Recommend a good war book please

The Desert Fox

The Iliad is one of my best
The Red Badge of Courage is tremendous (Civil War - America)

"The Guns of August" covering the start of world war 1. It won the pulitzer prize, one of the best books I've ever read.
It's a fantastic book and shines a light on so much ignorance we have about ww1, it's causes, how it started, (the "Blackadder" view), and also shows how far from being cowards the French fought ferociously, with more men, over a larger front, and with much larger casualties than us. We basically held one end of the long line.

All Quiet on the Western Front & The Hunters another two great reads

great stuff thx bap,jc

if you like things like The Iliad then a must rad is: History of the Peloponnesian War

sparta and athens wasnt it?

The good soldier schweik  -   an 'ordinary' soldier on the eastern front on the german side - wwII  ARGH !!! what a terrible story.

sorry, rommel the latter is about the war between Sparta And Athens. Great stuff

Light reading -fiction - SHARPE  series and, Heavy,       Gates (author)    on the Peninsular war.  Big thick tome - you can rest your feet on it with the rest of them.

you beat me to it, rommel, a bit like Tobruk

i will read anything concerning Greek Mythology; The House of Hades is pretty recent, but was excellent

haha,ab comments on the book arnhem,sounds like monty was a bit of a one,think churchill thought he was a fckn reet one

To Lose a Battle  - alistair horne (france 1940)

Panzer operations   memoirs from general Raus

loads of stuff from the german side if you look

my sideboards/shelves groan with the wwII and napoleonic

Novels By Patrick O'brian Napoleonic Sea stories wonderfully written

Napoleons Campaigns - Chandler - a lovely heavy book to stack on top of the Peninsular war

by weight the winner is The peninsular War Atlas  colonel nick lipscombe - the campaign with maps and detail of each battle in order.   Can be at the bottom of the pile - a significant. stack that would keep you going.

Arnhem was imho a good idea with a few too many c0ck ups (like radios not working) and the disasterous coincidence of a good armour regiment being there for a refit.

You need to make gambles in war, otherwise it's just going to be two sides slogging it out a-la world war 1.

If that regiment hadn't been there and it had went a bit better, how many lives would it have saved?

Baphornet • January 8, 2019 1:17 PM GMT
"i will read anything concerning Greek Mythology"
-
An interesting theseus.

a few mistakes were made in Holland; or bad luck of course

anyone like mary beard - She has written loads - - she got in trouble with the 'progressives' too.!!!

I've not liked anything Mary Beard has done since she left ZZ Top.

All Quiet On The Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
Les Silences Du Colonel Bramble - Andre Maurois
The Long The Short And The Tall

yes  you are quite right check in. and she is a naughty girl anyway

i'm currently trying to read ALL HELL LET LOOSE by max hastings.

it's a good book but i lack staying power when reading and might take me a couple of years to get through it.

The Long etc , is by Willis Hall and is said to be a play but it was published in paperback and reads as a book .

Don't over do the german general memoirs or someone may come and shout 'NAZI' at you and where would we be then!!!   Outrageous!!!

General Memoirs actually fought for the French, doh!

same thing, JC

The Qur'an .
Starts quite slowly and lots of duplication but the ending has gotta be seen to be believed .............. apparently

http://community.betfair.com/chit_chat/go/thread/view/94038/28023617/world-w...

Catch 22.

The Universe Doesn't Give a Flying **** About You! (Johnny Truant)

Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall.

Monty: His Part in My Victory.

I read Catch 22 a long, long time ago, Pokermonster and lately I have been considering reading it again as I have a copy in my bookcase, but whenever I look to choose a book I tend to choose one I haven't read, so I think I will have to give it to a charity shop or should I read it again?

Give it to a charity shop, Annie. With such a wealth of remarkable literature at our fingertips, life is too short to read the same book twice.

Thanks, Pokermonster, you have made my mind up

One book I always recommend to gamblers is Fast Company by Jon Bradshaw. Truly a fascinating read and superbly written by a master of his craft.

Available on Amazon for 99p.

Before giving it to a Charity Shop. If it's a First Edition it is worth between £300 and £1000 depending on it`s condition. If it's a signed copy a lot more.

Thanks, Pokermonster, you have made my mind up

No, mac, it is just a bog standard paperback, unfortunately.

Do you ever read a book in one sitting? I used to do that quite regularly at one time. Alas, no longer.

I have done before, but it would mess up the next day for me if I read all night and then slept in late to recover! 

I don't start reading fiction books ( that doesn't sound quite right ) until after I have finished playing poker which can be quite late.  I read non-fiction during the day if I have time after reading the newspapers.

read catch22 many moons ago,then another of hellers-something happened,like chewing a brick

don't try War & Peace then rommel

haha,always fancied it

war.another goodun=quartered safe out here-george mcdonald fraser

it's a fine book that took me from aged 17 to 28

The Last Enemy - by Richard Hillary

he joined the RAF at the start of WW2 from university and served as a spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain
He was shot down and suffered severe facial burns
The book was written when he was in America in 1941 to support the cause of America joining the war
However he was not allowed to appear in public due to his scarred appearance and made newspaper and radio broadcasts
towards the end of the war he was killed in an aircraft training accident , he was 24

They Hosed Them Out
Ill Met By Moonlight
Boldness Be My Friend
any book by Paul Brickhill

Night Ambush was not a bad adaptation of Ill Met By Moonlight

The Knights Of Bushido

There were several good films Baph , adaptations of books . Reach For The Sky for one .

the guy who directed Night Ambush earlier did Peeping Tom, still creepy that film

indeed, Dunlaying.

La plaça del Diamant = The Time of the Doves; about the Spanish Civil War adapted well. The list is endless tbh

good spanish civil war-a moment of war,laurie lee

British Sea Power - David Howarth , sounds dry but it is not .
K Boats - Don Everitt , I hope this is the title that I read and enjoyed many moons ago . It is about the steam driven subs used in the Sea of Marmara .

believe douglas bader was a right b******

masterpiece-king rat,james clavell(japanese pow camp,changi jail in singapore)

masterpiece-king rat,james clavell

Pursuit - Ludovic Kennedy , about the hunt and sinking of the Bismarck .

Rommel , I knew somebody who flew with him and it seems he was a right bastard .

Ludovic Kennedy did a progamme once that resonated with my family greatly. It was about HMS Glorious which was sank in the Atlantic by the Scharnhorst.

* North Sea obviously.

i'd like to read something about the resistance.thought charlotte gray was a decent movie

just bought this-

Resistance: A French Woman's Journal of the War
Agnès Humbert,

  A  real-life Suite Française, this riveting diary by a key female member of the French Resistance in WWII is translated into English for the first time.

Agnès Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in 1940. Though she might well have weathered the oppressive regime, Humbert was stirred to action by the awful atrocities she witnessed. In an act of astonishing bravery, she joined forces with several other colleagues to form an organized resistance—very likely the first such group to fight back against the occupation. (In fact, their newsletter, Résistance, gave the French Resistance its name.)

Guns of August is about the start of WW1, another I enjoyed was kind of the opposite, "Endgame 1945" by D Stafford.
This is full of facts (little known) from a more anecdotal view, to give you a picture of the last months of ww2 from different perspectives.

jc,guns of august on audiobook on youtube,ill listen later

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2yOLloYflo

It's a big book so how long .... lol 11:20 hours. Lot of reverb on that!

NODDY AND BIG EARS LEAVE TOY TOWN TO JOIN THE ARMY

BY ENID BLYTON

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (who also wrote Charlotte Grey), is brilliant.
The audio book version, voiced by the bloke from Spooks is even better.

I always found the books by Sven Hassel a good read but that was a good many years ago. 50 million+ copies sold says something. Whether they were fictional or autobiographical (doubtful) they were generally grounded on some facts. They're written from the perspective of a small group of German soldiers often involved in barbaric fighting usually, but not always, against the Russians. It somehow seemed wrong when reading them to side with the Germans but you couldn't help it. They were very popular with British squaddies.

Montgomery,1994-76 is a superb book that reveals much of the ineptitude of lesser generals and politicians near end and after WW2. A superb read.

i'll give that one a go, treetop