It’s impossible when looking at World War II statistics to fully grasp the enormity of the war’s impact on the lives of ordinary people. In his ambitious new work, the Swedish journalist and historian Peter Englund turns his considerable research skills to addressing just this by exploring the lives of individuals during a single month during the war: November 1942.
Eleven months after the United States entered the war may not, at first glance, seem like an obvious turning point. But Englund argues that events during these four critical weeks turned the tide in favor of the Allies, although a final victory would still be years away. However, the author is not writing military history here. He has something more intimate in mind: to uncover what it was like for human beings caught up in what Englund calls the “struggle between barbarity and civilization.”
In November 1942: An Intimate History of the Turning Point of World War II, Englund explores his theme through a series of 39 interwoven biographies. Peter Graves’ translation from Swedish is seamless, and readers will be immediately invested in the vivid depictions of places and people, which have largely been drawn from memoirs and diaries. Some of the people are well known, such as author and pacifist Vera Brittain and Albert Camus. Other figures are more obscure. In the Hongkou district of Shanghai, a 12-year-old German refugee named Ursula Blomberg and her parents follow the war on a friend’s hidden radio. Englund uses Ursula’s diary to vibrantly bring her to life. And so it is with each individual that follows, whether it’s Willy Peter Reese, a young German infantry private; Royal Air Force machine-gunner John Bushby; or Lidiya Ginzburg, a Jewish resident in Leningrad.
November 1942 is cinematic in scope and execution, both intimate and wide-ranging. In the hands of another writer (and translator), interweaving so many disparate lives and the events of four weeks in a global war into a single cohesive narrative might fail to hold together. Instead, November 1942 stands out as a unique and remarkable achievement, and a significant contribution to our understanding of war.
