Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway

A Bridge Too Far

Cornelius Ryan · 639 pages

Reviews the individuals, tactics, and events involved in Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery's plan to end World War II.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

James D. Hornfischer · 516 pages

While the Battle of Midway is perhaps more well known, the Battle of Guadalcanal was a far larger, longer, and more brutal struggle which marked the turning point in the Pacific War. It was an all out fight on land, sea, and air which lasted for over 4 months, into which both sides poured all the resources they could summon. This book is about the many major naval battles which to a large extent

When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler

David M. Glantz, Jonathan M. House · 407 pages

By the time Pearl Harbor had ripped apart America's peacetime pretensions, the German blitzkrieg had already blasted the Red Army back to the gates of Moscow. Yet, less than four years later, the Soviet hammer and sickle flew above the ruins of Berlin, stark symbol of a miraculous comeback that destroyed the German army and shattered Hitler's imperial designs. Told in swift stirring prose, When T

History of the Second World War

B.H. Liddell Hart · 768 pages

The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944

Ian W. Toll · 688 pages

The Second World War

John Keegan · 608 pages

A chronological history of each theater of the war, analyzing five battles for their distinctive kind of warfare of the period.

Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945

Max Hastings · 640 pages

Armageddon is the epic story of the last eight months of World War II in Europe by Max Hastings--one of Britain's most highly regarded military historians, whose accounts of past battles John Keegan has described as worthy "to stand with that of the best journalists and writers" (New York Times Book Review).In September 1944, the Allies believed that Hitler's army was beaten, and expected that the

The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

Rick Atkinson · 896 pages

This book is the magnificent conclusion to Rick Atkinson's acclaimed Liberation Trilogy about the Allied triumph in Europe during World War II. It is the twentieth century's unrivaled epic: at a staggering price, the United States and its allies liberated Europe and vanquished Hitler. In the first two volumes of his bestselling Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson recounted how the American-led coali

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943

Antony Beevor · 520 pages

This gripping history is the definitive account of the battle that shifted the tide of World War II, conveying the experience of soldiers on both sides as they fought in inhuman conditions, and of civilians trapped on an urban battlefield.

The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany 1944-45

Ian Kershaw · 578 pages

The last months of the Second World War were a nightmarish time to be alive. Unimaginable levels of violence destroyed entire cities. Millions died or were dispossessed. By all kinds of criteria it was the end: the end of the Third Reich and its terrible empire but also, increasingly, it seemed to be the end of European civilization itself. In his gripping, revelatory new book Ian Kershaw describe

Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw

Norman Davies · 776 pages

A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II

Gerhard L. Weinberg · 1,178 pages

From the Publisher: In a new edition featuring a new preface, A World of Arms remains a classic of global history. Widely hailed as a masterpiece, this volume remains the first history of World War II to provide a truly global account of the war that encompassed six continents. Starting with the changes that restructured Europe and its colonies following the First World War, Gerhard Weinberg sheds

The Third Reich at War

Richard J. Evans · 926 pages

The final volume in Richard J. Evans's masterly trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany traces the rise and fall of German military might, the mobilization of a "people's community to serve a war of conquest, and Hitler's campaign of racial subjugation and genocideAlready hailed as "a masterpiece" (William Grimes in The New York Times) and "the most comprehensive history...of the Third Reich" (Ian

The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific

James Campbell · 400 pages

Lying due north of Australia, New Guinea is among the world's largest islands. In 1942, when World War II exploded onto its shores, it was an inhospitable, cursorily mapped, disease-ridden land of dense jungle, towering mountain peaks, deep valleys, and fetid swamps. Coveted by the Japanese for its strategic position, New Guinea became the site of one of the South Pacific's most savage campaigns.

The Generals: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and the Winning of World War II

Winston Groom · 512 pages

Groom tells the intertwined and uniquely American tales of George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and George Marshall. These three remarkable men-of-arms who rose from the gruesome hell of the First World War to become the finest generals of their generation during World War II redefined America's ideas of military leadership and brought forth a new generation of American soldier. Against the backdrop

The Longest Winter: The Battle of the Bulge and the Epic Story of World War II's Most Decorated Platoon

Alex Kershaw · 368 pages

Overview: "It was a cold December morning in 1944, deep in the Ardennes forest of Belgium. Eighteen men of a small intelligence platoon commanded by twenty-year-old lieutenant Lyle Bouck were huddled in their foxholes, desperately trying to keep warm. Suddenly the early morning silence was broken by the roar of a huge artillery bombardment. Hitler had launched his bold and risky offensive against

Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath

Michael Norman, Elizabeth M. Norman · 463 pages

Following the U.S. surrender to the Japanese on the peninsula of Bataan in 1942, 76,000 American and Filipino POWs began the infamous Death March. This gripping narrative, told in unsparing but sympathetic detail, focuses intermittently on American POW Ben Steele, whose sketches adorn the book, and the hell of Japanese prison and labor camps that introduced these captives to the starvation, dehydr

The Grand Alliance (The Second World War, Vol. 3)

Winston S. Churchill · 934 pages

With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain

Michael Korda · 336 pages

Michael Korda's brilliant work of history takes the reader back to the summer of 1940, when fewer than three thousand young fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force — often no more than nine hundred on any given day — stood between Hitler and the victory that seemed almost within his grasp.Korda re-creates the intensity of combat in "the long, delirious, burning blue" of the sky above southern Englan

Killing the Rising Sun: How America Vanquished World War II Japan

Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard · 384 pages

Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. This book takes readers to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, w

The Victors: The Men of World War II

Stephen E. Ambrose · 400 pages

From America's preeminent military historian, Stephen E. Ambrose, comes a brilliant telling of World War II in Europe, from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to the end, eleven months later, on May 7, 1945. The author himself drew this authoritative narrative account from his five acclaimed books about that conflict, to yield what has been called "the best single-volume history of the war that most of us will

Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain

Len Deighton · 272 pages

Novelist Len Deighton has written a military buff's delight: a meticulous history of the men and machines of the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force in their struggle over Britain in the summer of 1940. Deighton describes the Battle in the stark, no-nonsense terms of a chess player recounting a game; the reader will not feel what it was like to be a Spitfire or Messerschmitt pilot, but he will know

Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

James D. Bradley · 416 pages

This acclaimed bestseller brilliantly illuminates a hidden piece of World War II history as it tells the harrowing true story of nine American airmen shot down in the Pacific. One of them, George H. W. Bush, was miraculously rescued. What happened to the other eight remained a secret for almost 60 years. After the war, the American and Japanese governments conspired to cover up the shocking tr

Enemy At The Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad

William Craig · 457 pages

Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle of WWII, cost the lives of nearly two million men and women. It signaled the beginning of the end for the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler; it foretold the Russian juggernaut that would destroy Berlin and make the Soviet Union a superpower. As Winston Churchill characterized the result of the conflict at Stalingrad: " the hinge of fate had turned." William Craig, aut