During the Second World War, Allied bombing was responsible for over 500,000 deaths in Europe. The bombing was one part of a war to defeat Nazi Germany and is little appreciated for its impact on the course of the war.  Stalin constantly wanted a second front to help his war, and little understood how the air war contributed to his ability to defeat the Nazi war machine.  As usual, Richard Overy has provided us with the one book we would recommend for anyone to understand the Allied air war.

For anyone who has read books which deal with how men react in wartime, this novel is often referred to as a realistic description of military life. In a sense, it could in certain parts, be an English version of Joseph Hellers novel, Catch-22 with better character development and a darker form of humor. Evelyn Waugh is best known for his novel, Brideshead Revisited, but this novel is a semi-biographical account of his war time experiences as well as his relationship with his Catholicism (he converted to Catholicism in 1930 after the failure of his first marriage).

Richard Rhodes is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and has written both fiction and non-fiction, on topics as diverse as the Donner Party, the invention of the Atom Bomb and the Audubon Society.  In this work, he traces how the Einsatzgruppen were organized, their scope of activity, their relationship with the Wehrmacht and the impact of mass killings on the individuals within the units.

Originally deployed in Poland at the start of the war, their primary directive was the murder of the leaders of Polish society; lawyers, doctors, educators, political leaders, etc. as the conqueror Poles were destined to be a source of ignorant slave laborers who did not need to count much above 100 in their future live.  The “special action groups” also targeted any Poles who offered any resistance either real or imagined.  At the same time, they went after suspected communists and finally, the Jews of Poland.  As the original plan was to move the Jews out of Europe, the concept of committing mass murder of the Jews was not in their primary list of objectives.  Yet once the killing began, and they were under the protection of SS-Reichsfuehrer Himmler, their murderous campaign quickly expanded.

Grossman is best remembered for his novel, Life and Fate which has been described as the greatest Russian novel since War and Peace. When originally shown to the Soviet censors, they agreed that it was a great novel but that it could not be published for at least two hundred years; its descriptions of the men and women fighting in the Great Patriotic War were too real and did not pay any homage to Stalin.

Finland managed to fight two wars with the Soviet Union during the 20^th century; once it was attacked, and in the second, it was the attacker, an ally of Nazi Germany.  There was never any doubt that Finland could win either war; the best Finland could do was to ride on the coattails of a Germany victory.  In fact, the Finnish offensive action during the second war was limited and basically was aimed at regaining the territory lost during the first war.

This massive (about 2,000 words) trilogy (An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle and The Guns at Last Light) detailing the U.S. led coalition which fought in North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe to help defeat Hitler.  It offers not only a strategic view of the war, but many interesting human stories of the men who both led and did the actual fighting.  They certainly are not all saints; all the human emotions are evident in the telling, including arrogance, lust for glory, stupidity, cruelty, humanity, and anger.  Despite the length of each book (and their weight), they are easy to read and difficult to put down, even for a reader with knowledge of the subject.

Considered by many to be the founding father of the Panzer concept in pre-war Germany, Guderian was forceful, stubborn, opinionated and driven; all the virtues that would put him at odds with most traditional militaries around the world.  Fortunately for him, he caught the eye of Hitler and Guderian’s concepts represented exactly the type of bold thinking that Hitler sought to enable him to carry out his military goals. From that point, it was a love/hate relationship between the two, with Guderian being cast aside, brought back, ignored by Hitler, apologized to by Hitler and finally once again sent into the wilderness.

Histories of war are often told from the viewpoint of grand strategies, major military or political leaders or combat personnel.  Seldom do we get a view of the war from the ground level as experienced by non-combatants; we somehow seem to believe that their lives go on with a feel of normality, even in occupied territories.  In this book we find how a woman, living in an occupied land managed to not only lead a life, but to defy the occupiers and at great risk to herself, feed prisoners of war while at the same time hurting the occupiers war effort.

For years, Albert Seaton’s “Battle for Moscow” has been the gold standard for reviews of that famous and brutal battle. This work is a welcome addition to any library on the subject as it is lighter and raises several points which are worth examining. Michael Jones uses eyewitness accounts of actions to bring a personal touch which was missing from Seaton’s and thus the reader is drawn not so much by the technical aspect of the battle as by the personal.