The Best WWII Memoirs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anonymous · 1959 · 261 pages

Published anonymously because the author faced hostility for breaking the taboo around wartime sexual violence. A harrowing,.

Vasily Grossman · 2005 · 378 pages

The raw notes behind Life and Fate, including the first published account of an extermination camp. Some of the finest war reporting ever written, from the war's worst places.

Norman Lewis · 1978 · 206 pages

Routinely named among the greatest war diaries ever published — liberation as black comedy and humanitarian catastrophe, in prose of unreasonable beauty.

Ernie Pyle · 1944 · 474 pages

The most read war correspondent in history, who wrote about privates by name and made America know them. He died on Okinawa with the men he wrote for.

Władysław Szpilman · 1946 · 222 pages

Adapted into Roman Polanski's film. Szpilman's account is remarkable for its restraint — he records horror without.

William Manchester · 1980 · 401 pages

The most literary Pacific War memoir. Manchester — also Churchill's biographer — writes prose of extraordinary beauty about the.

Geoffrey Wellum · 2002 · 338 pages

Wellum wrote it decades later for himself, never intending publication — which is exactly why it feels more honest than any other fighter-pilot memoir.

Corrie ten Boom · 1971 · 241 pages

The rescuer's perspective on the Holocaust — and a testament of faith under persecution that has never been out of print.

William Shirer · 1941 · 605 pages

History with no hindsight: Shirer watching the war begin from inside the Reich, not knowing how it ends. The raw material his Rise and Fall was later built on.

Edith Eger · 2017 · 320 pages

The natural successor to Frankl, whom Eger knew. Memoir and therapy in one: what the camps taught her about the prisons people build afterwards.

Michihiko Hachiya · 1955 · 238 pages

The essential Japanese companion to Hersey — the blast from ground zero, recorded by a doctor with clinical precision and no idea what weapon had struck.

Leo Marks · 1998 · 614 pages

The Life That I Have, the most famous code-poem of the war, is his. Funny, devastating, and the inside story of the secret war's signals.

Bill Mauldin · 1945 · 228 pages

Patton wanted Mauldin court-martialed for them; the infantry loved him for the same reason. The truest picture of the soldier's war ever drawn.

Robert Leckie · 1957 · 320 pages

Featured alongside Sledge's memoir in HBO's The Pacific. Leckie writes with a novelist's eye for character and dark humour that.

Guy Sajer · 1965 · 465 pages

The most vivid memoir of the Eastern Front from the German side. Essential for understanding the ordinary German soldier's.

Winston S. Churchill · 1948 · 4448 pages

The war narrated by the man who ran it — partial, magnificent, and the work that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature. History written by the winner, knowingly.

George Wilson · 1987 · 288 pages

The unglamorous truth of infantry attrition: Wilson survived D-Day plus eleven months when the average rifle-platoon leader lasted weeks.

Charles B. MacDonald · 1947 · 278 pages

Written two years after the events by a man who later became the Army's official historian. The classic American account of junior command in combat.

Alistair Urquhart · 2010 · 320 pages

Possibly the unluckiest and most resilient man of the entire war. He wrote it at ninety so the dead of the Railway would not be forgotten.

Yoshida Mitsuru · 1952 · 152 pages

The Japanese navy's death ride described from its bridge — the war's end rendered as tragedy by one of the handful who lived.