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).

This book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sniper-Easte.../dp/1844153177



The most brutal, honest and grotesque account of what actual combat was like on one of the most disgustingly violent battles the world has ever seen. I highly highly recommend this book. It's probably the best anti war text I have ever read, just went the realities of battles are detailed in such a matter of fact way. Granted it was written retrospectively, but it is considered an accurate account. I've read the recently released Russian sniper on eastern front book, and Zaitsev's book, but this one trumps them all.

Also it is interesting to note, there were a lot of fake books circulting just after the war. For example:



I always considered this one of the defining combat books as well, but was disappointed when I did some research and it's is regarded by many academics to be a total fake.

Other truly excellent books, anythnig by Antony Bevoir is amazingly researched, and a good balance between every dimension of the battles he focuses on, political, economic and human. Stalingrad is my favorite:



Berlin is also an excellent one.

This book by Biedermann is fascinating, but some people might find it dry:



It portrays a lot of the feeling of front line troops very well, the pointless tragedy of it all, his poetry and romanticism is really interesting, but it is quite a dry book.

Anything by Primo Levi is also superb, he was a hollocaust survivor. Probably the most articulate and intelligent writing I have ever read on it.



Treblinka is an astonishing account of an uprising in a holocaust camp as well, I highly recommend this book, but it is deeply disturbing reading (as you would probably expect).

This book about Zhukov is excellent, but very heavy reading and it's overly strategic which always loses me, but netherless an interesting read on the greatest ww2 General.



This is a gem of a book as well:



The often unknown war between Russia and Finland, detailing extrodinary resistance and acts of bravery against overwhelming odds. Truly amazing book.

Also highly recommend this book:



The brutal account, comparably disturbing as the holocaust, when the Japanese went into the city and destroyed it.

Anyway those are just the best from the ones I've read imo

Also in regards to chemical warfare, the Japanese were king here during WW2. I read somewhere that they dropped disease infected lice bombs in china, the bombs would have a small charge in them to disperse the lice over a large area and the disease would spread really quickly. I'll try find more info on this.

They also launched explosive balloons across the Atlantic, a few of them actually dropped onto American soil, but no injury was known to be caused by them afaik.

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

Also whilst we are talking about the Japenese, read about Unit 731:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

Note that a lot of these researchers became high up workers in US pharmaceutics companies after the war. Recently they have been coming forwards near to death in admittance of their participation in these camps, overwrought with guilt.

There is a good film on 371, I think it's a Chinese one. A lot of modern researchers refuse to reference of use any knowledge derived from research from Unit 731 on moral grounds even if the information is useful to them.

Also in regards to atomic weapons being developed by Germany, I think Mason is right, they did actually plan for it in the beginning, but decided not to because the research process would have taken too long and cost too much resources/money, when they were expecting the war to be over relatively quickly.

In regards to this book, it was actually so disturbing it's sort of nightmare triggering sort of material, I've never been so sickened by a book that I've wanted to put it down before.

I actually asked why I was reading it, it seemed more like exploitative cinema where it is gruesome for the sake of being gruesome, but I had to keep reminding myself I was reading about real people, and their struggle and end had real educational value as to why we should exhaust every democratic option before engaging in war.

No human beings should ever have to go through what they have, and unfortunately war isn't cleaner or more sanitised as we would like to think it is nowadays with the aid of technology, it's still gritty and visceral, and something we should avoid at all costs. It still ends with young people who haven't started their lives dying of excruciating wounds in unknown places.

Lighter weapons were redeployed a lot more often than heavier machinery. With captured weapons you are always running into an issue of ammo supply and parts\repair (with tanks and autos).

I read somewhere that Wehrmacht considered they use for chemical weapons only as defensive option. There was also huge distaste for that option by higher command who knew first hand all the implications of using gasses during ww1.

A great book = The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Its very long but excellent. Pulitzer Prize/National book award winning.

From that book, the Nazis were not interested in developing the bomb and did not have access to the materials required to develop it. The Norwegian heavy water plant was sabotaged by the Allies (The Heroes of Telemark.) Many prominent Jewish physicists fled Germany and worked on the American bomb. The Allies would bomb any suspected nuclear site although that might not be completely effective.

I don't think Germany could afford to develop the bomb after attacking the Soviet Union. The United States spent an extreme amount of money and resources developing the bomb. Hundreds of thousands of workers were employed. Billions of dollars were spent. Each bomb cost roughly $500 million. That represented a significant portion of $$$ spent on other weapons. Once Germany was in a life and death struggle with the Soviet Union and suffering from Allied strategic bombing, it was impossible to keep up with conventional weapons manufacturing never mind develop atomic weapons.

If the Nazis had seriously worked on the bomb instead of attacking the Soviet Union, the world might be a different place today.

Thanks for clarification guys.

I was just watching an interview with a Soviet veteran in which he said that Soviet soldiers often took machine guns from dead German soldiers because they were lighter and easier to use.

The primary function of a soviet soldier was not to fire bullets anyway, it was to absorb them.

As soon as I saw the thread I was going to reccommend the Hardcore History podcast Ghosts of the Ostfront, but someone beat me to it.

I thought that the podcast covered post-Kursk better than most history pieces. In my experience most, if not all, Eastern Front coverage goes "Pre-War-Blitz-Winter Counter Attack-Blitz-Stalingrad-One paragraph on Kursk-Russian Steamroller-Berlin" with little mention about anything specific after Kursk. Most books you would encounter in school were lucky to even mention one thing about the East between Stalingrad and Berlin.

A great book for anyone even vaguley sympathetic to Holocaust denial or just interested in the day to day functioning of the Nazi party:

http://www.amazon.com/Unwritten-Orde.../dp/0752433288

The Unwritten Order is a deep and thorough acount of just how the final solution was implemented and maintained by the Nazi's, and Hitler's explicit role in it. Very well written and a powerful and moving book.

Has anyone watched the documentary series The World at War? It was produced in Britain in the early 1970's; as such, it contains extensive interviews with people who lived through the war, both "common" people and historically significant personalities, such as Albert Speer. I found the series absolutely riveting. You can watch it at http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-w...rsary-edition/

I'd also like to highly recomend Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder. It's a pretty recent book detailing the effects of Hitler and Stalin on the region between Germany and the Soviet Union, especially Poland. It's not entirely about WWII, as the book deals fairly extensively with Stalin's crimes in the Soviet Union prior to the outbreak of the war (like the Ukranian famine and The Great Terror), but most of the book deals with events during the war.

+1 for World at War, I got all the DVD's, brilliant series.

Concur!!!!!!! I've listened to these several times, I can't get enough. They're fantastic, IMO.

Does anyone know of some good books written about the war in Russia? Dan Carlin whetted my appetite

Sniper on the Eastern front and Antony Beevoirs Stalingrad/Berlin are excellent books.

very good book about the Eastern Front from the perspective of a Soviet journalist on the front lines. It's taken from his original notes so there's none of the typical Soviet censorship/sugarcoating of everything. Fascinating read.

^ Thanks, I'm gonna buy that

The Germans captured a huge amount of Russian equipment in the early phases of Barbarossa, and used a lot of it.

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.62_cm_Pak_36%28r%29

I believe at one point the SS Das Reich Panzer Division had an entire battalion of T-34s.

They used a lot of French and Czech equipment as well IIRC.

From the 731 unit wiki
I never realised they were so brutal! Any other examples of this?
In UK history we only learned about the causes and victory in the West; no Japan, no pacific etc..
I know why but it seems a huge gap! Good books to read up on for this?
Reading that wiki about 731 definitely edits my thoughts on Japanese conduct. The way its been portrayed to me in the past is just that they were a resilient enemy; and the atrocities were more or less equatible with other nations; allied or not.
731 is just mad awful though

Rape of Nanking.

Japan was not fair in fighting at all. They were brutal and fought to the death. Only 30,000 pows vs 1.3 million soldiers killed. Only 85,000 wounded. This is a crazy statistic. No other nation had numbers like this. They simply did not surrender ever even when hopeless. Consider Germany had 11,000,000 soldiers captured and Soviets 4,000,000. British had like 300,000 captured, 500,000 killed, 500,000 wounded.

They would target medics on the battlefield. They would treat pow's inhumanely and desecrate American dead leaving them to be found by their buddies. They used kamikaze's and suicide missions.

Just some examples.

I think the war between China and Japan was always quite a traditional and age old war, the modern China vs Japan war started early in the 1930's I think, but historically they had been warring for many centuries. So it wasn't really included in the official scope of WW2, but I might be wrong on that. I rarely see it mentioned though (also I rarely see the Finish/Russian war mentioned even though it was an incredibly important stage of the overall war).

Geologically the feud between Japan and China was fairly unimportant for the Western world, which is why it probably isn't had so much weight put on it from education. It didn't really affect our economy, nor did it noisily interfere with our morals. It's a shame in my opinion that only one brutal act of the war (the holocaust) is taught, it seems to give the impression that it was an isolated freak occurance, but sadly, even to this day such occurances are not so rare.

Unit 731 was horrific and nightmarish. It was on an equally morally deprived footing, if not worse, than the hollocaust. Read up on the rape of Nanking if you want to read more about what the Japanese were capable of during WW2 as well. What strikes me is the imagination some of the Japanese displayed. I despair that people with such imaginations and intelligence focused their energies on the systematic liquidation of human beings.

The Japanese method is a reasonably good argument for attempting to end the war quickly with atomic weapons. During WW2 my grand dad was stationed as an infantryman in India, and him and his friends were petrified of being sent into action in Japan. Stories of ferocity of the battles leaked back to the common solider, and scared them to death. No one wanted to go there.

Arguably also, (and I hope this splinters into a discussion on the topic), the estimated deaths of a land invasion would be far far greater than the bombs. On some of the small islands the Allies invaded, when they approached small villages mothers would jump off cliffs holding their babies because they were convinced by Japanese propaganda that the Western people (who most of them had never ever seen) were there to kill, torture and rape them all. The 'fight to the very end' mentality is a very good deterant, but when it is obvious they are going to lose, it's a very good way to waste a lot of life.

Flags of Our fathers the book, is a superb books which captures the ferocious nature of Japanese warfare very well, a lot better than the films. It contains graphic details that the films couldn't really get near. The book is fascinating, as it's central subject is that famous photograph. A stunning photograph, that seems to stir a sense of patriotism in me and romanticism, symbolising the struggle and sacrifice for an unarguable good quintessentially, where the cause far outweighs the needs of individuals.

The photo was taken on Iwo Jima, I think deaths per square km wise this was the most deadly place you could be in any stage of the war as a combat troop. A disturbing and tragic battle that lasted around 6 weeks over an area about 8 square miles big. 24,000 people died on those 8 square miles. That's 3,000 bodies per square mile. That's 70 deaths per square mile every single day of the battles. Of the roughly ~18,000 Japenese deaths, only around 200 were taken prisoner. That's how unforgiving Iwo Jima was.

It seemed in WW2 the further East you went, the more horrific and unforgiving the battles were. At least in Western Europe, a certain degree of ethics was for the most part displayed by fighting troops.

For a German troop in France, a severe punishment was to be sent to the Eastern front. As well as being an effective punishment, it actually backfired a little, as seasoned Eastern Front German troops who were reinforced with punishment soldiers wondered why they were there at all.

The Russian German war was a terrible event. The clash between differences in political ideals became more polarised. The modern age of media unleashed it's power as well in the form of efficient and mass propaganda. It fuelled hatred and racism. This in turn caused the battles to be particularly despicable.

'In Deadly Combat' and 'Sniper on the Eastern Front' describe some harrowing events in visceral detail. And how many more of these events happened, to real people that will never be known? Fields turned into meat grinders with mud boiling from non stop artillery, and people being forced to run into it. A German Flamethrower tank that found a pocket of a few hundred Russians in a hole in the steppes and charged in with them, the cries of hundreds of men burning to death and the tracks churning flesh. Faces grinning in agony before their bodies burst as tanks rolled over them. WW2 was the beginning of the modern age of mechanised warfare, and all the horror that brought along with it.