WWII

Otsuka has recently been awarded the Carnegie Medal for Excellence for her novel about a Japanese American woman who's lost much of her memory to dementia. Originally broadcast Feb. 22, 2022.

Infantryman Robert Kotlowitz was one of only three in his platoon to survive an ill-advised attack on the Germans. Robert Williams served with the Tuskegee Airmen. Originally broadcast in '99 and '95.

Historian MATTHEW F. DELMONT is the author of the new book Half-American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. It's about the African American experience in World War II, the discrimination Black Americans faced in the military and in civilian defense industries.

Ken Burns' new three-part documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, explores what everyday Americans knew — or didn't know — about what the Nazis were doing in Europe.

China scholar Michael Beckley says China is engaged in the largest military buildup since World War II, and is being increasingly aggressive with its Asian neighbors and with the U.S.

Dole, who died Dec. 5, represented Kansas in the Senate for 27 years, and was the Republican nominee for president in 1996. He spoke to Fresh Air in '05 about his experiences fighting in World War II.

Lesley M.M. Blume's book tells the story of John Hersey, whose on-the-ground reporting in Hiroshima, Japan, exposed the world to the devastation of nuclear weapons. Originally broadcast Aug. 19, 2020.

In resurrecting lives that never were, Light Perpetual is a miracle, not only of art, but of encompassing empathy. The novel becomes not only about the terribly brief lives of these five fictional children, but of the finitude that bounds all the living and the dead.

The legendary aviator, who died Dec. 7, served as a fighter pilot in World War II. Later, as a test pilot, he was the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. Originally broadcast in 1988.

Historian David Nasaw tells the story of more than a million people stranded in defeated Nazi Germany after World War II. Some felt they couldn't return to their home countries under Soviet control. Others were Jewish survivors who had no homes to return to. Nasaw's book is 'The Last Million.'

When the U.S military dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the American government portrayed the weapons as equivalent to large conventional bombs. Military censors restricted access to Hiroshima, but a young journalist named John Hersey managed to get there and write a devastating account of the death, destruction and radiation poisoning he encountered. Author Lesley M.M. Blume tells Hersey's story in her book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World.

In The Splendid And The Vile, author Erik Larson details the British prime minister's first year in office, during which England endured a Nazi bombing campaign that killed more than 44,000 civilians.

Previte, who died Nov. 16, spent 30 years working with at-risk youth and kids in detention in Camden, N.J. The center she ran became a national model. Originally broadcast in 1993.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's new film tells the story of an artist who grows up in Nazi Germany, comes of age in East Germany and travels to the West to find freedom for himself and his art.

"I don't use my life as inspiration," says the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Her new book, Manhattan Beach, imagines the lives of the women who worked on the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.

Mudbound follows two families — one white and one black — just before, during and after World War II. Rees says her experiences growing up in Nashville, Tenn., in the 1980s informed her new film.

Film historian Noah Isenberg revisits the making of the classic Hollywood film in his new book, We'll Always Have Casablanca. "Seventy-five years after its premiere, its still very timely," he says.

A new film dramatizes the '40 Allied retreat from the beaches of France as the Nazis close in. Despite strong action sequences, Dunkirk relies too much on fragmented storytelling and obvious plotting.

TV critic David Bianculli says the new documentary series Five Came Back, based on the book of the same name, "leaves you hungry to seek out more (films) from the briefest documentary short to the subsequent Oscar-winning postwar features.