Secondhand Military History Bargain Book Box SP4183

Secondhand Military History Bargain Book Box SP4183

Beevor’s Stalingrad and Berlin, Keegan’s The Face of Battle, Tuchman’s August 1914, Macintyre’s SAS: Rogue Heroes, Hastings on the Dambusters and three Forgotten Voices oral histories. Seventeen paperbacks that cover both world wars from the top down and the trench up. 

1. A History of Warfare — John Keegan — Keegan’s argument that war is culture, not politics, from Easter Island to the nuclear age. The big one.
2. The Dambusters Raid — John Sweetman — The standard account of Operation Chastise: Barnes Wallis, 617 Squadron, the Möhne and the Eder, and what it did and didn’t achieve.
3. The Battle of the Bulge — Martin King — Hitler’s last gamble in the Ardennes, told through the men in the foxholes. 75th-anniversary edition.
4. Chastise: The Dambusters — Max Hastings — Hastings re-examines the raid and the cost in the valleys below. The sceptical companion to Sweetman.
5. Bomber Crew — John Sweetman — Life and death in a Lancaster, from the training to the odds. The book to read before Chastise.
6. The Face of Battle — John Keegan — Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, asking what it was actually like to stand in the line. The most influential military history of the last fifty years.
7. Forgotten Voices of the Second World War — Max Arthur — The Imperial War Museum’s sound archive turned into a book: hundreds of voices, no narrator.
8. Forgotten Voices of the Somme — Joshua Levine — The same method for the worst day in British Army history. Hard to put down, harder to read.
9. Lost Voices of the Royal Navy — Max Arthur — Eyewitness accounts from Jutland to the Arctic convoys.
10. The Marne — Georges Blond — The battle that stopped the Germans outside Paris in 1914, by a French writer who makes it a thriller.
11. August 1914 — Barbara Tuchman — The first month of the Great War and how everyone’s plans failed. Pulitzer winner; Kennedy read it during the Cuban missile crisis.
12. Tank! 40 Hours of Battle, August 1944 — Ken Tout — A Sherman gunner’s own account of Normandy, hour by hour. The best tank memoir there is.
13. Berlin: The Downfall 1945 — Antony Beevor — The Red Army’s assault on the city and what happened when it got there. Beevor doesn’t look away.
14. Stalingrad — Antony Beevor — The battle that broke the Wehrmacht, from both sides. Samuel Johnson Prize winner, and the book that made him.
15. SAS: Rogue Heroes — Ben Macintyre — The authorised history of the regiment’s founding in the desert, from the secret archives. The TV series came from this.
16. Scram! — Harry Benson — A Royal Navy helicopter pilot’s Falklands, the junglie squadrons flying under fire with no radar. First-hand and vivid.
17. The Imperial War Museum Book of 1914 — Malcolm Brown — The first year of the war through letters and diaries in the IWM’s collection.