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To: erikm88
First suggestion: the US Army's official military histories. They did outstanding work. And their work on the Eastern Front was truly groundbreaking.

Anything by a German commander is worth a read, but do take it with a grain of salt--there is a tendency to blame everything on Hitler, including their own misjudgements.

Charles B. MacDonald: Company Commander and A Time For Trumpets. The former is a personal memoir of commanding a rifle company in Europe; the latter is an outstanding account of the Battle of the Bulge. He was part of the Army's Center for Military History after the war.

Charles Whiting: Death of a Division. Focuses on the US 106th Infantry Division ("The Golden Lions"), which was put on a quiet sector in Belgium in December, 1944. Turns out that they were directly in the path of the 6th SS Panzer Army during the Battle of the Bulge. The book examines issues of leadership, training, and esprit de corps.

For an assessment of the naval war, I'd recommend Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War. It has aged surprisingly well, considering that it was published in 1960, well before ULTRA was publicly acknowledged. Morison was already a distinguished history professor and took a commission in the US Navy to act as an official historian. He was present at some of the events he discusses, including some of the night actions in the Solomons and in several amphibious landings.

Morison's book is a single-volume distillation of his History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, which is a mammoth 15-volume work.

Clay Blair's Silent Victory is an excellent account of the US submarine campaign against Japan. His last work was The U-Boat Wars, published immediately after his death. Both are two-volume works.

For a detailed discussion of intelligence in the Pacific Theater, no one was topped John Prados' Combined Fleet Decoded.

Another good book on intelligence is Ultra at Sea, by John Winton. He also wrote The Forgotten Fleet, an excellent history of the British Pacific Fleet in 1944-45.

53 posted on 08/29/2002 1:36:48 PM PDT by Poohbah
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To: Poohbah
Gosh, you beat me on Blair....
55 posted on 08/29/2002 1:48:36 PM PDT by onedoug
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