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Reviewed by Robert A. Groves for Readers' Favorite
Afterbursts is a collection of first-hand memories from 100 survivors of World War II. Author Lucy Colback traveled the globe for four years, interviewing people from every side of the war. Global representation in the collection includes China, Japan, Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These are verbatim oral histories and not a battle chronicle. There are stories of close calls that saved people. One of the most vivid is the story of an entire military unit saved by a measles outbreak on Guadalcanal. The disease prevented them from moving forward into a battle. One of the most harrowing stories is about how people in Hiroshima played a game of rock-paper-scissors to decide who would receive post-radiation treatment due to limited resources. There are also tales of humanization, such as U.S. soldiers playing baseball games with Japanese prisoners of war and former enemies helping each other. These are just a few; there are so many more amazing accounts.
Reading Afterbursts: Reliving World War II expanded my knowledge of history and helped me learn details not found in textbooks. For one, war did not break out simultaneously across the world. From the first two countries declaring war to the last to enter the conflict, a span of ten years passed. I can only imagine the time Lucy Colback invested in bringing these oral histories to the page. The speakers’ words are left intact, but Colback did an excellent job of adding context and footnotes for clarity. This work is important as it captures memories before they are gone and makes war’s human cost impossible to abstract away in the future. One of the most profound realizations is that, regardless of where the oral history participants were located, they shared universal experiences and emotions. Chief among them was the feeling of survivor’s guilt. Why were they spared when so many were lost? It is an astounding preservation of history. Thank you, Lucy, for the determination to keep it available for future generations.
