aulsmith's wwii books

A list of the books I've read for my World War II research project, with comments.

Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre. This led me off on an entire tangent about military intelligence, which is an entire research project of it's own. Macintyre is an excellent writer and I'm looking forward to Operation Mincemeat.

Teach Yourself the Second World War by Alan Farmer. I found myself lost in the European Theater in Agent Zigzag book, so I skimmed this to get an overview. Excellent book for a quick overview of background material you need for something else. I wouldn't want to read it cover-to-cover.

Enigma: The Battle for the Code by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore. The breaking of the German naval codes by the Allies. Most of this book is about naval exploits to steal code books and cypher machines, which makes it a pretty exciting read. However, I'm more interested in the personalities of the codebreakers, like Alan Turing, so I need another book to supplement this one.

Edited for typos.

I've got you Starred!

aulsmith,

RE: codebreakers,

You might try The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh. I read this in 2008, and as I recall, there was a fairly long section on the WWII codebreakers. The whole book might not interest you, that section just might.

Bill Masom

Bill,

Thanks very much. I'll check it out.

Just finished Warlord : a life of Winston Churchill at war, 1874-1945 by listening to the audio book. Recently I've found it much easier to do biographies on audio. There's always some part of a person's life that's boring or repetitious. If I'm reading, I usually get bogged down and end up not finishing the book, but with the audio I'm doing something else at the same time, so it doesn't bother me as much.

Another audiobook:

Let Me Go by Helga Schnieder. The memoir of a woman meeting her mother, an unrepentant Nazi death camp guard, after being estranged most of her life. No need to get this one on audio. It's gripping and short.

6: That's a book I'd be interested in reading. What a thing to have to work through in one's life, but there must be many such stories. What is your WWII project?

I want to write a story where the world the people live in is very unstable and changes everyday and people have radically different views about who is even human. World War II was the closest real world analog I could find. That's why the reading is so scattered. I'm not looking at particular facts or sequences of events so much as what various situations felt like for different kinds of participants. For instance, the spies (from Zigzag and the Enigma stuff) were afraid in a much different way than the children in Berlin bombings, which comes up in Let Me Go. There's a lot of personal adventure tied up in spying that the Berlin children don't have (which is probably why the author of Let Me Go exhibits a lot of the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, though she doesn't apply that label to herself.)

I've read a number of really good things about the concentration camps over the years. The best from the point of view of how do you get people to do such horrible things to other people are The Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton and Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka : the Operation Reinhard death camps

8: Ah, this adds context to the project. Afraid in different ways is a thing to think about.

You might enjoy reading the spy novels by Alan Furst. He does an excellent job of evoking the atmosphere of a world which is filled with unknowns and yet one must carry on. His settings are frequently ones which have not been often used, such as Eastern Europe.

10. Thanks. I am reading a bunch of fiction to, but this is the non-fiction group ;)

I want to write a story where the world the people live in is very unstable and changes everyday and people have radically different views about who is even human. World War II was the closest real world analog I could find.

(Sounds like what you need is Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day.) Let me think about non-fiction....

(Later) Well, yes a lot of the WWII literature will be about defining humanity. A microcosm of that problem is about defining reality, which shows up "when Bohr met Heisenberg", an incident which has been discussed in lots of books (Copenhagen comes to mind), where the two cannot speak directly about what they need to talk about but have to hint to each other about the work they're doing.

12: Copenhagen was superb. I'll check out the Bowen. And, yes, whose reality are you going to live in is a big component of the questions that are brought up by the conflicts of World War II. Some of Let Me Go is about that. I'm thinking stuff on the German generals who plotted against Hitler would be interesting, since they started out living in Hitler's reality, but realizing it was non-viable, tried to create another one.

11: If you want to keep all of your WWII project books in one place, I'm certainly not going to object if some of them are fiction.

I've hardly finished any books this summer, though I've sampled a good many, some of which I hope to go back to. My most recent sample was from Einstein's German World by Fritz Stern. This is a set of previously published essays and is a good book to sample from rather than read straight through. Stern's basic thesis is that Germany at the turn of the 19th to 20th century presented a unique combination of factors which made for a leap forward in scientific discovery. These factors included government and industrial support for scientific investigation and, surprisingly, anti-Semitism, which spurred many scientists of Jewish extraction to push harder in order to get recognition. Obviously all these factors had drawbacks as well, many of which became particularly apparent during the two World Wars. Stern draws a very interesting portrait of the intellectual climate that made discoveries like relativity possible. I was particularly intrigued by the essay comparing and contrasting Fritz Haber, the German/Jewish chemist who developed mustard gas, and Einstein, who was a friend and colleague of Haber.

Just finished the audio version of Turning the Tide by Ed Offley. I'm starting to see a pattern in the books I really like. They have both personal stories of individuals and lots of insight into the broader aspects of the war that related to the individual. This one was very good on the lives of merchant seamen (which were really scary), the naval people on the escorts, and the U-Boat captains.

Again we get the different kinds of being afraid. The merchant seamen weren't really equipped to fight back where the naval people on the escorts were, so even though collectively they were all doing the same job (getting supplies to Great Britain) and faced the same threat (drowning or freezing to death in the North Atlantic), the merchant seamen felt more like hapless victims than the sailors on the escorts.

There's one particularly affecting part in the Epilogue about the trips home to German by one of the U-boat captains which get more and more horrific as the allies step up the bombing campaign of Germany.

There were also great insight like the fact that the firebombing of Hamburg not only destroyed some of the shipworks, it also killed a lot of the skilled boat builders living in the city which possibly made it more difficult for Germany to produce a new type of U-Boat they had on the drawing boards.

If this book seems interesting to you, you probably don't want the audio. The details were very hard to follow in audio form.

Happy Holidays!

My reading tends to intersect in interesting ways. I've been over here reading about mythology for a while, which wondered off into abusive religious movements and gurus. Today I picked up The Nazi State and the New Religions, and reading the introduction, I realize that the Nazis are acting just like the followers of bad gurus described in Feet of Clay by Anthony Storr. I'd never really seen the connection between those two areas of interest before.

As for the Nazi State and New Religions, it's mostly about the accommodations the major non-state churches made with the Nazi regine (Mormons, Jehovah's Witness, Christian Scientists, New Apostolic Church and Seventh Day Adventists). It's much more detail than I need for my current interests, so the introduction was all I read.

Are you reading much about Japan's role in WWII? I just read Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken, which is just an amazing story. Now I would like to read more about Japan's role in the war from a Japanese viewpoint.

An informative book about Japan in the aftermath WWII is Embracing the Defeat by John Dower.

19: My reading on Japan in and around wwii has been very spotty and mostly fiction. If no other lurkers have recommendations, you could try the the Japanese Culture forum. I've found them generally knowledgeble.

I riffed a bit on Explaining Hitler in my mythology thread. It's really much more about the mythology centered around Hitler than it is a biography of Hitler. The good news is that it reviews all the major Hitler biographies, so, depending on your interests, you can get by without reading the actual books.

Aside from the building of mythologies aspect of this book, the most useful part for my project was the sections on the Munich journalists, both from the Left and the Right, who could see that Hitler was not a harmless nobody you could manipulate and tried to warn people not to be duped by his vision. They were unsuccessful and lost their lives. Rosenbaum clearly revers them as heroes, both for seeing the evil and trying to combat it. Worth reading just those chapters if their stories are unfamiliar to you.

Aside: I've been in a number of discussions lately with people on LT who advocate reading entire books rather than skimming. These people are clearly much younger than I am. I have more books piled up beside my chair than I could read in their entirety in 6 months! I think the essence of scholarly reading is to know what questions you are looking to answer and to know when those questions require reading and understanding certain books and when skimming, sampling and reading other people's reviews of the literature will do.

I think Rosenbaum's book is a good illustration of how a non-fiction book can be used in different ways:

The book itself is about the construction of meaning around Hitler after World War II. It's a very interesting look at conflicts in Western philosophy and how Hitler and Nazi Germany challenge various philosophical ideas we (in the West) hold dear. If you're interested in that, you have to read the whole book carefully and may even want to go off an explore some of the literature he's dealing with.

While working through his main thesis, Rosenbaum read every major biography of Hitler, so if you're looking to read a biography of Hitler but don't know where to start, he summarizes where each author is coming from. Skimming this material, which you can do using the table of contents and the index, would be very useful and safe a lot of time in finding the biography of Hitler that's right for you.

In the course of writing the book, Rosenbaum did a lot of original research on reactions to Hitler in Munich from 1920 to 1933 (I suspect that he started with this material wanting to write a book about that and found out he didn't have enough material for a book). This is information you're not going to find elsewhere, but it's only a couple of chapters of the book. So if that interests you but not the thesis, you should read just those few chapters.