Can /lit/ recommend me some books on WWI and WWII? I'm talking history here and just the basics genow. An overview on dates and major battles.that kinda stuff thx
>>8196759
The guns of August is a great book about the start of WWI. It's about the lead up to the war and the first month of the war. Reads almost like a novel and keeps your interest.
>>8196759
Guns of August, Evans' Third Reich Trilogy, Churchill's Memoirs, Stalin: In the Court of the Red Tsar, and Churchills WW1 Book where he says I WASNT WRONG ABOUT GALLIPOLI 15 times
>>8196772
Also Storm of Steel, Grossman's On Killing, and Keegan's Face of Battle pair nicely.
>>8196759
Check this out sprölölö
>>8196759
the meaning of the second world war ernest mandel.
a great article on the politics in the balkans leading up to ww1 is trotsky's war and the international
>>8196759
The War that Ended Peace is a good one too, by Margaret MacMillan. MacMillan also wrote Paris 1919 about post-war diplomacy
>>8197375
Yes please
>>8197840
>>8197375
>>8197390
>>8196759
>>8197375
OH GOD PLEAAAAASE
>>8198032
>no belle epoque
>no interwar period
>>8198036
I was getting books on the spanish civil war and franco's biography and the painted bird and the ethiopian war and the polish soviet conflict in the 20s, but
>ww1 and ww2
>interwar
pick one
>>8198049
Are you retarded?
>>8198059
Well too bad, the image is copyrighted and you cant fix it yourself. Not possible, I put DRM on it.
>>8198032
>Band of Brothers
>non-fictional
Okay, it kinda isn't, but it's also pop history and Ambrose has that tendency to take witness account at face value rather than being a bit more vindictive in his research.
Then again, it's amazing and fun for a pop-historian.
Then again, when reading Panzer Leader, you also have to exert a lot of caution to see past Guderian's pride and bullshit.
Antony Beevor's The Second World War is a good general compendium through the war for a complete newbie to the conflict. The rest of his books are also decent, and the one on Stalingrad is just eerie.
For WWI I highly recommend the WWI Atlas by Arthur Banks as a companion. It's full of highly detailed, clearly drawn maps that help illustrate the goings on.
My Reminiscences Of East Africa by von Lettow-Vorbeck. During the entirety of WWI he held down 300,000 Allied troops with just 3,000 German soldiers/sailors and 15,000 black colonial troops. He's the general that Wheraboos wish Rommel was.
For WW2:
Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. Pretty much the go-to book on how fucked up the Nazi economy and production systems were.
Shattered Sword by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully. Makes use of primary sources and dispels a lot of myths about the battle that stem from taking Japanese post-war memoirs at face value.
Anything by Col. David Glantz is good, if you're interested in the eastern front. He makes a few errors in his earlier books like saying the Panther has a 88mm gun but the tactical/strategic writing is well done. He also did this really good talk at the US Army war college:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Clz27nghIg
>>8198032
Keegan is a idiot who doesn't understand Clausewitz, why is he on that list?
>>8199913
>and the one on Stalingrad is just eerie.
The eastern front: "we're going to turn the war crimes up to 11"
You wanna read about battleships?
Dreadnought and Castles of Steel by Robert Massie. Dreadnought covers the naval arms race, tensions before 1914 and the design of the ship itself. Castles continues the coverage of the arms race and covers all the major naval engagements and strategies of the war.
From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow by Arthur Marder. Five volume series covering the Royal Navy from 1909 to 1919.
Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer. October 25, 1944. During the Battle of Leyte, Gulf, Admiral Halsey gallivants off after a Japanese decoy fleet, leaving 6 escort carriers and the American landing forces defended only by 3 destroyers and 4 destroyer escorts. Steaming towards them is the Japanese Center Fleet: 4 battleships including the Yamato, 6 heavy cruisers, 2 light cruisers and 11 destroyers.
>>8200751
>On the morning of the 25th a strong Japanese force of battleships slipped through the San Bernardino Strait headed toward the American landing forces,[6] prompting their commander, Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, to send a desperate plaintext message asking for support.[7]
>When Nimitz, at CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, saw Kinkaid's plea for help he sent a message to Halsey, simply asking for the current location of Task Force 34, which due to a previous misunderstanding, was unclear:[6]
>Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four?
>With the addition of metadata including routing and classification information, as well as the padding at the head and tail, the entire plaintext message to be encoded and transmitted to Halsey was:
>TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS
>While decrypting and transcribing the message, Halsey's radio officer properly removed the leading phrase, but the trailing phrase looked appropriate and he seems to have thought it was intended and so left it in before passing it on to Halsey,[1] who read it as
>Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four? The world wonders.
>The structure tagging (the 'RR's) should have made clear that the phrase was in fact padding. In all the ships and stations that received the message, only New Jersey's communicators failed to delete both padding phrases.
>The message (and its trailing padding) became famous, and created some ill feeling, since it appeared to be a harsh criticism by Nimitz of Halsey's decision to pursue the decoy carriers and leave the landings uncovered. "I was stunned as if I had been struck in the face", Halsey later recalled. "The paper rattled in my hands, I snatched off my cap, threw it on the deck, and shouted something I am ashamed to remember", letting out an anguished sob.[12] RADM Robert Carney, Halsey's Chief of Staff (who had argued strongly in favor of pursuing the carriers), witnessed Halsey's emotional outburst and reportedly grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, shouting "Stop it! What the hell's the matter with you? Pull yourself together!" Recognizing his failure, Halsey sulked in inactivity for a full hour while Taffy 3 was fighting for its life – falsely claiming to be refueling his ships – before eventually turning around with his two fastest battleships, three light cruisers and eight destroyers and heading back to Samar, too late to have any impact on the battle.
