The Embattled Moment

LIFE'S PICTURE HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II (368 pp.)--Time Inc. ($10).

Most combat men of World War II saw only their tiny private areas of tension and boredom, explosively punctuated by sudden death. But cameramen in every theater were seizing the embattled moment on film, and artist-correspondents were recording bits of the war's hue and heroism on canvas. LIFE'S Picture History of World War II fits 726 such vivid fragments into a monumental mosaic covering every important aspect of the war and putting it all in sharp, balanced historical perspective.

To achieve that perspective, hundreds of thousands of pictures were examined. LIFE'S own morgue of 3,000,000 photographs was only a starting point. The armed services contributed from their own and captured enemy files. So did the press associations and many private sources. In the final selection, only about a fourth of the pictures used had appeared in LIFE itself.

The Gaunt Faces. In such a book, arrangement counts heavily. Picture History's twelve sections skillfully plait far-flung but interrelated events into a clean-cut chronology. The result is a sense of historical meaning, from Hitler's first martial rumbles to the dramatic ceremony on the deck of the Missouri. Much of the book's clean impact comes from the 75,000-word text, written mostly by Novelist John Dos Passos and TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod. Closely wedded to the pictures, their text is at once sharp description and lucid interpretation.

But words come after the facts, and it is the pictures that recall the facts of war as they were. An opening shot of hundreds of helmeted Germans standing still and steely as cars in a parking lot brings back the initial awesomeness of Nazi arms. The ferocity of the advancing Japanese is reflected in the gaunt faces of U.S. soldiers captured at Bataan. Color pictures of London under the blitz are reminders that it takes less than an atom bomb to turn a city into a hell. The slowly swelling might, the losses and final victories of the Allies are recorded in pictures that sometimes hurt and sometimes lift the heart.

The Aerial Blue. Along the stages of the Allied road to victory lay the Normandy beaches, the high, frowning bluffs of Monte Cassino, the coral reefs of Tarawa, the aerial blue over the sea approaches to Japan, with the Kamikazes coming in. Picture History has gathered in the look of it all. There are individual faces, too--sometimes composed, more often starkly candid--of the men of all armies and all ranks. There is the home front, with its crucibles and assembly lines, its boom towns and bond drives.

Half a million copies of this book have been ordered in advance of publication, a publishing phenomenon but no great surprise. To future generations, Picture History may be just what its title implies: to those who lived through World War II, it is a long reminder of reality.

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