RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
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Published April 2010
EDITORIAL REVIEWS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
"Helluva Town" is a helluva read. Richard
Goldstein, who writes for The New York
Times, is the author of several books about
World War II. For his latest, he takes a line
from 'New York, New York,' a song in the
musical "On the Town," where three sailors
on leave sing about the city as a "helluva
town"
During the war, it was certainly that.
Amid the fear and patriotism, the theaters
still staged plays - productions such as "This
Is the Army" and "Winged Victory," and
nightlife went on. Amid the bustle, refugees
from Europe began pouring into New York.
With them came artists, scientists and giants
of the literary world.
"Helluva Town" is a fascinating look at a
remarkable time and a remarkable town.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York is big, and much of this
swaggering, nostalgic history recounts the
sheer size of the city's contribution to the
Allied victory: the prodigies of shipbuilding
and repair at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; the
81,000 WAVES churned out at Hunter
College; the millions of soldiers sent
overseas from New York's harbor after
consoling themselves with America's glitziest
nightlife ... The upheaval became fodder for
the city's efflorescent culture. Insouciant
Manhattanites partied in the streets during
civil defense drills instead of taking cover;
Broadway tunefully repurposed patriotic and
martial themes in "Oklahoma!" and "On the
Town;" and at the Stage Door Canteen, a
nightclub for servicemen staffed by
celebrities, a GI could score a dance with
Laren Bacall. In these engaging vignettes,
New York - lively, brave, humane - conquers
not just the Axis but war itself.
LIBRARY JOURNAL
Thanks to exemplary use of many firsthand
accounts, Goldstein captures the spirit of the
wartime city, offering enormous appeal to
fans of New York City as well as to students
of World War II history.
WORLD WAR II MAGAZINE
HELLUVA TOWN: THE STORY OF NEW YORK CITY Selected Works
DURING WORLD WAR II
History
In the signature number from the 1944 Broadway musical On the Town, three HELLUVA TOWN: THE STORY
sailors heading out on a 24-hour search for love in wartime Manhattan sing OF NEW YORK CITY DURING
"New York, New York, it’s a helluva town." WORLD WAR II
Published April 2010
DESPERATE HOURS: THE
The Navy boys’ race against time mirrored the very real frenzy in the city that EPIC RESCUE OF THE
ANDREA DORIA
entertained three million servicemen on their way to an uncertain destiny.
The fog-bound collision in the
Atlantic that spawned the world’s
This was a time when soldiers and sailors waiting to be shipped out, when greatest peacetime rescue at sea.
defense-plant workers flush with cash, jammed the Broadway theaters, the AMERICA AT D-DAY
Times Square movie houses with lavish stage shows, the nightclubs like the A 50th anniversary account of the
battle that turned the tide of
Latin Quarter and the Copacabana. It was a time when bobby-soxers rioted
World War II.
outside the Paramount in the crush to swoon over Frank Sinatra, a skinny but
adored substitute for the boys who had gone to war. Quick Links
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Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II recalls the Free Press/​Simon and Schuster author
electricity of the wartime homefront while recounting the important role New website for "Helluva Town"
York played in the national war effort and its emergence as the world capital Authors Guild
at war’s end.
More than 800,000 New Yorkers went to war, and six of them received the
Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, three of the citations
bestowed posthumously.
The Port of New York became known as "Last Stop USA." While soldiers
boarded troopships in the harbor, headed to Britain, the Brooklyn Navy Yard
turned out battleships and aircraft carriers and repaired thousands of Allied
vessels. Here, too, is the story of a wrenching winter’s night in 1942 when the
famed French liner Normandie, undergoing conversion to a troopship, caught
fire and capsized at her Manhattan pier, never to sail again.
Helluva Town recounts the pioneering experiments by émigré nuclear
physicists at Columbia University leading to creation of the atomic bomb. It
tells of the Navy officers and the pioneering Waves who trained on New York
college campuses. It recalls the breaking of racial barriers at the Coast Guard
boot camp in Brooklyn and the training films produced by the Army in
Queens.
This is also a portrait of New York as a haven for thousands of refugees from
Hitler, among them Europe’s leading scientists, artists and writers. New York
healed as well: the Pfizer drug company of Brooklyn produced the penicillin
accompanying the American infantrymen who invaded Normandy on D-Day.
On Broadway, the plays of Lillian Hellman, Robert Sherwood, Maxwell
Anderson and John Steinbeck championed the democratic cause. Irving
Berlin’s This Is the Army and Moss Hart’s Winged Victory paid tribute to the
military with their all-servicemen casts; Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
"Oklahoma!" hailed American optimism at a time of national testing; the

Engaging, breezy, offbeat entertainment,
dappled with colorful characters, Hollywood
and Broadway celebrities, statistics, spies,
racism, gang wars, troop embarkations,
shipbuilding and repair - the vivid, nonstop
gamut of the home front in the city that never
sleeps.
BOOKLIST
Goldstein chronicles how citizens, famous
and obscure, acted and reacted as the nation
prepared for and went to war. Drawing on
interviews and memoirs, he recalls how New
Yorkers remember first hearing the news of
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; enlisting
in the service or other war efforts,from
conservation to victory gardens; the rounding
up of Japanese, German and Italian nationals
for a reverse Ellis Island experience; and
Mob dock workers helping to root out
saboteurs. He recalls patriots as well as spies;
heroism as well as rising anti-Semitism and
racism. A complex look at New York during
WWII.
KIRKUS REVIEWS
How the can-do spirit of metroplitan New
York helped define the country's attitude
toward the war ... Goldstein produces a
worthwhile book for WWII buffs and
lifelong New Yorkers.
THECOLUMNISTS.COM
MAURY ALLEN
Goldstein's war tales are as dramatic,
exciting, revealing, entertaining as any of the
battle books of the combat war from Norman
Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead," Irwin
Shaw's "The Young Lions" to James Jones'
"From Here to Eternity." More than 17
million men and women served their country
in uniform during World War II across the
globe. Millions more served at home by
keeping their homes, villages, businesses and
communities operating safely. Goldstein's
book explains that they earned as much
glory."
CAPE COD TIMES
Goldstein, who's penned a number of books
about World War II, knows New York
intimately. This book covers everything from
Broadway's contributions to the war to the
city's role as an embarkation point for the
European theater. ... you probably don't know
all you could about America during the war
until you've read this book.
Leonard Bernstein-Jerome Robbins production of On the Town introduced
two iconic figures of American music and dance to the theater world.
Broadway’s leading actors and actresses entertained servicemen at the Stage
Door Canteen in midtown and at bases and hospitals around the world.
Helluva Town re-creates a time long before "9/​11" when New Yorkers felt
vulnerable to a foreign foe. The city was labeled "Target Number One" if the
Germans could send bombers into America’s skies or shell the coastline from
U-boats. Some 400,000 New Yorkers served as air-raid wardens while
antiaircraft guns ringed the city. The neon advertising signs in Times Square
went dark. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia warned of terror from the skies.
Calamity indeed arrived, but not at the hands of the Germans. On a summer’s
day in 1945, an Army Air Forces bomber pilot fresh from combat became lost
in rain and fog on a routine flight and crashed into the Empire State Building.
Here too are tales of the FBI chasing down Nazi spies in the city, Britain’s
counter-espionage network housed in obscure offices in Rockefeller Center,
and the Navy’s use of Mafia bosses to help avert German sabotage on the
mob-run piers.
New Yorkers joined together to buy war bonds and donate blood, but racial
and ethnic tensions simmered and finally burst. Longstanding racism and the
indignities endured by New York’s black GIs in the training camps of the
South spawned a riot that devastated Harlem in the summer of 1943. The
German-American Bund, based in Manhattan’s Yorkville section, spewed
anti-Semitism, and Irish-Catholic youth gangs attacked Jewish youngsters and
vandalized synagogues while the police remained indifferent.
And this is the story of New York’s emergence as the power and glory of the
world stage in the war’s aftermath, underlined when the newly created United
Nations voted to establish its permanent headquarters astride the East River
and a vast international airport arose in Queens.
Finally, a personal note.
In recalling life in the wartime city, and telling of its men and women who
went to war, I was struck by the story of a particular GI. His name was Irving
Strobing, he was from Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, and he was a
radio operator in the Signal Corps. When he died in Durham, North Carolina,
at age 77 in 1997, he made the obituary pages of The New York Times. His
life over the previous three decades seemed ordinary enough: He worked for
the Federal Aviation Agency and the Department of Agriculture before
retiring. But the obit headline told another story: "Hero of Corregidor."
It was nearly five months since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and two
months since General Douglas MacArthur fled the Philippines for Australia.
In the tunnels of the rock called Corregidor, the remnants of the American
forces under General Jonathan Wainwright were in the last throes of their
holdout, waiting for the Japanese onslaught.
Their final words were tapped out on May 5, 1942, by Private Strobing, 22
years old and the son of a tailor.
"General Wainwright is a right guy and we are willing to go on for him, but
shells were dropping all night, faster than hell. They are piling dead and
wounded in our tunnel.
 "My name Irving Strobing. Get this to my mother, Mrs. Minnie Strobing, 605
Barbey Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. They are to get along o.k. My love to Pa, Joe,
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Sue, Mac, Garry, Joy and Paul. God bless you and keep you."

Goldstein chronicles not only New York

City's magnificent contribution to the war
effort, but also its concomitant scientific,
sociological, and cultural transformations....
Goldstein's well-researched Helluva Town is
a rich, wonderful wartime whirl through a
great city.
ADVANCE PRAISE BY AUTHORS
Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, author of "The
Promise: President Obama, Year One," and
"The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred
Days and the Triumph of Hope"
Strobing’s radio message was picked up in Hawaii by an Army radio
technician named Arnold Lappert, a Manhattan boy. Lappert relayed
Strobing’s words to the American mainland, and they were printed in
newspapers, touching the emotions of the homefront.
In September 1945, Strobing was released from a Japanese prison camp. A
month later, Irving Strobing of Brooklyn and Arnold Lappert of Manhattan
joined together to re-enact their connection in springtime 1942 at a Madison
Square Garden pageant telling of the contributions American Jews had made
in all the nation’s wars.

Richard Goldstein has produced a rollicking,
finely reported tale of the coming-of-age of
the "capital of the world." All of the actors in
the greatest drama of the 20th Century - Nazi
spies, movie stars, talented immigrants, and
the American soldiers who save democracy -
come together on history's center stage - New
York. "Helluva Town" is one helluva ride.
---------
Strobing had graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School and attended
Brooklyn College for a year before entering the Army. I grew up in Brooklyn
as well and I graduated from Jefferson in 1959. I, too, went on to Brooklyn
College. I’m Class of 1963.
We were a generation apart. But I feel a kinship. And so a belated salute to
Irving Strobing, to Arnold Lappert, and to all the men and women who left
New York for the military training camps of America and their roles at home
and abroad in the winning of the Second World War.

David Margolick, author of "Beyond Glory:

Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World
on the Brink," and a contributor to
Newsweek.

The iconic image of a sailor and nurse

embracing in Times Square has always stood
for New York City during World War II, but
Richard Goldstein's "Helluva Town" gives us
innumerable others to better understand, and
to round out, that era: U-boats off the Long
Island coast; Bundists in Yorkville;
"dimouts" in the Polo Grounds; the
bittersweet merriment at the Stage Door
Canteen and the bizarre frivolity of the
Copacabana; a city filled with troops - and
troupes; rioting in Harlem; the "Normandie"
aflame; European refugees and Fiorello La
Guardia just about everywhere. As so many
eyewitnesses to this facinating but largely
forgotten chapter in New York's history leave
the scene, Goldstein has brought it all back in
pulsating neon.

----------

Philip B. Kunhardt III, co-author of "Looking

for Lincoln" and "Lincoln, LifeSize."

Richard Goldstein's "Helluva Town," like the

hit show tune from the '40s that gave him the
phrase, is brimful with affection for his
native New York City. Through a series of
fascinating vignettes in this tale of World
War II New York, he introduces titans like La
Guardia, Morgenthau, and Rockefeller, but
also Sono Osato, a Japanese-American
dancer whose father was among those swept
into the internment camps, and Seymour
Wittek, a Bronx Coastguarder who became
Wittek, a Bronx Coastguarder who became
eyewitness to a major threat to the Port of

New York. Sailors, dockhands, artists,

canteen workers, intellectuals, actors, Army
men, and a myriad of others move through
these pages, along with Ethel Merman, Moss
Hart, Lillian Hellman, and Irving Berlin. As a
fellow New Yorker, I reveled in the vistas
into our shared history, and in an era of
extrordinary human accomplishment.