World War II Books

[rollei]

That reminds me of the movie, The Great Escape. Steve McQueen was good.

[jscarbo]

Churchill's "The Gathering Storm" is one of today's Daily Deals in the Kindle store, priced at $2.99: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...d_i=1000677541

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by rollei

That reminds me of the movie, The Great Escape. Steve McQueen was good.

Yea, he was good, but from what I read, he was purely a made up character. The Great Escape is one of my favorite movies, but it's a bit like the Lord of the Ring movies, i.e. a lot of changes from the original story.

[Pulpmeister]

You might try "Exempleray Justice". This is the postwear outcome of the infamous massacre of the Great Escape escapees on Hitler's orders. With enormous patience and dilgence, the entire command line of that war crime was tracked down, all the way from truck driver to machine-gunner, up the line to Hitler, and everybody they could find who was still alive was prosecuted for war crimes.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Pulpmeister

You might try "Exempleray Justice". This is the postwear outcome of the infamous massacre of the Great Escape escapees on Hitler's orders. With enormous patience and dilgence, the entire command line of that war crime was tracked down, all the way from truck driver to machine-gunner, up the line to Hitler, and everybody they could find who was still alive was prosecuted for war crimes.

I haven't read it yet, but Human Game, by Simon Read, also deals with the hunt for the murderers of the escapees.

[John K]

The Liberator by Alex Kershaw

The riveting true story of the bloodiest and most dramatic march to victory of the Second World War, following the battlefield odyssey of a maverick U.S. Army officer and his infantry unit as they fought from the invasion of Italy to the liberation of Dachau at war's end.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...-the-liberator


The SBS in World War II: An Illustrated History by Gavin Mortimer

The Special Boat Squadron (SBS) was Britain's most exclusive Special Forces unit, similar to US Navy SEALS. Highly trained, highly secretive and utterly ruthless, the SBS was established as an entity in its own right in early 1943 having previously operated under the auspices of the SAS during the war in North Africa.

Though the movie Guns of Navarrone was inspired by SBS exploits, most people know little about them. Unlike its sister unit, which numbered more than 1,000, the SBS never comprised more than 100.
These men were mostly former commandos of guardsmen, cherry-picked by the unit's leader Lord George Jellicoe for their daring, initiative, and proficiency in killing Germans. The new unit was first committed to action on the islands of Crete and Sardinia, before spending much of the war fighting in the islands of the Aegean.
Led by men such as the famed Victoria Cross winner Anders Lassen, the SBS went from island to island, landing in the dead of night in small fishing boats and launching savage hit and run raids on the Germans. Sometimes they blew up a telegraph station, other times they cratered the airstrip, and more often than not they laid waste to a barrack room of sleeping soldiers. Like modern-day Vikings or pirates, they terrorised the German garrisons and were even described in the House of Commons as a band of "murderous, renegade cut-throats".
By the end of the war they had served in Italy, the Balkans, and mainland Greece, and following the cessation of hostilities their deeds were airbrushed out of history by an establishment that had never warmed to their piratical exploits. Gavin Mortimer, with his unrivalled access to the SBS and through interviews with the surviving members of the unit, has pieced together the dramatic exploits of this elite fighting force.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...n-world-war-ii


For a memoir, mystery writer Tony Hillerman's Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir. A large part of it concerns his war time service as a mortarman in the 103rd Infantry Division. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and earned the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart.

In this affectionate and unvarnished recollection of his past, Tony Hillerman looks at seventy-six years spent getting from hard-times farm boy to bestselling author. Using the gifts of a talented novelist and reporter, Hillerman draws brilliant portrait not just of his life, but of the world around him.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...m_Disappointed

[jtdolphins]

This books takes during 1933. Not exactly what your asking for. Its from the viewpoint of the American Ambassador to Berlin. You get a different view point from most other books on the changes taking place in Germany.

I found the book interesting, though it does spend a bit to much time on the daughter. That's the way I remember it. Haven't read it since it came out.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson

[pwalker8]

For those who are just looking for WW II novels, you might want to check out W.E.B. Griffin's Corps series which deals with the Marine Corps in the Pacific during WW II. The series starts just before the war, in China and goes through the Korean war.

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

For those who are just looking for WW II novels, you might want to check out W.E.B. Griffin's Corps series which deals with the Marine Corps in the Pacific during WW II. The series starts just before the war, in China and goes through the Korean war.

One of my favourites. The first book "Semper Fi" and the third "Counterattack" have nice details about military life in Shanghai and Hawaii just before Pearl Harbor.

[CharredScribe]

WWII is a topic of interest for me, so I have read several books (fiction and non). One of my favourites is The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts: I like that the author focused on periods, battles and issues beyond US, UK and Germany. Includes a good focus on the Soviet Union and other parts of Europe, as well as the run-up to the war. Only downside: politically and ethically, I disagree with his conclusion that use of nuclear warfare by the US was justifiable.

It is still a good read.

[Pulpmeister]

"Always Tomorrow" by John Leeming.

Leeming was on a plane delivering gold bars to the Italian resistance when shot down over the Mediterranean. He and the crew frantically shovelled something like 5 million pounds worth of gold out of the plane into the ocean before bailing out. He spent much of the war in an Italian POW camp, and his book is hugely entertaining.

"Always Tomorrow" comes from the standard response of Italian camp officers when the prisoners wanted something done: "Domani, domani!" Tomorrow, tomorrow.

I read it years ago, enjoyed it enormously, and haven't found a copy since. I'm still looking.

[hildea]

Fiction recommendations would be cool, too. However, for some reason, my preferences for WWII fiction lean toward espionage

Code name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. It starts with the narrator writing from Gestapo captivity, so it's not happy book, to put it mildly. But very, very good, and from what I can tell the author takes her research seriously.

[rollei]

For fiction, one of the best is Jack Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed.

[underdunne]

breakout and pursuit by Martin Blumenson is a good account of operation cobra and after but I've only seen it in PDF or hardback

[pwalker8]

Rick Atkinson's new book D-Day: The Invasion of Normandy, 1944 just hit the beach in the kindle store today. I pre-ordered it, so it's sitting in my to be read stack.