Agree as to the necessary emphasis on multicausality.

Jim’s mention of 9/11 in connection with Pearl Harbor is interesting since we do have a bit of distance now after 8 years. Would we have been better off characterizing 9/11 as a criminal act instead of an “act of war”? At the time I rather forcefully argued for the latter definition since I feared we would lose our way in “legalizations”, but in fact it seems we have lost our way in a very different way . . .

Yeah we were attacked in 2001, too, and that unity lasted maybe a year. If the CP assets in the intelligentsia had been told to adhere to the peace line it would have all been much, much different. There was a bit of trutherism about Pearl Harbor (“Roosevelt knew the attack was coming”) but it was very marginalized; had it been expedient to oppose the war, Dalton Trumbo would have written the 1942 version of “Fahrenheit 911″ (and it would have been superior in quality, I’m sure.)

Perhaps you’re not fully aware of the extent of CP influence in the media, Holywood, and the unions during WWII.

I think you’re letting your politics get the better of your analysis. The reason we were united in WWII and not in the other wars you mentioned, is that we were attacked. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour followed by Germany’s declaration of war on the US four days later are what solidified US support for that war.

Highly interesting.

Two of my absolute fiction favourites (The cruel Sea and Sword of Honour) have been mentioned already. A work of fiction by a veteran (former bomb aimer Col. Jules Roy) may be added: La Vallée Heureuse, Charlot, Paris 1946. Apparently it has never been translated. I prefer it to St. Ex in most respects.

Nonfiction: several of my favs mentioned already. I must admit that my own reading is rather French, Eastern Front and German centric so I do not think it wd be of great interest here. I will look up Weinberg though, thx for the hint. Sounds good.

One interesting new book: Finest Years by Max Hastings, Harper Press £25 pp688 a new Churchill book which has just come out (ft.com and Timesonline).

Lex,

I hope you are wrong and wonder whether children here in Europe are better informed. Probably will see this when mine get older. In my time (Germany, 80s) we had a small number of history buffs with an interest in mil affairs and politics and large indifferent majority with a very limited knowledge and an all consuming interest in a man called Jackson. Plus ca change … Incidentially, the leftist/pacifist teachers we had then angered me into reading more, not less, history though not with the results intended.

Here is my three + 1

The North Africa and Italian Campaigns, part of a trilogy.
“Army at Dawn” and “Day of Battle”, by Rick Atkinson

Best personal account of battle.
“With the Old Breed” by EB Sledge

Single campaign
“Guadalcanal” by Richard B Frank

Peniakoff led Popski’s Private Army, a raiding unit that operated with the New Zealanders of the legendary Long Range Desert Group behind Axis lines in North Africa, then went motorized in Italy. His memoir is an earthy and gripping account of war, desert exploration, intelligence gathering and raiding, the harshness and beauty of deserts and mountains, and the camaraderie of life among soldiers and Senussi tribesmen.

If you look at the history of the US’s wars, almost every one had very substantial segments of the population opposing the war and hindering the war effort. Loyalist Tories, Hartford Convention, Lincoln’s “spot” resolutions against the Mexican war, Copperheads and draft rioters in the Civil War, Twain and others bitterly opposing the Spanish-American war and the Philippine Insurrection, Debs going to prison in WWI, and of course all the protests against wars since WWII. WWII is the huge outlier, and that was all due to Hitler invading the USSR.

We’ll never have that again.

Yes, that’s how it was. I grew up with pretty much the same experiences . . . hearing all those stories. Pretty much all gone now and not to be repeated since I don’t know if we even have that story-telling/listening ability today. But then for better or worse I don’t think the West would be up to fighting a WWII, let alone a WWI, again.

I am not sure if there is or can be a solution. There can only be mitigation of a bad situation.

I remember a high-school English teacher and his wife, who was the school librarian. Germanic accents. Thin, both of them, and sometimes when the weather was hot and people had sleeves rolled up you could notice the numbers tattooed on their arms. I suppose the revisionists would say they faked them, for some reason. They seemed real to me.

Many of these people I knew are dead now, and many of the stories they didn’t tell me are lost. If young people today got started, they could probably hear a few such stories from the men who are in their 80s and 90s. But soon they will be all dead. And most young people won’t get that experience. They will know the war mostly from bad movies, which today are mostly merely bad homages to movies that weren’t very real when they were made.

These books we’re talking about are important. There won’t be many more people who can learn all this from direct conversation with the participants. Soon the books will be all that is left. The majority of the stories will have gone unrecorded.

I hope the ones that were recorded continue to be read.

“MacArthur’s Jungle War: The 1944 New Guinea Campaign” by Stephen Taaffe

New Guinea deserves more attention that it has gotten, but that is true of other parts of the war as well.

“Paratrooper!: The Saga of US Army and Marine Parachute and Glider Combat Troops during WW2″ by Gerard Devlin

Bought this after I graduated from Airborne School and have enjoyed it ever since, especially the story of the 509th at Avellino and the 503rd at Corregidor

“Fate is the Hunter” by Ernest Gann. One of the best aviation memoirs. Gann was a civilian airline pilot who served in the ATC during WW2. The meat of the book covers this time.

Just about anything by John Keegan, but also just about anything by Norman Davies as scene setters and on consequences.

For specific battles or campaigns, there are just too many to name.

For that reason:

Black Edelweiss

To Hell and Back

With the Old Breed

The Holocaust is not “WWII” to me, but a separate if related historical subject.

I thought Wages of Destruction was GREAT and there’s a lot to compare to how the current US administration is approaching the “reorganization” and “rationalization” of the private sector to align it with “national goals”

Someone earlier mentioned Eric Bergerud’s two books-certainly- excellent.Also Jonathan Parshall “Shattered Sword” a much needed corrective to all the myths about Midway.

Essential book (among others) to understand the logistics of getting millions of tons of stuff to the South Pacific to conduct the war. The reading is a bit dry, but if you are interested in aspects of the war outside of the actual combat such as supply you will find it fascinating.

Not many think about all the food, medical supplies, trucks, pants, and all the rest that an army needs, and it is especially impressive that our men were an ocean away at the time.

I think it was Patton who said that our greatest weapon was our 2 ton truck.