Germany was a signatory to the Hague Declaration of 1889, a decision that helped to establish the principle that some kinds of wartime combat were “uncivilized.” Among those types of combat was the use of “deleterious gases.” In April 1915, Germany violated its pledge, and chemical warfare as we know it was born. In A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare, authors Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman present a general history of gas and germ warfare. The book was first published in 1982, but in this updated paperback edition, the authors have added new material covering recent developments. Compelling, timely and important, the book is even more relevant today than when it first appeared. Despite concerted efforts around the world to outlaw chemical and biological warfare, the threat still looms large. In this well-researched, briskly written account, the authors focus on the scientific and military aspects of the subject, as well as governmental and diplomatic issues. They also look at the effects of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the black market in weaponry that resulted. Recent terrorist attacks and attempts by Third World countries to establish arsenals are also given thorough coverage.

Because the research and development of these weapons has been done clandestinely, the authors use the term “secret history” in their title. The book takes us behind the secrecy to reveal the stories of victims who suffered and died, some by design, others by accident. And we learn of such figures as the Japanese army major, Shiro Ishii, who was given government permission to build the world’s first biological warfare installation in 1937, thus starting the biological arms race. Of particular interest is the reluctance of both sides to use biological or chemical weapons during World War II. Although either side might have deployed them under certain circumstances, both FDR and Hitler were opposed to their use. FDR regarded poison gas as “barbaric and inhumane” and rejected all proposals to use it. Hitler had been wounded by mustard gas in World War I and, the authors say, “was known to have a marked aversion to using chemical weapons.” Top Nazi leaders repeatedly advised Hitler to use them but to no avail. Churchill, on the other hand, strongly promoted the production and possible use of gas. The British were the first, in 1940, to prepare serious plans for using it. As late as July 1944, Churchill, proposed in an extraordinary memo, which the authors quote in full, that his service chiefs seriously calculate again the pros and cons of such use.

Robert Harris is known for best-selling fiction thrillers like Fatherland, Enigma and Archangel. Jeremy Paxman is a prominent news anchorman in Great Britain whose distinguished career has taken him to the Middle East, Africa and Central America, among other places. As the two point out, “Proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is now perhaps the most urgent problem facing Western military planners.” Their exploration of this grim but important subject helps us to understand it in a wider historical perspective. Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

The chaos in the art world resulting from World War II continues to this day, as paintings, icons and sculptures routinely emerge in auction rooms and private sales. As the Nazi armies raced towards Leningrad in 1941, the Catherine Palace was hastily dismantled and Peter the Great’s art treasures packed away. One of them, a room made of panels of amber mined from the Baltic Sea a gift from the King of Prussia has never been found. In September 2001, journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark began their own search for the Amber Room, combing through archives in Moscow, Leningrad and Berlin, interviewing the few surviving figures and relatives of those deceased, and poring over previously unknown diaries. Their quest is meticulously recounted in The Amber Room: Uncovering the Fate of the World’s Greatest Lost Art Treasure. Levy and Scott-Clark have turned up two conflicting stories as to the fate of the Amber Room.

One theory follows the reasoning of Anatoly Kuchumov, a curator in charge of packing up Leningrad’s art treasures as the Germans invaded in 1941. Figuring that the Amber Room could not be moved, Kuchumov decided to disguise it instead. Another theory comes from archeology professor Alexander Brusov, who led the first search for the room just as the war ended in 1945. He concluded it had been carted off by the Nazis to Konigsberg Castle in East Prussia, where it survived until the city fell to the Red Army on April 9. By the end of May, the castle was a charred ruin, undoubtedly the work of Red Army troops, unaware that Russian art treasures were stored there.

Perhaps finally accepting the probability of the room’s destruction, Russia began assembling a replica in 1999, which officially opened in May 2003. While the fate of the room may never be established, The Amber Room is a fascinating tale of obsession, intrigue and fabrication rivaling a work of fiction. And since art works supposedly “missing” in the war continue to be uncovered, there may be a trove of similar stories waiting to be told. Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati, Ohio, and La Veta, Colorado.

From 1791 through 1794 in western Pennsylvania, acts of resistance to a federal excise tax on the production of whiskey led to an insurgency serious enough for George Washington to deploy the nation’s first federal military force to put it down. This was the first war for the American soul, according to William Hogeland, who traces the events in his lively new book The Whiskey Rebellion.

In part, Hogeland explains, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton needed the whiskey tax of 1791 to fund the nation’s staggering war debt. Beyond that, he saw a continuing pool of capital in the hands of moneyed investors [whose] financial ambitions would fund the nation’s ambitions. The poorest people, however, would experience the whiskey excise as a tax on income.

The ensuing rebellion pitted well-off Easterners with large distilleries against less well-off Westerners, many of them desperate and disgruntled war veterans with small farms and businesses. Radical Westerners felt that resisting the tax, often with threats and violence (such as the tarring and feathering of collectors), was their last chance for fairness. Caught in between were Western moderates who worked to reach a compromise, but found themselves distrusted and threatened by both sides. As resistance continued, Hamilton advised Washington to raise an army to enforce the law, an action Washington saw only as a last resort.

Hogeland gives us vivid characterizations of the major players and evokes the atmosphere around the protestors. One of the most colorful is Herman Husband, a wealthy businessman, a plantation owner who owned no slaves, a Quaker pacifist who believed in nonviolence, and a radical leader, legislator and author. Religious absolutism brought him to the conviction that what was happening was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Hogeland also describes the Dreadful Night, as it came to be called, when people whose names appeared on lists that Hamilton and his allies had compiled were rounded up and detained. Unfortunately, almost every adult male was fair game for capture. The fact that most of those arrested would have to be turned loose later was not an issue for the Dreadful Night. The Whiskey Rebellion is important history, carefully researched and written with verve for a general readership. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

In the days before D-Day, everyone knew that a seaborne invasion of Europe by the Allies was coming. The big questions were when and where. We now know that the landings on the beaches of Normandy were crucial to eventual victory in World War II. But what was life like in the days just before D-Day? Drawing on a wide range of sources, including letters, diaries, contemporary documents and interviews, historian and former diplomat David Stafford takes us into the lives of ordinary people and military personnel in his Ten Days to D-Day: Citizens and Soldiers on the Eve of the Invasion. The result is a narrative that flows easily, much like an engrossing documentary film, from one person and country to another.

The many profiles include men like Andre Heintz, a French schoolteacher in Caen, who was part of the Resistance. He forged identity cards for those in trouble, but also had the potentially more dangerous role of collecting intelligence about changes in the city’s German military installations. In an Oslo prison, there is Peter Moen, who had been one of the main editors of the most important of the clandestine newspapers in Norway before becoming a prisoner of the Gestapo. Women contributed as well. In the days before D-Day, there were more than 70,000 women working as spies, codebreakers, radio mechanics and in other nontraditional roles. Twenty-year-old Sonia d’Artois, from England and an expert on explosives, parachuted into France before D-Day. The remarkable Vera Atkins was in charge of the French intelligence section; female agents had been sent to France as early as 1942. Along with the personal stories of everyday citizens like those mentioned above, Stafford explores the concerns and frustrations of the leaders, in particular General Eisenhower, Prime Minister Churchill and General de Gaulle. The author also illuminates the central role of the Spaniard Juan Pujol, the double agent who supplied false information to the Germans under the alias of “Arabel,” while secretly submitting reports to the Allies. Pujol’s misinformation was necessary to keep the actual date and time of the invasion secret from the Germans.

Written with admirable clarity, Ten Days to D-Day helps us to appreciate the difficulties, ingenuity, personal courage and sacrifice of the many individual citizens in addition to the Allied leaders in the period just before the D-Day landing. Roger Bishop is a bookseller in Nashville and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Do we need another book about Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican senator (1947-1957) whose name marks a fearsome era in American history? Tom Wicker, a former editor at the New York Times, thinks so. McCarthy is best understood in the context of the Cold War, which began about the time he arrived in Washington. The Soviet Union, partner in the allied victory, had claimed sovereignty over eastern Europe. Mao Tse-Tung overran Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists and China had gone communist. It seemed that the red star was on the rise.

Gifted with energy, intelligence and pugnacity, McCarthy now saw a wondrous opportunity: anti-communism. His baseless charge of 205 communists in the State Department, made in February 1950, catapulted him to fame. For the next four years, he investigated communists wherever he imagined them the executive branch, the Democratic Party and, finally, the military. His goal was simply personal aggrandizement. In Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy, Wicker writes, He never uncovered much less sent to jail a single communist, in or out of government. Still, colleagues, presidents and press lords quailed before his popularity in the polls.

Wicker relates the familiar story of how McCarthy’s attack on the Army brought him down. It began with the efforts by his chief aide, Roy Cohn, to gain favor for Cohn’s homosexual lover, Pvt. G. David Schine. And it ended with the magnificent words of chief counsel to the Army, Joseph Welch, whose law partner McCarthy had smeared: Have you at long last, sir, no decency? The hearings were televised. As long as print covered the senator, he remained a popular idol; when people saw his sneer and heard his vicious words, he plummeted in esteem. Wicker’s book adds few facts to what’s known about McCarthy, but it provides a valuable analysis of how his popularity presented dilemmas for both parties in the early 1950s. And he acknowledges McCarthy’s genuine gifts, which, tragically, were used only to seek renown. James Summerville lives and writes in Dickson, Tennessee.

Essentially, Voices of Valor was born in 1983, when the then director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, historian Stephen E. Ambrose, started interviewing D-Day veterans for an oral history project. Realizing how extraordinary it would have been to have had the technology to tape-record the soldiers of Gettysburg or Vicksburg during the U.S. Civil War, Ambrose and his associate, Captain Ron Drez, USMC a decorated rifle company commander in Vietnam in 1968 embarked on a mission. For over a decade they canvassed America, attending veterans’ reunions and tracking down forgotten men. The Eisenhower Center collection grew to more than 2,000 accounts of D-Day experiences. “This is the most extensive first-person, I-was-there collection of memoirs of a single battle in existence,” Ambrose wrote in the acknowledgments to his best-selling book D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.

D-Day was the turning point of World War II. British prime minister Winston Churchill summed it up best when he deemed it “the most difficult and most complicated operation ever to take place.” That is saying a lot, for it was a rare day during the war when something crucial didn’t transpire somewhere in the Pacific, Burma-India-China, the Middle East, North Africa, the Soviet Union, the North Atlantic or Europe. On June 4, 1944, for example, the Americans marched triumphantly into Rome, headquarters of Fascist Italy and the first major capital to be liberated by the Allies. But the D-Day invasion in northern France two days later was a turning point of a different sort: land conquered by the Nazis was taken back for freedom. It was only a narrow strip of sea-sprayed beach, but it was land, hard-fought for, and it was the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler.

Everything about D-Day was large the overarching strategy, the vast mobilization, the sheer number of troops. But it is the daring boldness and intrepid courage of the men America’s 1st, 4th, and 29th Infantry Divisions, and its 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, along with the British 3rd and 50th Infantry Divisions, the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division, and the British 6th Airborne Division plus the incredible job of the U.S. Navy and Air Corps, that stand out. One can read biographies of Dwight Eisenhower or watch footage of John Ford, but the only way to understand D-Day fully is as a battle at its smallest: that is, one soldier and one reminiscence at a time. Collectively, these fighting men were the Voices of Valor the title of this book.

Infantryman Al Littke of the 16th Regiment Combat Team, for example, watched the naval bombardment of Omaha Beach as he waited in a boat to join the landing. “With all this fire power, it should be a cinch,” he recalled saying to himself, “I thought I was untouchable.” Leonard Griffing was a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division, preparing to drop onto French soil from a low-flying airplane. “As I stood there with my hands on the edge of the doorway ready to push out,” he recalled, “it seemed that we took some kind of a burst under the left wing because the plane went in a sharp roll and I couldn’t push myself out because it was uphill, so I just hung on.” D-Day was not one day, but a composite of many days, experienced by each of those individuals who played a part on the Allied side from the 120,000 men who landed during the initial action to the millions of personnel who supported them. In this volume, the story of D-Day is told through the impressions of those who were there. None of the people who lend their voices here saw the grand sweep of the battle, but rather only one small snapshot of it. Assembled in this book, Voices of Valor, are those memories some tragic, some humorous, and all of them imbued with human drama. They comprise the big picture of the largest invasion force ever assembled. Voices of Valor: D-Day June 6, 1944 includes two audio CDs of D-Day participants’ accounts introduced by Douglas Brinkley. Brinkley is a professor of history at the University of New Orleans, director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center for American Studies and author of several books. Co-author Ronald J. Drez is writing a children’s book on D-Day for National Geographic.

In his engrossing new book, award-winning historian Alan Taylor masterfully explores the transition of the borderland of Iroquoia, an alliance of Native American groups called the Six Nations, into two bordered lands which became the state of New York in the American republic and the province of Upper Canada in the British Empire. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution offers a panoramic view of events from multiple perspectives over a period of 50 years. Throughout the painful, and, for many, tragic process including war, diplomacy, broken treaties and promises, land speculation, greed and opportunism the Indians become divided among themselves and devalued as human beings by others. Taylor, recipient of both the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for Mr. Cooper’s Town, explains in extensive detail what lay behind Westward expansion and the settlement of the frontier.

At the heart of this narrative are Joseph Brant, a Mohawk Indian, and Samuel Kirkland, a clergyman’s son, whose 50-year link began in 1761 at a colonial boarding school. It was intended that the boys would become teachers and missionaries to the Indians. However, these one-time friends became bitingly hostile opponents: Brant siding with the British, Kirkland with the revolutionary colonists. Brant sought to help the Indians as he, at least for a while, moved nimbly and with great influence and power between the two cultures. Kirkland also tried to help the Indians, then left to join the rebelling colonists, returning to the Indians late in life. Both men profited handsomely from being able to bridge the cultures.

Taylor also gives us carefully drawn portraits of many other prominent personalities, including the Seneca chief Red Jacket, who was an extraordinary negotiator, and George Clinton, who dominated New York’s politics from 1777 to 1795 and was primarily responsible for the massive transfer of Iroquois lands into state possession for sale and settlement.

Taylor shows that the Indian leaders, with foresight, chose to manage settlement by leasing land rather than selling it. However, a so-called preemption right, by which state and colonial leaders declared imminent and inevitable their acquisition of Indian land, diminishing aboriginal title to a temporary possession, accomplished the objectives of dispossessing the Indians and creating the private property that led to the development of New York in the United States and British interests in Canada. Taylor is concerned about scholars who treat preemption as anything more than a partisan fiction asserted to dispossess native people. Of particular interest to him is the Washington administration’s serious concern about the strength of Indian forces which led to a decision to revise the nation’s frontier policy. The foundation of the new federal policy, passed by Congress and signed by President Washington in July 1790, invalidated any purchase of Indian land, whether by a state or an individual, unless conducted at a treaty council held under federal auspices. The power of The Divided Ground comes from both the accumulation of so much detail from all sides regarding specific events and by the roles played by individual leaders. This is a crucial part of American history that all of us should understand, and Taylor is an excellent teacher.

Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

There can hardly be a more frustrating or thankless task than trying to impose a moral code on war, an institution which, by its very nature, feeds on its own excesses. Yet that is the job that A.C. Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, undertakes here. Although he cites examples from armed conflicts throughout history, Grayling draws his chief conclusions from the bombings of cities in Europe and Japan during World War II. Grayling first makes it clear that he is not an apologist for Germany or Japan and that they were clearly aggressors who merited being defeated. His moral question is: what did the Allies owe to the innocent civilians of those two nations when it came to planning and carrying out their bombing raids? He is specifically concerned with area bombing, which he defines as the strategy of treating whole cities and the civilian populations as targets for attack by high explosive and incendiary bombs, and in the end by atom bombs. The two great Allied proponents of area bombing were Great Britain’s Sir Arthur Harris and America’s Gen. Curtis E. LeMay. Each, according to Grayling, had an inflated notion of the effectiveness of the technique in winning the war. Their unfortunate laboratories for testing their theories included not only the industrial centers of Berlin and Tokyo but also such targets of questionable military value as Augsburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Dresden and Nagasaki. At the beginning of the war, both Germany and Britain went to some lengths to avoid the gratuitous bombing of civilians. But as the conflict heated up and one outrage incited another, the niceties fell away and the rationalizations for indiscriminate slaughter blossomed. (LeMay conceded that had the U.S. lost the war, he might have been indicted as a war criminal.) Beyond the great loss of innocent lives, Grayling points out that the bombings also amounted to culturecide the needless destruction of libraries, schools, churches, monuments and other irreplaceable objects of artistic and historic importance. (To America’s credit, he notes, Secretary of War Henry Stimson removed Kyoto, Japan’s cultural center, from the list of cities to be bombed.) In addition to contending that it was morally wrong, Grayling further argues that area bombing was not nearly as militarily effective as its champions insisted it was. He says it didn’t sap the Germans’ will to fight nor break the back of their industrial productivity. Just as it had in Britain, the attacks seemed only to stiffen national resolve and bring out the people’s resilience and ingenuity. According to official estimates, Allied bombing principally by the British killed 305,000 German civilians and injured another 780,000.

The lingering question is: who can punish the victor in war, no matter how flagrant his crime? Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

In times of greatest inhumanity our common humanity becomes most clear. Most Americans today know that our prisoners of war in Vietnam were tortured, but few truly know the extent of cruelty inflicted on these men, or the astounding reserves of strength physical, emotional and spiritual they called upon to survive.

Two Souls Indivisible: The Friendship that Saved Two POWs in Vietnam is the story of two of these men. Major Fred Cherry, a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, and Lt. j.g. Porter Halyburton, a navigator on a Navy fighter, were shot down in separate incidents. The two were made to share a single cell, where Halyburton was ordered to care for the severely injured Cherry. Halyburton was a white Southerner. Cherry was a black man. Knowing vaguely of the racial strife in America at the time, the North Vietnamese captors assumed the arrangement would be psychological torture. The North Vietnamese were wrong.

Hirsch’s book chronicles how Cherry and Halyburton broke through barriers of race and prejudice to build bonds of friendship that saw only each other’s souls. The reader will alternate between horror at the vicious cruelty of the North Vietnamese, anger at political machinations and betrayal back home, pride in the prisoners themselves, and awe at the amazing resilience of the human spirit.

James S. Hirsch is the author of the best-selling biography Hurricane, about boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (portrayed on film by Denzel Washington). Two Souls Indivisible is no doubt headed for the same acclaim. Powerful, compelling, moving, inspiring and ultimately healing, it deserves a place among the great books about the dark days of the Vietnam War and the men who lived through the greatest darkness of all, trusting that they would one day see home. Howard Shirley’s interest in Vietnam stems from his aunt, Jo Ann Jones Shirley, whose brother Bobby M. Jones was shot down over Vietnam in 1972 and has been listed as MIA since 1973.