Here are 100 books that Rolling Thunder fans have personally recommended if you like
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I read the books in my list decades before I started writing air war stories. My first novel was a sci-fi space opera about hot starpilots flying from what I called “spacecraft carriers” in an interstellar war. Over the years I’ve flown sailplanes, power planes, and logged time in the SNJ and the DC-3. Since I was never there, flying high-performance airplanes in combat, I try to read all the histories and memoirs and pilot’s manuals I can get my hands on, and study pictures of the people, time, place, and airplanes I’m writing about.
This was one of the first books I read showing how, in 1939, no one knew how to fight a major air war. I didn’t know that meant the first year of World War II would be a series of bloody, deadly experiments.
This book brings out this uncertainty and the often-fatal consequences for a squadron of RAF pilots flying Hawker Hurricanes in defense of France. I’ve always loved the Hurricane, and wondered what it would be like to fly for the RAF in that time and place, to sit in the cockpit of a Hawker Hurricane, and be both hunter and hunted.
This book let me live the story, as much as any story can.
From the Phoney War of 1939 to the Battle of Britain in 1940, the pilots of Hornet Squadron learn their lessons the hard way. Hi-jinks are all very well on the ground, but once in a Hurricane's cockpit, the best killers keep their wits close. Newly promoted Commanding Officer Fanny Barton has a job on to whip the Hornets into shape before they face the Luftwaffe's seasoned pilots. And sometimes Fighter Command, with its obsolete tactics and stiff doctrines, is the real menace. As with all Robinson's novels, the raw dialogue, rich black humour and brilliantly rendered, adrenalin-packed dogfights bring…
I read the books in my list decades before I started writing air war stories. My first novel was a sci-fi space opera about hot starpilots flying from what I called “spacecraft carriers” in an interstellar war. Over the years I’ve flown sailplanes, power planes, and logged time in the SNJ and the DC-3. Since I was never there, flying high-performance airplanes in combat, I try to read all the histories and memoirs and pilot’s manuals I can get my hands on, and study pictures of the people, time, place, and airplanes I’m writing about.
This book was the first adult air-war novel I read, and it pulled me right into the world of naval aviation in World War II.
The protagonist was young, fresh out of flight school and barely qualified to land on aircraft carriers. The author was a navy fighter pilot during World War II, and he put this youngster’s hands on the controls during some tough flying and fighting. After that, I was hooked!
I read the books in my list decades before I started writing air war stories. My first novel was a sci-fi space opera about hot starpilots flying from what I called “spacecraft carriers” in an interstellar war. Over the years I’ve flown sailplanes, power planes, and logged time in the SNJ and the DC-3. Since I was never there, flying high-performance airplanes in combat, I try to read all the histories and memoirs and pilot’s manuals I can get my hands on, and study pictures of the people, time, place, and airplanes I’m writing about.
This book came out a few years after World War II ended and became a movie and later a TV series.
I started watching the TV series when I was quite young, and in that impressionable time I was sure when I grew up I’d fly B-17s for General Savage and the 918th Bomb Group. This despite the fact that I was well aware of modern jet bombers like the B-52!
The book itself taught me a lot about what it’s like to command a bomb group during an air war. It contains one of the most detailed and exquisitely excruciating descriptions of a bomber mission ever written, in the present tense, as it was lived by the authors themselves, during their time with the 8th AF in 1943.
I read the books in my list decades before I started writing air war stories. My first novel was a sci-fi space opera about hot starpilots flying from what I called “spacecraft carriers” in an interstellar war. Over the years I’ve flown sailplanes, power planes, and logged time in the SNJ and the DC-3. Since I was never there, flying high-performance airplanes in combat, I try to read all the histories and memoirs and pilot’s manuals I can get my hands on, and study pictures of the people, time, place, and airplanes I’m writing about.
I’ve always loved the Republic F-105 Thunderchief. It’s one of those jets that look like it’s going Mach 2 sitting on the ground!
I know people who flew the airplane during the Vietnam War. This book has the inside scoop, since Wilson flew F-105s during Vietnam. It’s one hell of a ride, in the cockpit and out.
I’ll probably take that ride again, soon, if only to prepare for future oral history interviews with Thud drivers.
In 1966, the tide of the air war above North Vietnam is turning against the United States. F-105 Thunderchiefs, and the elite fighter pilots who fly them, are being slaughtered. To destroy the greatest array of sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons ever assembled, the Pentagon creates the Wild Weasel. The mission of Lt. Colonel Mack MacLendon's 357th Tactical Fighter Squadron is to fly these technological demons straight into the teeth of North Vietnam's deadly air defenses and destroy the SAMs and Soviet MiGs that have killed their friends, and now seek their death.
I’m pretty well qualified to provide you with a list of five great books about men at war because, frankly, I’ve spent half my life reading them and the other half trying to write them (you be the judge!). My degree in Military Studies was focused on the question of what makes men endure the lunacy of war (whether they be ‘goodies’ or ‘baddies’), and it was in fiction that I found some of the clearest answers–clue: it’s often less about country and duty and more about the love of the men alongside the soldier. In learning how to write, I also learned how to recognize great–enjoy!
I came across this book while researching why the US Army (and Marines) struggled so badly in the Vietnam War. As with all the books I’m recommending here, it spoke to me of how men go to war for their duty but stay at war for their brothers.
It speaks volumes of the frustrations and contradictions of a war in which an American generation skewed to the poor and racially discriminated against was sent to fight a highly motivated army of liberation and paid the price for their obedience. And told me more about what really happened in the valleys of that benighted country than any history book could.
I read it cover to cover and then read it again, eagerly consuming its truth at a time when the scars were so fresh that the truth was barely starting to emerge, and I commend it to you both as a…
Hailed as the most important novel to emerge from the Vietnam War when first published in 1978, this book launched a spectacular writing career for James Webb that now includes four bestselling novels. A much-decorated former Marine who fought and was wounded in Vietnam, Webb tells the story of a platoon of tough, young Marines enduring the tropical hell of Southeast Asian jungles while facing an invisible enemy--in a war no one understands. Filled with the sounds and smells of combat, it is nevertheless a book about people, an amazing variety of closely observed characters caught up in circumstances beyond…
Since I was a child, I wanted to be a pilot. I started flying when I was in high school, and now I am a captain for one of the world’s largest airlines. My journey has been the greatest adventure I could ever imagine, but so many others are out there. Far too many adventures for one person to experience. Through great books, I have been able to visit so many facets of the profession I love so much. I treasure so many of the amazing books about flying that have been written and greatly anticipate the many more that are just beyond the horizon.
I was never a fighter pilot. Through timing and happenstance, I was never able to make this journey. Yet, through the magic of the written word, I was taken on an adventure I could never make on my own.
It is great when you can find a book penned by an author who is an expert on a subject, but it is amazing when you find a writer who has lived the experience. For me, Jake Grafton's experiences outside the cockpit are secondary to the flights he makes in his A-6.
Thanks to Stephen Coonts, I feel I have sat on the deck of an aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam and launched into the sky to face my own mortality.
In Flight of the Intruder Jake Grafton is an A-6 Intruder pilot during the Vietnam War who flies his bomber on sorties past enemy flak and SAM missiles, and then must maneuver his plane, often at night, onto the relatively small deck of an aircraft carrier. Former Navy flyer Stephen Coonts gives an excellent sense of the complexities of modern air raids and how nerve-wracking it is, even for the best airmen, to technically solve sudden problems over and over, knowing that even a twist of fate like a peasant wildly firing a rifle from a field could wipe out…
I am passionate about the Vietnam War because my male relatives served and came back changed by the experience. I spent ten years as the editor of The Patton Saber, writing articles about the experience of World War II soldiers, but when I came across an idea for a novel about past life memories, I decided to focus on memories of the Vietnam War. What I love about this list is that it reflects many facets of the war, including soldiers, nurses, veterans, and the family members touched by those affected by war.
O’Brien’s depiction of American soldiers in Vietnam was vivid and moving. It gave me a deeper understanding of the soldier’s experience. His artful use of the metaphor of what they carried revealed not only the items on hand but also the psychological baggage each soldier dealt with.
The stories were haunting and made me a full witness to the complexity of war and the many ways it is experienced. It is artfully written, moving, complex, touching and unforgettable.
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.
But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried', it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry through…
I am the child of Holocaust survivors who chose not to talk about it. The effects were clear and stark – my mother crying out with nightmares, my father doing everything in his power not to be noticed by authorities – but I was not allowed to know their sources. Though my lottery number was 76, I missed going to Vietnam by a year as the draft ended; I watched so many of my peers come back either damaged or at least profoundly changed. I never wish I experienced war in all its hellaciousness, but from early adolescence, I have wondered how I would have acted.
How does one capture and transmit what the mixture of boredom and abject terror that is often a soldier’s life does to the psyche most effectively?
I had read a number of fictionalized reportages and Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut, which added science fiction. Still, it wasn’t until I powered through this book that I felt I could know how difficult it is for young men to try and make sense of it. The book was a puzzle with pieces that were hard to place next to each other into a coherent picture, and that felt to me like what Vietnam did to those in my generation who fought there.
Winner of the National Book Award, 'Going After Cacciato' captures the peculiar mixture of horror and hallucination that marked the Vietnam War, this strangest of wars.
In a blend of reality and fantasy, this novel tells the story of a young soldier who one day lays down his rifle and sets off on a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris.
In its memorable evocation of men both fleeing from and meeting the demands of battle, 'Going After Cacciato' stands as much more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of…
I fell in love with Italy the first time I visited as a graduate student. Later, as a professor spending extended periods there with my family, I began investigating Italy’s experience of World War II. I was inspired by the diary of Iris Origo, an Anglo-American who lived in rural Tuscany. She reported of civilians bombed by Allied aircraft and strafed by machine guns from the air—even after Italy had surrendered. In my quest to understand the relations between the Allies and Italian civilians, I came upon a trove of great wartime novels, many recently back in print, and I am eager to share my enthusiasm for them.
I encountered this book backward. As a teenager growing up at the end of the US war in Vietnam, I read the Mad magazine spoof of the movie version long before I saw the movie itself, and then I read the novel. I focused on the antiwar theme and the concern of the bomber crew to get home without getting shot down.
The novel was based on Heller’s wartime experience, but I hardly realized it was about bombing Italy until I discovered the papers one of his crewmates had donated to Cornell University. I learned how many of the episodes were based on real incidents, including the only time the novel focuses on Italian civilians—when the crew objects to destroying an Italian Alpine village of no military significance.
Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage.
Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the…
I used to be afraid of the thriller section, assuming it was synonymous with horror. It took me until my 30s to register that I’d been reading thrillers for years without realising it. Tomorrow When the War Began, the Hunger Games, A Wrinkle in Time, The Darkest Minds, Mortal Engines: they’re all big loves. I’ve come to realise that thriller basically just means heart-pumping. There’s something about a book keeping you on the edge of your seat, desperate to turn the page and find out what happens next.
I loved this star-crossed lovers story. It was dark, mysterious, and achy. In a weird way, it reminded me of the Harry Potter series, in how it was a mystery forever unfolding and I love that about it. It certainly kept me guessing and on the edge of my seat and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Legend is the much-anticipated dystopian thriller debut from US author, Marie Lu.
THE must-read dystopian thriller fiction for all teen fans of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Divergent by Veronica Roth. A brilliant re-imagining of Les Miserables, the series is set to be a global film sensation as CBS films have acquired rights to the trilogy. The Twilight Saga producers, Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey, will produce.
Los Angeles, California Republic of America
He is Day. The boy who walks in the light.
She is June. The girl who seeks her brother's killer.
