We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories from the Band of Brothers

Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest

Stephen E. Ambrose · 336 pages

Follows the 101st Airbone as it drops into Normandy on D-Day and fights its way through Europe to the end of World War II.

The Longest Day

Cornelius Ryan · 304 pages

A clear, well-researched, and very readable account of Operation Overlord as told by survivors. Skip the Ambrose book and read this instead.

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

Laura Hillenbrand · 514 pages

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. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Se

Flags of Our Fathers

James D. Bradley, Ron Powers · 379 pages

In this unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military history, James Bradley has captured the glory, the triumphs, the heartbreak, and the legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Here is the true story behind the immortal photograph that as come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America. FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS In February 1945, Am

Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission

Hampton Sides · 384 pages

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

Easy Company Soldier: The Legendary Battles of a Sergeant from World War II's "Band of Brothers"

Don Malarkey, Bob Welch · 282 pages

Sgt. Don Malarkey takes us not only into the battles fought from Normandy to Germany, but into the heart and mind of a soldier who beat the odds to become an elite paratrooper, and lost his best friend during the nightmarish engagement at Bastogne. Drafted in 1942, Malarkey became one of the one-in-six soldiers who earned their Eagle wings. He went to England in 1943 to provide cover on the ground

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

Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris; June 6 - Aug. 5, 1944

John Keegan · 365 pages

"The armies of six nations met on the battlefields of Normandy in what was to be the greatest Allied achievement of World War II. With dramatic, driving power, John Keegan describes the massed armies--American, Canadian, English, German, Polish, and French--at successive stages of the invasion. As he details the strategies of the military engagements, Keegan brilliantly shows how each of the armie

The Good War: An Oral History of World War II

Studs Terkel · 591 pages

Studs Terkel, a master of the interview, talks with a wide variety of people and learns about their opinions and experiences regarding World War Two - how it affected the lives of those who lived or were born during that period of human history.

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 Pacific

Hugh Ambrose · 508 pages

'The Pacific' describes the extraordinary true stories of four U.S. Marines and a U.S. Navy carrier pilot fighting in the Pacific region during World War II.

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944

Rick Atkinson · 816 pages

In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy. In An Army at Dawn -- winner of the Pulitzer Prize -- Rick Atkinson provided a dramatic and authoritative history of the Allied triumph in North Africa. Now, in The Day of Battle, he follows the strengthening Am

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.

First Light

Geoffrey Wellum · 352 pages

"Geoffry Wellum tells the ... true story of his coming of age amid the roaring, tumbling dogfights of the fiercest air war the world has ever seen. It is the story of an idealistic schoolboy who couldn't believe his luck when the RAF agreed to take him on as a 'pupil pilot' at the minimum age of seventeen and a half in 1939. In his fervor to fly, he gave little thought to the coming war"--Jacket.

At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor

Gordon W. Prange · 912 pages

"Fifty years after the attack that plunged America into World War II, 'At Dawn We Slept' remains the greatest account of Pearl Harbor ever written. This gripping study scrupulously reconstructs the Japanese attack, from its conception (less than a year before the actual raid) to its lightning execution; and it reveals the true reason for the American debacle: the insurmountable disbelief in the Ja

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

Spitfires

Becky Aikman · 369 pages

The heart-pounding true story of the daring American women who piloted the most dangerous aircraft of World War II through the treacherous skies of Britain.

The Greatest Generation

Tom Brokaw · 412 pages

"In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe that marked the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. There, I underwent a life-changing experience. As I walked the beaches with the American veterans who had returned for this anniversary, men in

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

Helmet for my Pillow

Robert Leckie · 234 pages

This is a real story of a Marine's ordeal fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific during World Two. Amazing stories reveals what Marine Combat was like during the Island Campaign that took so many lives of Japanese and Americans.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

William L. Shirer · 1,264 pages

Two Generals

Scott Chantler

War's Unwomanly Face

Svetlana Alexievich · 247 pages