Favourite WW2 Books / Publications

Is Max Hasting's book Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 any good?

I recommend Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale for an insight into the Red Army pre OPeration Barbarossa up to the fall of Berlin

I wouldn't mind something more Japanese oriented, almost everything has a very American bias, even though it's often not intended.

Morlar wrote: »

Apparently there are a handful of copies of the May 1945 edition of that which are extremely collectible. You should post those up on the militaria forum when they arrive. Signal and Der Wehrmacht are always fascinating, the adverts and pictures and content are all very interesting in my view.

i think Chapters in Dublin has a few Signal magazines reproduced in book format. look upstairs where the second hand books are. you really will find the most unusal of books there. am peeved with them though that they do not give discounts ot loyalty points.

jonsnow wrote: »

I think I have that book. its just called Monte Cassino.Its about a german panzer regiment.Its quite good but one thing always bugged me about it.It has the regiment clashing with US marines (veterans of the pacific).But I don,t think the marines ever served in Italy.Could be wrong though.

hassel's descriptions of german regiments at certain location at certain times does not tally either.

there used to be a guy called Leo Kessler/ Charles Whiting. i enjoyed his books as a teenager.

Just Got a copy of This

It's in German and English, and the illustrations are pretty damn good

Some other interesting books on Here too.

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ollaetta wrote: »

Leo Kessler, now there's a name from the past. Used to read loads of them but unfortunately didn't keep any. I seem to remember him being a kind of "Sven Hassel - lite".

I still have 10 Sven Hassel books which I bought in the 70s. Keep meaning to read them again but there is so much good stuff out there to get through first.

Just finished Leningrad - State of Siege by Michael Jones which was very interesting. Another good one I read recently was Endgame 1945 by David Stafford which covers the last months of the war and the aftermath.

Sven Hassel books are to WW2 what the Sharpe books are to the Napoleonic wars. Theres a bit of truth to them but a lot of exaggeration and over the top writing. They are entertaining books though.

I just got this in the post. I've just skimmed through bits of it at the moment but it gives a fairly dispassionate and even account of the battle for the Rzhev pocket which was going on at the same time as the more famous battle for Stalingrad.

Stalingrad is the more famous battle but Rzhev was it seems just as important an education for the Red Army in what not to do and it encapsulates how good the german officer corps was in small unit combat and counterattacking but also how desperately short of manpower they were at that stage (late 1942)

Have a few new contributions and some repeat entries to endorse.

1. The Forgotten Soldier - Guy Sajer
As has been mentioned several times, this is a must. One of my all time favourite war memoirs.

2. Panzer Commanger - Hans Von Luck
Mentioned already by another poster also. A very vivid account of the war from a man who served in seemingly every major part of the ETO and North Africa. Great writing style and frankness, his ability to convey a picture of the scene he witnessed is quite good.

3. The Big Show - Pierre Clostermann
For those of you with any interest in the air war over Europe this is by far the best first hand account of many that I have read. Clostermann claimed the most kills of any RAF/FAF pilots during the war second only to Johnny Johnson (whose memoirs are also excellent). A really good read with some funny and sad events threaded throughout.

All I can post right now but more to come.

BlaasForRafa wrote: »

I flew for the Fuhrer by Heinz Knoke is pretty good too, it has some good accounts of taking on heavy bombers and their escort fighters. I've read some of "Blond Knight of Germany" by Erich Hartmann too, the post war accounts are especially harrowing.

Read 'I Flew For The Fuhrer' last year, excellent book, the part with dropping the bombs on the B25s :eek:, similarly for his mission taking off in the 109 with a bent wing. He was a brave man, and very lucky. Funnily enough, I was lucky enough to pick up a cheap older edition hardback of this last week in Sydney to re-read while I'm working here. It's just as good as I remember it tbh!

Have wanted to read Hartmann's book but it's quite pricey last I checked online, might I ask where you got your copy and for how much?

i just finished reading 'After the Reich'. garphic details of how the Germans were tortured after VE Day. could make you rethink a few things about how we view the conflict.


Review: After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh


Americans have a very benign view of the postwar occupation of Germany. In the conventional narrative, the US liberated the German people from Nazi tyranny, schooled them in Western-style democracy, brought them market-driven prosperity, and protected them from the evil Soviet empire. But the historical truth is rather different, especially for the period from the Armistice in 1945 to the Berlin Airlift in 1948. This is the period covered in Giles MacDonogh's book After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation. With startling detail, MacDonogh tells a story of rape, ethnic cleansing, pillage, starvation and slavery that resulted in an estimated 3 million German deaths (1 million of which were POWs) after Germany surrendered. Of the two million civilians who perished, the vast majority were women, children and elderly Germans who fell victim to suicide, hunger, disease and mass murder.
The first chapters of the After the Reich are perhaps the most gruesome, since MacDonogh describes the fate of the women and girls in the Soviet occupied territories. Hardly any - even as young as 8-years old or as old as 80 - escaped being brutally raped, sometimes as many as 25 times - 25 times a day. This led to a wave of suicides, atrocious injuries of young girls, terrible venereal disease (when there were no antibiotics available) and pregnancies. Nor were the Russians entirely alone in their enthusiasm for rape: On April 17-18, 1945, French soldiers raped at least 600 women in the small Black Forest town of Freudenstadt, before going on to Stuttgart where they raped another 3,000 women and eight men. American forces prohibited rape, but there were more than 600 courts-marshal involving rape charges against American soldiers. Only the Brits come off better, since they preferred to barter cigarettes and chocolate for sex with the defeated enemy.
Then MacDonogh tells the largely untold story of the slaughter of more than 250,000 Sudeten Germans by Czech nationalists, as well as similar stories of ethnic cleansing in Poland, Silesia, and East Prussia - a predictable outcome from the Yalta Conference. This sad chapter of postwar history deserves a great deal more study, and MacDonogh deserves much credit for bringing to the attention of American readers.

The other area where MacDonogh breaks new ground is his inclusion of Austria in his study of the postwar occupation. The author clearly has special knowledge of Austria, and uses it to great advantage in his description of the fall of Vienna and subsequent discussion of Austria's occupied zones and sectors. After the war, Austria presented itself to the world as the first victim of Nazism, but it clearly was not perceived as such by the Allied forces, and After the Reich provides a much needed corrective on that score.
MacDonogh discusses the treatment of German POWs in some detail, and this is an especially painful chapter for Americans. After Germany's unconditional surrender the status of the millions of German POWs changed to DEP (Disarmed Enemy Persons), which meant they were no longer subject to the Geneva Conventions. Food rations were immediately reduced and starvation became commonplace. The most notorious American camps were the Rheinwiesenlager - the Rhine Meadow Camps - where more than 400,000 prisoners were left to starve out in open in the mud. 10% of them died from hunger, disease and exposure. The "lucky" ones were herded into former Nazi concentration camps - such as Dachau - where they were treated horribly and many died. I had read about some of this abuse in Ernst von Salomon 's autobiographical book Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire), where he describes in detail his treatment as a prisoner of the Americans, and MacDonogh also draws on von Salomon's account. Former Wehrmacht and SS officers were subjected to brutal "interrogations". At Schwaebisch Hall, a particularly infamous prison near Stuttgart for officials suspected of major war crimes, MacDonogh writes: So this puts our treatment of enemy combatants in Guantanamo in historical context.
Much more research into the fate of 8 million German POWs needs to be conducted. For example, how did the treatment of German POWs at American and Canadian POW camps change after the war ended? I've already looked into this a bit. It also appears that the Americans and British were happy to contract out German prisoners as slave laborers to France and Belgium.
There are some weaknesses to MacDonogh's book, mostly because he tries to cover too much ground. For example, his revisionist take on the Nuremberg Trials is rushed. After the Reich probably contains the foundations for three or four new books on immediate postwar European history. But it is an important book which should be read along with Joerg Friedrich's Der Brand ( The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945). The truth of "The Good War" and its aftermath needs to be told.