Inspired by watching the new Ken Burns documentary, I’m looking for some supplemental reading material on World War II. General overviews, specific treatments of particular aspects, anything at all that you’ve read and enjoyed and/or found illuminating on this topic.
I’ve already read D-Day by Stephen Ambrose, and A Bridge Too Far is on my to-read list. More suggestions, s’il vous plait?
Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides was a fantastic book. It about the Bataan Death march and the American rescue operation.
I would suggest Churchills Second World War series. The first book, The Gathering Storm, is great.
From Here to Eternity by James Jones is a favorite of mine. Not only is the book well written, but it has a firm place in history. Not only does the book talk about the war in a frank way that had previously not been presented (at that time, at least), but also the way in which the book was written effected society at the time of the publication. Jones felt that the soldiers in the book should, well, talk like soldiers. His copious use of the word fuck got Jones in trouble with the publishers, causing many book sellers to even say they wouldn’t stock the book. After much back and forth, they edited all the uses of fuck to be “fug”, causing a whole free speech uproar.
Anyway, the book is a good book regardless, but it is important for more than just the militaristic aspect.
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge
Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic by Paul Fussell
Up Front and The Brass Ring by Bill Mauldin
“Band of Brothers” and anything else by Ambrose.
At Dawn We Slept, by Gordon Prange. A pretty comprehensive look at Pearl Harbor, drawing from the Senate investigations.
Long Day’s Journey into War, by Stanley Weintraub. A very comprenhensive look at the day of Pearl Harbor, looking at what was going on everywhere else, in addition to Hawaii.
Army at Dawn, by Rick Atkinson. This is the first part of a trilogy and deals with the early part of the US involvement of the war. Part 2, Day of Battle, is due out soon. (October)
I also liked D-Day, by Stephen Ambrose.
The Wild Blue is another decent Ambrose book, in this case about the B-24 pilots over Germany.
My recent favorite is a book called We Die Alone, by David Howarth. It’s a deeply impressive (and true) winter survival story from Norway during the war.
Hans Von Luck’s Panzer Commander. He saw it all. Invasion of Poland? Check. Invasion of France? Check. Eastern Front? Yup. North Africa? He was there. Normandy on D-Day? Yep.
Fantastic. Somebody should make a movie about the guy.
American Caesar is the biography of Douglas MacArthur, and it’s a very good read.
That reminds me. The war autobiography and travelogue of the Pacific battlefields as they were in 1980, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, by the author of “American Caesar,” William Manchester.
Manchester was present when John Wayne was booed off the stage by wounded veterans.
These are all excellent recs. The Sledge book is IMO The single best war memoir of WW2 ever written. I’m no expert, but Fussell and John Keegan seem to agree with that. It’s simply brilliant, brutally honest, compassionate, and devoid of any agenda besides telling one man’s story. If possible get the Oxford University edition with the introduction by Fussell: Literary critic, social historian and WW2 infantry vet. Try to avoid the new Presidio press edition with introduction by neo-con windbag Victor David Hanson. (I almost started a pit thread about this.) But if you don’t have any choice, get the Presidio. The book really needs no introduction.
You’ll probably want a good single volume general history of the War. I haven’t read Keegan’s yet, but it looks pretty good. Some people find him dry, though.
Also, see if you can find a copy of Len Deighton’s novel Bomber. It’s excellent and better, again IMO, than Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse 5. It’s not that those are bad books–they’re both very good–but Bomber is less surreal and brings the horror and futility of war home with powerful realism.
If you want a history book, a friend of mine has a couple of big hardback books in black and white that detail WW2 day by day. He is obsessed and hasn’t put them down for weeks and has missed work to read them.
It has to be many years out of print, but Mark of the Lion made a big impression on me as a boy. It’s a biography of Captain Charles Upham VC*, one of only three men ever to be awarded the Victoria Cross for a second time and the only one for actual combat feats (the other two, equally meritorious, were for rescuing wounded men under enemy fire).
An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson.
And if you’re interested in the Pacific air war, “Baa Baa Blacksheep” by Greg “Pappy” Boyington is a pretty good book.
Wartime by Paul Fussell is an excellent antidote to the usual rah rah Greatest Generation hagiographies.
**Slithy Tove ** and I must have similar tastes, as I own copies of all the books he’s recommended in this thread and I agree with all of his suggestions. I’ll add Alistair Horne’s To Lose a Battle: France 1940, which is an excellent read but hews too closely to the France-was-doomed-to-fail line, in my view. For an antidote, I’d suggest *Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France * by Ernest R. May.
For a personal account of most phases of the War in the Atlantic, I reccomend RADM Daniel V. Gallery’s U-505. It combines his first person account of his war in the Atlantic, first at Reykyavik, then as commander of a jeep carrier hunter-killer task group, including his capture on the high seas of the eponymious U-505; with a greatly researched account of the Kreigsmarine’s u-boat fleet, and battles, as seen through the lens of the U-505’s service in the war.
I second “Army at Dawn”
“Armageddon: The battle for Germany 1944-1945” was good as well.