Best WW2 Related Book You Have Read

to Fozman: As far as I am aware he lives in Spain. Regards

 

Go and read Auschwitz by Laurence Rees, super good!

 

Best book I have read on WWII was "The Second World War" by John Keegan. The chapter that really caught my attention was "Roosevelt's strategic dilemma". Keegan's views on the cash and carry program with Britain was very interesting.

 

Best book I have read on WWII was "The Second World War" by John Keegan. The chapter that really caught my attention was "Roosevelt's strategic dilemma". Keegan's views on the cash and carry program with Britain was very interesting.

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed this. I'm reading Keegan's First World War right now, and it's incredibly interesting and informative. He really packed it with information. I'll have to pick up The Second World War when I finish the First.

 

Bought and read Panzer Leader by Guderian last month, it is a book I'd highly recommend to serious student of WWII who is interested in military tactics and strategy.

Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad is also a very good book that focus on a very important battle in the Eastern campaign.

 

Well, I realize I am reviving a thread from 11 years ago, but it was either this or start a new thread. It would be interested if people who posted earlier have new favourites or not.

I would currently have to pick Peter White's memoir, With The Jocks. Infantry accounts are or were not my focus of reading, but I thought it was tremendously good at conveying the experience of being in the slit trenches.

 

That's the book that got me started reading/collecting military history. Like most diaries, the perfect way to digest them is night by night--as they were written, an entry or three at a time. The ending was slightly contrived (the diaries extend further, but the editors snipped them), but I found it quite poignant: after years of stress and constantly buzzing activity, he has lunch, a useful talk with Paget and 'motors home'.

From there I got onto Monty's Memoirs. The narrative 'voice' is unmistakable. For the first few chapters I thought I was reading the work of an curiously knowledgable but mildly autistic child; after a hundred pages I thought it was fantastic stuff.

Anybody know whether the Alanbrooke biography by David Fraser is good?

Edit: although I have a strong preference for first-hand accounts, I'll put Stephen Bungay's The Most Dangerous Enemy a second or third place.

 

Well, "The Wages Of Destruction" has been written since this thread went into hibernation, and that is THE book on WW2, isn't it?

If you haven't read it yet, prepare to have your mind blown.

A personal favourite is Pierre Clostermann's almost-forgotten collection of semi-factual short stories, "Flames In The Sky". Incredibly exciting, and quite a bit better than "The Big Show" imho.

 

Would you care to elaborate?

 

Charlie Fortnum said "Anybody know whether the Alanbrooke biography by David Fraser is good?"

The Alanbrooke biography is excellent and paints him as a brilliant mind and military strategist. I read it after a recommendation from our dear late friend Tom Canning. Well worth the read.

 

Cheers:- will purchase at some point.

Does it go well beyond his (subsequently published) diaries for sources?

 

Basically it explains just what a fragile, bungling, desperate, tied-together-with-bits-of-string contraption the Nazi state was.

And how its savage aggression was the only way that it could sustain itself. It was like a virus with no alternative but to eat away at everything around it, because the moment it stopped expanding, it died.

It also explains that to understand Hitler, it was necessary not to read Mein Kampf, but his largely forgotten second book, which identified the USA as the prime enemy. The invasion of the USSR was seen as a necessary preliminary to secure the resources for the ultimate battle against America.

It's a book full of eye-opening stuff, tbh. Another interesting point it makes is that the bombing campaign in the Ruhr of 1943 was a whisker away from bringing down the Nazi economy, but Bomber Harris saved the day by switching the target to Berlin.

No matter how low your opinion of the Nazis was before reading this book, it will be even lower after reading it.

 

Yes it does.

His main sources are the Alanbrooke Papers, which are deposited at the Liddell-Hart Centre, King's College, London. These include letters, documents and notes on various conferences he attended during the war, material that is not included in the diaries. He also uses the "Grand Strategy" volumes of the "History of the Second World War" written as they were with full access to the documents lodged in the Public Records Office which are, to quote David Fraser, " an indispensable aid for any biographer of Alanbrooke".

It's a five star read and highly recommended.