10 books like Neptune’s Inferno

Shattered Sword changed the way historians think about the Battle of Midway. While the results will never change, Parshall and Tully provide insight and perspectives that have never before been explored. And in doing so, they help clear up many of the inconsistencies in both Japanese and American books on the battle. 

This is the first history of the Battle of Midway in which the authors looked at the ships operating logs and compared them to events. What you learn is that the U.S. Navy’s and the Imperial Japanese Navy’s operating doctrines were very different. The Japanese did not improve their damage control practices after the Battle of the Coral Sea, and their indecision at Midway was caused by one part culture, one part lack of intelligence, one part arrogance and one part carrier launch and recovery doctrine and failure to follow proper ordnance handling procedures. The result was a… show more.

Perceptions of the first several months of World War II in the Pacific war usually focus on Douglas MacArthur’s actions in the Philippines. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy and its British, Dutch, and Australian allies waged a largely unsung and losing battle against the Japanese onslaught to control the natural resources of the Netherlands East Indies.

Rising Sun, Falling Skies scrutinizes the learning curve of allied command, the hopelessness of facing numerical superiority, and the grim awakening that airpower plays a decisive role no matter how powerful the fleet. Cox’s portraits of admirals Thomas Hart and Karl Doorman beg a host of intriguing “what ifs.”

The US Navy at war in the Pacific is the backdrop to a series of high-pressure decisions made by various officers in command. The most striking is the heroic attack of a group of lightly armed US destroyers against the main forces of the Japanese Imperial Navy in the battle of Leyte Gulf. The so-called “Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” and the heroism in particular of Commander Ernest Evans, a Native American who receives the Medal of Honor for his decisions in the battle. I’ve always been awestruck by Evans, who was a quiet, thoughtful man who had to make the hardest choice literally “to risk it all” to achieve his mission.

Yes, there was a naval war in the Atlantic, too. Had not the Allies defeated Hitler’s U-boats over a multi-year battle—the longest of the war—World War II would likely have been lost no matter the heroics in the Pacific. Hitler’s U-Boat War does for the Battle of the Atlantic what Blair did with Silent Victory for submarine actions in the Pacific.

This book is exhaustive in detail—pick a boat or an engagement, and Blair has chronicled it— but taken overall, these volumes show the tenuous nature of the battle that was won in the aggregate by individual conflicts between hunter and hunted. This is a reliable desktop reference as well as a compelling read.

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… show more.

This book haunted me long after I’d finished. Telling the story of an English bomber pilot in World War Two—an ordinary hero—and his endearing eccentric family, A God In Ruins ponders the brutality of fate. The narrative is woven through different timeframes, plunging us into the real human experience and the unbearable moral question of carrying out acts of war. The novel made me question my concept of reality, of memory, and of choosing a path in life. Have you ever wondered if your own parallel universe is unspooling simultaneously as another lifetime?  

A meticulously compiled coffee-table ‘yearbook’ of the 509th Composite Group, including over 850 photos of people, places, and planes, along with 346 pages of text. A sometimes hard-to-come-by collector’s volume that is always pricey, it is nevertheless worth every penny. One will discover information nuggets here that cannot be found anywhere else. A must-book for anyone interested in the 509th CG. As told by the veterans who dropped the atomic bombs on Japan.

Robin Robertson’s noir narrative The Long Take might seem like an unusual choice for this list.

Essentially a long noir poem, The Long Take concerns Walker, a Canadian veteran of D-Day with acute PTSD who finds life unraveling in the urban landscapes he inhabits after the war.

With a poet’s precision, Robertson follows Walker as he moves from city to city, taking it all in. Homelessness, crime, race—nothing is spared.

Why, you’d think you were in a 40s film noir, reading about it all, and then you find Walker on the streets of LA in 1948 seeing some of those very films being shot, films like Act of Violence and Criss Cross.

An outstanding achievement, The Long Take is a wholly original work of art.

Written in the fifties, perhaps the author’s gender helped excuse her brave assumption that the intimate thoughts and feelings of a group of young gay men attempting to come to terms with their sexual identity was a valid topic. Renaud writes of stunted lives: the invented girlfriends, the cautious hints to probe another man’s preferences, the desperate need to belong, provoking the retreat into society’s stereotyping even amongst themselves. The novel is dated; one character has to explain to another what drag is! But it was one more step towards gay men’s forming their identity and self-acceptance. 

A direct inspiration on my book, this is a great espionage thriller set in Philadelphia about a disgraced Revolution-era spy who gets hired by Alexander Hamilton to help against his arch-enemy, Thomas Jefferson, and finds his path intersecting with a farmwife standing up against a frontier uprising.

Liss is a master of the historical form (and a friend, full disclosure!)