war books?

[Anonymous No.23155043]

hey lit. i really like war movies. i cry a lot about the heroism and the sacrifice, how so much of the violence is unnecessary, but also the sheer goodness of men willing to fight for what they believe is right, and to fight for each other, and to fight to survive. there's some kind of messed up beauty in everything. i recently watched hacksaw ridge and band of brothers. i really enjoyed them. i didn't go to school, so my reading is pretty bad. i need glasses and i'm slow. big words or old language really confuse me too. i still like reading a lot, it's just very hard for me to find books i can get through. do you guys have any books set during a historical war that won't be too hard for me to read? i have a library card so i can probably get most things, i've just had a lot of times i take a book home and realize it's too tough for me to get through, which also makes me feel sad and stupid.

i have read lord of the flies (which i ended up thinking was really stupid), an embarassing amount of kids books, and a few of the travis mgee books. i read the first chapter of starship troopers and enjoyed it a lot, but once it started getting into a lot of talk about politics and governments, i got lost. i've partially read a bunch of other books i got lost in, i think mostly because my library has a lot of very old books. i read a weird fantasy western book series that started with wake of vultures that i was really enjoying, about some escaped slave girl with magic powers hunting werewolves or something, but it was very grounded despite that, and i was liking it a lot, but the main character decides she wants to be trans and then pretends to be a man for the rest of the series and i stopped relating to the character and it felt weird to read so i quit. but i liked it up until that point.

[Anonymous No.23155061]

Try the Book Thief by Marcus Zusak and The Winds of War by Herman Wouk

[Anonymous No.23155070]

>>23155061
thanks anon, i'll put those on my list :)

[Anonymous No.23155136]

>>23155043
The Short-Timers and the Phantom Blooper by Gustav Hasford, you can find them on the archive. Also Blood Meridian is a book about the philosophy of war if you’re interested in that, though I wouldn’t recommend if you’re still new to reading. Asian Odyssey is a hell of a book that recounts a personal experience with Baron Von Ungern Stienberg and much more.

[Anonymous No.23155318]

Storm of Steel is obligatory. I recommend reading the 1960 version. A Farewell to Arms is fiction but is one of my favourite books and I can't rec it strongly enough. And my favourite book of all time is picrel, about an English journalist's witness of the Bosnian war and it's simultaneously the most beautiful, tragic, and badass thing I've ever read. There's a sequel too which is just as good and is a must-read as well.

[Anonymous No.23155867]

SS General, by Sven Hassel. But check out his other works too.

[Anonymous No.23155877]

>>23155043
Spike Milligan's WW2 memoirs, starting with "Hitler: My Part in his Downfall"

[Anonymous No.23155884]

Start with the Greeks

[Anonymous No.23155910]

>>23155043
Unironically get into Warhammer 40k
I recommend the Gaunts Ghosts or Ciaphas Cain Series

[Anonymous No.23156387]

SlaughterHouse V

[Anonymous No.23156467]

>>23155043
Dispatches by Michael Herr (American experience in Vietnam)

[Anonymous No.23156475]

>>23156387
This is hardly about war

[Anonymous No.23156541]

>>23156467
I want to drop the Hunter, the Hammer, and Heaven by Robert Young Pelton. He's a war journalist with a dark sense of humor like like if you crossed a little bit of Hunter S. Thompson with Rudyard Kipling. The book covers first-hand experiences in Sierra Leone, Chechnya (during the Russian siege of Grozny) and tribal warfare in Bouganville in the South Pacific.

[Anonymous No.23156609]

>>23156541
>Robert Young Pelton.
I love his World's Most Dangerous Places series.

[Anonymous No.23156898]

WWI list, Read them free here
https://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?tags=World%20War%20I

WWI list, read them free here:
https://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?tags=World%20War%20II

Napoleonic Wars for old timey kino, read them free here:
https://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?tags=Napoleonic%20Wars

[Anonymous No.23157095]

La Main coupée or Lice is a great book if you manage to get your hands on it

[Anonymous No.23157145]

>>23155884
this seems definitely outside of my reading power. are you sure this is digestible for a beginner?

>>23156541
i'm putting this on my list as well, thank you.

>>23155318
i will check those out, thank you.

[Anonymous No.23157318]

>>23155043
I remember being 16. I enjoyed this at the time.

Shortly after I annoyed my English teacher by submitting a creative writing assignment that was mostly just a character describing the Anzio beachhead

[Anonymous No.23157366]

>>23155043

[Anonymous No.23157611]

>>23155043
Dispatches by Michael Herr is good if you want a realistic account of war. It's Herr's memoir of his time as a war correspondent during the Vietnam war. It's a good account of war from a neurotypical person's perspective, rather than a weird war autist like Ernst Jünger who enjoyed it, didn't experience fear normally, and saw it all just like a in-person video game.

[Anonymous No.23157645]

>>23157611
>is good
Who am I kidding? Dispatches is more than good. It's rad.
>“There was a black marine called Philly Dog who'd been a gang lord in Philadelphia and who was looking forward to some street fighting after six months in the jungle, he could so the kickers what he could do with some city ground. (In Hue he turned out to be incredibly valuable. I saw him pouring out about a hundred rounds of .30-caliber fire into a breach in the wall, laughing, 'You got to bring some to get some'; he seemed to be about the only man in Delta Company who hadn't been hurt yet.)”
>“There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.”
>“The problem was that you didn't always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn't frozen, you are.”
>“Saigon remained, the repository and the arena, it breathed history, expelled it like toxin, Shit Piss and Corruption. Paved swamp, hot mushy winds that never cleaned anything away, heavy thermal seal over diesel fuel, mildew, garbage, excrement, atmosphere. A five-block walk in that could take it out of you, you'd get back to the hotel with your head feeling like one of those chocolate apples, tap it sharply in the right spot and it falls apart in sections.”
>“When all the projections of intent and strategy twist and turn back on you, tracking team blood, 'sorry' just won't cover it. There's nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.”

[Anonymous No.23159165]

>>23155043
>diary of a napoleonic foot soldier, jakob walter
my confession, samuel chamberlain
>storm of steel, ernst junger
have fun.

[Anonymous No.23160694]

>>23155043
Konstantin Simonov is a not much known but a good author in this regard

[Anonymous No.23161402]

>>23157145
Xenophon is an easy read. Get the Landmark edition for neat maps and extensive footnotes. Though the correct starting point should be Thucydides (Who continues after Herodotus if you want the whole picture) so you all the necessary backstory and the aftermath. The Caesar and Alexander landmark books are also great.

Lesser known books/memoirs
"The forgotten soldier" for ww2 german eastern front perspective

"One Soldier's War" for the war in Chechnya in the 90's

"Defeat into victory" A British general fighting in ww2 Burma

[Anonymous No.23161716]

>>23161402
>recommending thucydides to someone who found starship troopers too hard
the people on this website, man...

[Anonymous No.23161740]

>>23155043
Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer. It's totally boot-2LT-from-West-Point-core but for good reason.

[Anonymous No.23161747]

>>23161716
yeah, i am trying to research these books ahead of time, but i think it is a decent rule that if i do not understand the title then i probably won't be good at reading the book. a lot of these suggestions seem hard to grasp for me. i don't know if anons are really picking up that i read kids books most of the time.

[Anonymous No.23161750]

>>23155043
The thebaid, by statius.

[Anonymous No.23161755]

>>23161740
OCS?

[Anonymous No.23161762]

>>23161755
Nah, I read it as a dumb enlistoid. Still enjoyed it though.

[Anonymous No.23161764]

>>23161762
Right on, brother.

[Anonymous No.23161774]

>>23161747
I'd keep the suggestions in this thread for the future, a lot of good books. The easiest books in this thread to start with are the Book Thief and Slaughterhouse 5. Also, read the book in picture (written by a University Professor) on how to read books!

[Anonymous No.23162254]

try Gravity's Rainbow

[Anonymous No.23163428]

>>23155318
>STORM OF STEEL
Based one of my favorite war book. I would also add Mine Were of Trouble by Peter Kemp. Which is about a English volunteer who travels to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). He ends up fighting for the Nationalists and fights alongside some Carlist Militias and the Spanish Foreign Legion. Its slow at some points but overall is an interesting biography that I would call an adventure just with the amount of interactions and shit.

[Anonymous No.23163438]

>>23155043
Dispatches
t. Michael Herr

[Anonymous No.23163531]

For whom the bell tolls / a farewell to arms are good war stories without being too tough.

[Anonymous No.23163629]

>>23155043
Baen has a lot of David Drake books for free on their website. If you want military sf, I feel he would be your butter with warhammer 40k being your bread.

[Anonymous No.23163661]

1. The Great War and Modern Memory
2. Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth
3. Stalingrad by Antony Beevor
4. With Napoleon in Russia 1812
5. Game to the last

[Anonymous No.23163683]

>>23155043
>Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger
>All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Remarque
Start here

[Anonymous No.23163690]

What not to read:
1. Singapore: The Pregnable Fortress
2. Odd Man Out: The Story of the Singapore Traitor
3. Invading Australia

[Anonymous No.23163695]

Based

[Anonymous No.23163701]

>>23163661
this is the way

[Anonymous No.23163727]

Does anyone know any good books about the Battle of Jutland?

[Anonymous No.23163733]

Also on a side note, does anyone know any good books about the Battle of Kursk?

[Anonymous No.23163784]

Civil War trilogy.
Ortona.