BOOKS ON WORLD WAR II, or specific aspects of it, are almost legion. They range from the official histories, to memoirs by virtually all the important participants, to specific histories of certain aspects of the struggle. The following list makes no attempt to be all-inclusive. The titles contained in it are bound together by nothing more philosophical than the fact that I have found them useful or interesting over the course of several years of reading and teaching about the Second World War.
To have listed works as they refer to each chapter would have entailed a substantial amount of repetition. They are placed here, therefore, more or less by theater or by general topic, and the reader wishing to obtain more material on a certain campaign or aspect of the war ought to have little difficulty in finding a title.
GENERAL. Those who want a fairly complete list of works available on the war, at least until the time of publication, might look at J. Zeigler’s World War II: Books in English, 1945-65 (Hoover Institution Bibliographical Series: 45, Stanford, 1971). A smaller work is L. Morton’s Writings on World War II (Washington, 1967). The official histories vary in length, quality, and readability; one cannot get very deeply into World War II without them, but it is more convenient to list the series here than to try to refer to individual volumes. Most complete is the series entitled The United States Army in World War II (Washington) which runs to well over a hundred volumes, with some still appearing, and covers all aspects of the army’s activities during the war. Rather more concise, and the most popularly written of all of them, is S. E. Morison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Boston, 1947-62, 15 vols.). W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate edited The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago, 1948-58, 7 vols.). The British have also put out an extensive series of official histories, in a somewhat convoluted sequence of titles. The most important are the several volumes in the Grand Strategy series, by different authors, and the most useful in a purely military way is probably C. Webster and N. Frankland’s The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany (London, 4 vols., 1961). There are also histories of the different campaigns, and then a second group that are written in a more popular style, and some of these will be referred to below.
In a war as wide-ranging as World War II an atlas is indispensable, and the best is volume II of V. J. Esposito’s West Point Atlas of American Wars (New York, 1958). This will be a useful place to mention general treatments of the war. There are several of these, and among the best are V. J. Esposito’s A Concise History of World War II (New York, 1964); L. L. Snyder’s The War: A Concise History, 1939-45 (New York, 1965); and B. H. Liddell Hart’s History of the Second World War (New York, 1972). The approaches taken in these vary from the strictly factual, as in Esposito, to the highly interpretive, as in Liddell Hart.
THE PREWAR PERIOD. For general surveys of this period there are H. S. Hughes’ Contemporary Europe (Englewood Cliffs, 1961), D. Thomson’s Europe Since Napoleon (New York, 1958), and R. A. C. Parker’s Europe, 1919-1945 (New York, 1969). On naval disarmament, E. B. Potter’s The United States and World Sea Power (Englewood Cliffs, 1955) is useful. Later revisions of this standard work have appeared under the authorship of E. B. Potter and Admiral C. Nimitz entitled Sea Power.
France and its weaknesses in the interwar period have been dealt with at length by a large number of writers. A useful survey is P. Ouston’s France in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1972). Books that deal both with the fall of France in 1940 and as well extensively with the background to that event are Alastair Horne’s To Lose a Battle: France, 1940 (London, 1969), and William L. Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic (New York, 1969). The best-known book on the French Army between the wars is Paul Marie de la Gorce’s The French Army (New York, 1963). Aidan Crawley’s De Gaulle (Indianapolis, 1959) is a readable account of this towering French leader. Many works aside from Shirer and Horne deal specifically with the collapse of 1940, and those will be mentioned later.
On Great Britain between the wars the latest volume in the Oxford History of England, A. J. P. Taylor’s English History 1914-1945, came out in 1965. It is Professor Taylor who takes the line that World War I was good for Great Britain. General studies of the period are A. F. Havinghurst’s Twentieth Century Britain (London, 1962), and C. L. Mowat’s Britain between the Wars, 1918-1940 (London, 1955). This is as good a place as any to mention Winston Churchill’s monumental and indispensable six-volume History of the Second World War (Boston, 1948-53), the first part of the first volume of which deals with the background to the war. Though the work is indeed indispensable, one is constrained to recall Churchill’s remark to his officers when they disagreed with him, “Mind you, gentlemen, history will support my view—at least the way I write it, it will.” Some of the seminal figures in the R. A. F.—Dowding, Harris, and Tedder—are treated briefly in Sir Michael Carver, ed., The War Lords: Military Commanders of the Twentieth Century (Boston, 1976), which has short biographies of most of the major commanders of World War II.
As to the revisionist states, the most readable biographies of Mussolini are Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick’s Mussolini: A Study in Power (New York, 1968) and Christopher Hibbert’s Benito Mussolini (London, 1962). A general history is Dennis Mack-Smith’s Italy: A Modern History (Ann Arbor, 1959). Ciano’s various Diaries (London, 1947-52), gives general insight to the later Fascist period. The standard work on the Spanish affair is Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War (London, 1961), in which the author deals with the fact of German intervention on the Republican as well as the Nationalist side. Italy’s increasing ties with Germany are covered in F. W. Deakin’s The Brutal Friendship (London, 1962) and Elizabeth Wiskemann’s The Rome-Berlin Axis (London, rev. ed., 1966).
The reader can drown in works on Nazi Germany. For general background there is G. Mann’s The History of Germany since 1789 (New York, 1968). More specifically on the Hitler era is T. L. Jarman’s The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany (London, 1955). On Hitler himself there is W. L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York, 1960), which is as much a biography of Hitler as it is a general history of his era, and Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London, rev. ed., 1974). Mein Kampfappeared in an unexpurgated English edition (Boston, 1943). There have been collections of Hitler’s speeches, his table talk, his war conferences. The army’s role in the New Order has been extensively examined. Probably best known are Walter Goerlitz’ History of the German General Staff (New York, 1954); J. W. Wheeler-Bennett’s The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918-1945 (London, 1961); Gordon Craig’s The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945 (New York, 1964); and Telford Taylor’s Sword and Swastika: Generals and Nazis in the Third Reich (Chicago, 1969).
There has been less written on Japan. For a general survey there is P. H. Clyde and B. F. Beers’ The Far East: A History of the Western Impact and the Eastern Response (1830-1965) (Englewood Cliffs, 4th ed., 1966). For the thirties there is Richard Storry’s The Double Patriots: A Study in Japanese Nationalism (Boston, 1957). F. F. Liu’s A Military History of Modern China (Princeton, 1956) treats the period of undeclared war, as the name implies, largely from the Chinese side.
R. D. Charques’ A Short History of Russia (New York, 1956) and F. L. Schuman’s Russia since 1917 (New York, 1957) are general histories of Russia covering this period. On foreign policy there are the brilliant works of George F. Kennan: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1941 (New York, 1960), and Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (New York, 1961). The standard biography is I. Deutscher’s Stalin: A Political Biography (London, 1967). Albert Seaton’s Stalin as Military Commander (New York, 1976) in the first chapters contains material on the interwar years.
As might well be expected, there is a large amount of material on the United States, though the majority of it is domestic in orientation. A good general survey is G. H. Knoles’ The United States: A History since 1896 (New York, 1960); also A. S. Link’s The American Epoch (New York, 1959). The classic biography of Roosevelt is Arthur Schlesinger’s multi-volume The Age of Roosevelt (Boston, 1959). On diplomacy, isolationism, and neutrality there are F. R. Dulles’ America’s Rise to World Power, 1898-1954(New York, 1955); Selig Adler’s The Isolationist Impulse (New York, 1957); George F. Kennan’s American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago, 1951), which touched off the argument about the relativity of diplomacy; and B. Rausch’s Roosevelt: From Munich to Pearl Harbor (New York, 1950). On American naval and military posture there are R. F. Weigley’s History of the United States Army (New York, 1967) and his The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York, 1973), both volumes in the series of the Macmillan Wars of the United States; and for the navy there is Thaddeus V. Tuleja’s Statesmen and Admirals: Quest for a Far Eastern Naval Policy (New York, 1963). The definitive study of Japanese-American prewar relations is H. Feis’ The Road to Pearl Harbor (Princeton, 1950). Needless to say, Pearl Harbor has received extensive examination. The most popular accounts are W. Lord’s Day of Infamy (New York, 1957) and J. Toland’s But Not in Shame (New York, 1961), which takes the story from Pearl Harbor to Midway. Probably the best specific study to date is Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, 1962).
Many of the works listed above, especially those dealing with Germany and with Britain during the period 1937-39, have sections on the prewar crises. As mentioned in the text, A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War (New York, 1962) is crucial, whether or not one agrees with it. Particularly condemnatory of Chamberlain is Leonard Mosley’s On Borrowed Time (New York, 1971). The standard biography is by K. Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (New York, 1946). For the Czech crisis there is K. Eubank’s Munich (Norman, Okla., 1963). Laurence Thompson’s The Greatest Treason: The Untold Story of Munich (New York, 1968) is a very readable account that emphasizes both the banality of the participants and the divisions among them.
THE EUROPEAN WAR: EARLY PHASE. For all the campaigns there are the standard histories of the war referred to earlier. Probably the two best surveys of the Polish campaign are R. M. Kennedy’s The German Campaign in Poland, 1939 (Washington, 1956) and a French work, R. Jars’ La Campagne de Pologne (Paris, 1949). An interesting personal memoir is Gen. K. S. Rudnicki’s The Last of the War Horses (London, 1974). The question of western inactivity is dealt with in J. Kimche’s The Unfought Battle (New York, 1968).
For the Russo-Finnish War there is V. A. Tanner, The Winter War: Finland Against Russia, 1939-1940 (London, 1961). Marshal Mannerheim wrote his Memoirs (New York, 1954), dealing extensively with relations between his unfortunate country and Soviet Russia.
On the Norwegian campaign B. Ash wrote Norway (London, 1964), and K. Derry’s The Campaign in Norway (London, 1952) is a useful volume of the United Kingdom Military Series. The British naval officer Captain D. G. F. W. MacIntyre wrote a study specifically on Narvik (New York, 1960). A more recent study of the whole war in Norway is R. Petrow’s The Bitter Years: The Invasion and Occupation of Denmark and Norway, April, 1940-May, 1945 (New York, 1974).
As might well be expected, the greatest military collapse of the twentieth century, the fall of France, has inspired an enormous amount of investigation. The general studies by W. L. Shirer and Alastair Home have already been referred to. Gamelin wrote his memoirs, and Reynaud wrote his twice, the first under the title, in French, France Has Saved Europe (Paris, 2 vols., 1947), and again under the title, in its English translation, In the Thick of the Fight (New York, 1955). It is safe to say that memoirs of French generals and politicians have been somewhat critically received in the English-speaking world. This is equally true of de Gaulle’s War Memoirs (London, 3 vols., 1955-60). Probably the most balanced account of events by a close observer is General Sir E. Spears’ Assignment to Catastrophe (New York, 2 vols., 1954). Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat (New York, 1949) has also been highly regarded. For the actual military operations, there are several works available. T. Draper’s The Six Weeks’ War (New York, 1944) is old but surprisingly good, considering it was published while the war was still on. The Battle of France, 1940, by Colonel A. Goutard (New York, 1959) takes the view that France’s defeat was pure military stupidity and cuts the ground from under all the generals who claimed they were outnumbered, or undermined by their politicians. The most thorough examination of the whole matter is J. Benoist-Mechin’s Sixty Days that Shook the West (London, 1963). The British part in the campaign is covered by L. F. Ellis’ The War in France and Flanders, 1939-1940 (London, 1953), another volume of the U. K. Military Series. Dunkirk has been extensively dealt with. A recent treatment is R. Collier’s The Sands of Dunkirk (London, 1961). Airey Neave in The Flames of Calais (London, 1972) discussed the question of the utility of the heroic defense of the old town by the British. The latest treatment of Mers-el-Kebir is Warren Tute’s The Deadly Stroke (New York, 1973).
The Battle of Britain has received nearly as much attention as the Battle of France. Any of the following are useful: E. Bishop’s The Battle of Britain (London, 1960); Basil Collier’s The Battle of Britain (New York, 1962); A. McKee’s Strike from the Sky: The Story of the Battle of Britain (London, 1960); and Drew Middleton’s The Sky Suspended: The Battle of Britain (London, 1960). A slightly different tack is taken in Constantine Fitzgibbon’s The Blitz (London, 1957). Perhaps the best single short work is Len Deighton’s Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain (London, 1977), written recently enough to dispose of many of the common myths, and also concentrating heavily on the matériel and equipment problems of both sides. Several works have appeared on the question of the German invasion. P. Fleming’s Operation Sea Lion (New York, 1957) is a good general coverage. R. Wheatley’s Operation Sea Lion: German Plans for the Invasion of England, 1939-42 (Oxford, 1958) is the most detailed study.
The Battle of the Atlantic has also received extensive coverage. General works on the naval war are S. W. Roskill’s White Ensign: The British Navy at War, 1939-1945 (Annapolis, 1960); P. K. Kemp’s Key to Victory: The Triumph of British Sea Power in World War II (Boston, 1957); F. Ruge’s Der Seekrieg: The German Navy’s Story, 1939-1945 (Annapolis, 1957); T. V. Tuleja’s Twilight of the Sea Gods (New York, 1958). More specifically there is D. G. F. W. MacIntyre’s The Battle of the Atlantic (London, 1961). One of many books on the U-boats is Heinz Schaeffer’s U-Boat 977 (London, 1952). The classic technical study on the big ships is S. Breyer’s Battleships and Battlecruisers, 1905-1970 (New York, 1973), and the best account of the convoys is in M. Middlebrook’s Convoy (London, 1976). Almost all of the big-ship episodes have received treatment by one or more writers. A. McKee’s Black Saturday (New York, 1959) is about the sinking of Royal Oak; Dudley Pope wrote Graf Spee: Life and Death of a Raider (New York, 1956). On the Bismarck there are R. Grenfell’s The Bismarck Episode (London, 1948), and W. Berthold’s The Sinking of the Bismarck (London, 1958). D. Woodward dealt with The Tirpitz and the Battle for the North Atlantic (New York, 1953), and F.-O. Busch with The Sinking of the Scharnhorst (London, 1974), on which there is also M. Ogden’s The Battle of the North Cape (London, 1962).
THE WAR IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. For the naval aspects of the struggle in the Mediterranean there are the general naval histories referred to above; there is also D. G. F. W. MacIntyre’s The Battle for the Mediterranean (London, 1964). S. W. C. Pack covered The Battle of Matapan (London, 1961). A view from the other side is M. A. Bragadin’s The Italian Navy in World War II (Annapolis, 1957).
On Greece and Crete there is C. Buckley’s Greece and Crete, 1941 (London, 1952); A. Heckstall-Smith and H. T. Baillie-Grohman’s Greek Tragedy, 1941 (New York, 1961); and R. Crisp’s The Gods Were Neutral (London, 1960). More especially on Crete there is A. Clark’s The Fall of Crete (New York, 1962), and J. H. Spencer’s The Battle for Crete (London, 1962).
For the desert campaign in Libya and Egypt there are D. W. Braddock’s The Campaigns in Egypt and Libya, 1940-1942 (Aldershot, 1964), and A. Moorehead’s The Desert War (London, 1965): Correlli Barnett wrote a critique in The Desert Generals (London, 1960); Sir John Smyth’s Leadership in War, 1939-1945 (New York, 1974) is also mostly on North Africa, and R. Crisp’s Brazen Chariots (London, 1959) is an evocative memoir of tank-fighting in the desert. Rommel has attracted a good deal of attention, as in P. Carell’s The Foxes of the Desert (London, 1960), H. W. Schmidt’s With Rommel in the Desert (London, 1951), and D. Young’s Rommel (London, 1950). A more recent assessment is D. Irving’s On the Trail of the Fox (London, 1977). J. H. Robertson’s Auchinleck: A Biography of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (London, 1959) is the standard work on this ill-used general. Alan Moorehead’s African Trilogy (London, 1959) is an evocative view by one of the leading correspondents of the war. A. Heckstall-Smith, in Tobruk (London, 1959), dealt with the sieges of that small but once-famous port. Much British attention has focused on the great battle of El Alamein, but a lot of what was written on it can now be disregarded. Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver wrote a straightforward military account, El Alamein (London), in 1962; F. Majdalany did the same in The Battle of El Alamein: Fortress in the Sand (London, 1965), and so did Brigadier C. E. L. Phillips, Alamein (London, 1962). Carver mused on how strange it was that it all seemed so easy after Montgomery arrived, and wondered why it had been so hard before that. Montgomery in his Memoirs (London, 1958) rather implied that the answer to that lay in his own brilliance, and it was not until the publication of F. W. Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret (New York, 1974) that the real answer—the British reading of the Germans’ codes—came out. A far-from-fiattering view of the man some regarded as Britain’s greatest soldier of the war is in Alun Chalfont’s Montgomery of Alamein (New York, 1976).
Canadians retain strong views on the Dieppe raid, and the best single volume on that unhappy incident is T. Robertson’s The Shame and the Glory: Dieppe (Toronto, 1962).
The invasion of French North Africa and the campaign there has attracted relatively less attention than many areas of the war. Auphan and Mordal’s The French Navy in World War II (Annapolis, 1959) has chapters on it. Some of the agonies of divided French loyalties are dealt with in M. Blumenson and J. L. Stokesbury’s Masters of the Art of Command (Boston, 1975). The Darlan episode has many of the earmarks of a modern spy story, and P. Tompkins in The Murder of Admiral Darlan (New York, 1965) attempted to unravel the threads of it all. Martin Blumenson’s Kasserine Pass (Boston, 1967) thoroughly covered that traumatic event, and his The Patton Papers (Boston, 2 vols., 1972-74) deals with Patton’s role in North Africa, as well as the rest of the career of that enigmatic soldier. A biographical treatment is L. Farago’s Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (New York, 1964).
THE RUSSO-GERMAN WAR. There are several good general histories of this titanic conflict. Alexander Werth’s Russia at War (New York, 1964) is especially good on the domestic Russian attitudes and Alan Clark’s Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-1945 (New York, 1965) is a standard account. A popular German treatment is P. Carell’s Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (Boston, 1965). H. Guderian’s Panzer Leader (New York, 1965) has a good deal to say on the use of armor in Russia. The Red Air Force is treated in R. Wagner’s The Soviet Air Force in World War II (New York, 1973). A more personal account is H.-U. Rudel, Stuka Pilot (New York, 1958). A. Dallin’s German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945: A Study in Occupation Policies (New York, 1957) in a dispassionate way does much to explain the passion of the Russian reaction to the German invasions. An excellent long-range military-historical study which compares Hitler’s invasion with previous western ones is W. G. F. Jackson’s Seven Roads to Moscow (New York, 1958). As the great turning point of the war, Stalingrad has received much attention. J. E. Vetter edited Last Letters from Stalingrad (MacLean, Va., 1955). General studies are V. I. Chiukov’s The Battle for Stalingrad (New York, 1964), H. Schroter’s Stalingrad (London, 1960), and R. Seth’s Stalingrad—Point of Return (London, 1959). The French Guy Sajer wrote a moving memoir in The Forgotten Soldier (New York, 1971). On the siege of Leningrad the best-known work is Harrison Salisbury’s The Nine Hundred Days (New York, 1969). Also good is L. Gouré’s The Siege of Leningrad (Stanford, 1962). The post-crisis period has been relatively less well covered, and for that the general histories of the Russo-German war are most helpful.
OCCUPATION, RESISTANCE, BOMBING, AND ALLIED PLANS AND PROBLEMS. Much is available on the German occupation of Europe and the resistance to it. The best general survey is Henri Michel’s The Shadow War: European Resistance, 1939-45 (New York, 1952). Eugene Davidson in The Trial of the Germans (New York, 1966) deals with some of the key German figures and their policy roles. A short treatment is in G. Wright’s The Ordeal of Total War (New York, 1968), and Kenneth Macksey wrote generally on The Partisans of Europe in the Second World War (New York, 1975). On the Vichy question there are R. O. Paxton’s Parades and Politics at Vichy: The French Officer Corps under Marshal Petain (Princeton, 1966) and Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York, 1972). Many British writers have covered the connections between the indigenous Resistance operations and the Allied attempts to channel and control them. There are also works on specific countries. P. Howarth edited a work on Special Operations (London, 1955); R. Collier’s Ten Thousand Eyes (London, 1958), B. Marshall’s The White Rabbit (Boston, 1953), and D. Howarth’s We Die Alone (New York, 1955) are all worth reading. D. Lampe covered the Danish Underground in The Savage Canary (London, 1957), and T. Bor-Ko-morowski, commander of the Polish Home Army, wrote The Secret Army (London, 1950). A great deal has appeared on the French Resistance, perhaps in some respects as an antidote to France’s military collapse. A general review is P. de Vomecourt’s Who Lived to See the Day: France in Arms, 1940-45 (London, 1961); an intriguing personal memoir, which also tells much of both the strengths and weaknesses of the Resistance movement, is Henri Frenay’s The Night Will End: Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York, 1976). The beginning of the Resistance is covered in Martin Blumenson’s moving The Vilde Affair (Boston, 1977), from which the story of listening to the BBC is taken.
The effectiveness of strategic bombing remains a subject of contention, and there is a vast number of books on the subject generally, and on specific aspects of it. For the technical side of what the bombers could do, and how they were developed, William Green’s Famous Bombers of the Second World War (New York, 2 vols., 1959-60) is the work to start with. There have been many German works on the air war; notable were C. Bekker’s The Luftwaffe War Diaries (New York, 1972), which is regarded as a semiofficial history; W. Baumbach’s The Life and Death of the Luftwaffe (New York, 1960); and K. Bartz’ Swastika in the Air: The Struggle and Defeat of the German Air Force, 1939-1945 (London, 1956). Adolf Galland, the famous German fighter pilot chief, wrote The First and the Last: The Rise and Fall of the German Fighter Forces, 1938-1945 (New York, 1957). Specific raids or periods of the campaign have been covered by many writers. Martin Caidin wrote The Night Hamburg Died (New York, 1960), and also Black Thursday (New York, 1960), about the first American daylight raid, against Schweinfurt. D. J. C. Irving wrote The Thousand Plane Raid (New York, 1966), which describes the first of Harris’ “big raids.” Martin Middlebrook’s The Nuremberg Raid(New York, 1974) is an engrossing examination of the technical and human problems of the air war.
The Cold War prompted extensive discussion of how the wartime allies got along, and why they fell out. The newest book to review the problem, and what is likely to be the last memoir by one of the participants, is W. Averell Harriman’s Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946 (New York, 1975). An exhaustive study of the three great powers and their leaders is H. Feis’ Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (Princeton, 1967). The Australian war correspondent Chester Wilmot touched off the great debate about American naivete in The Struggle for Europe (London, 1952); though his conclusions have often been challenged, the work remains fascinating reading. Even earlier than that, W. L. Neuman wrote Making the Peace, 1941-1945: The Diplomacy of the Wartime Conferences (Washington, 1950). The enduring question of what to do with Germany is treated in J. L. Snell’s Wartime Origins of the East-West Dilemma over Germany (New Orleans, 1962). Slightly more specific were A. Armstrong’s Unconditional Surrender: The Impact of the Casablanca Policy upon World War II (New Brunswick, N. J., 1961) and M. Viorst’s Hostile Allies, FDR and Charles de Gaulle (London, 1965); Roosevelt’s treatment of de Gaulle during the war does a great deal to explain de Gaulle’s treatment of the United States in the sixties.
THE EUROPEAN WAR: LATER PHASE. The general problem of continuing in the Mediterranean and invading Italy, as opposed to going directly into France, is discussed in M. Howard’s The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War (New York, 1968), and in Trumbull Higgins’ Soft Underbelly: The Anglo-American Controversy over the Italian Campaign, 1939-1945 (New York, 1968). An overview of the entire Italian campaign is in E. R. R. Linklater’s The Campaign in Italy (London, HMSO., 1951). Separate episodes have been covered in detail by several writers. Hugh Pond wrote Sicily (London, 1962) and Salerno (London, 1961). Cassino as the crisis of the campaign has had a number of chroniclers; an interesting German view is R. Bohmler’s Monte Cassino (London, 1964). British accounts are C. Connell’s Monte Cassino, The Historic Battle (London, 1963), and F. Majdalany’s The Battle of Cassino (Boston, 1957). Martin Blumenson wrote on the Rapido incident in Bloody River (Boston, 1970), and H. L. Bond in Return to Cassino: A Memoir of the Fight for Rome (London, 1964) provided an infantry officer’s moving recollection of the fight. R. Trevelyan did a similar memoir in The Fortress: A Diary of Anzio and After (London, 1956), while L. J. W. Vaughan-Thomas in Anzio (London, 1961) wrote a general British account, and Martin Blumenson in Anzio: The Gamble That Failed (London, 1963) did a general American account. An overall critique of the great May offensive is W. G. F. Jackson’s The Battle for Rome (New York, 1969). Concerning the attempt to crack The Gothic Line there is the work by D. Orgill (New York, 1967).
For a general account of the German failures in France there is M. Shulman’s Defeat in the West (New York, 1948). Sir Frederick Morgan filled in the pre-invasion period in Overture to Overlord (New York, 1950). The great invasion itself has been thoroughly covered. Paul Carrell produced the most popular German account, Invasion—They’re Coming! (London, 1962). On the Allied side is David Howarth’s D-Day, the Sixth of June, 1944 (New York, 1959). S. L. A. Marshall did another of his classic studies of men under fire in Night Drop: The American Airborne Invasion of Normandy (Boston, 1962), and Cornelius Ryan popularized a phrase with The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 (New York, 1959). For the post-D-Day period there is E. M. G. Belfield and H. Essame’s The Battle for Normandy (London, 1965), Alexander McKee’s Caen: Anvil of Victory (London, 1964), and E. Florentin’s The Battle of the Falaise Gap (London, 1965). A general account of the campaign of France after it opened up is Martin Blumenson’s The Duel for France, 1944 (Boston, 1963). General Montgomery also covered the whole campaign in Normandy to the Baltic (London, 1947). A French view is R. Aron’s De Gaulle Triumphant: The Liberation of France, August, 1944-May, 1945 (London, 1964). Southern France has not been as thoroughly covered as northern France, but Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny’s memoir, The History of the First French Army (London, 1952), is basically on that campaign. The July Plot is covered in virtually all the books on Hitler and his Germany, and specifically in Constantine Fitzgibbon’s 20 July (New York, 1956), and R. Manvell and H. Fraenkel’s The July Plot: The Attempt in 1944 on Hitler’s Life and the Men Behind It (London, 1964). Arnhem has had many recorders. C. Hibbert’s The Battle of Arnhem (London, 1962) is a general account. Cornelius Ryan in A Bridge Too Far (New York, 1974) tried to repeat for Arnhem what he had done with D Day.
A general treatment of the campaign of Germany is G. Blond’s The Death of Hitler’s Germany (New York, 1954). All of the innumerable works on Hitler deal with his last days, often at stultifying length. The German missile campaign is the subject of Basil Collier’s The Battle of the V-Weapons (London, 1964). As might be expected, the Battle of the Bulge has been thoroughly examined. Specific aspects of it were covered by S. L. A. Marshall in Bastogne (Washington, 1964), and R. Gallagher in The Malmedy Massacre (New York, 1964). The most popular general treatment was John Toland’s Battle: The Story of the Bulge (New York, 1959). Most of the material on the Russian advances comes from German works, but there is available Maria Galantai’s The Changing of the Guard, The Siege of Budapest, 1944-1945 (London, 1961). A classic popular general account of the closing days of the war in Europe is John Toland’s The Last 100 Days (New York, 1956). On the western breakthrough into Germany there is C. B. MacDonald’s The Battle of Heurtgen Forest (Philadelphia, 1963); MacDonald’s Company Commander (Washington, 1947) has become a classic memoir. R. A. Briggs did The Battle for the Ruhr Pocket (West Point, Ky., 1957), R. W. Thompson wrote The Battle for the Rhineland (London, 1958) and The Eighty-Five Days: The Story of the Battle for the Scheldt (London, 1975), and K. W. Hechler did The Bridge at Remagen (New York, 1957). On the Bavarian Redoubt there is R. G. Minott’s The Fortress that Never Was: The Myth of the Nazi Alpine Redoubt (London, 1965), and finally, on Berlin itself, S. E. Ambrose’s Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Stop at the Elbe (New York, 1967), and A. Tully’s Berlin, the Story of a Battle (New York, 1963), as well as the many works on Hitler suggested above.
THE WAR IN EAST ASIA AND THE PACIFIC. Far Eastern geography is so complicated that an atlas such as Esposito’s excellent West Point Atlas of American Wars referred to earlier is indispensable for dealing with the war in that area. Potter’s U. S. and World Sea Power and John Toland’s But Not in Shame have excellent coverage of the whole war and of the period up to Midway respectively. The fall of Singapore, as a major disaster, has attracted many British writers. A most interesting general account is Noel Barber’s A Sinister Twilight: The Fall of Singapore, 1942 (Boston, 1958). The outstanding single event of the Malayan campaign was the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales; on this there are R. Grenfell’s Main Fleet to Singapore (London, 1951) and B. Ash’s Someone Had Blundered: The Story of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales (London, 1960). The collapse of the Malay Barrier is treated in R. C. H. McKie’s The Survivors (Indianapolis, 1953), and the horrible conditions of fighting in New Guinea will be found discussed in R. Paull’s Retreat from Kokoda (London, 1960). The extremely complex battle at Midway is made clear for the reader in Thaddeus V. Tuleja’s Climax at Midway (New York, 1960) and Walter Lord’s Incredible Victory (New York, 1967); it was Professor Tuleja who made sense out of contradictory movement charts by discovering that some Japanese carriers had their island structures on the port side, whereas most carriers carry them to starboard. The view from the other side is in M. Fuchida and M. Okumiya’s Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan (Annapolis, 1955).
China continues to be the poor relation in writing on the war. General Stilwell published his view of affairs in The Stilwell Papers (New York, 1948), and so did his successor in Wedemeyer Reports! (New York, 1958). Barbara Tuchman took a longer view in Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 (New York, 1970). A more specialized study is L. Anders’ The Ledo Road: General Joseph W. Stilwell’s Highway to China (Norman, Okla., 1965).
For the British campaign in Burma there is a short military critique, G. F. Matthews’ The Re-Conquest of Burma, 1943-1945 (Aldershot, 1966), and J. Bagaley’s The Chindit Story (London, 1954). A. F. Campbell wrote The Siege (London, 1956) on Kohima, and on the companion battle, Sir G. C. Evans and Anthony Brett-James covered Imphal (London, 1962). The classic memoir of the campaign is Field Marshal Sir William Slim’s Defeat into Victory (London, 1956).
Virtually all of the island operations have been covered by official histories or monographs, either by the U. S. Army or the Marine Corps. For the general course of these and the development of the operational methods, there are F. O. Hough’s The Island War: The United States Marine Corps in the Pacific (Philadelphia, 1947), and J. A. Isley and P. A. Crowl’s The U. S. Marines and Amphibious War: Its Theory and Practice in the Pacific (Princeton, 1951), the standard study of the Marines’ war. There are also Robert Leckie’s Strong Men Armed: The United States Marines Against Japan (New York, 1967), E. B. Potter and Admiral C. W. Nimitz’ Triumph in the Pacific (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), and H. M. Smith and P. Finch’s Coral and Brass (New York, 1949).
More specific works are Brian Garfield’s The Thousand Mile War (New York, 1969) on the Aleutians; also R. L. Sherrod’s Tarawa: The Story of a Battle (New York, 1954). On Guadalcanal and the naval battles around it there are S. B. Griffith’s The Battle for Guadalcanal (Philadelphia, 1963), and R. Leckie, Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal, the Turning Point of the War (New York, 1965). Even with a good general coverage, some events have received much more treatment than others. R. L. Eichelberger wrote Our Jungle Road to Tokyo (New York, 1950), but there has been a great deal more on the central Pacific than on the southwest fighting. Clark Reynolds traced the development of the new naval combination in The Fast Carriers (New York, 1968), while J. J. Fahey’s Pacific War Diary, 1942-1945 (Boston, 1963), provides the memoir of a young participant in the war. Japanese views are in T. Hara, F. Saito, and R. Pineau’s Japanese Destroyer Captain (New York, 1961), and S. Hayashi and A. D. Coox’ Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War (Quantico, Va., 1959). F. O. Hough chronicled The Assault on Peleliu (Washington, 1950). Leyte Gulf has received a great deal of attention, beginning with J. A. Field’s The Japanese at Leyte Gulf: The Sho Operation (Princeton, 1947), and G. V. Woodward’s The Battle for Leyte Gulf (New York, 1947). A later study is S. E. Smith’s The Battle of Leyte Gulf (New York, 1961).
For the submarine campaign against Japan there is E. L. Beach’s Submarine! (New York, 1951), and for the Japanese side, M. Hashimoto’s Sunk: The Story of the Japanese Submarine Fleet, 1941-1945 (New York, 1954). A thorough general treatment is T. Roscoe’s United States Submarine Operations in World War II (Annapolis, 1949). For the strategic bombing campaign there are W. H. Morrison’s Hellbirds: The Story of the B-29s in Combat (New York, 1960), and Martin Caidin’s A Torch to the Enemy: The Fire Raid on Tokyo (New York, 1960). Stories of Japan’s air forces are M. Okumiya, J. Horikoshi, with Martin Caidin, Zero! (New York, 1956), and S. Sakai with Martin Caidin and F. Saito, Samurai! (New York, 1957).
R. Henri wrote The U. S. Marines on Iwo Jima (Washington, 1945), and a later treatment is R. Wheeler’s The Bloody Battle for Suribachi (New York, 1965). For Okinawa and the kamikaze campaign there are R. E. Appleman’s Okinawa: The Last Battle(Washington, 1948), and M. Ito and R. Pineau’s The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy (New York, 1962). R. Inoguchi, T. Nakajima, and R. Pineau wrote The Divine Wind: Japan’s Kamikaze Force in World War II (London, 1959), and the French novelist Jean Larteguy edited The Sun Goes Down: Last Letters from Japanese Suicide Pilots and Soldiers (London. 1956).
A great deal has been written on the atomic bombs. The classic account of the bombing itself is John Hersey’s Hiroshima (New York, 1946). The director of the bomb development project, Leslie R. Groves, wrote Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York, 1962). M. Amrine did The Great Decision: The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1959), and W. L. Lawrence wrote Dawn over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1947). From the Japanese point of view, which as might be expected is markedly different from the American, there are M. Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945 (Chapel Hill, N. C, 1955), and T. Nagai’s We of Nagasaki: The Story of Survivors in an Atomic Wasteland (New York, 1951). Herbert Feis ties the bombings and the surrender together in Japan Subdued: The Atomic Bombs and the End of the War in the Pacific (Princeton, 1961).
Finally, problems of the end of the war have tended to shade rapidly into problems of the Cold War, and there is a considerable literature on many of the matters merely touched in passing at the close of the war. On Nuremberg and the War Crimes trials a most interesting work is Bradley F. Smith’s Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (New York, 1977). J. M. Blum presented a liberal view of what the war did to and for, and what it did not do to and for, the United States in V was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York, 1976). For longer views, Andre Fontaine’s History of the Cold War (New York, 2 vols., 1970) began with the Russian Revolution, and L. J. Halle’s The Cold War as History (New York, 1967) does an excellent job of putting the postwar upheaval in perspective, as does the previously mentioned G. F. Kennan’s Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (Boston, 1960).