Care to recommend any books written by people from the side we’re not used to hearing from? For example, I’ve read many accounts by US and Australian Vietnam War veterans, but I’ve never seen anything from the perspective of the NVA and VC. Same for the American Revolution, WWI, etc. I’d be particularly interested in accounts of Iraqi and Afghani insurgents, as well as post WWII Soviets in Afghanistan. The Balkan wars and Checnyan insurgencies would also be appreciated.
All Quiet on the Western Front?
Now, the Germans in that story were not fighting the Americans, but our (future) allies, the French. But I think that still counts.
Kim Philby wrote an account of his spying, My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy, printed while he was in exile in the USSR
They’re “the other side”, not “the enemy”, but there’s an account of the conquest of the Aztecs by Cortez told by the Aztecs, Broken Spears. It makes an interesting counterpoint to Bernal Diaz:
One Soldiers War by Arkady Babchenko I found to be an excellent but disturbing read. Translated from Russian. It chronicles a russian soldiers experience while serving on the front lines during the Checnyan war who later became a journalist.
I believe there’s a book that presents the American Civil War from the Southern point of view called Gone With The Wind
Wicked.
Guy Sajer The Forgotten Soldier he was a Frenchman who fought in the German army during WWII.
There’s a ton of WWII German memoirs, fewer Japanese.
The best German ones I’ve read:
The First and the Last by General of Fighters Adolf Galland
Stuka Pilot by Huns Ulrich Rudel
Iron Coffins by Herbert Werner
A couple of Japanese ones:
Japanese Destroyer Captain by Tameichi Hara
Samurai by Saburo Sakai
These are all very good, all written by men who saw front line combat for most of the war.
The Sorrow of War will do nicely for the North Vietnamese perspective.
*The Far Side of the World * by Patrick O’Brian has Jack Aubrey and Co. chasing an American frigate preying on Britsh whalers during the War of 1812. The film makers wussed out and made the bad guys French.
As for nonfiction, there’s I Was a Kamikaze by Ryuji Nagatsuka. Much better than the sensationalistic title would lead you to expect.
Mein Kampf?
He must have been really terrible at it.
Another interesting book is The KGB: The Inside Story by Oleg Gordievsky, who was working as a double agent for the British while also assigned as the station chief of the London KGB.
Soldat is a pretty good book by a German officer. He joined the army prior to the war and served on all fronts and was in the Bunker near the end. Later emigrated to the US.
He and his flight failed to find targets (twice!) and were forced to return to base. The whole group was arrested and sentenced to transcribe imperial indicts as punishment. Instead of the indicts Nagatsuka started a journal about how he felt about the war and his experiences in French (his field of study before being inducted). The book was originally published in France and has never been translated into Japanese.
The Wind Blows Away our Words by Doris Lessing (on the muhadjideen, forerunners of the Taliban)
Not exactly “by the enemy” but Lessing does take a position firmly on the side of the Afghans fighting against the Soviet army, in a way that I found quite deeply disturbing, given what we know of later history (the book was written in 1986) - and especially considering that she is a writer I very much respect. Very well worth reading. Take with much salt.
Storm of steel by Ernst Junger is well worth reading. It’s the story of Junger’s experiences in WW1 on the western front from 1915 to 1918. He started the war a private and ended as an officer so you get the full experience of what it’s like to be a grunt and in command. Junger was wounded 14 times so it’s fair to say he saw quite a bit of action.
It’s particularly interesting because Junger considered it the time of his life as opposed to other WW1 books I have read that take the more familiar war is hell path.
Kamikazis were expected to return if they did not find a target; they were not to sacrifice themselves in vain.
The Mujahideen were most certainly NOT the forerunners of the Taliban, for the 7084th time. The Taliban’s formation was partly in reaction to the mess the various factions caused in post Soviet Afghanistan; the very name Taliban suggests that they are not Mujahideen.