Meh, Shirer's book is still a great read, but it is so out of date on so many key topics. The research that has been done into so many fields has advanced so much that it has really badly aged Shirer's book historiographically.

Richard J Evans three part series on the Third Reich are the best books I know of at the moment.

why are the attacks on the UK called Blitz? i thought Blitzkrieg referred mostly (only?) to the tactic of using tank divisions as spearheads that ventured far ahead of other ground troops into enemy territory (with the attacks on Poland and France the prime examples). did the name just carry over to the air raids as a catchy headline or is there something else, warfare-related behind it?

I thought that Britain had a double agent that convinced Hitler to switch from bombing RAF bases to London because the RAF was being pummelled so much that it soon wouldn't have be able to defend against a sea invasion due to lack of planes.
No source, just a documentary from a few years ago.

re first hand accounts, what's obviously rarely recommended are those by german soldiers, so i'll fill this gap with probably the best one out there: Das Boot, by L.-G. Buchheim (http://www.amazon.com/Das-Boot-Boat-...9687317&sr=8-8). Well known for the movie based on it (but rarely read, i think) and while that movie is good the book is much, much better. It's very well written and manages to convey everything movies can't or hardly can, smells, feelings, all the little details that together can give you an idea of what it was like to be on a submarine in WWII.

It might not be for everyone though, it can seem quite longwinded with long passages of "nothing" happening - but that's certainly not a deficiency imo, after all it's not a book geared to provide suspense (although it has copious amounts of that too) but a realistic view on the life of the crew of a sub and those downtimes are simply a part of that.

and again, Buchheim's writing is very enjoyable - to me at least, i bought his two other novels after reading Das Boot, The Fortress and The Parting. Both are in the same style (knowing hardly anything about literature theory i'd call it stream-of-consciousness-y); Fortress is a 1500-pages-monster about his experiences in pre- and post-D-Day France that lacks the sheer suspense of Das Boot. nonetheless i still enjoyed it a lot.

I was fascinated by Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" series, Ghosts-of-the-Ostfront. It's 4 free podcasts covering the war on the eastern front. The scale and horror of the eastern front is unbelievable. I don't know how accurate the series is. I would like to read some books on the eastern front. There seem to be few books written in English about the east. Any recommendations?

I'd recommend (I think it's called) Nuremberg Diary -- the prison interviews with the Nuremberg defendants. Perversely engrossing to read the first person thought processes/reflections of the losing side.

Questions:
In what extent did Wehrmacht and Red Army used captured tanks, artillery and other heavy weapons? When reading about great battles of WWII I always see statistics which mention how many weapons were captured by winning side, but I never hear anything about their usage.

Also: why didn't Wehrmacht use chemical weapons on eastern front? They were first to use poison gas in WWI, they used artillery which were originally designed to fire gas canisters and for Wehrmacht war against USSR was a war of annihilation. So why didn't they?

All wars are generally fought on a pretty ad hoc basis in terms of supply, and weapons are perhaps the best example of this. I would guess that basically all weapons and ammo were used up unless crews could not be found to man them, in which case it would have been destroyed. It is so heavily promoted as a stat by the victors simply because it shows how many weapons they have deprived the enemy of.

Gas is actually a pretty poor weapon in these sort of terms. You are much better off encircling armies and destroying them later. Gas is unpredictable, often non-lethal, and could be easily avoided by gas masks.

re gas, there was a kind of stalemate similar to the one in the Cold War w/nuclear weapons, if one side used gas it could be certain the other side would too which would have been devastating for both. Germany would have been hit very hard obviously with the huge Allied air superiority later on but V2 attacks with nerve gas on London could have been awful too.
then there were logistical problems - the gas available to Nazi Germany might have been several dozen times more toxic than the ones used in WWI but they didnt have enough and couldnt produce enough for a large scale attack which would have been necessary to offset the negatives - Allied and Russian retaliations with chem weapons themselves; also in the late stages of the war (44/45) the necessary infrastructure for those large scale poison gas attacks simply wasnt there anymore.
there are also some rumours that the higher-ups kept the effectiveness of the available chemical weapons from Hitler, for whatever reason; and that Hitler himself was reluctant to use them because of his own experiences in WWI - thats unlikely though as he himself ordered their development and production.

finally chemical warfare just isn't that effective in a "modern" war without big trench fights - you cant use gas with the necessary accuracy unless you know exactly where the enemies are (which obviously was the case in WWI) - unless you launch a massive attack, and Germany wasnt able to do that at the time.

I just read The Forsaken Army by Heinrich Gerlach. Gerlach was a school teacher in his life before the war. It's a story by one of the 5000 survivors of the 6th Army on the Eastern Front. He tried to smuggle out a version of his writings while he was a POW but the manuscript was confiscated and destroyed. After the war, although he managed to survive his health was ruined, and so his memory for specific events was compromised.

So, he wrote a novelized account of the surrounding of the German Army, the many promises of reinforcements from Berlin, and the eventual surrender of the frozen troops against Hitler's orders. Although we tend to have less sympathy for them because they were, well, Nazis, as well as being the aggressors, it's hard to imagine the level of suffering depicted in the book.

I love Tuckman, but I found this book tough sledding. A little off topic in WWII thread, but her book A Distant Mirror is fantastic.

I know it is American-centric, but I've enjoyed immensely the two volumes produced so far by Rick Atkinson in The Liberation Trilogy. Especially the first volume--An Army at Dawn. It is aimed at the general reader, but gives you a lot of depth. Think Shelby Foote, only for a different time.

A great book along these lines (only non-fiction) is Stalingrad - Memories and Reassessments by Joachim Wieder and Heinrich Graf Von Einsiedel.

It is a pretty astonishing account of the battle of Stalingrad by a senior officer who survived the battle, the encirclement and then Russian capitivity. Words fail me in describing this book tbh - a muct read for anyone interested in the Eastern Front.

I think there's a simple reason for this, and it's may also be the reason the Germans never developed nuclear weapons. It's simply that they thought the war would be won quickly, and there was no need to move forward on any of this other stuff.

Mason

V1 and V2 glide bombs? Jet Fighters? Plastic explosives? Germany had a huge R&D program during the war.

It's much more likely that they simply realised gas was a terrible weapon for use in wars without static lines for pretty obvious reasons. The development and large scale depolyment of effective and easy to use gas masks amongst soldiers and civilian populations probably swayed any doubt.

They did of course use gas against static targets just as they did in WW1 - only the soldiers were replaced with civilians and the trenches were replaced with fake shower rooms.

Tabun was developed in '36, Sarin in '39. Soman in '44 (all in Germany). All highly effective nerve agents, all mass-produced by the US and USSR during the Cold War, all still used late in the 20th century (Iraq-Iran War, Iraqi massacres against Kurds, some terrorist attacks).