What would be some good accounts of a ship at war?
I read the fictional H.M.S. Ulysses, which is a story about a British cruiser on the Murmansk convoy route. Very good book. I read Battleship at War, the non-fictional story of the USS Washington (or N.Dakota?) during WW2. Very good.
Any other good books regarding a single ship during WW2?
That’s why I liked A.J.P. Taylor’s book on the Great War over Keegan’s. Taylor’s is heavily illustrated, and his captions are wryly funny. I need pictures to get me through the war!
Permit me to recommend Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MaDonald Fraser {author of the Flashman novels, among others}: not so much non-fiction as a personal memoir {he even makes the comparison between official accounts and his own first-hand experiences} of his experiences as a callow 19 year old fighting the Japanese in the Burma campaign. It’s very reflective, beautifully written, utterly engrossing, and probably one of the best accounts ever of war as experienced by an ordinary infantryman.
U-Boats Offshore: When Hitler struck America by Edwin P. Hoyt - has some amazing stories about how close the allies came to defeat due to massive shipping losses close to the American coast.
Codename Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan by Norman Polmar & Thomas B. Allen - Examines the pros & cons of the plans to invade Japan, looking at both the Army & Navy estimates of casualties, the differing invasion plans for each Island and how they changed with the advent of the Atomic bomb (the plan for a beach-head near Tokyo called for the use of at least six nukes! - the planners had no briefing on radioactivity & just treated them as really big conventional bombs)
Those Brits do know how to inject their wry humor into just about anything. In one of my WW2 airplane reference books (Axis Aircraft of WW2, I think), in the blurb for the Betty or some other Japanese bomber, the author wrote something like:
Unfortunately, the lack of self-sealing fuel tanks meant that this wonderful and useful bomber would frequently be turned into a terrible and useless flaming wreck …
I’ll check out those A.J.P. Taylor books. They may be propaganda, but worry not! Nothing will dissuade me from my steadfast hope for the ultimate victory of the Thir-err, nevermind. I’ll give’em a look!
Well, to be fair, “ancecdotal” and “oral history” are not the same thing. My issue with Ambrose is that he doesn’t bring it together into anything, not even the oral history itself. I feel like he’s just pulling various snippets from conversations with people, with no real rhyme or reason. There’s nothing cohesive to what he does, and what analysis he does try to provide seems poor. If I want to read primary sources, I can.
The book is called Japanese Destroyer Captain by Tameichi Hara with Fred Saito and Roger Pineau.
If your FIL hasn’t read them yet, there is EM Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front for WWI fiction, and Hans Helmut Kirst trilogy 08/15 for WWII fiction.
For the Pacific war I would recommend Martin Caidin’s The Ragged Rugged Warrior for the first six months of the air war, Richard B. Frank’s Guadalcanal for that famous campaign. Mehitabel mentionned Walter Lord previously but she forgot to mention his Midway, the incredible victory about the turning point of the Pacific war.