The Best World War II Books

Eugene Sledge · 1981 · 326 pages

The most visceral, psychologically honest Pacific War memoir ever published. Selected by the Marine Corps as essential reading.

Anne Frank · 1947 · 283 pages

The most widely read document of the Holocaust. Essential reading that transcends the category of war book.

Primo Levi · 1947 · 188 pages

Levi writes with the analytical precision of a chemist. His chapter 'The Drowned and the Saved' is one of the most important.

Elie Wiesel · 1960 · 120 pages

At just 120 pages, Night is the most concentrated expression of the Holocaust's horror. Wiesel's loss of faith and the death of.

Jonathan Parshall & Anthony Tully · 2005 · 613 pages

Using Japanese operational records ignored by Western historians for sixty years, it rewrote the accepted story of the battle — including the famous fatal five minutes that never happened.

Vasily Grossman · 1960 · 871 pages

Grossman covered Stalingrad as a frontline correspondent; the KGB arrested the manuscript itself. Smuggled out on microfilm, it is now regarded as the greatest Russian novel of the century.

Richard Rhodes · 1986 · 886 pages

Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle winner. Science, biography, and moral history fused into one of the great nonfiction books of the century.

Antony Beevor · 1998 · 493 pages

Beevor was the first Western historian to access Soviet military archives on Stalingrad. It set the template for modern popular.

Cornelius Ryan · 1974 · 670 pages

Ryan's final masterpiece. His account of the doomed British paratroopers at Arnhem is among the most gripping combat writing ever.

Art Spiegelman · 1991 · 296 pages

The first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. Spiegelman invented a new way to tell the story of the Holocaust — through the.

James Hornfischer · 2004 · 480 pages

The most thrilling naval combat narrative ever written. Hornfischer tells the impossible story of destroyers and escort carriers.

John Hersey · 1946 · 152 pages

Originally published as the entire contents of a single New Yorker issue, Hiroshima changed how America understood the bomb..

Ian Toll · 2020 · 944 pages

The definitive modern account of the Pacific endgame, unflinching on the firebombing of Japan and the surrender decision.

George MacDonald Fraser · 1992 · 225 pages

Possibly the finest infantry memoir of any theater — profane, funny, unsentimental, and written in the Cumbrian dialect of his section. The Forgotten War at ground level.

Field Marshal William Slim · 1956 · 576 pages

Widely considered the best general's memoir ever written — honest about failure, generous to soldiers, and still taught at staff colleges worldwide.

Christopher Browning · 1992 · 271 pages

The most disturbing book on this list, because its answer to how ordinary people commit genocide is: easily. Required reading in Holocaust studies for thirty years.

Primo Levi · 1986 · 203 pages

His most profound work, completed months before his death. The chapter on the grey zone is the most important piece of moral analysis to come out of the Holocaust.

Svetlana Alexievich · 1985 · 384 pages

The book that helped win Alexievich the Nobel Prize. The war's most silenced veterans, recorded before they died, saying what the official histories refused to print.

Cornelius Ryan · 1959 · 350 pages

Ryan interviewed over 1,000 D-Day participants — many for the first and only time. The pioneering work of multi-perspective.

Rick Atkinson · 2002 · 681 pages

Pulitzer Prize winner. Atkinson shows an American army learning to fight — badly at first, but ultimately effectively.

John Keegan · 1976 · 354 pages

Keegan asked what it's actually like to stand in a battle. The book changed military history as a discipline.

Viktor Frankl · 1946 · 184 pages

Part memoir, part psychological theory. Frankl's argument that humans can endure anything if they find purpose has sold over 16.

William Shirer · 1960 · 1249 pages

Shirer was CBS's correspondent in Berlin. He watched Hitler rise and had access to captured Nazi documents before other.

Ian Toll · 2011 · 597 pages

The finest modern narrative of the Pacific War's opening year. Toll combines strategic overview with vivid combat writing, giving.

Laura Hillenbrand · 2010 · 473 pages

An extraordinary survival story. Hillenbrand's research into Japanese POW camps is meticulous, and Zamperini's resilience is.