David H. Lippman

I am a 34-year veteran journalist with experience in newspapers, wire services, TV, radio, public relations, on three continents: North America, Asia, and Oceania.

Some of the events I have worked on include New York City’s 50th anniversary celebration of D-Day, New Zealand’s 50th Anniversary Celebration of V-E Day, and Hurricanes Irene and Sandy. In doing so, I have had the good fortune to meet such varied characters as paratroopers who jumped into Normandy (like Bill Guarnere), Royal Navy Battle of the Atlantic veterans, Victoria Cross recipients, and Marines who fought in the liberation of Guam.

I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from New York University and Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing from the New School for Social Research. I have won numerous awards for journalism in daily newspaper work.

For the past 16 years, I have served as Press Information Officer with City of Newark, NJ, under four mayors (James, Booker, Quintana, Baraka), and writes articles on World War II for World War II History magazine.

Before starting this project, I wrote award-winning “World War II Plus 55” website until death of its webmaster in 2013 — now turning day-by-day history of World War II series into a series of e-books.

I spend rest of my time with my family. I support the Society for American Baseball Research (member of Biography, Games, Black Sox, and Media Committees), New York Transit Museum, and the Gettysburg Foundation.

World War II has always been an obsession with me, since I was in the fourth grade, when I did a puppet show on the sinking of the Bismarck, which left my teacher amazed, my schoolmates puzzled, and me a permanent dork.

Doing this project has turned my unbelievable nerdishness to something that I hope that will be a bit more useful and positive in life, as well as entertaining and educational for readers.

The research I have done on this project has been entirely on my own, on my own time. I have gone to sources as varied as the New Zealand Official History (I have 32 volumes, probably the most in private captivity in North America), to the diaries of the British padre in the legendary Colditz PoW camp.

My focus in this project has been on people, both high and low. I am more interested in what it was like to be in a position to make a decision or to experience the results of that decision than in the technology, numbers, and equipment. I have seen people on the internet get into enraged flame wars over such topics as the precise contents of ammunition racks on Sherman tanks in the Lorraine in 1944, the relative technical capabilities of the P-51 and the FW 190, and the endless “Who’s cooler? Patton or Rommel? Prove it.”

There won’t be much here that is “revisionist.” The Holocaust really happened. The American leadership did not “allow” Pearl Harbor to happen. Rudolph Hess really did fly to Britain on a bizarre peace mission (and was pretty bizarre himself). President Roosevelt didn’t “sell out” Eastern Europe to the Communists. The A-Bomb probably did end the war, but at an appallingly horrific cost and with an equally terrifying warning. If you’re looking to read otherwise, you’ve come to the wrong place.

If you’ve come to read about what it was like to fight and live through the Second World War, you’ve probably come to the right place, and you’re more than welcome.