Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler
Bruce Henderson, 2017
HarperCollins
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062419095
Summary
Joining the ranks of Unbroken, Band of Brothers, and Boys in the Boat, the little-known saga of young German Jews, dubbed The Ritchie Boys, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, came of age in America, and returned to Europe at enormous personal risk as members of the U.S. Army to play a key role in the Allied victory.
In 1942, the U.S. Army unleashed one of its greatest secret weapons in the battle to defeat Adolf Hitler: training nearly 2,000 German-born Jews in special interrogation techniques and making use of their mastery of the German language, history, and customs.
Known as the Ritchie Boys, they were sent in small, elite teams to join every major combat unit in Europe, where they interrogated German POWs and gathered crucial intelligence that saved American lives and helped win the war.
Though they knew what the Nazis would do to them if they were captured, the Ritchie Boys eagerly joined the fight to defeat Hitler. As they did, many of them did not know the fates of their own families left behind in occupied Europe.
Taking part in every major campaign in Europe, they collected key tactical intelligence on enemy strength, troop and armored movements, and defensive positions. A postwar Army report found that more than sixty percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from the Ritchie Boys.
Bruce Henderson draws on personal interviews with many surviving veterans and extensive archival research to bring this never-before-told chapter of the Second World War to light.
Sons and Soldiers traces their stories from childhood and their escapes from Nazi Germany, through their feats and sacrifices during the war, to their desperate attempts to find their missing loved ones in war-torn Europe. Sons and Soldiers is an epic story of heroism, courage, and patriotism that will not soon be forgotten. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Bruce Henderson is an American journalist and author of more than 20 nonfiction books. He served in Vietnam with the U.S. Navy from 1965-67, after which he headed to college on the G.I. Bill. After graduating, Henderson worked as an investigative reporter for several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and, as an associate editor, for New West and California Magazine.
In 1991 Henderson co-wrote And the Sea Will Tell with Vincent Bugliosi, prosecutor of Charles Manson. The book reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and later became a CBS miniseries.
Most recently, Henderson published his 2017 Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler.
In between those two books, he published other bestsellers, including his 2015 Rescue at Los Baños: The Most Daring Prison Camp Raid of World War II. The book is an account of the February 23, 1945, raid that freed more than 2,000 civilian prisoners of war — American men, women and children, as well as other Allied nationalities — from an Japanese internment camp in the Philippines.
In 2010 Henderson released Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War, the story of Dieter Dengler. A U.S. Navy pilot, Dengler was shot down over Laos in January, 1966, escaping from a POW camp six months later. Henderson and Dengler served on the same aircraft carrier USS Ranger (CVA-61) in 1965–66.
True North: Peary, Cook, and The Race to the Pole, out in 2005, examines the ongoing controversy regarding the race to the North Pole—who reached it first: Robert Peary in 1909 or Frederick Cook in 1908? Henderson's other Arctic title, Fatal North: Murder and Survival on the First North Pole Expedition, released in 2001, tells the story of the ill-fated Charles Francis Hall expedition to the North Pole.
An experienced collaborative writer, Henderson co-authored Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality, the autobiography of African-American theoretical physicist Ronald Mallett. That was in 2006. Working with Dean Allison in 2014, he published Ring of Deceit: Inside the Biggest Sports and Bank Scandal in History, which chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of boxing promoter and convicted swindler, Harold Smith.
Henderson has taught writing courses at University of Southern California School of Journalism and Stanford University. He lives in Melo Park, California. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/4/2017.)
Book Reviews
Riveting.… Richly detailed.… Puts readers alongside the Ritchie Boys in some of the darkest moments of history. ... A spellbinding account of extraordinary men at war.
USA Today
Highly compelling.… The Ritchie Boys… are the unsung heroes who saved so many American lives and helped win the war.
Daily Mail (UK)
Harrowing.… No small amount of courage was needed for [the Ritchie Boys’] work.… Their contribution to victory is undeniable.
New York Post
An irresistible history of the WWII Jewish refugees who returned to Europe to fight the Nazis.
Newsday
Henderson does well to humanize the story of the boys, although he occasionally gets bogged down in the details of particular battles.… [Still] this is an ably researched and written account of a previously unknown facet of the American-Jewish dimension of WWII.
Publishers Weekly
According to an army estimate, 60 percent of all credible intelligence during World War II resulted from work done by the Camp Ritchie boys. Verdict: An inspiring story about a group of men who took up arms for their adopted country against their former countrymen. —Chad E. Statler, Lakeland Community Coll., Kirtland, OH
Library Journal
An inspiring account. … Chronicles how, despite great personal risk if their Jewish identity was discovered, these soldiers were on the front lines in Europe, gathering crucial intelligence.
Booklist
(Starred review.) The inspiring story of the "Ritchie Boys" and their unique contribution to the Allied victory in World War II.… A gripping addition to the literature of the period and an overdue tribute to these unique Americans.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Soldiers and Sons … then take off on your own:
1. How much of the history of the Ritchie Boys was known to you before reading this book? If the answer is "some," what new information did you come away having learned by reading Sons and Solders? What surprised you, or resonated with you, the most?
2. Talk about the reasons many of the young men were sent to the U.S. in the first place, some of them without their parents. Consider, in particular, the stories of Martin Selling and Stephan Lewy.
3. What made the Ritchie Boys so valuable to the Allied effort? What particular dangers, over and above other Allied soldiers, did they face in returning to Germany?
4. Discuss some of the information they provided U.S. intelligence, as well as the various subterfuges they carried out.
5. Talk about the horrors that Bruce Henderson reports in Sons and Soldiers—soldiers using bloated cows for cover, the young German soldier laying under the apple tree in obvious agony, or scorched crews crawling out of their burning tanks. What else?
6. Werner Anagress wrote the following in his journal:
The longer this war lasts, the more ugly sights I see and the more I get to know what death looks like, the more I am convinced that it will be our first duty after this war to prevent a second one.
Are you ever concerned that the farther we move away from the men Tom Brokaw called "the greatest generation," the more we risk forgetting the horrors of war?
7. Was World War II the last good war—a war in which the cause was just and enemy so evil?
8. Talk about some of the ironies inherent in German Jewish men returning to their homeland to kill their compatriots. Also, consider this ironic episode: "On the long walk across the valley, with the German Jew leading the blindfolded SS officer by the crook of his arm and telling him when to watch his step, the two began to talk." What other ironies can you discern?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)