100 books like Night Airwar

This book horrified me.

As I devoured the pages, I saw a normal young German Catholic boy who loved camping and the outdoors turn into a fanatical Nazi fighter pilot revelling in the slaughter of Russian ‘sub-humans.’

Because it’s based on Knoke’s diary, I could chart his war day by day, week by week, and see his innermost thoughts and feelings. He holds nothing back, and reading his words gave me a fascinating–if terrible–insight into what makes an unrepentant Nazi.   

I was enraptured by this book. It took me right into the middle of one of the defining events of the air war over Germany in a way that no other book did, not even Sinclair McKay’s superb Dresden.

Through Middlebrook’s book, I saw the bombing of Germany’s second city through the eyes of the British bomber crews, the helpless German fighter pilots, and the people of Hamburg itself. It made me realise how close bombing came at that point in the war to causing a German collapse–totally absorbing.     

I’ve always liked Donald’s work; he’s a specialist in the air war, and I really enjoy reading something by an expert in their field, but for my money, this book is the cream of the Caldwell crop.

I love the format; he kicks off in 1942 and details every Allied air raid and the German reaction from then on. I thought it could be quite dry, but instead, it charts so clearly how the air war evolved into truly gigantic battles fought out over vast tracts of Europe’s skies.

I would struggle to think of another book on the subject that gives me the same sense of scale–an incredible achievement.   

I must admit I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book; it was too dry, too academic, and too detail-obsessed. To be honest, I found it to be all those things, and yet it was absorbing!

I came to the conclusion that I really liked it because I was either a) a geek or b) quite sad, and both are true. Anyway, what I discovered was that I liked this book exactly because it was dry and detailed.

It told me a story I hadn’t heard before and one that opened my eyes and my thinking to a hugely important aspect of the air war–the world of guns and those who crewed them, who, increasingly as the war went on, were schoolchildren. 

Howard Snyder’s B-17 and crew were part of the 8th Air Force, stationed in England. They were shot down in February of 1944 on the French/Belgium border. Two members of the crew of 10 were killed in the plane, some were rescued and in hiding, and some were captured.

The author, Howard Snyder’s son, not only researched what happened to his father, but also the rest of the crew. He contacted a former German pilot who shot down the Susan Ruth.

Howard Snyder was kept hidden by brave Belgians. Paul Delahaye was 13 years old when the Americans forced out the Germans. Delahaye made it his mission to make sure the Americans were never forgotten, building memorials and starting museums. Steve Snyder kept in touch with his father’s rescuers, visiting Belgium and meeting Paul Delahaye.

A remarkable story.

As the first in his series of novels on the 1930s in Europe, Alan Furst's Night Soldier tends to earn the most critical praise, but Dark Star remains my personal favorite. Furst masters the noir ambiance and moral ambiguity of Europe as war approaches, where everyday people are drawn into the world of espionage and intrigue. His settings often lie outside the main urban centers of Paris and Berlin in the remote reaches of Eastern Europe. Furst's novels are impeccably researched for accurate detail-one of my must-haves in historical fiction-and each book will draw you to read the next in his series.

I am crazy about this book, as this book almost made me crazy (in a good sense).

It tells the story of one of the most famous holocaust survivors and writers and how the nightmares from the concentration camp, known as Auschwitz, haunted this survivor. He suffered for years until he was treated with LSD. His mind was changed for the better. He stopped dreaming about the suffering he had experienced, and this was done by changing his consciousness.

It shows how much our mind is open to improvements and what is the real power and benefit of practicing shamanism and altered states of consciousness. And how it worked for many years for our ancestors, and how we can benefit from it nowadays. Such a powerful and hope-making book!

This is a harrowing account of the genocide in Rwanda told by one of its survivors, Imaculee llibagiza, after Hutu soldiers murdered her father, mother, and two brothers during a killing spree that took the lives of a million Rwandans.

In a fight for survival, Imaculee and seven other women took refuge in a 3’ by 3’ bathroom hidden behind a wardrobe in a pastor’s home. As the machete-wielding gunmen continued hunting for more victims, Imaculee and the women remained in their cloister in silence. Her  91 days in hiding is a testimony of endurance and resilience in the face of unrestrained evil.

When everyone you love is dead, and everything you love is lost, how do you go on? Imaculee found the answer in faith, love, forgiveness, and optimism. It is a haunting story of an ordinary woman and earthly mortal forced into an enlightening spiritual experience with the… show more.

This is not a full biography – the biography Steinert wrote later in her career is not available in English – but many of the ideas in Steinert’s biography can also be found in this earlier work, which has faded into posterity slightly but can be read with great profit. Here, Steinert is concerned to give texture to a hitherto often two-dimensional image of German society and its attitudes to Hitler’s War. The result is an interesting, differentiated account of public opinion in Nazi Germany. In many respects, it was pioneering and opened up questions surrounding the relationship between state and society that other historians went on to explore further in the 1980s. Steinert’s Francophone background, and perhaps the fact that she was a female writer working in a profession that was then very male-dominated, probably account for the fact that her work is less well-known in the English-speaking world… show more.

British Radio Direction Finding stations (RDF), later to be dubbed Radar, with their iconic arrays of masts along England’s south coast, contributed greatly to the RAF’s success in the Battle of Britain by detecting approaching raids and giving early warning. Both sides in the European war possessed similar technologies operated from ground stations. The race to miniaturise RDF sets for airborne interception, once realised, would have devastating consequences for intruding bomber crews facing A.I. equipped night fighters over Britain and Germany. Price takes an even-handed approach in relating the development of these technologies in Britain, Germany, the US, and Japan, making this an absorbing and enjoyable read that demystifies an aspect of the war that is usually only mentioned in passing.