When I committed to reading as much as I could handle on World War I during its centennial year, I used my Kindle to quickly identify about ten books to consider. I'm so happy with my choices: The World War I Reader and Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War. The latter book was a thrilling, but ch...
Armageddon is a very insightful and deep book about the final 9 months of World War II in Europe. The book chronicles the slow and at times deadly advance of the Allied forces through Hitler's Europe starting with the ill fated Operation Market Garden through the bloody, savage , and gruesome Ea...
Worth reading even for the prologue alone, when a squadron of Vickers Wellingtons gets torn apart by German fighters over the Heligoland Bight in 1939. But read on and you get a compelling account of the plight of British pilots and the politics that created the area bombing campaign that eventua...
In this readable,insightful, and well-written volume, Hastings aims to paint a “portrait” of the war and does not claim to provide anything resembling a comprehensive history, although in the end the book is a fine balance of both for the most part. The book is also mostly focused on military act...
Another outstanding work by Hastings on a WWII campaign, which in this case includes the Normandy invasion through the Breakout, approx. Jan-Aug 1944.As always the author is extremely detailed. This is particularly valuable when he compares and contrasts opposing weapons (more below). It does b...
World War II, like most significant events, has it's share of legends. There are heroes, such as the French Resistance, the British SAS, and the Allied SOE and Jedburgh teams. There are devious villains, such as the Waffen-SS men of the Das Reich division. There are daring missions behind Germ...
Maquis groups further north did not attempt to attack such an overwhelmingly powerful force in unfavourable country. London had never expected that résistants would be able to achieve much against major formations in areas approaching the battlefront. The division was not even aware of the existe...
Its early pages have described chiefly the lot of soldiers, some of whom endured traumatizing experiences. Hereafter, however, as the pace of the Third Reich’s collapse quickened, the civilian population of Germany began to suffer in a fashion dreadful even to those already familiar with aerial b...
TENBush Fever The success of Eagle, and of its Special Investigator column, offered Mac a splendid opportunity. He had almost exhausted the scope for undertaking Boy’s Own adventures close to home, and had little difficulty convincing the editor, Marcus Morris, that he should head for the Dark Co...
Granted, large forces of aircraft battered Germany in a bomber offensive of which much was made in newspapers and cables to Stalin. The Royal Navy, with growing strength, assurance and success, was still waging a vital defensive struggle to hold open the Atlantic convoy routes. US forces fought s...