Thread: Recommended WWII Readings

In general: The best one-volume history of the war is probably Keegan's The Second World War. Keegan provides a list of further reading, which includes very good books on most aspects of the war.

Good overview also provided by Richard Overy's Why the Allies Won.

The most important single campaign of course was in Russia, and unfortunately a really authoritative history of that campaign has not yet been written, although during the '90's much more archival material became available.

--Standard works, based mostly on German sources, are Earl Ziemke's and Paul Carrill's. Liddell-Hart's chapters of analysis in Strategy are also in this school, and are still worth reading today.
--Until recent years John Erickson's volumes (Soviet High Command, The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin) were the only widely available English works based on Soviet sources.
--But now David Glantz has produced a number of books, such as When Titans Clashed and Colossus Reborn, which while stylistically mediocre, are very important works simply because no one else has yet closely studied that body of data.


War economics: old but good is Alan S. Milward's The German Economy at War. Also good is the British Official History by M.M. Postan, Design and Development of Weapons for its insight on the overall nature and course of procurement decisions and criteria.

The vogue in economic history has now gone radically monetarist, but I'm no longer up-to-date on this, and need to do more reading myself. The thing to bear in mind, however, is that the writing of economic history tends to track contemporary economic thought, and thus like so much historiography, tells us as much about the historian's own age as it ever does about the subject itself!

The climax of the postwar, command-view, economics is perhaps Georgi Ranki's Economics of the Second World War which while published posthumously and unfinished, is nevertheless important for the light shed on the economics of German-occupied Europe, and for its consideration of oft-overlooked matters, such as agriculture during the war.