The best World War II stories gleaned from letters, diaries, and personal remembrances

This fast-moving telling of Winston Churchill’s first year as prime minister proved invaluable in helping me understand the initial phase of World War II and of Britain’s need for a reluctant America to become a full-fledged ally.

The granular details Erik Larson serves up about Churchill, his loved ones, and well-known political figures during Germany’s 1940-1941 air bombing of Britain are especially delicious. Larson treats readers to conversations pulled from diaries, letters, memoirs, and other historical documents and weaves them into a seamless narrative that compelled me to keep turning pages.

In Larson’s skilled hands, l was the unseen guest in dining rooms and board rooms, in basements and on rooftops, vicariously experiencing London’s and the British countryside’s darkest hours–and Churchill’s finest.

Full disclosure: James Madison, professor emeritus of history at Indiana University, is someone I not only know but have long admired for his many books on Hoosier history.

In this book, he focuses on Elizabeth Richardson, a Red Cross Clubmobile hostess from Mishawaka, Indiana, who shared coffee, doughnuts, and small talk with soldiers in England and France beginning in 1944. In July 1945, she died overseas in a plane crash, and her remains rest today in the American Cemetery in Normandy, one of only four women buried there among the nearly 9,400 men.

Madison supplies vital background information about Richardson but also allows her to speak directly to readers through her many war-era letters and diary entries. We come to care deeply about this intelligent, curious, and determined Red Cross worker who – as Madison put it – “without firing a weapon ... came to know war.”

Red Cross trainees were among the thousands of people who poured into Washington, D.C., during World War II, with Mary Brandon–in our book–arriving there for instruction in 1943. What was the city like?

Esteemed journalist David Brinkley shared his personal reminiscences of a 1940s-era Washington in this lively account, showing how the city morphed rapidly from a slow-moving Southern town into an initially ill-prepared wartime capital. Brinkley’s many anecdotes are amusing, astonishing, and always instructive, as when he noted that even though the army placed antiaircraft guns on roofs of government buildings, so few guns were available that some–it was later learned–were merely wood replicas.

Through Mary Brandon’s letters, I glimpsed wartime Washington. Brinkley’s book treated me to a full portrait.

This is the third and final of Rick Atkinson’s three-volume Liberation Trilogy, and if you loved the first two, as I did, you’ll love this one. A meticulous researcher and masterful storyteller, Atkinson devotes this volume to the final year of World War II in Western Europe (D-Day to V-E Day).

Along with mining diaries and letters of soldiers, civilians, journalists, and world leaders for fresh details, Atkinson balances the human drama with crisp military analysis and engrossing background information.

I was indebted to this two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author for helping me better grasp what Ellen England’s father experienced while he labored, in concert with thousands of Allied troops, to cripple and ultimately defeat Hitler’s vaunted Wehrmacht.

It’s no secret that uniformed men and women welcome canine friends in wartime. In our book, Bill Husselman and Mary Brandon wrote home regularly about dogs they or their mates adopted in France, Italy, and elsewhere.

That said, Robert Weintraub’s book is no ordinary tale about bonding between humans and animals. Weintraub painstakingly recounts how an RAF radar technician named Frank and a purebred English pointer named Judy survived separate hells at the start of World War II, only to be imprisoned in an internment camp in the Pacific. There, despite being close to starvation, they used their wits to keep each other alive, even as they were subjected to ever-worsening cruelty and malnutrition.

Weintraub’s story is spellbinding and inspiring–and no less a love story of loyalty between man and dog.