The 10 Best WWII Books

If you read one book about the American soldier in Europe, make it Band of Brothers. Stephen E. Ambrose follows a single paratrooper company from training in Georgia through Normandy, Holland and the Battle of the Bulge to Hitler's mountain retreat, drawing on interviews with the men themselves. The chapters are short and the people stay vivid. One claim, that this company reached Berchtesgaden first, is disputed by veterans of another division.

Unbroken reads like a thriller, yet Laura Hillenbrand built it on years of research and long talks with its subject. Louis Zamperini was an Olympic runner whose bomber went down in the Pacific in 1943. He drifted for weeks on a raft, then survived Japanese prison camps and a guard who singled him out for cruelty. The beatings are told in close detail, so younger teens may need a parent's preview first.

For D-Day itself, The Longest Day is the classic account. Cornelius Ryan, a former war correspondent, built it from interviews with thousands of Allied troops, German defenders and French civilians, then cut between them hour by hour. The result moves fast and stays clear, with a cast that feels like real people rather than symbols on a map. It covers only one day, and the 1959 prose can feel old-fashioned in places.

A Higher Call centers on one strange moment in the air war. In December 1943, a German fighter ace pulled alongside a shot-up American bomber, saw its wounded crew and escorted it out instead of finishing it. Adam Makos traces both pilots' lives before and after, and the long search that brought them together decades later. It reads quickly. Much of it rests on the pilots' memories, recorded about half a century after the fact.

Readers who want spies more than battles should start with A Woman of No Importance. Sonia Purnell tells how Virginia Hall, an American who walked on an artificial leg, built resistance networks in occupied France while the Gestapo hunted her, then slipped back in for a second tour. She earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the only civilian woman in the war to receive it. The large cast of agents and code names can be hard to track.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is the one-volume classic on how the Nazis took power, ran Germany and lost the war. William L. Shirer reported from Berlin before the war, then built this history from captured German files, and it won the National Book Award. The storytelling holds up well. Its claim that German history led straight to Hitler is disputed by many historians, and it's a very long read.

Elie Wiesel's Night can be read in a single evening, but it isn't light. Wiesel was 15 when his family was deported from their town, now part of Romania, to Auschwitz, and he tells of the camps, a winter death march and his father's death in plain, spare sentences. This edition carries a fresh translation by his wife, Marion, and a preface by the author. It's harrowing throughout, and it covers the camps rather than the fighting.

Paul Fussell, a veteran and critic, called With the Old Breed one of the finest memoirs to come out of any war. E.B. Sledge was a young Marine mortarman on Peleliu and Okinawa, and he wrote it from notes he kept tucked in his pocket New Testament. He spares nothing: the heat, the thirst, the unburied dead and what the fighting did to decent men. The violence is graphic, and some passages are hard to read.

An Army at Dawn explains how the U.S. Army learned to fight, the hard way, in North Africa. Rick Atkinson follows the campaign from the landings in late 1942 through defeats like Kasserine Pass to the Axis surrender in Tunisia, moving between generals and privates. It won the Pulitzer Prize for History and opens a three-book series that runs to Germany. It covers one campaign in close detail, and the names and units pile up fast.

For a reader who wants the whole war at a glance, Smithsonian World War II lays it out in maps, photos and short entries, from the first German attacks to the atomic bombs. Spreads on single battles, weapons and leaders let you dip in and out, and it suits teens and gift buyers. It's a big, heavy hardcover, and the short entries make it a better reference than a book to read straight through.