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...