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   There are many dates and events in this volume that are omitted in other books about 1942.  The WW II generation lived those days.  It is important to note that each date and event are concentric to understanding what that generation went through, because at no other time in WW II history did they suffer so much, at least from the U.S. perspective.  The homeland of Japan was relatively safe in 1942.  The people of Germany only began to receive a taste of heavy air bombing beginning in mid 1942, from the British.  Much of what had been in Axis hands in 1941 was still under Axis dominion in 1942.   Why not order a copy of vol. 2?  PDFs below are low res, however all illustrations in the book are actually high res.  Picture of babies (further below) are infants in portable gas masks in Hawaii.

    1942 really began horrible.  There were spies, saboteurs, attacks on ships off our shore, rations of foods and commodities.  The entire Philippines was captured by the Japanese, and their rules and laws became more vicious as time passed. Ditto for all of Asia.  Moreover, readers of this volume will see that things did not get that much better until past summer.  There were lots of air raids.  And, plenty of anti-aircraft batteries, although not like THAAD.  Luckily, the aircraft of that era could not reach U.S. shores; but there were attacks on U.S. soil principally on the West Coast. One thing that highlights 1942 over previous WW II years is the acceleration of the extermination of the Jewish people of Europe.

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      Inside Germany, the concentration camps were operating at near capacity and they would not begin the worst of the worst until from 1942 onward, specifically after a secret meeting held on January 20 in Berlin called the Wansee Conference.  It called for deportation of Jews from German-occupied areas from Britain (Hitler still thought he would conquer Great Britain) to Eastern Europe for a "Final solution to the Jewish Problem."  Technically it would be a hideous continent-wide genocide but, most death camps and crematoriums would not exist for much of 1942—they would not be etched in history until after 1942.  Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany possessed many prisoner camps, ranging from POW camps to concentration camps to factory camps of slave laborers.  This is not to say Death camps did not exist in '42, for example Belzec began receiving the first masses in Mar. of 1942.  This ugly SS camp burned exhumed corpses on five-open-air grids that made the air foul; was closed in 1943.  One of the most hideous was Treblinka II, where the Jews who arrived there were told it was only a transit camp, complete with fake ticket windows, fake train schedules, and a fake train station clock. From September 1942 on, the prisoners were greeted with a message that they were at a transit point on the way to Ukraine, to have their clothes disinfected and be given work clothes, so they en masse were stripped naked and lured to the building with showers. In reality, that is where they were gassed.  All prisoners were separated by gender.  Those Jews from Bulgaria were different.  They did not arrive in box cars, they came in passenger cars, complete with tickets and allowed to keep their luggage . . . until they reached Treblinka.  The SS guards used whips on anyone who did not "cooperate."  All women had their hair shaved off, before they went to the gas chambers.  Their feminine hair was used to make socks for U-boat crews.  All gold teeth were removed for use in the Greater Aryan Third Reich. Dead prisoner bodies in Germany would be used to make soap and fertilizers, which the general public in 1942 never dreamed it would happen.  One point about this is a report from one of America's most celebrated broadcast journalists Edward R. Murrow, on the concentration camps, issued December 13, 1942:  "One is almost stunned into silence by some of the information reaching London.  Some of it is months old, but it's eyewitness stuff supported by a wealth of detail and vouched for by responsive governments ...millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered...a picture of mass murder and moral depravity unequaled in the history of the world."   Excerpt from Edward R. Murrow, And The Birth of Broadcast Journalism by Bob Edwards.