Good WW2 books...

Fiction or non-fiction, so long as it concerns WW2....Give me some suggestions.

The Man Who Never Was by Ewan Montagu. A wonderful little nonfiction story of an ingenious undercover mission. Love it.

Lisa Fittko's Escape Through the Pyrenees and Escape Through the Pyrenees and Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940

http://www.librarything.com/tag/WWII,+fiction will get you hundreds of books.

Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse-Five are the two classic American WWII novels that you've probably already read (if you haven't, do, because they will certainly fit in with your science-fiction/horror interests).

For the experience of the Holocaust, the Italian writer Primo Levi is one good starting point. He was there himself, and his rather sober, scientific prose makes it a bit easier for readers to deal with the appalling subject-matter, without in any way reducing its awfulness. Anne Frank's Diary of a young girl is terribly over-hyped, but it's worth reading once (but perhaps only if you're still a teenager yourself). Sebald's Austerlitz is a great modern novel about the experience of looking back at the Holocaust, but it isn't everyone's cup of tea. For more mainstream novels, try Sophie's choice or Schindler's Ark.

For naval adventure, try Das Boot or Nicholas Monsarrat's The cruel sea. They are both written in a sort of docu-fiction style, and were of course both made into classic films. Alastair Maclean and C.S. Forester also wrote some great WWII adventure stories.

For a slightly different perspective, Hrabal's Closely observed trains looks at the experience of German occupation from the point of view of a young Czech railway worker; Harry Mulisch's The Assault describes how the consequences of an assassination during the occupation of Holland work out in post-war history. Both of these are quite short.

I'm very fond of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of honour trilogy and Anthony Powell's A dance to the music of time sequence. Both describe the experience of military life during the war from the point of view of an upper-middle-class British writer who has signed up as a temporary officer. But these are very British books, which possibly don't travel well.

...there are thousands of other books about WWII, of course.

Night by Elie Weisel

ETA: to set touchstone. It was wonky yesterday.

Herman Wouk wrote two excellent and thick books - The Winds of War and War and Remembrance - real epics, and well-researched.

Norman Mailer's The naked and the dead is still worth a read, and I can recommend Castle to castle by Celine for a look at life as a Vichy supporter while the war is ending.

Recent noteworthy fiction books that concern children and the holocaust. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Sarah's Key. Good for lovers of Anne Frank. Be careful and keep some tissues out. Nice short reads.

The Zookeeper's Wife non fiction. It will have you laughing one minute, crying the next, and regularly biting your fingernails worrying about what will happen next.

Winston Churchill's The Second World War volumes 1-6 are an excellent source.

If you like stories about adventure, escape, and survival try The Long Walk, We Die Alone, and The Sledge Patrol.

Off the top of my head, I'm not sure if any of these have been mentioned.

The Good War

The Longest Day

A Bridge Too Far

Suite Francaise

Berlin Diaries

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman

Stalingrad

The 900 Days: The Siege Of Leningrad

Cross of Iron by Willi Heinrich about the Wehrmacht's withdrawl from the Crimea.

Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman is a masterpiece and gives insight into the Russian perspective and the Eastern front.

Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre is a fascinating true story of espionage behind Nazi lines in France.

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada is a brilliant fictional look inside Nazi Germany, specifically Berlin.

The Siege by Helen Dunmore is a novel about the siege of Leningrad.

The Thin Red Line by James Jones.

Two good fiction books that deal with occupation of "Liberated" towns are:

Armageddon by Leon Uris deals the occupation of German towns near the end of the war up to the Berlin Air Lift
A Bell for Adano by John Hersey This Pulitzer Prize winner is about the occupation of an Italian town during the Battle of Sicily.

History books
Good War by Studs Terkel
At All Costs: How a Crippled Ship and Two American Merchant Mariners Turned the Tide of World War II by Sam Moses - Deals with the supplying of Island of Malta.

An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943, Volume One of the Liberation Trilogy and The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Liberation Trilogy) both by Rick Atkinson
The First Heroes by Craig Nelson
The Wild Blue : The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45 by Stephen E. Ambrose

Two good ones about the War in the Pacific from the Jappanese prospective;
Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy's Story by Mitsuo Fuchida
"Samurai" by Saburo Sakai (touchstones goes to wrong book)

One book that is interesting in that it was published in 1931 that told the story of a war in the Pacific between Japan and the U.S.A. -

" The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japane​se Campaign of 1931-1933 by Hector C Bywater

It is amasing how accurate it was being publish ten years before the War.

A history that also includes the Depression and that is fantastic on both it and the war, from the US perspective, is Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy, one of the best books I read last year.

>16

I happily second this suggestion of Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman. It's all that rebeccanyc says, and so much more. It's Stalingrad, which threw up some of the worst WWII excesses. No vainglory here, just survival. It's also an insightful analysis of the way Uncle Joe learned from Uncle Adolf how to do anti-semitism. The story of how Stalin tried to suppress the book says a lot too - this is recounted in the edition I have.

An unusual one in this context is The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb by Mervyn Peake, best known for the Gormenghast Trilogy. It's an epic poem about survivors of the V1/V2 missile campaign launched against London. Very sad and moving.

#20, I don't think the Russians and the other people within the Soviet Union needed to learn from anyone about anti-Semitism.