The best books on D-Day airborne operations

A meticulous examination of the Battle of The Bulge, the largest battle ever fought by the US Army. What I found so fascinating was that, even given the massive scale of the fight, it reads more like a wide series of small engagements, scattered and disconnected from each other.  Individual units, often cut off from each other and vastly outnumbered and outgunned, still put up a stiff resistance, enough to pick away at the juggernaut advance of the Germans, each one slowing the enemy a little more and a little more and a little more, until reinforcements can finally put a stop to the enemy advance.

A question I’m often asked is if I’m related to Eugene Bondurant Sledge, whose classic work from World War II became the basis for the HBO miniseries, The Pacific. Though I don’t know, when reading Sledge’s work, I found the way he described the horrors of combat in manners that pricked at the edges of my own war experience. (“His intestines were strung out among the branches like garland decorations on a Christmas tree.”) Sledge has been one of the few who explains the moral injury soldiers face on the battlefield long before the term became common in the Iraq and Afghan Wars. His novel impacted me so deeply, I quote him in my book.

Fallujah is one of the most horrendous and hard-fought battles in U.S. history. David Bellavia has written an unforgettable story of triumph, tragedy, and the resilience of the human spirit. In the second Iraq conflict, Bellavia shows us the stairways and alleys of Fallujah through the sights of his rifle. Politics and strategy are impossible luxuries for the combat soldiers, but Bellavia writes about even bigger themes: courage, fear, brotherhood, and duty. To read this account is to know intimately the daily grind and danger of men at war, a rare and gripping account of the frontline war. He captures the brutal action and raw intensity of leading his Third Platoon, Alpha Company, into a lethally choreographed kill zone: the booby-trapped, explosive-laden houses of Fallujah's terrorists.

Bringing to searing life the terrifying intimacy of hand-to-hand infantry combat, this gripping war memoir features an indelibly drawn cast of characters, not all of whom would make it out alive, as well as the sober account of the singular courage that earned Bellavia the Medal of Honor: Entering one house alone, he used every tool at his disposal in the fight of his life against America's most vicious enemy. Bellavia's riveting, poignant, and at times even humorous firsthand account intensely emphasizes why this battle must never be forgotten.