Dirty Little Secrets of WWII Military Information No One Told You About the Greatest, Most Terrible War in History - By James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi 1994

This is not a history of World War II , but revelations about many of the
lesser-known details. Because it is a book of facts, you don't read it
from beginning to end, but rather you jump in wherever it strikes your
fancy. There are over three hundred separate items, each a complete
story in itself.
As a rule, much of the information found in one section of the book
will usually also be applicable to the others as well. After all, although
aircraft carriers are inseparably associated with the Pacific war, they
also performed yeoman service in the Atlantic and Mediterranean,
while the problems of troop transport transcended theater.
After reading this book, you'll never look at World War II the same
way again. We have not changed the story of that conflict; we are
providing information about it that is not generally known. We often
l ook at the same subject from several different angles, giving you a
better appreciation of, for example, how a blitzkrieg was conducted,
what it took to supply partisans, and why the U.S. Army had more
ships than the U.S. Navy.
World War II was the most enormous human drama in history. No
one volume could ever really come close to examining all of the
unusual, and often important, aspects of this, history's greatest war. So
much has had to be left out, from the drama of Dunkirk to the U.S.
Navy's coal-burning, paddle-wheel aircraft carriers on the Great Lakes;
from the Marine Corps's Navaho communications specialists to the Japanese Navy's "American" pilots; not to mention the improbable
adventures of FDR's son, the extraordinary antiarmor tactics of the
Finns, and the secret missions of Harry Hopkins. Also left out are many
i nteresting items from the "secondary" theaters such as China, Burma,
Finland, and the Middle East. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has
thrown open the Soviet World War II archives. Much fascinating ma-
terial is coming out. We were shown a volume (in Russian) of some of
the newly revealed material already being published in Russia and
realized that we could have added several dozen pages of previously
unknown goodies for this book from that one Russian volume alone.
Well, if we sell enough copies of this book, there may be more. We
certainly have enough to fill several more volumes.
This book undoubtedly displays an "American" bias. This is nat-
ural, given the audience. Without much difficulty the authors could
produce a book of similar length with a "British" or "German" or
"Chinese" bias which, while being somewhat repetitive, would still
manage to include a lot of unusual and interesting material. World War II was the most enormous human drama in history, and there is far
more to be told about it than can possibly be included between the
covers of a single book.