Just Beneath the Soil

The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller How the Word Is Passed takes us on an astonishingly original—and heartbreakingly intimate—journey to meet some of World War II's witnesses before they're gone. “This is a riveting, serious tour de force.” —Ken Burns

Clint Smith’s great-uncle Lawrence landed on a beach at Normandy in early June of 1945. Lawrence grew up in Jim Crow Mississippi, and Smith had always wondered what his uncle felt, fighting fascism and racial hatred on behalf of a country that was subjecting him and his family to racial apartheid. His uncle’s experience wasn’t consistent with the story of World War II being the “good war” as Smith had been taught in school.

In this enthralling, lyrical account, Smith follows his curiosity across four continents to uncover other stories obscured by the War’s mythology. He begins in the Navajo Nation, where he meets the last surviving Code Talkers, and heads to the former incarceration camps in California where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during the war. When he travels abroad, he finds echoes of the racial hatred that distorts American life and the silencing that perpetuates it. In Nagasaki, where Americans dropped their second atomic bomb, Smith bears witness to survivors’ stories and finds that the bomb may not have been the necessary evil he’d been told it was. The heartbreaking stories he hears from the so-called “Comfort Women,” survivors of sex slavery by the Japanese military, are often met with complete denial in Japan. In Germany, he finds multiple memorials atoning for the sins of the Holocaust, but their contrition has a dark side. And in Argentina, where many of the Holocaust’s perpetrators fled, few talked about the thousands of Nazis who found sanctuary there, though their ghosts loomed over the towns where they hid.

Every place he goes, Smith’s unique gift for eliciting astonishing, personal stories brings this global conflict down to the unit of the individual. Each of these portraits—of people, of places, of memories—acts as a powerful reminder that how we tell the story of the past shapes our understanding of the world today.