When the lockdowns started, I posted a list of substantive works of science fiction/fantasy to help people get through the pandemic while maintaining their sanity. Today, I thought I would make a similar list, only this time, works of military history dealing with World War II.
The books represent a wide array of WW2-related subjects. Their accessibility varies; some can easily be read and enjoyed by anybody, while others are more rewarding if you already have some knowledge on the particular subject. I have marked the most accessible works with an *.
1. The German Invasion of Norway/The Battle for Norway. Both by Geirr H. Haarr (Naval Institute Press). The 1940 campaign in Norway is often mentioned only briefly in a rush to get to May 10, 1940, but these two books present the air, sea, and land aspects in wonderful detail.
2. On Shaggy Ridge/The Battle for Wau/To Salamaua/D-Day: New Guinea. All four by Phillip Bradley (Oxford Univ Press, Cambridge Univ Press, and Allen & Unwin). Four solid works of operational military history detailing Australian campaigns against the Japanese in New Guinea.
3. Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939. Alvin Coox. Souls brave enough to try this huge book on the 1939 Soviet-Japanese border war will be rewarded by one of the best ever depictions of a Japanese military campaign, previewing every weakness the Japanese Army displayed in WW2.
4. *Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East. David Stahel (Cambridge UP). The first of a 5-book (so far) revisionist account of German Army campaigns in the Soviet Union; this one details the planning for the German invasion and the campaign through Smolensk. While
Stahel overstates his case, his basic contention--that Germany hopelessly underestimated the USSR and the invasion largely failed as early as Smolensk in late summer 1941--is certainly true. For the truly brave, read it & David Glantz's two-volume book on Smolensk in succession.
5. Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941-1945. This is the only diary or memoir on this list, but I include it here because of its unique perspective: a rare English-language perspective on the Pacific War from the point of view of a senior Japanese admiral.
Because so many in the Japanese military failed to return from their war, because the Japanese destroyed so many military records, and because of language barriers, English speakers have few opportunities to see the war from the perspective of Japanese participants. This is one.
6. *Burma 1942: The Japanese Invasion. Ian Lyall Grant and Kazuo Tamayama. A very difficult book to find, and one that certainly deserves reprinting, this is an excellent operational history of the 1942 Burma campaign from both Allied and Japanese perspectives. Great maps, too.
7. May 1940: The Battle for the Netherlands (Herman Amersfoort & Piet H. Kamphuis) & The Loss of Java (P.C. Boer). These books are juicy operational accounts by Dutch writers on the 1940 German invasion of the Netherlands & the 1942 Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies.
8. *Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East (Stephen G. Fritz) & Hitler's Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich (Ben H. Shepherd). Two broad works that examine the experience and complicity of the German Army in the crimes of the Third Reich.
9. *Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942-1945 (Soenke Neitzal). One of the more surprising revelations in recent years was the fact that the British & Americans engaged in large-scale wiretapping of the conversations of Axis POWs in Allied custody
and that many records and transcripts of these recordings still exist. This book provides some of the juicier excerpts from transcriptions of the conversations of senior German officers in custody and makes fascinating reading. Neitzal and Harald Welzer also wrote the more
analytical (and, it must be admitted, less interesting) Soldiers: German POWs on Fighting, Killing, and Dying, on the same subject. A very recent book, The Walls Have Ears: The Greatest Intelligence Operation of World War II, by Helen Fry, goes into great detail on how the
tapping was done (in Great Britain), though she overstates the intelligence value of the operation.
10. *The Defense of Moscow 1941: The Northern Flank (Jack Radey & Charles Sharp). No one was more surprised than I to discover that this book by nonhistorians on the battle for Kalinin was a nuanced, thoughtful, and solid work of operational military history weaving together
both German and Soviet sources into a solid, well-researched narrative.
11. Riviera to the Rhine (Jeffrey J. Clark & Robert Ross Smith). The US Army's official history of WW2 (the "Green book" series) is excellent but some of its volumes, such as on Normandy and the Ardennes, are simply too dense and detailed to be read as narratives and are best
used for reference and research. However, some volumes--including this one, which I believe was the last one completed in the series--make solid operational narratives. This study traces the Franco-American landings in the south of France in August 1944 and the subsequent (but
sadly mostly forgotten) campaign of the 6th U.S. Army Group (consisting of the 7th U.S. Army and the 1st French Army) up to the Rhine. I should note that English-language accounts of the 1st French Army are scandalously few, but for the assiduous there are the long out of print
memoirs of its brilliant but overbearing commander, Marshal De Lattre de Tassigny, published as The History of the French First Army. They too deserve to be reprinted--and this army studied more.
12. *World War II at Sea: A Global History (Craig L. Symonds) and The War for the Seas: A Maritime History of World War II (Evan Mawdsley). Within a couple of years, two different historians have published recent one-volume histories of the naval aspects of World War II. While
both books illustrate how difficult it is to discuss such a broad topic in the span of a single volume, they provide needed overviews. If you only have the wherewithal for one of the two, I'd go with the Symonds, but both are decent.
13. Rückzug: The German Retreat from France, 1944 (Joachim Ludewig). Most books on the campaign in the west in 1944 concentrate on Normandy, then skip quickly through the breakout to get to the fighting along the West Wall. This book looks at the interstitial between the two,
when a reeling German Army was trying to save itself from the Allied onslaught. For a very different sort of book on this subject, and one aimed much more at a military buff, but nevertheless still interesting, see Jean Paul Pallud's Rückmarsch Then and Now.
14. Finally, there is The Ardennes, 1944-1945: Hitler’s Winter Offensive, by Christer Bergström. I had low expectations for this book but it turned out to be far better researched than I had expected, with solid analysis. Though the author has rather a low opinion of the fighting
prowess of the U.S. Army during the Battle of the Bulge, this is actually one of the better operational narratives on the subject, all the more so because it does not contain itself to the most well-known parts of the battle but shows the course of the entire struggle, including
key fighting in late December and early January. It is actually better than several best-selling pop histories of the battle published in recent years (which shall go nameless).
