October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller’s pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death of Navy Seaman Second Class Wanza E. Matthews, moments before midnight, after the Japanese submarine I-56 attacked his ship off New Guinea. The sinking of the hellship Arisan Maru—a lesser-known tragedy of the war—bookends and weaves through the two-dozen selected other incidents.
No Average Day eschews the conventional discourse of the war’s origins, its great battles, and the maneuvering of generals, admirals, and politicians. Instead, it directs its attention to ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. These are men, perhaps a reader’s brother, father, or neighbor, who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place. There, described in relatable terms, the men hunch their shoulders against the cold, wipe grit from their foreheads, or pen a letter home minutes before drawing their last breath. No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in France and jungles in the South Pacific, to the villages, placid bays, and forested mountainsides across the globe where the war also raged.
Rona Simmons is an Atlanta-area author of historical fiction and nonfiction. After co-authoring Images from World War II in 2016 celebrating the art of WWII veteran and artist Jack Smith, Simmons again turned to the Second World War for The Other Veterans of World War II: Stories from Behind the Front Lines. The book, released by Kent State University Press in 2020, celebrated the remarkable but often untold contribution of noncombat veterans. Her latest book, A Gathering of Men combined her passion for history and her skill in research to tell another story with a unique perspective on the war, that of the true story of the toll of war on the psyche of an American soldier—a B-17 pilot. The book was published by Koehler Books in 2022.
