Authors
The historians, veterans, and novelists whose work defines how we understand war.
Antony Beevor
Narrative military history — WWII European theater
One of the most widely read military historians alive. Known for combining archival research with gripping narrative.
3 booksMax Hastings
WWII operational history and strategy
Former war correspondent turned historian. Writes with journalistic clarity and challenges received opinion.
5 booksCornelius Ryan
WWII — D-Day, Market Garden, Berlin
War correspondent who witnessed D-Day firsthand. His trilogy pioneered the multiple-perspective battle narrative.
3 booksEugene Sledge
Pacific theater — firsthand memoir
Marine veteran of Peleliu and Okinawa. With the Old Breed is considered the finest Pacific War memoir.
1 bookStephen Ambrose
WWII — American GI experience
Popular historian who brought the stories of ordinary soldiers to a mass audience.
5 booksJohn Keegan
Military history — all eras
Perhaps the most influential military historian of the 20th century. The Face of Battle changed how battle is written about.
4 booksAnne Frank
Holocaust — personal diary
A Jewish girl who documented life in hiding during the Nazi occupation. Her diary is the most widely read document of the Holocaust.
1 bookPrimo Levi
Holocaust — survivor memoir
Italian chemist and writer who survived Auschwitz. His memoirs are among the most important works of Holocaust literature.
2 booksRick Atkinson
US Army in WWII — European theater
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His Liberation Trilogy is the definitive American account of the liberation of Europe.
3 booksWilliam Shirer
Third Reich — political and military history
CBS correspondent in Berlin during the 1930s. His Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains the best-known popular history of Nazi Germany.
2 booksElie Wiesel
Holocaust — survivor memoir
Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor. Night is the foundational text of Holocaust memoir.
1 bookViktor Frankl
Holocaust — psychology and memoir
Psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor who developed logotherapy. Man's Search for Meaning has sold some 16 million copies.
1 bookJames Jones
WWII Pacific — fiction
Combat veteran who served at Guadalcanal. His war trilogy — From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle — is a landmark of American war fiction.
2 booksJames Hornfischer
Pacific naval warfare
Naval historian whose accounts of Leyte Gulf and Guadalcanal are considered among the finest Pacific naval histories.
4 booksIan Toll
Pacific War — naval and strategic
Author of the Pacific War Trilogy. Pacific Crucible, The Conquering Tide, and Twilight of the Gods tell the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to the surrender.
3 booksWilliam Manchester
WWII Pacific — memoir and biography
Marine veteran wounded on Okinawa. Also Churchill's biographer. Goodbye, Darkness is one of the great Pacific War memoirs.
2 booksJohn Hersey
WWII journalism
War correspondent whose Hiroshima, published as an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1946, changed how America understood the bomb.
2 booksAlex Kershaw
WWII — American units in Europe
Journalist and author specialising in individual American units and soldiers. Known for vivid, fast-moving narrative history.
3 booksLaura Hillenbrand
WWII biography
Author of Unbroken and Seabiscuit. Known for meticulous research and cinematic narrative nonfiction.
1 bookWładysław Szpilman
Holocaust — personal memoir
Polish-Jewish pianist who survived the Warsaw Ghetto. His memoir was adapted into Roman Polanski's 2002 film.
1 bookArt Spiegelman
Holocaust — graphic memoir
Cartoonist whose Maus, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.
1 bookWalter Lord
WWII — narrative battle histories
The master of the minute-by-minute narrative. His accounts of Pearl Harbor, Midway, and Dunkirk, built from hundreds of participant interviews, defined popular battle history for a generation.
3 booksHerman Wouk
WWII — epic fiction
Navy veteran of the Pacific whose Pulitzer-winning fiction — The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance — became the great American fictional chronicle of the entire war.
3 booksVasily Grossman
Eastern Front — fiction and war reporting
Red Army correspondent who covered Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin, and wrote the first published account of a Nazi extermination camp. His suppressed masterpiece Life and Fate is now ranked with Tolstoy.
3 booksBen Macintyre
WWII espionage and deception
The leading popular historian of wartime intelligence. His accounts of Operation Mincemeat, the Double Cross system, and Allied deception are built on declassified MI5 files.
4 booksPaul Brickhill
WWII — POW escapes and air war
Spitfire pilot, POW in Stalag Luft III, and participant in the tunnel scheme he later immortalised. The Great Escape and The Dam Busters founded the modern escape-and-mission genre.
2 booksRobert Leckie
Pacific theater — memoir and histories
Marine machine-gunner at Guadalcanal turned prolific military historian. His memoir Helmet for My Pillow became one half of HBO's The Pacific.
2 booksErnie Pyle
WWII — frontline war correspondence
The most beloved war correspondent of all time, who wrote the infantryman's war from North Africa to the Pacific, where he was killed in 1945. His columns won the Pulitzer Prize.
2 booksKate Quinn
WWII — bestselling historical fiction
The dominant WWII novelist of the 2020s. Her fiction — Bletchley codebreakers, Soviet snipers, Nazi hunters — is built on real women whose stories went untold.
3 booksAlistair MacLean
WWII — action fiction
Royal Navy veteran of the Arctic convoys whose thrillers defined the WWII adventure genre for thirty years and sold over 150 million copies.
2 booksWilliam Craig
WWII — narrative histories of the war's end
Historian whose interview-driven accounts of Stalingrad and the fall of Japan were written while the participants still lived.
2 booksErich Maria Remarque
WWI — German soldier's experience (fiction)
A wounded German veteran of the Western Front whose 1929 novel became the defining anti-war book of the century — and was burned by the Nazis, who stripped him of his citizenship.
1 bookErnst Jünger
WWI — German stormtrooper memoir
Decorated stormtroop officer wounded fourteen times, whose diary-based memoir renders trench combat with a cold, unflinching clarity unlike anything else in the war's literature.
1 bookRobert Graves
WWI — British officer memoir
Poet and classicist who served on the Western Front and was reported dead of his wounds at the Somme. His bitter, blackly funny memoir is a classic of the war.
1 bookSiegfried Sassoon
WWI — British officer memoir and poetry
Decorated officer turned public protester against the war, and one of its greatest poets. His lightly fictionalised memoirs trace an officer's path from patriotism to disillusion.
1 bookVera Brittain
WWI — nurse's memoir
Volunteer nurse who lost her fiancé, her brother, and her closest friends to the war. Her memoir is its definitive account from the home front and the hospital ward.
1 bookEdmund Blunden
WWI — British officer memoir
Poet who served two years on the Western Front, longer than almost any other writer of the war, and recorded it in prose of pastoral restraint and quiet horror.
1 bookSebastian Faulks
WWI — historical fiction
British novelist whose 1993 bestseller brought the tunnellers and trenches of the Western Front to a new generation of readers.
1 bookPat Barker
WWI — historical fiction
Booker Prize–winning novelist whose Regeneration trilogy explores shell shock, psychiatry, and the war poets through the real figures of Sassoon and W. H. R. Rivers.
1 bookBarbara Tuchman
WWI — narrative history
Two-time Pulitzer winner whose account of the war's opening month set the standard for narrative history and was read in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1 bookChristopher Clark
WWI — origins and diplomacy
Cambridge historian whose study of how Europe stumbled into war in 1914 reshaped the modern debate over the question of war guilt.
1 bookHew Strachan
WWI — operational and global history
One of the foremost historians of the First World War, whose single-volume history restores its truly global scope.
1 bookRobert K. Massie
WWI — naval history
Pulitzer-winning biographer and naval historian whose account of the Anglo-German fleets and the Battle of Jutland reads like a novel.
1 bookPeter Englund
WWI — intimate global history
Swedish historian and member of the academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, who told the war through the diaries and letters of twenty ordinary people on every front.
1 bookAdam Hochschild
WWI — war and dissent
American historian who tells the war through both those who fought it and the Britons who resisted it, in a moral history of a society tearing itself apart.
1 bookPeter Hart
WWI — narrative battle history
Oral historian of the Imperial War Museum whose battle histories are built from the voices of the men who were there.
1 bookNorman Stone
WWI — the Eastern Front
Historian whose study of the Eastern Front rescued the war's forgotten half — the vast, mobile struggle between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia — from obscurity.
1 bookAdam Makos
WWII air war — narrative nonfiction
American journalist and military historian. A Higher Call reconstructs the 1943 encounter between a crippled American bomber and the German fighter pilot who chose not to shoot it down.
1 bookAdam Tooze
Third Reich — economic history
London-born economic historian, now at Columbia. The Wages of Destruction reframed the Nazi war effort around the German economy's limits and won the Wolfson History Prize.
1 bookAlbert Speer
Third Reich — insider memoir
Hitler's architect and, from 1942, his armaments minister. Convicted at Nuremberg and served twenty years in Spandau. Inside the Third Reich was written there, and historians have since shown how much it conceals.
1 bookAlexander Werth
Eastern Front — wartime reporting
Russian-born British journalist who reported from the Soviet Union for the BBC and the Sunday Times from 1941 to 1946. Russia at War draws on what he saw and heard there.
1 bookAlistair Urquhart
Far East — POW memoir
Gordon Highlander captured at Singapore in 1942 who survived the Death Railway, the sinking of a Japanese transport ship and the Nagasaki bombing from a nearby camp. He published his memoir at ninety.
1 bookAndrew Hodges
Codebreaking — biography
Oxford mathematician whose 1983 life of Alan Turing remains the standard biography and was the basis for the film The Imitation Game.
1 bookAndrew Roberts
WWII — single-volume history and biography
British historian and biographer of Napoleon and Churchill. The Storm of War is his single-volume account of the Second World War, with an argument about why Germany lost.
1 bookAnthony Doerr
WWII — literary fiction
American novelist. All the Light We Cannot See, set in occupied Saint-Malo, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
1 bookAntonio Iturbe
Holocaust — fiction based on testimony
Spanish journalist and novelist. The Librarian of Auschwitz is drawn from his interviews with Dita Kraus, who as a girl guarded a handful of smuggled books in the Birkenau family camp.
1 bookBernhard Schlink
Holocaust aftermath — fiction
German novelist, law professor and former judge. The Reader, about a post-war generation confronting its parents' guilt, became an international bestseller.
1 bookBill Mauldin
WWII — frontline cartoons and memoir
Infantryman turned Stars and Stripes cartoonist whose Willie and Joe showed the war as the dogface saw it. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 at the age of twenty-three.
1 bookC.S. Forester
Naval war — fiction
British novelist best known for the Hornblower series. The Good Shepherd, his novel of an Atlantic convoy escort commander, was filmed as Greyhound.
1 bookCatherine Merridale
Eastern Front — social history of the Red Army
British historian of Russia. Ivan's War is built on interviews with Red Army veterans and on letters and diaries, and asks what the war was like for the ordinary Soviet soldier.
1 bookCharles B. MacDonald
WWII — US Army in Europe, memoir and official history
Commanded a rifle company in the 2nd Infantry Division through the Bulge, then spent a career as a US Army historian. Company Commander is the memoir; A Time for Trumpets is the history.
2 booksChristopher Browning
Holocaust — perpetrator history
American historian of the Holocaust. Ordinary Men, his study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, remains the central work on how ordinary Germans became mass murderers.
1 bookCorrie ten Boom
Holocaust — rescuer's memoir
Dutch watchmaker whose family hid Jews in their Haarlem home until their arrest in 1944. She survived Ravensbrück; her father and sister did not.
1 bookDavid Benioff
Eastern Front — fiction
American novelist and screenwriter, later co-creator of HBO's Game of Thrones. City of Thieves is set during the siege of Leningrad.
1 bookDavid Glantz & Jonathan House
Eastern Front — operational history
Glantz, a retired US Army colonel, is the leading Western authority on the Red Army; House is a US Army officer and historian. Together they rewrote the English-language account of the Soviet-German war from Soviet sources.
2 booksDenise Kiernan
Home front — the Manhattan Project
American journalist and author. The Girls of Atomic City tells the story of the women who worked at Oak Ridge without knowing what they were building.
1 bookDiane Ackerman
Holocaust — rescue narrative
American poet and naturalist. The Zookeeper's Wife, drawn from Antonina Żabińska's diary, tells how the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo hid hundreds of Jews in its grounds.
1 bookDonald L. Miller
WWII — the American air war
American historian. Masters of the Air, his history of the Eighth Air Force, was the basis for the television series of the same name.
1 bookDoris Kearns Goodwin
WWII — the American home front and presidency
Presidential historian. No Ordinary Time, her account of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's wartime White House, won the Pulitzer Prize for History.
1 bookDoug Stanton
Pacific War — narrative nonfiction
American journalist. In Harm's Way reconstructs the sinking of USS Indianapolis in 1945 and the days its crew spent in the water.
1 bookDwight D. Eisenhower
WWII — Supreme Allied Commander's memoir
Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe from 1943 to 1945 and later the thirty-fourth President of the United States. Crusade in Europe is his account of the campaign.
1 bookEdith Eger
Holocaust — survivor memoir and psychology
Deported to Auschwitz from Hungarian-ruled Košice at sixteen, she later became a clinical psychologist in the United States. The Choice combines her memoir with her work on trauma.
1 bookElizabeth Norman
Pacific War — military nursing history
Historian of nursing at New York University. We Band of Angels follows the American nurses captured on Bataan and Corregidor and held for three years.
1 bookElizabeth Wein
WWII — young adult fiction
American-born novelist and pilot living in Scotland. Code Name Verity, about a captured British agent and her pilot friend, won a Printz Honor.
1 bookErik Larson
WWII — narrative nonfiction
American author of narrative history. The Splendid and the Vile follows Churchill and his circle through the first year of his premiership and the Blitz.
1 bookErwin Rommel
WWII — German field marshal's papers
Commanded the Afrika Korps and later the Normandy defences, and was forced to take his own life in 1944 after the July plot. The Rommel Papers were assembled from his writings by B. H. Liddell Hart.
1 bookField Marshal William Slim
Burma — commander's memoir
Commanded the Fourteenth Army from the retreat out of Burma to the reconquest, then served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Governor-General of Australia. Defeat into Victory is widely regarded as the finest commander's memoir of the war.
1 bookGeoffrey Wellum
Battle of Britain — pilot's memoir
Flew Spitfires with 92 Squadron in the Battle of Britain at eighteen. First Light, written decades earlier, was published when he was eighty.
1 bookGeorge MacDonald Fraser
Burma — infantry memoir
Author of the Flashman novels, who served as a private in the Border Regiment with the Fourteenth Army in Burma. Quartered Safe Out Here is his memoir of that campaign.
1 bookGeorge S. Patton
WWII — US Army commander's diaries
Commanded the Seventh Army in Sicily and the Third Army from Normandy to Czechoslovakia. He died in December 1945; War As I Knew It was assembled from his diaries and published posthumously.
1 bookGeorge Wilson
WWII — US infantry officer's memoir
Rifle platoon and company officer in the 4th Infantry Division from Normandy through the Hürtgen Forest and the Bulge. If You Survive is his account of a year at the front.
1 bookGeorgia Hunter
Holocaust — fiction from family history
American novelist. We Were the Lucky Ones is based on her own family, the Kurcs of Radom, scattered across the world by the war.
1 bookGerhard Weinberg
WWII — global history
Born in Hanover and brought out of Nazi Germany as a boy, he became one of the leading American historians of the war. A World at Arms is his single-volume global history.
1 bookGitta Sereny
Holocaust — perpetrator interviews
Austrian-born journalist. Into That Darkness is built on some seventy hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, conducted in prison before his death.
1 bookGordon Prange
Pearl Harbor — history
Historian who served on MacArthur's staff in occupied Japan and spent decades researching Pearl Harbor. At Dawn We Slept was completed by his collaborators after his death in 1980.
1 bookGünter Koschorrek
Eastern Front — German soldier's memoir
German machine-gunner in a panzer division who fought at Stalingrad and across the Eastern Front. Blood Red Snow is drawn from notes he kept secretly at the time.
1 bookGuy Sajer
Eastern Front — German soldier's memoir
Born in Alsace to a French father and a German mother, he served in the Wehrmacht's Grossdeutschland Division. The Forgotten Soldier is his memoir; its details have been disputed by some historians.
1 bookHampton Sides
Pacific War — narrative nonfiction
American journalist and author. Ghost Soldiers tells the 1945 raid on the Cabanatuan camp to free survivors of the Bataan Death March.
1 bookHannah Arendt
Holocaust — political philosophy
German-born political theorist who fled the Nazis in 1933. Eichmann in Jerusalem, her report on the 1961 trial, introduced the phrase 'the banality of evil' and has been argued over ever since.
1 bookHarrison Salisbury
Eastern Front — the siege of Leningrad
New York Times correspondent in Moscow and Pulitzer Prize winner. The 900 Days was the first full Western account of the siege of Leningrad.
1 bookHeather Morris
Holocaust — fiction based on testimony
New Zealand-born novelist based in Australia. The Tattooist of Auschwitz is drawn from her conversations with Lale Sokolov; the Auschwitz Memorial has criticised its accuracy.
1 bookHeinz Guderian
WWII — German panzer general's memoir
Architect of the German armoured arm, who led panzer corps in Poland and France and a panzer group into Russia. Panzer Leader shaped the post-war image of the Wehrmacht and has been challenged for it.
1 bookHelen Dunmore
Eastern Front — literary fiction
British poet and novelist, winner of the inaugural Orange Prize. The Siege follows one Leningrad family through the first winter of the blockade.
1 bookHerbert Werner
Battle of the Atlantic — U-boat memoir
German U-boat officer who commanded U-415 and U-953 and was among the few of his cohort to survive the war. Iron Coffins is his memoir.
1 bookHolger Eckhertz
Normandy — German accounts (disputed)
Named as the editor of D-Day Through German Eyes, presented as interviews with German defenders collected by his grandfather, a wartime correspondent. The book's provenance has been questioned and little is known about him.
1 bookHugh Ambrose
Pacific War — narrative history
Historian and son of Stephen Ambrose. The Pacific, written as a companion to the HBO series he advised on, follows several Marines through the island campaigns.
1 bookHugh Trevor-Roper
Third Reich — the end of Hitler
Oxford historian and wartime intelligence officer who was assigned in 1945 to establish what had happened to Hitler. The Last Days of Hitler is the result.
1 bookIan Kershaw
Third Reich — biography of Hitler
British historian and the leading biographer of Hitler. His two-volume life, Hubris and Nemesis, was abridged into a single volume in 2008.
1 bookIan McEwan
WWII — literary fiction
Booker Prize-winning British novelist. Atonement turns on a false accusation in 1935 and the retreat to Dunkirk five years later.
1 bookIris Chang
War in China — the Nanking Massacre
Chinese-American journalist. The Rape of Nanking brought the 1937 massacre to a wide Western readership. She died in 2004.
1 bookIrwin Shaw
WWII — fiction
American playwright and novelist who served in the Army Signal Corps in Europe. The Young Lions follows two American soldiers and one German from 1938 to the camps.
1 bookJ.G. Ballard
War in China — autobiographical fiction
British novelist born in Shanghai, who as a boy was interned by the Japanese at Lunghua camp. Empire of the Sun is drawn from that experience.
1 bookJack Fairweather
Holocaust — resistance biography
British journalist and former war correspondent. The Volunteer, his life of Witold Pilecki, who had himself sent to Auschwitz to report on it, won the Costa Book of the Year.
1 bookJames A. Michener
Pacific War — fiction
Served as a naval officer in the South Pacific. Tales of the South Pacific, his first book, won the Pulitzer Prize and became the musical South Pacific.
1 bookJames Bradley
Pacific War — narrative history
Son of a Navy corpsman long identified as one of the Iwo Jima flag-raisers; a 2016 Marine Corps review concluded his father was not in the famous photograph. Flags of Our Fathers and Flyboys are his Pacific histories.
2 booksJames Clavell
Far East — POW fiction
Australian-born British novelist and screenwriter who was held in Changi prison camp. King Rat is drawn from that captivity; Shōgun came later.
1 bookJohn Boyne
Holocaust — fiction for young readers
Irish novelist. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has sold millions of copies and has been criticised by Holocaust educators for its historical inaccuracies.
1 bookJohn W. Dower
Pacific War — Japan and its aftermath
Historian of modern Japan at MIT. Embracing Defeat, on Japan under the American occupation, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
1 bookJonathan Littell
Holocaust — fiction from the perpetrator's view
American-born writer who works in French. The Kindly Ones, narrated by an SS officer, won the Prix Goncourt in 2006.
1 bookJonathan Parshall & Anthony Tully
Pacific War — naval history
Independent naval historians. Shattered Sword used Japanese sources to overturn the long-accepted account of the Battle of Midway.
1 bookJoseph Heller
WWII — satirical fiction
Flew sixty missions as a B-25 bombardier from Corsica. Catch-22 drew on that service and gave the language a phrase.
1 bookJudith Kerr
Nazi Germany — autobiographical fiction for children
Born in Berlin, she left Germany with her family in 1933, weeks before Hitler took power. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is her account of that flight, written for children.
1 bookKate Atkinson
WWII — literary fiction
British novelist. Life After Life, which lives its heroine's life repeatedly through the Blitz and beyond, won the Costa Novel Award.
1 bookKeith Lowe
WWII aftermath — European history
British historian. Savage Continent, on the violence and chaos of Europe in the years after 1945, won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.
1 bookKimberly Brubaker Bradley
Home front — children's fiction
American author for young readers. The War That Saved My Life, about a disabled London girl evacuated to the countryside, was a Newbery Honor book.
1 bookKristin Hannah
Occupied France — popular fiction
American novelist. The Nightingale, about two sisters in occupied France, was one of the bestselling war novels of its decade.
1 bookKristin Harmel
Occupied France — popular fiction
American novelist. The Book of Lost Names follows a forger of identity papers in the French resistance.
1 bookKurt Vonnegut
WWII — fiction
Captured during the Battle of the Bulge and held in Dresden, where he survived the firebombing in an underground meat locker. Slaughterhouse-Five came out of that night.
1 bookLarry Collins & Dominique Lapierre
Liberation of Paris — narrative history
American and French journalists who wrote a series of bestselling histories together. Is Paris Burning? reconstructs the liberation of the city in August 1944.
1 bookLaurent Binet
Holocaust — fiction about history
French novelist. HHhH, on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the problem of writing about it, won the Prix Goncourt du premier roman.
1 bookLeo Marks
SOE — codemaster's memoir
Head of agents' codes at the Special Operations Executive. Silk and Cyanide is his memoir of the work, and of the agents he coded for who did not return.
1 bookLeon Uris
Holocaust — popular fiction
Marine veteran of Guadalcanal and Tarawa turned bestselling novelist. Mila 18 is set in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
1 bookLiza Mundy
Codebreaking — American women
American journalist. Code Girls recovers the story of the thousands of women recruited to break Axis codes for the US Army and Navy.
1 bookLois Lowry
Holocaust — children's fiction
Two-time winner of the Newbery Medal. Number the Stars, about the rescue of Denmark's Jews in 1943, is read in classrooms across the world.
1 bookLothar-Günther Buchheim
Battle of the Atlantic — fiction
German painter and art collector who sailed on U-boat patrols as a naval war correspondent. Das Boot is drawn from those voyages.
1 bookLouis de Bernières
Occupied Greece — fiction
British novelist. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, set on Italian-occupied Cephalonia, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
1 bookLynne Olson
WWII — Anglo-American relations
American historian and former journalist. Citizens of London follows the Americans who stood with Britain before and after the United States entered the war.
1 bookM.T. Anderson
Eastern Front — nonfiction for young readers
American author. Symphony for the City of the Dead tells the siege of Leningrad through Shostakovich and his Seventh Symphony.
1 bookMajor Dick Winters
WWII — airborne company commander's memoir
Commanded Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry, the unit of Band of Brothers, from Normandy onward. Beyond Band of Brothers is his own account, written with Cole Kingseed.
1 bookMark Sullivan
Italian campaign — fiction from a true story
American novelist. Beneath a Scarlet Sky is based on Pino Lella, a Milanese teenager who guided refugees over the Alps and became a driver for a German general.
1 bookMarkus Zusak
Nazi Germany — fiction
Australian novelist. The Book Thief, narrated by Death and set in a small German town, has sold many millions of copies worldwide.
1 bookMartha Hall Kelly
Holocaust — fiction based on real women
American novelist. Lilac Girls is built around Caroline Ferriday and the Polish women subjected to medical experiments at Ravensbrück.
1 bookMatthew Parker
Italian campaign — battle history
British historian. Monte Cassino is his account of the four battles for the monastery and the town in 1944.
1 bookMichael & Elizabeth Norman
Pacific War — Bataan
Michael Norman, a former New York Times reporter and Marine, and Elizabeth Norman, a historian of nursing. Tears in the Darkness tells the Bataan Death March from American, Filipino and Japanese sides.
1 bookMichael Ondaatje
WWII — literary fiction
Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer. The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1992 and the Golden Man Booker in 2018.
1 bookMichelle Magorian
Home front — children's fiction
British author. Goodnight Mister Tom, about an evacuee and the widower who takes him in, won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
1 bookMichihiko Hachiya
Hiroshima — physician's diary
Director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, injured in the bombing. His diary of the following weeks, kept while treating the survivors, is a primary document of the atomic age.
1 bookMitchell Zuckoff
Pacific War — narrative nonfiction
American journalist and professor. Lost in Shangri-La reconstructs a 1945 plane crash in New Guinea and the rescue of its survivors.
1 bookMitsuo Fuchida & Masatake Okumiya
Pacific War — Japanese naval account
Fuchida led the air attack on Pearl Harbor; Okumiya was a naval aviator and staff officer. Their account of Midway shaped the Western view for fifty years before later research found it unreliable in places.
1 bookMolly Guptill Manning
Home front — books and the war
American lawyer and author. When Books Went to War tells how the Armed Services Editions put over a hundred million paperbacks into soldiers' hands.
1 bookNicholas Monsarrat
Battle of the Atlantic — fiction
Served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve on corvettes and frigates escorting Atlantic convoys. The Cruel Sea is the novel that came out of it.
1 bookNikolaus Wachsmann
Holocaust — the camp system
German-born historian at Birkbeck, University of London. KL, his history of the Nazi concentration camps, won the Wolfson History Prize.
1 bookNorman Lewis
Italian campaign — intelligence officer's diary
British travel writer who served in the Intelligence Corps in occupied Naples. Naples '44 is his diary of the year.
1 bookNorman Mailer
Pacific War — fiction
Served with the 112th Cavalry in the Philippines. The Naked and the Dead, published when he was twenty-five, made his name.
1 bookPaullina Simons
Eastern Front — popular fiction
Born in Leningrad and raised in the United States. The Bronze Horseman is set in the city during the siege.
1 bookPierre Boulle
Far East — fiction
French engineer in Malaya who joined the Free French and was captured and imprisoned in Indochina. The Bridge over the River Kwai was followed by Planet of the Apes.
1 bookRana Mitter
War in China — history
British historian of modern China. Forgotten Ally argues for China's place as a major combatant from 1937 to 1945.
1 bookRichard J. Evans
Third Reich — history
Cambridge historian and expert witness in the David Irving libel trial. The Third Reich at War completes his three-volume history of Nazi Germany.
1 bookRichard Overy
WWII — strategy and analysis
British historian and Wolfson Prize winner. Why the Allies Won argues that Allied victory was neither inevitable nor simply a matter of resources.
1 bookRichard Rhodes
The atomic bomb — history
American author. The Making of the Atomic Bomb won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
1 bookRichard Tregaskis
Pacific War — war correspondence
War correspondent who landed with the Marines at Guadalcanal in August 1942. Guadalcanal Diary was published while the campaign was still being fought.
1 bookRonald Spector
Pacific War — single-volume history
American military historian and Marine veteran of Vietnam. Eagle Against the Sun is his single-volume history of the war with Japan.
1 bookRuta Sepetys
WWII — young adult fiction
American novelist of Lithuanian descent. Salt to the Sea, about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, won the Carnegie Medal.
1 bookSarah Rose
SOE — women agents
American journalist. D-Day Girls follows the women the Special Operations Executive sent into occupied France.
1 bookSiegfried Knappe
WWII — German officer's memoir
German artillery officer who served from Poland to the fall of Berlin and spent years as a Soviet prisoner. Soldat, written with Ted Brusaw, is his memoir.
1 bookSonia Purnell
SOE — biography
British journalist and biographer. A Woman of No Importance is her life of Virginia Hall, the American agent who ran resistance networks in France.
1 bookSvetlana Alexievich
Eastern Front — oral history
Belarusian writer and winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Unwomanly Face of War is built from the testimony of Soviet women who fought.
1 bookTatiana de Rosnay
Occupied France — fiction
French-British novelist. Sarah's Key turns on the Vel' d'Hiv roundup of Paris's Jews in July 1942.
1 bookTed Lawson
Doolittle Raid — pilot's memoir
Piloted one of the B-25s in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo and lost a leg after crash-landing in China. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was published the following year.
1 bookThomas Keneally
Holocaust — fiction from a true story
Australian novelist. Schindler's Ark won the Booker Prize in 1982 and became Spielberg's Schindler's List.
1 bookTimothy Snyder
Eastern Europe — mass killing
Yale historian. Bloodlands treats the Nazi and Soviet killings in the lands between Berlin and Moscow as a single history, an argument that has been widely debated.
1 bookWilli Heinrich
Eastern Front — German fiction
German novelist who served as an infantryman on the Eastern Front and was wounded repeatedly. Cross of Iron was filmed by Sam Peckinpah.
1 bookWilliam Styron
Holocaust aftermath — literary fiction
American novelist who trained as a Marine officer at the war's end. Sophie's Choice won the National Book Award.
1 bookWinston S. Churchill
WWII — the prime minister's history
British prime minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951. His six-volume history of the war, part memoir and part document collection, helped win him the Nobel Prize in Literature.
1 bookYoshida Mitsuru
Pacific War — Japanese naval memoir
Junior officer aboard the battleship Yamato and one of the few survivors of its final sortie in April 1945. Requiem for Battleship Yamato is his account.
1 book