November 1942 marked a turning point in the development of World War II. The month began with the strategic victory of the British army at El Alamein (Egypt), which made it possible to frustrate German attempts to take control of the Suez Canal. This triumph was followed, a few days later, by the Allied landing in Morocco and Algeria, an incursion that would help prepare the ground for the subsequent invasion of Italy.
In the Pacific there was the crucial Battle of Guadalcanal, in which American troops managed to prevent the Japanese from using the Solomon Islands as a base to cut off the supply route between the United States, Australia and New Zealand. And at Stalingrad, the Red Army launched a major counteroffensive, the so-called Operation Uranus, which led to the pocketing of the German 6th Army. The month closed with another key event: physicist Enrico Fermi completed the construction of the Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor in history, which would lay the foundations for the development of the atomic bomb.
As the Swedish historian Peter Englund explains in his magnificent November 1942, all those military victories changed the perception of the conflict: “At the beginning of that month, there were many who believed that the Axis powers were going to emerge victorious; By the end, it was evident that his defeat was only a matter of time.”
Englund, as he did in his previous The Beauty and Pain of Battle (Roca, 2011), focused on the First World War, casts a diverse and deeply human look at those events. Through the testimonies – diaries, letters, memoirs – of thirty-nine people who lived that month of November (all appear with a photo and location on a map at the beginning of the book), the author builds a masterful experiential and emotional puzzle about the conflict.
Anonymous people (soldiers, refugees, prisoners, officials), renowned figures (the anti-Nazi activist Sophie Scholl, the Jewish student Hélène Berr, the physicist Leona Woods, the writers Albert Camus, Vera Brittain, Vasili Grossman…) and even events like the premiere of Casablanca (released at the end of the month to coincide with the taking of the city of Casablanca) make up this vibrant and moving polyphonic story that manages to convey in an extraordinarily vivid way the intimate, everyday and terrible experience of war.
