Born in Texas in 1922, Emiel W. Owens went on to live an extraordinary life as an educator and economic/financial consultant. He shares with the reader his life experiences from growing up under Jim Crow segregation in Texas, through his service in the U.S. Army during World War II with the 777th Field Artillery Battalion (which was engaged in almost constant combat in Europe between October 1944 and V-E Day in May 1945), and his subsequent reassignment to a quartermaster unit that was shipped to the Philippines shortly before the end of the Pacific War.

Owens was honorably discharged from the Army shortly after returning to the U.S. in early 1946. He went on to earn his undergraduate degree at Prairie View A&M University and graduate degrees (a Masters and doctorate) in economics from Ohio State University. He would go on to teach and serve in a variety of educational and consultative endeavors both in the U.S. and abroad.

I very much enjoyed reading this memoir. It is well-written and a rare work, because there are very few memoirs from African American veterans of World War II. That in itself makes "BLOOD ON GERMAN SNOW" a book to treasure.

The author of this book, Ivan J. Houston, a native of Los Angeles, CA, was a student at the University of California - Berkeley, when he was called to active duty in January 1944. He had hoped to become a combat pilot, but was instead routed to infantry training at Fort Benning, GA. Subsequently, Houston was assigned to the 3rd Battalion of the 370th Regimental Combat Team of the 92nd Division, with whom he would serve for the remainder of his service with the U.S. Army. The 92nd Division fought alongside the 442nd Infantry Regiment (Japanese American) as well as various British, South African, British Empire and Commonwealth forces, and the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (which was attached to the U.S. 5th Army).

This book serves as both a testimonial to Ivan Houston's Army service (he also sheds some light on his life postwar) and the combat actions and achievements of the 92nd Infantry Division during the Second World War. There are also a number of maps in "Black Warriors" that allows the reader to trace the movements made by the 92nd Division from its introduction to combat in August 1944 along the Arno River to the end of the war in May 1945.

One particular passage in the book that has personal resonance for me was the special ceremony on June 6th, 1945 in which one of the units of the 92nd Division was given "the honor of escorting the ashes of Christopher Columbus back to Genoa from where they had been hidden by the partisans during the war. The men of Company H of the 370th Infantry Regiment accompanied the ornamental urn, which rested on a horse-drawn carriage, into the Piazza della Vittoria, largest square in Genoa." Company H was commanded by my uncle, who was a captain at the time and "regarded as one of the regiment's outstanding leaders." I confess to being filled with pride as I read those words.

The author of this book, Ivan J. Houston, a native of Los Angeles, CA, was a student at the University of California - Berkeley, when he was called to active duty in January 1944. He had hoped to become a combat pilot, but was instead routed to infantry training at Fort Benning, GA. Subsequently, Houston was assigned to the 3rd Battalion of the 370th Regimental Combat Team of the 92nd Division, with whom he would serve for the remainder of his service with the U.S. Army. The 92nd Division fought alongside the 442nd Infantry Regiment (Japanese American) as well as various British, South African, British Empire and Commonwealth forces, and the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (which was attached to the U.S. 5th Army).

This book serves as both a testimonial to Ivan Houston's Army service (he also sheds some light on his life postwar) and the combat actions and achievements of the 92nd Infantry Division during the Second World War. There are also a number of maps in "Black Warriors" that allows the reader to trace the movements made by the 92nd Division from its introduction to combat in August 1944 along the Arno River to the end of the war in May 1945.

One particular passage in the book that has personal resonance for me was the special ceremony on June 6th, 1945 in which one of the units of the 92nd Division was given "the honor of escorting the ashes of Christopher Columbus back to Genoa from where they had been hidden by the partisans during the war. The men of Company H of the 370th Infantry Regiment accompanied the ornamental urn, which rested on a horse-drawn carriage, into the Piazza della Vittoria, largest square in Genoa." Company H was commanded by my uncle, who was a captain at the time and "regarded as one of the regiment's outstanding leaders." I confess to being filled with pride as I read those words.

For those among us who have family members among the Second World War generation (a generation that is now, sadly, dying off in ever increasing numbers), this book brings home a tangible, palpable sense of what life on the Home Front USA was like during those times.

The author of "Slacks and Calluses" was a high school English teacher in Southern California who opted (with a friend, C.M., who was an art teacher) to work in an aircraft assembly plant during the summer of 1943. The beauty of their experiences in helping assemble the B-24 Liberator heavy bombers is in the telling as Bowman Reid takes the reader along with her and her friend C.M. on their first day at work in the plant, where they had to fill out a plethora of forms, select the shift that suited them (4:30 PM to 1 AM), and blend in and work with their colleagues in assembling different sections of the aircraft. Bowman Reid observes that "[i]t wasn't that the bombers weren't big; they just weren't so big as we had expected them to be. The effect of their size was broken by the paraphernalia around them. There was a platform about six feet high under the wings and another about a foot high under the belly. In the back of the tail and in the front was one going up into the nose. People were all over the bombers, popping in and out of the nose, walking along the top of the fuselage, working on the high platforms under the wings, sticking their heads out the side windows, sliding flat under the belly, climbing up and down the ladder into the tail, ducking in and out from underneath, so that the bombers looked like sleeping Gullivers overrun by the people of Lilliput."

An interesting aspect of life on the home front touched upon in the book that I found revealing was the change in gender roles and perceptions brought on by women working in the defense plants. Example: "In war-time San Diego there are just two kinds of women: the ones who go to work in skirts and the ones who go in slacks. The girls who work in slacks are sometimes cleaner and neater than the girls who work in skirts. They usually make more money than their skirted sisters behind the ribbon counter at the Five and Ten or at the controls of the elevator in the bank. But they have to wear slacks. Whether they are dust-bowl mothers buying butter and eggs for the first time, or former dime store clerks making more money than army majors, or war wives who feel they must keep them flying because their husbands are flying them, or school teachers putting in a summer vacation on a war job, they are women who work in slacks instead of skirts." Real ladies wore skirts, wide hats, lipstick, perfume, coiffed hairdos, and were demure and dainty. But the women who wore slacks were NOT deemed by the men (and society at large) to be ladies, but rather like women of loose morals or ill-repute.

For all its 181 pages, "Slacks and Calluses" offers the reader a view of the Home Front USA in the Second World War that brilliantly illuminates (C.M. provides some fascinating illustrations depicting their war work experiences)  what it was really like for 2 women who did their part for the war effort.