Best WWII non-fiction you've read

[ellecf21]

Mine was Tattooist of Auschwitz. Possibly one of the most incredible stories I've ever read. What's yours?

Whoops those stars were my copy & pasting gone wrong

All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings. It’s a history of the entire of the war but he never lets you loose the thread of what’s happening and puts some fascinating things in context. Like how the Pacific and North African was were partly driven by a need to keep the war “going” until the European invasion was ready.

Dresden by Frederick Taylor - about the bombing of 13th / 14th February 1945

Berlin
Stalingrad

Both books by Anthony Beevor

Just started Operation Pedestal by Max Hastings which is the story of the convoy sent to relieve Malta, pretty good so far

Also Operation Mincemeat by Ben McIntyre

For fiction books still don't think you can beat The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Montserrat and Das Boot by Lothar Gunther Buchheim. Battle of the Atlantic seen from both sides

Stalingrad by Antony Beevor

Dambusters by James Holland

A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous - she kept her identity secret for decades. It’s about how the author and other women coped / had to cope when the Soviet forces “liberated” Berlin in 1945

East West Street by Philippe Sands, about the two Jewish lawyers who developed the ideas of genocide and international human rights laws, interwoven with their family histories.

Savage Continent Keith Lowe

If this is a man Primo Levi

A woman in Berlin

If this is a woman Sarah Helm

Their darkest hour Laurence Rees

I Will Bear Witness, the war diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic. Written in secret and hidden during the war, as it was illegal for him to keep a diary, they tell an often harrowing story of the minutiae of his daily life, as he lived continually with fear and hunger.
He survived the bombing of Dresden, and the desperate chaotic months of the fall of the Third Reich.

Two different books with the same name.
Operation Sealion - Leo McKinstry.
Operation Sealion - Peter Schenk.

The wartime memoir of Władysław Szpilman, the English translation is called The Pianist. About the gifted musician's fight for survival in Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto, and later in the ruins of the city, by turns heartbreaking and heartwarming.

The Bomber Boys Trilogy by Kevin Wilson, I'm just reading them again for the fourth time. My uncle was shot down & killed while serving in Bomber Command as part of 626 Squadron & I was so proud that his crew got a mention in the last book.

Lancaster Target by Jack Currie, the story of his tour as part of 626 Squadron as a pilot of a Lancaster Crew.

Ungentlemanly warfare by Giles Milton is superb and all about how the SOE started.

Seconding or thirding Nella Last’s War. Brilliant, as was the follow up, Nella Last’s Peace.
Mischling, Second Degree, memoirs of a girl in Nazi Germany with one Jewish grandparent is also excellent.

Berlin by Antony Beevor

I read Piepel by Ka-Tzetnik when I was about 15. My mum used to collect second hand books for Oxfam, and I often used to choose a book or two to read before they went to Oxfam. This book was among them.

It is the most unbelievably harrowing account of life in Auschwitz. I don't think I could read it again.

Is it the one by Norman Longmate or Rodney Foster? Both appear to have been colonels and used the same book title! Or was it by someone else entirely?

@whatausername Rodney Foster. (How daft of a publisher to put another book on the same subject out under an existing title.)

A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous - she kept her identity secret for decades. It’s about how the author and other women coped / had to cope when the Soviet forces “liberated” Berlin in 1945

This is harrowing. A book you won't forget.

Following

I'd add The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan. A description of the battle for Berlin in spring 1945 from the perspective of all parties - German civilians and military, Russian and Jewish. Absolutely gripping.

Might be out of print though as it was written in 1966.

The Cut Out Girl

www.penguin.co.uk/books/298975/the-cut-out-girl-by-es-bart-van/9780241978726

@tobee I read These Wonderful Rumours! recently and loved it.

Both East West Street and The Ratline by Philippe Sands are absolutely gripping. Someone mentioned Norman Longmate - his classic How We Lived Then is a history of everyday life during WW2, based on diaries, letters, oral history etc, and is just fascinating and wonderful.

Colditz Story by PR Reid. Published soon after the war, and was his own story.

Petals Bridge by S aAmbrose... felt his other books were a bit twattish though, but his writing style rather than the actual story.

Ill Met By Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss is the gripping, real life Boys' Own adventure story of the kidnapping of a German General from occupied Crete by two British officers and a group of Cretan partisans.
Patrick Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss were the two British officers, and the tale is told in a rollicking style, with several original photographs in the hardback version.

Can anyone help me with the name of a book written about/by an RAF pilot (I think) in WW2 who was captured, escaped, made it back as far as the Netherlands then was captured again and taken to a POW camp in Eastern Europe. I read it years ago but can never seem to find it when I Google search for it, I think the author was called something Pope?

If you don't mind narrative 'non-fiction' - i.e., based on a true story (more or less loosely) but written as fiction, then Helen Forrester's autobiographical books about wartime in Liverpool give a real feel for what life was like then (and in the last years of the Depression as well). These are not factual, text-book style histories though, but written as stories.

She also wrote other fictionalised books based on things that happened to her or others she knew.

Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees by Edward Stourton. Smuggling people into Spain along the Chemin de la Liberté.

I've travelled around the Pyrenees quite a lot and recognised so many places, it's fascinating.