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SWJED
03-26-2006, 01:15 PM
25 March Wall Street Journal - Victor Davis Hanson's book list - Fighting Words - The Definitive Books on the Battles of the 20th Century (http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/fivebest/?id=110008143).

Click on the link for the full commentary - VDH's list:


1. "The Price of Glory" by Alistair Horne (St. Martin's, 1963). Over the course of 10 months in 1916, the French and Germans killed or wounded about 1.25 million of their best soldiers in a few wooded acres around a fortress complex near the French town of Verdun on the Western Front...

2. "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge (Presidio, 1981). There are some brilliant memoirs of the savage battle for Okinawa, but E.B. Sledge's is by far the most haunting....

3. "The Face of Battle" by John Keegan (Viking, 1976). This exploration of the soldiers' experience at Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme--all within a few miles of each other in the cockpit of Europe--introduced the young military historian John Keegan to the wider American public...

4. "Stalingrad" by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 1998). We in the West cannot quite comprehend what really went on in this distant battle of Armageddon that began in late 1942, but Antony Beevor provides an extraordinary account of a terrible conflict in which the Nazis' tanks met the Soviets' T-34s, the Luftwaffe's best encountered skies full of rockets, and a million Russians fought the last crack troops that an exhausted Germany and Eastern Europe could throw at them...

5. "The Fall of Fortresses" by Elmer Bendiner (Putnam, 1980). This too often overlooked memoir is the best personal account of American daylight bombing over Germany. The calm and reflective Elmer Bendiner, a navigator on a B-17 "Flying Fortress," describes how the Army Air Corps in Western Europe asked bomber crews to do the impossible: fly in daylight without escort into the face of thousands of German fighters and experienced flak batteries...