Road of Bones – Fergal Keane
(Deals with the siege of Kohima – the turning point in the British war against Japan)

A Separate Little War – Andrew Bird
(This is pretty obscure but will be especially interesting if you live in NE Scotland. Covers the extremely dangerous aerial battle against axis shipping in Norway at the very end of the war)

The Big Show – Pierre Clostermann

I’ve recently finished and then reread 2 books about the Pacific war.

Both Eugene Sledge’s ‘With the old breed’ and Robert Leckie’s ‘Helmet for my pillow’ are very humbling and stark views of the fight against the Japanese from the perspective of an ordinary marine.

Dunno what else to say about them really. I found both books, but particularly Sledge’s, deeply affecting.

A book called The Dark Valley by Piers Brendan is an excellent introduction to European politics in the years leading up to WW2.

Is the Eugene Sledge one what the Pacific mini series was based on?

Look for Saul David as an author.

His book on how Churchill sacrificed the Highland Division to allow the rest of the British army to evacuate from Dunkirk is very interesting.

Then there is Clay Blair on the U-boat war. See Churchill deliberately allowing convoy HX229 to sail directly into the line of U-Boats with huge loss of life and ships, all so he had a negotiating point for more US protection. The Merchant Navy had the highest death rate of any of the services – something like 30+%. It was safer in the army.

Is the Eugene Sledge one what the Pacific mini series was based on?

Yes, he was the young lad who was kept back from the draft by his father. Both books I mentioned formed the basis for the HBO series although there is a certain amount of weaving of the stories that never actually happened.

Germany 1945

Quite a stunning book which basically charts why Germany had to be finished off totally, but also details the suffering caused to the average person – more Germans were killed in January 1945 than the UK suffered throughout WW2…

History of the Second World War by Liddell Hart is a pretty dry read but comprehensive and fairly rigorous. Maybe a bit dated in style.

I struggled with Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor, so i haven’t tried any of his other books.

With regards novels, along with Catch 22 (i’ve never simultaenously loved and hated a book as much as that one), some that i found particular arresting are “Schindler’s List” by Thomas Keneally and “Alone in Berlin” by Hans Falleda.

Probably a lot lesser known than most British commanders, but this biography of the frankly mad Wingate is fascinating.
The Chindits and their commander are hardly remembered these days, and their strategic achievements were highly debatable, but this is another example of the off the wall operations that peppered the Second World War.

The SE Asia/Pacific campaigns seem a bit forgotten from the British perspective these days- or is that just my imagination?

no-one for martin gilbert? either the middle book on the history of the twentieth century or the holocaust book. for a more personalised insight into the mechanism of extermination then into that darkness, a biography of franz stangl the treblinka commandant, by gitta sereny is a deserved classic

both of primo levi’s if this be a man/ the truce. and, if you’re reading them this way for the gas ladies and gentlemen by tadeusz borowski is one that shouldn’t be missed.

The book I mentioned before (I couldn’t recall the author at the time)
With the Jocks by Peter White

As a 24-year-old lieutenant in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Peter kept an unauthorised journal of his regiment’s advance through the Low Countries and into Germany in the closing months of the war in Europe. Forbidden by his commanding officer from doing so for security reasons, Peter’s boyhood habit of diary keeping had become an obsession too strong to shake off. In this graphic evocation of a soldier at war, the images he records are not for the faint hearted. There are heroes aplenty within its pages, but there are also disturbing insights into the darker sides of humanity – the men who broke under the strain and who ran away; the binge drinking which occasionally rendered the whole platoon unable to fight; the looting, the rape, and the callous disregard for human life that happens when death is a daily companion. Hidden away for more than 50 years, this is a rare opportunity to read an authentic account of the horrors of war experienced by a British soldier in the greatest conflict of the 20th century.

mastiles_fanylion – Member

And personally I found Stalingrad a boring read and didn’t complete it. I have Berin too so can’t even face starting it.

I downloaded them from iBooks and read them on my iPhone. The combination of the smaller column width and not having a daunting big door-stop of a book in your hands made them easier to read and quicker to get through.

WW2 – Huge Area.

The Forgotten Highlander.

Stalingrad

Pegasus Bridge

First Light

Loads of good suggestions in the thread. A lesser known book well worth a read for the picture of everyday life in a Scots Battalion from the Western Desert via Italy to D-Day is Battalion by Alistair Borthwick. He was an officer in the unit, The 5th Seaforths, throughout the war. It’s well written. The author is better known for his 1930s account of rock climbing and hillwalking in Scotland, a classic still in print today, – Always A Little Further.

Battalion is out of print but available second hand.