Unexplained Mysteries of World War II - William B. Breuer

The key thing about this book is that the title says "unexplained mysteries", rather than something like "mysteries explained." So for all the mysterious things Breur discusses, he doesn't have any answers. Was the bombing of the American gunboat Panay by the Japanese in December of 1937 a trial run for the eventual bombing on Pearl Harbor? Who can say? Why did Hitler cancel Operation Felix, the plan to capture Gibraltar? In these troubled times, who can say why anyone does anything? Why did FDR suddenly publicly announce that the Allies would only accept unconditional surrender by the Nazis without discussing it with Churchill first? *shrug*

Of course, the book is not actually all unexplained mysteries. There's a section for weird coincidences, like two GIs with the same name being trained at the same camp, so one starts receiving the other's mail and ultimately marries his girlfriend. Or stuff like Patton (or any number of other people who have seen a lot of combat) remarking that today, they think they're going to die. And then they died!

There are a few that were interesting, mostly the ones about disappearances. Like when the cargo ship Rubicon was found drifting off the coast of Florida, the entire crew missing, except for a dog. Or Brigadier General Keerans, who flew along on a C-47 meant to airdrop commandos on Sicily, only for the flight to be shot up by American ships and soldiers. One soldier said he encountered Keerans on the beach after, the Keerans walked into the forest and was never seen again.

But then you're back to the fact Breuer has no answers for any of these mysteries, so the reader is left with a whole bunch of stories that are either unfinished, or frankly kind of lame. An American oil baron meets with FDR to try and convince him to help bring about peace between the Nazis and England. Breuer frames it as the President sitting down to talk with a enemy foreign spy, because the Abwehr listed the guy as an operative, but the story also makes it clear the guy wants peace because Britain's blockade was keeping him from selling any oil to the Nazis. So he's really just trying to make money, which makes him a scumbag, but scumbags trying to influence foreign policy for their financial gain is not an unusual occurrence here in 'Murica..

'Was the New Yorker advertisement a sophisticated means for German or Japanese espionage operatives in the United States to warn colleagues and sympathizers that the Japanese were about to launch a sneak attack somewhere in the Pacific? Swamped by a flood of other investigations in the wake of the Pearl Harbor catastrophe, the undermanned FBI was not able to fully explore that possibility.'