world war 2 autobiography books

100 Must-Read World War II Books

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

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In search of World War II books, by any chance? If so, you’ve come to the right place.

Below, I’ve compiled a list of fiction, YA, memoir, biography, and history for you to check out. This is by no means a comprehensive list. The number of World War II books available is vast . People love to read about one of the worst events in history. In a way, this makes no sense—the list below makes for some depressing reading. But in another way, the list contains reading that is compelling and essential: we need to know our history now, if ever.

So take a look at the list below and let me know in the comments if your favorite World War II book didn’t make the cut!

Descriptions come from publisher copy on Goodreads.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

“[ All the Light We Cannot See is] about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. “

Atonement by Ian McEwan

“ On a hot summer day in 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives. “

Blackout by Connie Willis

“ Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser into letting her go to VE-Day.”

Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Translated by Denver Lindley

“ In autumn 1941, a German U-boat commander and his crew set out on yet another hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over the coming weeks they brave the ocean’s stormy waters and seek out British supply ships to destroy. But their targets travel in well-guarded convoys. When contact finally occurs, the hunter quickly becomes the hunted .”

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

“ Herman Wouk’s boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life-and mutiny-on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of World War II. “

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

“ Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him. “

China Dolls by Lisa See

“[ Grace, Helen, and Ruby ] become fast friends, relying on one another through unexpected challenges and shifting fortunes. When their dark secrets are exposed and the invisible thread of fate binds them even tighter, they find the strength and resilience to reach for their dreams. But after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, paranoia and suspicion threaten to destroy their lives, and a shocking act of betrayal changes everything. “

The City of Thieves by David Benioff

“ During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive.”

Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War II by Joseph Bruchac

“ Throughout World War II, in the conflict fought against Japan, Navajo code talkers were a crucial part of the U.S. effort, sending messages back and forth in an unbreakable code that used their native language. They braved some of the heaviest fighting of the war…yet their story remained classified for more than twenty years. “

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

“ With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II.”

The Gallery by John Horne Burns

“ A daring and enduring novel—one of the first to look directly at gay life in the military—’The Gallery’ poignantly conveys the mixed feelings of the men and women who fought the war that made America a superpower. “

Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy

“ In a stunning tour-de-force, Marge Piercy has woven a tapestry of World War II, of six women and four men, who fought and died, worked and worried, and moved through the dizzying days of the war. “

The Great Fortu ne by Olivia Manning

“ Guy and Harriet Pringle, newly married, arrive in Bucharest in the autumn of 1939. The city they find is one of contrasts and rumours, on the edge with wavering loyalties and the tension of war, peopled with an international cast of characters, including the inimitable and eccentric Russian émigré Prince Yakimov. “

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows

“ January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb….”

The Guns of Navarone by Alistair MacLean

“ An entire navy had tried to silence the guns of Navarone and failed. Full-scale attacks had been driven back. Now they were sending in just five men, each one a specialist in dealing death. “

Half Blood Blues by esi edugyan

“ The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black.”

HHhH by Laurent Binet

“ HHhH: ‘ Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydric,’, or ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.’ The most dangerous man in Hitler’s cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the “Butcher of Prague.” Heydrich seemed indestructible—until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service, killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History. “

The Investigation by J.M. Lee, Translated by Chi-Young Kim

“ Fukuoka Prison, 1944. Beyond the prison walls, the war rages. Inside, a man is found brutally murdered. What follows is a searing portrait of Korea before their civil war, and a testimony to the redemptive power of poetry. “

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

“ Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. “

Jackdaws by Ken Follett

“ D day is approaching. They don’t know where or when, but the Germans know it’ll be soon, and for Felicity ‘Flick’ Clairet, the stakes have never been higher. “

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, Translated by Charlotte Mandell

“ A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France…Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. “

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

“ What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?…Does Ursula’s apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can—will she? “

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

“ Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman’s characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war.”

A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka

“ Whimsical, wise, beautiful, magical, and sometimes even heartbreaking, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True weaves together two remarkable stories, reimagining half a century of Polish history through the legacy of one unforgettable love affair. “

A Midnight Clear by William Wharton

“ Set in the Ardennes Forest on Christmas Eve 1944, Sergeant Will Knott and five other GIs are ordered close to the German lines to establish an observation post in an abandoned chateau. Here they play at being soldiers in what seems to be complete isolation. That is, until the Germans begin revealing their whereabouts …”

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

“ The Narrow Road to the Deep North is about the impossibility of love. At its heart is one day in a Japanese slave labour camp in August 1943. As the day builds to its horrific climax, Dorrigo Evans battles and fails in his quest to save the lives of his fellow POWs, a man is killed for no reason, and a love story unfolds. “

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

“ Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners—three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. “

A Pledge of Silence by Flora J. Solomon

“ When Margie Bauer joins the Army Nurse Corps in 1941, she is delighted to be assigned to Manila—the Pearl of the Orient. Though rumors of war circulate, she feels safe—the island is fortified, the airbases are ample, and the Filipino troops are well-trained. “

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

“ What would happen if someone did the unthinkable—and didn’t deliver a letter? Filled with stunning parallels to today, The Postmistress is a sweeping novel about the loss of innocence of two extraordinary women-and of two countries torn apart by war. “

Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally

“ This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mercy. “

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

“ Set at a boys boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. “

The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers

“ Written in 1939, first published in 1942… The Seventh Cross presented a still doubtful, naive America a first-hand account of life in Hitler’s Germany and of the horrors of the concentration camps. “

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick

“ Depicting both the horrors of the Holocaust and the lifetime of emptiness that pursues a survivor, ‘The Shawl’ and ‘Rosa’ recall the psychological and emotional scars of those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. “

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

“ Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore…we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut’s) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. “

Small Island by Andrea Levy

“ Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. “

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

“ Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman’s past—one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction. “

Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi

“ Trudi Montag is a Zwerg —a dwarf—short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share—from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he’s a girl, to the Jews Trudy harbors in her cellar. “

Suite française by Irène Némirovsky

“ Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940, Suite Française tells the remarkable story of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control. “

The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh

“[The trilogy’s] central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war too much for him. “

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

“ Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame. “

A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell

“ It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. “

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

“ On his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. Haunted by the deaths of his parents and wielding his tin drum Oskar recounts the events of his extraordinary life; from the long nightmare of the Nazi era to his anarchic adventures in post-war Germany. “

The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

“ From the acclaimed writer Peter Ho Davies comes an engrossing wartime love story set in the stunning landscape of North Wales during the final, harrowing months of World War II.”

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

“ Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination ‘both physical and emotional’ of a generation of Japanese Americans. “

Children’s/Young Adult

Between shades of gray by ruta sepetys.

“ Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they’ve known.”

The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak

“ Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist—books. “

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

“ Berlin 1942. When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. “

The Chosen by Chaim Potok

“[ The Chosen is the] story of two fathers and two sons and the pressures on all of them to pursue the religion they share in the way that is best suited to each. And as the boys grow into young men, they discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever considered before. “

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

“ Oct. 11th, 1943—A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it’s barely begun. “

Dust of Eden by Mariko Nagai

“‘ We lived under a sky so blue in Idaho right near the towns of Hunt and Eden but we were not welcomed there.’ In December 1941, thirteen year-old Mina Masako Tagawa and her Japanese-American family are sent from their home in Seattle to an internment camp in Idaho. What do you do when your home country treats you like an enemy?”

Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith

“Ida Mae Jones dreams of flight. Her daddy was a pilot and being black didn’t stop him from fulfilling his dreams. But her daddy’s gone now, and being a woman and being black are two strikes against her. “

Good Night, Mr. Tom by Michelle Magorian

“ When the Second World War breaks out, young Willie Beech is evacuated to the countryside. A sad, deprived child, he slowly begins to flourish under the care of kind old Tom Oakley. But then his cruel mother summons him back to war-torn London… “

Journey to Topaz: A Story of the Japanese-American Evacuation by Yoshiko Uchida

“ Like any 11-year-old, Yuki Sakane is looking forward to Christmas when her peaceful world is suddenly shattered by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Uprooted from her home and shipped with thousands of West Coast Japanese Americans to a desert concentration camp called Topaz, Yuki and her family face new hardships daily. “

Mare’s War by Tanita S. Davis

“… somewhere on the road, Octavia and Tali discover there’s more to Mare than what you see. She was once a willful teenager who escaped her less-than-perfect life in the deep South and lied about her age to join the African American battalion of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. “

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

“ Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think of life before the war. It’s now 1943 and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching through town. “

Someone Named Eva by Joan M. Wolf

“ In 1942, eleven-year-old Milada is taken from her home in Lidice, Czechoslovakia, along with other blond, blue-eyed children to a Lebensborn center in Poland. There she is trained to be a ‘proper German’ for adoption by a German family, and all the while she struggles to remember her true identity. “

You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen by Carole Boston Weatherford and Jeffery Boston Weatherford

“From training days in Alabama to combat on the front lines in Europe, this is the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, the groundbreaking African-American pilots of World War II. In vibrant second-person poems, Carole Boston Weatherford teams up for the first time with her son, artist Jeffery Weatherford. “

Straight-Up History

Americans in paris: life and death under nazi occupation 1940-1944 by charles glass.

“ When the German army marched into Paris on June 14, 1940, approximately 5,000 Americans remained in Paris. They had refused or been unable to leave for many different reasons; their actions during the course of the German occupation would prove to be just as varied. “

Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII’s Forgotten Heroes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton

“ A powerful wartime saga in the bestselling tradition of Flags of Our Fathers , Brothers in Arms recounts the extraordinary story of the 761st Tank Battalion, the first all-black armored unit to see combat in World War II. “

Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee

“ As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals, at the same time that Churchill brilliantly opposed the barbarism of the Nazis, he governed India with a fierce resolve to crush its freedom movement and a profound contempt for native lives. “

Dirty Little Secrets of World War II: Military Information No One Told You about the Greatest, Most Terrible War in History by James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi

“ Dirty Little Secrets of World War II exposes the dark, irreverent, misunderstood, and often tragicomic aspects of military operations during World War II, many of them virtually unknown even to military buffs.”

Fighting for America: Black Soldiers—the Unsung Heroes of World War II by Christopher Moore

“ The African-American contribution to winning World War II has never been celebrated as profoundly as in Fighting for America . In this inspirational and uniquely personal tribute, the essential part played by black servicemen and -women in that cataclysmic conflict is brought home.”

Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides

“ On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected U.S. troops slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty rugged miles to rescue 513 POWs languishing in a hellish camp, among them the last survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March.”

The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan

“ In The Girls of Atomic City , Denise Kiernan traces the astonishing story of these unsung WWII workers through interviews with dozens of surviving women and other Oak Ridge residents…this is history and science made fresh and vibrant.”

Harlem at War: The Black Experience in World War II by Nathan Brandt

“ In Harlem at War, Nat Brandt vividly recreates the desolation of black communities during World War II and examines the nation-wide conditions that led up to the Harlem riot of 1943. “

Hiroshima by John Hersey

“ On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey’s journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. “

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

“ As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition. “

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel

“ Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world’s great art from the Nazis. “

Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard

“ A powerful and unflinching account of the enduring impact of nuclear war, told through the stories of those who survived. “

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

“In December 1937, the Japanese army invaded the ancient city of Nanking, systematically raping, torturing, and murdering more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. This book tells the story from three perspectives: of the Japanese soldiers who performed it, of the Chinese civilians who endured it, and of a group of Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city and were able to create a safety zone that saved many. “

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer

“ The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind. “

The Rising Sun: The Decline & Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-45 by John Willard Toland

“ This Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

The Second World War by John Keegan

“ In this comprehensive history, John Keegan explores both the technical and the human impact of the greatest war of all time. He focuses on five crucial battles and offers new insights into the distinctive methods and motivations of modern warfare. “

The Second World War by Winston S. Churchill

“ Winston Churchill was not only the war’s greatest leader, he was the free world’s singularly eloquent voice of defiance in the face of Nazi tyranny, and it’s that voice that animates this six-volume history. “

To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African-American WACs Stationed Overseas During World War II by Brenda L. Moore

“ Despite the social, political, and economic restrictions imposed upon these African-American women in their own country, they were eager to serve, not only out of patriotism but out of a desire to uplift their race and dispel bigoted preconceptions about their abilities … Filled with compelling personal testimony based on extensive interviews, To Serve My Country is the first book to document the lives of these courageous pioneers.”

Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings

“ A vivid and incisive portrait of Winston Churchill during wartime from acclaimed historian Max Hastings, Winston’s War captures the full range of Churchill’s endlessly fascinating character. “

The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman

“ When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw—and the city’s zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. “

Biography, Autobiography, Memoir

All but my life: a memoir by gerda weissmann klein.

“ All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein’s six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. “

Boy 30529: A Memoir by Felix Weinberg

“ In 1939 twelve-year-old Felix Weinberg fell into the hands of the Nazis. Imprisoned for most of his teenage life, Felix survived five concentration camps, including Terezin, Auschwitz, and Birkenau, barely surviving the Death March from Blechhammer in 1945. “

Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII by Chester Nez and Judith Schiess Avila

“ Although more than 400 Navajos served in the military during World War II as top-secret code talkers, even those fighting shoulder to shoulder with them were not told of their covert function…Of the original twenty-nine Navajo code talkers, only two are still alive. Chester Nez is one of them. “

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Translated by Susan Massotty

“ The Diary of a Young Girl… continues to bring to life this young woman, who for a time survived the worst horrors the modern world had seen—and who remained triumphantly and heartbreakingly human throughout her ordeal. “

Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston

“ Farewell to Manzanar is the true story of one spirited Japanese-American family’s attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention—and of a native-born American child who discovered what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire in the United States. “

The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom by Corrie Ten Boom, John Sherrill, and Elizabeth Sherrill

“ Corrie ten Boom and her family became leaders in the Dutch Underground, hiding Jewish people in their home in a specially built room and aiding their escape from the Nazis. For their help, all but Corrie found death in a concentration camp. The Hiding Place is their story. “

Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6–September 30, 1945 by Michihiko Hachiya, Translated by Warner Wells

“ The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. “

Honoring Sergeant Carter: A Family’s Journey to Uncover the Truth About an American Hero by Allene G. Carter and Robert L. Allen

“ President Clinton awarded the Medal of Honor to several black soldiers who served in World War II. Sergeant Edward A. Carter Jr. was among the recipients. Shocked to learn the extent of Carter’s service, Allene was determined to uncover both the truth about her father-in-law’s wartime record and why his official recognition was so long in coming. “

In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke and Jennifer Armstrong

“‘ You must understand that I did not become a resistance fighter, a smuggler of Jews, a defier of the SS and the Nazis all at once. One’s first steps are always small: I had begun by hiding food under a fence.’ An amazing, courageous, uplifting autobiography about a brave teenager who was not afraid to get involved.

I rena’s Children by Tilar J. Mazzeo

“ From the…author of The Widow Clicquot comes an extraordinary and gripping account of Irena Sendler—the ‘female Oskar Schindler’—who took staggering risks to save 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. “

A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII by Sarah Helm

“ Once rumored to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny, Vera Atkins climbed her way to the top in the Special Operations Executive, or SOE: Britain’s secret service created to help build up, organize, and arm the resistance in the Nazi-occupied countries. “

Night by Elie Wiesel, Translated by Marion Wiesel

“ Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity .”

Nisei Daughter by Monica Itoi Sone

“ With charm, humor, and deep understanding, a Japanese American woman tells how it was to grow up on Seattle’s waterfront in the 1930s and to be subjected to ‘relocation’ during World War II. “

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

“The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew.”

Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW by Alexander Jefferson and Lewis Carlson

“ One of the few memoirs of combat in World War II by a distinguished African-American flier, [this book] is also perhaps the only account of the African-American experience in a German prison camp. Alexander Jefferson was one of 32 Tuskegee Airmen from the 332nd Fighter Group to be shot down defending a country that considered them to be second-class citizens. “

Spy Princess: The life of Noor Inayat Khan by Shrabani Basu

“ This is the remarkable biography of Noor Inayat Khan, code named ‘Madeleine.’ The first woman wireless transmitter in occupied France during WWII, she was trained by Britain’s SOE and assumed the most dangerous resistance post in underground Paris.”

Tuskegee Airman: The Biography of Charles E. McGee: Air Force Fighter Combat Record Holder by Charlene E. McGee Smith

“ Colonel Charles E. McGee fought in World War II, in Korea and in Vietnam. He holds the record for the highest three-war total of fighter com-bat missions of any pilot in US Air Force history. His military service began as one of the Tuskegee Airmen in the 332nd, famed pioneers who fought racial prejudices to fly and fight for their country in WWII. “

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

“ On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. “

The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy by Judith L. Pearson

“ Virginia Hall left comfortable Baltimore roots of privilege in 1931 to follow her dream of becoming a Foreign Service Officer. She watched as Hitler rolled into Poland, then France, and she decided to work for the British Special Operations Executive .”

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary by Anonymous, Translated by Philip Boehm

“ For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. “

Graphic Novels/Memoirs

Maus i: a survivor’s tale by art spiegelman.

“ A story of a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father’s story and history itself. “

Onward Towards our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki, Translated by Jocelyne Allen

“ Shigeru Mizuki is the preeminent figure of Gekiga manga and one of the most famous working cartoonists in Japan today… Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is his first book to be translated into English and is a semi-autobiographical account of the desperate final weeks of a Japanese infantry unit at the end of WorldWar II. “

Truth: Red, White, and Black by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker

“W riter Morales pursues [the idea of Captain America] and also draws inspiration from U.S. government experiments in the 1930s that left unwitting African-Americans infected with syphilis, leading to many deaths. Beginning his story in 1940, Morales incisively depicts the racism his various African-American characters confront both in civilian life and in the military.”

If this list isn’t enough, we have even more posts on World War II books available for you!

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Wwii reads: memoirs.

Two members of the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy select their four "can't miss" WWII memoirs.

We have always enjoyed reading a good war memoir. The memoir genre is uniquely suited to pulling in the reader and giving them a first-person view of the author’s experiences. Memoirs immerse us in small pieces of the war, showing us both its incredible brutality and the struggle for participants to retain their humanity. World War II easily spawned more memoirs than any other twentieth century conflict by virtue of its size alone. But with so many out there it can be hard to choose which ones to tackle first. Here are four of our “can’t miss” favorites:

Ernie Pyle was probably the most famous of all war correspondents; he also gave us one of the first eyewitness accounts of the fight against Hitler in Ernie Pyle in England . Published in 1941, this book was a compilation of Ernie’s reporting from England in 1940 as that nation struggled under the daily German bombing raids and desperate shortages caused by the U-boat menace. Ernie visited Royal Air Force airfields to recount pilots’ heroics, but he also told of his stops in sleepy farm towns which were now the front lines in feeding a beleaguered nation. Above all, Ernie showed America a heroic and defiant Britain that soldiered on. From London, Ernie explained,

“And Big Ben? Well He’s still striking the hours. He hasn’t been touched, despite half a dozen German claims that he has been knocked down. Bombs have fallen around Trafalgar Square, yet Nelson still stands atop his great monument, and the immortal British lions, all four of them, still crouch at the base of the statue, untouched…If you had a favorite pub, ten to one it is still serving ale.”

Ernie’s reporting helped convince America that Britain’s fight was the fight of all freedom-loving people, and it stands the test of time as one of the great tales of the era.

Another indispensable American account of World War II is Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow. First published in 1957, this is the extraordinary account of Leckie’s WWII combat experiences with the 1st Marine Division. Leckie was a member of a machine gun crew and participated in every one of the Division’s campaigns except Okinawa. His story begins in basic training where he was initiated into the “cult of the Marine.” Leckie explained the pride in his service:

“No one could forget that he was a marine. It came out in the forest green of the uniform or the hour-long spit-polishing of the dark brown shoes. It was in the jaunty angle of the campaign hats worn by the gunnery sergeants. It was in the mark of the rifleman, the fingers of the gun hand longer than those of the other.”

Robert Leckie

Leckie went on to give a vivid picture of the confused jungle combat on Guadalcanal and the savage combat on hellish Peleliu. He also included an extremely rare glimpse of what a marine felt when suffering from what now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Following the publication of Leckie’s memoir, he authored nearly 40 other works of fiction and nonfiction, including several historical studies of campaigns in the Pacific War. His memoir surpassed them all in sales, however, because of its brutal honesty and directness. No student of the Pacific War can afford to overlook it.

Leckie has few rivals among memoirists in the Pacific Theater but his comrade in the 1st Marine Division, Eugene Sledge, left us with what is widely considered to be one of the best accounts of war from any era. Eugene Sledge published his memoir, With the Old Breed , in 1981 after using clandestine notes he made in his wartime Bible to reconstruct his memories. Sledge served with a mortar team in the 5th Marines. In this no-holds-barred book, Sledge does an incredible job of making readers understand the tragedy taking place, and how war makes men do things they would never have imagined doing. He conveyed the terror of combat on Peleliu and Okinawa and recounted the atrocities on both sides. Near the end of operations on Okinawa, Sledge explained how fear gripped him.

“While I plodded along through the darkness, my heart pounding, my throat dry and almost too tight to swallow, near-panic seized me. Having made it that far in the war, I knew my luck would run out. I began to sweat and pray that when I got hit it wouldn’t result in death or maiming. I wanted to turn and run away.”

Eugene Sledge 

Although Sledge survived the war physically unscathed, like many veterans he was tormented for decades by nightmares and memories of what he had witnessed. His written account of his service is one of the most compelling memoirs of the war.

For our last memoir recommendation, we are jumping back to the European theater of the war. George Wilson’s 1987 memoir, If You Survive , is not as popular or well known as many other WWII memoirs, but it covers nearly the entire campaign from Normandy to VE-Day through the eyes of an infantry officer. Lieutenant Wilson was the commander of F Company, 22nd Regiment with the 4th Infantry Division. He entered battle in late June of 1944, and was in combat for nearly eight continuous months. His story moves incredibly fast as he describes his experiences through the Normandy Campaign, Siegfried Line, Hurtgen Forest, and the Battle of the Bulge. His memoir tells of ambushes and close calls, with a tone of detachment that showed how many officers had to separate their feelings from many of the events in order to command effectively.

These are just a couple of our favorite memoirs from among the thousands of WWII memoirs out there. We hope you enjoy discovering or revisiting them as much as we did.

Dan Olmsted

Tyler Bamford

Tyler Bamford was the Sherry and Alan Leventhal Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at The National WWII Museum from 2019-2021. He obtained his PhD in history from Temple University and his BA in history from Lafayette College.

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The greatest books ever written about the Second World War

From biographies to bird's-eye views, memoirs to timeless reportage, here is a selection of the best non-fiction books ever written about the Second World War.

To call the Second World War merely a war is almost a misnomer; it was never just one war, but so many wars in one. Certainly, it was far too big, too vast and varied, to remember as a single event. The sheer volume of books about it are testament to that.

No war in history – except possibly the one that ended 20 years earlier – has inspired more literature. WWII has been seemingly endlessly written about, pored over, interpreted and re-interpreted – most recently, with the release of the film Oppenheimer , which takes place against the backdrop of the Second World War.

The film's release has caused a resurgence of interest in literature about WWII. But, with so many books to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start.  

Mercifully, we’ve got the scope to help – and have rounded up the best non-fiction books ever written on the conflict. 

Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw (1991)

To read this book is to ride shotgun through the mangled mind of a maniac – a mind so twisted, dark and terrifyingly pathetic that it demands a guide. Fortunately, Ian Kershaw has spent a lot of time there – and he knows the scenic route.

Far from the puffed-up political strongman that history remembers, Kershaw paints a portrait of an idle, tasteless, disillusioned loafer who got lucky. Kershaw’s examination of how a 'spoilt child turned into the would-be macho man' is unrivalled, not only in its breadth and depth, but in its richness of character. Here was a man, plagued by paranoia, Parkinson’s Disease and arteriosclerosis who had no firm ideas beyond a gut-deep hatred of Bolsheviks, poor social skills and a quite chronic case of donkey breath. And yet he convinced a nation that a brutal genocidal war was a good idea, and that he had the chops to take on the world.

This is a heavyweight biography from a world-champion historian. It remains undefeated in its category.  

Inside the Centre by Ray Monk (2013)

This extensive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer shines a unique light on one of the most contentious and influential figures of the period. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, Oppenheimer oversaw the efforts to beat the Nazis in creating the first nuclear bomb. But Inside the Centre delves deeper into the man called the 'father of the Bomb', uncovering Oppenheimer's complicated and fragile personality, and how the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings weighed on his conscience. This is a thorough investigation into a fascinating figure, and definitely worth a read.

Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts (2018)

'We are all worms,' Winston Churchill once told a friend. 'But I do believe that I am a glow worm.'

And glow he did. We all know the headlines – his rousing speeches play on a perpetual loop at the back of Britain’s national psyche – but Andrew Roberts’ exceptional biography gets further beneath the skin of the old bruiser than anyone – bar, perhaps, the man himself – has before.

The greatest challenge of writing a biography of Churchill is that Churchill has already done it inimitably ( My Early Life ,  The World Crisis ,  The Second World War ). But Roberts never falls into the punji hole of trying to out-Churchill Churchill. He writes with supreme authority, brio and no small amount of panache of Churchill’s exhilarating life, from his birth in 1874, to his death ninety years later. Nor does he pull his punches when it comes to Churchill’s many mistakes, either. Which is why Roberts’ tome earned the reputation of 'the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written'.

If This Is a Man by Primo Levi (1947)

If you are to read one book about The Holocaust in your lifetime, let it be this. It is the most profound, haunting, and soul-churningly beautiful book I have ever read about the atrocity. I try to avoid bringing myself into these recommendations, but in this case I can’t help it: my copy reduced me to tears. Or, take it from Phillip Roth, who called it 'one of the century's truly necessary books.'

Primo Levi was a Jewish-Italian chemist and member of Italy’s anti-fascist resistance when he was arrested and herded to Auschwitz in 1944. If This Is a Man relives the horror of his experience.

If you’re looking for a historical investigation into the rise and appeal of Nazism, or an inquiry into the origins and nature of evil, look elsewhere. This is a guidebook to Hell. It’s a story of collective madness, sheer evil, incredible stupidity and cruelty, but also humanity, spirit, grit and luck. Buy two copies – you may need a spare. 

X Troop by Leah Garrett (2021)

It might invoke Inglorious Basterds , but this isn’t fiction. Here, the real-life tale of Jewish refugees from Britain, sent to infiltrate and disrupt the Nazi war effort at every turn, is brought to vivid life by in-depth original research and interviews with the surviving members by author Leah Garrett.

Trained in counter-intelligence and advanced combat, these survivors – who lost families and homes to the Third Reich – became a unit known as X Troop, and their untold exploits, now published in full, illuminate a hitherto unknown story from an endlessly documented era.

The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich (1985)

War is seldom told from a woman’s point of view. And yet, a million women fought for the Red Army during the Second World War. The Unwomanly Face of War tells their stories, in their words. Snipers, pilots, gunners, mothers and wives: Alexievich spoke to hundreds of former Soviet female fighters over a period of years in the 1970s and 1980s.

After decades of the war being remembered by 'men writing about men,' her goal was to give a voice to an ageing generation of women who’d been dismissed as storytellers and veterans, shattering the notion that war need be an ‘unwomanly’ affair.

In the author’s words, ‘“Women’s” war has its own colours, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.’ It is a challenging read, namely because it is difficult to swallow in one go, but it would be hard to think of any book that feels more important, immersive and original. It was also one part of a body of work that earned its author a Nobel Prize in 2015.

Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness by Sinclair McKay (2020)

On February 13th, 1945 at 10:03, British bombers unleashed a firestorm over Dresden. Some 25,000 people – mostly civilians – were incinerated or crushed by falling buildings. In some areas of the city, the fires sucked so much oxygen from the air that people suffocated to death.

Dresden, now, has become a byword for the immeasurable cruelty of war. But was it a legitimate military target, or was it a final, punitive act of mass murder in a war already won? McKay’s account of that awful day – and many on either side – is probably the most gripping and devastating of them all. It is certainly the most comprehensive.

He tells the human stories of survivors on the ground as well as the moral conflicts of the British and American attackers in the sky. But McKay is under no illusion: Dresden was an atrocity. Sizzling with heart, anger, and brooding intensity, this tells the story of a once-great city pulverised to ash. No other Dresden book beats it. 

First Light: The Story of the Boy Who Became a Man in the War-Torn Skies Above Britain by Geoffrey Wellum (2002)

It took Geoffrey Wellum 35 years to turn his notebooks into a narrative. And a further quarter-century to get them published. The result is best described as one of the most engaging personal accounts of aerial warfare ever written.

Wellum was 17 when he joined the RAF in 1939, and 18 when he was posted to 92 Squadron. That’s where he first encountered a Spitfire. At first, he was clueless about the ways of combat, ravaged by fear and self-doubt. He found himself flying several sorties a day. He fought the Battle of Britain, and against German bombers during the Blitz. He fought at day and at night, from the skies above Kent to those above France. By 21, he was a battle-hardened flying ace who’d shot down as many enemies as friends he’d lost. In the end, life-or-death stress of mortal combat began to take its toll, as he succumbed to battle fatigue.

It is a beautifully written story of fear and friendship, bravery, bullets and, ultimately, burn out. You can practically smell the oil and gun smoke in the ink. 

Stalingrad by Antony Beevor (1998)

Many terrible battles were fought during the Second World War, but none come close to the savage four-month German Soviet battle of Stalingrad. It was all shades of awful. For context, consider that the Allied death toll in Normandy reached an appalling 10,000. At Stalingrad, it was closer to a million.

The staggering scale, the megalomania, the depravity, the crushing absurdity, and the unspeakable carnage that took place across Stalingrad from August 1942 to February 1943 is exquisitely captured in Beevor’s definitive history of the event.

He magnificently combines a novelist’s verve with an academic’s rigor as he recounts, step by step, how the battle unfolded in all its miserable awfulness. In doing that, Beevor has created an unforgettable diorama of one of the most savage battlefields in history, one of wholesale death, indignity and waste.

1945: Victory in the West by Peter Caddick-Adams (2022)

By March 1945, victory was within the Allied grasp – yet, the last 100 days of the Second World War would prove to be some of the very hardest. In this latest tome from Peter Caddick-Adams, the writer, broadcaster, and former lecturer in Military and Security Studies at the UK Defence Academy – not to mention a PhD-holding expert in multiple war zones – zooms in on the brutal last days of the Allied forces, as exhausted they slogged on through villages and towns, fighting bloody battles and finding, near its end, the barbarities of Hitler’s death camps.

Meticulously researched but compellingly told, 1945: Victory in the West is a new masterwork with a strong claim to canonical status in the World War Two library.

Forgotten Voices of D-Day by Roderick Bailey (2010)

The Normandy Landings of 6th June, 1944 are well-documented, having gone down in history as one of the largest, most ambitious, and most conequential military operations of all time.

This volume by historian Roderick Bailey, however, uncovers the story of this world-shaping event from new perspectives, drawing from previously unpublished material and thousands of hours of first-hand accounts from commandos, pilots, naval officers and more. Forgotten Voices of D-Day brings new life, immediacy, and humanity to our understanding of what it was really like for those on the front lines of this brutal and pivotal moment that changed the course of the Second World War.

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer (2023)

While not technically a book about the Second World War, Beyond the Wall addresses the legacy of the war on Europe; specifically, how it led to the creation of the socialist state of East Germany.

Far from the Cold War caricature of desolation often painted by the West, historian Katja Hoyer finds that despite the hardship and oppression, East Germany was home to a rich political and cultural landscape. She traces the history of the German Democratic Republic from the exiled German Marxists who created it, through to the building of the Berlin Wall, the prosperity of the 1970s, and the rocky foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s.

This unique story, which was an instant Sunday Times bestseller, compiles interviews, letters and records, to give a clear picture of the Germany that nobody really knows about: the one beyond the Wall.

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20 Gripping, Must-Read Books About World War II

When it comes to World War II books, these are the ones that stand out.

More has been written about World War II than probably any other conflict in human history. Yet, whether you are a World War II scholar or someone for whom the conflict is little more than a notation in history books, there is always something new to learn about this massive and world-changing confrontation. From the memoirs of Holocaust survivors to the cockpits of fighter planes above the Pacific, these 20 books will show you new aspects of the Second World War, some of them brutal, and some inspiring, but all of them gripping.

The Victors

By Stephen E. Ambrose

From the New York Times  bestselling author of Band of Brothers comes this “riveting” ( Atlanta Journal-Constitution ) book from a “superb historian” ( New York Times Book Review ) that chronicles the war in Europe from D-Day to Germany’s surrender in 1945. From the experiences of individual soldiers to the big picture of the European theater, see why historian James McPherson raved that, “If there is a better book about the experience of GIs who fought in Europe during World War II, I have not read it.”

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The War Below

By James Scott

During World War II, one of the most dangerous places you could be was under the water. The casualty rate among submarine crew was higher than any other branch of the military, with almost one in every five submarines destroyed. Drawn from more than 100 interviews with submarine veterans as well as previously unpublished letters and diaries, this “gripping” ( Kirkus Reviews ) book from Pulitzer Prize finalist James Scott paints a vivid portrait of what life was like for the brave men aboard these deadly vessels.

The Story of World War II

By Donald L. Miller

In 1945, with the war freshly over, Henry Steele Commager published an ambitious book that aimed to be a definitive guide to the conflict. Years later, historian and host of PBS’s A Biography of America Donald L. Miller revised, rewrote, and expanded Commager’s original text to create a more complete picture, one filled in by data that simply wasn’t available in 1945. While a complete history of the war may be more than one book can manage, “the extensive, moving testimonies by veterans of their brushes with death and terror humanize and vivify” this exhaustive and fascinating volume ( Publishers Weekly ).

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The Storm on Our Shores

By Mark Obmascik

“A poignant chronicle” ( Kirkus Reviews ), this true story of a soldier’s lost diary and the man who returned it to his family years later is transformed by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Obmascik into “a moving, intimate tale of two men, two families, and two countries” ( Publishers Weekly ) torn apart and brought together by war and peace. Conflicted about the war, Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi was devoted to his homeland and willing to fight for it. Along the way, he kept a diary that would eventually fall into the hands of an American soldier named Dick Laird. This one-of-a-kind book tells the story of the war from both sides, “perhaps the only way warfare can truly be understood” (Helen Thorpe, author of Soldier Girls ).

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Patton's Panthers

By Charles W. Sasser

In April of 1942, the first all-Black tank battalion in the United States Army was activated at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. Known as the Black Panthers, the members of the 761st Tank Battalion would go on to serve under General George S. Patton in some of the war’s most important conflicts, including the Battle of the Bulge. The Panthers defeated more than 6,000 German soldiers, captured 30 towns, and helped to liberate concentration camps. While Charles W. Sasser’s “convincing” portrait is “not the first study of the 761st, this highly readable book is one of the best” ( Booklist ).

My Name Is Selma

By Selma van de Perre

“There are many extraordinary books written by survivors of the Holocaust, and this numbers among them,” raves Library Journal about this international bestseller, which chronicles the author’s life as a member of the underground Resistance against the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The result is “a Holocaust story of incredible luck, breathtaking bravery and incalculable loss” ( The Forward ) written by the person who experienced it firsthand, living under an assumed identity and doing what “had to be done” until she was eventually captured and placed in the Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Human Smoke

By Nicholson Baker

Celebrated novelist Nicholson Baker turns his hand to nonfiction in this “riveting and fascinating” ( New York Times Book Review ) book which uses a variety of firsthand sources, including newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and diaries, to paint an alternative portrait of the days leading up to World War II and the grim march toward the Holocaust. The result is a book that has already become highly controversial, as it “movingly pierces the lies, hopes, fears, and myths we so easily imbibe on the road to war” (Gar Alperovitz, author of The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb ).

11 D-Day Books to Read for the Invasion's 80th Anniversary

Four Hours of Fury

By James M. Fenelon

On March 24, 1945, some 2,000 Allied aircraft dropped more than 17,000 soldiers on the far side of the Rhine River, deep into Nazi territory. Despite the scope and scale of the invasion, however, Operation Varsity is not nearly as well-known as many of the other operations undertaken during World War II. In this “inspired” ( Wall Street Journal ) account, former paratrooper James M. Fenelon seeks to rectify that in “a riveting account of an airborne division at war” ( Army Times ) and four hours that helped to bring an end to the Second World War.

Retreat from Moscow

By David Stahel

A Senior Lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales, David Stahel’s revisionist look at Germany’s winter campaign of 1941 and 1942—often regarded as the Nazis’ first defeat—is “an engaging, fine-grained account” that takes “a fresh look at a crucial series of battles about which we wrongly thought we already knew everything there was to know” ( Wall Street Journal ). From the Wolf’s Lair itself to the soldiers on the ground, facing frostbite as deadly as any artillery, this “compelling account of an oft-misunderstood period of the Second World War” ( Military History Matters ) argues for a different understanding of the German campaign and how it ended.

Day of Deceit

By Robert B. Stinnett

We all know what happened at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, right? According to this “exceptionally well-presented” ( Wall Street Journal ) book by a former member of the United States Navy who earned 10 battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation, maybe not. “It is difficult, after reading this copiously documented book, not to wonder about previously unchallenged assumptions about Pearl Harbor,” wrote Richard Bernstein in The New York Times . Drawing on more than two decades of research, Stinnett argues that what happened at Pearl Harbor was neither a military coup by Japan nor a failure of American intelligence, but something more sinister than either.

Day of Infamy : Inside the Destruction of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor

D-Days in the Pacific

Though it has gone down in history like no other, the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, was not even the largest invasion force of the war. In fact, there were numerous D-Days throughout World War II’s Pacific theater, including the invasion of Okinawa on April 1, 1945, which involved an invasion fleet larger than the one assembled for Normandy. In this far-ranging book, a “distinguished historian” ( Publishers Weekly ) recounts the many battles of the Pacific theater, from the bloody and close-quarters fighting that followed amphibious assaults to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

To Hell and Back

By Audie Murphy

Today, we know Audie Murphy as the star of such films as Red Badge of Courage ,  The Quiet American , and  Ride a Crooked Trail . In 1949, however, he was simply the most decorated American combat soldier who fought in World War II. A kid who wasn’t yet 21 on V-E Day, Murphy was nonetheless credited with having captured, killed, or wounded some 240 enemy soldiers. His 1949 memoir sat astride the bestseller list for 14 weeks and has since become a classic, adapted into a 1955 movie starring Murphy as himself. 

Climb to Conquer

By Peter Shelton

The first of its kind, the 10th Mountain Division of the United States Army depended on skiers and rock climbers to traverse some of the most treacherous conditions on the planet. Survivors of the unit’s exploits during World War II include the Sierra Club’s David Brower, Friedl Pfeifer of the Aspen Skiing Corporation, and Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman. Now, drawing on years of interviews and research, Peter Sheldon—himself a contributing editor and columnist for  Ski magazine—tells the unique and unforgettable story of this one-of-a-kind unit, from their unorthodox boot camp to scaling an “unclimbable” cliff face in the Italian Apennines to get the drop on German soldiers.

A Bridge Too Far

By Cornelius Ryan

Adapted into the star-studded 1977 film of the same name , Cornelius Ryan’s book tells the gripping story of Operation Market Garden, an ultimately doomed attempt by Allied troops to take the German-occupied Netherlands. By dropping troops into the city of Arnhem, they hoped to capture several strategic bridges across the Rhine. However, the massive operation ultimately cost the Allied forces nearly twice as many casualties as D-Day. From the decision-makers at the top to the soldiers who fought and died and the Dutch civilians who were caught in the crossfire, this ambitious book tells the unforgettable true story of one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

30 Essential World War II Books That Examine Every Angle of the Conflict

By James Wyllie

With the recent release of Jonathan Glazer’s  The Zone of Interest , the daily lives of the Nazis who perpetrated the horrors of the Holocaust is in new focus, which makes it a perfect time to pick up James Wyllie’s “chilling and richly detailed” book ( Publishers Weekly ). Examining the Third Reich through the lens of the women who were married to its leaders,  Nazi Wives explores the personal lives and motivations of the women in Hitler’s inner circle in a deep dive that is “exhaustive and studded with fascinating detail” ( The Tablet ).

By Joe Pappalardo

In the air above the French city of Saint-Nazaire—nicknamed “flak city” by Allied airmen because the U-boat pens below were protected by heavy antiaircraft gun—Staff Sergeant Maynard Harrison Smith became one of the most unlikely heroes of World War II. He singlehandedly saved six crewmen of his B-17 Flying Fortress bomber as it was riddled with more than 3,500 bullets and pieces of shrapnel before limping into an English airfield, where the craft immediately broke in two. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions. In this “wonderful yarn” ( Wall Street Journal ) by veteran journalist Joe Pappalardo, Harrison’s story becomes the story of the many airmen who served in World War II, often suffering a casualty rate of nearly 40 or 50 percent.

A Bookshop in Berlin

By Francoise Frenkel

A Jewish woman originally from Poland, Francoise Frenkel fulfilled a lifelong dream in 1921, opening Berlin’s first French bookshop. Unfortunately, that dream was to be short lived, as Nazi ideology was poisoning the nation, eventually driving Frenkel from Germany and into France as she fled Kristallnacht and the persecution of Hitler’s regime. Named a  People magazine Book of the Week, this “exceptional” ( Wall Street Journal ) book was quietly published in 1945 and only rediscovered years later, whereupon it became “a haunting tribute to survivors and those lost forever – and a reminder in our own troubled era, never to forget” ( People ).

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Battleground Pacific

By Sterling Mace, Nick Allen

The Pacific theater saw some of the bloodiest and most brutal fighting of the war, and the men of K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines—or K-3-5—saw some of the worst of it. In this “engrossing account of the vicious combat encountered by U.S. Marines in the Pacific theater of World War II” ( Kirkus Reviews ), Sterling Mace, one of the men who was there, tells his own unforgettable story, with the help of Nick Allen, the son of a combat rifleman who has spent much of his life interviewing combat veterans. Read it to see why the  New York Post says, “You see the word ‘hero’ tossed around a lot these days, but Mace and his comrades were the real deal.”

The Real Terry and the Pirates : How the Sino-Japanese Struggle Became America’s War

By Robert K. Wilcox

Today, millions of people see the Blue Angels, the most famous flight demonstration team in the world, perform every year. Yet most have never heard of the man who founded the Blue Angels, a World War II flying ace named Butch Voris, who flew fighters above some of the fiercest combat in the Pacific theater. Now, Robert K. Wilcox, a “master of aviation history” ( Booklist ) has set out to remedy that, introducing readers to a unique and exciting figure in aviation history whose contributions after the war, when he worked on the development of the F-14 Tomcat and the lunar lander, may even outshine those of his ace combat record.

10 Books About the North African Campaign of WWII

1941: The Year Germany Lost the War

By Andrew Nagorski

In early 1941, it looked like total victory was within Hitler’s grasp. Nazis controlled much of Europe, and England was withering beneath the bombing of the Blitz. In this “entertaining” ( Wall Street Journal ) book, bestselling historian Andrew Nagorski “brings keen psychological insights into the world leaders involved” ( Booklist ) in this fateful year which saw the United States and the Soviet Union joining the war effort against Germany, ultimately setting into motion the end of the war and the defeat of Hitler’s Germany.

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50 Books on World War II Recommended by John Keegan

At the end of his book, The Second World War , John Keegan offers a list of 50 books in English that “together provide a comprehensive picture of the most important events and themes of the war, which are readable and from which the general reader can derive his own picture of the war as a guide to deeper reading.” ((John Keegan, The Second World War  (New York: Viking, 1990), 596.)) Keegan admits this list is not all inclusive and it reflects his interests. For example, there is no book on the invasion of Poland in 1939.

The list is nearly 20 years old, but it is still valuable to those researching World War II. Some of these books are out-of-print, but most of them are readily available and have been republished several times which means Keegan put together a quality list.

1.)  The West Point Atlas of American Wars , Vol 2 by Colonel Vincent J. Esposito is the first book listed. The books has since been broken up, expanded, and re-branded as  The Second World War: Europe and the Mediterrean Atlas  and  The Second World War Asia and the Pacific Atlas .  The books have detailed maps of all campaigns, not just the ones involving Americans. Even better, the new version are spiral-bound, which stands up better against wear and tear.

Hitler and Nazi Germany

3.) Hitler’s War and the War Path  by David Irving is an interesting recommendation by Keegan. The book has been criticized for years as being “pro-Hitler”, yet Keegan recognizes it as one of the most import books on the time period. ((Keegan 1990, 596.)) In a later book, Keegan acknowledges the criticisms of the book, but he also says it “is unique in that it recounts the war exclusively from the German side.” ((John Keegan, The Battle for History: Re-Fighting World War II  (New York: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 50.)) Irving’s portrayal of Hitler is that of a man trying to do the best for his country. Keegan sees value in the book because of Irving’s work “in all the major German archives,” interviews with many survivors, and personal discovery of important documents. The major flaw Keegan sees in the book is “it is untouched by moral judgment.” ((Keegan 1996, 52.))

4.) The German Army and the Nazi Party, 1933-1939  by Robert O’Neill

5.) Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 1939-45  by Walter Warlimont, one of Hitler’s operation officers.

6.) Inside the Third Reich  by Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister from 1942.

7.) Hitler’s War Directives 1939-1945  by Hugh Trevor-Roper lists approximately 80 major war directives given by Hitler starting with the invasion plans for Poland in 1939 to the last stand of the Reich in 1945.

8.) The Last Days of Hitler  by Hugh Trevor-Roper

Beginnings and Early Battles

10.) To Lose a Battle: France 1940  by Alistair Horne is the final installment of Horne’s trilogy on the major conflicts between France and Germany between 1870 and 1940 ( The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, 1870-71 and The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 ).

11.) Why France Fell: The defeat of the French Army in 1940  by Guy Chapman

12.) Parades and Politics at Vichy   by Robert Paxton focuses on the French Army in 1940.

13.) The Breaking Wave: The Second World War in the Summer of 1940  by Telford Taylor focuses on the war between Britain and Germany during 1940 with particular attention to Hitler’s strategy.

14.) Hitler’s Strategy 1940-1941: The Balkan Clue  by Martin van Creveld

15.) The Struggle for Crete  by I. M. G. Stewart, a medical officer of one of the British battalions in the battle.

16.) The Desert Generals  by Correlli Barnett details the battles throughout North Africa, focusing the German and Allied generals.

The War in the East

18.) The Road to Stalingrad  by John Erickson

19.) The Road to Berlin  by John Erickson

20.) German Rule in Russia  by Alexander Dallin

21.) Comrades in Arms: British Aid to Russia 1941-1945  by Joan Beaumont provides details on not only the policies implemented in Russia by the Germans, but also the policies considered and rejected.

Britain’s Strategy On Its Own

22.) The Continental Commitment  by Michael Howard

23.) The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War  by Michael Howard

Anglo-American Strategy

24.) Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-1942  by Maurice Matloff

25.) Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1943-1944  by Maurice Matloff

26.) Command Decisions  by Kent Roberts Greenfield focuses on key decisions that had long-term repercussions during the war. Written for leaders, the book analyzes the information available to the commanders leading up to and during the decisions.

Code Cracking and Intelligence

28.) The Hut Six Story  by Gordon Welchman focuses on a British mathematician who was instrumental in breaking the German’s coded messages.

29.) Ultra Goes to War  by Ronald Lewin focuses on how the Allies intercepted and decoding German transmissions during the war.

30.) The American Magic: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan  by Ronald Lewin focuses on the use of encoding, decoding, and decoys between America and Japan.

31.) Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre 1939-1945  by Patrick Beesly focuses on how the British utilized Enigma decoding to combat the German’s U-boat threat.

32.) Ultra in the West: The Normandy Campaign of 1944-45  by Ralph Bennett, a retired British intelligence major, details how the Allies used Ultra in campaigns throughout France and Germany. Bennett’s own experience as hands-on, as he was responsible for translating and annotating the decoded messages from the German Army and Air Force.

The War in the Pacific

33.) A History of Modern Japan by Richard Storry

34.) Empires in the Balance: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies to April 1942 by H. P. Willmott

35.) Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan by Ronald Spector

36.) Coral Sea, Midway and Submarine Actions, May 1942-August 1942 by Samuel Eliot Morison

37.) Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 by Christopher Thorne focuses on how Western colonialism and imperialism played a role in the war against Japan.

Wartime Economies and Efforts to Disrupt

39.) The Design and Development of Weapons by M. M. Postan, which is expensive and out-of-print but really cheap on the Kindle .

40.) Keegan values Bomber Command by Max Hastings “for its study of the effects of the campgain both on the Germans and crews who took part.” ((Keegan 1990, 598.))

41.) Donitz: The Last Fuhrer by Peter Padfield provides a detailed look at the man who rose to Grand Admiral and led the U-boat campaign against the Allies throughout World War II.

The North-West Europe Campgain

42.) Keegan credits The Struggle for Europe by Chester Wilmot for effectively inventing “the modern method of writing contemporary military history, which combines political, economic and strategic analysis with eye-witness accounts of combat.” ((Keegan 1990, 598.)) While Keegan admits that some of Wilmot’s judgements are no longer valid, he believes the book remains “the supreme achievement of Second World War historiography.” ((Keegan 1990, 598.))

Resistence and Life Under Nazi Rule

43.) The Shadow War: European Resistance, 1939-1945  by Henri Michel

44.) The Embattled Mountain by F. W. Deakin, a memoir of a British paratrooper who found himself in the middle the Yugoslav partisan movement against Nazi occupation.

45.) Life with the Enemy: Collaboration and Resistance in Hitler’s Europe, 1939-1945 by Werner Rings focuses on Switzerland’s involvement in the war.

46.)  The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945  by Gerald Reitlinger focuses on the early stages of persecution against the Jews, tracing sentiments, legislation, and events through the end of the war.

Personal Memoirs

48.) Wartime by Milovan Djilas, an officer in Tito’s Yugoslavia, providing a firsthand account of the partisan campaign.

49.) Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945 by Marie Vassiltchikov, a 20-something Russian princess who worked in the German Foreign office and then as a nurse during the war, focusing on the lead up and then the effects of the failed 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler.

50.) The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg, the memoir of a British author who married a German and lived in Berlin before and during the war.

You might also be interested in 8 books for the Military History Undergrad .

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Scott Manning

25 novels and biographies about World War II

• Post author: Mandi
• Post published: July 6, 2020
• Post category: Good Books

2013 was marked by an obsession with young adult dystopian novels, and last year was the year of escapism (and also the year I discovered that not all contemporary fiction is as cheesy as most of the contemporary Christian fiction I read in my early 20s…but that’s a post for another day). While I have several reading goals this year, the year as a whole just might end up being characterized by books about World War II.

I’ve always been a fan of both history and historical fiction, and last year I picked up a couple of different stories that sparked a desire to read more and learn more about World War II. Reading Unbroken solidified that new passion, and I think I could easily read nothing by WWII biographies and fiction this year and be very happy!

This list includes both the books I’ve read and recommended as well as a (much longer) list of the books I’d like to read. I’m not sure I’ll make it through this whole list this year, but we’ll see.

Table of Contents

WWII Books I’ve Read and Recommend

• Unbroken: A World War II Book of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption   by Laura Hillenbrand
• The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived The Holocaust by Edith Hahn Beer
• The Hiding Place  by Corrie Ten Boom
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet   by Jamie Ford
• Between Shades of Gray   by Ruta Sepetys
• Code Name Verity (Code Name Verity #1)   by Elizabeth Wein
• Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
• The Kommandant’s Girl by Pam Jenoff
• Far to Go by Alison Pick

WWII Books on My Reading List

• The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics   by Daniel James Brown
• Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons from an Extraordinary Life  by Louis Zamperini and David Rensin
• No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II by Mitchell Zuckoff
• Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II by Vicki Croke
• Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue by Kathryn J. Atwood
• Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity #2)   by Elizabeth Wein
• The Boy in the Striped Pajamas  by John Boyne
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult
• The Paris Architect: A Novel by Charles Belfoure
• Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two by Joseph Bruchac
• The Soldier’s Wife by Margaret Leroy
• Tallgrass by Sandra Dallas
• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Classical conversations

Do you like this genre of books? Which of these have you read? Any books you’d add? 

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29 Best World War II, Biography & Autobiography Books

• Nelson Mandela
• Brené Brown
• Stephen King
• Tim Ferriss
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• Barack Obama
• Biographies
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• Money & Finance
• Mystery Thriller & Suspense
• Personal Development
• Politics & Social Sciences
• Relationships
• Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Startups & Business & Careers
• Teen & Young Adult
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Table of Contents

World War II, Biography & Autobiography is a popular category for many book lovers. Our team at Speechify has curated a list of the top World War II, Biography & Autobiography audiobooks everyone must read.

See the top 29 World War II, Biography & Autobiography audiobooks below.

Saving My Enemy

• By: Bob Welch
• Narrator: Grover Gardner
• Length: 9 hours 10 minutes
• Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
• Publish date: January 01, 2021
• Language: English
• 4.65 (80 ratings)

Saving My Enemy is a Band of Brothers sequel like no other.

Guilt nearly killed one of the celebrated Band of Brothers members, Sgt. Don Malarkey. He was a hero for his service in World War II, especially in the Battle of the Bulge, yet he came to the brink of suicide, haunted by the memories of the German soldiers he killed.

Across the ocean, Fritz Engelbert was shackled in shame for having been a pawn of Hitler–he too had fought in the Battle of the Bulge–but for the Germans. He could not find peace.

Saving My Enemy is the touching true story of two soldiers on opposite sides of WWII whose unlikely friendship, forged in their eighties, dissolves six decades of guilt and shame that had pushed both men to despair.

“I contend that every vet crying over his beer in some American Legion hall about something that happened seventy years ago is doing so not because of lost buddies, but because of lost honor, of shame. Long after World War II was over, Don helped restore that honor in Fritz. And Fritz did the same for Don. I was gripped by this story.”

–Jeff Struecker, a former US Army Ranger who heard this story directly from the men’s families

Malarkey and Engelbert had completely different backgrounds, but their stories collided amid the largest and bloodiest single battle fought by the USA in WWII–the Battle of the Bulge. Beneath blankets of snow, the earth was hardened like iron. With temperatures dipping below zero degrees Fahrenheit, the conditions were as brutal as any in the history of warfare. This was Germany’s last hope to stop the Allies and they were desperate for victory.

Fritz, nineteen, a private in the Panzer-Lerh-Division, had the chief duty of being a krad messenger (on a military motorcycle). Don, twenty-three, is a sergeant in E Company, 506th Regiment, and is living in a foxhole in the woods overlooking villages below where Fritz and other German soldiers are awaiting the fight. Both men took quiet moments of introspection. Fritz remembered a dead American soldier he saw alongside the road and he “thought of his parents who would miss him dearly” and felt a certain “brotherhood with the enemy.” Two weeks later, as Easy Company pushed Germany back, Don had a similar experience–he had just shot and killed a German soldier and was shocked to find he was only sixteen. “I looked at his face, eyes fixed forever. A face that I wouldn’t forget. Not the next day. Not the next month. Not ever.”

Welch gives intimate glimpses into these men’s souls as they fought each other during the war, lived in despair and guilt in the decades that followed, and finally found forgiveness and peace through each other. Don and Fritz’s story is one of hope and inspiration that will not be forgotten.

Days of Steel Rain

• By: Brent E. Jones
• Narrator: Dan Woren
• Length: 13 hours 8 minutes
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Publish date: May 11, 2021
• 4.51 (94 ratings)

This intimate true account of Americans at war follows the epic drama of an unlikely group of men forced to work together in the face of an increasingly desperate enemy during the final year of World War II. Sprawling across the Pacific, this untold story follows the crew of the newly-built “vengeance ship” USS Astoria , named for her sunken predecessor lost earlier in the war. At its center lies U.S. Navy Captain George Dyer, who vowed to return to action after suffering a horrific wound. He accepted the ship’s command in 1944, knowing it would be his last chance to avenge his injuries and salvage his career. Yet with the nation’s resources and personnel stretched thin by the war, he found that just getting the ship into action would prove to be a battle. Tensions among the crew flared from the start. Astoria ‘s sailors and Marines were a collection of replacements, retreads, and older men. Some were broken by previous traumatic combat, most had no desire to be in the war, yet all found themselves fighting an enemy more afraid of surrender than death. The reluctant ship was called to respond to challenges that its men never could have anticipated. From a typhoon where the ocean was enemy to daring rescue missions, a gallant turn at Iwo Jima, and the ultimate crucible against the Kamikaze at Okinawa, they endured the worst of the final year of the war at sea. Days of Steel Rain brings to life more than a decade of research and firsthand interviews, depicting with unprecedented insight the singular drama of a captain grappling with an untested crew and men who had endured enough amidst some of the most brutal fighting of World War II. Throughout, Brent Jones fills the narrative with secret diaries, memoirs, letters, interpersonal conflicts, and the innermost thoughts of the Astoria men–and more than 80 photographs that have never before been published. Days of Steel Rain weaves an intimate, unforgettable portrait of leadership, heroism, endurance, and redemption.

A Bright and Blinding Sun

• By: Marcus Brotherton
• Narrator: L. J. Ganser
• Length: 8 hours 20 minutes
• Publish date: May 24, 2022
• 4.51 (109 ratings)

From a New York Times bestselling author comes an incredible true war story of an underage soldier who experiences his first love and loss on the battlefields of Bataan and Corregidor–perfect for fans of The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz and Unbroken . Joe Johnson Jr. ran away from home at the age of 12, hopping a freight train at the height of the Great Depression. He managed to talk his way into the U.S. Army two years later. Seeking freedom and adventure, he was sent to the Philippines. Adrift in spirit, Joe visited a teenage prostitute, and they became unlikely, smitten allies. Yet when the Japanese attacked on December 8, 1941, their hopes of being together had to wait. Joe and his fellow soldiers fought for four brutal months in Bataan and Corregidor, until they were forced to surrender. The boy endured years of horror as a prisoner of war, only dreaming about seeing again the girl he’d come to love. This lyrically written and deeply encouraging saga will remind you that every life can be lifted, forgiveness is the patron of restoration, and redemption is available to all.

Bloody Ridge and Beyond

• By: Marlin Groft
• Narrator: Joe Barrett
• Length: 12 hours 13 minutes
• Publish date: January 01, 2014
• 4.44 (143 ratings)

A story of sacrifice and defiance at Guadalcanal, from the New York Times bestselling coauthor of A Higher Call and Biggest Brother

On the killing ground that was the island of Guadalcanal, a two-thousand-yard-long ridge rose from the jungle canopy. Behind it lay the all-important air base of Henderson Field. And if Henderson Field fell, it would mean the almost certain death or capture of all 12,500 marines on the island.

But the marines positioned on the ridge were no normal fighters–they were the hard-fighting men of Edson’s Raiders, an elite fighting unit within an already elite Marine Corps. Handpicked for their toughness and submitted to a rigorous training program to weed out those less fit, they were the best of the best.

For two hellish nights in September 1942, about 840 marines–commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Austin “Red Mike” Edson–fought one of the most pivotal battles of World War II in the Pacific, clinging desperately to their position on what would soon be known as Bloody Ridge.

Wave after wave of attacking Japanese soldiers were repelled by the Raiders, who knew that defeat and retreat were simply not options. In the end, and against all odds, the defenders prevailed.

Bloody Ridge and Beyond is the story of the First Marine Raider Battalion, which showed courage and valor in the face of overwhelming numbers, as told by Marlin Groft, a man who was a member of this incredible fighting force.

The Indomitable Florence Finch

• By: Robert J. Mrazek
• Length: 10 hours 19 minutes
• Publish date: July 21, 2020
• 4.43 (410 ratings)

The New York Times bestselling author of Fly Girls shares the riveting story of an unsung World War II hero who saved countless American lives in the Philippines. When Florence Finch died at the age of 101, few of her Ithaca, NY neighbors knew that this unassuming Filipina native was a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, whose courage and sacrifice were unsurpassed in the Pacific War against Japan. Long accustomed to keeping her secrets close in service of the Allies, she waited fifty years to reveal the story of those dramatic and harrowing days to her own children. Florence was an unlikely warrior. She relied on her own intelligence and fortitude to survive on her own from the age of seven, facing bigotry as a mixed-race mestiza with the dual heritage of her American serviceman father and Filipina mother. As the war drew ever closer to the Philippines, Florence fell in love with a dashing American naval intelligence agent, Charles “Bing” Smith. In the wake of Bing’s sudden death in battle, Florence transformed from a mild-mannered young wife into a fervent resistance fighter. She conceived a bold plan to divert tons of precious fuel from the Japanese army, which was then sold on the black market to provide desperately needed medicine and food for hundreds of American POWs. In constant peril of arrest and execution, Florence fought to save others, even as the Japanese police closed in. With a wealth of original sources including taped interviews, personal journals, and unpublished memoirs, The Indomitable Florence Finch unfolds against the Bataan Death March, the fall of Corregidor, and the daily struggle to survive a brutal occupying force. Award-winning military historian and former Congressman Robert J. Mrazek brings to light this long-hidden American patriot. The Indomitable Florence Finch is the story of the transcendent bravery of a woman who belongs in America’s pantheon of war heroes.

Fierce Valor

• By: Jared Frederick
• Narrator: Chris Abell
• Length: 9 hours 39 minutes
• Publish date: January 01, 2022
• 4.42 (75 ratings)

Fans of Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers will be drawn to this complex portrait of the controversial Ronald Speirs, an iconic commander of celebrated Easy Company during D-Day and beyond, whose ferocious courage and drive across three wars were matched by a devotion to duty and a hidden heart shadowed by lost love.

Fight Like You Mean to Win

His comrades called him “Killer.” Of the elite paratroopers who served in the venerated “Band of Brothers” during the Second World War, none were more enigmatic than Ronald Speirs. Rumored to have gunned down enemy prisoners and even one of his own disobedient sergeants, Speirs became a foxhole legend among his troops. But who was the real Lieutenant Speirs?

In Fierce Valor, historians Jared Frederick and Erik Dorr unveil the fuller story of Easy Company’s longest-serving commander. Tested by trials of extreme training, military rivalry, and lost love, Speirs’s international odyssey begins as an immigrant child in Prohibition-era Boston and continues through the bloody campaigns of France, Holland, and Germany. But 1945 did not mark an end to Speirs’s military adventures. Uncovered by sharp scholarship, his lesser-known exploits in Korea, the Cold War, and embattled Laos also come to light for the first time.

Packed with groundbreaking research, Fierce Valor unveils a compelling portrait of an officer defined by boldness on the battlefield and the inherent costs of war. His story serves as a telling reminder that few soldiers escape the power of their own pasts.

Every Man a Hero

• By: Ray Lambert
• Narrator: Kaleo Griffith
• Length: 7 hours 39 minutes
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Publish date: May 28, 2019
• 4.39 (1287 ratings)

AN EXTRAORDINARY AND UNFORGETTABLE NEW FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF D-DAY

Seventy-five years ago, he hit Omaha Beach with the first wave. Now Ray Lambert, ninety-eight years old, delivers one of the most remarkable memoirs of our time, a tour-de-force of remembrance evoking his role as a decorated World War II medic who risked his life to save the heroes of D-Day.

At five a.m. on June 6, 1944, U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Ray Lambert worked his way through a throng of nervous soldiers to a wind-swept deck on a troopship off the coast of Normandy, France. A familiar voice cut through the wind and rumble of the ship’s engines. “Ray!” called his brother, Bill. Ray, head of a medical team for the First Division’s famed 16th Infantry Regiment, had already won a silver star in 1943 for running through German lines to rescue trapped men, one of countless rescues he’d made in North Africa and Sicily.

“This is going to be the worst yet,” Ray told his brother, who served alongside him throughout the war.

“If I don’t make it,” said Bill, “take care of my family.”

“I will,” said Ray. He thought about his wife and son-a boy he had yet to see. “Same for me.” The words were barely out of Ray’s mouth when a shout came from below.

To the landing craft!

The brothers parted. Their destinies lay ten miles away, on the bloodiest shore of Normandy, a plot of Omaha Beach ironically code named “Easy Red.”

Less than five hours later, after saving dozens of lives and being wounded at least three separate times, Ray would lose consciousness in the shallow water of the beach under heavy fire. He would wake on the deck of a landing ship to find his battered brother clinging to life next to him.

Every Man a Hero is the unforgettable story not only of what happened in the incredible and desperate hours on Omaha Beach, but of the bravery and courage that preceded them, throughout the Second World War–from the sands of Africa, through the treacherous mountain passes of Sicily, and beyond to the greatest military victory the world has ever known.

American Warlords

• By: Jonathan W. Jordan
• Narrator: Malcolm Hillgartner
• Length: 19 hours 47 minutes
• Publish date: January 01, 2015
• 4.38 (241 ratings)

American Warlords is the story of the greatest “team of rivals” since the days of Lincoln.

In a lifetime shaped by politics, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proved himself a master manipulator of Congress, the press, and the public. But when war in Europe and Asia threatened America’s shores, FDR found himself in a world turned upside down, where his friends became his foes, his enemies his allies. To help wage democracy’s first “total war,” he turned to one of history’s most remarkable triumvirates.

Henry Stimson, an old-money Republican from Long Island, rallied to FDR’s banner to lead the Army as Secretary of War and championed innovative weapons that helped shape our world today. General George C. Marshall argued with Roosevelt over grand strategy, but he built the world’s greatest war machine and willingly sacrificed his dream of leading the invasion of Europe that made his protege, Dwight Eisenhower, a legend. Admiral Ernest J. King, a hard-drinking, irascible fighter who “destroyed” Pearl Harbor in a prewar naval exercise, understood how to fight Japan, but he also battled the Army, the Air Force, Douglas MacArthur, and his British allies as they moved armies and fleets across the globe.

These commanders threw off sparks whenever they clashed: generals against politicians, Army versus Navy. But those sparks lit the fire of victory. During four years of bitter warfare, FDR’s lieutenants learned to set aside deep personal, political, and professional differences and pull a nation through the twentieth century’s darkest days.

Encircling Roosevelt’s warlords—and sometimes bitterly at odds with them—was a colorful cast of the Second World War’s giants: Winston Churchill, MacArthur, Josef Stalin, Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Charles de Gaulle. These and other larger-than-life figures enrich a sweeping story of an era brimming with steel, fire, and blood.

Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources, American Warlords goes behind closed doors to give readers an intimate, often surprising view of titans who led America from isolation to the summit of global power. Written in a robust, engaging style, author Jonathan W. Jordan offers a vivid portrait of four extraordinary Americans in the eye of the war’s hurricane.

The Jersey Brothers

• By: Sally Mott Freeman
• Narrator: Cassandra Campbell
• Length: 18 hours 41 minutes
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Publish date: January 01, 2017
• 4.37 (1198 ratings)

This extraordinary adventure of three brothers at the center of the most dramatic turning points of World War II is “liable to break the hearts of Unbroken fans, and it’s all true” ( The New York Times ). They are three brothers, all Navy men, who end up coincidentally and extraordinarily at the epicenter of three of the war’s most crucial moments. Bill, a naval intelligence officer, is tapped by FDR to set up and run his secret map room in the White House basement. Benny is the gunnery and antiaircraft officer on USS Enterprise , one of the few ships to escape Pearl Harbor and, by the end of 1942, the only aircraft carrier left in the Pacific to defend against the Japanese. Barton, the youngest, gets a plum commission in the Navy Supply Corps because his mother wants him out of harm’s way. But this protection plan backfires when Barton is sent to Manila and listed as wounded and missing after a Japanese attack. Now it is up to Bill and Benny to find and rescue him… Based on a decade of research drawn from archives around the world, interviews with fellow shipmates and POWs, and half-forgotten letters stashed away in attics, The Jersey Brothers is “a captivating tour-de-force” ( San Antonio Express-News ) that whisks readers from America’s front porches to Roosevelt’s White House to the battlefronts of the Pacific. But at its heart The Jersey Brothers is a family story, written by one of its own in intimate, novelistic detail. It is a remarkable tale of agony and triumph; of an ordinary young man who shows extraordinary courage as the enemy does everything short of killing him; and of brotherly love tested under the tortures of war. “ The Jersey Brothers shines in singularity. A blend of history, family saga and family questions, Freeman’s book [is] a winning and moving success, and adds an authoritative entry to the… vast canon of war literature” ( Richmond Times Dispatch) .

Whatever It Took

• By: Henry Langrehr
• Narrator: Mike Ortego
• Length: 6 hours 28 minutes
• Publish date: May 05, 2020
• 4.34 (298 ratings)

Published to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day, an unforgettable never-before-told first-person account of World War II: the true story of an American paratrooper who survived D-Day, was captured and imprisoned in a Nazi work camp, and made a daring escape to freedom.

Now at 95, one of the few living members of the Greatest Generation shares his experiences at last in one of the most remarkable World War II stories ever told. As the Allied Invasion of Normandy launched in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1944, Henry Langrehr, an American paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, was among the thousands of Allies who parachuted into occupied France. Surviving heavy anti-aircraft fire, he crashed through the glass roof of a greenhouse in Sainte-Mere-Eglise. While many of the soldiers in his unit died, Henry and other surviving troops valiantly battled enemy tanks to a standstill. Then, on June 29th, Henry was captured by the Nazis. The next phase of his incredible journey was beginning.

Kept for a week in the outer ring of a death camp, Henry witnessed the Nazis’ unspeakable brutality–the so-called Final Solution, with people marched to their deaths, their bodies discarded like cords of wood. Transported to a work camp, he endured horrors of his own when he was forced to live in unbelievable squalor and labor in a coal mine with other POWs. Knowing they would be worked to death, he and a friend made a desperate escape. When a German soldier cornered them in a barn, the friend was fatally shot; Henry struggled with the soldier, killing him and taking his gun. Perilously traveling westward toward Allied controlled land on foot, Henry faced the great ethical and moral dilemmas of war firsthand, needing to do whatever it took to survive. Finally, after two weeks behind enemy lines, he found an American unit and was rescued.

Awaiting him at home was Arlene, who, like millions of other American women, went to work in factories and offices to build the armaments Henry and the Allies needed for victory. Whatever It Took is her story, too, bringing to life the hopes and fears of those on the homefront awaiting their loved ones to return.

A tale of heroism, hope, and survival featuring 30 photographs, Whatever It Took is a timely reminder of the human cost of freedom and a tribute to unbreakable human courage and spirit in the darkest of times.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Hanns and Rudolf

• By: Thomas Harding
• Narrator: Mark Meadows
• Length: 8 hours 52 minutes
• Publish date: January 01, 2013
• 4.31 (1736 ratings)

The untold story of the man who brought a mastermind of the final solution to justice

May 1945. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. One of the lead investigators is Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who is now serving in the British Army. Rudolf Hoss is his most elusive target. As kommandant of Auschwitz, Hoss not only oversaw the murder of more than one million men, women, and children, he was the man who perfected Hitler’s program of mass extermination. Hoss is on the run across a continent in ruins, the one man whose testimony can ensure justice at Nuremberg.

Hanns and Rudolf reveals for the very first time the full, exhilarating account of Hoss’ capture, an encounter with repercussions that echo to this day. Moving from the Middle Eastern campaigns of the First World War to bohemian Berlin in the 1920s to the horror of the concentration camps and the trials in Belsen and Nuremberg, it tells the story of two German men–one Jewish, one Catholic–whose lives diverged and intersected in an astonishing way.

Coffin Corner Boys

• By: Carole Engle Avriett
• Narrator: Patrick Lawlor
• Length: 6 hours 48 minutes
• Publish date: January 01, 2018
• 4.17 (336 ratings)

As a young band of brothers flies over German-occupied France, they come under heavy fire. Their B-17 is shot down and the airmen–stumbling through fields and villages–scatter across Europe. Some struggled to flee for safety. Others were captured immediately and imprisoned. Now, for the first time, their incredible story of grit, survival, and reunion is told.

In 1944, George Starks was just a nineteen-year-old kid from Florida when he and his high school buddies enlisted in the US military. They wanted to join the action of WWII. George was assigned to the Ninety-Second Bomb Group, in which the median age was twenty-two, and on his crew’s first bombing mission together received the most vulnerable spot of a B-17 mission configuration: low squadron, low group, flying number six in the bomber-box formation.

Airmen called George’s position the “Coffin Corner” because here exposure was most likely to draw hostile fire. Sure enough, George’s plane was shot down by a German Fw 190, and he jumped at 25,000 feet for the “first and only time,” as he tells the story. He landed near Vitry-en-Perthois to begin a 300-mile trek through the dangers of war-torn France towards the freedom of neutral Switzerland.

Through waist-deep snow, seering exhaustion, and close encounters with Nazis, George repeated to himself the mantra “just one more day.” He battled to keep walking. His comrades were scattered all across Europe and experienced places as formidable as German POW camps and as hospitable as Spain, each crew member always wondering about the fate of the others.

After the war, George made two vows: he would never lose touch with his men again and one day would attempt to thank those who had risked their lives to save his. Despite passage of time and demands of career and family, he accomplished both. He reunited with his crew and then twenty-five years later, returned to France to locate as many as he could of the brave souls who had helped him evade the enemy.

Join George as he retraces his steps to freedom and discover the amazing stories of sacrifice and survival and how ten young American boys plus their French helpers became heroes.

The Art of Resistance

• By: Justus Rosenberg
• Narrator: Rob Shapiro
• Length: 7 hours 36 minutes
• Publish date: January 28, 2020
• 4.11 (467 ratings)

An unforgettable World War II memoir set in Nazi-occupied France and filled with romance and adventure: a former Eastern European Jew remembers his flight from the Holocaust and his extraordinary four years in the French underground. Justus Rosenberg, now 98, has taught literature at Bard College for the past fifty years.

In 1937, as the Nazis gained control and anti-Semitism spread in the Free City of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, penniless and cut off from contact with his family in Poland, Justus fled south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist in Marseille who was helping thousands of men and women escape the Nazis, among them artists and intellectuals Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst.

With his German background, understanding of French cultural, and fluency in several languages, including English, Justus became an invaluable member of Fry’s refugee network as a spy and scout. The spry blond who looked even younger than his age flourished in the underground, handling counterfeit documents, secret passwords, and black market currency, surveying escape routes, and dealing with avaricious gangsters. When Fry was eventually forced to leave France, his trusted colleague Justus–Gussie, as he was affectionately known–could not get out. For the next four years, Justus relied on his wits and skills to escape captivity, survive several close calls with death, and continue his fight against the Nazis, working with the French Resistance and eventually the United States Army. At the war’s end, Justus emigrated to America and built a new life.

Justus’ story is a powerful saga of bravery, daring, adventure, and survival with the soul of a spy thriller. Reflecting on his past, Justus sees his life as a confluence of circumstances. As he writes, “I survived the war through a rare combination of good fortune, resourcefulness, optimism, and, most important, the kindness of many good people.”

Those Who Fall

• By: John Muirhead
• Narrator: Robertson Dean
• Length: 10 hours 53 minutes
• 4.07 (83 ratings)

As a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber pilot, John Muirhead led missions into northern Italy, Germany, and Bulgaria during World War II. Ultimately, he was shot down and taken prisoner.

John Muirhead’s re-creation of those years is a breathtaking mingling of ravaging horrors and silent, surreal images; of raw, tumultuous memory and elegantly paced narrative; of lightening humor and measured reflection.

Seldom has a reader been made to feel terror so viscerally. Rarely has a reader ascended the skies so thrillingly. And never has one felt so close to the numbing fear, the boredom, the eerie beauty, and the dislocated sensibilities of war in the air as in Those Who Fall .

Moondrop to Gascony

• By: Anne-Marie Walters
• Narrator: Nicola Barber
• Length: 9 hours 41 minutes
• Publish date: January 01, 2016
• 4.07 (57 ratings)

On a cold, moonlit night in January 1944, Anne-Marie Walters, just twenty years old, parachuted into southwest France to work with the Resistance in preparation for the long-awaited Allied invasion. The daughter of a British father and a French mother, she was to act as a courier for George Starr, head of the “Wheelwright” circuit of the Special Operations Executive. Over the next seven months, Walters crisscrossed the region, carrying messages, delivering explosives, arranging the escape of downed airmen, and receiving parachute drops of arms and personnel in the dead of night–living in constant fear of capture and torture by the Gestapo. Then, on the very eve of liberation, she was sent off on foot over the Pyrenees to Spain, carrying urgent dispatches for London.

Anne-Marie Walters wrote Moondrop to Gascony immediately after the war, while the events were still vivid in her mind. It is a tale of high adventure, comradeship and kindness, of betrayals and appalling atrocities, and of the often unremarked courage of many ordinary French men and women who risked their lives to help drive German armies from French soil. And through it all shines her’s quiet courage, a keen sense of humor and, above all, her pure zest for life.

For this new edition, David Hewson, a former regular-army officer interested in military history, adds biographical details for the main characters, identifies the real people behind the code names, and provides background information. He also tells about Anne-Marie Walters’ early life and what happened to her in the postwar years.

The Diggers of Colditz

• By: Jack Champ
• Narrator: Steve Shanahan
• Length: 9 hours 31 minutes
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
• Publish date: January 01, 2019
• 4.06 (39 ratings)

Colditz Castle was Nazi Germany’s infamous ‘escape-proof’ wartime prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful Allied prisoners were sent. Despite having more guards than inmates, Australian Lieutenant Jack Champ and other prisoners tirelessly carried out their campaign to escape from the massive floodlit stronghold, by any means necessary. In this riveting account – by turns humorous, heartfelt and tragic – historian Colin Burgess and Lieutenant Jack Champ, from the point of view of the prisoners themselves, tell the story of the twenty Australians who made this castle their ‘home’, and the plans they made that were so crazy that some even achieved the seemingly impossible – escape! ‘A stirring testimony of mateship . . . We are often on tenterhooks, always impressed by their determination, industry and courage’ Australian Book Review

Sisters in Resistance

• By: Tilar J. Mazzeo
• Narrator: Lisa Flanagan
• Length: 8 hours 29 minutes
• Publish date: June 21, 2022
• 4.06 (251 ratings)

In a tale as twisted as any spy thriller, discover how three women delivered critical evidence of Axis war crimes to Allied forces during World War II: “Mazzeo is a fascinating storyteller” ( New York Journal of Books ). In 1944, news of secret diaries kept by Italy’s Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, had permeated public consciousness. What wasn’t reported, however, was how three women–a Fascist’s daughter, a German spy, and an American socialite–risked their lives to ensure the diaries would reach the Allies, who would later use them as evidence against the Nazis at Nuremberg. In 1944, Benito Mussolini’s daughter, Edda, gave Hitler and her father an ultimatum: release her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, from prison, or risk her leaking her husband’s journals to the press. To avoid the peril of exposing Nazi lies, Hitler and Mussolini hunted for the diaries for months, determined to destroy them. Hilde Beetz, a German spy, was deployed to seduce Ciano to learn the diaries’ location and take them from Edda. As the seducer became the seduced, Hilde converted as a double agent, joining forces with Edda to save Ciano from execution. When this failed, Edda fled to Switzerland with Hilde’s daring assistance to keep Ciano’s final wish: to see the diaries published for use by the Allies. When American spymaster Allen Dulles learned of Edda’s escape, he sent in socialite Frances De Chollet, an “accidental” spy, telling her to find Edda, gain her trust, and, crucially, hand the diaries over to the Americans. Together, they succeeded in preserving one of the most important documents of WWII. Drawing from in-depth research and first-person interviews with people who witnessed these events, Mazzeo gives readers a riveting look into this little-known moment in history and shows how, without Edda, Hilde, and Frances’s involvement, certain convictions at Nuremberg would never have been possible.

The Last Days of Hitler, 7th Edition

• By: Hugh Trevor-Roper
• Narrator: Steven Crossley
• Length: 8 hours 56 minutes
• 4.05 (2 ratings)

In late 1945 the fate of Adolf Hitler was a complete mystery. Missing for four months, he had simply vanished. Hugh Trevor-Roper, a British intelligence officer, was given the task of solving the mystery. With access to American counterintelligence files and German prisoners, his brilliant detective work proved finally that Hitler had killed himself in Berlin. It also produced one of the most fascinating history books ever written.

Originally published in 1947, The Last Days of Hitler tells the extraordinary story of those final days of the Thousand-Year Reich–a dramatic, carefully planned finale to a terrible chapter of history.

In Solitary Witness

• By: Gordon Charles Zahn
• Narrator: Pete Cross
• Length: 9 hours 28 minutes
• Publisher: Dreamscape Media
• Publish date: November 26, 2019
• 4.04 (1 ratings)

This is the book that discovered Franz JA$?gerstA$?tter and his inspiring story of unyielding resistance to Nazi orders and his commitment to the dictates of conscience even at the cost of life itself. When German troops moved into Austria in 1938, JA$?gerstA$?tter was the only man in his village to vote against the Anschluss (Annexation of Austria). Although he was not involved in any political organization and did, in fact, undergo one brief period of military training, he remained openly anti-Nazi and declared he would not fight in Hitler’s war. This twentieth-century martyr, a husband and father of three, was beheaded for his refusal to serve a ruler his conscience could not accept.

The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line

• By: Mari K. Eder
• Narrator: Bernadette Dunne
• Length: 10 hours 2 minutes
• 4.02 (1079 ratings)

For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line takes you inside the lives and experiences of fifteen unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII–in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line are the heroes of the Greatest Generation that you hardly ever hear about. These women who did extraordinary things didn’t expect thanks and shied away from medals and recognition. Despite their amazing accomplishments, they’ve gone mostly unheralded and unrewarded. No longer. These are the women of World War II who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen–in and out of uniform.

Liane B. Russell fled Austria with nothing and later became a renowned US scientist whose research on the effects of radiation on embryos made a difference to thousands of lives. Gena Turgel was a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Bergen-Belsen and cared for the young Anne Frank, who was dying of typhus. Gena survived and went on to write a memoir and spent her life educating children about the Holocaust. Ida and Louise Cook were British sisters who repeatedly smuggled out jewelry and furs and served as sponsors for refugees, and they also established temporary housing for immigrant families in London.

Retired US Army Major General Mari K. Eder wrote this book because she knew their stories needed to be told–and the sooner the better. For theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

Frances Langford

• By: Ben Ohmart
• Narrator: Kathy Garver
• Length: 3 hours 14 minutes
• Publish date: January 01, 2020
• 4 (3 ratings)

Everyone was “In the Mood for Love,” when Frances Langford, renowned Big Band singer with a rich contralto voice, rose from performing at hometown parties in Mulberry, Florida, to Broadway, Old Time Radio, and movies during Hollywood’s Golden Era. Her signature song carried her from turntables to troops in World War Two, and then into the stuff of legends.

From the airwaves on Louella Parson’s Hollywood Hotel, Rudy Vallee’s The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour, and Dick Powell’s Campana Serenade (1942-1943), Frances achieved nationwide fame as Don Ameche’s insufferable wife, Blanche, on The Bickersons (1946-1951).

Her beauty eclipsed her broadcasts, when the movies plucked her from speakers to screens. Her film debut in 1935 in Every Night at Eight led to Broadway Melody of 1936, in which she popularized “Broadway Rhythm” and “You Are My Lucky Star;” Born to Dance in 1936; and in 1942 in Yankee Doodle Dandy with James Cagney, in which she sang the rousing “Over There.”

For the first time, her personal interviews with author-publisher Ben Ohmart bring the treasured memories from her past to light. Return with her to the front lines from 1941 into the 1980s with Bob Hope and Jerry Colonna on USO tours through Europe, North Africa, and the South Pacific, entertaining thousands of GIs throughout the world.

Frances Langford. More than a voice. More than the GIs’ choice.

Code Name: Lise

• By: Larry Loftis
• Narrator: Kate Reading
• Length: 9 hours 59 minutes
• 3.97 (5352 ratings)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Goodreads Choice Awards semifinalist Florida Book Awards Silver Medalist Featured in The New York Times , The Atlantic , Time , New York Newsday , and on Today ! Best Nonfiction Books to Read in 2019– Woman’s Day The Best Nonfiction Books Coming Out This Year– BookBub “A nonfiction thriller.”– The Wall Street Journal From New York Times and international bestselling author of the “gripping” (Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author) Into the Lion’s Mouth comes the extraordinary true story of Odette Sansom, the British spy who operated in occupied France and fell in love with her commanding officer during World War II–perfect for fans of Unbroken , The Nightingale , and Code Girls . The year is 1942, and World War II is in full swing. Odette Sansom decides to follow in her war hero father’s footsteps by becoming an SOE agent to aid Britain and her beloved homeland, France. Five failed attempts and one plane crash later, she finally lands in occupied France to begin her mission. It is here that she meets her commanding officer Captain Peter Churchill. As they successfully complete mission after mission, Peter and Odette fall in love. All the while, they are being hunted by the cunning German secret police sergeant, Hugo Bleicher, who finally succeeds in capturing them. They are sent to Paris’s Fresnes prison, and from there to concentration camps in Germany where they are starved, beaten, and tortured. But in the face of despair, they never give up hope, their love for each other, or the whereabouts of their colleagues. In Code Name: Lise , Larry Loftis paints a portrait of true courage, patriotism, and love–of two incredibly heroic people who endured unimaginable horrors and degradations. He seamlessly weaves together the touching romance between Odette and Peter and the thrilling cat and mouse game between them and Sergeant Bleicher. With this amazing testament to the human spirit, Loftis proves once again that he is adept at writing “nonfiction that reads like a page-turning novel” ( Parade ).

• By: Douglas Waller
• Narrator: George Newbern
• Length: 16 hours 53 minutes
• 3.9 (175 ratings)

“A fantastic book, one of the very finest accounts of wartime spookery” ( The Wall Street Journal )–a spellbinding adventure story of four secret OSS agents who would all later lead the CIA and their daring espionage and sabotage in wartime Europe from the author of the bestselling Wild Bill Donavan . They are the most famous and controversial directors the CIA has ever had–Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Before each of these four men became their country’s top spymaster, they fought in World War II as secret warriors for Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services. Allen Dulles ran the OSS’s most successful spy operation against the Axis. Bill Casey organized dangerous missions to penetrate Nazi Germany. Bill Colby led OSS commando raids behind the lines in occupied France and Norway. Richard Helms mounted risky intelligence programs against the Russians in the ruins of Berlin. Later, they were the most controversial directors the CIA has ever had. Dulles launched the calamitous operation at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Helms was convicted of lying to Congress over the CIA’s role in the ousting of President Salvador Allende in Chile. Colby would become a pariah for releasing a report on CIA misdeeds during the 1950s, sixties and early seventies. Casey would nearly bring down the CIA–and Ronald Reagan’s presidency–from a scheme that secretly supplied Nicaragua’s contras with money raked off from the sale of arms to Iran for American hostages in Beirut. Mining thousands of once-secret World War II documents and interviewing scores, Waller has written a worthy successor to Wild Bill Donovan . “Entertaining and richly detailed” ( The Washington Post ), Disciples is the story of these four dynamic agents and their daring espionage and sabotage in wartime Europe.

Before Their Time

• By: Robert Kotlowitz
• Length: 6 hours 6 minutes
• 3.9 (94 ratings)

In this memoir of his experiences as a teenage infantryman in the US Third Army during World War II, Kotlowitz brings to life the harrowing story of the massacre of his platoon in northeastern France, in which he–by playing dead–was the only one to survive.

The King’s War

• By: Mark Logue
• Narrator: Greg Patmore
• Length: 9 hours 22 minutes
• 3.85 (74 ratings)

Following the New York Times bestselling The King’s Speech, this eagerly anticipated sequel takes King George VI and his confidant and speech therapist Lionel Logue into the darkest days of World War II.

The broadcast that George VI made to the British nation on the outbreak of war in September 1939—which formed the climax of the multi-Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech—was the product of years of hard work with Lionel Logue, his iconoclastic, Australian-born speech therapist. Yet the relationship between the two men did not end there. Far from it: in the years that followed, Logue was to play an even more important role at the monarch’s side.

The King’s War follows that relationship through the dangerous days of Dunkirk and the drama of D-Day to eventual victory in 1945—and beyond. Like the first book, it is written by Peter Conradi, a London Sunday Times journalist, and Mark Logue (Lionel’s grandson), and again draws on exclusive material from the Logue Archive—the collection of diaries, letters, and other documents left by Lionel and his wife, Myrtle. This gripping narrative provides a fascinating portrait of two men and their respective families—the Windsors and the Logues—as they together face the greatest challenge in Britain’s history.

Ministers at War

• By: Jonathan Schneer
• Narrator: Matthew Brenher
• Length: 12 hours 28 minutes
• 3.78 (205 ratings)

In May 1940, with France on the verge of defeat, Britain alone stood in the path of the Nazi military juggernaut. Survival seemed to hinge on the leadership of Winston Churchill, whom the king reluctantly appointed prime minister as Germany invaded France. Churchill’s reputation as one of the great twentieth-century leaders would be forged during the coming months and years as he worked tirelessly first to rally his country and then to defeat Hitler. But Churchill–regarded as the savior of his nation, and of the entire continent–could not have done it alone.

As prizewinning historian Jonathan Schneer reveals in Ministers at War , Churchill depended on a team of powerful ministers to manage the war effort as he rallied a beleaguered nation. Selecting men from across the political spectrum–from fellow conservative Anthony Eden to leader of the opposing socialist Labor Party Clement Attlee–Churchill assembled a war cabinet that balanced competing interests and bolstered support for his national coalition government. The group possessed a potent blend of talent, ambition, and egotism. Led and encouraged by Churchill, the ministers largely set aside their differences–at least at first. As the war progressed, discord began to grow. It reached a peak in 1945. With victory seemingly assured, Churchill was forced by his minsters at war to dissolve the government and call a general election, which, in a shocking upset, he lost to his rival Attlee.

Authoritatively recasting our understanding of British high politics during World War II, Schneer shows that Churchill managed the war effort by managing his team of supremely able yet contentious cabinet members. The outcome of the war lay not only in Churchill’s individual brilliance but also in his skill as an executive and in the collective ability of men who muted their personal interests to save the world from barbarism.

I Marched with Patton

• By: Frank Sisson
• Length: 8 hours 21 minutes
• Publish date: October 20, 2020
• 3.77 (227 ratings)

Published to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of General George Patton’s death, a gripping firsthand account of World War II written by a soldier with the American Third Army who served under the legendary warrior and participated in many of the most consequential events of the conflict–including the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of Dachau.

Following in the footsteps of the bestsellers All the Gallant Men, Every Man a Hero, Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In, and Never Call Me a Hero, I Marched with Patton is a remarkable eyewitness account that offers priceless insights into a foot soldier’s life on the front lines during World War II under the command one of the legendary figures in American military history.

Now a spry ninety-four years old, Frank Sisson looks back at his life and his service in the Third Army. Born in rural Oklahoma, Frank grew up fatherless during the Great Depression. In 1944, at age eighteen, he enlisted and was deployed to France where he marched with Patton, taking part in many of the key Allied movements of the war. Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge, nearly died crossing the Rhine with Patton, and was among the first American soldiers who liberated the notorious Dachau concentration camp.

After the war, Frank continued to serve in the army as a military police inspector in Berlin. When he finally returned home, he attended college and built a career in business.

Frank Sisson’s remarkable reminiscences provide a fresh, unique look at Patton’s leadership, the final year of World War II and its direct aftermath, and the experience of combat on the front lines.

82 Days on Okinawa

• By: Art Shaw
• Narrator: Jim Seybert
• Length: 8 hours 49 minutes
• Publish date: March 03, 2020
• 3.77 (293 ratings)

In celebration of the 75th anniversary, a riveting first-hand account of the Battle of Okinawa–the Pacific War’s “bloodiest battle of all” ( New York Times )–from the first officer ashore, who served at the front for the battle’s entire 82-day duration, heroism that earned him a Bronze Star.

On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, 1,500 Allied ships and 1.5 million men gathered off the coast of the Japanese island of Okinawa and launched the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific War. They expected an 80% casualty rate. The first American officer ashore was Major Art Shaw, a unit commander in the U.S. Army’s 361 Artillery Battalion of the 96th Division, often called the Deadeyes. For the next three months, Major Shaw and his men served at the front lines of the Pacific’s bloodiest battle, their artillery proving decisive against a “phantom enemy” who had entrenched themselves into rugged, craggy island. Now, at 98, Art Shaw looks back to tell the story. 82 Days on Okinawa is an extraordinary eyewitness account of this critical World War II battle.

The first step of Operation Downfall–the ground invasion of Japan–the Battle of Okinawa became legendary for its brutality. Over 82 days, the Allies fought the Japanese Army in one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war, one in which more than 150,000 soldiers would die. When the final calculations were made, the totals said that the Deadeyes had killed 37,763 of the enemy. The 361 Field Artillery Battalion had played a crucial role in victory. It would be the last major battle of World War II, and a key pivot point leading to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrender in August, two months after the siege’s end.

A riveting first-person account of this turning point, 82 Days on Okinawa joins the ranks of Donald Stratton’s All the Gallant Men and Dusty Kleiss’ Never Call Me a Hero.

Hitler’s First Hundred Days

• By: Peter Fritzsche
• Length: 14 hours 29 minutes
• Publish date: March 17, 2020
• 3.76 (313 ratings)

This unsettling and illuminating history reveals how Germany’s fractured republic gave way to the Third Reich, from the formation of the Nazi party to the rise of Hitler. Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler’s First Hundred Days , award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich. Fritzsche examines the events of the period — the elections and mass arrests, the bonfires and gunfire, the patriotic rallies and anti-Jewish boycotts — to understand both the terrifying power the National Socialists exerted over ordinary Germans and the powerful appeal of the new era they promised. Hitler’s First Hundred Days is the chilling story of the beginning of the end, when one hundred days inaugurated a new thousand-year Reich.

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Cliff Weitzman

Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.

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10 top nonfiction books about World War II

Posted by Mal Warwick | History , Most Popular Reviews , Nonfiction , Reading Recommendations | 2

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If you’ve been reading my reviews for very long, you’re aware that the World War II era holds special fascination for me. This might have something to do with the fact that I was born then—in fact, about six months before the USA entered the war. Or maybe it’s just because it all preceded the disillusionment that set in once the war had ended, when the boundaries between good and evil no longer seemed so clear.

This post was updated on July 3, 2024

In addition to the many World War II novels I’ve read and reviewed here, both mysteries and trade fiction, I’ve read a great many nonfiction books about the years leading up to and during the war. Here I’m listing two dozen of the best I’ve come across in recent years. They cover everything from economic policy in the Depression and the rise of Nazi Germany to the role of business and the conduct of the war itself. All together, they provide a significant dose of insight about what later historians might well conclude was the most significant period in the history of the world.

As is blindingly obvious, this is by no means a comprehensive bibliography. No doubt hundreds of thousands of books have been written about the World War II era. The ten top books and the many runners-up simply represent where my taste and my instincts have taken me in recent years. I’ve arranged these books in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names within each of the two lists below (the top ten and other books about World War II). Each is linked to my review.

10 TOP NONFICTION BOOKS ABOUT WORLD WAR II

American Heritage History of World War II by Steven E. Ambrose and C. L. Sulzberger (1966, 1997) 640 pages ★★★★★

Thousands of books have been written about World War II—”history’s greatest catastrophe.” Amazon shows more than 70,000 titles. Among them are general histories from the likes of the Smithsonian Institution , the New York Times , and unnumbered others. Although I can’t claim to have read them all, or even more than a handful, the very best short history of World War II that I’ve come across is the product of three eminent authors writing for the American Heritage magazine: Stephen E. Ambrose, C. L. Sulzberger, and David McCullough. You’re unlikely to find a better introduction to the grand sweep, the intensity, and the human reality of the Second World War. Read the review .

Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz  by Omer Bartov (2018) 417 pages ★★★★★

Historian Omer Bartov demonstrates how very complicated the Holocaust was. By tracing the history of antisemitism in a single Polish-Ukrainian town from the sixteenth century to the present, and detailing day by day how the Holocaust unfolded there, he brings to light the many nuances lost in historical portraits painted with a broader brush. The book is a masterful effort that should stand for decades if not centuries as one of the most insightful accounts of that shameful episode in what is so casually called civilization . Read the review .

Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II by Marc Gallicchio (2020) 282 pages ★★★★☆

Three-quarters of a century after the end of World War II, FDR’s policy to demand unconditional surrender from Germany and Japan may seem simply logical. After all, in an era of total war, the only guarantee that either nation wouldn’t sufficiently recover to attack again was total Allied control over their system of government following the end of hostilities. That seemed assured in the case of Germany, which ended the war in rubble and ashes and divided between East and West. But unconditional surrender was a far more complex question with respect to Imperial Japan . For US President Harry Truman to pursue the policy to the end in 1945 involved a complex calculus weighing a host of mutually contradictory military, political, diplomatic, and economic factors. Villanova University historian Marc Gallicchio adroitly untangles them in Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II . Read the review .

The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945, by Max Hastings (2016) 645 pages ★★★★★

The eminent British historian Max Hastings undercuts the many popular treatments of espionage during World War II with a sober revisionist survey. In his well-informed view, practically nothing either side did in the realm of intelligence had any meaningful impact on the war. The only exceptions, in his view, were the successful efforts by all the major combatants to crack their enemies’ secret codes. Unlike most of other books about the subject, Hastings examines not just the British and American intelligence efforts but those of Russia, Germany, and Japan as well. This is must reading for anyone who wants to understand how espionage really works (or, more often, doesn’t). Read the review .

Agents of Influence: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II by Henry Hemming (2019) 401 pages ★★★★★

In The Splendid and the Vile , a moving and revealing account of Winston Churchill’s leadership during the Blitz, Erik Larson makes much of the Prime Minister’s dogged campaign to persuade Franklin Roosevelt to drag the United States into the defense of Britain. Historians concur that Churchill’s influence on the President played a major role in bringing about American intervention in the European war. But few observers and analysts remark about another factor that may well have been more decisive: British interference in American politics in 1940 and 41 that helped shift public opinion from isolationism to engagement. Because FDR had perfected to a fine art the practice of “ leading from behind .” And that’s central to the story so ably told by Henry Hemming in Agents of Influence . Read the review .

Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, by Arthur Herman (2012) 433 pages ★★★★★

The US became known as the “arsenal of democracy” because the American business community mobilized on a hitherto unattainable scale to produce hundreds of thousands of airplanes, ships, tanks, trucks, and other war materiel. Arthur Herman’s study of the topic focuses on the efforts of two remarkable industrialists who were among the most prominent figures in the effort: General Motors CEO William Knudsen and shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser. Read the review .

The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War by Benjamin Carter Hett (2020) 402 pages ★★★★★

The events of the years 1937 through 1941 appear fixed in time. It seems foreordained that Britain, France, the US, and the USSR would have gone to war with Nazi Germany under any circumstances. But that was assuredly not the case, as historian Benjamin Carter Hett makes abundantly clear in his illuminating portrayal of the period, The Nazi Menace . In fact, confusion reigned throughout those years, with the major players stumbling through thickets of uncertainty about one another’s intentions. The forces lined up only haphazardly into the now-familiar split between Allies and Axis. And the alliances in the war that ensued shocked and surprised many of those whose actions had made it inevitable. Read the review .

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson (2020) 546 pages ★★★★★

At the age of sixty-five, Winston Churchill achieved his lifelong dream, becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on May 10, 1940. Less than a year into World War II, Britain was on the brink of defeat. Yet somehow the aging Prime Minister—an alcoholic with a reputation for questionable judgment—mobilized the British people despite what so many were convinced was a hopeless fight against the Nazi juggernaut. Both King George VI and some of Churchill’s colleagues in the Cabinet were skeptical that he was up to the job. Regardless, through sheer force of will and an unparalleled gift for stirring rhetoric, Churchill led his nation virtually alone in the world for eighteen months before the United States finally entered the war. That’s the story Erik Larson tells, and tells so well, in The Splendid and the Vile .  Read the review .

Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter (2013) 480 pages ★★★★☆

Read just about any popular history of World War II, and you’ll find any number of references to the Allies as the Big Three of Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union. What’s missing is recognition that China bore nearly as high a price as the USSR, with an estimated fourteen to twenty million dead compared to fewer than half a million for the UK and the US. (The Soviet Union lost as many as twenty-four million dead.) On that basis alone, Oxford University historian Rana Mitter is justified in titling his revisionist history of China in World War II Forgotten Ally . But, as he explains at length, recognition of China’s contribution to the war effort is overdue on a far broader basis than that. Read the review .

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II  by Sonia Purnell 2019) 368 pages ★★★★★

Popular fiction abounds with superheroes. But it’s not often at all that you’ll come across a true-to-life story of a person who comes even close to the sort of over-the-top heroism that so many popular writers favor. However, the story of WWII American woman spy Virginia Hall (1906-82) fits that bill. In A Woman of No Importance , Sonia Purnell relates the woman’s experience in World War II in compelling and often jaw-dropping detail. It’s the best study I’ve ever read about the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the French Resistance . I found it nearly impossible to put the book down. Read the review .

OTHER TOP NONFICTION BOOKS ABOUT WORLD WAR II

The war in europe, the day of battle: the war in sicily and italy, 1943-44, by rick atkinson, the guns at last light: the war in western europe, 1944-1945, by rick atkinson.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning military historian Rick Atkinson’s trilogy about the Allied conduct of World War II is sometimes referred to as the best reasonably brief historical treatment of the subject. I read the first of the three books, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-43 , before 2010, when I began posting reviews here. I remember it with admiration. All three books are accessible and written with a fine appreciation for the contributions not just of the generals and admirals who led the war effort but of the enlisted men who carried out their orders and bore the brunt of the conflict.

Warlords: An Extraordinary Re-creation of World War II Through the Eyes and Minds of Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin by Simon Berthon and Joanna Potts

Historians long debated the Great Man Theory of History attributed to the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1840. As we have come to understand the contrasting views on either side of the question, some insist that the course of history is set by the ideas and actions of “great men.” Others assert that the currents of their time carry along even these extraordinary leaders, who are merely actors on the stage of history. We hear little of that debate these days, since today we accept that history is shaped both from above and from below. But a close look at World War II might cause us to reexamine that conclusion. Then, four exceptional men—Hitler, Churchill, FDR, and Stalin—played oversized roles in determining the course of history. And that question rises to the surface in Warlords , an intimate examination of the relationships—and the misunderstandings—among the four.

The Ghost Army of World War II: How One Top-Secret Unit Deceived the Enemy with Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, and Other Audacious Fakery  by Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles

A headline in a New York Times obituary recently caught my eye. “ Gilbert Seltzer, Soldier in Secret Unit That Duped Germans, Is Dead at 106 ,” it read. In scanning the amazing story of Lieutenant Seltzer’s World War II experience, I came across a reference to a book about the top-secret unit in which he had served. That led me to The Ghost Army of World War II by Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles. Their story, which is profusely illustrated, is one of the most astonishing tales of deception to come out of the Second World War. It’s also immensely entertaining.

The Warsaw Uprising, 1 August to 2 October 1944  by George Bruce

No country in the world suffered greater devastation in World War II than Poland, not even the Soviet Union, where as many as twenty-seven million people died. Poland’s six million dead represented an even higher proportion of the pre-war population—about one in five. And Poland’s cities lay in rubble. Yet the devastation was greater still in Warsaw, the site of two of the signal events of the war: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the spring of 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 by the Polish underground. Of the two, the events in the Ghetto have received far more attention. And in The Warsaw Uprising, 1 August to 2 October, 1944 , George Bruce fills the gap with a moving, blow-by-blow account of that tragic episode in Polish history—the world’s “first example of full-scale urban guerrilla warfare.”

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell

In The Bomber Mafia , Malcolm Gladwell departs from the precincts of social psychology he knows so well ( The Tipping Point , Talking to Strangers , Outliers ) and ventures into the history of World War II. The book, subtitled “ A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War ,” dramatizes the debate at the heart of the growing use of airpower in the war—the dispute between the two schools of thought about strategic bombing in WWII: high-altitude precision targeting and unrestrained area bombing of cities. Gladwell terms it “a case study in dreams gone awry.” In his telling, the debate was personified by the divergent careers of two US Army Air Force generals, Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay . LeMay emerged the winner at the time, and he comes across as the author’s hero.

Das Reich: The March of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Through France, June 1944  by Max Hastings

The renowned British military historian assesses the effectiveness of the French Resistance at a crucial point in the war: when the Nazis desperately sought to reinforce their defense in Normandy—and the Resistance slowed them down by many days.

The Bridge at Remagen by Ken Hechler

In March 1945, Allied commanders were shocked to discover that a small group of American soldiers had defied orders and engineered a strategic breakthrough that would shorten World War II. This remarkable little book is their story.

Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France  by James Holland

History can deceive us. When we read about the major events of the past, they appear inevitable with all the black-and-white certainty of words on a page. And that’s certainly true about D-Day. The Allies had assembled such overwhelming force in June 1944 that it may seem they couldn’t possibly have failed to crash past the Nazi defenders in northern France and drive through to Germany. But of course that wasn’t the case at all. This is merely one of the many myths about D Day.

12 Seconds of Silence: How a Team of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Spies Took Down a Nazi Superweapon by Jamie Holmes

You can’t help knowing that the atomic bomb was a product of World War II and greatly influenced its outcome. If you’ve read a little, you’re aware that radar played a decisive role in the war as well, implemented both in the air, at sea, and on land. But it’s less likely you’ve heard about a third technological breakthrough that many military analysts and historians believe was equally important. It’s called the proximity fuse . “Known as the world’s first ‘smart’ weapon, the proximity fuse (or fuze) was a five-pound marvel of engineering, industry, and can-do spirit.” And its development and deployment is the subject of Jamie Holmes ‘ impressive if idiosyncratic book, 12 Seconds of Silence .

Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton and the Partnership That Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe  by Jonathan W. Jordan

This is the story of three American generals, their on-again, off-again friendship, and the military operations they led from 1942 to 1945 to win the war against Nazi Germany. For those old enough to remember the history, two of their names live on in memory, the third, much less often. But all three played pivotal roles in World War II, and military historians credit them with a large share of responsibility for the Allies’ success in Europe. But when the United States entered the war in December 1941, few at the time would have expected such exalted achievements from any of the three. Dwight D. (Ike) Eisenhower , Omar N. (Brad) Bradley , and George S. Patton rose through the ranks of American officers at a meteoric pace. Historian Jonathan W. Jordan tells their astonishing story in Brothers, Rivals, Victors , and he tells it exceedingly well.

The war in the Pacific

The admirals: nimitz, halsey, leahy, and king—the five-star admirals who won the war at sea by walter r. borneman.

They were children of the Victorian Era. Annapolis graduates around the turn of the twentieth century. Junior officers in World War I, captains by 1927. They gained their first admiral’s stars by the 1930s, and all four were near or past retirement age when war broke out. Yet they rose to the pinnacle of leadership in that war and played outsized roles in the Allied victory. And one by one, as their talents became unmistakably clear, they each received a fifth star, becoming the only five-star admirals in American history. Walter Borneman engagingly tells their stories in his joint biography, The Admirals .

The Fall of Japan: The Final Weeks of World War II in the Pacific by William Craig

Twenty-two years after the war ended, American historian William Craig revealed how Japan’s unconditional surrender came about. He dug into hidden documents and spoke with dozens of those who played pivotal roles at the time both in Japan and the US. Day-by-day, and often hour by hour, Craig reconstructed the events that unfolded in Tokyo as the Empire of Japan pondered the Allies’ inflexible demands. He focused on the fateful days between August 9, 1945, when Fat Man detonated over Nagasaki, and August 15, when Emperor Hirohito radioed a message to Switzerland accepting the Allied terms of surrender. The story Craig tells in The Fall of Japan is at once compelling, disturbing, and illuminating. This book is a stellar example of how history can shine a bright light underneath the surface myths and reveal the messy human reality of the past.

Whirlwind: War in the Pacific  by Richard Freeman

Within just six months of the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States Navy reversed the strategic trajectory of the war in the Pacific. By mid-June, the Japanese Imperial Navy was on the defensive. In the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 4-8, 1942), the American fleet met the best the Empire could bring to the war and fought them to a standstill. And at Midway (June 4-7, 1942), US forces under Admirals Jack Fletcher and Raymond Spruance cut the heart out of the Japanese Navy, destroying four of the empire’s six heavy aircraft carriers. Afterwards, despite Japanese gains on the Asian continent, the die was cast for the United States to prevail. And it’s those three battles—Pearl Harbor, the Coral Sea, and Midway—that Richard Freeman analyzes in Whirlwind .

Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze  by Peter Harmsen

To an outsider, a rapid Japanese victory in the 1937 Battle of Shanghai might have appeared inevitable. That Emperor Hirohito and the militarists who commanded the Japanese Imperial government shared that opinion. After all, the country had been building its military into a world-class force for nearly seventy years since the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The Chinese were no match for the mechanized might of the Japanese Army on land and its superiority both in the air and on the water. Unsurprisingly, then, as Harmsen notes, “[i]n their habitual disdain for the Chinese, the Japanese leaders figured that this would be more than enough to deal with the nuisance across the sea.” They expected to take Shanghai within days. “Underestimating the foe was a mistake they were to repeat again and again in the coming weeks and months.”

Storm Clouds Over the Pacific, 1931-1941 (War in the Far East #1 of 3)  by Peter Harmsen

Anyone with more than a cursory knowledge of World War II knows that the Soviet Union paid the greatest price for resisting the Nazis. Estimates of the country’s total dead range from 24 to 30 million. But fewer know that China’s losses in the war were also massive. They were somewhere between 15 and 20 million, far greater than those in any other country. But for the USSR the war lasted four years. For China, it lasted fourteen. Because beginning in 1931, the Empire of Japan seized China’s northernmost province, Manchuria, and held it until the war’s bitter end—while occupying nearly half the rest of the country. And, in Storm Clouds Over the Pacific, 1931-1941 , the first in a series of three short books, author Peter Harmsen offers an account of the first decade of World War II in China in grim and sometimes painful detail.

Rescue at Los Baños: The Most Daring Prison Camp Raid of World War II by Bruce Henderson

Early in 1945, as the Nazi regime began to crumble and American soldiers, marines, and sailors relentlessly pushed ever closer toward the Japanese home islands, two thousand civilian prisoners of war, mostly Americans, suffered indescribable deprivation at the hands of a sadistic prison camp commander, deep in a Philippine jungle. Their story—and that of their liberators—is brilliantly told in Bruce Henderson ‘s Rescue at Los Baños . It’s a tale of courage and resourcefulness that illuminates one of the most revealing chapters in the history of World War II.

Dead Reckoning: The Story of How Johnny Mitchell and His Fighter Pilots Took on Admiral Yamamoto and Avenged Pearl Harbor  by Dick Lehr

This is the story of two men, one Japanese, the other American. They’re 30 years apart in age and might have come from different galaxies for all the different ways their experience has shaped them. One is Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese Empire’s Combined Fleet. He’s the man who planned the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor carried out on December 7, 1941. The other is Major John Mitchell of Enid, Mississippi. Known as Mitch, he commanded the US Army Air Forces fighter squadron that ended the admiral’s life on Palm Sunday, April 18, 1943, exerting revenge for Pearl Harbor. (The mission was called Operation Vengeance .) In Dead Reckoning , journalist Dick Lehr brings both men back to life in a compelling account of their lives up to the fatal moment when their timelines intersected.

The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler by John Lukacs

On May 10, 1940, two historic events grabbed the world’s attention. Hitler’s Panzer armies broke through the French frontier. And King George VI asked Winston Churchill to form a new government. To tell the story of the eighty days that followed, historian John Lukacs frames the conflict between Britain and Nazi Germany as a “duel” between Churchill and Adolf Hitler. The book is a worthy account of the early days of World War II in Europe.

Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis’ Fortress Prison  by Ben MacIntyre

World War II prisoner-of-war escapes are a staple of adventure fiction. IMDB lists twenty-one films on the theme, most prominently the 1963 production The Great Escape , starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough. In reality, however, successful escapes were rare. Britain’s Imperial War Museum notes that “Of the 170,000 British and Commonwealth prisoners of war in Germany in the Second World War, fewer than 1,200 of them managed to escape successfully and make a ‘home run.'” But the numbers fall far short of conveying the sheer drama in the German camps. And perhaps the most colorful examples have emerged from Colditz , the Nazi camp for Allied officers in Germany’s east from 1939 to 1945. Author Ben MacIntyre brings the drama into high relief in Prisoners of the Castle , a nonfiction rendering of life in the most famous of the nearly one hundred WWII Nazi POW camps.

Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor by Robert B. Stinnett

When you challenge the historical consensus fundamental to our understanding of the past, you’d better be prepared for trouble. And that’s exactly what Robert Stinnett got when he published Day of Deceit , purporting to tell the truth about Pearl Harbor. Picking up on a charge long ago rejected by most historians, he claimed that President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew the Japanese were about to attack Pearl Harbor and deliberately withheld the information from the admiral in charge there. When Stinnett’s book was published in 1999, the New York Times review was typical: “Despite a dogged and sometimes compelling effort . . . Stinnett has produced no ‘smoking guns'” to substantiate his arguments. Established historians piled on, questioning the reliability of some of his sources and rejecting the evidence he produced to support his conclusions.

Although he fails to convict FDR of the charge he levels at him, he does succeed in revealing an even more explosive finding about US involvement in starting the war in the Pacific. And he successfully proves that historians have got it wrong about some aspects of their accounts of the battle that launched the USA into World War I. Unfortunately, his book is very poorly written.

Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution by Helen Zia

Zia uses the tools of biography to paint a wide-screen view of China’s troubled history from 1937, when Japan launched World War II by invading the country, to 1949, when Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. Her principal subjects are two women and two men among the estimated one million Chinese who fled Shanghai as the Red Army neared the city. One of the women was her mother.

Hitler’s Spy Chief: The Wilhelm Canaris Story by Richard Bassett

Most histories of World War II give the impression that the conflict was a straightforward affair. Whether recounting the story of battles (Stalingrad, Normandy, Midway) or the tales of spies and saboteurs (Britain’s SOE , America’s OSS , Germany’s Abwehr ), they tend to draw straight lines from one event to the next. Of course, human affairs are never so simple. History doesn’t travel in straight lines. But only in recent years, as classified or hidden files have opened up, have we gained a clearer picture of just how complex and confusing the war was. Hitler’s Spy Chief , Richard Bassett’s biography of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris , director of the Abwehr, makes that abundantly clear. This book reveals that, even today, there is a secret history of World War II that remains to be told.

Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin by Howard Blum

Novelists including Ken Follett , Jack Higgins , Alan Furst , and Philip Kerr have indulged us with thrilling accounts of spies and saboteurs in World War II. Rarely, though, have they managed to equal in their fiction the sheer audacity of the real-world Nazi plot to kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin which unfolded in Tehran late in November 1943. This is a story that no novelist could possibly invent and expect to be believed. And Howard Blum tells it with all the skills of a thriller writer in his deeply-researched book, Night of the Assassins .

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington  by Jennet Conant

Soon after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain in May 1940, he turned to a Canadian industrialist named William Stephenson for help. Stephenson’s charge was to weigh in on his biggest challenge in prosecuting the war against Germany: persuading the United States to join the fight. Churchill appointed Stephenson head of a new top-secret organization dedicated to that purpose. Called British Security Coordination , the new offshoot of SIS (the Secret Intelligence Service , or MI6) was charged with rooting out German spies in America and countering the influence of the hugely popular America First Committee .

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg by Nicholas Dawidoff

Moe Berg (1902-72) was one of the most confounding men who ever donned a glove in Major League Baseball . He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, earned a law degree from Columbia, and studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. Berg had a fair command of six foreign languages and could understand many more. He pored through up to ten daily newspapers and wore one of eight identical black suits every day. And during World War II, after a nineteen-year career as a catcher for a succession of American League teams, he enlisted in the OSS and pulled off one of the agency’s most spectacular espionage coups. But nearly all this information has come out elsewhere. If that’s all there were to the story, a biography of Moe Berg wouldn’t be worth reading. But there was much more to the man.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone

Working with recently declassified files from the World War II era as well as long-ignored archival records and contemporary press reports and interviews, journalist Jason Fagone has brought to light at last the astonishing story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman and her husband, William Friedman. The Friedmans may well have been the most important 20th-century American codebreakers, and quite possibly the best and most successful in the world.

Nancy Wake: The gripping true story of the woman who became the Gestapo’s most wanted spy by Peter FitzSimmons

Recent years have seen a flood of new books belatedly highlighting the role of women in espionage in World War II. Despite rampant sexism and misogyny, women did indeed fill vital roles as spies and analysts in intelligence-gathering as well as partisan activities behind enemy lines. And few women played as prominent a part as a phenomenal Australian woman named Nancy Wake (1912-2011). Her exploits in France during the war have been the subject of at least five books as well as a feature film and a TV series. The best of the books, I’ve found, is Peter FitzSimmons ‘ Nancy Wake , which appeared in 2011, the year of her death at the age of 98.

The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb by Sam Kean

Given the universal perception that German physicists were the best in the world, the Allies feared a nuclear attack almost throughout the war—as late as the middle of 1944. Unaccountably, then, the Allies launched the Alsos Mission to investigate how far the Nazis had progressed in the field only in September 1943. “People called it the Bastard Unit” because it worked independently, hence the title of Sam Kean’s often jaw-dropping account of the perilous effort to explore and undermine the German nuclear program.

Bletchley Park and D-Day: The Untold Story of How the Battle for Normandy Was Won  by David Kenyon

Romanticized accounts of the World War II codebreakers at Bletchley Park convey the impression of a cozy community of brainy people with Oxford and Cambridge degrees laboring in isolation in the countryside. And there is some truth in this picture during the first two years of the war. But that changed. By mid-1944, as the Normandy Invasion approached, 7,500 men and women—some three-quarters of them women, as it happened—worked there. They slogged away, day after day, in a cold, sprawling campus fifty miles from London. The place is studded with makeshift huts and drab concrete and steel buildings on 58 acres. By 1945, the head count there grew to almost 9,000 working in three shifts around the clock. The crowding and primitive working conditions resembled a factory more than a military installation, much less an academic campus. Kenyon views it as the Bletchley Park intelligence factory.

Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family’s Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Europe  by Alex Kershaw

Despite all the reading I’ve done about World War II — dozens, and perhaps more than a hundred books — I found Alex Kershaw ‘s book about Occupied Europe and one extraordinary American family’s experience there to be at least as revealing as the best political or military histories. I learned things that would never turn up in conventional history books, things that gave me the feeling that I was getting at least an inkling of what it was really like to live in Nazi-occupied territory while despising the Nazis and everything they stood for.

The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare  by John Lisle

Historians debate whether Britain’s Special Operations Executive ( SOE ) and the American Office of Strategic Services ( OSS ) had a material effect on the outcome of World War II. After all, they operated on the margins, behind enemy lines, never capable of mounting strategically significant missions. But later testimony from military leaders in the war effort insisted they’d made a difference. And whatever their strategic impact might have been, their activities—especially the often colorful antics of the OSS—make for great reading. Which you’re likely to conclude from the latest addition to the abundant literature about Wild Bill Donovan and his charges in the OSS, The Dirty Tricks Department . In the book, historian John Lisle peers into the record of the secret warfare waged by the OSS, revealing some of the agency’s most flamboyant activities.

Code Name: Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became World War II’s Most Highly Decorated Spy,  by Larry Loftis

She was the most decorated spy in World War II of either gender. Her name was Odette Sansom (later Odette Hallowes). From 1942 to 1945, she served as an officer of Britain’s Special Operations Executive . From November 1942 to April 1943, she worked in southern France as a courier for an SOE network that delivered arms, money, and supplies to the French Resistance. Betrayed by the witless leader of a French network operating in the same area, she was arrested along with her leader and lover, Captain Peter Churchill . She spent the rest of the war in prison, first in France and later at the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. And when it was all over, she emerged as the war’s most highly decorated spy. Yet these bare-bones facts convey not a hint of the woman’s almost superhuman courage, the subject of Larry Loftis ‘s excellent portrait, Code Name: Lise .

The Princess Spy: The True Story of World War II Spy Aline Griffith, Countess of Romanones by Larry Loftis

Most accounts of Allied spies in World War II highlight their heroic exploits. Stealing top-secret documents. Operating clandestine radios. Leading scores or hundreds of Resistance fighters in battle. Or blowing up Nazi troop trains. Aline Griffith did none of these things. But the fascinating story Larry Loftis tells in The Princess Spy reminds us that espionage then involved a great deal more than fighting on the front lines. His tale of a middle-class American woman who became an OSS spy and married into Spanish nobility offers its own rewards for readers eager to understand World War II in depth.

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben MacIntyre

Operation mincemeat: how a dead man and a bizarre plan fooled the nazis and assured allied victory by ben macintyre, rogue heroes: the history of the sas, britain’s secret special forces unit that sabotaged the nazis and changed the nature of war, by ben macintyre, agent sonya: moscow’s most daring wartime spy by ben macintyre.

Ben MacIntyre is one of the most prolific and popular of the many historians who have specialized in World War II. Double Cross tells the often astonishing tale of the wildly unconventional people who acted as spies for the Allies and helped mislead the Germans about the location of the Normandy invasion. Operation Mincemeat is the equally improbable story of the deception scheme that misled the Nazis about the Allied invasion of Sicily, directing their attention instead to southern France. British intelligence accomplished this by planting misinformation on the dead body of a supposed “courier” who washed up on the coast of Spain. In Rogue Heroes , MacIntyre’s authorized history of the Special Air Service, we learn the amazing story of the British unit that established the pattern for Special Forces in armies around the world. And Agent Sonya relates the improbable story of one of the war’s most successful intelligence agents. All four books bring history to life with intimate and telling detail.

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews

Richard Sorge was an active Communist who began spying for the Comintern immediately after World War I and, later, for Soviet military intelligence (today the GRU ). Nonetheless, he managed to join the Nazi Party and eventually become a close personal friend and part-time employee of the German ambassador to Tokyo. Through his access to top-secret Nazi communications, he was able to advise his handlers in Moscow of Germany’s intention to invade the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, he was also running agents who were embedded at the very top of the Japanese government and was equally able to monitor Japan’s on-and-off-again plans to invade Siberia.

A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America’s Most Important Spy in World War II  by Lucas Delattre

One of the reasons the resistance to Nazism within Germany itself was so meager was the refusal of the Allies to support the men and women who opposed Hitler. Still, many brave souls persisted nonetheless, hoping to overturn the Third Reich and reach a peace agreement with the Americans and British. But the Allies demanded unconditional surrender , and there were few in Germany who could countenance the utter destruction of the land they loved. One of those few exceptional individuals was a mid-level official in the German Foreign Ministry named Fritz Kolbe—and he became the top American spy in the war. In A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich , French journalist Lucas Delattre tells the astonishing story of Kolbe’s three-year work funneling top-secret documents from Berlin to the CIA in Bern, Switzerland.

Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy

During World War II more than 10,000 women worked on cryptography for the US Army and Navy in Washington, DC. They were sworn to secrecy about their work, and to this day some of those who survive, now in their 90s, are still reluctant to talk about it. As Mundy reveals in Code Girls , there were in fact not two (the German Enigma and the Japanese Purple) but three breakthroughs in untangling Axis codes that were decisive, and most of those who worked on all three were women.

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler by Lynne Olson

She led the largest French Resistance network against the Nazis for nearly five years. Three thousand agents answered to her, and they delivered intelligence to the British that helped the Allies win the war. Yet she has been virtually forgotten for decades, her courage and resourcefulness ignored by Charles De Gaulle and the French Communist Party, the dominant political forces in France for decades. Because she wasn’t politically allied with either. And because she was a woman. Now a new biography belatedly restores her to the spotlight. It reads like a thriller. And it reveals the long-hidden truth about the French Resistance.

Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence  by Nicholas Reynolds

World War II began for the United States with a catastrophic intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor . Two decades earlier, during the First World War, the US military had begun building capacity in signals and communications intelligence. But little was left in place by 1941. Yet, just four years later, tens of thousands of Americans were working round the clock in Army, Navy, State Department, and FBI intelligence units and the Office of Strategic Services . Author Nicholas Reynolds tells the story of how this all came about in Need to Know , an eye-opening account of the rise of American intelligence.

D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II by Sarah Rose

D-Day Girls spotlights the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), the world’s first large fighting force trained and organized to operate behind enemy lines. Author Sarah Rose pays special attention in D-Day Girls to a handful of women in the French Section (F Section) of the SOE. But throughout she puts their experiences in the larger context. “Women made up some two thousand of the approximately thirteen thousand employees of the Special Operations Executive . . . They were translators, radio operators, secretaries, drivers, and honeypots. Only eight were deployed as special agents in Autumn 1942, when SOE’s first class of female trainees was seconded to France.”

Poland Alone: Britain, SOE and the Collapse of the Polish Resistance,1944  by Jonathan Walker

Stories of the French Resistance crowd library shelves. They’re among the most popular books about World War II. But many give a misleading picture of reality. Only about 500,000 French men and women worked for the Resistance during the five years of the war, a little over one percent of the country’s population. And most enlisted only in the final months of the war, as Allied victory came to seem more likely. By contrast with resistance movements in other occupied countries, especially Poland and Yugoslavia, the French effort was paltry. In Poland, the Underground State was complex, highly organized, and numerous from the outset. It featured its own administration, judiciary system, and educational facilities as well as an army organized along traditional military lines. In Poland Alone , historian Jonathan Walker tells the story of the extraordinary Polish Resistance movement from the perspective of the British, its sole ally.

Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage,  by Douglas Waller

Under Donovan’s forceful leadership, the upstart American agency homed itself in on the storied operations of MI6, the British Secret Service, and forced one Allied commanding general after another to shelter his agents in their armies. Against the prevailing wisdom in military circles, and often the determined opposition of his superiors, he mounted extensive operations to organize partisans in North Africa, in France, in the Balkans and Central Europe, and ultimately in Germany itself. In short, William J. Donovan, raised hell in World War II.

Science and technology in the war

Tuxedo park: a wall street tycoon and the secret palace of science that changed the course of world war ii by jennet conant.

He was a privileged young man, a product of Andover, Yale, and Harvard Law and a first cousin and protegé of Henry L. Stimson (who was variously Secretary of State and War under Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt). He made an immense fortune on Wall Street in the 1920s. But his first love was science. Even while helping structure the nation’s electric power industry, he established a lavish private laboratory that attracted leading scientists from all over the world. And when World War II approached, he played a leading role in assembling the men and resources that produced radar and the atomic bomb in record time.

Engineers of Victory: The Problem-Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War,  by Paul Kennedy

The noted historian Paul Kennedy brings to light the often-ignored contributions of the scientists and enlisted soldiers who helped turn the tide in the Allies’ favor in World War II. Their inventions and innovations in the conduct of war may have played as large a role in the ultimate victory as those of the generals and admirals whose names are most closely associated with the war effort. Surely, when millions of men and women served in the Allies’ armed services, the efforts of a handful of individuals can’t possibly be viewed as carrying the brunt of the load.

Churchill’s Shadow Raiders: The Race to Develop Radar, WWII’s Invisible Secret Weapon by Damien Lewis

Military historians tend to agree that radar played a singularly important role in the Allied victory in World War II, arguably greater than the decoding of the German Enigma codes (and certainly greater than the atomic bomb, which only ended the war). But British and American sources tend to disagree on where the critical advances in the technology took place. Unsurprisingly, the British highlight the role of British scientists, the Americans that of Americans. However, in fact, it was Nazi scientists whose contributions may have been the most significant. That’s the little-known fact that comes to light in author and filmmaker Damien Lewis ‘s fascinating book about the theft of German radar technology, Churchill’s Shadow Raiders .

Hitler’s Gift: The True Story of the Scientists Expelled By the Nazi Regime  by Jean Medawar and David Pyke

Scan any list of the physicists, chemists, and other top scientists who created the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project. What you’ll find there, one after another, are the names of Europeans who’d fled the Nazis in the 1930s. They dominate the list, and their contributions were the key to the weapon’s development. But the work at Los Alamos only hints at the broader contributions refugees made to British and American science. Because “some 2600 scientists and other scholars left Germany within the first year [alone], the vast majority of them Jewish. Twenty-five per cent of all physicists were lost from German universities in an insane squandering of talent.” And, overwhelmingly, they emigrated to universities in the UK and US, where an inordinate number of them later won Nobel Prizes. In Hitler’s Gift , Jean Medawar and David Pyke tell the amazing stories of the scientists who fled the Nazis.

A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Board Game Helped Win World War II by Simon Parkin

Parkin tells the tale of a top-secret unit established deep underground in Liverpool. There, a small staff developed wargames to help develop new antisubmarine tactics, eventually training thousands of British naval officers who commanded escort vessels protecting the convoys of merchant ships who traversed the Atlantic throughout the war. A retired officer turned game designer named Gilbert Roberts masterminded the effort, working with a staff composed largely of young Wrens, some of them barely out of secondary school. The Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU), as it was called, arose out of desperation. Winston Churchill personally set WATU in motion, ordering Roberts to “‘Find out what is happening and sink the U-boats.”

Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age  by David A. Price

When I searched Amazon for “ Bletchley Park books,” 269 entries turned up. I’ve read and reviewed at least a half-dozen of them. But David A. Price’s Geniuses at War surprised me. Most accounts of the World War II British codebreakers at Bletchley Park single out Alan Turing (1912-54) as the central figure in the enterprise and the genius who built the first digital computer. It’s not true. Turing’s Bombe was an analog device. He speculated that a digital computer might be faster and more efficient. But others acted on Turing’s ideas and actually designed and built the machine. It was called Colossus . And David A. Price has written their story in Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age .

Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race  by Margot Lee Shetterly

Before UNIVAC , before the IBM 650 , computers were people. Nearly all of them were women, and many were Black. Employed by the thousand in the US war effort in World War II, they crunched the numbers and ran the equations to calculate the effects of wind on aircraft and the trajectory of artillery shells and torpedoes. But these women were not entry-level data entry staff, their fingers dancing over the keys of adding machines. They were academically qualified mathematicians. A single equation they worked with might take up “the better part of a page.” The solution to a problem in aeronautics could run to as many as ten pages. These were the Black women profiled so ably in Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling book, Hidden Figures . It’s the surprising and hitherto untold story of Black women in the space race.

The Holocaust

The school that escaped the nazis: the true story of the schoolteacher who defied hitler  by deborah cadbury.

Amazon lists 4,000 books about the Holocaust. Half are nonfiction, such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. The rest include such bestselling novels as The Book Thief and The Tattooist of Auschwitz . Of course, some of the innumerable memoirs and novels relate the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of children. But I’ve never come across a book that more poignantly tells the tale from their perspective than Deborah Cadbury’s The School That Escaped the Nazis .

Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties  by David de Jong

You might expect a book with the title Nazi Billionaires to feature the Krupp family, who manufactured steel and armaments for the Third Reich, and the men behind the chemicals giant I G Farben , notorious for producing the Zyklon B gas used to murder millions in the death camps. But both firms had their roots in earlier centuries and were well established at the pinnacle of German industry long before World War II. Instead, author David de Jong turns our attention to the five families who were the greatest of the Nazi war profiteers, building dynastic wealth by collaborating with Hitler’s regime.

The Last Jews in Berlin  by Leonard Gross

When we consider the fate of the Jews in Europe during the Nazi years, our thoughts tend to drift toward stereotypical images. The gas chambers at Auschwitz and other death camps. And doomed Anne Frank cooped up in hiding for two years until she was betrayed. Both images are accurate, as they reflect the experience of millions of European Jews. But there were exceptions, and their experiences tell us a great deal about life in Nazi-dominated Europe. Author Leonard Gross does an excellent job conveying the alternate reality they represented in The Last Jews in Berlin . Yes, it’s true. Jews survived the Holocaust in Berlin.

From Kraków to Berkeley: Coming Out of Hiding, by Anna Rabkin

In a beautifully written memoir, longtime former Berkeley City Auditor Anna Rabkin tells the tale of her flight as a child when the Nazis invaded Poland. After hiding with a Christian family, she eventually moved to England and then to the United States, learning new languages and acclimating herself to the strange new customs of her adopted homelands. This is the odyssey of a Holocaust survivor whose experience parallels in some ways what so many refugees today are facing.

The Last Jew of Treblinka by Chil Rajchman

Rajchman was twenty-eight years old when he and his nineteen-year-old sister were captured in October 1942 and shipped to Treblinka. She was murdered almost instantaneously upon arriving there. But he was pressed into service as a “barber,” employed to cut off the hair of women and girls before they were herded into the gas chambers. Later, as a “dentist” — removing teeth to extract the gold and platinum — and as a laborer in the Sonderkommando , he survived because he was strong and useful to the Nazis. And then, in the course of a camp-wide revolt, he was one of about one hundred Jews who escaped.

Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory , by Elizabeth Rosner

Survivor Café  is a memoir, but it is far more than that. Rosner set out to understand the impact of her parents’ experiences in the war on her own life. She read deeply in the literature about the Holocaust and about the phenomenon of epigenetics , “the study of environmentally induced changes passed down from one generation to the next.” This emerging field is controversial and its research easily overdramatized. However, interpreting the findings narrowly, Rosner found in it an explanation for her own deep feelings about the Holocaust—and those in other second- and third-generation offspring of survivors.

I Escaped from Auschwitz  by Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Holocaust memoirs have seen the light of day in the nearly 80 years since World War II ended. But this one may well be the most important from an historical standpoint. It was based on the author’s eyewitness account in 1944 about Auschwitz that first informed Allied leaders of details about the Final Solution . . . and produced sensational stories in the New York Times and the BBC.

In the Name of Humanity: The Secret Deal to End the Holocaust  by Max Wallace

The seemingly unstoppable orgy of murder called the Holocaust probably didn’t end when or how you thought it did. What really happened has come to light in mutually inconsistent accounts in some of the books written about World War II’s final months. But, as best I can tell, none of the authors of those books dug as deeply into the question of how the Holocaust ended as has Canadian Holocaust scholar Max Wallace in his 2017 book, In the Name of Humanity . It’s a tour de force of historical scholarship and an eye-opening look at when, why, and how the killing stopped.

Other aspects of World War II

The nazi seizure of power: the experience of a single german town, 1922-1945, revised edition  by william sheridan allen  .

Today, Northeim is a railroad town of some 29,000 people in northern Germany. But only about 10,000 called it home in 1930, when the Nazi Party began its explosive rise to dominance throughout the country. Historian William Sheridan Allen chose the town for his study at the local level of how Hitler’s minions succeeded in an alarmingly short time. His account, The Nazi Seizure of Power , spans the years 1922 to 1945. But the heart of the book—as reflected in the subtitle of the original, 1965 edition—covered the years 1930 to 1935. It was during that period when the tiny Right-Wing splinter group called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party ( Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ) gained the support of nearly two-thirds of Northeim’s voters in three short years and then quickly moved to suppress all opposition.

Year Zero: A History of 1945, by Ian Buruma

Bard College professor Ian Buruma brings into high relief the seminal events of 1945, including the surrender of Germany and Japan, the opening of Germany’s concentration camps, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the founding of the United Nations, and the Yalta Conference that laid the foundations for the Cold War. Much of Buruma’s book is social history, with extensive coverage of such topics as “fraternization” between occupation troops and local women, the conditions faced by millions of survivors trapped (sometimes for years) in “displaced person” camps, the bitter and often violent struggles between the partisans who had waged guerrilla war against Germany and the conservatives who had often collaborated with the enemy, and the hunger that swept through the nations hardest hit in the war, especially Japan and Germany.

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War  by Deborah Cohen

They were the media superstars of their time. Millions read their dispatches from overseas, listened to them on the radio, and attended their lectures. In today’s atomized media environment, there is no one who compares to the breadth of their influence on public affairs. The closest analogue were the network TV anchors of the 1960s and 70s. Walter Cronkite . Chet Huntley and David Brinkley . Peter Jennings . Celebrities, one and all. And historian Deborah Cohen brings them back to life in Last Call at the Hotel Imperial , her engaging group biography of the most celebrated American foreign correspondents of the 1930s and 40s. Without exception, they viewed war inevitable as the 1930s unfolded. And they helped lay the foundation for American intervention in Europe when at last it came to the USA.

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad  by Matthew F. Delmont

Histories of the US role in World War II frequently mention the famous Tuskegee Airmen , a segregated African-American fighter squadron that distinguished itself in the European Theater. Sometimes they also cite the 92nd Infantry Division (“Buffalo Soldiers”), which breached the Gothic Line in northern Italy. The 761st Tank Battalion (“Black Panthers”) occasionally appears too. The Black tankers fought their way with General George S. Patton’s Third Army from Normandy, across France, and deeply into Germany. But singling out these exceptional units does a disservice to the much more substantial role of African-Americans in World War II.

Atlas of World War II: History’s Greatest Conflict Revealed Through Rare Wartime Maps and New Cartography  by Neil Kagan and Stephen G. Hyslop

This remarkable atlas combines contemporaneous and new maps with sometimes startling photographs and lucid prose to convey an accurate picture of the grand sweep of the war. Photos dramatize the human drama. Maps portray a general’s-eye view of the action. And terse narrative carries the story forward. Combined, they offer an indispensable tool for anyone who seeks to understand the single event of the twentieth century that has done the most to shape the world we know today.

The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans, a Story of Love and War by Catherine Grace Katz

Few Americans today remember the name Yalta . But for two generations following the end of World War II, the word conjured up conflicting political visions of the war’s outcome. It was there on the shores of the Black Sea that Franklin Roosevelt , Winston Churchill , and Joseph Stalin met for eight days in February 1945 to resolve the most troublesome questions facing the Allies: the treatment of defeated Germany, the fate of Poland, and whether the Soviet Union would enter the war with Japan. How those questions were resolved set off the Yalta controversy, which would divide Americans throughout the years of the long Cold War . And historian Catherine Grace Katz opens a window on those fateful eight days in her engaging account of three elite women who bore witness as aides to their fathers: Anna Roosevelt , Sarah Churchill , and Kathleen Harriman .

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

Erik Larson, one of America’s premier nonfiction writers, has produced a stirring tale about a courageous American diplomat who spoke out loudly against the growing Nazi terror while posted as US Ambassador in Hitler’s Berlin. He and his family ran afoul not just of the German government but of the US State Department as well. The Department, under Secretary of State Cordell Hull, was notoriously anti-Semitic and resisted all efforts to take action against the Nazis until the advent of war forced them to relent.

Darkest Hour: How Churchill Brought England Back from the Brink  by Anthony McCarten

Most accounts of World War II convey the impression that Britain speedily turned to Winston Churchill as Prime Minister once Hitler’s stormtroopers proved the folly of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. Through his indomitable will and soaring rhetoric, Churchill then rallied the people of Britain and led them brilliantly through the darkest early days of the war—and on, eventually, to victory. There is truth in that. But a closer examination muddies the picture. In fact, viewing the events of those early days with a microscope, it’s hard to avoid concluding that the impression many share is highly misleading. In Darkest Hour , Anthony McCarten follows the men in the leadership of the British government day by day and at times hour by hour during the fateful month of May 1940. The result is a picture that is both more equivocal and more credible.

Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour by Lynne Olson

Most accounts of the British-American alliance in World War II dwell on the closeness between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. But a more fine-toothed inspection of history reveals that others played equally significant roles in making the relationship work. And historian Lynne Olsen has dug into contemporaneous accounts, dredging up eye-opening facts about three prominent Americans whose wartime careers were pivotal in forging and sustaining the bond. US Ambassador John Gilbert Winant. Lend-Lease administrator W. Averell Harriman. And CBS radio broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. In Citizens of London , she follows these three remarkable men throughout the war, tracing the many ways they eased (or sometimes complicated) the relationship between the two powerful Western Allies. Her account is at times jaw-dropping. If a work of history can be a page-turner, Citizens of London fits the bill.

The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace, by Eric Rauchway

University of California, Davis, history professor Eric Rauchway argues persuasively that none of FDR’s New Deal policies to stimulate the American economy played as significant a role in ending the Depression as the President’s decision to take the United States off the gold standard. Delinking the dollar from gold permitted prices to rise domestically—and world trade to increase—as Roosevelt and British economist John Maynard Keynes maneuvered major European countries into parallel policies. This, Rauchway argues, is how capitalism was saved. The fiscal stimulus of the New Deal was far too modest to make much of a difference.

Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese-American Internment in World War II, by Richard Reeves

No one who lives in California today and has made even the most cursory effort to understand the state’s history can be unaware that the US government under Franklin Roosevelt herded Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during most of World War II. Included were not just recent immigrants but families whose roots lay two generations in the past. What is less well known about this shameful episode in our country’s history are the roles played by such revered figures as future US Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and leading members of Roosevelt’s Administration.

No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State  by Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern

Resistance to Hitler was notoriously weak. After all, he had ended unemployment and restored Germany’s stature in the world. His regime kept spirits afloat with adroit public pageantry and incessant propaganda. And official terror reigned, imprisoning those who spoke out in opposition and cowing those who feared to do so. Yet from the start of the Third Reich, “two admirable men did their utmost, each in his own way, to oppose Nazi outrages and then conspired to overthrow the tyrant.” Thus write Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern in No Ordinary Men , their portrait of the two famous brothers-in-law. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and attorney Hans von Dohnanyi were among a handful of men and women in the uppermost reaches of German society who consistently, and almost successfully, worked to rid the world of Adolf Hitler.

The Order of the Day by Éric Vuillard

The Order of the Day opens and closes with Vuillard’s observations about the twenty-four men who attended a secret meeting with Adolf Hitler on February 20, 1933. They were the cream of Germany industry and finance, men such as Gustav Krupp (1870-1950), Wilhelm von Opel (1871-1948), and Albert Vögler (1877-1945). They had come together at the request of the Führer ‘s economic adviser, Hjalmar Schacht (1877-1970), to hear an appeal for campaign contributions from Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler himself. And they gave. Oh, yes, they gave, quite enough to pave the way for the little corporal to gain enough electoral support and soon proclaim himself dictator. This was “nothing more for the Krupps, Opels, and Siemenses than a perfectly ordinary business transaction.

1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History , by Jay Winik

Historian Jay Winik asserts that “the State Department was now using the machinery of government to prevent, rather than facilitate, the rescue of the Jews. The fear seemed to be, not that the Jews would be marched to their deaths, but that they would be sent to the Allied nations.” It’s unavoidably clear now that the Department has the blood of more than a million people staining its already sad record of amorality: yes, in the absence of the obfuscation, foot-dragging, and bureaucratic nonsense from key members of the Department, more than a million lives could have been saved.

Gaining perspective on World War II

For the United States, World War II lasted less than four years (December 1941 to September 1945). But for much of the rest of the world the war was a much more protracted affair. In Europe, its formal beginning was September 1, 1939, when Hitler’s forces invaded Poland, although on both sides preparations for the conflict had been underway for several years previously. Meanwhile, in China, the war officially began July 17, 1937, but it makes more sense to date the beginning to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. And the numbers of war dead in countries such as the USSR (more than 20 million), China (15 to 20 million), Poland (6 million), and Germany (7 million) represented a far greater proportion of their population than American, British, and French fatalities, none of which exceeded half a million. Yet we Americans continue to think of that war in terms of its impact on France, England, and the US. Despite this contrast, nearly all the books listed above focus squarely on the role of French, British, and Americans in the war. For those of us who are French, British, or American, it’s understandable. But we would do well to recognize that World War II was truly a global affair.

For related reading

For the long background to the story of Nazi Germany, see The Shortest History of Germany: From Roman Frontier to the Heart of Europe―A Retelling for Our Times  by James Hawes ( 2,000 years of German history in 200 pages ).

This post is one of  My 10 top reading recommendations .

I’ve written a long article, “ 7 common misconceptions about World War II ,” which is posted on this site along with other articles about the war. And check out The 10 most consequential events of World War II .

See also 10 true-life accounts of anti-Nazi resistance .

I strongly recommend watching two Netflix documentaries, WWII in Color: Road to Victory , and World war II from the Frontlines . They’re both superb.

Although I don’t recommend the book, you could follow the major battles of the war in The Historical Atlas of World War II  by Alexander Swanston and Malcolm Swanston ( World War II in full-color maps and photos ).

You might also be interested in:

• 10 top WWII books about espionage
• 20 top nonfiction books about history
• 15 good books about the Holocaust
• The 10 best novels about World War II

And you can always find all the latest books I’ve read and reviewed on the Home Page .

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October 25, 2018

Hi Mal, Leigh Plews, Melbourne, Australia. I am a retiree. I am highly impressed by your article “7 common misconceptions about World War II.” It’s brilliant. In Australia, over the last twenty years or so, uncritical jingoism regarding our contribution to both World Wars has increased enormously. On a different topic, of which I know very little about, I have often been amazed at the seeming tenacity of the Vietnamese.

Cheers Leigh

Thanks, Leigh. It’s always great to learn people actually read the stuff I write!

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60 books about World War II

Anthony Doer's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See proved that books about World War II continue to fascinate readers. WWII is such an important period of 20th century history . There is a huge array of books focusing on the battles and conflict, the struggles of the military and ordinary people, the key moments such as D-Day, and many more subjects. We've selected 10 YA books, 20 novels and 30 examples of non-fiction with the ability to inspire, educate and display humanity's remarkable ability to self-destruct.

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This page lists resources on the Library of Congress website that will be useful for researchers looking for information about World War II.

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American Folklife Center

• Finding Aid for World War II Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture The Archive of Folk Culture mainly consists of the collections of the American Folklife Center. Today the Archive includes over three million photographs, manuscripts, audio recordings, and moving images, consisting of documentation of traditional culture from all around the world. It is America's first national archive of traditional life, and one of the oldest and largest of such repositories in the world.

Exhibitions

• American Treasures of the Library of Congress - World War II This online exhibition contains notable examples of World War II era materials from different areas of the Library, including photographs, posters, newspapers, and original documents.
• Dresden: Treasures from the Saxon State Library This exhibition includes photographs of twentieth century Dresden, including View from the Georgen Gate showing the ruins of the Frauenkirche and surrounding buildings, summer 1947 and View of Dresden's Neumarkt and the Frauenkirche, August 1949.
• Herblock's History: Political Cartoons from the Crash to the Millennium This exhibit includes a number of editorial cartoons from the World War II era by Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Herbert L. Block (1909-2001).
• John Bull and Uncle Sam: Four Centuries of British-American Relations The section of this exhibition titled "From Enemy to Ally" contains a variety of World War II materials, including examples of sheet music, photographs, and speeches.
• Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters During WWII This exhibition spotlights eight women who succeeded in "coming to the front" during the war--Therese Bonney, Toni Frissell, Marvin Breckinridge Patterson, Clare Boothe Luce, Janet Flanner, Esther Bubley, Dorothea Lange, and May Craig. Their stories--drawn from private papers and photographs primarily in Library of Congress collections--open a window on a generation of women who changed American society forever by securing a place for themselves in the workplace, in the newsroom, and on the battlefield.

Journeys and Crossings

• Anne Hoog on Pearl Harbor Oral Histories Ann Hoog ( Folklife Specialist, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) discusses After the Day of Infamy: 'Man-on-the-Street' Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor.
• Sheridan Harvey on Rosie the Riveter Sheridan Harvey (former Women's Studies Specialist, Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Library of Congress) explores the evolution of "Rosie the Riveter"and discusses the lives of real women workers in World War II.

Prints and Photographs Division Guides

• Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar The same images as presented on the Library of Congress American Memory site. This site contains background information, and a few selected images are included here as a quick sample of the collection.
• Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives The photographs of the Farm Security Administration (FSA)-Office of War Information (OWI), transferred to the Library of Congress in 1944, form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1943. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording rural and urban conditions throughout the United States and mobilization efforts for World War II.
• Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs Photographers working for the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1944 made approximately 1,600 color photographs that depict life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The pictures focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working.
• Rosie Pictures: Select Images Relating to American Women Workers During World War II The Prints & Photographs Division holds hundreds of images relating to American women workers in World War II. These selected images were issued by the U.S. government or by commercial sources during World War II, often to encourage women to join the work force or to highlight other aspects of the war effort.

Today In History

• February 4 The United Service Organizations, popularly known as the USO, was chartered on February 4, 1941, in order to provide recreation for on-leave members of the U.S. armed forces and their families.
• June 6 D-Day: Operation Overlord, The Allies invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944.
• June 13 On June 13, 1942, seven months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Office of War Information (OWI) was created. An important U.S. government propaganda agency during World War II, the OWI supported American mobilization for the war effort by recording the nation's activities.
• June 21 On June 21, 1945, Japanese troops surrendered the Pacific Island of Okinawa to the United States after one of the longest and bloodiest battles of World War II.
• August 13 On August 13, 1942, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin drafted a memorandum to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin Roosevelt opposing their decision not to invade Western Europe at that time.
• September 29 In 1942, John F. Kennedy entered the United States Navy to join American forces fighting in World War II. Prior to his departure, playwright Clare Boothe Luce, a close friend of the Kennedy family, sent the young naval officer a good luck coin that once belonged to her mother. On September 29, 1942, Kennedy wrote to Luce thanking her for sharing such an important token with him.
• October 23 The Senate passed the $5.98 billion supplemental Lend-Lease Bill on October 23, 1941, bringing the United States one step closer to direct involvement in World War II.
• October 24 The United Nations was established by charter on October 24, 1945. Initially, the United Nations included only the twenty-six countries that had signed the 1942 Declaration by United Nations, a statement of war against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) in World War II.
• November 26 Rick's Place: World War II military code for the city of Casablanca. The film Casablanca premiered in New York City on November 26, 1942, as Allied Expeditionary Forces (AEF) secured their hold on North Africa during World War II.
• December 2 At 3:25 P.M. on December 2, 1942, the Atomic Age began inside an enormous tent on a squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field.
• December 7 On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory killing more than 2,300 Americans.

Veterans History Project

• Veterans History Project home page Provides information about this oral history project, as will as links to information about how to participate, a database of participating veterans, and digitized materials from the collection.
• Veterans History Project Guide to Oral History sites A guide to (predominantly WWII) oral history sites online.
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• Next: Databases and External Websites >>
• Last Updated: Jul 28, 2023 11:49 AM
• URL: https://guides.loc.gov/ww2

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