Looking for recommendations for non-fiction ww2 books


  • Thunder Below!

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    Well my post is a bit different from all who have mentioned books but this may be helpful.

    I personally enjoy WWII reference books akin to something like Jane’s militry reference books. I have quite a few and they are pretty expensive if you pay the usual fifty to even pushing up towards a hundred dollars.

    The trick is to wait until after the Christmas season and check out your local major retail booksellers such as Barnes & Noble. Many times these books don’t sell as well so you can get them for a steal some times as high 90% off. I built up a collection of some very nice books this way.


  • @toblerone77:

    I personally enjoy WWII reference books akin to something like Jane’s militry reference books. I have quite a few and they are pretty expensive if you pay the usual fifty to even pushing up towards a hundred dollars. The trick is to wait until after the Christmas season and check out your local major retail booksellers such as Barnes & Noble. Many times these books don’t sell as well so you can get them for a steal some times as high 90% off. I built up a collection of some very nice books this way.

    Good advice.  Among the reference books in my collection, some of my favourites are the three books on WWII battleships by Garzke and Dulin: one on US battleships, one on (non-US) Allied battleships and one on Axis and Neutral battleships.  They’re extremely detailed studies of all the battleships and battlecruisers that were built (or contemplated) in the 1930s and 1940s.  I also find Conway’s Battleships (aka Conway’s All the World’s Battleships, depending on the edition) to be a very useful single-volume source on all the dreadnoughts built from 1905 onward.


  • I always seem to end up with more of the nuts and bolts type of works.  For WWII here are a few that I didn’t see mentioned that I find very useful as references:
    1.  M.J. Whitley’s Destroyers of WWII, An International Encyclopedia.  This one covers most of the heavier ocean going torpedo boat types as well, but not some of the escorts/corvettes/frigates–often slower ASW/AA boats.
    2.  M.J. Whitley’s Cruisers of WWII, An International Encyclopedia.
    3.  Kay & Smith’s German Aircraft of the Second World War.
    4.  Francillon’s Japanese Aircraft of the Pacific War.
    5.  Dean’s America’s Hundred Thousand, U.S. Production Fighters of World War II.
    6.  Gordon and Khazanov’s Soviet Combat Aircraft of the Second World War.  Two volume set.


  • Yes, those two books by Whitley are very useful, as is his “Battleships of World War Two”.  I also like these two related books: Aircraft Carriers of World War Two by Antony Preston, and Submarines of World War two by Erminio Bagnasco.


  • Older books but,

    Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich
    John Toland’s  The Rising Sun - Pacific from the Japanese point of view (won puliter prize)


  • Find the complete lot of Illustrated World War II Encyclopedia . It was published by H.S Stuttman Inc. Publishers

    It’s unbiased and deep in content.

    At 15 I was hired to clean my neighbors storage shed and found a set that was about to get burned. I took the set .

  • '10

    Winston Churchill’s The Second World War Series.

    A MUST read for any serious student of WW2 History

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_World_War_book_series

    EPIC read…  EPIC detail and interesting perspective.

    Jeremy


  • @FieldMarshalGames:

    Winston Churchill’s The Second World War Series.

    I think these were the projected volumes to which Churchill was referring when he allegedly said that he knew that history would treat him favourably because he was going to write it.


  • I like the stories from individuals:

    ROBINSON CRUSOE, USN tells the story of George Tweed, who is local and is buried at ‘Eagle Point National Cemetery’

    The movie is “No Man Is An Island” from 1962.

    Great true stories.


  • The Second World War by John Keagan. Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45 by Alan Clark. Illustrated World War II Encyclopedia by Lieutenant Colonel Eddy Bauer.

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