For That One Day: The Memoirs of Mitsuo Fuchida, the Commander of the Attack on Pearl Harbor by Mitsuo Fuchida
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For That One Day is a very interesting memoir from Captain Mitsuo Fuchida who planned and executed the raid on Pearl Harbor and eventually wound up becoming a Christian missionary. He lived an interesting life to say the least!

Fuchida has written about the Pacific War elsewhere, so this is really more of a personal remembrance as opposed to a military history. It does contain a lot of interesting details about the Pearl Harbor attack and his experience at Midway. Because it is not a military history, Fuchida is not shy about offering his opinion on people and events. He is not too happy with most of the admirals that he served under – they were too timid.

I found the story of his conversion to Christianity to be fascinating. And his stories of his mission trips to the United States are very interesting as well – he was able to meet with many of his former adversaries, like Nimitz and MacArthur and also then President Eisenhower.

Fuchida never really completed this memoir – he had some serious medical issues and only wrote about a third of what he had planned to write. Even so, it’s a very compelling story. The editor and translators did a remarkable job. I strongly recommend this book.

Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Danubia is, for me at least, a rather unusual history book. The author is not kidding about the “personal history” aspect! The narrative is very anecdotal and tends to jump from place to place within the former Habsburg empire, but it does remain in roughly chronological order. Although the personal stories form the places that the author visited can make for a choppy narrative in places, it also makes it easy to put the book down and pick it back up again a week or two later.

I found that the author’s personal stories about the places he visited in the course of his research really brought the Empire to life and added quite a bit of color to what can often be the tedious tale of the Habsburgs and their domains. There’s a lot of Central European history here, but by focusing on places and people and their stories, the book is much more enjoyable than most of histories of the Habsburg empire. I really enjoyed reading it, and if you’re interested in the history of Central Europe I recommend that you give it a try.

Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War by Tim Bouverie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Appeasement is a history of British foreign policy in the 1930s. Beginning with the accession of Hitler to the German chancellorship, continuing through the Munich Conference of 1938 to the attack on France and the Low Countries in 1940 the author traces the complete failure of the policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini.

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is the most well-known of the appeasers, but appeasement was a popular policy, not just within the Chamberlain government but within society as a whole, simply because nobody wanted another large scale conflict after the First World War. There were “anti-appeasers” as well – most famously Winston Churchill – but they were a small group without a large following. We often think of the Munich Conference when we hear the word appeasement, but that was neither the beginning nor the end of appeasement.

The author has crafted a compelling narrative of this period. I am familiar with this period of history but I learned quite a few things. Of course we know how it all turns out: appeasement was a disaster. But there were so many opportunities to avoid the looming disaster that it is a fascinating and tragic story.