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The Forgotten Soldier
Guy Sajer (1967)
“Buffeted from the Eastern to the Western Front, the author, a teenage German soldier, demonstrates the sheer scale of World War II. Particularly memorable are the scenes of enduring artillery barrages and the retreat from Russia.”

Bloody Pacific 
Peter Schrijvers (2010)
“This gets inside the heads of American soldiers, who experienced the Pacific as a ‘frontier of the imagination,’ and were motivated by fear and hatred of an enemy shrouded in the unknown.”

SOE Syllabus
Denis Rigden (2001)
“Training documents for Churchill’s secret warriors. Always ingenious, sometimes comedic, the work of a desperate nation’s best minds set to the task of stopping Hitler.”

Masters of the Air
Donald L. Miller (2006)
“The airman’s perspective is always center stage in this superb take on the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force’s European ‘aerial battlefield.’ A perfect mix of strategic overview, leadership quandries, technological detail, and personal insight.”

Beyond the War
“Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence is the last word on the visual display of information. And even includes the famous example of Minard’s map of Napoleon’s 1812 Russian Campaign. Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, is the best book I’ve ever read on the co-dependencies of technology, invention, and materials—mixed with a bit of luck.”

Max Gadney, a London-based design specialist who has been obsessed with the Second World War since childhood, has created our popular “Weapons Manual” feature for the past four years. A longtime BBC website designer, Max left the network last year to become chief creative officer of Hall & Partners, a brand and communications research company; his final “Weapons Manual” appeared in our March/April issue. Look for an exciting relaunch of “Weapons Manual” in our next issue, July/August 2011.