The Foreign Service Journal, November 2005

Captains of Bomb Disposal T. Dennis Reece, Xlibris, 2005, $20.99, paperback, 197 pages. In pursuit of an understanding of what his late father and other American bomb disposal personnel did in World War II, T. Dennis Reece has pieced together an often com- pelling account of the contribution these 5,000 largely-unrecognized individuals made to winning the war and, afterward, helping with the prob- lem of up to two million tons of surplus explosive ord- nance scattered about the theater. This is the first American book on the subject in World War II literature. Reece shows the kinds of problems bomb disposal personnel faced, and documents the suc- cesses of a group of bomb disposal squads in the Ninth Air Force that operated in northwestern Europe. The second part of the book centers on the work of one bomb dispos- al captain during a top-secret mission to Czechoslovakia that had profound political and legal consequences. When explosives experts disarmed a booby-trapped cache con- taining highly confidential documents, including informa- tion about the Nazi occupation of the region, there was considerable diplomatic and public relations fallout. Reece devotes two chapters to recounting how Embassy Prague and the State Department handled the flap. Retired FSO T. Dennis Reece served in Moscow, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Cape Verde, Guyana and Washington, D.C. He now resides in Tampa, Fla. Are We Winning? Are They Winning? A Civilian Adviser’s Reflections on Wartime Vietnam John R. Campbell, AuthorHouse, 2004, $10.25/paperback, $3.95/e-book, 150 pages. This is an unusual addition to the literature of the Vietnam War. F O C U S 28 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5