Dearest Ones: A True World War II Love Story
This affecting memoir by a Red Cross volunteer eschews sentimental clichés about World War II. Letters to the author's parents in San Francisco, supplemented by entries from a journal in which she recorded material she feared would disturb either them or the censors, relay Rosemary Norwalk's experiences in England during the war's final year and for a few months in Germany after it ended. The Red Cross "girls" served doughnuts and coffee to soldiers disembarking from or boarding ships to the European front, but the mundane nature of their work didn't prevent sharp observers like Rosemary from grasping how this bitter, global conflict was indelibly marking her generation. The author's youthful prose is no more than serviceable in her letters and at times in the journals even self-conscious, but her insights are impressive. Thumbnail portraits of her Red Cross buddies are vivid and perceptive; her political maturity shows in biting remarks about average Germans' willed blindness to the horrors of the Holocaust--and, much more impressive for a young woman on the winning side, in her acknowledgment that many Americans probably would have done the same. Her romance with the army captain she eventually married was similarly grown-up (he had an estranged wife and a young child), and readers will root for their happy ending.--Wendy Smith