I know we’ve got a lot of WWII buffs on the boards and I’m looking to expand my book collection a bit and, hopefully, my understanding of the conflict.
Put simply, what books would you see as absolutely essential reading and indispensable for any self-described Second World War geek when it comes to building a library on the topic?
Gordon Prange - At Dawn We Slept, Dec. 7, 1941, Miracle At Midway, Target Tokyo.
Winston Churchill - The Second World War
Paul Brickhill - The Great Escape
P. R. Reid - Escape From Colditz
The classics - Cornelius Ryan - The Longest Day, The Last Battle
Lots more when I get to school and can check my bookcase.
Cheers silenus, I’ve read an abridged version of Sir Winston’s volumes, not heard of the one by Prange though so I’ll give it a look.
The first two by Prange will give you an unbelievably deep look at Pearl Harbor. Personally I like Target Tokyo, which is the story of the Sorge spy ring.
A really good overview is Gerhard Weinberg’s A World at Arms - erudite and readable
A couple from senior participants:
Churchill’s Second World War - to see what history written by an eloquent victor looks like 
Allan Brooke’s War Diaries - somewhat a counterpoint to the above
Personal favourite:
Anthony Cave Brown’s Bodyguard of Lies - It’s probably been superseded in many ways, but one of the early attempts to map out just how sneaky the Allied intelligence effort was
A few first-person narratives:
George Grider - War Fish
Richard O’Kane - Clear the Bridge!: The war patrols of the USS Tang
A few from Martin Caidin - Black Thursday, The B-17, Thunderbolt!, Samurai, Fork-Tailed Devil
War Fish is Grider’s story as he rose through the ranks of the US Submarine Force to become the captain of the sub with the highest tonnage sunk record for the war.
Alistair Horne: To Lose a Battle: France 1940.
William Craig - Enemy at the Gates - how crappy Stalingrad was
Guy Sajer - The Forgotten Soldier - great German perspective on how crappy the Russian front was
William Manchester - **Goodbye Darkness **- how awful the pacific theater was for a foot soldier
James Hornfischer - The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors - how horrible it is to be in an actual naval battle
Stephen Ambrose’s works - all about the same, but interesting for American perspectives
Paul Brickhill - The Great Escape - the quintessential prison break story (echoing Silenus’s recommendation)
Also, Jeff Shaara’s three novels of WW2 - historical fiction, but the best immersive way to pick up history I’ve ever read
**The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich **by William L. Shirer
Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre.
Several books by Ben Macintyre -
Agent Zigzag
Double Cross
Operation Mincemeat
I would throw in Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back
Some good general histories of the war:
Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings
The Second World War by Antony Beevor
A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II by Gerhard L. Weinberg
One problem with these books is they all tend to be written from a Western perspective and ignore the war in Asia. So you might want to also check out Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter
You definitely want to read Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy:
An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945
If you’re looking for something out of the ordinary, you should check out Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham. It’s an unusual general history of the war that considers it from the viewpoint of food production and distribution.
*Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb *by Thomas Powers
*Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb *by Robert Wilcox
*The Ultra Secret *by F.W. Winterbotham
American Caesar by William Manchester. An excellent biography of Douglas MacArthur, warts and all.
Antony Beevor
Ardennes 1944
Berlin: The Downfall 1945
Stalingrad
To Lose a Battle by Alistair Horne is a really detailed account of the defeat of France in 1940, including the history and the politics that led to the French military being starved of resources and utterly unprepared to fight a modern (in 1940) army.
If you think the French lost because they didn’t put up a fight, you really should read this.
Pacific Crucible and The Conquering Tide (about the war in the Pacific) by Ian Toll.
Shattered Sword, by Parshall and Tully, about the Battle of Midway. Deconstructs a lot of the myths surrounding the battle, and points out the flaws in the thinking and strategy by the Japanese brass which led to their losing both the battle and the war.
I’ve been looking for books on the war in the Pacific for some time now and these look interesting. Thanks.
I second the recommendation of Shattered Sword.
Another of Cornelius Ryan’s books that I didn’t see mentioned but ought to be is A Bridge Too Far.