Matrix Games Forums

A new non-fiction book about the Battle
of the Huertgen Forest by Gerald Astor....

... he is excellent in his re-creations via interviews by the guys that were there..

Mike
Cleveland Ohio USA

Oh yeah - the name of the book is
"The Bloody Forest" (by Gerald Astor)

amazon.com has it........

I think it's 23 dollars and some change

Mike

"Enemy At The Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad" by William Craig.

This isn't a novel, but for my money it's still one of the best war books ever.
Unique in that it covers the "big picture"
of the battle for Stalingrad, as well as
the "little picture"--the battle as it was
experienced by individual soldiers on both sides. It reads like a novel. I read it 25 years ago and still come back to it often.


Tony

Try this:
The Forgotten Soldier
By: Guy Sajer

Oops, a little late on that post......

Here's an option:

Patton: A Genius For War
by Carlo D'este

And if that doesn't work........

For Esme', With Love and Squalor
by JD Salinger

If you can still get a copy I recomend 'Don't cry for me Seargent Major'
It's about the British Army in the Falklands War. It's not a stratgy history, it's told very much from the 'Grunts' on the ground perspective. It's quite humourous in a black sort of way, and leaves the reader wondering just how the hell we managed to get back on the islands as it lists cock up after cock up!

A wonderful book I have really enjoyed is Panzer Battles of the Waffen SS, by Will Fey
Very hard to find. The only way I know how to obtain this book is from the publisher,
JJ. Fedorowicz, located in Canada. I do believe they have a website too http://www.escape.ca/~jjfpub/. Anyway they have quite the selection of non-fiction WWII books. Although very pricey, the quality and content more than makes up for it! If you are like me (a book collecting WWII enthusiast) they will prove to be a find.

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When the enemy is weak, attack--Sun Tzu

My all time favorite Military Novels are

Piece of Cake by Derek Robinson....deals with an RAF fighter squadron in 1939 to 1940. The BBC made an excellent production of it. He has a new book out now call "Hornets Sting" which I just finished and I recommend it to. Robinson is truly great a drawing characters.

A Midnight Clear by William Wharton...also made into an excellent movie. Set during the Bulge. Great book and Great movie.

Seven Men from Gascony by RF Delderfield. Excellent Napleonic Novel. If you like the period this is one of only a handful of novels I have found on the subject.

All three of these books have one thing in common...great characters. THe characters carry the story.

A Good place to find Piece of Cake and Seven Men is at Bibliofind.com. Hornets Sting is new so try Barnes and Noble or Amazon. You can even read an excerpt at Harvill.com the publishers web site.

For historical information anything by S.L.A. Marshall. I really like Nightdrop, about parachute operations during D-Day. He also wrote about small unit actions during Korea and Vietnam. On the East Front Paul Carrell's Hitler Move East and Scorched Earth cover that theater in great detail. For fiction I enjoy W.E.B. Griffin's series - The Brotherhood of War and The Corps.

Cross of Iron, by Willi Heinrich (as many others have suggested) is fantastic. The prose is spare, and having the story being told from constantly changing viewpoints adds to the tension of the story. It is interesting to compare the book to the (wonderful) movie that it inspired.

Another book I enjoyed quite a bit was called Squadron Airborne; I forget the author's name. It's about two days in a British fighter squadron during the Battle of Britain, with an interesting ensemble of characters. I doubt it's still in print, but my battered old copy (in a crate somewhere) was a Bantam paperback, so it might not be too hard to find (and it'll probably be cheap, to boot!).

Tim Obrien's interlocking story collection The Things They Carried is a modern literary classic, and one that is very accessible to the average grognard (I was in a lit class last semester that studied it, and was amazed that footnotes were needed to explain Claymores, C-Rations, etc.). The stories are tough and unsentimental, concerning a platoon of GIs in Vietnam (the author is a veteran of that war); a couple veer into surrealism, but still feel somehow true to the experience of war (though I have nothing to compare it to in my own experience).

Hackett's Third World War is an interesting, strategic-level account of the greatest war that never was.

These last few books are non-fiction, but it's interesting to compare them to their fictional cousins:

Everything We Had by Al Santoli is a collection of true anecdotes from many Vietnam vets.

One Soldier, by John Shook, is another interesting grunt's eye view of 'Nam.

MacDonald's Company Commander is good for WWII.

Ken Rutsky

[This message has been edited by Ken Rutsky (edited September 24, 2000).]

I too recommend "The Unknown Soldier" by Väinö Linna. And during this week the original book will be published for the first time! The book suffered from censorship in the fifties when it came out...Some "anti-soviet" and "anti-war" material were removed and even some events that would have made some "heroic" characters look not so innocent and righteous. Censorship sucks ass! But read the book, you'll enjoy it.

The "Forgotten Soldier" is a great book, though there is a debate about whether it is fiction or autobiography. The author and publisher claim it is autobio, but even if it isn't, it is a great WW2 book. Btw, the author IS French, but his mother was German, so the Germans considered him German and required military service of him. That's why he ended up on the Eastern Front.

Someone mentioned the article about the veracity of the book that is on Jason Pipes' WW2 website. Here is the link to that article: http://www.csd.uwm.edu/~jpipes/sajer.html

Originally posted by zombie:
Regarding the `forgotten soldier` by Sajer, i read an article by an ex-GD vet who said the book was utter nonsense, he thinks it was written by a French author. It was pretty persausive,if i can find it i can post the relevant points here if anybody is interested. War of the rats also has my vote for a great read and if you are interested in artillery at all read the series by Geogre Blackburn, The guns of normandy,victory and where the hell are the guns, its a bout a Canadian FO from before the start of the war to the finish.

About war novels that make for good reading. I wanted to mention some here. Toey already said that he read Ralph Peters' "Red Army", but I wanted to recommend it to anyone who hasn't. It's a typical look at WW3 in Europe ca. 1988, but it is very well done and has the added benefit of being from the perspective of the Soviets, hence the title. Anyway, I have always felt there was a dearth of war novels out there, and so I long ago turned to military science fiction to satisfy the urge. Here are some of my favorite military Sci Fi books:

1) "Hammer's Slammers" by David Drake; a little over the top at times, but if you like heavy armor, these stories make for fun reads.

2) "A Small Colonial War" by Robert Frezza; mainly light infantry combat

3) "The Mountain Walks" by Roland Green; I loved this book, but unfortunately his others were not nearly as good

4) "Falkenberg's Legion" by Jerry Pournelle; again, mainly light infantry combat; the other books in the Falkenberg series, incl those co-authored by SM Stirling, are also excellent

5) "The Regiment" by John Dalmas; you got it, light infantry at its best!

Most of these 5 books really don't go overboard with fancy technology, so I would almost say they are using late 20th century weapons, with a few modifications. Hammers Slammers is the big exception to that, though the combat is recognizable to anyone who has read a good WW2 or Vietnam war novel (Drake is a Vietnam vet).
There are also some good "naval" sci fi books out there, which essentially try to imagine space combat in an ordered way (with strategy and tactics). If anyone is interested, send me an email, and I can give you some titles.

Over at my war book review site, I am still looking for someone to help me set up a review site for military fiction. Anyone interested?
http://members.nbci.com/kcurow/hussar/index.html

or
http://members.tripod.de/yuanti/index.html

Oh, I forgot to mention. If you are interested in ancient warfare, then you can't beat Pressfield's "Gates of Fire", a novel about the battle of Thermopylae, in which the Greeks fight to the last man (more or less) against the Persians. Good stuff.

Getting away from the modern, but still a grat book is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's (sherlock Holmes creator) " The Great Boer War". May be a bit hard to find. My copy came via my grandfather. I recall watching him read and re-read this book all through my childhood. I now think that, as he was a veteran of the First World War, he was looking for the origins of the mindset of the British General Staff that resulted in so much futility in the first war.

Bonzo

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Robert (Bonzo) Lindsay, Coordinator
28th (North-west) Battalion Headquarters
http://dreadnaught.home.icq.com
nwbattalion@icqmail.com

The books by Eric L Harry are great. Invasion is the last one out and it really put you into the battlefield.
A really good Vietnam novel is "The Fire Dream" by Frank Allen Lieb. An excellent novel!

Modern War:
Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy
"The Scott Dixon Series" by Harold Coyle

Alternate WWI:
The Great War Series by Harry Turtledove
WWI with the US allied with Germany and the Confederacy allied with Britain & France. This series doesn't have any SF or fantasy elements like some of HT's other alternate histories.


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Billy Yank
I don't define "my own" the way you want me to.

While I don't read much fiction, I can suggest some outstanding non-fiction titles:

"We Were Soldiers Once....And Young" by Joe Galloway and LtGen(Ret) Hal Moore. A riveting account of a very nasty situation for the 7th Cav in the Ia Drang.

"A Time for Trumpets" by Charles MacDonald. The most engaging account of the Ardennes Offensive I've ever read. Excellent detail, from operational strategy to accounts of small scale units and individual soldiers.

"Landscape Turned Red", by Stephen Sears. The lost opportunities of a timid McClellan at the Battle of Antietam. The carnage at Burnside's Bridge, Bloody Lane and Miller's Cornfield were some of the toughest fighting of the entire Civil War.

Marklaker