Military Must-Reads

Military Must-Reads

In his New York Times best-selling memoir, Beyond Band of Brothers, Maj. Dick Winters states, "War brings out the worst and the best in people. Wars do not make men great, but they do bring out the greatness in good men." If your New Year's resolution is to learn more about military history and combat leadership, here are two areas and several books that might be of interest.

Civil War Must-Reads

Freeman, Douglas S., Lee's Lieutenants, 3 vols (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1942-44)

Written by the foremost Southern historian, Lee's Lieutenants is a study in command of the principal leaders of the Army of Northern Virginia who fought under Gen. Robert E. Lee. Freeman describes the rise and fall of the early commanders and officers whose reputations were made or lost during the period of the great Confederate victories of 1862 and 1863. He concludes his study with the fortunes of Lee's commanders at Gettysburg through the eventual defeat of the Confederacy.

Grant, Ulysses S., Personal Memoirs, 2 vols (New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885-86)

Often described as a classic in military literature, Personal Memoirs is Gen. U.S. Grant's own account of his military service. Mark Twain considered Grant's memoirs the best written memoirs since Caesar's Commentaries. If one wants to know why the North won the Civil War, he or she need only read these volumes.

McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)

McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning study is the standard one-volume history of the Civil War by America's finest Civil War historian. McPherson provides fresh interpretations to the political, social and military events that shaped this nation's history from the outbreak of the war with Mexico to Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

Sears, Stephen W, Gettysburg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003)

Written by a historian whom the New York Times Book Review called "arguably the preeminent living historian of the war's eastern theater," Sears' Gettysburg has replaced Edwin B. Coddington's The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command as the definitive study of the war's greatest and most costly battle. Sears masterfully relates the campaign from its conceptual stage to Lincoln's delivery of the "Gettysburg Address."

Shaara, Michael, The Killer Angels (New York: Ballantine Books, 1974)

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel chronicles the Battle of Gettysburg and the events leading to it through the eyes of the senior Confederate generals of the Army of Northern Virginia and the mid-level leaders of the Union Army of the Potomac. Shaara manages to capture the essence of war, leadership under fire and the human drama that characterized the Battle of Gettysburg.

World War II Must-Reads

Ambrose, Stephen E., Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992)

Published on the 50th anniversary of World War II, Band of Brothers follows Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, from basic training at Camp Toccoa, Ga., through D-Day, Operation Market-Garden, the Bulge and on to Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden. Later the basis for the Emmy Awardwinning HBO miniseries of the same title, Band of Brothers is a tribute to America's citizen-soldiers who waged World War ? in the European theater.

Blumenson, Martin, The Patton Papers, 1940-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974)

Blending biography and autobiography, Blumenson reveals the full tapestry of a combat commander whom another biographer claimed was the most famous and controversial American soldier of the 20th century. As Gen. George S. Patton's official biographer, Blumenson chronicles his subject's extraordinary career in World War Ii in a masterpiece of superb editing and flowing narrative.

Linderman, Gerald F., The World Within War (New York: The Free Press, 1997)

Subtitled America's Combat Experience in World War 11, The World Within War is social history at its best. As he did with his previous books on the Spanish-American War and the Civil War, Linderman introduces another amazing cast of characters who served on the front lines and who experienced extended combat. This study is an attempt to see the war through the eyes of those American combat soldiers - Army infantrymen and Marine riflemen - who fought in what Linderman calls the vanguard of military power.

Millett, Allan R. and Murray, Williamson, A War To Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000)

A compelling one-volume history of World War II, A War To Be Won concentrates on the conduct of operations by the military organizations that waged the war. At the heart of the narrative is the superb operational analysis of the military effectiveness of all belligerents by two of the war's foremost military historians.

Sledge, E.B., With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1981)

In his first-person account of the fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa through the eyes of a 20-year-old marine, Sledge captures the indelible mark combat leaves on its survivors. To Sledge, war is "brutish, inglorious and a terrible waste." If I would choose a single book to see war as it actually is, it would be this one.

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