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I have really got into my historical books again recently - I have recently re-read Is That Not A Man? and just completed The Somme by Peter Hart now onto 11th Hour, 11th Day, 11th Month by Joseph E Persico which is now making me more interested in reading more on the First World War about Verdun and other historical battlefields. I have also read All Quiet on the Western Front which I subsequently found out is not a historical account but a novel (albeit written by a German veteran) and I would happily read more accounts from the German side.
Ohh and I have also read (but intend on rereading) With The Jocks by Peter White.
I have tried reading Antony Beevor but don't get on with his writing style and have Overlord by Max Hastings still to read.
So - what else would anyone recommend?
Catastrophe is very good. It's focused on 1914 and you really get the reality of how WW1 was largely a German/French war at first. Savage Continent is worth reading, though very depressing.
Two I have enjoyed and that give a differnt perspective
All Quiet on the Western Front - Henre Remarque - a german soldiers first had account of WW1
and The Foresaken army Heinrich Gerlach - again a german soldiers account of stalingrad
I'm on with Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August at the moment, a Pulitzer prize winning account of the first month of WW1. Definitely worth a look.
I've also got The Deluge to read at some point.
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge. First hand account of life in the Pacific in WWII so not a historical or strategic analysis but excellent all the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_the_Old_Breed
"Marked for death - the first war in the air" is a good read. As is "1918, the final act".
Geoffrey Wellum "First Light", Max Hastings' "All hell let loose"; "Bomber Boys". I've got loads, they are just some I can remember off the top of me head.
Two Leon Uris novels I have enjoyed - IIRC basically historically correct with fictionalised charectars
Battle cry - about marines in the pacific campaign
Mila 18 - the story of the Warsaw Ghetto and uprising
*glances at bookshelves*
A few here,
Operation Mincemeat - Ben Macintyre
First Light - Geoffrey Wellum
The Most Dangerous Enemy - Stephen Bungay
Enigma - Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
Anthony Beevor has quite a few books on WW2 inculding one called The Second World War
^^ As my OP, I don't get on with Antony Beevor - I just don't like his writing style. I got about 30% into Stalingrad and gave up.
And TJ - I have read All Quiet On The Western Front (which is actually a novel, not a true account)
Do'h
Its still good tho 😉
Loads of good stuff out there.
A few off the top of my head.
WW1 - The Donkeys - Alan Clark and then Mud, Blood Poppycock - Gordon Corrigan.
Storm of Steel - Ernst Junger
Goodbye to All That - Robert Graves
WW2 - Enemy at the Gates - William Craig
Quartered Safe Out Here - GM Fraser
The Forgotten Soldier - Guy Sajer
Audiobook - Blueprint for Armageddon - Dan Carlin
An Epic 5 part, something 15+ hrs, WW1 history. Free download from his website. Really recommend if you haven't heard it.
Dan carlin downloads
The Bombing War, Europe 1939-45 by Richard Overy. It’s a big history book, but really well written, and gives a different (objective) perspective - not jingoistic at all. In addition to the well known parts of the air campaign by both Axis and Allies, there’s a lot of stuff about geographic areas that are often overlooked.
I read the above after reading Geoffrey Wellum ‘First Light’ and ‘Luftwaffe Fighter & Bombers’ by Chris Goss. The latter is a day by day history of the Battle of Britain from perspective of Luftwaffe aircrew, and includes loads of first hand accounts, and photos taken by ground crew/air crew at the time. Fascinating to read this after the Wellum book.
Its still good tho
Agreed - I am going to re-read it again though, especially after finding out that the author of the book I am currently reading says it should be mandatory reading for all world leaders.
"we die alone" by David howarth is quite a good account of one man's amazing feat of survival during WW2. It was actually mentioned in another book I read and I thought I'd give it a go.
The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart.
Winged Victory, Yeates- a bit difficult to describe (suggest you look at the reviews to see whether it might be the sort of thing that floats your boat), semi-autobiographical novel by a WW1 pilot.
An Army At Dawn and its sequels. Makes quite a change to see the war from the US point of view rather than the British one:
http://liberationtrilogy.com/books/army-at-dawn/
One to avoid: Band of Brothers. Poorly written, and the TV series is much much better.
Operation Mincemeat – Ben Macintyre
First Light – Geoffrey Wellum
+1
Also
Agent Zigzag – Ben Macintyre
Double Cross: The True Story of The D-Day Spies - Macintyre, Ben
Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks who Plotted Hitler's Defeat
Milton, Giles
Danger Uxb: The Heroic Story of the WWII Bomb Disposal Teams Paperback by James Owen
wings on my sleeve by eric winkle brown
One to avoid: Band of Brothers. Poorly written, and the TV series is much much better.
I have that (and Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose too) - I nearly picked CS up to start reading yesterday but chose 11th Hour instead. I did try it once before but couldn't get into it and gave up (so I can believe the same can be said for Band of Brothers too - and yes I did enjoy that series).
Hear what you say about Anthony Beevor but his Second World War book is far better in my view than his single campaign books like Stalingrad and Berlin (though I enjoyed those too). It gives a great overview of the geopolitics, regional conflicts and alliances around the world which led to a truly global war. how the Sino Japanese war, Russo Japanese war, the Chinese civil war etc. all affected the conduct and outcome of WW2. How in fact WW2 was just an extension of WW1.
There is an incredible example of the global element at the beginning of the book. A picture of a young Korean in Wermacht uniform captured by the Americans in Normandy. He had been captured and conscripted in turn by the Japanese, the Red Army, then the Germans!
The other great thing about Beevor is his use of eyewitness accounts, by ordinary fighting men and civilians as well as the generals and politicians which makes it all a little easier to relate to.
Give him another try!
I should say though that even me, a massive Beevor fan boy, gave up on his history of the Spanish Civil War. The voluminous preamble explaining 19th and 20th century Spanish politics, theology and royalty and the hundreds of factions involved was just too turgid to wade through!
Another vote here for first light.
Give him another try!
Yeah I may do at some point - the Peter Hart one I have just finished (The Somme) relies very heavily on veteran's accounts, diary entries etc too. And it was fascinating to get a much better understand of what happened (why the German trenches were better, why they didn't go running Over The Top on July 1, why the Allies struggled at times against a materially very similar opposition etc).
The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer is an account of a French guy IIRC who had a parent from Alsace, and he got cinscrioted into the German army. I very personal account and a good read.
I think the definitive set of first hand accounts is "The War the Infantry Knew" by Captain J.C. Dunn:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Infantry-Knew-1914-1919-Chronicle/dp/0349106355
The story of a battalion, but far, far more than that with referenced memories from loads of people.
Just be glad it hasn't happened in our generations
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(The second pic is representation IMO, not the actual men)
The Thin Red Line by James Jones. The book not the film that is loosely based on it.
From wiki...
British historian and military writer John Keegan nominated The Thin Red Line as, in his opinion, one of only two novels portraying Second World War combat that could be favorably compared to the best of the literature to arise from the First World War (the other was Flesh Wounds (1966) by British writer David Holbrook).[6] Paul Fussell said that it was "perhaps the best" American WWII novel, better than A Walk in the Sun and The Naked and the Dead.[7]
I was reading about this book earlier, it looks fascinating, and I’ll probably pick up a copy some time soon.
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/11/711773072/virginia-hall-the-subject-of-a-woman-of-no-importance-was-anything-but
It's a few years since I read it but I enjoyed this account of WW II Desert warfare.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3338501-popski-s-private-army
The Good War by Studs Terkel if you like eyewitness accounts (and it was the model for World War Z).
Big fan of anything by Ben Mcintyre, the three mentioned above plus Rogue Heroes, about the early days of the SAS.
Abdolutely my favourite WWII book, and one of my very favourite books of all time, is Paul Brickhill's The Dambusters - an amazing story wonderfully told, tracing 617 squadron from their earliest roots to the end of the war, an engaging, engrossing story told with a wonderful dry humour. And what characters - 617's most famous leader has to be Guy Gibson, but Leonard Cheshire... Wow, what a story he could have told, had he not been far too modest to do so. Brickhill also wrote The Great Escape and Reach For The Sky which are cracking reads, but The Dambusters trumps all for me. 🙂
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Road of Bones (The siege of Kohima) by Fergal Keane is a good read. My wife's grandfather fought there.
Spike Milligan's War Memoirs. They're not just funny.
Rising 44 is pretty brilliant, one of the most readable WW2 books that I've read.
The First World War by Liddel Hart is a decent narrative history of WW1. It was written reasonably soon after the war finished so some of the analysis is still quite raw, but I thought it had aged pretty well.
I read 'The beauty and the sorrow' by Peter Englund earlier this year.
It's 20 diary accounts of WW1 all woven together in chronological order. It looks at the war on all fronts from a wide range of perspectives. It's quite eye opening.
Big fan of anything by Ben Mcintyre, the three mentioned above plus Rogue Heroes, about the early days of the SAS.
Rogue Heroes is sat on my bedside table to read next. Just finished Skunk Works (cold war rather than WW2) another excellent read...
As an aside, if you like Ben McIntyre, I can recommend The Spy and The Traitor (cold war). Also on the cold war theme, David E. Hoffman's books Dead Hand and The Billion Dollar Spy are also excellent.
As an aside, if you like Ben McIntyre, I can recommend The Spy and The Traitor (cold war).
Is that his latest, Oleg Something what defected to the west? I remember hearing extracts on Book Of The Week, cannae wait to read it! 🙂
Is that his latest, Oleg Something what defected to the west? I remember hearing extracts on Book Of The Week, cannae wait to read it!
Yep Hard back only at the moment. Fascinating read and ties into The Dead Hand nicely as well as Oleg played a big role in helping Reagan and Thatcher understand the Soviet point of view regarding nuclear disarmament.
IIRC Oleg Gordievsky is still alive somewhere in the UK (trying not to be poisoned by Putin).
Sound, look forward to that - BOTW said his location is still classified and he is still under 24 hour surveillance as the KGB still want him knocked on the back of the head. And I honk about the odd long day....
as footflaps mentions Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is brilliant
Audiobook – Blueprint for Armageddon – Dan Carlin
An Epic 5 part, something 15+ hrs, WW1 history. Free download from his website. Really recommend if you haven’t heard it.
This, and the first two parts of his podcast about the Japanese - and the back story (from ~1900) that provides insights into their WW2 campaign. - "Supernova In The East"
And if you're not a fan of podcasts, or never heard him before, try ten minutes. Awesome voice and ridiculous amounts of research (he averages 2.5 podcasts per year...
Also Dan Carlin Ghosts of the Ostfront is a great listen