What follows is an excerpt from my recent book, Lessons From The Good Books, What a Reading Addiction Taught Me About America, Music & Sports ©2016. The “Lessons” are set off in bold type.

“Freedom has a taste to those that fight and almost die that the protected will never know.”

Most of the people I know I met in books. This is most likely an indictment of my social skills and friend-making abilities. Oh well. I met Frank Buckles. Frank Buckles, was the last living veteran of World War I. He died in 2011, he was 110. He lied to get into the service when he was sixteen and went to Europe on the Carpathia, the ship famous for rescuing survivors of the Titanic. Today a lot of people meet other people online or through some sort of smartphone app … You’re not gonna meet anyone like Frank Buckles on some fuckin’ app. I met Harry O’Neill and Elmer Gedeon. Harry and Elmer were the only two major leaguers to die in World War II. Harry only played in a single game; he never came to bat. I met Sergeant York. On October 8, 1918, Sgt. Alvin York single-handedly killed seventeen Germans and captured 123 more. York Avenue in NYC is his street.

How are you supposed to meet brave men without books? How are you supposed to go places that don’t exist anymore without books? Turn the page of a book and you turn the pages of history, bumping up against men who would step forward when every primal urge screamed to fall back. World War II deaths: America = 418,000, Germany = 5.5 to 7 million (8 to 10 percent of the male population), Russia = 20 million (about 14 percent of the male population), Japan = three million, China = 10 to 20 million. With a book in my hand, I find things out about my country, human nature, the evil that often makes war necessary, the incredible capacity of the human mind and body.

-More Americans died at the Battle of Meuse-Argonne in World War I (9-26-1918 to 11-11-1918) than any other battle before or after.
-The U.S. 99th Division entered combat on November 9, 1944, and was in action 151 days, taking 6,103 battle casualties, 5,884 nonbattle casualties.
-The Battle of the Somme during World War I (1916) lasted four months and claimed over one million lives; 20,000 British soldiers alone were killed on the first day. Friedrich Steinbrecher: “Somme. The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.”
-The Thunderbirds, the U.S. 45th Division, 157th Infantry Regiment, suffered 62,907 combat/noncombat casualties in 511 days of fighting in World War II.
-Stalin is said to have ordered between 50 to 60 million deaths during World War II, more than the population of the United Kingdom at the time.

Death during World War II happened in some unlikely places. There were 52,000 stateside air accidents resulting in 14,903 deaths; 35,946 Americans died in nonbattle U.S. Army Air Corps situations. German U-boats were indiscriminately blasting ships of all shapes, sizes, purpose and nationality. They were spotted and created havoc at the mouth of the Mississippi River, around the Great Lakes and in the Chesapeake Bay. In 1942 alone, 548 Allied/neutral merchant marine vessels were sunk and 2.2 million tons of cargo were lost in the Western Atlantic. Merchant marine deaths in WWII totaled 9,300. The casualty rate for the merchant marine was 3.9 percent, 1 out of every 26 men; the U.S. Navy casualty rate was only 1.49 percent. The only place more dangerous than being in the general vicinity of a German U-boat was actually being on a U-boat. Thirty-nine thousand men served on German U-boats in World War II; 27,000 were killed. The seventy percent mortality rate is the highest for any fighting force in modern warfare. Of the 830 German U-boats deployed, 717 were sunk.

Now that we’re all reading, we may as well have a little music. Songs and war have a way of crossing paths. The line in the “Marines’ Hymn,” “to the shores of Tripoli,” refers to our 1805 encounter with the Tripoli pirates who were messing with American merchant ships. Those encounters resulted in the American flag being planted on foreign soil for the first time, and it was also the first time a U.S. Navy mission was supported by Marine ground forces. George M. Cohan published over 300 songs, including “Yankee Doodle Boy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” but many thought his best American war song was World War I’s “Over There.” Other composers also took a shot at pumping up the troops with less success, writing real songs with titles like: “We’ll Wipe You off the Map Mr. Jap” and “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

The human cost on Omaha Beach was 2,500 dead, missing and wounded. Not all the sacrifices were American. German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel reported for the month of June 1944 approximately 250,000 casualties including twenty-eight generals and 354 commanders. For those lucky enough to get off the beach at Normandy, the Germans had the game rigged inland as well, as they rearranged the European landscape in the form a gauntlet running east-west, north-south. The Gustav Line, sometimes referred to as the Winter Line, was a line of defense that ran east to west across Italy and through Montecassino where over 55,000 Allies died. Conversely, the Siegfried Line ran vertically along western Germany for 630 miles, from Holland to Switzerland. Lines of defense, lines of invasion, impregnable lines, invisible lines, lines that can’t possibly be held, lifelines. Lines at which to throw every last resource, every last hope. In terms of troops engaged (600,000) and casualties sustained (81,000), the Battle of the Bulge was the greatest battle ever fought by American troops.

Eighty-three thousand service members have gone missing in action in the last century, 73,000 of those during WWII and 45,000 of those in the Pacific, a number that almost equals the total soldiers that died in Vietnam. Missing, missed, but not invisible, not without a name, a face, a past, a hometown, not without a story. That’s what a book can do for a guy, for a country, a civilization.

♦

Four Damn Good Books—Warriors for Democracy

The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day, June 6, 1944, by Cornelius Ryan
On the deck of a D-Day ship, Technical Sgt. Roy Stevens sought out his twin brother. “I finally found him, he smiled and extended his hand, and I said ‘No! We will shake hands at the crossroads in France like we planned’ … We said goodbye and I never saw him again.” The film version, even with John Wayne and Henry Fonda, can indeed feel like a very long day, but the book is a wonderfully straightforward narrative filled with poignant anecdotes of soldiers and civilians. Sidney Dawe was a schoolteacher who for 20 years, put together the crossword puzzle for London’s Daily Telegraph.  It never repeated the same clue twice.  In the days leading up to the D-Day invasion, he came under surveillance of Scotland Yard. It turns out, completely by chance, that his puzzles during the spring of 1944 contained words that included Overlord, Utah and Omaha. The book shatters some myths set down by the more famous movie, and in other cases it provides names and details that create a rich, personal backdrop for what transpired that fateful day. For example, in the movie, actor Red Buttons played a soldier whose parachute gets wrapped around a church steeple. That was real. It was a private named John Steele who dangled from the steeple in Sainte-Mère-Église. He teetered there for about two hours (playing dead and in great pain) before being captured by the Germans. June 6, 1944: a day of logistics and luck (of both kinds), bravery and destiny, the results of which have in so many ways shaped our world.

Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam, by Andrew West
When FDR died, any chance of fighting colonialism in Vietnam died with him. The boys of 1967 were much like the “Band of Brothers” Stephen Ambrose wrote of, in that they were citizen soldiers who came running at first ask, were trained together as a unit, deployed as a unit, and ultimately, died (mostly) as a unit. Our government believed that if we showed our determination in Vietnam, Hanoi would not put up a challenge. We made this mistake repeatedly starting in 1961. In point of fact, the enemy was always more serious about his country than we were. The author does a wonderful job of weaving the story, especially in the use of letters home. In 1966 382,010 American men got drafted, the single largest yearly draft call of the Vietnam War. Very moving, very sad, what a waste of the best and the brightest. Vietnam: over 58,000 killed, over 150,000 wounded, $111 billion.

Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor, by James M. Scott
Pearl Harbor gets bombed, and as Americans, we want revenge. In the minds of certain military men, revenge can only mean one thing: bomb Tokyo. It was a ridiculous idea. For starters, you’d need to figure out how to launch your big bombers from the deck of a carrier—to some, a suicidal notion. I’d heard the term Doolittle’s Raid, but never knew what the big deal was. Said the Miami Daily News, “His deeds are in sharp contrast to his name.” This is moving history. The against-all-odds success of the raid (if you can call it that; the raid was poorly planned, and it was a miracle a single bomb landed in Japan), and the far-reaching fallout from it are staggering. Target Tokyo reinforces two powerful lessons: evil has no limits, and there is no match for the determination of the human spirit.

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War, by A. J. Baime
Great storytelling about Henry and Edsel Ford and how they converted the company they built into a war materiel juggernaut by using their ingenious principles of mass production. In five war years, 18,000 B-24 Liberators were turned out. In contrast, in the 40 years since its inception, only 1,500 747s have been built. We tend to think of America as a leader in all things, but in the years leading up to World War II that simply wasn’t the case. We essentially had no Navy. Unlike Germany and other nations that had been involved in post-WWI military conflicts and who were investing heavily in their military super-structures, the U.S. was focused on domestic issues, had significantly downsized its Army and maintained only a scant supply of the implements of war. Each B-24 had 360,000 rivets. In short, we were caught with our pants down. The manner in which we would pull them up and begin kicking some ass, started with the factories in Detroit. Firing up those factories, retooling them, filling them with American workers and American sweat, came about when the sleeping giant stirred. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it,” FDR declared in a December 1940 fireside chat.“We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” The creation of this arsenal remains a shining moment and a world-changing accomplishment.