I saw "The Longest Day" last night, and it made me want to read a good book about WWII again. After I received my PhD, I stopped reading medical related articles/books for awhile, and focused on reading about WWII. I so enjoyed it. I think I am a WWII wannabe!

It's time to read about WWII again, though this time I'd like some recommendations for something superb. Last time, I just read everything I could get my hands on, and besides...I didn't have all of you to ask for recommendations!

Though I'm sure others will come up with better and more general histories and overviews, these are some of my favorite books on WW2. They are quirky and specialist, and two of them are novels.

1. Janusz Piekalkiewicz. 1979. The Cavalry of World War II. Mainly pictures and maps, but a great book on horse-based cavalry in WW2. (Originally written in German.)

2. Herbert A. Werner. 1969. Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-Boat Battles of World War II. A fascinating read by one of the few U-Boot commanders to make it to the end of the war. Now a US citizen if he hasn't passed on.

3. Solomon Perel. 1997. Europa, Europa. (Originally written in French.) Amazing story, made into a great movie, about a young Jewish boy who survives on the Russian front being an official translator for the German Army.

4. John Hersey. 1944. A Bell for Adano. Published during the war. An Italian-American Major tries to get a new bell for the town being occupied by him and his troops.

5. Heinrich Böll. 1971. Group Portrait with Lady. Though parts of it take place before and after the war, it's still one of my favorite WW2 novels, though the same author's Billiards at Half-Past Nine is a close second.

6. Bryan Mark Rigg. 2004. Rescued from the Reich : How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Amazing, true story of how a German-Jewish WW1 veteran saved Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn from Warsaw after the Germans occupied that city, transporting him and some of his immediate family and followers to Lithuania, where they caught a ship to the States, right before the USSR invaded.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

Of course there are so many!

We were at "Wings and Wheels" at Dunsfold yesterday and Margaret bought a book written by a WW2 fighter pilot - who was actually there on the stand and signed it for her!

Thanks, Z. I have a whole shelf of WWII books, and yet I don't have any of the books you recommend. I love the Jewish aspect in the ones you recommended, and I also like WWII books that talk about how the war affects the people, rather than the strategies of all the battles. These sound very much like I'd like them. I am going to make a list of these and try to buy them all.

While not specifically about WWII, Shu has bought me What If? and What If? 2. If you aren't familiar, they were written by the world's foremost historians, looking at how things would be if such and such didn't happen. These are a collection of essays with an accurate history, and there are several about WWII.

Any fiction recommendations? My daughter just finished Winds of War, War and Remembrance and The Naked and the Dead and is looking for more.

Any fiction recommendations?

Besides the two I suggested above:

1a. Louis-Ferdinand Céline. 1968 [1957]. Castle to Castle.

b. —. 1972 [1960]. North.

c. —. 1969. Rigodon.

POV of WW2 and its immediate aftermath from the POV of a French WW1 veteran, writer, and infamous anti-Semite and collaborator. (Praised by Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut.) The final, posthumous novel is one of my favorite post-war novels.

2a. Kurt Vonnegut. 1965. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

b. —. 1969. Slaughterhouse-Five.

Vonnegut was in Dresden during and after the Allied fire bombing. He is one of the finest post-war writers, and the second book is a deserved classic.

3. Claude Simon. 1960. The Flanders Road. An amazing New Novel that centers around a single episode during the German invasion of France where a detachment from a dragoon (heavy horse cavalry) regiment engages with mechanized forces of the Wehrmacht. Simon was in such a situation, but here he writes about a man coming to visit the widow of his captain who was slain during the engagement.

4a. Gregor von Rezzori. 1981 [1979]. The Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.

b. —. 1991 [1989]. The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography.

The first book is a novel and the second one a memoir. They both go together and are a good read. The author was a German-speaking Romanian aristocrat of Italian ancestry.

As long as you are mentioning Vonnegut as WWII books, I'll suggest Catch-22, one of my all time favorites.

I met my daughter for dinner tonight, and she was quite irritated at me for asking this question here; I should have asked her! She apparently studied WWII in college (her major was political science, and I hadn't known the specifics), and she is wants to know what everyone recommended. She is so funny!

I will go through all the ones that I have read, but I know that one of my favorites was Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust."

quote:

I'll suggest Catch-22, one of my all time favorites

I considered Catch-22, but I think that, although it is set in WWII, it's not really about WWII.

Wow, my daughter already answered me. From Z's list she said she loved Europa Europa. She says that she doesn't really know the others, though she says they sound like "pretty solid recommendations." After I read the others, I will share them with her.

Catch-22

That's the problem with lists and making lists. You always leave off something great and obvious. I have been meaning to read Goldhagen's book, but just haven't gotten round to it. In the non-fiction category, I should've mentioned Peter Gay's My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, 1998.

Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley... simply wonderful... don't watch the movie!

Oh, there are some great ones here.

Shu recommended Churchill's:

The Hinge of Fate;
Closing the Ring;
Triumph and Tragedy;
The Grand Alliance;
Their Finest Hour;
The Gathering Storm

They are informative, but I didn't like the battle strategies as much as he did. I'd rather read how the war affected the people.

Besides those and Goldhagen's book above, I also read:

Stanley Weintraub's Long Day's Journey into War;
Edwin Hoyt's Hitler's War;
David Schoenbaum's Hitler's Social Revolution

There were others, but I couldn't find, nor remember, them. However, I will now try some of your suggestions.

don't watch the movie!

That's funny. I liked the movie.

I tend to gravitate to stories of how people (mostly civilians) managed to survive. I like
_The Hiding Place_ by Corrie ten Boom. This is her first-person, biographical account of her and her family's involvement with the Dutch Underground.

There is also a re-telling of Sleeping Beauty that is set in the Holocaust. _Briar Rose_, by Jane Yolen. It is considered by some to be Young Adult Fiction, but is a very good read for adults, too. She also wrote a book called _The Devil's Arithmetic_, that was for young people. This novel is more about life in a concentration camp.

Yes, Devil's Arithmetic is excellent. There are a number of good books on the holocaust for children. Interestingly, when our kids were in junior high, they had a module on the holocaust. There was a family in Winnetka who didn't believe the holocaust actually happened, and they went to the Board and argued that it shouldn't be included in the course content. The parents were given their say, but the module remained. Of course the whole discussion became very public, and I think it was a good experience of the kids to hear the debate.

It's appalling how some people will so vociferously deny history, don't you think?

Yes, Caterwauler, amazing how that works. When I was in Psych 101 (in the year 101 ), that was called cognitive dissonance. I saw it in action for real when I used to visit a middle-class German family of my parents' generation (they were the AFS family of a close friend). They had a terrible time coming to terms with those events of WWII which they 'should have' stopped or at least known about. They were always latching onto some form of rationalization or denial. It was not so much because they were around us at the time [Americans], but because their son's generation held their feet to the fire about it. I've read that the same sort of generation-feuding went on in Japan.

I think it says a great deal for your community, Kalleh, that the parents in Winnetka felt free to speak up, and that the debate was aired fully and publicly. As you say, a great lesson for the kids. Would it play out the same way today, in the PC era?

Well, my kids aren't that old (where is my wink when I need it!). I think it would play in the same way today. While Winnetka is located in the North Shore of Chicago, which is generally more Jewish than other areas around Chicago (Glencoe, for example, is often referred fondly to "Glencohen;" Highland Park is quite Jewish as well), Winnetka (and Lake Forest) have their anti-Semitic tendencies. In fact, someone once put a note on our car saying something like, "It just figures that a Jew with a big fancy car like yours would park here." Our car was hardly fancy; in our rush to get our kids to soccer, we were partially blocking the crosswalk. It was wrong, of course, to partially block a crosswalk, but I was shocked to get that note. Yet, most of our community isn't like that, and our friends and neighbors were equally shocked.

This item was in today's "Travel Daily"

THE owner of a hotel in southern Germany is at risk of losing his licence to trade after allowing guests to see a Nazi World War 2 bunker in its cellar. The Bavarian property in Obersalzberg has become a major attraction for neo-Nazis, who gather there to see the swastikas, propaganda and anti-Semitic statements on its walls. Authorities insist there be no “glorification of the Nazi regime” and plan to lay criminal charges.

Whereas I agree that "glorification" of the Holocaust is reprehensible, I can't see that it's wrong for people to see what a WW2 bunker was actually like - warts and all. Apart from that minority of "Holocaust deniers" there can't be many people who are unaware of the anti-Semitic feelings in Nazi Germany at that time and it is surely helpful to modern students to see for themselves just how these feelings manifested themselves.

In spite of what it says in the article, I can't believe that all (or even a majority) of the visitors to this bunker are neo-Nazis, any more than those who visit other WW2 sites hold particular views. Most will, I feel quite sure, simply be interested in the history. "Dark Tourism" is a growing industry and, although nothing can change the past, I think it is right that the past should be used to give lessons for the future.

I'm not much of a WWII history buff, but a fascinating book about British intelligence then is A Man Called Intrepid by William Stephenson.

And then, the people story we all read and wept over in high school, The Diary of Anne Frank.

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