Fans pick 100 books like The Red Cross Letters

I recommend this book because it gives a broader picture of the women who changed the way women participate in society forever. It wasn’t just building bombs, liberty ships, and planes that women had a part in. It was everything! When I’ve talked to women who lived during that time, and when I read this book, I realized how many ways women changed during that period of history.

Good friends stick together through thick and thin. That’s the premise I took away from The Beantown Girls. 

When one of three forever best friends from Boston learns that her fiancé is missing in WWII action, she determines to go to Europe and against all odds, find him. She convinces her two best friends—women with very different personalities, very different gifts, and skills—to join her as Red Cross Clubmobile girls in what could be a grand adventure or a terrible risk to their lives. 

They never expected to care so deeply for the soldiers they go to help, to encounter the horrors and deprivation of war they do, or that their friendship and camaraderie will be tested and yet become the thing that carries them through.

I absolutely love the layout of this book–the title, the photos, and the fonts. This irresistible chapter heading made me want to know more: “Training: Thrilled to Death with Everything.” At the start of the book, I knew nothing about World War II Red Cross volunteers and next to nothing about the war in Africa. LeOna’s letters are so exuberant with descriptions so vivid you feel like you are walking in her footsteps. I love the photos with her smiling face. I finished this book with a deep respect for the dedicated women who worked so hard to provide soldiers with comfort and a connection to home.

The authors spent ten years researching and acquiring the 30,000 letters that resulted in this collection portraying the wide range of experiences of women in uniform during World War II. I’ve returned to this book often during my research and would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the role women played during the war. These eyewitness accounts of the day-to-day lives of ordinary women stepping up to do extraordinary things are compelling and inspirational.

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.

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.

Rumer Godden is a favourite novelist of mine, but this is non-fiction. Godden was born in India and only left after Independence. Towards the end of World War Two, she made a long journey to document the work done by women volunteers in the Bengal region of India during the war, travelling huge distances, crossing many rivers, to remote places. The book, with photographs, includes the work of both European and Indian volunteers in a huge number of organizations, ranging from the Red Cross, hospital trains, and dispatch riders to the ARP and mobile canteens. Best of all are the descriptions Godden gives us in this wonderful book as she turns her novelist's eye on all these people and places of work and brings them all to life.

The Battle of the Atlantic (or the Atlantic Campaign) was the longest and one of the deadliest battles of the Second World War. Of the 40,000 men who served in the German U-boats, 30,000 of them lie at the bottom of the ocean, while over 70,000 Allied naval and merchant marine personnel lost their lives. Blair, in what could have been a cold, impersonal recounting of facts and figures, puts a very human face on the confrontations between the U-boats and their prey – the Allied merchant ships and their naval escorts – in the battle that both sides desperately wanted to win, as whoever lost would lose the war.

 This novel was first published in Germany in 1954, based on the author’s actual experience as a U-boat man during the Second World War. Told through the eyes of the fictional Teichmann, it is a visceral tour-de-force of German naval life beginning on minesweepers and gravitating toward U-boats. A brilliant portrayal of a grim reality.

I read this book during my teenage years and it was one of the first times I can remember reading a book that is grittily realistic; devoid of the 'boy's own' adventure style of many Second World War novels, but nor did it preach an obvious repentance by the German protagonist that also became quite common. In that sense, it’s virtually a dramatized documentary story of the author’s war.

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.