited the countries that the Soviets’ controlled and drew a stark contrast between the eastern Soviet countries like Poland and and the western democracies like Great Britain. She took photographs for “Vogue,” accompanied by insightful, shocking stories about fashion, art, and the war.
In many ways one might say she lived many lives, was sexually promiscuous, travelled much of the world and lived the life (lives) she wanted.
I am going to make this review short, simply because, if you are interested in World War II this is a book that needs to be read. Ms. Olson is one of the great historians of our generation and many of her books that focus on World War 2 I have read and have always come away bedazzled and awe-struck by the knowledge I have come away with.
“Last Hope Island,” has simply floored me in the amount of new material Ms. Olson has revealed in a personal and empathetic way that never obstructs the facts.
After the Germans had rolled over Continental Europe at the beginning of World War 2, Britain remained the only European democracy still holding out against the Nazi war machine and in so doing became the refuge for the governments, armed forces, and the spy networks of 7 countries, France, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Czechoslovakia, and Denmark.
The contributions of these 7 governments in exile was nothing short of extraordinary. It was the efforts of the Polish pilots during the Battle of Britain that saved the British from becoming the eight country taken over by Hitler. It was the contributions of the Polish and French code breakers that cracked the Germans’ “Enigma Code,” which led to the flood of top secret information about German intelligence and operations that would help ensure the success of the Allied invasion of occupied Europe. The Highly regarded MI6 was quite useless during most of the war and without a doubt contributed to the senseless deaths of thousands of spies and resistance networks in each of the seven occupied countries.
MI6 had a reputation for being the best spy organization in the world before the war simply because a number of fiction writers used MI6 as the organization for which their heroic, fictitious, spies worked for.
President Roosevelt’s betrayal of Poland and Czechoslovakia and his unwillingness to help the Netherlands at the end of the war while the Nazis were committing another genocide inside part of the country, is criminal. The Poles had probably done more to help the Allied cause than any other exiled country. The President said he didn’t care about the Polish people, and he had promised that country to Stalin. General Patton was only forty miles from the Czechoslovakian capitol and when asked permission to free the Czechs from the Nazi oppression they suffered under for five years was told by Eisenhower that it would upset Stalin who was 120 miles away.
Ms. Olson reminds the reader that unless you lived under the brutal repression of the Germans or fought against them, or was part of a resistance, you really had no idea what was really going on. Apparently, quite a few prominent people in high positions, unknowingly, perpetrated the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people, allies of ours, because their empathy went only so far.
This is a great book. I have only touched on a few parts of the book but, believe me, the knowledge I came away with was enormous.
After working in a famous, infamous, often described as a speakeasy, Hollywood restaurant the site of movie stars, musicians, ballplayers, politicians, high classed call girls, etc. was an everyday occurrence.
Amazing, how familiarly can often take the shine off certain people and at the same time add luster to other individuals. Working at this famous establishment would provide me with some of the greatest stories I have ever heard. Strange as it might sound, almost all the stories had nothing to do with the world of entertainment, politics, or sports.
I don’t know if I have read any autobiography on any famous entertainers, sport figures, or politicians, unless of course they had experiences in the real world that I found exceptional.
Jimmy Stewart, a famous actor, certainly fit into the category of a person who did something exceptional far outside his acting profession. Mr. Stewart came from a family of men who served in the military. He had relatives who fought in the Civil War, his father fought in World War 1, and so when World War II broke out with the bombing of Pearl Harbor it saw a surge in American boys joining the military while many more were drafted.
Jimmy Stewart was not a young boy when he tried to join the military and was rejected because of his weight and age. He was thirty-one and wanted to join the air-force and Louis Mayer, head of MGM, didn’t want to hear any talk from one of his major stars about joining the military. Steward was not only a major star but had dated some of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood and was making really good money.
But it is amazing what perseverance and talent can get you. Unwilling to take ‘no’ from the military, he convinced them with his knowledge and ability to handle a plane that he was exactly what the American air-force needed. After overcoming obstacle after obstacle by Mayer to at least keep him in states, he convinced the air-force to send him over to England where he would rise in rank and command twenty combat missions over France and Germany…escaping death many times.
To put this in perspective: “The most dangerous were the first and last five trips. During the whole war, 51% of aircrew were killed on operations, 12% were killed or wounded in non-operational accidents and 13% became prisoners of war or evaders. Only 24% survived the war unscathed.”
“Mission, Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe,” by Robert Matzen is so much more than about the courageous movie star. It is a story of so many courageous young men in their early twenties that never made it back, or were severely wounded. “The Liberator bomber” that was flown and commanded by Stewart and his crew wouldn’t pass the easiest safety standards that the military goes by today. They were death traps in so many ways.
Mr. Stewart stayed four and a half years in the air force and wasn’t discharged until the war in Europe was over. Like so many of his crew and fellow air force personnel that made it back, the war and the destruction and death would stay with them to their dying days.
David Leonhardt’s, “Ours Was The Shining Future,” is the best book I have read on the American economy. The ‘Gilded Age,’ and ‘The Roaring Twenties,’ might make wonderful T.V. and movies but it was during these periods that the largest wage gap between the rich and working class existed. It was during this time that the one percenters controlled their biggest share of the U.S. economy.
Enter President Franklin Roosevelt, who inherited the worst depression in modern American history. He decided that it was about time that the largest corporation in the world, the U.S. Government, had to invest in corporations.
Slowly, the economy started to pick-up. There was the highway bill, a pick up in car manufacturing, airplane production, and many, so many more schools built. He introduced Social Security and Medicare. Two untouchable programs nearly 90 years later but not so popular with the republicans and big business at the time. He supported labor unions which also increased wages for the poor and working class, black and whites.
Then World War 2 came and the U.S. economy went into overdrive with manufacturing reaching peaks unimaginable. For the next 5 decades the U.S. economy out paced the rest of the world in manufacturing, education, research, health care, and life expectancy. The best decade being the 1950’s under the leadership of President Eisenhower, a republican, who continued the Roosevelt blueprint, against the wishes of his own party.
Naturally, as times changed, and President Reagan’s policies of small government, lower taxes, and less regulations came back into play, ‘The Gilded Age,’ made somewhat of a comeback and the gap between the working class and the one percenters grew larger and larger. Wages remained stagnant and corporations like Amazon and Google grew richer and richer.
Enter President Biden, a man so old he was friends with Augustus Caesar. Suddenly, that ancient idea of investing in America became fashionable again. He passed the Infrastructure bill, invested in the U.S., computer chips, stood in line with striking union workers, and forced pharmaceutical companies to drastically drop their prices on life saving drugs. And that’s just a few of the things he has achieved. Under his leadership the U.S. economy is the strongest it has been since the 1950’s, there are more jobs than workers, the gap between the rich and working class has lessened somewhat, and the minimum wage in over twenty states has risen to $15 dollars or more.
Strange, but President Franklin Roosevelt, who was crippled from the waist down from polio, and President Biden, who many Americans believe is too old, both accomplished so much for The American People…For the American People!!!!
The points I have stated above are just a small portion of what is discussed in this book. It is an all encompassing look at the U.S. economy that I strongly recommend. Thank you Bradford for this amazing gift.
A couple of weeks ago I read an article in a magazine about this extraordinary lady Lee Miller. What I couldn’t understand was how I never heard about her because she was in Paris, France during the late 1920’s and then, on and off, throughout the 1930’s. She hung out with the likes of Picasso, was in the company of Hemingway, and so many other artists that I have read so much about.
She was a beautiful lady and started out as a fashion model for Vogue and then went on to be one of its leading photographers, covering not only fashion, but the Normandy invasion and the allies advance into Germany. She and her partner were the first to step into Hitler’s mansion, and she took a bath in Hitler’s bathtub and slept in Eva Braun’s bed. If all this might seem a little weird, believe me, after reading this book it seemed perfectly in her character.
She traveled the world, was sexually active, and needed adventure in her life to feel alive. The more dangerous the better. She drank heavily, was interested not only in photography but anything that was new in science, medicine, technology, and world events. She wrote numerous articles for Vogue about the war with photographs that only someone up close, in danger of being killed, could have taken.
She is what I call a little ‘Da Vinci.’ It is the highest compliment I could give to a person. Like Da Vinci, the world around her was fascinating and needed an explanation. “The Lives Of Lee Miller,” was a great start getting to know this unique and talented lady, and I see reading a number of other books about her in the near future.
Mr. Munninghoff’s, “The Son and the Heir,” is the fifth novel I have read about the Netherlands, with World War II at the center of the story, in the last couple of months. Some of the books I’d decided to read on my own and a few were purely by accident. All five were really good, but “The Son and Heir,” was fantastic.
“The Son and the Heir, a Memoir,” begins at the beginning of the 20th century, around World War I, and follows the Munninghoff family, to the very end of the century. It is different not only in scope, but also highlights the devastating effects that World War 2 had on the Netherlands and on this particular family in general. The Netherlands, which borders Germany to the West, was taken over by the Germans early in war, 1940.
The Munninghoff family was rich, and the grandfather, The Old Boss, was behind the family’s good fortune. He was a wise, perceptive, somewhat corrupt businessman who was a devout Catholic, anti-German, patriotic Dutchman, and a man who tried to keep his family together in the Dutch tradition anyway he could, even if it meant discarding one of his son’s wives who was German and eventually discarding that son who joined the SS.
Previously, I did not think of the Netherlands as playing a big part in World War 2. I knew that General Patton fought some vicious and famous battles in the Netherlands against the occupying Germans at the end of the war before finally arriving in Berlin, but not much else. Mr. Munninghoff’s memoir gives a clear picture of how the war, the occupation, and the liberation of the Netherlands, to this very day, still plays a role in the everyday life of the Dutch people. It is truly a fantastic memoir with unforgettable characters and many intricate plots.
You would think that after reading numerous books on the Holocaust that I would know a lot more than I do, but after reading each book I realize how little I still know. “Dancing with the Enemy,” is an extraordinary story about a unique, intelligent, talented woman (Rosie Glaser) who survives a number of Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, with her astonishing good looks, dancing ability, sleeping with the enemy, and her ability to speak four languages.
Betrayed by her former husband and dance partner, then by her current lover, she and her parents are arrested by the Dutch authorities simply because she is Jewish. They are first placed in a number of holding camps, run by the SS, in the Netherlands. It is in these first camps that she makes her secretarial and organizational abilities known to an SS officer.
Shortly thereafter, they start sleeping together, with the added benefits for Rosie of much more food, unlimited freedom to walk around the camp, and to be the highlight performer at a club where the officers gathered together to get drunk and where Rosie teaches them to dance.
If this seems like a betrayal and siding with the enemy it just might be, except for the fact that the extra food she gets she gives to starving prisoners and the information she gets from her lover keeps her abreast of the real motives of the SS.
Rosie is a survivor and not only does her techniques help her survive Auschwitz but, in turn, she helps other prisoners survive and, like her, eventually find freedom.
I highly recommend this book. It not only highlights the different and creative methods survivors used to finally reach that place we call freedom, but in the real life character of Rosie Glaser the reader is introduced to a unique, captivating, highly unusual woman who this reader found to be truly heroic.
Many years ago in lovely Southern California, in a very famous restaurant, I was talking to this young couple, maybe 5 to 7 years older to me. We were discussing the Bronx, where I was born and raised, movies, Broadway, and a host of other topics. When they were getting ready to leave they invited me the very next day to a Memorial Day Party at their house in Malibu.
I gracefully had to decline and when they asked me why I replied, “Because on Memorial Day I always go to the Veterans’ cemetery in Westwood.”
They then asked, “If I had anyone buried there?”
I said, “No, it’s just a tradition.”
Sadly, this very nice couple was not able to figure out why I would be going to a cemetery on a holiday in which so many people were throwing parties and celebrating the beginning of summer.
The very next day, I went to the Veterans’ Cemetery and laid flowers on a gravestone that didn’t seem to have had any visitors in decades. Down from where I was standing, a veterans’ day parade was taking place and there were lines of young children waving the American flag. I figured they were children of military personnel because beside most of the children were adults in uniforms.
A few years ago, I thought back to those children and wondered how many followed in their father or mother’s footsteps and went into the military and how many were probably killed or maimed fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I bring this up because throughout Ms. Cheney’s wonderful memoir she brings up many times how many men and women have died and were maimed fighting for the freedom that so many of us take for granted.
I had thought I had known a lot about all the events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack but my God was I wrong. Ms. Cheney’s memoir seriously enlightened me to many things I never even thought about and that alone is one of many reasons I so highly recommend this book. It is beautifully written, seriously depressing in that so many of our supposed leaders are a bunch of cowards and so many Americans are so ill informed because of the false narrative broadcast every day and night into their living rooms. The threat is still there, and in many ways much more dangerous than when our illiterate, selfish, self-centered, corrupt former president was in office.
If one is enjoying the Holidays, I would not recommend reading Anne Applebaum’s brilliant biography, “Gulag: a history.” But after the holidays are over and the gloom of January and February move in, I would strongly recommend picking up this book.
I have read quite a few books on the Holocaust and Stalin’s reign of terror and yet “the horror. the horror,” of these historical events has never failed to get me sick regardless of how many books I read on these two topics.
I always refer back to a reporter’s question to then Senator Harry Truman, “Senator, what do you think of the Nazis declaring war on the Russians?”
Senator Truman replied, “The best thing that could happen is that they destroy each other.”
At first the statement might seem kind of harsh, people forgetting that before Germany declared war on Russia, they were allies.
I, on the other hand, think that if they did destroy each other millions upon millions of lives would have been saved, including millions of Russians and Germans.
The one big difference between the Nazis’ concentration camps and Stalin’s Gulags, as Ms. Applebaum’s points out is that the Nazis wanted to eradicate the Jewish race and a few others while the Stalin’s Gulags wanted to keep their prisoners alive because they were a source of free labor…but it’s hard to keep prisoners alive and healthy for long when a hundred men or a hundred women are sleeping in a cell barely big enough for 4 prisoners and barely getting enough food for a day nevertheless for a week and working in temperatures 40 degrees below zero.
To be one of the unfortunate millions of Russians who were sent off to the Gulags you did not actually have to be a political turncoat. You could be a tailor in Moscow and suddenly find yourself an enemy of the state and off you went, or a Russian soldier who was captured by the Germans (a POW) and after being released and going back home to mother Russia charged and found guilty of espionage and sent off to a Gulag.
During Ms. Applebaum’s research for this book she was in Russia during the 1990’s and early 2000’s. To her surprise when she asked elderly Russians who were alive during Stalin’s reign of terror about the Gulags and the repression most of them said, “Why talk about that, that was in the past.”
Sadly, history has a way of repeating itself and the Russians now have as their president Vladimir Putin…at least until 2036.
In 1989 Audrey Hepburn, in her last movie, played an angel in Steven Spielberg’s, “Always.” At the time I thought what a perfect piece of casting. In my mind, I always felt that of all the Hollywood starlets she was the one who looked like a divine, angelic, being.
In 1993, at the age of 63, Ms. Hepburn passed away. For the previous 5 years I was following her new career as a UNICEF ambassador visiting war torn countries where children were starving, such as Ethiopia, El Salvador, the Sudan, Somalia, etc. She had not only played an angel but was a living, breathing angel.
Mr. Matzen’s biography, “Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II,”is a meticulously researched book about a young Audrey Hepburn, ten to fifteen years old, her family, friends, and all the people of the Netherlands living under Nazi occupation between the years of 1940-1945. It was never easy during any part of the occupation, but it was especially brutal during the last year.
After the Normandy invasion in June of 1944, many people came to believe that the war was just about over. The Allies had finally landed in Europe and even though the fighting to retake Paris and France had been fierce there was even greater optimism that the war would end soon, especially in the Netherlands and Belgium. While the French celebrated their liberation, after previously forming the Vichy government in collaboration with the Nazis the war intensified as the Nazis tightened their hold on the Netherlands. (The French believed why fight while others will do the fighting for you. When asked about the sudden disappearance of all their Jewish neighbors, they simply replied, “Well no one told them to be Jewish..” Of course, I am only half joking. The French Resistance was very instrumental to relaying important information to the allies and without their help the bloody invasion of Normandy would not have happened. Many of the French Resistance groups were lead by courageous women)
The Germans, ever resourceful, developed what they called the V1 and V2 flying bombs (vengeance bombs) that could travel 150 miles and were launched from the coast of the Netherlands and could hit targets as far away as Britain and France. These bombs were brutal weapons and the Nazis were going around telling everyone that the war would soon turn around and be in the Germans favor.
They were right about one thing, they were brutal, but their malfunction rate was exceptionally high, exploding in mid-air and landing on the towns of the Netherlands causing tremendous and deadly damage. Dead civilians were spread out across the towns of Velp and Arnhem where Audrey and her family took to the basement for months. People were starving to death, yet Audrey and other youths like her carried messages from the hospital to individuals that the doctors thought the Germans were hunting down. She helped out at the hospital and took care of dying children and children whose families were wiped out. She continued to walk the streets until the Germans picked her up and threw her in the back of a truck with other young girls. Once the truck started moving she jumped out of the truck and ran back to the basement where they hid a British serviceman from the Nazis.
What Audrey did during the war was exceptional but it was no different than what most children her age and younger did. But what she experienced during the entire war, along with everyone else, would stay with her for the rest of her life. Her older brother Otto, who she was very close to, was taken to a forest and shot with four other men in retaliation for a bombing at the railroad station which they had nothing to do with.
I have had the fortune, sadly, to know many gentlemen who fought in World War II, survived Nazi concentration camps, fought in Korea, and Vietnam. Except for one, I had known them all for a long time before they ever told me about their experiences. I imagine their confidence in me came from our many talks about current events and my knowledge of history. When they finally did confide in me it was like they were transformed back to that time. Unless one has been in combat one has no idea what it is like. I don’t care how many books you read, or monuments and historical sites you might have visited, you will never know what it is all about unless you have lived it.
Ms. Hepburn never gave many interviews and she was quite adept at dodging any questions about the five years she spent under Nazi occupation. If forced to answer about her experiences, she would say that “What I experienced so did many, many others.”
A Curious View 