Here are 100 books that Ardennes 1944 fans have personally recommended if you like
Ardennes 1944.
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I’m a combat veteran and longtime soldier trying to figure out my own wartime experiences by learning about what others did. Soldiers may join up for mom and apple pie and the grand old flag. But they fight for each other, and they follow leaders they trust. I tried to be one of those solid combat leaders. Since I had never been under fire before that day came, I endeavored to learn from—and write about—the lives of others who led soldiers in war. I’m still reading and still writing about battlefield leadership.
There are a lot of books about the Battle of The Bulge, the biggest American engagement of World War II. I think this one is the best, and that’s because author Charles B. MacDonald fought in the Bulge as a rifle company commander, then for years after the war served as an official U.S. Army historian writing about the Bulge and the other major campaigns. MacDonald had that rare opportunity to figure out what really happened to him and his fellow soldiers. He makes a brief appearance in his own gripping narrative, just another tired, cold, young officer trying to keep himself and his troops alive in the biggest clash of the entire war. MacDonald understands how and why the Bulge went the way it did.
On December 16, 1944, the vanguard of three German armies, totaling half a million men, attacked U.S. forces in the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg, achieveing what had been considered impossible -- total surprise. In the most abysmal failure of battlefield intelligence in the history of the U.S. Army, 600,000 American soldiers found themselves facing Hitler's last desperate effort of the war.
The brutal confrontation that ensued became known as the Battle of the Bulge, the greatest battle ever fought by the U.S. Army -- a triumph of American ingenuity and dedication over an egregious failure in strategic intelligence.…
Jeremy Black is a prolific lecturer and writer, the author of over 100 books. Many concern aspects of eighteenth-century British, European, and American political, diplomatic and military history but he has also published on the history of the press, cartography, warfare, culture, and on the nature and uses of history itself.
Much of what I have said about James Holland can also be said of his friend Peter Caddick-Adams, whose first-rate works include Monte Cassino. Ten Armies in Hell (2012), Sand and Steel: A New History of D-Day (2019), and this, by far the best book on the last major German offensive. Adroit at capturing the German perspective, Caddick-Adams is also very good on the American response. A lengthy read, but worth it.
Snow and Steel is a huge reassessment of Hitler's last great throw of the dice: 'The Battle of the Bulge', the battle for the Ardennes 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945. This was an utterly fascinating five weeks when for a time it looked like Hitler had outflanked the allied armies pushing toward the Rhine and might just throw them back to the Normandy beaches. It is also the context for the catastrophic events at Bastogne depicted so graphically in Band of Brothers.
For military history fans this is one of those touchstone battles of the second world war,…
John C. McManus, Ph.D., is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of U.S. Military History at Missouri University of Science and Technology, and a recipient of the prestigious Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History. He is the author of 14 books, including Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers who Made the Defense of Bastogne Possible.
Quite simply, the best Bulge division history ever written. Plus, Fontenot sheds long-overdue light on the fighting at St. Vith, whose importance was nearly equivalent to the more famous struggle for Bastogne. Like every author on this list, he knows how to combine first-rate scholarship with excellent storytelling. Fontenot spent decades interviewing commanders and other participants, visiting the ground, and compiling source material. He knew many of the principal characters quite well and yet he never let his personal relationships stand in the way of historical objectivity. Plus, as a retired colonel and a veteran of Desert Storm who commanded an armor battalion in combat, he brings his own professional understanding into the mix. The result is a fascinating and innovative historical work.
St Vith and Back closes a gap in the record of the Battle of the Bulge by recounting the exploits of the 7th Armored Division in a way that no other study has. Most accounts of the Battle of the Bulge give short-shrift to the interval during which the German forward progress stopped and the American counterattack began. This narrative centers on the 7th Armored Division for the entire length of the campaign, in so doing reconsidering the story of the whole battle through the lens of a single division and accounting for the reconstitution of the Division while in…
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
I’ve written two books on the topic of the Battle of the Bulge and countless articles. These are my favorite books on the subject and three of the five books are cited in my own monographs. (Schrijvers wrote his book after I published mine and Kershaw’s work was only tangential to my subject matter).
Compared to Macdonald’s tome, Toland’s book is a far more succinct account of the Battle of the Bulge (If you could call 444 pages succinct!). Toland doesn’t spend a lot of time on exposition. He dives right into the battle after the first twenty pages, which is refreshing because too many authors and historians spend too much time, writing about the build-up before the battle. Before you know it, you’re already halfway through the book and it’s only December 16. Toland avoids that pitfall. His prose is simple and straightforward. If you can’t read a 900-page book about the Bulge, then read Toland’s account.
The perspective of 15 years, painstaking research, thousands of interviews, extensive analysis and evaluation, and the creative talent of John Toland [paint] the epic struggle on an immense canvas
By Barbara Olenyik Morrow and Ellen England
Author
Why are we passionate about this?
It is no secret that the World War II generation is fast disappearing, with fewer and fewer veterans of that global conflict alive today. As their voices are lost, wartime letters often can speak forcefully and eloquently for that earlier generation, informing modern-day readers about the grind, frustrations, and hardships those in uniform experienced. We discovered as much when we read the 505 letters that Ellen's parents, friends before the war, wrote to their respective families while serving in Europe to defeat Nazi tyranny. This collaborative project also taught us a valuable lesson: Before tossing out old letters stashed in drawers, closets, or attics, read them. Hidden treasures may lurk inside.
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.
In the first two volumes of his bestselling Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson recounted how the American-led coalition fought through North Africa and Italy to the threshold of victory. Now he tells the most dramatic story of all - the titanic battle for Western Europe. D-Day marked the commencement of the European war's final campaign, and Atkinson's riveting account of that bold gamble sets the pace for the masterly narrative that follows. The brutal fight in Normandy, the liberation of Paris, the disaster that was Market Garden, the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and finally the thrust to the heart of…
Having been born two months before Pearl Harbor, as I grew older, I vaguely remember hearing my parents talking about the war. When I was able, I used to pull my little red wagon around the neighborhood to collect bacon grease I donated to the local butcher shop to support the war. After retiring from the technology industry, I tried my hand at writing books. After a few futile attempts, I finally started writing novels about WWII. I first wrote Return to La Roche-en-Ardenne, then Innocence Lost - A Childhood Stolen, and finally Thou Shall Do No Harm – Diary of an Auschwitz Physician which will be re-released in early 2023.
I love reading true stories of WWII told by people who lived through it. I find it difficult to understand how ordinary men could live, fight, and die in a foreign land without questioning in order to protect the United States; they were certainly true patriots. In the fall of 1944, two hundred true patriots of K Company, 333rd Infantry, 84th Division landed in Europe. For the next one hundred days, they were on the edge of the Allied spearhead into Nazi territory. If you ever wanted to be in the infantry, you need to read this book.
Offers a moving dramatic portrait of the soldiers and officers of the K Company and their experiences on the Siegfried Line, at the Battle of the Bulge
As a child with older sisters, I read their books beyond my age level under the blankets with a flashlight in bed at night. I became a reading addict. Raised in The Netherlands with the Second World War casting its large shadow on our lives, I only became interested, after my parents were gone, in how people survived and had to find their courage under impossible circumstances. They would never talk about those occupation years. My search into history led me to find the answers.
I loved this novel, based on the author’s mother’s life!
It made me aware of American women called Donut Dollies and their roles in WW2
following the troops as they liberated Europe. I imagined being there and how
it would be for the protagonist.
An unusual and heartbreaking story. The events
experienced affected the author’s mother afterward all through her life, and
she died isolated and alone. I recognized how a mother was affected by war, as
my mother also was traumatized.
This "powerful, uplifting, and deeply personal novel" (Kristin Hannah, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Four Winds), at once "a heart-wrenching wartime drama" (Christina Baker Kline, #1 NYT bestselling author of Orphan Train) and "a moving and graceful tribute to heroic women" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), asks the question: What if a friendship forged on the front lines of war defines a life forever?
"Urrea's touch is sure, his exuberance carries you through . . . He is a generous writer, not just in his approach to his craft but in the broader sense…
Andrew is a long-time WWII history buff and writer who looks for any excuse to do a deep dive into his favorite history topics. For his WWII horror novel One Last Gasp, he spent over a year researching the Battle of the Bulge, from first-hand accounts of front-line soldiers to official U.S. Army documents.
An infantry company commander’s first-hand account of his experiences in the European theater. His first command was to be thrust smack dab into the middle of the Battle of The Bulge, and his account is filled with surprisingly raw and honest observations not only about the war but about his reaction to it.
I’ve written two books on the topic of the Battle of the Bulge and countless articles. These are my favorite books on the subject and three of the five books are cited in my own monographs. (Schrijvers wrote his book after I published mine and Kershaw’s work was only tangential to my subject matter).
Unlike Toland’s and MacDonald’s monographs, Schrijvers concentrates his narrative on only a portion of the Battle of the Bulge – the Siege of Bastogne. As a result, he can delve into far greater detail than the other books. In Schrijvers’s book, we read about the individual soldiers and paratroopers who fought the Germans to a standstill and held the vital crossroads town against the odds. In addition, we learn about the civilians who also played a part in the battle for Bastogne. Lastly, the author gives the Germans a voice, too, and you begin to understand what motivated the average German Landser to continue to fight for a cause that was lost. If you enjoyed my books, No Silent Night and Patton at the Battle of the Bulge and you want to know more about Bastogne, this is a good place to start.
A new telling of the brutal siege of Bastogne, where vastly outnumbered American forces held off a savage German onslaught and sealed the fate of the Third Reich
Hitler's last gamble, the Battle of the Bulge, was intended to push the Allied invaders of Normandy all the way back to the beaches. The plan nearly succeeded, and almost certainly would have, were it not for one small Belgian town and its tenacious American defenders who held back a tenfold larger German force while awaiting the arrival of General George Patton's mighty Third Army.
I am a longtime Los Angeles trial lawyer, as well as a writer and librettist. I graduated with honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz and from the Santa Clara University School of Law where I was a member of the Law Review. Me and my wife, Susan, are the parents of six children and live in Santa Monica, California. My previous novel, The Logic Bomb, a legal thriller, was published in 2015.
Scott Turow, author of numerous legal thrillers, turns his hand to historical fiction Ordinary Heroes, which manages to combine action and suspense with the touching personal journey of a journalist looking for the truth about his father and what he did during and after World War II.
The father, a JAG lawyer, is on the hunt for a rogue OSS agent and on the way, falls in love, finds himself in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge, and uncovers the horrors of a concentration camp.
Far removed from his usual Kindle County milieu – Turow, often unjustly pigeonholed as a genre writer – turns in some of his best writing. Its ending left me in tears.
As a post-script, I was so moved by the book that I did something I almost never do – I emailed Turow a fan letter. I got a call from his…
From the bestselling author of Presumed Innocent comes Ordinary Heroes, Scott Turow's Second World War story of family and bravery.
All parents keep secrets from their children. My father, it seemed, kept more than most . . .
Whilst mourning the death of his father, journalist Stewart Dubin decides to research the life of a man he had always respected, always admired, but possibly never quite knew . . .
As a young, idealistic lawyer during the last terrible months of the Second World War, David Dubin was sent to the European Front - ostensibly to bring charges against a…
