A WWII Reading and Watching List

Lately, I have been mildly obsessed with World War II. It seems to raise so many thorny questions. There are moral issues and there also strategic issues. And it is also the context for much great drama.

Non-fiction:

1. Armageddon, Max Hastings. Why it was so hard to get Germany to surrender after Normandy invasion.
   
2. The War of the World, Niall Ferguson. The role of racial hatred in the conflicts in Europe and Asia.
   
3. Chapter on Hitler in The Mask of Command, by John Keegan. How Hitler's experience in the trenchs of WWI shaped his destructive decisions on the Eastern front.
4. Stalingrad, Antony Beevor. The beginning of the end for the Germans in WWII. In August 1942, the German army had reached the Volga. German bombing destroyed the city there and German soldiers occupied most of the ruins. And yet they did not take the whole city and less than six months after their triumphant arrival, the whole German 6th army, something like 300,000 men would be dead or prisoners of the Soviets.
   

Fiction:

1. Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky. French society during the June invasion and the subsequent occupation.
2. The Siege, Helen Dunmore. Leningrad's saga.
3. Goodbye, Mickey Mouse, Len Deighton. Good story about the Americans stationed in England flying bomber escort missions over Germany.
   

Viewing:

1. Band of Brothers, HBO miniseries. The American perspective on the Western Front from Normandy to Bastogne.
   
2. Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood movie. The Japanese perspective in the face of certain defeat.
3. Enemy at the Gates, a movie about two snipers (Jude Law playing the historical Noble Sniper Vassily and Ed Harris playing his German stalker--probably mythical) in the battle of Stalingrad. While some elements of the movie appear to be inventions, many aspects of the battle (e.g. the civilians amidst the ruins, the harrowing crossing of the Volga, the Russians who fired on their own men to discourage retreating, etc.) are corroborated in Beevor's book mentioned above.