World War II history has always fascinated me, although that fascination started more because of cool drawings of bombers, fighters, and half-tracks that I saw in a Richard Scarry book, Hop Aboard! Here We Go! Later, I saw the models that a couple of my uncles built, only deepening my interest in this conflict that directly impacted me via my grandparents, who lived through and fought in the war. I still think the vehicles are a pretty cool part of the war, but the history of the people and places has grown on me since my childhood. Since the scope of the war is so broad, there are many stories to tell.
A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative of the Hero Whose Spy Network and Secret Diplomacy Changed the Course of History by William Stevenson (ISBN: 978-1-59921-170-1) is the story of Sir William Stephenson, whose code name was Intrepid, a Canadian who served as the head of British Security Coordination (BSC) during World War II, which coordinated most of the UK’s espionage efforts in the Atlantic Theater, particularly with the United States, including before the U.S. was officially involved in the war. The book is long and full of all kinds of stories about things like Camp X, a training center in Canada for various clandestine operators (spies, saboteurs, guerillas, etc.), code breaking, honey pots, financial schemes, resistance efforts (including the Norwegian efforts described in more detail in the Winter Fortress), and even some more traditional spying. Intrepid, in addition to being involved in intelligence activity, was also a diplomat. His efforts were instrumental in securing U.S. and Canadian support for many of the efforts the UK was involved in. He had access to the highest levels of government, including President Roosevelt. He had to navigate inter-agency and inter-service battles, but did so largely successfully and got most of the support he needed from England’s allies, eventually leading, both directly and indirectly, to the Allied victory against the Germans. Many historians figure that without the efforts of Intrepid, the war could have gone very differently, and the book lays out that case rather convincingly. The book ends with an interesting discussion of how Intrepid would’ve preferred a more open society after the war even though clandestine activity helped the Allies secure victory.
I thought the book was very interesting and a good read. It was published in 1976, so is slightly more academic in nature than modern mass-market history (a fact that I appreciate). The intriguing information it contains hasn’t aged. Some of the code breaking and diplomacy-related sections are a little dryer, but fit into a bigger picture of a man who was clearly talented and helped change the course of history. The book doesn’t get into the philosophical or political implications of intelligence work until the very end. Many of the stories in the book can be read about in their own books. This doesn’t always have all the details, but it’s detailed enough in most instances to keep one’s attention and provide an informative read for those interested in the course of World War II. It even has a couple dozen pages of pictures.
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The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen, and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II by Judith M. Heiman (ISBN: 978-0-15-101434-7) tells a fascinating story from the Pacific. As the Allies tried to claw their way toward Japan, while a ground invasion was still a potential plan, territory in what is now Indonesia was of strategic importance to the belligerents. Japan held what was then referred to as Borneo because of its oil reserves. The Allies wanted to cut that off. During a bombing mission against Japanese forces and industry in Borneo, a few U.S. planes were shot down. The occupants of one met death, either in the wreck or at the hands of the Japanese. Two other planes, though, had survivors who avoided capture. While this was initially thanks mostly to good luck, later capture was avoided because of the efforts of the natives, some of whom were formerly formidable headhunting tribes. The case of characters involved Malaysians, various highland jungle tribes, and the Americans. Later, Australian forces joined made it to the jungle and helped the natives fight the Japanese and the Americans get home. In the six months between the downed planes and the exfiltrations, though, the natives and the Malay helped the Americans avoid detection by the Japanese. They provided the Americans with hiding places, food, and taught them some of their ways to help make survival in the jungle a little easier. It wasn’t easy and involved sickness, insects, leeches, and injury, but the downed American soldiers eventually made it back home. In fighting the Japanese and keeping them off the Americans’ trail, the natives brought back their age-old tradition of headhunting. It might not have been exactly the same since it was revitalized out of necessity, but it served its purpose and aided in keeping the Japanese out of the interior jungles.
Ravished Armenia: The Story of Aurora Mardiganian, the Christian Girl Who Survived the Great Massacres by Aurora Mardiganian (Arshalyus Mardiganyan) is an autobiographical account of the Turkish oppression of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire starting in 1915. The Mardiganian family, relatively wealthy financiers, are warned by their shepherd that he had a dream about the Armenians’ imminent destruction, but his prediction is dismissed. Soon, though, it comes true, as the family is driven from their home, along with all the other Armenians. Occasionally, leniency is shown to those who will renounce their Christian faith and adopt Islam, but even then, the freshly converted Armenians are killed by their Turkish and Kurdish oppressors. Aurora, like most of the women and children, is driven from place to place, guarded by Turkish policemen. Those who are too slow to keep up during forced marches are dispatched quickly and usually cruelly, although Mardiganian’s account does point out a few instances of decency and humanity from guards or locals in the places the Armenians were marched. Her story, like many of those who lived during this time, is made all the more tragic because she was there to see the deaths of her father, mother, a sister, and a brother. She was sold multiple times to be a harem girl. This never worked out for the buyer because Aurora was never willing to accept Islam. It really didn’t work out for her, either, though, because her refusals were usually met with abuse and deprivation. After wandering the Ottoman Empire under the care of the Turkish police or as the property of various rich Turks, having seen so much killing, rape, and pillaging, her old shepherd friend, then working for a Turk trying to get Aurora to submit to Islam before being fully accepted into his harem, helped her escape. She stayed with friendly Kurds before eventually being helped by Americans in the region and then making her way to Russian-controlled territory and under Russian and Armenian military oversight, made her way to Tbilisi, then Russia, and then the United States.
Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family’s Heroic Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris by Alex Kershaw (ISBN: 978-0-8041-4004-1) is one story of underground activity during the Nazi occupation of France. It is about an American, Dr. Sumner Jackson, his Swiss-born wife, Toquette, and their son, Phillip, who lived on the same street as many of the leaders of the occupying Germans, but aided the French resistance and paid the ultimate price for that patriotic effort. Jackson was a surgeon at an American hospital in France and used both his residence and the hospital as venues for fighting the Germans. Toquette and Phillip were also happy to be involved. Phillip couldn’t do much as a teenager, but understood what his parents were involved in. The house was used as a place to pass documents and information, the hospital was used to make Allied soldiers disappear once they had been adequately treated. Many were able to escape to neutral Spain and then back to England. The Nazis were next door and across the street and in houses all along the street, but the Jackson family was able to aid the resistance for quite some time before eventually being rounded up with other patriotic Frenchmen and sent to concentration camps in Germany. The entire family survived the camps. Toquette was extricated from one by the Swedes (reminded me a tiny bit of Raoul 
Assassination: Operation Anthropoid: 1941–1942 by Michal Burian, Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich, and Eduard Stehlík (ISBN: 80-7278-158-8) tells the story of one of the better-known assassinations in World War II, that of Reinhard Heydrich, the commander of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), acting governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and a principal architect of the Holocaust. The operation was conceived by Czechoslovaks in exile in the UK, but carried out by paratroop commandos in occupied Czechoslovakia in concert with local members of the resistance. Like many of the operations in occupied Czechoslovakia, most of the people involved ended up dead. Radio operators, paratroopers and soldiers, resistance members who helped the paratroopers hide, farmers who lent a place to stay or a warm meal, all of them met the same fate once the Nazis discovered that they were in any way associated with the efforts against Germany. Thankfully for the Czechoslovaks, there were enough people that were willing to risk it all, and two of the paratroopers who had undergone intensive and extensive training in the UK, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, were able to execute their plan against Heydrich. The plan was to shoot him, but that didn’t initially work, so a bomb was tossed toward his car. The explosion, which happened just outside the back of the car, didn’t kill Heydrich initially, and the attackers had to run away, chased for a short distance by their target. A week later, Heydrich succumbed to his wounds, and in the coming weeks, Nazi reprisals wiped out complete Czechoslovak towns and eventually also wiped out Gabčík and Kubiš.
Kommando: German Special Forces of World War Two by James Lucas (ISBN: 0-304-35127-X) is a book that takes a look at special forces from the other side. Lucas is clearly pro-Ally and writes from a perspective driven purely by scholarly interest. The writing is dispassionate and appropriately covers the material. He discusses German special forces in the army, navy, and air force during World War II. He notes that German efforts in this area, just like happens to be the case for many other countries, historical and modern, were hampered by bureaucratic infighting, although this is probably a good thing in the case of World War II. The book catalogues various battles and operations that German special forces were involved in, some successful, such as the taking of a large fortress, the Belgian Fort Eben-Emael, and others resulting in large losses for the Germans, such as an attempt at capturing Yugoslav Partisan leader Josip Tito. There were also descriptions of guerilla action and more political things, such as an operation in Poland, where the intent of the operation was to make it look like the Poles were revolting, harming Germans, and giving Germany a reason to attack. There were descriptions of the German Navy trying to conduct special operations in specially designed boats and submarines, most of which were abject failures. The air force didn’t fare much better, although the author places much of the blame for this on German military leadership, including Hitler, who expected too much and did not use the special forces in appropriate situations. Finally, the book examines non-military forces, which were special only in the sense that they weren’t regular soldiers. In general, using civilians was even more havoc-filled than the failed operations that involved professional soldiers.
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe (ISBN: 978-1-250-03356-7) takes a very raw look at the immediate post-World War II period in European history. The author catalogues the side of post-war Europe that is not usually highlighted in articles and books: genocide, ethnic cleansing, corruption, and violence. The wartime years are famous for those, but they continued, usually on a smaller scale and in a more isolated fashion, for years after the Allies defeated the Axis powers. Lowe examines the post-war conditions and how they created the ideal setting for further violence. While the Allied armies tried to gain control and figure out just what they had on their hands, displaced persons and refugees wandered Europe. There were plenty of instances of vigilante justice and people looking for revenge against the Germans or other people that had truly or only purportedly wronged others. In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and a few other places, the German concentration camps were still being used, either has temporary housing or by the Soviets or others for their original purposes, just against a new type of inmate. Ukrainian and Poles fought. Greece went into a civil war. Jews continued to find no quarter. The Allies and international organizations worked hard to remedy the harsh conditions, but given the level of destruction the war had wrought, it was often slow going. Finally, the emerging struggle of the Cold War meant that some of these problems were not given the focus that some would have liked them to have been under.
In Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe by George Friedman (ISBN: 978-0-307-95113-7), the author examines the history of Europe between the great wars and then wants to know if Europe will continue in its post-World War II ways or return to its long history of war. He argues that Europe’s history of conflict has not come to an end. The war in Bosnia & Herzegovina after Yugoslavia disintegrated and Russia’s invasions of Georgia and Ukraine are given as the most prominent examples of how Europe has not been very peaceful since the fall of the Soviet Union, and that’s relatively recent. He discusses many of the problems Europe is facing, such as immigration from predominantly Muslim societies, the UK’s distance from the EU (the book was written before Brexit was finalized), friction between northern Europe and southeastern Europe, and economic concerns throughout the European Union. Friedman bases a lot of his analysis on what he calls 
12 Strong: The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton (ISBN: 978-1-5011-7995-2) tells the story of the earliest American soldiers to go into Afghanistan after the attacks that rocked America. The book starts with the airplanes flying into the World Trade Center and the reactions of the Army Special Forces soldiers who would eventually be the first to respond. The reader learns quite a bit about the lives of the twelve guys to go into Afghanistan. There were a variety of backgrounds, but all were committed to serving their country and making sure the terrorists didn’t strike again. The book tells of their preparations, some of which were rather unorthodox, including buying things from local stores or ordering supplies from catalogs. Actually getting into Afghanistan was a complicated matter, even with bases nearby in Uzbekistan. The helicopter rides from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan were harrowing experiences with pilots flying blind in unfamiliar territory with unfamiliar weather patterns. They eventually made it, though, and then the soldiers got to doing what they were trained to do. It wasn’t just fighting, though, as they were also trained to adapt to local conditions and get in the heads of the people they would be fighting with and against. They had to make allies out of temperamental Afghan warlords. The book portrays this as happening fairly easily and quickly, which may have been the case, but the men expressed a lot of trepidation about how their interactions with the Afghan leaders would go and were grateful for the American firepower that backed up what they were claiming they’d be able to help with. The initial American soldiers were careful to remain in their advisory roles and let the Afghans run the war. This also built respect and trust, and was a key to both building alliances and successful military action. The special forces soldiers were convinced that their work in Afghanistan was so successful because it was really the Afghans’ fight against the Taliban — America was just helping. One subplot, if it can be called that, in the book is the story of John Walker Lindh, the American who joined the Taliban. He was a prisoner that some of the soldiers in the book came in contact with. The book closes with happy reunions for the soldiers after completing their tour of duty, but then some must turn around and go to Iraq. They answered the call of duty, but most did not see the war in Iraq in the same light as that in Afghanistan, and it ended in the loss of life for some of them. They didn’t see the same system in Iraq, where the Americans were simply advisors and the suppliers of firepower, and that bode badly, according to them.
The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman (ISBN: 978-0-345-47609-8), since it is about the first thirty days of the war, doesn’t do much more than mention reconnaissance planes a couple times when it comes to the airplanes of World War I, but the book does provide a very detailed review of those critical early battles in 1914. The stage is set with an extensive review of both French and German military doctrine leading up to the war, as well as the military and political personalities involved. After the French and German positions were well established, the reader learned about the English and the Belgians. Then, things got moving, and the Germans invaded Belgium. It didn’t go quite as they planned, though, with a lot more Belgian defensive efforts than they planned on and an English response that somehow seemed to not be completely accounted for in German war planning. The Germans still advanced quickly, taking advantage of their superior numbers and superior firepower. Once they were well into French territory, the French finally gathered themselves and were able to stop the German advance only miles from Paris. The French effort was eventually aided by the British, who were shown to, overall, be slow and indecisive during this opening stage of the war, and by the Russians, who opened an eastern front that the Germans were forced to respond to even though it ultimately proved to be less of a concern than initially thought. Throughout the first thirty days of the war, all parties involved suffered from indecisiveness, incomplete information, and decisions based more on what people had planned on than on what was actually happening. These mistakes were a large reason the war took the turn that it did, leading to four years of trench warfare that left Europe broken.
A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-torn Skies of World War II (ISBN: 978-0-425-25286-4) by Adam Makos and Larry Alexander is a unique story that tells the story of one of America’s greatest generation as well as a German fighter pilot who was doing his patriotic duty in fighting to defend his family and his country who came together for a few minutes over wartime Germany for an experience like no other. The book chronicles the life of Franz Stigler, the German ace pilot. He had other plans for life, but became one of Germany’s top pilots once war forced itself into his life. In the 480 combat missions he flew, he faced just about everything imaginable, including the loss of his closest kin. It also tells about American Charlie Brown, although I thought maybe not in quite the same detail. Brown did not have the long, distinguished combat career that Stigler did. He got off to a bit of a rough start, though, and his plane and crew were badly shot up in their first bombing raid over Germany. A couple of them lost their lives, and it seemed to the men in the plane that they should not have been able to fly back to their base in England. Brown more than once credited the fact that the plane stayed up to the hand of God, and I do not doubt him. As the American bomber flew away from its target, Stigler approached in his fighter. He could’ve easily been the straw to break the camel’s back, but he was himself amazed at how the plane stayed up in its battered state, flew in for a closer look, and felt a professional respect for his aeronautical compatriot behind the controls of the American plane. His long combat career and worthy mentors had taught Franz that his job was about protecting his homeland and the everyday people of his homeland (Franz, like many of the aviators, was ideologically against the Nazis), not needlessly killing, even when he had the enemy in his crosshairs. Instead of shooting the plane down for yet another kill, Stigler escorted the bomber past the German anti-aircraft defenses. This act was unprecedented and unrepeated. The book finishes with a description of Brown’s desire to find the German pilot who had been so kind to him and their subsequent opportunity to meet up and bring some understanding to people who had been on opposite sides of such an awful conflict.
Dachau and the Nazi Terror: 1933–1945: Testimonies and Memoirs edited by Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (ISBN: 3-9808587-0-7) is a collection of memoirs written up by a variety of people who, in some way, experienced the Nazi concentration camps. The volume contains thoughts from a couple different German Jews, a member of the French resistance, American liberators, Jews from other parts of Europe, including Poland, what was then Czechoslovakia, and even the further-away Latvia. It was interesting to read the variety of experiences. The common denominators were that everyone, sooner or later, experienced the terror of the concentration camps and that the vast majority of those interred were there because of their ethnicity or because of their political beliefs. Other than the two short testimonies provided by American liberators, each of the former prisoners discussed the drudgery of prison life, the daily struggle for life that got harder and harder the longer the war dragged on, and extreme contrast between the brutality of so many and the kindness of a few soldiers and citizens who rose above the prevailing patterns of thought and behavior. It was interesting to read about the various commentators’ lives before and during the war, their varying degrees of commitment to their religious or political ideals, and their varied responses to life in the concentration camps.
The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb by Neal Bascomb (ISBN: 978-0-544-36806-4) is a story that tells just such a story (incidentally, also in Norway). The book tells part of the story of Nazi Germany’s efforts to acquire an atomic bomb. Those efforts were tightly tied to Norway’s hydroelectric capabilities and a substance known as heavy water, or water with extra deuterium in it. Early experiments by Allied and Axis scientists alike indicated that heavy water could be used in making an atomic bomb. Germany pursued this theory rather aggressively. After occupying Norway, the Germans used Norway’s production of heavy water to accelerate their nuclear experiments. The Allies knew this and wanted to come up with a plan to prevent the German scientists from getting what they needed. Norwegians in the resistance did a lot in their day-to-day efforts to sabotage the heavy water without doing too much damage to the plants where it was produced since that would lead to German reprisals and put many Norwegians out of work. It was something the Norwegians had to carefully balance. As things got down to the wire, though, even the Norwegians could see that their efforts would have to increase in scale. With help from the UK, various plans were set in motion, including one that led to some disastrous deaths in the Norwegian outback as saboteurs rode gliders into Norway only to crash land with horrible results. Later attempts were more successful with Norwegian commandos, already in Norway, conducting two successful raids against heavy water, one damaging the plant and one preventing a large delivery of the water from being completed. After the first raid on the plant, the production capabilities were eventually brought back on line, but when they were, the U.S. bombed the plant, putting down for the count until the end of the war. The book chronicles these operations, all that led up the them, and many of the brave people it took to make them successful.