World War II

Battle of London

London at the outset of war in 1939 was the greatest city in the world, the heart of the British Empire. The defiant capital had always been Adolf Hitler's prime target and 1945, the last year of the war, saw the final phase of the battle of London.
The Blitz and other bombing by the German airforce during World War II killed over 30,000 Londoners and flattened large tracts of housing and other buildings across London. The first air raids on London were mainly aimed at the Port of London in the East End.

London 1945

Bridge at Remagen

While American troops crossed the Rhine the Germans made desperate attempts to destroy the bridge by bombing and even by employing frogmen, but in ten days time 40,000 soldiers crossed the bridge.

Bridge at Remagen

Our mothers' war

Our mothers' war is an eye-opening and moving portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. Never before has the vast range of women's experiences during this pivotal era been brought together in one book.

Women during World War II

Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan

Only now can the full scope of the war in the Pacific be fully understood. Historian Ronald Spector, drawing on newly declassified intelligence files, an abundance of British and American archival material. Japanese scholarship and documents, and research and memoirs of scholarly and military men, has written a stunning, complete and up-to-date history of the conflict.
Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan by Ronald H. Spector
Random House, 1985

Why the Allies Won by Richard Overy

Richard Overy's bold book begins by throwing out the stock answers to this great question: Germany doomed itself to defeat by fighting a two-front war; the Allies won by "sheer weight of material strength." In fact, by 1942 Germany controlled almost the entire resources of continental Europe and was poised to move into the Middle East. The Soviet Union had lost the heart of its industry, and the United States was not yet armed. The Allied victory in 1945 was not inevitable. Overy shows us exactly how the Allies regained military superiority and why they were able to do it. He recounts the decisive campaigns: the war at sea, the crucial battles on the eastern front, the air war, and the vast amphibious assault on Europe. He then explores the deeper factors affecting military success and failure: industrial strength, fighting ability, the quality of leadership, and the moral dimensions of the war.
Why the Allies Won by Richard Overy
Norton & Company, 1997

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's classic The Great War and Modern Memory remains one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. In its panoramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world.
Fussel compellingly depicts the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II by analyzing the wishful thinking and the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality; by describing the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most importantly, by emphasizing the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and wit.
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War by Paul Fussell
Oxford University Press, 1990

Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich

In Hitler's Army, Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union - where the vast majority of German troops fought - to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. In the unprecedented ferocity and catastrophic losses of the Eastrn front, he writes, soldiers embraced the idea that the war was a defense of civilization against Jewish/Bolshevik barbarism, a war of racial survival to be waged at all costs. Bartov descibes the incredible scale and destruction of the invasion of Russia in horrific detail. Even in the first months - often depicted as a time of easy victories - undermanned and ill-equipped Geman units were stretched to the breaking point by vast distances and bitter Soviet resistance.
Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich by Omer Bartov
Oxford University Press, 1992