The best nonfiction books about World War II
The World War II era holds special fascination for me. This might have something to do with the fact that I was born then — in fact, about six months before the USA entered the war. Or maybe it’s just because it all preceded the disillusionment that set in once the war had ended, when the boundaries between good and evil no longer seemed so clear.
In addition to the many World War II novels I’ve read and reviewed, I’ve read a great many nonfiction books about the years leading up to and during the war. Here I’m listing two dozen of the best I’ve come across in recent years. They cover everything from economic policy in the Depression and the rise of Nazi Germany to the role of business and the conduct of the war itself. All together, they provide a significant dose of insight about what later historians might well conclude was the most significant period in the history of the world.
As is blindingly obvious, this is by no means a comprehensive bibliography. No doubt hundreds of thousands of books have been written about the World War II era. The 5 top books and the many runners-up simply represent where my taste and my instincts have taken me in recent years. I’ve arranged these books in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names within each of the two lists. Each is linked to my review.
5 top nonfiction books about World War II
The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939–1945, by Max Hastings
The eminent British historian Max Hastings undercuts the many popular treatments of espionage during World War II with a sober revisionist survey. In his well-informed view, practically nothing either side did in the realm of intelligence had any meaningful impact on the war. The only exceptions, in his view, were the successful efforts by all the major combatants to crack their enemies’ secret codes. Unlike most of other books about the subject, Hastings examines not just the British and American intelligence efforts but those of Russia, Germany, and Japan as well. This is must reading for anyone who wants to understand how espionage really works (or, more often, doesn’t).
Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, by Arthur Herman
The US became known as the “arsenal of democracy” because the American business community mobilized on a hitherto unattainable scale to produce hundreds of thousands of airplanes, ships, tanks, trucks, and other war materiel. Arthur Herman’s study of the topic focuses on the efforts of two remarkable industrialists who were among the most prominent figures in the effort: General Motors CEO William Knudsen and shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser.
Engineers of Victory: The Problem-Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, by Paul Kennedy
The noted historian Paul Kennedy brings to light the often-ignored contributions of the scientists and enlisted soldiers who helped turn the tide in the Allies’ favor in World War II. Their inventions and innovations in the conduct of war may have played as large a role in the ultimate victory as those of the generals and admirals whose names are most closely associated with the war effort. Surely, when millions of men and women served in the Allies’ armed services, the efforts of a handful of individuals can’t possibly be viewed as carrying the brunt of the load.
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson
Erik Larson, one of America’s premier nonfiction writers, has produced a stirring tale about a courageous American diplomat who spoke out loudly against the growing Nazi terror while posted as US Ambassador in Hitler’s Berlin. He and his family ran afoul not just of the German government but of the US State Department as well. The Department, under Secretary of State Cordell Hull, was notoriously anti-Semitic and resisted all efforts to take action against the Nazis until the advent of war forced them to relent.
The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace, by Eric Rauchway
University of California, Davis, history professor Eric Rauchway argues persuasively that none of FDR’s New Deal policies to stimulate the American economy played as significant a role in ending the Depression as the President’s decision to take the United States off the gold standard. Delinking the dollar from gold permitted prices to rise domestically — and world trade to increase — as Roosevelt and British economist John Maynard Keynes maneuvered major European countries into parallel policies. This, Rauchway argues, is how capitalism was saved. The fiscal stimulus of the New Deal was far too modest to make much of a difference.
Other excellent nonfiction books about World War II
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–44, by Rick Atkinson
The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945, by Rick Atkinson
The Pulitzer Prize-winning military historian Rick Atkinson’s trilogy about the Allied conduct of World War II is sometimes referred to as the best reasonably brief historical treatment of the subject. I read the first of the three books, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–43, before 2010, when I began posting reviews here. I remember it with admiration. All three books are accessible and written with a fine appreciation for the contributions not just of the generals and admirals who led the war effort but of the enlisted men who carried out their orders and bore the brunt of the conflict.
Year Zero: A History of 1945, by Ian Buruma
Bard College professor Ian Buruma brings into high relief the seminal events of 1945, including the surrender of Germany and Japan, the opening of Germany’s concentration camps, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the founding of the United Nations, and the Yalta Conference that laid the foundations for the Cold War. Much of Buruma’s book is social history, with extensive coverage of such topics as “fraternization” between occupation troops and local women, the conditions faced by millions of survivors trapped (sometimes for years) in “displaced person” camps, the bitter and often violent struggles between the partisans who had waged guerrilla war against Germany and the conservatives who had often collaborated with the enemy, and the hunger that swept through the nations hardest hit in the war, especially Japan and Germany.
The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: J. M. Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy, by Ed Conway
The course of globalization as we know it today was set in motion at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. There, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White led their respective delegations, British and American, in designing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Ed Conway’s story of the conference is replete with drama and intrigue.
The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies, by Jason Fagone
Working with recently declassified files from the World War II era as well as long-ignored archival records and contemporary press reports and interviews, journalist Jason Fagone has brought to light at last the astonishing story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman and her husband, William Friedman. The Friedmans may well have been the most important 20th-century American codebreakers, and quite possibly the best and most successful in the world.
Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl
Frankl’s almost matter-of-fact description of his years in concentration camps is profoundly moving, the more so because it’s a fiercely personal document and makes no attempt to relate the familiar statistics now surrounding the topic or to place the Nazi phenomenon in historic perspective. Frankl writes simply about how he personally managed to remain hopeful in the face of staggering brutality, including the murder of his young wife at Bergen-Belsen and the death of numberless friends and colleagues.
The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History, by Thomas Harding
Much of The House by the Lake is dominated by the saga of the author’s family of prosperous, assimilated Jews, who built a vacation home on the shores of a lake near Berlin in 1927. The house they built became home to a succession of four other families in the decades following their flight from Nazi Germany in 1934. In many ways, the story of this house must resemble what took place in other homes from which German Jews fled or were seized and shipped off to the death camps.
Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, by Adam Hochschild
Historians recognize that the Spanish Civil War served as a rehearsal for the German and Italian armed forces, both of which weighed in on the side of the fascist uprising led by General Francisco Franco. The bestselling popular historian Adam Hochschild tells the story of the war through the eyes of its American (and, in some cases, British) participants. He dwells not just on the war’s most famous Western figures, Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, but on some of the many unsung men and women who volunteered, and often lost their lives, to support the Republican cause.
Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine, by Diarmuid Jeffreys
It’s well known that Hitler and his cronies were by no means wholly responsible for the rise of Nazi Germany. The men at the helm of IG Farben and other leading Germany industrial concerns have long been identified as having played key roles in bringing Hitler to power and in rearming the country. In Hell’s Cartel, British journalist Diarmuid Jeffreys drilled down more deeply than other English-language writers have tended to do and uncovered the largely hidden crimes of Germany’s leading industrialists before and during World War II. These crimes went far beyond IG Farben’s production of the lethal gas used to exterminate millions of Jews.
Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family’s Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Europe, by Alex Kershaw
Alex Kershaw’s account of one extraordinary American family’s experience in occupied Europe during the war is at least as revealing as the best political or military histories. An American surgeon, his Swiss wife, and their adolescent son lived in Paris on Avenue Foch, within yards of the headquarters of the Gestapo. Yet their home served as the Paris hub of one of France’s principal Resistance networks. It’s a fascinating tale.
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben MacIntyre
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured Allied Victory, by Ben MacIntyre
Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit that Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War, by Ben MacIntyre
Ben MacIntyre is one of the most prolific and popular of the many historians who have specialized in World War II. Double Cross tells the often astonishing tale of the wildly unconventional people who acted as spies for the Allies and helped mislead the Germans about the location of the Normandy invasion. Operation Mincemeat is the equally improbable story of the deception scheme that misled the Nazis about the Allied invasion of Sicily, directing their attention instead to southern France. British intelligence accomplished this by planting misinformation on the dead body of a supposed “courier” who washed up on the coast of Spain. In Rogue Heroes, MacIntyre’s authorized history of the Special Air Service, we learn the amazing story of the British unit that established the pattern for Special Forces in armies around the world. All three books bring history to life with intimate and telling detail.
Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism, by Kathryn S. Olmsted
California historian Kathryn Olmsted argues that today’s ascendant Right-Wing movement in America is rooted in the cotton and fruit fields of the state’s Central and Imperial Valleys in the 1930s. There, labor organizers, some of them Communists, were experiencing growing success in organizing the migrant workers who had flooded in from the dusty Midwest and Mexico. (As a sidelight, the author emphasizes that John Steinbeck ignored the majority Mexican laborers and focused instead on the much less numerous “Okies” in his classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath.) Olmsted asserts that the growers constituted the heart of the so-called conservative activists of the 1950s and 1960s who built the John Birch Society and the later campaigns for Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
From Kraków to Berkeley: Coming Out of Hiding, by Anna Rabkin
In a beautifully written memoir, longtime former Berkeley City Auditor Anna Rabkin tells the tale of her flight as a child when the Nazis invaded Poland. After hiding with a Christian family, she eventually moved to England and then to the United States, learning new languages and acclimating herself to the strange new customs of her adopted homelands. This is the odyssey of a Holocaust survivor whose experience parallels in some ways what so many refugees today are facing.
Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese-American Internment in World War II, by Richard Reeves
No one who lives in California today and has made even the most cursory effort to understand the state’s history can be unaware that the US government under Franklin Roosevelt herded Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during most of World War II. Included were not just recent immigrants but families whose roots lay two generations in the past. What is less well known about this shameful episode in our country’s history are the roles played by such revered figures as future US Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and leading members of Roosevelt’s Administration.
Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, by Elizabeth Rosner
Survivor Café is a memoir, but it is far more than that. Rosner set out to understand the impact of her parents’ experiences in the war on her own life. She read deeply in the literature about the Holocaust and about the phenomenon of epigenetics, “the study of environmentally induced changes passed down from one generation to the next.” This emerging field is controversial and its research easily overdramatized. However, interpreting the findings narrowly, Rosner found in it an explanation for her own deep feelings about the Holocaust — and those in other second- and third-generation offspring of survivors.
Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, by Douglas Waller
Under Donovan’s forceful leadership, the upstart American agency homed itself in on the storied operations of MI6, the British Secret Service, and forced one Allied commanding general after another to shelter his agents in their armies. Against the prevailing wisdom in military circles, and often the determined opposition of his superiors, he mounted extensive operations to organize partisans in North Africa, in France, in the Balkans and Central Europe, and ultimately in Germany itself. In short, William J. Donovan, raised hell in World War II.
1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History, by Jay Winik
Historian Jay Winik asserts that “the State Department was now using the machinery of government to prevent, rather than facilitate, the rescue of the Jews. The fear seemed to be, not that the Jews would be marched to their deaths, but that they would be sent to the Allied nations.” It’s unavoidably clear now that the Department has the blood of more than a million people staining its already sad record of amorality: yes, in the absence of the obfuscation, foot-dragging, and bureaucratic nonsense from key members of the Department, more than a million lives could have been saved.
You might also be interested in 100 good nonfiction books about history, including my top 20.
