Thunder Below! is the one I thought of.

Or Run Silent, Run Deep.

Absolutely agree with both original topics. Silent War is an awesome treatment of WWII US sub ops and Silent Victory is a real compliment to it. I'm 2/3 through the book now, while playing the full campaign of SW. Outstanding!!

Awful game.



Just not enough there for me. I know a lot of people love it though.

I enjoy this because its a chaotic wargame that I can get non-wargamers to play.

I found the book the comes with the PC "RED BARON" game pretty good read.

Also try "They Fought for the Sky," by Quentin Reynolds, a superb book.

Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson is another good one.

While we're on the subject, I just finished A Bridge too Far by Cornelius Ryan. Man...amazing book, well written, covering everything from the operational to the tactical level. And while it is dominated by the allied story, the germans seem to be given a pretty fair shake (and indeed, many of their commanders and soldiers from the battle were extensively interviewed for the book). If you think the first part is a bit slow, keep reading...once they get to the attack the book is hard to put down! The only problem is, now I want to buy a bunch of Market Garden wargames, and the ones I have already barely get played by my eurogaming friends!

I'm definitely going to have to read The Longest Day and The Last Battle now.

"A Bridge Too Far" was the work of a dying man and it shows. The book is badly disjointed and shot through with the usual errors. The more embarrassing truths hadn't quite started to come out at the time it was published.

I got the strong feeling that Kershaw was a peacetime professional. His assertion that the Germans liked to use captured Stens because the side magazine allowed easier use while prone is hard to believe, and the repetitive use of words significant to the School of Infantry grates after a while. I found the appendices very interesting, and also his acknowledgement of The Cauldron by Zeno...

...which is the best book on the subject of the war that I've read, even if it is a novel. It describes continuous combat, which is very rare in any autobiography, but all the more useful for that, and rarer still that the author's memories were this clear twenty years on. After a while it starts to feel real. It was interesting that the heavy losses of the first days fell off later on, presumably because were fewer targets left.

William Buckingham's book revealed all sorts of naughtiness in high places and a fair amount in low ones too, so you can't really do without it, despite it being a recent publication. Questionable leadership, poor training and a lot of inexperienced replacements paints an unfortunate picture.

My two cents after reading tons of books on the subject...Bridge too Far is a dramatic read but has lots of boo-boos in it. Still worth a read to get the overall feel of what happened...It Never Snows is decent but as I dived more into the topic, it too has lots of boo-boos in it. These are the kind of errors that may not bother the more casual reader though...

My recommendation for a start is to get the three Battleground Europe books by Saunders (Hell's Highway, Nijmegen and The Island - steer clear of the two Arnhem books by Steer on Arnhem). FOr the Arnhem area, look to Manchester or Buckingham. Both are solid works.

If you want more nitty-gritty...
B Company has Arrived for low level ops in the Arnhem area. Terrific stuff and most highly recommended.
Arnhem: The Fight to Sustain for the logistic efforts.
Echos from Arnhem for the Radio problems
Red Berets and Red Crosses for the medical corps struggles.

Just a few but this is a well covered campaign that offers detail on most facets of the op. If you are interested in a particular aspect of the battle, IM me and I can point you to something.

If you want to blow a little cash, the Before and After book on Market Garden is spectacular.

In the movie A Bridge Too Far, a German tank commander walked into the tank and went for a direct assault across the bridge, regardeless of the British defense on the other side. Coming under heavy fire, the German tank commander got killed. It appears to be a heroic suicidal attack to me. Is it true to what happened? Would the German Army do such a thing? What's the purpose of doing such senseless dash across the bridge?

The gaffes by the Allies in the Market Garden op amaze me, but the worst to me are:

- the radio failure debacle suffered by the British 1st Abn. Absolutely disgusting that they didn't stress-test (so to speak) the ability of those radios to function in an urban environment over those distances... and to test the crystals in the UHF sets... and to have redunancy to communicate with LtGen Browning and the UK to coordinate air supply and air support

- the apparent need to have spent the entire 1st half of D-day in doing air bombardments, which meant that the Airborne landings and ground advance didn't really get going until 2pm, with dusk only a few hours away

- the failure to race ahead, rather than slow down, once word got out to the Guards Armored div that the Son bridge had been blown

- the British probably should have used more Airborne light tanks (i.e. Tetrarch)... in retrospect they may not have survived for long but may have helped more troops reach the bridge on the first 2 days...

- possibly worst of all- the choice to not risk landing in suboptimal areas in the Arnhem sector... some Airborne battalion commanders wanted to be dropped as close to the bridge as possible...

Check out "The Minutemen, The First Fight: Myths & Realtiies of The American Revolution" by General John R. Galvin. Those minutemen were not the untrained and inexperienced farmers that American legend and myth make them out to be. Excellent book.

"Those minutemen were not the untrained and inexperienced farmers that American legend and myth make them out to be."

It's a comfortable myth for most Americans to simplify an otherwise complex situation. In truth the Americans did everything they could to emulate the (sucessful) British system of drill and musketry. People usually ignore the eventual adoption of uniforms and massed formations and fixiate on the early image of "sneaky buckskin clad colonists sniping from the woodline".

Actually, the British column on April 19th WAS ambushed from Concord all the way back to Boston with near overwhelming numbers of local militias armed with rifles (not muskets) firing from behind stone walls and trees. There was no Continental Army until sometime after the battle on Breed's Hill ("Bunker Hill"). Still, these men were far from untrained and inexperienced. The militia system had been in place for many decades and the "Minute Men" were the elite of that force. They were better trained and equipped than most of the other militiamen.

Not only can Foote write, but in the Ken Burns civil war series, he was, hands down, the most engaging if the historians interviewed. I would have loved to have lunch with him.

Personally, I prefer Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson to both Catton and Foote, if you're looking for a good introduction and narrative to the war.

For Catton: What you really want is the American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War--just for the great illustrations, especially the magnificent battle maps by David Greenspan. It has inspired more than one person to become a Civil War scholar. (Gary Gallagher among them.)

Briefly, one very rarely finds Foote or Catton (or Battle Cry of Freedom) cited in The Literature, except if one is discussing the popular historiography of something. Discussing which is more scholarly is a little beside the point.

They're actually kinda seen like the Command & Colors series is by grognards. You've got one camp that wants them drummed out, and another that respects them for what they are, and hopes that the enjoyment derived brings the reader/player to meatier fare.

As Ben mentioned, the key word is "narrative." Yes, there is not a footnote to be found in Foote (sorry, couldn't resist), but I would like someone to demonstrate that Shelby Foote did not do his "homework" before writing his trilogy.

I am a fanatic about the need to cite supporting evidence, and I can cite examples of what I feel are poorly done efforts that pass for history writing. Foote's would not be among those, however, because of the word "narrative." By the way, I would have also found it super to have had supper with Shelby. Some may equal Foote's historical prose style, but I doubt he will be surpassed. I am also surprised at how often I have seen Foote cited in the footnotes/endnotes of other ACW authors.

"Battle Cry of Freedom" by James McPherson I found to be dull and dry; why it won a prize is beyond me; it must have been a slow year for history. I think Sears has inherited Bruce Catton's place, as Sears combines scholarship with good prose.

As for the game, "A House Divided," I'll be kind and say nothing.

Years ago I wanted to read something that covered the whole war. I had already read many accounts of battles but I couldn't link them together. For instance, I really wanted to know how they got from Chancellorsville to Gettysburg and I wanted to fill in all the other gaps. At the time I had a pretty good idea of the flow of events of Napoleonic history but I was missing the big story of the ACW. I found Foote's books at the library and started reading them. I had to buy them, too. While I was reading them I would also have the appropriate Time-Life book (and the big Catton book with pictures and maps) alongside for more detail.

I tend to agree with Joseph when he speaks of Foote and the emphasis on the word narrative. Foote, both from his books and the Ken Burns' documentary, clearly knows his stuff. As a writer, I found Foote's trilogy to be engaging, envoking, and a masterpiece of historical prose.

Catton, I found dryer, but still very good. A wargame designer would probably find Catton more to his/her liking since he is more a stickler for detailing where a military formation was at during a specific time. I found both Foote and Catton complement one another quite well, actually.

I never did like McPherson's book, I'm afraid. I sensed a strong Pro-Union bias in his book and felt it was written as "first I came to my conclusion, then I found the facts to support it." Hardly unusual, of course, but annoying nonetheless. People cite the book often, so this may be me instead of the book, but I'd still take Foote's almost poetic prose over McPherson's shoving his opinions down my throat anyday.

Danny Parker's Battle of the Bulge. (1st edition)

Highly recommended by Bitter Wood's designer, and available fairly cheap at abebooks and the like.

I love Chandler. I've been longing to read this one again. mmm nice foldout maps.

The price is high, but worth it. I was lucky enough to get a used copy years ago for $35 (it was $75 cover price at the time), but if I had to, I'd pay full price today. One of my favorite military history books.

I just bought a copy last week for $30 at a used bookstore that was going out of business. I didn't know that it was so well received, I just knew that it was comprehensive and read very well.

It's only been the last couple of months that I started getting interested in Napoleon after stumbling onto the Wikipedia entry -- I'm glad I got a good book to start with!

An excellent book that describes the Battle of Marengo in great detail is MARENGO & HOHENLINDEN by James Arnold. One chapter of over 40 pages (with some pictures and maps) provides a blow by blow account of the battle. It is very interesting to use the BaM game board and some of the pieces to move along as you read the account of the battle. I have made great use of both the book and the game in my high school world history and military history classes. Chandler is great, but for a more in-depth view of this particular battle (Marengo), Arnold's book, I believe, is more useful.

I concur with Rod RE Jim Arnold's Marengo, see also Battle of Marengo by Dave Hollins. Blundering to Glory by Owen Connelly is a good counter to "Campaigns."

...giving this series a shot, I mean.

In my earlier entry I didn't mean to imply all academic historians write lifelessly, I was just preemptively defending Foote from criticisms I've seen in the past that unfairly hold him to the most rigorous standard.

The best of both worlds (highest academic standards with unmistakably fun and approachable writing) is wonderful when it happens, but I'd suggest it is fairly rare.

There's definitely a tension there, and beyond a doubt not all historians write well. There's far less Academe-ese jargon in military history--or, at least, US military history--than in most fields, though. (It's hard to be too postmodern about this stuff.)

I'm reminded of a story Gary Gallagher told in an interview with Southern Historian a little while ago. He had just been hired by Penn State--and his dissertation had just been published and chosen as a selection by the Book of the Month Club. His first week on the job, he came to his first department meeting. A colleague leaned over to him...

"I hear your book was chosen by Book of the Month."
"Why yes it was!"
"Make sure that never happens again."

I think most of my selections here are both scholarly and readable. Well, maybe not the first Vicksburg one...

Try "Bloody Roads South" by Noah Andre Trudeau. He also wrote "Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862-1865".

Gordon Rhea's series on the campaign are also good. His narrative starts at the Wilderness and has ended (now) after Cold Harbor.

I agree, Rhea is excellent; Bruce Catton's GRANT TAKES COMMAND is still a good read.

There are some bad Keegan books, too -- well, at least one bad one, Intelligence in War. I liked his book on the first world war, though.

I like Keegan's examination and critism of Clausewitz in "A History of Warfare". Another thought-provoking book by Keegan.

I found 6 Armies in Normandy to be a marvellous book, one of Keegan's best (up there with The Mask of Command and The Face of Battle). Well-written, well-paced, readable, compelling, and excellent history. I think the goal of every writer, historian or novelist, is to convey a little bit of truth. Keegan manages to do more than most here.

After reading the book "D Day" by Stephen Ambrose I thought the opening battle scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan was a little tame.

Max Hasting's Overlord.

...I'd also recommend Green's The Greco-Persian Wars about...well, you'll figure it out. Read Herodotus too, of course. His concerns--if, sometimes, not his precise methods--are closer to those of modern historians than we sometimes realize. He's on the upswing.

I recommend just about anything by Peter Green, actually. He's a little out-of-fashion, since most of his books focus on the "superstructure" rather than the "base" (to uncharacteristically use some Marxist jargon for a moment), and he's quite opinionated about subjective matters (if he thinks Menander's plays are crep, he'll say so)...still, great stuff. (And I consider the latter trait to be a feature, not a bug. The former is a limitation, but sometimes an inescapable one.)

Of course you'd recommend that series! Look at your username!

Having just plowed through a huge number of Alexander books for my thesis, I’d like to recommend some of the best. First, I agree that Peter Green’s work is unique in its combination of scholarly approach and readability. (Just ignore his description of the Battle of Granicus, even he later admitted it was flawed.)

For those interested in further reading:

For a strictly military analysis of Alexander’s campaign, you can’t go wrong with J.F.C. Fuller’s The Generalship of Alexander the Great. His has the most (and clearest) maps and the most detailed battle descriptions. If the military side of Alexander interests you, get this book.

For more general treatments:

For a “pro-Alexander” view check out N.G.L. Hammond’s Alexander the Great: King, Commander, and Statesman. He includes pretty detailed battle descriptions and decent (though a bit clunky) maps.

For the most famously fawning view of Alexander, read W.W. Tarn’s classic Alexander the Great, published in 1956. Tarn famously advanced the theory that Alexander sought to bring about a “brotherhood of man.” Historians to this day take great pains to refute him, though Tarn gets credit for reinvigorating modern Alexander scholarship. Tarn’s book is short and concise at maybe 160 pages. It is based on the incredibly analytical (and dry, for the lay reader) 2nd volume which is 600+ pages of extremely dense and scholarly analysis of various Alexander issues, from the length of the sarissa (the 14 foot spear wielded by the phalangites) to Alexander’s deification.

For a more balanced approach, check out A.B. Bosworth, widely recognized as the most accomplished Alexander scholar today. Most of his work is quite academic and expensive, but Conquest and Empire: the Reign of Alexander the Great is accessible, both monetarily and intellectually.

For a really short overview of Alexander that celebrates him as a warrior, I second the recommendation of Keegan’s Mask of Command. It was after reading Keegan’s description of Alexander at the siege of the small tribal village that I become fascinated by the man. (Keegan describes how Alexander leapt up on the village’s wall to harangue his men, then, when he became the target of archers, dropped down alone inside the city. After a desperate fight Alexander received his most serious wound of the campaign)

Sorry for the lengthy post, but, hey, its Alexander. (By the way, my moniker, Cleitus the Black, commanded Alexander’s elite force of heavy cavalry, the agema of the hypaspists. Alexander later ran Cleitus through with a spear when Cleitus refused to bow before Alexander’s growing megalomania.)

I am enjoying Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness by Guy MacLean Rogers (2004). Fresh, fast-paced and full of detail. Have any of you played Conquerors?

And you chose the username Cleitus because...Um...Your supervisor at work did this to you?

I'd add in the whole "Mighty Eighth" series by Roger Freeman. I believe it is a 4-5 volume set that literally covers everything from the 8th Air Force.

I too think it's a great game (my wife will actually play it instead of making fun of it!)

Caesar's accounts are the stuff of legend, almost literally.

If I'm not mistaken, this game must be based on Caesar's work as the details of Alesia are not chronicled by any other historian.

Haven't looked in detail, but recent scholarship seems to suggest that even the traditional assumed location of Alesia might be off. New Alesia game, btw, appears to be in (slow) progress, I believe by GMT.

While Caesar, like any memoir writer, has to be considered with proper skepticism, he shouldn't be rejected out of hand, either. His account is a contemporary one, and presumably could have faced contemporay criticsm if it had been too far off the mark. I'm not aware of a contemporary critic, and, indeed, Caesar's political opponents seem to have been very aware of how capable he was.
As far as being the only account goes, we have very few corroborating accounts for any ancient history. Many of the accounts we do have were written many generations after the events they describe. Caesar's account at least has the credibility of being written soon after the events by an eyewitness and participant.

This is the second recent recommendation I've gotten for Victor Davis Hanson's book. Here's my thing. I personally found the only book I've read of his (The Soul of Battle) to be thoroghly wretched. But I'm told that his area of expertise is hoplite warfare, and that War Like No Other is largly free of the difficulties that I felt plagued The Soul of Battle.

So ... without wishing to get into a debate on the merits of The Soul of Battle, if I disliked that previous book is War Like No Other still worth a look?

I've actually not read Soul of Battle. Hanson is a classicist by training, so I wouldn't be totally surprised if his interpretations of the ACW and WW2 are less than spectacular. I do know that War Like No Other has received rather more broadly-based praise than Soul, for whatever that's worth.

I thought A War Like No Other was excellent, as was his earlier The Western Way of War. I enjoy his POVs, but have been warned away from many of his sweeping histories for reasons you allude to.

I also recommend Hanson's Western Way of War .

He did for hoplite battle what Keegan did for more modern warfare in The Face of Battle.

...Just figured out how to use italics

There are way, WAY better historians than Hanson, who got lucky and is now riding the commercial gravy train. For some criticisms of Hanson, my blogging buddies at Lawyers, Guns, and Money have a few things to say:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22victor+davis+hanson%22+sit...:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

I've been interested in finding a good overview of this war, thanks for the tip. I actually picked up A Leap in the Dark a while back, but as a book about the founding of the country, not so much about this war. I haven't gotten a chance to break it open yet, but I'm glad to hear that it will cover this as well.

I met Anderson this year and discussed the game and some of these books. The War That Made America is the companion book to the interesting PBS miniseries aired this year. It focused heavily on the young George Washington in order to attract viewer interest, and was written down to a public high-school level. It does have a few details and changes that weeren't in his earlier book.

He also recommended Montcalm and Wolfe, which he said held up very well today (he gave Parkman a lot of latitude for the common attitudes of the period). I've read it and it's excellent.

I haven't read Crucible of War yet, but I better if I hope to get him to play Wilderness War the next time I can loiter in Boulder, hopefully later this year.

I just finished "Empires at War" by William Fowler, and I really enjoyed it. It is lighter than "Montclaim and Wolfe" and I found it more engaging that the Anderson book.

The chapters on the Fall of Louisberg and Quebec are particularly good.

I second the Parkman recommendation. Parkman's use of language is fantastic, his grasp of the terrain is excellent and his grasp of the personalities involved in the war (especially Wolfe) is quite good. It's not a difficult read at all, quite enjoyable.
(His whole "History of France in North America" is also fantastic, but is a serious undertaking.)

Without any doubt "Montcalm and Wolfe, The French and Indian War" by Francis Parkman is the ultimate book reference for this conflict... I have read many books on this subject and if you have to read only one, it should be this one for sure...

On the other hand, once you have read it you will realise how poor is the historical simulation in Wilderness War... It covers the French and Indian wars as well as Axis & Allies covers the WW2, not any better...

See also Grant Moves South by Bruce Catton, Dee Brown's Grierson's Raid (made into John Wayne's The Horse Soldiers), and James Arnold's excellent GRANT WINS the WAR.