Posted on 01/10/2014 5:48:26 PM PST by dynachrome
War is unquestionably mankind at his worst. Yet, paradoxically, it is in war that men — individual men — often show the very best of themselves. War is often the result of greed, stupidity, or depravity. But in it, men are often brave, loyal, and selfless.
I am not a soldier. I have no plans to become one. But I’ve studied war for a long time. I am not alone in this.
The greats have been writing and reading about war — its causes, its effects, its heroes, its victims — since the beginning of written text. Some of our most powerful literature is either overtly about war or profoundly influenced by it. Homer’s epic poems are about war — first, ten years of battle against Troy and then ten years of battle against nature and the gods. Thucydides, our first great historian, wrote about the Peloponnesian War — the great war between Sparta and Athens. Rome was built by war and literature, and the world has been influenced by that ever since. The American Empire is no different — our men came home and wrote about the Civil War, about the Spanish-American War, about WWI, about WWII. A new generation has come home and has written (and is still writing) powerful books about the counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The study of war is the study of life, because war is life in the rawest sense. It is death, fear, power, love, adrenaline, sacrifice, glory, and the will to survive.
(Excerpt) Read more at artofmanliness.com ...
There are so many good books on military history and war that it’s hard to come up with 43. Rather than just read 43, I’ve devoted my life to reading history books. Here is a list of the books in my home library that pertain to World War II. I have a lot more pertaining to other topics, but this is just the WW2 list. I have added about 10-15 more since this list was created about a year ago.
General:
Rise and Fall of The Third Reich by William Shirer
Death of the Wehrmacht by Robert Citino
Luftwaffe Fighter Aces by Mike Spick
Me-109 by Martin Cadin
P-51 by William Hess
German Secret Weapons by Brian Ford
Waffen SS by John Keegan
Panzer Division by Kenneth Macksey
War at Sea by Nathan Miller
One Volume Ed. Of The Two Ocean War by Samuel Eliot Morrison
Fighting Divisions by E. J. Kahn
Judgment at Nuremburg by Joseph Persico
France/North Atlantic:
Strange Victory by Ernest May
Collapse of the Third Republic by William Shirer
France 1940 by John Williams
Battle of Britain by Ira Peck
Operation Sea Lion by Peter Fleming
Hitler’s High Seas Fleet by Richard Humble
Battleship Bismarck by Burkhard Baron von Mullenheim-Rechberg
Black May by Michael Gannon
Seizing the Enigma by David Kahn
North Africa/Italy
An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson
Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson
Beda Fomm by Kenneth Macksey
Afrika Corps by Kenneth Macksey
Fatal Decision by Carlo D’Este
War in Italy by Field Marshal Lord Carver
War in the East:
The Following by David Glantz and/or with Jonathan House:
Stumbling Colossus, The Red Army on the Eve of WW2
When Titans Clashed
The Stalingrad Trilogy: The Road To Stalingrad, Armageddon in Stalingrad and After Stalingrad
Colossus Reborn
Zhukov’s Greatest Defeat (Operation Mars)
The Battle of Kursk
Red Storm over the Balkans
Other authors:
What Stalin Knew by David Murphy
Stalin’s Folly by Constantine Pleshakov
Ivan’s War by Catherine Merridale
Russia at War by Alexander Werth
Fighting in Hell by Alexander Tsouras
Barbarossa by John Keegan
Barbarossa by Alan Clark
Road to Stalingrad & Road to Berlin by John Erickson
The Russo-German War by Albert Seaton
Stalingrad The Fateful Siege by Anthony Beevor
Stalingrad The Turning Point by Geoffrey Jukes
Kursk by Geoffrey Jukes
Battle of the Korsun Pocket
Soviet Blitzkrieg (Operation Bagration) by Walter Dunn
Hitler’s Greatest Defeat by Paul Adair
Red Storm on the Reich by Christopher Duffy
Armageddon by Max Hastings
Battle for Berlin by Earl Ziemke
The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan
Northwest Europe:
US Official Histories:
Cross Channel Attack
Breakout & Pursuit
The Siegfried Line Campaign
Riviera to the Rhine
The Battle of the Bulge
The Last Offensive
Other books:
Decision in Normandy by Carlo D’Este
Breakout by James Mason
Steel Inferno by Michael Reynolds
Airborne Carpet by Anthony Farrar-Hockley
A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan
Hitler’s Last Offensive by Peter Elstob
Bastogne by Peter Elstob
Hitler’s Last Gamble by Trevor DuPuy
A Time For Trumpets by Charles B. MacDonald
Pacific Theater:
The Rising Sun by John Toland
Silent Victory by Clay Blair Jr.
Unrestricted Warfare by James DeRose
Dec. 7 1941 by Gordon Prange
Battleship; the Sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse by Martin Middlebrook
Defeat in Malaya by Arthur Swinson
Fall of the Phillipines by Ward Rutherford
Queen of the Flattops (sinking of the Lexington) by Stanley Johnston
Stilwell and the American Experience in China by Barbara Tuchman
Miracle at Midway by Gordon Prange
Shattered Sword, the Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parschall and Anthony Tully
New Guinea by John Vader
Guadalcanal by Richard Frank
Operation Cartwheel, the Reduction of Rabaul (US Army official history) by John Miller Jr.
Clash of the Carriers by Barrett Tillman
Battle of Leyte Gulf by Thomas Cutler
Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by John Hornfischer
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Downfall; the End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank
Memoirs and Biographies:
Tigers in the Mud by Otto Carius
The Rommel Papers (edited by Basil Liddel-Hart)
Panzer Commander by Hans von Luck
Panzer Battles by F.W. von Mellenthin
Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer
Lost Victories by Erich von Manstein
Patton, A Genius for War by Carlo D’Este
Stalin by Constantine Plehashov
Stalin, Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Montefore
Don’t limit yourself to a mere 43. Just read.
"They will live a long time, these men of the South Pacific. They, like their victories, will be remembered as long as our generation lives. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge."
We lost two Admirals in one battle, as I recall: Admiral Scott and Admiral Callahan.
Both killed on November 13th in The First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.
I’ve read only some of your list. One of my favorites is PANZER BATTLES by von Mellenthin.
But one I have mixed feelings about is STILLWELL AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN CHINA. It makes Chiang Kai-Shek out to be such a poor ally with his reluctance to concentrate only on the Japanese but in the end it was Chiang who saw the big picture. He stated that “the Japanese are a disease of the skin while the communists are a disease of the heart”. Of course Stillwell only had one mission and that was the Japanese. When China was lost to the communists we soon faced war in Korea and more Americans perishing by the thousands.
Great list, Henker...I am keeping it!
An interesting book is Joseph McCarthy’s “Retreat From Victory” (which is considered to be ghostwritten)
If my memory serves me correctly, Stillwell absolutely and without reservation detested and despised Chaing Kai-Shek.
I think McCarthy’s analysis of “who lost China” was spot on.
The History Channel had a program on WWI battles which was actually pretty good. They described one battle won by the Americans with a lot of casualties.
There is a sign at the American Graveyard which says. “America Will Never Forget What You Did Here”. The trouble is, America already has forgotten and I had never even heard of the battle.
I agree totally with you. My favorite comparison is with gunpowder: consisting of three ingredients which together, and only together is an explosive mixture.
But the "religion" element is the one always in the forefront for its apologists, while the ignored violent military element has been preeminent in its history.
This book has also critical complements : Alms for Jihad, J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, and Unholy Terror, Schindler. Documenting the financing and geographically identified training and planning for the 20th Century resurgence of muslim attempted world domination.
When I was at CPAC in 2009 I got M. Stanton Evans to sign my copy of BLACKLISTED BY HISTORY. Evans’ book is a detailed treatment of McCarthy but I can’t say it is “the best book since the Bible” which Ann Coulter claimed. It is not an easy read. RETREAT FROM VICTORY would be a great addition to my library.
Fields of Fire by James Webb
Barbarossa 1941-David Glantz
Thud Ridge: F-105 Thunderchief Missions Over Vietnam by Jack Broughton and Hanson Baldwin
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Hitler Moves East 1941-1943 - Paul Carell
Stalingrad - Theodor Plievier
Campaign in Russia-Leon Degrelle
Tuchman was a communist, or at least a communist sympathizer. In her book, she strongly intimated that had we dumped Chaing during the war, and embraced Mao, we could have together defeated the Japanese and had a wonderful post-war relationship.
She didn’t know Mao very well.
Every day I read the posts by Homer_J_Simpson "Real Time Plus 70 Years" where he posts excerpts from the New York Times from 70 years ago. You can follow the progress of World War II day to day, just as the American people did. One of the regular military analysts is Hanson Baldwin. Nobody had a clearer vision of strategy and progress of the war at the time.
Blacklisted by History is one of the books I bought an electronic version of so I could bookmark facts in it and find them easily.
The finest and fairest book on the subject, in my opinion.
After I read Ann Coulter’s “Treason”, I was perplexed. It ran counter to everything I had ever heard on the subject from the media, teachers, you name it.
One of them had to be false, they couldn’t both be right.
It made me curious enough to compel me to get the transcripts to the hearings (available in PDF) and I actually read them.
Ann Coulter was spot on. Her portrayal of those hearings was accurate. The rest of it was all lies, and even though I have been a conservative since I was thirteen years old, that REALLY turned the worm for me.
After that revelation, I realize that I cannot listen to a liberal without feeling a deep suspicion at every word they speak or write.
All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues) by Erich Maria Remarque, a novel FWIW.
Wow, I haven’t seen mention of Plievier’s STALINGRAD in a long time. I have an old 50-cent Berkley paperback edition that I inherited from my father. I read part of it as a teenager and started getting other books on Stalingrad way back then.
In Life and Fate there are more disturbing pictures.
In one succession of chapters he shows Auschwitz victims being shoved into their gas chamber, and in the next he portrays Hitler as a child playing near a forest, but fearful of a Monster Wolf in the forest coming as in a Grimm’s fairytale to exact some unknown retribution.
Eichmann’s activities and the meticulous work that goes into designing a working death camp are put forth in detail.
Smedley Butler: War is a Racket
Yes, that's a classic. The Things They Carried is another classic.
They carried their own lives.
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die.
Grief, terror, love, longing.
They carried shameful memories.
They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained -
the instinct to run or freeze or hide - this was the heaviest burden of all;
it could never be put down; it required perfect balance and perfect posture.
They carried their reputations.
They carried the soldiers' greatest fear - the fear of blushing.
Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to.
It was what had brought them to war in the first place.
Nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor;
just to avoid the blush of dishonor.
They died so as not to die of embarrassment.
I doubt that very much.
I played that game with the book Alms for Jihad, and I paid a LOT more than that for my copy. Within a year, knowing where to look, a PDF totally free copy was (is) available on the internet.
Book suppression has been pretty much impossible since the explosion of the World-Wide Web. Fahrenheit 451 is no longer possible.
In Atlanta, GA: the War of Northern Aggression, On the monuments in/around Galena, IL (U. S. Grant's home town): The War of the Rebellion.
Then there is the biography of Curtis LeMay, Ulysses S. Grant, Eisenhower, Churchill, etc.
About 1958 I read through the summary written by Lt. Gen. Robert L. Eichelberger, on the conduct of the Pacific campaign, starting with assuming command of the forces in New Guinea, and righting the conduct of the Pacific campaign (which we were about to lose) by defeatin the Japanese at Buna. The book went on to describe the strategy of the Pacific campaign by island-hopping, bypassing whole segments of the Japanese forces, and denying them supplies to continue. This book, I think titled "Our Jungle Road to Tokyo," could well be on this list, as it was a very graphic account of fighting through personal direct command of the New Guinea fighting forces, right in close action there. I have talked with men who served under him, that saw him as a fine and reliable battle commander. Eichelberger was a "can-do" kind of gritty warrior, and took no guff from MacArthur.
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